New hardware initiatives are being undertaken by the Navy. Name the system: CAPTOR, Sea Control Ship, LAMPS, Harpoon, SSN-688, ULMS, or any one of several others, and you are naming a make-or-break contributor to our future Navy’s posture. The key men upon whose shoulders success rides-are the designated project managers, who are responsible for melding together engineering possibility, industrial performance, and Congressional appropriations to produce operational reality.
Since its origination in the ballistic missile programs of the 1950s, the term “project manager,” has been applied widely—but not always well—to a variety of men in a variety of situations at many organizational levels. A true project manager in the Navy is responsible for the engineering development, acquisition, and fleet introduction of a specifically defined platform-sensor-weapon capability in conformance with an established Initial Operational Capability (IOC) date. Properly, such a project manager and his supporting portion of the material establishment should go out of business on some reasonably postulated basis, such as IOC-plus-one-year. In the past, project managers have continued on well beyond the innovative and development stages of some systems—e.g., the P-3, A-4, and A-6 aircraft series.
The term “project manager” is sometimes mistakenly applied to the management of a class of material items, the subsystem contributors to larger systems. Thus, a “project” manager for all aircraft engines was once named within the Naval Air Systems Command. Also, more recently, project managers for related types of ships have been designated within the Naval Ship Systems Command.
The word “program” rather than “project” should be used to describe managers of situations where several hardware configurations and delivery dates and more diffuse funding and engineering definition apply. Such jobs may be important, but they do not contain within themselves the intense, all-consuming, direct, personal activity of one lone naval officer who is totally responsible for giving the Fleet a major new and distinctive hardware capability on a definite date. Only an individual asked to perform in this last category is truly a project manager.
There are well-defined time limits within which an individual should be a project manager and allowed to rule supreme, as he makes or influences long-term tactical constraints and logistic commitments for the Navy. Historically, this period begins with the concept validation phase for his potential hardware system, and extends through execution of the prime development and acquisition contract to the Board of Inspection and Survey (BIS) trials of his system. Typically, this is a five- or six-year time span. A properly prepared, motivated, and equipped candidate project manager has to be brought along in synchronism with this gestation process for new hardware systems, prepared and able to devote five or six years of his professional career to this one incremental enhancement of the Navy’s total fighting capability. The Navy has yet to establish a system to provide the right man for each of these critically important jobs at the right time. The Navy’s manpower planners must pursue definite initiatives to provide for this vital new class of officer.
Important first steps have been taken.
Foremost among these has been the designation of a group of current project management billets as equivalent to a major command, when occupied by a captain. This makes “career-enhancing” what were a few years ago considered dead-end material command billets.
There is, quite naturally, a great measure of comparability of executive and management experience between command at sea and project management ashore. The great underlying common denominator is accountability. As the ultimate in individual personal accountability, there can never be a completely equivalent shore-based substitute for the experience of unit command at sea, or in the air. The driving motivation behind the need for project management ashore is the same, however: accountability—to provide for a focus of line responsibility and authority to accomplish a stated purpose. Lives and combat effectiveness are at stake, too, in project management decisions, as well as command at sea decisions, although the time constants of effect are measured in years instead of in minutes or days.
Classically, in the Navy, the ultimate test of the accountability of unit command at sea has been the prompt and unquestioned removal from command of officers found at fault whose vessels have foundered, run aground, or been involved in collision. It is not too much to hope that some day project management ashore will conform to this same ultimate criterion in accountability: when a project manager’s career, too, will stand in jeopardy at a green table cloth when his prime contract runs “aground” because of a severe, unanticipated cost growth or when delivered hardware does not perform.
With the current draw-down in sea command opportunities in the Navy, the appeal of selected project management billets as major command equivalents should be strong. An unfortunate connotation is being given to this command-equivalency status. Thus, the Armed Forces Journal has observed that “. . . as a result of reduced numbers of ships . . . as remedial measures . . . selection boards have been instructed to regard program management of a major weapons system or a major command ashore as equivalent in responsibility to a major command at sea.”
There may be an acceptable equivalency for commands ashore with commands at sea, but special consideration should be given to the equivalency of project management in assigning candidate officers. Thus, many capable officers schooled and experienced for major command at sea may be presumed to have the qualities needed for project management ashore. While, as already alluded to, there are several strands of executive commonality between the two undertakings, there are important differences. Project management does not occur in the “right full rudder,” absolute personal presence environment that pertains to command of a ship operating in the remoteness of the ocean. (Even that element of command at sea, independent operation, has eroded through the ever-increasing efficiency of modern communications.)
The project management environment ashore, invariably performed in Washington at the seat of government itself, is an adaptive, fishbowl world, lacking absolutes; where advice, scrutiny, and discourse between fractious coordinating elements flow together to create a never-ending crescendo of noise in the circuit of day-to-day deliberation and decisions. To the project manager, a uniformed and obedient ship’s company becomes instead a polyglot technical crew of civil service specialists and contractor civilians, a sprinkling of military action officers in headquarters and at a variety of field activities, politically appointed and inspired civilian bosses, a continually-shifting flag rank hierarchy, numerous other executive branch officials, representatives of the news media, legislators and their staffs, and the general accounting office—all personages with allegiances and motivations completely foreign to the day-to-day operation of the USS Own Ship. The project manager must act as his own CIC, sharing with the ship commander the responsibility of eternal vigilance, discriminating between spikes of noise to be ignored and incoming bogeys with which he must deal.
There are, then, important areas of divergence between the two careers of command at sea and project management ashore. Just as excellence in command at sea builds on previous personal experience at sea, an essential contributor to being a professional project manager is having had previous exposure and responsibilities in a project management or material acquisition situation.
The requirements for career progression to project management, then, work directly contrary to the requirements for command at sea and progression to flag rank based on accepted norms of the past. Most importantly, after acquiring operational experience and the required technical background, the candidate project manager will often find the time he needs, for gaining “hands on” experience as a project manager, competing directly with the time he should devote to preparation for command. Clearly, the Navy cannot have it both ways; clearly, the direction from on high is that project managers “must be given more recognition toward career advancement in all of the Services and good managers must be rewarded just as good operations people are rewarded.” (From a DepSecDef memorandum dated 28 May 1970.) The major command equivalent directive takes a step in this direction. Like much else that he has done, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt’s recent initiative on major command equivalency will require a formidable adjustment by the Navy. Merely diverting outstanding officers from major combatant commands to come ashore and become project managers would be commendable and an interesting alternative but it would only be rendering lip service unless the individuals concerned had the requisite experience and qualifications. Most probably they wouldn’t have, because the career pattern that qualified them for major command at sea would deny them the apprenticeship experience required for management of a major material project.
A recently constituted task group of major project managers, whose membership was drawn from all three of the Services, identified specific traits of a project manager. In their listing of these traits we begin to see critical divergences between what is required to get the project management job done and what is the accepted norm of a typical line captain’s behavior as he proceeds through the prescribed command and staff stepping-stones to flag rank:
“. . . a fierce, uncompromising attitude, frame of mind, and personality that constantly guards against and wards off any attempt to share in the responsibility of conducting the day-to-day management involved in the work by anyone . . . [the project manager] is a loner. He cannot have his superior, his commanding officer, sharing in the management responsibility. This is particularly difficult in any acquisition, but in the military establishment it is about unworkable. The most successful programs have been operated in violation of the established organizational structure and completely outside the influence of the established procedures and higher headquarters . . . ; he must defy the staff, the support agencies, the offered assistance, at any echelon within the Department of Defense . . . .”
Depending on personal bent, a given project manager, who may be a superior performer as a project manager, may also be an iconoclast or be deficient in certain of the accepted social amenities.
The recent, explicit recognition of the need in the Navy to promote some iconoclasts to flag rank is, thus, a subtle new initiative that gives recognition to this important adversary mechanism trait. Past, sometimes iconoclastic, project managers have recognized the professional corner they have backed into by specializing in technical matters and project management, but the creative appeal and excitement of their jobs in leading and defending a major system acquisition have provided an overriding personal reward.
Past flag selection boards have confirmed these men’s personal deviations from the “norm” by usually failing to select project managers to flag rank. The Navy’s two most successful (and iconoclastic, as it turned out) project managers currently active, Hyman Rickover and Levering Smith, were both passed over by flag selection boards. In both cases, public clamor was responsible for Congressional action which resulted in their promotions.
If prior technical, project management experience provides the essential on-the-job training (OJT) needed for future success of a major system project manager, a postgraduate course of instruction is also required: “. . . a broad technical background is a basic requisite.” So said the tri-service group of project managers. The core of this instruction has to be one of the well-established master’s degree technical curricula long available in the Navy, either at Monterey or other recognized institutions. Beyond this currently unpopular, tough engineering fare (it takes two to three years to get a master’s degree in engineering vice the ten months required in “management” at Monterey), a competent project manager needs to have equally strong and complementary skills in other areas: cost estimating and accounting; financial management; contract law and procedures; parametric analysis; organizational techniques and administration; and, most importantly, a frank appreciation of governmental working relationships and past Navy dealings with the Congress. These course offerings tend to fill out the “business” side of the future project manager’s needed capabilities so that he becomes a versatile, resilient technical administrator. He will be dealing with experts in these fields. He must become an expert himself. This “business” course material must be provided in much greater depth and with much greater currency than is available in the usual “public administration” or “management” departments of even a first-rate university. Currently no academic institution in the country is equipped to provide the instruction required.
For the Navy, though, a positive initiative is being taken to provide this capability at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. Commencing in the fall of 1971, a special Weapon System Acquisition Manager’s (WSAM) curriculum began. Envisioned in this program is a two-tier academic regime that will lead to the awarding of two master’s degrees, one for the candidate’s technical field, one in management.
For those observers whose span of concern is limited to the here-and-now problems associated with the current military “procurement mess,” the Monterey WSAM curricula can rightly be termed a possible step to help the future but it is of little use in today’s climate of debilitating weapon system cost growth.
Why a WSAM course now? Why has the PG system not been providing this background adequately in decades past? Answers to these questions lie in the fact that the PG School is but one participating element in a much larger and very diffuse environment that surrounds the personnel structure of the Navy’s commissioned officer corps. Any shortcomings of the school must be traced back to the root causes and actions of the past when the officer corps interpreted its needs and treated its own. Leadership at the school has been desultory. Some two dozen separate curricula sponsors in Washington pull and tug at defining the school’s academic fare. For the students, technical PG education, with its several years of tough academics, has been a questionable enhancement to an officer’s career. What CNO ever took a technical PG course?
Common sense, and a source of new hope, have prevailed in Secretary John H. Chafee’s recent letter to the FY-72 flag selection board: “. . . all selectees should not be viewed as potential Chiefs of Naval Operation.” This initiative, plus the establishment, in OpNav, of a new Director of Naval Education and Training (Op-099) to set an elevated tone and to knit together a clear purpose for the Navy’s in-house university triumvirate (Annapolis-Monterey-Newport) are signs of hope for the future. Disgruntled, retired admirals have recently been quoted as decrying the passing of naval “warriors” and the rise of “weaponeers.” Perhaps the truth is that past warriors were not properly equipped to make the major weapon system decisions and technical management judgments that have resulted in the current, tragic “procurement mess.” Perhaps the weaponeers and technicians should have been encouraged and permitted to share more in the decisions of leadership, instead of being suppressed. This past history will not be repeated if the new breed of project managers is capitalized on as a vital new source of material-conscious weaponeers, if you will, who in proportionate numbers should be called on to provide flag rank leadership in the Navy.
For the Navy to turn to Monterey for the WSAM curriculum is, of course, simply capitalizing on the reason for the school—to be responsive to unique Navy needs. Thus, Monterey made a little recognized but singularly important contribution to technical education in the early 1950s with its establishment (along with Case Institute) of a tough, mathematics-based two-year Operations Research master’s program (the old RO curriculum). This was a pioneer course amongst American academic institutions. Adequately supported, without too much second guessing from on high, a vigorous reputation in weapon system acquisition management similarly can be established. The biggest uncertainty will be in obtaining the necessary faculty to conduct the “business” side of the program. The normal vested interests and parochialism surrounding the current “management” program may have to be altered within the school itself. A viable option might be that a portion of the “business” part of the program should be accomplished at the recently established Defense Systems Management School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. At that site, Washington-aware, current-problem-oriented faculty participation, both permanent and temporary, might be more efficiently brought to bear. Coupling this geographic convenience with the flexibility inherent under Federal Contract Research Center (e.g., the Center for Naval Analysis) of hiring faculty would give vitality and currency while avoiding some of the pitfalls frequently associated with tenure.
The history of the Naval PG School, of necessity is intertwined with the emergence of material complexity in the Navy. The school came into being a decade after the Amalgamation Act of 1899 abolished the Navy’s staff corps of engineers, thereby imposing on line officers all of the operating responsibilities for ships at sea, top to bottom, engineroom, turrets and bridge. With abolishment of the Engineer Corps, the four-year curriculum at Annapolis, always more practically-oriented than the more theoretically-oriented curriculum at West Point, suddenly came under additional pressures to include additional practical training and instruction at the expense of theoretical consideration. The burgeoning mechanical and electrical technology of the day was continually introducing more and more elements of apparatus and machinery into ships, and line officers now had to run it all. By 1909, it was necessary to establish a postgraduate course in marine engineering at Annapolis to teach selected officers the theory needed to cope with the design aspects of new equipment. By 1916, with the last vestiges of the old Engineer Corps’ technical competence gone from the Navy, a special legislative umbrella had to be sought under which a small group of officers, designated for Engineering Duty Only (EDO), could devote themselves on a career basis to engineering design and development for the Bureau of Engineering. Sixty-five of these specialists were initially selected and carried as extra numbers in the line. After reaching the grade of commander, they were expected to work almost exclusively ashore as experts to provide uniformed leadership and in-depth participation in the material acquisition process for marine machinery. The emergence of the EDO concept, created as a special element of the line in response to ever widening material complexity the pre-World War I Navy, presaged in its way the current interest in establishing a protected career for a cadre of line project managers who will direct, as specialists, new system acquisition in our vastly more complex, modern-day Navy.
Of ancillary interest in recounting these earlier years it should be recalled that a staff corps element of naval constructors presided over ship and hull design in the Bureau of Construction and Repair. This group was melded into the EDO group in 1940 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Bureau of Ships out of Engineering and Construction and Repair. Also, the formation of the Bureau of Aeronautics after World War I, the EDO principle was applied to that Bureau’s responsibilities for aviation material with the legislative establishment in 1935 of an Aeronautical Engineering Duty (AED) category for aviation’s corresponding group of naval aircraft constructors and other engineering specialists.
Briefly, then, this has been the history of the emergence in the Navy of unique bureau-oriented cadres of material acquisition specialists, tethered and kept in proper bounds by the old Bureau of Navigation by being assigned the opprobrious label of “the restricted line” and pointedly having the “O” of their acronym stand for “only” instead of “officer.” Modern usage is to drop the “O” and thereby drop the subject. Currently the restricted line category numbers approximately 1,720 officers split 1,200/400/120 among the ED (140X)/AED (151X)/OED (170X) groups (“O” for ordnance, in this case).
Looking beyond internecine barbs, however, at the history of past decades, the Navy, the most technical of all the Services, has been making timely and well-intended accommodations within its officer corps structure to discharge its technical material responsibilities. A PG system of higher education is now fully ingrained and functioning; cadres of officers have been created whose career structure provides almost every element now being postulated as required for project managers. A technical PG degree is a requisite for restricted line officers and, as importantly, a career permitting the garnering of technical weapon system acquisition experience, through consecutive shore tours, is the norm. Looking side-by-side at the career patterns of two contemporary officers just finishing a technical PG course, one unrestricted, one restricted line, only the current restricted line career easily accommodates the tour progression needed to acquire the OJT material acquisition experience required of a future project manager. An unrestricted line career progression continually puts the opportunity to gain this experience in jeopardy because of the forces created in pursuing the classic career carrot at the end of the stick: major combatant command.
The number of educated, experienced, and mature material acquisition specialists needed to fill Navy project management billets is less than a hundred, all in the ranks of captain or rear admiral. The pipeline of maturing officers in the ranks of lieutenant commander and commander needed to sustain this work force will require a supporting population numbering perhaps an additional two hundred. A precise definition of the numbers required will not be attempted at this point. What will be attempted is to address a subject that arises naturally, namely, whether or not the project management career group should be carried inside or outside of the restricted line structure. The size of the population required for the effort is certainly compatible with the current restricted line strength. With an augmentation of the “business” education provided to candidates, the restricted line cornerstones, of requiring a technical PG degree and providing ample opportunity for material acquisition “apprenticeship” experience, would seem to make it an ideal vehicle.
Speaking to the other side of the issue, making project management a viable career alternative in the unrestricted line, has several positive factors in its favor. First, and characteristically foremost, however, any complete discussion must mention the up-welling of emotion that traditionally attends any consideration of the restricted line by unrestricted line officers. The excuse for a selected few to neglect sea duty and the challenge of major combatant command. For the purposes of present discussion, however, let us be glad that we have explicitly mentioned this emotional factor, and then let us file it away. Logic and strong service needs long ago overtook consideration of this type of superficial thinking. What better examples to note than the fact that Admiral Thomas Moorer, as a 1310 captain, did not command an aircraft carrier or that Admiral Zumwalt, while an 1100 captain, never had a sea command, large or small.
Subspecialization within the unrestricted line, as a concept, has always been the alternate vis-à-vis the restricted line to provide individual officers with strong special talents to discharge important service needs. Historically, designation for aviation and submarines represents subspecialization within the unrestricted line; so does being “a destroyer sailor,” a communicator, or a warfare area specialist. The rich diversity and complexity of skills needed to operate a modern Navy has led each officer, often by happenstance of tours of duty, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes by deliberate personal choice, to become a subspecialist. If Secretary Chafee’s direction that “. . . all selectees should not be viewed as potential Chiefs of Naval Operation” is nailed to the mast and allowed to stand for the future, then subspecialization would seem to have gotten a vigorous endorsement and it would appear most inappropriate to throw CNO’s critically important project management specialists like cats in a sack over the restricted line fence.
The restricted line is a vestige of the old bureau, bilinear Navy that officially went out of business in 1966 when the Chief of Naval Material was put under the command of the Chief of Naval Operations. The Potomac River no longer divides CNM and the “material” Navy from CNO and the “operating” Navy. They are both on the same side of the river. Looking to the future, a strong argument can be made to carry a project management cadre of material acquisition subspecialists in the unrestricted line, rather than reverting to a personnel accommodation attuned to the past. This alternative necessarily carries with it a very important corollary action item, namely, it questions the future continuation of the restricted line concept. The present-day restricted line communities principally service the internal manning requirements of four material system commands: Air, Ship, Ordnance, and Electronic, which act very much like their predecessor “bureaus” of old. Restricted line billets are, thus, narrowly circumscribed. As a minimum, the whole narrowly constrained restricted line billet structure and its often subservient posture in the naval material command should be examined and revitalized before one could consider adding to it the project management cadre and pipeline. Given the need for this restructuring, in depth, a complete re-look at the need to continue the restricted line is suggested. Historically, the restricted line may have served its purpose. Perhaps naval officer corps mores and procedures have matured to the point that protective legislative umbrellas need not be Band-Aided onto the personnel structure to assure and preserve professional management of technology. Rather than think of the restricted line as now obsolete, it seems more likely that it embodies an awareness of technical management requirements which was decades ahead of the rest of the Navy.
The course of action for the future is, of course, clear: both the unrestricted line and restricted line will continue to exist side-by-side and the best-suited officers, regardless of source, will be assigned to current project management billets. Several of the designated major project management billets are already occupied by restricted line officers. For these men, their restricted line heritage has major, fatal shortcomings when they compare themselves to their unrestricted line contemporaries. The defects in their system concern flag rank aspirations. Since they can all be assumed to be normally motivated officers, their job performance and the Navy’s needs may suffer unconsciously (one would hope) because of the restricted line’s second-class-citizen status.
The specific fatal defects of the restricted line flag situation are two: First, current “gentlemen’s agreement” practice requires that each community of restricted line admirals provide its own flow and attrition with each individual agreeing to retire voluntarily when he achieves rear admiral upper half. This occurs four to six years after promotion to admiral. This forced attrition is necessary to assure the creation of flag opportunities each year for the community. At this writing, the restricted line communities of admirals have been exempted from the newly announced policy, starting in FY-72, of flag rank screening after three years in grade to create flow and opportunity. As will be seen, the wisdom of this exemption is debatable.
From the point of view of a front-running restricted line performer, who has been picked to make vital commitments for the Navy’s future as a project manager, this truncated flag rank opportunity has already hurt him because he has no realistic chance for deep selection since his group is characteristically several years behind the unrestricted line because of the past depressant effect of what tends to be a lock-stepped selection process. Indeed, under these circumstances, there is an admitted tendency by the “establishment” of wanting to keep a high-performance individual working productively for the Navy two or three years longer a captain because as soon as this valuable man is promoted to flag rank in the restricted line, the five-year clock starts and his talents will soon be lost to the Navy. Failure to invoke the three-year screening policy in favor of “five years and out” for the restricted line would appear to be a policy of benign neglect. Additionally, under the five-year-and-out policy, there is no parallel incentive in the restricted line purposely to select younger officers, where equally suited. As a matter of policy this has been pursued in the unrestricted line to create a pool of younger, experienced flag officers who can compete for many important positions for which, in the past, the age of flag candidates has worked to the Navy’s disadvantage. The restricted line, thus presents a discouraging environment for younger officers.
These reactionary circumstances in the restricted line dictate that meaningful flag rank utilization of the experience and demonstrated superior performance of project managers, who would come to flag rank via the restricted line, will be late in coming on stream and therefore late in being applied through the broader authorities of a flag billet. Once available, they will be lost prematurely because of early forced retirement. Correction of this problem can be accomplished as a matter of policy change within the Navy itself. It should not be required that the Congress or the President, for the good of the nation, as in the past, should have to force the continuation-on-active-duty of uniquely contributing flag officers that the Navy would eject because of a massive, “inert” system.
Because of these serious flag rank procedural deficiencies, and in spite of the other positive factors in its favor, as it is currently constituted and operating, the restricted line should not become the vehicle for the naval officer corps’ project management cadre and pipeline.
Beyond this factor of career truncation in terms of allowable years of service, a second flag rank deficiency of the restricted line is truncation in terms of meaningful and responsible billet opportunity. Again, as currently constituted, restricted line flag officers are usually destined to serve as assistants to unrestricted line officers. That a restricted line officer recently became Chief of Naval Material apparently was an historical accident. In the past, no AED or OED flag officer ever commanded anything, although the more populous and older ED community has managed to retain command of shipyards and two system commands, Ship and Electronic.
This truncated billet arrangement for restricted line flag officers would have to be abandoned if proper use were to be made of specialist project management experience. As a management principle it would seem to be in the Navy’s best interest to fill each flag billet in the Navy on a best-suited basis, and not ritualistically to restrict certain billets to certain source-groups of officers. Fortunately, there has recently been evidence of fresh initiatives in this area, suggesting the emergence of a more progressive outlook in the Navy.
An additional flag rank aspect of project management needs to be surfaced and discussed. Hugh Lucas of Aerospace Daily recently put his finger on a vital national question when he discussed the practice of “dissembling”—hiding under a false appearance—by responsible witnesses before the Congress. A subsidiary form of dissembling can also creep into the well-intentioned performance of a captain-grade project manager, who has his hand on a throttle that literally unleashes hundreds of millions of dollars and who, for the Navy and himself, has to ensure and project an image of success. It would be in the best interest of the Navy, and the nation, to reduce the temptation for weapon system acquisition dissembling by insisting that only flag rank officers head selected major projects. This is a particularly important principle to adopt during the first critical, formative years of a project, not only to provide objectivity and perspective that can afford to reject dissembling (because a promotion to flag rank is not at stake), but also to hold the line and insist on low risk technical choices for a myriad of subsystem decisions that must be negotiated with dozens of functional technical groups over whom the project manager has no direct authority. A flag rank project manager can deal more effectively with recalcitrant functional shops, including those in the office of the CNO. If it comes down to a question of already-thin flag rank resources, it would appear to be better to man a District Commandant’s office with a captain than to allow a ten-billion-dollar national defense investment to go divergent because key decisions were not hammered out objectively in the beginning.
Project management as a “new” material acquisition factor has already passed its faddish zenith. When David Packard first came to the Pentagon, he suddenly had thrust on his Lincolnesque shoulders all the finger-pointing and tragedy of the collective military “procurement mess.” As he groped his way through a frustrating morass, the only tiny voices that he heard which seemed to convey any semblance of an understanding of what was going on were those of the few existing project managers on the scene. Out of frustration, as much as anything else, Packard quickly elevated these men to a plateau of regular interpersonal contact, to the jeopardy, and chagrin, of the functional flag and general officer hierarchy.
All of this is fast passing. The project managers have not had all the answers, either. Neither has the special Congressional Government Procurement Commission, nor has the military’s most persistent critic, Senator William Proxmire. What is emerging as a permanent truth, however, is the need for forthrightness, professionalism, and accountability. This can come only from prepared and motivated project management provided by the officer corps itself. As an urgent matter of self-interest and survival of executive prerogatives, the officer corps must produce truly professional project managers who, through the uniqueness of their positions, have leverage on the Navy’s tactical and logistic future far out of proportion to any other positions of responsibility in the Navy.
A recent article in the Naval Institute Proceedings ended with the following quotation from General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 address to the Naval War College: “Was this dollar necessary?” He was talking about national defense. Let it not be said that America did not survive as a nation because her seapower atrophied, and this in turn, because she could not manage her affairs ashore.
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Captain Featherston learned about project management “on the job” when he was responsible for four-and-a-half years for development and pilot production of PHOENIX, the fire control and missile system that has been the justification for the F-6D, F-111B, and F-14 aircraft platforms. Designated for Aeronautical Engineering Duty in 1958, he worked as an AEW operations analyst, and as an AEC manager for SNAP systems. He did early analysis in support of satellite ocean surveillance. He attended the University of Virginia, the U. S. Naval Academy (B.S., 1950), and the U. S. Naval Postgraduate School (Ph.D. 1963). Currently, he is Commanding Officer of the Naval Training Device Center, Orlando, Florida.