Integrity: A Sea Non-Story

Flash Post #1

First, an update. I started law school a couple months ago. Apparently, there’s a lot of reading and writing involved. Till now, I’ve generally tried to include cites to references and other sources in my posts. Unfortunately, the amount of time I have to devote to law school does not allow me to really dig too much into problems related to my past life (though I did finally get to dress up for Halloween as a naval officer). It’s not my intention to “abandon” the blog, so in lieu of that, expect some posts (flash posts) that amount to me just shooting from the hip. This first one might almost be said to start out with a “sea story,” but then there’s not much story to it…

The Non-Story

We had just finished recovering the ship’s boat from a man overboard drill. The sky was blue, the clouds were white, and “the sun was shining on the sea.” I went to my boss, the Operations Officer. I was going to tell him we couldn’t take credit for the drill. We’d taken too long, per the Fleet Exercise Publication, and so it was a failure.

But Ops got the first word in. “It’s about an hour to sunset…” he mused, looking from me, to the horizon, and back again. “Almost civil twilight.”

I followed his gaze and reflected back at him. “Uh, Ops?” I said, not quite sure what he was getting at.

He was a kind man for the most part–I’ll give him that. So he smiled at me as if I were a child. “We can take credit for a daytime and a nighttime recovery,” he said.

“Sir,” I started off in a low whisper, like one embarrassed to have to be the one to tell the Emperor he has no clothes, “it’s broad daylight. Technically, we can’t even claim credit for this as a daytime recovery–“

Ops’ smile gave way to a scowl. A kind man, yes, but a SWO too. “Mister Rogers,” he said sternly, “we’re not going to do this again. There’s no time. It’s almost sunset,”–here again my eyes darted to the horizon to see that it still wasn’t anywhere close–“and we’re going to exercise some efficiency. The ship has other tasking, and we’re behind on drills.”

“Sir–“

“Just enter it into the spreadsheet. Daytime and nighttime. Make the chart green.”

Before I could protest further–not that there would have been a point–he turned his back on me and stormed off along the starboard side, heading for the break. The outer hatch screeched open and slammed shut as he went back inside the skin of the ship. I confess, I did not follow his order, but then it never came up again. If it had, I’d have probably done it. Because what else was I going to do? Tell the Captain?

To be fair to my old Ops, perhaps it was just stress. Maybe the reason he never followed up was because he knew he’d blurted out something born of frustration, not deliberation, and saw the error in it. But that he gave the order at all–even if only out of frustration–is telling all the same. What was he thinking?

I’ll Tell You a Joke

If you’ve been in the Navy for any length of time, and especially if you’re a nuke, you’ve probably heard this one before–most commonly stated as if it were a natural law. So much so that you might not even consider it a joke but a truism. It’s called “the conservation of integrity.” That is, integrity must be conserved: every bit used up now will be that much less available for later. Get it? It’s like a play on the conservation of energy. Instead of the take away being “it never really goes away,” it’s that every little use of it is like a deduction from your personal reserve. An expenditure. It means it’s not only okay to allow for certain small “lapses” in integrity, but necessary. Strategic. Pick your battles. If you find your own personal integrity at odds with higher authority or the exigencies of the service, ask yourself, “Is this the hill I want to die on?” Anyway, they say if you have to explain a joke, it’s probably not funny. And I agree: nothing about this is funny.

One of my many problems as an Ensign–perhaps the only one that really wasn’t–was that I still believed that it was expected I would be truthful in reporting to my superiors. That an ugly truth stated bluntly counted for more than a pleasant deception, no matter how well-constructed the façade. After all, I had just come out of an undergrad program with a very rigid honor code and had been assured that the Navy, too, cared about this thing called “honor.” And why wouldn’t it? It’s right there printed on the label, foremost among the core values: “Honor, Courage, and Commitment.” In short, I took the cool-aid the moment it was offered and gulped it down without hesitation. It never occurred to me it might be poison. I never would have guessed.

So what does this have to do with my little non-story about the man overboard drill? Consider these two premises:

1. I wasn’t really all that atypical as an Ensign–at least where integrity is concerned. The vast majority of new sailors–officer and enlisted–would prefer to be truthful. They’d rather actually do a good job than simply appear to do a good job.
2. My Operations Officer, apart from maybe being a little nicer than most, also wasn’t especially atypical. That is, by the time an officer goes back to sea as a Lieutenant Department Head, it may be expected that they are prepared, in a moment of weakness, to stretch or break the truth to “make the chart green.”

If you’ll grant those two premises, the “unexceptionality” of myself and my Operations Officer, then the rest follows through induction. Ops had a need to “make the chart green”–a chart with so many more boxes to fill than just my man overboard drills–and yet the ship, for all the time it spent underway, did not have a quality of underway time that allowed it to achieve all training and operational requirements, particularly given the frequent need to keep pace with another ship or transit between distant points at an economical speed. While you can’t (easily) fake where the ship is relative to the carrier or a given point on the surface of the Earth, you can change the color of a box in a spreadsheet with just a few clicks of the mouse and a key stroke or two.

The point is, I’m sure my Ops would have loved to craft a schedule to allow the ship to accomplish all required training, fully, with time to do each drill over again if it didn’t go well the first time. Just like I’m sure someone new to the Navy would love to actually do a good job rather than merely pretend to do one. But somewhere along the way, my Ops got the message: when it comes to training, it’s “make the chart green,” and he tried at least once, explicitly, to pass that on to me. Follow that message down the line, to his department head, his department head’s department head, and his department head’s department head’s department head (etc), and I suspect you’ll find that whoever gave the message to him got it from someone else in turn, and on and on. But lest we conclude that the proper solution is to just tell whoever happens to be holding the line today–today’s division officers–to refuse to pass the message along themselves, to finally stand up and resist the pull to just “make the chart green,” consider that not everyone who passed the message along gave up or went away: some got promoted, still with that message on their lips. And so their influence multiplied.

None of this is to say that no one ever gets far in the Navy by taking a straight and narrow path, bounded at all times by a genuine commitment to core values and integrity. Only that there is a competitive advantage afforded those who can “make the chart green” without having to actually expend the energy–mental and emotional–to do it. This will be the case for so long as the Navy focuses more on what is reported than on actual conditions, delving into “actual conditions” only periodically in the form of scripted and rehearsed inspections or when something goes terribly wrong, as if the underlying problems couldn’t possibly exist beyond those events.

Department heads who succeed through deception will become Captains the same as those who succeed through actually putting in the work. But the ones who succeed through deception will, other things being equal, have had more time and energy to expend elsewhere, promoting themselves and magnifying their own accomplishments. Even if they don’t become more dishonest as they progress, the effect of their lapses in integrity will be to have a vision of the Navy–of what’s to be expected–built upon a foundation of quicksand. Untenable. These are the leaders who will step forward and answer the call to “do more with less,” reaping the benefits to their own careers for being seen to do so, for being heard to “answer the call.” Those more prudent, who see the hazard and would hold back, perhaps even express their reservations to higher authority, are left standing in the dust, set aside as “timid” or “indecisive.” But as the charts all go to green, the deckplates are rusting through.

No amount of integrity training or admonitions to “do the right thing” directed at junior sailors will change this dynamic. For integrity to take hold at the deckplates, for sailors to stop conceiving of it as something that must be “conserved” like drops of a precious liquid in a bucket full of holes, it has to be seen flowing down in torrents from the highest levels. Leaders who do have integrity must strive to eliminate the competitive advantage that comes from merely appearing to do a good job. They must manifest, through action, a willingness to get at what is actually happening, warts and all, and accept that the failure to appear to do a good job, absent scrutiny, is not the worst thing.

If I could say one thing to the Chief of Naval Operations, in his capacity as the top uniformed “commander” in the Navy, it would be this: Integrity is “Commander’s Business.” Get cracking, Admiral.

Integrity is “Commander’s Business.” Get cracking, Admiral.

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