I decided this middle-of-the-day bingeing had to be stopped. But it couldn’t be limited to the enlisted clubs. When I got back to the Pentagon I personally drafted an order that in effect said, “There will be no alcohol served at any of the clubs on a naval base or station during working hours. Bar service will not open until 1700 and will close at midnight.” The reaction was immediate. A fleet CinC called me and said he couldn’t do this. “The retired officers and their wives in the local community will give me hell,” he said. “They use the officers’ club, and they like to have a cocktail or beer or wine with lunch.” I replied, “I’m sorry that the retired got caught up in this thing, but the base clubs are primarily for active-duty people so they can dine without going off the base. If the retireds want to drink before 1700, they can have it at home or at a local bar or restaurant. Norfolk and Virginia Beach are full of them. We have to run these base facilities primarily for active duty fleet people.” The Navy was actively overhauling its policies to reduce the unnecessary discrimination among ranks in the matter of social privileges, and any policy concerning alcohol had to be consistent for everybody. We had to be tough on this issue.
A week later a related problem surfaced. The chief petty officers’ clubs asserted that it had been a long-term traditional privilege for them to remain open and serve liquor twenty-four hours per day. Their reasoning was that chiefs sometimes work unusual hours. And if a chief has the graveyard shift, and he gets off at eight in the morning, he ought to be able to go to his club and get a drink. My first reaction was that the Navy should not sponsor drinking at eight in the morning. There is no counterpart to this in civilian life. If they have to, the chiefs can get their drink at home or in a local bar. I held fast to my dictum of bar hours from five to midnight. So all of the base clubs had the same bar hours. There were sporadic complaints for a couple of weeks, and then it was accepted. After that, the issue of drinking during the working day went away.
The material readiness condition of the carrier force remained the principal concern of both the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets. The distribution of carriers between the two coasts was nine in the Pacific and seven or eight in the Atlantic, depending upon the often-fluctuating force level. The DoD established the Navy’s authorized force level of attack carriers on an annual basis (carriers were the only ships in the Navy other than fleet ballistic missile submarines to have their number so tightly controlled by the National Command Authority). The Joint Chiefs of Staff further dictated the disposition of the carrier force by mandating that there should never be fewer than two CVs in the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean and that one carrier of the Seventh Fleet must always be deployed within one thousand miles of Taiwan. The Navy was not permitted to gap these deployments, which were essential to the nation’s general war plans.
If a carrier were incapacitated by engineering difficulties that prevented it from getting underway, the schedules of all carriers in the fleet were affected, like dominoes. Carriers had to be extended on station, deployed months early from their maintenance availability in shipyards or crew training and work-up periods in their U.S. homeports in the assigned naval bases.
Although carrier material problems caused the major reverberations, there had to have been deep concern over the impact on overall operations and crew morale of the general deterioration of material readiness in the fleet, especially in the ships’ engineering plants. If a radar did not work, a destroyer could fix it usually while deployed at sea. If a bad boiler prevented a destroyer from getting underway, the operating forces were deprived of its use. It was as if the number of ships in the Navy had been reduced by one.
It didn’t take me long to identify the root cause of the problem. The entire professional area of naval engineering had been neglected since World War II. Command and control and weapons were the glamorous assignments in the surface ships. If a line office hoped to get ahead in the Navy, engineering duty was to be avoided at all costs. It was impossible to excel professionally in that department. The propulsion plants had been run hard and not well maintained. Engineering officers were, especially on the carriers, limited duty officers (LDOs), who, although very competent former enlisted men from the engineering ratings were nevertheless stuck in assignments in which they received little support and even less understanding from the ships’ commanding officers, who had seldom served at sea in an engineering billet.
My own experience had been invaluable in reaching the solution to these deep-seated problems. During World War II, I had served in two Fletcher-class destroyers where the naval officers assigned as chief engineers had been graded by their fitness reports in their overall performance as naval officers in the top ten percentile of their year group. The engineering departments on those ships performed as well as the gunnery departments, and both were essential for the ultimate survival of both ships throughout four years of fleet deployments in combat. Professionalism and pride had to be restored to the engineering departments in our men-of-war.
The chief engineers of the Essex-class carriers in which I served as a pilot with an embarked squadron were LDOs, professionally competent but physically and emotionally exhausted from the succession of daily crises in the machinery and in their overworked troops. In these crises they received little sympathy or recognition from the captain and department heads, aviators who usually had no real appreciation of the chief engineer’s problems. In fact, although the chief engineer was a department head and a member of the wardroom mess entitled to sit at the head table, he usually ate a sandwich of night rations while directing repairs in the engine room.
It became clear to me in the early weeks of my CNO tour that the first step in recovering from our crippling malaise in the material readiness of our ships was to restore professionalism and pride to the entire world of ships’ engineering. Rickover’s example of deep immersion of prospective commanding officers in engineering had impressed me. Further, my association with submarine officers through my nuclear training experience had been a valuable education. The lives of the crew depend upon a submariner’s ability in safely conducting its primary maneuvers of diving and surfacing. This in turn depended upon 100 percent engineering reliability. Nothing less was acceptable.
My first step was to decree, as a matter of Navy personnel policy, that a prerequisite for assignment of a commanding officer of a commissioned ship would be service in the engineering department of a seagoing vessel. This caused cries of anguish to rise from the surface warfare community, but I had a full concurrence and support from my chief of naval personnel, Jim Watkins, a nuclear submariner who later became a CNO. When the younger officers realized the Navy meant business in this regard — no waivers — there was a scramble from the best and brightest to get to sea promptly as a ship’s engineer.
The carriers represented a special problem. The challenges were of such magnitude that only the more able senior officers of special motivation could tackle the job and turn around a situation that was on the verge of coming apart. Again, it was Jim Watkins who, with a gutsy call, provided the solution. Senior top-performing commanders from the surface warfare community would be selected and ordered to the billet of chief engineer on a carrier for a normal head-of-department tour of two years. This was known as the Carrier Readiness Improvement Program. It could have been hard on the morale of the affected officers, who of course would have preferred to be a missile officer in an Aegis cruiser, but the program was part of a larger program to turn around an essential culture in the Navy that had gone awry. These officers responded magnificently, and the CNP made certain that they were professionally rewarded.