One way forward would be to begin rewarding officers for prudent decisions in putting the brakes on deployments of ill-prepared surface ships, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C., and a former strategic planner for the Navy.
“Right now what happens is decisions on whether to say no to a particular deployment generally rise all the way to the level of the chief of naval operations,” Clark said.
“Because people don’t want to go and tell CNO, hey, I can’t do this, below that level the can-do attitude sort of persists,” he said.
Such decisions should perhaps be pushed down to the fleet-forces command level where an officer has enough seniority to be able to stand up and say no but is still close enough to a readiness problem to directly understand it, he said…
“In theory it’s a great idea, but in practice it’s probably infeasible,” said Jan van Tol, who retired as a captain from the Navy in 2007 after a career that included command of three warships