Interview With USS Seawolf Commander Paul Stevens '83
What attracted you to the Navy?
I had no idea what I wanted do when I got out of college. I did the Semester in Industry program in fall '81, so I was in summer school before that. A Navy recruiter called after I filled out an interest sheet. Within about two months I had interviewed with Admiral Rickover down in Washington, D.C.
Initially did you intend to make a career of the Navy?
No. Usually your sea tours are about three years long. Your shore tours are about two years. And they alternate those. I've always left my options open and it's worked out.
Looking back over your career, were there any turning points or accomplishments that made you want to continue or go to the next level?
Probably my first sea tour on the USS Pogy and the amount of responsibility they give young junior officers early -- being the qualified officer of the deck driving a nuclear-powered submarine. The officer of the deck is responsible for the entire ship when he has his watch. One of the things I really enjoyed was when we did a Western Pacific deployment, and I got to drive the ship into Yokosuka, Japan, which is Tokyo Harbor, the busiest port, probably, in the world.
On the surface as officer of the deck, you man the bridge. And you're up in the top of the sail [tower]. It's just you and the lookout. And I really enjoyed that. One of the hardest parts of being commanding officer is remembering that experience, because I love being on the bridge. When the young junior officers are driving it now, I have to go up and make sure they're safe and I would love to stay up there. But I just remember how great it was not having the skipper up there with you. So I have to temper myself. Go up there, ask, 'Okay, you guys doing all right?' and come on back down and let them enjoy it.
What kinds of skills or what particular traits must an individual possess to become a successful submarine officer?
There's a whole spectrum of different personalities and leadership styles that are successful in the submarine corps. We'll talk a little bit later about how Clarkson prepares you in just the process of analytical thought. There are so many procedures and processes that we're involved in: the ability to monitor your guys doing one procedure, and then critique and self-evaluate it to determine how to make it better.
We're pretty good about teaching ourselves how to do that in the submarine corps. And I think one of the things Clarkson did well even back in the eighties was giving you independent work and teamwork. You had to work as teams to figure things out, and to come up with a solution, and then live or die by it. Of course you would get guidance form your instructor if you were going to be way off base. I think those were valuable tools.
Living or working on a submarine is a pretty unusual physical environment. I notice in some of the Navy information that you get a test to make sure you're not claustrophobic.
I don't ever remember taking any test like that. There's space to walk around, and we really keep the officers and the majority of the crew pretty darned busy. We really have very few problems. Maybe over my first six months of command there was maybe one kid, one young sailor who showed up, who just could not handle the aspect of being submerged on a submarine. So that's less than one percent, which is probably a pretty good number.
You have received a Defense Meritorious Service Medal, Meritorious Service Medal (two awards), the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal (five awards), and the Navy and Marine Corp Achievement Medal. Can you discuss what led to any of these honors?
The Navy's award system operates on a tour basis. So, if I do a tour on a submarine in three years, typically at the end of that tour, they'll recognize your performance with a certain level of medal. So most of those are for a two- or three-year block of time, for the activities that I did or the events that took place. A few of them are for individual events. Deployments, you know, the Western Pacific Deployment. I won awards for my performance there. Another was for a North Atlantic Deployment that we conducted. Heroism? No.
How did you become qualified for the Naval War College?
You request it, but your record is also screened to make sure you perform adequately academically. Then you're authorized to go. And then you just work with the people called the submarine detailers, who decide where your assignments go. And it's really the luck of the draw. The Naval War College is a fantastic experience that I was lucky enough to get.
What do you learn in the Naval War College primarily?
Well there are three trimesters. One is national security decision making. Another is operations. And the third is naval history, really history of warfare that goes all the way back through the Peloponnesian War. You work up through Hannibal, go into Karl von Clausewitz, and into World War Two, and work your way up. And that is a fantastic topic. You're taught by world-renowned history scholars. The operations trimester covers joint warfare. How do the services interrelate? How do you put together an operations plan for several of the conflicts that we see now? And then, in national security decision making, probably my favorite, you look at more recent case histories and how the national security team comes to a decision. They have case studies on a lot of the decisions that President Reagan made, and President Carter, and what the results were, which is pretty fascinating.
So you get a perspective, essentially, on how you and your mission are going to be fitting into the history of the U.S. military.
Right. It's not as applicable to the day-to-day operation of a submarine, but more to the operation of the country and national security.
Do specific engineering skills or aspects of that training assist you in your day-to-day duties as a commander? You got into nuclear engineering from a background in mechanical engineering. Is that pretty typical?
Most of the people who get picked up in the nuclear power program are engineers. Now, we do have a few who are not. There's a history major here, and physics majors and mathematics majors. The school is six months, essentially 40 hours a week of instruction, and at least that much time studying. By the time you're done, you've done more than a master's degree of work in a nuclear program. It covers the core of calculus, physics, and reactors.
So, how much does anyone who's going to be a commander of a nuclear submarine have to know about the mechanics of all the systems here?
This the fourth submarine that I've served on and it's the fourth different reactor plant design and the fourth different entire submarine design. A lot of the basics translate from (submarine) class to class, but when you arrive on board as commander you obviously can't know all the specifics. So you rely on the crew, the chief petty officers, enlisted sailors, and the officers that have been here for a while to maintain that expertise. What you bring is similar to a CEO coming in with that big picture. You stand back. The men say, 'Hey, captain, this is broken, this is what we want to do.' You say, 'Okay, show me the procedures. Show me what the instructions say. Show me how you're going to do it. Explain the precautions.' It's a little higher level view.
You know the questions to ask to make sure things are going to go the right way.
Hopefully.
Well, on the technical aspects, is there a simple way to explain how or why Seawolf is the quietest and fastest running sub?
Well, the workhorse of the submarine fleet is the 688 Class, the Los Angeles Class. And there's 52 of them left. They have started decommissioning them. But that submarine was designed in the late sixties and early seventies and it had really reached it's limit of what could you do to modernize it. So, this was a brand new design that took all those previous lessons learned and really incorporated significant sound silencing aspects and other technological improvements.
Can you say just what they are?
Not really. The Seawolf quieting program is pretty highly classified because that's the kind of technology that, if it got out to another country, would hinder our efforts.
The Navy's Submarine FAQ Web page mentioned the hydrodynamic slant of the tower.
The hydrodynamic aspect of the quieting really isn't as significant as the machinery.
So you can't talk about other technological innovations.
Well, I'll say just that the nuclear power plant is phenomenal. The reliability is incredible. It's capability is fantastic.
How about the safety aspects?
I wish I had the numbers right off the top of my head, but the number of reactor years that the U.S. Navy has operated is huge. [Lieutenant Commander L. Joe Carpenter, a Public Affairs Officer sitting in on the interview, noted that 'the Navy has the safest nuclear power program in the world. The Navy and the Department of Energy are hip to hip on policy and how they operate.']
Does the nuclear reactor run when you're in port?
No. Then we use what we call shore power. We hook up to an external electrical supply. We'll show you those cables, big cables that we're plugged into, up top. Some ports you pull into may not have shore power facilities to support. We could either anchor out in the bay, or go pier side.
I was wondering about your shifts at sea. Submariners run on an 18-hour day with three six-hour shifts. What about the commander? Do you have shifts? Are you effectively on call all the time?
Right. But my second in command is called the executive officer and he's usually qualified for command. So, typically, once you're comfortable enough with him, you can station him as the duty officer, to handle some of those decisions at a certain level. He still has to come talk with you.
If we're just out doing local operations or we're deployed, typically I get to bed. The midnight guys come in and get permission to take the watch. I'll stay up for that. And the morning guys come in at five-thirty. So, I get four or five hours that I can sleep. But if there's something that happens and they've got to call me, I've got a little system where they buzz me and I say, 'Please tell me what's going on.'
I don't stand any of the watches. So, personally, I'm on a normal schedule, other than getting [just] four to five hours of interrupted sleep a night. But the guys are on six-hour watches. Six to noon. Noon till dinner time. Dinner time till midnight. Midnight to six in the morning. It's a regression. They stand the morning watch, then the mid watch, then the evening watch, and they rotate around. In their 12 hours off, we run drills, or have training or have other things, so there's cycles where, if you have the mid-watch, and there's things happening during the day, and then you have the evening watch, you may go 25 or 26 hours without sleep. We try to make sure those guys always get some down time.
Does the executive officer do the master scheduling of people?
Yes, with the chief of the boat, a senior enlisted member, called the 'cob.'
As far as the command of Seawolf is concerned, what are the main challenges?
It is the most amazing submarine I've ever served on. The speed, the quietness, the weapons load-out capabilities. The combat systems are incredible. It's 20 percent bigger than the previous class of submarine, the 688, with the same number of people. So, one of the challenges is keeping it clean. And one of the hard parts of Navy life is field days, and cleanliness, and keeping it clean. You'd be amazed at how much dirt comes from just sitting here for 24 hours. It's a challenge in some of these out-of-the-way places around pipes, down in bilges, to get down and clean them. (Bilge - Old English in origin. A variation of 'bulge'. Where the ship 'bulged' most was at its bottom. There, sea water seeping in through the bottom planks became stagnant and foul, which was mixed by dripping water and 'slops' from the upper decks. Pumping out the bilges was a smelly, very disagreeable chore. The term became used to describe anything unpleasant or unbelievable.)
When you're undersea, where does all this dirt come from?
People. Skin. Clothing. It's amazing. We've got all sorts of operating equipment. There's more hydraulic valves just in the torpedo room on this ship than submarines in every other class have on their entire ship. There's a diesel engine that's got fuel oil and lube oil. We've got lots of rotating machinery, DC rotating machinery, so you have brushes for excitation. So, there are lots of sources. Even your clothes, your laundry. You get lint. The amount of dirt is something that would surprise you. So that's a challenge.
There must be other challenges.
Another challenge is that we're a volunteer force. Sea tours average between three to five years for most of the enlisted guys, and just under three years for officers. So, you lose 25 to 30 percent of your crew every year. So, how do you maintain a certain level of proficiency? You go through a cycle and you train everyone up and it's like, 'Excellent. I've got everyone trained and we're ready to go do our mission.' But you turn around and 25 percent of your guys are new. So, you have to realize that, if you haven't done something in a while, you have to treat it like you've never done it.
You need constant awareness of 'risk management,' that's what we term that situation. How risky is this next evolution? Who's on watch? When did they do it before? What measures can I put in place to make sure we do it safely?
So with all these procedures, it's a constant learning experience across the ship?
You have a core of enough expertise on board for equipment operation and maintenance. And we have the ability to send a message and say, 'Hey, we've exhausted our avenues on this problem. Give us some help.' There's a great shore support infrastructure.
Now occasionally on some missions that's not an option. You're not allowed to transmit. Then you're on your own. And it's amazing. I've done some missions where things break that you think, 'My God, we're going to have to leave.' And you turn that problem over to an enlisted guy and say, 'Make this thing work.' And it is amazing what these guys can accomplish. I remember once we had a foot-and-a-half long machine gear and it failed. And it was fairly complex. We needed about a two-inch steel stock and it was a gear drive, so they had to machine a certain type of gear and two different gear patterns on it. So, we have a lathe on board. And I just turn, 'Hey, who's the best lathe operator?' It was some guy who worked in the shop at home. He raised his hand and said he was a pretty good lathe operator and he built this thing. We put it back in the piece of equipment. It might not have been perfect, but it got us through the mission. It was incredible.
In your career overall, have you faced many situations of high stress or tension while submerged? Can you describe an example or two?
Well, when you submerge in a submarine, you're at the mercy of the ocean, so to speak. And we have lots of openings. And you go down to the unclassified depth of 800 feet. [i.e., they can actually go deeper.] So, the sea pressure at 800 feet, you know 44 pounds per 100 feet, is 300 plus pounds per square inch of pressure. We have lots of procedures and lots of safety features, so that if we have a flooding casualty, or if a component fails, or something happens and you have flooding, we can safely get to the surface.
I remember on one ship, we were operating near that depth and a small gauge line failed, a quarter-inch gauge line. Now, flooding is when you fear for your life. And a quarter inch hole is not going to sink the ship. You know an inch or two-inch or big 14-inch hole is going to be a significant casualty to deal with. So this quarter inch gauge line gave loose. But the amount of noise and the amount of spray and mist in the air created by that just small line caused a young sailor to call away flooding. So we ended up taking the actions for that and sorted it out afterward. So, that was an exciting time.
Because you practice your drills and do your drills and you sort of know they're drills. When a real casualty happens, the crew's response really brings home why we drill all the time.
Maybe a guy didn't clean the lint out of the drier, and it catches on fire and smokes, or something like that. Since we're in an enclosed atmosphere, if you don't attack a fire in the first couple of minutes, and get it under control, it can become a major casualty. So fire is something we take very seriously. And we drill to get extinguishing agent in under two minutes.
What is your biggest professional strength or skill?
I would have to say it's learning from an experience. The Navy, and I think most people, are very big on learning from failure. 'Hey, we messed that up huge. How do I not do that again?' So you sit down and evaluate it and you figure it out. You shy away from pain. And I think, all too frequently, that's the only way we learn, through negative feedback. So, I work very hard on analyzing things that go very well. 'Hey, we did that great. Well, why did it go good?' And then passing those lessons on to say, 'Hey, this didn't happen by pure magic. It took all these things to be put in place ahead of time. And people to be trained properly. And all these other things for that small thing to go right or that big thing to work right.' So I like to try to put as much emphasis on that as on the negative. You also plan for success.
Well, you've had a lot of success. Have there been other keys to that success? Attitudes, habits, procedures, insights, skills, or aptitudes?
People have to believe that, number one, you're competent. So, I'm a leadership by example type person. I will study and train myself for the job I'm in and make sure that I go out and can accomplish that.
Also, I like to be out in the spaces talking to people, almost a cheerleader type. I'm also an eternal optimist. You can always find the guy doing something good and give a few words of praise on something good. Even though he might have messed up 20 things before, you've always got to strive to find that good thing and reinforce that.
Obviously your team building skills are important.
There are all kinds of different levels of teams. For example, there's the wardroom team, all the officers. We have a specific function and way to go about doing our job that I think make us successful. And that's competence, displaying that competence in training the guys that support you. There are so many different things that have to happen to be successful for your mission accomplishment. If you try to take all of those on your shoulders and be the one-man show, in the long term you're going to be doomed to making a mistake. And also you haven't trained your guys on how to carry out some of those missions. Then there's the whole crew of the USS Seawolf. That's an awesome team to be on. There's the team of the submarine force in the area. You want to make sure that team stays united. And then you go to the Navy team and the Armed Forces, and the country. So you have all these different levels to work at it. And it's good to visit those on a routine basis.
Do enlisted men compete to get on to a nuclear sub?
They volunteer and they take exams for technical knowledge and regular rating knowledge exams that allow them to enter certain fields. They have to score fairly high on those exams. They have a six-month classroom school. And then they go to six months at a prototype, which is an actual operating nuclear power plant to learn how to qualify. They qualify watch station. Then some people go to submarine school before they come here. Some come right to the ship.
What attracts officers to submarine service?
If a young guy wants to come in the Navy and be a submarine officer, I can guarantee you, he'll be driving a multi-billion dollar machine. I can say that I drive the most expensive vehicle in the world. By far. It's a great one to keep up with the Joneses. But, they're going to be driving it! As an officer of the deck, they graduate, they do about a year and a half of school and another eight or nine months, so in under three years, two-and-a-half years, they will be driving a multi-billion dollar machine, and doing stuff that is supporting your nation and doing things that are important right now in the war on terrorism and for the foreseeable future. The submarine has been a stalwart part of our national defense since they went to sea.
Turning to your own education, what drew you to the field of engineering and to Clarkson?
I was always good at math and sciences. When I was starting to look at schools, my brother was going to St. Lawrence, so I'd heard of Clarkson as a good engineering school. I grew up outside of Buffalo, in Orchard Park. So, I applied early. I visited a couple of times. They said, 'Sure, we'll take you.'
And you picked mechanical engineering just because it was a kind of engineering?
Right.
Are there any skills or lessons from Clarkson that continue to serve you?
I think the mix of independent work and then teamwork. Clarkson really forced you, before a lot of other schools were doing it, into teamwork and making you do projects together. That has really served me well. Learning the interrelations among team members. How do you develop these? How do you assign different functions in the task? How do you resolve issues and get your project together?
Do any professors or classes stand out positively in your memory?
The semester in industry program and Ed Kear and the chance to stay at Clarkson in the summertime before that started. What a fantastic place in the summer. You get to see a different aspect of it. It thawed out and there was so much to do around there. Then I went right from the semester in industry over to London in the semester abroad at the City University. I think I was the first one to do that back-to-back. That was also just a fantastic experience.
So you had joined the Navy before you graduated from Clarkson?
Right. Beginning of my junior year. It's a fantastic program called Nuclear Propulsion Officer Candidate or NUPOC. The process was you took some written exams and if you met a certain standard, you went down to Washington, D.C., and did three oral interviews with Naval reactor engineers, and then you interviewed with the admiral who actually selected you or didn't select you. For me it was Admiral Rickover, one of his last four or five months in the Navy. It was a very intense interview. And you walked out of there and you've got a green ID card. You were an E-5 equivalent. You started getting paid. You got a couple thousand-dollar bonus. So I got a monthly paycheck for the last year-and-a-half of college. It was fantastic. And then I had to go to Officer Candidate School after graduation.
When were you last on campus?
I was up in the fall of 1984 when I was working out of a recruiter office in Buffalo. I've followed it through the magazine.
And you knew Blue Angels Commander Robert Field '81 at Clarkson.
Very well. He's from my home town. We hiked and skied together at Clarkson. He was a fantastic skier. He's a go-fast guy. He's a very good friend. We've run into each other constantly over our careers. I saw him out at Miromar when he taught at Top Gun. I rode the Eisenhower for a couple of weeks doing submarine stuff and he was the CO of the squadron then. So I hung out in his ready room, went up on the flight deck for cat launches and landings. I missed his change of commands because I was operating here when he took over the Blue Angels. But we stay in pretty close contact.
Do you have any overall philosophy or watchwords that guide you?
Keep a positive attitude. My wife will say, 'How can you always be happy and smiling?' Hey, it's a choice you make. There's always stuff that's not going right. Especially on a submarine. I mean it's continuous. You've got 154 guys running this incredibly complex machine. There are thousands and thousands of tasks that have to be accomplished each day. Even at a one percent failure rate, you're looking at four or five things a day that are probably not going exactly right. So you can either get all mad or you can approach it as 'Let's learn from that and move on.' Hopefully you ID problems when they're small and prevent the big ones from happening. So I think that positive attitude is my pathway to sanity and success.
How does a submarine career mesh with a family life?
We're separated from our families much more than society in general. I've been in command since the 12th of July, and I've been at sea 82 days already. And now we're going to get ready for a six-month deployment. So that's a pretty high departure rate. I've been married six years. I have three children. So that's a hard part of the job for me. Missing that family. That's part of the sacrifice of serving.
Are you are able to have e-mail and phone contact?
No phone contact unless we come to a port. We do have the capability to e-mail. But if we go on a mission, when we e-mail you put electrons in the air and they can be detected, and our whole mission is to remain undetected. Because that's part of our deterrent capability. They might know the possibility that you're out there, but they do not know where you are.
So sometimes at sea you make e-mail contact.
Right, we'll come up to communication depth and put a special mast up and we have a system that we send a packet of e-mail off and get a packet on board. Maybe a day or two late. If your operations don't support, it could be a week or two. It's something that's definitely new for me. I've never been on a ship that could do that.
What final point would you like to get across that we haven't covered?
Just that, as I said before, if the guys are looking for a challenge, and want to have responsibility, and they want to be able to accomplish incredible things, and have amazing amounts of responsibility at a young age, the submarine force is the place to be. I don't know of any other areas in the service where they're given the level of responsibility in the short period of time that they're on board. We're modern, we're definitely by far the best in the world. Come on down and let us show you what we can do.
In late January, University Editor Steve Hopkins interviewed Commander Paul Stevens aboard the nuclear submarine Seawolf for the story that appears in the Spring 2003 Clarkson Magazine. Here is a transcript of that interview.
