Posted by Vice Admiral Daniel Lerner (Personnel Director) in Discussion Topic: Ship Speeds and all that
Discussion Topic: Ship Speeds and all that

SNIP

-does the current link between requested speed and placement speed make sense? Should we be changing the categories on the application form?

SNIP

Daniel Lerner
Personnel Director

I don’t know the answer to the second question, but the answer to the first one is definitely “No.”

This concept of “Standardized Ship Speeds” was one that we adopted in 2011 specifically to make the Personnel Department’s job of placing people easier. It was said at the time we couldn’t allow ship COs to independently select the AWOL limits for their own ships (which, several ships at that point were actually doing), specifically because it made things too complicated for the Personnel Department to do placements. It was said that this was a return to a previously understood reality, even though that was not actually written down or formalized anywhere where anyone could read it, even though several senior members were opposed to the entire idea and claimed that this oral tradition didn’t actually exist. I was not one of these senior members; I only remember it because it was one of the very first Command discussions where I actually opined on something, and I don’t think I was even an XO yet. At the time, I was opposed to the idea because I thought it was completely backwards to ask the entire club to change how they run their ships to help the Personnel Department, when the point of having a Personnel Department is to help the club staff up ships. But, that’s the viewpoint that lost that particular argument at that particular time with that particular administration.

With that bit of backstory established, and given that the entire point of standardizing the “ship speed” is to make placements easy for the PDept, doesn’t the existence of an apparent mismatch between those speeds and what the PDept needs essentially demonstrate that the standardized speed policy has been a complete and absolute failure for almost a decade? I don’t have data handy on what other PDepts did, but I’m inclined to say the answer is “Yes” just because this is still an issue now.

If the answer is “Yes, standardized ship speeds are a failure at the exact thing they were supposed to do for the club”, then why do we continue to have them?

It seems to me that instead of trying to change the form to match ship speeds, or trying to create new measures of activity in order to match ship speeds, we ought to be doing something else that allows the Commanding Officer to establish what the expectations for people on their ship in some clear way, and then have the rest of the organization aligned to support that vision, rather than discuss how to map people off of the street onto some centralized, normative definition of things that nobody actually fits into well.

Joe