Playing by the Rules: A Forgotten Tradition?

Most everyone has, at one time or another, held a job. Every employer has a body of rules, regulations and instructions. When followed, clear, concise, well-written directions invariably lead to organizational cohesion as well as the on-time achievement of stated objectives.

An analogy illustrating how I came to understand the singularly critical and all-important nature of the above cited supposition fell into my lap during my U.S. Navy career, and is cited as follows.

In the Fall of 1969, the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) issued a revision to a directive delineating specific documentation procedures for the newly developed mechanized tracking, recording and reporting on the material status of every naval aviation activity's Aviation Support Equipment (ASE) assets. The program took years and millions of dollars to develop, and was considered the logistic cornerstone of both present and future equipment life-cycle management within the realm of Naval Aviation.

At that time, I was assigned to the ASE shop aboard the U.S. Naval Air Facility, Naples, Italy. To ensure compliance with the new directive, we held several informal brain-storming sessions; the result of which produced a simple but efficient set of internal procedures designed to assure that every equipment movement, maintenance and repair action source document had all of it's "I's" dotted and "T's" crossed.

While we were unaware of the broader system-wide findings of this new directive, we certainly benefited from the locally produced reports; as they clearly pointed to where our maintenance efforts would produce the best results. As a consequence, the shop soon went into "cruise-control" and all was good in the NAF Naples Aviation Support Equipment Division.

Then in the early spring of 1971, I was called, near the end of the work day on a Friday afternoon, into the Aviation Maintenance Officer's (AMO) office. He asked if we were having problems in the shop that he should know about. My response was an unequivocal "no."

The AMO then quipped, "there better not be; because NAVAIR (Commander, Naval Air Systems Command) is sending three high-ranking civil servants to conduct a formal inspection of your shop. They'll be here Tuesday morning. Be ready."

As it were, the three civilians were the designers, writers and senior managers of the new documentation system we had installed in the Fall of '69. The purpose of their visit was to conduct an in-depth audit to ascertain the methods the ASE shop at NAF Naples used to comply with the new system's directive.

In order to determine how data was recorded on the system's source document, the Maintenance Action Form (MAF), two of the civilians were assigned to monitor the documentation procedures of shop technicians. The senior civilian was "glued to my hip;" recording every action taken in transposing data from the MAF to singular equipment pre-punched computer cards; and how these actions were reflected in equipment status changes on the division's visual display (VIDS) board.

Before the audit concluded Wednesday afternoon, we had reviewed innumerable scenarios and answered hundreds of questions. The civilians also made inquiries with the activities serviced by the ASE shop as to the timeliness and quality of service provided in support of their respective missions.

The next day, our base Commanding Officer (CO), the AMO and the three civilians came into the shop and asked that we informally gather for a final word from the auditors. The senior civilian began (paraphrasing), stating that the new system's Navy-wide produced reports had been most discouraging — as the data neither made sense nor provided the information necessary to make informed program management decisions; and that NAVAIR had already adjudicated the system flawed and had budgeted for re-writing the computer code and all related instructions at a projected cost of several million dollars.

In that all U.S. Naval Aviation activities, but one, had led managers to believe that the system software and instructions were indeed faulty, they nonetheless felt it was worth the relatively meager expense to conduct an audit on the one activity whose produced reports gave them a logical progression of the data the system was designed to produce.

That activity was us—the ASE Division at NAF Naples. Continuing, the civilian stated that due to the inconsistencies revealed in every other activity's reports, they had harbored strong suspicions that we, in Naples, were "cooking the books" by "pencil whipping" our source documents; but were elated to report that as the sole activity to have followed the instruction to the letter, we not only had done an exemplary job in following system directives, but were to be credited with saving NAVAIR millions of dollars and at least another two years of promulgating system corrections, a re-write of the instructions, as well as an extended period that would be needed for further fleet-wide system implementation.

The senior civilian concluded with his profound thanks, on behalf of NAVAIR and the CNO, to the ASE Division of NAF Naples; and with the promise they'd do a better job of training other fleet aviation activities in the nuances of ASE documentation procedures.

The two overriding moral imperatives that constitute a “between the lines” feature of this accounting. First: In every endeavor, absent absolute truth, the word "justice" becomes indefinable and it's execution both selective and arbitrary; and, Second: Wrong actions will never produce right results.

How, one might wonder, does the above story relate to the current state of our nation?

Quite simply, it is a near-perfect microcosmic parallel to what has transpired within our nation's process of governance; to wit: a systemic rejection of public law and cultural mores have brought the country to the brink of economic and, more importantly, as the latter is the precursor to the former, moral collapse. 

Just as the disingenuous and ill-advised false reporting by a plurality of naval activities stood to tear that system apart, so have the lies and deceptions of Hegelian dialectic inspired, politically correct, post-modern dogma and unconstitutional lawmaking rendered our [historically effective] cultural mores impotent and our constitutional-rule of law system of governance so dysfunctional as to bring us, both as a people and a nation, to the brink of moral and economic bankruptcy.