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Surface Navy chief petty officers at all levels suffer from career broadening, which stretches them beyond their areas of expertise.
First, I am obviously not a chief petty officer, nor have I ever been one. But I have been a voracious consumer of chiefly product for 27 years. Thus, I think I am qualified to advance informed opinions regarding how well chiefs, writ large, are carrying out their responsibilities at sea.
Some believe that the Chiefs' Mess - the corpus formed by all the individual chiefs assigned to a ship - is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. We see the Chiefs' Mess as a powerful engine, deeply embedded in the ship and able to move critical levers with a collective flex of its will.
But today, this is not what really happens. Rather, the typical Chiefs' Mess nowadays is by and large ineffective. Perhaps more correctly, it is not doing what it was designed to do nor what it historically did.
Of course, some would emphatically disagree with this assessment. But when asked on what metric they base their glowing views of Chiefs' Mess performance, it becomes apparent that they don't have much to offer. Mostly, their disagreement reflects an admiration for individual chiefs rather than an evolved idea of how a given Chiefs' Mess produces desired effects.
This lack of introspection regarding what is commonly referred to as "the backbone of the Navy" is somewhat understandable. After all, this topic is an uncomfortable one for many. In the end it may be easier to go along with the accepted idea that the chiefs, both individually and collectively, are the foundation on which all success in ships is built. To look unblinkingly at what may be a downward trend seems an uncomfortable - even disloyal - indictment of sorts. If we are even asking these questions, are we not by extension certifying that some problem exists?
Demonstrable evidence, however, does point that way. While the recent trend of poor Inspection and Survey (INSURV) performance is merely a single example of a decline in Chiefs' Mess efficacy, it is a significant one. One would be hard-pressed to find a chief who would not firmly agree that INSURV, which is fundamentally a material...