Leave Action Messing to the Ships

This piece is inspired by an article written by Rear Admiral SY Shrikhande in an earlier issue of Naval Despatch about the inordinate time spent on Command Divisions in a naval station and his efforts to affect a change in thinking change such that the same (or better) results could have been obtained in lesser time if we were not held hostage to the mechanical aspects of parades, forgetting the initial impulses and objectives of any evolution. I feel that Action Messing is another endeavour where we seem to have similarly lost the plot. 

When my course joined the Cadets' training ships INS Brahmaputra, Beas and Betwa of the First Training Squadron (1TS) in 1985, action messing implied food being served at actions posts when the ship was at action stations. This was done by distributing food packets at the many designated posts. Usually, a time of one hour was allotted for the whole serial. These ships, the repurposed Leopard class frigates, had many places or posts that were non-Ops or rarely visited. Many of us, who had action posts in vague spots like Aft GDP or ECP, would get together and enjoy the meal as though it were a picnic. The food was either Biryani or Aloo Puri; an enterprising cadet found ways to add pickle, green chilli, onion etc., as garnish and we often looked forward to this serial as that ‘blissful one hour' in the packed schedule of being 'the lowest form of marine life'. A few smart guys even managed to catch a brief snooze. So, we could not be blamed if we thought action messing was, basically, a kind of ‘laissez faire activity' in the ship's exercise programme. 

A few years down the line, around the late 80s or early 90s, the Navy changed tack and Action Messing now entailed ship's crew falling out in "groups", usually Alpha to Echo, and eating in the galley-dining room complex. By now, we had few tenures under our belt and at the cusp of undergoing specialisation courses. The new policy seemed better, and, while I cannot say for sure, I believe it happened with the advent of Godavari class ships with more sophisticated operations rooms. Eating at action posts implied leftovers and debris at those places and an invitation to rats and cockroaches, which, in turn, impacted electrical and personal hygiene. Over a period of time, Action Messing was fine tuned to make it more realistic. Thus, it was exercised at different mealtimes and not just lunch as was the practice earlier; more importantly, action messing was accompanied by other drills or 'reactionex' to simulate what could occur in the heat of battle or action. 

Then, after a while, a perfectly good idea began to get modified and tweaked to ludicrous levels. The initial idea was simple; the five groups designated A to E would fall out in sequence from their action posts, have a quick bite in 10 minutes, followed by a changeover time of 2 mins with next group and so on. Thus, one finished the activity in one hour. In good military fashion, the Navy initially followed the simple sequence from A to E. Then, some 'wiz-kid' deduced that in this way Group E or D would always get their meal later and, possibly, be deprived of 'the most succulent pieces of chicken'. Thus, a 'brilliant solution' of 'random sequencing' was mooted both to get in the surprise factor and give everyone equal opportunity for the 'best part of meat'. Apart from this deduction being, in some way, a reflection of the logistics arrangement that personnel eating later were not getting the 'good stuff', it also reduced Action Messing into a guessing  game. 

But more "innovation" was to follow. To ensure that food was served more efficiently, it had to be plated and kept. Thus, a search was launched  for the 'perfect action messing plate' in Crawford Market (where else?) and, at last, one was found with several compartments, the kind that serve thali meals in restaurants. To make things more complicated, Action Messing now developed strange rigidities. Thus, if a Group A person went to eat with another group because of the peculiarities of his action post, it became a problem. The GIs and Regulating staff would pounce on him for not following the watch and station bill. How could one convince them that the enemy was not planning his attack based on how correctly the bill was being followed? 

At the Fleet Staff level this transformed, somehow, into a KRA (key result area) for some. In particular, with the greatest respect to gunners, the Fleet Master Chief GI and others in similar perches seemed to find great delight in inspecting Action Messing and finding flaws in the implementation. The simple logic of Action Messing was to be cognisant of the fact that a ship needed to be combat ready for prolonged durations and this implied that the manning of posts had to be harmonised with crew meal requirements. In short, no key weapon or sensor post should be left unattended throughout the specified period. In contrast, Action Messing drill, as carried out, became a measure of efficiency of the galley and the ship in ensuring good khaana (preferably of many dishes) while the ship was at action stations. Very surprisingly, this drill did not seem to take into consideration that many departments (ND, Communication, some L watchkeepers) follow a 1 in 2 routine throughout and had no requirements to scale up at action stations while Gunnery, ASW and NBCD, arguably, needed different manning at different times. Therefore, logically, this simple objective could have been left for a ship to undertake as part of its crew management instead  of making it a significant ship or Fleet activity with lots of accompanying commotion. However, just like Divisions, this became another orthodoxy. 

As the Fleet Communications Officer, Western Fleet from 2003 to 2004, this anomaly seemed very apparent to me. This was ostensibly, the remit of gunnery folks and fleet Gunnery, quite understandably, involved more weighty matters like integration of new age missiles and fleet tactics. I mentioned this to other fleet staff who, not surprisingly, thought I was making much ado about nothing. Upon my persistence, the then Fleet Operations Officer (FOO), Captain (later Admiral and CNS) Sunil Lanba asked what I had in mind. I mentioned that we merely need to give two orders - 'commence action messing' and 'conclude action messing' - and simply find out if all had their food in the interval. If we needed to check anything it ought to be key action posts and not the galley, whose management had to be left to the ship. In response, Captain Lanba, with eyes twinkling, directed me to implement that on the ship that I was going to command shortly, INS Vindhyagiri. 

Thus, I decided to try this method on Vindhyagiri taking my Executive Officer in confidence and overriding the expected objections from the ship's GO and GIS. The instructions were simple. First, the department in-charge were to determine who to send when for lunch without doing so in frenzied rush. Second, the galley must be able to serve everyone as they came. So long as one was assured of being served food anytime, it didn't matter which group he belonged to. We were able to prove this concept during our annual inspection with just two announcements of commencement and completion of the serial. Captain Lanba mentioned it in the debrief, gave us a big BZ and, in his inimitable manner, declined to make it a SOP for others. He too believed that I was probably tilting at windmills. 

A few years later, in command of INS Jalashwa, I was able to implement this more smoothly and, again, with some bewilderment from the G folks. For one, I was the Flag Captain, and my Fleet Commander Rear Admiral (later Vice Admiral) AK Jain gave me complete leeway. Second, Jalashwa had adequate resources to keep the galley open throughout. In fact, we implemented a 24- hour open galley on board with some kind of food available at all times. Once the crew was assured of that, it became good to see how the messing part of action messing became inconsequential. 

Suffice it to say, therefore, that with modern galley devices and improvements in food, we need to rethink how action messing works. Much time is wasted on the superficial in our existing drill. Instead, we need to only think in terms of ready larders, finger food, fruits, nuts and ready snacks, juices and energy bars and such like. We need to ensure that the ship's company can have a 'bite and drink anytime'. This is a ship management activity and not the charter of higher echelons. It is time we moved the focus in action messing to action and let messing be dealt at individual ship level, without too much fuss and ado. While it is true that a Navy sails on its stomach, let us leave it to the ships to adjust the sails and refocus our energies on more important things. 

P.S. This article was published in Indian Naval Despatch, Mar 2025 issue first and being shared for wider dissemination.