The Navy’s success since the 1950s in procuring and safely operating scores of nuclear-powered ships and in developing a succession of reactor designs using fuel cores with increasingly long lives can be considered a major success story.
Naval Reactors’ success can be attributed in part to its administrative setup, which provides Naval Reactors with a clear and focused mission, clear and total responsibility and accountability for implementing that mission, a director with a high rank and a long term of office, centralized control of the program’s industrial base and suppliers, and a fairly flat organizational structure with an in-house staff that is fully knowledgeable in the technology that it acquires from its contractors.
Naval Reactors’ success can also be attributed to its operational philosophy, which is characterized by, among other things, a focus on technical excellence, rigorous quality control, comprehensive procedures and procedural compliance, careful selection of personnel, and rigorous and continuous training of those personnel.
That was Ron O’Rourke testifying to Congress in 2014, Case Studies in DOD Acquisition: Finding what Works. It’s amazing to me that the philosophy of Naval Reactors is not the standard across defense acquisition. Perhaps Naval Reactors is too separated from regular channels and jealous of its independence — good luck getting any data out of them! But there’s a real culture of excellence that has held over from the Rickover years. Here is what should be an obvious statement made by Rickover in 1959*:
How can a man possibly take charge of complex technical matters, say a man who has been captain of a ship and has not had the requisite scientific and engineering training and experience? Why, it is an absurdity on the face of it, and this is where much of our difficulty starts.
And former DepSecDef David Packard** agreed:
To be brutally frank about this situation, the services need to be organized so that the development and production of new weapons systems is managed by people who are experts in that business. This is not the practice in the services. Instead, the weapons management job is performed under a system in which too much responsibility is given to officers whose special expertise is not development and procurement.
Obviously I agree with them, but leaders cannot feasibly delegate decisions to acquisition organizations unless they have technical experts up-and-down the chain to make a good use of that power. There are no short cuts to that organizational culture.
In another way, it’s good most acquisition offices aren’t like Naval Reactors because of how closed off they are. Nuclear propulsion has been quite modular and only requires coordination with three ship classes active in the investment phase. If a more cross-cutting or joint capability was siloed off like C4ISR, space, networking, or ordnance, then there would be a lot of challenges to effective integration.
*“Organization and Management of Missile Programs.” (1959, Feb.-Mar.). Hearings before the Subcommittee on Military Operations; Committee on Government Operations, House, 606.
**“Policy Changes in Weapon System Procurement.” (1970, Dec. 10). Forty-Second Report by the Committee on Government Operations, 19.
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