From The Source: Vice Admiral Ray Griggs AM CSC Chief of Navy

A naval career spanning 33 years has seen Vice Admiral Ray Griggs progress from radio operator to Chief of Navy. Now he faces the challenges of implementing significant new capabilities while boosting Navy’s technical and engineering resources at a time of economic stringency. He spoke to ADM’s Senior Correspondent, Julian Kerr, in Sydney.

ADM:  Where does the RAN stand at the start of 2012?

Griggs:  We have a significant number of challenges to deal with, but we’re also on the cusp of an incredibly exciting period and we must ensure we don’t overreact either way.
We’ve got to deal with the challenges but we should not let ourselves get consumed by bad media and bad publicity. When you see the first of the LHDs (Landing Helicopter Dock) arriving in Port Phillip later this year [2012], I think the excitement is going to spread.
To encapsulate the challenges, I’ve got three priorities. The first is to get back to where we should be in terms of our contract with government for the provision of current capability. Clearly in the amphibious space we’ve struggled over the past 12 months and on occasions in the same period we’ve had issues with submarine availability.
My second priority is to make sure we’re ready for the three new capabilities that have got my immediate focus – obviously AWD (Air Warfare Destroyer), LHD and the (MH-60R) Seahawk Romeos. Clearly Future Submarine is also on the agenda as are the offshore combatant vessels because that’s a fairly new area into which we’re heading. The third priority is on the cultural and reform side, both the Strategic Reform Program (SRP) and the New Generation Navy (NGN) cultural change program. I spent 12 months as the deputy head of the SRP so I’ve made it pretty clear to our team that we need to be at the forefront of making that work and it actually dovetails very nicely with NGN.

Operationally we’re doing very well. We’ve got a frigate in the Middle East tasked across three task forces – the counter-piracy, the maritime security, and the regional security task force inside the Gulf itself. We have people in Timor, we’ve got a number of clearance divers working in the IED area with the mentoring task force in Afghanistan, we’ve got a range of people in headquarters there, we’ve got 25-26 people in the regional headquarters in Dubai ,we’ve got people in Bahrain working with the US 5th Fleet and we’re about to send another team over to take command of the maritime security taskforce.
We’ve got a couple of people in the Sinai and we have four or five people in Southern Sudan. So we’re spread pretty well across the globe. Of course the big operational mission border protection under Operation Resolute and on any one day we’ll have between seven or eight ships assigned to that role.

ADM:  Are personnel being driven too hard?

Griggs:  No, I think our people work hard but one of the things we’re very conscious of and for which we’ve paid the price in the past is making sure that the workload is sustainable.
Our patrol boat force up in Resolute has a multicrewing regime with 21 crews for 14 boats. They work hard when they’re on rotation but they have some predictable periods when they’re off rotation and that structure is quite a sustainable one. It’s a lot harder to do in the bigger ships because the numbers involved add considerably to your overall workforce.

ADM:  What are the most recent advances in fleet capability?

Griggs:  Choules, even though it was born out of a very dark place for us, is a fantastic capability. The dock and the electric pod propulsion and a few things like that give us an ideal lead-in to the Canberra class LHDs. Getting the ship when it was needed and when there was competition showed an agility within the defence organisation which some would think doesn’t exist but it was a pleasure to watch it come together very quickly.
The other big story for us is the Anzac class antiship missile defence upgrade. That has gone exceptionally well and government is now considering whether to proceed with the upgrade for the other seven Anzacs.
Perth went over to Hawaii with Sydney when she did her SM-2 missile firings. Perth had already done an ESSM firing in Australia and didn’t do any in Hawaii, but she tucked in behind Sydney and used the high speed targets that were flying in to Sydney’s missiles to give its own system a workout and it performed really well.

ADM: The Anzacs are limited to 32 Evolved Sea Sparrow missiles (ESSM) in their Mk 41 vertical launch system (VLS). Is a second VLS being considered?

Griggs:  The space is there. I’m not sure where we are with weight margins. The thing to remember is that the force air defence system is a layered system which includes the FFGs with SM-2, soon the AWDs, and Wedgetail AEW&C. We’re not just talking naval air defence, we’re talking about the joint air defence picture.  You’re always trying to target the missiles further out and not have to rely on ESSM or Phalanx or something like that. We probably could, but I don’t think we will.

ADM: Has the non-availability of ships affected training?

Griggs:  We’ve got about 3,100 in our training force at the moment and we normally like to have about half of that. Part of that is due to the fact that in the last 12 months we haven’t had Manoora, we haven’t had Kanimbla, we haven’t had Success, we haven’t had Tobruk, and we haven’t had two Anzacs; that is a huge amount of training positions and a huge amount of training opportunities that have not been available. In the last 12 months, about 600 people were unable to be qualified because of the particular confluence of events.
 
We’ve got about the right number of people in the navy according to our funded strength, just a tick over 14,000, but the ratio of trained to training force is out of whack at the moment and that’s a concern to me. I’ve got Tobruk back at sea which is great and Choules will be able to carry a significant number of trainees although there is a limit to how many you can effectively train. You could throw 300 people on Choules but at some point they’d get in each other’s way.

ADM: Can simulation fill some of the gap?

Griggs:  In some parts of Navy there is still some cultural reticence in embracing simulation as much as I think we could. We look at the way we do things now and we tend then to chip away, get a five per cent saving here and a three per cent saving there when what you really need to do is take a big sledgehammer to the whole thing, smash it apart and say right, let’s start again.
Why don’t we, for example with our bridge simulator, say we’re going to qualify our officers of the watch in the simulator and then work back from there. At the moment we say we’re going to qualify them at sea and let’s see if we can slice off five or six per cent by doing a bit more in the simulator. Changing the way you look at the problem does lead to different outcomes.

ADM:  The Rizzo report recommended that Navy rebuild its engineering resources, but how will you achieve this in the face of the SRP and competition for skilled staff from the resources sector?

Griggs:  That is the single biggest challenge. Paul Rizzo’s report presents a huge opportunity for the navy because it has identified some longstanding systemic issues that frankly I’m glad are out on the table, particularly early in my tenure as CN.
I go to great lengths to explain to our people that if you think it’s just about engineering you’ve missed the point, it’s about capability management writ large. If we’re not on operations we are managing the capability, we are stewards of this capability over its 30 or 40 year life and we have not been doing that well in the amphibious and support ship area, so we’ve got to fix that.
I think there’s been a mindset; amphibs are trucks, they’re not complex. Tankers likewise. If you don’t look after those things properly they get you into trouble, like we’ve seen.
In terms of workforce I can’t compete financially in getting the technical and engineering people who are in such demand across the economy but I can compete on the opportunity to come into an organisation that is technologically focused and values those skills, and on the culture and ethos of the service. I think the fundamental problem borne out by Rizzo’s report is we had come to treat engineering as an overhead and not as an enabler. As with any business or enterprise, if you treat something as an overhead you only have one view about it, and that’s how to reduce it.

ADM:  How long do you think the engineering resource will take to rectify?

Griggs:  I’ve got a three-year term and I’d be naïve in the extreme if I thought I could fix this in that time. Where do I want to be in three years? I want us to have got back to basics on a lot of our configuration management, configuration control and maintenance planning and be well down the path. These things are really, really important because part of the problem was that the smallish workforce in the amphibious and support ship area had been overwhelmed with work.
When that happens, what tends to go by the wayside are the basics. How long will it take to fully rebuild our engineering capability? I think that is a five to 10-year proposition.

ADM:  Has too much responsibility been placed with contractors?

Griggs:  I think that’s overplayed. We could probably do more organic maintenance again and I think the pendulum is swinging back but I don’t think that’s necessarily a Rizzo issue. We need our people to have high levels of skills, we don’t want them inherently thinking that they’ll call in a contractor because when you’re a couple of hundred miles off the coast you need your own people to be able to fix things. That’s what they join to do and it’s important they get a bit more than they have.
We’re trying to use our fleet support units ashore, our maintenance support units ashore more, and I think the contractors by and large are happy to accommodate that.

ADM:  How far has the New Generation Navy (NGN) initiative come; what remains to be done?

Griggs:  It’s a five year-plus program and we’re in our third year now. When I came into the job, there were still a lot of people sitting on the fence. Very quickly I made the point that I was absolutely committed to NGN; it’s more than a behavioural program, this is about us setting ourselves up to have the right people and skills for a very sophisticated fleet over the next nine to 10 years.
We have to have the environment to do that. We have done an enormous amount in revamping our leadership training and that’s having an immediate effect with people. The key part of NGN for us is our 10 signature behaviours which support our values. What I’m trying to do is make those a very tangible thing.

As I’ve said to our people, I don’t expect you’re going to get all of those signature behaviours right every day, but what I want you to do is realise when you’re not, and think about it and reflect on that and work towards getting them right because just by doing that will shift the culture of the organisation. I think we’re getting some traction with those behaviours, we are holding people to account for those behaviours and that is an important part of it.

ADM:  What’s your view of people being held to account in the wider context, for example on issues such as failures in maintenance and ship availability which the general public inevitably identifies as a Navy issue although other organisations are involved?

Griggs:  When you analyse the decision train all the way back, the key decisions were often taken by people who are no longer around and some of those issues are truly systemic in nature. I don’t throw stones at other organisations because we all wake up with one thing in mind and it’s not to bugger things up, it’s to get on and work as a team and I actually think the relationship between DMO and Navy is in much better shape than people would have you believe.

Being seen to hold people to account is important. A couple of things make that tricky, one of which is the Privacy Act. We are exploring ways to make our workforce’s visibility of actions that we have taken while respecting the individual’s privacy.
The other issue is that in the media there is a mentality that accountability equals sacking. That’s not what accountability is. Accountability is holding someone to account at the right level for whatever shortcoming or failure they have exhibited.
Sometimes that’s a hard message to sell because there is this picture that if they’re not sacked they haven’t really been held to account. Well, if you get a censure in the military that can have a big impact on your future for a number of years, it’s just that the mechanisms we use to hold people to account are varied.

ADM:  What are the emerging regional maritime capabilities that Navy has to change or grow to meet?
 
Griggs:  The biggest one is anti-submarine warfare. The 2009 White Paper process addressed that pretty comprehensively. Clearly Future Submarine is a key part of that. The Future Frigate is very much ASW-focused as articulated in the White Paper, we’re getting the Seahawk Romeo which brings back dipping sonar. Then you’ve got the P-8A Poseidon as the logical replacement for the AP-3C Orion.

ADM:  What stage has discussion reached on the Offshore Combatant Vessel under Sea 1180?

Griggs:  John Harvey (Head of Capability Development Group) and I recently signed out the initial concept document for Sea 1180 and the RPDE organisation has a number of tasks running, I understand I’ll get some of the feedback on that early next year. The big thing to me about Sea 1180 is that it represents an opportunity to rationalise a number of ship types.
I’m holding the line on a preference for a single hull form because I know the minute I don’t we’ll end up with four hull forms. This is all about balancing up that capability across those different domains but doing it in a way where the cost of ownership is significantly reduced.
I don’t want to have four different propulsion systems, I don’t want to have four different radars, four different training systems for this and four different training systems for that.

ADM: There’s clear concern about what appear to be delays in the Future Submarine program timetable as set out in the DCP, and lack of knowledge about how long the Collins’ class hulls can continue in service. Do you share this?

Griggs:  We’re looking at the issue of Collins’ life. There’s a belief that we can get more life out of Collins but I don’t know the answer to that yet. One of the big lessons out of Collins is we probably started production too early in terms of the maturity of the design. We really want to avoid repeating that if at all possible. That’s driving the approach at the moment. I think it’s too early to start running around with hair on fire about this. I honestly think that we’re doing the right thing, we’ve got four broad options on the table and they all have pluses and minuses.

On timetable, I think we’re ok at the moment, we understand the scale of what we want to do and the life extension piece is a really important part of it. I don’t have a meeting with Rear Admiral Rowan Moffitt, head of the Future Submarine program and then have a separate meeting with Air Vice Marshal Chris Deeble, head of the Collins program or with my Director-General of Submarine Capability, I have a regular single submarine meeting.
To me Collins is an essential part of development towards Sea 1000, there’s so much synergy in there. I have everyone together every couple of weeks and we talk through what the issues are in the submarine world rather than looking at issues in silos.

ADM:  Will you ever put fixed-wing aircraft on the LHDs?

Griggs:  The decision has been made that we’re not going acquire and operate fixed wing aircraft on the LHD to do that. It’s easy to say you could cross-deck but I’m not sure what we have done in the design of the LHD that may have taken out a key component to support that.
Frankly, it hasn’t been high on our agenda – we have a big enough challenge introducing the amphibious capability we are getting. I’ve no doubt that we will at some stage cross-deck but that’s very different to operating truly off the LHD.