Chapter 20

One of the major products of a Board of Inquiry were a series of reports on the recommendations of the Board, based on the testimony they had reviewed and later discussed. These “Proposed Board Of Inquiry Recommendations” are forwarded on to all the participants in case they wanted to offer comments before those recommendations are finalized, and when finalized sent to the appropriate authorities that would determine if they could be implemented, based on available resources and the needs of the Confederacy. If they could be implemented and served an important need, they would become a Navy “Directive” to implement the proposed action, from a modification of an existing procedure, all the way up to developing a new weapon or platform.

Long ago one of those Directives had resulted, in a rather twisted and uncertain way, in the creation of the Oxford itself. Now the Board took up the question of whether additional ships of that class should be built, or the design specifications changed to build a better alternative, or whether the whole idea should be abandoned. That was the only “Proposed BOI Recommendation” I was really interested in.

The recommendation started with a description of the ship and a history of the operations it had participated in. It was quite thorough and used my earlier mission reports to list our accomplishments, even including what had happened during the exercises we had participated in. I was rather proud to read about our summarized effectiveness in killing ships, degrading their combat effectiveness, or providing valuable support to other combat ships. It looked like we had a pretty remarkable, if short, career.

The next part was a discussion on alternative courses of action that might be considered. There was a lot of discussion about adding ELINT capabilities that could be added to existing vessels, using the “stealth coating” that then-Ensign Hendricks had come up with to the surprise of us all for dedicated stealth platforms, or adding EW pods to combat ships. The alternatives sounded rather interesting, and would spread the capabilities we had developed across a pretty wide swath of the fleet.

Following that was an evaluation of the Oxford design. It pointed out all the compromises we had to make with the ship. We had the problem of not enough power to run both the FTL and the main engines at the same time. It only had one medtube, a choice which may have cost us lives that terrible day, but there wasn’t space for another. The mission bay could not be reloaded from a magazine, because we didn’t have space for that either. If we had made the ship large enough to accommodate all those changes and a larger reactor, it would have required additional crew, which would make the ship even larger, which would further compromise our stealth abilities. Every ship is a collection of compromises. Some that we had to make yielded pretty awful results.

It was the last section that hit me, the recommendations. They recommended that another in the Oxford class not be constructed, but that the technologies and capabilities that we had developed be used in other ways. At first I was heartbroken. The more I read however, the more I tended to agree.

We had become in many ways a ship that performed too many roles. We started out as a platform entirely dedicated to ELINT, and the recommendations stated that an ELINT collection capability could be added more flexibly in cargo pods that any number of ships could carry. Then we morphed into a stealth reconnaissance platform. That could be done with a smaller two-crewman platform that might operate off a carrier more effectively than we could have. It would be much less detectable than we were because of the significantly smaller size. Lastly we became a multi-purpose stealth attack platform, but we didn’t have the size to accommodate a magazine that would allow more than a very few shots without some rather creative techniques and a dedicated tender. We didn’t have the loiter time of a larger ship, and we didn’t have powerful enough weapons to actually perform that role.

I couldn’t argue with any of that. We had been a technology and tactical demonstration platform, and we had done a good job completing that unintended mission. There would never be another Oxford class vessel. It hurt, but I added my endorsement to the recommendations and sent it along with a note that we should pursue the alternatives listed in the last section and I believed they should become Navy Directives, at least to start developing design concepts for each of these identified alternatives for further evaluation.

I had the feeling that someday, they might.

Working with “Coach” to develop an officer training curriculum turned out to be much more interesting than I thought. It was all focused on creative thinking, good leadership, developing subordinates and effective planning. The course was remarkably light on the inevitable bureaucratic nonsense that senior officers have to manage, and much more about getting the most you can out of the people working with you.

Yes, I probably would have enjoyed working on Coach’s staff back in the day. He “got” it about this all being about leading people and team building. If we could have brought up Jack Welch, the famous CEO of General Electric to design all this, it wouldn’t have looked a whole lot different than what we were going to do. There is an amazing consistency about building effective organizations that transcends military, business and other organizations. People are people, no matter where they serve and the critical lessons of organizational culture development, effective leadership and good mentoring work across all sorts of disciplines and environments.

Certainly a military organization has some important differences. A business doesn’t order someone to undertake an action that is likely, or perhaps certainly going to result in that person’s death. If you get a bad employee, you can fire them. In a military organization, the consequences for failure are rather different.

But understanding your organizational culture and affecting deliberate change is something that crosses all those types of entities. Developing your subordinates, building your own leadership abilities, defining goals and fostering cooperation and collaboration are things that cross disciplines. Learning from history, whether it be military history for military personnel, or business history for businesspeople is the same endeavor for the same purpose. Fostering a curious mind, knowing how to ask “why” and “why not” questions to understand problems and potential solutions works anywhere.

We were going to build great leaders, and they were going to guide their people into being great leaders as well.

We also added an associated technical curriculum for designers and engineers, typically of lower ranks, to develop their talents as people who could effectively leverage their human creativity along with the AI assistance to help us develop the tools and technologies we would need to win. This we called this the “Confederacy Science and Technical College” and thought that the synergies between senior leadership and scientific and engineering excellence could yield some important benefits to our overall mission. It wasn’t difficult to expand our charter to include this aspect of the College.

“Coach” had been given a lot of latitude to recruit candidates to help fill out the instructor cadre, but the agreement reached for our unrestricted “poaching” of what HQ rightly assumed would be us cherry-picking the “cream of the crop” was that requests for personnel had to be implemented as a voluntary “call” for service for a period not to exceed four years, unless extended by higher authority. After that they had to return to non-academic service. That would ensure that these trainers would return, better for their experience, to do “real” work. Only the Commandant of the Joint CGSC/CSTC would be excepted, and that meant I had a clock ticking on my time there that started as soon as we got the first class in their seats.

The AI had finally figured out how to get those ancient sleep training modules to not be so brutally debilitating for those of us who might endure them. It had been quite an effort for them to determine how the mappings of whatever alien brains they were originally intended for needed to be adjusted for humans, and the trick to solving that puzzle had apparently been provided by the Oxford crew who had been the guinea pigs for this educational experiment. It finally figured out where the problems were, traced back the symptoms to the causes, identified the disconnects and fixed them. Nobody would now suffer as we had, and that was going to make it a lot easier to at least train up CSTC staff so they’d have the foundational scientific knowledge to deal with what we were intending.

We dove into what made some sleep training modules “restricted” and unavailable for use. With the huge number of available modules it had released to the Oxford crew, I wasn’t too worried about what we weren’t allowed to access. When we ran out of material, then I’d ask the question, but now that we were developing the CSTC courses, curiosity won out over my earlier satisfaction.

Of course the AI was obtuse about it all, but we finally figured out how to ask it so that we could get the information I’d wanted.

Everything about AIs was locked down. OK, that didn’t bother me too much. I wasn’t really that fond of AIs anyhow.

Everything about other Confederacy worlds and species was locked down. That bothered me a little more, as it meant that the only things we could learn about them and our opportunities to interact were utterly under the control of the AIs. Still, that wasn’t a subject I was all that concerned about, at least for this effort.