Changing the Tune - Why is the Royal Navy Scrapping Its Admirals?

The First Sea Lord has announced that the Royal Navy will be significantly reducing the size of Navy Command HQ (NCHQ) while also pushing for significant changes to how the Royal Navy is operated and supported. Speaking at the Defence IQ Surface Warships conference this week, he set out a compelling vision for change to how the Royal Navy is run.

A lot of time and energy online goes into debating the RN today and how many ships it has and how it could buy more or operate itself differently. This is always intriguing to read, but usually these conversations pay practically no attention at all to the importance of the underpinning HQ’s and shore support organisation that is intended to keep the RN at sea.

Arguably the challenges that the Royal Navy really needs to grip are less about working out if a carrier needs three or four CIWS, and far more about freeing up people to get ships fully crewed and fill gaps in the system that need covering.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

The RN is not a block of 30,000 people who are interchangeable, it is an organisation of dozens of different career structures, branches and specialisms where the numbers involved may be tiny. The loss of a single person at one rank may have an impact 10 years down the line for someone else when trained reliefs are no longer available.

Solving the people challenge is about trying to ensure that enough trained people with the right experience can go to sea and operate the ships the RN has on an enduring basis. This may sound simple but it’s a complex process – it requires ships with bunks to get trainees to sea early, and then then aligning ships programmes, the running of training courses, ensuring people get wider professional development and so on. Trying to get the right people, with the right training in the right role is hard and requires all the different parts of the system to work together to get it right.

This is made harder still by the way the force is structured, with there being a split between the Fleet Commander and 2^nd Sea Lord who each administer different parts of the RN, between the front line forces and the training, people and wider estate needed to keep the force working. This can lead to occasional conflicts of priorities between two organisations who have different mandates to deliver on.

Overseeing this process is the NCHQ itself, a major building on Whale Island in Portsmouth that effectively functions as the ‘brain’ of the modern Royal Navy. Built to provide the day to day management and support needed to the fleet, NCHQ has become larger in recent years as power has ebbed away from Whitehall, with more staff officers going into roles in the HQ instead.

The HQ sits in a curious place whereby it must get the fleet ready for operations, but also be ready to hand assets off to PJHQ for some operations, while retaining control over other parts of the system. It also has to maintain relationships upwards with the MOD in London, while also engaging with the procurement and support side in DE&S. Add to this the wide range of essential support like media, HR and other issues and you soon realise this is a busy and committed organisation.

Shrinking it down radically, possibly as much as by 50% if you believe some media reports represents a very different approach to how the RN will administer itself in future. You cannot remove this level of people out of a structure without fundamentally changing how business is done, and the way the organisation works.

On paper a cut of this scale, when coupled with the downgrading of Admirals posts (no less than 5 of the 13 Admiral roles associated with NCHQ are to be downgraded or removed) points to a major cultural shift. This could involve a more empowered workforce with significantly greater authority and autonomy for more junior personnel – in theory, a smaller HQ removes layers of command chains and means that lower ranks need to own tougher decisions.

This could work really well – a properly transformed and empowered HQ where people want to go to because they have the autonomy and authority to make and take decisions, and not feel as if they are highly paid briefing monkeys could have a significant effect on the way the Navy does business. But the risk is that if old behaviours persist, and the temptation to look to a one or two up for decision approvals continues, then there is a risk of decision paralysis as the whole HQ grinds to a halt waiting for the duty grown ups to read an email.

The reason this change is so interesting is precisely because it shows the opportunity on offer to really change how the RN works, driving down headcount and improving how things get done as a result. It will be an interesting test to see how much more gets done in an HQ where there are fewer people in the way to inject process.

The challenge though is making this change seem worthwhile to the people at sea and helping them appreciate why it is a big deal. If people working long hours to cover gapped posts don’t see meaningful and tangible improvements to these changes, it will be hard to keep them believing in the wider benefits. Its all well and good cutting HQ headcount and slimming process down, but if you’re a junior rating on duty for yet another weekend due to shortage of people, then the benefits are unlikely to be felt or appreciated.

If it is done well though and gets the support and traction it needs, then potentially it could free people up for other jobs elsewhere. When coupled with reported changes like bringing the Naval Bases and sea training under the Fleet Commander directly, then there is real potential to completely change how the RN works and supports its people.

One of the biggest potential changes that could occur is the move to try and get multiple watch crews onto more major surface ships, in the same way as the MCMV force do now. The force in the Gulf works by keeping four MCMVs and an FFG in the region permanently with crews rotating through.

In the case of the MCMV force there is a complete crew swap every few months, with one crew returning home and the other flying out to take over the ship. If this is adopted with a Type 23 or 45 then potentially this could significantly increase availability for sea while also reducing pressures on people.

Provided the increase in availability can be properly managed to ensure the ships continue to get the routine maintenance and work required to remain operational, and that work packages are not deferred by the growth of a ‘we can use the ship now and fix here in X years time’ mentality, then this could potentially be very good news for the RN.

The wider challenge that needs to be considered is how do you balance off the HQ structures with career opportunities for staff officers and ensure the right levels of governance and scrutiny are in place? While it is tempting to say ‘but we need less not more officers’ ensuring that there is a credible career path to keep people in, with opportunities for promotion and career development is important. Likewise, finding the opportunities to grow people able to fight the deep battles in Whitehall and beyond is also critical.

Trying to strike the balance between freeing up people for seagoing duties, and ensuring the RN has a senior officer cadre that can make the jump from warfighter and direct leader to senior management and delivery of multi-billion pound business is going to be important. If you make all the appealing work sit at the SO1 level, then your ability to persuade the best people to stay, promote and take the opportunity to shape the system is diminished.

Added to the mix is the question about how do you balance off the civilian and military talent pools to get the best from both systems? At the moment there is both a perception that military are needed to do the job in the HQ, but that the Civil Service is often cheaper and can stay for longer.

Trying to optimise the work force so that more routine process can be handed to a lower paid and cheaper civil servant, freeing up military personnel to go elsewhere makes sense – if a  job can be done more cheaply, without hurting operational output, why not civilianise it? But how do you then achieve the challenge of both giving busy sailors ‘down time’ to get time at home with families, while also upskilling them to not only do the shore job, but compete for future jobs at more senior levels – both within the Service and in a tri-service environment.

There is also the challenge that if you want to empower and change the culture in the HQ then relying on bulk civilianisation and trying to get staff in at low grades and low pay isn’t necessarily the answer. To really grow an impressive organisation and ensure you can get the best from it, you need to make the HQ somewhere that people want to come and work – and, to put it kindly, from a Civil Service perspective, Portsmouth isn’t always on most peoples lists of places to go and work in.

The challenge is that in a civilian system where London dominates and the majority of high calibre individuals who want to aspire for the top of the Civil Service structure usually work, moving outside London isn’t usually seen as a sensible thing to do. Even at its most basic, stepping off the London property ladder means accepting you are never returning – to move to Portsmouth means for many a stepping off of the career escalator in the wider system.

To fix this the RN needs to be prepared to dig deep and offer some very generous packages – funded accommodation moves, travel costs paid, probably an uplift in salary and so on to make working in NCHQ a desired ‘go to’ destination. If it doesn’t then it will continue to be seen as a less appealing career destination and not attract the right breadth of new talent.

There will always be a finite talent pool to draw on from the local area for some recruitment, but if you want to bring experienced people in, particularly at more senior levels, you need to be prepared to pay for it and not treat the Civil Service as a means of achieving savings measures on the sly.

Why all of this sort of thing matters more broadly is because it helps show that the Royal Navy is serious about changing the way it works ahead of what could potentially be a brutal defence review in terms of changes, cuts and rebalancing of force structures.

If the RN can show now that it is genuinely serious about real cultural change, scrapping historically important posts, reducing HQ numbers and really changing the way that it does business, then its case for funding, or additional funding is likely to be more positively received. After all, why reward and provide additional resources when its clear there is room for more efficiencies within?

However there is a big difference though between talking about change programmes, cutting posts and then not seeing cultural changes to the way work is done materialising. The risk is that having invested time, effort and peoples goodwill to change the way work is done, the system falls back into inertia mode and continues to function as before.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

In a rank heavy and highly hierarchical system which often relies on stripes not expertise, the concept of empowerment at more junior levels, letting people just take decisions and then getting on with it, and steering the ship with a light hand on the tiller may just be too much for some people.

The challenge is not going to be the downsizing of the posts or the new structures as all of this has happened before and it will all happen again. What really needs to change is the behaviours and attitudes to empowerment, delegation and not CCing in random senior officers to create an email problem chain to solve.

Humphrey really wants this programme to succeed because it has the potential to offer significant benefits to the Royal Navy and demonstrably show how people will do things differently in future. But he is worried that making the final jump to encourage some people to let go, and others to step up may be a step too far.

Were he in a Q&A with the mid level seniors (e.g. not the Admiralty Board, more 1* community) the sort of questions he would pose to the leaders about how to manage the change would be as follows:

a).       What decisions do you currently own that you no longer feel you want to be consulted on in future?

b).        How will you personally set the culture – what behaviours are you going to change, what reports/emails do you no longer want to get, what decisions do you trust your people to make without external consultation ahead of time?

c).        How do you create culture where taking genuine decisions and incurring risks is not punished by OJAR/SJAR failure?

d).       How will you react to the person that took a decision in your business area that went wrong – will you punish them, or accept that empowerment means letting go and accepting mistakes can happen?

e).        How are you going to empower yourself from your one & two ups – what will you be doing differently to take charge of your own situation, and how do you think your seniors will react?

Hopefully there will be some very positive reactions from these questions, but this is the sort of debate that needs to be had to turn the strong ambition and positive vision for the future of the RN into tangible success.

The prize is likely to mean more people at sea, more ships at sea and a compelling case to the MOD and Treasury that the Naval Service has a strong case for retaining and expanding funding accordingly. The cost if it goes wrong is that fewer people will be required to do the same, if not more, work with less resources and the cycle of retention crisis continues. Getting transformation right is probably the most important battle facing the Royal Navy today and it needs to succeed.