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West lays out plans for 2010

NAVAL AIR STATION JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The Navy’s top enlisted man — after spending his first year traveling tens of thousands of miles and taking the pulse of the fleet — is forging his to-do list for 2010. That includes speeding up the regional rollout of the new Navy Working Uniform, making warfare qualifications mandatory for every sailor and reasserting disciplinary power for chiefs through a new instruction.

Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy (SS/SW) Rick West has also taken on the Navy secretary’s call to eliminate sexual assault and harassment in the ranks, saying it’s up to the chiefs’ mess to make it happen.

But equally important, West is taking other items off his plate — choosing to postpone plans to rework evaluations for petty officers and junior sailors, and quashing a plan to rework the disciplinary system in the fleet.

“We’ll kind of hold it out and if it comes to it in the future, we’ll dust it off and take a look at it again,” he said of the evals. “But it’s not something I want to be looking at or focusing on in the near future. We’ve got bigger issues to deal with, ones that affect our sailors more.”

West spoke with Navy Times on Nov. 5 while meeting with his leadership mess — fleet and force master chiefs — in Jacksonville.

Blue cammie rollout

The region-by-region rollout of the new Navy Working Uniform will be accelerated, West said, making it available to all in the fleet by March at the latest, instead of October, which was the original plan. A Navy announcement with details is expected soon, he said.

Officials still want everyone in the Navy to own four sets of the cammies by Dec. 31, 2010.

“We’re real happy that we can now do this,” West said. “We first started pushing on this when we heard from a command master chief in the Pacific Northwest that their exchange was ready to go, ahead of their originally scheduled date. If we can do this, why not?”

He said the fleet is in a “good spot” right now with uniforms and wants to concentrate on getting them into all sailors’ hands.

But one thing he’s not in favor of is wearing ball caps with the NWU — even inside the ship or when sailors are at sea.

“I just don’t think it looks good at all, it really doesn’t,” he said. “If sailors want to wear their ball caps, they can still wear them with coveralls onboard the ship — that’s where it belongs now.”

While sailors are barred from wearing command ball caps with the NWU on or off base, commanding officers can allow sailors to wear them while aboard ship.

Warfare qualifications

One of the most pressing items the leadership mess dealt with in Jacksonville was the pending overhaul of warfare qualifications — something West plans to get done sooner rather than later.

One development: Top enlisted leaders want all sailors to get their quals no more than 30 months after reporting to their warfare command.

“I want this to be a requirement for everyone — a part of every sailor’s career — when they walk onboard that ship, you hand them the qual card as part of their training,” he said. “We made up our mind, now the fleets need to get down there and execute.”

Currently, most communities require E-5s and above to qualify within two years, though for the submarine force and communities like divers, explosive ordnance disposal and SEALs, it’s part of their training pipeline and happens within the first year of service.

West said each kind of commander will have to decide his own timeframe — as long as it happens within 30 months.

He said he has heard the arguments that making quals mandatory will lessen the effectiveness of the programs as commands try to push sailors through in time.

“I know there are those out there who say by doing this, we’re watering it down,” he said. “Well, to those chiefs I can say it’s up to them not to allow that to happen at their command. Personally, I have faith in the chiefs’ mess and in the E-6s to get this done for our junior sailors.”

West said he has also heard the sailors out there wanting to return to awarding advancement points for warfare pins. He’s not buying it.

“It’s not about having something that looks good on your uniform or getting advancement points, it’s about being an effective warfighter,” West said. “When I look at a sailor with a warfare qualification, I know they’ve met the basic knowledge requirements to save their ship, their shipmates and themselves in a time of peril.”

Sexual assault and harassment

West supports the Navy’s recent tough stance on sexual assault in the ranks. But he also said that to have an impact, chiefs must carry the ball to the deck plates.

“We’re going to attack this full force and from all angles — but it starts with the fleet and force master chiefs; they need to be leading the effort and making sure we’re reaching down to the deck plates to those E-1s and E-2s.”

Education and training are a big part of that, he said. “We needed to review the training piece on this, and now we are,” West said. “They are looking at what we have available to us now with an eye on determining if it is still effective to today’s sailor.”

But he’s not waiting around, either, and plans his own social media blitz on the subject.

“I’m going to be talking about this in any venue that I can,” he said. “I’m going to talk about it on Facebook and Twitter on a regular basis — I’m going to talk about it at all-hands calls. We’re not going to tolerate this in our Navy. It’s just something we can’t do.”

Discipline power for chiefs

After nearly two years of experimenting and development, West and his mess also have decided not to create a new “standards and conduct board” that was to have become the first line of Navy discipline.

“It was a highly successful pilot program, and the commands participating loved the process,” West said. “But in the end, we realized that it was better to use what we’d learned to strengthen existing programs instead of putting new ones out there.”

As a result, he said, Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. Mark Ferguson has directed that the current instruction governing disciplinary review boards gets a rewrite.

West wants the chiefs’ mess to assume a greater role in the disciplinary review process by having them screen every potential captain’s mast case and have the authority to provide alternative or lighter punishments that will not go on a sailor’s permanent record — just as the standards and conduct boards did in the pilot program.

“We will take the instruction already in place, put some structure to it,” West said. “It’s never been something chiefs didn’t have or that was taken away; it’s just people don’t use it or have gotten away from using it in recent years.”

Career development boards

West routinely asks sailors whether they have had a career development board — meant to guide them as they make decisions — and he is not pleased with what he has heard. “I think it’s slowly catching on, but it’s not fast enough for me,” West said.

He said he often gets e-mails from the fleet complaining that the best sailors aren’t getting approved to re-enlist through the Perform to Serve program. Having a command-level CDB would have helped in those cases.

“But career development boards are much more than just PTS. It’s planning what’s next for that sailor,” West said. “Career development boards have never been more important to our sailors. I still see commands that are not doing this as aggressively as they should.”

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