The Rise, Fall, and Early Reawakening of US Naval Professionalism
We are told the naval officer of today is a fighting engineer and this mockery of truth has been accepted by the profession. On this pernicious theory, naval education now concerns itself with the engine room and the battery alone. There it stops. Naval education now concerns itself with the training of arms and legs only. It takes no thought of brains.
Stephen B. Luce, 1911
Introduction
Seafaring is a technical enterprise. Since early humans first took to the sea they required some form of technical knowledge to build the craft that carried them. As these early mariners ventured away from coastal waters, shipbuilding became far more complex to withstand the towering swells and heavy rolls of the open ocean. Building ships of war compounded the importance of technology: suddenly the sea was not the sailor’s only enemy. From the development of the oared galleys that ruled the surface of the Mediterranean to the nuclear-powered submarines that prowl the ocean depths today, technology, the art of seafaring, and technicism—training in technical skills—have played a critical role in designing, operating, and fighting ships at sea. However, technology alone is not decisive and can often prove distracting unless it is coordinated with a proper understanding of wider national security objectives.
Effectively wielding the art of maritime power requires broad analytical knowledge of several interrelated subjects. Operating a ship efficiently and employing maritime power strategically are altogether different. The former depends on training, a process of learning to perform certain functions that, ideally, can be perfected over time. As maritime historian Clark Reynolds has instructed, throughout history “any individual was—and is—capable of learning the art of seamanship, with adequate training, exposure to and experience on the water.”1 The art of maritime strategy, on the other hand, encompasses a much broader sphere. Geopolitics, history, international relations, sociology, economics, and diplomacy are all critical interrelated subjects that officers must study to grasp a proper understanding of maritime power: the use of sea-based forces and diplomatic skill to guard maritime resources and secure freedom of transportation and of communication, and a stable international system to facilitate trade and economic prosperity. Mastering these areas and their interrelation cannot rest on technical training alone but requires the officer to think broadly and educate the mind over years of analytical practice.
Throughout its history, the US Navy has struggled to maintain a healthy balance between mastering the technical jurisdictions of seafaring and the higher art of maritime thought, a body of knowledge crucial to its professional existence. During the late nineteenth century a generation of reform-minded naval officers led by Stephen B. Luce set the Navy on course toward harmonizing these skills, which professionalized the service through thoughtful debate, advocacy for their positions, and the creation of the Naval War College (NWC), which became the intellectual heart of the Navy. In an era of technological innovation, Luce and his reform-minded Young Turks emphasized the interconnected role the study of history, analytical planning, and war gaming played—alongside technical training—in learning to think about the broader application of sea power and its relation to national security objectives. The process solidified naval identity around a professional body of abstract knowledge that naval officers studied and employed to diagnose security problems, advise their civilian clients, and perform operations with unmolested autonomy, thereby professionalizing the naval service.
After World War II a return to technicism fractured Navy identity and undermined the serious study of maritime strategy in the officer corps. Spending more time at sea, naval officers devoted their time to operations and technological training in their respective platform communities, spending little time thinking about maritime power in a broader context. Because of this intellectual atrophy and tighter civilian control, civilians performed the majority of the nation’s strategic thinking and no longer relied on the advice of naval officers to formulate national strategy, resulting in a deprofessionalization of the service and a diminished appreciation for sea power within the wider national security framework. The US Navy remains the most powerful naval force in the world today, but it can no longer claim professional status because the study of sea power and maritime strategy are no longer central to its officers’ mind-set, nor do these subjects fall within the Navy’s exclusive jurisdictional control. Sailors have become mere cogs in a bureaucratic machine; instruments of strategic policy made by civilians, with little input from a professional body of officers. Yet there are rumblings of an intellectual renaissance, especially among younger officers, who are beginning to think seriously about the wider application of maritime power again. If they are to revive naval professionalism, they cannot wait on policy changes but must look to themselves, using the past as a guide, to rediscover the healthy balance between technical training and the higher art of maritime power.
Professions, Professional Development, and the US Navy
Not all vocations are professions. While certain groups claim unique skills and perform those skills efficiently, this does not mean they are professions. Yet defining professions and how they develop has proven difficult because the very term “profession” is a social construct that changes over time.2 Undeterred by this historical critique, sociologists now tend to employ a loose definition, based on the work of Andrew Abbott, defining professions as occupations that use an abstract system of knowledge to diagnose and treat problems deemed essential to society.3
How these occupational groups form or develop remains more controversial. The formal process of professionalization, which identifies a strict storyline of events that must occur to gain professional status, has been attacked because it fails to account for diverse development and professional competition.4 Yet there is still much to appreciate in the formal approach, especially among modern professions in the United States. While professionalization might not be the result of a strict structural process, common mile-markers are decipherable, which different occupational groups will reach at different times aimed at developing professional knowledge and ensuring its efficient application.
Thus, while any definition is a potential intellectual land mine, for present purposes the professionalization of an occupation will be defined as the emergence of a vocational group that develops a systemic body of abstract knowledge—requiring extensive study and training at a postgraduate institution—and earns a reputation for performing analytical skills that clients rely on to diagnose problems, provide advice, and carry out work. As group identity solidifies and matures, a professional body is often formed that coordinates admission requirements and education standards and formulates policy for professional direction.5
Yet it is ultimately the client, not the worker, who awards the title of professional by determining whether an occupational group is performing effectively.6 Professional status is by no means permanent and can be lost if group identity is fractured, enabling jurisdictional infighting, or if members allow their reputational knowledge or skills to atrophy. In such cases, the client tends to lose confidence and will either seek service elsewhere (allowing a different occupational group to perform the former’s thinking for it), order work carried out under tighter bureaucratic control, or simply perform the task on her own.7 Therefore the development of professional knowledge and skills plus their healthy maintenance are crucial to a profession’s emergence and survival.
In 1957 Samuel Huntington published The Soldier and the State, the vanguard study of the military as a profession.8 His triad of expertise, responsibility (the performance of an essential service), and corporate identity remains an impressive description of professional character. Huntington’s study has its faults, but its recognition that professionalism is inextricably linked to strenuous education and critical thinking, enshrined and guarded by a common cultural identity to ensure operational effectiveness, remains unblemished.9 This chapter builds on Huntington’s ideas because many currently underappreciate them.
This chapter departs from Huntington’s study in several ways, however. First, it examines the US Navy as a separate profession. The branches of the US armed forces do not share a common corporate identity. They patrol separate jurisdictions of work, often battling over roles and missions; possess different histories, customs, and traditions; and are governed by their own bureaucratic departments. Second, Huntington’s conception of military expertise, the management of violence, is overly simplistic. Since its inception, the Navy has primarily existed to maintain a stable, rule-based international system to protect the free flow of commerce and maritime resources. In carrying out this mission, its jurisdictional duties have had far more to do with diplomacy and peacekeeping than with the application of force. Finally, as Don Snider notes, perhaps Huntington’s gravest shortcoming is his implication that once professional recognition is gained, it is permanent, which is simply untrue. Professions exist in competitive environments, battling one another for jurisdictional control over areas of work. As time passes, many vocations lose their professional status for the reasons previously discussed or cease to exist all together.10 Fortunately for Americans, the US Navy has suffered from the former, not the latter.
Most vocations generally acknowledged as modern professions came of age in the United States in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The older professions of law and medicine and newer fields like social work laid the foundation for their modern forms by moving away from an apprenticeship system of education toward professionalized schooling that imparted analytical methodologies alongside hands-on skills. In the 1880s no professional group had achieved full professional status, but scientific discoveries in the medical field, standardized education in law and medicine, and the founding of the American Bar Association had doctors and attorneys on their way.11
The same could be said for the Navy’s officer corps in the 1880s, since the US Naval Academy, founded in 1845, with its entrance exam and standardized curriculum, provided a formal system of selection and training. However, the Navy still lacked a specialized, theoretical body of knowledge and tended to focus on what Huntington referred to as technicism, the concentration of training in technical skills, rather than on educating the mind in the art of maritime power.12 Additionally, its corporate identity remained fractured. With few ships to sail, officers dedicated their careers to mastering skills within one of the Navy’s autonomous bureaus that built ships, researched gunnery and ordinance, provided resources, and handled administration with little coordination. This dedication emphasized technicism and prevented the emergence of a united professional body.13
Sailing in Shoal Waters
Most of these difficulties stemmed from technology. Prior to steam-powered propulsion, advances in naval technology occurred slowly. Galley warfare remained unchanged for thousands of years while naval technology and tactics were also relatively static during the Age of Sail. This snail-paced evolution reversed course in the mid-nineteenth century. Suddenly, vessels long subservient to wind, wood, and smoothbore cannon were replaced with fleets that employed a complicated system of self-propelled ships driven by steam-powered screws. Advances in ballistics, heavy armor, exploding shells, rifled gun barrels, and self-propelled torpedoes made fleet design a guessing game that demanded specialized expertise. While the bureaus hoped to master these developments, lack of coordination led to poor results and pulled officers away from understanding the broader purpose of navies.14
Traditional American values also set up hurdles. The descendants of minutemen and privateers were suspicious of a professional officer corps leading a permanent standing army and viewed large blue-water fleets as an overly expensive tool that could unnecessarily entangle the United States in European affairs. Americans were citizen soldiers who defended liberty in time of emergency and returned home after the threat had passed. They desired no Napoleons or Nelsons and held permanent soldiers and sailors in low regard.15 Blinded by Manifest Destiny, most Americans remained ignorant that their increasing economic strength and political integrity depended on maritime trade, open sea-lanes, and a stable international system.
Congressional legislation reflected these values. While the US fleet exploded in numbers during the Civil War, Capitol Hill starved the Navy of funding after the surrender at Appomattox and most vessels were either sold off or left to rot.16 Legislators also maintained a linear promotion system that ensured the officer corps would remain small.17 The number of young recruits swelled during the Civil War and promotion was swift, but for midshipmen graduating after the war, this linear system created a lieutenant logjam. With fewer ships to sail, officers remained lieutenants into their fifties. Faced with few prospects of promotion, the pay raise that came with it, and lucrative private sector jobs, junior officers with connections tended to retire. Others lost themselves in the Navy bureaus and either served their time or attempted to master individual technologies. They thought little of broader reform.18
But others did. Christened by historians as the Young Turks after a group of constitutional reformists in the Ottoman Empire carrying the same name, this intellectually gifted group of younger officers—including James Soley, William S. Sims, and Bradley Fiske—and their older allies navigated the Navy through its perfect storm by taking advantage of political, social, and cultural changes that encouraged naval development and a professional officer corps.19 Influenced by German military reforms, these officers founded and developed the NWC, which created a systemic body of abstract knowledge and ensured it became central to the American naval officer’s professional outlook. They also pushed for administrative reforms that unified service identity and created a single body of officers that coordinated policy and planning, managed technological innovation, and advised civilian superiors, who put their recommendations into practice. Finding a healthy balance between technicism and the higher art of naval warfare, their efforts professionalized the service.20
“O Captain! My Captain!”
Many men aided the Navy’s professionalization, but Stephen Bleeker Luce captained them. Luce did not professionalize the Navy, but he did provide the tools for that to happen. Entering the service in the Age of Sail, Luce believed in training the mind toward professional responsibilities through self-education, an idea he developed on his first cruise.21 While on duty, Luce learned the technical side of his trade but used his spare time to read broadly in literature and history.22 This reading, combined with his exposure to foreign cultures, taught him much about humanity and conflict and calcified his conviction that naval officers required a broad professional education to learn the duties of command, never losing sight of the importance history played as a map of human interaction.23 He became heavily influenced by German military reforms, especially the Prussian staff college and its general staff, both of which placed a heavy emphasis on military history to guide strategic planning.
Worried about the Navy’s trend toward technicism after the Civil War, Luce embarked on a quest to emulate the professionalization of the German military. He hoped to pull officers away from specialization by creating a professional body of knowledge for naval officers, a college where it could be taught, and a navy general staff to coordinate naval policy and strategy. Due to the revolution in naval technology, no concrete concepts of naval theory existed anywhere in the world, much less a methodology for their study. Luce’s approach for training minds in the science of naval warfare budded during the Civil War. As he later recalled, “It dawned upon me that there were certain fundamental principles underlying military operations—principles of general application whether the operations were conducted on land or at sea.”24 Luce believed these principles could be used to guide the practice of naval operations. The key to distilling them lay in the study of naval affairs as a whole, rather than the study of technical subjects that dominated the Navy’s intellectual analysis.
Luce divided his science of naval warfare into four interrelated subjects: statesmanship (or the art of diplomacy), strategy, tactics, and logistics.25 At the time, naval education omitted these subjects from its curriculum, so Luce insisted the Navy needed to create a postgraduate school to remedy this deficiency. “As extraordinary as it may appear,” he wrote the Navy Secretary, “the naval officer whose principal business is to fight is not taught the higher branches of his profession…. But with the recent revolution in naval warfare comes a demand for a higher order in the conduct of naval operation.”26 Unfortunately no books had been written to guide thinking in these areas either. Therefore, Luce developed a methodology that he hoped would lay the foundation for a professional body of thought by leading officers into “a philosophic study of naval history” so they could uncover the general principles that governed naval affairs through comparative historical research, essentially reasoning by analogy.27
History’s Higher Order
Luce’s emphasis on naval history as the key to establishing professional theory occurred within a larger intellectual movement.28 From 1873 through the interwar period, officers sought to understand the broader aspects of maritime power, many looking to history as a guide. Prompted by John Knox Laughton, a British historian and close associate of Luce, these scholars opened archives and studied naval documents to review the past conduct of competing nations to understand all the historical factors that influenced maritime strategy, essentially putting Luce’s method into practice. This historical school of thinkers argued that maritime powers must be prepared to exercise all forms of naval power as well as diplomatic and legal means to fully exploit the economic superiority maritime power provided. The work they produced popularized and improved naval history, but its main aim was to advance, if not outright create a professional body of knowledge for understanding the theory and practice of naval operations.29
This historical school of naval thought began on the western side of the Atlantic in 1873 with the founding of the United States Naval Institute. The group first met in the physics and chemistry building at the Naval Academy and discussed a variety of topics including naval history, strategy, policy, and technological modernization. Commodore Foxhall Parker, a firm believer in historical study to enlighten strategic analysis, lectured on the Battle of Lepanto, a 1571 engagement involving oar-propelled galleys, vessels that were unrestricted by wind, in an effort to guide thinking about steam-powered fleets that had the same advantage. The group began to publish a collection of essays later christened U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings.30 The Institute’s founding eventually demonstrated an emerging corporate identity and the need to establish a professional journal to exchange ideas and advance the Navy’s corporate knowledge.31
Younger officers also contributed to the rise of the historical school. Robert Solely, a staff officer at the Naval Academy, placed a heavier emphasis on the study of naval history at Annapolis. Solely added lectures on naval history to historical survey classes and established an independent course that required a tactical familiarity with fourteen famous naval battles from 494 BC to the present. In 1882 Solely became librarian of the Navy Department and served as superintendent of the Naval War Records Office, which he organized. To improve naval scholarship, he reorganized the library’s seven-thousand-volume collection, which dated back to 1800, and acquired as many books and original documents on naval affairs as possible to advance naval theory. Solely’s own work used these original documents to challenge previous studies of naval history and to demonstrate the critical role played by the Navy in national security affairs.32
Soley developed into one of the first Young Turks, supporting Luce’s drive for reform and serving as the instruments for implementing those changes. Though most remained devoted to technology in their early years, Luce and his comparative approach converted others while they remained junior officers, many turning to Proceedings to aid the development of maritime theory. In 1882 William G. David, citing Luce directly, examined the ancient maritime states of Venice, as well as the Spanish, Dutch, and British empires, to explain the decay of America’s merchant marine.33 He concluded that the rise and fall of these powers illustrated that maritime trade depended on three factors: a favorable geographic position, industrious shipbuilding, and a strong navy to protect vital sea-lanes.34 Other Turks placed less emphasis on history but still focused on strategy, tactics, and technology, demonstrating a balanced intellectual interest in Luce’s higher order of thinking before it became institutionalized.35
The historical school and the advance of naval professionalism took its most important step in 1884, when Luce, over stiff opposition from many in the Navy, founded the NWC at Newport, Rhode Island. To put his methodological approach into practice Luce recruited Alfred Thayer Mahan, who had recently worked with Solely on a history of the Navy in the Civil War, to serve as professor of naval warfare.36 After a year of research, Mahan lectured on the strategic principles taught by the Royal Navy during the Age of Sail. In 1890 Mahan, with Luce’s help, published his lectures as The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 with Little Brown and Company, one of the oldest and most influential publishing houses in America.37 Mahan’s book and his tidal wave of sea power writing that followed aided the Turks’ own drive for intellectual reform, many having written similar arguments that had gone unread because their publications failed to reach the mainstream audience of Little Brown and Company.
The cornerstone of Mahanian thought examined sea power in a political and social context, elucidating its geopolitical advantages for nations willing—and able—to practice it. He highlighted the value that command of the sea granted certain states by accentuating the economic benefits of overseas markets through trade. Nations prepared to defend their commercial shipping and sea-lanes with sufficient naval power, supported by overseas bases, held a powerful advantage over coastal states that could not because it left them open to blockade in wartime and diplomatic coercion in peacetime.38 Much of Mahan’s writing emphasized the importance of battle between concentrated fleets where the outcome, he argued, depended on capital shipping and an offensive-minded spirit. But his main thesis placed maritime power in a broader context by highlighting the economic and security benefits derived from the global trading network that undergirded so much of the world’s peace and prosperity.39 While his historical accuracy was questionable and his concepts not necessarily original, Mahan’s thinking did represent the first effective attempt by an American to address grand strategy in a serious academic context and laid the foundation for a professional body of naval thought.40
Newport and the General Board: Finding the Weather-Gauge
With a foundation of professional knowledge laid and a methodology for its impartation in place, the NWC now needed minds for enlightenment to balance the analytical education it provided with the technicism of the Navy’s bureau system. Unfortunately, it won few converts in its early years, at least within the Navy. Most naval officers believed in sea power as a concept but saw little value in listening to lectures on the Age of Sail during an era dominated by steam propulsion. Civilians were another matter. Theodore Roosevelt, a close associate of Luce and then Mahan, was a firm believer in Newport, as were most of the Secretaries of the Navy, who increasingly relied on the NWC for advice on strategic planning during war scares with Britain and Spain.41
In the 1890s Henry C. Taylor, an officer close with Luce and Mahan, added an annual war problem to the NWC course. The war scenario required students to plan operations based on original historical research, to draw charts and defensive positions, and to draft sample orders, which trained officers in staff work, critical for effective planning.42 At Taylor’s direction, NWC began to research and draft plans in 1894 for the coming conflict with Spain. Early in the process, Taylor confided to Luce that the Secretary of the Navy, the Navy’s chief client at the time, “is now … using me and the College as General Staff and me as the Chief of same with considerable powers.”43 Because of the planning, Secretary John D. Long and his assistant Theodore Roosevelt had concrete strategic plans in place and the fleet positioned to execute them when hostilities commenced.44
Despite these developments, the NWC’s value still went unappreciated by most officers. This finally changed under the leadership of William S. Sims. Initially devoted to gunnery and a Newport skeptic, after he attended NWC and witnessed the advantages it provided to officers serving in World War I, Sims strove to make it the most important institution in the Navy, even if it meant a smaller fleet.45 While he stressed the importance of professional reading and writing, his tenure focused on operations and tactics. As a result, war gaming took center stage. Refined by William McCarty Little during the Taylor years, gaming provided a laboratory for students to test strategic planning, operational concepts, and the new technologies that emerged at almost no cost. During the inter-war years, students examined submarine warfare, amphibious assaults, and naval aviation, leading Sims to conclude “the battleship is dead” before most aircraft carriers even existed.46
For the most part, Sims’ reforms remained permanent. The NWC became a test lab for operational and tactical concepts and an institution designed to instill officers with a sense of mission and a strict process of analytical decision-making.47 Although he served only two years, he produced a fraternity of naval officers schooled in operational and tactical analysis who ensured Newport played a prominent role in promotion and prevented officers, one wrote, from “becoming administrators rather than leaders.”48 In 1919 only 50 percent of the Navy’s admirals had attended Newport; by 1941 the number reached 99 percent.49 The Navy’s acceptance of professional education as critical to an officer’s development went a long way to completing the professionalization process, but the Navy still lacked a body of officers that could guide overall naval policy, rein in the bureau chiefs, and put Luce’s science of naval warfare into practice. In short, it lacked a general staff, an institution for which Luce had lobbied for years.
Luce would eventually get his wish but would not live to witness its maturation. Impressed with the advice he received from several ad hoc Navy War Boards before and during the Spanish-American War and pressured by Taylor and other officers unhappy with the Navy’s uneven performance against Spain—mostly due to lack of coordination by the bureau chiefs—Secretary Long established the General Board. Initially an experimental body charged with war planning, the Board eventually coordinated all matters of naval policy and strategy. This broad mission required the Board to manage the Navy’s bureau system, guide war planning, and create policy for every level of warfare. Faced with so many tasks, the Board’s development finally forced the Navy to find the professional balance between technicism and the art of naval power it had always lacked.50
The Board’s interwar membership and methodology reflected this reality. In 1915, due to Young Turk lobbying led by Bradley Fiske, Congress created the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), which granted the Navy operational control of the fleet, a dramatic development in professional autonomy. The CNO sat on the Board with the president of the NWC, commandant of the Marine Corps, director of naval intelligence, and other officers appointed to represent the Secretary of the Navy, most of whom had attended the NWC. The Board encouraged cooperation throughout the Navy. It coordinated fleet design with the bureau chiefs after sufficient testing and analysis had occurred on Newport’s game boards. Operational concepts were developed, first through war gaming and then by CNO fleet exercises. The Board developed technical and tactical issues by holding hearings, which solicited testimony from Navy, Army, and civilian experts alike. After the Board believed a concept or policy had been tested and studied sufficiently, it debated the issue with the Secretary of the Navy and issued a recommendation, but never without thorough analysis. As historian John Kuehn concluded, “Over time … advice from the General Board on a particular topic was considered the institutional ‘party line’ for the entire Navy.”51
The General Board’s coordination among Newport, the CNO, and the bureaus transformed the Navy into a modern fleet, fought and commanded by a professional officer corps schooled in the technical arts of seamanship as well as the art of war. Luce, Mahan, and their Young Turks bestowed much on the officers who fought World War II, including an offensive-minded ethos and a uniform professional identity as the guarantor of American greatness, which prepared the Navy well for the conflict.52 Civilians still controlled the service, but they relied on the professional advice of officers to diagnose problems, formulate solutions, and carry out operations once directed by their civilian clients. However, while World War II seemed the ultimate vindication of Mahan’s vision and the Navy’s professional prowess, the Navy’s oversimplification of Mahan’s wider theories, the historical analysis that yielded them, and a growing reliance on technology together welled beneath the surface and ultimately doomed naval professionalism as a hot war turned cold.
The Price of Command: The Ebbing Tide
During World War II, the Navy had become the most powerful naval force in existence. Yet, in planning to execute the basic strategy officers sketched out as early as the 1890s and modified over a half century to defeat the Axis powers, they had forgotten how to think about the application of maritime operations in a broader context. Officers had become so focused on Mahan’s writings regarding offensive battle that they neglected to reexamine the social and political factors that underpinned his larger geopolitical analysis of maritime power as the contemporary strategic environment evolved.53 The failure to exercise these skills left the Navy bereft of strategic thinkers who could reexamine and diagnose how maritime power might be leveraged in the postwar world to fend off new threats to open-market stability, which eventually proved critical to Western Europe’s reconstruction and containment but went unobserved by naval officers.54
The Navy revealed its superficial strategic skills almost as soon as the war ended during the debates over unification of the armed services. Arleigh Burke, in charge of the Navy’s testimony during a set of hearings derisively dubbed the “Revolt of the Admirals,” held to examine the Navy’s postwar roles and missions, later admitted, “People in the navy did not know very much about strategy…. That’s why we did not have any organization to lay out the Navy’s case or defend ourselves…. We suffered from a lack of knowledge within the Navy of what a navy was all about…. [This] was an ingrained attitude, and it had terrible consequences.”55 J. C. Wylie’s contemporary analysis confirmed what Burke could only reveal in hindsight: the Navy did not possess a clear understanding of sea power and maritime strategy.56 Naval officers seemed to think their performance during the war spoke for itself, vindicating sea power and the Navy’s professional reputation. However, as the United States began its long standoff against a new continental adversary, several naval officers realized they had been overly optimistic. “Our understanding and our exposition of the indispensable character of our profession and the undiminished and vital nature of Sea Power,” wrote Richard Conolly to the CNO in 1951, “have been dangerously superficial and elementary.”57
While all three of these officers attempted to revive strategic thought through historical study, the nuclear age caused a rapid deprofessionalization of the service as technicism reasserted itself within the officer corps and strategic thought. This retreat from history to technical issues resulted largely from nuclear weapons and the birth of modern deterrence theory. Pioneered by Bernard Brodie, deterrence argued that the purpose of military force was no longer to win wars but rather to avert them.58 Many early deterrence theorists, dominated by civilians like Herman Kahn and Hedley Bull, believed, much like early NWC critics in the Navy, that nuclear weapons had rendered history irrelevant to military affairs. They embraced a material school of strategy, which argued that overwhelming military firepower aided by advanced technology—material strength—could deter total war and thus should be the sole focus of a nation’s defense needs.59 Certainly not a new theoretical school, it dominated the postwar strategic thinking of civilians and officers and arguably still holds sway.60
The rise of the civilian strategists and their eventual control of the Pentagon magnified the material focus and seized jurisdictional control of strategic planning. The postwar years witnessed a waterfall of civilian publications on deterrence, which employed ahistorical methodologies like quantitative analysis and game theory that overwhelmed military thought. As a result, the military outsourced much of its strategic research and war gaming to civilian think tanks like the RAND Corporation, instead of the service colleges, which further diluted strategic thinking inside the military and demoted service-college interaction with planning.61 Robert McNamara’s civilian whiz kids intensified this demilitarization of strategic thought by introducing systems analysis directly into military planning when McNamara became secretary of defense, bringing his civilian strategists with him.62
McNamara’s tight bureaucratic control of decision-making and planning furthered the deprofessionalization process by undermining the influence of the Navy’s general staff–equivalent, leading many to conclude civilians were making the Navy’s decisions for it.63 During the 1950s the CNO still wielded full operational control of the service, assessed the strategic environment, and managed long-term planning. But when McNamara entered the Pentagon, Congress had deprived the CNO of operational control, and he ended up reporting to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which had final say on all the Navy’s decisions, curtailing its professional autonomy.64 During the days of the General Board, the Secretary of the Navy relied heavily on its guidance but this did not occur within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Civilians now made policy, and the Navy simply served as a bureaucratic sea-based instrument for implementing strategic decisions made by its former clients. This proved disastrous in the Vietnam War, a limited war controlled by RAND theorists impervious to naval advice. Sailors steamed off North Vietnam, whose coast and harbors went un-blockaded and unmined despite Navy protests, bombed their civilian-selected targets, and watched as they were rebuilt or replaced within a matter of days.
Inside the Navy the chief culprit for the Navy’s return to technicism was Hyman G. Rickover. Following the launch of Sputnik, Rickover believed America’s technical knowledge trailed the Soviets’ and argued that the Navy needed to emphasize technical education and training at the expense of liberal arts. He demanded deeper emphasis on specialized expertise in individual platforms—surface, subsurface, or aviation—which shattered Luce’s advice that commanding officers needed to think about the Navy as a whole, rather than focus on its individual parts. The Bureau of Naval Personnel endorsed Rickover’s recommendations and eventually required officers to obtain a technical subspecialty. This demanded additional technical training and embedded numerous subcultures within the Navy, each with its own language, operating doctrine, personnel priorities, and even its own professional associations, further adulterating professional identity and service culture.65 Training requirements, which continued to grow, created career paths dominated by technicism where officers focused on their own community issues.66 These changes contrasted starkly with “the cross-pollination of ideas and experiences” that characterized the platform communities of the pre–Cold War Navy where submariners served aboard surface vessels, surface-warfare officers served as the chiefs of staff for aviators, and vice versa.67
The Navy’s emphasis on operational experience further diluted broad professional knowledge. During the interwar period, the promotion system began to place a heavier emphasis on operational experience, but the fleet spent far fewer days at sea. Officers rotated between shore and sea-based billets, which included a stint at Newport. By contrast, the postwar fleet remained deployed forward and on virtual war footing throughout the Cold War, where it remains to this day. This forced officers to spend far more time at sea, especially as junior officers. “Operations,” according to Peter Haynes, “became the lens through which [the Navy’s] officers viewed the world, the defining element of [the Navy’s] narrow and empirically based worldview.”68
Running Aground
Because of these policy shifts and the NWC’s increasingly narrow focus on operations, professional military education, which is the foundation of professional development, simply collapsed. The few postwar officers the Navy sent to Newport, glad to take a break from long deployments, viewed these assignments as an opportunity to play golf rather than engage in serious research on strategic problems.69 The teaching methodologies emphasized by Luce and Mahan had also been abandoned. The chair of naval history remained vacant since Mahan left the position in 1894, allowing the advancement of maritime theory to languish. While the presidencies of Raymond Spruance and Richard Connelly attempted to revive strategic theory and maritime history, their reforms proved short lived.70 The curriculum eventually abandoned thesis-writing, historical case studies, and heavy required reading in history, strategic theory, and economics for lectures on contemporary international relations, systems analysis, and foreign policy that failed to challenge or engage the students. Officers claimed they learned more from listening to each other than from their lecturers.71
Predictably, with few officers studying subjects that required analytical thought and the weighing of evidence, the importance and quality of their professional writing, which had been a staple of the interwar Navy, also declined. In 1946 Raymond Spruance created the Naval War College Review for naval officers to share their views on sea power, but by the 1970s so few officers submitted quality articles that the Review was forced to recruit civilian academics for submissions to simply survive.72 Submissions to Proceedings by junior and mid-grade officers also dropped, which harmed the Navy’s ability to communicate and discuss ideas.73 With operational experience and training now controlling advancement and constant forward deployments, the long relay of officers from Luce to Sims to Ernest King, Chester Nimitz, and Spruance, who viewed Newport as the intellectual heart of the Navy and frequently submitted pieces to Proceedings, failed to pass the torch to their postwar brethren. Luce’s strategic thinkers had become Rickover’s managerial technocrats.
Following the Vietnam War, the profession’s balance between technicism and warfare-centric analysis seemed to revive. In 1972, Stansfield Turner transformed the NWC into a serious graduate program. Turner recruited some of the brightest civilian minds to the faculty to teach a rigorous, progressive curriculum.74 In his opening address Turner informed the new students they were not being challenged intellectually, lamented the outsourcing of strategic thinking to civilians, and warned that military officers must be able to hold their own “with the best of the civilian strategists or we will abdicate control over our profession.”75 To improve the situation, he returned the NWC to Luce’s original vision of self-education that redeployed the historical school of strategic thought, exemplified by his reintroduction of Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War to the curriculum.76 Designed to teach officers how to think instead of what to think, the course jettisoned passive lectures for seminars, rigorous reading, and historical case studies to illustrate recurring issues in strategy and tactics.77
Alongside the quality of professional naval education, its priority also improved. In the 1980s Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, a firm believer that history should guide strategy, built on Turner’s reforms with lucrative fellowships that attracted the most active scholars in military history to Newport, while CNO James Watkins insisted the Navy’s brightest minds would attend NWC as part of his overall emphasis on maritime strategy.78 Their support aided the ongoing intellectual renaissance within the Navy, evidenced by Watkins’ release of The Maritime Strategy, created by a well-educated group of officers that served in the Navy’s Strategy and Policy Division between tours, and the vigorous debates concerning it in Proceedings and the Naval War College Review.79
But these years proved exceptions. Serious support for professional education ended with Watkins and Lehman; while The Maritime Strategy certainly proved a breath of fresh air, it remained mired in the same battle-centric thinking of the interwar period, which left the Navy ill-prepared to deal with the unknown threats of the post–Cold War years. Even after legislative reforms required service-college attendance, a 2008 study taken twenty years later revealed that 80 percent of the Navy’s flag officers had not attended a service college.80 To this day, orders to Newport are viewed by some as a risk to their careers; while most NWC civilian faculty members remain the best in the professional military education system, their curricula are dictated from above, producing mixed academic performance.81
Due to its technical and training-centric ethos, the Navy frowns on the study of history, especially among the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps, which, as Luce and Mahan proved, forms the very foundation on which a strategic education is built.82 Navy fitness reports discourage officers from obtaining advanced degrees at civilian institutions, which are far more effective programs for educating officers because their programs last longer and are far more demanding.83 Williamson Murray offers a dire assessment of military education: “It … largely remains an arena that the services merely tolerate; for the most part, it neither challenges the students nor employs first-class intellectuals from within or outside of the military.”84 Lacking a graduate-level education in strategic analysis, ignorant of historical knowledge, and for the most part controlled by civilians who have neither asked for nor relied on the officers to provide strategic guidance, the Navy’s strategy skills have simply atrophied and left the Navy reliant on civilians to formulate strategic policy, instead of the other way around.
These signs of deprofessionalization are worrying. The United States is a maritime power—a fact dictated by its geopolitical position—but its postwar leaders have largely failed to appreciate how to apply the deft strategic power-balancing diplomacy required of maritime powers to avoid strategic overreach. American statesmen’s obsession with technology has allowed “technological means … to wag the strategic dog.”85 With continued unrest in the Middle East, Europe, and Western Pacific, demands for naval power are increasing while defense budgets, Navy retention rates, and combat strength decline.86 These realities suggest the return of the same difficulties faced by Luce and his Young Turks: a shrinking fleet, a broken promotion and retention system, poor strategic thinking, over-reliance on technology, a must-do culture that fails to question top-down command, and a variety of communities concerned with their own technical problems instead of the overall health of the Navy. The deaths of seventeen sailors in collisions at sea due to systemic failures of basic seamanship skills and the lack of a questioning operational and readiness culture are symptomatic of a profession that is losing its grip on basic professional skills.87
Conclusion
In fairness, the declining state of naval professionalism cannot be laid solely at the feet of naval officers; congressional reforms must also shoulder blame.88 The Navy is also making improvements.89 In addition, Congress has indicated a willingness to revisit the Goldwater-Nichols Act, which many rightly blame for their professional ills.90 But to reverse the signs of deprofessionalism and provide guidance for reform, a new generation of naval officers must rediscover a broader understanding of sea power. The revival must start with education and Luce must be the guide: “If we are to learn this highest, noblest branch of our profession at all, we must be our own teachers.”91 Some of the most prominent naval theorists, all of the historical school, including Mahan, Julian Corbett, Herbert Richmond, Henry Eccles, and J. C. Wylie, produced timeless theoretical work with little or no academic training; they studied and read history prodigiously to master the art of naval warfare.
But “art is a jealous mistress; most of all so is the art of war,” warned Luce.92 This is why James Mattis has cautioned that history must not only be read, but also studied.93 Analyzing history is a key component in developing naval thought, unsaddling dogma, and appreciating the benefits and limitations of maritime power because it does not divorce the human element from conflict, reining in unbridled theory and guesswork by providing a roadmap for decision-making. As Thucydides has long reminded his readers, the nature of war remains unaltered. Yet the character of war and societies that wage it can change rapidly, leading students who search for historical rules by neglecting to read broadly, widely, and deeply to account for context to catastrophic conclusions.94 Accordingly, officers of all stripes should follow the advice of Mattis and engage in the study of history as early as possible in their careers.
The study and acquisition of professional knowledge are not spectator sports. They depend on engagement with others and the ability to think and write as well as read. Roger Misso and Chris O’Keefe have challenged the Navy’s junior officers to engage in professional writing and debate, indicating a new generation of Young Turks could be on the rise. Scott Cheney-Peter’s founding of the Center for International Maritime Security is an inspiring example of individual initiative to create a platform for younger officers and civilians to debate and share ideas on maritime history, strategy, and technology, some of which have entered the fleet.95 Other online publications like the USNI Blog, The Strategy Bridge, War on the Rocks, and more formal publications like Proceedings and Naval War College Review, combined with social media, provide excellent forums to share arguments and debate ideas.96
Ultimately, though, the Navy must do some serious soul-searching about its technical, platform-centric mind-set. To resolidify professional identify, the General Board and the cross-community coordination it provided might offer helpful guidance. The Navy should also think seriously about reincorporating the NWC into its planning process. Creating a strategist career path that incorporates officers from every community and educates them accordingly, bolstering the Navy’s emphasis on policy and strategy, and continually updating their strategic concepts to coordinate ways, ends, and means should also be considered despite recent setbacks.97 However, these changes will all prove fruitless if naval officers do not have a balanced understanding of what maritime power is and how it has been leveraged effectively, which circles back to historical education.
Let us hope that a new generation of officers can reverse course. These sailors will face stormy seas in the form of fierce resistance from entrenched policies and ideas that they must navigate with caution, but to preserve naval professionalism and American sea power, the civilians of the United States need their Young Turks at general quarters. For, as Mahan warned, it is once again true that “a vague feeling of contempt for the past, supposed to be obsolete, combines with natural indolence to blind men even to those permanent strategic lessons which lie close to the surface of naval history.”98 To revive naval professionalism, this contempt for the past cannot remain afloat.
Notes
1. Clark G. Reynolds, Command of the Sea: The History and Strategy of Maritime Empires (New York: William Morrow, 1974), 18.
2. James Burk, “Expertise, Jurisdiction, and Legitimacy of the Military Profession,” in Snider and Matthews, The Future of the Army Profession, 41.
3. Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
4. According to the formal approach pioneered by Harold Wilensky, the storyline of events unfolds as follows: the founding of a training school, followed by a university school, a local association, national association, legal recognition through state licensing laws, and the development of an ethics code. See Harold L. Wilensky, “The Professionalization of Everyone?,” American Journal of Sociology 70 (1964): 137–58; Abbott, The System of Professions, 9–20.
5. This definition represents a hybrid approach. While it incorporates Abbott’s theories regarding abstract knowledge, diagnosis, and treatment, it also includes group identity and professional regulation as major elements, which Abbott tends to downplay or takes for granted due to his focus on work and professional competition. Professional regulation and direction includes the self-policing of ethical conduct, but the traversing of the ethical minefield by the US Navy is beyond the scope of this chapter, so I will not examine it here. However, as many of the other writers in this study point out, ethics is critical to professionalism, and while its regulation has certainly improved since a culture of dueling, brutal Naval Academy hazing, and other unethical conduct ruled the service, one could easily make the argument that its regulation, as in most professions, has always proven difficult, evidenced most recently by the Fat Leonard scandal. For a small taste of Fat Leonard, see Craig Whitlock, “ ‘Fat Leonard’ Scandal Swells; Three More Navy Figures Charged,” Washington Post, 27 May 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fat-leonard-scandal-swells-three-more-navy-figures-charged/2016/05/27/2e1d7b0e-2442-11e6-aa84-42391ba52c91_story.html?utm_term=.f6a5b53e5e3a.
6. Don M. Snider, “Professionalism and the Volunteer Military: Will Army 2025 Be a Military Profession?,” Parameters 45, no. 4 (Winter 2015–16): 41.
7. The field of law is beginning to witness such a loss as infamous tort litigation; rampant unethical conduct has injured the profession’s reputation while high legal fees have prompted several online companies to provide standard legal documents, such as prenuptial agreements, operating agreements for limited liability companies, and even legal research, available to the general public without the retention of legal counsel. Many who find these documents challenged in court, however, discover that proper legal guidance on the front end is far cheaper than the litigation and liability costs imposed on them when their documents are judged unenforceable. Engineers, pharmacists, and teachers are also witnessing deprofessionalization.
8. Huntington, The Soldier and the State.
9. Williamson Murray, “Professionalism and Professional Military Education in the Twenty-first Century,” in American Civil–Military Relations: The Soldier and the State in a New Era, ed. Suzanne C. Nielsen and Don M. Snider (Washington DC: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 134.
10. Snider, “Professionalism and the Volunteer Military,” 41–42.
11. Ronald Spector, Professors of War: The Naval War College and the Development of the Naval Profession (Honolulu, HI: University Press of the Pacific, 1977), 3–4, 152.
12. Huntington, The Soldier and the State, as cited in Joan Johnson-Freese, Educating America’s Military (New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group), Kindle edition, locations 2548–49.
13. Spector, Professors of War, 3–4.
14. Spector, 4–5, 65–69; John B. Hattendorf, “Luce’s Idea of the Naval War College,” in Naval History and Maritime Strategy: Collected Essays (Malabar, FL: Kriegar, 2000), 19–20.
15. Spector, Professors of War, 7.
16. The United States emerged from the war as one country, but the national debt had exploded. With the Southern states essentially decimated, Congress rightly focused on Reconstruction and could not afford to spend funds on a modern navy during an age of such revolutionary change, even if it had wanted to. Naval evolution was so fast during the period that ships whose service lives tended to last forty years now counted their modern lives in years instead of decades. A modern blue-water fleet also required coaling stations, which the United States could not afford to acquire or maintain. Accordingly, the US Navy returned to vessels of wind and wood, which could still show the flag overseas, and kept a small fleet of ironclads afloat for costal defense. On post–Civil War naval policy see Allen R. Millett, Peter Maslowski, and William B. Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States, 1607–2012, 3rd ed. (New York: Common Press, 2012), Kindle edition, chap. 8, locations 4430–46.
17. As long as an officer remained alive, he would eventually be promoted to admiral. However, an ensign or any other rank could not be promoted until a superior officer vacated a spot.
18. Peter Karsten, The Naval Aristocracy: The Golden Age of Annapolis and the Emergence of Modern American Navalism (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1972), 277–86; Spector, Professors of War, 10.
19. The closing of the West, the growth of large corporations that produced goods for export and sought international credit, the discovery of rich mineral deposits, a rising population, and a desire to continue Manifest Destiny into the Pacific and the Caribbean all combined to produce the environment that enabled the rise of the modern US Navy. John D. Hayes and John B. Hattendorf, eds., The Writings of Stephen B. Luce (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1975), 2.
20. Spector, Professors of War, 10–11.
21. Luce sailed the Mediterranean with a history of ancient Greece given to him by a friend. The book’s inscription provides a Rosetta Stone for the mind that fathered modern naval professionalism and, with its emphasis on self-education, professional development, and the importance of history to the naval mind, provides a shibboleth for its maintenance: “With this little volume my Dear Luce, you can teach yourself the history of one of the most important epochs of the world—when learning was in its infancy—and when education was the monopoly of a class. In giving it to you, I am animated by a sincere wish for your welfare, and with a sincere desire to contribute my all in order to improve you. It would be gratifying to see you an officer in every sense of the word, and to accomplish this end, you must exercise your energy. With a view of leading your mind to a sense of its duties, this book has been presented to you.” Luce kept the little volume with him throughout his life and put the inscription’s teaching to work immediately. Hayes and Hattendorf, The Writings of Stephen B. Luce, 5.
22. As he sailed around the world in the ebbing tide of the Age of Sail, Luce filled his journal with references to Milton’s Paradise Lost, the works of Charles Dickens and Shakespeare, George Grote’s twelve-volume History of Greece, as well as literature by Byron, Mommsen, and James Fenimore Cooper and poetry by the sailor-poet Falconer. Hayes and Hattendorf, The Writings of Stephen B. Luce, 6.
23. Hayes and Hattendorf, The Writings of Stephen B. Luce, 5–6.
24. As quoted in Spector, Professors of War, 17.
25. Statesmanship stood atop all the others because it was far more important for naval officers to understand the deterrent value and limitations of naval power to accomplish national security objectives in peacetime as well as war and its broader relationship to overall security policy. Hattendorf, “Luce’s Idea of the Naval War College,” 20.
26. As quoted in John Hattendorf, “History and Technological Change,” in Naval History and Maritime Strategy, 8.
27. Stephen B. Luce, “War Schools,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 9 (1883): 656.
28. This methodology paralleled a growing view among historians of the time who believed humanity was governed by a set of laws and that the proper duty of the historian was to discover these laws for the betterment of society, rather than record facts in the proper order, the consensus view among historians of the time. Spector, Professors of War, 18.
29. Reynolds, Command of the Sea, 10–11, 413–16.
30. Benjamin F. Armstrong, ed., 21st Century Mahan: Sound Military Conclusions for the Modern Era (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2013), 79. True to form, Luce christened the inaugural issue in 1874 with an article that called for educational reform for the merchant marine. Stephen B. Luce, “The Manning of Our Navy and Mercantile Marine,” Proceedings 1 (1874): 17–37.
31. Spector, Professors of War, 4; Hattendorf, “History and Technological Change: The Study of History in the U.S. Navy, 1873–1890,” in Naval History and Maritime Strategy, 2.
32. Hattendorf, “History and Technological Change,” 2, 5–6.
33. On the ruinous commerce raiding campaign waged by the Confederate Navy that drove American-flagged merchant shipping from the sea, see George W. Dalzell, The Flight from the Flag: The Continuing Effect of the Civil War upon the American Carrying Trade (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940).
34. William G. David, “Our Merchant Marine: The Cause of Its Decline, and the Means to be Taken for its Revival,” Proceedings 8 (1882), 155–56; as cited in Karsten, The Naval Aristocracy, 306. Many Turks wrote similar pieces for Proceedings as part of one of the Naval Institute’s essay contests; see J. D. Kelley, “Our Merchant Marine: The Cause of Its Decline, and the Means to Be Taken for Its Revival,” Proceedings 8 (1882): 3–34; C. J. Calkins, “Our Merchant Marine: The Cause of Its Decline, and the Means to Be Taken for Its Revival,” Proceedings 8 (1882): 35–73; Richard Wainwright, “Our Merchant Marine: The Cause of Its Decline, and the Means to Be Taken for Its Revival,” Proceedings 8 (1882): 121–49.
35. See W. I. Chambers, “The Reconstruction and Increase of the Navy,” Proceedings 11 (1885): 3–50.
36. Solely joined the faculty to teach international law, which eventually blossomed into one of the NWC’s most successful departments. Other permanent faculty and guest speakers addressed students on naval tactics, logistics, war gaming, gunnery, military strategy, and naval history. However, the lectures were not the primary purpose of NWC. Luce designed the curriculum around his steadfast belief in self-study and perceived the college as more of an institute than a school; attendance for lectures was not mandatory. Spector, Professors of War, 32. Luce explained, “The value of lectures on professional subjects must not be underrated. They are indispensable. But it is one of the principles of the Science of Education that throughout youth and in maturity the process in the acquisition of knowledge shall be one of self-instruction. Knowledge which the student has himself acquired, a problem which he has himself solved, becomes by virtue of the conquest much more thoroughly his own than it could otherwise be.” Stephen B. Luce, “The U.S. Naval War College (concluded),” Proceedings 36, no. 3 (1910): 695. As Casper F. Goodrich instructed a handful of early students, “This is not a school and you are not scholars. What you will learn and take away with you depends on you.” As quoted in Spector, Professors of War, 32.
37. Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812 (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1892) on the heels of The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (New York: Little Brown and Company, 1890). Mahan had failed to find a publisher on his own and Little Brown was already famous for publishing such influential classics as Peter Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Letters of John Adams, and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Hayes and Hattendorf, The Writings of Stephen B. Luce, 99. Theodore Roosevelt penned an anonymous review for the Atlantic Monthly calling the book “the best and most important … book on naval history which has been produced on either side of the water in many a long year” (Atlantic Monthly, April 1890).
38. For Mahan, Great Britain’s rise to hegemony illustrated that to exercise sea power effectively a nation needed to possess a geographic position that enabled it to defend itself and project power without large contingents of soldiers. Maritime powers also needed sufficient access to the oceans, deep-water ports, extensive seaboards, and a population inclined toward commercial pursuits governed by individuals willing and able to exercise sea power. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power, 29–58.
39. Geoffrey Till, Sea Power: A Guide for the Twenty-First Century, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013), Kindle edition, Locations 2049–173.
40. Julian Corbett and Herbert Richmond later refined Mahan’s thinking based on their own historical research, creating the classic strategic theory of command of the sea.
41. Naval History and Heritage Command, Documentary Histories, Spanish-American War, Pre-War Planning, “Introductory Essay,” http://www.history.navy.mil/research/publications/documentary-histories/united-states-navy-s/pre-war-planning.html.
42. Spector, Professors of War, 72–82. Taylor published the war problem in Proceedings and distributed copies to educators and journalists to improve the school’s image and challenge the naval minds not in attendance.
43. Capt. Henry C. Taylor to Rear Adm. Stephen B. Luce, 22 January 1896, DLC-MSS, Stephen B. Luce Papers, as quoted in Naval History and Heritage Command, “Introductory Essay.”
44. This efficient prewar planning contrasted starkly with the Army, whose train cars of troops destined for their departure points in Florida remained backed up to Charleston.
45. Huntington, The Soldier and the State; Janowitz, The Professional Soldier; Hackett, The Profession of Arms.
46. Michael Vlahos, The Blue Sword: The Naval War College and the American Mission, 1919–1941 (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press 1980), 63–75; Murray, “Professionalism and Professional Military Education,” 141; as quoted in Benjamin F. Armstrong, ed., 21st century Sims: Innovation, Education and Leadership for the Modern Era (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2015), Kindle edition, Location 247.
47. Dudley Knox played a critical role at Newport during the interwar years as guest lecturer, imparting students with a geopolitical ideology and sense of mission based on Mahanian precepts. Knox visited Newport throughout the early 1930s to deliver lectures on American grand strategy that were purely maritime. His lecture titled “National Strategy” emphasized the maritime advantages America’s geographic position as a world island provided. Sandwiched between Atlantic and Pacific markets, the United States could be the center of the world’s commerce, provided sufficient naval power existed to protect its sea-lanes. See Vlahos, The Blue Sword.
48. As quoted in Vlahos, The Blue Sword, 91. After World War II Chester Nimitz claimed “the classes were so thorough that after the start of WWII nothing in the Pacific was strange or unexpected,” due to the research produced at Newport. As quoted in Vlahos, The Blue Sword, 119.
49. Vlahos, The Blue Sword, 91–93.
50. John T. Kuehn, Agents of Innovation: The General Board and the Design of the Fleet that Defeated the Japanese Navy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2008), Kindle edition, Locations 496–514.
51. Kuehn, Agents of Innovation, Location 547–58; 513–14 (quote).
52. Peter Haynes, Toward a New Maritime Strategy: American Naval Thinking in the Post–Cold War Era (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2015), Kindle edition, Location 375.
53. Henry Stimson’s analysis of the Navy captures the problem quite succinctly. As he recalled, “The peculiar psychology of the Navy Department … frequently seemed to retire from the realm of logic into a dim religious world in which Neptune was God, Mahan his prophet, and the United States Navy the only true church.” Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 506.
54. George Kennan, the chief architect of containment, envisioned a series of limited wars that would apply pressure to the Soviet Union over time until a bankrupted economy eroded Soviet power from within. To fight these limited actions, Kennan argued that the military would need a conventional force of highly mobile divisions that, when deployed, could exercise local air and sea control anywhere around the world. See George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1925–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 311–12. His strategic research also relied on the work of Alfred Thayer Mahan during his teaching preparation at the National War College. John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), 233.
55. As quoted in George Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power: The U.S. Navy, 1890–1990 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 278.
56. “Naval participants in the unification hearings displayed a considerable degree of confusion, internal contradiction, and lack of originality whenever they spoke about strategic meanings of sea power. Navy professional journals show a striking reluctance to discuss controversial strategic problems. The Navy, it would seem, has been unable to successfully educate the American people in the imperatives of modern naval strategy and largely because the Navy has no clear concept of just what its strategic necessities are.” As quoted in John Hattendorf, Sailors and Scholars: The Centennial History of the U.S. Naval War College (Newport: Naval War College Press, 1984), 201.
57. Adm. Richard L. Conolly, USN, letter to Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Forrest P. Sherman, USN, 1 May 1951, as quoted in Haynes, Toward a New Maritime Strategy, Location 391–93
58. Bernard Brodie, “War in the Atomic Age,” in Bernard Brodie, ed., The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1946), 76.
59. Reynolds, Command of the Sea, 10–12, 548–49.
60. The material school had influenced many officers in the Royal and Imperial German Navies during Britain’s naval race with Germany prior to World War I, especially Alfred von Tirpitz and John Jellicoe. Arthur Radford’s demand for a carrier role in the atomic blitz and Arleigh Burke’s decision to move forward with the Polaris program, a submarine-launched nuclear missile, exemplified these views. However, Burke’s strategic thinking was far more mature than Radford’s. Realizing he knew little about strategy after the Admiral’s Revolt, Burke embarked on a campaign of self-education, focusing primarily on the study of history and international relations to improve his strategic knowledge. Accordingly, Burke’s thinking bridged both material and historical schools.
61. On civilian strategists and their methodology, see Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973) 399–440; Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (New York: Oxford University Press) 146–77; Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961); Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 3rd ed. (London: Palgrave, 2005).
62. For the McNamara Pentagon, war and planning were simply a matter of numbers, which flew in the face of thousands of years of human conflict, ignoring the Clausewitzian concept of friction.
63. Edward L. Katzenbach, “The Demotion of Professionalism at the War Colleges,” Proceedings 91 (March 1965), 34.
64. Haynes, Toward a New Maritime Strategy, Location 568–74; Baer, One Hundred Years, 370–80.
65. Adm. James Stavridis and Capt. Mark Hagerott, “The Heart of an Officer: Joint, Interagency, and International Operations and Navy Career Development,” Naval War College Review 62, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 31–32; Christopher D. Hayes, “Developing the Navy’s Operational Leaders: A Critical Look,” Naval War College Review 61, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 88; Haynes, Toward a New Maritime Strategy, Location 476. Hattendorf, Sailors and Scholars, 257–62. Stavridis and Hagerott point out that Rickover’s emphasis on individual platforms and technology was probably warranted due to the advanced and dangerous environment of nuclear reactors, but Rickover’s influence on technology-focused education and training cast a long shadow that continues to haunt naval education and the Navy’s professional status. On Rickover’s education views, see Hyman G. Rickover, Education and Freedom (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1959).
66. Aviators and surface warfare officers, for example, opposed Arleigh Burke’s decision to move forward with Polaris because it meant less money for naval aviation and surface combatants. Many submariners, including Rickover, also objected, believing the program too expensive. Baer, One Hundred Years, 353–59.
67. Haynes, Toward a New Maritime Strategy, Locations 479–82.
68. Haynes, Locations 347–51.
69. Murray, “Professionalism and Professional Military Education,” 141–42.
70. Their tenures produced research by Henry Eccles on naval logistics, studies by the World War II Battle Evaluations Group, and the School for Advanced Study in Strategy and Sea Power run by J. C. Wylie, which maintained the historical school’s approach and were of incalculable value. Hattendorf, Sailors and Scholars, 186–88, 189–91, 201–4.
71. Hattendorf, Sailors and Scholars, 234–36, 244–48, 276–80; Katzenbach, “The Demotion of Professionalism,” 34–41.
72. The Review also suffered because it remained classified until 1964. Hattendorf, Sailors and Scholars, 197–98.
73. According to one junior officer, many flag officers and senior leaders view individuals who submit articles to the Naval Institute or other publishers outside the Navy that advocate serious reform as outsiders. Roger Misso, “Sea Power and Fortitude,” Proceedings 141 (April 2015).
74. Hattendorf, Sailors and Scholars, 276–95.
75. Stansfield Turner, “Challenge! A New Approach to Professional Education at the Naval War College,” Naval War College Review (November–December 1972): 3.
76. Turner introduced Thucydides while the Vietnam conflict and student protests surrounding American involvement still raged. When one professor’s seminar discussed the Athenians’ Sicilian expedition, without mentioning Vietnam, several students openly wept. John Lewis Gaddis, “George Kennan and American Grand Strategy During the Cold War” (evening lecture delivered at the Naval War College, Newport, RI, 3 October 2011).
77. Turner, “Challenge!,” 2–9; Hattendorf, Sailors and Scholars, 276–95.
78. Williamson Murray, “Grading the War Colleges,” National Interest 6 (Winter 1986/87): 15.
79. The Office of the Chief of Naval Operations distributed classified versions of the document and released a declassified version in a special issue of Proceedings. On the development and evolution of the Maritime Strategy see Hattendorf, “The Evolution of the U.S. Navy’s ‘Maritime Strategy,’ 1977–1987,” in Naval History and Maritime Strategy, 201–28.
80. Hayes, “Developing the Navy’s Operational Leaders,” 95. See also David M. Rodney, Christine H. Fox, Samuel D. Kleinman, Michael J. Moskowitz, and Mary E. Lauer, Report: Developing an Education Strategy for URL Officers, CRM D0017231.A2/Final (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, March 2008).
81. On the naval officer corps’ resistance to professional education see Milan Vego, “There’s No Place Like Newport,” Proceedings 136, no. 2 (February 2010); on assessing professional military education, see Johnson-Freese, Educating America’s Military.
82. Only 15 percent of the Navy’s scholarship offers are reserved for NROTC Navytrack midshipmen who plan to major in nontechnical subjects. In fairness, midshipmen are allowed to change their major without disenrollment, provided the change is approved and the NROTC program goal is a graduating class with 65 percent technical majors upon commissioning. However, the policy still acts as a major deterrent to prospective midshipmen interested in studying liberal arts. For current Navy policy on academic majors see NROTC Training Selection Policy, NSTC Instruction 1533.3A, http://www.netc.navy.mil/nstc/NSTC_Directives/NSTC_Instructions/NSTC%201533.3A%20-%20NROTC%20Academic%20Major%20Selection%20Policy%20(CH-1).pdf.
83. Rodney et al., Developing an Education Strategy, 56–57. In 2016, the Navy introduced a number of initiatives that could allow its officers to obtain advanced degrees from civilian institutions. However, these programs seem geared toward degrees in business and administration, rather than advanced degrees in history or strategic studies. See Department of the Navy Talent Management Initiatives, N1 Handout FINAL—N1, available at http://navylive.dodlive.mil/files/2015/05/N1-Handout-FINAL.pdf. On the problems facing the study of military history in American universities, see John Lynn, “The Embattled Future of Academic Military History,” Journal of Military History 61, no. 4 (1997): 777–89; Lynn, “Breaching the Walls of Academe: The Purposes, Problems and Prospects of Military History,” Academic Questions 21.1 (2008): 18–36. David Petraeus learned about the academic rigor of civilian institutions to his dismay after receiving a D on his first test at Princeton, having finished at the top of his class at the US Army Command and Staff College. David Petraeus, “Beyond the Cloister: Civilian Graduate Programs Broaden a Soldier’s Horizons,” American Interest, 2 July 2007, http://www.the-american-interest.com/2007/07/01/beyond-the-cloister/.
84. Murray, “Professionalism and Professional Military Education,” 143. Murray seems to exclude the Naval War College faculty from this criticism.
85. Michael I. Handel, Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought, 3rd ed. (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2001), 271.
86. On retention problems see Guy M. Snodgrass, “Keep a Weather Eye on the Horizon: A Navy Officer Retention Study,” Naval War College Review 67, no. 4 (Autumn, 2014): 64–92.
87. On 17 June 2017 the guided-missile destroyer USS Fitzgerald collided with the the Philippine-flagged container ship Motor Vessel ACX CRYSTAL near the approaches to Tokyo Wan. The collision resulted in the death of seven US sailors due to impact with Fitzgerald’s berthing compartments, located below the waterline of the ship. Two months later, on 21 August 2017 another guided-missile destroyer, USS John S. McCain, collided with the the Liberian-flagged oil and chemical container ship Motor Vessel ALNIC MC in the Straits of Singapore. This collision killed ten US sailors due to the same reason. The Navy deemed both collisions avoidable. See Adm. John M. Richardson, “Memorandum for Distribution,” (Washington, DC: OPNAV: October 23, 2017), https://s3.amazonaws.com/CHINFO/USS+Fitzgerald+and+USS+John+S+McCain+Collision+Reports.pdf. Two other vessels in the 7th Fleet also collided with other ships in 2017 but no one was killed. On Navy culture, see Michael Bayer and Gary Roughead, “Strategic Readiness Review: 2017” (Washington, DC: OPNAV: December 11, 2017) https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4328654-U-S-Navy-Strategic-Readiness-Review-Dec-11-2017.html.
88. As Peter Haynes deftly points out about the most recent reform, the Goldwater-Nichols Act, “Goldwater-Nichols … shaped an understanding of strategy such that the White House, the secretary of defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff determined the ends, the geographic combatant commanders determined the ways, and the CNO and OPNAV focused on the means.” Haynes, Toward a New Maritime Strategy, Locations 5065–67.
89. OPNAV’s release of “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Sea Power” demonstrated that officers are able to examine maritime power in a broader context, but its recent replacement places far more emphasis on war fighting and downgraded its predecessor’s focus on the protection of open-market connectivity. Compare Adm. Gary Roughead, Gen. James T. Conway, and Adm. Thad Allen, A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower (Washington, DC: OPNAV, October 2007) to Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., and Adm. Paul F. Zukunft, A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower: Forward, Engaged, Ready (Washington, DC: OPNAV, March 2015); B. J. Armstrong, “The Brutal Realities of Naval Strategy,” review of Toward a New Maritime Strategy: American Naval Thinking in the Post–Cold War Era, by Peter D. Haynes, War on the Rocks, 29 July 2015, http://warontherocks.com/2015/07/the-brutal-realities-of-naval-strategy/. Additionally, the Navy’s release of its memo on the USS Fitzgerald and USS McCain collisions and the recent Strategic Readiness Review indicate that the service is taking a hard look at its professional shortcomings. See Adm. John M. Richardson, Memorandum for Distribution (Washington, DC: OPNAV, 23 October 2017) https://www.scribd.com/document/363215306/navy-collision-report-for-uss-fitzgerald-and-uss-john-s-mccain-collisions; Strategic Readiness Review: 2017 (Washington, DC: OPNAV, 11 December 2017) https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4328654-U-S-Navy-Strategic-Readiness-Review-Dec-11-2017.html. Whether their recommendations are put into effect is a different story.
90. Joe Gould, “HASC and SASC Chairs Want Goldwater-Nichols Review,” Defense News, 20 October 2015, https://www.defensenews.com/2015/10/20/hasc-and-sasc-chairs-want-goldwater-nichols-review/. It now seems these reforms, if made, will do little to heal the many problems associated with jointness culture. However, it should not be forgotten that Goldwater-Nichols resulted from the services’ ineffective conduct during the invasion of Grenada in 1983. Simply another case of the client losing confidence and restricting service autonomy through tighter bureaucratic control.
91. Stephen Bleecker Luce, “On the Study of Naval Warfare as a Science,” in The Writings of Stephen B. Luce, edited by John D. Hayes and John B. Hattendorf (Newport: Naval War College Press, 1975), 65. Luce designed the NWC as an institution of personal study where strategic problems could be researched and debated. Faculty expected officers to research and produce work independently and lectures formed a small part of their education, typical of modern-day graduate work.
92. As quoted in Hayes and Hattendorf, The Writings of Stephen B. Luce, 44.
93. Williamson Murray, “Introduction,” in The Past as Prologue: The Importance of History to the Military Profession, ed. Williamson Murray (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 9.
94. Hattendorf, “Luce’s Idea of the Naval War College”; John B. Hattendorf, Maritime History: The Eighteenth Century and the Classic Age of Sail (New York: Krieger Pub Co, 1997), 270; Michael Howard, “The Use and Abuse of Military History,” reprinted in Parameters 11, no. 1 (1981): 13.
95. Scott Cheney-Peters, personal correspondence with the author, 3 July 2015.
96. However, CNO John Richardson’s recent order not to discuss operational capabilities could prove a gag order, deterring many officers from writing.
97. James A. Russell, James J. Wirtz, Donald Abenheim, Thomas Durrell Young, and Diana Wueger, Naval Strategy Development in the 21st Century, Project #FY14-N3/N5-0001 (Monterey, CA: Naval Postgraduate School, June 2015), 35–36.
98. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 11.