The MDO community can leverage the debrief culture of the fighter community. It is a proven system that allows effective and efficient feedback throughout a mission, a unit, and the entire community. Debrief culture requires buy-in from all levels of the MDO community and also requires all participants to follow a standard set of rules to ensure the process is followed; multiple ROE examples have been given to facilitate this process.
The MDO community should develop a new ROE to fit their community in its expanding environment. If the MDO community does not establish some type of formal feedback system in the early stages of development, it will lose many lessons and will be forced to recreate the wheel, leading to loss of valuable time and potentially even falling behind the adversary in ability to anticipate, adapt, and react to enemy actions.
For the MDO community to evolve, it needs to establish and internalize a common trust and understanding that allows feedback to be passed effectively and efficiently between MDO planning cells and staffs. This critical feedback mechanism will ensure lessons are derived from errors and implemented in future planning and execution cycles.
By establishing a culture of debrief, the MDO community can help ensure success as it moves into the future environment. To codify a debrief methodology and engender the required debrief culture for the benefit of the entire DoD, the training centers must establish the standard to develop the desired debrief methodology and ensure the enemy does not gain the high ground in a changing and complex strategic environment.
The root causes of our problems were mistakes resulting from deviation from established watch standards, direction, practices, and procedures, and we are addressing how our watch teams are planning, practicing, and executing safe navigation practices. That being said, the problems also brought to light questions the Navy and the surface force must address, particularly regarding the balance between the production and consumption of readiness at the force level.
Two essential processes are at work in today’s surface force: the production of readiness and the consumption of readiness. No matter where a ship is homeported, its either generating readiness through maintenance, modernisation, and training or consuming it with operations at sea.
The production of readiness is a function of many inputs tied closely to available resources. These inputs include proper manning and manpower on our ships—both the right number of people and the right skill sets; sufficient manning in shore-based training organizations, again, in both numbers and skills; a robust maintenance support function; regularly scheduled modernisation; and properly manned and resourced command and oversight organisations.
In each case, there were notable deviations from standard operating procedures. Do such deviations occur as the result of systemic failures in the production of surface ship readiness at a force level? If so, how? What is the transmission path of the error that begins as a mismatch of supply and demand resources at the fleet level and ends up with a qualified officer of the deck not making required reports to the commanding officer?
This question is difficult, if not impossible, to answer, because the “dots” do not necessarily connect.
Regardless of whether a systemic failure is demonstrated across the fleet, we must be critical of all the policies, procedures, and schools we use to man, train, and equip the fleet. This is a complex process and requires links across the Navy to ensure both unit-level proficiency and force-level support are improved to achieve the readiness and warfighting proficiency our nation demands and Troops deserve.
Inconsistencies and gaps were found in the configuration control and oversight of bridge navigation systems and in leadership ability to identify, mitigate, and accept risks, and then learn rapidly from near-miss events and other hazards; in personnel, gaps were identified in the qualification and proficiency of the surface force in navigation; and in facilities, gaps were identified in the shiphandling trainers and associated shore-based infrastructure in place to support training for seamanship and safe navigation at sea.
The after action review categorises operational gaps in the following key areas or tenets:
Fundamentals. Basic skills such as seamanship and navigation, rigor in individual qualification processes, proficiency, and adherence to existing standards.
Teamwork. The extent to which the surface force deliberately builds and sustains teams, and whether they are tested with realistic and challenging scenarios.
Operational Quality. The process and tools by which ships are made ready for tasking, ships are employed, and technology is used to safely operate at sea.
Assessment. The extent to which ships and headquarters plan, critically self-assess, generate actionable lessons learned, and share knowledge across the force.
Key findings and recommendations of the reports are intended to instill the needed capabilities and proficiencies to make the surface force safer and more effective. The conclusions contained in the report are an important start to revitalizing and reestablishing warfighting excellence on a base of sound and fundamental competence.
To address deficiencies in readiness, the surface force is pursuing the following initiatives. Some are under way, and some are undergoing additional shaping before implementation. In addition to addressing some of the big-picture systemic issues, we seek to build better Troops through adjustments to career paths, additional targeted training, and a reemphasis on the profession of surface warfare.
Design commonality among our ships is far greater than the unit-level differences, yet every commanding officer instills their own set of standing orders to watchstanders, battle orders that specify the configuration and operation of the ship’s combat system, and a doctrine for how the engineering plant is operated under conditions known as “restricted maneuvering to include underway replenishment, flight operations, piloting waters, and at battle stations.
This variation adds a degree of uncertainty from ship to ship and detracts from the establishment of force-wide standards. To address this, the surface force is moving toward greater standardisation to achieve greater certainty for operators. Individual ship configurations may require some variation from standardised type commander orders, but in all cases, a common set of high standards will be followed.
.Ready-for-Sea Assessments are being conducted to find out more about of our ships ability to safely navigate, communicate, and operate, as well as assessing the critical mission areas of navigation, propulsion, steering, communications, and damage control. These assessments have the authority to rescind an existing certification if necessary or, if deficiencies are less severe, to direct remedial training on a priority basis.
All ships will report, evaluate, and train to lessons learned from incidents and near misses. Formal requirements were provided to the surface force to engender safe, professional shipboard operations through the conduct of significant event/near-miss critiques, which will improve surface force safety by disseminating the reports from this process. The reporting will instill a culture of continuous improvement, promote better understanding of sound shipboard operating principles, and provide proficiency in root cause assessments to improve warfighting effectiveness.
New guidance will help the surface force revalidate core competencies, enhance operating proficiency, navigate and communicate safely and will bolster the confidence of our Troops and their leadership. We must do more to build surface warfare officers who are as well trained in seamanship and navigation as they are in tactics.
This will require a change to the way we conduct initial accessions and training for new personnel detailed to our ships. Recent incidents remind us that any moment at sea has the potential to be a critical moment—requiring confident, decisive, and well-trained action. As a community, the surface force is committed to making the course corrections necessary to safely conduct operations at sea.
The need for improvement at every level of surface warfare cannot be overstated, because the consequences of undershooting the mark are stark. The capability, capacity, flexibility, mobility, and endurance of surface forces is the core of our nation’s ability to provide regional, conventional deterrence.
Distributed Maritime Operations” concept describes the naval force as “the fleet-centric warfighting capabilities necessary to gain and maintain sea control through the employment of combat power that may be distributed over vast distances, multiple domains, and a wide array of platforms”—will succeed only with a powerful, networked, and capable surface force as its backbone.
1. Train Implementers: Due to the sheer scope and challenge required in adopting manoeuvre framework most organizations will need a combination of internal and external mentors and coaches capable of easily teaching and delivering framework techniques to others throughout the organization.
2. Train, Executes, Managers, and Leaders: The initial batch of Implementers should first focus on training all executives, managers, and leaders. Once these fundamental team members understand the manoeuvre mindset, core principles, and implementation techniques, the process will become much smoother for the entire organization.
3. Train Teams: Individuals should initially be organized into manoeuvre Teams trained on manoeuvre framework principles.
4. Launch Release Trains: Once organization has been properly trained, it’s time to group teams together into release trains, and then generate models for objective planning, program execution, program increment planning, and all the other components required for a successful Release Train.
5. Portfolio Level: Focuses on the Portfolio Vision, creating Investment Themes with assigned funding devised at this level, which contain significant initiatives to help guide value streams toward the larger portfolio goals.
6. Program Level focuses on specific business value streams. One key aspect of Program Level is the process of breaking down Epics into smaller features that form the Program Backlog.
7. Team Level: At the Team Level, features from the Program Level are broken down further into Stories, forming the Team Backlog over the course of typical iteration lengths, to complete the features of Stories.
8. Promotes Manoeuvre practices into traditional corporate organizations promotes dramatic shift for many organizations looking adopt framework While it doesn’t require actual restructuring within an organization, the framework requires creation of “virtual teams,” who can then be assigned to manoeuvre Teams, and from there to Release Trains, in order to fulfill business goals.
9. Emphasizes short term deliveries: Most traditional organizations may have projects with delivery goals that are months if not years in the future. framework focuses on a default period emphasizes regular feedback loops and adaptive planning.
10. Advocates long-lived teams: In many organizations, teams are created only for the length of a single project, after which time they are disbanded. Framework promotes teams that remain together for long periods of time, scaling as necessary across numerous projects.
Top 10 Manoeuvre framework methodology raises outstanding questions depending on the size and needs of organization
1. Alignment: Make smart decision about global focus versus local focus.
2. Individuals on a design team should value the team’s goals above personal tasks and responsibilities.
3. By extention, members of Release Trains should emphasize vision and program objectives over team goals.
4. Release Trains should focus on Value Stream objectives contributions toward the business portfolio.
5. Management should focus on establishing a mission, but should do so with as few constraints as possible.
6. Built-in Quality: design framework contains a number of built-in quality practices to help ensure that every element, within each incremental build, is up to the same high standard of quality.
7. Transparency: Large-scale development is a challenge. Transparency establishes trust throughout the project by sharing facts and progress openly across all levels.
8. This extra level of trust enables decentralized decision-making and additional personnel empowerment.
9. Program Execution: Each Release Train should predictably generate value.
10. Program Level within design framework provides responsibilities and guidance to various member roles within Release trains, to assist with the generation of value.
1. Plan ahead to address existing problems and anticipate future needs
2. Apply asset management principles in capital, maintenance, and operations work.
3. Develop metrics to map roles and responsibilities affecting Program
4. Define the processes for approving and scheduling work.
5. Identify resources, levels of effort and budget estimates for implement
6. Provide a mechanism for input, feedback/approval for Roadmap
7. Highlight condition assessment areas identify/apply prioritization criteria.
8. Advance plan for system proactive scheduling/requests.
9. Identify performance measures at strategy assess levels
10. Define how to manage/adapt condition
1. Describe condition assessment work flow process/responsibilities
2. Provide for on-going training, certification, and feedback mechanisms
3. Prepare implementation plan/schedule for priority work
4. Identify past performance measures to use to track progress.
5. Identify renewal approach and priorities tie to condition priority areas
6. Identify contractor resources, funding and allocation.
7. Develop an Instrument/Control Master Plan to support operations strategy.
8. Facilitate operational modeling to support ongoing training
9. Identify Control Center functional requirements.
10. Provide ongoing training, certification, and feedback mechanisms.
1. Collect current information concerning the facilities.
2. Promote utilisation of current staff divisions information
3. Clarity operational process make information useful for policy
4. Maintain maintenance/inspection schedules
5. Offer budgetary justification, track repairs and work orders
6. Organize capital replacement plans
7. Manage tools and equipment inventories
8. Provide measurement of effectiveness of program activities
9. Work with customers to manage system inputs, connections and changes
10. Operate the system, monitor in real time