Retired Vice Admiral Albert Konetzni Jr. testified to the Base Realignment and Closure Commission. He gave his views on the closing of New London and Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. SRC adds some memories of its own to the impending disastrous decision by the movers and shakers in Washington D.C.

Americans have always been proud of the role their submarines played in winning the Second World War. They don't consider the blunders and wrong decisions made by professional militarists of the time. The torpedo exploder problem is well known to submariners but the average citizen looks at the final score card and is justly proud of the results. Those who make the "big decisions" aren't always right. They have no monopoly on brains.

During the cold war the Secretary of Defense became a true believer in the mystique of the computer; then in its infant stage. It was the age of automatic card sorting and simple statistical analysis. Submarine officers were taught how to inventory and quantify every item and every second of labor time. It was all done on cards with a number 2B pencil. Seamen who scraped a submarine's superstructure for an hour took another hour to record what they had just done. Scraping paint is a dirty job and one could see a seaman pull from his pocket the DOD cards which his filthy hands smudged to questionable readability. He penciled in the amount of time he spent on his work, but the hard part was identifying the work. This was done by an index with thousands of jobs and their code numbers. This too was carried in the seaman's pocket and this too became unreadable from being thumbed through by greasy hands.

When the seaman was certain he had the right work code he registered the time and work code on his daily work card by blackening the spaces between tiny parallel lines. It was like taking a multiple choice quiz except there were no right or wrong answers. Naturally, the seamen made mistakes and the erasers skidded around grease-streaked cards, making them useless. The dog-eared cards were collected and "reviewed" by chief petty officers who had been ordered to strive for neatness. At the end of the day he turned in his dog-eared and smudged cards to his division officer and from there it worked its way up the chain of command to the tender which sent them on to the Pentagon where punch card operators tried to make something out of the information received. The operators were expected to keep pace with the many thousands of cards received each day. They accomplished this using their imaginations. When the card sorters whirred and the data was collected on impressively long sheets it looked accurate, but any one in the chain of data collection could have told the good Secretary that it was meaningless.

If all went well in this process the Secretary of Defense had what he thought was hard data from which to make budget decisions. There were very few in the fleet who wanted to tell him that the data he so relied upon was as accurate as the sailor who tried to figure out the codes and columns of parallel lines. What saved us all from this dubious exercise was the Soviets whose ominous intentions kept us all on the ball. The enterprise lasted about a year, then some adviser told the Secretary that the information didn't make sense. That was the end of the cards in the seaman's back pocket.

We face the same type of arrogant reliance on faulty data, except we now do it without the threat of a larger and better equipped submarine force to keep our decision-makers on track. Of even greater significance is an apparent reversal of appropriation policy. In the past the level of commitment to an adequate submarine force was determined by what it took to keep the Untied States out of harm's way. This long-standing rationale has given way to a pre-determined fixed dollar amount and what cuts in the submarine force that will be required to meet the reduced spending level.

This means that New London and Portsmouth are likely to be closed. The impact of such closures has been quantified in dollar amounts, but no one has suggested how submariners are going to be trained. Another non-quantifiable concept is the effect of tradition on the submarine force. There has always been a permanency about New London that has transcended all the fuzzy ideas coming from the Pentagon. It has been the one place where only the welfare of the submarine force is relevant. When it goes, the force will not only lose the backbone of its infrastructure it will loose its one true home.