The newly established Physical Readiness Control Officer (PRCO) program will serve as a vital link between command fitness leaders and Navy Physical Readiness Program coordinators, officials said Oct. 11.Good Lord man. I await the donkey-bottom wiping instruction and certification course.
"We decided it would be beneficial to put a link between the commands and the Physical Readiness Program Office (OPNAV N135), where policy is written, to ensure accuracy and fairness to Sailors and commands," said Bill Moore, director, Navy Physical Readiness Program, OPNAV N135. "It lets us provide command fitness leaders (CFL) with more direct assistance and also gives each one of the echelons an opportunity to monitor the commands within their area to ensure compliance with the program."
In accordance with NAVADMIN 203/11, echelon III commanders must now appoint a PRCO to liaise with OPNAV and provide assistance to subordinate commands on physical readiness program policy and compliance and also ensure physical fitness assessment (PFA) compliance reporting semiannually.
...
"During training, the PRCOs went through everything that CFLs learn during the five-day CFL certification course," said Moore. "They learned all the major components of policy, frequently asked questions that we receive at headquarters, everything about the PRIMS 2011 and also what their role and responsibilities are as a PRCO."
"The Navy will benefit by having collateral duty PRCOs in place through the assurance that all commands are in compliance with the physical readiness program, how it is run, that it is administered in a standardized, efficient way and benefits each one of the Sailors, but most of all that it's fair," said Moore.
Hat tip T.
41 comments:
Already can hear it...
"The PRICK-O said I'm too fat..."
<span></span><span>Well, after all, with the exceptional number of COs displaying poor judgement these days (per the relief for cause stats), some moron decided to take the approach "All people are inherently lazy and evil" path to solve the problem...but then again, not unlike the view hasn't been in place for a while under different guises. In my personal experience, one such short term event like this was when I was rousted from my primary billet in Jan 93 to take a team to every ship in the East Coast fleet and validate they knew how to use NATO Sea Sparrow Safely....oh, yeah, except USS SARATOGA (CV-60)....and USS O'BANNON (she was in ROH). I tried to tell them, as the CSA Officer for LANT for almost 3 full years that I had never seen a CNSL ship come anywhere close to that disaster, but I had been sending WordPerfect copies of the CNSL CSMTT doctrine to CNAL training guys for over a year......anyhow, it's all about punishing the non-guilty because of idiots who are too stupid to follow the directives, or are so ful of themselves, they believe they are above them. The good news is I got a ribbon for participating in GWI, because I had to fly to the Red Sea to visit the USS STUMP and we met the newly changed criteria of 72 hrs in the "war zone." I don't proudly claim it, spending two days in Hurgata at a 5 Star hotel until NALO could get back to retrive us....but it is part of my official record...
I also did about 2 years as one of theses at FCTCL (80-82) for the department of almost 200....snet a few people home, who had their 6 months, and usually another 6 months to get with the program before we ADSEPed them.
Is it now common for COs to not understand OPNAV stuff means them, too, or is this just someone in DC wanting to get out of their career path?</span>
Phib, is the donkey-bottom thing an individual or ship-level certification? I can envision a whole team of people coming to the ship from Lakehurst to conduct an assist visit before the certification inspection...
If you were flight crew, you would STILL be trying to figure out how to get per diem for that stint. :)
Oh crap, they are cutting budgets, so staff weenies make up new requirements to keep the staff at a bloated size. But I am just a cynic.
This is what you get when you have a generation raised on the diktats of the Hitler Youth, er, Fitness Nazi's, I mean health advocates. (remember, as long as you look skinny in your jacket photo, it doesn't matter what the rest of your jacket looks like) I have to wonder if this is also a brilliant counter-move by the Diversity Zamplits Bureau, who perhaps seeing that their usefulness may be coming to an end under the new CNO, have found a place to hide themselves, waiting for time to pass...
Don't over think this too much. Alll this is just someone's brilliant idea to verify that CO's are complying with the PFA instructions and to properly review those personnel administration seperation packages so that we are seperating enough personnel under PFA rules and not have to pay out as much as if they used ERB or SERB process to dischage someone. I would bet dollars to donuts that this is postion is going to be filled by those senior officers who didn't screen for command or who were asked to leave thier command tour early, they are given this postion while awaiting thier own paperwork. I would also bet some more donuts to your dollars that these guys will also be tasked to wade through command records looking for those individuals who were given operational waviers or readiness waviers on thier PFA failures and instead should have been discharged. In turn they will be the ones making the decision to disharge sailors so that BuPers/NPC/Whatever they call Millington today, doesn't have to waste thier bodies from doing thier jobs in this sense. Remember the out going CNO and CNP has stated that we are over manned by almost 60k bodies and need to trim a minimum of 15k in the next 365 days.
So we can't afford to keep the 47s but we can afford this.
If micromanagement is needed and fixes things, then we should send some E-4 from a LCS to the Pentagon to oversee them to fix that huge problem. That would be a lot more beneficial than heaping another collatoral duty on some poor schmuck at every command.
This is another non-warrior administrivia excess that somone very high up who wants to focus on warrior type stuff should quickly and publicly rescind. And then send everyone in that office down to the waterfront to clean bilges or something useful for the remainder of their tour. ANd eliminate the billets they used to fill.
Silly me, I thought the centralized officer promotion system was supposed to select the right leaders to take care of all the chickenshit requirements.
AHMEN!!!!!!!!
The SLJO (SH**y Little Job Officer) grouping just got a whole new meaning.
oh Geeze..... this is an easy fix
I think that the diversity industry will object to the term PRCO without a female equivalent, or perhaps a gender neutral term...
Physical and Uniform Standards Selection Yeoman?
Do the Soviets know we are using their playbook?
Given the level of right sizing, sending an E4 anywhere from LCS is going to effectively be CASREPT.......
What a goat-rope! Some personal reflections to illustrat how screwed up we have allowed ourselves to be in just this small issue.
I was the PRT coordinator for my submarine from 1988 to 1992. Mainly due to the fact that both of my XO's used my name to fill out just about every collateral duty that they could stick me with! No five day course for me....just a file tossed at me by the outgoing PRT coordinator who was leaving the boat with a cheery "good luck!"
The job consisted of running the physical fitness test once a year and recording the scores for everyone who took the test. Not terribly difficult. Boomer patrol schedule meant that once every other off-crew I had to run the test and chase down the stragglers to get it done. Chasing down the stragglers was not too difficult as the COB enjoyed using any stragglers as his personal working party until they passed the PRT. Paperwork consisted of one sheet of paper for each man, which had an explanation of the physicall fitness test on the front and room on the back to record the test results for 3 different tests. Easy peasy....
Then sometime around 1990 or 1991 the form changed to some monstrous five or six page folded nonsense that only had room for recording two tests but required me to fill out all sorts of stupid screening questions of everyone and get a signature. WTF?? Plus it now took up four times the room than the previous set of records. No change in the actual test, but a tremendous increase in the amount of paperwork required to keep the PRT running along.
Apparently things have only gotten worse in the time since I left.
Good grief.
<span>Good Lord man. I await the donkey-bottom wiping instruction and certification course.</span>
I don't know about a cource but there is an MRC for that:
http://www.funtimenavy.com/games/mrc_d1r.pdf
On December 7, 1941 Ensign Jospeh K. Taussig was Officer of the Day for USS Nevada. Before dawn, he ordered an extra boiler lit off so as to switch the duty boiler once the day started. Once the attack began, LCDR Francis J. Thomas, USNR took command as senior officer and steamed the ship as far as she could before enemy attack threatened to sink her in the channel--at which point he had the ship grounded on Hospital Point. Chief Boatswain's Mate E.J. Hill posthumously won the Medal of Honor for his work in getting the ship underway and then trying to get her anchored, all while under fire.
And I bring this up to say this---when this PRCO is filled as a collateral by the wrong rank, don't be surprised if you don't get such intiative in the future, especially from your JOs. Most of the time, you can't expect people to spend an entire career looking over their shoulders waiting to see what instruction they are considered to have violated or if a certain element of the crew approves, and then, when the moment comes, be ready to act on their own.
When bureaucracy becomes a war-round, I'll be more supportive of this kind of crap.
Greetings:
I keep forgetting. In the Department of Redundancy Department, is it the co-ordinator who sits in between the two expeditors or the expeditor who sits in between the two co-ordinators.
We have a winner!!!!!
So Sean...did you wait till you were underway to chase down the stragglers? I imagine it would have been easy to corner them... but timing the mile run might have been a challenge. ;)
Political Requirements Conformance Officer. Stu nails it!
LMAO
Who was the frigate captain in the war of 1812 who fought most of one of the famous ship to ship duels with the british frigate with split britches because he had been attacked by the dread swivel chair spread syndome?
Every time the Navy gets short on money and end strength gets cut, they tighten the bolt three turns on the PT shackles. If the minimum wasn't good enough, it wouldn't be the minimum, get back to work (I was referring to the paperwork and officer manhours, of course).
I await the usual chorus of dismay and justification for the unecessary.
ahem...unnecessary.
end strength is coming down, boys. haven't you seen zombieland? the fatties go first!
Nah...like I said, the Chief of the Boat made it rather easy for me. Anyone who did not show up for the test was on the COB's sh*t list until I cleared it with the COB. Made people REAL motivated to show up for the make-up PRT !!
The only time my job was difficult was the time where the brand new Sonar girl failed the push ups section of the test. He stopped after doing about six or seven pushups and looked at me like "what is next"?? I thought he was f*cking with me and told him to get back down and finish the rest of the minimum number of pushups....when he got back down and could only do two more pushups I knew we had a problem. I told him I was going to forget he was here for the test and that we were going to do it again later that week but that if he could not do the minimum number of pushups then he was going to fail the PRT and BAD things were going to happen.
Later that week we tried again with even worse results. Frack me. Now I have to fail the kid and fill out nine million pieces of paper documenting how a supposedly healthy late adolescent male could not manage to pass the push up section of the PRT despite being in the military for more than two years! I had some strong words with the Chiefs quarters and asked them to pass word on down to NLON sub school that if this turned ugly there were going to be embarrassing questions asked as to how someone supposedly passed the exit PRT test from enlisted sub school yet managed to fail the same PRT not less than six months later?!?
As with anything else with the PRT...it can be used as a witch hunt to do things that you otherwise would find difficult....this kid had other issues and suddenly the failure on the PRT was the straw that broke the camels back and he was separated from the boat and probably from the Navy.
Dude...I did get per deim....but I had to babysit and OPS Tech LDO LCDR from GW....so I earned it....well, actually, once that flattop black shoe and I came to understand we really were on the same team....it was a great few months. BTW, I have the video of Don and I giving the story at TACTRAGRULANT on DVD....pulled it from the VHS tape it used to reside on.
HAve to get rid of the devisive term "man," but you're on the right track.
Yeoperson? Mein Gott im Himmel!
Yes, our very own zampolits have all received their baseline training at Frunze.
I like Sean's point but think back to days long ago when I got a call from the Chief of Staff telling me that I was getting a Failed grade for the PRT. I objected quite loudly and when he proved obdurate I took it to the Commodore. Not being present at the PRT and the retake was hardly my fault when the command had shipped me out to do a Command Inspection during the PRT and an Operational Readiness Exam for the makeup PRT. So yes, I ran my very own PRT at home and phoned in my scores to the COS. Stupid and pointless.
As others have pointed out, this is the selection/fail point that will identify the future former naval personnel who get slashed from the rolls as we process sailors for reintegration to civilian life. Wonder how that works with academy grads who fail 3 PRT in a row as Ensigns? Do they have to repay the money?
How does this fit in with the new CNO's recently announced "Three Tenets?"
Yup, another case of not "Sailor-proofing" the new acronym.
So we have the people skills guy from Office Space. We have codified that position, yes?
It could be worse. Those PRCOs could also be getting direction to go requisition a bunch of (slightly) used exercise bikes and heart rate monitors from DRMO (or whatever the DoD junkmeisters are called these days)...
Check out the navy.mil homepage this morning...the section with the 4 rotating pictures. Picture #3 shows a CFL class doing aerobics. In the explanation it states "The FIVE DAY certification course consists of...". Five days...40 hours...2,400 minutes! Taking what is likely a hard-charging PO1 away from a ship for a week for something that could be done in 1 day absolute max?
Boy have we come a "long way" since you assigned a good E-6 as PRT coordinator so he could have a collateral duty bullet on his eval. I predict that the next waterfront "crisis" will be ships not being able to get quotas for the certification course.
Stuff like this comes along whenever the real problems, like ship readiness, morale, and retention, get too hard. I don't remember guys getting hard-a55ed about their weigh until the mid-70s, when ships literally couldn't get underway, and the PRT didn't exist until the early '80s.
face it - the current 3 wars are all army/air force shows. Money is tight and the Navy is gonna get RIF'd big time and the "chub club" PRT gun-deckers are gonna get boned
Yea i know and all of that ignores the fact that the navy could probably do it cheaper, better, and faster.......if only they had a dedicated day/night attack aircraft with the versatility to do things like refueling, long range strike etc......
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_A-6_Intruder
But hey everyone knows one size fits all! Just ask the hornet drivers who's planes are getting taxed to hell and back because they dont have the range to carry a payload more than a couple hundred miles without numerous refuelings.....
Naw, just shorten to Yeo. All the bubbleheads already do when speaking.
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