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Wally Bock's Supervisory Leadership Tips The Ten Mission Principle
The movie, Top Gun, is a fictional and fanciful account of the Navy Fighter Weapons School that used to be in Miramar, California. It's also one of my favorite movies.
As a movie this is a bit less than a documentary. Forget Maverick performing stunts that would get him court-martialed in real life. Forget the fact that none of the pilots wear Nomex gloves. This is a fun movie about a real institution. But the real story of how the Fighter Weapons School came to be can give you some guidance about training.
The Navy Fighter Weapons School itself grew out of a performance problem. The problem was that too many Naval aviators were getting shot down, compared to the number of enemy pilots they shot down themselves. That's a measure called the "kill ratio."
In Viet Nam, the kill ratio for Naval aviators was about 2.5: 1, far worse than it had been in any other war where America participated. The Navy figured it had to do something, and it assigned Captain Frank Ault to research what was going on and recommend solutions.
Among the things that Ault found in his research was what became known as the "Ten Mission Principle." Ault noticed that if Navy and Marine fighter pilots who flew ten combat mission or more were far more likely to succeed than their less experienced peers.
That's insight number one. There has to be enough training. Eight or nine training missions won't get you 80 or 90 percent of the result. You've got to get through something equivalent to the ten missions. You'll find that's true with your people learning new skills. They have to get enough training to learn the task. Less will not work.
Ault's next big insight was that training should mimic those ten missions. But in order to do that, the training had to be realistic.
Prior to Ault's recommendations, U. S. Naval aviators who flew fighters learned their combat skills by flying against other Naval aviators flying the same kinds of fighters. That was easy on the budget, but it was lousy training because it wasn't realistic.
In Viet Nam, the MIGs being flown by the enemy had different performance characteristics from American jets. Their pilots used tactics that were different from American tactics.
The Naval Fighter Weapons School developed "aggressor squadrons." They fly aircraft like the aircraft the aviators are likely to encounter in combat. They use the tactics that the enemy uses.
Finally, good training needs to incorporate clear objectives and regular, quick feedback. Today, digital technology makes that easy at the Fighter Weapons School; but in the beginning, trained professional observers did the job. You don't need high tech, but you do need to have good observers trained to give helpful feedback.
The Navy Fighter Weapons School is one of the great successes in training. Naval aviators who were trained at the Fighter Weapons School during Viet Nam, scored a kill ratio of 10:1.
The lesson is clear. If you provide enough of the right kind of quality training, that training will make a huge difference in the performance of your organization.
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