Don’t Expect A New King’s Bay Admiral Soon Unless Something Else Is Going On
Loose talk about flag matters over at The Stupid Shall Be Punished. I know little about how flags do what they do, but know enough to put my $.02 in to the comments. Since this is a long comment, I’ll post it here. These are my opinions and I’ll frankly admit I don’t know what I’m talking about but you have to help me be smarter if you think so.
Commenter Srvd_SSN_CO mentioned the recent Air Force mistakes with nuclear weapons. The issue with USAF and nukes is more complex than I think he describes, and involves the deemphasis of the mission by commands also outside AF such as OSD, JCS and STRATCOM. More I ain’t saying here, but many switches closed to make the bad things happen, just like with other occurrences where something went wrong and the root cause gets more interesting as you pull the string. As for TLAM-N, ain’t commenting on this circuit.
Commenter RichG added a short recent history of submariner (1120) flag officer moves. Some data points to add:
- Basing of SSNs in Guam (again) was a long drawn out fight to make happen.
- Some submarine flags wanted to close the SD sub base (far from the fight, mostly) but the surface fleet didn’t like the loss of training. Plus, removing a flagpole is near impossible; I once worked for a senior officer based six states away, and the story was that the congressman said “Move, sure, just don’t expect ANY VOTE FOR ANYTHING EVER.” The guy stayed in place. Also, I’ve heard everyone from a CNO to a SecDef complain about the eyeglass factories (rationale: we could buy like everyone else without paying an O-6s retirement and basing for eight different flagpoles). They’re still there.
- The Groton swapover (somehow that admiral now owns one part of housing in Great Lakes and another admiral owns something else right next to it) was in my guess a drug deal to keep an 1120 flag there.
- We have more sub squadrons today and fewer ships. There are more Navy admirals than ships and has been for a long time. We’re not getting new flags; any shift is zero sum.
- Around 1995 we moved a one star 1120 to Yoko when we lost one on the west coast (Bangor? I forget). Probably a good idea; the other communities in C7F have stars on their collars and we needed to be at the table with a little more oomph.
- USAF and USN do things differently in the nuke role. Their key twisters are company and field grades; ours are enlisted in the same role.
- Partially because of the Greeneville collision aftermath, where every post-command submariner got redirected back to the waterfront or engineering, we lost the ability to see or influence what was going on in much of the rest of the Navy–or learn from our brethren from other communities. Liaison jobs or jobs outside the submarine community tended to go unfilled, and the hot runners no longer went to them. Sub Ops, or N6, jobs on a carrier flag staff weren’t seen by the community as paths to hot runner status, either. So we lost some knowledge, lost some mentoring and networking, and lost some influence. Because of that the next point becomes germane.
- Flags to my view seem to take two paths to multiple stars: one path through Navy (top: CNO) and one through the joint world (top: any COCOM then CJCS). I noticed in 2002 that not only didn’t we have any 1120s poised to be CNO (for instance, the OPNAV N8 job, DCNO, etc) but that we didn’t even have a process in place to grow one. Only one 1120 I saw in the E ring, an executive assistant in a job useful to the submarine community. Pretty much the only 1120s I saw in OPNAV were in jobs that helped submariners buy submarines (N87, N8, N2, N4 salt mines). On the other hand, there were plenty of examples of 1120 four stars that weren’t Naval Reactors, but all were in the joint world.
My guess as to Bubblehead’s post? The recommendation paper will likely not be directive although flogged by the 1120s. I’ve got a stronger tool available for my community–a DoD instruction mandating a path to flag for the community–but as of this moment there isn’t one and none I can see on the near horizon. Flag moves and changes are big fights because of the nature of humans and the Navy.
5 Responses to “Don’t Expect A New King’s Bay Admiral Soon Unless Something Else Is Going On”
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February 3rd, 2009 at 10:27 pm
Did you ever work with/for/around Stanley Szemborski? He was my 2nd Eng on the USS Omaha back in 78-81 and is now an O-7.
He was a good officer and gave the ELTs enough backing that we pretty much ran plant chemistry our way, up to backing us up when the O-gang got stupid. One night I told the EOOW I would only do a chem add to the Primary if the Eng gave me the order personally (at 3 AM when he was the day OOD). The EOOW called my bluff and had Mr. Szemborski woken up. After hearing both sides he came up with a truly Solomonic decision: No chem add, but I had to run chemistry and gas analyses every hour for 4 hours to prove the plant would do what I said it would.
The trust went both ways, and the Omaha aced our ORSE in April 1981. Excellent in all categories!
If I had stayed in I would have followed Mr. Sz anywhere.
Rick T
February 4th, 2009 at 12:07 am
Umm, didn’t C. Northcote Parkinson point out years and years ago, that the fewer ships the Royal Navy had, the more admirals they had?
February 5th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
What do you think the odds are that they will fork up 2 extra O-6s so they can have separate commdores for SQN-16/20 and SQN-17/19? I’m still confused how those two guys are making it work with the very disparate mission sets between the SSBNs and the SSGNs.
February 5th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
I don’t know. The platform is similar and on Kamehameha we were in a squadron with a bunch of 688s and we did fine–although not many people on the squadron staff knew about our primary mission set well enough to work with us there, a nuke plant is a nuke plant and basic submarining is common as well.
O-6s are kind of in tight supply and 42 is short of guys to fill the cruddy cubicle jobs just like the other communities. If you’re not shooting for admiral and your major command is done or resolved, it’s a tough call to work for 25% of base pay to get yelled at by some one star at 2000 every night. We also have more squadrons now, with less ships, than we did during the Cold War. Might be a hard sell but I don’t speak from knowledge here.
February 9th, 2009 at 11:30 am
I’ve been out of that game for a while, but also doubt the “need more emphasis on weapons” angle that Joel’s commenter made. To my ears it sounds more like NavTimes editorializing than reporting (but that would never happen, eh?). Agree that the flag fight and staff inflation is more a reflection of a political exercise than actual manning requirements. After all, if the number of boats keeps going down, why does the number of requested flag staffs seem to always be going up?
Re 1120 flags and career paths, you’ve heard my tales of woe from Pers 42 CO/XO screenings around the turn of the century (it’s just fun to say it that way). Repeatedly the “good nuke” would get the nod while (IMHO) an equally capable officer with a more diverse resume would be shuffled to COSS/XOSS or get completely passed over. I think the paucity of what you perceive to be 1120s headed for the top is a result of repeated selection decissions like the ones I witnessed. You’ve played with the big boys much more than I ever did, especially since I went 1125, but the last senior submariner I’ve known to knock my socks off was ADM Tom Fargo. I worked for him back at CSG7 and while PACOM is not too shabby I expected him to get the nod for CJCS or DCJCS at some point. Then again, maybe he was exactly where he wanted to be.
Speaking of CSG7, I think the Navy and submarine force are getting their money’s worth out of that billet upgrade. Besides moving the TASWC responsibilities to Flukey Hall (in the old days CTF-72 wore that hat with only partial visibility on what was really happening from up in Misawa), having a nuke flag in Yokosuka with a staff of nuclear engineers is what really allowed the GW homeporting there to happen. Not to mention the other dangling things CSG7 was able to pick up once they had the star muscle.
For most domestic waterfront facilities, though, we’re definitely too top heavy. Since squadron’s main function is care and feeding of the assets to support COCOM tasking, it makes little sense in my eyes to separate the SSGNs from the SSBNs. A separate DCOS for the different tackins should be more than sufficient, especially since squadron N3 mostly is a scheduling and movements job, not one involving tactical tasking.