The Rickover Effect by Theodore Rockwell
The Rickover Effect by Theodore Rockwell
Rickover's an excellent counter-part to the story of BoydFighterPilot -- Boyd blew everything up and only got a small amount of what he wanted, while Rickover carved out an empire and got most everything he wanted.
That said, Rickover doesn't have an OODA loop. Not having created a new and permanent acronym in the US Military is probably considered his greatest defect. His best equivalent is:
The Devil is in the details, but so is salvation.
Roddis had first heard of Rickover in the early days of the war, when Roddis was electrical officer on the battleship Maryland. He began to get notices from Rickover's Electrical Section of BuShips telling him how to modifiy his switchgear and other electrical equipment to maximize its resistance to battle damage. There were other electrical components aboard, under the jurisdictio of the bureau's Section on Intercommunication and Fire Control, which were not under Rickover. In many cases, these were identical components, but no instructions were comign from IC/FC. Roddis proceeded to make the corresponding modifications to the IC/FC equipment, but he couldn't help thinking about the difference between Command Rickover in Washington who was really trying to help him, and the others who didn't seem to be much help.
"I've been studing the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. And it's very clear that responsibility and authority for anything atomic lie with the US Atomic Energy Commission, the AEC. If atomic fuel is to be procured, if it is to be fabricated and reprocessed after use, if reactor safety inspections and evaluations are to be made -- all these matters require an AEC base. Only AEC kofficieals can sign contracts and make arrangements to deal with atomic materials nd atomic secrets. So I need an AEC hat too. In fact, all of you guys, or at least some of you, should have both hats. The question is, How do you set up an organization that operates within two wholly different government agencies""That's where we come up against the no-precedent problem."
"That doesn't have to be a problem. It can be an opportunity. If nobody's ever done this before, there's no way they can tell us we're doing it wrong. That's got to be our basic strategy. If the Navy doesn't like what we're doing, we'll do it with our AEC hat."
It took a week for Dick and Rickover to craft the carefully worded letter. They scrutinized every sentence from the standpoint of each of the officers who would have to sign off on it, trying to skirt issues they thought might be touchy. And then they began the tedious task of hand-carrying it to each of the necessary offices, taking it back and rewording each part considered offensive. Admiral Mills singed off, addingn a crucial endorsement. Two veteran submarine officers in the office of the chief of naval operations (CNO) provided critical help: Captain Elton W "Joe" Grenfell and Commander Edward L Beach. Their well-known wartime experience in submarines lent authority and credibility in to eyes of the line officers. Two months later, on 5 December 1947, the letter got to Nimitz. He was fascinated with the idea and signed immediately
... There was a military need for a submarine with unlimited endurance at high speed submerged. Only nuclear power could meet that need.
"There is also the problem of uranium supply. The demand for new types of weapons is increaseing, and it is a demand e must meet, by law. Yete the supply of good uranium ore is limited primarily to Colorado and the Belgian Congo. This fact has already distorted our nation's foreign policy, and we are frantically exploring to find new sources. In this situation, another demand for uranium, which if successful could increase at an alarming rate, is not one we view with equanimity.
Nine months had passed since Rickover ahd returned to Washington and had his group disbanded. He still had one more loose end to clean up. He went to Admiral Mills with a simple message: "I need to set up a small working team, patterned after the group I had at Oak Ridge, to take charge of htis program. It will have to have status in both the Bureau of Ships and wht AEC, and I think we can arrange that without too much fuss." Mills agreed. He had heard the point before, and he couldn't argue with it. but he was not prepared for Rickover's next point: "Obviously, the bureau can't have two people in charge of nuclear power. You'll have to get rid of either Mumma or me."
Since mid-194 Rickoer had used another training and work control procedure, one forwhich he ecame notorious and which quickly becam known throughout Rickover-land as "The Pinks".
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This was before the days of photocopiers, and Dixie kept carbon copies of all correspondence on pink tissue paper, for her boss's nightly perusal.
When the Admiral retired in 1982, Jean had become an institution, listed in the Navy phone ook as "Jean E. Scroggins, J-Item Engineer", which requires some explanation. The Adrmiral was in the habit of continually raisingn questions -- based on the pinks, on report from the field, from every conceivable source. To keep these from gettingn lost prior to resoution, he used to scrawl a question or comment on apiece of correspondence, directed to a particular person in the organization, along with a deadline for getting an answer. Jean kept track of these and issued a weekly report on the status of these "J-Items".
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the implementer of such a system would not find that the function endeared her to the participants, but Jean's good sense, good humor, and gentle persistence kept her both effective and well liked.
Another whole book should be written about the philosophy and procedures developed by Naval Reactors to arrive at and carry out long-range planning and budgeting. Rickover saw that the usual practice of "winging it" from year to year, and assuming htat Congress is an adversary rather than an ally in the process, would just not wrok. By laying out requirements years in advance, by having the same people present the same story year after year, and by making Congress a party to the problems as well as to the achivevements, Rickover created an atmosphere of stability and a predictability that was the envy of other major programs across the country.
One must create the ability in his staff to generate clear, forceful arguments for opposing viewpoints as well as for their own. Open discussions and disagreements must be encouraged, so that all sides of an issue will be fully explored. Further, important issues should be presented in writing. Nothing so sharpens the thought process as writing down one's arguments. Weaknesses overlooked in oral discussion becomes painfully obvious on the written page.
Years later, when the AEC's aircraft nuclear propulsion proram built a land prototype, another advantage of the Rickover approach becam clear: no problems were encountered in the submarine prototype plant that were not also applicable to the ship. In the aircraf prototype, the idea of making hte prototype simpler by making it different from the final model led to numerous problems unique to the prototype, problems whose solution did not contribute to the actual aircraft.
The initial design showed the head welded securely onto the body of the vessel. But Eugene Wigner, the Nobel laureate physicist, had suggested that the weld might possibly become impaired by the reactor operating conditions, so we had added gigantic bolts weighing hundreds of pounds each to hold the head in place against the inside pressure. At that point a number of industrial pressure vessel experts asked: Now that the head is bolted down, why do we need a weld?
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After being introduced to the visiting experts, he slowly asked a simple question: "Suppose your son were to serve on this submarine, with his life dependent on its safe operation. Would you be willing to let his life depend on the continued integrity of a gasket to hold back every droply of highly radioactive water? Or would you rather have a weld backing it up, just in case?
Complex jobs cannot be accomplished effectively with transients. Therefore, a manager must make the work challenging and rewarding so that his people will remain with the organization for many years. This allows it to benefit fully from their knowledge, experience, and corporate memory.
Rickover had cornered much of the nation's high-temperature stainless steel for his projects -- some six hundred tons -- and was under great pressure to release some of it for jet fighters being built for the Korean War. Lou Roddis had a call from a staffer in the office of the secretary of defense, warning that Rickover was about to create a serious national emergency and Roddis would be smart to get him to back off.
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"Roddis, you want me to take a statesmanlike position, to rise above my parochial viewpoint, to consider the good of the nation as a whole, and perhaps the good of all humanity, is that it? Well, I'm not going to do it. You're not in a position to judge just how urgent or important their need really is. Neither am I. What I do know i that I have been ordered by the President of the United States to have a ship ready to go to sea by January 1955, and I intend to do my damnedest to make that happen."
Finally, the time came for the cautious approach to "initial crit", meaning the first time that the reactor is brought to criticality, the point where the nuclear chain reaction is self-sustaining. As the core design was being settled, Rickover had always kept pushing for the higher value of uranium loading.Not so good at risk mgmt here, reactor needs to be able to shut down too.
a warship, unlike a laboratory or an industrial facility,cannot be inflexibly bound by rigid procedures -- her crew may have to take unusual action to survive. (For example, there are circumstances in which the safest mode for the reactor is shutdown. But if a ship is fighting a storm or an enemy, being suddenly adrift without power may not be the safest condition overall.)In this situation, Rickover directed that the designers consider and analyze every identifiable operational requirement, and define the appropriate procedure for it. But he did not stop there. He required that the operators be given sufficient knowledge of the processes and design limitations of the plant that they could intelligently judge alternative procedures if an emergency were to arise.
But Rickover's name was not even mentioned in the article, and this added to the rising public resentment. Senator Richard Russell, who had not been briefed by us, was nevertheless distrurbed to the point of telling a reporter taht this seemed to be the worse injustice since the World War I flying general, Billy Mitchell, was court-martialed for being too outspoken ad advocate for military aviation.
"Now let's talk about the civilian power project. We'll call it the Pressurized Water Reactor, or PWR for short, to distinguish it from all those crazy thermodynamic cycles that everyone else want to build. The only thing Navy about it is that we're going to keep it as simple as possible. Utility operators love automation and gadgets. You know how hard I fought to keep that junk off the submarines. Operators love to sit in a central air-conditioned control room and flip little electric switches. I want a guy who starts a pump to go to where that pump is and turn it on fro there. If it leaks, or smokes, or vibrates, or grinds its bearings, he'll be right there to hear it and do something.
"Go somewhere with no phones and stay wo or three days. Then give me a report of your conclusions."
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"We're working on all the questions we've identified. What ones have we missed? Getting the right questions is harder -- and more important -- than getting answers. Now go!"
"That's why we're going to thave the meeting, Admiral. To try to reachsome conclusions."
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"Dammit, that's why everyone else is going to the meeting. You're suppoed to be going to achieve certain clearly defined objectives. They should be written out in advance and discussed with me and other appropriate people here before you go. If you can't do that, you shouldn't go. How will you know if you've accomplished what you wanted to, if you haven't defined your objectives in advance? You'll end up agreeing to somebody else's objectives without realizing the implications of what you've done."
A frank and perceptive editorial in a recent Dupont publication, entitled "The Great Talent Search", remarks wrylyl that in competing for qualified professional me, business is handicapped since the only incentive it has to offer is money, whereas professional and academic life provide may intangible incentives. It is but a short step from recognition by business that there are other than monetary incentives to the realization that it, too, can provide such incentives.American businessment are noted for their ingenuity. They could, I am sure, reducate their management people to understand that it isn't good business to pay for professional services and then downgrade all one's bright young men to routine technicians.
"They all have excellent resumes, and they're supposed to have some spunk and some sense to boot. And you people are supposed to have checked out their practical technical smarts. So what I'm trying to find out is how they will behave under pressure. Will they lie, or bluff, or panic, or wilt? Or will they continue to function with some modicum of competence and integrity? I can't find that out with routine questions."
Engineering graduates from the top few percent of some of the best schools in the country were often woefully inadequate when it came to solving, or even just analyzing, simple technical problems. Their professor s could not believe that their students were unable to answer some of these questions. "You must be trying to trick or confuse them" was a typical response. But we learned early on that we did not need to be tricky, and in fact it was mjuch more instructive to be completely straightforward in our questions.
As each ship approached the date of initial criticality, her skipper knew he would soon experience a Naval Reactors Crew Quiz. This was part of the process by which Rickover satisfied himself, and then reported to the AEC, that the training and the performance of theis crew were up to the standards necessary to start up a nuclear reactor and take it to sea. (the on-board inspection and testing of crew abilities ran all weekend.)
"You keep urging me to get into fights I'd rather avoid. But when you get me into one, by God I'm going to win it. Each time you wina fight, you're sthat much stronger. People are more leery of taking you on. And each time you lose one, people start thinking, He isn't invincible. He can be beated. Maybe I've been too scared of him."