Five People, Every Deployed Platform

The Herbert Lott Efficiency Award appears on my CV as a single line: 2019, Fleet Stores Coordination Cell. That line undersells it in one direction and oversells it in another. It undersells the scale of what the cell was doing. It oversells what any one member of the team did alone, because the award went to five people together, and the citation says so explicitly.

Five People Doing More Than One Unit's Work

The Fleet Stores Coordination Cell was a small headquarters team supporting Fleet Operations. The cell was unusual in scope. Most logistics roles at that rank support one ship or one unit. This one supported every Royal Navy and Royal Marines platform on operations anywhere in the world, providing 24/7 cover and moving operational-defect material through military and commercial supply chains wherever a deployed platform needed it. The citation calls the level of autonomy and decision-making involved "rarely bestowed on a Leading Hand." That description applied equally to all five.

Three Operations, at the Same Time

The award citation names three concurrent commitments. The Royal Navy was re-establishing itself as a carrier navy through WESTLANT 18, the deployment marking the first-of-class F-35 Joint Strike Fighter flying trials. The cell worked directly with the afloat Carrier Strike Group staff, the Forward Logistics Site team, and US customs to keep it moving. At the same time, the cell was sustaining a second Forward Logistics Site in the Middle East, supporting the Amphibious Task Group and the standing UKMCC framework so the amphibious contribution to SAIF SAREEA 3 could go ahead. On top of both, Exercise Trident Juncture landed at the tail end of 2018, in the High North, at considerable distance from any support hub. None of them ran in sequence, since all three were watchkept together, around the clock, by five people.

What the Team Gave Up to Do It

The citation is specific about the personal cost as well as the operational output. It credits the flexibility the five team members and their families showed in absorbing a disrupted watch bill so that individual career development still happened during that period: an Admiralty Interview Board and professional and leadership courses, all fitted around coverage that could not lapse. The citation's own summary is blunt about the stakes: in that environment, a delay of a few minutes could become a delay of hours or days in mission-essential support, with a direct effect on operational capability. The award recognises that the cell held that line anyway, for the length of the assignment, as a team.

Crediting All Five

An account of this award built only from my own actions would still be true in outline, and it would misrepresent what happened. Five Leading Hands held global, round-the-clock coverage across three concurrent operations. The Royal Navy and Royal Marines Charity recognised all five, so the award is credited to all five here. In civilian terms, the work was global operations coordination and continuity planning under live, distributed pressure, the discipline that keeps a supply chain or operational resilience function running when several things fail in different places at once. The award belongs to the team, and this account credits it that way.