NAVAL BASE SAN DIEGO, Calif. – Approximately 25 percent of sailors in the surface fleet have bought into the “Get Real Get Better” principles two years after the Navy issued its push to improve culture in the service, according to surface fleet leaders.
The rest know little about it, according to a survey of about 1,000 sailors that a San Diego-based command conducted among ship crews on the waterfront to gauge what they knew about the Navy’s initiative.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do to really drive this down to the deck plate and have it be truly a part of who we are as a culture,” Rear Adm. Randall Peck, the commander of Expeditionary Strike Group 3, told an audience earlier this month at the Surface Navy Association’s 2024 Waterfront Symposium.
“About 25 percent understand what ‘Get Real Get Better’ as a cultural initiative is and have bought into it. And sadly, there’s a whole lot of other people… [who said] I’ve heard of it, but I’m not a believer,’” Peck said.
Back in January 2022, then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday issued the call to bolster the Navy’s readiness and warfighting capability by creating and embracing a culture that empowers its leaders and sailors to self-assess and work through performance issues. His successor, Adm. Lisa Franchetti, “has doubled down on it because culture is the most important thing to us as a Navy,” Peck said.
The Navy describes GRGB, as it’s known, as “adopting measurable standards for these leadership and problem-solving behaviors. The standards are: Align on standards and goals; find and embrace the ‘red;’ use Navy problem-solving methods to get at root cause; fix or elevate barriers; encourage learning through trust and respect; and specify ownership.”
The principles, as envisioned, would become tangible actions, practices and a mindset with honest self-assessments, continuous learning and “embracing” and resolving problems.
“History shows us that the force that learns, adapts and innovates faster than the enemy has an enduring warfare advantage,” Peck said during a GRGB panel discussion. “And there’s no more impressive example of that than the service warfare communities integrating their air missile defense successes in the Red Sea.”
The Navy has been involved in about 150 engagements since early November, when the Houthis began attacks on maritime shipping in the Red Sea region. Peck credited combat readiness and the successful mission to GRGB “mindsets and transformations in how we do business, the service warfare community aligned on doctoral and training standards. They aggressively assessed each one of these engagements. They sought and identified areas for improvement. And then they interfaced from the foundation back to the front to improve performance.”
“I guarantee you that the box score in the Red Sea would be different if we didn’t have a ‘Get Real Get Better’ mindset towards warfighting,” he said.
At ESG-3, Peck put a big focus on material readiness.
“It’s no secret here that amphibious material readiness is a challenge to our operational ability and our warfighting capability,” said Peck, a naval aviator who previously commanded aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74) and amphibious warship USS Mesa Verde (LPD-19).
Moreover, he noted, “INSURV data shows that material degradation on the deck plate is largely due to inadequate level of knowledge, lack of procedural compliance, and poor supervisor oversight.”
Applying GRGB principles, he noted, are transforming ESG-3 ship maintenance along the waterfront into a more efficient process.
One example he noted was the electrical tools work center aboard amphibious assault ship USS Essex (LHD-2). Four petty officers were assigned to the center “that frankly was in disarray,” Peck said. “When they walked into the department, there were literally hundreds of electrical test sets that were set in the same big pile. There was no inventory control.”
But “through their initiative they turned what I would say chaos into something that looked like a German engineering lab,” he said. “Now your sailors aren’t spending an hour trying to figure out what test set works and where it is. You’re quickly consulting the inventory, you’re grabbing the test set and you’re moving on. It allows them to do maintenance and support the test equipment to make sure it’s ready to go and calibrated for the next operation. So, I’m incredibly proud of Essex and what they did.”
Peck cited another GRGB example in the work by sailors with the aircraft intermediate maintenance department aboard USS Boxer (LHD-4), who identified a problem: The tools they needed to do their job were spread across two separate work centers, several decks and a scuttle apart. It could take a half-hour for a sailor to determine what tools they needed for the task at hand, and then sign off, do the work and return them.
So sailors worked through the problem, ultimately ordering and assembling backpacks containing the tool sets needed to complete particular tasks. The sailors were able to complete the job faster, reducing it from 18 to 35 minutes to five, also cutting down steps.
“That’s the power of Get Real Get Better,” he said. “We want to connect our core values to improve capability and improve processes through aligning the standards, by identifying areas of red, the problem sets, and applying the tools and principles, by creating teams of people using trust and transparency, and by identifying specific people to achieve specific goals.”
Identifying a problem and figuring out the solution isn’t a new concept for many in the fleet.
GRGB is “a cultural shift for those teams and organizations that aren’t implementing and being self-assessing, self-directing,” said Capt. Paul Murch, the waterfront operations officer with Southwest Regional Maintenance Center in San Diego.
Across the Naval Sea Systems Command enterprise, “they’ve been fully embraced as a part of our lexicon. There are areas of NAVSEA that have been using these processes and tools for years,” Murch said. “We talk about them differently now. But we embrace the red. We recognize that we’re not delivering ships and submarines on time. It’s been priority number one for years. And we’ve been finding ways to attack them.”
At Southwest Regional Maintenance Center in San Diego, which supports ships along the waterfront, sailors who train and work with center personnel see first-hand how GRGB principles are applied in the daily work, Murch said.
“We continue to build the capability to train the sailors that come to us on shore duty, send them back to the ship with the skill set to be able to fix, to have the confidence and the skills to be able to fix the things they can on their way,” he said.
Across the waterfront, it’s worth revisiting GRGB principles and practices daily through honest conversations about maintenance, readiness and sustainment, said Capt. Russ Caldwell, the force readiness officer with Naval Surface Force Pacific.
“We can have these hard conversations between the crews and between the COs, between the triads and the chiefs’ mess to make it better,” Caldwell, a former commander of guided-missile cruiser USS Antietam (CG-54) and guided-missile destroyer USS Ross (DDG-71), said during the panel discussion.
The GRGB mindset and actions by ships’ crews and decisions by their commanding officer can influence larger maintenance demands, and that’s especially important with planning ahead of significant repairs and the scheduled Chief of Naval Operations and complex maintenance availabilities.
“We need to bring in industry and our partners and our contractors earlier into the planning process. We need to have those hard conversations,” Caldwell said.
Having that plan and those processes in place and, in turn, working together would better position the crew and contractors to handle unexpected work during the maintenance availability.
“The reason why we’re not finishing the avails on time is we’re allowing too much growth work to creep into these avails,” Capt. Gary Harrington, commander of USS Tripoli (LHA-7), said when asked about his ship’s yard period. But Tripoli was a bright spot on the waterfront, “one of the rare ones who finished on time, actually five days early.”
“We kept our growth work purposely below 30 percent,” Harrington said. “And that number – that magic number of 30 percent – allowed us to finish on time.”
It’s not always easy, Caldwell acknowledged.
“Getting into the period there to get the ship out on time and ready to go is where we’re going to be challenged,” he said.
Crews must ensure repairs are done and that all ship and combat systems are “ready to go as we come out of those yard periods,” Caldwell said. “Those are the kind of areas that I think, as the N4, that we need to improve on,” he added, “not just for the amphibious fleet but also the surface force fleet as a whole.”
Murch noted several successes along the San Diego waterfront to trim time off the maintenance period.
“We finished Curtis Wilbur on time last year. We finished Tripoli on time last year. We’re green right now on Oakland (LCS-24),” he said. “There’s availabilities that we are very successful on, so I’m trying to find ways to get those teams to spread the knowledge and bring the other teams up there to par.”
