Basking in the glory of its role during the sweeping Allied victory in the Pacific, most of the post–World War II U.S. Navy was in no mood to consider, or even listen to, calls for radical change. If the combined navies of Germany and Japan hadn’t been able to sink the Allied fleet, where was the need?
The Navy was immense and included myriad rapidly evolving technologies, such as airpower. Military leaders saw no need to adjust to accommodate another new knowledge area. But Rickover believed nuclear technology could not be safely introduced unless naval culture dramatically changed—in itself a Herculean task that would prove to be more difficult than inventing the first reactor and the first nuclear submarine.
It is impossible to overstate the massive resistance Rickover encountered when he promoted nuclear power. It did not help that Rickover was not yet a member of the “Admirals Club” (he was far more junior when he began building the first nuclear submarine), was unimposing in appearance (he was short and slight), did not have a magnetic personality (sometimes referring to himself as having the charisma of a chipmunk1), and was largely unknown, even in naval circles. Rather than flinching at the difficulties, Rickover publicly engaged with an enthusiasm that often produced news headlines and headaches for the other Navy leaders.
At the time many of us in his own organization shook our heads at the multitude of conflicts in which Rickover personally engaged. Of course, in retrospect, just as his team at the Office of Naval Reactors often noted, Rickover’s instincts were usually better than others’ careful calculations.2
There are good and valid reasons a particular culture takes root in an organization. In military organizations culture assists men and women in adjusting to and accepting danger as well as the emotions that accompany fear. It is difficult to leave the comforts of home and sail for the unknown. It is heartrending to watch friends die and realize there is insufficient time to mourn. It is unnatural for people to kill other people. But this is all part and parcel of life for millions of men and women in the military. Service cultures thus form to help humans cope. Cultures assure individuals that these travails are natural, courageous, and patriotic.
The downside of culture is that it tends to stifle change and reform. A culture is akin to window shades. The lower the shades the less glare from the sun inside and the more comfortable it is for the people working in the room. However, with the shade down, outside events may pass unseen; certainly fewer people inside have the opportunity to recognize that the outside world is changing. As culture becomes stronger, it is equivalent to pulling the shades even lower. Thus, the very tool that helps people aggressively engage in conflict subliminally encourages “a preparation to fight the last war”—the most dangerous path for a military force.
An example of how pernicious this problem can be is the story of repeating rifles, another disruptive military technology. The first of these weapons (Spencer’s and Henry’s) grew out of the technological marriage of precision manufacturing techniques and new copper cartridges.3 Both rifles were introduced into the U.S. Army during the Civil War. Unlike previous muzzle-loading guns, the new rifles enabled the soldier to shoot multiple times before pausing to reload. Repeating rifles thus generated a much greater rate of fire than anything heretofore known in history. These transformative weapons were preferentially used by Union forces after 1863, as well as in Europe during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.
As should have been obvious, against a force armed with repeating rifles it was nearly impossible to overrun a position between successive volleys (while soldiers were reloading). Repeating rifles thus altered an open-terrain charge from a tried-and-true tactic to an invitation to a massacre. Yet, fifty years later, when World War I began, the American Army was still conducting charges on horseback. The downside of culture is that the stronger it becomes the more difficult it is to internally recognize a need to change.
During World War II, the Navy assigned submarines to the rank of a tertiary warship. This was an accurate assessment. Diesel boats were exceptionally fragile; their thin hulls could not withstand even the smallest round from a destroyer gun, and they were vulnerable to air attack. To compound these fighting shortcomings, the vessels were slow when actually submerged. In fact, diesel submarines normally operated on the surface (where their engines had all the air they wanted), diving only to attack or evade. Because of their many weaknesses, during World War II submarines had primarily been used as forward scouts or dispatched to conduct actions against unarmed merchants.
Nevertheless, five years after World War II (while the services were dealing with budgetary downturns intended to free up funding for the postwar American economic recovery), Rickover proposed using vast funds (effectively transferred within the Navy from already impacted aircraft and destroyer accounts) to build his new nuclear-powered submarines. If that were not sufficiently threatening to those who had served in and believed in the value of the (much more numerous) air and surface Navy components, Rickover also wanted to dragoon officer talent from the latter’s wardrooms. Given all the cultural barriers he sought to smash, how could Rickover possibly be successful?
The keys were the threat environment, his leadership methods, and his personal work ethic. Even with his exceptional management and personal work habits, Rickover would have failed if history had not also been on his side. It is important to recall the circumstances under which Nautilus was born: America was economically recovering from the gold poured into World War II, and there was trouble afoot in the world (the rise of international communism). In addition, the public expected newly discovered nuclear energy to have great benefits for humanity.
Even before World War II was over, the president and Congress had recognized that Soviet Communism was rapidly becoming our new global enemy. As a result of subsequent overt acts and rhetoric (e.g., the Berlin Blockade, 24 June 1948–12 May 1949; the Korean War, 25 June 1950–27 July 1953; and Khrushchev’s announcing that the Soviets intended to “bury us”4), many Americans believed the Soviets could do exactly as they were threatening. Nearly every American citizen had a tangible dread of the Soviet Union, the vast Red Army, and the stockpile of nuclear weapons the Soviets were building. Aware of the dangers such grim realities imposed, the American public was anxious for an answer—or at least a plan.
At the same time, President Eisenhower was determined to significantly limit military spending and balance the national budget. America was recovering from the great costs of World War II and the Korean War. Eisenhower thus chose an asymmetric warfare approach to visibly counter the increased Soviet bellicosity. Nuclear submarines had already been approved by Congress. The president placed his high-technology bet on them.
Rickover fueled President Eisenhower’s parsimonious predilection by building his first nuclear submarine, USS Nautilus, from used parts: a diesel submarine already under construction, liquid-holding tanks from a bankrupt New Jersey dairy, emergency diesel engines salvaged from a minesweeper that had spent the last few years sunk on the bottom of a river, and a refurbished engine room appropriated from a pre–World War II destroyer. He was thus able to build the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine for less than $70 million.5
Focused as they were on the least expensive method to defend the United States from the Soviet threat, the administration and Congress were predisposed to come down on the nuclear-submarine side of the ledger, and Rickover worked assiduously to keep them on his team. Without their support, Rickover would have had no chance of altering the culture of the Navy—because the latter was not interested in change. With two of the three branches of government on his side, the power of fresh thinking eventually won (at least part of) the day.
In fact, Rickover was not content simply to challenge the 90 percent of the Navy involved in supporting aviation and surface ships. For good reasons he also targeted the functional commands (those organizations and people that don’t directly operate ships and aircraft but provide essential support). He started by advocating that his nuclear submarines be built in privately owned shipyards (where he believed the boats would be built to his standards, for he controlled the money) rather than in facilities commanded by Navy admirals (who had myriad ties and thus could certainly resist a captain and even a fellow admiral). It would take many long years before the public shipyards ceased using old processes and procedures.
And, finally, in what was easily the most emotional aspect of the transformation, Rickover made it clear that most of the officers who had previously served in diesel submarines (the same officers who had just popularly “won the war in the Pacific”) were not welcome in nuclear submarines.
To understand why this last action aroused so much public interest, one should recall that during World War II, while the rest of the Army, Navy, Marines, and Allies fiercely fought the Germans and Italians in Europe, diesel submarines were directed to the Pacific to hinder, as they might, the encroaching Japanese advance. Carrying out that job was only for the intrepid, and after the first two years of World War II (a period in which the stress of war distinguished the ducks from the drakes in the submarine officer corps), the diesel-submarine force was staffed by an extraordinary group of brave sailors, whose personal boldness more than compensated for their platform’s lack of armor and speed. Submariners overcame poorly designed weapons by closing within rock-throwing range to make torpedo attacks from as near as five hundred yards.6 When they couldn’t get close enough while submerged on their batteries, they surfaced to run faster, relying solely on their low silhouette for protection. However, boldness comes with a price tag. Though few, diesel submariners received a disproportionate number of Medals of Honor—seven of the forty-seven awarded the Navy during the war.7 An equally disproportionate number of submariners died. A higher percentage of diesel submariners were killed in action during World War II than were members of any other U.S. service arm.8 Given their extraordinary war record, Rickover’s reluctance to accept these same officers into the wardrooms of the new nuclear submarines he was building, only a few years after the war had ended, was widely viewed, by the public and the rest of the military, as patently unreasonable.
So, in addition to trying to simultaneously invent and adapt a new technology to an otherwise unvalued naval vessel, Rickover was personally not terribly charming, needed lots of money, had 98 percent of the Navy arrayed against him, was proposing shattering the cookie jars of many other admirals, and was seen as downright disrespectful of the submarine heroes who had just won the first global war. How in the world did he succeed?