THIS BOOK, LIKE ANY COLLECTION OF ESSAYS, IS A COOPERATIVE EFFORT. I could not have had a more congenial group of authors to work with and to them goes my deepest debt of gratitude. Fourteen of the essays first appeared in previous collections that I edited: Command under Sail: Makers of the American Naval Tradition, 1775–1850 (1985); Captains of the Old Steam Navy: Makers of the American Naval Tradition, 1840–1880 (1986); and Admirals of the New Steel Navy: Makers of the American Naval Tradition, 1880–1930 (1990). The authors of those essays made minor revisions where necessary, particularly in adding to the suggestions for further reading the works that have appeared since they wrote their essays. Robert Seager so revised his essay for this book as to make it virtually a new work. The authors of the six essays especially written for this book bore with good humor my sometimes heavy-handed commentary and acquiesced to my pleas for brevity. At the Naval Institute Press, our editor, Paul Wilderson, provided encouragement, and our manuscript editor, Terry Belanger, saved us from infelicities and inconsistencies of style, and our proofreader, Barbara Johnson, caught a number of errors which eluded the contributors and the editor.
During the 1995–96 academic year, the Air War College provided an atmosphere most congenial to this undertaking. David Curtis Skaags shared his knowledge of the early navy, Mark L. Shulman offered his views of the “New Navy” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and both applied their critical eye to the preface. Our dean, Rear Admiral Ronald Kurth, USN (Ret.), contributed more than he realized through stimulating conversation shared over lunches. Alexander Cochran, chairman of the Department of Strategy, Doctrine, and Air Power, saw to it that I had time for this and other projects.
At my home institution, Texas A&M University, Judy Mattson typed the revised sections on “Further Reading” and Joseph G. Dawson made valuable suggestions to improve the preface.
This book is dedicated to my wife, Judy, who makes all possible and all worthwhile.