To doubt one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man. Don’t defend past actions; what is right today may be wrong tomorrow. Don’t be consistent; consistency is the refuge of fools.1
In July 1986, four years after he had been forced to retire, Admiral Rickover died. It is useful to recall that on the day he passed, whereas the Vietnam War (1959–75) was thankfully over, the Cold War and the accompanying arms race with the Soviet Union still showed no signs of abatement. Few diesel submarines remained in the U.S. Navy inventory.2 Yet nearly a third of active Navy ships were nuclear submarines.3 Of the remaining fleet, a half dozen of the cruisers and destroyers were also nuclear powered, as was every aircraft carrier built since Robert McNamara had been secretary of defense. Women were filling critical roles on board nearly every ship in the Navy except submarines.4
In the Navy the leadership at Naval Reactors had been successfully passed to Kin McKee (who had still never addressed the Nautilus main seawater valves) without apparent discontinuities. Rickover had used his three decades at the Naval Reactors helm to put his personal imprint on the officers who served throughout the nuclear-power program. Those who followed him were true believers. In the years Rickover ran Naval Reactors, he had personally interviewed each officer candidate—personally approved their training—and personally approved the credentials of each person who served as an engineer or commanding officer. He had read thousands of letters from commanding officers who periodically wrote to him and had individually spoken to thirty years of commanders by telephone if they displeased him. Less frequently, he also called if he thought a performance deserved special praise. Each of his senior officers knew him and his voice even if they recognized no other admiral in the Navy. Almost all of the three thousand officers in the submarine force, including me, believed they knew him.5
By the time Rickover was forced to retire, he had firmly established an enduring culture of “just do what is right.” That culture would guide the easing of the rudder a bit when it became evident the Kindly Old Gentleman had initially advocated the wrong course or when the heading of the submarine force needed to adapt to changing weather conditions, such as the unexpected end of the Cold War. One measure of the strength of the culture Admiral Rickover established is the ease with which significant changes were made after his death. I am sure there were many such changes. I was personally involved in three.
Bringing the Rudder Over: Decommissioning the Nuclear Surface Ships
The first course correction involved unraveling one of the programs that Rickover had firmly supported (if the program had been successful, it would have made both submarine and commercial nuclear power less expensive in the United States).
From 1988 to 1990 I was an admiral on the West Coast, responsible for training the attack submarines there and, as military officers are often fond of primly stating, “other duties as assigned.” One of those assigned duties was responsibility for the annual safety drills of the nuclear surface ships on the West Coast; I was the flag officer responsible for checking the nuclear safety of ships, yet another admiral had all other responsibilities for those same ships. This cockamamie arrangement had become necessary because the surface force had not routinely selected nuclear officers for flag rank. As a result of the surface community’s failure to promote sufficient qualified officers to look after the safety aspects of their ships,6 that specific responsibility had been assigned to the senior submariner in the local area.
So, during my day job I was responsible for everything on board my own sixty submarines (as well as the forty surface ships supporting them) and could reassign priorities, money, people, and assets as I saw necessary to accomplish my mission. I was held completely responsible—my reputation, my career, and my freedom at risk—for all the results. I had willingly accepted that unspoken contract when I had donned the broad gold uniform stripe that designates an individual as an admiral.
When I walked on board nuclear surface ships, it was as if I entered a different world. I well remembered a similar culture from my diesel-boat days. Surface ships outside the propulsion spaces retained the culture of diesel boats. Attention was on operations. The engineering plant was expected to get by. This was obviously an unsatisfactory situation.
One might change the culture of the surface force, but all attempts thus far had been unsuccessful. With the visible success of nuclear submarines (and the constant harping of Admiral Rickover), senior officers had led several efforts to change the approach of surface sailors toward engineering. All had failed. But given the opportunity, people do not behave completely irrationally. Why did the surface force essentially ignore the engineering plant? For the best of all possible reasons: surface ships weren’t submarines.
A surface ship did not provide presence simply by getting under way. A surface ship needed to have radars activated and guns or missiles visibly ready. In addition, when submerged a submarine is nearly invulnerable, susceptible to attack only in special circumstances. A surface ship could not become nearly invulnerable by simply slipping below the waves. It was potentially targetable 24/7. My experience is that the submarine commanding officer can often control the level of risk by choosing when to close (or, alternatively, open) dangerous situations. On board a surface ship, the environment chooses you. Finally, if a surface ship’s engineering plant stops, no one immediately dies (as might occur on board a submerged submarine). A surface ship simply floats until it is joined by one of its sister ships and can be towed or repaired. Given all the differences, is it surprising that surface-ship officers choose to pay the most attention to what is keeping them alive and maximize their warfighting capability?
Of course, this logic did not solve the nuclear safety concerns. Just as two dissimilar biological cultures will not usually exist in the same petri dish, it is difficult to maintain two separate cultures on board one ship. Rickover had destroyed the diesel culture in the submarine force because he knew the diesel-boat environment did not fit with highly technical operations like nuclear power (and the diesel boat was actually a surface ship, while the nuclear variant was the first true submarine). As I visited the nuclear surface ships, I believed I could easily predict the culture that would eventually prevail on board surface ships now that Rickover was gone.
If you are a student of Navy history, you will know that Rickover pushed hard for many years for an all-nuclear Navy. He thought that having every ship powered by nuclear power would relieve the Navy from the tyranny of the price of oil. He also insisted that nuclear power would release the Navy from relying on a network of support bases (primarily for oil resupply) and that unarmed oilers were vulnerable ships during wartime. By giving public speeches and using his influence in Congress, Rickover had succeeded in getting nuclear power on aircraft carriers as well as nine cruisers. However, his argument of increased mobility, flexibility, and warfighting agility had in the end failed to carry the day for surface ships other than carriers.
I carefully followed this public discussion during the sixties and seventies. The opposing argument for nonnuclear ships (what Admiral Zumwalt had advocated and termed the high-low mix) was that the construction cost of the nonnuclear ships was much, much less than that of nuclear ships. Thus, for the same amount of up-front money, one could have more surface ships, and those ships obviously could be in more places—always a concern when three-quarters of the globe is water.
In addition, the Navy would always need oilers and their infrastructure for transport aviation gas and munitions, as well as food and spare parts, from shore to the carriers for the aircraft flying from the big decks (refueling the destroyers is a minor additional burden). Examining the issue revealed that even if one achieved an all-nuclear surface-ship fleet, oilers, resupply ships, and the supporting infrastructure (fuel farms, tanks, etc.) located around the world would still be necessary. In addition, as both sides carefully avoided noting, the operation of a nuclear plant requires a person with much higher training.
I thought it was noteworthy that no one ever discussed the key training differentiator. Good people are always harder to find than money. Did no one recall the trouble Rickover had in locating sufficient people to run 150 submarines (each surface ship had a much larger wardroom than any submarine)? As I followed the public argument over the years, I couldn’t fathom how we would ever find enough qualified people to operate the six hundred ships we were trying to put to sea at the time if they were all nuclear-powered.
I had been leaning toward the side of Rickover’s opponents for some years. The physics seemed fairly simple: there was air on the surface and none below the water. This led to an obvious conclusion: nuclear power was essential to submarines but not so to surface ships.
When I returned to Washington in the early nineties, after my tour in San Diego, I headed a staff developing the Navy budget. Much of our time was spent consolidating consensus positions among my fellow air, surface, and submarine flag officers. When the Cold War ended in 1991, the dollars supporting the defense budget dramatically fell, and the situation, while stressful, also provided an opportunity for thoughtful changes. Consequently, decommissioning all the nuclear surface ships was one of the measures the Secretary of the Navy used to balance his budget. I personally briefed the Office of Naval Reactors in advance on this decision. It was a rudder change for the Navy as it searched for open waters. Although making the surface force completely conventionally powered was counter to the position he had advocated, I thought Admiral Rickover would have been pleased that safety considerations and the challenge of old assumptions had driven the new conclusion.7
Another Change of Course: Restructuring the Submarine Force after the Cold War
The day Rickover died, a third of the ships in the Navy were submarines, not because he was such an exceptional lobbyist, but because of the facts. Undersea platforms were able to avoid Soviet submarine and air defenses and to carry the offensive directly against the Soviet mainland. Presidents understood and appreciated this, even if the military services did not. As is only belatedly recognized, Rickover’s contribution to the U.S. victory in the Cold War was perhaps his greatest achievement.
However, in 1991, when the Soviets announced they were quitting, the Navy, which had been secretly monitoring the Soviets’ internal communications, realized the Soviet Union was truly collapsing.8 We therefore began a two-year review to restructure for future, non–Cold War threats. The first problem the submarine force faced was that we were building the wrong submarine. If the Soviets were out of business, then there was no need for the expensive submarine currently in production, the Seawolf class. This submarine had been designed to maneuver close to the Soviet coast, where no one else could go, and duplicate, with cruise missiles, the firepower of an aircraft-carrier strike.
In the world without a Soviet Union, carriers, no longer pitted against its hundreds of submarines, could operate much more freely. Consequently, to avoid overlapping missions, a less-expensive nuclear submarine was needed to operate in littoral (shallow, near-to-land) waters and conduct spy and intrusive missions. To design this new boat and keep a submarine production base warm,9 the submarine component of the Navy proposed to terminate the new Seawolf class (SSN-21) and build a submarine designed for the post–Cold War world.10 To free up funds for the research and development efforts necessary for this new submarine, the Navy proposed reducing the number of commissioned attack submarines by more than half.11
As you might suspect, the afternoon Vice Adm. Dan Cooper and I briefed Admiral Rickover’s old organization on Cooper’s plan to cut the number of attack submarines in half and also terminate the Seawolf class at three (instead of the larger number previously authorized by Congress), some in Naval Reactors were strongly convinced Cooper had lost his mind. But Vice Admiral Cooper’s plan was also the plan of Vice Adm. Bill Owens, the submariner responsible for the overall Navy’s plans and policy, and of Frank Kelso, who was then the Chief of Naval Operations.12
Twenty-five years later the Virginia-class submarine, at a cost much more affordable than the Seawolf, is a great success, and its construction is maintaining the desired industrial base. It represented another complete course change, vehemently opposed by Naval Reactors in the moment yet completely consistent with the culture Rickover had installed of doing what was right. Rickover taught culture well.
Decommissioning the nuclear surface ships and launching the Virginia-class submarine happened more than two decades ago. Subsequently, I was busy with my non-Navy career—until one day it came to my attention that Admiral Rickover’s culture was still particularly vibrant and strong in the submarine force.
Cultural Changes: Women in Submarines
In the fall of 2010, a brief note that the first class of twenty women would soon be entering nuclear training for assignments to submarines appeared in the Washington Post. Although several decades earlier I, and nearly every other senior submariner, had pressed hard for this change, we had lost the political battle. It was no longer my problem or my issue. I turned the page to read an article about the new pitcher for the Washington Nationals baseball team.
But as chance would have it, one of the outstanding women being admitted was the cousin of Audrey Noonan, who worked with me, and one afternoon, during my daily walk around the company, Audrey stopped me with a question: “Mr. Oliver, were you ever in submarines?”
“Yes . . .” I got no further, for her pent-up irritation literally burst forth—
“My cousin is an outstanding woman! Why should she go into submarines where they obviously don’t want her?” Audrey’s voice is normally quiet, but her tone was rising as was the blush in her cheeks. “Why should my cousin throw her talents away?” I could tell her lips badly wanted to add the words “on you pigs” at the end of her last phrase. She apparently only held back as a sop to my delicate sensitivities.
I spent a few moments trying to explain that the submarine culture was perfect for women. I emphasized that Admiral Rickover valued performance above everything else and had made a woman supervisor a critical part of his team in the early 1950s.13 But I made little progress. Audrey did not recognize the name “Rickover.” So, I invited Audrey and her cousin to lunch at our house. A few weeks later Audrey and her boyfriend came to lunch, along with her cousin, Jennie, and Jennie’s father, who was driving the new trainee down to Charleston, South Carolina, to commence her career there at the nuclear training center.
I tried to use the lunch to explain to Jennie what an extraordinary career she might be lucky enough to experience. I wanted to make clear that the great majority of senior submariners had politically pushed for thirty years to get women into submarines. Nearly all submarine flag officers realized we needed brains to make the submarine force successful, and that women possessed half of the available resource. The delay in accessing women into submarines had not been the result of difficulties of gender or inadequate facilities on board the submarines but rather the resistance of a few submarine reprobates and their political allies. Jennie was proof that the culture Rickover had established had over time solved the political factors. It had taken much too long, but . . .
My wife and I served a good lunch, and there is always the distraction of memorabilia lying around the house of a couple who spent thirty years in the military. Jennie and her father wanted to be polite to Audrey’s boss but were also eager to get on their way to Charleston and the beginning of Jennie’s new life. I think my spouse and I successfully portrayed that submarines welcomed women, but the limited time constrained our conversation.
As our guests drove away, I was disappointed that I had not managed to convey to Jennie how special the culture of nuclear submarines is and how unique the man who had built the realm she was poised to enter.14 I simply had not been adequately prepared. The two people, both deceased, by whom I still evaluate myself are my father and Admiral Rickover. Neither would have been impressed with my luncheon performance. My father never cursed me. I could not say the same for the good admiral.
But Rickover instilled a successful culture of management that has outlasted his name.