Operational Units Gain Stronger Voice In Decisions About Weapons, Training Requirements Process Was Controlled by Washington

By HUNTER C. KEETER
Associate Editor

The U.S. Navy’s top fleet leader, Adm. William J. Fallon, commander of the Norfolk, Va.-based U.S. Fleet Forces Command, wants to strengthen the input of operational forces with a fundamental shift in how the Navy identifies requirements for resources, equipment, manpower, and training programs.

“This is a little different than the way things are done today,” Fallon told Sea Power, noting that, in the past, the requirements process — the way the military identifies and brings up for Department of Defense (DoD) approval its formal needs — had been “Washington, D.C.-centric.”

Until recently, the Navy’s top leadership, working with the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, would manage the studies, wargames, and debates that led to the identification and defense of naval requirements. The change now in the offing would place greater emphasis on input from the sailors who carry out the Navy’s missions to assess the legitimacy of three aspects of naval requirements: the functionality of platforms and systems, the processes of balancing resources across the Navy’s budget, and the identification of readiness needs — for fuel, spare parts, training, and maintenance. The shift in authority will affect multibillion-dollar programs for buying ships, aircraft, and weapon systems.

Under the current process, requirements are matched against specific military needs at the Pentagon as the DoD develops its share of the president’s annual budget request. These requirements are vetted by the Pentagon’s joint requirements oversight council, a body that includes the vice chiefs of staff of each of the uniformed services. The council has the power to approve or defer requirements.

Each of the services has its own requirements development and approval process, though final authority rests with the joint requirements oversight council. Once the services and the council have approved sets of requirements, these help to form the basis of the programs within the DoD’s budget.

During the past several years, the DoD’s budget processes has been changing. For example, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld launched a controversial campaign in 2001 to reform the acquisition process. According to Rumsfeld, the process should operate more swiftly and be developed solely from requirements that match real needs for capabilities.

The uniformed services have been reforming their processes for distributing resources, of which the assessment and development of requirements is an integral part. Under a massive reorganization plan originally launched in 2001 by Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations, the Fleet Forces Command was made responsible for implementing the service’s policies and plans for the manning, training, and equipping of all the U.S. Navy’s fleets worldwide.

Fallon, who assumed command at Norfolk in October 2003 after a tour as the vice chief of naval operations — and as a member of the joint requirements oversight council — has brought insider experience in how the requirements process used to work, and how he now wants it to change, to his current post.

“If Fleet Forces Command is going to be responsible for executing the Navy’s plan, it makes a lot of sense for the fleet to have a bigger role in determining what it is we are going to have, instead of being handed a bunch of tools and told to go and figure out how to use them,” Fallon said.

Rear Adm. James A. Winnefeld Jr., director of warfare programs and readiness with the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, and Fallon’s point man on the requirements effort, told Sea Power that the fleet now would have a formally defined participation in the requirements process.

A key example of that participation is in the development of initial capabilities documents for a given system or platform program, according to Winnefeld.

“Adm. Fallon will now have a signature line on those documents,” he said. “That is a very important step forward. It means the fleet will have direct voice in determining the actual parameters to which a new system has to perform. This is a powerful tool.”

Top Navy commanders, such as Adm. Michael G. Mullen, vice chief of naval operations, have heralded a crackdown on programs that don’t measure up against the service’s requirements. Mullen and Clark have set a goal of freeing $10 billion annually from the service budget to help defray the costs of modernization and ongoing operations.

In the Pentagon’s annual budget cycle, the fleet will have a stronger voice in shaping the Navy’s program objective memorandum, the basis from which a year’s funding profile is derived. Fleet Forces Command will have formal input into the development of the program objective memorandum early on, as the Navy reviews its mission needs, and assesses gaps in capability and plans for closing them. Additionally, Fleet Forces Command would be involved in assessing the process of how resources are distributed across the Navy’s budget, Winnefeld said.

Winnefeld noted that readiness requirements are also going to get a stronger review by fleet commanders. Requirements — for spare parts, fuel, test ranges, and maintenance — beginning in fiscal year 2004, will be formally articulated by Fleet Forces Command. The command will produce a report, entitled the “Integrated Readiness Capabilities Assessment,” that will form the basis for funding the service’s readiness needs. Fiscal 2004 will mark the first year that the readiness capabilities assessment is produced by the fleet and not by the Navy Staff itself.

Among the challenges ahead for Fleet Forces Command, Winnefeld noted that the fleet has never been configured to “feed the requirements process” as it must in the year ahead. The task of providing quality information to the Navy’s requirements process, in terms of manpower and hours of labor, is enormous. To overcome this, the fleet will use information technology to link operational forces with subject matter experts who may be geographically dispersed, to stay current on the latest technological, organizational, operational, and administrative trends areas such as sea basing, and sea-based air and missile defense.

Another challenge is for the fleet to work closely with the Navy’s experimentation efforts to help determine the technological and operational concepts that should be accelerated into development, and defer the ideas that may not warrant further investment.

Finally, the fleet faces a business challenge of learning how to moderate its newfound power in the resourcing process. Winnefeld noted that the fleet must “exercise caution not to ask for everything.” Rather, those carrying out what Clark calls “the business of the Navy … combat,” must be careful to articulate legitimate needs.