Welcome to the Proceedings Podcast. I'm Bill Hamlet, the Editor-in-Chief at the U.S. Naval Institute. It's Wednesday, the 4th of February. Good to have you on board, everyone. I just want to make note of the fact that we just said farewell, our big farewell to Eric Mills, longtime Editor-in-Chief of Naval History Magazine. And Eric was here for 23 years at the Naval Institute in a variety of different jobs. I think the last seven years, he's been the editor-in-chief in a fantastic one of Naval History Magazine. He'll be replaced by Emily Abdao, who's just joined our team. And so Emily will start doing some episodes of the Proceedings Podcast, the Naval History episodes coming up, I think, next week. So lots to look forward to there. And Eric's going to keep writing for us. He's going to keep doing some editing for us from time to time. And so he's not leaving the team, but he's definitely stepping back from his editor-in-chief role. All right. This episode is brought to you by General Dynamics Electric Boat. GDE Electric Boat has a 126-year legacy of delivering the submarines our nation needs to defend our freedoms and those of our allies. To ensure our nation's defense now at this critical time in history, GDEB is investing in the next generation of shipbuilders and infrastructure to answer the call. It was EB then and it's EB now. Learn more at gdeb.com slash about slash EB now. Okay, my guest today joining us from Newport, Rhode Island is Captain Joe Baggett. He's the commanding officer of the Navy's Surface Warfare Schools Command, and he's the author of an article in the January issue of Proceedings titled, Not Your Father's Surface Warfare Training. Joe, welcome back to the show. And Bill, thank you for having me back again. You said welcome back because I was there last year and it's great to be back again. Yeah, last year you were here and the same thing happens tomorrow night here at the Naval Academy. So every year around this time of year is when the surface warfare selectees from the graduating class here at the Academy select their ships. And it's a big sort of rock star event. I mean, it has just this amazing electricity to it. And you were down here last year. I know Admiral McLean, the SWO boss usually comes to it and the N96 boss comes to it and all these senior SWOs. But it's a very exciting time. And we've got a couple hundred SWOs to be from the class of 26 who will be selecting their ships. And, you know, which what ship, what port. And, you know, it's an exciting time for them. So that's always a big event. But you couldn't make it to that one this year. but we got you on the show and we're happy to have you. And we got you in the magazine too, which was also really exciting. And so your article, I mean, to me, and I wasn't a SWO, but it's a really motivating piece, right? And it talks about a lot of really cool things that's happening with professionalization of surface warfare training. And you start the article by recalling the tragic collisions of 2017, the Fitzgerald and the McCain out there in the Western Pacific, both guided missile destroyers. We don't need to belabor those collisions, but you describe those events as a wake-up call. So just start there, talk about that wake-up call and sort of what's happened since then. Yeah, Bill, I appreciate the question. And then, yeah, you know, first off, I really wish I could be there. Last year was such an exciting time to see the nation's newest leaders about to select their ships and head out to the fleet. But it wasn't meant to be this year, but definitely I want to get back out there again for the next iteration of this. But no, thanks for having me back. And thank you for you and the team and all the help you guys gave me with putting that article together, because I just felt like it was an important time to write that piece. I've been in command here at Service Warfare Schools Command for about two years now and seeing it firsthand, just the growth of our mariner skills and how we're training our officers, seeing it firsthand and how it's paying off out in the fleet. I just felt like nobody's telling this story of all the investments and how great the Navy is doing now. And unfortunately, it was born on the heels of those catastrophic events in 2017. And like you talked about, we don't need to relitigate those incidents today. But what is key is that it forced the service Navy to confront something very uncomfortable. And that's that we had slowly let our skills, our basic mariner skills atrophy, right? We had slowly accepted risk knowingly or unknowingly in an area that we hold very very true and unfortunately it bore itself out in the collisions and the loss of life as you know the navy commission of report called the comprehensive review and and going back and reading through that because we had some specific task out of that review for our schoolhouse but it didn't just contribute the collisions in 2017 to isolated human errors it didn't just you know pin the fault on on a couple bad watch standards It really took a look at the entire system and called out the fact that we had allowed fundamental skills and systematic readiness issues to atrophy. So the Navy needed to take a whole look. And I tell you, Bill, as I look at the review and what we've done since then, couldn't be prouder to be a SWO. Why? Because we didn't just look at it as a singular event. we wanted to learn from it, right? Because it was a Waco call to see that it was a whole systematic failure that had led to those two collisions. So we learned from it. We wanted to learn from it. So we took it seriously. We didn't treat it as just a checklist and we really restructured how we do our training. So I wanted to tell that story because I'm so proud of the fact that, you know, we took that opportunity to say never again. And we asked ourselves, How do we build professional mariners from this day forward? Yeah. And in response to that wake up call and your article mentions this and really talks in depth about it, the surface warfare community created that new program, the Mariner Skills Training Program or MSTP. Tell us about the program, who it affects, its scope and its scale. Yeah. So the Mariner Skills Training Program, as you highlighted, you know, MSTP, it's our return to mastery of the basics. but we're using, we're executing that with modern tools. The Navy and the lawmakers in D.C. decided that we needed to invest in training. We need to do things holistically different. We need to invest in it. So they programmed over a billion dollars across the program's life to build these state-of-the-art facilities to execute training. And when you think about MSTP, it really constitutes four pillars, right? The first being these new facilities, these new trainers. I mean, they're state of the art. If any of your readers get a chance to visit Norfolk or San Diego, they're called the Mariners Skills Training Centers. And I talk a little bit about it in my article, but it is eye-opening and breathtaking, just the level of fidelity in those trainers and what the officers get when they go through that, right? So you have the trainers. We revamped the curriculum. We revamped the assessment process. That's the third pillar. and I'll talk about that a little bit more later. And then finally is the data analytics piece, right? We needed to move away from making decisions about how we train officers on our feeling, right? We feel like they're doing well. We feel they're not doing well. And now we're making actual data informed decisions on where to adjust curriculum and adjust training and adjust, you know, how we send our officers out to the fleet, where we send them to, how we give them orders, right? But, you know, it affects every officer that stands watch on the bridge and every officer that goes to a ship, right? So from junior officer, meaning instant, all the way up to major commander 06, they all have to take part of the MSTP. And what I love about the MSTP bill is for the first time we have an actual training continuum And what I mean by that is every officer gets a specific training based on the milestone that they going to on the ship And then as they come back through the schoolhouses to every milestone that they go through, they go through additional training that builds upon itself. And then they're assessed along the way. Right. So they have a no kidding continuum. And we in the community now have a mechanism to validate their skills. Right. and hold them accountable if those skills atrophy before we send them back out to the fleet to do difficult things. So this is really our way of getting our hands around the mariner skills and professionalizing the mariner skills in the fleet. And CNO talks about this, too, but it's about MSTP treating citizenship as a warfighting skill, not just a prerequisite. Yeah, I remember in the wake of the collisions in 2017, former CNO, Admiral Mike Mullen, who was a SWO, he wrote a piece that we published in Proceedings where he kind of did a mea culpa. He said, basically, we took some of our seamanship and navigation skills among the surface warfare community kind of for granted. And we didn't have those sort of periodic check rides and we didn't have those periodic assessments. And we let some of our lieutenant commanders and commanders go five, six years between sea duties. And we expected them to get back into their next C-Duty and have their skills be what they were when they left. And that was just really unrealistic. That's right. That's right. Talk a little bit about what was SWOT training like before that wake-up call, before 2017. Specifically in your article, you mentioned that, and you talked about it already, those very high fidelity training centers and simulators, bridge watch simulators, that now surface warfare officers can expect to spend about 800 hours in their career in those simulators. And before 2017, it was maybe 300 hours. So that shows you the night and day. Just talk a little bit more about that sort of the night and day between where we were and where we are now in a decade hence. No, absolutely. So what you articulated is about 160% increase in training. And I'll tell you, Bill, I'll start my answer off with a little bit of a C story. So I was in command of USS Trucks in circa 2014. And quality, quality officers being sent to my ship, right? But they were being sent directly to the ship without going to training first. And they would get some level of training, spend some time on the ship, and then go back to training. And the thought process was OJT, train them on the ship, right? They would go back to school and come back to the ship, look and complete the training, qualify. But we equated to, we equated, excuse me, a proficiency of an officer to the amount of experience they had out at sea, right? If they're qualified, they've been on the ship for a certain amount of time, they must be proficient. That was proven to be false, right? Proven to be false. But so I saw in 2014 on Truxton, again, quality officers, But as the commanding officer, it required so much more oversight, so much more mentorship, so much more coaching for me to get those officers over the hump. Right. And rightly so. That was my job. Well, flash forward to 2021 when I'm in command of USS Monterey, which is my major command tour. The level of the officers that were coming to the USS Monterey was just astounding. I mean, my job was on the floor when I could because I deployed right away and deployed into the Eastern Med up to the Black Sea, through the Suez, over to Fifth Fleet. And I could trust my JOs who were just showing up to navigate the ship in complex environments because their training was just exponentially better than what it was before. So I tangibly saw the difference when I was in command in 2021. right um i even took the time to send a note back to the CO SWAS at the time and all the NSST instructors going i don't know what you guys are doing but keep it up because these officers are absolutely amazing um you talked about you know the the number of hours that increased but it's not just the hours it's the purpose in those hours right um the training is structured now it's standardized which is what i care about the most uh um maybe not the most but i do care about it because now you reduce that variance across the fleet. Imagine before you didn't have that. So you just left it up to the CEOs to train their officers. All great, all great officers. Right. But you get that variability. You don't know what the outcome is. Right. Now I get to standardize it. I get to decide how these officers are trained. I get to decide what the metric is for them to pass or fail. Right. And we get to assess that now more than we did before. So it's that conditions check to make sure that their skills haven't atrophied and we can trust them on the bridge and with the lives of the sailors that they're responsible with leading. And then not to mention the training is recurring now. I talked about that continuum that didn't exist before, right? So now an officer can expect that at every career milestone, when they come back to the schoolhouse, they're going to receive some level of NSS training and they're going to be assessed in their skills. So they have to maintain, they have to keep that sword sharpened, right? And so we get better product. So this is a cultural shift in our community now and it's paying huge dividends. Yeah. So you touched on that assessment. I just want you to dive in a little bit more on in the MSTP, the mandatoriness of those assessments, who gets assessed, how often, and how rigorous. So if somebody gets screened, an example question here, right? Somebody screens for or XOCO of an O5 level command, before they go back, before they go to that ship, right, they have to come back through your training and they have to get assessed. Talk about that and talk about the, you know, hey, there's actually teeth in this assessment. No, yeah, there's teeth in the assessment, right? So they're called Mariners Skills Assessments. We call them MSAs, and there's 10 of them throughout an officer's career now, right? And they take one at each of the milestones. Now, some of them are just proficiency checks. Right. But there are out of those 10, there are four go, no go checks. Right. You take one before you head back out for your second demo tour. And if you don't pass it, you don't go. Right. You take one as a department head. If you don't pass it, you don't go. You take one before you go to O5 command. If you don't pass it, you don't go. And the fourth one, fourth and final one you take prior to major command. and that is a go no go and we have had 06's fail right i talk to my team about it all the time um and our job at surface warfare schools command the navy has been clear we now have a new standard for mariner skills you know the standard always existed before but we have a standard now we're going to assess our officers to the standard our job at surface warfare schools command is is to get our officers up to that standard so we're going to coach them we're going to teach them we're going to do everything we can to get them there but sometimes there are officers who can't get to that standard. And we need to identify those officers early and often and then recommend a different career for those officers, if you will. And I say a little flippantly, but that didn't exist before. And I think that would have prevented the catastrophes from before. So yeah, every officer gets it. Like I said, the 10 are spread out across the officer's career, but it is structured, it is data-driven, and it is not easy. They are high traffic density environments where we test not only their knowledge of the rules of the road, but can you apply it, right? Because they do have to take a rules of the road exam where it's just memorization and can you answer the questions on the test. But then when you go in the trainer, can you apply the rules of the road So we testing your judgment And then we put you in situations where you have to apply the rules but also make risk based decisions to keep the ship safe And then we evaluate you on your ability to do that So and it proven it proven it proven out huge dividends As officers, more and more officers go through this merit and skills process, they know what to expect. Again, they're keeping their sword sharp, they're refining their skills, and it's translating out in the fleet. Yeah, that's great. A couple of years ago when Scott Smith, Captain Scott Smith, was the senior member of our editorial board, the chairman of our editorial board here. And he was up at Surface Warfare Schools Command as the director of senior officer training. Right. So you've got an O6 who works under you that screens and trains those who are going out to command ships. And Scott invited me up and he took me into the simulator, put me on the bridge of a DDG. It was nighttime, very low light, straight of Malacca, high traffic situation. And I just remember thinking, wow, this is a varsity situation, right? That's right. And he said, yeah, this is one of those scenarios that we throw people into and they've got to pass. That's right. That's right. One of many, one of many. And it's not just can you keep the ship safe? That's a huge part of it. Right. But can you also accomplish the mission? Right. Because in the U.S. Navy, we have places to be and we have to be there on time. Right. So you have to be able to navigate that while also following the rules and keeping the ship safe. So you can't just slow down and wait for the bad stuff to happen in front of you. Right. You know, you got to figure out a way to navigate your way through it and still accomplish the mission. So you mentioned the MSTCs in Norfolk and San Diego. Are they the same level of fidelity in terms of a simulator as what you've got up in Newport? So to be honest with you, they're better, right? They're better. Wow. Yeah, these trainers were built post-2017. So they're brand new buildings, state-of-the-art trainers, state-of-the-art classrooms. There's a trainer there called the NSST-5. Coming out of the comprehensive review, one of the issues during the collisions was the fact that CIC and the bridge weren't talking to each other. They weren't communicating. They weren't working together to keep the ship safe so that, hey, the Navy needs to build a trainer to be able to do that. I don't have that capability here in Newport. So these training centers were built. And now both of those training centers have the ability for a ship to come over with a full bridge watch team and a full combat watch team in a different room and run through scenarios where they have to talk to each other and they have to coordinate. Yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing. So so I've got those trainers there. I've got an upgraded trainer at every fleet concentration area, which is great. And I'm working on getting funding to upgrade my trainers here in Newport. They're great for what I need them to do here, but they're not up to the level as the Marist Coast Training Center. So I need to upgrade them. Got it. So I was amazed last year when we met, you mentioned just the scope and the breadth of your command, right? It's not just in Newport. It's not just in San Diego and Norfolk, but you've got training centers out. You mentioned in Yokosuka and in Bahrain and in Rota. All over the place. All over the place, right? So how big is Surface Warfare Schools Command? How many people are in the command? Yeah, so I've got 12 different commands and 24 different sites. Yeah, it's all over the place. Yeah, and we train about 80,000 students a year is our throughput, right? A large portion of that is the firefighting trainers that I have in Norfolk and San Diego. The scope of responsibility from Service Corporate Schools Command is huge. I own all the A schools, the engineering A schools and the quartermaster A schools and the bosom A schools in Great Lakes. So that on top of the Mariner Schools training stuff that I own and on top of the firefighting training that I do for the Navy. I own 90 percent of the firefighting trainers for the Navy. So I've got a lot of great Americans working for me and doing great things. That's awesome. That's a lot of responsibility. I want to ask you a question about data and analytics, because improving anything, especially any complex process, just requires better data, better analytics. So how is your command capturing data and using it to keep improving? Yeah, I think one of the things that, you know, amongst all the other things that the comprehensive review called out, it talked about that the Navy liked a feedback loop, meaning we had no mechanism to determine how training was impacting the fleet, was it working, where we needed to make adjustments and so forth. So the Navy got after that, right? So instituted something called the Mariner Skills Logbooks. So now every officer gets issued a Mariner Skills Logbook, and they're required to log their hours and their watchstanding and their special evolutions that they do when they're on the bridge. In concert with that, the Navy's also developed a digital logbook, if you will. Right. So that's still coming online. It's online, but we're making the transition from the manual logging to the digital logging. Right. So they're kind of doing both right now. But in concert with that, my staff, my team developed a data analytics program called Sexton, where we can take that data and put it into the system and crunch numbers and make a determination on how our officers are performing. So in Sexton, I can put how you did on your exams. I can put how you did on your MSAs when you come here to the schoolhouse. I can put the number of hours that you logged in your logbook. I can put the number of evolutions that you've done. I can put how recent you have stood watch, right? And you put all those into the calculator and I can come up with a proficiency score for every officer, right? And what that helps me do, especially with the MSA scores, because I can track all 10 MSAs, how our officers are coming to the schoolhouse, how they're doing on those MSAs. I can make a determination or make a recommendation to soil boss on where we need to make adjustments in policy, where we need to make adjustments in curriculum, where we need to make adjustments in the trainers, in the scenarios. Like the amount of data that is coming into our organization now is astonishing, right? And I think we're just scratching the surface of how we can use this data. But I'm really encouraged about where we are right now and the information we're getting directly back from the fleet of how our officers are performing out there so I can make needed adjustments. And it's only going to grow from here. But I'm really excited about where we are with Sexton and how that is helping us make data-informed decisions when we make changes to how we are training our officers. Again, a lot of great Americans in the past doing great things, but now instead of, hey, I think the officers are doing poorly, we need to make adjustments, now I can show Slow Boss with data since 2018, because that's really when this started. But using that data, based on this, I think we need to make an adjustment here, right? And as you you know, making those data informed decisions set the organization up for success. Yeah, that's really exciting. Yeah. Does that feed in at all to the detailing loop, right? So does the detailers in Millington, do they know sort of the scores or the assessment level or the proficiency level of individual officers? And does that impact like when they get sent to certain ships or tours, et cetera? Not not not yet. We're on the leading edge of that bill. That's a great question right now, because what I can do now is I can track officers. And to your point, like we all understand that maintenance is a mission as a missionary. We have to get ships into the yards, get them fixed. And we need officers to be leaders during the yard periods to successfully get those ships through those periods and get them back out on the front line. But what I can track now is an officer that is, say they got sent to their first tour and their ship was in the yards the whole time and they got a minimal amount of hours. Right. I can track that officer and then make a recommendation to PERS. Hey, for their second tour, they need to go to an operational unit that is going to be deploying so we can get them the necessary amount of hours. because that foundational that they gain out of those first two tours the foundational skill sets that they gain in mariner skills in those first two tours is instrumental So we need to track that So we do make recommendations to purrs on that And we're at the leading edge of, you know, making recommendations to purrs based on those proficiency scores. An officer should go here, shouldn't go here. We're not quite there yet, but the whole, the whole point of it is, and SWOT boss is leading the charge on this is taking care of sailors, right? If an officer wants to stay in and go on to command, then it's on us to track them and make sure they have the necessary skills to be successful when they show up to command. Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. So for the past two years, the surface warfare community has had a serious test of seamanship and warfighting skills over in the Red Sea. Describe that environment for us a bit. And what kinds of feedback are you getting from commanding officers out there about the value of your training and the preparedness of officers who are showing up for their department head tours or their JO tours? Yeah, again, you know, every good school has a sea story, right? So I've never, you know, I've always obviously deployed several times in that area, but I wasn't on a ship during the Red Sea crisis. I was the Maritime Operations Center director on the Fifth Fleet, and I was the guy, you know, under Admiral Cooper's charge maneuvering the ships around. and putting them on mission. And I remember one time tasking a ship with taking a specific station and it took them longer than I thought it should have taken them to get to said station, right? Didn't unpack it at the time, but I remember talking to the CO after the fact and he was telling me, yeah, I had three merchant ships around me in order to get to the high value unit. We had a UAV coming in at us and we got detection of a missile. So I had to go all back emergency, maneuver around unmasked batteries, take out the missile, come back around the port side, come up to flank speed to take station on the high-value unit. So it took me a little bit longer. And I had no idea, right, because that's tactical unit execution. But I remember that. So when I got here to SWISC and I took command, I asked them, hey, what do we have for high-density tactical maneuvering scenarios, right? And they had a couple in the stables and the stocks, but nothing to that level. So I had them created. So we called that CEO, we called the Desron Commodore that was out there at the time, had them come over and walk us through what it was like over there. And we rebuilt that scenario. So now every sailor that goes through a milestone course at Swistic will see that, right? And it's about maneuvering your ship in a combat tactical environment. How do you do that? Keeping the ship safe, following the rules as best as you can, unmask battery so you can take out the threat and then still increase speed to take station on the high value unit. We just never practiced that before. So we built that now. And commanding officers are giving me feedback saying it's eye opening to them because they've never seen that before. But now they know what to expect. And then getting the reference sets here in the trainer in the schoolhouse better prepares them for when they see it in real life. right? So we've upped our game on not just increasing the amount of traffic density that you would normally see in those contested environments, but also adding in the tactical threats and the tactical maneuvering, the other things that officers need to be thinking about that we had not done in the past. And you can really extrapolate that from the Red Sea to the South China Sea to the Eastern Med to what they're seeing down in Fourth Fleet right now. So exposing these officers early and often throughout the training cycle. So do the sets and reps now. So when you get out there and you've seen it before, you've done it before, and it's second nature and it's paying off. It's paying off. Yeah, that's fantastic. Do you think you'll be building any of those fourth fleet scenarios that what's been happening down there the last three or four months in the Caribbean into? Yeah. to yeah no good question i haven't seen anything yet um um that's something i need to take a look at and we definitely have some south china sea scenarios already based on feedback that we're getting from the fleet um but i'll take out that's a great question um because they're experiencing down there for fleet as well and uh and we we need to that's one thing that i love um the flexibility that we have in our program and in our systems now you know for example you know we had a near miss in the fleet not too long ago and uh tie commander calls me up and goes hey i need you to get the information from this near miss um i need you to rebuild the scenario and your trainers once it's done i want to take a look at it uh check everything went great and he is now directed at every ship that's going out on deployment needs to go look at this right so we can learn as a force i love i love that right but that's the flexibility and the fidelity of the trainers that we have now that we now have that capability right to go hey let's learn from this near miss because this is an an opportunity now for us to learn to make sure that nothing bad happens in the future. And I now have a trainer where I can recreate that and then bring watch standards in and talk through what happened, why it happened, what should have happened, and what they need to learn from it. So when they see that again, they can do the right thing. What advice would you give to those who are going to be junior surface warfare officers soon? Yeah, first off, I'll just tell them congratulations. First off, they are demonstrating just how intelligent they are by choosing to be a SWO, so congratulations to them on that. But no, I'm proud of them. I'm happy for them and to let them know that they're about to go into a job that is challenging but highly rewarding. You know, people ask me today, I've been in the Navy 30-plus years, and why are you still doing it? It's because of the joy that I get from doing this job. And when you do it right, you get the missions you get to accomplish and the impacts that you get to have on people's lives is second to none. and they're about to embark on that. Talking about what we're talking about today, we need to understand that navigation, ship handling, tactical judgment, those are all perishable skills. It's not a one and done, and that's one thing that we've learned through the institution of the Mariner's Coast Training Program. Just because you get qualified doesn't mean you're good for the rest of your career. It has to be continuous. You have to continue what the reps and sets. You have to continue to educate yourself. So stay hungry, stay focused, continue to grow, get better every single day, and you're going to be successful. But I'm excited for what they're about to go out and go do because the service community is hot right now. We're busy. We're doing great things. And I love us being a tool and a tool set for this administration to go, hey, we need to make a difference in the geopolitical stage. So let's get the Navy involved. And we're always poised and ready to go. And they're about to be a part of that. So I'm excited for them. Nice. That's a great way to end up. So our guest today has been Captain Joe Baggett. He's the excited commanding officer at the Wilkera Schools Command, headquartered up in Newport, Rhode Island. His article in the January issue of Proceedings is titled, Not Your Father's SWO Training. Joe, thanks for writing for Proceedings and for being on the show again. Yeah, Bill, thank you. Thank you for all your help with the article. Thank you for you and your team and what you guys do. Conversations like this are important. And I really appreciate being a part of this and being able to write for USNI and proceedings and being able to do this podcast. It's an honor. So thank you. Awesome. Fantastic. Well, stay warm up there in Newport. This episode was brought to you by General Dynamics Electric Boat. GD Electric Boat has a 126-year legacy of delivering the submarines our nation needs to defend our freedoms and those of our allies. To ensure our nation's defense now at this critical time in history, GDEB is investing in the next generation of shipbuilders and infrastructure to answer the call. It was EB then and it's EB now. Learn more at gdeb.com slash about slash EB now. If you like the show, ring the bell, subscribe, tell a friend. Until next episode, remember, victory begins at the Naval Institute. Bye-bye.
