OPPORTUNITIES in 

the

Edited by Michael J. Crawford

NEEDS AND

of 

theU.S. NAVY

MODERN HISTORY
NEEDS AND 

OPPORTUNITIES IN 

THE MODERN HISTORY 

OF THE U.S. NAVY

The essays in this book examine 

what has been written, what has not 

been written, what should be written, and the challenges to writing 

on the modern history of the United 

States Navy in the subject areas 

of forward presence, operations, 

personnel policy, programming and 

acquisition management, science, 

social history, strategy, and technology. These are all subjects of 

intense interest to the U.S. Navy’s 

leaders, planners, and operators. 

The authors are experts on their 

subjects. The Navy’s goal in publishing these essays is that, while 

serving as guides to research and 

writing, they will stimulate historians to publish studies of the Navy’s 

recent past that will help the Navy 

make wiser decisions informed by 

a keener understanding of the historical context.

Jacket photograph: 

The U.S. Navy Ceremonial Guard 

assigned to Naval District Washington, D.C., stands in formation 

during Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s farewell ceremony at 

Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, 

Virginia, 9 January 2016.

170109-D-DB155-009C

Department of Defense photo by 

E. J. Hersom


Edited by Michael J. Crawford

Naval History and Heritage Command 

Department of the Navy

Washington, DC

2018
Published by

Naval History and Heritage Command 

805 Kidder Breese Street SE 

Washington Navy Yard, DC 20374-5060 

www.history.navy.mil 

Book Design by Jessica Craney

Use of ISBN

This is the official U.S. Government edition of this publication and is

herein identified to certify its authenticity. Use of 978-1-943604-11-1

is for the U.S. Government Publishing Office hardcover edition only. 

The 508-compliant PDF edition is cataloged under ISBN 978-1-943604-13-5. The 

e-book/Mobi edition is cataloged under ISBN 978-1-943604-46-3. The

Superintendent of Documents of the U.S. Government Publishing Office requests that 

any reprinted edition clearly be labeled a copy of the authentic work with a new ISBN.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Crawford, Michael J.

Title: Needs and opportunities in the modern history of the U.S. Navy/ 

 edited by Michael J. Crawford.

Description: Washington, DC: Naval History and Heritage Command, Department 

 of the Navy, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018025656 | ISBN 9781943604111 (hard bound: alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: United States. Navy--History--20th century. | United States. 

 Navy—History—21st century. | Naval art and science—United 

 States—History.

Classification: LCC VA58.4.N44 2018 | DDC 359.0072/2—dc23 LC record available at 

https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025656

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the requirements for permanence established 

by the American National Standard for Information Sciences “Permanence of Paper for 

Printed Library Materials” (ANSI Z39.48-1984).

For Sale by Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Publishing Office

Internet: Bookstore.gpo.gov; Phone: toll free 1-866-512-1800; DC area 202-512-1800; 

Fax: 202-512-2104; Mail: Stop SSOP, Washington, DC 20402-0001
v

Contents

Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

1 Forward Presence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Forward Presence in the Modern Navy: From the Cold War to a 

Future Tailored Force

by Thomas G. Mahnken

2 Operations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

Writing U.S. Naval Operational History 1980–2010: U.S. Navy Mine 

Countermeasures in Terror and War

by Scott C. Truver

3 Personnel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

Naval Personnel since 1945: Areas for Historical Research 

by Donald Chisholm

4 Programming and Acquisitions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

The Historiography of Programming and Acquisition Management 

since 1950, with a Focus on the Navy

by Thomas C. Hone

5 Science. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

The Navy, Science, and Professional History

by Gary E. Weir

6 Social History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221

The Social History of the U.S. Navy, 1945–Present: 

A Historiographical Essay

by Edward J. Marolda

7 Strategy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .271

The U.S. Navy’s Role in National Strategy, Especially between 1980 

and Today

by Sebastian Bruns

8 Technology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309

The Historiography of Technology Since 1950, with a Focus on the Navy

by Mark D. Mandeles
vi

Acronyms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371

Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377

About the Authors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417

Sebastian Bruns

Donald Chisholm 

Thomas C. Hone 

Thomas G. Mahnken

Mark D. Mandeles 

Edward J. Marolda 

Scott C. Truver

Gary E. Weir
vii

Introduction

The historian seeking to produce a study that will bring fresh understanding of 

the U.S. Navy’s recent past will find helpful guidance in this book. Eight essays 

identify needs and opportunities in the modern history of the Navy in specific 

subject areas on which little has been published. The historian writing on any of 

these topics can rest assured that the resulting study will find an interested audience among the Navy’s leaders, planners, and decision makers, for the subjects of 

these essays were selected based on the recommendations of many of those very 

leaders, planners, and decision makers.

Like operating a motor vehicle without a rearview mirror, leading the Navy, 

or any organization, without using history to inform decisions, is dangerous and 

unwise. Reference to history provides context, explains complexities, informs 

about what has worked and what has not, and alerts us to potential unintended 

consequences. For these reasons, the Navy’s leaders seek wisdom in an understanding of the past. The Naval History and Heritage Command serves as the 

principal agent for providing the Navy’s historical understanding. The stream 

of the Navy’s history since the end of World War II, however, runs broad and 

deep, outrunning the limited resources of the command. The command, therefore, looks to academics and independent scholars to supplement their work in 

advancing historical insights useful to the Navy.

To promote the study of the modern history of the Navy by academics and 

independent scholars, the Naval History and Heritage Command engaged scholars 

from outside its bulwarks to report on ten areas of the Navy’s recent history, identifying topics needing original or additional study and opportunities for making 

such studies. Given that the most neglected period of the Navy’s history is the 

most recent, the scholars were enjoined to focus on the decades since World War 

II and especially the years since the end of the Cold War. The subject areas are the 

ones Navy leaders, the Navy’s historians, and outside experts consulted by the 

Naval History and Heritage Command identified as pregnant with the greatest 

potential benefit to the Navy. These subjects are: forward presence, intelligence 

and information warfare, logistics, operations, personnel policy, programming 

and acquisition management, science, social history, strategy, and technology. 

Each of the engaged scholars presented a talk on his findings in the course of 

2016 and 2017 and then was asked to prepare an essay embodying the findings. 
viii

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

The essays concerning intelligence and information warfare and logistics were 

unavailable at the time of publication. 

There is one more area of the recent history of the Navy among those of 

primary interest to the Navy for which there is no historiographical essay: the U.S. 

Navy’s institutional and cultural history between the end of World War II and 

the present. Needed are studies that consider the Navy’s heritage and institutions, 

media image and popular representation, and the distinctive institutional culture 

of its various warfare communities—studies of what the essence of the Navy has 

been. In other words, what is the history of the Navy’s institutional mindset since 

the end of World War II? None of the outside scholars whom the Naval History 

and Heritage Command approached was willing to tackle this subject. Perhaps 

you will be the exception and pursue a topic within this subject area!

This compilation of essays constitutes an agenda for future research and 

writing on the modern history of the U.S. Navy. The hope of the Naval History 

and Heritage Command is that it will inspire original historical studies that will 

inform the Navy’s leaders and operators, providing them with a rearview mirror 

that enables them to steer the Navy with one eye on what has come before. 

The guided missile destroyer Porter (DDG-78), right, leads a pass in review formation during 

divisional tactics training trailed by the guided missile destroyers McFaul (DDG-74) and Cole 

(DDG-67), and the guided missile cruisers Cape St. George (CG-71) and Anzio (CG-68). The 

destroyers and cruisers were assigned to Commander, Carrier Strike Group Twelve, March 2005.

050305-N-4158S-001 U.S. Navy photo by Lt. (j.g.) Caleb Swigart
Chapter 1

Forward Presence in the Modern Navy: 

From the Cold War to a Future Tailored Force

by Thomas G. Mahnken

Forward presence is a central element of U.S. naval strategy. Since the earliest days of the republic, American forces have operated forward in peacetime and 

wartime. Forward operating naval forces have not, however, always been combat credible.

Before World War II, the U.S. approach to forward presence fluctuated 

and largely involved small detachments, which were supported periodically in 

peacetime or reinforced in time of war by major fleet units. Since World War II, 

for political, geographic, and technological reasons, the United States has maintained major fleet elements forward. Over time these forces were increasingly 

forward-based, usually in the territory of newly developed allies and partners, as 

well as forward-deployed, to allow the United States to maintain both permanent 

and intermittent presence in different areas of operation, or “hubs.”

Today, combat-credible naval forward presence is largely recognized as a key 

national advantage that helps defend American lives and property, protect allies, 

ensure the free flow of commerce, prevent the rise of a hegemon on the Eurasian 

continent, and help provide for the common good (to include not only humanitarian missions, but also the post-World War II global order of open trade, collective security, and adherence to international norms).

However, a range of domestic and international challenges has increasingly 

called into question the viability of this approach. In essence, it is difficult for a 

shrinking fleet to maintain combat-credible numbers and combinations of capable 

assets, and the growing scale and sophistication of counter-naval capabilities 
2

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

posed by China, Russia, and Iran threaten to hold forward-operating forces at 

risk, thus undermining their combat credibility and ability to carry out missions 

of presence, deterrence, reassurance, and warfighting.

This essay examines the historical evolution of U.S. naval forward presence, 

with a focus on the post–World War II era; describes the current state of forward 

presence; and identifies alternatives that can inform Navy force structure and 

posture decisions.

Scholars and practitioners have examined U.S. naval forward presence. Their 

works can largely be divided into those that explore historical elements of forward 

presence and deployment strategy and those that evaluate options relevant to 

forward presence in light of resources, challenges, threats, and opportunities.

In the former category, Samuel Huntington’s “National Policy and the 

Transoceanic Navy,” published in 1954, divided the history of U.S. naval policy 

into a “Continental Phase,” an “Oceanic Phase,” and a “Transoceanic Phase.”1

The seminal article summarized trends in U.S. naval history, articulated the 

need for service strategic concepts, and argued the Navy was effectively suited to 

counter threats in Eurasia.2

More recently, Peter Swartz’s 2002 Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) report, 

Sea Changes: Transforming U.S. Navy Deployment Strategy, 1775–2002, is the 

most elegant and comprehensive work on Navy deployment strategy.3 The report 

describes 25 distinct eras in Navy deployment strategy since 1775, including 

eight in the post–World War II era. It also identifies future deployment strategy 

options. Adam Siegel’s CNA report The Use of Naval Forces in the Post-War Era: 

U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps Crisis Response Activity, 1946–1990 serves 

as a detailed review of incidents in which naval forces were employed during the 

Cold War.4

In the early 1990s, the Navy argued that its peacetime combat-credible 

forward deployment strategy should be its principal force-sizing criterion, 

building on earlier arguments made throughout the Cold War and especially in 

the 1980s. The 1994 Navy Service Concept Forward . . . From the Sea, signed 

by Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jay Johnson, codified that the “primary 

purpose of forward-deployed naval forces is to project American power from the 

sea to influence events ashore in the littoral regions of the world across the operational spectrum of peace, crisis and war.”5

 Subsequent naval service concepts 

have reaffirmed this stance.

In terms of options for forward presence, Dov Zakheim and Andrew 

Hamilton’s 1978 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report on the Peacetime 

Presence Mission illuminated the force structure and budgetary impact of 
3

Forward Presence

peacetime missions on the Department of the Navy.6 Many of the options 

presented in this work still serve as the basis for options under contemporary 

consideration. In 2010 Daniel Whiteneck, Michael Price, Neil Jenkins, and Peter 

Swartz wrote a CNA report, The Navy at a Tipping Point, that sounded the 

alarm on the unsustainable strain of existing models for combat-credible forward 

presence amid the shrinking fleet.7 In 2015, Eric Labs of CBO wrote a report 

identifying options for Preserving the Navy’s Forward Presence with a Smaller 

Fleet.

8

 Later that year, Bryan Clark and Jesse Sloman of the Center for Strategic 

and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) wrote a report also contending that the Navy 

and Marine Corps were Deploying Beyond Their Means and offering specific 

alternatives to maximize combat-credible forward presence.9

The aforementioned eight works are arguably the most important in terms of 

examining the broad discourse on American naval forward presence history and 

strategies available to the nation. Other works examined for this essay play an 

important role in complementing the key works by providing additional detail on 

specific historical periods or strategies, describing factors that informed the adoption of employment or deployment strategies, examining dynamics that challenge 

current deployment strategies, and advancing models and capabilities to address 

existing and projected gaps.

However, none of the works comprehensively reviews both the history of 

forward presence in the modern Navy and examines the range of alternatives 

available today. This essay seeks to contribute to the rich literature on the subject 

by examining previous secondary and published primary sources on the subject 

and offering options for national, Department of Defense, and Department of the 

Navy policymakers.

HISTORY OF FORWARD NAVAL PRESENCE

U.S. forward naval presence has deep roots in the nation’s history. This essay 

focuses on the history of U.S. forward presence in four phases: from the 

Spanish-American War to World War II, from World War II through Occupation, 

the Cold War, and from the 1990s to the early 2000s. Nonetheless, the history 

of U.S. naval forward presence in the 18th and 19th century (largely what 

Huntington termed the Continental Phase) left an indelible mark on Navy culture 

and strategies that significantly informed the choices taken in the 20th century.

During the War of Independence, although most Navy ships and privateers 

operated in the western Atlantic and Lake Champlain, a number conducted 
4

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

commerce raiding—and even amphibious raids—off British territory in the 

Caribbean and British Isles. After the war, the nation sold off its fleet given 

its high maintenance costs, and lacked a Navy until 1798 (although it started 

construction of six frigates in 1794).10

During the Quasi-War with France from 1798–1800, the nation’s naval 

forces focused on protecting American merchant vessels in the Atlantic and 

Caribbean; however, some ships deployed to the East Indies to escort American 

merchantmen.11 From 1801 to 1805, President Thomas Jefferson deployed a 

squadron of Navy ships to blockade, bombard, and assault the Barbary states.12

During the War of 1812, in addition to engagements on the Great Lakes and Lake 

Champlain, the Atlantic, and Caribbean, frigates and sloops deployed into the 

Pacific to attack British ships.13

After the war of 1812, the Navy transformed itself into a “globally-dispersed 

set of forward-stationed squadrons” directed to conduct commerce and whaling 

protection, primarily against pirates.14 The Navy established dedicated stations 

of varying duration across the world: the Mediterranean Station, the West India 

Station, the Africa Station, the Brazil Station, the Pacific Station, and the East 

India Station. Navy ships generally operated independently and seldom exercised with other ships.15 These forces also carried out diplomatic, scientific, and 

humanitarian missions.

Of consequence for U.S. naval posture, the 1817 Rush-Bagot Agreement 

between the United States and Great Britain dramatically limited naval forces on 

the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain to four small vessels for each party. This 

arms limitation agreement allowed the United States to increase its proportion of 

naval resources dedicated to other areas.16

From 1841 until nearly the end of the century, with the exception of the Civil 

War, the Navy adopted a deployment strategy that combined a home surge force 

for defense of the homeland from potential threats, principally Great Britain, 

with continued presence in forward stations and diplomatic and scientific expeditions. The most acclaimed of these expeditions was Commodore Matthew Perry’s 

opening of Japan with ships of the East India Squadron in 1853. The following 

year, the East India Squadron deployed its first warship up the Yangtze River.17

After the Civil War, Navy deployment strategy largely continued as before. 

However, the Civil War saw a dramatic reduction in the size of the U.S. merchant 

marine, primarily due to the result of ship owners transferring their flags for 

security and competitive reasons to Great Britain; consequently, the post-bellum 

forward presence force had significantly less U.S.-flagged commerce to protect.18

Nonetheless, it continued to conduct a range of commerce protection, diplomatic, 
5

Forward Presence

and humanitarian missions. This period exhibited dozens of missions in which 

U.S. naval forces conducted highly assertive uses or threats to use force in 

resolving disputes.

Phase I: Spanish-American War to World War II

Toward the end of the 19th century, the Navy gradually entered into Huntington’s 

“Oceanic Era,” a period in which the nation shifted its sights from homeland territorial defense to defense of its interests at sea and its overseas territories. During 

the Spanish-American War of 1898, the North Atlantic and Asiatic Squadrons 

conducted sea control operations in the Caribbean and the Philippines, respectively. Resounding victory in the war directly resulted in the U.S. acquisition 

of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico, and the subsequent annexation of 

the Republic of Hawaii through the Newlands Resolution. These new territories 

increased the defense responsibilities of the Navy and Army and contributed to 

an increase in peacetime-tailored forward presence forces in the Western Pacific 

and Caribbean.

The period’s most influential navalist, Alfred Thayer Mahan, contended 

that apart from requisite forces for coaling stations, the Navy should consolidate 

its ships in a home battle fleet, rather than forward squadrons that could be 

destroyed in detail.19 Nonetheless, the Navy continued to maintain the North 

Atlantic Squadron, the European Squadron, the South Atlantic Squadron, the 

Pacific Squadron, and the Asiatic Squadron, with the preponderance of heavy 

naval forces in the North Atlantic Squadron. Forward squadrons continued their 

assertive practices, regularly using force or the threat of force throughout Central 

and South America, Lebanon, Turkey, Korea, and China.20

During his first term in office, President Theodore Roosevelt diverted from 

regular peacetime naval posture by employing the global fleet to deter foreign 

intervention and signal support. Most notably, in 1903 he repositioned all 

Atlantic forces to the Caribbean and the Pacific Squadron (and a significant 

portion of the Asiatic Squadron) to near the Pacific coast of Panama in order to 

solidify U.S. support for an independent Panama and deter potential European 

intervention.21 The same year Roosevelt deployed the North Atlantic Squadron 

for a major diplomatic mission to France and Germany, thus forward-deploying 

the Navy’s combat-credible force.22

In 1905, Roosevelt eliminated the Mediterranean and South Atlantic 

Squadrons and over time reorganized the Navy into an Atlantic Fleet, a Pacific 

Fleet, and an Asiatic Fleet, with the majority of heavy battleships allocated to the 

Atlantic Fleet in support of War Plan Black to counter potential German naval 
6

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

forces that might seek to establish an advanced base in the Caribbean.23 Although 

the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets focused on sophisticated fleet exercises near the 

United States, they were occasionally surged for short deployments from 1905 to 

1914 to signal diplomatic support to various states and demonstrate U.S. power.24

These were frequently opposed by naval officers, who protested these distractions 

from fleet exercises in support of war plans. The most famous cruise for diplomatic purposes of this period was that of the Great White Fleet of 1907–1909, 

which highlighted the importance of refueling stations and the relative utility of 

oil over coal to power naval ships.25

With the outbreak of World War I, the nation ceased deploying the Navy on 

forward surges, leaving it to concentrate on exercises in its Atlantic and Pacific 

Fleets in preparation for its potential involvement in the war. Small groups of 

forward naval forces in the Caribbean and China did conduct minor diplomatic 

and peacekeeping operations. Additionally, the opening of the Panama Canal in 

1914 increased the ability of the fleet to consolidate.

During World War I, instead of the planned surface engagement with the 

German Navy, the Navy focused on sealift and escort across the Atlantic. While 

the majority of the fleet aggregated in the Atlantic to execute these missions, the 

Navy continued to maintain the Asiatic Fleet on station throughout the conflict. 

The size of the Navy increased from 224 ships in 1914 to 324 in 1917 to 774 by 

the end of World War I.26

During the Inter-War Period, the large fleet consolidated first in 1919 into 

two equally-sized Atlantic and Pacific Fleets to prepare to counter either Great 

Britain or Japan and then in 1922 into a single United States Fleet largely based 

on the West Coast to counter Japan.27 Avoiding forward deployments that were 

perceived as provocative, the U.S. Fleet focused on annual fleet exercises and 

experiments near the United States. The fleet was only deployed forward once 

this period, to Australia and the southwest Pacific in 1925, which elicited significant criticism from Japan.28

During this period, the Special Service Squadron in the Caribbean and the 

Asiatic Fleet, with its subordinate Yangtze Patrol, conducted various diplomatic 

and peacekeeping missions. In 1937, during the course of the Sino-Japanese 

War, Japan sank the Yangtze Patrol gunboat Panay (PR-5) and attacked three 

Standard Oil tankers, which led to a reduction in Asiatic Fleet efforts to protect 

U.S. interests in China.29

In May of 1940, after its annual Fleet Problem, President Franklin D. 

Roosevelt ordered the U.S. Fleet to remain in Hawaii indefinitely as a deterrent to 

Japan. Fleet Problem XXII, scheduled for January 1941 in the Central or North 
7

Forward Presence

Pacific, was subsequently cancelled in order to not provoke Japan.30 In 1941 

the U.S. Fleet was re-divided into an Atlantic Fleet (formerly the Atlantic Patrol 

Force), a Pacific Fleet, and a small Asiatic Fleet.31 This action further consolidated the force and placed the majority of modern ships in the Atlantic and 

Pacific Fleets.

In contrast to the modern Pacific Fleet, on 7 December 1941, the Asiatic Fleet 

consisted of one relatively modern heavy cruiser, Houston (CA-30), one old light 

cruiser, Marblehead (CL-12), 13 World War I–era Clemson-class destroyers, 

29 submarines (a mix of older Porpoise-class and new Salmon- and Sargo-class 

boats), one pre–World War I destroyer tender, and a variety of older gunboats, 

minesweepers, and auxiliary support ships, old coastal Yangtze River Patrol 

vessels, the 4th Marine Regiment, and amphibian patrol aircraft.32 Overall, the 

Asiatic Fleet lacked the ability to deter credibly. Instead, at best it constituted a 

delaying force and at worse a tripwire, while the Pacific Fleet (and reinforcing 

Atlantic Fleet) represented the nation’s deterrent force.

Phase II: World War II through Occupation

During World War II, the Navy was used to protect territory, defend allies, protect 

commerce, conduct sea denial, and project power. Initial Japanese attacks decimated the Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor and a series of battles in early 1942 near 

the Dutch East Indies sunk most of the Asiatic Fleet. The remnants of the attrited 

Asiatic Fleet were incorporated into the South West Pacific Area Command in 

February 1942.33

The Pacific Fleet initially focused on raiding Japanese islands and countering 

the Japanese fleet, while Submarine Force Pacific conducted forward antiship 

patrols. By 1943, following a series of victories, the Navy reorganized its Pacific 

Fleet into a Third/Fifth Fleet, the Seventh Fleet (under the South West Pacific 

Area Command), a continued Submarine Force Pacific, and Twelfth, Eighth, 

and Fourth Fleets in the Atlantic. As the ability of the fleets to exert sea control 

increased, major U.S. naval forces focused on transoceanic power projection for 

strikes and amphibious assaults.

These forces were supported not only by a burgeoning network of advanced 

bases and afloat logistics forces that included sophisticated forward maintenance, 

battle damage repair with floating drydocks and other assets, and medical facilities, but also an underway replenishment capability that reached its apotheosis 

with the introduction of underway munitions transfer capability for aircraft 

carriers during the Iwo Jima campaign in 1945.34

After World War II, the Navy continued to operate from a significant number 
8

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

of bases in both theaters that had supported the conduct of the war. Additionally, 

the Navy established bases in occupied portions of the former Nazi and Japanese 

empires. Forces operating forward supported occupation and relief efforts and 

were envisioned as a temporary global overseas presence.

Phase III: Cold War

1946–1947

In the first couple of years following World War II, the nation reinstituted a 

deployment strategy in which equally powerful combat-credible surge battle fleets 

were stationed on both coasts of the United States, and smaller presence forces 

were deployed forward in the Pacific and Europe. The Seventh Fleet, based in the 

Marianas, supported the occupations of Japan, Korea, and western Pacific islands, 

and also supported Marines in China. A small Naval Forces Mediterranean/

Northern European Force maintained a presence in European waters.

This new deployment strategy reflected not only change in the geopolitical 

landscape, but also in the size of the Navy, given the lack of an identified maritime threat. By 1947 the Navy had been pared down from a 6,800-ship leviathan 

in 1945 to a still-imposing 842 ships, which included 14 fleet carriers and four 

battleships.35

Furthermore, to some strategists the tremendous power of nuclear weapons 

seemed to obviate the need for large naval forces. As Bernard Brodie wrote in 1946,

The atomic bomb introduces the possibility that in another general war the 

utility of navies will be decided ashore rather than at sea. A nation which 

has had its entire economy destroyed may be able to put a fleet to scant 

use . . . . The traditional concepts of military security which this country 

has developed over the past fifty years—in which the Navy was correctly 

avowed to be our ‘first line of defense’—must be reconsidered.36

Two atomic tests at Bikini Atoll in the summer of 1946 (Operation 

Crossroads) assessed whether nuclear weapons could destroy an entire dispersed 

fleet. Although test observers concluded that “ships under way will rarely constitute suitable targets for atomic bomb attack” given the limited degree of damage 

to the ships targeted, the Navy’s strategic and operational utility was under 

assault.37

Regardless, Navy forward deployments continued to play an important role 

in this period—even though the majority of naval forces was at home in the surge 
9

Forward Presence

battle fleets. In 1946, amid Soviet pressure on Turkey and concern over Soviet 

presence in Iran, the battleship Missouri (BB-63) was employed to return the 

body of deceased Turkish ambassador to the United States to Istanbul, Turkey, as 

a sign of support for the Turkish government.38 A subsequent port call in Piraeus, 

Greece, similarly signaled support for the Greek government.39 The following 

month, as the Communist insurgency in Greece grew, the aircraft carrier Franklin 

D. Roosevelt (CVB-42) and its escorts visited Piraeus to again underscore 

support for the Greek government, and the U.S. government announced a policy 

in which Navy units would be permanently stationed in the Mediterranean.40

Similar visits were conducted by U.S. naval units throughout Europe in the subsequent years. Thus, even during a perceived period of post-war retrenchment, 

the Navy re-established permanent forward presence in the western Pacific and 

Mediterranean.

1948 Onward

In 1948, the Navy began deploying combat-credible forces forward in peacetime to counter mounting Soviet and broader Communist threats. Gradually, 

the Navy returned in force to where it had ended the previous war and stayed 

forward in force throughout the Cold War (and until today). World War II had 

revealed that American security depended on ensuring that no hegemon could 

dominate Eurasia and that, if conflict did occur, the ability to control sea lanes to 

surge ground and air forces forward was essential. This experience informed the 

maintenance of superior naval forces.

National leaders sought to use the Navy to protect U.S. territory, defend 

allies, protect commerce, prevent the rise of a hegemon, and act for the common 

good. As such, the Navy would serve as an instrument of presence, deterrence, 

reassurance, and warfighting—all aiming to shape Soviet behavior.

This shift toward a Navy deployment strategy that used combat-credible 

forward forces was driven by the geopolitics of the Cold War and the state of 

military technology. In terms of geopolitics, the United States had frontline 

allies on the European continent and just offshore who required protection from 

Soviet intimidation. The seemingly high probability of a war rapidly breaking 

out gave urgency to maintaining a swift, combat-credible response that would 

serve operational aims in time of war. The ability of Soviet forces to launch their 

own nuclear strikes from 1949 onward, quickly advance onto allied territory 

with ground forces, and disperse their naval forces (some of which eventually 

fielded nuclear weapons) placed a premium on eliminating Soviet forces early in a 
10

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

conflict. Lastly, by maintaining a forward force capable of achieving operational 

aims, the Navy aimed to reassure allies and deter Communist threats.

In terms of the state of military technology, naval forces—even carrier 

aircraft—initially exhibited relatively short strike ranges, which required naval 

forces to deploy far forward if they were to be ready for immediate employment in 

conflict. Furthermore, in order to translate U.S. maritime superiority into advantage against the Soviet continental power, the Navy would require new technological innovations that enabled strike from the sea, in addition to traditional sea 

control missions, especially securing Atlantic sea lines of communication.

In the 1948 Key West Agreement, the Navy obtained the right to control 

its own aviation assets and deploy nuclear weapons “in the carrying out of its 

function,” such as striking ports and inland airfields with aircraft that may 

sortie to attack the fleet.41 As a result, the Navy developed larger, angled-deck 

“supercarriers” that incorporated catapult assisted take-off, enhanced recovery 

systems, and strengthened flight decks capable of launching heavy, long-range 

jet aircraft. In addition, in the 1950s the Navy first developed carrier-launched 

nuclear bombers and then nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs). 

Initial Polaris-class submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) featured an 

approximately 2,500-nautical mile range, requiring the forward deployment of 

SSBNs in order to reach requisite inland targets. These SSBNs were supported by 

tenders forward-based in Scotland, Spain, and Guam.42

During this Transoceanic Phase, the Navy employed self-sustaining 

combat-credible permanently forward-deployed numbered fleets that largely 

mirrored those forces that would have been used in time of war. Organized 

into European (initially mostly Mediterranean and then also eastern Atlantic), 

western Pacific, and later Arabian Sea/Persian Gulf hubs, these forces primarily 

consisted of carrier battle groups (CVBGs) and amphibious ready groups (ARGs).

These front-line capital ships and aircraft forward-deployed from the United 

States, and over time many were also forward-based. Throughout the Cold War, 

U.S. naval forces were eventually homeported in Japan, the Philippines, Bahrain, 

Spain, Greece, Italy, the United Kingdom, Iceland, and Norway, among other 

countries.43 This approach of placing front-line capital ships forward marked a 

major break from earlier deployment strategies in which forward-homeporting 

was reserved for small groups of second-line ships.

Although this approach increased the potential risk faced by fleet units 

compared to homeporting in the United States, it had both strategic and operational advantages. “Strategically, basing warfighting forces forward reduced 

American response time, showing the Soviets that aggression may be promptly 
11

Forward Presence

defeated or that punishment would be swift. Further, forward-based forces 

helped demonstrate American resolve to allies and partners concerned by the 

oceans separating them from the United States. Operationally, forward-based 

forces provide more forward presence, or enable the same presence to be maintained by a smaller overall fleet.”44

As confrontation with the Soviet Union increased in the late 1940s, U.S. 

naval officers gradually shifted their preferred deployment strategy to one in 

which combat-credible forward presence forces permanently operated forward 

to deter Soviet aggression and shape the geopolitical environment. This posture 

first took hold in Europe as forces in the Mediterranean grew into the permanent presence of a CVBG, an amphibious task force, and supporting submarine 

and destroyer deployments. The force was renamed the Sixth Task Fleet in June 

1948.45 Later, a combat-credible forward presence posture was adopted in the 

western Pacific, with the deployment of a carrier task force to the western Pacific 

on a permanent basis in 1950.46 Thus, the Navy adopted a two forward presence 

hub strategy in which at least two carrier task forces operated in each of the 

European and western Pacific hubs.

By the early 1950s, the “home fleets” (the First and Second, and after 1973 

the Third in place of the First) conducted at-sea fleet exercise coordination for 

the Navy.47 Of note, these exercises took place not only near the United States, 

but also far forward. Often the exercises aimed to “work up,” or prepare, naval 

forces for forward deployments, and these forces and already forward forces used 

exercises to demonstrate U.S. offensive capabilities and exercise freedom of navigation consistent with international law.

All the while, forward-operating forces continued to respond to a variety 

of crises. For example, following the withdrawal of Nationalist Forces from the 

Chinese mainland to Taiwan in 1949, Navy forces served to deter threatened 

Communist Chinese invasions of Taiwan and Nationalist invasions of Mainland 

China on various occasions, and in 1954 the Navy supported rescue efforts for a 

Cathay Pacific airliner that was shot down by People’s Republic of China aircraft 

(and during the course of operations downed three People’s Liberation Army 

aircraft that fired on U.S. aircraft).48

Each of the forward fleets was considered capable of responding independently and supported by follow-on forces across the spectrum of operations. 

Although the Korean and Vietnam Wars did lead to the deployment of additional 

forces, and certain crises such as the 1956 Suez Crisis led to the surge deployment 

of additional forces, the Navy’s deployment strategy remained relatively constant.

The Navy’s procurement strategy fluctuated significantly during this period. 
12

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

The post–World War II decline in the size of the fleet continued throughout the 

late 1940s, and in 1949 Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson cancelled the planned 

United States (CVA-58), the first of the so-called supercarriers, and would have 

established a Fiscal Year 1951 carrier force level requirement of four fleet aircraft 

carriers.49 A series of congressional hearings and combat experience in Korea 

demonstrated the utility of a larger fleet in general—and a larger carrier fleet in 

particular—and the new Secretary of Defense, George C. Marshall, approved 

construction of the first supercarrier, Forrestal (CVA-59).50 The size of the carrier 

fleet grew from 11 in 1950 to 26 in 1962, before declining as older and less 

capable carriers were replaced by new construction.

During the early Cold War, the Navy deployed three classes of capabilities 

that greatly enhanced its combat credibility: the aforementioned nuclear forces, 

the Military Sea Transport Service, and forward-operating intelligence units. In 

1949 the Military Sea Transport Service (the progenitor of the Military Sealift 

Command) was created, ensuring capable sealift forces would be retained and 

deployed in peacetime and reducing the Navy’s reliance on the merchant marine 

for limited contingencies.51 This force not only addressed strategic sealift requirements, but also ensured that naval forces would have ready underway and afloat 

logistics (as opposed to slowly-surging support forces). Many of these forces were 

forward-deployed and some were forward-homeported.

The Navy also fielded various forward-operating intelligence units, with 

“Naval Communications Units” operating following World War II from Port 

Lyautey, Morocco, and Sangley Point, Philippines.52 Electronic intelligence 

aircraft operating from these home bases conducted operations from forward 

staging points to cover targets throughout Europe, the Middle East, and the 

western Pacific. Given surging collection requirements and growing numbers of 

other U.S. naval forces operating forward, the first Fleet Intelligence Center was 

activated at Port Lyautey, Morocco, in March 1954.53

While the grand majority of Navy intelligence gathering missions by aircraft, 

ships, and other assets were conducted covertly, a series of attacks on and seizures 

of Navy intelligence-gathering assets in international waters and airspace in the 

late 1960s drew significant public attention. In particular the 1967 seizure by 

North Korean forces of Pueblo (AGR-2), the 1967 attack by Israeli forces on 

Liberty (AGTR-5), and the 1968 shootdown by North Korean forces of an 

EC-121 reconnaissance aircraft were notably covered by the press.54

In the 1970s, the Navy continued a strategy of forward-deploying 

combat-credible forces in groups of two carrier task forces and amphibious 

ready groups in both the Mediterranean and western Pacific. However, under 
13

Forward Presence

the command of Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, 

the Navy also planned to forward base those forces in the same regions.55 In the 

Mediterranean, efforts to forward-base naval units in Italy and Greece progressed 

until political change in Greece and mounting budgetary limits constrained these 

initiatives. In the Pacific, however, starting in 1972, Japanese ports hosted a 

growing number of Seventh Fleet assets, including carrier and amphibious task 

forces. The homeporting of the carrier Midway (CVA-41) at Yokosuka in 1973 

(and subsequent carriers) increased the credibility of extended deterrence over 

Japan and served as a bridge between the U.S. nuclear umbrella and Japan’s 

non-nuclear policy.56 Thus, the Seventh Fleet was forward-based, while the Sixth 

Fleet remained largely forward-deployed.

In the 1960s, growing Soviet presence in the Indian Ocean and receding 

British military power led observers to contend U.S. naval presence was wanting 

in the region.57 In the early 1970s, in addition to its two hubs, the Navy began 

an intermittent but routine presence of carrier task forces in the Indian Ocean 

that grew to an almost permanent presence of carrier or surface combatant task 

forces by 1979.58

The 1970s witnessed growth in the size and capability of the Soviet 

Navy, while the size of the Navy diminished from 885 ships in 1969 to 521 

by 1981.59 This decline notably included a major reduction in the number of 

aircraft carriers, amphibious ships, and submarines. Guided by Admiral of the 

Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergey Gorshkov, the Soviet Navy underwent a major 

quantitative and qualitative expansion that sought to inhibit the ability of Navy 

forces (in particular CVBGs) to operate within strike range of the Soviet Union. 

New bombers armed with antiship cruise missiles (ASCMs), nuclear attack and 

guided missile submarines with ASCMs, and satellites contributed to a deepening 

“reconnaissance-strike” complex capable of effectively locating and striking 

U.S. CVBGs.

These growing threats began to manifest themselves in the late 1950s and 

1960s. In the 1950s, Soviet bombers could effectively hold at risk Sixth Fleet 

assets in the Mediterranean. In response the Navy developed new air defense 

technologies and tactical deception methods, tested through the Haystack 

Exercises beginning in 1957.60 The introduction of Soviet nuclear-powered attack 

submarines (SSNs) in the late 1950s and SSNs armed with ASCMs in the 1960s 

again challenged Haystack tactics, forcing the Navy to devise new capabilities 

and new tactics under Project UPTIDE (Unified Pacific Fleet Project for Tactical 

Improvement and Data Extraction) for antisubmarine warfare groups (typically 

an ASW carrier, its air wing, and a destroyer squadron) to frustrate and defend 
14

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

against missile and torpedo attacks by enemy submarines within moving or static 

areas of high tactical interest.61

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Navy developed new methods to track and 

exploit the poor sensitivity of Soviet radar ocean-reconnaissance and electronic 

intelligence ocean reconnaissance satellites, so that large warships, such as 

aircraft carriers, could maneuver to avoid and if necessary present their smallest 

radar cross sections and minimize emissions as satellites passed overhead.62

Additionally, in the early 1980s the Navy developed new capabilities and concepts 

for long-range air defense, such as Outer Air Battle and the Aegis weapon system, 

to counter Soviet bombers and incorporated U.S. SSNs into CVBG operations to 

counter quiet Soviet SSNs and SSGNs. However, the growing number of these 

sophisticated threats, coupled with a period of decreased readiness in the Navy, 

presented major challenges in the 1970s and early 1980s.

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan and Secretary of the Navy John Lehman 

proposed a 600-ship fleet. This fleet aimed to counter growing Soviet capability 

and capacity and ensure the Navy had sufficient capacity in peacetime to operate 

in multiple regions simultaneously. Consequently, peacetime operating forces 

significantly influenced the force size.

During the 1980s, the planned employment strategy of the “home fleets,” 

the Second and Third Fleets, increasingly took the form of multi-carrier operations off of Soviet Pacific strongholds and Scandinavia. In a series of exercises, 

the Navy trained to sustain the flow of reinforcements to Europe (and possibly 

some forces to Russia’s Pacific coast) during a conflict with the Soviet Union and 

conduct strikes from CVBGs in the northern Atlantic, eastern Mediterranean, 

and western Pacific. These aims were codified in the 1982 maritime strategy, 

elements of which were publicly released in 1986.63

The 1980s witnessed the addition of a third forward deployment hub in the 

Arabian Sea, designed to counter Iranian threats in the vital waterway and ward 

off Soviet interference in the region. Although the Navy grew in the 1980s from 

521 ships in 1981 to 594 in 1987, the addition of a third hub reduced the number of 

CVBGs normally forward in the other hubs from two to one.64 The third hub also 

increased the number of Military Sealift Command prepositioning ships deployed 

to Diego Garcia.65 Finally, the response of forward-deployed and home-based 

forces to numerous crises increased the length of ship deployments, leading to 

sailor dissatisfaction. In 1985, CNO Admiral James Watkins announced “a 

policy of six-month maximum peacetime deployments, thus setting a bound on 

deployments of combat-credible forces forward in the absence of war”—a policy 

that would be revised and greatly exceeded in the coming decades.66
15

Forward Presence

One technological change that reduced the level of forward deployment was 

the introduction of the long-range Trident SLBM. This new, longer-range missile 

reduced the need for forward-deployed support for SSBNs, and forward SSBN 

sites and tenders were gradually withdrawn, with Rota tenders withdrawing in 

1979 and Holy Loch tenders in 1992. 

1978 CBO Report on Peacetime Presence

In 1978, Dov Zakheim and Andrew Hamilton released a Congressional Budget 

Office report on Navy peacetime presence.67 The report astutely observed that 

although combat-credible Navy overseas presence centered on CVBGs was a key 

aspect of U.S. political relationships with many of its overseas allies, the mission 

placed a substantial demand on naval forces and budgets.68

The report identified that, regardless of wartime need, a minimum of 12 

operational carrier battle groups was required to meet Navy peacetime missions 

of two CVBGs at each of two hubs. The report also identified an excessive 

concentration of the Navy’s offensive striking power in carrier platforms and 

their airwings that required a large number of other defensive platforms to 

increase their survivability.69

By contrast, U.S. aims in the Indian Ocean and the Middle East would likely 

not require CVBGs, but could instead be met with “lower-value forces” that would 

be less costly to procure and maintain, such as land-based aircraft to perform 

naval missions or landing helicopter assault ships or smaller conventional carriers 

with vertical/short take-off and landing aircraft.70 This approach could also be 

applied to the permanent deployment of CVBGs to the eastern Mediterranean 

given the threat posed by bomber bases in the Soviet Union. Other alternatives 

to the Navy’s posture included homeporting an additional carrier overseas (thus 

reducing the number of carriers required to support forward deployments) and 

moving to a flexible, as opposed to a permanent, deployment pattern.

Overall, the report foresaw the dilution of naval power as a third hub 

emerged and recommended consideration of alternatives that facilitated a 

more regionally-tailored, economical, and flexible approach to presence and 

crisis-response requirements than currently available, which “uniformly call for 

carrier forces in all regions.”71 Many of the report’s concerns and alternatives 

apply today.

1990s and Early 2000s

The fall of the Soviet Union and changes in the global environment led to 
16

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

significant adjustment in Navy deployment strategy. Iraq’s 1990 invasion of 

Kuwait and subsequent U.S. operations in the region increased Navy forward 

deployments in the Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf. In 1995 the Navy reestablished 

the Fifth Fleet, with its headquarters in Bahrain.72 Although the headquarters was 

forward-based, the majority of the fleet’s combatant ships were forward-deployed 

from the United States. Although the Navy adopted the goal of maintaining three 

hubs in the Pacific, Mediterranean, and Arabian Sea/Persian Gulf, declining force 

levels (with the force shrinking to 337 active ships by 2001) and the reallocation 

of forces to other theaters frequently resulted in major presence gaps—in particular, CVBG presence.

 The 1993 Department of Defense (DOD) Bottom-Up Review (BUR) aimed 

to restructure military forces for the post–Cold War era. The review sought to 

address the “dangers posed by nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass 

destruction; regional dangers; dangers to democracy and reform; and economic 

dangers.”73 A near-simultaneous two major regional conflict (informed by the 

threats posed by Iraq and North Korea) served as the lead force-sizing and 

shaping construct, with peace enforcement and “Intervention Operations” as the 

second set of operations that would size and shape forces.74

Recommending a fleet of 346 ships (including 11 active aircraft carriers, 

one reserve/training aircraft carrier, and 45–55 attack submarines), the BUR 

asserted that peacetime overseas presence needs, especially for aircraft carriers, 

could exceed those needed to win two major regional contingencies (MRC). 

Recognizing the utility of naval combatants to conduct a range of non-MRC 

missions, the review force structure was “sized to reflect the exigencies of overseas presence, as well as the warfighting requirements of MRCs.”75

The BUR’s assumptions and recommendations came under critical review, 

with observers commenting that the review’s force structure was unaffordable 

under the William J. Clinton administration’s proposed defense budget. Increased 

engagement and peace enforcement and intervention operations would stretch 

thin forces obligated for MRCs (especially as the fleet shrunk compared to the 

Cold War), and combatant commanders questioned assumptions and strategic 

enabler capacities in the plan to respond to two near-simultaneous MRCs.76

The Navy informed and supported the incorporation of forward presence as 

a Navy-unique leading force-sizing criterion in the 1993 BUR.77 Additionally, as 

threats to Navy sea control declined, the Navy emphasized its power projection 

capabilities across the range of operations and argued that its combat-credible 

forward deployment strategy was its principal force-sizing criterion and organizing concept.78 Its 1994 service operational concept Forward . . . From the Sea
17

Forward Presence

articulated the value of forward-deployed and based power projection forces,79

and the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) similarly asserted that “the 

demands associated with maintaining overseas presence play a significant role in 

determining the size of our naval forces.”80 Some observers commented that this 

combat-credible forward presence-based argument enabled the Navy to “win” 

the inter-service rivalry battle of the 1997 QDR, “by being able to fend off any 

potential further cuts to the centerpieces of its force structure—aircraft carriers.”81

In terms of naval force posture, the BUR identified the goal of being able 

to maintain a carrier strike group (CSG) and amphibious ready group (ARG) 

more or less continuously off Southwest Asia, Northeast Asia, and Europe (in 

the Mediterranean); however, in order to reduce the length of deployments while 

shrinking the force, the review identified “ways to fill gaps in carrier presence 

or to supplement our posture even when carriers are present” with ARGs, 

Tomahawk-launching cruisers, destroyers, and submarines, and land-based 

maritime patrol aircraft.82

During the 1990s, the Navy greatly increased its support of military operations other than war around the world as well as its deployment of forces for 

partnership-building deployments off Africa, South America, and Southeast 

Asia. These operations and frequent combat operations employed Navy and 

other service forces at higher rates than anticipated by the BUR, leading to the 

reallocation of research, development, and acquisition funding to operations and 

maintenance accounts.

During this period, there were calls for experimental fleet battle exercises that 

mirrored those of the interwar years, and the Navy did conduct some fleet battle 

experiments and joint fleet exercises. However, these exercises—conducted in 

addition to a variety of forward-presence activities that demanded a large portion 

of the shrinking fleet’s available time—resulted in them largely transforming into 

work-up exercises that prepared fleet units for elements of forward deployment.83

During the 1990s, the Navy’s repair ship and destroyer tender forces were 

eliminated, and the forward submarine tender force significantly cut, as most 

repair responsibilities shifted back to bases in the United States.84 Throughout 

the Cold War, intermediate-level maintenance and repair increasingly became 

a function of forward-based and homeland-based depots ashore. By the 1990s, 

the Navy’s mobile logistics force (with the exception of the Combat Logistics 

Force underway replenishment assets) atrophied. Beginning with the deployment 

of prepositioning ships to Diego Garcia in 1981, the Afloat Prepositioning Force 

permanently forward-deployed ships with equipment and supplies (largely for 

Marine Corps, Army, and Air Force requirements) for immediate offloading 
18

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

in contingencies. Overall, this trend reduced the ability of the Navy to conduct 

forward or transoceanic operations independent of land bases.

In the early 2000s, the Navy continued a deployment strategy of 

forward-deploying combat-credible forces, albeit in two-and-a-half rather than 

three hubs, with the Mediterranean receiving a de facto “half-hub” status as 

ongoing combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq drew a greater proportion of 

naval forces and the size of the fleet continued to shrink.85

Service strategies further elevated the role of combat-credible forward presence. The 2007 Department of the Navy and Coast Guard strategy, A Cooperative 

Strategy for 21st Century Seapower, identified it as a distinct strategic advantage 

for the nation, the aegis of the global economic system, and an essential feature to 

prevent wars in addition to winning them.86 In 2015 a revised maritime strategy 

titled Forward, Engaged, Ready: A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century 

Seapower continued to highlight forward presence as an enabler of deterrence, 

rapid crisis response, partner training, and maritime security.87 Additionally the 

revised strategy explicitly named “challenges” from China, Russia, and Iran as 

reasons to maintain combat-credible forward presence to deter, and if necessary, 

defeat aggression.

Yet even during this period, the ever-increasing demand for forward presence 

was significantly outpacing forces available. In congressional testimony, Vice 

Admiral Conrad Lautenbacher, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, declared that 

“it is no secret that our current resources of 316 ships are fully deployed and in 

many cases stretched thin to meet the growing national security demands,” and 

commentators bemoaned the “tyrannical hold” of presence that threatened to 

break Navy readiness.88

THE CURRENT STATE OF FORWARD PRESENCE

More than a quarter century since the end of the Cold War, the United States 

still follows the same Cold War approach to forward presence. It persistently 

forward deploys and bases major combat-credible units in two to three hubs. 

Although the pattern of deployments has changed, with more forces allocated to 

the Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf and fewer to the Atlantic and Mediterranean, 

the fundamental deployment strategy remains the same. All the while, the Navy 

has contributed to large and small ongoing combat operations around the world 

and fielded other independent deploying assets to do engagement, crisis response, 

and short term surges.89
19

Forward Presence

Peter Swartz contends that the major factors that drive determination of 

deployment strategy include: the international environment, the domestic environment and strategic outlook, and technological innovation.90 Arguably, all 

three have changed in a way that would suggest a need to reevaluate deployment 

strategy in general and forward presence in particular.

Challenges to Current Forward Presence

The growth and spread of precision strike capabilities and the cost of modes 

of forward operation call into question both the value and sustainability of the 

current U.S. approach to naval forward presence. A growing number of precision 

strike capabilities can hold forward-operating fleet assets at risk. These capabilities apply to adversaries such as China, Russia, and Iran, but also increasingly 

(albeit at lower levels of scale and sophistication) to smaller states and nonstate 

actors. Most notably, the People’s Republic of China has developed antiship 

ballistic missiles (ASBMs) capable of engaging surface ships at ranges exceeding 

2,000 nautical miles.91 These threats are complimented by Chinese and Russian 

aircraft, surface ships, and submarines that can fire a variety of missiles and 

torpedoes, and multi-phenomenology integrated surveillance and targeting 

complexes that challenge American counterintelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance efforts—especially for forward operating vessels. While U.S. undersea 

superiority has long been regarded as a major advantage in potential contingencies, improvements in Chinese and Russian antisubmarine warfare capabilities 

may also threaten submarine operations in forward areas.92

Analyzing these trends, a 2015 RAND Corporation report concluded that:

over the next five to 15 years, if U.S. and PLA forces remain on roughly 

current trajectories, Asia will witness a progressively receding frontier of 

U.S. dominance. . . . PLA forces will become more capable of establishing 

temporary local air and naval superiority at the outset of a conflict. In certain 

regional contingencies, this temporal or local superiority might enable the 

PLA to achieve limited objectives without ‘defeating’ U.S. forces.93

The growing effectiveness of Chinese and Russian military forces may lead 

them to believe they can rapidly achieve campaign objectives and possibly even 

deter American intervention—especially if conducted in a low-intensity “gray zone 

warfare” manner. Conversely, these trends may undercut the combat credibility 

of U.S. forces to allies, diminishing the reassurance aims of forward-deployed 

capital units.
20

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Overall, the Navy faces a range of threats that significantly exceed the scale 

and sophistication of those envisioned in the 1993 Bottom-Up Review and subsequent analyses that sized a Navy to defeat regional aggressors with “100–200 

naval vessels, primarily patrol craft armed with surface-to-surface missiles, and 

up to 50 submarines.”94 The Navy’s 2016 Force Structure Assessment called for 

355 ships, in part based on the expectation that the force would suffer additional 

losses in conflict against a peer or near peer adversary. Of note, the 355 ship total 

was the “minimum force structure to comply with [Pentagon] strategic guidance” 

and was not the “desired” force size the Navy would pursue if resources were 

not a constraint, which would be a 653-ship fleet to meet all global presence and 

warfighting requirements with minimal risk.95

Current forward presence models also face another challenge: The fiscal and 

opportunity costs of current modes of operation and the cost of the fleet are 

difficult to sustain. In the post–Cold War environment, the demand for naval 

forces has significantly increased. In the 1990s, the Navy did not reap a “peace 

dividend,” as it conducted “persistent operations in the Balkans, the Caribbean, 

and the Persian Gulf after Desert Storm, continued its role in Asia, and expanded 

its peacetime engagement as COCOMs [combat commands] increased ‘shaping’ 

activities.”96 After 9/11, the Navy decreased its role in the Balkans and Caribbean 

but dramatically increased its homeland defense and ballistic missile defense 

roles, conducted major operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and adopted new 

humanitarian assistance, maritime partnership building, littoral combat, and 

special operational forces missions. Overall, the Navy battle force has shrunk, 

while the number of ships on deployment has remained relatively steady and the 

Navy has increased its forward presence missions.97 To achieve this, the number 

of ships undergoing maintenance or underway in the continental United States 

for training has decreased (with deleterious effects on readiness to conduct 

high-intensity operations against adversaries) and the length and frequency of 

deployments have increased (resulting in a reduction in time available for maintenance, a reduction in the time available for training, and negative impacts on 

morale).98 Demand for additional naval forces in the European theater (in the 

North Atlantic and Mediterranean) to deter Russian aggression and hold at risk 

Russian or Syrian forces threatens to significantly increase demands on naval 

forces, absent a concomitant major reduction in naval forces elsewhere.

Although Navy leadership has hoped for a respite from operations to “reset” 

the force, the current national commitment to forward-deploying naval forces, 

centered around major fleet units, makes this challenging.99 In a sense, the Navy 

has fallen victim to its own success in promoting and executing forward-deployed 
21

Forward Presence

combat-credible naval forces, with insatiable demand for more naval forces 

forward exceeding available supply. This imbalance applies not only to aircraft 

carriers, but even to amphibious forces, such as expeditionary strike groups, 

that are increasingly requested to not only counter major adversaries, but also to 

provide additional forward presence for engagement and counter-nonstate actor 

operations in the littorals.100

Whereas the tempo of current operations strains the force, the Navy also 

faces another challenge: the continued decline in the size of its fleet. Since the 

1980s, it has continued to shrink, almost without interruption, to 275 ships in 

2017.101 Although the Navy aims to grow the fleet in its shipbuilding plans, it is 

unclear it will receive adequate shipbuilding funds to achieve those goals. Per the 

Congressional Budget Office, the Fiscal Year 2016 30-Year Shipbuilding Plan 

would be 32 percent more expensive than the Navy’s historical average annual 

shipbuilding budgets,102 and if it received an average annual shipbuilding budget 

of $16 billion (its recent historical average), the fleet inventory would decrease to 

251 ships by 2044.103 Even amid the decline in the size of the fleet, concern has 

been raised that the Navy has inadequately emphasized investments in modernization and readiness essential to ensuring forces are effective in combat against peer 

or near-peer adversaries. In a 2015 memorandum, Secretary of Defense Ashton 

Carter chastised Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus that the Department of the 

Navy budget had “overemphasized resources used to incrementally increase total 

ship numbers [thus aiding the maintenance of forward presence] at the expense of 

critically-needed investments” for warfighting.104 Absent major growth in the size 

of the fleet, these fiscal and operational dynamics present the Navy with a difficult choice: reduce forward presence to increase readiness at home or continue 

with the current course that risks undermining readiness and combat capability.

Options for Navy Force Planning

Naval forces can continue to play major roles in addressing U.S. national security 

challenges. While current forward deployment models appear unsustainable for 

operational and fiscal reasons, there are force planning options that can adjust 

naval capabilities, posture, and forces as appropriate. This essay examines three 

classes of primary options: status quo, status quo-plus, and withdrawal that relies 

on range.105

The nation could choose to continue to pursue the status quo option for 

Navy deployment strategy and force structure. Under this option, easy to implement bureaucratically and politically (both domestically and internationally), the 

nation would continue to follow the same deployment strategy developed in the 
22

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Cold War. Innovations to the current approach could seek to “optimize” to maintain forward presence with a smaller fleet by increasing the length and frequency 

of deployments, basing more ships overseas, or rotating crews.106

However, this approach would ultimately whistle past the graveyard. It would 

accept greater risk as the number of forces available forward decline due to the 

shrinking fleet and as growing strains on the fleet to maintain forces forward 

reduce readiness. Additionally, this approach would likely suffer from reduced 

combat credibility. Over time many classes of forward-deployed naval forces 

could be held at greater degrees of risk by adversaries.107 This would undermine 

deterrence and reassurance objectives. It might even encourage opportunistic 

aggression by adversaries, since forward-deployed units organized around CSGs 

and ESGs (expeditionary strike groups) would neither be well suited to effectively 

counter low-intensity gray zone aggression nor be effectively suited to respond in 

mass with a surge force to counter high-intensity aggression because the readiness 

of forward-deployed forces would be prioritized over forces in the United States.

In a “status quo plus” option, the nation would continue to deploy 

combat-credible forces forward, but to reduce their vulnerability, it would employ 

alternative force packages and concepts. This could include the use of large-deck 

amphibious ships or smaller carriers to substitute for CVNs or the incorporation 

of additional offensive weapons on surface combatants, both efforts to disperse 

the combat potential of the fleet among a greater number of forces. Leveraging 

concepts such as distributed lethality and electromagnetic maneuver warfare, it 

would seek to create a resilient force that would still conduct operations forward.

Without the participation of CVN-based carrier air wings (CVW), this force 

may, however, lack the requisite firepower to effectively defend surface forces 

or conduct sustained offensive operations. Additionally, if counter-intelligence, 

surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) efforts were not as effective as desired, 

then the forward operation of the dispersed fleet could make it vulnerable to 

destruction in detail.

A third option is to withdraw from forward presence and rely on long-range 

strike capabilities, both within and without the Navy. Reducing the forward presence of major fleet units, such as CSGs, would decrease their risk to detection and 

destruction. The fleet could leverage long-range CVW aircraft and missiles to 

launch powerful strikes before withdrawing once more to a safer area.

This approach might be effective for high-intensity strike and sea denial operations; however, absent complementary lower campaign value forward-operating 

forces it would suffer difficulty demonstrating presence in a region or addressing 

low-intensity gray zone threats. Additionally, unless sufficient numbers of 
23

Forward Presence

relatively expensive, long-range munitions were procured, high munitions expenditure rates would be difficult to sustain over the course of a campaign.

An Alternative Approach to Forward Presence

All three classes of primary options face significant limitations. Instead, the nation 

requires a deployment strategy that distinguishes between the different peacetime 

and wartime tasks naval forces conduct and a force structure that matches these 

demands. Inextricably linked in effective strategic planning, both force posture 

and force structure must be tailored to current and future challenges.

Squadrons of forward-deployed forces would focus on peacetime presence, 

deterrence, assurance, and warfighting missions. These forces would consist of 

lower vulnerability assets (such as submarines) and lower campaign value assets 

(such as smaller surface combatants and various kinds of unmanned systems), yet 

would be able to reassure allies and deter weak adversaries. During a major conflict, 

these peacetime forces would be capable of conducting offensive operations for 

operationally-relevant periods of time. Guided by new operational concepts and 

grouped into force packages, this force would not be capable of assured defense 

of allies, but would be capable of significantly delaying or disrupting adversary 

aggression (instead of serving as a mere tripwire).108 Some elements of these forces 

could include new heterogeneous architectures of manned-unmanned systems of 

systems, including patrol boats, frigates, submarines, and unmanned sensors 

and surface and undersea vehicles, that would be capable of holding adversary 

maritime forces at risk or providing long-endurance surveillance and targeting 

for standoff forces at low cost. When forward-deployed sea-based aviation 

assets are necessary, they would be fielded from large-deck amphibious ships 

and surface ships, not aircraft carriers. Non-low signature forward-operating 

forces would be expected to suffer relatively high attrition rates in a sudden, 

high-intensity conflict.

In such a conflict, surviving forward-deployed forces would complement 

the large surging warfighting force. This force would focus on multi-carrier, 

cross-domain, high-end warfare and would incorporate a mix of standoff and 

stand-in capabilities (such as CSGs with long-range CVWs, surface ships with 

standoff missiles, and submarines) and would have the requisite mass to conduct 

sustained operations from multiple, geographically distant axes. To ensure 

that a requisite number of surge forces would be capable of responding in an 

operationally-relevant period of time, a portion of the surge force would conduct 

fleet exercises and occasional cruises. The rest of the force would be maintained 

in the homeland at relatively high states of readiness.
24

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Critical to the combined fleet would be a robust and redundant 

defense-industrial base capable of developing and supporting the fleet in peacetime and rapidly expanding production of defense platforms and systems in 

wartime to sustain a potential protracted, high attrition conflict.

In many respects, this bifurcated force posture would mimic the fleet’s 

interwar period deployment strategy. The surge fleet would conduct “recurrent 

large-scale exercises in home waters [. . .] undistracted by the pull of a different 

actual peacetime employment strategy.”109 In contrast, however, to the Asiatic 

Fleet, forward-operating forces would have sufficient striking power to delay or 

disrupt adversary operations.

In 2016 the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) conducted 

a congressionally-directed alternative fleet architecture study that generated a 

geographically tailored force similar to the one proposed.110 As discussed, the 

study divided forces into a forward-operating and geographically-tailored deterrence force and a surging maneuver force. Forces operated forward throughout 

the western Pacific, Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf, Mediterranean and North 

Atlantic, Africa, and Central and South America. To ensure credible coverage, 

the proposed fleet’s total battle force consisted of 366 ships (408 if patrol vessels 

are counted).111

The challenges to developing a new force structure and posture are likely to 

be both budgetary and social. Budgetarily, a number of studies, to include the 

Navy’s 2016 Force Structure Assessment and CSBA’s study, recommend growing 

the Navy to or past 350 ships. However, the nation may not devote the requisite 

level of funding to grow the fleet.112 For instance, the average annual cost to 

procure CSBA’s proposed alternative fleet architecture (including the wartime 

Combat Logistics Force) is $23.6 billion, 20 percent greater than the Obama 

administration’s President’s Budget (PB) 2017 plan.113 The operations and maintenance costs associated with the proposed fleet architecture plan will cost an 

average of $16.5 billion per year, 14 percent more than the PB 2017 level.114

Further, the United States has acculturated friends and adversaries to equate 

forward presence with commitment and CSGs as the primary sign of commitment. This situation places the United States in a delicate balance maintaining 

adequate levels of presence and combat credibility. Additionally, as the Navy fields 

more unmanned vehicles or other lower signature forces, it may face difficulty 

deterring adversaries or reassuring allies using these new platforms—especially 

if they are usually unseen. Additionally, lacking humans, unmanned systems 

may not pose the same tripwire barriers to adversaries, who may be comfortable 

neutralizing these systems with lowered expectations of escalation.
25

Forward Presence

Nonetheless, an alternative Navy force posture and structure can be pursued 

and implemented. The Navy and senior DOD leaders should clearly articulate 

the need for higher overall defense and Navy budgets to develop Navy force 

structures and postures properly aligned with threats and opportunities. The 

Navy’s post-1970 budgets have remained flat in real terms as a percentage of 

gross domestic product, while continually-increasing portions of the Navy 

budget are consumed by non-research and development, procurement, or maintenance costs.115 Absent a larger budget and reform of growing costs that do 

not contribute to military effectiveness, the Navy may be forced into a situation 

similar to that of early 20th century Great Britain, in which the Royal Navy 

reoriented its posture to meet the German threat in the North Sea, leaving the 

western Atlantic and eastern Pacific to the United States.116 In the 21st century, 

there is not a suitably capable, benevolent great power on the horizon.

Furthermore, even if the Navy’s budget does not increase to the level required 

to procure and sustain the full alternative force structures (and it is essential that 

they increase), the proposed bifurcated deployment strategy could still be implemented by forces to varying degrees.

Additionally, dedicated alliance and partner engagement efforts and strategic 

signaling to adversaries would be critical to accustom states to combat-credible 

non-CSG forward-operating naval forces. Cognizant of the enormous initial 

alliance management challenges associated with this approach, with the right 

level of engagement, such an approach could overcome initial ally and partner 

concerns and result in an even more credible force, since both allies and partners 

and adversaries would recognize the operationally-superior combat performance 

and availability of the new force.

Strategic communication would convey that the force posture of this bifurcated fleet would not be a withdrawal from the region, but rather a growth in 

forward-operating low-signature and low-campaign value forces (that would 

likely result in a significant net increase in the total number of assets operating 

forward—many of them unmanned) and a repositioning of higher signature 

forces to an optimal deterrence and warfighting areas. Moreover, during the 

transition period from the current status quo deployment strategy to the new 

deterrence force/maneuver force strategy, uncertainty regarding U.S. operational 

capabilities in both forces (some of which would be unknown or poorly understood by adversaries) could significantly contribute to deterrence since that uncertainty could “tip cost/benefit calculations in favor of restraint.”117
26

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

CONCLUSION

Change in Navy deployment strategy has been constant. While the Navy has 

always had a forward presence, the character of that presence has adapted to 

fluctuations in the domestic power and interests of the United States, the global 

environment, and technological capabilities.118 Today, the nation faces changes 

in its domestic power with the prospect of new defense budgets, changes in the 

global environment with great power adversaries, capable regional actors, and 

nonstate actors all threatening it in different ways, and technological innovation 

on the part of adversaries and the United States alike that present major threats 

and opportunities.

A new force structure and posture strategy would address these major changes. 

In evaluating the strategic effectiveness of the alternative forward deployment 

strategy, three fundamental questions must be posed: how to measure presence; 

what is it that allies and friends pay attention to; and what is it that competitors 

pay attention to?

Careful examination by Navy leaders and policymakers would identify the 

proposed strategy’s virtues. It would also recognize the capabilities and limitations of these naval forces. In particular, naval forces—even forward-deployed 

and present deterrence forces—may be limited in their ability to shape adversaries.119 Accordingly, shaping operations should be carefully evaluated and 

specifically targeted. Similarly, for some forms of aggression, including some 

gray zone warfare actions, the Navy may not be the best proactive or reactive 

U.S. government organization. Instead, whole-of-government efforts or efforts 

drawing on the capabilities of other organizations may be more effective. Lastly, 

it is likely that changing Chinese and Russian deployment patterns (including 

Chinese forward deployment in the Indian Ocean) will require further evolutions 

in U.S. deployment strategy.120 A fleet that has the flexibility to tailor its forces 

forward and husband its power can more effectively respond to these challenges.

The continuation of a 70-year-old deployment strategy is an historical 

aberration, and it is increasingly operationally and strategically ineffective. The 

United States must adopt new, tailored approaches that employ more of the right 

forces forward for both peace and war and hold more of the right forces further 

back for employment in war. An approach that deploys differentiated deterrence 

and maneuver forces sets the Navy and the nation on a course for success.
27

Forward Presence

Notes

1 Samuel Huntington, “National Policy and the Transoceanic Navy,” U.S. Naval 

Institute Proceedings 80, no. 5 (May 1954), 483.

2 Of note, Huntington’s work was particularly timely as it advanced a service strategic concept that addressed counter-arguments (especially by some early nuclear 

theorists and the U.S. Air Force) that the Navy and Army were largely irrelevant to 

future warfare.

3 Peter M. Swartz, Sea Changes: Transforming US Navy Deployment Strategy, 1775–

2002 (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 31 July 2002).

4 Adam B. Siegel, The Use of Naval Forces in the Post-War Era: U.S. Navy and U.S. 

Marine Corps Crisis Response Activity, 1946–1990, CRM 90-246 (Alexandria, VA: 

Center for Naval Analyses, February 1991).

5 Jay L. Johnson, Forward . . . From the Sea (Washington, DC: U.S. Navy, March 

1997), http://www.navy.mil/navydata/policy/fromsea/ffseanoc.html.

6 Dov S. Zakheim and Andrew Hamilton, U.S. Naval Forces: The Peacetime Presence 

Mission (Washington, DC: Congressional Budget Office, December 1978), https://

www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/95th-congress-1977-1978/reports/78-cbo-044.pdf.

7 Daniel Whiteneck, Michael Price, Neil Jenkins, and Peter Swartz, The Navy at a 

Tipping Point: Maritime Dominance at Stake? (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval 

Analyses, 2010), 3.

8 Eric Labs, Preserving the Navy’s Forward Presence with a Smaller Fleet (Washington, 

DC: Congressional Budget Office, March 2015).

9 Bryan Clark and Jesse Sloman, Deploying Beyond Their Means: America’s Navy 

and Marine Corps at a Tipping Point (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and 

Budgetary Assessments, 18 November 2015).

Of note, Thomas Mahnken serves as President and Chief Executive Officer 

of CSBA.

10 Ian Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the US Navy (New York: 

W. W. Norton, 2006).

11 Michael A. Palmer, Stoddert’s War: Naval Operations During the Quasi-War with 

France, 1798–1801 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1987).

12 William S. Dudley, “The Origins of the U.S. Navy’s Mediterranean Squadron, 1783–

1816,” International Journal of Naval History, 1 (April 2002).

13 Gordon K. Harrington, “The American Challenge to the English East India Company 

During the War of 1812,” in New Interpretations in Naval History: Selected Papers 

from the Tenth Naval History Symposium, eds. Jack Sweetman et al. (Annapolis, 

MD: Naval Institute Press, 1993).

14 Swartz, Sea Changes, 18.

15 Ibid., 78.

16 Stanley L. Falk, “Disarmament on the Great Lakes: Myth or Reality?,” U.S. Naval 

Institute Proceedings 87 (December 1961), 69–73.

17 Kemp Tolley, Yangtze Patrol: The U.S. Navy in China (Annapolis, MD: Naval 

Institute Press, 1971).
28

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

18 K. Jack Bauer. A Maritime History of the United States: The Role of America’s Seas 

and Waterways (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), 241–96.

19 Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783

(Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1890).

20 Swartz, Sea Changes, 29.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 Holger H. Herwig, Politics of Frustration: The United States in German Naval 

Planning, 1889–1941 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1976), 42–91.

24 Seward W. Livermore, “The American Navy as a Factor in World Politics, 1903–

1913,” American Historical Review 63: 4 (July 1958): 879.

25 James R. Reckner, Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet (Annapolis, MD: Naval 

Institute Press, 1988).

26 U.S. Navy Active Ship Force Levels, U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, 

https://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/us-ship-force-levels.html.

27 William Braisted, “On the American Red and Red-Orange Plans, 1919–1939” in 

Naval Warfare in the Twentieth Century, 1900–1945, ed. Gerald Jordan (London: 

Croom Helm, 1977), 167–85; Edward S. Miller, War Plan Orange: The U.S. Strategy 

to Defeat Japan, 1897–1945 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1991).

28 Peter M. Sales, “Going Down Under in 1925,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings

(1985), 45–53.

29 Harland J. Swanson. “The Panay Incident: Prelude to Pearl Harbor,” United States 

Naval Institute Proceedings, (December 1967).

30 Swartz, Sea Changes, 172.

31 Ibid., 42.

32 David DuBois, “Admiral Thomas C. Hart And The Demise Of The Asiatic Fleet 

1941–1942” (2014). Electronic Theses and Dissertations, East Tennessee State 

University. Paper 2331. http://dc.etsu.edu/etd/2331.

33 Ibid., 58.

34 Of note, the Navy experimented conducting underway coal refueling shortly after 

the Spanish-American War, and during World War I the Navy developed the ability 

to refuel destroyers conducting transatlantic convoy escort from tankers. After the 

Washington Treaties of 1922 prohibited fortification of fixed forward bases in the 

Pacific, afloat forward logistics support was identified as a critical enabling capability. However, the dedication of few funds to military logistics assets and the small 

size of the U.S. merchant marine inhibited the nation’s logistics potential to support 

the fleet in war. By World War II the Navy had developed dedicated underway 

refueling procedures and assets (oilers) that increased in number and sophistication as the war progressed, and the size of the U.S. merchant marine dramatically 

increased. The subsequent Korean War led to the introduction of further improved, 

all-weather underway replenishment systems. For more information see: Worrall 

Carter, Beans, Bullets, and Black Oil: The Story of Fleet Logistics Afloat in the Pacific 

During World War II (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1953); 

Duncan S. Ballentine, U.S. Naval Logistics in the Second World War (Princeton, NJ: 
29

Forward Presence

Princeton University Press, 1949); Thomas Wildenberg, Gray Steel and Black Oil: 

Fast Tankers and Replenishment at Sea in the U.S. Navy, 1912–1995 (Annapolis, 

MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996), 2–7; Marvin O. Miller, John W. Hammett, and 

Terence P. Murphy, “The Development of the U.S. Navy Underway Replenishment 

Fleet,” Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers Transactions Vol. 95 

(1987), 123–58.

35 U.S. Navy Active Ship Force Levels, Naval History and Heritage Command, 

https://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/us-ship-force-levels.html.

36 Jakub J. Grygiel, “The Dilemmas of U.S. Maritime Supremacy in the Early Cold 

War,” Journal of Strategic Studies 28 (2): 187–216.

37 Jonathan M. Weisgall, Operation Crossroads: The Atomic Tests at Bikini Atoll

(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1994).

38 Adam B. Siegel, The Use of Naval Forces in the Post-War Era: U.S. Navy and U.S. 

Marine Corps Crisis Response Activity, 1946–1990, CRM 90-246 (Alexandria, VA: 

Center for Naval Analyses, February 1991).

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 Grygiel.

42 Swartz, Sea Changes, 192.

43 Clark and Sloman, Deploying Beyond Their Means.

44 Ibid., 3.

45 Swartz, Sea Changes, 49.

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid., 81.

48 Siegel, The Use of Naval Forces in the Post-War Era.

49 Matthew S. Muehlbauer and David J. Ulbrich, Ways of War: American Military 

History from the Colonial Era to the 21st Century (London: Routledge Press, 

2013), 423.

50 Jeffrey G. Barlow, Revolt of the Admirals (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 

1994); Seth Cropsey, Bryan G. McGrath, and Timothy A. Walton, Sharpening the 

Spear: The Carrier, the Joint Force, and High-End Conflict (Washington, DC: 

Hudson Institute, October 2015), 17.

51 Swartz, Sea Changes, 72.

52 Wyman H. Packard, A Century of U.S. Naval Intelligence (Washington, DC: 

Department of the Navy, 1996), 100.

53 Ibid., 30.

54 In 2001, following a collision with an aggressive PRC J-8 fighter in international 

airspace, a Lockheed EP-3E Aries II signals intelligence aircraft was landed in 

Hainan Island, China, and Chinese forces seized the aircraft until its disassembled 

repatriation to the United States.

55 Elmo Zumwalt, On Watch (New York: New York Times, 1976), Chapter 6.

56 Kotani, Tetsuo, “Presence and Credibility: Homeporting the USS Midway at 

Yokosuka,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 15 (1-2)(2008), 51–76.
30

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

57 John E. Withrow, “Needed: A Credible Presence,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings

Vol. 92/3/757 (March 1966).

58 Swartz, Sea Changes, 52.

59 U.S. Navy Active Ship Force Levels, U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, 

https://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/us-ship-force-levels.

html. Of note, even while the number of U.S. and Soviet forces operating near Soviet 

home waters and elsewhere increased, the 1972 Incidents at Sea Agreement provided 

tactical procedures and an arbitration mechanism that reduced the number and 

severity of confrontations between U.S. and Soviet naval forces.

60 Robert G. Angevine, “Hiding in Plain Sight: The U.S. Navy and Dispersed Operations 

Under EMCON, 1956–1972,” Naval War College Review 64 (2)(2011): 79–95.

61 Ibid.

62 Norman Friedman, Seapower and Space: From the Dawn of the Missile Age to 

Net-Centric Warfare (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000), 195.

63 James D. Watkins, “The Maritime Strategy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings

(January 1986), 2–16.

64 Swartz, Sea Changes, 54.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid.

67 Dov Zakheim and Andrew Hamilton, U.S. Naval Forces: The Peacetime Presence 

Mission (Washington, DC: Congressional Budget Office, December 1978), https://

www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/95th-congress-1977-1978/reports/78-cbo-044.pdf.

68 Ibid., i.

69 Ibid., 40–41.

70 Ibid., xiii.

71 Ibid.

72 Barbara Starr, “U.S. Fifth Fleet Reborn for Active Duty in the Persian Gulf,” Jane’s 

Defence Weekly, 27 May 1995, 11.

73 Les Aspin, Report on the Bottom-Up Review (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 

October 1993), http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/Reading_Room/Other/515.pdf, 2.

74 Ibid., 20.

75 Ibid., 24.

76 Steven Sternlieb, Sharon Pickup, William Wood, Barbara Gannon, Samuel Hinojosa, 

and Nancy Ragsdale, Bottom-Up Review: Analysis of Key DOD Assumptions

(Washington, DC: United States General Accounting Office, GAO/NSIAD-95-56, 

January 1995); Baker Spring, John Luddy and Larence DiRita, Thumbs Down to the 

Bottom-Up Review (Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, 24 September 1993), 

http://www.heritage.org/defense/report/thumbs-down-the-bottom-review.

77 Sam J. Tangredi, “The Rise and Fall of Naval Forward Presence,” U.S. Naval Institute

Proceedings (May 2000), 28–33.

78 Philip A. Dur, “Presence: Forward, Ready, Engaged,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 

(June 1994), 41–44.
31

Forward Presence

79 Jay L. Johnson, Forward . . . From the Sea: The Navy Operational Concept

(Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, March 1997).

80 Tangredi.

81 Ibid.

82 Aspin.

83 Swartz, Sea Changes, 82–83.

84 Ibid., 91.

85 U.S. Navy Active Ship Force Levels, U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, 

https://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/us-ship-force-levels.html.

86 James Conway, Gary Roughead, and Thad Allen, A Cooperative Strategy for 21st 

Century Seapower (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, 2015), 21.

87 Joseph Dunford, Jonathan Greenert, and Paul Zunkunft, Forward, Engaged Ready: 

A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower (Washington, DC: Department 

of the Navy, 2015), 9.

88 Conrad C. Lautenbacher, “House Armed Services Committee on Shipbuilding 

Statement,” Subcommittee on Procurement, 106th Cong., 1st sess., 29 February 

2000; Daniel Goure, “The Tyranny of Forward Presence,”  Naval War College 

Review 54 (3)(2001), 11–24.

89 Whiteneck, et al, The Navy at a Tipping Point, 14.

90 Swartz, Sea Changes, 114.

91 Harry J. Kazianis, “China’s DF-26 Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile: What Does the Pentagon 

Really Think?,” The National Interest, 18 May 2016, http://nationalinterest.org/

blog/the-buzz/chinas-df-26-anti-ship-ballistic-missile-what-does-the-16260.

92 Lyle J. Goldstein, “China’s New Missile-Torpedo May Curb U.S. Submarine Power,” 

The National Interest, 16 August 2016, http://nationalinterest.org/feature/its-missil

e-its-torpedo-its-chinas-new-anti-submarine-weapon-17374.

93 Eric Heginbotham, et al, The U.S.-China Military Scorecard: Forces, Geography, 

and the Evolving Balance of Power, 1996–2017 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND 

Corporation, 2015), xxxvi, http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_

reports/RR300/RR392/RAND_RR392.pdf.

94 Aspin, 15.

95 Sam LaGrone and Megan Eckstein, “Navy Wants to Grow Fleet to 355 Ships; 47 

Hull Increase Adds Destroyers, Attack Subs,” USNI News, 16 December 2016, 

https://news.usni.org/2016/12/16/navy-wants-grow-fleet-355-ships-47-hullincrease-previous-goal.

96 Whiteneck, et al, The Navy at a Tipping Point, 3.

97 Ibid., 4.

98 Navy and other DOD planners face a three sided, zero-sum tradeoff in setting the 

cycle length of major combatants. “They must balance the goals of the deploying 

[ships] and generating forward presence, holding [ships] in reserve and keeping 

them surge-ready to meet emerging needs, and maintaining the materiel condition of the ships.” (Roland J. Yardley, James G. Kallimani, John F. Schank, and 

Clifford A. Grammich, Increasing Aircraft Carrier Forward Presence: Changing 
32

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

the Length of the Maintenance Cycle [Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 

W74V8H-06-C-0002, 2008.])

99 Of note, the 1958 Defense Reorganization Act removed the CNO from the operational chain of command and the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act further reduced the 

influence of the CNO in the deployment and employment of naval forces. Currently, 

the Navy must meet the forward presence requirements defined by the annual 

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of Defense–approved, Global Force 

Management Allocation Plan that authorizes force allocations and deployment 

of forces in support of combatant commander requirements. (U.S. Department of 

Defense, Defense Logistics Agency, “Instruction: Global Force Management [GFM],” 

effective 5 February 2014, 9, www.dla.mil/issuances/Documents/i3000.03.pdf.

100 David Anderson, “Naval forward presence: The future threat looms in the many 

littoral nations that are fragile, at-risk states,” Marine Corps Gazette 91 (12)

(2007), 64–8.

101 “Status of the Navy,” U.S. Navy, http://www.navy.mil/navydata/nav_legacy.

asp?id=146.

102 Eric Labs, An Analysis of the Navy’s Fiscal Year 2016 Shipbuilding Plan (Washington, 

DC: Congressional Budget Office, October 2015), 3.

103 Eric Labs, Preserving the Navy’s Forward Presence With a Smaller Fleet (Washington, 

DC: Congressional Budget Office, March 2015).

104 Ashton Carter, “Navy Program Balance,” Secretary of Defense Memorandum for 

Secretary of the Navy, 14 December 2015, accessed via “Document: Budget Directive 

Letter from SECDEF Carter to SECNAV Mabus,” USNI News, 17 December 2015, 

https://news.usni.org/2015/12/17/document-budget-directive-letter-from-secdefcarter-to-secnav-mabus.

105 In his examination of Navy deployment strategy, Peter Swartz identifies seven 

deployment strategy models that the Navy could adopt: 1) Combat-credible 

forward presence in hubs (the current model); 2) combat and diplomatic surge 

readiness; 3) Global Forward Military Operations Other than War; 4) Cruising; 

5) Experimentation; 6) Homeland Defense; and 7) Composite Model. (Swartz, Sea 

Changes, 114.) Daniel Whiteneck and his colleagues identified five options in their 

study: 1) a 2-hub option (that drastically limited other area engagement missions); 2) 

a 1+ hub option (that maintained a single hub and continued to perform engagement 

and ballistic missile defense (BMD) missions in other areas); 3) a shaping option 

(that focused on engagement activities and BMD stations and maintained a small 

combat fleet); 4) a surge option (that discontinued persistent presence missions by 

CSG/ESGs, but rather would focus on continental United States training and surge 

to conflict when needed and would conduct periodic cruises to show the flag); and 5) 

a shrinking status quo option (that would “salami slice” forces allocated to missions 

as pressures increase). Whiteneck, et al, The Navy at a Tipping Point, 23.

106 Labs, Preserving the Navy’s Forward Presence With a Smaller Fleet.

107 Potential gaps include not only difficulty countering threat capabilities, but also 

countering threat capacity as defense of forward-operating naval forces may require 

very high munitions expenditure rates.

108 Robert C. Rubel, “Straight Talk on Forward Presence,” U.S. Naval Institute

Proceedings Vol. 141/3/1, 345 (March 2015).
33

Forward Presence

109 Swartz, Sea Changes, 2.

110 Section 1067 of the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act directed the Secretary 

of Defense to commission three separate studies to define future fleet architectures 

for the 2030 timeframe: one by an internal Navy group, one by a federally funded 

research and development center, and one by a non-profit think tank. The Office of 

the Chief of Naval Operations Assessment Division (N81), the MITRE Corporation, 

and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments were chosen to conduct 

the studies.

111 Bryan Clark, Peter Haynes, Bryan McGrath, Craig Hooper, Jesse Sloman, and 

Timothy A. Walton, Restoring American Seapower: A New Fleet Architecture For 

The United States Navy (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary 

Assessments, 2017), 111.

112 Kirkland Donald, Jonathan Altman, and Jon Solomon, “The U.S. Navy’s Role In 

Ensuring 21st Century American Security And Prosperity,” Real Clear Defense, 

16 March 2017, http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2017/03/16/navy_21st_

century_american_security_and_prosperity__110980.html.

113 Clark, et al, Restoring American Seapower, 111.

114 Ibid.

115 Kirkland, et al.

116 Daniel Whiteneck, Michael Price, Neil Jenkins, and Peter Swartz, The Navy at a 

Tipping Point: Maritime Dominance at Stake? (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval 

Analyses, 2010), 24.

117 Michael Gerson and Daniel Whiteneck, Deterrence and Influence: The Navy’s Role 

in Preventing War (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, CRM D0019315.

A4/1Rev, March 2009), 35.

118 Swartz, Sea Changes, 124.

119 Edward Rhodes, Jonathan DiCicco, Milburn Moore Sarah, and Tom Walker, 

“Forward Presence and Engagement: Historical Insights into the Problem of 

‘Shaping’,” Naval War College Review 53 (1)(2001), 25–61.

120 As a potential historical parallel, in the 1960s, Admiral Gorshkov led the Soviet 

Navy into the “World Ocean” with “forward deployments” of assets. While this 

strategy did not fundamentally change U.S. deployment strategy, it did lead to the 

reallocation of forces across theaters and increased the threat faced by U.S. forces 

in some scenarios. In contrast to the Soviet Union, however, China’s significantly 

larger comprehensive national power and multifaceted engagement with the world 

may pose a much greater threat. Please see: Gary Charbonneau, “The Soviet Navy 

and Forward Deployments,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (Vol. 105/3/913, 

March 1979).
34

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

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Diver Aviation Ordnanceman 1st Class David Ahearn attaches an inert satchel charge to a training mine, during exercises in waters off Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

970215-N-3093M-001 U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Andrew Mckaskle
Chapter 2

Writing U.S. Naval Operational History 

1980–2010: U.S. Navy Mine Countermeasures 

in Terror and War

by Scott C. Truver

PERSPECTIVE

When Senior Historian Michael Crawford of the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) invited me to prepare a paper on the “needs and 

opportunities in U.S. Naval History in the post–World War II” period, my first 

thought was: “Doesn’t he know? Political scientist . . . not historian?”

To be sure, I had taken several history courses while at college. However, 

I wondered about the relevance of “Renaissance and Reformation”—I was 

thinking about becoming a Lutheran minister—to my proposed NHHC “needs 

and opportunities” topic, which was:

Operations—the Navy’s security roles in reference to China and Southeast 

Asia, Africa, South America, and Europe, particularly since 1980, and the Navy’s 

role in counter-piracy since the 1820s.

So we met, and he assured me that all would be good.

We also agreed to rethink the discussion of counter-piracy since the 1820s 

and focus on the 1980 to 2010 period. The goal was to provide a perspective of 

the “post-Vietnam War, post–Cold War, post-9/11” Navy and assess how Navy 

operations have been addressed by means of a historiographical survey of the 

English-language literature:

■ Identify what has been published on the subject of Navy operations from 1980 

to 2010, including counter-piracy ops (operations)
44

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

■ Explain the broader historical context and the subject’s historical significance

■ Map out the scholarly landscape by reviewing everything of significance 

published on the subject, and

■ Identify needs and opportunities to help set the agenda for the research and 

writing of the history of U.S. Navy operations for the next 20 years

His use of “Navy” operations and not “naval” or “maritime” meant that I 

was not to address the other two sea services—the U.S. Marine Corps or Coast 

Guard—just the U.S. Navy.

Nevertheless, I remained concerned by the inclusion of “everything of 

significance.”

Thus, one of my initial objectives was to set boundaries to the problem, to 

determine what exactly “Navy operations” and “everything of significance” could 

mean. I did a preliminary search of NHHC holdings, resources available at the 

Naval War College and Naval Postgraduate School libraries, the Center for Naval 

Analyses (CNA) library, the Library of Congress and JSTOR (Journal Storage), 

and Google Scholar, Google Chrome, and Bing. I focused only on operations—I 

did not include the much more numerous Navy, joint force, and international 

exercises—and came up with 158 identifiable/named operations from 1980 to 

2010: There might well be more but there will not be fewer. These are listed in 

Appendices 1–3 (sources for these are in Appendix 1) and are summarized here:

■ Operations by decade

1980–89 49

1990–99 85

2000–2010 24

■ Types of operations by intensity

Peace operations/forward presence 15

Humanitarian assistance/disaster relief 15

Freedom of navigation 3

Maritime interception 3

Counter-piracy 3

Noncombatant evacuation 26

Show of force 49

Contingent positioning 20

Combat 24

■ Frequency of operations

Show of force 49
45

Operations

Noncombatant evacuation 26

Combat 24

Contingent positioning 20

Humanitarian assistance/disaster relief 15

Peace operations/forward presence 15

Counter-piracy 3

Maritime interception 3

Freedom of navigation 3

■ Operations by world region

Mediterranean 51

Arabian Gulf 32

Africa 27

Western Hemisphere 18

Pacific 14

Indian Ocean 6

Southwest Asia 4

United States 3

Europe 2

Red Sea 1

The 1990–99 period was the busiest with 54 percent of the total ops. The 

show-of-force ops were the most frequent with 31 percent. And, as would be 

expected, the Mediterranean/Arabian Gulf ops comprised most—53 percent—

across all ten regions.

The challenge was multiplied by what I call “embedded operations.” This 

refers to an overarching operation under which subordinate operations were 

carried out. For example, Operations Sharp Guard and Decisive Enhancement 

from 1992–98 in the Mediterranean/Balkans region had 11 embedded ops:

■ Sharp Vigilance 1992 show of force

■ Maritime Guard 1992–93 show of force

■ Deny Flight 1993–95 show of force

■ Provide Promise 1994 contingent positioning

■ Joint Endeavor 1996 peace operations/forward presence

■ Decisive Edge 1996 show of force

■ Deliberate Force 1996 combat

■ Deliberate Guard 1996–97 show of force

■ Joint Guard 1996–98 peace operations
46

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

■ Joint Forge 1997–2001 show of force

■ Deliberate Forge 1997–98 show of force

There was one other, but less extensive, instance of embedded ops—Continued 

Hope, Africa/Somalia 1993–95: Show Care, More Care, and Quick Draw. Still, 

individual bibliographical searches had to be conducted for each operation, using 

each of the nine search engines noted above and numerous key words and phrases 

for each, to ensure that I captured “everything of significance.” A quick assessment of time to complete was about 1,200 hours.

I again met with Michael: How can we cut this down and still meet the 

NHHC’s goals?

Because of my interest in naval mine warfare (MIW),1 I suggested, and he 

agreed, to focus on two U.S. Navy mine countermeasures operations in the 

post-1980 era.

The first was the 1984 “Mines of August” state-sponsored terrorist mining 

crisis in the Red Sea and the Navy’s Operation Intense Look response.2

The second was Operation Candid Hammer in 1990–91, an embedded op 

to Desert Shield/Storm show-of-force, contingent positioning, and major combat 

operations. The last time the Navy confronted a similar mining event was off 

Wonsan, North Korea, in October 1950, when 3,000 Russian mines kept a United 

Nations amphibious task force at bay and prompted task force commander Rear 

Admiral Allen E. Smith to lament: “We have lost control of the seas to a nation 

without a navy, using pre–World War I weapons, laid by vessels that were utilized 

at the time of the birth of Christ.”3

Michael reminded me that the focus of the effort remained on the historiography of these two operations, not the operations themselves. My revised 

tasking was now:

■ Identify what has been published on the subjects Operations Intense Look and 

Candid Hammer (and other Arabian/Persian Gulf MCM ops in Desert Shield/

Storm 1990–91)

■ Explain the broader historical context and Navy mine warfare’s historical 

significance

■ Map out the scholarly landscape by reviewing everything of significance 

published on operations Intense Look and Candid Hammer

■ Identify needs and opportunities to help set the agenda for the research and 

writing of the history of U.S. Navy mine warfare
47

Operations

In that regard, then, let me first address broader historical context and Navy 

mine warfare’s historical significance.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND SIGNIFICANCE

Sea mines and the need to counter them have been constants for America 

since Bushnell’s Turtle in 1776.4 Mines figured prominently in the Civil War, 

Spanish-American War, both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, several Cold War 

crises (including at least one hoax), and in Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi 

Freedom. In 2016, traditional navies as well as maritime terrorists have at their 

disposal mines and underwater improvised explosive devices to challenge military and commercial use of the seas.5

These “weapons that wait” are the quintessential global asymmetric 

anti-access/area-denial threat, pitting our adversaries’ strengths against what 

they perceive as our naval and maritime weaknesses. They can be put in place by 

virtually any platform—aircraft, surface vessels and craft, submarines, and even 

ferryboats—and their low cost belies their effectiveness. World War I–era contact 

weapons bristling with “horns” can be as dangerous as highly sophisticated, 

21st-century computer-programmable multiple-influence mines that can fire 

from the magnetic, acoustic, seismic, and pressure “signatures” of their victims.

In 2016, perhaps as many as a million sea mines of more than 300 types are 

in the inventories of more than 50 navies worldwide, not counting U.S. weapons. 

More than 30 countries produce and more than 20 countries export mines. Even 

highly sophisticated weapons are available in the international arms trade. The 

Navy’s potential adversaries hold mines and mining in high regard: Russia is 

thought to have upward of 250,000 mines; China, 80,000 to 100,000; North 

Korea, about 50,000; and Iran, between 3,000 and 6,000 weapons.6 Worse, 

these figures are for sea mines, proper; they do not include underwater improvised 

explosive devices, which can be fashioned from 50-gallon drums and discarded 

refrigerators—virtually any container.

And, the Navy’s experience attests to the seriousness of the mine threat: Since 

the end of World War II, mines have severely damaged or sunk four times more 

U.S. Navy ships than all other means of attack. Yes, four of these 15 mine victims 

were minesweepers clearing the way for U.N. naval forces during the Korean 

War, but that tragically underscores the dangers from mines—even MCM 

experts are at risk.
48

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Operation Intense Look, 19847

The use of mines during the Arabian Gulf “tanker war” had only begun to ramp 

up and the mine strikes of the reflagged tanker MV Bridgeton and frigate Samuel 

B. Roberts (FFG-58) were several years away, when commercial vessels reported 

suspicious underwater explosions in the Red Sea in July and August 1984.

At least 16—and perhaps as many as 19—merchant vessels transiting the 

Gulf of Suez and the Red Sea as far south as the Bab el Mandeb claimed they 

had been mined. Various extremist groups avowed responsibility for planting 

mines in the international waterway—Islamic jihad being one of the more vociferous. Inasmuch as the first victim was the Soviet-flagged Knud Jesperson on 9 

July, the Soviet Red Star military newspaper had another take on what it called 

“American aggression and imperialism in the Red Sea”:8

■ Washington and its NATO allies are expanding their military influence in the 

Red Sea. They are mining the Red Sea in order to control Arab countries.

■ Using the excuse that they plan to clear mines, NATO forces are expanding 

their military presence in the Red Sea and the Middle East.

Responding to actual Egyptian and Saudi requests, with Riyadh being 

particularly concerned about the safety and security of pilgrims making the 

annual Hajj to Mecca, U.S. Navy mine countermeasures and explosive ordnance 

disposal (EOD) teams joined an international mine hunt to search for the sources 

of the explosions. Egypt, France, Italy, Great Britain, The Netherlands, and the 

Source: U.S. Navy N85 and PEO LMW, 2009
49

Operations

Soviet Union deployed mine-sweeping and mine-hunting vessels and supporting 

EOD divers.

The U.S. Navy deployed four RD-53D airborne mine countermeasures 

(AMCM) helicopters from Helicopter Mine Squadron Fourteen (HM-14) 

equipped with the advanced AQS-14 mine-hunting side-scan sonar—this was 

the first real-world deployment of the “Q-14”—in addition to legacy in-service 

mine-sweeping systems. Responding to Saudi requests to sweep the ports of Jidda 

and Yanbu, the Commander Mine Warfare Command divided U.S. forces into 

two detachments. The first was supported by the Middle East Force flagship La 

Salle (LPD-31) and focused on sweeping those ports as well as the Bab el Mandeb 

to ensure safe passage for the aircraft carrier America (CV-66) and her escorts 

transiting from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean.

The second swept middle sectors in the Red Sea, supported by the coastal 

hydrographic survey ship Harkness (T-AGS-32). Harkness embarked an Atlantic 

Fleet EOD side-scan sonar detachment, and the amphibious transport Shreveport 

(LPD-12) supported the AMCM helos deploying the Q-14 mine-hunting sonars. 

However, U.S. MCM forces detected no mines.

The U.S. involvement in theater was from 13 August to 1 October 1984, less 

than two months.

International MCM forces swept several mines, including ordnance that 

dated to before World War II. Moreover, the British recovered, rendered safe, 

and exploited a recently deployed weapon—the absence of sea growth indicating 

it had not been in the water long—an advanced Soviet multiple-influence mine 

dubbed “99501” from markings on the mine case. It was of a design that heretofore had never been seen in the West.

It was later determined that Libya’s navy had acquired at least 16 of the 

advanced mines from East Germany (Moscow was reportedly furious with East 

Berlin), which had been deployed from the stern ramp of a Libyan commercial ferry, Ghat. Manned by a Libyan navy crew and the head of the Libyan 

mine-laying division, she entered the Red Sea southbound from the Suez Canal 

on 6 July, declaring she was carrying “general cargo,” returning northbound at 

the canal on 23 July.

 “In light of the ease with which terrorists demonstrated their ability to mine 

this important international choke point,” mine warfare historian Tamara Moser 

Melia concluded:

MCM quickly became the focus of international concern. Studies soon noted 

the importance of coordination of international MCM forces and national 
50

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

integration of mobile air, sea, and undersea MCM forces, the lessons repeatedly learned by U.S. MCM forces since Wonsan. The overall effect of such 

low-intensity mine warfare by terrorist organizations and the Third World 

reminded many nations of their own vulnerability to mines.9

Operation Candid Hammer/Gulf War MCM, 1990–9110

As it turns out, the actual title of the 1990–91 Desert Shield/Desert Storm–

embedded MCM operations proved difficult to determine, with “Candid 

Hammer,” “Desert Sweep,” “Desert Clean Up,” and “Arabian/Persian Gulf MCM 

Ops” used by various sources. Furthermore, some characterized Candid Hammer 

as an “exercise” while others as an “operation.” Dates were uncertain, too, 

although a “mid-August 1990 to early October 1991” period for the overall U.S. 

Navy MCM/EOD deployment and operations seems reasonable. Nevertheless, 

these ambiguities complicated the Desert Shield/Desert Storm and post–Desert 

Storm bibliographical searches, compared to Operation Intense Look.11

The need for U.S. and multinational Coalition partners’ MCM assets in 

Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm was clear from the outset, given the 

use of mines by both sides in the Iran-Iraq war and the Navy’s experiences during 

Operation Earnest Will—Navy surface warship escorts of re-flagged merchant 

vessels. MCM deployment planning commenced immediately after Saddam 

Hussein captured Kuwait on 2 August 1990.

The six AMCM helicopters from HM-14 were ready to deploy to the Persian 

Gulf via strategic airlift on 4 August, but, because of priorities in airlift requirements, they did not depart Norfolk Naval Air Station until 4 October. Once 

in-theater, however, HM-14 was flying mine-sweeping training operations beginning on 11 October.

EOD detachments deployed to the Gulf in mid-August and immediately 

began in-theater training with multinational Coalition MCM forces. This training 

included the Desert Saber advance EOD MCM rehearsal/exercise in support of a 

planned amphibious assault north of Ash Shuabah on the Kuwait coastline that 

was cancelled and redirected as an amphibious raid on Faylaka Island. That, too, 

was cancelled because of the mine events of 18 February. EOD MCM operations 

began on 12 February 1991, and channel-clearance operations began when the 

ground war ended on 27 February.

Avenger (MCM-1, commissioned in 1987) and three 1950s-era ocean minesweepers (MSOs)—Adroit (MSO-509), Impervious (MSO-449), and Leader 

(MSO-490)—were transported onboard the U.S.-leased Dutch heavy-lift ship, 

Super Servant III, leaving Norfolk on 29 August and arriving at Bahrain on 3 
51

Operations

October. The availability of such heavy-lift ships for surface MCM deployments 

is critical, as it significantly reduces wear and tear on ships and crews during 

long transits to overseas mine crises. After completing in-theater training and 

preliminary surveys, the MCM vessels commenced mine-hunting and -sweeping 

operations in suspected mine danger areas in the Gulf on 16 February 1991, a 

month after the air war began.

On 18 February 1991 two U.S. warships—Tripoli (LPH-10), which ironically 

had embarked the Navy’s HM-14 AMCM helicopters, and the guided-missile 

cruiser Princeton (CG-59)—suffered mine strikes. Two Italian-made Manta 

bottom influence mines attacked Princeton (actually one was a sympathetic firing 

several hundred yards away from the first, which detonated right under the cruiser’s keel) and a single LUGM-145 contact mine holed Tripoli. Although Princeton

restored some strike and anti-air warfare capabilities (within 20 minutes or two 

hours, depending on the source), she ultimately was a mission kill and had to be 

towed to port. Despite a 16-by-20-foot gash below the waterline on her starboard 

side, Tripoli continued AMCM flight ops for another five days.

By all accounts the Iraqi use of naval mines was extensive and well planned. 

Moreover, because of a lack of focused intelligence, the Coalition did not know 

the extent and sophistication of the enemy’s mine-laying efforts until after the 

Iraqi surrender. Then, the Iraqi military provided detailed charts showing the 

location and types of mines in ten minefields and lines, extending from off the 

Kuwait/Saudi border north to just west of the Ad-Darah oil fields. Following 

receipt of Iraqi mine charts on 4 March, concerted minefield clearance operations 

involving all MCM assets began in earnest with three goals: (1) open normal 

commercial shipping channels and ports; (2) sweep known minefields; and (3) 

complete area clearance of the Kuwaiti coast and the northern Gulf.

During the post-conflict MCM operations, six other countries joined the 

United States and United Kingdom assets: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, 

Japan, and the Netherlands. Initially without the United Kingdom, the European 

countries formed an independent Coalition of MCM forces under the aegis of the 

Western European Union (WEU), with Belgium being the first to begin operations in March 1991. The U.S. and U.K. MCM forces continued joint operations 

until mid-April, when the Royal Navy’s ships also joined the WEU Coalition. The 

Japanese operated independently, but with assistance from U.S. EOD forces, after 

entering the gulf in June. The WEU countries completed their MCM operations 

20 July; the United States and Japan completed theirs in early October.

Naval historian Edward J. Marolda noted: “These mine countermeasures 

ships were critical to the success of the naval operation because the Iraqis had 
52

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

established a minefield with almost 1,300 magnetic, acoustic, and other mines. 

The ships (and ship-based mine-countermeasures helicopters) cleared lanes 

through what they believed were the minefields.”12

HM-14 was called off the MCM task on 17 June and completed redeployment 

to Norfolk on 8 July. Avenger returned to the United States in August, and the three 

MSOs returned via heavy-lift ship in November. Guardian (MCM-5) self-deployed 

and arrived in mid-June 1991, remaining in the gulf until the spring 1992. This 

was the beginning of a constant U.S. Navy MCM presence there, with surface 

vessels, AMCM helicopters, and EOD MCM detachments deployed to the region.

Of the nearly 1,200 mines destroyed by Coalition MCM forces through 

October 1991, 200 were sophisticated acoustic/magnetic-influence bottom mines, 

including the Manta bottom mines that attacked Princeton. After hostilities 

ended, Iraq reported that it had laid 1,167 mines of all types. Caitlin Talmadge 

noted Operation Candid Hammer apparently cleared 907, or 78.6 percent, of the 

original mines, “an impressive rate of clearance.”13

Lieutenant Commander Colin K. Boynton challenged the “impressive” assessment. “These operations were performed under permissive conditions against the 

easiest of mines to sweep (moored contact mines) and more importantly, the mine 

hunters had an Iraqi chart showing mine locations in their possession.”14

EVERYTHING OF SIGNIFICANCE

With that as prelude, I began a focused search to build the bibliography of “everything of significance.” (See Appendix 4.) I revisited the nine original sources—

NHHC; Naval War College and Naval Postgraduate School libraries; the Center 

for Naval Analyses library; the Library of Congress and JSTOR; and Google 

Scholar, Google Chrome, and Bing. The Library of Congress was difficult to 

maneuver, and many hours with JSTOR resulted in little of value; in fact, I culled 

only three publications:

■ C. H. Stockton, “The Use of Submarine Mines and Torpedoes in Time of War,” 

The American Journal of International Law 2, no. 2 (April 1908): 276–84.

■ Bradley A. Fiske, “Naval Preparedness,” North American Review 202, no. 

719 (October 1915): 847–57.

■ Franklin D. Roosevelt, “The Future of the Submarine,” North American 

Review 202, no. 721 (December 1915): 505–8.
53

Operations

Remarkably, Google Scholar identified many useful “hits.” But there was 

much chaff to winnow: A 14 May 2016 search of “US Navy/mine warfare/

Operation Intense Look/Red Sea/1984” resulted in about 13,400 items to be 

reviewed. A similar search for Operation Candid Hammer produced much 

fewer results—three—and only a handful more when the search was broadened to “Desert Shield/Desert Storm Arabian/Persian Gulf War MCM operations 1990–91.”

The “mother lode” was the mine warfare bibliography constructed and 

maintained by Greta E. Marlatt, senior research librarian, Dudley Knox Library 

at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California. If a publication has the 

words “sea mine” associated with it, I have no doubt that Greta has it chronicled. 

I am particularly thankful for her excellent, cheerful, and long-suffering bibliographical assistance to this project. Likewise, Dr. Timothy O’Hara, research 

scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses, searched the CNA library and archives 

for this project.

GENERAL ARTICLES

The search turned up 215 articles related to Operation Intense Look, published 

between 9 July and 21 October 1984, but only 13 for Operation Candid Hammer/

Gulf War MCM operations that spanned a year. Most of Operation Intense Look 

articles were “today’s news,” reporting what had transpired in the previous 24 

hours or so, and thus should not be considered history by any stretch of the imagination. However, they were secondary sources for the more scholarly articles 

and publications.

Three articles published well after the Royal Navy found the Soviet/East 

German/Libyan mine and the Mines of August crisis ended have served as 

unofficial histories of the event. (Other than command histories of ships and 

helicopter squadrons, the only government document that discusses the Red 

Sea crisis in an historical context is the 1992 Mine Warfare Plan.

15) These were 

the U.S. Naval Institute (USNI) Proceedings/Naval Review “Mines of August” 

article (May 1985); Jan Breemer’s “Intense Look: U.S. Minehunting Experience 

in the Red Sea” (August 1985);16 and retired Royal Navy Captain John Moore’s 

overview—“Red Sea Mines a Mystery No Longer,” Jane’s Naval Review (1985), 

which provides good information from the United Kingdom’s perspective. These 

have been referenced numerous times in subsequent publications that focus on 

naval mine threats and mine countermeasures requirements, capabilities, plans, 
54

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

programs, technologies, and operations.17

Among what must be the many tens of thousands of articles and publications 

related to Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, the 13 articles specifically 

addressing mine countermeasures topics in Desert Shield/Desert Storm/Candid 

Hammer did provide historical perspectives, mostly lessons re-learned about the 

threat and the requirements for effective countermeasures.

For instance, Vice Admiral Stanley Arthur and co-author Marvin Pokrant’s 

“Desert Storm at Sea” in the May 1991 U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings summarized what would be their book, Desert Storm at Sea: What the Navy Really 

Did, published in 1999, which devotes significant discussion of MCM. Two 

months later, U.S. Navy Captain J. M. Martin focused sharply on lessons “We 

Still Haven’t Learned” in the July 1991 U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, even as 

post-hostilities MCM “sweep” ops continued in the gulf. Likewise, Lieutenant 

Ernest Fortin, USNR, addressed the nature of the mine threat—“Those Damn 

Mines” in the February 1992 Proceedings—and how to counter it. In the 

October 1992 Proceedings, EOD Commander R. J. Nagle outlined the difficult 

challenges that the Navy’s EOD forces confronted in the gulf. Finally, writing 

in the Summer/Fall 1992 Amphibious Review, Carle White discussed how the 

Navy’s MCM assets addressed the shallow-water threat.

As noted, there was an important international component to the Shield/

Storm/Candid Hammer MCM operations. David Foxwell had four articles (one 

with David Brown) in the International Defense Review—“The Gulf War in 

Review: Report from the Front” (5/1991); “MCM and the Threat Beneath the 

Surface” (7/1991); “Mine Warfare in an Uncertain World” (5/1992); and “Naval 

Mine Warfare: Underfunded and Underappreciated” (2/1993)—that addressed 

the challenges from the allies’ perspectives. Similarly, Anthony Preston’s “Allied 

MCM in the Gulf” (Naval Forces 4/1991) and Vice Admiral Josef De Wilde’s 

“Mine Warfare in the Gulf” (NATO’s Sixteen Nations 1/1992) remind readers 

that the global aspects of the threat demand collaboration and cooperation 

among friends.

BOOKS

I could find no book-length historical treatment specific to either Operation 

Intense Look or Operation Candid Hammer/Gulf War MCM—like, for example, 

the Naval Historical Center’s history of mine-sweeping operations in North 

Vietnam, Operation End Sweep.

18 Instead, several significant discussions were 
55

Operations

found in publications dealing with the broader focus. I address these according 

to the operation.

Operation Intense Look

David Crist’s Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict 

with Iran (2013) weaves a riveting story in chapter 13, which begins (235) “. . . 

[in] the morning of July 6, 1984, the small cargo ship Ghat left Libya on its way 

to the Eritrean Port of Assab. The round-trip journey through the Suez Canal 

normally took eight days, but nothing about this trip was routine. Instead of the 

usual cargo of foodstuffs and crated goods, Ghat carried advanced Soviet-made 

naval mines designed to detonate in response to the mere sound of a passing ship. 

Rather than her normal civilian crew, Libyan sailors, including the commander 

of Muammar Gaddafi’s mine force, manned the pilot house. Once in the Red Sea, 

the sailors lowered the stern ramp and hastily rolled the mines off into the water.”

Gregory Hartmann and I collaborated on the 1991 update of his original 

1979 edition of Weapons That Wait: Mine Warfare in the U.S. Navy. The discussion of Operation Intense Look relies heavily on “Mines of August,” but was 

updated to early 1991 (and thus does not include discussion of MCM in Desert 

Shield/Storm/Candid Hammer). New materials included conjecture that some of 

the Libyan-laid “99501” mines had only half-explosive charges, which was to 

ensure ships would be damaged but not sunk, and that Libya had specifically 

requested advanced weapons from Moscow to bolster Libyan coastal defense.19

Howard S. Levie’s Mine Warfare at Sea (1992) devotes just three pages to 

Intense Look and provides little that is new.

Tam Moser Melia’s “Damn the Torpedoes” (1991) provides better operational information, but in only two pages.

Operation Candid Hammer/Gulf War MCM

Anthony Cordesman and Abraham R. Wagner allocated eight pages to this operation in their 1,000-page The Lessons of Modern War, Volume IV: The Gulf War 

(1996), but they provided excellent treatment of the MCM activities (888). “Mine 

warfare was one of the few areas where the long pause between Iraq’s invasion 

of Kuwait and the beginning of Desert Storm acted to Iraq’s advantage. Iraq 

used the time to deploy an extensive set of minefields off of the coast of Kuwait, 

which affected both the Coalition’s options for amphibious warfare and many 

of its other naval operations.” They provided detailed information on the mine 

threat, mine fields and mine lines, and the capabilities of the Navy (890)—“The 

U.S. Navy had significant problems dealing with the Iraqi mine threat.”—and 
56

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

its international MCM Coalition partners (892)—“The British force took the 

lead in most of the mine countermeasures operations during Desert Storm” They 

concluded: “In short, mine warfare must be taken seriously from the start of a 

crisis” (897).

Marvin Pokrant’s Desert Storm at Sea: What the Navy Really Did (1999) 

devotes chapter 9 to mine countermeasures, a good deal of chapter 12 to 

post-hostilities mine clearance, and all of chapter 15 to “Observations on Mine 

Countermeasures.” Particularly important was its treatment of the role Vice 

Admiral Stanley Arthur, Commander U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, 

played in planning and execution of the MCM ops plan. He provides perhaps 

the best insight of the lack of intelligence about the mine threat, the Tripoli

and Princeton mine strikes, U.S. and MCM Coalition partners’ capabilities, 

mine-clearance ops, and lessons learned (231): “Just as Iraq paid a price for 

allowing the Coalition to build up its forces unhindered for five months, the 

Coalition paid a price for allowing Iraq to lay mines without opposition. Once 

mines are in place, locating and clearing them under the guns of the enemy will 

always be hard and time consuming.”

Edward Marolda and Robert Schneller’s Shield and Sword devoted significant space to the treatment of the Iraqi mine threat, the U.S. Navy and Coalition 

MCM assets and capabilities, and pre-/post-conflict operations (322):

During the first three months of the mine-removal operation, the European 

mine clearing forces performed as would have been expected in a NATO 

conflict. Operating sophisticated ships and equipment, by mid-May the 

well-trained and experienced European seamen had destroyed or otherwise 

neutralized 750 sea mines. The Belgian and French mine hunters destroyed 

nearly 500 of them. The French mine hunter Sagittaire performed skillfully, 

neutralizing 145 mines in only 20 days. The U.S. and British forces destroyed 

fewer mines during the early months of the operation, in part because they 

were more concerned with clearing the existing lanes to the coast of Kuwait 

than systematically removing mines from identified minefields.

The European MCM forces finished their share of the mine clearance task 

on 20 July 1991. The U.S. Navy and the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense 

Force completed their MCM operations on 10 September 1991. Guardian

(MCM-5), the last remaining MCM ship in gulf waters, departed on 

January 1992.
57

Operations

Finally, Andrew Lambert’s “The Naval War” chapter in The Gulf War 

Assessed (1992) provides a detailed analysis of the naval campaign generally, but 

offers sharp judgment from a U.K./Royal Navy/European perspective about U.S. 

Navy MCM operation (127):20

The major weakness of the USN lay in its limited mine countermeasures 

(MCM) force. With two new classes under construction, the USN had to rely 

on ships from the early 1950s and their solitary new Mine Countermeasures 

Vessel (MCMV), the USS Avenger. The strength in experience of RN and 

European MCM forces gave them a clear role, and made their presence a 

matter of urgency if the USN was to operate safely in waters which had 

already seen one mine campaign [1980s Tanker War].

These four books make a significant contribution to the historiography of 

Desert Shield/Storm MCM operations.21

Center for Naval Analyses Reports

I call out CNA because of its unique position as the Navy’s think tank, a 

provenance extending back to the Operational Evaluations Group of 1945, if 

not earlier.

Three Center for Naval Analyses reports figure into the historiography of 

mine warfare in Candid Hammer/Desert Shield/Desert Storm, but not Intense 

Look.22 Sabrina Edlow and colleagues provided a chronology of U.S. Navy 

mining (as opposed to mine countermeasures) generally (April 1997). Specifically 

with regard to Desert Storm, CNA notes (1),

the United States employed naval mines during the opening days of 

Operation Desert Storm. Commanders were not allowed to conduct 

anti-surface warfare against questionable transitors within Iraqi territorial 

waters and, as a last resort, requested permission to mine. Four A-6s from 

USS Ranger [CV-61] sortied, but only three returned. (In all prior military 

uses of mines, the mining occurred toward the end of conflict—here it’s 

at the initiation of the allied offensive.) On-scene commanders recalled no 

impact on Iraqi operations from this mining effort. They chose to discontinue mining operations.

Dwight Lyons Jr. and CNA colleagues discussed “The Mine Threat: Show 

Stoppers or Speed Bumps” (July 1993) and concluded (30), “the lesson from 
58

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Desert Storm is not that mine fields are impenetrable, but that if you ignore the 

threat, you pay for it.”

The third is Ralph Passarelli, et al., Desert Storm Reconstruction Report, 

Volume IV: Mine Countermeasures (U), Research Memorandum 91-180, 

October 1991. This remains classified.

Command Histories

Squadron and ship command histories provide some insight into the “deck-plate 

viewpoint” in both operations:

■ John T. Hall (FFG-32): “After receiving urgent tasking, USS JOHN L. HALL 

got underway on 19 August and proceeded at best speed to Port Said, Egypt for 

a second southbound passage of the Suez Canal. . . . Shortly after midnight on 

22 August, USS JOHN L. HALL entered the Suez Canal arriving at Port Suez 

by mid-morning on 23 August. Immediately exiting the Canal, USS JOHN L. 

HALL proceeded at best speed to gain visual contact on the Soviet Naval Task 

Force headed south in the Red Sea. For the next month, USS JOHN L. HALL 

conducted national interest surveillance operations against the LENI[N]

GRAD (CHG-103) and her escorts. These operations were also in conjunction 

with Operation INTENSE LOOK, which was the joint U.S., French, British 

and Dutch Mine Countermeasure Operation in the Red Sea.”

■ Shreveport (LPD-12): “. . . in response to orders received calling for embarkation of Helicopter Mine Countermeasures Squadron FOURTEEN, with four 

RH-53D helicopters. USS SHREVEPORT had been assigned as the support 

ship for Airborne Mine Countermeasures in conjunction with Operation 

‘Intense Look’ in response to the mining of the Gulf of Suez and the Red 

Sea. . . . On the 10th of August, SHREVEPORT began her transit to the Gulf 

of Suez.  .  .  . Arriving at Port Said on the 15th, SHREVEPORT embarked 

Egyptian pilots and immediately commenced her passage of the Suez Canal 

as an individual ship. The passage was completed in the record time of seven 

hours and forty-five minutes and SHREVEPORT continued south to her operating area off Ras Shukheir, Egypt, in the Gulf of Suez. Enroute on the 16th . . . 

SHREVEPORT anchored off Ras Shukheir on the 16th and was joined by 

USNS HARKNESS. The remainder of the day was spent conducting briefings 

aboard SHREVEPORT for commencement of mine hunting operations on the 

17th. For the next thirty days, mine hunting operations continued in the Gulf 

of Suez from sunrise to sunset making use of available daylight hours.”

■ Helicopter Support Squadron Four: “[W]hile embarked in USS NASSAU 
59

Operations

through 11 Aug, the HC-4 Det set impressive standards by meeting 100 percent 

of assigned operational commitments. On 14 Aug 84, three days after the 

return of the NASSAU Det, X-4 was tasked with yet another unique deployment by providing support to operation ‘Intense Look.’ This deployment again 

demonstrated squadron versatility and the range of the aircraft capabilities, by 

providing responsive logistic support to this high visibility task force.”

The following command histories of ships and helicopters deployed to Intense 

Look and Candid Hammer/Gulf ops were not available or could not be accessed 

to meet schedules:

■ AMCM Helicopter Squadron Fourteen, 1984, 1990–91 (classified)

■ Adroit (MSO-509), 1990–91

■ Avenger (MCM-1), 1990–91

■ USNS Harkness (T-AGS-32), 1984

■ Impervious (MSO-449), 1990–91

■ Leader (MSO-490), 1990–91

Government Publications

In April 1992, the Department of Defense submitted its Final Report to 

Congress: Conduct of the Persian Gulf War, mandated by Title V, Public Law 

102-25. It concluded that the Iraqi mine threat affected almost all naval operations during the Persian Gulf Conflict. From the outset, the principal mission of 

Coalition MCM assets was to clear a path to the Kuwaiti coast for naval gunfire 

support and a possible amphibious landing. Post-conflict assessments noted the 

Iraqi minefields were not placed to maximize their effectiveness and Iraqi forces 

deployed many mines improperly. Nevertheless, mines had considerable effects 

on Coalition maritime operations in the Persian Gulf (273, 286).

The May 1991 Department of the Navy/Chief of Naval Operations report, 

The United States Navy in “Desert Shield/Desert Storm,” served as a stepping 

stone in the development of the Navy’s first post-Cold War mine warfare plan. 

The conflict had

. . . again illustrated the challenge of mine countermeasures (MCM) and 

how quickly mines can become a concern. Because of the difficulty of 

locating and neutralizing mines, we cannot afford to give the minelayer free 

rein. Future rules of engagement and doctrine should provide for offensive 

operations to prevent the laying of mines in international waters. Our Cold 
60

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

War focus on the Soviet threat fostered reliance on our overseas allies for 

mine countermeasures in forward areas. The MCM assets of our allies—on 

whom we have relied for MCM support in NATO contingencies for years—

provided their mettle in the Gulf  .  .  . highlighted the need for a robust, 

deployable U.S. Navy MCM capability (61).

The January 1992 Mine Warfare Plan: Meeting the Challenges of an 

Uncertain World (U), was produced initially at the request of the Assistant Chief 

of Naval Operations (OP-03) but, as a result of increased awareness of the mine 

threat, the Chief of Naval Operations approved the plan and the programs it 

championed. “I believe there are some fundamentals about mine warfare that 

we should not forget,” Admiral Frank B. Kelso II noted in October 1991 (1). 

“Once mines are laid, they are quite difficult to get rid of. That is not likely to 

change. It is probably going to get worse, because mines are going to become 

more sophisticated.” Admiral Kelso was echoing the statement of Chief of Naval 

Operations Admiral Forrest Sherman, following the Wonsan MCM debacle of 

October 1950:

[W]hen you can’t go where you want to, when you want to, you haven’t 

got command of the sea. And command of the sea is a rock-bottom foundation of all our war plans. We’ve been plenty submarine-conscious and 

air-conscious. Now we’re going to start getting mine-conscious beginning 

last week.23

The objective of the 1992 plan was to put mine warfare within what later 

that year would be the . . . From the Sea strategic context. It surveyed post-World 

War II mine crises, including Operation Intense Look and Gulf War MCM ops, 

and it examined the changed strategic context, the nature of the global mine 

threat, enduring as well as emerging requirements, in-service capabilities to meet 

these needs, programs to address gaps and shortcomings, and resources to carry, 

bringing reality rather than rhetoric to the nation’s mine warfare mission area.

Academic Materials

In addition to a handful of international law-related articles—Elsadig Yagoub 

A. Abunafeesa, “The Post-1970 Political Geography of the Red Sea Region with 

Special Reference to United States Interests” (1985); Juden Justice Reed, “‘Damn 

the Torpedoes!’: International Standards Regarding the Use of Automatic 

Submarine Mines” (1984); and Ronnie Anne Wainwright, “Navigation through 
61

Operations

Three Straits in the Middle East: Effects on the United States of Being a Nonparty 

to the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea” (1986)—that touched upon the 

Red Sea mine crisis, if only tangentially, there has been a surprising number of 

mine warfare papers at war colleges and postgraduate schools. However, there 

is little that is new, and most use the Mines of August and Desert Shield/Desert 

Storm/Candid Hammer experiences to advocate for policy and programs.

For example, Lieutenant Commander Colin K. Boynton—“Operations to 

Defeat Iranian Maritime Trade Interdiction” (2000)—relies on previous discussions of Candid Hammer, such as they are, to counter Iranian use of mines in 

some future crisis. Lieutenant Commander Jason Gilbert—“The Combined 

Mine Countermeasures Force: A Unified Commander-in-Chief’s Answer to the 

Mine Threat” (2001)—highlighted past MCM challenges to argue for a revitalized international/maritime partners approach to combined MCM warfighting. 

Finally, Dr. Raymond Widmayer—“A Strategic and Industrial Assessment of Sea 

Mine Warfare in the Post–Cold War Era” (1993)—outlined a strategic framework for a robust mine warfare industrial base.

NEEDS AND OPPORTUNITIES TO HELP SET THE AGENDA

This survey of the historiography of two U.S. MCM operations reveals what might 

have been expected, a priori. As much as mines have had strategic, operational, 

and tactical impacts, MCM remains a niche warfare area—even more so when 

the Navy’s mines and mining are brought into the equation. The episodic nature 

of the threat, with sometimes years between events, generates an “out of sight, 

out of mine” philosophy. So it seems for histories of mine warfare operations, too.

There are the challenges of working U.S. Navy subjects that have classified 

materials. The CNA library has “thousands” of classified materials/reports/

message traffic relating to Desert Shield/Desert Storm MCM, but I had no 

access to them.

That begs the question: Where to look for mine-warfare historical resources 

within the U.S. Navy? This is problematic, given the challenges of a fragmented 

warfare community with no single champion.24 Mine Warfare in the Office of 

the Chief of Naval Operations—the Navy’s headquarters—is centered in the 

Director of Expeditionary Warfare, but other naval warfare sponsors have overlapping and sometimes competing responsibilities for ships, helicopters, and 

unmanned systems.

There is no single mine-warfare voice in the operating forces, and the mine 
62

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

warriors suffer from organizational churn. In the acquisition community, an 

emphasis on mine warfare has all-but been eliminated from various program 

executive officer organizations from the mid-1990s through 2011:

■ PEO (Project Executive Office)-MIW—created specifically to make MIW well 

and give it a competitive edge—MIW exclusive, no other warfare area

■ PEO-MUW (Mine and Undersea Warfare)—mines listed first

■ PEO-LMW (Littoral and Mine Warfare)—mines listed last

■ PEO-LCS (Littoral Combat Ship) [MIW not even in the title]—some MIW 

“codes” were excluded altogether, e.g., PMS-408 (EOD)

Before 2006, the Commander Mine Warfare Command 

(COMINWARCOM)—in Charleston, South Carolina, and Ingleside, Texas—

had operational control. Then the Navy disestablished it and stood up the Navy 

Mine and Antisubmarine Warfare Command—at San Diego, California—

which commanded mine warfare as a secondary mission, but still at the flag 

officer level. The Navy disestablished that command in 2015 and established 

Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Command—still in San Diego—

for ships and weapons. The operating force responsibility for the AMCM helicopters resides in the Commander, Naval Air Forces—San Diego—but the two 

AMCM helicopter squadrons are located in Norfolk, Virginia. And, the Naval 

Expeditionary Combat Command—Little Creek, Virginia—has had explosive 

ordnance disposal cognizance.

Conducting historical research in mine warfare thus looks to be a “Where’s 

Waldo?” evolution.

It does not help when the community shoots itself in the foot. Mine warfare 

expert George Pollitt explained,

When COMINWARCOM was in Charleston, there was an MIW archive 

kept at the Naval and Mine Warfare Training Center (NMWTC). This 

archive had operational data going back to before [World War I]. When 

COMINWARCOM moved to Corpus Christi, the archive was culled 

and the part that was retained was stored in boxes in the SECRET vault 

at COMINEWARCOM. I was told that, when COMINEWARCOM was 

disestablished, all the remaining archive was destroyed.25

Looking ahead, since 1992 there has been no book-length publication 

focused solely on the history of mine warfare in the United States and elsewhere 
63

Operations

(Hartmann/Truver, Levie, and Melia).26 However, much has transpired since 

then: MIW vision, strategy, threats, requirements, capabilities, programs, and 

operations. The U.S. Navy confronted an Iraqi mine threat in Operation Iraqi 

Freedom (2003),27 but nothing like 1990–91, and in May 2008 Tamil Black 

Tiger commandos used limpet mines to sink the (ill-named) MV Invincible

(A-520), a Sri Lankan navy cargo ship loaded with explosives.28

Perhaps it is time to update/revise Weapons That Wait.

My experience focusing on the historiography of Operations Intense Look 

and Candid Hammer/Gulf War MCM ops could easily be repeated in the other 

156 or so global U.S. Navy Operations from 1980 to 2010 outlined at the beginning of this paper. Official sources will remain difficult to access due to classification, and where to locate materials remains uncertain. A first step would be to 

take advantage of NHHC resources and the Navy library, as well as the Naval 

War College, Naval Postgraduate School, and (if access can be granted) CNA 

libraries. It should be expected that the names and dates of specific operations 

might not be correct. In this effort for Intense Look/Candid Hammer, I relied 

on numerous secondary sources, which at times had contradictory information.

At the end of the day, then, the issue is not whether we will experience a 

mining event, but when and where it will happen and whether we will be ready 

to defeat the threat. There are more than a million sea mines of more than 300 

types in the inventories of more than 50 navies worldwide, not counting terrorist 

mines and underwater improvised explosive devices. I recall something about 

either learning from history or repeating it.

And, in that regard, I have no doubt that naval mines, like “The Poor,” will 

be with us, always.

Again, my thanks to Michael Crawford and the NHHC for the opportunity 

to share my thoughts and to NHHC’s Greg Bereiter for his commentary; to my 

colleagues George Pollitt and Norman Polmar for their technical and operational 

review; Greta Marlatt and Tim O’Hara for bibliographic support; and my bride 

Annmarie, who ignored my crankiness as the deadline drew near.
64

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Naval History and Heritage Command

Discussant Commentary

Dr. Gregory Bereiter, PhD, NHHC Historian, offered his insights 

regarding this review of mine warfare historiography.

My comments in response to Scott’s presentation will briefly address two issues. First, I’d like to consider the challenges of researching and writing about recent operational history in general. Second, I’d like to suggest some 

potential avenues for future historical work on mine warfare in the U.S. Navy.

 Scott’s presentation has touched on a crucial challenge for naval historians in 

general: how to approach the recent past. While many problems and methods are 

similar regardless of the time period, recent history introduces particularly challenging obstacles, from ephemeral digital sources to surviving participants with 

a vested interest in how their history gets written. Historians who seek to write 

about recent operations—especially about its more obscure aspects (like naval 

mine warfare)—confront challenges and dilemmas that our graduate training 

does not entirely prepare us to navigate.

Historians are trained to research in archives. However, most official documents on recent mine warfare operations are classified—and will remain so for 

the foreseeable future. Thus, anyone “outside the family” attempting to write 

about recent mine-warfare developments won’t be able to access the documents 

they need to reconstruct a given event. This forces a heavy reliance on eyewitness 

recollections. But historians would never rely solely on what historical actors of, 

say, the 17th or 18th century said they were doing. Yet, despite the fallibility of 

memory, oral histories are sources of insights that cannot be found in written 

records. Our job is to bring myriad resources together, so that we might not 

only reconstruct what actually happened, but also interpret the meaning of what 

happened in the broadest terms.

Despite these challenges, avenues for future historical work on naval mine 

warfare certainly exist.

Some of the most exciting recent work on mine warfare focuses on the later 

19th and early 20th centuries. Two recent articles in The Journal of Military 

History demonstrate the promise of current research into this topic. Timothy 

Wolters’ examination of Confederate “electric torpedo” development in the Civil 
65

Operations

War provides a fascinating perspective on the ways in which mining technology, 

memory, and history were interconnected. Richard Dunley’s assessment of the 

late 19th-century Royal Navy demonstrates how it proactively engaged with the 

new technology of controlled mining, shaping this technology to suit its particular strategic and cultural requirements.

There may also be an opportunity for historians to reexamine aspects of the 

North Sea Mine Barrage during World War I, which was established primarily 

on American initiative between March and June of 1918 in an effort to restrict 

the movements of U-boats from the North Sea into the Atlantic.

Historians of the Cold War–era Navy should also note that one of the key 

aims of NATO maritime strategy during the Cold War was to prevent the exit 

of Warsaw Pact naval forces through the Danish Strait or the Turkish Strait in 

European waters, or the exit of the Soviet Pacific Fleet through La Pérouse Strait 

and the Korea Strait in the Pacific.

Lastly, in light of present escalating tensions with Russia and China, both of 

whom together are thought to possess close to 350,000 sea mines, historians of 

the very near future will likely need to engage in comparative historical analysis 

of anti-access and area-denial warfare against these two maritime competitors.
66

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Notes

1 It was by accident that I became interested in naval mine warfare—mine countermeasures, as well as mines and mining. An Air Force brat growing up in the 1950s, 

I remembered World War II submarine movies, particularly enthralled by Cary 

Grant’s maneuvering the USS Copperfin through a defensive minefield in Operation 

Destination Tokyo. In 1979, I worked on a project to address the international legal 

regime related to the development and operation of a very long-range, accurate, 

stealthy, and precise remote-control, multiple-influence, submarine-launched mobile 

mine. My “Mines of August: An International Whodunit” appeared in the May 1985 

U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings/Naval Review, 94–117. Since then my teams and I 

have provided research, analysis, and program support to the Navy’s mine warfare 

community, including producing the service’s first post–Cold War mine warfare plan 

in 1992—Mine Warfare Plan: Meeting the Challenges of an Uncertain World (U)

(Washington, DC: Mine Warfare/EOD Branch [OP-363], Assistant Chief of Naval 

Operations for Surface Warfare [OP-03], Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, 29 

January 1992) Unclassified. This also was produced in a classified version.

2 Earlier in 1984, several mines were planted in Nicaraguan ports and waters, damaging 

several ships and generating suspicions that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency 

had assisted the anti-communist insurgents, the Contras, intent on overthrowing the 

Sandinista government. In fact, the mining operations were carried out by CIA-hired 

contractors without the Contras’ knowledge. No mines were recovered, and the 

United States rejected the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice. Howard 

S. Levie, Mine Warfare at Sea (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1992), 162–63; Jude 

Justice Reed, “‘Damn the Torpedoes!’: International Standards Regarding the Use of 

Automatic Submarine Mines,” Fordham International Law Journal 8, issue 2, article 

5 (1984): 286–22; and the Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence, U.S. 

Senate, 98th Congress Second Session, 1 January 1983 to 31 December 1984, 4–12.

The Arabian Gulf Iran/Iraq “Tanker War” 1980–1988 also witnessed the indiscriminate use of naval mines. Martin S. Navias and E. R. Hooton. Tanker Wars: The 

Assault on Merchant Shipping During the Iran-Iraq Conflict, 1980–1988 (London: 

Tauris Academic Studies, I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1996), ch. 6. See also George K. 

Walker, ed., “Chapter VI: The Tanker War and the Maritime Environment, The Tanker 

War 1980–1988—Law and Policy,” International Law Studies, Naval War College 

Press 74 (2000): 481–604; and Michael A. Palmer, On Course to Desert Storm: The 

United States Navy in the Persian Gulf (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 

Contributions to Naval History No. 5, 1992), 121–34. Ronald O’Rourke reported 

that of the 340 types of weapons used by both sides through 1987, only ten were 

mines. Mines were employed in 1987 for the first time since 1984, and the first 

1987 mine attack occurred near Kuwait, a day after the Iraqi missile attack on Stark 

(FFG-31). The victim of the mining was a Soviet-flag ship chartered by Kuwait. 

Even counting some of the “unknown attacks” as mine-related, however, mining 

accounted for only a small fraction of all attacks. The significant attention paid to 

the mining threat might thus be seen in part as a reflection of the psychological effect 

that mines can generate. “The Tanker War,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 

1988; http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1988-05/tanker-war.

3 Tamara Moser Melia, “Damn the Torpedoes”: A Short History of U.S. Naval Mine 
67

Operations

Countermeasures, 1777–1991 (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 1991); 

http://edocs.nps.edu/dodpubs/topic/general/DamnTorpedoesWhole.pdf, 76.

4 Roy R. Manstan and Frederick J. Frese, Turtle: David Bushnell’s Revolutionary 

Vessel (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2010); Gregory K. Hartmann with Scott 

C. Truver, Weapons That Wait: Mine Warfare in the U.S. Navy (Annapolis, MD: 

Naval Institute Press, 1991); Levie, Mine Warfare at Sea; and Melia, “Damn the 

Torpedoes,”.

5 Scott C. Truver, “Mines and Underwater IEDs in U.S. Ports and Waterways,” Naval 

War College Review 61, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 106–27; CDR Michael C. Sparks, 

USN, “A Critical Vulnerability, A Valid Threat: U.S. Ports and Terrorist Mining,” 

Paper, Joint Forces Staff College, Joint Advanced Warfighting School, 13 April 2005; 

and Peter von Bleichert, “Port Security: The Terrorist Naval Mine/Underwater 

Improvised Explosive Device Threat,” dissertation, Walden University, 2015; http://

scholarworks.waldenu.edu/dissertations.

6 On the Chinese threat, see my “Taking Mines Seriously: Mine Warfare in China’s 

Near Seas,” Naval War College Review 65, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 30–66.

7 In addition to the “Mines of August” article, see generally: Elsadig Yagoub A. 

Abunafeesa, “The Post-1970 Political Geography of the Red Sea Region with 

Special Reference to United States Interests,” dissertation, Durham University, 1985; 

http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/7876/, 384, 394–400; David Crist, Twilight War: The Secret 

History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (New York: Penguin, 2013), 

“The Invisible Hand of God,” ch. 13, 235–55; Hartmann and Truver, Weapons 

That Wait, 250–55; Levie, Mine Warfare at Sea, 159–62; and Melia, “Damn the 

Torpedoes,” 118–19.

At my request, in June 2016, Dr. Timothy O’Hara, Research Scientist at the 

Center for Naval Analyses, searched the CNA library and archives for “Operation 

Intense Look,” which resulted in no original analyses or sources that would help the 

historiography, and “Operation Candid Hammer,” which turned up one citation.

8 Soviet News and Propaganda Analysis, based on Red Star (The Official Newspaper 

of the Soviet Defense Establishment) for the period 1–31 August 1984 (Washington, 

DC: Joint Special Operations Agency, Joint Chief of Staff, 1984), 10–11.

9 Melia, “Damn the Torpedoes,” 119.

10 Department of Defense, Conduct of the Persian Gulf War: Final Report (Washington, 

DC: 1992), 273–78; Mine Warfare/EOD Branch (OP-363), Mine Warfare Plan, 8–17; 

Melia, “Damn the Torpedoes,” 127–31; and Anthony Cordesman and Abraham 

R. Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War, Volume IV: The Gulf War (Boulder, CO: 

Westview Press, 1996), ch. 10, 810–17.

11 There are other uncertainties, with some references noting a Candid Hammer exercise in November–December 1990 and others indicating operations in January–

April 1991. In June 2016, Dr. O’Hara searched the Center for Naval Analyses library 

and archives for “Candid Hammer,” turning up only one document, an archived 

classified DESRON (Destroyer Squadron) 15 report, with the (unclassified) name 

of the document, “Exercise CANDID HAMMER File, 20 Dec 90–11 Jan 9.” Those 

dates match up with the discussion of a maritime patrol aircraft deployment: “1 

Nov–Dec 1990: VP-4 (‘Skinny Dragons’) deployed to Diego Garcia in support of 

Desert Shield, and participated in exercise Candid Hammer while operating out of 
68

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

a remote site at Massirah, Oman.” Michael D. Roberts, Dictionary of American 

Naval Aviation Squadrons, Volume 2, The History of VP, VPB, VP(HL) and VP(AM) 

Squadrons (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 2000), 39.

On 16 January 1991, U.S. Central Command announced the completion 

of the exercise/operation “CANDID HAMMER, communications techniques/

mine warfare drills in central Arabian Gulf (Participants: USN, Royal Saudi, 

French, British, Canadian, and Australian naval forces);” https://www.facebook.com/RememberingtheGulfWar/posts/467897699934301 and http://www.

history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/u/

us-navy-in-desert-shield-desert-storm/january-1991.html.

Also, naval analyst Caitlin Talmadge provided data specific to Candid Hammer, 

from 1 March to 20 April 1991. See, “Closing Time: Assessing the Iranian Threat 

to the Strait of Hormuz,” International Security 33, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 94–96.

During June 2016, I “pinged” on the U.S. Navy and foreign navy mine warfare 

community via an informal Internet mine warfare information service maintained 

by George Pollitt, a mine warfare expert at Johns Hopkins University Applied 

Physics Laboratory. He emailed the question—“Does anyone recall an Operation 

Candid Hammer in 1990–91?”— to several hundred recipients that included Gulf 

War commanders of the mine warfare group, commanders and crews of the MCM 

vessels, and AMCM helicopter pilots: “No.” It remains an enigma.

12 Edward J. Marolda, “The U.S. Navy in the Cold War Era, 1945–1991” (based 

on the chapter, “Cold War to Violent Peace,” in W. J. Holland Jr., ed.,  The 

Navy. Washington, DC: Naval Historical Foundation, 2000.), http://usnavymuseum.

org/pdf/Activity_16_background.pdf, 28. See also, Edward J. Marolda and Robert J. 

Schneller Jr., Shield and Sword: The United States Navy and the Persian Gulf War. 

Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 1998, 68, 118, 122, 141–42, 148–49, 

181, 192, 205, 212, 223–26, 231, 233, 247–51, 255–59, 277, 282, 321–25, and 442. 

There is no mention of Candid Hammer in a list of related operations at page 507.

13 Talmadge, “Closing Time,” 95.

14 Boynton, “Operations to Defeat Iranian Maritime Trade Interdiction,” paper, Naval 

War College, 4 May 2009.

Mine warfare expert George Pollitt, who was in-theater during “sweep” ops, 

recalls, “The MCM operations started in early February with AMCM, USS Avenger, 

three MSOs, and four Royal Navy Ton Class sweepers and continued through the 

end of June 1991. By my rough calculations, 650 square nautical miles were cleared 

during that period. The USN and RN forces operated alone until the WEU came in. 

Then all operated until 30 June. (The WEU came back to port on 20 July according 

to Marolda, but the USN was still operating, and I know that AMCM cleared nine 

mines using the Q-14 during the last two weeks they were out there.) Altogether I 

counted 25 ships and six AMCM helicopters clearing. The overall clearance rate was 

0.2 square nautical miles per MCM asset day. It was true that some of the mines 

were cleared quickly by the French and Belgians after they knew the mine positions 

(they went straight down the mine-lines, as defined by the Iraqi charts), but that was 

only part of their assignment, and they were not assigned the entire area.” Email 

exchange, 9 August 2016.

15 Mine Warfare/EOD Branch (OP-363), Mine Warfare Plan, 21–22.
69

Operations

16 Breemer, “Intense Look: U.S. Minehunting Experience in the Red Sea,” Navy 

International 90, no. 8 (August 1985): 478–82.

17 For example, writing in 2013, David Crist, Twilight War,, ch. 13, 600n3, states, 

“By far the most comprehensive account of this operation” was the “Mines of 

August” article.

18 Edward J. Marolda, ed. Operation End Sweep: A History of Minesweeping 

Operations in North Vietnam (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 1993).

19 “Coastal defense” or “offense” should not be discounted. As “regime change” in 

Libya was being carried out in the spring 2011, forces loyal to Gaddafi reportedly 

laid mines off the coast of Misurata. A NATO spokesperson noted three sea mines 

were discovered two miles off shore and destroyed, but there were fears that others 

remained as yet unfound and posed a threat, in what officials said was a clear breach 

of international law. VADM Rinaldo Veri of the Italian navy said the mining of a 

civilian port was “clearly designed to disrupt the lawful flow of humanitarian aid 

to the innocent civilian people of Libya,” calling it another “deliberate violation” of 

Security Council resolutions. Rob Crilly, “NATO Warships Clear Misurata of Sea 

Mines as Gaddafi Remains Defiant,” The Telegraph, 30 April 2011; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8485650/Nato-warship

s-clear-Misurata-of-sea-mines-as-Gaddafi-remains-defiant.html.

20 Lambert, “The Naval War,” in John Pimlott and Stephen Badsey, eds., The Gulf War 

Assessed (London: Arms and Armour, 1992), 125–46.

21 While Michael Palmer’s On Course to Desert Storm provides valuable insight 

into the Navy’s long history in the gulf, particularly the Tanker War (122–46), he 

nowhere gives mention of “The Mines of August” and leaves the history of Desert 

Shield/Desert Storm to others.

22 See note 9.

23 Melia, “Damn the Torpedoes,” 79.

24 Scott C. Truver, “Wanted: U.S. Navy Mine Warfare Champion,” Naval War College 

Review 68, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 116ff.

25 Email exchange, 9 August 2016.

26 CDR David Bruhn, USN (ret) published two books on MCM vessels in 2007 

and 2009: Wooden Ships and Iron Men, The U.S. Navy’s Ocean Minesweepers, 

1953–1994 (Westminster, MD: Heritage Books, 2007) and Wooden Ships and Iron 

Men, Volume II, The U.S. Navy’s Coastal and Motor Minesweepers, 1941–1953

(Westminster, MD: Heritage Books, 2009).

Other books seek to advocate for a more robust mine warfare capability, for 

example: Oceans Studies Board, Oceanography and Mine Warfare (Washington, 

DC: National Research Council, National Academy Press, 2000): and Naval Studies 

Board, Naval Mine Warfare: Operational and Technical Challenges for Naval Forces 

(Washington, DC: National Research Council, National Academy Press, 2001).

27 RADM Paul Ryan, USN, and Scott C. Truver, “U.S. Navy Mine Warfare Vision . . . 

Programs . . . Operations: Key to Sea Power in the 21st Century,” Naval Forces 90, 

no. 3 (2003): 28–32.

28 “Sea Tiger Commandos Sink SLN Supply Ship in Trinco Harbour,” TamilNet, 9 May 

2008; https://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=13&artid=25590.
70

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Appendix 1

U.S. NAVY OPERATIONS 1980–2010 (158)

Types of Operations: Peace Ops/Forward Presence, Humanitarian Assistance/

Disaster Relief (HADR), Freedom of Navigation (FON), Maritime Intercept Ops 

(MIO)1, Counter-Piracy, Noncombatant Evacuation Operations (NEO), Show of 

Force, Contingent Positioning, Combat

Names/Dates Type Region/Countries

1980–89 (49)

Desert One 1980 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iran

Creek Sentry 1980–81 Show of Force Europe/Baltic/Poland

Iran-Iraq War 1981–82 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq/Iran

Israeli Invasion 1981 NEO Mediterranean/Lebanon/Israel

Al-Biqa Missiles I 1981 Show of Force Mediterranean/Israel/Syria

Sadat Assassination 1981 Contingent Mediterranean/Egypt

Yugoslav Unrest 1981 Contingent Mediterranean/Adriatic/

Yugoslavia

Gulf of Sirte I 1981 FON Mediterranean/Libya

Surveillance Ops 1981 Show of Force Western Hemisphere/Nicaragua

ELF Sentry 1982–83 Contingent Mediterranean/Egypt

Lebanon War 1982–84 Contingent Mediterranean/Lebanon/Israel

Early Call 1983 Show of Force Mediterranean/Egypt/Libya

Marine Barracks Bombing 

1983

Combat Mediterranean/Lebanon

Chad 1983 Peace Ops Africa/Chad/Libya

KAL007 1983 Show of Force Pacific/Soviet Union/S. Korea

Urgent Fury 1983 Combat Western Hemisphere/Grenada

Seaward Explorer Rescue 

1984

Contingent Western Hemisphere/Cuba

Syria Attack 1984 Combat Mediterranean/Lebanon

Lebanon Withdrawal 1984 Combat Mediterranean/Lebanon

Iran-Iraq War 1984 Show of Force Arabian Gulf

1 MIO also included vessel boarding, search and seizure (VBSS) ops.
71

Operations

Names/Dates Type Region/Countries

Basra-Kharg Island Crisis 

1984

Show of Force Arabian Gulf

Intense Look 1984 Show of Force Red Sea/Gulf of Aqaba/Libya

Ship Escorts 1984–1986 Show of Force Arabian Gulf

Embassy Show of Force 1985 Show of Force Mediterranean/Lebanon

Saudi Hijacking 1985 Contingent Arabian Gulf

Lebanon Hostages 1986 Contingent Mediterranean/Lebanon

Display Determination 1986 Contingent Mediterranean/Turkey

Egypt Air Hijacking 1986 Contingent Mediterranean/Morocco

TWA 847 Hijacking 1986 Contingent Mediterranean/Lebanon

Achille Lauro Rescue 1986 Combat Mediterranean/Italy

Gulf of Sirte II 1986 FON Mediterranean/Libya

El Dorado Canyon 1986 Combat Mediterranean/Libya

Yemen Civil War 1986 NEO Indian Ocean/Yemen

Lebanon Hostages 1987 Contingent Mediterranean/Lebanon

Pakistan Air Hijacking 1987 Contingent Mediterranean/Cyprus

Nimble Archer 1987 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iran

USS Stark 1987 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Earnest Will 1987–88 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq/Iran/Kuwait

Pneumatic Hammer 1987–88 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq/Iran/Kuwait

Praying Mantis 1988 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iran

USS Samuel B. Roberts 1988 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iran

Jittery Prop 1988 Contingent Western Hemisphere/El Salvador/

Nicaragua

Golden Pheasant 1988 Show of Force Western Hemisphere/Honduras

Nimrod Dancer 1988–89 Show of Force Western Hemisphere/Panama

Valiant Boom 1988 Show of Force Western Hemisphere/Panama

Maldives Coup 1989 Contingent Indian Ocean/Maldives

Classic Resolve 1989 Show of Force Pacific/Philippines

Hurricane Hugo 1989 HADR U.S. East Coast

Just Cause 1989–90 Combat Western Hemisphere/Panama

1990–99 (81)

Sea Angel 1990 HADR SW Asia/Bangladesh

Sharp Edge 1990–91 NEO Africa/Liberia
72

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Names/Dates Type Region/Countries

Desert Shield 1990–91 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Candid Hammer 1990–91 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Desert Storm 1991 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Provide Comfort 1991–97 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Iraq MIO 1991–2000 MIO Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Eastern Exit 1991 NEO Africa/Somalia

Victor Squared 1991 NEO Western Hemisphere/Haiti

Impressive Lift 1992 Peace Ops Africa/Somalia

Iraq Nuclear Facility Strike 

1992

Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Southern Watch 1992–2000 Peace Ops /MIO/

Combat

Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Sharp Guard/Decisive 

Enhancement 1992–98

Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Sharp Vigilance 1992 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Maritime Guard 1992–93 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Deny Flight 1993–95 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Provide Promise 1994 Contingent Mediterranean/Balkans

Joint Endeavor 1996 Peace Ops Mediterranean/Balkans

Decisive Edge 1996 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkan

Deliberate Force 1996 Combat Mediterranean/Balkans

Deliberate Guard 1996–97 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Joint Guard 1996–98 Peace Ops Mediterranean/Balkans

Joint Forge 1997–2001 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Deliberate Forge 1997–98 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Iraq TLAM Strikes 1993 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Restore Hope 1993 HADR Africa/Somalia

Korea/Nuclear Tensions 

1993–94

Show of Force Pacific/Koreas/Japan

Support Democracy 1993–94 Show of Force Western Hemisphere/Haiti

Continued Hope 1993–95 Peace Ops Africa/Somalia

Show Care Peace Ops Africa/Somalia

More Care Peace Ops Africa/Somalia

Quick Draw Peace Ops Africa/Somalia

Distant Runner 1994 NEO Africa/Liberia

Support Hope 1994 HADR Africa/Somalia
73

Operations

Names/Dates Type Region/Countries

USLO Withdrawal 1994 NEO Africa/Somalia

Able Vigil 1994 MIO Western Hemisphere/Cuba

Vigilant Warrior 1994–95 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Kuwait

Uphold Democracy 1994–95 Show of Force Western Hemisphere/Haiti

Maintain Democracy 1995 Peace Ops Western Hemisphere/Haiti

Sea Signal JTF 1994–96 MIO Western Hemisphere /Cuba/Haiti

Greece/Turkey Tension 1995 Show of Force Mediterranean

United Shield 1995 NEO Africa/Somalia

Nuclear Reactor Negotiations 

1995

Contingent Pacific/Koreas

Vigilant Sentinel 1995–96 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Sentinel Safeguard 1996 Show of Force Western Hemisphere/Cuba

Assured Response 1996 NEO Africa/Liberia

Quick Response 1996 NEO Africa/Monrovia

Taiwan Flexible Deterrent 

1996

Show of Force Pacific/China (PRC)/Taiwan

Desert Strike 1996–97 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Operation Monitor 1997 Contingent Western Hemisphere/Cuba

Passive Oversight 1997 Contingent Western Hemisphere/Cuba

Silver Wake 1997 NEO Mediterranean/Albania

Guardian Retrieval 1997 NEO Africa/Zaire

Noble Obelisk 1997 NEO Africa/Sierra Leone

Bevel Edge 1997 Show of Force Pacific/Cambodia

Silent Assurance 1997–98 Combat SW Asia/Afghanistan

Northern Watch 1997–2001 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Desert Thunder 1997–98 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Desert Fox 1998 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Bevel Incline 1998 NEO Pacific/Indonesia

Autumn Shelter 1998 NEO Africa/Zaire

Shadow Express 1998 NEO Africa/Liberia

Safe Departure 1998 NEO Africa/Ethiopia/Eritrea

Silver Knight 1998 NEO Mediterranean/Albania

Determined Falcon 1998 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Deliberate Guard 1998 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Balkan Calm 1998 Peace Ops Mediterranean/Balkans
74

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Names/Dates Type Region/Countries

Infinite Reach 1998 Combat Africa/Sudan/Afghanistan

Resolute Response 1998 NEO Africa/Kenya

Desert Fox 1998 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Eritrea NEO 1999 NEO Africa/Eritrea

Shadow Express 1999 NEO Africa/Liberia

Desert Viper 1999 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Noble Anvil 1999 Combat Mediterranean/Balkans

Shining Hope 1999 Peace Ops Mediterranean/Balkans

Allied Force 1999 Peace Ops Mediterranean/Balkans

Joint Guardian 1999 Peace Ops Mediterranean/Balkans

Balkan Calm II 1999 NEO Mediterranean/Balkans

Noble Safeguard 1999 Show of Force Mediterranean/Israel

Avid Response 1999 HADR Mediterranean/Turkey

East Timor Stabilize 

1999–2001

HADR Pacific/Indonesia

2000–10 (25)

Determined Response 2000 NEO Indian Ocean/Yemen

EP3 Incident (PRC) 2001 FON Pacific/China (PRC)

Bold Samaritan 2000–2002 HADR Pacific/Indonesia/East Timor

Sheltering Sky 2003 NEO Africa/Liberia

Enduring Freedom 2001–2014 Contingent/ 

Combat

SW Asia/Afghanistan

Pegasus Venture 2002 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Dynamic Response 

2002–2003

Peace Ops Mediterranean/Balkans

Shining Express 2003 Contingent/ NEO Africa/Liberia

North Korea Nuclear Crisis 

2003

Show of Force Pacific/Koreas/Japan

Iraqi Freedom 2003–10 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Unified Assistance 

2004–2005

HADR Pacific/Thailand/Indonesia

JTF Katrina 2005 HADR U.S. Gulf Coast

Sea Horse 2005 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Lebanon War II 2006 NEO Mediterranean/Lebanon/Israel

Goodwill-Kaibigan 2007 HADR Pacific/Philippines
75

Operations

Names/Dates Type Region/Countries

Sea Angel II 2007 HADR SWA/Bangladesh

Caring Response 2008 HADR Pacific/Samoa/Tonga/Solomon 

Islands/ Kiribati/Marshall 

Islands

Assured Delivery 2008 Show of Force Russia/Georgia

Ocean Shield 2008– Counter-Piracy Indian Ocean/Gulf of Aden

Allied Protector 2009– Counter-Piracy Indian Ocean/Gulf of Aden

Maersk Alabama 2009 Counter-Piracy Indian Ocean/Gulf of Aden

Deepwater Horizon BP Oil

Spill 2010

HADR U.S. Gulf Coast

Hot Rock 2010–11 HADR Mediterranean/Sicily

Unified Response 2010 HADR Western Hemisphere/Haiti

New Dawn 2010–11 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Sources

Cobble, W. Eugene, H. H. Gafney and Dmitry Gorenburg, For the Record: All U.S. 

Forces’ Responses to Situations, 1970–2000 (with Additions Covering 2000–2003). 

Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, Center for Strategic Studies, CIM 

D0008414.A3/1Rev, May 2005.

Forster, Larissa. Influence without Boots on the Ground: Seaborne Crisis Response. 

Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, Newport Papers 39, January 2013.

Gafney, H. H. and Robert C. Benbow Jr., et al. Employment of Amphibious MEUs 

in National Responses to Situations. Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 

Center for Strategic Studies, CIM D0015288.A2/Final, December 2006.

Kingsley, Maria and Alison Rimsky Vernon. Disaster Relief and Engagement Operations, 

1990–2010: A Synthesis of CNA Analyses. Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval 

Analyses, CRM D0024934.A1/Final, April 2011.

Seigel, Adam B. “The Use of Naval Forces in the Post-War Era: U.S. Navy and U.S. 

Marine Corps Crisis Response Activity, 1946–1990.” Center for Naval Analyses 

Research Memorandum 90-246, February 1991.

Swartz, Peter M. and Karin Duggan. The U.S. Navy in the World (1981–1990): Context 

for U.S. Navy Capstone Strategies and Concepts. Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval 

Analyses, MISC D0026419.A1/Final, December 2011.

Swartz, Peter M. and Karin Duggan. The U.S. Navy in the World (1991–2000): Context 

for U.S. Navy Capstone Strategies and Concepts. Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval 

Analyses, MISC D0026420.A2/Final, March 2013.

Swartz, Peter M. and Karin Duggan. The U.S. Navy in the World (2001–2010): Context 

for U.S. Navy Capstone Strategies and Concepts. Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval 

Analyses, MISC D0026422.A2/Final, December 2011.
76

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Appendix 2

U.S. NAVY OPERATIONS 1980–2010: 

TYPES OF OPERATIONS

Types of Operations: Peace Ops/Forward Presence, Humanitarian Assistance/

Disaster Relief (HADR), Freedom of Navigation (FON), Maritime Intercept Ops 

(MIO)2, Counter-Piracy, Noncombatant Evacuation Operations (NEO), Show of 

Force, Contingent Positioning, Combat

Name/Dates Type Region/Countries

Peace Operations (15)

Chad 1983 Peace Ops Africa/Chad/Libya

Impressive Lift 1992 Peace Ops Africa/Somalia

Southern Watch 1992–2000 Peace Ops/

MIO/ 

Combat

Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Joint Endeavor 1996 Peace Ops Mediterranean/Balkans

Joint Guard 1996–98 Peace Ops Mediterranean/Balkans

Continued Hope 1993–95 Peace Ops Africa/Somalia

Show Care Peace Ops Africa/Somalia

More Care Peace Ops Africa/Somalia

Quick Draw Peace Ops Africa/Somalia

Maintain Democracy 1995 Peace Ops Western Hemisphere/Haiti

Balkan Calm 1998 Peace Ops Mediterranean/Balkans

Shining Hope 1999 Peace Ops Mediterranean/Balkans

Allied Force 1999 Peace Ops Mediterranean/Balkans

Joint Guardian 1999 Peace Ops Mediterranean/Balkans

Dynamic Response 2002–2003 Peace Ops Mediterranean/Balkans

Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief (15)

Hurricane Hugo 1989 HADR U.S. East Coast

Sea Angel 1990 HADR SW Asia/Bangladesh

Restore Hope 1993 HADR Africa/Somalia

2 MIO includes vessel board, search and seizure ops.
77

Operations

Name/Dates Type Region/Countries

Support Hope 1994 HADR Africa/Somalia

Avid Response 1999 HADR Mediterranean/Turkey

East Timor Stabilize 1999–2001 HADR Pacific/Indonesia

Bold Samaritan 2000–2002 HADR Pacific/Indonesia/East 

Timor

Unified Assistance 2004–2005 HADR Pacific/Thailand/Indonesia

JTF Katrina 2005 HADR U.S. Gulf Coast

Goodwill-Kaibigan 2007 HADR Pacific/Philippines

Sea Angel II 2007 HADR SW Asia/Bangladesh

Caring Response 2008 HADR Pacific/Samoa/Tonga/

Solomon Islands/ Kiribati/

Marshall Islands

BP Oil Spill 2010 HADR U.S. Gulf Coast

Unified Response 2010 HADR Western Hemisphere/Haiti

Hot Rock 2010–11 HADR Mediterranean/Sicily

Freedom of Navigation (3)

Gulf of Sirte I 1981 FON Mediterranean/Libya

Gulf of Sirte II 1986 FON Mediterranean/Libya

EP3 Incident (PRC) 2001 FON Pacific/China (PRC)

Maritime Interception (3)

Iraq MIO 1991–2000 MIO Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Able Vigil 1994 MIO Western Hemisphere/Cuba

Sea Signal JTF 1994–96 MIO Western Hemisphere/Cuba/

Haiti

Counter-Piracy (3)

Ocean Shield 2008– Counter-Piracy Indian Ocean/Gulf of Aden

Allied Protector 2009– Counter-Piracy Indian Ocean/Gulf of Aden

Maersk Alabama 2009 Counter-Piracy Indian Ocean/Gulf of Aden

Noncombatant Evacuation (25)

Israeli Invasion 1981 NEO Mediterranean/Lebanon/

Israel

Yemen Civil War 1986 NEO Indian Ocean/Yemen

Sharp Edge 1990–91 NEO Africa/Liberia
78

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Name/Dates Type Region/Countries

Eastern Exit 1991 NEO Africa/Somalia

Victor Squared 1991 NEO Western Hemisphere/Haiti

Distant Runner 1994 NEO Africa/Liberia

USLO Withdrawal 1994 NEO Africa/Somalia

United Shield 1995 NEO Africa/Somalia

Assured Response 1996 NEO Africa/Liberia

Quick Response 1996 NEO Africa/Monrovia

Silver Wake 1997 NEO Mediterranean/Albania

Guardian Retrieval 1997 NEO Africa/Zaire

Noble Obelisk 1997 NEO Africa/Sierra Leone

Bevel Incline 1998 NEO Pacific/Indonesia

Autumn Shelter 1998 NEO Africa/Zaire

Shadow Express 1998 NEO Africa/Liberia

Safe Departure 1998 NEO Africa/Ethiopia/Eritrea

Silver Knight 1998 NEO Mediterranean/Albania

Resolute Response 1998 NEO Africa/Kenya

Eritrea NEO 1999 NEO Africa/Eritrea

Shadow Express 1999 NEO Africa/Liberia

Balkan Calm II 1999 NEO Mediterranean/Balkans

Determined Response 2000 NEO Indian Ocean/Yemen

Sheltering Sky 2003 NEO Africa/Liberia

Lebanon War II 2006 NEO Mediterranean/Lebanon/

Israel

Show of Force (47)

Creek Sentry 1980–81 Show of Force Europe/Baltic/Poland

Iran-Iraq War 1981–82 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq/Iran

Al-Biqa Missiles I 1981 Show of Force Mediterranean/Israel/Syria

Surveillance Ops 1981 Show of Force Western Hemisphere/

Nicaragua

Early Call 1983 Show of Force Mediterranean/Egypt/Libya

KAL007 1983 Show of Force Pacific/Soviet Union/S.

Korea

Iran-Iraq War 1984 Show of Force Arabian Gulf

Basra-Kharg Island Crisis 1984 Show of Force Arabian Gulf
79

Operations

Name/Dates Type Region/Countries

Intense Look 1984 Show of Force Red Sea/Gulf of Aqaba/

Libya

Ship Escorts 1984–86 Show of Force Arabian Gulf

Embassy Show of Force 1985 Show of Force Mediterranean/Lebanon

Earnest Will 1987–88 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq/Iran

Pneumatic Hammer 1987–88 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq/Iran/

Kuwait

Golden Pheasant 1988 Show of Force Western Hemisphere/

Honduras

Nimrod Dancer 1988–89 Show of Force Western Hemisphere/

Panama

Valiant Boom 1988 Show of Force Western Hemisphere/

Panama

Classic Resolve 1989 Show of Force Pacific/Philippines

Desert Shield 1990–91 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Candid Hammer 1990–91 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Desert Storm 1991 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Provide Comfort 1991–97 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Sharp Guard/Decisive Enhancement 

1992–98

Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Sharp Vigilance 1992 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Maritime Guard 1992–93 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Deny Flight 1993–95 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Decisive Edge 1996 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Deliberate Guard 1996–97 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Joint Forge 1997–2001 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Deliberate Forge 1997–98 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Korea/Nuclear Tensions 1993–94 Show of Force Pacific/Koreas/Japan

Support Democracy 1993–94 Show of Force Western Hemisphere/Haiti

Vigilant Warrior 1994–95 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Kuwait

Uphold Democracy 1994–95 Show of Force Western Hemisphere/Haiti

Greece/Turkey Tension 1995 Show of Force Mediterranean

Vigilant Sentinel 1995–96 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Sentinel Safeguard 1996 Show of Force Western Hemisphere/Cuba

Taiwan Flexible Deterrent 1996 Show of Force Pacific/China (PRC)/Taiwan

Bevel Edge 1997 Show of Force Pacific/Cambodia

Northern Watch 1997–2001 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq
80

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Name/Dates Type Region/Countries

Desert Thunder 1997–98 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Desert Fox 1998 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Determined Falcon 1998 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Deliberate Guard 1998 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Desert Viper 1999 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Noble Safeguard 1999 Show of Force Mediterranean/Israel

North Korea Nuclear Crisis 2003 Show of Force Pacific/Koreas/Japan

Assured Delivery 2008 Show of Force Russia/Georgia

Contingent Positioning (20)

Sadat Assassination 1981 Contingent Mediterranean/Egypt

Yugoslav Unrest 1981 Contingent Mediterranean/Adriatic/

Yugoslavia

ELF Sentry 1982–83 Contingent Mediterranean/Egypt

Lebanon War 1982–84 Contingent Mediterranean/Lebanon/

Israel

Seaward Explorer Rescue 1984 Contingent Western Hemisphere/Cuba

Saudi Hijacking 1985 Contingent Arabian Gulf

Lebanon Hostages 1986 Contingent Mediterranean/Lebanon

Display Determination 1986 Contingent Mediterranean/Turkey

Egypt Air Hijacking 1986 Contingent Mediterranean/Morocco

TWA 847 Hijacking 1986 Contingent Mediterranean/Lebanon

Lebanon Hostages 1987 Contingent Mediterranean/Lebanon

Pakistan Air Hijacking 1987 Contingent Mediterranean/Cyprus

Jittery Prop 1988 Contingent Western Hemisphere/El 

Salvador/ Nicaragua

Maldives Coup 1989 Contingent Indian Ocean/Maldives

Provide Promise 1994 Contingent Mediterranean/Balkans

Nuclear Reactor Negotiations 1995 Contingent Pacific/Koreas

Operation Monitor 1997 Contingent Western Hemisphere/Cuba

Passive Oversight 1997 Contingent Western Hemisphere/Cuba

Enduring Freedom 2001–14 Contingent/ 

Combat

SW Asia/Afghanistan

Shining Express 2003 Contingent/ 

NEO

Africa/Liberia
81

Operations

Name/Dates Type Region/Countries

Combat (24)

Desert One 1980 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iran

Marine Barracks Bombing 1983 Combat Mediterranean/Lebanon

Urgent Fury 1983 Combat Western Hemisphere/

Grenada

Syria Attack 1984 Combat Mediterranean/Lebanon

Lebanon Withdrawal 1984 Combat Mediterranean/Lebanon

Achille Lauro Rescue 1986 Combat Mediterranean/Italy

El Dorado Canyon 1986 Combat Mediterranean/Libya

Nimble Archer 1987 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iran

USS Stark 1987 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Praying Mantis 1988 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iran

USS Samuel B. Roberts 1988 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iran

Just Cause 1989–1990 Combat Western Hemisphere/

Panama

Desert Storm 1991 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Iraq Nuclear Facility Strike 1992 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Deliberate Force 1996 Combat Mediterranean/Balkans

Iraq TLAM Strikes 1993 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Desert Strike 1996–97 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Infinite Reach 1998 Combat Africa/Sudan/Afghanistan

Desert Fox 1998 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Noble Anvil 1999 Combat Mediterranean/Balkans

Pegasus Venture 2002 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Iraqi Freedom 2003–10 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Sea Horse 2005 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

New Dawn 2010–11 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Sources: See Appendix 1
82

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Appendix 3

U.S. NAVY OPERATIONS 1980–2010 BY REGION

Types of Operations: Peace Ops/Forward Presence, Humanitarian Assistance/

Disaster Relief (HADR), Freedom of Navigation (FON), Maritime Intercept Ops 

(MIO)3, Counter-Piracy, Non-combatant Evacuation Operations (NEO), Show 

of Force, Contingent Positioning, Combat

Name/Dates Type Region/Countries

Mediterranean (51)

Israeli Invasion 1981 NEO Mediterranean/Lebanon/

Israel

Al-Biqa Missiles I 1981 Show of Force Mediterranean/Israel/

Syria

Sadat Assassination 1981 Contingent Mediterranean/Egypt

Yugoslav Unrest 1981 Contingent Mediterranean/Adriatic/

Yugoslavia

Gulf of Sirte I (Sidra) 1981 FON Mediterranean/Libya

ELF Sentry 1982–83 Contingent Mediterranean/Egypt

Lebanon War 1982–84 Contingent Mediterranean/Lebanon/

Israel

Early Call 1983 Show of Force Mediterranean/Egypt/

Libya

Marine Barracks Bombing 1983 Combat Mediterranean/Lebanon

Syria Attack 1984 Combat Mediterranean/Lebanon

Lebanon Withdrawal 1984 Combat Mediterranean/Lebanon

Intense Look 1984 Show of Force Red Sea/Gulf of Aqaba/

Libya

Embassy Show of Force 1985 Show of Force Mediterranean/Lebanon

Lebanon Hostages 1986 Contingent Mediterranean/Lebanon

Display Determination 1986 Contingent Mediterranean/Turkey

Egypt Air Hijacking 1986 Contingent Mediterranean/Morocco

TWA 847 Hijacking 1986 Contingent Mediterranean/Lebanon

Achille Lauro Rescue 1986 Combat Mediterranean/Italy

3 MIO also included vessel boarding, search and seizure (VBSS) ops.
83

Operations

Name/Dates Type Region/Countries

Gulf of Sirte II (Sidra) 1986 FON Mediterranean/Libya

El Dorado Canyon 1986 Combat Mediterranean/Libya

Lebanon Hostages 1987 Contingent Mediterranean/Lebanon

Pakistan Air Hijacking 1987 Contingent Mediterranean/Cyprus

Hot Rock 2010–11 HADR Mediterranean/Sicily

Sharp Guard/Decisive 

Enhancement 1992–98

Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Sharp Vigilance 1992 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Maritime Guard 1992–93 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Deny Flight 1993–95 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Provide Promise 1994 Contingent Mediterranean/Balkans

Joint Endeavor 1996 Peace Ops Mediterranean/Balkans

Decisive Edge 1996 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Deliberate Force 1996 Combat Mediterranean/Balkans

Deliberate Guard 1996–97 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Joint Guard 1996–98 Peace Ops Mediterranean/Balkans

Joint Forge 1997–2001 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Deliberate Forge 1997–98 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Greece/Turkey Tension 1995 Show of Force Mediterranean

Silver Wake 1997 NEO Mediterranean/Albania

Silver Knight 1998 NEO Mediterranean/Albania

Determined Falcon 1998 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Deliberate Guard 1998 Show of Force Mediterranean/Balkans

Balkan Calm 1998 Peace Ops Mediterranean/Bakans

Noble Anvil 1999 Combat Mediterranean/Balkans

Shining Hope 1999 Peace Ops Mediterranean/Balkans

Allied Force 1999 Peace Ops Mediterranean/Balkans

Joint Guardian 1999 Peace Ops Mediterranean/Balkans

Balkan Calm II 1999 NEO Mediterranean/Balkans

Noble Safeguard 1999 Show of Force Mediterranean/Israel

Avid Response 1999 HADR Mediterranean/Turkey

Dynamic Response 2002–2003 Peace Ops Mediterranean/Balkans

Lebanon War II 2006 NEO Mediterranean/Lebanon/

Israel
84

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Name/Dates Type Region/Countries

Arabian Gulf (32)

Desert One 1980 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iran

Iran-Iraq War 1981–82 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq/Iran

Iran-Iraq War 1984 Show of Force Arabian Gulf

Basra-Kharg Island Crisis 1984 Show of Force Arabian Gulf

Ship Escorts 1984–86 Show of Force Arabian Gulf

Saudi Hijacking 1985 Contingent Arabian Gulf

Nimble Archer 1987 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iran

USS Stark 1987 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Earnest Will 1987–88 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq/Iran

Pneumatic Hammer 1987–88 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq/Iran/

Kuwait

Praying Mantis 1988 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iran

USS Samuel B. Roberts 1988 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iran

Desert Shield 1990–91 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Candid Hammer 1990–91 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Desert Storm 1991 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Provide Comfort 1991–97 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Iraq MIO 1991–2000 MIO Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Iraq Nuclear Facility Strike 1992 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Southern Watch 1992–2000 Peace Ops/ MIO/

Combat

Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Iraq TLAM Strikes 1993 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Vigilant Warrior 1994–95 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Kuwait

Vigilant Sentinel 1995–96 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Desert Strike 1996–97 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Northern Watch 1997–2001 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Desert Thunder 1997–1998 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Desert Fox 1998 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Desert Viper 1999 Show of Force Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Pegasus Venture 2002 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Iraqi Freedom 2003–10 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

Sea Horse 2005 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq

New Dawn 2010–11 Combat Arabian Gulf/Iraq
85

Operations

Name/Dates Type Region/Countries

Africa (26)

Chad 1983 Peace Ops Africa/Chad/Libya

Sharp Edge 1990–91 NEO Africa/Liberia

Eastern Exit 1991 NEO Africa/Somalia

Impressive Lift 1992 Peace Ops Africa/Somalia

Continued Hope 1993–95 Peace Ops Africa/Somalia

Show Care Peace Ops Africa/Somalia

More Care Peace Ops Africa/Somalia

Quick Draw Peace Ops Africa/Somalia

Distant Runner 1994 NEO Africa/Liberia

Support Hope 1994 HADR Africa/Somalia

USLO Withdrawal 1994 NEO Africa/Somalia

Restore Hope 1993 HADR Africa/Somalia

United Shield 1995 NEO Africa/Somalia

Assured Response 1996 NEO Africa/Liberia

Quick Response 1996 NEO Africa/Monrovia

Guardian Retrieval 1997 NEO Africa/Zaire

Noble Obelisk 1997 NEO Africa/Sierra Leone

Autumn Shelter 1998 NEO Africa/Zaire

Shadow Express 1998 NEO Africa/Liberia

Safe Departure 1998 NEO Africa/Ethiopia/Eritrea

Infinite Reach 1998 Combat Africa/Sudan/

Afghanistan

Resolute Response 1998 NEO Africa/Kenya

Eritrea NEO 1999 NEO Africa/Eritrea

Shadow Express 1999 NEO Africa/Liberia

Sheltering Sky 2003 NEO Africa/Liberia

Shining Express 2003 Contingent/ NEO Africa/Liberia

Western Hemisphere (18)

Surveillance Ops 1981 Show of Force Western Hemisphere/

Nicaragua

Urgent Fury 1983 Combat Western Hemisphere/

Grenada

Seaward Explorer Rescue 1984 Contingent Western Hemisphere/

Cuba
86

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Name/Dates Type Region/Countries

Jittery Prop 1988 Contingent Western Hemisphere/El 

Salvador/ Nicaragua

Golden Pheasant 1988 Show of Force Western Hemisphere/

Honduras

Nimrod Dancer 1988–89 Show of Force Western Hemisphere/

Panama

Valiant Boom 1988 Show of Force Western Hemisphere/

Panama

Just Cause 1989–90 Combat Western Hemisphere/

Panama

Victor Squared 1991 NEO Western Hemisphere/

Haiti

Support Democracy 1993–94 Show of Force Western Hemisphere/

Haiti

Able Vigil 1994 MIO Western Hemisphere/

Cuba

Uphold Democracy 1994–95 Show of Force Western Hemisphere/

Haiti

Maintain Democracy 1995 Peace Ops Western Hemisphere/

Haiti

Sea Signal JTF 1994–96 MIO Western Hemisphere /

Cuba/Haiti

Sentinel Safeguard 1996 Show of Force Western Hemisphere/

Cuba

Operation Monitor 1997 Contingent Western Hemisphere/

Cuba

Passive Oversight 1997 Contingent Western Hemisphere/

Cuba

Unified Response 2010 HADR Western Hemisphere/

Haiti

Pacific (14)

KAL007 1983 Show of Force Pacific/Soviet Union/

South Korea

Classic Resolve 1989 Show of Force Pacific/Philippines

Korea/Nuclear Tensions 1993–94 Show of Force Pacific/Koreas/Japan

Nuclear Reactor Negotiations 1995 Contingent Pacific/Koreas

Taiwan Flexible Deterrent 1996 Show of Force Pacific/China (PRC)/

Taiwan

Bevel Edge 1997 Show of Force Pacific/Cambodia
87

Operations

Name/Dates Type Region/Countries

Bevel Incline 1998 NEO Pacific/Indonesia

East Timor Stabilize 1999–2001 HADR Pacific/Indonesia

EP3 Incident (PRC) 2001 FON Pacific/China (PRC)

Bold Samaritan 2000–2002 HADR Pacific/Indonesia/East 

Timor

North Korea Nuclear Crisis 2003 Show of Force Pacific/Koreas/Japan

Unified Assistance 2004–2005 HADR Pacific/Thailand/

Indonesia

Goodwill-Kaibigan 2007 HADR Pacific/Philippines

Caring Response 2008 HADR Pacific/Samoa/Tonga/

Solomon Islands/ 

Kiribati/Marshall 

Islands

Indian Ocean (6)

Yemen Civil War 1986 NEO Indian Ocean/Yemen

Maldives Coup 1989 Contingent Indian Ocean/Maldives

Determined Response 2000 NEO Indian Ocean/Yemen

Ocean Shield 2008– Counter-Piracy Indian Ocean/Gulf of 

Aden

Allied Protector 2009– Counter-Piracy Indian Ocean/Gulf of 

Aden

Maersk Alabama 2009 Counter-Piracy Indian Ocean/Gulf of 

Aden

Southwest Asia (4)

Sea Angel 1990 HADR SW Asia/Bangladesh

Silent Assurance 1997–98 Combat SW Asia/Afghanistan

Enduring Freedom 2001–14 Contingent/ Combat SW Asia/Afghanistan

Sea Angel II 2007 HADR SW Asia/Bangladesh

United States (3)

Hurricane Hugo 1989 HADR U.S. East Coast

JTF Katrina 2005 HADR U.S. Gulf Coast

BP Oil Spill 2010 HADR U.S. Gulf Coast
88

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Name/Dates Type Region/Countries

Europe (2)

Creek Sentry 1980–81 Show of Force Europe/Baltic/Poland

Assured Delivery 2008 Show of Force Russia/Georgia

Red Sea (1)

Intense Look 1984 Show of Force Red Sea/Gulf of Aqaba/

Libya

Sources: See Appendix 1
89

Operations

Appendix 4

Bibliography4

4.1 GENERAL ARTICLES

4.1.1 Operation Intense Look—Red Sea Mining 1984

“2 Dutch Minesweepers Due at Port on Red Sea.” New York Times, 16 September 1984.

“3 Italian Minehunters Returning to Red Sea.” New York Times, 23 September 1984.

“3 Mines Reported Found in Red Sea as International Fleet Speeds to Scene.” Toronto 

Star, 14 August 1984.

“5 or 6 Ships Have Struck Mines in Red Sea, Lloyd’s Intelligence Unit Reports.” 

Los Angeles Times, 4 August 1984.

“5 Possible Mines Found in Suez Gulf.” The San Diego Union, 22 August 1984.

“5 Soviet Ships Bound for Red Sea Mine Hunt.” The San Diego Union, 24 August 1984.

“10th Ship Hits Mine in Red Sea.” Philadelphia Daily News, 6 August 1984.

“17th Ship Said Ripped by Mine/U.S. Ship Joins Sweep Operations in Red Sea Area.” 

The San Diego Union, 17 August 1984.

Abu-Yassar, Yassine Mohammed. “Red Sea Mines a Hoax.” The Globe and Mail, 28 

September 1984.

“‘Almost New’ Mine Found in Gulf of Suez.” Los Angeles Times, 20 September 1984.

“Among the Mine Sweepers.” The Washington Post, 18 August 1984.

“Another Ship Strikes Red Sea Mine.” The Vancouver Sun, 16 August 1984.

Beecher, William. “Escort Service/Navy Not Clear on Who Laid Gulf Mines.” Houston 

Chronicle, 22 July 1987.

Behr, Edward A. “A Special Weekly Report from the Wall Street Journal’s Capital Bureau.” 

Wall Street Journal, 14 September 1984.

Biddle, Wayne. “200 Navy Men Off for Gulf of Suez to Combat Mines.” New York 

Times, 8 August 1984.

———. “Source of Mines is Still a Mystery as U.S. Force Heads for Red Sea.” New York 

Times, 15 August 1984.

———. “Suez Sweep.” New York Times, 12 August 1984.

———. “U.S. Says Red Sea Mine Unit Gets Set to Sail.” New York Times, 10 August 1984.

———. “U.S. Sends Copters to Help Remove Mines in Red Sea.” New York Times,

7 August 1984.

———. “U.S. to End Search for Mines Off Egypt.” New York Times, 18 September 1984.

———. “U.S. Weighs Move to Help Egypt Rid Red Sea of Mines.” New York Times,

5 August 1984.

4 I am particularly thankful for the excellent, cheerful, and long-suffering bibliographical assistance of Greta E. Marlatt, Senior Research Librarian, Dudley Knox Library, Naval Postgraduate 

School, Monterey, CA. She has compiled an extraordinary mine warfare resource. Likewise, I 

thank Dr. Timothy O’Hara, Research Scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses, who searched 

the CNA library and archives for this project.
90

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

“Blast Hits Merchant Ship in Red Sea; Mine Suspected.” Philadelphia Inquirer,

21 September 1984.

Breemer, Jan. “Intense Look: U.S. Minehunting Experience in the Red Sea.” Navy 

International 90, no. 8 (August 1985): 478–82.

“Britain, France and USSR to Join Red Sea Mine Search.” The Christian Science Monitor,

10 August 1984.

“British and French Vessels Enter Suez Canal.” New York Times, 15 August 1984.

“British Searchers Find a Mine in the Red Sea.” Philadelphia Inquirer, 18 September 

1984.

“British Ship Finds Red Sea Mine.” Calgary Herald, 18 September 1984.

“British Ships to End Red Sea Mine Search.” Los Angeles Times, 14 October 1984.

Brooker, R. W. “Survey Ship Goes Mine Hunting: Harkness and ‘Intense Look’.” All Hands, 

no. 815 (February 1985): 32–34; https://archive.org/details/allhands8158unit.

“Caller Says Extremists Will Place More Mines.” The Globe and Mail, 15 August 1984.

Cockle, Mark. “Suez Canal Blockade Warning by Iraq.” Lloyd’s List, 24 May 1984.

“Copters Drag Sea in Hunt for Mines.” The Globe and Mail, 18 August 1984.

“Cypriot Ship 17th to Trigger Red Sea Mine.” Calgary Herald, 16 August 1984.

“Cypriot Ship Strikes Mine in Red Sea.” Los Angeles Times, 16 August 1984.

Dionne, E. J., Jr. “Khomeini Denies Link to Mining; Criticizes the Government Radio.” 

New York Times, 10 August 1984.

Dunn, Michael Collins. “Fishing in Troubled Waters,” Defense and Foreign Affairs 12 

(October 1984).

“Egypt ‘70% Sure’ Libya and Iran Planted Mines That Damaged Ships in Gulf of Suez 

and Red Sea.” Los Angeles Times, 11 August 1984.

“Egypt Asks Britain for Minesweepers.” The Globe and Mail, 7 August 1984.

“Egypt Calls Gulf of Suez Safe, But Patrols Red Sea.” Los Angeles Times, 6 August 1984.

“Egypt Navy Tightens Security on Suez Canal Amid Threats of Interference—Chief.” 

BBC Monitoring Newsfile, 21 October 2013.

“Egypt Says Effort to Clear Mines Is Expected to End this Month.” New York Times,

14 September 1984.

“Egypt Says No End in Sight to Red Sea Mines Search.” The Globe and Mail, 7 September 

1984.

“Egypt Vows to Close Canal to Layers of Mines.” Los Angeles Times, 12 August 1984.

“Egypt Vows to Keep Red Sea Open Despite Threat.” The San Diego Union, 15 August 

1984.

“Egypt Warns Iran, Libya on Suez Canal Closing.” The Washington Post (1974–Current 

File), 11 August 1984.

“Egypt Warns It May Bar Iran Ships from Canal.” Los Angeles Times, 10 August 1984.

“Egypt: Soviets Made Mine Found by British.” The Washington Post, 1 October 1984.

“Egyptian Describes Red Sea Mine.” The Washington Post, 12 October 1984.

“Egyptian Paper Blames Libya for Red-Sea Mines.” Philadelphia Daily News, 21 August 

1984.

“Egyptians Ask Britain to Send Minesweepers.” Boston Globe, 7 August 1984.

“Egyptians Uncover Mine in Red Sea.” Calgary Herald, 17 August 1984.

“Experts Close to Origin of Sea Mine.” The Globe and Mail, 28 September 1984.

“Explosions Linked to Gulf War as Suspicions Focus on Tehran.” The Globe and Mail,

8 August 1984.

“Finding Who Laid Red Sea Mines ‘Impossible,’ U.S. Commander Says.” Philadelphia 

Inquirer, 20 August 1984.
91

Operations

“Five Ships Damaged by Mines in Red Sea, Shipping Sources Say.” The Globe and Mail, 

4 August 1984.

“Five Ships in Red Sea Strike Mines.” Winnipeg Free Press, 4 August 1984.

“Foes Decry U.S. Role in Red Sea/USSR, Iran Say Mines Exploited to Gain Control.” 

The San Diego Union, 14 August 1984.

“France and Italy Agree to Extend Their Search for Mines in Red Sea.” New York Times, 

22 September 1984.

“Freedom at Sea: Use It or Lose It . . .” New York Times, 21 August 1984.

“Freighter Sinks in Red Sea.” Houston Chronicle, 26 April 1985.

George, Christian. “The World’s Military: Jane’s 1984.” Houston Chronicle, 30 June 1985.

Gerstenzang, James. “British, French Ships Join Flotilla Hunting for Mines.” Los Angeles 

Times, 15 August 1984.

———. “Egypt Seeks U.S. Aid to Clear Mines.” Los Angeles Times, 7 August 1984.

Greenberger, Robert S. and Youssef M. Ibrahim. “U.S. Is Considering Ways to Help Egypt 

Clear Red Sea Mines.” Wall Street Journal, 6 August 1984.

Gumucio, Juan Carlos. “Iran Threatens to Block Persian Gulf Entrance.” The Washington 

Post, August, 1984.

Halloran, Richard. “U.S. Forces in the Mediterranean Not Alerted or Ordered to Move.” 

New York Times, 21 September 1984.

———. “U.S. Sends Copters to Aid the Saudis in Hunt for Mines.” New York Times,

14 August 1984.

Harsch, Josh C.“A Suez Story.” The Christian Science Monitor, 28 August 1984.

———. “US Tests Mideast Waters—Gingerly.” The Christian Science Monitor, 17 August 

1984.

Haskin, Kevin. “Stop Red Sea, That’s the Ticket.” Topeka Capital Journal, 20 September, 

2000.

Hiatt, Fred. “British Moving Possible Mine from Red Sea.” The Washington Post, 

18 September 1984.

———. “Team Urges U.S. to Help Clear Red Sea Mines.” The Washington Post, 4 August 

1984.

———. “Vessels Report being Damaged Below Red Sea.” The Washington Post, 3 August 

1984.

———. “Explosions Hit Three Ships in Gulf of Suez.” The Washington Post, 1 August 

1984.

 “International Force Afloat to Clear Mines from Suez.” The Globe and Mail, 14 August 

1984.

“Iran Accuses U.S. and Israel of Laying Mines in Red Sea.” The Globe and Mail, 8 August 

1984.

“Iran Accuses U.S., Israel of Sowing Red Sea Mines It Hailed.” The San Diego Union,

9 August 1984.

“Iran Accuses US, Israel of (Red Sea) Mine Plot.” The Gazette, 9 August 1984.

“Iran and Libya Linked to (Red Sea) Mines.” The Vancouver Sun, August 10, 1984.

“Iran Blames U.S., Israel for Red Sea Mines.” Los Angeles Times, 8 August 1984.

“Iran Charges U.S., Israel with Mining of Red Sea.” The Washington Post, 9 August 1984.

“Iran Hails Mine Blasts in Red Sea.” The Globe and Mail, 7 August 1984.

“Iran Lauds Ship Attacks But Denies Role.” New York Times, 8 August 1984.

“Iran Links Terrorists, Ship Mines/Praises Islamic Jihad But Denies any Involvement.” 

The San Diego Union, 8 August 1984.
92

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

“Iran Says It Will Retaliate if Egypt Harasses Its Ships.” New York Times, 18 August 

1984.

“Italian Ships to Join Hunt for Red Sea Mines.” The Globe and Mail, 21 August 1984.

Jansen, Godfrey. “The Red Sea Mines.” Middle East International 232, (24 August 

1984): 6.

Jansen, G. H. “Shia Extremists Extend Gulf War into Red Sea.” Los Angeles Times,

12 August 1984.

Jenkins, Loren. “Blast Damages Another Freighter in Red Sea.” The Washington Post,

17 August 1984. 

———. “British Officer Says Mine Hunt May Take Months.” The Washington Post,

27 August 1984. 

———. “Copters Pull Sonar in Vain Search for Mines.” The Washington Post, 20 August 

1984. 

———. “Egyptian Almost Certain of Libyan Role in Mining.” The Washington Post,

22 August 1984. 

———. “Italian Ships Join Red Sea Mine Hunt.” The Washington Post, 29 August 1984. 

Kaplan, Fred. “US Ponders Riddle of Red Sea Mines.” Boston Globe, 19 August 1984. 

“Khomeini Denounces Reported Red Sea Mining, Assails Iran Radio.” The San Diego 

Union, 10 August 1984. 

“Khomeini Raps Mining, Iran Radio.” Los Angeles Times, 9 August 1984. 

Lamb, David. “4 Italian Ships Joining Red Sea Mine Hunt.” Los Angeles Times,

29 August 1984. 

———. “Cypriot Ship Damaged by Red Sea Mine.” Los Angeles Times, 17 August 1984. 

———. “Effort to Clear Red Sea Mines Intensified.” Los Angeles Times, 13 August 1984. 

———. “Egypt Can’t Identify Mines, Diplomats Say.” Los Angeles Times, 22 January 

1985. 

———. “Mine-Hunting Crews in Red Sea Expect to Come Up Empty-Handed.” Los 

Angeles Times, 8 September 1984. 

———. “New Mining Evidence Cited Against Libya.” Los Angeles Times, 22 August 

1984. 

———. “Red Sea Mine Sweep May Take 3 Months.” Los Angeles Times, 27 August 1984. 

———. “Red Sea Mines Not Powerful, Experts Say.” Los Angeles Times, 19 August 1984. 

———. “Some Nation Behind Mining, Experts Say.” Los Angeles Times, 14 August 1984. 

Levie, Howard S. Mine Warfare at Sea. Leyden, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff 

Publishers, 1992, 189.

“Libya Accused of Planting Red Sea Mines.” The Vancouver Sun, 21 August 1984. 

“Libya Placed Red Sea Mines, U.S. Believes.” Los Angeles Times, 3 October 1984. 

“Libya, Iran Deny Laying Red Sea Mines.” The Globe and Mail, 13 August 1984. 

“Libya, Iran Suspected as Egypt Investigates Evidence on Mining.” The Globe and Mail,

11 August 1984. 

“Lloyds Reports That Five More Ships Hit Mines in Red Sea; U.S. Sends Aid.” Philadelphia 

Inquirer, 4 August 1984. 

“Main Red Sea Port Swept for Mines.” Winnipeg Free Press, 18 August 1984. 

Masland, Tom. “Amid Mines and Mystery, the Faithful Sail the Red Sea.” Philadelphia 

Inquirer, 12 August 1984. 

———. “Khadafy’s Hand Seen in Mines/Egypt Has a Suspect in Attacks on Ships in Red 

Sea.” Philadelphia Inquirer, 19 August 1984. 

———. “U.S. Craft Arrives to Join Red Sea Search for Mines.” Philadelphia Inquirer, 

16 August 1984. 
93

Operations

———. “With the Search for Red Sea Mines: Hunting ‘What It Is That Is Going On’.” 

Philadelphia Inquirer, 15 August 1984. 

Miller, Judith. “2 Soviet Ships Join Hunt in Red Sea.” New York Times, 23 August 1984. 

———. “Blast in Red Sea Damages a Cypriot-Registered Vessel.” New York Times,

17 August 1984. 

———. “British Naval Forces Inspect a Mine Found in Gulf of Suez.” New York Times, 

20 September 1984.

———. “Egypt Links Libya and Iran to Mines.” New York Times, 11 August 1984. 

———. “Egypt Says Libyan Role in Blasts in Red Sea Is ‘Almost Confirmed’.” New York 

Times, 22 August 1984. 

———. “Libya Denies Link to Mines; Europeans May Join Search.” New York Times,

13 August 1984. 

———. “Little is Known about Group Linked to Mining of Red Sea.” New York Times,

8 August 1984. 

———. “Red Sea Flotilla Crosses the Canal.” New York Times, 16 August 1984. 

———. “A Saudi Vessel Is Damaged by Explosion in Gulf of Suez.” New York Times, 

21 September 1984. 

———. “Suez Canal Eases Back to Normal.” New York Times, 18 August 1984. 

———. “Suez Mines Are Yet Another Obstacle in Mubarak’s Path.” New York Times,

19 August 1984. 

———. “Vowing to ‘Find It,’ U.S. Presses Mine Hunt.” New York Times, 20 August 1984. 

“Mine (Found in Red Sea) Believed to be Russian.” Halifax Chronicle-Herald, 1 October 

1984. 

“Mine at Egypt Beach Kills 4.” Los Angeles Times, 6 May 1985. 

“Mine Blamed in Sinking of Cargo Ship in Red Sea.” Houston Chronicle, 25 April 1985. 

“Mine Damages 17th Red Sea Ship.” Halifax Chronicle-Herald, 17 August 1984. 

“Mine Damages Polish Freighter in the Red Sea.” The Washington Post, 12 August 1984. 

“Mine found in Red Sea is Called Soviet-made.” New York Times, 1 October 1984. 

“Mine found in Suez Gulf ‘Almost New’.” Los Angeles Times, 19 September 1984. 

“Mine in Red Sea Was Made by Soviets, Says London Times.” The Christian Science 

Monitor, 1 October 1984. 

“Mine Said to Sink Freighter in Red Sea.” The Washington Post, 25 April 1985. 

“Mine Source Eludes Red Sea Search Force.” Winnipeg Free Press, 10 September 1984. 

“Mine-Hunters (in Red Sea) Come Up Empty.” Halifax Chronicle-Herald, 25 August 

1984. 

“Mines Damage Several Ships in Red Sea Off Yemen Coast.” New York Times, 4 August 

1984. 

“Mines Found in Red Sea.” Philadelphia Daily News, 14 August 1984.

“More Ships to Join Mine Effort.” New York Times, 29 August 1984. 

Moore, Captain John. “Red Sea Mines a Mystery No Longer.” Jane’s Naval Review, 

Fourth Year. London: Jane’s Publishing Company, 1985, 64–67.

“Mubarak Links Iran, Libya to Red Sea Blasts.” The San Diego Union, 11 August 1984. 

“Multi-Force Sweep Fails to Net Red Sea Mines.” The Globe and Mail, 21 August 1984. 

“Multinational Mine Search (in Red Sea) in Full Gear After Explosion.” Winnipeg Free 

Press, 22 September 1984. 

“Netherlands Joins Search for Mines in the Red Sea.” Philadelphia Inquirer, 23 September 

1984. 

Nitschke, Stefan. “MCM from the Air-Mine Detection and Clearance.” Naval Forces 24, 

no. 6 (2003): 8–12, 14–16. 
94

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

“No Mines, Saudi Official Says.” New York Times, 27 August 1984. 

“Oil Tanker ‘Sinking’ After Hitting Mine in Southern Red Sea.” Toronto Star, 6 August 

1984. 

“Old Soviet-Made Mine Found in Red Sea, Not Linked to Blasts.” The Washington Post,

17 September 1984. 

“Poland Reports Cargo Ship Heavily Damaged by Red Sea Mine.” The San Diego Union,

12 August 1984. 

“Poland Says Ship Hit Red Sea Mine.” Boston Globe, 12 August 1984. 

“Polish Vessel Hits a Mine in Red Sea.” New York Times, 12 August 1984. 

“Polish Vessel Is Damaged by Red Sea Mine.” Los Angeles Times, 12 August 1984. 

Priest, Dana and George C. Wilson. “U.S. Helicopters Sent to Egypt to Clear Mines.” The 

Washington Post, 7 August 1984. 

Prina, L. Edgar. “Libya’s Nervous Neighbors Wonder Whom Khadafy Will Hit Next.” 

The San Diego Union, 17 November 1984. 

“Red Sea Cleared of Mines.” Calgary Herald, 11 October 1984. 

“(Red Sea:) Helicopters Complete Mine Scan.” The Vancouver Sun, 22 August 1984. 

“Red Sea Incident Demonstrates U.S. Need for Mine Sweepers.” Omaha World-Herald,

24 September 1984. 

“Red Sea Mine Damages 17th Cargo Ship.” Winnipeg Free Press, 17 August 1984. 

“Red Sea Mine Force Finds No Explosives/Egypt Lacks Hard Evidence That Libyans 

Mined the Waterway.” The San Diego Union, 25 August 1984. 

“Red Sea Mine Hunt Called Long Term.” New York Times, 21 August 1984. 

“Red Sea Mine Soviet-made But Moscow Is Not Blamed.” The Globe and Mail, 1 

October 1984. 

“Red Sea Mine Threat Issued: Egypt Warns Against further Disruption of Waterways.” 

Winnipeg Free Press, 15 August 1984. 

“Red Sea Mine Threat Probed.” The Vancouver Sun, 15 August 1984. 

“Red Sea Mines Linked to Libyans.” Winnipeg Free Press, 4 October 1984. 

“Red Sea Task Force Fails to Find Mines.” Winnipeg Free Press, 25 August 1984.

“Russian Vessel Struck a Mine in the Red Sea.” The Vancouver Sun, 13 August 1984. 

“Russian-made Mine Reported in Red Sea.” The San Diego Union, 17 September 1984. 

“Safety of Navigation.” The Christian Science Monitor, 7 August 1984. 

“Salvagers Raise Mine Found in Gulf of Suez.” The Globe and Mail, 20 September 1984. 

“Search for Mines in Red Sea Fruitless.” The San Diego Union, 21 August 1984.

Seib, Gerald F. “U.S. Experts May Have Found Mines in Suez.” Wall Street Journal, 14 

August 1984.

———. “U.S. Warns Ships in the Suez Canal Area Following Blasts Possibly Caused by 

Mines.” Wall Street Journal, 1 August 1984. 

Seib, Gerald F. and Robert S. Greenberger. “Iran’s Signals Mixed on Mines in the Red 

Sea.” Wall Street Journal, 8 August 1984. 

———. “U.S. Is Dispatching Helicopters to Egypt to Help Clear the Red Sea of Explosives.” 

Wall Street Journal, 7 August 1984. 

“Ship Strikes Mine in Red Sea, Sinks.” Seattle Times, 25 April 1985. 

“Soviet Ships at Suez Expected to Join Hunt.” The Globe and Mail, 23 August 1984. 

“Soviet Trawler Hit by Red Sea Mine as Sweepers Arrive.” The Globe and Mail, 15 

August 1984. 

“Soviet-Made Mine Found in Red Sea.” Winnipeg Free Press, 17 September 1984.

“Soviets See U.S. Power Play in Red Sea.” The Globe and Mail, 13 August 1984. 
95

Operations

Southerland, Daniel. “West Acts Calmly and Quickly to Counter Red Sea Mining.” The 

Christian Science Monitor, 8 August 1984.

“Sweeping the Red Sea Mines.” Boston Globe, 9 August 1984. 

“Tanker Is Struck by Red Sea Blast; Mine Is Suspected.” New York Times, 6 August 1984. 

“Teheran Blames U.S. and Israel for Red Sea Mines.” New York Times, 9 August 1984.

Temko, Ned. “Red Sea Blasts: Gulf War Spinoff?” The Christian Science Monitor, 7 

August 1984. 

———. “Red Sea Crisis Boosts US.” The Christian Science Monitor, 15 August 1984. 

“Terrorism’s Worldwide Reach.” Omaha World-Herald, 31 August 1984. 

“Top-Level Inquiry to Probe Blasts Near Suez Canal.” The Globe and Mail, 1 August 

1984.

Truver, Scott C. “Mines of August: An International Whodunit” U.S. Naval Institute

Proceedings 111, no. 5 (May 1985): 94–117.

Turner, Stansfield. “Terrorism’s New Weapon: Mines at Sea.” The Christian Science 

Monitor, 27 August 1984. 

“Two Ships Damaged by Mines in Red Sea, North Yemen Reports.” The Globe and Mail, 

4 August 1984.

Ulbrich, Jeffrey. “US Sweeps Sea for Mines; Iran Warns Against Harassing of Ships.” 

Boston Globe, 18 August 1984. 

———. “US, British Forces Search for Mines in Suez Gulf.” Boston Globe, 19 August 

1984. 

“U.K. Forces in Red Sea Find Unidentified Mine.” The Globe and Mail, 18 September 

1984. 

“U.S. Copters on Call for Suez Minesweeping.” Los Angeles Times, 5 August 1984. 

“U.S. Copters Still Draw Blank in Hunt for Mines.” The San Diego Union, 20 August 

1984. 

“U.S. Copters to Hunt Mines Near Saudi Red Sea Ports.” Los Angeles Times, 13 August 

1984. 

“U.S. Divers to Look for Mines,” UPI, 20 August 1984, http://www.upi.com/Archives/

1984/08/20/US-divers-to-look-for-mines/6410461822400/.

“U.S. Expects to End Minesweeping in 10 Days.” New York Times, 5 September 1984. 

“U.S. Helicopters Begin Sweeping Red Sea Waters for Mines.” The San Diego Union, 18 

August 1984. 

“U.S. Helicopters Sweep Saudi Coast for Mines.” Los Angeles Times, 19 August 1984. 

“U.S. Helicopters to Help Egypt Sweep Red Sea Mines.” The San Diego Union, 7 August 

1984. 

“U.S. Military Experts to Clean Mines from Red Sea.” Philadelphia Daily News, 8 

August 1984. 

“U.S. Mine-Sweeping Choppers May Help Solve Suez Mystery.” The San Diego Union,

5 August 1984.

“U.S. Navy Investigates Possible Mines in Red Sea, New Mexico Daily Lobo, 31 August 

1984.

“U.S. Sends Copters to Hunt Mines in Red Sea, Suez Gulf.” Los Angeles Times, 7 August 

1984. 

“U.S. Ties Libya to Mideast Mines.” New York Times, 4 October 1984. 

“U.S. Vessel Shadows Soviet Mine-Hunters.” The Globe and Mail, 24 August 1984.

“U.S. Weighs Move to Help Egypt Rid Red Sea of Mines, New York Times, 5 August 1984; 

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/08/05/world/us-weighs-move-to-help-egypt-ridred-sea-of-mines.html. 
96

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

“UK, France to Join Hunt for (Red Sea) Mines.” The Vancouver Sun, 9 August 1984. 

“US Begins Mine Hunt in Red Sea.” Halifax Chronicle-Herald, 18 August 1984. 

“US Exploiting Mine Explosions in the Red Sea (Say Iran and Soviet Union).” Halifax 

Chronicle-Herald, 14 August 1984. 

“US Helicopters to Join Red Sea (Mine Clearing) Force.” Halifax Chronicle-Herald,

August 16, 1984. 

“Vessel Reports Damage Caused by Red Sea Mine.” The Globe and Mail, 17 August 1984.

“Vowing to ‘Find It,’ U.S. Presses Mine Hunt.” New York Times, 20 August 1984, http://

www.nytimes.com/1984/08/20/world/vowing-to-find-it-us-presses-mine-hunt.html 

Weisman, Steven R. “Reagan and Italian Confer on Red Sea Mines.” New York Times,

14 August 1984.

4.1.2 Operation Candid Hammer

First Gulf War Mine Countermeasures 

November 1990–October 1991

Arthur, Vice Admiral Stanley R., and Marvin Pokrant. “Desert Storm at Sea.” U.S. Naval 

Institute Proceedings 117, no. 5 (May 1991): 82–87.

Brown, David K., and David Foxwell. “The Gulf War In Review. Report from the Front: 

MCM and the Threat beneath the Surface.” Two parts. International Defense Review

5 (1991): 451–81, and 7 (1991): 735–38.

De Wilde, Vice Admiral Josef. “Mine Warfare in the Gulf.” NATO’s Sixteen Nations 1 

(1992): 9–11.

Fortin, Lieutenant Ernest, USNR. “Those Damn Mines.” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings

118, no. 7 (July 1992): 95–98. 

Foxwell, David. “Mine Warfare in an Uncertain World.” International Defense Review 5 

(1992): 425–29.

———. “Naval Mine Warfare: Underfunded and Underappreciated.” International 

Defense Review 2 (1993): 125–29.

Martin, Captain J. M. “We Still Haven’t Learned.” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 117, 

no. 7 (July 1991): 64–68.

Miller, Mitchel. “Navy Minesweepers Said to be Up to the Task in the Persian Gulf.” UPI, 

19 February 1991; http://www.upi.com/Archives/1991/02/19/Navy-minesweeperssaid-to-be-up-to-task-in-Persian-Gulf/6178666939600/.

Nagle, Commander R. J., USN. “Having a Blast in the Persian Gulf.” U.S. Naval Institute 

Proceedings 118, no. 10 (October 1992): 104–107.

“Operation Candid Hammer” Remembering the Gulf War—Operation Desert Storm, 

Today in Gulf War History, 16 January 2013; https://www.facebook.com/

RememberingtheGulfWar/posts/467897699934301

Preston, Anthony. “Allied MCM in the Gulf.” Naval Forces 4 (1991): 48–69.

Truver, Scott C. “Exploding the Mine Warfare Myth.” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings

120, no. 10 (October 1994): 36–43.

———. “Wanted: U.S. Navy Mine Warfare Champion.” Naval War College Review 68, 

no. 2 (Spring 2015): 116ff.

White, Carle. “Shallow Water Mines—Meeting the Challenge.” Amphibious Review, 

Summer/Fall 1992, 78–84.
97

Operations

4.2 BOOKS

Cordesman, Anthony H., and Abraham R. Wagner. The Lessons of Modern War, Volume 

IV: The Gulf War. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. Chapter 10, 810–17.

Crist, David. Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with 

Iran. New York: Penguin, 2013. Chapter 13, “The Invisible Hand of God,” 235–55.

Hartmann, Gregory K. with Scott C. Truver. Weapons that Wait: Mine Warfare in the U.S. 

Navy. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1991, 250–55.

Lambert, Andrew. “The Naval War,” in John Pimlott and Stephen Badsey, eds. The Gulf 

War Assessed. London: Arms and Armour, 1992, 125–46.

Levie, Howard S. Mine Warfare at Sea. Leyden, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff 

Publishers, 1992, 159–62, 166–70.

Melia, Tamara Moser. Damn the Torpedoes: A Short History of U.S. Naval Mine 

Countermeasures, 1777–1991. Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 1991, 

http://edocs.nps.edu/dodpubs/topic/general/DamnTorpedoesWhole.pdf, 118–19.

Marolda, Edward J. and Robert J. Schneller, Jr. Shield and Sword: The United States Navy 

and the Persian Gulf War. Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 1998, 68, 118, 

122, 141–42, 148–49, 181, 192, 205, 212, 223–26, 231, 233, 247–51, 255–59, 277, 

282, 321–25, 442.

Navias, Martin S., and E. R. Hooton. Tanker Wars: The Assault on Merchant Shipping 

During the Iran-Iraq Conflict, 1980–1988. London: Tauris Academic Studies, I. B. 

Tauris Publishers, 1996, Chapter 6.

Palmer, Michael A. On Course to Desert Storm: The United States Navy in the Persian 

Gulf. Contributions to Naval History No. 5. Washington, DC. Naval Historical 

Center, 1992, 121–4.

Pokrant, Marvin. Desert Storm at Sea: What the Navy Really Did. Westport, CT: 

Greenwood Press. Contributions in Military Studies Number 175, 1999, chapters 

9, 12, and 15.

4.3 CNA REPORTS

Edlow, Sabrina R. U.S. Employment of Naval Mines: A Chronology (CIM 502). 

Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 1997.

Lyons, H. Dwight, et al. The Mine Threat: Show Stopper or Speed Bump? Alexandria, 

VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 1993.

4.4 COMMAND HISTORIES

USS John L. Hall (FFG-32), Command History, 1984, http://www.history.navy.mil/

content/dam/nhhc/research/archives/command-operation-reports/ship-commandoperation-reports/j/john-l-hall-ffg-32-i/1984.pdf.

USS Shreveport (LPD-12), Command History, 1984, http://www.history.navy.mil/

content/dam/nhhc/research/archives/command-operation-reports/ship-commandoperation-reports/s/shreveport-lpd-12-ii/pdf/1984.pdf, http://www.history.navy.mil/

research/histories/ship-histories/danfs/s/shreveport-ii--lpd-12-.html.

Helicopter Combat Support Squadron 4 (HC-4) , Command History, 1984, http://www.

history.navy.mil/content/dam/nhhc/research/archives/command-operation-reports/

aviation-squadron-command-operation-reports/hc/hc-4/pdf/1984.pdf.
98

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Patrol Squadron 4 (VP-4) Support to CANDID HAMMER (November–December 1990), 

Command History: Michael D. Roberts. Dictionary of American Naval Aviation 

Squadrons, Volume 2: The History of VP, VPB, VP(HL) and VP(AM) Squadrons. 

Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, Naval Historical Center, undated. 

Chapter 3, 39.

The following command histories of MCM helicopters and vessels deployed to Intense 

Look and Candid Hammer/Gulf operations were not available at NHHC and proved 

impossible to find elsewhere:

■ AMCM Helicopter Squadron Fourteen, 1984, 1990–1991 (NHHC has no 

command history reports for HM squadrons, generally)

■ USS Adroit (MSO-509), 1990–91

■ USS Avenger (MCM-1), 1990–91

■ USNS Harkness (T-AGS-32), 1984 

■ USS Impervious (MSO-449), 1990–91

■ USS Leader (MSO-490), 1990–91

4.5 GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS

Department of Defense. Conduct of the Persian Gulf War: Final Report. Washington, DC: 

1992, www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/Reading_Room/Other/404.pdf, 273–78.

Department of the Navy, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. The United States 

Navy in “Desert Shield/Desert Storm” and Annex A. Washington, DC: May 1991.

DON/CNO/HQMC/DHS/USCG. The Commander’s Handbook on the Law of Naval 

Operations (NWP1-14M). Washington, DC: July 2007, Section 9.2, 92–93.

Department of State. Mine Threat in the Gulf of Suez and Red Sea. Washington, DC: 

1984.

Joint Special Operations Activity, Joint Chiefs of Staff. Soviet News and Propaganda 

Analysis, 1–31 August 1984 (QE-Q148 259, DTIC). Washington, DC: 1984, 4, 10–

11, 24.

Mine Warfare/EOD Branch (OP-363), Assistant Chief of Naval Operations for Surface 

Warfare (OP-03), Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. Mine Warfare Plan: 

Meeting the Challenges of an Uncertain World (U). Washington DC: January 1992.

4.6 ACADEMIC MATERIALS

Abunafeesa, Elsadig Yagoub A. “The Post-1970 Political Geography of the Red Sea 

Region with Special Reference to United States Interests.” Dissertation, Durham 

University, 1985. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/7876/, 384, 394–400.

Adkins, LTC Arthur A. and CDR David P. Burnett. “Solving the Mine Countermeasures 

Problem: A Matter of Focus and Priority.” Paper, Naval War College, May 1996.

Ball, LCDR James F. “The Effects of Sea Mining upon Amphibious Warfare.” Paper, U.S. 

Army Command and General Staff College, 5 June 1992.

Bordon, CDR Steven A. “Mine Countermeasures: A Comparative Analysis of US Navy 

Mine Countermeasures 1999 VS 2020. Paper, U.S. Army War College, 10 April 2000.
99

Operations

Boynton, LCDR Colin K. “Operations to Defeat Iranian Maritime Trade Interdiction.” 

Paper, Naval War College, 4 May 2009. 

Gilbert, Jason A. “The Combined Mine Countermeasures Force: A Unified Commanderin-Chief’s Answer to the Mine Threat.” Paper, Naval War College, 5 February 2001, 8.

Lluy, Paul A. “Mine Warfare: An Old Threat Presents New Challenges for NATO’s PostCold War Navies.” Thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, December 1995, 18, 53.

Molenda, LCDR Patrick A. “Organic Mine Countermeasures: An Operational Commander’s 

Key to Unlocking the Littorals?” Paper, Naval War College, 5 February 2001.

Nerheim, CDR Steven. “Enabling the Enabling Force: A Naval Mine Countermeasures 

Force for the Twenty-First Century.” Paper, Marine Corps War College, Marine 

Corps University, May 1991.

Reed, Juden Justice. “‘Damn the Torpedoes!’: International Standards Regarding the Use 

of Automatic Submarine Mines.” Fordham International Law Journal 8, Issue 2, 

Article 5 (1984): 286ff. 

Rios, John J. “Naval Mines in the 21st Century: Can NATO Navies Meet the Challenge?” 

Thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, June 2005, 12, 40–43.

Sparks, CDR Michael C. “A Critical Vulnerability, A Valid Threat: U.S. Ports and Terrorist 

Mining.” Paper, Joint Forces Staff College, Joint Advanced Warfighting School, 13 

April 2005.

von Bleichert, Peter. “Port Security: The Terrorist Naval Mine/Underwater Improvised 

Explosive Device Threat.” Dissertation, Walden University, 2015, http://scholarworks.

waldenu.edu/dissertations

Wainwright, Ronnie Ann. “Navigation through Three Straits in the Middle East: Effects 

on the United States of Being a Nonparty to the 1982 Convention on the Law of the 

Sea.” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 18, Issue 3 (1986): 361ff.

Walker, George K., ed. “The Tanker War, 1980–1988: Law and Policy.” International 

Law Studies 74, Naval War College Press (2000): 481–604.

Widmayer, Dr. Raymond S. “A Strategic and Industrial Assessment of Sea Mine Warfare 

in the Post-Cold War Era.” Paper, The Industrial College of the Armed Services, April 

1993.

4.7 CONFERENCES AND SEMINARS

Cockfield, David W. The Gulf of Suez Mining Crisis: Terrorism at Sea. Transcript 

of seminar held 30 May 1985, at U.S. Naval Academy, moderated by David W. 

Cockfield. Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute, May 1985. 

4.8 MEDIA

Photo: “Equipment in support of Operation INTENSE LOOK is stacked on the flight 

deck of the amphibious transport dock USS SHREVEPORT (LPD-12) during 

Operation INTENSE LOOK,” https://research.archives.gov/id/6396269.

Photo: “Equipment in support of Operation INTENSE LOOK is stored on bunks in a 

berthing area aboard the amphibious transport dock USS SHREVEPORT (LPD12). The area is being occupied by members of Helicopter Mine Countermeasures 

Squadron 14 (HM-14) during their participation in the Operation,” http://research.

archives.gov/description/6396271.
U.S. Naval Academy midshipmen stand at parade rest during a brigade summer whites uniform 

inspection. 

100406-N-5528G-003 U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Patrick Green
Chapter 3

Naval Personnel since 1945: Areas for 

Historical Research

by Donald Chisholm

Men matter most.

—Wayne Hughes, Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat, 1999

A nineteenth century sailor would be bewildered in a modern 

warship, but regardless of the appearance of ships, there is one 

element, the most important of all, that remains unchanged—

the man himself. Human nature in all the changing years has 

altered but little. It is the human element in warfare which may, 

if understood by the commander, prove to be the only way of 

converting an impossibility into a reality.

—War Instructions (F.T.P. 143 [A]), Admiral Ernest J. King, 

Commander-in-Chief, United States Fleet and Chief of 

Naval Operations, 1 November 1944

Is there any law that says a Yeoman must be a man?

—Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, 1916
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

THE HUMAN ELEMENT IN NAVAL WARFARE

Nearly three years into World War II, Admiral Ernest J. King published his War Instructions, a central means by which he communicated his general 

guidance and intent to a vastly grown wartime Navy. It followed on two previous 

iterations, published in 1924 and 1934 by his predecessors, Edward Eberle and 

William Standley. By this point in the war, King and his principal subordinates 

had figured out, at the cost of considerable blood and treasure in actual combat, 

what mattered most among the several ingredients that, when combined, were 

likely to produce successful outcomes at sea. They got “it.” Thus, in stark contrast with the earlier publications, King’s version began not with naval organization, tactics, or technologies, but by discussing “the Human Element in Naval 

Strength.”1 As Representative Fred Britten, Chair of the House Naval Affairs 

Committee, stated before the war, “Cold steel isn’t worth a damn in an emergency. You need men to direct it.”2

In Admiral King’s view, implicitly, the whole of the Navy’s personnel system 

existed to support the commander, who embodied the several military virtues:

■ Responsible courage, both moral and physical—the moral courage to do the 

right thing and the physical courage to face any personal danger.

■ Decision of character—ability to select the essentials, weed out the nonessentials, and fix the mind on the objective to be reached. This implies foresight 

and an imagination that can see all the advantages, all the chances, all the 

obstacles, in their true proportion and can decide firmly what is to be done.

■ Sound judgment—which in its application may be called common sense, 

though it is not a common but rare quality, and is based on possession of all 

available facts.

■ Initiative—the ability to understand and take advantage of new situations.3

King’s desiderata are no less relevant today. They form the very foundation 

of naval efficiency.4

At the same time, it must be emphasized that organizations are not intended 

to rely upon the fortuitous presence of either geniuses or heroes, or some combination thereof, for effectiveness, but rather on a cadre of competent professionals. 

Herman Wouk’s description of his fictional Victor “Pug” Henry makes this point:

[H]e is not a brilliant strategist like Raymond Spruance. He’s not a celebrated, flamboyant leader like William Halsey. What he is, is a backbone 
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officer, and it is the Victor Henry’s who create the victories for the Spruances 

and Halseys.5

If an organization finds itself dependent upon geniuses and heroes for success, 

this suggests its larger system of personnel has not been effective in its purpose 

and task. How does/should/can the Navy produce the Pug Henry’s (and his 

enlisted counterparts) it needs for success? The answers to this question underlie 

the development, maintenance, and adaptation of the Navy’s personnel function.

That personnel constitute the core assets of any large-scale formal organization, such as a navy, may seem obvious, but aside from biographies of great and 

heroic naval leaders, naval historians have shown a disinclination to systematically address aspects of naval organization that produce the competent officers 

and enlisted personnel who support and embody the characteristics of effective 

commanders and subordinates.6 In any given period of the Navy’s history, ample 

room exists for thoughtful study of naval personnel, but especially so from the 

conclusion of World War II to the present.

Two characteristics of blue water navies, such as the U.S. Navy, add special 

urgency to effectively addressing these matters. Once the Navy acquired the 

defining characteristics of a profession, for officers at least, this translated to a 

personnel system that admitted its members, with few exceptions, only at the most 

junior level. As a result, after 1916, through a progressive winnowing process of 

selection up, combined with graded retirement, the Navy has produced its senior 

leadership from those who were initially commissioned decades previous.7 It has 

also been accorded substantial autonomy in regulation of its officer corps and 

enlisted personnel. Notwithstanding various mechanisms since the American 

Civil War to rapidly and temporarily expand the officer corps during wartime, 

its leadership has been drawn almost exclusively from its existing regular 

officer corps.

At the same time, like other blue water navies, although the U.S. Navy 

deploys and operates at sea during peacetime much as it does during war, major 

actions involving the clash of fleets occur only every few generations.8 Thus, the 

Navy develops and maintains personnel against the requirement for performance 

in actions that may never come during the service lifetime of any given member. 

When such actions do come, they may not closely resemble known historic actions 

that have typically provided the foundation for predictions about future actions. 

The decisive battles of World War II in the Pacific were not fought by the much 

anticipated battle lines in relatively close quarters, but by carrier-based aircraft 

at such distances that the ships of the opposing fleets never visually sighted each 
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other.9 It was a new, more mobile naval warfare occasioned by technological 

changes that set in motion great perturbations within the Navy’s formal structure 

and culture, during the interwar period, during the war itself, and afterwards. 

This suggests that flexibility and adaptability to unforeseen circumstances is 

required of the Navy’s officers and enlisted personnel.

Compounding the problem, throughout its history the Navy has developed 

and maintained an image of the war at sea—since the 1890s, the Mahanian 

decisive fleet battle—it wants to fight. It has organized, trained, manned, and 

equipped itself to fight this war, even though it will with high probability actually 

have to do other things for which it has not prepared. As with its Army counterpart, the assumption has evidently been that preparation for “big war” will allow 

the Navy to be effective in its conduct of other, “lesser” operations.10

Arguably, decisive fleet actions have obtained in only two of its conflicts—

during the Spanish-American War in the Philippines and Cuba, and during 

World War II in the Pacific. In the latter, protection of sea lines of communication and projection of power ashore via amphibious operations in both Atlantic 

and Pacific theaters, along with a guerre de course against Japanese shipping à 

la Corbett and Callwell, occupied a major portion of its attention and resources. 

Amphibious operations, in particular, required the design and construction of 

specialized shipping and development of amphibious tactics, techniques, and 

organization during the war, notwithstanding the seizure of forward operating 

bases in the Pacific as an early cornerstone of War Plan Orange’s operational 

idea, and considerable thought given to the matter by the Marine Corps in the 

1920s and 1930s. Following World War II, along with the rest of the military, 

the Navy’s ships, aircraft, and personnel were greatly reduced in force, but the 

amphibious forces most dramatically of all its components. Although some, 

including, famously, General Omar Bradley, were persuaded that atomic weapons 

had rendered amphibious operations impossible, the United States found itself 

conducting four major such operations in the second-half of 1950. More recently, 

the submarine force found itself greatly reduced after the “end” of the Cold War 

and now must regenerate.

Moreover, the admittedly important mastery of a highly technical profession 

during peacetime has not necessarily translated into effective leadership in war. 

It is easier to teach and learn technology, tactics, techniques, and procedures 

than warfighting leadership and command—as Secretary of the Navy Gideon 

Welles discovered during the Civil War, and he was compelled to rework, amid 

the conduct of operations, the personnel system in order to promote and assign 

to duty the officers who could and would command and fight. The same problem 
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Personnel

of personnel obtained during World War II—the senior officers in place at the 

outset were not always the ones who would ultimately carry the load for the fight. 

The probable compression of time in any future naval war suggests that the kind 

of sorting out process possible in earlier wars may be less feasible in the next 

go-around, creating more pressure to get it right before hostilities occur.

Although this essay has so far focused on the Navy’s function in protecting 

the national interest, and the instrumental role of personnel in this effort, based 

on an image of the administrative organization as a mechanism for achieving 

certain objectives, with specified resources, in a particular environment, the Navy 

also serves its civilian masters in the broader context of a democratic republic. 

Since at least the immediate post–Civil War era, the Navy has functioned along 

with its sister services as a vast training and educational system that has supplied 

the private economy with individuals possessing essential skills and experience 

while offering individual Americans, very often from disadvantaged sectors of 

society, paths for social and economic mobility.11

The Navy’s personnel system and personnel tend to reflect, however imperfectly, the values, including biases of various sorts, of that larger society within 

which they reside and from which they are drawn. Sometimes it has lagged changes 

in societal values; in other times it has led change. At certain points, serious rifts 

in the larger society have been reflected in the Navy’s internal dynamics, while 

at other times it has been somewhat insulated from them. The post–World War 

II period has seen both, as American society has struggled to come to terms with 

changing demographics and historic racial, ethnic, and gender bias, and more 

latterly, with sexual and gender identity. The Navy, as with its sister services, has 

also episodically faced the need to adapt to profound changes in values across 

generations in order to attract, retain, and employ effectively the young people 

it requires.

A DEARTH OF INTEREST

It seems sensible that systematic reflection on this organizational function and its 

place in both naval efficiency and American society would be of regular interest 

to historians, if not for its slim intrinsic appeal then to put the Navy in good stead 

for the future. But this has not been the case. In this deficit, the Navy does not sail 

alone—the personnel functions of few organizations private or public, civilian 

or military, generate much excitement among historians.12 Personnel policies 

often include highly confidential organizational decisions—especially regarding 
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promotion and selection for leadership positions. Officers’ memoirs either ignore 

the matter entirely or speak about it in elliptical, opaque terms.

However challenging it may be for any large-scale formal organization to 

engage regular academic interest in its personnel, the Navy has had additional 

competing factors to overcome. It has many bright, shiny objects in its ships, 

aircraft, and weaponry. Both visually and viscerally, its episodic operations and 

campaigns contain all those elements of human drama that contrive to draw one’s 

ready attention—chance, extreme violence, pathos, brilliant and failed decisions, 

courage and its opposite, and both cruelty and kindness. Studying personnel 

must pale by comparison to these matters, which historically have dominated 

both professional and popular perceptions of the Navy’s history.13 Even the staid 

programming and acquisitions processes seem to have more intrinsic draw. In 

this, personnel functions seem to occupy largely the same niche as naval organization and administration, which enjoyed a brief flirtation with the A-List for 

naval historians during World War II but has since attracted little systematic 

attention.14 Such describes the historiography of the Navy through the end of 

World War II. The same holds for the period, now more than seven decades 

long (!), since that war ended.

Beyond these general factors, other, specific elements have influenced the 

focus of historians during this particular period. World War II loomed so large in 

the mind’s eye given its duration, scope, and complexity, not to mention that the 

Pacific war was the apotheosis of the Navy’s vision of naval warfare, that little 

room existed for other pursuits—especially for naval administration—of which 

personnel resides as a minor subspecies. Samuel Eliot Morison did not publish the 

last installment of his multivolume History of United States Naval Operations in 

World War II until 1962. The Naval War College, appropriately, devoted considerable treasure to study of the signal battles, operations, and campaigns of the 

Pacific War, in order to capture important lessons for future naval officers who 

might not be afforded the opportunity to learn those lessons through their own 

experience in war.15 Then came the Korean and Vietnam Wars punctuating the 

consistent drumbeat of the Cold War, followed by the first and second Gulf Wars, 

Afghanistan, and presently the matter of Daesh, not to mention China rising and 

the resurgent and troublesome Russian Bear.

However, we are not entirely bereft of contributions to our historical understanding of the Navy’s personnel since World War II. There are, foremost, articles in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings, usually by serving officers, both 

junior and senior, typically about immediate problems of personnel; for example, 

stagnation in promotion, emerging requirements for expertise not at the time 
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Personnel

resident within the Navy’s personnel, or changes in Naval Academy curriculum. 

Consistent with their pre-war frequency, multiple such articles have appeared 

every year since World War II. They highlight internal perceptions of enduring 

and emerging personnel problems, sometimes indicate official attention, and 

thereby provide heuristics for those historians who might be paying attention.16

Similarly, policy papers commissioned by the Navy (also by the other military 

services and the Department of Defense) of private think-tanks, if not strictly 

histories, have often contained historical narrative and have, thereby, episodically and incidentally contributed to our historical understanding of the Navy’s 

personnel.17 At a minimum, taken as a collectivity, these publications indicate 

what issues concerned the Navy’s personnel at any given point in time and how 

they thought about them.

WHAT IS TO BE STUDIED?

So, the bad news is that we have little systematic study of the Navy’s personnel by 

historians; the good news is that the field of study is entirely open. On agreeing 

to undertake this historiography, the author supposed a well-bounded, relatively 

narrow domain, but that simple notion was soon revealed as naïve, and well . . . 

simple. Not uncommon to historical research, the onion presented itself, and the 

practical challenge became one of setting reasonable limits rather than a struggle 

to find enough to address. The matter of personnel touches virtually every aspect 

of the organization. In this paper, the author proposes to limn out the field and 

boundaries of naval personnel for the purposes of the historian, with the larger 

objective of suggesting fruitful areas for future research.

For the purposes of this paper, the general subject area for histories of naval 

personnel includes the following:

1. Legal and administrative rules and procedures governing accession, training, 

education, promotion, assignment to duty, relief for cause, pay and benefits, 

retention and retirement of officers and enlisted personnel, and management 

of episodic requirements for personnel expansion and reduction as dictated 

by economy and world events.

2. Conceptualization of professional careers of officers and enlisted personnel; 

the flow through the several grades for officers and through the ranks for 

their enlisted counterparts; the preferred paths and associated milestones, 

both formal and informal, and their effects on who accedes to senior 
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leadership positions, along with the relationship, formal and informal, 

between commissioned officers and enlisted.

3. Organization of naval personnel into line and staff corps: essentially the 

formal division of labor and specialization for the Navy. Also, the formal 

and informal delineation of the role and function of the naval reserves and 

their relationship to the regular Navy.18

4. Conceptualization and reconceptualization of what defines the line officer 

and the relation of the line with the staff corps; ditto for what defines the 

differences between commissioned officers and the enlisted personnel.

5. Form, organization, and place within the Navy of the administrative function for personnel.

6. Changing societal valuation of the balance between profession and family.

7. Social, economic, political, ethnic, and gender composition of the Navy’s 

officers and enlisted personnel, and the conflicts, challenges, and processes 

of change associated with changing composition, including matters of 

explicit and implicit bias and discrimination.

The first five areas above comprise what historically have been the (largely) 

internally controlled and focused formal and informal aspects (including the 

Navy’s organizational culture) of the Navy’s personnel, aimed primarily—

perhaps narrowly—at the Navy’s warfighting efficiency. The last two directly 

address the role and function of the Navy (along with the other military services) 

in a American democratic society, which has, over the years, become less and 

less willing to advance, accept, or tolerate the exclusion of members of various 

groups defined by ascriptive traits, and includes the effects of those changes on 

the Navy’s organizational culture.19 The present essay addresses the first five 

areas, with lesser attention to the last two. For a direct focus on social forces and 

the Navy, the reader is referred to Ed Marolda’s fine “The Social History of the 

U.S. Navy, 1945–Present: A Historiographical Essay.”20

HOW MAY WE USEFULLY THINK ABOUT STUDYING IT?

The present essay approaches the Navy as an organization that perpetually invents 

and reinvents itself as it struggles to identify and come to terms with problems 

presented by its environment. As with other aspects of the Navy’s organization, 

its personnel function has never actually reached a more or less permanent, stable 

resting point, where all its problems were solved, leaving it to proceed without 
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Personnel

much friction or noise. That means, practically speaking, that it only sometimes 

has achieved a temporary equilibrium in which it has done a satisfactory job of 

addressing the problems it was able to identify and structure to that point, but the 

solutions to those problems themselves have produced unintended consequences, 

some of which were identified and assessed as undesirable and have had to be 

addressed as new problems.21

To a great extent this obtains because the Navy has always done and continues 

to operate as an open system in continual interaction with its environment, which 

changes in significant ways, at greater or lesser speeds, that the Navy can usually 

not control and can only occasionally predict accurately (but can endeavor to 

adapt to and sometimes hope to influence).22 This open-system status obtains, 

notwithstanding the Navy’s relatively closed status as an institution. Its permeability has varied over time, which sometimes, in important ways, has left it out 

of synch with the broader society within which it resides and for whose security 

it exists. The net result has been and continues to be an organizational function 

that only ever is likely to be more than partially in balance with the problems it 

is intended to solve.

How might we usefully think about the environment for Navy and the dimensions of its personnel function as described above, in order to identify fruitful 

avenues of inquiry for historians? Let me suggest the following dimensions as a 

way to organize our thinking:

1. the nature of warfare, and, especially, the enduring nature of warfare at sea

2. character of the operations, campaigns, and war(s) U.S. military, but especially the Navy, conducts/fights, how it chooses to do so, and for which it 

must prepare in the foreseeable future

3. organizational and legal aspects, including joint organization and 

requirements

4. present state of play for technology and projected future trends, especially 

where technological expertise is readily transferable between the Navy and 

the private economy

5. social and cultural values and norms, particularly as they concern equality of 

treatment and opportunity for minorities and women, expressed through a 

variety of means, most importantly by elected and appointed public officials

6. demographic characteristics of the American population from whence are 

drawn the Navy’s personnel, especially regarding ethnic mix and generational changes

7. state and trend lines of the domestic American economy
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

This essay focuses principally on the second through fourth environmental 

aspects and their effects on the dimensions of the Navy and its personnel outlined 

above. I wish to emphasize that although stated individually, these aspects inevitably interact in complex ways with one another, compounding their effects, 

direct and indirect, on the Navy’s personnel function, which dimensions also 

interact in complex and frequently unpredictable ways, leaving the door wide 

open for unintended consequences to follow from purposive actions to reorganize the personnel system. Consequently, this essay is organized more or 

less chronologically rather than by personnel dimensions and environmental 

aspects. By emphasizing temporal context, this approach highlights the simultaneity of changes in and complex interactions among these key variables.

WHERE TO LOOK

As with any historical research, developing an understanding of naval personnel 

writ large or along specific dimensions translates to employing a wide range of 

primary and secondary sources. Congressional legislative activities, whether they 

result in a law or not, provide considerable grist for the mill: draft legislation, 

subcommittee and committee hearing testimony and reports, and transcripts of 

floor debates (in the Congressional Record) help to build a picture of important 

issues and the positions and thoughts of interested actors. They also help limn out 

the executive and legislative processes, formal and informal, by which draft bills 

become law, and how changes in them over time affect substantive outcomes.

Reports from the Congressional Budget Office and the Government 

Accountability Office (née General Accounting Office) serve similarly. 

Navy-generated data and reports through the Navy Personnel Command and its 

Bureau of Naval Personnel, along with reports from the Chief of Naval Operations’ 

former Strategic Studies Group in Newport, are essential to any historical study. 

However, issues of security classification for post–World War II materials might 

hinder access, usage, and citation.23 The National Archives maintains records of 

50 years or greater for the executive departments—newer means going directly 

to the Navy. Even where data are not classified, its sensitivity, say for comparative 

promotion and command screen rates for different line communities, although 

worthwhile, tends to make it challenging to obtain. One might review the old 

print editions of All Hands (previously Bureau of Navigation News Bulletin, first 

published in 1922, the name changed in 1945), which are archived online and 

searchable, along with its contemporary online incarnation.
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Personnel

Finding and accessing documentary resources may prove to become more 

rather than less challenging with the trend toward electronic generation, communication, and storage of official papers intensifying over the past two decades.24

Email, especially, may play a central role in personnel policy matters, but is 

particularly thorny to discover and access.

Think tanks and their studies occupy a kind of in-between ground. A World 

War II institutional innovation, such include nonpartisan stalwarts as the RAND 

Corporation (first organized in 1948) and the Center for Naval Analyses (initially 

organized in 1942) that produce under contract with the military services (and 

others) research, analyses, and recommendations on a range of issues, including 

personnel problems and policies. More recently, more partisan-focused organizations such as the Heritage Foundation (founded 1973) and the Center for a New 

American Security (CNAS, founded in 2006) have also produced useful reports 

and recommendations.

Oral histories and memoirs are also important primary sources but the historian may feel a little like a baleen whale straining many tons of sea water to get a 

few krill—references are there, and sometimes become important guideposts for 

further research, but one must sort through many words to find them. Neither 

have oral histories been systematically and consistently collected for naval officers (let alone enlisted personnel) as they have been for personnel of the other 

services. The U.S. Naval Institute maintains a significant, if not entirely up-todate, collection, as does the Naval Historical Foundation, along with the Naval 

War College.

Published secondary sources include articles in general circulation newspapers, especially papers of record such as the New York Times and Washington 

Post, but also in local or regional newspapers that circulate in Navy-intensive 

geographic areas, such as San Diego (San Diego Union-Tribune—merged from 

two newspapers in 1992) and Norfolk (Virginian-Pilot). Specialized publications 

such as Military Times and its more focused Navy Times and Marine Times

can be very fruitful. These are the modern descendants of the wonderful old 

print-weeklies, the Army and Navy Journal and Army and Navy Register. That 

they may be accessed and searched online eases research. Ditto for the wide array 

of Navy-focused blogs and websites that provide unique material for the last 

two decades and offer insights into the thinking of Navy officers. Along with 

oral histories and memoirs, these sources are particularly useful for divining 

how social issues and changes affect the Navy’s personnel, sometimes generating 

strong feelings and “warm contentions” among competing groups.

Articles and letters published by the U.S. Naval Institute in its monthly 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Proceedings magazine (in print and online) might be reasonably considered, 

depending on their authorship and content, as either primary or secondary 

sources. Articles in the Naval War College Review, first published in 1948 in 

print and recent years also online, with an online searchable comprehensive 

archive, are more likely to serve as secondary sources. It should also be remembered that since the unification of the services under the National Security Act of 

1947, personnel policies have become increasingly, though not comprehensively, 

standardized across the several military services, which means that the researcher 

must cast a wider net.

Studies by scholars and pundits, published in book form, along with both 

academic and popular biographies, make up the final dimension of material suitable for historical research into Navy personnel matters.

Collectively, these primary and secondary sources may be employed to 

develop a reasonably complete narrative for both the broad trends and the 

dynamics of specific aspects in naval personnel since 1945.

BY THE TIME OF PEARL HARBOR AND INTO 

WORLD WAR II

In the nearly 150 years of its history from its rebirth in 1794 to the onset of 

World War II, the Navy devoted surprising time and effort—which included the 

inevitable false starts and errors of understanding—to figuring out a personnel 

function that would produce the Pug Henrys among its officers and their enlisted 

equivalents. It elaborated the structure of officer grades and enlisted ranks with 

their respective duties that endures largely intact today. It devised a scheme of 

specialization dividing responsibilities between line and staff and defined what it 

meant to be a line officer (although the exact places of aviators and non-aviators 

in the line were still under discussion).25 The distribution of officers and enlisted 

into the grades and ranks had been refined and algorithms for its adjustment 

figured out, based largely on ratios of personnel to capital ship tonnage. It established and refined a multidimensional system of commissioning officers (Naval 

Academy, Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps, and Naval Aviation Cadets) 

and recruiting enlisted. A naval reserve of officers and enlisted had been established and institutionalized and its relationship to the regular Navy agreed upon.26

Officer promotion by selection up from lieutenant(j.g.) to lieutenant through rear 

admiral was well-established (having been initiated in 1916 for the Navy’s top 

three grades), and, if not universally acclaimed, accepted as legitimate by both 
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line and staff. It included a regularized calendar, well-defined precepts for the 

boards of officers who made the selections, and established procedures for the 

selection boards, many of which endure to the present day.

Career paths for officers were more or less defined, including progressive 

levels of responsibility, professional education (including a system of education 

by correspondence for enlisted personnel, initiated by Secretary of the Navy 

Josephus Daniels), and training.27 Time in each grade had been normalized 

and the need for flow through the grades understood if not entirely achieved. 

In support of those paths and flow the Navy had in place a reasonably efficient 

system for assigning duty with a regularized and predictable annual rotation. The 

pay structure was well developed and deemed effective for its purpose. There was 

a system of graded retirement (based initially on age and then years of service) 

in place for officers and enlisted. In all of this it must be said that the Navy 

had advanced further toward a modern professional personnel than had its sister 

service. In fine, the personnel foundation had been constructed that would allow 

the Navy’s effective expansion to a previously unimagined size during the course 

of prosecuting World War II.28

But this relative success should not lead us to assume that the history of 

personnel had somehow ended on the eve of World War II. In fact, the demands 

of wartime dictated suspending many of the personnel procedures for the duration. For example, promotion by selection up gave way temporarily to promotion en bloc for regular and reserve officers alike. As well, a great many officers 

who had been separated from the service for non-selection, medical disability, or 

normal service-in-grade retirement were returned to active duty for the duration 

in order to meet exigent demands for more officers.29

During this century and a half of problem solving, three central values 

emerged, in uneasy dynamic tension with one another, to dominate decisions 

about the Navy’s personnel. Their relative importance varied substantially over 

time and continues to do so: efficiency (effectiveness) of the Navy, equity for 

individuals (more for officers than for enlisted during this period), and economy, 

which is to say near and long-term expense (including pay and allowances along 

with the cost of the retired list). The period from the Navy’s inception in 1793 

to the eve of World War II is accurately described as “from equity to efficiency.” 

Early in the Navy’s history, when efficiency and equity came into close conflict, 

the latter typically emerged triumphant. By 1916, however, and initial adoption 

of promotion by selection up for officers, the balance had tilted in favor of efficiency and so it has remained. Economy has waxed and waned in importance, 

growing during peacetime and diminishing in times of expansion and war. Since 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

9/11, however, the United States has been more or less in a continuous state of 

war in one place or another, with no relief in sight, which may mean the old 

approach to economy may have been overcome by events.

Thus, by the post–World War II period under consideration here, an effective main framework for the Navy’s personnel function was in place. What 

did not emerge before the war, and indeed, after, however, was the inclusion of major portions of the American population into the Navy—including 

African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Filipinos, and women. Like the larger 

American society, the Navy remained racially segregated, both de jure and de 

facto, with women being treated only as necessary temporary accommodations 

to the exigencies of wartime. Unsurprising to social scientists who have studied 

political development, organizations in their values, culture, and form can only 

exist if reasonably consistent with the societies within which they reside.30

The Navy was, historically, the most class conscious of the military services, 

with a great divide between officers and enlisted, a chasm reinforced both by 

formal rules and endless symbolic communication.31 And, as a self-consciously 

tradition-focused organization that venerated and exalted longstanding ways 

of doing business, from the Navy’s perspective at the time, equal protection 

and equal opportunity were simply not problems to be addressed. Social and 

economic mobility, a historic latent function of the military generally, and especially afforded by the Navy—through training and education, responsibility, and 

pay and benefits—to those white Americans who would join were not available 

to many other fellow citizens. It would take an existential war and a virtually 

insatiable demand for personnel to begin that change.32

IMMEDIATE POST-WAR CHANGES AND CHALLENGES: 

DRAWDOWN, LIMITED CONFLICTS, AND INTEGRATION

With the successful conclusion of World War II, the United States was left 

standing as the dominant Western power, and the prevailing notion of an 

“American way of war” had been reinforced.33 The mid-1940 Navy comprised 

13,162 regular and officers on active duty and 144,824 enlisted personnel. By 

mid-1945 it had grown to an astounding historical peak of 317,316 officers in all 

corps and 1,933,563 enlisted. Demobilization was relatively swift as historically 

has been the American wont. After all, only a small percentage of those officers 

and enlisted who had served for the duration were to be needed and just as few 

were interested in staying. Indeed, there was no reason to suppose that the United 
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States could not return to its historical stance of a small military establishment—

the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans remained where they were, ICBMs were yet to 

come, the Soviet Union’s blockade of Berlin, its other adventures in Europe, and 

the North Korean attack on its southern brother had not yet put paid to that era’s 

“peace dividend.”

While the near-term challenge was to return recently mothballed ships to 

commission and activate the reserve personnel to run them for the duration of the 

Korean War, the Navy’s (and the other services’) challenge became how to maintain a permanently larger (than pre–World War II) establishment to confront 

what became a persistent Soviet threat. Fortunately, the draft was continued after 

the war, providing the Navy with the relative advantage of a greater appeal than 

that held by the Army, enhanced by a civilian economy that struggled to absorb 

the return of so many people who had served in the military. The status and role 

of the naval reserve and how it would support the Cold War Navy outside of a 

major hot war also came into discussion.

With the United States and its military now cast in a continuing and central 

role upon the world stage after the war, the tectonic plates of federal government 

organization also shifted dramatically. The growth of the federal administrative apparatus, incremental since the founding and accelerated during the Great 

Depression and again during the war, had left the President with an unsustainable span of control, no institutional presidency to assist him in running that 

apparatus, and a welter of agencies with overlapping and conflicting missions. 

At President Harry Truman’s request, former President Herbert Hoover returned 

from trout fishing in Wyoming to run a commission that comprehensively 

analyzed federal administrative management problems and proposed courses of 

action for their resolution.34 In the national security domain, this endeavor coincided with a long-standing desire by advocates of a separate air force for a unified 

department of defense. Perhaps equally important, some of the nation’s most 

senior military leaders, such as George C. Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower, 

had emerged from their experiences in World War II with profound regard for the 

power of joint commands and staffs in the conduct of joint arms. For example, 

in his post-war narrative, Eisenhower emphasized several times the vital importance of what he called the “air-ground-naval team” even as he recounted his 

recurring efforts to ensure unity of command over his disparate forces.35 The 

Navy’s days of independent steaming were coming to an end.

Not without considerable blood on the deck, as a piece of the larger reorganization of the federal government, the National Security Act of 1947 became effective 26 July of that year, establishing, among other things, a unified Department 
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of Defense, with a defense secretary superimposed above the service secretaries 

(no longer members of the cabinet), a legally formalized Joint Chiefs of Staff, 

and a new Department of the Air Force. It comprised the greatest changes in 

national security organization since the ratification of the Constitution.36 This 

left the Navy with much less independence than previously to manage its own 

affairs, including those of its personnel. The Officer Personnel Act of 1947 (OPA) 

followed on 7 August 1947, with the stated intention of providing uniform rules 

and practices in personnel management across the services. Ironically, perhaps, 

this act adopted many of the key aspects of the Navy’s officer personnel system as 

it then stood and made them applicable to the other services. Thus, while the new 

law was substantively congenial to the Navy, procedurally the sea service had lost 

a large measure of control over how to manage its personnel. This constituted 

only the beginning stage of a long series of incremental joint requirements that 

would reduce the Navy’s independence.

These changes were followed less than a year later on 26 July 1948 by Truman’s 

Presidential Executive Order 9981, which directed immediate desegregation of 

the armed forces. Major wars inevitably trigger unintended significant social, 

economic, and political changes. President Franklin Roosevelt had published 

an Executive Order on 25 June 1941 mandating non-discrimination in defense 

industry employment. To meet the requirements of economic mobilization for an 

existential war, every available and able American was needed. African Americans 

had been prohibited from enlisting in the Navy following World War I. In 1932, 

that ban was lifted, but only mess ratings were opened to them. On 7 March 1942, 

the Navy opened enlistment for “general service” in the Navy to black Americans. 

Although ultimately about 150,000 African Americans served in the Navy during 

World War II, they remained greatly restricted in the enlisted ratings open to them, 

were limited to a quota of ten percent per ship, and most neither went to sea nor 

saw combat. There were no male African-American officers until 1945.37

Notably, the Navy had employed African Americans as stevedores in segregated units, and thereon hangs the tale.38 On 17 July 1944, two ships being loaded 

with ammunition at the Navy’s Port Chicago facility on Suisun Bay in northern 

California exploded, immediately killing more than 300 personnel, over 200 of 

whom were black. The explosion and aftermath proved to be a catalytic event in 

the history of African Americans in the Navy (and in the military more generally), 

although its effects would not begin to be felt clearly until Presidential Executive 

Order 9981.39 For quite some time, the U.S. military and the Navy (even though 

it may have dragged its feet in implementing the required changes) led the broader 

civilian society in opening opportunities to black Americans, presaging similar 
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openings for American women, for gay and lesbian Americans, and more recently 

for transgender Americans. Still, it was not the beginning of the end, but more 

like Winston Churchill’s famous “end of the beginning”—formal legal changes 

did not universally translate into actual practice.

The effects of mobilization during the Korean War and the subsequent 

drawdown led to what Congress believed to be military services top-heavy with 

commissioned officers. To redress this problem and to forestall it in the future, the 

Officer Grade Limitation Act of 1954 (OGLA) was enacted. It linked numbers of 

officers by grade in the unrestricted line and staff corps to the numbers of enlisted 

personnel.40 This law shaped the Navy’s reduction in force already underway 

following the Korean armistice.

That same year, on 17 May the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its epochal 

decision in Brown v. Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas. The 

profound, widespread effects of this ruling took decades to unfold, followed by 

other federal rulings, and federal legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 

2 July 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 6 August 1965, and the Fair Housing 

Act of 11 April 1968 (passed barely a week after the assassination of Martin 

Luther King). All told, these laws comprehensively addressed the sources and 

loci of racial discrimination in the United States. Now more than 50 years later, 

American society and its military are still working through the challenges.

INTO THE 1960S AND 1970S

Racial conflict in the nation’s urban areas in the 1960s and 1970s did not leave 

the Navy unaffected. Neither did growing opposition to the Vietnam War and 

generational differences between young officers and Sailors and their seniors, 

who had started their Navy careers during World War II. Aboard ship, relations 

between white and black Sailors were often strained, sometimes worse:

[R]ecruiting standards were lowered and basic-training shortened to fill the 

Navy’s manpower needs more quickly and in fairer racial proportion. As 

much as anything, the new recruitment policies spelled trouble. Men lacking 

even an elementary education were entering an organization whose greatest 

demand was for personnel with high technical qualifications. Blacks were 

rushed from “street to fleet” in less than two months, only to find themselves performing the least attractive shipboard duties, usually under white 

supervision.41
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Thus, efforts to redress racial problems may well have increased the potential 

for, if not the probability of, racial tension aboard ship, exacerbated by the high 

operational tempo and extended deployments.

The antiwar movement also found adherents in uniform and at times the 

lines on the two sets of issues coincided. In a number of cases, the situation deteriorated into violence. Ranger (CVA-61) suffered perhaps a dozen acts of deliberate 

sabotage while deployed June–October 1972, the most serious of which was 

committed by a white sailor who threw a wrench into the main reduction gears.42

A fire was deliberately set in Forrestal (CVA-59). On 11 October 1972, while 

she was operating as part of Operation Linebacker II off the coast of Vietnam, a 

full-bore riot broke out among white and black Sailors amid an antiwar protest 

in Kitty Hawk (CVA-63), leaving at least four dozen injured and 25 black Sailors 

and no white Sailors arrested.43 Aboard Constellation (CVA-64), 130 sailors, all 

but nine of whom were African Americans, protested discriminatory job assignments and disciplinary proceedings, forcing the ship to return to San Diego.44

To be sure, in 1970 President Nixon had named 49-year-old Elmo Zumwalt 

as Chief of Naval Operations. The admiral resolved to bring the “Navy’s treatment of ethnic or racial minorities, especially blacks, into conformity with stated 

national policy, not to say common fairness and decency.”45 He moved rapidly 

to reduce racial and sexual [as it was then called] discrimination in the Navy 

and to increase enlistments of African Americans. Aboard the larger ships he 

emplaced minority affairs and human relations staff officers. Their efficacy was 

unclear. There were also his direct communications of policy decisions and their 

implementation to all hands via a total of 121 “Z-Grams,” and his relaxation of 

restrictions on facial hair and ethnic hairstyles, along with changes in uniforms, 

these, sincere efforts to address significant generational changes.

Zumwalt’s efforts were at times simultaneously staunchly opposed by his 

fellow senior officers and deemed insufficient by younger Sailors. He has not 

always been treated kindly by history and occasionally has been vilified. 

However, it is difficult to conjure what might have been done very differently by 

Zumwalt—all of American society’s institutions were under similar great stress 

during that time. Zumwalt allowed the Navy to bend, not break.46

The military draft, which had been maintained continuously since 1940, 

was, by the Act of 22 September 1971, continued in effect only through June 

1973.47 Apart from those actually drafted, conscription had played a significant 

role in “encouraging” some of those American youth who “volunteered” for military service, especially in the Navy. Male registration for Selective Service was 

reinstated by Presidential Proclamation 4771 of 2 July 1980, but neither military 
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nor civilian leadership have displayed much appetite for an actual draft. Now 

over four decades in, the “all volunteer” force has largely been judged a successful 

policy and it would be useful to sort out its effects on the Navy’s personnel during 

that period.48

Opposition to the Vietnam War in the American public and rising levels of 

a general societal malaise also had their effects on the Navy’s officer personnel. 

As with the other services, toward the end of the Vietnam War, the Navy lost 

substantial numbers of junior officers who decided that the seagoing life was not 

for them.49 The Navy’s loss was the private sector’s gain. Although not readily 

empirically measurable, it also seems probable that individuals who might in a 

different time have opted for the Naval Academy or the NROTC now elected 

not to do so. We cannot know with any certainty who these individuals were but 

we may be reasonably confident that had they been commissioned and stayed in 

the Navy the senior officer corps in the late 1990s and early 2000s would have 

looked noticeably different.

More recently, the effects of the business models instituted by Admiral 

Vern Clark while Chief of Naval Operations included the systematic reduction 

of manning aboard ship and the decommissioning of ships—which were not 

replaced one-for-one. These changes, in which economic efficiency was to trump 

effectiveness, were not so troubling during the relative calm of the period immediately following the end of the Cold War, when deployments and operational 

tempo continued in predictable and bearable calendars.50 However, the wars 

in Afghanistan, then Iraq, and now Syria and elsewhere, combined with the 

resurgent Bear and the rise of the Peoples Republic of China, have increased 

demand for naval forces—in the form of longer and more frequent deployments—that has stretched both materiel and personnel. Naval personnel who 

thought they were signing up for one contract are finding that they have gotten a 

somewhat different one, and one not altogether to their liking. Secular changes 

in demographics and social attitudes during the immediate post-war period and 

through to today, including more families with both parents working fulltime 

and decreased willingness to endure separations from families, have intensified 

the negative effects of increased personnel tempo. Some promising officers have 

resigned their commissions relatively early in their careers while other more 

senior successful officers have elected to take themselves out of the running for 

the flag grades by choosing duty assignments friendlier to their families but not 

in “flag track.”51
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NAVAL RESERVE OFFICERS TRAINING CORPS

During the first five decades of the Navy’s history, there was no rationalized, 

systematic mechanism for annually securing the right individuals in the right 

numbers as officers, and only inadequate means for their education and training. 

The numbers varied widely from year to year, based largely on requirements for 

patronage, rather than the needs of the service. Appointment as a midshipman 

was treated as a plum and indeed, for young men politically connected, 

half-pay provided a decent sinecure. Many never went to sea and ashore earned 

well-deserved reputations as dissolutes. Their education and training was better 

than haphazard, via a Corps of Mathematicians teaching aboard ship, but only 

just. Establishment of the U.S. Naval Academy in 1845 and a system for appointment of the appropriate number of qualified cadets thereto largely solved the 

problem of numbers and education for a stable peacetime Navy. As the demands 

of the Civil War showed, however, the Naval Academy would never be sufficient to supply officers to meet the requirements of a greatly expanded wartime 

Navy. For that conflict, the Navy accepted volunteer officers, largely from the 

merchant marine, for the duration. Enlisted personnel were increased by voluntary enlistments.

During World War I the vast expansion of the Navy occasioned by the Act 

of 29 August 1916 once again necessitated sourcing officers from other than 

Annapolis. The great lesson of the Great War was that some sort of permanent mechanism for temporarily expanding the Navy, especially its officer 

corps, needed to be put in place. Accordingly, in 1926, following the model of 

the Army’s previously established Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), the 

Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC) was organized at a strength 

of 1,200 midshipmen at six universities. On graduation, the midshipmen were 

commissioned as reserve officers. The Naval Aviation Cadet program was created 

in 1935 to build a larger foundation of reserve officers in preparation for wartime 

expansion.

World War II’s projected and actual requirements quickly exceeded the 

supply from the Naval Academy and existing reserve programs. In June 1940, 

as part of the Two-Ocean Navy Act, Naval Reserve Midshipmen’s Schools were 

established at various colleges and universities, and, thus, the so-called “90-day 

wonders.” In 1943, the V-12 program, again through colleges and universities, 

aimed to further increase the numbers of commissioned officers educated in the 

technical curricula the Navy required. Both programs worked wonderfully well 

to provide both line and staff officers. Notably, the V-12 program also had as 
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another stated objective: arresting the decline in college enrollment caused by the 

military draft and increasing the college population.

The Navy’s modern Officer Candidate School (OCS) and staff officer equivalents evolved from World War II’s V-7 and V-12 programs, and today comprises 

the third commissioning source for line officers. The Navy Aviation Officer 

Candidate School started training at Pensacola in 1947, while the Navy Officer 

Candidate School was organized at Newport in 1951. The two merged in 1994 

at Pensacola, and in 2007 moved to Newport. Both programs ultimately came 

to reflect the requirements of permanently maintaining a large Navy during the 

decades of the Cold War—a policy decision unprecedented in American history. 

When and how NROTC and OCS graduates have been commissioned, whether 

as reservists or regulars, and the length and type of their post-commissioning 

commitments has varied over time with the needs of the Navy.

Although commissioning officers through NROTC and OCS was initially 

intended simply to provide means for temporary expansion, and was then institutionalized to produce a steady stream of officers above and beyond the capacity 

of the Naval Academy, these organizations have also come to serve other policy 

objectives (as the V-12 program did during World War II). The nation has found 

it desirable for a democracy to source officers from more than just the military 

academies. The education of OCS- and NROTC-commissioned officers overlaps 

with their Naval Academy counterparts in military science and relevant technical 

curricula, but their college studies overall range more widely. This has helped 

to serve the purpose of creating and maintaining an officer corps that broadly 

reflects the American population, especially important under the regime of an 

all-volunteer force, but also ensures a range of perspectives on the business of the 

Navy, enhancing creativity and organizational innovation.

Inevitably and understandably, these programs created internal conflicts in 

the officer corps, based on commissioning source, that were evident from the 

post–Civil War period through World War II. Naval Academy graduates, rightly 

or wrongly, have often been perceived to have an edge over their regular-Navy 

counterparts when it comes to promotion to the higher grades and selection for 

command. To be sure, quantitative data on these matters have not been readily 

available. This author suspects, but can muster no systematic evidence to support, 

that in recent decades such differences have attenuated due to the high operational tempo and a new generation.

Perhaps more important—at least more visible—than any conflicts internal 

to the officer corps, have been differences in values between the larger American 

society and the military more generally. The upheavals occasioned by the 
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Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, and opposition to that war— sometimes 

violently—especially on the campuses of universities, led to the banning of 

NROTC programs from a significant number of schools and their absence from 

same for several decades, thereby and unfortunately truncating demographic 

sources for officers.

When the military was downsized following the collapse of the Soviet Union, 

just as enrollment at the Naval Academy was reduced so were NROTC enrollment numbers and programs reduced. In order to maintain access to students 

from the widest range of universities and colleges, while still reducing overall 

numbers and expense, NROTC programs were essentially merged into consortiums, in which students enrolled in one institution became part of programs 

located at other institutions. For example, under the command of a single Navy 

captain, the Chicago-area NROTC consortium had staffs at the Illinois Institute 

of Technology and Northwestern University, and also enrolled students from the 

University of Illinois, Chicago, and Loyola University.

At about the same time, the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of the Clinton 

administration led to serious discussions among both students and faculty on 

campuses—both with NROTC programs and without—about how to reconcile 

university nondiscrimination policies with U.S. military laws and regulations 

that discriminated against individuals openly homosexual, including enrollment 

in NROTC programs. The practical effect was, it appears, to delay direct reengagement of universities with the NROTC programs, even after Vietnam-era 

sentiments had largely faded from their campuses and even though after 9/11 

the military has been increasingly perceived positively. With recent changes in 

federal law and Department of Defense regulations regarding sexual preference 

and gender identity, it is entirely possible that more civilian colleges and universities will rethink their policies concerning NROTC.

DOPMA

The first major reworking of officer personnel after OPA and OGLA did not 

come until the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act of 12 December 1980 

(DOPMA). It went further than the earlier legislation with the specific aim to 

produce greater uniformity across the military services in the management of their 

officer personnel. It established relatively stable and predictable (“normalized”) 

career paths for officers, used graded retirement to protect equity for individual 

officers who were forced to retire for not having been selected for promotion (the 
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“up or out” rule after two “looks”). The objective was to produce a vigorous, 

relatively youthful, highly professional officer corps that would enhance military 

efficiency. It absorbed and modified the rules embedded in the earlier OPA and 

OGLA. Nearly four decades later, DOPMA is judged a mixed success but efforts 

to rescind or substantially modify it have not found sufficient support.52

GOLDWATER-NICHOLS, JOINTNESS, AND EDUCATION

And now we come to the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986.53 Problems in 

Operations Desert One, Just Cause, and Urgent Fury catalyzed a long-standing 

congressional inclination toward imposing requirements for jointness on the U.S. 

military services into action. This produced the Goldwater-Nichols Act, which 

created the combatant commands, elevated joint doctrine, and established Joint 

Professional Military Education (JPME) requirements for officers of all services. 

These changes wrought a profound realignment of service and joint responsibilities, resulting in changes in educational and experience requirements for 

promotion. The operational level commanders of the geographic and functional 

combatant commands became the ones to employ the forces provided by the Title 

10 service chiefs. The service chiefs themselves suffered a reduction in formal 

power while the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff acquired more.

At the same time, technological changes in intelligence, surveillance, and 

reconnaissance coupled with greatly improved precision in weapons also altered 

the way in which the U.S. military goes to war, increasing the importance of 

joint staffs, joint planning for and joint command of operations. In this brave 

new world, a lieutenant commander not destined ever to command might, as 

a member of a joint targeting board on a joint commander’s staff, exercise a 

more profound influence on carrier air strikes than the embarked carrier air wing 

commander serving as the Navy strike warfare commander (under the composite 

warfare command concept), with a high probability of making flag. The apparent 

end of the Cold War, the absence of a deep-water naval threat (until recently), and 

near continuous conduct of low intensity land operations (punctuated by two 

invasions of Iraq) cast the Navy in a supporting role to land commanders (whose 

services have played dominant roles in writing joint doctrine). More recently, 

constraints on budget resources have impelled an increased reliance of each military service, including the Navy, on capabilities and capacities of its counterparts. 

Taken together, these changes suggest the wisdom of reconsidering how the Navy 

thinks about what it means to be a naval officer.
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Naval officers found themselves subject to externally-imposed schoolhouse 

joint education milestones (Joint Professional Military Education I and II) that 

ran counter to a longstanding Navy indifference toward post-graduate education, unless such specifically advanced directly relevant technical knowledge 

(i.e., ordnance engineering, underwater acoustics, hydrography, and the like). 

Throughout its more than two-century history the U.S. Navy, like its progenitor 

the Continental Navy, and its British Royal Navy forebear, has maintained a 

certain ambivalence about “how to get good.” On the one hand, as an “old” 

service, it has tended to favor the “school of the ship” as the most effective means 

by which officers and enlisted alike might gain the requisite experience and expertise. On the other, it has recognized that as its foundational technologies became 

(and continue to become) vastly more complex some sort of formal training, if 

not education, concomitantly increased in practical importance.

Against the background of longstanding internal opposition to a “naval 

school” the Naval Academy was established in 1845—more than four decades 

after its Army counterpart was founded at West Point—with one portion of 

its cadets selected to engineering. Following merger of the line with the Corps 

of Engineers in 1899, the Annapolis curriculum came to be dominated by and 

known for engineering. The development and growth of Navy schools of all 

stripes became most dramatic during World War II given the mutually reinforcing 

demands imposed by rapid technological innovation and integration along the 

exponential expansion of its personnel. These schools were institutionalized in 

subsequent years to become an indelible part of Navy life. Following the war, 

technical education for officers continued in its place of honor, provided by the 

Naval Postgraduate School and civilian universities.

Against this ready acceptance, the Naval War College has, since its founding 

in 1884 in the former Newport Asylum for the Poor, enjoyed a peculiarly indifferent relationship with its service. Newport’s broader education regarding the 

profession of arms at sea loomed important during the interwar years, but was 

largely suspended for the duration of World War II, and although in recent times 

praised as the “Navy’s Home of Thought,” and esteemed highly by the other 

military services, seems never quite to have recovered its former luster in the 

post-war era.

In autumn 1950 Rear Admiral Arleigh Burke wrote to a young officer that 

in his view the best way to “get good” was still to go to sea. Officer career paths 

developed and were largely maintained that emphasize time at sea, and left little 

time for resident professional education. The Navy continued to emphasize the 

“school of the ship” and did not build into the normalized career milestones 
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required by DOPMA time for resident education. Where the other military 

services have historically valued resident graduate education and officers 

selected for that experience compete before selection boards, the Navy continues 

to employ its detailers to fill quotas for resident JPME schools. The Navy has 

favored distance education means for fulfilling JPME I requirements because 

they do not demand time away from the fleet and still provide the “check in 

the box.” To its credit, the Navy made completion of JPME I mandatory for 

successfully screening for O-5 command in the unrestricted line communities.54

The surface warfare community has found ways to build time for resident JPME 

into its officers’ career paths.

At the same time, the Navy promised every officer one resident graduate 

education experience.55 This means that officers who go to the Naval Postgraduate 

School for a master’s degree are also required to complete JPME I during their 

course of study. For the first two decades following Goldwater-Nichols, the Navy 

sometimes under-filled their quotas at the Joint Forces Staff College and regularly sought and gained waivers for JMPE II for their “hot runners.” Waivers 

largely went away in the mid-2000s at the insistence of Representative Ike Skelton 

(D-MO) and other members of Congress, and for a time the Navy had to work 

diligently to ensure that its officers could meet the requirements.

In addition to JPME I and II, for promotion to flag rank Goldwater-Nichols 

mandated joint tours, and designated specific billets that satisfied those requirements. And again, the Navy, like the other services, had to find room in officers’ 

career paths to satisfy them.56

The years following Goldwater-Nichols saw extensive development of joint 

doctrine, but written largely by the other military services, especially the Army, 

and, not surprisingly, that joint doctrine has reflected those services’ cultures and 

preferences (for command and control and for planning processes, for example). 

To the extent that the Navy for some years eschewed an active role in the development of that doctrine it placed itself at a disadvantage, both because the substance 

of the doctrine did not necessarily favor Navy preferred ways of doing business 

and naval officers were not well versed in that substance. In recent years the 

Navy has come to recognize the practical value of JPME as a way of “breaking 

the code” of joint doctrine and has become increasingly active in producing both 

doctrine and officers who understand it so that the Navy can compete effectively 

with the other services—especially with the Air Force over control of the employment of carrier aviation—in the joint arena.
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WOMEN IN THE NAVY

For most of its modern history, the Navy maintained an ambivalent attitude 

about women among its officers and enlisted personnel. Fleet Admiral Ernest 

King, for example, favored having women serve in the Navy, while Fleet Admiral 

Chester Nimitz decidedly did not. The Navy emerged from World War II having 

had some 86,000 women serve as nurses or in the Women Accepted for Volunteer 

Emergency Service (WAVES) under the provisions of the Naval Reserve Act of 

1938 as amended by the Act of 30 July 1942, which established the Women’s 

Reserve Program. Although the vast majority served in the United States in 

administrative capacities, a number deployed overseas and some were captured 

and held as prisoners by the Japanese. However, as had been the case during 

World War I, women in the naval uniform continued to be understood not as a 

long-term investment but as a temporary expedient during the war with a return 

to the status quo ante bellum intended.

However, in 1947 the Army-Navy Nurses Act established the Nurse Corps 

as permanent staff corps of the Navy and Army and granted permanent commissioned rank for nurses. And on 12 June 1948, President Truman signed into law 

the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act, which enabled women to join the 

Navy in regular or reserve status and disestablished the Women’s Reserve created 

by the acts of 1938 and 1942. This was no mere change in name; women for the 

first time were to serve alongside their male counterparts under the same organization, but the specialties open to women remained limited and among officers 

no flag rank was authorized. Subsequently, female reservists along with male 

reservists were recalled for active duty during the Korean War. Not until 1967 

was a two percent cap on women in the Navy lifted.

Given new energy by the various civil rights laws passed in the 1960s, and 

having been passed by both U.S. House and Senate, on 22 March 1972 the Equal 

Rights Amendment was sent to the states for ratification, but ultimately failed to 

gain the required number of positive votes (38 states) within the time limit specified in the amendment. Less than four months later, on 7 August 1972, Chief of 

Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt released Z-Gram 116.57 It was nothing short 

of revolutionary.

Its objectives were to accord “women equal opportunity to contribute 

their extensive talents and to achieve full professional status.” He prefaced the 

substance of the message by noting that (1) the imminence of the all-volunteer 

force had heightened the importance of women as a personnel resource; (2) he 

hoped soon to have the authority to utilize female officers and enlisted aboard 
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ship in order to maintain the Navy at the size required and allow for a proper, 

sustainable sea-shore rotation; and (3) he was establishing a task force to examine 

all laws, regulations, and policies that required change in order to “eliminate any 

disadvantages accruing to women from either legal or attitudinal restrictions.”

As had been the case for African Americans and women during World Wars 

I and II, some of the impetus for women’s inclusion came from a practical realism 

that continued discrimination imposed an opportunity cost on the Navy and the 

other military services, one likely to increase in severity under an all-volunteer 

force regime. The difference was that whereas the wars were temporary, this 

regime was likely to be long-term if not permanent.

Z-Gram 116 specified several actions already underway to achieve the objectives above:

■ authorizing limited entry of women into all ratings 

■ assigning a limited number of women to sea duty on Sanctuary (AH-17) as a 

pilot program pending legislation that would authorize women to ships at sea 

■ removing existing restrictions on women succeeding to command ashore

■ opening up the Civil Engineer and Chaplain Corps, thereby opening all staff 

corps to women

■ expanding assignment of technically qualified unrestricted line women to 

restricted line billets

■ offering paths to flag rank within the technical managerial spectrum as was 

being contemplated for men

■ eliminating the practice of assigning women exclusively to certain billets and 

assigning qualified women to the full range of challenging billets

■ opening midshipmen programs to women at all NROTC campuses and 

considering women for selection to joint war colleges.

The CNO enjoined all commanding officers to (1) accurately reflect the spirit 

and intent of Z-Gram 116 in their own commands; (2) “initiate similar equalization actions in matters within their purview in order to ensure that women 

are accorded full trust and responsibility to function in the assigned position or 

specialty;” and (3) be guided by standards of duty, performance, and discipline 

which are truly equitable for both men and women.”

Of course, the CNO could and did fundamentally alter the formal rules 

of the game, but the proof of the pudding would be in the behavior of officers 

and enlisted, all part of a self-consciously traditional culture loath to change. 

Organizational cultures are notoriously difficult to alter appreciably other than 
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over the long term. As with racial attitudes, the Navy’s culture has historically 

reflected the broader American culture, even if at times it has been somewhat out 

of synch with it.

In the 20 years following Z-Gram 116, women were graduating from the 

Naval Academy and Aviation Officer Candidate School. They qualified as naval 

aviators; there were unrestricted line flag officers. They were screening for 

command ashore and afloat. Ships were delivered with habitability modifications for full gender integration. More than 2,600 Navy women participated in 

Desert Storm.58

And yet, there was Tailhook in September 1991, which indicated with great 

force the distance full integration of women into the Navy had yet to go. Emotions 

still run high and opinions on what happened in Las Vegas still differ. Even today, 

it is challenging to find a carefully reasoned and empirically sound account and 

evaluation of Tailhook.59

However, not entirely unlike the 1944 Port Chicago events and the 1972 

riots aboard deployed Navy ships, Tailhook acted as a catalyst for change in both 

the formal laws, regulations, and policies concerning women in the Navy and 

for shifts in the Navy’s organizational culture. It may be that relatively closed 

institutions like the military are likely only to make profound changes in their 

existing cultures following near-cataclysmic events like Tailhook, which then 

realign them with the broader society within which they reside.

The integration of women aboard ship and in the Navy more broadly has 

introduced specific challenges regarding privacy, harassment, and assault, along, 

apparently, with shifts in the causes for the reliefs of commanding officers, executive officers, and command master chiefs. In this, the Navy evidences a commitment to cultural change within, but this must be sustained for perhaps another 

generation.

TECHNOLOGY

Navies, and the U.S. Navy in particular, have always depended on the most 

modern and often the most sophisticated technologies of any given era, whether 

it be the sailing ship-of-the-line, coal-fired reciprocating steam engines, nuclear 

propulsion, use of radio communications, radar-directed naval gunfire, or GPS. 

In each major era the Navy has adapted its organization to the dominant technologies employed. But as technologies continue to evolve, this has periodically 

resulted in sharply punctuated equilibria. As an example, just as the Navy figured 
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out how to safely and effectively operate internal combustion engine propeller 

aircraft from its carriers, the introduction of the jet aircraft toward the end 

of World War II necessitated a very compressed adaptation embodied by the 

angled-deck carrier, replacement of hydraulic by steam catapults, and the hand 

paddles of the landing signal officer by the optical ball system, all accompanied 

by changes in carrier flight operation procedures.60

Let me suggest, however, that the most momentous technological changes in 

the post–World War II period in terms of their effects on naval personnel were: 

(1) nuclear propulsion, initially for submarines, subsequently for surface ships 

(2) replacement of naval guns by guided missiles

(3) vast expansion of the sophistication, complexity, and capabilities of electronic sensors

(4) the extension of programmable microprocessors into virtually every aspect 

of the ship and aircraft. 

Excepting its conventional propulsion, the new Zumwalt (DDG-1000) 

embodies and exemplifies each of these changes.

The peculiarities of nuclear propulsion (along with the advantage that 

nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines gave the Navy in the post–World 

War II competition with the Air Force for strategic mission) led to a fundamental 

rethinking of what it meant to be an unrestricted line officer as profound as the 

1899 amalgamation of the line with the engineers (the belated recognition that one 

could no longer fight a ship without a grasp of its engineering characteristics).61

Although the greatest consequences came for the submariners, early optimism 

about the potential of nuclear propulsion for the surface Navy led to changes 

there as well.62 Even the aviators were not immune. Nuclear-powered carriers as 

conventional aviation assets before them were/are by law to be commanded by 

naval aviators.63 This ultimately, because of the career time required for nuclear 

qualification and deep-water command prior to carrier command, produced a 

fundamental divide between aviators who would become air wing commanders 

and those who would command the carriers.

Curriculum at the Naval Academy and for the NROTC programs was 

revised to reflect increased engineering requirements. Admiral Hyman G. 

Rickover acquired the institutional power to select the cream of Naval Academy 

and NROTC graduates for the nuclear power program, which imposed certain 

opportunity costs on the other officer communities. Time had to be built into 

already crowded career paths for nuclear power school, including aviators who 
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were selected to command nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.

Contemporaneous with the introduction of nuclear propulsion, the Navy 

began to shift to guided missiles for antiaircraft defense, and cruise missiles for 

offensive strike against ships at sea and to project power against land targets.

The pre–World War II battleship captain, whose situational awareness was 

limited to visuals from his ship and radio messages from other ships and his 

organic scouting aircraft, who was expected to fight his ship at distances within 

the range of his main batteries and lay those guns with optical equipment, and 

whose battle station was to be the armored conning tower with only narrow slits 

for vision, was displaced by the World War II development of the radar-driven 

Combat Information Center (CIC) made necessary by the great closing speeds 

and lethality of Japanese aircraft.64

The CIC and its associated electronic sensors continued to evolve rapidly 

following World War II, given urgency by the development of highly accurate 

anti-ship missiles with even greater speed and lethality than aircraft. With other 

technological changes that incrementally reduced ship manning requirements 

(including the continuing replacement of steam with gas turbines or diesels for 

propulsion of non-nuclear powered ships), the rise of the CIC began a fundamental alteration in the composition of the ship’s complement. The deck and 

engineering sections were much reduced while increasing numbers of enlisted 

and officers alike were dedicated to sensors and weaponry rather than the maintenance and operation of the ship itself. Systematic cross-time comparison of 

functionally equivalent ships from 1945 forward would reveal, I would wager, 

the revolutionary character of these changes. In turn, educational and intelligence 

requirements for Sailors increased along with classroom training regimens. The 

higher order skills required of the operational specialists (along, of course, with 

engineers) has made them appealing to the private sector in ways boatswains, 

firemen, and gunners had never quite managed, thereby creating new issues of 

retention and turnover for the Navy.65

Rising education levels for enlisted personnel to support their increasingly 

complex duties may well have lessened the divide between them and the officers, 

and has probably subtly altered the historic officer-enlisted relationship. Indeed, 

some, in both military and public policy domains, have called for the end of 

the officer-enlisted divide, calling it essentially a kind of social anachronism, an 

institutional arrangement inherited from the 18th-century British Royal Navy 

that reflected the enormous requirement for human physical labor to operate 

sailing ships.66

Technological change, even as it offers innovations in the conduct of warfare, 
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occasions resistance because it also disturbs existing structures of power and 

known ways of doing business, as historians have demonstrated in studies of 

the Navy.67

LINE OFFICERS AND STAFF CORPS

It might be said that the two most important questions for any large-scale formal 

organization, such as the Navy, are first, how to divide up the work so as to exploit 

the efficiencies of horizontal and vertical divisions of labor and specialization, 

and second, how to reintegrate that division of labor and specialization in order 

to produce a synthetic organization that effectively accomplishes its mission.

The Navy organizes its officer personnel into a complex array of line communities and staff corps. This organization has, for the most part, become more 

differentiated and specialized over the Navy’s history. Stimuli for changes have 

largely been concentrated in the effects of technology, mission requirements, and 

environmental developments. Changes have not always been conflict free. How 

the Navy organizes its personnel into line and staff, the formal and informal relationships across officer groups, and their formal responsibilities speaks volumes 

to what the Navy thinks it needs by way of specialized expertise and how much 

relative value it places on any given area of expertise.

In general terms, the line has and continues to dominate, acquiring new 

expertise by organizing new officer communities and staff corps but limiting 

their responsibilities, authorities, and prestige, in order to maintain the line’s 

definition of its own responsibilities and its preeminent place. Once upon a time, 

staff officers were accorded only “relative” or “assimilated” rank. Thus, a passed 

assistant engineer ranked with, but behind, his line officer lieutenant colleagues. 

Since World War II all naval officers have worn the same uniforms, with unique 

distinguishing insignia for staff officers, enjoy the same ranks, and are subject, 

generally, to the same promotion processes.

The Navy began at its 1794 rebirth with line or executive officers, medical 

corps, following shortly by pursers (which soon became paymasters, organized 

into a Paymaster Corps). It added a corps of mathematicians to teach midshipmen 

celestial navigation and other matters until the Naval Academy was established. 

From 1842 to 1899 there was a corps of engineers (when they were merged with 

the line and a new definition of what it meant to be a line officer emerged), and 

naval constructors and civil engineers were added. Beginning with the introduction of submarines and aviation, the line commenced differentiating itself into 
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various communities, which today number five unrestricted (URL): surface, 

aviation, submarine, special warfare, and explosive ordnance disposal (formerly 

special operations). Within each community, officers may specialize, usually 

informally, but in some cases formally. For a time some officers were designated 

as General Unrestricted Line (GURL).68

A wide range of restricted line communities has developed over the past 

century, beginning with Engineering Duty Only, followed by Aeronautical 

Engineering Duty Only, Aerospace Maintenance Duty Officers, Intelligence, 

Cryptologic Warfare, Foreign Area, Public Affairs, Oceanographers, Information 

Professionals, and Human Resources. There are presently eight staff corps: 

Medical, Dental, Nurse, Medical Service, Supply, Civil Engineer, Chaplain, and 

Judge Advocate, the last having been organized only in 1967. Staff officers may 

and do command within their corps. Both restricted line and staff corps acquire 

officers from transfers from the line, from the service academies and reserve 

officer training corps programs, direct commissioning into the corps via officer 

indoctrination school, and from senior enlisted personnel, the latter often designated as “limited duty officers.”

There was and is no single, ineluctable linear path by which the Navy 

has organized its officers. Other navies, such as the British Royal Navy, have 

addressed mostly the same challenges by different modes of officer organization. 

For example, the Royal Navy has aboard ship line officers who command, along 

with engineer officers, and weapons engineer officers. The Navy’s organization of 

its personnel will not remain static but will continue to change episodically. Each 

decision taken regarding the organization and specialization of its personnel has 

created new challenges of authority and relationships.

All the way back in the post–Civil War period, the engineers recognized that 

absent an institutional home, they would have no real power within the Navy, 

and thus was born the Bureau of Steam Engineering. When naval aviation began 

to grow the aviators took a page from the steam engineers’ book and the Bureau 

of Aeronautics was established, with a portfolio of responsibilities, including 

detailing aviators to duty assignments. Naval aviation also might have become a 

separate flying corps, as obtained in the U.S. Navy and in the British Royal Navy, 

but in the mid-1920s the decision was made to retain aviators as an integral part 

of the unrestricted line.

For example, with the end of the Cold War, the vast Cryptologic community was reduced in size and status, its organization altered. In 2009 as cyber 

warfare and information operations became increasingly important, the Navy 

established the Information Warfare community, which in recent years has come 
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including Information Professionals, Cryptologic Warfare Officers, Intelligence 

Officers, Oceanographic Officers, and the like. This reorganization was specifically intended to merge intelligence with command, control, communications, 

and computers. In turn, the Navy now has a type commander institutionalized 

as Navy Information Forces with Fleet Cyber Command/Tenth Fleet as the operating force. Whether the information warfare officers, wholesale or in part, may 

at some point become an unrestricted line officer community is an interesting 

question for historians to consider.

THE GREAT DIVIDE

Of the several U.S. services, the Navy has historically maintained the greatest 

distinction between its officers and enlisted. This comprehends both differences 

in role and place aboard ship and social differences. Commissioned officers have 

tended to use the “distorting lens of class” through which to view the enlisted 

personnel and their officers.69 The differences have been reinforced by pay, 

uniforms, berthing, messing, and other symbolic and substantive communications both at sea and ashore.

Consider messware. Although officers have always dined apart from the 

enlisted, from the 1890s forward, officers of the wardroom have eaten on 

specially contracted Navy china, using heavy hotel-grade silver plate utensils 

in the “Kings” pattern, served on white linen by enlisted stewards using an 

extensive array of silver plate pieces (tea pots, coffee pots, vegetable bowls, soup 

tureens, gravy boats, creamers, fish platters, and many more). Enlisted have eaten 

different food in their own messes on heavy restaurant plates and bowls, using 

stainless steel knives, forks, and spoons, served cafeteria style.70

As a great maritime nation, the Navy was for more than a century able to draw 

principally upon already salty merchant seamen, vice landsmen, for its enlisted 

until World War I. The enlisted were effectively treated as infinitely substitutable 

with their replacements readily available. They were not considered professionals. 

Establishment in 1845 of the Naval Academy reinforced the differences between 

educated professional officers and the enlisted. During the Civil War, for example, 

heroic acts by commissioned officers were rewarded with advancement by lineal 

number of seniority and in grade, while the enlisted might only be awarded the 

newly created Medal of Honor, the supposition being that officers had careers 

while enlisted were largely temporary members of the service.71 Not until after the 

Spanish-American War, as the Navy began its expansion under Teddy Roosevelt 
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were the old “receiving ships” replaced by stations to train the vast untapped 

pool of young (lands) men from the Midwest and other inland areas—thus, the 

establishment of Great Lakes Naval Station in 1905 and its rapid growth during 

World War I to accommodate the vastly increased requirements for personnel, 

both commissioned and enlisted, occasioned by the Act of 29 August 1916, to 

that date the largest ship-building program in history.

Of course, this distinction did not come from Moses and the tablets, but evolved 

out of a vertical division of labor from a time when most heavy work aboard ship 

was accomplished through the physical labor of large crews of enlisted—hoisting 

barrels of salt pork and water aboard ship, raising and lowering ships’ boats, 

weighing anchor, setting sail, moving cannon, and the like. These tasks required 

neither keen intellect nor education for their successful performance. And, in fact, 

the enlisted were a pretty rough and ready group, with one important function of 

Marines aboard ship to provide enforcement of enlisted discipline and personal 

security for the commissioned officers. In contrast, commissioned officers (also 

styled “gentlemen”) performed the demanding intellectual work of navigation, 

sailing, and steam engineering, along with the support functions such as supply 

and weapons development. The problem remained as to what sort of individual 

would occupy the ranks immediately below the commissioned officers and above 

the enlisted.

The Royal Navy had developed a useful system in which a relatively small 

number of enlisted men might develop specialized expertise in important areas 

and aspire to become more or less career so-called “petty officers” or “forward 

officers.” Petty officers included master’s mates, captain’s clerks, stewards, and 

yeomen, who served in their rate at the pleasure of the ship’s captain and could be 

disrated by him.72 On the other hand, warranted forward officers comprised the 

ship’s boatswain, gunner, carpenter, and sailmaker.73 This system was in place 

from almost the beginning of the U.S. Navy. The precise boundaries between 

the forward and petty officers and the commissioned officers have varied significantly over time. The warranted “sailing master” served aboard larger warships 

as the individual principally responsible for the navigation of the ship.74

Even though the warship has been and continues to be the most technologically complex system of every historical era, its technology has become exponentially more complex with time. The introduction of steam engineering, along 

with hydraulic and electrical systems during the 19th century began an accelerating trend in which mechanical energy was substituted for human energy aboard 

ship, and accordingly, the skills required for the warship’s effective operation 

began to change. As the Navy came to terms with redefining what it mean to be 
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a commissioned line officer in the 1890s, resulting in the merger of the engineer 

corps with the line in 1899, part of that adjustment included establishing rates of 

machinists to operate and maintain (still under the command of commissioned 

officers) the steam propulsion plants.75 New technologies such as the automobile 

(or Whitehead) torpedo brought new ratings as did radio and the vastly increased 

use of electricity aboard ship. What was once a vast unwashed mass of enlisted 

personnel primarily used for physical labor aboard ship had begun to require 

complex skills, and in turn a system of different ratings, each with its own formal 

qualifications, and, with World War I, what would become a vast system of 

training organs.

In more recent years, with profound changes in the broader American 

society, these distinctions have begun to blur and have, perhaps, in the present 

day become a kind of social atavism deriving from the origins of the U.S. Navy’s 

culture in that of the 18th-century British Royal Navy. Levels of education in 

the United States are much higher than before World War II. The all-volunteer 

military needs and has been able to insist upon higher educational attainment for 

its recruits than in the past, and this has helped to narrow the educational gap 

between enlisted and commissioned officers. It is not unknown for chiefs and 

warrants to have more formal education than the commissioned officers under 

whom they serve.

At the same time the composition of a warship’s crew has greatly changed 

since World War II to reflect continued mechanization of tasks, shifts to nuclear 

and gas turbine propulsion, and the exponentially increased use of electronics for 

just about everything, but especially sensors and weapons. From about a dozen 

crude radar sets on its ships just before the war, the Navy acquired tens of thousands of radars for both ships and aircraft—ditto for sonars. The concomitant 

development of the Combat Information Center, which integrated command, 

sensors, and weapons aboard ship in turn required manning by highly trained 

specialist enlisted personnel, demand for which has continued to grow. The deck 

and engineering crew, once comprising the preponderance of enlisted personnel, 

on most ships now is in the minority, supplanted by operations and other technical specialists. This, of course, raises issues of retention for warranted and petty 

officers much as it does for commissioned officers—the skills and qualifications 

they develop in the Navy, once useful only in a maritime context, now have broad 

applicability in the civilian sector, which can usually offer more remuneration 

than the Navy.

The heightened requirement for technically sophisticated and experienced 

personnel, the concomitant development of professional careers for enlisted 
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personnel, and the all-volunteer force have conspired to increase the incentive for 

the military services, including the Navy, to retain their enlisted personnel, and 

petty and warranted officers. Boards to select for promotion to petty and warrant 

officers and milestones for career development, combined with caps on years 

of service unless promoted, have come to make the enlisted ranks more closely 

resemble their commissioned superiors.

Finally, we need take note of movement between enlisted and commissioned 

officers. Of the several services, as a matter of both tradition and practice, the 

Navy has been and remains the least willing of the several services to commission 

officers out of the enlisted ranks. It has done so during wartime emergencies 

and the need for temporary officers since the Civil War, with reversion back to 

enlisted status for most following the conclusion of the conflict. Following World 

War I, a number of former enlisted were granted permanent commissions in order 

to provide officers for naval aviation. At that time, such officers were labeled 

“mavericks,” and did not enjoy the same status or promotion rates as their Naval 

Academy brethren. Later they were known as “mustangs,” a term with similar 

negative connotation. In the post–World War II era, certain staff and other officer 

corps have increasingly sourced officers out of their enlisted personnel, with 

comparatively fewer so sourced for the unrestricted line communities.

The historian might usefully ask several questions about trends in the conceptualization of and distinction between enlisted and commissioned officers.

ENDLESS WAR, OPERATIONAL AND PERSONNEL 

TEMPO, RETENTION, AND THE RESERVE

Russell F. Weigley observed more than four decades ago that Americans historically have maintained a concept of a dichotomous state of war/not war.76 To 

some extent this proved reasonably accurate as a description of relations among 

Western-style “states” and Western-style conventional warfare that involves the 

polite protocol of declaring war and its conclusion through formal peace treaty. 

And, for much of its history, the United States was insulated from the intrigues of 

Europe and Asia by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This narrative survived the 

intercontinental ballistic missile and the four-decade “Cold War” with the Soviet 

Union, and conditioned the deliberate drawdown of the U.S. military following 

that war’s “end” in order to exploit the economic benefits of the so-called “peace 

dividend.”

However, it was never very apt as a description of relations between “states” 
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and non-state actors, and remains so. More important, with the rise of China as 

an antagonist to the United States over the past two decades, we see its unwillingness to engage with the United States in the form of conventional conflict at 

which we excel and a corresponding disposition toward other means of conflict 

(such as economic and information warfare) and a willingness to press U.S. limits 

up to the point of direct armed conflict.77

Since 9/11 the United States has found itself involved in conflict with various 

incarnations of jihadism across the planet, at least one of which overtly has called 

for a Fabian war of exhaustion against the United States, with no end in sight to 

any of its ongoing commitments and the real possibility of expansion to other 

geographic areas.78 The blurring of the U.S.-preferred lines between war and 

not-war by its antagonists, combined with the effects of the post–Cold War drawdown, and certain assumptions about the substitution of capital for personnel 

have, across the military services, led to an enduring relatively high operational 

tempo and a concomitant high personnel tempo. The military remains sized and 

organized for relatively short, high-intensity conventional conflicts. This has 

translated for the Navy into longer deployments and less time in home ports. 

Although the unplanned wear and tear on ships and aircraft is often the most 

visible manifestation of high tempo, increased stress on personnel has produced 

reasonable founded and genuine concern, in the absence of a draft, about recruitment and retention, especially of the best qualified officers and enlisted. Increased 

pay only goes part way in mitigating the problem, especially when the economy 

is strong and the private sector prizes the experience and abilities of military 

personnel. Officers and enlisted alike have skills and abilities readily translatable into private sector or civilian government jobs, and some, at least appear to 

believe that the sustained high personnel tempo “violates” the implicit contract 

or expectations they believe should govern their service lives.

These stresses have also affected the Navy Reserve. Peculiar to the Navy, 

its reserve has, for the most part, not been organized into deployable units, but 

has instead deployed individual reservists to augment its regular personnel. 

Some thoughtful individuals have begun considering whether the Navy’s reserve 

component might usefully be re-conceptualized and reorganized to recognize 

what appear to be permanently changed circumstances.79 Put differently, reserve 

forces originally thought of as a force to be called up perhaps once in a generation have been and are being employed as an operational force, affecting several 

services’ profoundly.
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CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

It is easy to miss the sweep of history when we are in the midst of events. It is 

easy to forget or to minimize how much change we may have experienced only 

a few years previously. And sometimes we find events of the distant past more 

compelling than what might be called “near history” and the world must wait for 

a future generation to tell that history.80 Often we seem to learn as much about 

the period when the history was written as we do about the period about which

it was written. When histories are written the mind’s eye tends to recur to some 

components of the human experience and not so much to others. And even (or 

perhaps especially) when it does investigate some less attended to subject matter 

what seemed fairly simple at the outset emerges as a finely detailed complex set of 

dynamics that defy easy simplification and generalization.

Every one of these difficulties beset the author in attempting for this paper 

to make sense of the broad history of naval personnel during the period since the 

end of World War II. And because virtually nothing that goes on in any organization leaves its personnel unaffected, it proved difficult to establish and maintain 

a useful set of boundaries for the subject. Pretty much everything concerning 

personnel was in play. Fortunately the task set was not to write the history but to 

limn out at least some of the areas worthy of closer attention by historians and to 

suggest some useful ways to think about them.

In the century-and-a-half of the Navy’s history up to World War II, it had 

contended more or less annually with enduring, cyclic, and emerging problems of 

its naval personnel. Many, if not all, of them will be familiar to the contemporary 

student of the Navy. It had managed to find reasonable formal solutions to these 

problems in laws, regulations, and policies, and, improbably perhaps, had built 

a distinctly more modern professional personnel system than its sister services. It 

had transformed itself from an organization focused on the protection of equity 

for individuals to one that regarded military effectiveness as the highest order of 

business, but still managed to provide protections for individuals. The plain fact 

is that it worked. In fact, if one knows the Navy’s personnel system on the eve of 

World War II, then arguably one understands the majority of the system in place 

today. That was and remains quite an achievement.

But of course history did not end. And although the nature of war (and of 

the sea) has not changed, and the human element remains its most important 

component, the environment in which the Navy moves continued to change in 

important ways, so that it has had to find ways of adapting. It successfully prosecuted the war against Japan largely on the terms it wanted.
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Personnel

At the end, the Navy found itself in the position to which it had for many 

years aspired: the most powerful such service in the world (and in history, for 

that matter). But Americans were tired of war and not so inclined to immediately 

accept the mantle of leadership in the world community and demobilization was 

swift, much as it had been following the Civil War and World War I. Events 

in Europe and Asia soon necessitated partial remobilization and ultimately 

continued maintenance of a large naval establishment for the Cold War, drawn 

initially at least from the capital investments of World War II, in terms both of 

materiel and personnel.

In charting its course, the Navy quickly found itself with reduced freedom of 

maneuver compared to what it had enjoyed up to the war. Establishment of the 

Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff meant that the Navy was 

subject to real and external administrative and legal control at a level below the 

President and would be compelled to follow courses of action it had not charted 

for itself or negotiated directly with Congress. On the matter of personnel, 

initially it did not have to change much, as its system was essentially adopted 

DOD-wide. However, in subsequent decades its personnel, especially officers, 

would be subject to increasing externally-imposed constraints and restraints 

through OPA, OGLA, the all-volunteer force, DOPMA, and Goldwater-Nichols. 

There would be no going back. That the Navy now lives in a relentlessly “joint” 

world means that its personnel must understand the perspectives and processes 

of the other services and relevant civilian agencies more profoundly than at any 

time in its history, with implications for education, training, and career paths.

The pace and scope of technological change relevant to naval warfare accelerated rapidly after the war, with nuclear propulsion, guided and cruise missiles, 

jet aircraft, and electronic sensors heading the list. These innovations required 

changes in personnel, including how the naval officer was defined, the skills and 

abilities required of enlisted, the appropriate education and training, organization 

of specialized corps, the composition of ship’s complements, and the relationships 

between officers and enlisted. In these changes, the Navy was moving through 

problems analogous to ones previously encountered, and if the latter were not 

especially well-remembered, the personnel problems were mostly solvable. The 

novel problem was the ready marketability of highly sophisticated technological 

skills of officers and enlisted in the private economy. This, combined with the 

social and political pressures summarized below, led to significant challenges to 

retaining personnel, something the Navy had not previously confronted. Current 

technological trends, especially those associated with cyberwarfare, suggest that 

adaptation and exploitation of these technologies will require changes in the 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

organization of the Navy’s personnel, how they are accessed, educated, trained, 

and retained.81 Associated with retention are military pay and benefits, which, 

for reasons of economy, have come under close scrutiny and their transformation 

begun.82 Expenditures on such things as graded retirement pay have historically 

gone some distance to ease the sting of non-selection and involuntary separation. Similarly, since 2001 regular military pay increases have compensated 

partially for higher personnel tempo and deployment frequency and duration. 

Both have been at the considerable cost of long-term commitment of resources by 

the taxpayer. In recent years, the mechanisms for military retirement have been 

revisited with an eye toward shifting more of the burden to naval personnel for 

retirement income. Ditto for the costs of medical care both on active duty and 

when retired.

If many of the challenges of personnel remained consistent with earlier 

periods, the post-war Navy has been subject far more to the social, political, 

and economic perturbations moving through American society. Issues of race 

and gender associated with shifts in the demographics of the American population, the structure of its economy, and attitudes of Americans became perhaps 

the most profound factors requiring the Navy to adapt. World War II set in 

motion new and powerful social and political forces in American society that 

have taken decades and will take decades more to address—compounded by the 

political and social turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s—because they required 

fundamental alterations of the Navy’s organizational culture. The Navy did not 

make those adjustments easily nor are they complete today. American society’s 

continued willingness to expand the participation of historically excluded groups, 

such as gays and lesbians, suggests that the business of adjustment will not end 

anytime soon.83

The indirect effects of the Vietnam War for the Navy’s personnel mostly had 

to do with retention of personnel, officers and enlisted alike, and the need to bend 

in order not to break under the social and political pressures of the time. It did so 

pretty well, though not to universal approbation, especially from the older, World 

War II generation of officers and senior enlisted personnel.

More recently, there was the continuing drawdown of the military across the 

board, based upon the idea of a “peace dividend” following the collapse of the 

Soviet Union, improvements in intelligence, and technological innovation that 

would reduce requirements for ships, aircraft, and personnel (including reduced 

manning aboard highly automated ships). Throughout, operational requirements have remained at least constant and episodically increased—the long 

war against Islamic extremist groups contributing mightily to high operational 
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Personnel

tempo. The apparent resurgence of Russia and the rapid rise and aggressiveness 

of China suggest that the two decades following the end of the Cold War were 

anomalous rather than indicative. How the Navy manages these challenges for 

its personnel will have much to do with its future effectiveness.84 Similarly, the 

issue of managing officer career paths seems destined to attract continuing attention.85 And what should the overall contours for naval personnel look like into 

the future?86

World War II ended more than seven decades ago; there has been a lot of 

history since, and not all of it has been beer and skittles. Here, naval historians, 

though still subject to the siren call of the Navy’s shiny platforms and weapons 

and still attracted by the real dramas of operations, should find full-time employ 

in the study of the Navy’s personnel. In so doing they have a genuine opportunity 

to contribute meaningfully to the Navy’s future effectiveness.
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Notes

1 The 1924 War Instructions started with organization, mission, and tactical 

command, while the 1934 version began with a discussion of the Navy’s function in 

war and limned out its war organization. Neither provided a dedicated discussion of 

the human element in warfare.

2 Comments, on the floor of the House of Representatives, 15 May 1934, during a 

debate over selection up for junior line officers (O-2 to O-3 and O-3 to O-4).

3 War Instructions, 1 November 1944, 1. King neither discounted nor emphasized 

mastery of technical knowledge. However, he pointed out that technologies change 

and assumed that technical mastery was attainable and would be attained, but 

certain personnel characteristics essential to effective command remain immutable, 

more important, and more difficult to achieve. 

4 Hughes sets “Men matter most” as the first of his six principles of naval warfare 

in his classic work. See Wayne P. Hughes, Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat, 2nd 

Edition (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1999).

5 Herman Wouk, “Herman Wouk’s Navy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 121(1995): 

29. Henry is the central protagonist of Wouk’s sweeping historical novels of World 

War II, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. Wouk’s concept of Pug 

Henry and his real-world counterparts is another signal contribution to our understanding of the Navy through his fiction. Arguably, organizations that find themselves in the position of having to rely on heroes and geniuses are those that have 

failed to produce a sufficient number of competent professionals suited to executing 

the organizations’ missions.

6 To be sure, naval biographies and memoirs can and have shed important, but typically indirect, anecdotal, or incidental light on matters of personnel. Heartburn 

over failure of promotion or selection to command has found its way into memoirs, 

and, aside from making real the personal consequences of organizational personnel 

systems, it sometimes points to personnel laws and regulations worthy of investigation. See, for example, Yates Stirling Jr. Sea Duty: Memoirs of a Fighting Admiral

(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1939).

7 A profession generally is characterized by (1) status as a full-time occupation, (2) 

a relative monopoly on a specialized body of expertise, (3) dedicated educational 

and training bodies, (4) a professional ethos to govern its members, (5) attainment 

of a certain social and political standing that facilitates relative independence and 

the delegated authority to self-regulate its members. The U.S. Navy, arguably, was 

among the second wave of professions in the United States, marked in the mid-19th 

century by steam engineering and the birth of the Naval Academy.

8 The British Royal Navy, for example, went more than a century between the fleet 

actions of the Napoleonic wars and World War I’s Battle of Jutland. Aside from its 

actions during the Spanish-American War, the U.S. Navy had never engaged in bona 

fide major fleet actions until 1942 at Coral Sea and Midway. Since World War II’s 

October 1944 Battle of Leyte Gulf, there have been no fleet actions anywhere (I 

exclude Okinawa here). The last two U.S. Navy warships actually sunk by enemy 

action were Pirate (AM-275), mined and hit by enemy shore batteries, and Pledge

(AM-277), mined, both at Wonsan in October 1950.
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9 Ironically, the most significant single surface-only action of the Pacific Theater, 

October 1944’s Battle of Surigao Strait, from the U.S. side was fought by the six 

Old Battleships, as they were called in Campaign Plan Granite, which were there 

to provide naval gunfire support for the Leyte landings, instead of the modern fast 

battleships, which, as part of the Interceptor Force were to steam eastward at the 

time. Similarly, the smaller, usually night, actions during the 1942–43 Solomons 

Campaign were fought primarily by U.S. cruisers and destroyers, as was the March 

1943 Battle of the Komandorski Islands. However conceptualized, in the event the 

fast battleships served primarily as escorts, most importantly as antiaircraft platforms, for the fast carriers, and as oilers for the screening destroyers.

10 On the more general problem of the inclinations of militaries to prepare for the war 

they want to fight versus the one they are actually fighting or will likely have to fight, 

Waghelstein comments, “There is a flaw in the American Military’s love affair with 

doctrine. The services develop doctrine that presents their view of how the next war 

will be fought. This view is often a replication of the last war, particularly if it was a 

success. After the Gulf War the Air Force developed the Air Power doctrine that is, in 

essence, Desert Storm and the way air power influenced the outcome. That doctrine 

is the cornerstone of the Air Force’s view of war in the 21st century. The Army’s 

doctrine, Force XXI and FM 100-5/1993, emphasizes technology, planning and low 

casualty rates-again a validation of the Gulf War. The Navy and Marine Corps are 

a bit of an exception and have developed a blueprint ‘Forward From the Sea’ that 

portrays the role of Sea Power in the littorals, a role limited in Desert Storm. Rather 

than a rehash of Desert Storm, the Naval Services validated their traditional warfare 

roles across the full spectrum of conflict. In sum all the services are, as is prudent, 

developing a set of doctrines that deal with worst case scenarios, those that present 

the greatest threat to national security. Not surprisingly these scenarios envisioned 

are those that will require the maximum use of our power from our weapons systems 

and the commensurate force structure. What should be of equal concern is how will 

we deal with a threat that is not amenable to this vast array of combat power and 

technology. Given the lessons of history, this focus is not enough. We should also be 

focusing on how we will deal with the ‘asymmetrical’ challenges, on those scenarios 

in which our array of power may have less applicability. We have a history in which 

our preoccupation with the ‘BIG WAR’ has led us to ignore the ‘little war’s’ requirements for minimal use of firepower, restraint in campaigning and patience over the 

protracted nature of the contest.” John D. Waghelstein, “Preparing the U. S. Army 

for the Wrong War, Educational and Doctrinal Failure, 1865–91.” Small Wars and 

Insurgencies Vol.10, No. 1 (Spring 1999): 1–33.

11 See, for example, Patricia Danette Light, Marching Upward: The Role of the 

Military in Social Stratification and Mobility in American Society. PhD Dissertation. 

Department of Sociology, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. 1 May 

1998. During the post–Civil War period, the Navy seconded engineers to the newly 

established civilian land-grant colleges in order to jump start engineering education 

in support of the rapidly industrializing U.S. economy.

12 The present author claims no special prescience or moral high ground. He was no 

less inclined to dismiss naval personnel as an uninteresting subject for serious study. 

He embarked on research for a book on how organizations adapt to environmental 

change, of which precisely one chapter was to consider the interwar battle between 

battleship sailors and aviators for the soul of the Navy. In the dim light of the old 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

National Archives reading room, he stumbled across a series of 1934 memoranda 

that revealed starkly the near-violent conflict of Navy flag officers (then RADM 

Ernest J. King, Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, and RADM William D. Leahy, 

Chief of the Bureau of Navigation) over language to be included in precepts to the 

soon to be constituted initial junior line selection boards. It was riveting! Who knew? 

Over a decade later, he had published an entirely different book, this one on naval 

personnel, and never did write the book he initially intended. See Donald Chisholm, 

Waiting for Dead Men’s Shoes: Origins and Development of the U.S. Navy’s Officer 

Personnel System, 1793–1941 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2001).

13 During its 1981–2016 existence, the Strategic Studies Group in Newport, chartered 

annually by the Chief of Naval Operations to investigate and report on matters of 

import to him (and representing a substantial investment in personnel and other 

resources), addressed naval personnel matters directly only in its penultimate year of 

existence, when it considered the challenges of “talent management” for then Chief 

of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert.

14 To World War I, for administrative history, there was only Charles Oscar Paullin’s 

series of Proceedings articles, ultimately published in 1968 as a compendium: 

Paullin’s History of Naval Administration, 1775–1911, by the U.S. Naval Institute. 

Alas, Paullin addresses personnel only incidentally. Early in World War II, the Navy 

commissioned a number of professional historians, under the direction of Robert C. 

Albion, to produce focused histories of various aspects of the Navy’s shore establishment. The effort was to parallel Morison’s highly anticipated and much reprinted 

histories of operations. Except for a number of incidental articles, the sole published 

volume resulting from this research was Julius Fuhrer, Administration of the Navy 

Department in World War II (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1959). 

The author stumbled over these bound typescript histories on the shelves of the Navy 

Department Library. For an overview of the administrative histories see: https://

www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/USN-Admin-Guide/USN-Admin-Guide-1.html. 

Thomas C. Hone’s Continuity and Change: The Administrative History of the Office 

of the Chief of Naval Operations, 1946–1986 (Washington, DC: Naval Historical 

Center, 1989) is one of the rare administrative histories of the post–World War II 

Navy. Fortunately, as this paper was being written, under the aegis of the Navy’s 

Naval History and Heritage Command, Hone’s unique volume was in process of 

expansion and updating to cover the entire 100 years’ existence of the office of the 

Chief of Naval Operations.

15 Commodore Robert Bates headed the post–World War II history effort for the Navy 

at the Naval War College, which produced magisterial volumes on the Battles of 

Coral Sea, Midway, Savo Island, first and second Philippines Sea, and Okinawa, all 

produced with the stated objective of educating future naval officers who had not 

served in combat, in order to jump start effectiveness in future naval conflicts. In 

the foreword to every volume, it was noted that: “The present senior officers of the 

Navy are well aware of the reasons for changes in established doctrines and in the 

development of new ones. But this cannot necessarily be said of the commanders of 

the future, who very probably will be inexperienced in command in war.”

16 Proceedings articles have performed the useful service of identifying and structuring 

personnel problems and often recommending courses of actions for their resolution. 

See, for example, James W. Sigler, “Repeating NASA’s Deadly Mistakes,” U.S. Naval 

Institute Proceedings, Vol 133, No. 9 (September 2007): 48 ff. Sigler provided an 
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analysis of F/A-18 Hornet-squadron manning and the capacity to support war plans 

that materially affected Navy policy.

17 Since its establishment following World War II, the RAND Corporation has accrued 

an extensive corpus of studies of military personnel, some of which specifically 

focus on naval personnel. The Center for Naval Analyses has a similar, though 

not quite as extensive, record on same. The more recently established Center for a 

New American Security has jumped into ongoing debates over military personnel, 

generally. Federal legislative organizations, such as the Congressional Budget Office, 

Congressional Research Service, and General Accounting [Accountability] Office 

have also produced policy papers that include historical background material useful 

to historians.

18 In 2005, the “Naval Reserve” was restyled “Navy Reserve” to better communicate 

within and without the Navy its integral role in the Navy.

19 As used here, “ascriptive” refers to those characteristics of the individual that are 

primarily hereditary and over which the individual has little or no control, to be 

contrasted with an individual’s ability, volitional behavior, and achievement.

20 See Edward J. Marolda, “The Social History of the U.S. Navy, 1945–Present: A 

Historiographical Essay,” also commissioned by the Naval History and Heritage 

Command as part of its historiographical series. https://www.history.navy.mil/

research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/n/needs-opportunitie

s-modern-history-us-navy/social-history-usnavy.html. The essay, commissioned by 

the Naval History and Heritage Command, approaches the Navy’s history since 

1945 from the perspective of its social variables, generally, which perforce address its 

personnel’s demographics and origins, and the organizational dynamics surrounding 

them, while the present essay considers its personnel more broadly, especially its 

administrative aspects, but cannot divorce itself from the social aspects.

21 See Chisholm (2001), ch. 1 on problem solving and institutional development. On the 

concept and implications of “unintended consequences” see Robert K. Merton, “The 

Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action.: American Sociological 

Review 1 (1936): 894–904.

22 On the concept of organizations as open systems, see James D. Thompson, 

Organizations in Action: Social Science Bases of Administrative Theory (New York: 

McGraw Hill, 1967); and W. R. Scott, Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open 

Systems, 5th Edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002).

23 The present author elected to end his own study of Navy officer personnel in 1941 

in part because of the sensitivity of the topic—the relevant actors to that date were 

deceased by the time of the research—but also because the problem of access to 

Navy documents and security classifications.

24 See, for example, General Accounting Office, The Challenge of Electronic Records 

Management. Statement of L. Nye Stevens, Director, Federal Management 

and Workforce Issues, General Government Division. Testimony Before the 

Subcommittee on Government Management, Information, and Technology 

Committee on Government Reform, House of Representatives. 20 October 1999; 

Kenneth Thibodeau, “The Electronic Records Archives Program at the National 

Archives and Records Administration” First Monday, Vol. 12, No. 7 (July 2007). 

http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_7/thibodeau/index.html; and Jessie Kratz, “The 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Challenges of Electronic Records.” https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2016/10/09/

the-challenges-of-electronic-records/.

25 On the matter of naval aviators, see Donald Chisholm, “Big Guns versus Wooden 

Decks: Naval Aviation Officer Personnel, 1911–1941,” 52–78 in Douglas V. Smith 

(Editor), One Hundred Years of U.S. Navy Air Power. Annapolis, MD: Naval 

Institute Press, 2010.

26 For a carefully researched and highly readable comprehensive history of the naval 

reserve, see David Winkler’s Ready Then, Ready Now, Ready Always: More than 

Century of Service by Citizen Sailors (Washington, DC: Navy Reserve Centennial 

Book Committee, 2014).The status of reserve officers and enlisted personnel relative 

to the line was solved formally even if informally the reserves remained in a decidedly 

second-tier status compared to the regulars. Moreover, some reserves, those commissioned through four-year Reserve Officer Training Corps (NROTC) programs, 

were more equal than reserve officers commissioned via the several wartime-only 

programs. Notably, a World War II ship’s deck log indicated commissioning source 

for each officer joining the ship’s company. Reserve officers commissioned through 

NROTC before the war typically advanced to lieutenant commander during the 

war, while the “lesser” wartime commissioned reserve officers only promoted to 

lieutenant.

27 On the matter of correspondence-based education for the Navy’s enlisted personnel, 

see Richard McKenna, “The Wreck of Uncle Josephus,” 155–83 in Robert Shenk 

(Editor), The Left-Handed Monkey Wrench: Stories and Essays by Richard McKenna

(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1984). Best known as the author of The Sand 

Pebbles, McKenna served in the old Asiatic Fleet from 1931–1941, thence through 

World War II aboard a troop transport in all oceans, and stayed through the Korean 

War, retiring in 1953. He credited Daniels’ education program for Sailors for much 

of his own development while in the service.

28 See Chisholm (2001). Still, the place and status of aviators in relation to non-aviators 

had not been resolved and the so-called “hump” slowed promotion and hurt morale 

among junior officers, especially.

29 The present author’s family history is emblematic. Commissioned as an ensign in 

the Naval Reserve in May 1936 through the NROTC program at the University of 

California, Berkeley, the author’s father, William K. Chisholm, went on his first active 

duty in July 1940 as a 28-year-old ensign aboard the four-stack destroyer Brooks

(DD-232). By late 1943, he was a 31-year-old temporary lieutenant commander and 

went on to command a destroyer minesweeper, Boggs (DMS-3), and, subsequently, 

an amphibious unit, LSM Group 37, at Okinawa. As with other such officers, at the 

conclusion of the war he was confirmed as a permanent lieutenant commander.

30 See Martin Landau, “Linkage, Coding, and Intermediacy,” Journal of Comparative 

Administration 2 (1971): 401–29; and Arthur L. Stinchcombe, “Social Structure and 

Organizations,” 142–93 in James G. March (editor), Handbook of Organizations

(Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1965).

31 On the interwar naval culture and its carryover into World War II and beyond, see 

Thomas C. Hone and Trent Hone, Battle Line: The United States Navy 1919–1939

(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006); and Theodore C. Mason’s remarkable 

trio of memoirs: Battleship Sailor. With a foreword by Edward L. Beach (Annapolis, 

MD: Naval Institute Press, 1982); We Will Stand by You: Serving in the Pawnee, 
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1942–1945(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1990); and Rendezvous with 

Destiny: A Sailor’s War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1997); along with 

James J. Fahey, Pacific War Diary, 1942–1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963). 

For a social history of the early Navy officer corps see Christopher McKee’s brilliant 

A Gentlemanly and Honorable Profession: The Creation of the U.S. Naval Officer 

Corps, 1794–1815 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1991). For an analysis 

of the 19th century social aspects of the officer corps, see Peter Karsten, The Naval 

Aristocracy: The Golden Age of Annapolis and the Emergence of Modern American 

Navalism (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1972). When Karsten’s book was 

first published, it quickly became known in some circles as the “Little Red Book,” 

an unfavorable allusion to Mao’s infamous publication known colloquially by the 

same name. That it was excellent work and continues to have legs is evidenced by 

its republication in 2008 by the U.S. Naval Institute. Social histories of the U.S. 

Navy owe a debt to Michael Lewis’ several books on the British Royal Navy, beginning with A Social History of The Royal Navy, 1793–1815 (London: George Allen 

& Unwin Ltd., 1960), which demonstrated the value of social histories for understanding the behavior of navies.

32 See Catherine N. Barry, Moving On Up? U.S. Military Service, Education and Labor 

Market Mobility among Children of Immigrants. PhD Dissertation. University of 

California, Berkeley, 2013. See also Patricia Danette Light, Marching Upward: The 

Role of the Military in Social Stratification and Mobility in American Society. PhD 

Dissertation. Department of Sociology, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State 

University. 1 May 1998.

33 The “American Way of War:” Russell Weigley’s argument that historically the 

United States has preferred to maintain a small military; if deterrence fails, mobilize 

massively, vanquish the foe, and return in relatively short order to victory parades, 

demobilization, and a peacetime military establishment. See his The American Way of 

War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York: Macmillan, 

1973). The size and prominence of the post–World War II U.S. military that several 

generations have become accustomed to seeing runs directly at odds with American 

history up to that point.

34 The scope of the Hoover Commission’s work was breathtaking and unprecedented 

in American history. It left virtually no aspect of the federal government’s organization unexamined. See Commission on the Reorganization of the Executive Branch of 

the Government, Task Force on National Security Organization, National Security 

Organization: A Report with Recommendations. January 1949. For an analysis of the 

Hoover Commission’s work more broadly, see Ferrell Heady, “The Reorganization 

Act of 1949,” Public Administration Review 9 (Summer 1949): 165–74; and “The 

Reports of the Hoover Commission” Review of Politics 11 (July 1949): 355–78.

35 See Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Garden City, NY: 1948), 152, 154, 

158, 223, 261, 266, 384.

36 For the sea services’ perspectives on defense unification, see Jeff Barlow, Revolt of 

the Admirals: The Fight for Naval Aviation, 1945–1950 (Washington, DC: Naval 

Historical Center, 1994) and Gordon W. Kaiser, The U.S. Marines and Defense 

Unification, 1944–47 (Baltimore, MD: Nautical and Aviation Publishing Company 

of America, 1996). Although President Roosevelt established a Joint Chiefs of Staff 

early in World War II, it had no legal status, and, as Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

pointed out, such left its function and importance entirely malleable by the President 

as he saw fit. See his memoir, I Was There (New York: McGraw Hill, 1950).

37 See Paul Stillwell, The Golden Thirteen: Recollections of the First Black Naval 

Officers (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003). Two African-American 

nurses were commissioned in 1944.

38 Two days after Pearl Harbor, the National Association for the Advancement of 

Colored People (NAACP) telegrammed then Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, 

requesting that all enlisted ratings be opened to African Americans. Knox denied the 

request. One week later the NAACP made the same request of President Roosevelt, 

who turned the matter over to his newly created Fair Employment Practices 

Committee, whose positive recommendation was negatively received by the Navy, 

whereupon the President sent a note to Secretary Knox suggesting that the Navy 

could probably find something for black Americans to do outside the mess ratings.

The General Board recommended on 27 March 1942 against opening up all 

naval enlisted ratings to African Americans on the curious rationale that there were 

plenty of capable African Americans who would earn promotion, thereby placing 

them in supervisory roles over other Sailors, some of whom would be southern 

whites, and disciplinary issues undesirable during a war would arise. On 7 April 

1942, the Navy announced that African Americans could enlist for “general service.” 

Two ship-manning experiments were conducted using all-black crews with white 

officers, a destroyer escort, Mason (DE-529), and a 173-foot submarine chaser, 

PC-1264. On these two ships, see Mary Pat Kelly, Proudly We Served: The Men 

of the USS Mason (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995); and Eric Purdon, 

Black Company: The Story of Subchaser 1264 (New York: Robert C. Luce, 1972). 

A white, Purdon was PC-1264’s commanding officer from commissioning in April 

1944 to September 1945. Future flag officer [then] ENS Samuel Gravely reported 

aboard as the executive officer in May 1945, and saw her through decommissioning 

in February 1946.

39 See Robert L. Allen, The Port Chicago Mutiny (San Francisco: Heyday, 2006).

40 On at least two previous occasions Congress had attempted to reduce and limit the 

overage of naval officers. It froze the numbers and distribution of officers at their 

existing levels in 1842 in consequence of concerns over expense, and again in 1882 

froze the numbers and distribution of officers, and also reduced annual admissions 

to the Naval Academy. See Chisholm (2001), chs. 8 and 16.

41 Leonard F. Guttridge, Mutiny: A History of Naval Insurrection (Annapolis, MD: 

Naval Institute Press, 1992, 260.

42 See the Associated Press news story of 20 November 1972 at https://news.google.com/

newspapers?nid=2519&dat=19721120&id=xm1eAAAAIBAJ&sjid=fGENAAAAIB

AJ&pg=6059,2750985&hl=en.

43 Gregory A. Freeman, Troubled Water: Race, Mutiny, and Bravery on the USS Kitty 

Hawk (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

44 For an overview of race relations in the Navy during the Vietnam War, see Jon 

Darrell Sherwood, Black Sailor, White Navy: Racial Unrest in the Fleet During the 

Vietnam War Era (New York: New York University Press, 2007). To place the 1970s 

events aboard ship in larger context, see Christopher M. Bell and Bruce A. Elleman 

(Editors), Naval Mutinies of the Twentieth Century: An International Perspective 
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Personnel

(Cass Series: Naval Policy and History) (London: Routledge, 2003). Guttridge 

(1992), 258, asserts that by the end of 1972 “the United States Navy would log 

seventy-four instances of sabotage, more than half on aircraft carriers, none of them 

attributable to ‘enemy’ action.” He provides no source for this claim.

45 As quoted by Guttridge (1992), 259.

46 For the Navy’s upbeat assessment of its own efforts, see “A Look at the Human 

Side: A Review of the Navy’s Long-Range Human Goals Plan” All Hands No. 682, 

November 1973, 3–17.

47 See Bernard Rostker, I Want You! The Evolution of the All-Volunteer Force 

(Washington, DC: RAND Corporation, 2006) and Morris Janowitz, “The 

All-Volunteer Military as a ‘Sociopolitical’ Problem,” Social Problems 22 (February 

1975): 432–49.

48 See, for example, Karl W. Eikenberry, “Reassessing the All-Volunteer Force,” 

Washington Quarterly 36 (Winter 2013): 7–24; and Congressional Budget Office, 

The All-Volunteer Military: Issues and Performance (Washington, DC: 2007).

49 Admiral Zumwalt’s second Z-Gram as CNO named the problem of retaining both 

officers and enlisted as the Navy’s single most important personnel challenge. He 

employed so-called Retention Study Groups to brainstorm ideas for improving retention rates, resulting in changes in post-deployment leave policies along with attire 

and grooming policies. See http://www.navy.mil/ah_online/archpdf/ah197208.pdf.

50 Ship deployments during the Cold War came to be planned out years in advance, 

which allowed not only regularly scheduled time for yard availabilities, but a useful 

predictability for naval personnel and their families. That regularity went away 

during Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure as Secretary of Defense, amid the greater uncertainty attendant to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and the declining number of ships 

in commission.

51 The ground services appear to have been more immediately and profoundly affected 

than the Navy and the Air Force by the operational and personnel tempos occasioned by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, losing great numbers of captains and 

majors in the combat arms.

52 See Donald J. Cymrot, Paul W. Mayberry, and Michael Mara, Managing Military 

Careers (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 1998) and Pete Schirmer, Harry 

J. Thie, Margaret C. Harrell, and Michael S. Tseng. Challenging Time in DOPMA 

Flexible and Contemporary Military Officer Management (Washington, DC: RAND 

Corporation, 2006); and, more recently, Pete Schirmer and Dwight “Buzz” Philips. 

“A ‘Measured Approach’ To Managing Military Officers.” 15 July 2015. http://

breakingdefense.com/2015/07/a-measured-approach-to-managing-military-officers/.

53 Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. Public 

Law 99-433—1 Oct.1986. http://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/dod_

reforms/Goldwater-NicholsDoDReordAct1986.pdf.

54 This was an ingenious course of action—command screen boards are administrative 

vice statutory entities, allowing the Navy to change the requirements without having 

to seek changes in the law.

55 Navy Graduate Education Review Board, “Transforming Graduate and Professional 

Military Education. Briefing. 2002.
150

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

56 The emerging vision for the development of joint officers was given fluent expression in Chairman, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Vision for Joint Officer Development. 

(November 2005). More recently, Gen. Dempsey outlined his own vision for military 

leadership. See Chairman, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Desired Leader Attributes for 

Joint Force 2020,” Memorandum to Chiefs of the Military Services, Commanders 

of the Combatant Commands, Chief, National Guard Bureau, and Directors of the 

Joint Staff Directorates, CM-0166-13, 28 June 2013. http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/

education/officer_JPME/cjcsvision_jod.pdf. Ironically, one of the coauthors of this 

document was a recently retired Navy surface warfare officer. On a Navy approach 

to jointness for officers, see James Stavridis and Mark Hagerott. “The Heart 

of an Officer: Joint, Interagency, and International Operations and Navy Career 

Development,” Naval War College Review 62 (Spring 2009): 26–41.

57 http://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/z/z-grams-list-policy-directives-issued-admiral-zumwalt/z-gram-116.html.

58 In 2015, the Navy Personnel Command published a detailed and useful historical 

timeline for women and/in the Navy. As a matter of interest, it contains no reference 

to what arguably was the most important event in the post–World War II period 

related to women—Tailhook and its aftermath. See http://www.public.navy.mil/

bupers-npc/organization/bupers/WomensPolicy/Pages/HistoryFirsts.aspx.

59 See Jean Zimmerman, Tailspin: Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook (New York: 

Doubleday, 1995); and William H. McMichael, The Mother of All Hooks: The Story 

of the U.S. Navy’s Tailhook Scandal (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction 

Publishers, 1997) for two substantially different analyses of the event and subsequent related actions and events.

60 Thomas C. Hone, Norman Friedman, and Mark D. Mandeles, “The Development of 

the Angled-Deck Carrier: Innovation and Adaptation,” Naval War College Review

64 (Spring 2011): 63–78.

61 Chisholm (2001), chs. 18 and 19.

62 Think of the innovative Bainbridge (DLGN/CGN-25) and Long Beach (CGN-9), 

originally envisioned as the vanguard of an entirely nuclear-powered surface fleet.

63 Legislation requiring that aviation units, whether shore stations, aircraft squadrons, 

air groups, or wings, or ships be commanded by qualified naval aviators or naval 

flight observers was enacted in the late 1920s. Chisholm (2001), ch. 25.

64 See John Monsarrat, Angel on the Yardarm: The Beginnings of Fleet Radar Defense 

and the Kamikaze Threat (Historical Monography Series Naval War College No. 6) 

(Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1985).

65 See Lawrence Kapp, Recruiting and Retention: An Overview of FY 2011 and 

FY2012 Results for Active and Reserve Component Enlisted Personnel (Washington, 

DC: Congressional Research Service, 2013).

66 The original frigate Constitution, 370 ft. overall length and 2,200 tons, for example, 

required about 450 officers and enlisted, the vast majority of the latter being required 

to tend to its sails and fight its guns.

67 See, for example, Elting E. Morison, Men, Machines, and Modern Times

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966); Thomas C. Hone, Norman Friedman, and 

Mark D. Mandeles, American & British Aircraft Carrier Development, 1919–1941

(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1999); and Mark R. Hagerott, Commanding 
151

Personnel

Men and Machines: Admiralship, Technology, and Ideology in the 20th Century U.S. 

Navy. PhD Dissertation. Department of History, University of Maryland, 5 August 

2002. Morison (no relation to Samuel Eliot Morison) was the son-in-law of ADM 

William S. Sims and his biographer.

68 See Chisholm (2001), chs. 18 and 25 on the old Corps of Engineers and the naval 

aviation community, respectively. On the personnel and organization of naval aviation, also see Chisholm (2010).

69 See Michael J. Crawford, Officers of Peculiar Skill: Petty and Forward Officers 

of the U.S. Navy, 1797–1860 (Washington, DC: Naval History and Heritage 

Command, 2017), 2.

70 Since the 1970s the degree of formality in the wardroom mess has diminished somewhat, with some wardrooms opting to eat the same food as their enlisted personnel, 

while the use of silver plate has also decreased.

71 See Chisholm (2001), 280. The Medal of Honor was not authorized for commissioned naval officers until 1915.

72 Crawford notes that “In the age of sail, petty officers, in contrast to those holding 

warrants or commissions, were appointed by a ship’s commanding officer and held 

their posts at the commander’s pleasure. ‘An Act for the Government of the Navy 

of the United States,’ enacted by Congress and signed by President John Adams on 

2 March 1799, provided that ‘all officers not having commissions or warrants (or 

appointed commission or warrant officers for the time being), are termed petty, or 

inferior officers.’ The U.S. Navy has employed the term petty officer ever since.” See 

Crawford (2017), 1.

73 “They were designated forward officers because they berthed adjacent to each other 

in small cabins forward of the mainmast and shared a mess. They held warrants 

signed by the President and served during good behavior. Petty officers, in contrast, 

were appointed by a ship’s commanding officer and held their posts at the commander’s pleasure.” Crawford (2017), 15–16.

74 In time, sailing masters were divided into those not in the line of promotion and 

those in the line of promotion, and the title changed to simply “master.” They ranked 

immediately behind “lieutenant” and in front of “midshipman.” Ultimately, those not 

in the line of promotion were allowed to die out, while those in the line of promotion 

became lieutenants, junior grade.” See Chisholm (2001), chs. 6, 8, 10, and 16.

75 Addressing the same problem, the British Royal Navy adopted a different system of 

vertical division of labor. See Chisholm (2001), chs. 18–20.

76 Weigley (1973).

77 The clearest statement of this distinctly non-Western approach to state-on-state 

conflict is found in Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. Unrestricted Warfare (Beijing: 

PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, February 1999).

78 See, for example, Osama bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of war against the 

Americans. http://www.mideastweb.org/osamabinladen1.htm. On the matter 

of expanded jihadist war see warnings by ADM Harry Harris, Commander, U.S. 

Pacific Command. https://www.wsj.com/articles/jihadists-are-seeking-beachheadsin-asia-u-s-admiral-warns-1498636905?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=EBB%206.29.17&utm_term=Editorial%20-%20Early%20

Bird%20Brief.
152

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

79 See, for example, Jacob Alex Klerman. Rethinking the Reserves. Santa Monica, CA: 

RAND Corporation, 2008. This monograph is based upon a study produced for 

the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review. More recently, JPME students have entered 

the discussion. See Brian M. Howlett, “Rethinking the Operational Reserve.” A 

Research Report Submitted to the Faculty In Partial Fulfillment of the Graduation 

Requirements (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air War College, 7 February 2012); and Albert 

Orgain, “Preventing a Crisis in Sustainability: Recommendations for the Future 

Navy Reserve.” Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the program requirements 

for Advanced Studies in Naval Strategy. (RI: Naval War College, 13 June 2014).

80 I am indebted for the term “near history” to novelist Alan Furst, who has used it to 

locate in time his series of espionage novels, all of which are set in the late 1930s 

through the middle of World War II. See the end matter in Night Soldiers (New York: 

Harper Collins, 1998) [originally published in 1988].

81 These challenges have not gone unnoticed. See, for example, David Barno and Nora 

Bensahel, “Can the U.S. Military Halt Its Brain Drain?” The Atlantic, 5 November 2015. 

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/us-military-tries-halt-braindrain/413965/; and Congressional Budget Office, Recruiting, Retention, and Future 

Levels of Military Personnel (Washington, DC: 2006).

82 See Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission, Report

(April 2015). For earlier analyses of the problem, see for example, Michael Hansen 

and Martha Koopman, Military Compensation Reform in the Department of 

Defense (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 2005); and Cindy Williams 

(Editor), Filling the Ranks: Transforming the U.S. Military System (Cambridge, MA: 

MIT Press, 2004).

83 For recent analysis of how minorities and women are doing in the Navy, see 

Amos Golan, William Greene, and Jeffrey M. Perloff, “U.S. Navy Promotion and 

Retention by Race and Sex,” January 2010. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.

cfm?abstract_id=1547800. And see Laura L. Miller, Jennifer Kavanagh, Maria C. 

Lytell, Keith Jennings, and Craig Martin, The Extent of Restrictions on the Service 

of Active-Component Military Women. (Washington, DC: RAND Corporation, 

2012). See also Undersecretary of Defense, Personnel and Readiness, Population 

Representation in the Military Services, Fiscal Year 2015 Summary Report

(Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2015), one of an annual series of such 

reports from 1975. Some in the Navy today have noted that the diversity of perspective afforded by the integration of various ethnic groups into the Navy is likely 

to enhance its effectiveness. On the matter of the practical consequences for the 

Navy of cultural differences, see, for example, Lorand B. Szalay, and Jean A. Bryson, 

Filipinos in the Navy: Service, Interpersonal Relations and Cultural Adaptation 

(Washington, DC: American Institutes for Research, 1977). Michael Shawn Davis 

provides a historical analysis of black Americans in the Navy through 1955. It might 

serve as a useful guide for what could be written about the period since World War 

II. See his “Many of Them Are Among My Best Men: The United States Navy Looks 

at its African American Crewmen, 1755–1955,” PhD Dissertation (Manhattan, 

KS: Department of History, Kansas State University, 2011). On sexual assault and 

harassment, see Andrew R. Morral, Kristie L. Gore, and Terry L. Schell (Editors), 

Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment in the U.S. Military (Washington, DC: RAND 

Corporation, 2016).
153

Personnel

84 See Bernard Rostker, Right-Sizing the Force: Lessons for the Current Drawdown 

of American Military Personnel (Washington, DC: Center for a New American 

Security, 2013).

85 See Ann D. Parcell and Amanda Kraus, Recommendations from the CNGR 

Implementation Plan: Exploring the Requirements of DOPMA and ROPMA

(Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 2010); and Ann D. Parcell and Jonathan 

D. Mintz, with David L. Reese, Challenges for Navy Officer Personnel Management.

(Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 2014).

86 Naval Studies Board, Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences, National 

Research Council, Manpower and Personnel Needs for a Transformed Naval Force

(Washington, DC: National Research Council, 2008).
154

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

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Valle, James E. Rocks and Shoals: Naval Discipline in the Age of Fighting Sail. Annapolis, 

MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996.
159

Personnel

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mixedcru.html.

Waghelstein, John D. “Preparing the U. S. Army for the Wrong War, Educational and 

Doctrinal Failure, 1865–91.” Small Wars and Insurgencies 10, No. 1 (Spring 1999): 

1–33.

Weigley, Russell F. The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy 

and Policy. New York: Macmillan, 1973.

Williams, Cindy (Editor). Filling the Ranks: Transforming the U.S. Military System.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.

Winerip, Michael. “The R.O.T.C. Dilemma.” New York Times, 26 October 2009. http://

www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/education/edlife/01rotc-t.html.

Winkler, David. Ready Then, Ready Now, Ready Always: More than Century of Service 

by Citizen Sailors. Washington, DC: Navy Reserve Centennial Book Committee, 

2014.

Women in Military Service to America Memorial Foundation. “Highlights in the History 

of Military Women.” http://www.womensmemorial.org/Education/timeline.html.

Wouk, Herman. “Herman Wouk’s Navy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 121(1995): 

29.

———. War and Remembrance. New York: Little, Brown, 1978.

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Yardley, Roland J., Dulani Woods, Cesse Cameron Ip, and Jerry M. Sollinger. General 

Military Training Standardization and Reduction Options. Washington, DC: RAND 

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Ships assigned to the John C. Stennis (CVN-74) Strike Group and ships assigned to the Republic 

of Korea (ROK) Navy 1st Fleet Maritime Battle Group One steam together during Maritime 

Counter Special Operations Force exercise, which was part of Foal Eagle 2016. Foal Eagle is an 

annual bilateral training exercise designed to enhance the readiness of U.S. and ROK forces and 

their ability to work together during a crisis. Providing a ready force supporting security and 

stability in the Indo-Asia-Pacific, John C. Stennis was operating as part of the Great Green Fleet 

on a regularly scheduled U.S. Seventh Fleet deployment.

160324-N-XX566-253 U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Andre T. Richard
Chapter 4

The Historiography of Programming and 

Acquisition Management since 1950, with a 

Focus on the Navy

by Thomas C. Hone

INTRODUCTION

Military systems acquisition does not command public attention the way that combat operations always do. For example, there are several very 

good novels about the modern Navy, but I know of only one about modern 

Navy acquisition: The Minotaur (1990), by best-selling author and Navy veteran 

Stephen Coonts.1 Many readers consider it the weakest of his novels featuring 

Navy Captain Jake Grafton, first introduced to the public in The Flight of the 

Intruder in 1986. Why do many of those who like the Jake Grafton stories not 

like The Minotaur? The answer is that it lacks the riveting action scenes of the 

first novel of the series. Unfortunately for authors of novels, the acquisition of 

a major military system is a complex, time consuming, and often tedious process. To be sure, there is often drama to the process, but not necessarily the 

heart-pounding type so often found in combat operations.

In some cases, the congressional debates over a specific system such as the 

Joint Strike Fighter grab the headlines, but acquisition, like budgeting, usually 

gets media attention only when there is immediate drama—some deviation from 

routine. In short, topics such as programming, budgeting, shipbuilding, and 

the cost of preserving the Navy’s industrial base are usually left to journalists, 

analysts in organizations such as the Center for Naval Analyses or the RAND 

Corporation, and those who work in watchdog agencies like the Government 

Accountability Office (GAO). Note that I have not mentioned academic historians.
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

That is not to say that useful and insightful scholarly histories of military 

acquisition haven’t been written since World War II. Some have, and this paper 

will cite them. I will also explain why the lines separating history from journalism and from analysis have been difficult to draw—why the post–World War 

II history of military acquisition has been a mix of the products of historians, 

journalists, and analysts. Finally, I will explain why, with the publication in the 

last decade of serious, detailed histories of the military acquisition process, this 

situation has changed, and changed very much for the better.

WHY THE HISTORY OF MILITARY ACQUISITION 

IS IMPORTANT

Since World War II, military acquisition—which includes military research 

and development—has been a major political issue. For example, is there a 

military-industrial complex? If so, just how does it operate? Why, if it exists, is it 

influential? And if indeed it is influential, then does its influence create problems 

new to the constitutional order of the United States? These questions have stimulated both public discussions and expert analysis since former President Dwight 

D. Eisenhower warned the nation about the “military-industrial complex” in his 

farewell address on January 17, 1961. There also have been fierce debates since 

the beginning of the Cold War about whether the armed services can obtain the 

equipment—the “systems”—they believe that they need at a cost that the nation 

can afford. These debates have drawn on case studies of acquisition management 

(and mismanagement). Many of those studies have not been written by historians 

but by journalists, or scholars who are not historians, or consultants, or faculty 

at Defense Department schools.

The history of military acquisition since World War II has been difficult 

for historians to write for two reasons. The first is that military acquisition 

has mattered politically, economically, and socially; therefore, studying it and 

writing about it has drawn scholars into the world of policy analysis and into 

public debates about national military policy—places where scholarship is often 

dominated by the urge to influence opinion. The second reason is that its study 

has posed methodological challenges to historians. How should its history be 

studied? Is it a type of business and therefore the province of the professional 

students of business and management? Can historians gain access to the information that they need, or must the historical profession wait for key records to be 

declassified? Can you write history without all the relevant records?
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HOW SHOULD THE HISTORY OF MILITARY 

ACQUISITION BE STUDIED?

In an essay published in 1978, the highly regarded historian John Lukacs argues 

for history that is “microcosmic and sociographic, not sociological and generalizing.” By that he means history from the viewpoint of the participants.2

 But just 

how close must the historian be to the people that he or she is studying? To write a 

useful history of acquisition, must the researcher be or have been an active participant in the process? Is the field so arcane that only insiders can really understand 

it? Is the history of military acquisition therefore like the history of science, where 

the historian needs special preparation in order to work successfully?

Adding to the historian’s task is the fact that elements of specific acquisitions—stealth aircraft designs, for example—often have been highly classified, 

creating a significant barrier to researchers who want access to the relevant 

records. At the same time, acquisition professionals and senior executives in 

the Defense Department often want reliable lessons learned that they can use 

to improve their own work. To be useful, those lessons may have to be written 

and then briefed by people who can be trusted to prepare and handle classified information. So should at least some acquisition histories be classified? If 

not, then how should sensitive information be used, and how should it be cited? 

Moreover, in the absence of official, unclassified documents, what is the value 

of oral histories or of interviews and memoirs in studying both classified and 

unclassified military acquisition projects? And what is the proper way to study 

the relationship—obviously important—between acquisition and programming 

and budgeting? How do you study in a rigorous way activities that are both the 

province of specialists and highly classified without becoming part of the organizations that conduct these activities?

I believe that historians and other researchers are getting some serious studies 

that will help them answer the many questions that have been raised about military acquisition in the United States since the end of World War II. I also believe 

that some of the recent studies do what John Lukacs argued had to be done if 

history is to be trusted. In supporting my claim, however, I first have to review 

the existing literature and then show why recent work is a major step forward. 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

TO UNDERSTAND ACQUISITION IN THE COLD WAR, 

GO BACK TO WORLD WAR II

Perhaps the best book ever written on military acquisition in the United States 

came out of the Army’s World War II history program: Buying Aircraft: Materiel 

Procurement for the Army Air Forces, written by Irving B. Holley Jr. and 

published by the Department of the Army’s Chief of Military History in 1964.3

Buying Aircraft shows that most acquisition practices in place during the initial 

decades of the Cold War had their roots in World War II, when the emphasis was 

primarily on the mass production of essential items such as combat and transport aircraft, armored vehicles, and amphibious assault ships like the landing 

ship tank (LST). Research and development also mattered in World War II. As 

much as possible, the mass produced conventional weapons had to incorporate 

the latest technology, as in airborne radars. But to produce thousands of tanks, 

amphibious craft, and planes, the World War II acquisition workforce had to 

adopt planning, manufacturing control, and inspection practices borrowed from 

private industry, especially the automobile industry.

The strength of Buying Aircraft is the way that it links War Department 

procurement policy with actual practice. Holley recognizes the truth of the cliché 

“The devil is in the details,” and masters the details, preserving them for later 

generations. Buying Aircraft combines an insider’s understanding of details of 

procurement with an historian’s broader perspective. It is the sort of history that 

John Lukacs argues is essential. An essential precursor to Buying Aircraft was 

Holley’s wonderful Ideas and Weapons, published in 1953.4 The theme of Ideas 

and Weapons is clear from the book’s subtitle: “A Study in the Relationship of 

Technological Advance, Military Doctrine, and the Development of Weapons.” 

Ideas and Weapons is a work of historical investigation; it tells you what 

happened. It is also, however, a work of analysis; it tells you why things happened 

the way they did. It is also a study that encourages the reader to consider whether 

the patterns of the past might actually be repeated in a somewhat altered form in 

the future.5 Holley shows the way in the field of acquisition history. In a sense, he 

created it. Could others follow his example?

After World War II, military—and especially naval—historians tended to 

bypass acquisition and focus on operations. Samuel Eliot Morison’s multivolume 

history of the Navy in World War II, for example, is a history of operations. 

The Navy Department did compile administrative histories in World War II, but 

what we today call acquisition was mainly covered in the histories of the Navy’s 

bureaus.6 There was no overall study of Navy procurement or acquisition, and no 
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special, focused study to rival Holley’s Buying Aircraft. There was also no Navy 

analog to the War Department’s Global Logistics and Strategy, 1940–1943 and 

the follow-on volume covering the years 1943–1945, both of which intelligently 

and thoroughly take on the subjects of strategic and operational logistics.7

MORE BACKGROUND: COLD WAR STUDIES OF 

ACQUISITION

From the perspective of historians interested in military systems acquisition, the 

Cold War was both the best of times and the worst of times. It was the best 

because so many new systems were developed and fielded. Each new system could 

be thought of as a case study in acquisition management, and some management 

(such as that leading to nuclear-powered attack submarines) was very impressive.8

However, it was also the worst because the military acquisition process developed 

for World War II was in some ways an actual obstacle to creating and sustaining 

an approach specially designed for the Cold War. How could a process suited to 

directing mass production be replaced by one dedicated to scientific research and 

to the rapid development of technologically sophisticated systems? How could 

the military services successfully drive innovation and then integrate innovative 

systems (such as powerful turbojet engines) into existing forces?

Fortunately, enough of a foundation for doing this development and integration had been created during World War II to carry the nation through the lean 

defense budget years after the war. There was no great failure of wartime acquisition to capture the attention of Congress, citizens, and historians, and so wartime 

acquisition was assumed to have been a success. In addition, the postwar years 

were filled with other issues concerning the management of national defense, 

including the debate over unifying the armed services, the proper control of 

atomic weapons, and the relationship between Navy and Air Force aviation.9 As 

Holley’s Buying Aircraft shows, producing a detailed history of wartime acquisition took time—years of careful research and writing. What university history 

department could wait that long for a younger faculty member to produce such 

a study? Moreover, the major issue confronting those seriously concerned about 

national defense after World War II was the role of nuclear weapons in national 

strategy. Other topics accordingly received much less attention.

Despite these obstacles, there were eventually a number of Cold War studies 

of military systems (aircraft, submarines, radars, etc.) and even some very useful 

accounts of the processes through which these systems were developed and fielded. 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

However, the routine classification of documents during the Cold War years often 

restricted what information was available regarding the costs of systems, their 

characteristics, how they drew on advanced technology, and—especially—how 

they were manufactured and tested. Despite routine secrecy, there were numerous 

journalists’ accounts of specific weapons and their genesis and development; 

some of the stories were thorough enough to be called histories. One example is 

Orr Kelly’s Hornet: The Inside Story of the F/A-18, published in 1990. Another 

example, and one that is both history and analysis, is Glenn Bugos’s Engineering 

the F-4 Phantom II: Parts into Systems, published in 1996.10

There were also historians of weapons and technology who combed the 

available records to describe what was developed, when it was procured, and then 

deployed. For example, there is a large audience of readers from many nations 

that is fascinated by military aircraft, and it has been well served by—among 

others—Barrett Tillman, author of many books on aircraft and aircraft carrier 

operations.11 For those fascinated by warships, there are the illustrated design 

histories of U.S. battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, and destroyers by Norman 

Friedman.12 Historians intent on understanding acquisition should not bypass 

these publications. They contain reliable information and insights related to 

acquisition (including logistics), as well as information about how aircraft and 

ships performed in combat.

Much military acquisition is about things, from infantry weapons to huge 

warships. If you want to understand where these come from and why they do 

what they do, you need to start with the things themselves. That means reading 

the books prepared for the audiences that are fascinated by the machinery of 

war and willing to pay for reliable guides to that machinery. If you do that, 

you can retrace the steps of researchers such as Norman Friedman, who began 

studying U.S. Navy ship designs and where they came from and progressed to 

studying the processes of warship design used in other navies, the technology of 

weapons design and support, the history of command and control systems used 

by modern navies, the military uses of space, and the development of unmanned 

air vehicles.13 In effect, Friedman built up knowledge and research expertise from 

the bottom by studying the particulars of weapons, sensors, and command and 

control systems. Over time, his studies have become more strategic and insightful, 

and his research interests wider—to even include an award winning study of the 

Cold War.14

There were also useful official histories produced during the Cold War years. 

Examples include a three volume history of the Atomic Energy Commission, 

histories of the Naval Weapons Center and the Navy’s White Oak, Maryland, 
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laboratory, and U.S. Air Force history office studies of the development of Air 

Force aircraft and ballistic missiles.15 The Air Force History and Museums 

Program also released a history of acquisition management in 1997, and the 

service published an official history of the Air Force Materiel Command in 2006.16

In 2003, the U.S. Army Materiel Command’s (AMC) history office published A 

Brief History of AMC, 1962–2000, and in 2006, the Department of the Army 

issued U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command: Chronological Highlights. In 

1983, the Center for Naval Analyses published the proceedings of an interesting 

conference on the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS), and 

in 2004, the Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation (PA&E) presented a 

“historical perspective” on PPBS at the 37th Annual Department of Defense Cost 

Analysis Symposium.17

The RAND Corporation also produced a number of studies of military 

research and development (R&D) and acquisition. Economist Burton H. Klein 

and his colleagues at RAND wrote a series of interesting papers on military R&D 

and acquisition over a 13-year period from 1958 to 1971.18 The analysts understood that the mass production models of World War II had been superseded by a 

new model of constant, routine R&D and production. That new model, however, 

had to be made up and refined as time passed. It could not be borrowed—as 

the mass production model had been borrowed—from existing organizations 

like the automobile industry. Accordingly, the analysts drew on concepts from 

economics, operations research, and academic studies of decision-making. These 

nonhistorical concepts were useful because major acquisition decisions were 

essentially political and bureaucratic ones.19

Under the auspices of the Business Executives for National Security, 

retired Army Colonel M. Thomas Davis, who had headed the Army’s Program 

Development Division, wrote two thoughtful studies of the planning, programming, and budgeting process in 2000.20 In 2003, the Institute for Defense Analyses 

issued a study entitled “Exploring a New Defense Resource Management System” 

(IDA Paper P-3756), and the Army War College published “PPBS to PPBE: A 

Process or Principles,” by Colonel Steven R. Grimes in 2008.21 Though quite 

useful, these studies tend to focus on how management processes work and not 

on the histories of their development.

David D. Acker, who served as an engineer and manager in the aerospace 

industry and was a specialist in aircraft and missile guidance systems, also helped 

draft the first major system acquisition directive while working in the Office of 

the Secretary of Defense. He eventually produced what might be considered the 

first comprehensive participant’s history of post-Cold War military acquisition, 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Acquiring Defense Systems: A Quest for the Best, in 1993, while teaching at 

the Defense Systems Management College.22 In 1996, Wilbur D. Jones, also a 

member of the faculty of the college, supplemented Acker’s history with From 

Packard to Perry: A Quarter Century of Service to the Defense Acquisition 

Community, which describes the creation and operation of what is now the 

Defense Acquisition University.23 Another participant-historian was Dov S. 

Zakheim, who served as Defense Department Comptroller from 2001 to 2004. 

Zakheim wrote an engaging and revealing memoir of his involvement, as the 

Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Planning and Resources (1985–1987), in 

the project to produce Israel’s ill-fated fighter, the Lavi.24

Other relevant Cold War studies include the assessments of defense resource 

management by economist Charles J. Hitch,25 who is acknowledged to be the 

father of the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System when he served 

as Defense Department Comptroller under then–Defense Secretary Robert 

McNamara. There is also the classic study of the Navy’s Polaris program by 

MIT political scientist Harvey M. Sapolsky,26 and quite a bit of research by 

management analysts, especially J. Ronald Fox of the Harvard Business School.27

Sapolsky’s analysis of the Navy’s ballistic missile submarine program was a model 

of its kind. However, its focus was not historical but instead (as the title makes 

clear) bureaucratic or—to use a less offensive term—organizational.

In 1962, Harvard Business School economists Merton J. Peck and Frederic 

M. Scherer produced The Weapons Acquisition Process: An Economic Analysis, 

a detailed study of a dozen major defense acquisition programs and of the interaction of industry professionals with their military counterparts. Their economic 

analysis identifies the three major factors in any major acquisition program: cost, 

schedule (or time), and product performance.28 It also shows that trade–offs could 

be made among the three major factors, and it was their analysis that stimulated 

the use of quantitative metrics (such as cost/schedule control systems) in program 

management.29

In the 1980s, researchers not then employed by the federal government or 

by a university also wrote very useful books and articles on military acquisition. 

Gordon Adams produced The Iron Triangle: The Politics of Defense Contracting

for the Council on Economic Priorities in 1981. Thomas L. McNaugher, then 

on the staff of the Brookings Institution, published New Weapons, Old Politics: 

America’s Procurement Muddle in 1989.30 Both books, as well as a number of 

articles, popularized the metaphor of the iron triangle, the three-sided political 

relationship among defense contractors, military requirements officers, and 

members of Congress, and the way that the relationship dominated the military 
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acquisition process. Along with studies done by the GAO (now the Government 

Accountability Office), these publications highlight the continuing problem of 

rising costs for military systems.

However, then–Rear Admiral Donald L. Pilling (later the Vice Chief of Naval 

Operations) argued in his insightful Competition in Defense Procurement (1989) 

that the available evidence failed “to demonstrate statistically that procurement 

competition,” a key piece of acquisition reform, did “in fact reduce program cost.”31

Like I. B. Holley, Pilling was historian John Lukacs’s model investigator—an 

experienced, highly educated (PhD in mathematics) officer with an insider’s view 

of how decisions were made in the field of military acquisition. Pilling’s conclusions are sobering, though not quite as dramatically negative as those of Franklin 

Spinney in his Defense Facts of Life: The Plans/Reality Mismatch, published in 

1985.32 Spinney argues that the Defense Department, given the way it practiced 

the acquisition of major systems, was on a sort of treadmill. The military services 

and the contractors they worked with would develop overly optimistic estimates 

of acquisition costs in order to gain a place in a service’s budget. Later, when the 

costs proved (almost always) to be higher than initially estimated, the number of 

systems procured would be reduced, leading to a military force with a smaller 

and smaller number of major systems.

Complementing these studies was the writing of journalist George C. Wilson, 

who for many years covered the Pentagon for The Washington Post. In 2000, 

he wrote a fine study of the defense budget process entitled This War Really 

Matters: Inside the Fight for Defense Dollars.

33 This slim volume, based on a 

series of interviews he conducted of Pentagon officials, was overshadowed by 

the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001. It remains, however, a 

useful historical snapshot of defense budgeting because it illustrates the maneuvering over resources that took place within the Pentagon and among the military 

services before the terrorist attacks.

 Another interesting memoir describing the interaction of the Executive 

Branch with Congress is James R. Locher’s Victory on the Potomac: The 

Goldwater-Nichols Act Unifies the Pentagon.

34 His perspective on civil-military 

relations and on the optimal chain of military command can be contrasted with 

that of former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman’s as presented in Command 

of the Seas or that in former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger’s memoir, 

Fighting for Peace.

35 Moreover, what might be called “the Reagan years” or, for 

students of the Navy, “the Lehman years,” can be compared with a later time 

as presented by Robert M. Gates in his Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, 

published in 2014.36
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

HISTORIANS REDISCOVER ACQUISITION

To get an insightful and comprehensive historian’s view of military acquisition, 

we had to wait for the publication of Paul A. C. Koistinen’s Arsenal of World 

War II: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1940–1945, in 2004. The 

subtitle is revealing. Koistinen defines the “political economy of warfare” as “the 

interrelations of political, economic, and military institutions in devising the means 

to mobilize resources for defense and to conduct war.” He identifies four types of 

factors that shaped how the United States mobilized in wartime: “the level of maturity of the economy,” “the size, strength, and scope” of the Federal Government, 

“the character and structure of the military services and the relation between them 

and civilian society and authority,” and “the state of military technology.”37 He 

carried forward this perspective of political economy from his previous volumes, 

which covered the years from the creation of the American republic to World War 

II, and he also applied it to the Cold War years, in State of War, 1945–2011.

38

Koistinen chose the analytical perspective of political economy because 

military procurement (later more broadly defined by those doing it as “military 

acquisition”) unavoidably involves the interaction of political and economic 

organizations (such as trade unions and industrial associations) and political 

and economic institutions (Congress, the defense bureaucracy, and the military 

services). Military acquisition is complex because it is a political as well as an 

economic and technical activity. This mix of politics, economics, law (especially 

contracting law), and technology is why Paul Koistinen chose to approach military acquisition from the perspective of political economy.

But is political economy history? Perhaps not. For example, in his survey of 

military acquisition from 1945 to 2011, Koistinen argues that the main lesson 

to be learned is that the military-industrial complex is “so entrenched in the 

economic, political, and social lives of the nation that it is nearly impossible 

to downgrade, let alone root out.”39 Koistinen agrees with Seymour Melman’s 

argument that “the inefficiency and incompetence of the military-industrial 

sector inevitably spread out to affect, directly and indirectly, most functions of 

the civilian economy.”40 The result, according to Koistinen, has been a loss of 

American economic vitality and hence American power. This is obviously a very 

serious charge, and it illustrates how closely the study of history can be related to 

polemics about the meaning of history.

Economist Vernon W. Ruttan presents a very different perspective on the 

political economy of defense acquisition in Is War Necessary for Economic 

Growth? Ruttan argues in this book that Department of Defense investment 
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had in fact promoted technological advances in the following fields: jet aircraft, 

commercial nuclear power, semiconductors, mainframe computers, the internet, 

and satellite communications and navigation. Indeed, Ruttan’s argument is that 

the U.S. economy is losing its vitality—despite the boom in personal digital 

devices—because the Defense Department is not investing in basic research the 

way it did during the early years of the Cold War.41 Whose assessment is correct? 

How can historical studies lead to an answer?

If John Lukacs was correct, if “Historical knowledge . . . is participant 

knowledge,”42 then how can one researcher get “participant knowledge” of a 

process that is so complex, so large, and that changes over time? The task is 

daunting, if only because—for the years since World War II—there is so much 

primary and secondary source material. This challenge of trying to survey such 

a huge mass of relevant material is perhaps the main reason why the literature 

on Cold War military acquisition contains interesting case studies of particular 

acquisition programs (like the F/A-18) and surveys of the development of specific 

types of systems, such as armored vehicles, but not many overarching historical assessments. Participant knowledge may be essential for detailed histories of 

specific programs, but it is almost impossible for anyone to participate in military 

acquisition at multiple levels in both government and private industry.

THE RECENT DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE 

ACQUISITION HISTORIES

There is a way to tackle this methodological problem. At the end of the administration of former President William J. Clinton, the Under Secretary of Defense 

for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Dr. Jacques Gansler, noted that 

“during the more than fifty years since the National Security Act of 1947, the 

Department of Defense acquisition function has experienced great change and 

received extraordinarily high public visibility and congressional attention. We 

are missing, however, a comprehensive record of Defense acquisition accomplishments and failures from which we may have an opportunity to learn.”43 To 

remedy this problem, Gansler authorized funding for “The Defense Acquisition 

History Project,” the purpose of which was to cover in detail the history of 

military acquisition since World War II. Under Secretary of Defense Edward 

C. Aldridge continued the project, and it led to a symposium—“Providing the 

Means of War”—held at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces (ICAF) in 

September 2001.
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At the symposium, historians and military analysts presented 15 papers of 

basically two types covering the years from 1945 to 2000.44 The first surveyed 

the changes in military acquisition taking place across time. How did the laws 

governing acquisition change? How did military service acquisition organizations 

change? The second type dealt with specific acquisition programs or with issues 

identified as critical to the acquisition process. J. Ronald Fox, a distinguished 

student of acquisition on the faculty of Harvard Business School and a former 

assistant secretary of the Army, gave the keynote address at the symposium, 

and B. F. Cooling, an experienced historian and professor at ICAF, delivered 

the closing remarks. The symposium also included a panel discussion among 

Gansler; Paul Ignatius, a former secretary of the Navy; and Paul Kaminski, who 

preceded Gansler as Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology.

The goal of the symposium was to discover what the various researchers 

could produce in a relatively short time. From the papers presented, it was clear 

that they had captured the major changes in military acquisition since World 

War II and had explored several of the most important acquisition issues. In 

short, the plan for the papers broke the history of military acquisition since 1945 

into manageable pieces, relieving the historians brought into the project from 

the almost impossible task of trying to understand the whole history of military 

acquisition since the end of World War II.

Authors of the papers broke the chronology of acquisition into the following 

pieces: 1945–1958, 1959–1968, 1969–1980, 1981–1990, and 1990–2000. 

Specific acquisition programs addressed included the Navy’s underwater sound 

surveillance system, early Air Force efforts to develop intercontinental ballistic 

missiles (ICBMs), the Navy’s DASH maritime unmanned aerial vehicle, the 

Navy’s FFG-7 frigates, the Army’s Bradley fighting vehicle, and the Brilliant 

Pebbles missile defense system. Issues covered were the adequacy of contracts as 

the bridge between the military and industry, the value and potential drawbacks 

of concurrent development in a weapons program, the origins and effects of the 

Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act, reducing acquisition schedules, and moving a system from research and development to initial production. 

The symposium papers and commentaries were published in 2005 as Providing 

the Means of War: Historical Perspectives on Defense Acquisition, 1945–2000.

In my view, Providing the Means of War is an essential publication for any 

historian interested in military acquisition since World War II. The papers and 

commentary in this volume tell you what acquisition is, how it differs from 

procurement, how it is governed by laws and regulations, and why it is a complex 

enterprise. As mentioned, the post-World War II disputes over service roles, the 
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Programming and Acquisitions

control of nuclear material, the proper authority of the Secretary of Defense, 

and the nation’s relationship with Europe and the Soviet Union overshadowed a 

series of changes in acquisition laws and organizations in the late 1940s and early 

1950s.45 In effect, changing the procurement model to an acquisition model was 

an incremental enterprise, if only because of the country’s need during the initial 

stage of the Cold War to sustain a large conscript force that was equipped with 

adequate numbers of modern weapons.

One post-World War II lesson learned by the Air Force (an independent 

service as of July 26, 1947) was that it needed to abandon its wartime concept of 

acquisition as the mass production of aircraft and weapons and adopt a strategy 

of continuously developing technology and then integrating that technology into 

the service’s organizational structure. But what way of doing that would be both 

effective and efficient, especially given constraints in defense funding? In short, 

how could the Air Force promote what came to be called an aerospace industry 

without creating a system of aircraft arsenals?46 This was a major issue for the Air 

Force, which on its creation had inherited the Army Air Corps Materiel Division 

(for research and development) but did not inherit an in-house acquisition organization like the Naval Aircraft Factory.47

The existing acquisition model was sequential. First a service conducted or 

sponsored research; then, based on that research, it explored the potential of an 

as yet undeveloped system. After exploratory development, a service acquisition 

organization could move ahead with prototype production and then, if the prototyping were successful, with quantity production. Once it was clear, however, 

that there was in fact a “cold” war between the United States and the Soviet 

Union, the model of sequential development and production was called into question, just as it had been in World War II. The practices put in place to deal with 

the drawbacks of the model of sequential development and production therefore 

mimicked somewhat the practices of World War II—parallel development (the 

USAF’s decision to pursue simultaneously the Atlas and Titan ICBMs), concurrent development and production (used in missile and jet aircraft programs), and 

upgrades of existing systems.48

What about the control and direction of acquisition inside the new 

Department of Defense? The 1958 Department of Defense Reorganization Act 

gave the Secretary of Defense real formal authority over military service budgeting 

and hence acquisition. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara chose to use 

that authority aggressively. He and his assistants reduced the use by the services 

of cost contracts, created the Defense Supply Agency to procure items common 

to all the services, and championed the concept of Total Package Procurement, 
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where one contractor would develop, produce, and support a major system across 

that system’s lifetime. But his major achievement in the field of acquisition was in 

structuring the development of the nation’s nuclear forces, where he and his staff 

linked national strategy to nuclear war doctrine and then to acquisition.49

There is no need to describe for military historians the political and bureaucratic backlash to Secretary McNamara’s initiatives. But if he had been too strong 

an executive, infringing on the traditional—and perhaps even the legal—prerogatives of the military services, then what was the alternative? David Packard, the 

Deputy Secretary of Defense, provided the answer in 1970. It was a formal sequential process, mandated by the Secretary of Defense that was based on milestone 

reviews, and it became the basis for the 5000-series of Department of Defense 

Directives that still govern the process of acquiring major military systems. Under 

Packard—or because of Packard—the services adopted life-cycle costing, parametric cost estimating, and the idea of designing to cost, which made cost as 

important a governing factor in acquisition as schedule and performance.50

The adoption of these initiatives did not fix military acquisition. It was 

one thing to develop and promulgate a logical, sequential acquisition process, 

but that process did not guarantee that what started it off—the adoption by a 

military service of a formal requirement—would lead to something that was 

both affordable and militarily effective. In the case of what became the Bradley 

fighting vehicle, for example, the General Accounting Office accused the Army of 

pushing ahead with a new system while it was still trying to figure out just how 

that system would be used. As critics of the Bradley pointed out, how could the 

infantry-carrying vehicle accompany the new M-1 tank when the tank was far 

better protected than the Bradley?51 The fracas over the Bradley ran right into 

the middle of the 1980s.52 Critics of the Army’s acquisition process considered 

Bradley just another mistake like the reputedly failed Sheridan antitank tracked 

vehicle from the 1960s. Thoughtful critics saw the problem as one where the 

requirements process was not properly disciplined and therefore pushed unrealistic requirements on the Army’s acquisition officials.

The solution to this sort of problem was a new round of legislative action. 

Congress funded the additional and modernized forces requested by Presidents 

James E. Carter and Ronald R. Reagan, but along with the increase in funding 

came new legislative mandates, including the Gramm-Rudman Deficit Reduction 

Act of 1984, the clause in the 1984 Department of Defense Authorization Act that 

required an office in the Defense Department to oversee operational test and evaluation, the Competition in Contracting Act of 1984, the Defense Procurement 

Improvement Act of 1985, and the Defense Acquisition Improvement Act of 
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1986.53 David Packard was recalled to Washington to oversee yet another study 

of military acquisition. His study commission issued three reports between 

February and June 1986. Those reports argued that the acquisition process was 

still flawed, and Packard’s group singled out a lack of cooperation between the 

services and the Office of the Secretary of Defense as a major source of problems. 

But Packard and those members of Congress who shared his views gained a victory 

in 1990 with the passage of the Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement 

Act. The new law treated the acquisition workforce as a cadre of professionals 

who required special training and retraining as they advanced in their careers.54

There was another wave of acquisition reform in the 1990s, this time triggered by the end of the Cold War and the need to shrink the size of the military and reduce the cost of acquisition. When he became Secretary of Defense in 

1994, William J. Perry began a process of major acquisition reform. His initiatives included tailoring or even abandoning military specifications and standards 

in contracts, championing the use of “total quality management,” fostering 

“dual-use” technologies, and writing solicitations to industry that were based on 

desired performance in order to push defense firms away from coming back to the 

Defense Department with only modifications of what they had already developed. 

He also created the post of Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition 

Reform and gave the job to an experienced appointee. Congress weighed in with 

more legislation: the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994, the Federal 

Acquisition Reform Act of 1995, and the Information Technology Management 

Reform Act of 1995. Perry’s successor, William Cohen, inaugurated the Defense 

Reform Initiative in 1997, kicking off an effort labeled “the revolution in business 

affairs.”55

Providing the Means of War, which documented these and many other developments, was a success, and soon it was complemented by other studies. In 2008, 

the U.S. Army Center of Military History published Thomas C. Lassman’s very 

useful history of research and development done by the military laboratories and 

research centers between 1945 and 2000.56 Lassman’s study methodology was 

innovative. He relies almost completely on unclassified sources, most from the 

national security trade press. He demonstrates that trade press publications can 

serve as a reliable and accurate source of changes within the services and the 

defense industry. In doing that, he highlights one way to overcome the unavoidable obstacles to research created by the classification of primary sources.

The historians executing the acquisition history project continued to produce 

fine studies. J. Ronald Fox, the dean of acquisition historians and analysts, cooperated with others involved in the project to produce Defense Acquisition Reform, 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

1960–2009: An Elusive Goal, in 2011.57 Though this book focuses more on 

the 1990s than on earlier decades, it is wonderfully detailed and contains four 

excellent appendixes, one of which tracks changes to Department of Defense 

Directive 5000.1 from 1971 to 2008 and another that provides a chronology of 

63 defense acquisition reforms from March 1966 to May 2001. The highlights of 

the acquisition history project, however, are four detailed acquisition histories. 

The first two are in print: Elliott V. Converse III’s Rearming for the Cold War, 

1945–1960, and Walter S. Poole’s Adapting to Flexible Response, 1960–1968.

58

As of this writing (June 2015), three additional detailed studies are in draft form: 

Department of Defense Acquisition History, Vol. III, 1969–1980, with five 

chapters drafted by Walton S. Moody and the rest being prepared by David G. 

Allen; Vol. IV, 1981–1990, by Thomas C. Lassman and Andrew J. Butrica; and 

Vol. V, 1991–2000, by Philip L. Shiman.

These volumes, along with a separate compilation of primary source documents related to military acquisition, are the very useful and often insightful 

products of the Defense Acquisition History Project. Students of acquisition 

finally have detailed and thoughtful histories. The whole project is a credit to 

former Under Secretaries of Defense Jacques Gansler and Edward Aldridge and 

to their successors. Moreover, the project has come along like a deliberately 

planned and well-managed acquisition project. First was the symposium, which 

tested whether there was the talent available to produce excellent histories and 

whether a chronological organization would be suitable for a multivolume study. 

In effect, the symposium was a prototype, but it also produced some interesting 

and relevant case studies and, in that sense, it was like an advanced concept technology demonstrator. One of the better case studies is that of the Brilliant Pebbles 

project in the Strategic Defense Initiative Office, in which Donald R. Baucom, 

who had served as the official historian of the Brilliant Pebbles effort, shows how 

the same general policy guidelines could set the Office of the Secretary of Defense 

and a dedicated and innovative program manager at odds.59

After the symposium came the 2008 study, based on what might be called 

the military-industrial complex’s trade press. This was followed by J. Ronald 

Fox’s 2011 effort to understand why defense acquisition reform was “an elusive 

goal.” Now we also have two of the detailed acquisition history volumes and 

can look forward to three more. The success of the acquisition history project 

shows why it had to be a group effort. The subject—across time and multiple 

administrations and congresses—is just too large for one individual to comprehend. But the two volumes in print so far also show what good historians can do 

even if they lack an insider’s or participant’s perspective. One weakness of Paul 
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Koistinen’s volume on the years 1945–2011 is his reliance on secondary sources, 

especially those that do not necessarily throw light on the day-to-day workings 

of military acquisition. The two volumes of the acquisition history project do not 

have that same weakness. They were written by historians who are more familiar 

with the details of the acquisition process and are therefore better able to understand and describe it.

THE STUDY OF INNOVATION AS A SUBSET OF THE 

STUDY OF ACQUISITION

Innovation in military acquisition forms an important subfield of the study of 

military acquisition in general. In the case of the Navy, both those with and 

without participant knowledge have produced such studies. Serious studies 

by insiders range from a detailed discussion of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover’s 

administration of the nuclear-powered submarine program60 to Admiral William 

Owens’s account of how he and Admiral Frank Kelso altered the workings of the 

Office of the Chief of Naval Operations in the wake of the Cold War.61 Other 

studies of post-World War II naval innovation include Owen Cote’s The Third 

Battle: Innovation in the U.S. Navy’s Silent Cold War Struggle with Soviet 

Submarines, James Blaker’s Transforming Military Force: The Legacy of Arthur 

Cebrowski and Network Centric Warfare, and Innovation in Carrier Aviation, 

by the author of this paper and his coauthors, Norman Friedman and Mark D. 

Mandeles.62 In 1998, Mandeles also wrote a useful and insightful study of innovation in the development of the design of the U.S. Air Force’s B-52.63

Robert O. Work, a retired Marine colonel who served as Under Secretary 

of the Navy and is now the Deputy Secretary of Defense, is also a prolific writer 

and careful student of the Navy. While serving as an analyst with the Center for 

Strategic and Budgetary Assessments prior to being appointed Under Secretary 

of the Navy, he wrote unclassified but very detailed studies of the genesis of the 

littoral combat ship and the concept of seabasing.64 There is, however, room 

for more research on innovation—assuming that there is adequate unclassified 

information to sustain a serious inquiry. Are there really general guidelines for 

promoting innovation in military acquisition, or does the field change all the 

time, blocking the utility of inferences often referred to as lessons learned? Joy D. 

Mikulcik addressed the issue of organizational culture and innovation in a 2004 

study of the Air Force Materiel Command, and John T. Dillard took on the issue 

in 2003 of whether “centralized control” of acquisition programs was in fact 
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beneficial or harmful to innovation.65 The products of the Defense Acquisition 

History Project will strengthen future versions of these sorts of investigations.

PROGRAMMING AND BUDGETING

The fields of programming/budgeting and military acquisition, though intimately 

related, are different, attract different types of people, and have spawned their 

own literatures. But what about the issues? Do these bring the two areas together? 

One major issue is methodology: how can two different areas of professional 

work that interact be systematically studied? Programming is supposed to bridge 

the gap between the different fields of budgeting and acquisition. Programmers 

are supposed to do the reviews that are so essential to the management of acquisition. But studies of the relationship of programmers to budget staffs on the one 

side and acquisition managers and their staffs on the other side tend to be done 

by management specialists and not by historians. Does this mean that historians 

have little to offer?

Likely making matters worse is the recent insistence by members of Congress 

that the Department of Defense empower “chief financial officers” to promote 

accrual-based accounting at the service level and “chief management officers” to 

do the same for “performance-based management.”66 The pressure to make the 

military services (and the Defense Department generally) more like businesses has 

been steady, but it is not based on evidence that moving ahead with these changes 

will make the acquisition and programming/budgeting process more effective 

and efficient.67 This is, I believe, one area where historians can contribute. To 

do that, however, they will have to study whether management innovations have 

been effective in private enterprises, and that is something the private sector may 

not allow.

OBSTACLES TO RESEARCH

Historians cannot do their work if they cannot see official papers, especially those 

that are generated in interactions between a government acquisition office and a 

private contractor. A good illustration is the story of the A-12, the Navy’s stealth 

carrier attack aircraft. Though canceled in 1991 by the Navy, the program’s legal 

issues dragged on for more than two decades and, because the government and 

the Navy’s contractors were at odds, it could not be clear to historians just which 
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pieces of evidence (including interviews) were reliable.68 Moreover, the A-12 

program was classified above top secret, and therefore it was going to take some 

years for all the pertinent information to become known. Classification obviously impedes research. In addition, far too little is known about the histories of 

the major defense firms. There are a few biographies that focus on key individuals, and a few case studies that cover specific systems, but nothing I know of 

to compare with Peter Drucker’s Concept of the Corporation, a classic study of 

management in General Motors.69 Some journalistic accounts of management in 

defense firms, however, suggest that the area is well worth scholarly study.70

WHAT QUESTIONS SHOULD BE ASKED OF THE DATA?

Despite these obstacles to historical research, some questions are obviously 

important. Does it make sense to talk of a military-industrial complex? Is it a 

useful concept in studying military acquisition? If not, have historians developed 

a better concept? Has program budgeting been a useful, effective management 

tool? Is it still? How would we know? Do major military systems, such as ships, 

aircraft, missiles, and fighting vehicles, cost too much? If I compare the constant 

dollar cost of a ship today with the constant dollar cost of a similar ship from 

50 or 75 years ago, what will I find? Is that sort of comparison even a historical 

exercise? Or is it a form of analysis that belongs to some other discipline, such 

as operations research or economics? What is the most effective way to study 

the influence of science and technology on the military services? How reliable 

are the oral histories of individuals involved in military acquisition or defense 

programming and budgeting? Was the Goldwater-Nichols legislation effective? 

How has implementing it influenced the planning, programming, budgeting, and 

execution process, or the defense acquisition process?71

The Navy embraced the Maritime Strategy in the 1980s. The literature on 

what the strategy was, who developed it, and how it was tested in exercises is 

large,72 but how exactly did it shape programs and budgets? According to Navy 

Captain Peter Swartz, who certainly possessed what historian John Lukacs called 

“participant knowledge,” the essential historical records are those of OP-603, 

the Strategic Concepts Group in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. As 

Swartz observed in his 1987 Addendum to “Contemporary U.S. Naval Strategy: 

A Bibliography,” the “operator-strategists” in OP-603 worked almost entirely out 

of sight of “the general and national security affairs academic publics,” and what 

they produced was “largely classified”73 and adopted by senior Navy officers and 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

civilians such as Navy secretary John Lehman. This poses a very real problem of 

access for researchers, though the recent publication of Toward a New Maritime 

Strategy: American Naval Thinking in the Post-Cold War Era, by Captain Peter 

D. Haynes, shows what a careful researcher can achieve with the information 

that is available.74

CONCLUSION

So where are we? First, I think that Lukacs has a point. Historians who write 

about programming or acquisition will find it easier to master the subject if they 

have experienced these processes first hand. But how can historians gain this 

knowledge? Even if they have firsthand knowledge, what historical concepts can 

they use to organize their knowledge? Second, the questions that matter to historians may not matter to the people and organizations that they are studying, and 

that may make it difficult if not impossible for historians to obtain the access 

to records that they need. If they or their students do eventually gain access to 

once classified records, how will they know that their reconstructions of events, 

motives, and the views of participants are correct? Third, researchers (and not 

just historians) always run the risk in investigating activities such as programming and acquisition of missing the point or of drawing questionable inferences. 

I believe these are the reasons why—for the Navy—there is no history that quite 

compares with I. B. Holley’s Buying Aircraft.

However, the Defense Acquisition History Project has shown that there are 

historians capable of conducting the research, and the federal government has a 

good track record of releasing once classified documents. One of the major insights 

from such research is the deliberate development by the Cold War Navy of digital 

systems that allowed its antisubmarine forces to switch from active sensing and 

targeting of enemy submarines to passive sensing and then passive targeting of 

submerged enemy submarines.75 This was ambitious and creative technological 

development, and now we know what was done and why it mattered. Just how it 

was done and who specifically did it is an area of study open to the next generation of historians.
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Notes

1 Stephen Coonts, The Minotaur (New York: Dell, 1990).

2 John Lukacs, “The Historiographical Problem of Belief and Believers: Religious 

History in the Democratic Age,” reprinted in Remembered Past, ed. by Mark G. 

Malvasi and Jeffrey O. Nelson (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), 128.

3 Irving Brinton Holley Jr., Buying Aircraft: Materiel Procurement for the Army Air 

Forces (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, Office of the Chief of Military 

History, 1964). This volume was reprinted by the Office of Air Force History in 

1989. Compare it with H. C. Thomson and L. Mayo, The Ordnance Department: 

Procurement and Supply (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, 

Department of the Army, 1960). The latter lacks the detail and the insights found in 

Buying Aircraft.

4 Irving Brinton Holley Jr., Ideas and Weapons (New Haven, CT: Yale University 

Press, 1953). This volume was reprinted in 1983 by the Office of Air Force History.

5 Other related volumes in the U.S. Army’s series on World War II are: C. M. Green, et. 

al., Planning Munitions for War (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, Office 

of the Chief of Military History, 1955), and H. C. Thompson and L. Mayo, The 

Ordnance Department: Procurement and Supply (Washington, DC: Department of 

the Army, Office of the Chief of Military History, 1960).

6 See Rear Adm. Julius Augustus Furer, Administration of the Navy Department in 

World War II (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, 1959); Buford Rowland 

and William Boyd, U.S. Navy Bureau of Ordnance in World War II (Washington, 

DC: GPO, 1954); Duncan S. Ballantine, U.S. Naval Logistics in the Second World 

War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949); Robert H. Connery, The 

Navy and the Industrial Mobilization in World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton 

University Press, 1951); and Archibald D. Turnbull and Clifford L. Lord, History of 

United States Naval Aviation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1949).

7 Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy, 1940–

1943 (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1955), and Robert 

W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, Global Logistics and Strategy, 1943–1945

(Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, U.S. Army, 1968).

8 This notion that each new acquisition program was a case study in the acquisition 

process is one developed by Norman Friedman. In a conversation with me, he noted 

that the many comparisons of different acquisition programs by analysts (especially 

at RAND) were based on the assumption that each was a particular case of a general 

process, and that studying the cases was the key to better understanding the process.

9 See Jeffrey G. Barlow, From Hot War to Cold: The U.S. Navy and National Security 

Affairs, 1945–1955 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), and Barlow, 

Revolt of the Admirals: The Fight for Naval Aviation, 1945–1950 (Washington, DC: 

Naval Historical Center, Department of the Navy, 1994).

10 Orr Kelly, Hornet: The Inside Story of the F/A-18 (Shrewsbury, England: Airlife 

Publishing, 1990), and Glenn E. Bugos, Engineering the F-4 Phantom II: Parts into 

Systems (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996).

11 Barrett Tillman, Hellcat: The F6F in World War II (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Press, 2000); Tillman, Wildcat: The F4F in World War II (Annapolis, MD: Naval 

Institute Press, 2001); Tillman, Dauntless Dive Bomber of World War II (Annapolis, 

MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006); Tillman, Corsair: The F4U in World War II and 

Korea (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2014); and Tillman, MiG Master: The 

Story of the F-8 Crusader (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2014). This is 

just a sampling of Tillman’s books in print. He also has numerous articles to his 

credit. See also Tommy H. Thomason, U.S. Naval Air Superiority: Development of 

Shipborne Fighters, 1943–1962 (North Branch, MN: Specialty Press, 2007); and 

Thomason, Strike from the Sea: U.S. Navy Attack Aircraft from Skyraider to Super 

Hornet, 1948–Present (North Branch, MN: Specialty Press, 2009). Thomason, an 

experienced flight test engineer, is another student of aircraft development. See also 

Dennis R. Jenkins, F/A-18 Hornet: A Navy Success Story (New York: McGraw-Hill, 

2000). This is an interesting account of a controversial aircraft and the development 

of modern fighters by another engineer who has written about contemporary Navy 

aircraft. This book is one of a series edited by the accomplished aerospace historian 

Walter J. Boyne.

12 Norman Friedman, U.S. Aircraft Carriers: An Illustrated Design History (Annapolis, 

MD: Naval Institute Press, 1983); Friedman, U.S. Cruisers: An Illustrated Design 

History (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1984); Friedman, U.S. Battleships: An 

Illustrated Design History (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1985); Friedman, 

U.S. Amphibious Ships and Craft: An Illustrated Design History (Annapolis, MD: 

Naval Institute Press, 2002); and Friedman, U.S. Destroyers: An Illustrated Design 

History, rev. ed. (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2004). As in Tillman’s 

case, this is just a sampling of a long list of books, some of them quite analytical, 

such as Network-Centric Warfare: How Navies Learned to Fight Smarter Through 

Three World Wars (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2009). See also Norman 

Polmar, Aircraft Carriers: A History of Carrier Aviation and Its Influence on World 

Events, Vol. II, 1946–2006 (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2008); and Polmar and K. 

J. Moore, Cold War Submarines: The Design and Construction of U.S. and Soviet 

Submarines, 1945–2001 (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2005). Polmar, a contemporary of Friedman, has also published a number of books about naval warfare.

13 Norman Friedman, U.S. Amphibious Ships and Craft: An Illustrated Design History

(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2002); Friedman, Submarine Design and 

Development (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1984); Friedman, The 

Postwar Naval Revolution (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1986); Friedman, 

Unmanned Combat Air Systems: A New Kind of Carrier Aviation (Annapolis, MD: 

Naval Institute Press, 2010); Friedman, Seapower and Space (Annapolis, MD: 

Naval Institute Press, 2000); and Friedman, Network-Centric Warfare: How Navies 

Learned to Fight Smarter Through Three World Wars (Annapolis, MD: Naval 

Institute Press, 2009). Friedman also wrote what is likely the classic description of 

the trade-off process involved in setting warship requirements: Modern Warship 

Design and Development (New York: Mayflower Books, 1979). He also wrote US 

Naval Weapons: Every Gun, Missile, Mine and Torpedo Used by the US Navy from 

1883 to the Present Day (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1985).

14 Norman Friedman, The Fifty-Year War: Conflict and Strategy in the Cold War

(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000). You can see some of the roots of The 

Fifty-Year War in Friedman’s The Postwar Naval Revolution (Annapolis, MD: Naval 

Institute Press, 1986).
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15 See Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, The New World, 1939–1946 (vol. 

3, A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission) (University Park, PA: 

Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962); Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan, 

Atomic Shield, 1947–1952, (vol. 2, A History of the United States Atomic Energy 

Commission) (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969); 

Richard G. Hewlett and Jack M. Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 1953–1961, vol. 3 

(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989). Also see Albert B. Christman, 

Sailors, Scientists and Rockets: Origins of the Navy Rocket Program and of the 

Naval Ordnance Test Station, Inyokern, (vol. 1, History of the Naval Weapons 

Center, China Lake, California) (Washington, DC: Navy Department, Naval History 

Division, 1971); Joseph P. Smaldone, History of the White Oak Laboratory, 1945–

1975 (White Oak, MD: Naval Surface Weapons Center, 1977). Also Jacob Neufeld, 

The Development of Ballistic Missiles in the United States Air Force, 1945–1960

(Washington, DC: US Air Force, Office of Air Force History, 1990) and Marcelle S. 

Knaack, Encyclopedia of U.S. Air Force Aircraft and Missile Systems, vols. I and II 

(Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, U.S. Air Force, 1978, 1988). These are 

just some of the official histories produced, although most of those focused mainly 

on operations and policy-making.

16 Lawrence R. Benson, Acquisition Management in the United States Air Force and 

Its Predecessors (Washington, DC: Air Force History and Museums Program, 

1997), and Department of the Air Force, Air Force Materiel Command History

(Washington, DC: Air Force History and Museums Program, 2006). See also Stephen 

L. McFarland, A Concise History of the U.S. Air Force (Washington, DC: Air Force 

History and Museums Program, 1997), and Daniel L. Haulman, One Hundred Years 

of Flight: USAF Chronology of Significant Air and Space Events (Washington, DC: 

Air Force History and Museums Program, 2003).

17 Center for Naval Analyses, Naval Study Group Proceedings, Conference on the 

Defense Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS): Past, Present, and 

Future (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 1983). Program Analysis and 

Evaluation staff created a briefing entitled “DoD’s Planning, Programming and 

Budgeting System (PPBS): A Historical Perspective,” for the 37th Annual Defense 

Department Cost Analysis Symposium, 23 Feb. 2004.

18 Mark D. Mandeles has carefully studied the many RAND papers. The more significant ones from Klein and his associates include: Burton H. Klein, “What’s Wrong 

with Military R and D?” (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1958); Klein 

and William Meckling, “Applications of Operations Research to Development 

Decisions” in Operations Research, vol. 6 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 

1958); Klein, William Meckling and Emmanuel G. Mesthene, “Military Research 

and Development Policies” (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1958); Klein, 

“The Decision-Making Problem in Development” (Santa Monica, CA: RAND 

Corporation, 1960); Klein, William Meckling, and E. G. Mesthene, “The Nature 

and Function of Military R&D” (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1960); 

Klein, “Policy Issues Involved in the Conduct of Military Development Programs” 

(Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1962); and Klein, Thomas K. Glennan 

Jr., and G. H. Shubert, “The Role of Prototypes in Development” (Santa Monica, 

CA: RAND Corporation, 1971). Other related RAND papers include: Andrew W. 

Marshall and William Meckling, “Predictability of the Costs, Time, and Success of 

Development” (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1959); Richard R. Nelson, 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

“Uncertainty, Learning, and the Economics of Parallel Research and Development 

Efforts” in Review of Economics and Statistics 43: 351–64 (Santa Monica, CA: 

RAND Corporation, 1961); Thomas K. Glennan Jr., “Policies for Military Research 

and Development” (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1965); Robert L. Perry, 

“The Mythography of Military R&D” (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 

1966); Perry, “Innovation and Military Requirements: A Comparative Study” (Santa 

Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1967); Perry, Giles K. Smith, Alvin J. Harman, 

and Susan Henrichsen, “System Acquisition Strategies” (Santa Monica, CA: RAND 

Corporation, 1971); and Perry, “American Styles of Military R&D” (Santa Monica, 

CA: RAND Corporation, 1979).

19 See Jacob A. Stockfisch, Plowshares into Swords: Managing the American Defense 

Establishment (New York: Mason & Lipscomb, 1973).

20 M. Thomas Davis, Framing the Problem of PPBS (Washington, DC: Business 

Executives for National Security, Jan. 2000) and Davis, Planning, Programming and 

Budgeting System (PPBS) Study Report (Washington, DC: Business Executives for 

National Security, Nov. 2000). See also Davis, Managing Defense After the Cold War

(Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 1997).

21 Exploring a New Defense Management System, Paper P-3756 (Alexandria, VA: 

Institute for Defense Analyses, April 2003). Col. Steven R. Grimes, “PPBS to PPBE: 

A Process or Principles?” (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Army War College, 2008).

22 David D. Acker, Acquiring Defense Systems: A Quest for the Best, Technical Report 

TR 1-93 (Ft. Belvoir, VA: Defense Systems Management College [now Defense 

Acquisition University], 1993). Acker served as a system designer, project manager, 

and senior technical manager at North American Aviation, which became while 

he was employed there Rockwell International. He also served on the staff of the 

Director of Defense Research and Engineering in the Office of the Secretary of 

Defense, and taught engineering at both Rutgers University and Virginia Polytechnic 

Institute.

23 Wilbur D. Jones Jr., From Packard to Perry: A Quarter Century of Service to the 

Defense Acquisition Community (Ft. Belvoir, VA: Defense Systems Management 

College Press, 1996).

24 Dov S. Zakheim, Flight of the Lavi: Inside a U.S.-Israeli Crisis (Washington, DC: 

Brassey’s, 1996).

25 Charles J. Hitch and Roland N. McKean, The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear 

Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961). Also Hitch, Decision-Making 

for Defense (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1965). Hitch was head 

of the economics program at RAND from 1948 to 1961, when he was appointed 

the Comptroller of the Department of Defense by Secretary of Defense Robert 

McNamara. It is worth finding and reading his four lectures on “Decision-Making 

in the Department of Defense,” April 5–9, 1965, published by the University of 

California at Berkeley. Also see his “Management Problems of Large Organizations,” 

Operations Research Vol. 44, No. 2 (March–April 1996), 257–64.

26 Harvey M. Sapolsky, The Polaris System Development: Bureaucratic and 

Programmatic Success in Government (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University 

Press, 1972). Also see Sapolsky, Science and the Navy: The History of the Office 

of Naval Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), originally 

published in 1990.
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27 J. Ronald Fox, with James L. Field, The Defense Management Challenge: Weapons 

Acquisition (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1988). Also see Fox, et. 

al., Defense Acquisition Reform, 1960–2009: An Elusive Goal (Washington, DC: 

Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 2011), and Fox, Edward Hirsch, and George 

Krikorian, Critical Issues in the Defense Acquisition Culture (Ft. Belvoir, VA: Defense 

Systems Management College [now Defense Acquisition University], 1994).

28 Merton J. Peck and Frederic M. Scherer, The Weapons Acquisition Process: An 

Economic Analysis (Boston, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Business 

Administration, 1962). Peck was a former Navy Supply Corps captain and Scherer 

was a young scholar. Together, with Scherer doing the bulk of the writing, they 

produced this book plus separate volumes of the weapons systems studied. See 

also Scherer, The Weapons Acquisition Process: Economic Incentives (Boston, MA: 

Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration, 1964).

29 What we now call “cost/schedule control systems” were pioneered during World 

War II, but it was the work of Peck and Scherer that showed their value. See Erik 

G. Cummings and Kirk Schneider, “Cost/Schedule Control Systems Criteria, A 

Reference Guide to C/SCSC Information,” Air Force Institute of Technology and Air 

University (September 1992).

30 Gordon Adams, The Iron Triangle: The Politics of Defense Contracting (New York: 

Council on Economic Priorities, 1981). Thomas L. McNaugher, New Weapons, 

Old Politics: America’s Procurement Muddle (Washington, DC: Brookings 

Institution, 1989).

31 Donald L. Pilling, Competition in Defense Procurement (Washington, DC: Brookings 

Institution, 1989), 15.

32 Franklin C. Spinney, Defense Facts of Life: The Plans/Reality Mismatch (Boulder, 

CO: Westview Press, 1985). Spinney was an analyst in the program analysis and 

evaluation office in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. His book was based on a 

Pentagon briefing that he had given for several years.

33 George C. Wilson, This War Really Matters: Inside the Fight for Defense Dollars

(Washington, DC; CQ Press, 2000). Wilson’s other books include Supercarrier: An 

Inside Account of Life Aboard the World’s Most Powerful Ship, the USS John F. 

Kennedy (New York: Macmillan, 1986); Mud Soldiers: Life Inside the New American 

Army (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989); and Flying the Edge: The Making 

of Navy Test Pilots (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1992). Wilson’s work 

resembles that of famous New York Times reporter Hanson W. Baldwin. Baldwin 

and his colleagues did an excellent job reporting on the Navy between World War 

I and World War II. See Hanson W. Baldwin, What the Citizen Should Know about 

the Navy (New York: Norton, 1941).

34 James R. Locher III, Victory on the Potomac: The Goldwater-Nichols Act Unifies the 

Pentagon (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2002).

35 John F. Lehman Jr., Command of the Seas (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988); 

Caspar W. Weinberger, Fighting for Peace: Seven Critical Years in the Pentagon (New 

York: Warner Books, Inc., 1990). For the view from a senior Navy program manager’s perspective, see Thomas C. Hone, “The Program Manager as Entrepreneur: 

AEGIS and RADM Wayne Meyer,” Defense Analysis, Vol. 3, No. 3 (1987), 197–212.

36 Robert M. Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 
186

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

2014). The title is revealing: “Secretary at War” instead of “Secretary of War.” In 

this, Gates describes his efforts to get special mine-resistant vehicles—MRAPs—to 

troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. The account exposes the character of the 

acquisition process in the Department of Defense. The Secretary wanted to save 

soldiers’ lives, but Army acquisition professionals, reacting to the policy embodied in 

Department of Defense Directive 5000.1, did not want a one-off vehicle that would 

be used only in Iraq and Afghanistan and then abandoned.

37 Paul A. C. Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II: The Political Economy of American 

Warfare, 1940–1945 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 2. For a 

different history of World War II mobilization, see Maury Klein, A Call to Arms: 

Mobilizing America for World War II (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013). Klein 

regards the “greatest generation” claim as a myth, and he uses mostly secondary 

sources to point out that national mobilization was often confused and almost 

always controversial. His perspective is useful for any student of mobilization 

in World War II because he has studied and written extensively about American 

industry, especially railroads.

38 Koistinen produced a set of five volumes on “the political economy of American 

warfare” (from p. 1 of State of War, 1945–2011; see below). Paul A. C. Koistinen, 

Beating Plowshares into Swords: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 

1606–1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996); Mobilizing for Modern 

War: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1865–1919 (Lawrence: University 

Press of Kansas, 1997); Planning War, Pursuing Peace: The Political Economy of 

American Warfare, 1920–1939 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998); 

Arsenal of World War II; and State of War: The Political Economy of American 

Warfare, 1945–2011 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012).

39 Paul A. C. Koistinen, State of War: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 

1945–2011 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012), 237.

40 Ibid., 215. In State of War, p. 7, Koistinen notes that the “nearly overwhelming 

collection” of secondary sources “amply met the reference requirements for this 

book, without further research in primary documents.”

41 Vernon W. Ruttan, Is War Necessary for Economic Growth? Military Procurement 

and Technology Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Ruttan 

argues that Congress made a major mistake in 1994 when it eliminated the 

Department of Defense’s Technology Reinvestment Program, which financially aided 

firms trying to convert from defense production to the manufacture of dual-use 

items. After the Cold War ended, the defense industrial base shrank significantly. 

Ruttan does not think that the growth of the personal digital devices industry can 

make up for the defense industrial capacity lost starting in the mid-1990s.

42 John Lukacs, “The Historiographical Problem of Belief and Believers: Religious 

History in the Democratic Age,” first published in 1978 and reprinted in Remembered 

Past, ed. by Mark G. Malvasi and Jeffrey O. Nelson (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 

2005), 128.

43 Cited in Elliott V. Converse, History of Acquisition in the Department of Defense, 

Vol. I, Rearming for the Cold War, 1945–1960 (Washington, DC: Historical Office 

of the Secretary of Defense, 2012), i.

44 Shannon A. Brown, ed., Providing the Means of War: Historical Perspectives on 
187

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Defense Acquisition, 1945–2000 (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military 

History and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, 2005).

45 Elliott V. Converse, “Into the Cold War: An Overview of Acquisition in the 

Department of Defense, 1945–1958,” in Providing the Means of War, 27–46.

46 Martin J. Collins, “Weapons, ‘Weak’ States, and the Military Contract System: 

The Case of RAND and the Air Force, 1945–1950,” in Providing the Means of 

War, 61–78.

47 See William F. Trimble, Wings for the Navy: A History of the Naval Aircraft Factory, 

1917–1956 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1990).

48 John Lonnquest, “Building Missiles: Concurrency and the Legacy of the Early Air 

Force ICBM Program,” in Providing the Means of War, 97–110.

49 Walter S. Poole, “Acquisition in the Department of Defense, 1959–1968: The 

McNamara Legacy,” in Providing the Means of War, 79–96.

50 Shannon A. Brown with Walton S. Moody, “Defense Acquisition in the 1970s: 

Retrenchment and Reform,” in Providing the Means of War, 141–68.

51 W. Blair Haworth Jr., “Moving Target: The U.S. Army Infantry Fighting Vehicle 

Program in the 1970s,” in Providing the Means of War, 183–98.

52 James G. Burton, The Pentagon Wars: Reformers Challenge the Old Guard

(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2014). Burton illustrates the tension between 

a service acquisition process (in this case, the Army’s) and the efforts of the Office 

of the Secretary of Defense to discipline that process when it did not conform to the 

Department of Defense directive to conduct realistic live-fire tests of systems before 

approving full-rate production.

53 Andrew J. Butrica, “An Overview of Acquisition, 1981–1990,” in Providing the 

Means of War, 199–224.

54 James H. Edgar, “The Origins and Impact of the Defense Acquisition Workforce 

Improvement Act (DAWIA),” in Providing the Means of War, 261–82.

55 Philip L. Shiman, “Defense Acquisition in an Uncertain World: The Post-Cold War 

Era, 1990–2000,” in Providing the Means of War, 283–316.

56 Thomas C. Lassman, Sources of Weapon Systems Innovation in the Department of 

Defense: The Role of In-House Research and Development, 1945–2000 (Washington, 

DC: Center of Military History, 2008).

57 J. Ronald Fox, with David G. Allen, Thomas C. Lassman, Walton S. Moody, and 

Philip L. Shiman, Defense Acquisition Reform, 1960–2009, An Elusive Goal

(Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2011).

58 Elliott V. Converse III, Rearming for the Cold War, 1945–1960 (Washington, DC: 

Historical Office of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2012), and Walter S. 

Poole, Adapting to Flexible Response, 1960–1968 (Washington, DC: Historical 

Office of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2013).

59 Donald R. Baucom, “The Strategic Defense Initiative and Acquisition Reform: The 

Case of Brilliant Pebbles,” in Providing the Means of War, 225–60.

60 Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan, Nuclear Navy (Chicago: University of 

Chicago Press, 1974). Compare this very formal study with a much more readable 

account of Admiral Rickover’s career by Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, 
188

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Rickover (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982). For a more recent insider’s view 

of Admiral Rickover’s accomplishments that compares them to the achievements 

of former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, see Rear Adm. Dave 

Oliver, Against the Tide: Rickover’s Leadership Principles and the Rise of the Nuclear 

Navy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995).

61 Vice Adm. William Owens, High Seas: The Naval Passage to an Uncharted World

(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995). Also see The Reminiscences of Admiral 

Frank B. Kelso, II, U.S. Navy (Retired), interviewed by Paul Stillwell (Annapolis, 

MD: U.S. Naval Institute, 2009).

62 Owen R. Cote Jr., The Third Battle: Innovation in the U.S. Navy’s Silent Cold War 

Struggle with Soviet Submarines (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 2003). 

James R. Blaker, Transforming Military Force: The Legacy of Arthur Cebrowski 

and Network Centric Warfare (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007). 

Thomas C. Hone, Norman Friedman, and Mark D. Mandeles, Innovation in Carrier 

Aviation (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 2011).

63 Mark D. Mandeles, The Development of the B-52 and Jet Propulsion: A Case 

Study in Organizational Innovation (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University 

Press, 1998).

64 Robert O. Work, Naval Transformation and the Littoral Combat Ship (Washington, 

DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2004) and Work, Thinking 

About Seabasing: All Ahead, Slow (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and 

Budgetary Assessments, 2006).

65 John T. Dillard, Centralized Control of Defense Acquisition Programs: A Comparative 

Review of the Framework from 1987 to 2003 (Monterey, CA: Naval Postgraduate 

School, 2003). Joy D. Mikulcik, Challenges Facing Military Organizational Cultural 

Reform: A Study of the 2004 Air Force Materiel Command Reorganization, AFIT/

GRD/ENV/06M-10 (Wright-Patterson AFB, OH: Air Force Institute of Technology, 

2012). For a candid assessment of changes to the defense acquisition process, see 

Mark Cancian, “Acquisition Reform: It’s Not as Easy as It Seems,” Acquisition 

Review Quarterly (Summer 1995), 189–98.

66 See Douglas A. Brook, et. al., “Implementation of the Chief Management Officer in 

the Department of Defense, An Interim Report” (Monterey, CA: Center for Defense 

Management and Research, Naval Postgraduate School, 2013).

67 See “Department of the Navy Business Transformation Plan, Fiscal Year 2013 & 

Fiscal Year 2012 Annual Report,” approved by the Under Secretary of the Navy on 

28 December 2012.

68 See James P. Stevenson, The $5 Billion Misunderstanding: The Collapse of the 

Navy’s A-12 Stealth Bomber Program (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2001), 

and Herbert L. Fenster, “The A-12 Legacy: It wasn’t an Airplane—It Was a Train 

Wreck,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 125 (Feb. 1999), 33–39. Neither the article 

(written by a lawyer representing one of the parties to the court case) nor the book 

can be entirely trusted because the program documentation was so highly classified. 

The court case was not finally settled until 2014, almost 25 years after the Navy’s 

decision to cancel the program.

69 Peter Drucker, Concept of the Corporation (New York: John Day, 1946). Drucker 

was a young and not yet famous management consultant when he persuaded 
189

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Donaldson Brown of General Motors to allow him to study how the firm was 

run. However, Alfred Sloan, the Chairman of GM, did not like Concept of the 

Corporation, and his dislike of the book may have persuaded other executives to 

close their doors to Drucker and others like him. There is one thoughtful memoir 

of a major company engineer and executive who dealt with the Navy after World 

War II: Edward H. Heinemann and Rosario Rausa, Ed Heinemann: Combat Aircraft 

Designer (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1980). There are also George A. 

Spangenberg’s reminiscences (31 August 1997), available as George Spangenberg 

Oral History, 2010, at www.georgespangenberg.com. Spangenberg was a member 

of the Bureau of Aeronautics (later the Naval Air Systems Command) staff from 

the end of piston-engine aircraft through the swing-wing F-14. Heinemann is well 

known within the community of people who love airplanes as the designer of the 

SBD and BT2D in World War II and the A4D in the decade after the war.

70 See “How the Deal Was Done: The Lockheed-Martin Marietta Merger,” by Ted 

Shelsby, Baltimore Sun (March 12, 1995), for an account of how leaders of defense 

firms reacted in response to the Department of Defense’s warning after the Cold 

War that defense firms would have to merge or leave the field of defense acquisition. 

One of the key figures in this post-Cold War drama was Norman R. Augustine, 

chief executive officer of Martin-Marietta. He has not published a memoir. The 

closest he has come is “Managing to Survive in Washington: A Beginner’s Guide to 

High-Level Management in Government” (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic 

and International Studies, 2000).

71 The literature on the Goldwater-Nichols act and its consequences is large. It 

includes articles defending the legislation: James R. Locher III, “Taking Stock of 

Goldwater-Nichols,” Joint Force Quarterly, No. 13 (Autumn 1996), 10–16, and 

“Has It Worked? The Goldwater-Nichols Reorganization Act,” Naval War College 

Review, Vol. LIV, No. 4 (Autumn 2001), 95–115. It also includes a very perceptive assessment by Archie D. Barrett, then the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary 

of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, in Joint Force Quarterly, No. 13 

(Autumn 1996), 13. These are just the tip of the iceberg. See also Linda H. Flanagan, 

The Goldwater-Nichols Act: The Politics of Defense Reorganization (Cambridge, 

MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); James Kitfield, Prodigal Soldiers: How the 

Generation of Officers Born of Vietnam Revolutionized the American Style of 

War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); Thomas L. McNaugher and Roger L. 

Sperry, Improving Military Coordination: The Goldwater-Nichols Reorganization 

of the Department of Defense (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1994); Adm. 

William J. Crowe and David Chanoff, The Line of Fire: From Washington to the 

Gulf, the Politics and Battles of the New Military (New York: Simon & Schuster, 

1993); Jay C. Mumford, “Reinventing Government: The Case of the Department 

of Defense,” Public Administration Review 56, No. 2 (March/April 1996), 219–20; 

Adm. William A. Owens and James R. Blaker, “Overseeing Cross-Service Trade 

Offs,” Joint Force Quarterly, No. 13 (Autumn 1996), 37–38; Gen. Colin L. Powell, 

interview, “The Chairman as Principal Military Advisor” Joint Force Quarterly, No. 

13 (Autumn 1996), 29–36; L. Parker Temple III, Implosion: Lessons Learned from 

National Security, High Reliability Spacecraft, Electronics, and the Forces Which 

Changed Them (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-IEEE Press, 2012); Gordon N. Lederman, 

Reorganizing the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986

(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999); and Charles Nemfakos, Irv Blickstein, Aine 
190

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

S. McCarthy, and Jerry M. Sollinger, “The Perfect Storm: The Goldwater-Nichols Act 

and Its Effect on Navy Acquisition,” (Washington, DC: RAND, 2010). Most of the 

available literature is partisan, either supporting or criticizing the Goldwater-Nichols 

Act and its consequences.

72 See The Maritime Strategy, a special supplement to Proceedings of the U.S. Naval 

Institute, Jan. 1986; also Peter M. Swartz, Addendum to “Contemporary U.S. Naval 

Strategy: A Bibliography”, (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute, 1987). The Swartz 

bibliography is understandably comprehensive because he was one of the developers of “The Maritime Strategy.” The importance of “The Maritime Strategy” to 

the Navy of the 1980s is clear. The Navy’s senior officers still discuss updating or 

revising it. The persistence of the idea of a maritime strategy unique to the Navy 

suggests a parallel to War Plan Orange developed within the Office of the Chief 

of Naval Operations in the 1920s. But did “The Maritime Strategy” influence the 

Navy the way that the Plan Orange did? Some possible answers to this question are 

in “The Maritime Strategy,” U.S. Naval Institute Professional Seminar Series, Naval 

Air Station, Jacksonville, FL, 29 May 1986. How would a historian know about 

this interesting publication if he or she did not have a contact within the U.S. Naval 

Institute?

73 See the Addendum, cited above, 14-1.

74 Peter D. Haynes, Toward a New Maritime Strategy: American Naval Thinking in the 

Post-Cold War Era (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2015).

75 Norman Friedman, Network-Centric Warfare: How Navies Learned to Fight 

Smarter Through Three World Wars (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2009).
191

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———. “Management Problems of Large Organizations,” Operations Research 44, no. 2 

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194

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———. Victory on the Potomac: The Goldwater-Nichols Act Unifies the Pentagon.

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———. “Innovation and Military Requirements: A Comparative Study.” Santa Monica, 

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Work, Robert O. Naval Transformation and the Littoral Combat Ship. Washington, DC: 

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1996.

U.S. Navy photo
Chapter 5

The Navy, Science, and Professional History

by Gary E. Weir

This analysis will focus on the United States Navy as participant and patron in relation to the scientific community since the opening of the 20th century. 

The sciences that have played the greatest role in furthering the naval mission will 

take center stage, viz., physics, the earth sciences, and oceanography. This exploration will not venture into the literature relating to what the Office of Naval 

Research (ONR) would place outside the realm of federal basic research and 

exploratory development funding. Thus, the historical literature on the history 

of technology, and the applications that emerged from scientific work, will play 

no role here. That is a specialized field all its own. In the present essay, I shall 

critically touch on the more insightful works in the history of the Navy’s interaction with the scientific community, seeking to reveal the direction and nature of 

current scholarly inquiry.

My work as a naval historian first touched the history of science when I 

began exploring the ocean environment as the submarine’s natural habitat. I initiated work in the history of oceanography as soon as the ocean emerged in my 

research as a significant element in the design, construction, and operation of 

these remarkable vessels. From World War II onward, the environment below the 

ocean surface and its varying characteristics, especially temperature, pressure, 

and depth, defined the limits of submarine operations. These same attributes 

challenged engineers and designers as they developed successive generations of 

submarines. Of course the most important element in undersea warfare involves 

an understanding of ocean acoustics. As the submarine began to inhabit the ocean 
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depths for longer periods with silence and detection constant concerns, understanding the forces governing sound in the depths became essential. I needed to 

appreciate the scientific aspect of undersea warfare and how the Navy responded 

over the years to the challenges the ocean presented. Thus, more than a passing 

familiarity with the best literature on the Navy and the scientific community 

became necessary.

A review of the historiography in any field naturally leads a historian to look 

first at the broader treatments of the subject, which usually provide a foundation 

for further work. In this case a reader might expect that I would begin with 

comments on studies like James Phinney Baxter’s Scientists Against Time, which 

reviewed in a penetrating manner the effort to mobilize science to defeat the 

Axis in World War II. In the process, Baxter won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 

1947.1 Moving to the Cold War, I might use David Allison’s fine contribution on 

postwar naval research to Merritt Roe Smith’s compendium, Military Enterprise 

and Technological Change.2 For this presentation, however, I have decided to 

take quite another approach.

In my present position as chief historian at the National Geospatial-Intelligence 

Agency, I have learned to come to terms with the one perpetual feature of our 

history that emerges from every source, text, media, and oral history. I refer to 

the fault lines between the intelligence tradecrafts that came together to form our 

agency in 1996. The stovepipes that protect each tradecraft have, over the last 

20 years, aggressively discouraged collaboration. In the late 1990s, our agency 

actually viewed the placement of cartographers and imagery analysts in the same 

office as a risky experiment. Thankfully, as a result of good leadership and some 

extraordinary developments in methodology, the divisions have softened considerably over the past decade.

As historians, we all realize that the cultural identity of professional communities and the traditions and practices that define them can strongly resist any 

effort at redefinition, combination, or prolonged collaboration. Very often, even 

the importance of the mission cannot persuade a stovepiped community to understand that a combination of skills may prove stronger by an order of magnitude 

for mission success than any singular approach.

As historians, we can also become too comfortable in our splendid isolation. 

Are we historians of science or naval historians? I imagine that all historical 

professionals can stand up and define themselves given their training and special 

interest. As long as we remain within our special category we feel safe. As naval 

historians, we take comfort in and satisfaction from exploring and understanding 

a culture that has absorbed many of us for decades. We examine the nature of 
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Science

the naval experience, its ships, its internal structure, its leaders, and its role in the 

national defense. We carefully dissect the Navy’s internal practices, its reward 

structure, its educational institutions, and its role in the national life.

What happens when we must invite a foreign element into our efforts to 

understand the Navy? What happened when a scholar like Frank Duncan had 

to wrestle with nuclear physics in his relentless effort, through multiple studies 

including a very fine biography, to understand his career-long, fascinating 

burden: Hyman George Rickover? Duncan touched the laboratory world of 

General Dynamics, General Electric, and Westinghouse. He had to explore the 

administrative interaction between the Navy and industry in the effort to create 

the nuclear Navy. He achieved an understanding of entities that were not naval 

in nature, which operated by different standards, and for the profit motive. He 

also offered some of the most important insights into the Navy’s nuclear program 

produced by any historian. He managed this only because he reached outside his 

naval history experience, encountered the business, scientific, and engineering 

communities, and worked hard through research and human contact to understand those cultures. He revealed the product of their encounter with the Navy in 

his history of Rickover, the nuclear Navy, and in his earlier work on the Atomic 

Energy Commission with Richard Hewlett. He taught us the discipline of technology as Rickover viewed it and as industry and science understood it.3 He profitably crossed the cultural boundary through a concerted effort to understand all 

of the components that contributed to the understanding he wished to achieve 

and share.

William M. McBride’s work on science and the Navy has accomplished much 

the same. In his work on the Navy’s “alliance” with academia he demonstrated 

the nature of the conversation, born in the 19th century, between university-based 

science and naval officers. He also provided insights into the distinction between 

line officers and the engineering corps, that arm of the service constantly linked 

in many ways to scientific developments. The Navy of the Great War itself had 

a way to go before it realized how much it truly depended on science’s growing 

knowledge of the natural world, especially in the area of undersea warfare. 

McBride permitted us to look closely at the opportunities World War I offered 

both to pure science and to naval officers motivated to enable science within the 

naval service.4

This need to reach beyond the boundaries of strictly defined naval history 

as suggested by Duncan and McBride also led Kathleen Broome Williams to 

explore the world of computer development in her biography of Rear Admiral 

Grace Hopper and the personal struggles of a number of important women in her 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

volume on the improbable female warriors who managed to penetrate the world 

of science and technology.5

In one of her warrior portraits, Professor Williams examines the career of a 

scientist of my acquaintance, Mary Sears. To understand the life of Mary Sears 

and her accomplishments, any historian would have to set aside all naval history 

assumptions and intellectually embrace Sears in her context as a marine biologist 

at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). Sears served in the Navy 

as a WAVE (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) during World 

War II, but she became a vital part of the wartime role of ocean science and 

an important link with the Navy given her senior position at the Hydrographic 

Office. At one point in my research at Woods Hole, I uncovered a letter written 

by the institution director, Columbus Iselin, in which he accidentally referred 

to Sears with the male personal pronoun. She had become a natural part of the 

male-dominated ocean science community. Even as a WAVE she lived as a physical part of WHOI and a thread in the ocean science fabric.

Williams provides an excellent model for the type of historical analysis that 

can successfully and willingly cross between professional cultures to examine 

aspects of the naval experience that we can illuminate only in that way. She has 

successfully overcome the inclination to remain within the familiar cultural 

milieu of the Navy. Williams realized that in no other way could she reach 

Mary Sears and her fellow warriors.

Thus, this historian feels strongly that the best work examining the intersection between science and the U.S. Navy seeks to explore the relationship between 

two professional cultures and the extent to which that relationship affected the 

mission-related work of both.

In his work on nuclear testing and the broad ramifications of Project Vela 

Uniform, Kai-Henrik Barth reveals a situation in which government funding 

increased by a factor of 30 in the 1950s and 1960s in an effort to monitor Soviet 

nuclear testing. All of the services and their efforts to develop nuclear capability 

depended in part on the knowledge thus gained. In this case, Barth looked at the 

most powerful of the scientific groups that touched the defense establishment 

during the Cold War, those working in weapons-related physics. His analysis 

demonstrates that scientists in pursuit of knowledge—that is, science for its own 

sake in the purest form—did not compromise their intent by taking defense 

dollars to work on military projects. Barth strongly rejects the suggestion that 

defense money and influence distorted the goals of science and violated the intent 

of scientific inquiry. Both scientists and the United States government derived 

what they wanted from a mutual experience: an investment without compromise.
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Science

In Barth’s view, the scientists involved saw the effort to monitor nuclear 

activity as an opportunity to advance their work while providing a byproduct 

that would satisfy the needs of those desiring to achieve an arms control treaty 

with the Soviet Union.

Many historians of science have energetically refused to agree. The 

Distortionist Theory as Barth describes it, pervades the history of science literature and appears in its clearest form in the writings of Paul Foreman, a historian 

of considerable influence, whose best works look into the early history of nuclear 

physics.6 He and some others believe that defense funding, and the motives behind 

the goals of the Navy or any other service, divert pure science from its quest for 

knowledge into avenues that corrupt the practice or reduce science to a support 

function for military or political ends. This view presents the possibility that any 

naval involvement in scientific work would naturally pervert the scientific process. 

This perspective has influenced the way some historians of science look at the relationship between scientists and any arm of the government, including the Navy.7

In his groundbreaking work on the laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute 

of Technology and Stanford University, Stuart Leslie lamented the tendency of 

defense dollars to often determine scientific projects and the policies that guide 

engineering, engineering education, and the development of technology. If some 

of the best and most provocative work happens relative to naval needs and goals, 

does that not skew the larger world of scientific progress, professional education, 

and the choices we make as a society? Leslie’s work puts the question in a more 

compelling form than does Foreman. This author must also take care in reading 

Leslie because I am from that generation that experienced the Vietnam War and 

its effect on American society. The passion of the groups Leslie examines, from 

the student protesters on the one side to Charles Stark Draper on the other, brings 

me back to my days waiting for my number to come up in the draft lottery and I 

can feel that familiar social and political tension in his excellent narrative.8

However, while Leslie looks for science to divert attention from weaponry 

to more peaceful and constructive ends, he also sees the reasons for continued 

defense work at the laboratories, not all of which rested purely on the availability of funding. In my own effort to explore this same period, I discovered that 

underwater acoustics research not only offered the possibility of Soviet submarine detection, but also a much deeper understanding of the nature of the ocean, 

as well as ways of monitoring global warming, measuring tides, and determining 

water transport as well as the migration patterns of ocean mammals. Only by 

reaching across the boundaries between science and naval concerns can we attain 

this level of historical understanding.
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

We can see insights similar to those derived by Barth and some of Leslie’s 

themes in Donald MacKenzie’s historical sociology of nuclear missile guidance, 

Inventing Accuracy. MacKenzie very effectively illuminates the development of 

accurate missile targeting systems by Charles Stark Draper and others as both a 

product of a particular historical dynamic and as a social creation. He concludes 

that the achievement could only happen as a “complex process of conflict and 

collaboration.” This author found MacKenzie’s work very useful when working 

on An Ocean in Common and serving as head of contemporary history at the 

U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command. I followed MacKenzie’s lead and, 

influenced by sociologist Clifford Geertz, closely examined the role of cultural 

translators in facilitating the kind of teamwork that both Barth and MacKenzie 

discovered as the primary factor enabling successful collaboration between 

science and the military services. Cultural translators would use their knowledge 

of both communities, developed over time, through war, friendship, common 

interest, and training, to enable the communication necessary to permit both 

scientists and naval personnel to work together effectively. In that way they 

sought to satisfy both themselves and the goals of their patron.9

Very often those who define themselves as historians of science naturally 

have further questions to ask about the present subject relationship from their 

own cultural perspective. The question of classification frequently and legitimately arises. With the results of much naval-inspired research shrouded behind 

classification markings, how can shared knowledge advance humanity, inspire 

other inquiries, or encourage international collaboration? In reality, has the military truly taken control of the direction and nature of fundamental research? The 

debate on classification, although considered naive by many naval historians, has 

emerged over the years as a very legitimate concern. Michael Dennis, a historian 

of science whose work I respect, asked a question a few years ago in an article 

synthesizing the contributions of many scholars to a single volume of the journal 

Social Studies of Science. I paraphrase:

What might have happened if the Navy declassified earlier than it did at 

the beginning of this century, the climate data that led many to eventually 

accept the reality of global warming?

This concern remains pressing and real. Might concerted action and policy 

come to the fore sooner?10 This problem still confronts both historians of science 

and naval historians, often unnecessarily. Declassification takes place far too 

slowly and far too late.
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Science

The earth sciences offer yet another conundrum. In an article examining 

military influence on what he calls the environmental sciences, historian of 

science Ronald Doel looked at the ways in which the Navy and other governmental groups influenced the selection of work considered essential, the ways in 

which scientists pursued these projects, and the selections of the questions they 

asked of the data. Can the process of scientific investigation and experimentation 

fall easily within the confines of an Office of Naval Research contract? ONR 

does not offer grants, but rather carefully composed contracts. In other words, 

can scientific inquiry have so clearly defined parameters that any scientist could 

project the beginning, middle, and end of an original research project in terms 

of a contract? What does this process do to the nature of scientific inquiry? Does 

this system encourage younger scientists to frame their work in a different way in 

an effort to achieve short-term results? In addition, if the system assists only those 

sciences the Navy values, does this amount to a setback for science in general?11

In addressing Doel’s very legitimate concerns, the early years of the Naval 

Research Laboratory (NRL) provide an interesting and profitable set of observations. In his excellent dissertation on the development of radar at NRL, historian 

David Allison commented on the early years of research practice at the new laboratory created by the Naval Consulting Board and Congress. A large measure of 

the resources necessary to carry out research at NRL certainly came from the 

Navy bureaus, but the basic research money largely came from Congress. The 

internal administration of NRL initiated projects and dispensed the resources, 

set priorities, and managed projects according to its own judgment.12 Only when 

direct naval application loomed on the horizon did the bureaus assume direction.

When ONR emerged as the Office of Research and Inventions in 1947, 

it operated in much the same manner. Interviewing Gordon Lill, head of the 

geophysics branch of ONR and the premier source of oceanographic funding 

in the 1950s and 1960s, provided me with unique insights into ONR operation. 

Similar comments by Arthur Maxwell, Lill’s deputy and later head of the Institute 

for Geophysics at the University of Texas, confirmed those insights. They both 

recalled that rules did not exist; they wrote them as they went along. The system 

was absolutely flexible. Their personal relationships with various major scientists, 

including a number of institution directors, led them to provide ONR’s funds 

to those directors, permitting their trusted associates to invest the money for 

the Navy’s purposes while serving science at the same time. Lill and Maxwell 

assumed the latter, and knew these friends and World War II veterans would 

make sure they never lost sight of the Navy’s purpose. Columbus Iselin, Woods 

Hole director, once commented that without ONR money he and his colleagues 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

could do little more than explore Buzzards Bay in their smallest research vessel, 

Asterias.

13

Did the system change over time? It did, but many historians of science 

assume that those who used and administered it in the 1950s and 1960s would 

recognize ONR practice in the 1980s and 1990s.14 No professional historian 

should make that assumption. This knowledge becomes analytically important 

when one realizes that one key to the nature of the naval-science relationship 

in the 20th century largely rests with organizations like the National Research 

Council, the Naval Consulting Board, NRL, and ONR. The last became far 

more influential and powerful than any of its government-inspired cousins. These 

issues and institutions need more professional historical attention.

In some cases, ONR’s policies and the Navy’s priorities did occasionally 

leave some avenues of scientific research out in the cold. Doel especially points 

this out. Remember, ONR represented the only source of government funding for 

science after World War II until the advent of the National Science Foundation 

(NSF) in 1950. For years after the arrival of NSF, ONR still acted as the premier 

investor of government funds in science. For the Navy’s part, physical oceanography arose as one of the most important avenues of inquiry, especially in the 

realm of antisubmarine warfare and pro-submarine matters. As a consequence, 

the Navy paid little attention to disciplines like marine biology, which suffered 

from a lack of funding in the years after World War II, when ONR emerged as 

the premier source of funding for the ocean and earth sciences.

To those historically examining Navy-related scientific work, it often seems 

that the service’s perpetual presence and considerable resources truly placed the 

scientific community in an awkward position. As a result, a number of influential 

works have analyzed certain topics in a way that resonates very well with the 

Distortionist Theory mentioned by Barth. One case in particular introduced me 

to the distortionist perspective as I initiated my research into naval oceanography 

back in the early 1990s.

In the summer of 1993, I rode a bus down from Logan Airport to Woods 

Hole, returning from a research visit to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography 

during my work on An Ocean in Common. Leaving the bus at the Martha’s 

Vineyard ferry terminal, I noticed the scientist Allyn Vine walking down the 

street from his home on Juniper Point, just a short distance away. My wife had 

told him when I was due to arrive and he came down with a rather intense 

look on his usually jovial face. He carried with him a book entitled A Fragile 

Power: Scientists and the State by Chandra Mukerji, a sociologist attached to the 

communications department at the University of California, San Diego. He asked 
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me if I had seen the study and I had to admit that I had not, even though it had 

appeared roughly four years earlier. He gave me a questioning look and simply 

said that the book did not describe the world in which he matured as a scientist. 

He felt that the book’s author had totally missed the mark.

In the days following that encounter I read the book and immediately understood the problem Vine had with it. Mukerji’s thesis asserts that the Navy used 

the funds dispersed by ONR to reduce a cadre of scientists to the status of an 

auxiliary workforce, suitable for fulfilling the operational scientific needs of the 

service given the threats presented by the Cold War.15

It is my habit in working major projects to dive deeply into the archival 

primary sources with my own preliminary questions before exploring any extant 

secondary literature. While this may go against the graduate school grain, I 

believe it is important to have a preliminary grasp of the source material before 

appreciating how other historians and academics analyzed those documents and 

offered the conclusions they have drawn.

In the Mukerji case, this process proved particularly valuable. Initially, I 

noticed that I could not track any of the interview quotations, because the author 

granted all subjects anonymous attribution. A serious historian would want to 

evaluate the information offered by these people in a larger professional context. 

This could not happen in this study. I have done more than 400 oral histories in 

my career and no subject has ever asked me for anonymity. The need to withhold 

names seemed a bit odd in this case. The most important discovery I made while 

reading Mukerji’s book related to ONR: While that office obviously played a very 

important role in her analysis, she never used the ONR records in RG-298 at the 

Washington National Records Center at Suitland, Maryland.

She explored the way the Navy and the oceanographic community interacted 

and never once used naval primary sources. Her analysis remained within the 

scientific stovepipe and followed carefully the observations of the eminent sociologist Robert Merton regarding the nature of the scientific community, its practices, expectations, and reward structure.16 Mukerji’s work offered no insights 

into the nature of the Navy in its interaction with ocean scientists. Quotations 

offered from the interviews she conducted confirmed her thesis, but a reader 

could not evaluate the assertions or validate them in the context of the subject’s 

work and career. As an informed historian in the field, I could only guess, which 

one simply cannot do.

Mukerji sees many scientists reduced to providing either sophisticated 

support to naval activity or the data necessary to operate naval weapons systems. 

As a scientist deeply involved in work with the Navy from the earliest days of 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

World War II, Allyn Vine, the creator of the submersible Alvin (DSV-2) and the 

scientist who perfected the bathythermograph, did not recognize the world she 

described. That is because that world never existed.

Doubtless, all of it seemed perfectly reasonable to the author of A Fragile 

Power as seen from the perspective of a sociologist working with sources directly 

related only to the scientific community. However, she examined a relationship,

which implied the presence of at least two entities. In this case, each had a strong 

cultural heritage, its own practices, professional habits, and technical language. 

The naval culture does not shine through in any of her narrative and naval intrusion into the scientific world via ONR appeared as an alien influence. Very little 

suggested either a fluency with things naval or an appreciation of ONR and its 

internal practices, the latter often based upon close friendships developed during 

World War II between senior scientists and those tasked with dispensing ONR 

resources to various scientific specialties.

Professor Mukerji also failed to explore the common use of summer studies 

like Projects Hartwell (1950) and Nobska (1956) which gave birth to systems like 

the undersea sound surveillance system (SOSUS) and the submarine-launched 

Polaris missile system. The summer study rationale brought together a critical 

mass of scientists and naval personnel to examine closely, precisely defined naval 

needs and issues over the course of a summer. The dynamic here would have 

revealed a great deal about the relationship Mukerji sought to examine, but her 

study gives no indication that she knew these things existed. Summer Studies still 

perform this function, notably in the case of the on-call services of the Jasons, 

currently administratively supported by the Mitre Corporation.

The Mukerji study frequently appears in bibliographies of historical works 

on the Navy and science. Even when her views do not find universal acceptance, 

for some unknown reason they still help frame the debate and discussion over the 

Navy’s relationship with science.

Any naval historian would find the results of historical analyses ignoring 

naval sources a bit questionable, both in a professional sense and as an indicator 

of simple research gone wrong. In an exceedingly long article, Naomi Oreskes 

explored naval research into oceanography and the discovery of the hydrothermal vents off the Washington and Oregon coasts.17 While using the archives 

of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Scripps—save for a small 

number of primary sources related to the Naval Research Laboratory—this piece 

of work also ignores the Suitland collection of ONR records in RG-298. Orestes 

drew conclusions about the nature of the collaboration between science and the 

Navy that do harmonize with the better contributions to the literature. However, 
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many of the links she makes in the course of her narrative contribute little to an 

accurate understanding of deep submergence, seemingly related projects, and the 

projects themselves.

Oreskes explores the origins of Alvin and Aluminaut, the deep-diving submersibles, linking them to the need to maintain the submarine acoustic warning nets 

in the Atlantic and Pacific, with secondary applications to basic science related 

to physical oceanography and ocean bottom geology. She never links the origins 

of Alvin to the 1963 loss of the nuclear-powered submarine Thresher (SSN-593). 

The inability to reach Thresher led the Navy to look more closely at this kind of 

vessel. Her assessment of Allyn Vine takes him at his word, that he saw himself as 

a Navy-related oceanographer. However, she never really tells us what that meant 

for Vine, but uses this identity to demonstrate the close link between Navy goals 

and intentions and the origins of these submersibles. Her article offers no naval 

sources that might confirm or contest her assertions. She also links the submersibles to Project Artemis, an active acoustic detection system proposed for the 

Atlantic based upon an active, at-sea sound source with submerged Texas towers 

holding the acoustic reflection receivers. She uses sources prepared by eminent 

scientists Robert Frosch and Alan Berman but fails to inform us that the project 

never came to fruition owing to the size and unwieldy nature of the components. 

The passive acoustic SOSUS system presented more than sufficient warning of a 

Soviet submarine presence.

Not having explored naval sources and oral histories, she also failed to 

discover the dual nature of the word “Artemis,” which presented some confusion at the time. While certainly the code name for the active system Oreskes 

described, it had another significant meaning. If she had read other studies or oral 

histories, especially those held by the Naval History and Heritage Command, she 

would have realized that Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, also stood, in many 

quarters within the scientific and submarine community, for a scientist actually 

named Hunt. Frederick V. Hunt of the Harvard Underwater Sound Laboratory 

issued the so-called bombshell report in May 1950, proclaiming the possibility 

of a passive system like SOSUS. Highly classified at the time, the very idea of a 

long-range, shore-based, passive acoustic detection system able to sweep an entire 

ocean in one hour, remained “behind the green door,” and needed a convenient 

name to permit even classified discussion. “Artemis” performed that function 

before “Jezebel,” “Michael,” and “Project Caesar” took its place. Without that 

knowledge, much of Oreskes’s narrative on Artemis becomes a bit confusing. 

Naval sources would have enabled a more coherent analysis.

Oreskes also briefly treats the summer studies used by the Navy and the 
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scientific community to solve problems and set priorities. Her article gives these 

gatherings only passing attention in spite of the remarkable products and ideas 

that emerged from them. As I mentioned earlier, these studies would provide an 

excellent subject for an in-depth study of the dynamic that ruled the relationship 

under examination here.

The affliction affecting Oreskes and Mukerji in different ways has reached 

even further in the history of science literature. It appears in the works published 

more recently by Jacob Hamblin.18 He produced a study examining international 

programs in oceanography during the Cold War. I was asked by the journal 

Technology and Culture to review the book, but when Professor Hamblin referred 

to civilian Assistant Secretary of the Navy James Wakelin as an admiral, I knew 

the study might present a few problems. Like Oreskes and Mukerji, Hamblin 

never used ONR records even though virtually every project he examined in 

the book doubtless drew on Navy funds during this period. He did use the strategic program files at the old Naval Historical Center’s Operational Archives, but 

ignored the files on the Hartwell Summer Study, Project Nobska, and the Low 

Report housed in the same place. He understood the need to penetrate analytically down to the individual level, factoring in the personal relationships, but 

without the context that the ONR records would have provided. In an article 

derived from his book and published by the journal Isis, Hamblin concluded that

[D]espite the confluence of interests between the Navy and oceanographers, 

there was a decisive difference in their views as to the ultimate utility of basic 

research. This difference stemmed largely from scientists’ limited perception 

of science as the capital for new technology and the Navy’s perception of 

science as the collection of operational data for existing technology.19

The conclusion relative to “operational data” conforms exactly to the analysis presented by Mukerji. Hamblin consulted strategic program files, which 

would naturally review scientific inquiries underway that should provide immediate help addressing the perceived threats that any strategy must confront. 

Those who composed these records would take pains to make sure the weapons 

systems would perform. However, Hamblin never consulted the ONR files that 

would directly reveal the nature of the relationship between the Navy and the 

scientific community that would appear in the ONR records. Only then would 

the files from WHOI, Scripps, and other institutions actually make sense. Since 

ONR enabled many of the summer studies, the reasoning behind them and the 

relationships that made them so productive would also reside there. Hanblin’s 
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work in the records of the National Academy of Sciences National Research 

Council files should have provided an additional naval perspective because of 

ONR involvement and the maritime emphasis of a good number of the projects 

he examined. Both in his book and the article on the Navy and science he 

published in Isis in 2002, naval culture does not emerge. He never took the time 

to explore the nature of the records sufficiently to understand the culture of the 

scientific community’s partner in these cases. He remained within the stovepipe 

with all of his conclusions.

Many historians of science also feel that the ONR records reside under a 

cloak of classification. Actually, the bulk of the documents most useful in cases 

related to the environmental sciences and oceanography no longer carry restrictions or actually offer perfect cases for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 

actions. Furthermore, any exploration of these records should happen in conjunction with oral histories left by the major players. Professor Hamblin knew of the 

interviews resident at Scripps and Woods Hole, but never looked at those housed 

at the U.S. Navy’s Operational Archive, done with many of the seminal players 

in these matters. Only through use of those interviews would the actual nature of 

the Navy-science relationship begin to emerge.

Unfortunately, no comprehensive history of ONR has yet appeared. The 

history sponsored by the Sloan Foundation and ONR written by Harvey 

Sapolsky in 1990 never achieved the scope envisioned by the original project. 

Professor Sapolsky felt obliged to turn his attentions elsewhere and the history 

became six rather brief chapters that did not deeply probe the nature of the organization or sufficiently explore its significance. The first three chapters provide 

a much needed exploration of ONR’s origins, but the last chapters do not offer 

the detailed insight that the literature needs. That history still awaits composition. However. Professor Sapolsky did explore the changes in ONR, owing to 

close congressional oversight, that altered the habits of the first two postwar 

decades into the stricter contract system many of the history of science community currently identify with ONR practice.20

As an avenue of naval-scientific advancement, albeit of a very different 

sort, the NRL commissioned science writer Ivan Amato in 1998 to prepare a 

75th-anniversary narrative. Amato provided an excellent foundation for an 

appreciation of the laboratory’s origins and achievement. This work provides a 

sound basis for appreciating the many very specific reports about NRL’s scientific 

activity that do not historically reach outside the realm of naval culture.

To understand NRL’s role in naval science, one has to appreciate the laboratory not as a commissioning agent on the ONR model, but as a practitioner. 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

In this role some of the best historical work comes from historians like David 

Allison, mentioned earlier, and the works of the late NRL historian David van 

Keuren on progressivism, science, and the military as exemplified by the NRL in 

its early years, as well as Hoyt Taylor’s 25-year review of NRL’s history penned 

in 1948.21 The functioning and nature of the laboratory emerged in studies like 

historian Bruce Hevley’s examination of NRL’s work in ultra-violet and X-ray 

astronomy.

NRL deserves a great deal more attention, especially for its work appreciating various geospatial aspects of the Earth. NGA has taken particular note of 

the NRL’s activities in this sphere. A bureaucratic blunder caused the National 

Archives and Records Administration to dispose of the records documenting 

NRL’s role in the Vanguard program. In spite of this tragedy, the 1969 history of 

that effort published as a NASA report took the naval effort out of the laboratory’s realm and moved it into the larger initiative that drove the early space flight 

competition with the Soviet Union. This examination of the Vanguard missile 

and satellite program by Constance McLaughlin Green and Milton Lomask 

provided an indication of the Navy’s role, exploring NRL’s contribution as well 

as the support provided by ONR. These historians made a beginning that other 

documentation and oral histories might analytically resolve in the future.

The sources feeding the history of the Navy’s relationship with science 

clearly demonstrate a work-in-progress led and facilitated by individuals who 

could appreciate the cultural divergence between the two communities and yet 

still recognize the possibilities. In writing his book An Ocean in Common, this 

author discovered this truth emerging repeatedly from all manner of primary 

sources. In the aftermath of World War I, the relationship and its productivity 

rested with personal ties between scientists and ranking naval officers. Two of 

the most important ocean scientists of the century, Roger Revelle and Richard 

Fleming, went to sea on their first major cruise because Thomas Wayland 

Vaughan, director of the Scripps Institution, knew the Hydrographer of the Navy 

who needed his help. Arrangements between professional colleagues counted for 

much of the opportunity for training and advancement. Allyn Vine, creator of the 

Alvin submersible, and J. Lamar Worzel, co-discoverer of the deep sound channel 

and its amazing acoustic transmission properties, found themselves at Woods 

Hole as World War II began. They came with Maurice Ewing, an emerging leader 

in the field of geophysics and at the invitation of Columbus Iselin, the director of 

the WHOI. Their ability to understand the Navy’s needs and communicate the 

value of their work saved countless lives. Ewing taught them, as Kai-Henrik Barth 

demonstrated in his history, that they could do groundbreaking science while 
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satisfying the needs of their naval patron. The two were not mutually exclusive.

Friendships forged by the war did not end in 1945 with the conflict. Much 

of what ONR became rested on the personal trust established between naval 

officers and scientists, between ship-drivers and seekers, made firm by cultural 

translators who understood both communities and could facilitate between 

them. Part of the future in this field must determine how and why that changed. 

The relationships touched by the Navy had a flexibility and rested on a personal 

basis, much of which has eroded. We need to understand that process. A lack of 

understanding or just poor research and analysis has resulted in the distorsionist 

view discussed earlier. The Navy’s relationship with science and scientists became 

much more professionally intimate than many historians of science realize.

In conclusion, let me share with you a mistake that I made, one that I hope 

other naval historians will not repeat. When Allyn Vine gave me Chandra 

Mukerji’s book, I read it, suspected the problems that it had, but I never sought 

to review it for the larger naval history community. I should have. A conversation about her approach needed to begin at that point. We now need to do 

these things. Naval historians need to enter this intellectual debate aggressively. 

We need to explore the history of science and the Navy in a way that respects 

Duncan, Barth, Williams, MacKenzie, Leslie, and others. We need to challenge 

analyses that fall terribly short and we need to fill gaps in the literature. We 

need to address the interaction between the Navy and science in a professional 

way; in a way that our graduate mentors prescribed all those years ago when we 

learned how to do history. In the coming days, if a young naval historian decides 

to look at the summer study phenomenon alone, so much about the relationship 

will emerge. Naval historians need to challenge those who have virtually ignored 

ONR and RG-298. You cannot validly examine the relationship in question here 

without the ONR records. It is simply not possible.

Find the excellent literature, not all of which I could address in my time here, 

learn from it, and build upon it. Because of some of the flaws I have mentioned, 

one can do a great deal in this field, but only by taking care to explore and understand the part of the relationship that remains external to the naval experience. 

Bring yourself to the point at which fluid intellectual movement between cultures 

becomes possible. Know the sources, interview as many of the players as you 

can. Your analysis will broaden and your insights deepen. That exploration will 

prove fascinating. In the process you will illuminate both the Navy and its most 

significant partner.
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Notes

1 James Phinney Baxter, Scientists Against Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968).

2 David Allison, “U.S. Navy Research and Development since World War II,” Merritt 

Roe Smith, Military Enterprise and Technological Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT 

Press, 1985), 289–328.

3 Francis Duncan, Rickover and the Nuclear Navy: The Discipline of Technology

(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press [Hereafter, NIP], 1990); Rickover (Annapolis, 

MD: NIP, 2001).

4 William M. McBride, “The ‘Greatest Patron of Science’: The Navy Academia Alliance 

and U.S. Naval Research, 1896–1923,” The Journal of Military History 57: 7–33.

5 Kathleen Broome Williams, Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea (Annapolis, 

MD: NIP, 2004); Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in 

World War II (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2001).

6 Paul Foreman, “Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as a Basis for 

Physical Research in the United States, 1940–1960,” Historical Studies in the 

Physical and Biological Sciences 18 (1987): 149–229.

7 Kai-Henrik Barth, “The Politics of Seismology: Nuclear Testing, Arms Control, and 

the Transformation of a Discipline,” Social Studies of Science 33, no. 5 (October 

2003): 743–81.

8 Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-IndustrialAcademic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York: Columbia University 

Press, 1993).

9 Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile 

Guidance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: 

Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

10 Michael Aaron Dennis, “Earthly Matters: On The Cold War and the Earth Sciences,” 

Social Studies of Science 33, no. 5 (October 2003): 809–19.

11 Ronald E. Doel, “Constituting the Postwar Earth Sciences: The Military’s Influence 

on Environmental Sciences in the USA After 1945,” Social Studies of Science 33, no. 

5 (October 2003): 635–66.

12 David Allison, New Eye for the Navy: The Origin of Radar at the Naval Research 

Laboratory, NRL Report 8466 (Washington, DC: NRL, 29 September 1981), 52–53ff.

13 Gary E. Weir, An Ocean In Common: American Naval Officers, Scientists, and the 

Ocean Environment (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001).

14 Harvey Sapolsky, Science and the Navy: A History of the Office of Naval Research

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), ch. 1–3.

15 Chandra Mukerji, A Fragile Power: Scientists and the State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton 

University Press, 1990).

16 Robert K. Merton, On Social Structure and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago 

Press, 1996).

17 Naomi Oreskes, “A Context of Motivation: U.S. Navy Oceanographic Research and 

the Discovery of Sea-Floor Hydrothermal Vents,” Social Studies of Science 33, no. 5 

(October 2003): 697–742.
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18 Jacob D. Hamblin, Oceanographers and the Cold War: Disciples of Marine Science

(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005).

19 ———, “The Navy’s ‘Sophisticated’ Pursuit of Science: Undersea Warfare, the Limits 

of Internationalism, and the Utility of Basic Research,” Isis 93: 1–27.

20 Harvey Sapolsky, Science and the Navy: A History of the Office of Naval Research

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

21 David van Keuren, “Science, Progressivism, and Military Preparedness: The Case 

of the Naval Research Laboratory, 1915–1923,” Technology and Culture (1992); 

A. Hoyt Taylor, The First Twenty-Five Years of NRL (Washington, DC: Navy 

Department, 1948).
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Bibliography

Allison, David. “U.S. Navy Research and Development since World War II.” In Merritt 

Roe Smith, Military Enterprise and Technological Change, 289–328. Cambridge 

MA: MIT Press, 1985. 

———. New Eye for the Navy: The Origin of Radar at the Naval Research Laboratory. 

NRL Report 8466. Washington, DC: Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), 29 

September 1981. 

Barth, Kai-Henrik. “The Politics of Seismology: Nuclear Testing, Arms Control, and the 

Transformation of a Discipline,” Social Studies of Science, vol. 33, no. 5 (October 

2003): 743–81.

Baxter, James Phinney. Scientists Against Time. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968.

Dennis, Michael Aaron. “Earthly Matters: On the Cold War and the Earth Sciences,” 

Social Studies of Science, vol. 33, no. 5 (October 2003): 809–19.

Doel, Ronald E. “Constituting the Postwar Earth Sciences: The Military’s Influence on 

Environmental Sciences in the USA after 1945,” Social Studies of Science, vol. 33, 

no. 5 (October 2003): 635–66.

Duncan, Francis. Rickover and the Nuclear Navy: The Discipline of Technology.

Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press [Hereafter, NIP], 1990.

———, Rickover: The Struggle for Excellence. Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2001.

Foreman, Paul. “Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as a Basis for Physical 

Research in the United States, 1940–1960,” Historical Studies in the Physical and 

Biological Sciences 18 (1987): 149–229.

Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology. New 

York: Basic Books, 1983.

Hamblin, Jacob D. “The Navy’s ‘Sophisticated’ Pursuit of Science: Undersea Warfare, the 

Limits of Internationalism, and the Utility of Basic Research,” Isis 93 (2002): 1–27. 

———. Oceanographers and the Cold War: Disciples of Marine Science. Seattle: 

University of Washington Press, 2005.

Leslie, Stuart W. The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic 

Complex at MIT and Stanford. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

MacKenzie, Donald. Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile 

Guidance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.

McBride, William M. “The ‘Greatest Patron of Science’: The Navy Academia Alliance 

and U.S. Naval Research, 1896–1923,” Journal of Military History 57 (1993): 7–33.

Merton, Robert K. On Social Structure and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago 

Press, 1996.

Mukerji, Chandra. A Fragile Power: Scientists and the State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton 

University Press, 1990.

Oreskes, Naomi. “A Context of Motivation: U.S. Navy Oceanographic Research and the 

Discovery of Sea-Floor Hydrothermal Vents,” Social Studies of Science, vol. 33, no. 

5 (October 2003): 697–742.

Sapolsky, Harvey. Science and the Navy: A History of the Office of Naval Research.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Taylor, A. Hoyt. The First Twenty-Five Years of NRL. Washington, DC: Navy Department, 

1948.

van Keuren, David, “Science, Progressivism, and Military Preparedness: The Case of the 

Naval Research Laboratory, 1915–1923,” Technology and Culture 33 (1992): 710–36.
219

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Weir, Gary E. An Ocean in Common: American Naval Officers, Scientists, and the Ocean 

Environment. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001.

Williams, Kathleen Broome. Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea. Annapolis, MD: 

NIP, 2004.

———. Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in World War II.

Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2001.
160117-N-XT273-325 U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Justin Stumberg

Sailors aboard the Arleigh Burke–class guided-missile destroyer Ross (DDG-71) conduct sea 

and anchor detail before arriving at Rota, Spain, in January 2016. Ross, forward deployed to 

Rota, was on routine patrol in the U.S. Sixth Fleet area of operations in support of U.S. national 

security interests in Europe.
Chapter 6

The Social History of the U.S. Navy, 

1945–Present

by Edward J. Marolda

INTRODUCTION 

The special circumstances of the early Cold War significantly influenced the social evolution of the U.S. Navy. As the greatest political, economic, and military power on earth after World War II, the United States assumed the responsibility with the support of key allies for ensuring global peace and prosperity. This 

mission suggested the need to integrate into the Navy America’s most intellectually 

and physically capable men and women, regardless of their race, gender, religion, 

or ethnic identity. The advent of nuclear weapons and nuclear-driven warships; 

sonars, radars, communications, and other electronic equipment; jet-powered aircraft; and ballistic and shorter-range missiles required the enlistment of America’s 

most skilled workers and its brightest minds. Forward-thinkers argued that the 

Navy’s global deployment could not be sustained by the limited number of mostly 

white, Anglo-Saxon men who constituted the pre–World War II Navy. So, the 

needs of the service called for the reduction of existing social and cultural barriers 

that had prevented the full exploitation of America’s human resources.

Another factor influencing the change in the Navy’s post–World War II 

demographic composition was the growing desire of many Americans for the 

equal treatment of all citizens. The positive contribution in World War II by 

women, African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and other 

members of minority communities had opened the eyes of some—certainly 

not all—of their fellow citizens to the patriotism of those groups and to their 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

often ill treatment by the military services. The exploits of Cook Third Class 

Doris Miller, the Tuskegee Airmen, and other black Americans who fought and 

died for their country but who suffered discrimination piqued the conscience of 

many. So too did the valiant service in Europe of the Army’s Japanese-American 

442nd Infantry Regiment, one of the most highly decorated units in U.S. military history, which was juxtaposed with the incarceration of Japanese-Americans 

at internment camps throughout the West. The courage of Ira Hayes, one of 

the flag-raisers on Iwo Jima, and Captain Ernest Evans, whose leadership and 

self-sacrifice helped win the Battle of Leyte Gulf, highlighted the contribution of 

America’s first inhabitants. The fact that “Rosie the Riveter” and hundreds of 

thousands of other women replaced men in the production of airplanes, ships, 

weapons, and ammunition or transported combat aircraft overseas enlightened 

many of their compatriots about female skills in the workplace and in the military and potential for future employment in the armed services.

A fully integrated Navy devoid of sexism, racism, discrimination, and associated ills, however, was far from realized in the years following World War II. 

The naval service took positive measures to improve the lot of minority sailors 

during the latter half of the 20th century, but grudgingly and often as the result 

of pressure from the executive branch, Congress, progressive interest groups, and 

the female, black, Hispanic, and other communities. Too many Navy leaders 

doubted that members of the minority communities had the education, skills, or 

aptitude to serve alongside white male sailors in the fleet. Over time, minority 

men and women moved into the service’s mainstream but progress was excruciatingly slow and sometimes painful for those sailors denied equal treatment by their 

Navy. Indeed, black sailors rebelled against what they considered discriminatory 

treatment during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Throughout their service but 

especially during the 1990s, many Navy females had to endure sexual discrimination and harassment while carrying out their duties. For years, Congress’ 

combat exclusion law hindered the ability of women to operate with men on an 

even plane. Despite all the obstacles to their advancement, however, minority 

leaders and sailors took advantage of opportunities and ultimately established 

themselves as full-fledged members of the Navy family.

As will be elaborated on in this paper, historical coverage of social change 

in the modern U.S. Navy has been spotty, narrowly focused, and until the last 

25 years mostly confined to specialized studies. Much of that work has reflected 

first-rate scholarship but it has not been incorporated into the major histories of 

the naval service. To remedy that deficiency and to prevent similar problems with 

future work, this author recommends two major historical endeavors:
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A Social History of the United States Navy, 1945–Present

There is great need for a comprehensive social history of the U.S. Navy from 

World War II to the present. This era was one of the most dynamic in the struggle 

of American women, blacks, Asians, gays, and other minority sailors in the quest 

for dignity and equal opportunity in the naval service. No single work exists that 

encompasses the integration struggles and the Navy’s actions to deal with institutional sexism, racism, discrimination, harassment, and associated ills. There 

are discernable periods of modern naval history that would support a chronological approach to the overall topic. For instance, the late 1940s saw passage 

of hopeful legislation on the integration of women and blacks followed by two 

decades of social retrenchment or at best modest achievement. Paralleling developments in American society, the 1970s witnessed social turmoil in the Navy and 

a renewed focus on improving the opportunities and service of naval personnel. 

The continued advances of women and African Americans during the 1980s were 

offset, at least for women, by the Tailhook scandal and related gender issues of 

the early 1990s.

The standard texts on the modern history of the U.S. Navy treat the service’s 

social history briefly or not at all. Kenneth J. Hagan’s 400-page This People’s 

Navy (1991)1 apparently refers to white male people since no blacks or women 

(other than Hawaiian Queen Liliuokalani) are indexed in the work. The same 

applies to George Baer’s 450-page One Hundred Years of Sea Power (1994).

2 

Other historians incorporate a few short paragraphs on key events. Paolo E. 

Coletta’s 600-page The American Naval Heritage (1987)3 has a few brief paragraphs on women and blacks. The only mention of social issues in Nathan Miller’s 

300-page The U.S. Navy (1997)4 are two short paragraphs on the shipboard 

disturbances of 1972 and Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr.’s Z-Grams. Michael T. 

Isenberg’s Shield of the Republic (1993)5 includes four full pages on social issues, 

but they are hardly balanced against the 800 other pages in his massive tome. The 

histories mentioned above end at the latest in the early 1990s, so there is great 

opportunity for a new work that carries the story forward.

Ample sources exist to support greater coverage of social issues, including 

records in the National Archives, Navy Operational Archives, and the collections 

maintained by the Naval War College, U.S. Naval Academy Library, and many 

other repositories. Only a handful of the U.S. Naval Institute’s (USNI) more than 

225 oral history volumes were accomplished with women, mostly related to their 

service in the World War II. A great many of the interviews with male naval 

leaders, however, contain rich and often frank discussions of social issues with 

which they dealt. The Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) holds 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

hundreds of interviews conducted with veterans of the Cold War and post-Cold 

War Navy. The command’s Navy Reserve Combat Documentation Detachment 

206 gathered hundreds more interviews with naval personnel who served in 

Iraq and Afghanistan. The Naval Historical Foundation holds 196 interviews, 

including those with Rear Admiral Mack C. Gaston, the first black commander 

of the Great Lakes Naval Training Center.6 The Military Women’s Memorial 

Library holds additional interviews with Navy women.7

A History of the U.S. Navy in the 21st Century

With legislation now in place to combat sexism, racism, and other forms of 

outright discrimination and harassment, and with naval personnel the most 

diverse group in the Navy’s history, there is need for a major historical overview. 

Unlike the general tomes identified above, this proposed work should include 

not only the leaders, strategies, combat operations, tactics, weapons, and technologies employed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the fight against terrorism, but also 

how naval officers and enlisted personnel of all ranks have performed in these 

conflicts and how they have been influenced by them. We need to learn the stories 

of individual members of this diverse Navy who acted heroically and those who 

might not have earned distinction but served. Another important factor to be 

investigated is the much more robust role played by members of the Navy Reserve 

in this century’s conflicts as compared to previous eras. Thousands of citizen 

sailors have participated as individual augmentees or in units during the wars in 

Afghanistan and Iraq. David Winkler’s Ready Then, Ready Now, Ready Always 

(2015) on the Navy Reserve has covered some of this experience but much more 

needs to be done.8

An important topic within this overall study would discuss how female 

sailors, as routinely exposed to the dangers of combat as male sailors, have 

fared in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and against terrorists. How have women 

handled Islamic cultural and religious taboos? Have women benefited from their 

gender in situations where men could not operate? Has sexual discrimination 

or harassment seriously compromised their service in the combat theater? What 

female leaders and sailors have earned distinction in combat? A number of works 

have been published on the exploits of Navy women in Afghanistan and Iraq, 

including Navy Nurse Cheryl Ruff’s Ruff’s War (2005)9 and Heidi Kraft’s Rule 

Number Two (2007).

10 Gail Harris in A Woman’s War (2010) describes her 

experiences as a Navy intelligence analyst focusing on Saddam Hussein’s activities in Iraq from 1991 to 2003.11 Still, we need more work on the Navy story in 

this new century.
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HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE 

MODERN U.S. NAVY

The late 1940s witnessed a major push by key naval leaders and female officers, 

many of the latter having served in the WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) during World War II, for a more permanent status in 

the Navy. A key source on the WAVES in the war is Regina T. Akers, Doing 

Their Part: The WAVES in World War II (2000).12 She argues that these Navy 

women made a significant contribution to the war effort that has not been widely recognized. In April 1947, Congress passed the Army-Navy Nurses Act that 

established the Navy Nurse Corps as a permanent staff corps. The WAVES also 

achieved permanent status in the Navy but it took an almost three-year effort by 

determined female leaders and supporters in Congress to bring it about. Hence, 

on 12 June 1948, Congress passed the Women’s Armed Service Integration Act 

(Public Law 625) and President Harry S. Truman signed it into law on July 30. 

The measure provided for the permanent service of officer and enlisted personnel in the regular and reserve components of the armed forces. Few Americans, 

however, were prepared for an across-the-board integration of women into all the 

roles and missions of the military services, especially combat.

Despite the passage of Public Law 625 and measures taken by the Navy 

during the next two decades to integrate women into the service, not until the 

1970s did significant published works begin to appear on the subject. The U.S. 

Naval Institute released Lady in the Navy (1972)13 by Joy Bright Hancock, who 

had served as an enlisted Yeoman (F) in World War I and as a high-ranking 

WAVES officer with the Bureau of Aeronautics in World War II. As one would 

expect, much of Hancock’s memoir covers that early service. Hancock, however, 

was also a primary figure in the passage of Public Law 625 and she discusses at 

length the behind-the-scenes actions to get it passed. While Captain Hancock 

and her subordinates did most of the work preparing for the congressional hearings, male officers made the case to Congress. Hancock considered it entirely 

appropriate that male officers take the lead since women “were not in a position 

of sufficient authority.”14 It also helped that Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, 

General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, 

and other distinguished leaders spoke in favor of the legislation. Regina Akers in 

her positive portrayal, “Joy Bright Hancock: Pioneering Spirit” (2013), concludes 

that Hancock “opened many doors for women in the naval service” and “did so 

with a strong sense of professionalism, innovative thinking, diplomatic skill, and 

open-mindedness.”15
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Senator Margaret Chase Smith (D-ME), another key figure with regard 

to Public Law 625, published her own biography, Declaration of Conscience 

(1972),

16 which reinforces many of Hancock’s observations. At one point, to 

support the employment of Navy women overseas, Smith observed “the Navy 

either needs these women or they do not.”17 Elizabeth Allen in her Navy WAVES 

(1988)18 discusses the critical involvement of Smith and Hancock in the legislative 

process and provides a useful summary and chronology through 1988 of key 

dates relating to Navy women.

Other sources of information and insight can be found in the numerous oral 

history interviews conducted by the U.S. Naval Institute’s John “Jack” Mason 

and Etta Belle Kitchen, the latter a member of the World War II WAVES. Included 

in the collection are the remembrances of Hancock (1969–70), Louise K. Wilde 

(1969), and Winifred Quick Collins (1969), of whom the latter two worked to 

overcome bureaucratic and institutional lethargy during the 1950s and served 

as Assistant Chief of Naval Personnel for Women (ACNP [W]) during the era.19

Additional interviews with female officers and enlisted personnel include those 

with Robin Quigley (1976), Mildred McAfee Horton (1969), Jean Palmer (1969), 

Elizabeth Crandall (1970), Frances Rich (1960), Eleanor Rigby (1970), and Tova 

Peterson Wiley (1969).20 As with other oral histories and personal memoirs, 

these should be used with caution because they can be self-serving and colored 

by sometimes flawed remembrances. Nonetheless, the U.S. Naval Institute oral 

histories frequently provide insight into the actions taken by the Navy with 

regard to women and how these female leaders coped with the many challenges 

they faced. Quigley, for instance, related that long before she proposed dropping 

the term WAVES, Joy Bright Hancock had suggested the same thing. According 

to Quigley, Hancock had written a memorandum, the purpose of which was to 

“say she wished they would stop using the term . . . ‘Wave Officer’ because after 

all, the women were naval officers, not Wave officers.”21

The most in-depth studies of women in the Navy can be found in Crossed 

Currents (1999)22 by Jean Ebbert and Marie-Beth Hall and Serving Proudly 

(2001) by Susan H. Godson.23 Ebbert and Hall, both of whom had long connections to the service and married Navy captains, contend that “ours is not a 

particular feminist stance . . . [but our] sensibilities have been challenged by 

feminist thought.” Hence, “while we have tried to show the genuine professional concerns that lie beneath some of the Navy’s cautious attitudes and decisions about women, we have also described inequities the service has imposed 

on women.”24 Ebbert and Hall conclude, with justification, that Navy women 

have been “all but neglected by historians and biographers.”25 They make the 
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especially apt observation that before the 1980s, accurate and useful information on women in the Navy could only be found in small archival collections, 

newspaper, magazine, and journal articles, obscure memoirs, and interviews. To 

correct that deficiency, Crossed Currents incorporated extensive documentation 

from national and naval archives, libraries, special collections, wide-ranging 

secondary sources and memoirs, magazines and journals articles, oral histories, 

and personal interviews with hundreds of Navy men and women.

A key object of Crossed Currents was to “serve as a general text that will 

acquaint a wide audience with this nearly unknown aspect of 20th-century 

American history [and] a starting point for further research into naval, feminist, 

and social history.”26 It was the authors’ intent to produce a balanced work that 

described the Navy’s acceptance of its need for women and pride in their accomplishments but also its reluctance to accommodate them. For the most part, they 

have achieved their goals. They successfully followed a chronological approach to 

the topic but also put emphasis on women at sea and in combat, pregnancy, child 

care, fraternization, sexual discrimination and harassment, lesbianism, female 

leadership, and other key issues.

Susan H. Godson’s Serving Proudly complements Crossed Currents in that 

both works thoroughly detail the history of women in the Navy in the 20th 

century. Ebbert and Hall focus solely on Navy women other than nurses, the 

latter of whom they conclude were deserving of separate treatment. In contrast, 

at the request of the Naval Historical Center (now Naval History and Heritage 

Command), which sponsored her work, Godson treats the two groups of Navy 

women in parallel. She acknowledges that while the nurses, who generally 

performed long-accepted roles in the military, did not face the same resistance 

from men as non-nurse women, the story of their service has many similarities. 

That argument has merit.27

Godson is a PhD historian and author of Viking of Assault: Admiral John 

Leslie Hall Jr. and Amphibious Warfare (1982)28 and other works. She admits 

that interviewing numerous women in preparation of the book was a learning 

experience since she had not served in the Navy. But her scholarship is first-rate 

and is supported by extensive research in the relevant collections of the National 

Archives, Navy archives, and other repositories and the secondary literature. 

Godson tracks the integration of women in chronological fashion. Close to half 

of the book deals with the World War II and previous eras but individual chapters 

cover developments in the late 1940s, the Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf War, 

and the Tailhook scandal. While Godson’s Serving Proudly does not impart the 

same passion and insider feel as does Ebbert and Hall’s Crossed Currents, it does 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

not avoid contentious issues. Indeed, individual segments expand on pregnancy 

and motherhood, sexual harassment, and sexual discrimination. In short both 

Serving Proudly and Crossed Currents provide solid foundations of information 

and analysis on the history of women in the Navy through the 20th century.

A work that had a significant influence on the books by Godson and Ebbert 

and Hall is Women in the Military (1982; revised edition 1992)29 by retired 

Air Force Major General Jeanne Holm. The author made the salient point that 

women were critical to the post-Vietnam, all-volunteer armed forces and that 

“so integrated are they [women] into the services, and on such a scale, that the 

United States could not go to war without them.”30 Holm’s book includes a sizeable chapter entitled “Taking to the Air and the Sea” that discusses in detail the 

issues related to the integration of Navy women into the aviation and surface 

warfare communities. She relates that the experimental assignment of women 

to hospital ship Sanctuary (AH-17) in the mid-1970s was bound to fail since the 

Navy allowed a double standard to exist on the ship that fueled male resentment: 

“women stood no watches [and] were given the best assignments. . . . Single 

women were allowed to live in off-base housing, while the men lived in the 

barracks or onboard the tugs.”31 Holm’s 1992 revised edition included the service 

of military women in Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf War.

A complementary work is Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider’s Sound Off

(1988),32 which presents excerpts from interviews with 300 women from all the 

services. The topically arranged book looks at the issues of women in combat, 

feminism, pregnancy and childbirth, and the impact of military service on family 

life. The authors observe that, despite occasionally experiencing sexual discrimination and harassment, “most of our interviewees believe in an expanding future 

for women in the military.”33

There is need for a study, similar to Sharon Disher’s First Class: Women Join 

the Ranks at the Naval Academy (1998),34 on the first female sailors who went 

to sea in the 1970s and 1980s. There are ample oral history interviews, journal 

and magazine articles, and archival sources to support a work on the legislative 

and bureaucratic processes that enabled women such as Deborah Gernes and 

Catherine Leahey to join the crews of non-combatant and then combatant ships; 

the plusses and minuses of their reception by male officers and enlisted sailors; 

and the adjustments made by the Navy and the women to make that transition 

successful.
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A NEW ERA FOR AFRICAN-AMERICAN SAILORS

In World War II, many citizens came to recognize the similarity between the 

harsh treatment of religious and ethnic minorities meted out by German Nazis 

and Japanese militarists and America’s historic racism and abuse of blacks. A. 

Philip Randolph and other key black leaders enlisted the support of President 

Franklin D. Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to improve the status 

of blacks in the military. Hence, the Navy allowed the commissioning into the 

Naval Reserve of a small number of black officers (including one warrant officer), 

the subject of Paul Stillwell’s in-depth study The Golden Thirteen (1993).35 While 

Stillwell’s well-written and evocative book focuses on World War II, one chapter 

provides a concise summary of developments with regard to blacks through the 

late 20th century and statistical information on black personnel in the Navy 

in 1992. Stillwell characterizes one of the Golden Thirteen, Dennis D. Nelson 

II, as “a ‘tree shaker’ who did much on behalf of black naval personnel in the 

years following World War II.”36 Nelson, although not a historian, authored a 

short overview entitled The Integration of the Negro into the United States Navy, 

1776–1947 (1948) published by the Navy Department.37

Towering figures in the history of African-American integration into the U.S. 

military during much of the 20th century, Morris J. MacGregor and Bernard 

C. Nalty produced the 13-volume Blacks in the United States Armed Forces: 

Basic Documents (1977).

38 The work presents what they considered to be the 

most significant documents on the U.S. government’s interaction with African 

Americans in the military service from colonial times to the close of the Vietnam 

War. Their research led the authors to conclude: 1) “when in need of manpower, 

the armed forces . . . turned to the Negro;” 2) “influential individuals, acting on 

principle but usually arguing in terms of increased military efficiency, prodded 

the armed forces toward acceptance of blacks and whites as equals”; and 3) “the 

black community, gathering strength and self-awareness, succeeded in exerting 

strong if sometimes indirect pressure upon personnel policies within the armed 

forces.”39 The publisher condensed that work in one volume entitled Blacks in the 

Military: Essential Documents (1981).40 MacGregor then authored the incisive 

Defense Studies: Integration of the Armed Forces: 1940–1965 (1981)41 for the 

Army’s Center of Military History. That well-researched and authoritative analysis describes the successful effort to eliminate the “legal, administrative, and 

social barriers to the black American’s full participation in the military service of 

his country.”42 Given the racial difficulties experienced by the military services in 

the late 1960s and early 1970s, that conclusion appears overly optimistic.
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

In Strength for the Fight (1986), Nalty, a long-time federal historian, 

observes that “racism deprived generations of blacks of . . . basic rights, in the 

process imposing artificial limits on their opportunities within the military.”43

With others, he makes the salient point that “the recurring need for manpower 

prevented the armed forces from continuing to indulge in the wastefulness of 

racism.”44 Half of Nalty’s Strength for the Fight deals with the post–World 

War II era, which he covers in detail, especially the 1948 integration act and its 

consequences, the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, and the services’ successful 

handling of its racial problems in the 1980s. Another useful source on the 

topic is James T. Controvich, African Americans in Defense of the Nation: A 

Bibliography, which identifies relevant books, PhD dissertations, and journal/

magazine articles on blacks in the Navy.45 Significant information on the black 

experience in the military available nowhere else can be can be found in Crisis, 

the magazine of the NAACP; black newspapers such as the Norfolk Journal and 

Guide and the Pittsburgh Courier; and the NAACP papers maintained by the 

Library of Congress.

Improving the Navy’s efficiency in the Cold War became a driving force 

behind the integration of blacks but it had far to go to achieve that goal. In 

1948, black sailors in the Navy’s enlisted force numbered only 4.3 percent of the 

total. Between 1946 and 1948, only 16 African Americans completed Officer 

Candidate School and only 14 blacks were commissioned through the Naval 

Reserve Officer’s Training Corps (ROTC) program. The one memorable event, 

long overdue, was the Naval Academy’s graduation and commissioning of Wesley 

A. Brown, the first African American to graduate from the institution that had 

been established more than 100 years before. The seminal work on Brown and 

his experiences in Annapolis is Robert J. Schneller’s Breaking the Color Barrier

(2005).46 Schneller, a professional historian, argues that Brown succeeded where 

other African-American midshipmen had failed because of a “convergence of 

forces that leveled the playing field.” This success resulted from a “push from 

the black community, national political imperatives, a shift in racial attitudes 

among the American people, direct intervention by leaders, and the strengths and 

abilities of individuals in the trenches.” One key asset was Wesley Brown himself, 

who possessed the “requisite talent.”47

President Harry S. Truman breathed life into the integration effort, for 

the most part to win political favor with voters but he also opposed discrimination against African Americans. On 26 July 1948, the commander in chief 

issued Executive Order 9981, which mandated a policy of “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to 
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race, color, religion, or national origin.”48 The order established a committee to 

advise the President on specific measures to improve the lot of minorities in the 

armed services. And in 1950, Secretary of the Navy Francis P. Matthews issued 

a policy statement prohibiting “discrimination based on race, color, religion, or 

national origin in enlistment, appointment, promotion, or assignment” of Navy 

personnel.49

Starved of budgetary support in the late 1940s, the Navy found itself in 

great need of sailors at the outbreak the Korean War in June 1950. Enabled 

by Truman’s integration order, the Navy increased the number of blacks in the 

half-million-man service from almost 15,000 men in 1950 to 24,000 by the end 

of the conflict in 1953. No longer assigned to segregated units, black sailors 

served on board the Navy’s battleships, aircraft carriers, and other combatants. 

Ensign Jesse L. Brown was one of the first African Americans to earn naval 

aviator wings. He died when his attack plane went down in the mountains of 

North Korea while supporting the 1st Marine Division in its epic December 1950 

battle and withdrawal from Chosin Reservoir. Theodore Taylor in his popular 

work, The Flight of Jesse Leroy Brown (1998), details the officer’s early life and 

education, training as a naval aviator, service on board aircraft carrier Philippine 

Sea (CV-47), and interaction with his wingman and Medal of Honor recipient, Thomas Hudner. Taylor relates the circumstance of Brown’s crash landing 

and death.50

Lenwood G. Davis and George Hill’s Blacks in the American Armed Forces 

(1985) provides a useful guide to magazine and journal articles on black sailors in 

the Korean War.51 An important short summary of the African-American naval 

experience is Bernard Nalty’s contribution entitled Long Passage to Korea in The 

U.S. Navy and the Korean War (2007) series.52 Supported by Nalty’s deep understanding of the topic and knowledge of relevant sources, the illustrated monograph traces the history of blacks in the Navy from the American Revolution on 

but with an emphasis on the Korean War. Nalty is candid about the challenges 

faced by the Navy and its African-American sailors.

One problem that outlasted the Korean War was the racial composition of 

the Steward Branch, whose black sailors served white officers. Naval Academy 

history professor Frederick Harrod, in a scholarly USNI Proceedings article 

(1979), relates that Lester Granger, director of the National Urban League during 

the war, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell (D-NY), and others pressured the 

Navy to desegregate the branch and open up more general Navy billets to blacks.53

At one point, Powell argued that “intelligent, ambitious Negroes are boycotting 

the United States Navy because they are not interested in making the world safe 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

for democracy by shining shoes, nor are they interested in fighting communism 

with frying pans.”54 While only covering the 1930s and early 1940s, Richard 

E. Miller’s The Messman Chronicles (2004) analyzes the challenges faced by 

African-American sailors serving in the segregated Steward Branch.55 The 

Navy redoubled its efforts to integrate Caucasian and Asian-Americans into 

the predominantly black branch, although that effort proceeded slowly during 

the 1950s.

WOMEN IN THE KOREAN WAR

Officer and enlisted women also answered the call to serve in the Korean War. 

The demands of the service increased the number of women in the Nurse Corps 

from 1,921 in 1950 to 3,405 at the peak of the conflict. The nurses did not serve 

ashore in Korea but on board ships of the Military Sea Transportation Service 

and at more than 150 medical stations in the United States and abroad. Nurses 

also served on board hospital ships Consolation (AH-15), Repose (AH-16), and 

Haven (AH-12) off Korea. Navy nurses died serving their country throughout 

the war, for instance when hospital ship Benevolence (AH-13) en route to Korea 

collided with a merchant ship in San Francisco Bay in August 1950. The following 

month, 11 Navy nurses were killed when the plane carrying them to the naval 

hospital at Yokosuka went down in the Marshall Islands. Altogether, the war 

claimed the lives of 29 nurses.56

As recommended by the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the 

Services (DACOWITS), President Truman launched a nationwide campaign in 

late 1951 to encourage female enlistment. Even though the Navy fell short of 

its goal of 11,000 women on active duty, 9,000 did wear Navy blue by war’s 

end. Overall, the number of women in the Navy tripled between 1950 and 

1953.57 While focusing for the most part on non-Navy women, William B. Breuer 

in his War and American Women (1997) provides a useful discussion of the 

activities of DACOWITS from its establishment through 1997 and the political 

issues connected with women in the military and in combat.58

The standard texts on the Navy’s involvement in the Korean War, including 

Malcolm W. Cagle and Frank A. Manson’s The Sea War in Korea (1957), James 

A. Field’s History of United States Naval Operations: Korea (1962), and this 

author’s The U.S. Navy in the Korean War (2007), mention Navy nurses cursorily or not all.59 More focused works include Jan Herman’s Frozen in Memory 

(2006), which covers in detail not only the activities and reminiscences of nurses 
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but also those of doctors, dentists, corpsmen, and other medical organizations 

and personnel.60 The challenges faced by Navy nurses in Korea are also focused 

on in the Women in Military Service for America Foundation work A Defense 

Weapon Known to be of Value (2005).

61 The Navy Nurse Corps records maintained by the Navy’s Operational Archives provide a wealth of information on 

the Korean War experience of individual nurses as do the cruise books for the 

hospital ships that served there, which are held in the Navy Department Library.

INTO THE DOLDRUMS

Despite the passage of key legislation and the positive experience of the Korean 

War, neither the nation nor the Navy aggressively pursued better treatment for 

women and non-white men and their full inclusion in the service during the next 

two decades. Indeed, the period witnessed the continued relegation of women 

to second-class status. Nation-wide, African Americans, Hispanics, Asians and 

other minorities suffered injustices and mistreatment at the hands of racists north 

and south. The national fight over the civil rights and educational opportunities 

of African Americans was divisive, extended, and often violent.

The Navy’s handling of the integration issue in some ways mirrored that of 

society at large, with improvement to the lot of its minority sailors slow in coming. 

No women could serve in combat aircraft or on board battleships, carriers, and 

other combatants. The custom of naval personnel referring to women in the 

service as “WAVES” well into the 1970s, long after the official end of that designation, only hardened the perception that the women were separate from the 

mainstream Navy. One ray of hope occurred in 1956 when President Dwight 

D. Eisenhower signed Public Law 585-84, which enabled the promotion of a 

small number of female lieutenant commanders and commanders. In some ways, 

things got worse for enlisted women. The Navy concentrated women in specific 

functional areas to avoid having to make special arrangements with regard to 

their housing, discipline, and administration. Hence, 90 percent of Navy women 

served in clerical or medical jobs.62

Coauthors Ebbert and Hall conclude, however, that in the 1950s and early 

1960s, when “women in the Navy might have disappeared altogether . . . they 

survived.” The excellence of their work in the administrative, medical, and 

intelligence areas to which they were confined, and their determination to take 

advantage of opportunities, eventually convinced Navy men that they “could no 

longer view their female counterparts as a novelty; a momentary aberration.” 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

An equally relevant observation was that the women “posed no threat to Navy 

men. The fields in which they excelled were seen as peripheral to the Navy’s chief 

reason for being, which was readiness for war at sea.”63

A poignant and descriptive work on the experience of Navy women serving 

in the Vietnam War is former Lieutenant Commander Roberta “Bobbi” Hovis’ 

Station Hospital Saigon (1991).64 Her reminiscence certainly helped refute the 

age-old perception held by many Americans that women could not handle the 

fears of a combat zone. Assigned to the Navy hospital in the South Vietnamese 

capital of Saigon in 1963, she found herself in the middle of a coup attempt 

against the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Gunfire from aircraft, 

artillery, tanks, and infantry weapons splattered her bachelor officer’s quarters 

(BOQ) and on a number of occasions narrowly missed hitting her. Jan Herman, 

former Historian of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, in his Navy Medicine 

in Vietnam (2010), Edward J. Marolda and Oscar P. Fitzgerald in their From 

Military Assistance to Combat (1986), and Thomas J. Cutler in his article 

“Purple for Christmas” (2015), discuss to a greater or lesser degree the service 

of Navy nurses in Vietnam.65 The three works document the Navy’s award of 

Purple Heart medals to Nurse Corps Lieutenants Barbara Wooster, Ruth A. 

Mason, and Frances L. Crumpton, and Lieutenant (j.g.) Ann Darby Reynolds, 

for wounds they suffered during the Viet Cong terrorist bombing of the Brink 

Bachelor Officers Quarters on Christmas Eve 1964. They were the first female 

members of the U.S. Armed Forces to receive the award in the Vietnam conflict.

Herman’s illustrated monograph describes the work of the approximately 

450 female and male nurses who served in Saigon and at the 600-bed Station 

Hospital Danang. Other nurses operated from hospital ships Repose (AH-16) 

and Sanctuary. Herman’s treatment of women as part of a team and in the overall 

context of Navy medicine in general is entirely appropriate. Navy nurses worked 

closely with general physicians, surgeons, psychiatrists, and other specialists, 

medical equipment technicians, hospital corpsmen, and of course the badly 

wounded soldiers and Marines coming in from the field. Naval Reserve Rear 

Admiral Maryanne Gallagher Ibach has posted a detailed and moving account 

of nursing in Vietnam as remembered by a number of women who served there.66 

Ibach observes that “my sense of our work, day to day, was that our success in 

saving lives was phenomenal.”67 Lieutenant Commander Marie Joan Brouillette 

recalled that she “had never seen such teamwork before or since my tour in 

Vietnam.”68 The Repose and Sanctuary cruise books and operational reports 

maintained by the Navy Department Library and the Navy archives provide 

information on the Nurse Corps’ wartime experience found nowhere else.
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Integration of the corps during the 1960s involved not only women but also 

men. Once more, the needs of the service necessitated change. A drastic shortage 

of nurses throughout the nation and the naval service in 1964 prompted the Navy, 

in Godson’s words, to do “the unthinkable: it allowed male nurses to enter the 

Nurse Corps.”69 In many ways, the experience of the first men who sought to join 

the exclusively female Navy corps suffered from the same prejudice and mistreatment suffered by women in the Navy at large. It was common for female nurses 

to resent the intrusion of men into what had traditionally been a female preserve. 

Since men are now fully integrated into the corps it would be instructive to learn 

how this process was managed. This topic deserves serious historical study.

Despite the example of the Navy women who risked death and injury and 

served with distinction in Vietnam and offshore, naval leaders, as Ebbert and 

Hall and Godson relate, believed that women, other than nurses, should not serve 

in the fleet. The primary champion of that view was the Navy’s top woman, 

Captain Rita Lenihan, the ACNP (W). She didn’t think “women belong onboard 

ship. . . . Their place is on shore and I don’t think the day will come when women 

will be seagoing as the men.” The captain added that “I don’t think we’ll ever be 

hearing of service women at Cape Kennedy ready to blast off into outer space.”70 

Lenihan elaborates on her philosophy in oral histories and interviews conducted 

by the U.S. Naval Institute and Jean Ebbert. Hence, only nine female line officers served in South Vietnam. Despite the increasing need for military personnel 

during the war, the Navy also failed to exploit the readiness of American women 

to serve in the Navy itself. In 1960 and nine years later in 1969 there were still 

only about 6,000 women in the Navy of 600,000 to 700,000.71

Perhaps no other woman in the Navy’s history has achieved as much renown 

as Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper. One of the most comprehensive works 

on her life and Navy career is Kathleen Broome Williams’ Grace Hopper: 

Admiral of the Cyber Sea (2004).72 Williams’ biography is an insightful analysis not only of Hopper’s professional accomplishments and technical genius but 

also of her exemplary personal traits of perseverance, pedagogical excellence, 

and dedication to Navy service. Hopper also figures prominently in Williams’ 

Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in World War II

(2001), in which the author focuses on the scientific and technological accomplishments of four women, including Hopper, whose work significantly aided the 

Navy’s war effort.73 Williams highlights Hopper’s need to “be at the forefront of 

her profession, never satisfied with the status quo.” Williams adds, “it was her 

ability to sustain this eager probing with undiminished energy.”74

Other works on Hopper include Charlene W. Billings’ Grace Hopper (1989), 
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a popular treatise that sings that admiral’s praises while eschewing deep analysis.75 Carmen Lois Mitchell’s “The Contribution of Grace Murray Hopper to 

Computer Science and Computer Education” (1994), a PhD dissertation for the 

University of North Texas, discusses in detail Hopper’s “philosophy of teaching 

and learning, and her pedagogical legacy for today’s teachers and scholars of 

computer science and computer science education.”76 Hopper’s Navy experience, 

however, is incidental to the piece. Kurt W. Beyer in his “Grace Murray Hopper: 

Technical Innovator” (2013) praises the admiral’s “confidence in her abilities, 

leadership skills, sense of honor, and aggressive nature [that] allowed her to 

win over even the toughest critics” and serve as a “role model for generations of 

women in the computing industry and the Navy.”77

This author, in his chapter “Cold War to Violent Peace: 1945–1991” (2000) 

in The Navy, and a booklet entitled Women in the United States Navy produced 

by the Navy Diversity Directorate (N134) and the Naval History and Heritage 

Command (2011), presents short, useful analyses of Hopper’s contributions.78 

One of Hopper’s great strengths was her ability to make computer science understandable to the layman and in that regard she teamed up with Steve Mandell to 

write Understanding Computers (1984).79 Articles on Hopper abound in Navy, 

computer science, electronic engineering, and other journals, identified in the 

Navy Department Library link http://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/

bibliographies/hopper-grace-admiral-select-bibliography.html 80

When Hopper retired from the service in 1966, Navy leaders concluded that 

they could not lose her special skills and brought her back on active duty. In the 

following years, she continued to champion the applicability of computers for 

information management in American business and industry. Nonetheless, Grace 

Hopper considered her highest award to have been “the privilege and honor of 

serving very proudly in the United States Navy.” 81

Former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman included Rear Admiral Hopper 

in his book On Seas of Glory: Heroic MEN [capitals added for emphasis], Great 

Ships, and Epic Battles of the American Navy (2001).

82 Despite his general ambivalence about women serving in the Navy, he gives her high praise for her tireless 

efforts to convince the service that computers were essential to future success in 

battle. Indeed, he observes that “more than any other person she kept the culture 

of the Navy focused on exploiting the digital revolution [and this] ever-widening 

lead in technology over the Soviets that came from this focus hastened the end of 

the Cold War.”83
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AFRICAN-AMERICAN SAILORS IN AN ERA OF TURMOIL

As with Navy women, constraints on the service of African Americans limited 

their full or equitable integration into the Navy during the 1950s and 1960s. 

Naval leaders were not convinced that black sailors would improve the service’s 

efficiency. Moreover, the Navy became complacent in the 1950s concluding that 

the previous and modest ongoing measures to improve the status of blacks in 

the service were sufficient. Even before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down 

the concept of “separate but equal” in Brown vs. Board of Education, the 

Navy enacted the Defense Department order prohibiting segregation in military 

schools, a plus for the Navy.84

Despite Wesley Brown’s accomplishment, by 1968 only three dozen black 

men or women had graduated from the Naval Academy. Robert J. Schneller, 

author of Blue & Gold and Black (2008), the definitive work on racial integration at the Naval Academy, observes that “black midshipmen were not yet fully 

integrated, professionally or socially.”85 These factors soured many in the black 

community on the Navy’s primary institution for commissioning officers for the 

fleet. Schneller adds that black families also considered the Navy as “the epitome 

of snobbery” because the service still assigned many blacks to the Steward Branch 

[now termed Culinary Specialists]—to serve white officers.86

The Civil Rights Commission, established in the late 1950s, suggested that 

“all but a few aspects of racial discrimination” had been eliminated from the 

military, but singled out the Navy which the commission felt had “shown little or 

no improvement” since Truman’s integration order.87 Inspired by the efforts of the 

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the civil rights movement, in 1967 

the Navy’s Bureau of Personnel mounted a major, albeit largely unsuccessful, 

recruiting effort to double the number of black officers in the Navy within two 

years. Schneller relates that the percentage of African-American officers in the 

Navy rose only from 0.3 in 1965 to 0.7 in 1970. By that latter date, there were 

only three black captains in the service.

Samuel L. Gravely Jr., who became the first black admiral in 1971, deserves 

a full-length biography. A veteran of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, Gravely 

was the first African American to command a combatant ship, to be promoted to 

flag rank, and to command a naval fleet. Gravely’s life and naval career, spanning 

the years from 1944 to 1982, paralleled the ups and downs of black integration into the Navy. Oral histories and archival materials on Admiral Gravely are 

ample. A solid starting point for a work on Gravely is Paul Stillwell’s “Samuel L. 

Gravely Jr.: Setting the Precedent” in Joseph J. Thomas’ Leadership Embodied 
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(2013).

88 Stillwell observes that “one hallmark of a successful leader is the ability 

to go where no one has gone before, to light the way, and to serve as a role 

model and mentor so that others may follow. Samuel L. Gravely Jr. was such an 

individual.”89

ZUMWALT

No individual has been more associated with the history of social change in 

the modern U.S. Navy than Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., the Chief of Naval 

Operations from 1970 to 1974. Published books, book chapters, encyclopedia 

entries, and oral histories abound on this dynamo of a leader who served with 

distinction in command of naval forces in Vietnam and at the young age of 49 

took the helm of the Navy over the heads of 33 more senior admirals. The starting 

point for any understanding of Zumwalt is his memoir, On Watch (1976).90 The 

admiral was keenly sensitive to the inequities that he knew African-American, 

female, and other minority sailors suffered on a daily basis in the Navy. The 

admiral also understood that unless he took action to reverse the drastic attrition 

of naval personnel in the wake of the Vietnam War and America’s anti-military 

fervor at the time, the Navy would be in serious trouble. Hence, as in previous 

eras, the needs of the service loomed large.

Zumwalt was also a man of great ambition. As an indication that he had 

more in mind than reforming the fleet’s personnel policies, much of his 511-page 

On Watch focuses on Vietnam, aircraft carriers, a nuclear treaty with the Soviet 

Union, and his contentious relationships with Admiral Hyman Rickover, Henry 

Kissinger, and the Nixon administration. The admiral was supremely confident 

in his own abilities and the correctness of his views. As with most memoirs, On 

Watch is self-serving, selective in its use of information, and must be weighed 

carefully against other sources.

Not much help in that regard is Larry Berman’s tome, Zumwalt (2012).91 The 

author, a journalist and author of several books on the Vietnam War, raises hagiography to new heights. Much of the work relies on Zumwalt’s memoir; a complimentary oral history the admiral recorded with the U.S. Naval Institute; other 

USNI interviews with admiring former subordinates Alex Kerr (1984),92 Howard 

Kerr, W. Lewis Glenn, and Worth Bagley (the latter three in 1989);93 Zumwalt 

family papers; and materials housed in Texas Tech’s Vietnam Archive. Restrictions 

with regard to still-classified information prevented Berman’s access to the official Zumwalt papers and other documentary records held in the Navy archives. 
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Still, Berman did not avail himself of unclassified Zumwalt-related command 

histories, operational reports, interviews, and other sources available at NHHC 

or in other relevant collections nationwide. Berman’s treatment of his subject is 

superficial and one-sided and many of his interpretations argumentative.

One of the more balanced appraisals of Zumwalt’s tenure as CNO and his 

activist programs is Thomas J. Cutler’s chapter “Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr.: Hero 

or Heretic” in James C. Bradford’s Quarterdeck and Bridge (1997).94 Cutler 

concludes that Zumwalt’s “methods were unquestionably radical and provocative, but they also achieved what had not been done before. Zumwalt’s contention that traditional methods were prone to failure when revolutionary changes 

were needed makes sense, as viewed historically.”95 In “Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr.: 

Innovation” (2013), Cutler makes similar observations, characterizing the 

admiral as “one of the most controversial naval leaders of all time” who “both 

literally and figuratively . . . changed the U.S. Navy.”96 Norman Friedman in 

Robert Love’s The Chiefs of Naval Operations (1980) relates that Secretary of 

Defense Melvin Laird and Secretary of the Navy John Chafee wanted Zumwalt 

for the job “because his views on the roles of blacks and women in the navy 

were more liberal than those of other senior admirals. He did not think that the 

navy had ever really tried to integrate blacks into the service and saw the general 

policy towards both blacks and women as tokenism.”97 Friedman’s assessment is 

that Zumwalt offered the Navy “revolutionary solutions to its gravest problems, 

rather than the evolutionary changes with which most of the naval community 

felt comfortable. . . . Zumwalt was flamboyant: his style resembled the charismatic, vigorous military leader of the past, rather than the colorless, bureaucratic manager of modern armed forces.”98 Edgar F. Puryear Jr.’s American 

Admiralship (2005) speaks about Zumwalt and his personnel reforms, but for 

the most part through the mouths of others, including Zumwalt himself and 

the historians who have written about the admiral.99 The book presents page 

after page of needlessly lengthy block quotes. Despite eschewing much editorial 

comment, Puryear does conclude that Zumwalt “was a champion of change who 

dared to sail into the political mine fields . . . and was ever willing to ‘rock the 

boat’ in an attempt to correct what he perceived as the serious ills of the U.S. 

Navy during the early 1970s.”100

An especially balanced, thoroughly researched, and insightful work on the 

racial aspects of Zumwalt’s tenure is John Darrell Sherwood’s Black Sailor, 

White Navy (2007).101 Sherwood discusses the impact of Zumwalt’s so-called 

“Z-Gram” communications to the fleet, each of which can be seen at the 

NHHC link http://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/
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title-list-alphabetically/z/z-grams-list-policy-directives-issued-admiral-zumwalt/

list-z-grams.html.102 Z-Gram 66 (Equal Opportunity in the Navy), for instance, 

expressed Zumwalt’s belief that “ours must be a Navy family that recognizes no 

artificial barriers of race, color, or religion.” Sherwood covers the racial unrest 

that exploded on aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk (CVA-63), fleet oiler Hassayampa

(AO-145), aircraft carrier Constellation (CVA-64), and many other Navy ships 

and shore stations in 1972 and 1973. Lenwood G. Davis and George Hill, eds., 

Blacks in the American Armed Forces (1985) is a useful compendium that identifies magazine and journal articles on blacks in the racial disturbances and other 

aspects of the Vietnam War.103

To many observers, African Americans opposed the war in Vietnam, railed 

against the discrimination and harassment they experienced in the Navy, and 

ultimately rioted on board ships connected to Vietnam service. This is only 

one side of the story, however. Information and resources abound about black 

sailors who willingly served, shared the dangers and hardships of their white 

shipmates, often performed heroically, and valued their experience in the Navy. 

There is the need for a balanced history of the topic. Sherwood also describes 

the Navy’s response to this turmoil and the success or failure of its efforts in the 

short and long term. Thoroughly vetted by subject-matter experts, Sherwood’s 

work is based on interviews with many relevant naval personnel and research 

in the Chief of Naval Operations or “double zero” records, the information-rich 

official Zumwalt Papers, the Vietnam Command Files, and other primary source 

materials maintained in the Navy archives.

Sherwood probes the question of whether or not there was institutional 

racism in the Navy before 1972. He also explores the reasons why Zumwalt had 

become “a crusader for equal opportunity and affirmative action in the Navy.”104

Later chapters analyze the causes of the racial disturbances and the House Armed 

Services Committee’s findings on them. Some senators from the South, retired 

flag officers, and other sympathetic commentators suggested that the disturbances resulted from black activism and the lax discipline and permissiveness of 

the Vietnam-era Navy.

Indeed, the list is long of those flag officers who railed not only against 

Zumwalt’s handling of race issues but also other aspects of his personnel reform 

programs, especially Z-Gram 57 that sought to eliminate “Mickey Mouse” rules 

and regulations. Sailors could now grow beards and sideburns and communicate 

their concerns directly to the CNO in Washington. Oral histories recorded by 

the U.S. Naval Institute with Admirals Thomas H. Moorer, Kent L. Lee (1990), 

Robert L. J. Long (1995), Raymond E. Peet (1984), and other retired flag officers 
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reflect widespread dissatisfaction with what they considered Zumwalt’s hasty 

and ill-thought-out social changes that he pressed on the Navy.105 Thomas B. 

Hayward (2009), CNO from 1978 to 1982, recalled that “the Z-grams were 

always a big problem with me and with most of us. . . . Later, when I was CNO, 

I reversed a lot of them.”106 James D. “Jig Dog” Ramage (1993), a former fleet 

commander, contended that the Z-Grams had “generated an air of permissiveness, led to the deterioration of smartness, and the denigration of the CNO’s 

authority.”107 Gerald E. “Jerry” Miller (1984), one-time colleague of Zumwalt 

on the Navy staff and former fleet commander, contended that “the chain of 

command was being destroyed. Bud [Zumwalt] was a great builder and a great 

destroyer.” He added, “what a tragedy—for him and the Navy.”108 Historian 

Thomas C. Hone in his Power and Change (1989)109 has observed that to some 

Navy officers Zumwalt had weakened “naval command authority—the chain of 

command [and] in the process he undermined the tradition of seniority.”110

Admiral James L. Holloway III, who served as Zumwalt’s Vice Chief of 

Naval Operations from 1973 to 1974, related in his interviews with this author 

(2012) that all the living CNOs concluded that “we’ve got to get rid of Zumwalt 

. . . . He’s just tearing the Navy apart.” Admiral George W. Anderson met with 

President Nixon to express the admirals’ views and according to Holloway, 

“Zumwalt would have been fired if Watergate hadn’t come along.”111

Holloway later observed that

Admiral Zumwalt does not qualify as a great leader because his command 

philosophy was not to lead but to accede to the wishes of the subordinate 

levels of the Navy. Unfortunately, he often did this without consideration 

of whether this permissiveness would be helpful to the overall mission of 

the Navy or hurt it. Admiral Zumwalt was a dashing figure, articulate and 

immensely popular with the junior officers and younger sailors who constitute the majority of the Navy. But we must not confuse popularity with 

leadership [Holloway’s italics].112

Holloway also had decidedly mixed feelings about Zumwalt’s approach to 

the problem of race relations in the Navy. Holloway believed the Navy profited 

from Zumwalt’s actions to improve the lot of African-American sailors because 

“it highlighted a problem that nobody else would agree” about, but “my disagreement was the way it was done.” Holloway felt that the racial awareness program 

was amateurish and not “professionally run.”113

Both Zumwalt and Holloway, however, acknowledged that racism was 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

endemic to the Navy and worked to end it. A problem was the failure of blacks 

and whites to understand one another. As Sherwood has observed, “black sailors 

represented a changed civilian world, while the white chain of command represented a Navy culture stuck in the social and cultural world of the 1950s.”114 

Sherwood is spot on when he concludes that by improving the image of the Navy 

in the black community, both Zumwalt and Holloway helped transform the 

service “into one of the best employers in the nation for minorities—a workplace 

often cited later as a model of racial harmony.”115

Sherwood correctly credits Holloway for carrying forward many of 

Zumwalt’s programs and Holloway’s institution of the Navy Affirmative Action 

Plan (NAAP). As documented in a University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School 

study entitled Black and Other Minority Participation in the All-Volunteer Navy 

and Marine Corps (1979), both services had high aims for their affirmative action 

programs, including the elimination of racial bias, the distribution of “minorities 

proportionately across paygrade and rank categories,” and an increase in the 

“total number of minorities in service, especially in the officer corps.”116 The 

study found that because of competition with private industry, both services 

“have had difficulty in finding minorities for their officer and higher skilled positions.”117 Nonetheless, the racial climate in the Navy had improved markedly by 

the late 1970s.

Zumwalt also took action to improve the lot of women in the Navy. He 

was keenly aware of the strength of the American feminist movement during the 

late 1960s, whose adherents called for greater equity and non-discrimination in 

the armed forces. Even though it was never ratified, the proposed Equal Rights 

Amendment to the Constitution reflected the support for a change to the status of 

women, as did the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1971.118 Zumwalt was 

also aware, with the abolition of the draft in 1973, of the Navy’s pressing need to 

enlist and retain qualified women for the “all-volunteer force.”

Zumwalt took concrete action with regard to women. In Z-Gram 116 of 

August 1972 the main purpose was to “eliminate any disadvantages to women 

resulting from either legal or attitudinal restrictions.”119 The communication 

gave enlisted women greater access to billets; assigned women to the (non-nurse) 

crew of hospital ship Sanctuary; and stated the intention to promote women to 

flag rank, and to command of shore-based units. Loanne Johnson, in Making 

WAVES, relates her personal experiences, not always positive, as an enlisted 

sailor in “this man’s Navy” during the post-Zumwalt years.120

In this context, one woman who deserves biographic treatment is Captain 

Robin Quigley, the highest-ranking woman in the Navy from 1971 to 1973. 
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She took bold steps to eliminate the perception that women were somehow a 

“special” or separate category in the Navy; she strongly urged everyone to stop 

using the acronym WAVES, since that had no official standing after 1948. She 

abolished the billet of ACNP (W)—her own job—as anachronistic. She also 

recommended abolition of each Navy command’s special advisor for women’s 

concerns contending that commanding officers should directly handle all such 

issues. The captain, however, was much more conservative on other issues. In 

his memoir, Zumwalt suggests that Quigley lost favor with the administration 

because she upset Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird over the elimination of the 

ACNP (W) billet.121 Quigley later exclaimed, “that is an unbelievably preposterous misrepresentation of the facts. . . . The Secretary of Defense [had] not the 

foggiest thing to do with anything [regarding Navy women] until 1972, after I 

had told the Chief of Naval Operations I could not and would not endorse his 

program.”122

Zumwalt does not reveal that he lost confidence in her because of her 

more traditional outlook. According to Quigley, however, the CNO was “most 

unhappy with my philosophy” and she alludes to the “hypocrisy of Admiral 

Zumwalt’s purported interest in women.”123 She opposed women serving on 

naval vessels, taking flight training, or attending the U.S. Naval Academy. It was 

clear to Quigley that she was persona non grata with the CNO and that “they 

had to find out what to do with the squirrely lady. . . . Her next assignment 

needed to be something with a certain degree of high visibility, so that it would 

not look as though I had been fired or quit.”124 Recognizing her ability to work 

in Washington was nil, Quigley agreed to accept command of the naval schools 

in San Diego, and despite her differences with the CNO, thus became the first 

woman to lead a major Navy command. Some naval leaders, both male and 

female, considered a number of measures instituted by Zumwalt and Quigley 

too radical and destabilizing and worked to reverse course. As one example, 

in 1979 the Navy established the billet of Special Assistant for Women’s Policy 

(OP-01[W]), in essence bringing back Quigley’s old job.

In general, the 1970s witnessed significant advances with regard to Navy 

women. In 1970, 6,633 women (.95 percent of all naval personnel) served on 

active duty but by 1979 that figure had risen to 24,644 (4.7 percent of those in 

service).125 By 1979, out of 102 enlisted ratings, 91 (including 15 combat-related 

billets) were open to women. In April 1972, Zumwalt selected Alene B. Duerk, 

head of the Navy Nurse Corps, to be the first female flag officer.

The nurses made great strides integrating males into the corps. In 1970, only 

156 men served alongside 2,273 female officers in the Nurse Corps but by 1979, 
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648 men represented 25 percent of the 2,551-person organization. In 1972, the 

first women entered naval aviation training and by the end of the decade many 

of them piloted helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. In 1978, Lieutenant Barbara 

Allen became the first woman to qualify in jet aircraft. The practice of separating 

from the service pregnant women or women with dependents under 18, long the 

norm, was ended by 1975. Holloway opened the U.S. Naval Academy to women 

in 1976 and in 1978 authorized women to serve on board naval vessels other than 

hospital ships and transports.126

Many Americans and most historians, including this author, credit Zumwalt, 

despite a number of programmatic missteps, with changing for good how the 

service accommodated the quest for dignity, equality, and opportunity by its men 

and women. In his eulogy of Zumwalt in 2000, President Bill Clinton observed 

that the admiral “worked in the face of wilting criticism and a highly resistant 

institutional culture to make the Navy do the right thing and make the Navy one 

of the most colorblind institutions in our entire nation.” He added that Zumwalt 

“had the vision to see a great future for the Navy” and that “the changes he 

brought about . . . will continue to shape the character and culture of our Navy 

for a long time in the 21st century.”127

There is need for a balanced study of the personnel, disciplinary, social, and 

other changes that impacted on the Navy in the early 1970s. A work is called for 

that does not focus on any one aspect, for instance the actions taken to improve 

the lot of women, but looks at the influence of American society at large, steps 

taken (or not taken) by the Navy before Zumwalt’s time as CNO, and the lasting 

effects of those measures (good and bad) on the service. There are many more 

sources available to support this study.

THE PROMISE AND PROBLEMS OF THE 20TH CENTURY’S 

LAST DECADES

In the 1980s and 1990s, African Americans registered great gains in the Navy. 

As documented by historian Robert J. Schneller, at the naval academy “the 1,511 

African-Americans admitted into the classes of 1980–99 represented a quantum 

leap over the 476 black midshipmen who entered into the classes of 1969–79.” He 

added that “by and large, black midshipmen, male and female, from the classes 

of 1980–99 looked back with pride at the Naval Academy as an unparalleled 

opportunity to obtain a first-class education, a gateway to the naval profession, 

and a ticket to a lucrative civilian career.”128
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Social History

Bernard C. Nalty wrote of the 1980s that “the eradication of the last vestiges 

of racial discrimination from the armed services yielded during this period of 

quiet to such objectives as improving relationships within military families and 

rehabilitating drug users and alcoholics.” In short, “years of progress in race relations had removed the worst manifestations of racism.” He ascribed this development to the improvement of race relations in society at large and the recruitment 

of a higher caliber of black and white sailors.129

In 1994, Secretary of the Navy John Dalton raised the goal of African-American 

officers in the Navy to 12 percent, representative of the black population of 

the United States.130 In 1996, Paul Reason became the first African American 

promoted to four-star flag rank when he took command of the Atlantic Fleet and 

accepted responsibility for 122,000 service men and women, 200 naval vessels, 

and 1,400 aircraft.131

Navy women also registered successes during the last decades of the 20th 

century. During the 1980s, the number of non-nurse Navy women rose from 

30,000 to almost 58,000, the latter figure representing 9.5 percent of the men and 

women in uniform. Female officers began rising to the Navy’s flag ranks. Pauline 

Hartington, Grace Hopper, Frances Shea, Mary Nielubowicz, Mary Hall, and 

Roberta Hazard put on admiral’s stars during the 1980s.132 Regina Akers’ oral 

history interview with Roberta L. Hazard (1994) highlights how the admiral 

distinguished herself in a 32-year career during which she had a significant impact 

on improving the quality of service and training of Navy personnel.133 Every year 

during the 1980s approximately 100 women entered the Naval Academy and 

many of them excelled as officers in the brigade of midshipmen, students, and 

athletes. In 1981, the first four Hispanic women and the first Native-American 

woman graduated from the Naval Academy.134

But resistance within the Navy toward the service of women in non-traditional 

roles remained strong. In 1986, outgoing Chief of Naval Operations Admiral 

James D. Watkins called for a limit to the number of women in the Navy and his 

successor, Admiral Carlisle A. H. Trost, planned to implement that action. Only 

Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger’s intercession prevented that restriction 

from becoming a reality.

Chase Untermeyer, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Manpower 

and Reserve Affairs from 1984 to 1988, kept a diary of his daily interactions 

with Secretary of the Navy John Lehman and his successor James Webb. 

While Untermeyer’s work is self-serving and routinely reflects a one-sided 

view of matters, his Inside Reagan’s Navy (2015) opens a window into the 

decision-making of the Reagan-era secretariat.135 Untermeyer relates that both 
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secretaries were unsympathetic to a proposal to assign women to non-combatant 

ships in the Mobile Logistics Support Force. Lehman reportedly worried that 

Navy wives would be up in arms about fraternization and compel their husbands 

to leave the service.136

Webb, a highly decorated Vietnam combat veteran, was remembered by 

many even before he became Secretary of the Navy as the author of a November 

1979 article in Washingtonian magazine entitled “Women Can’t Fight” that 

made the case that women were inherently unsuited for combat.137 Once in office, 

Webb was so sensitive to the perception that he was anti-woman that he fired 

his Chief of Naval Personnel, supposedly unsympathetic to the plight of female 

sailors, but other factors apparently prompted the action. He announced in a 

meeting with the Women Officer’s Professional Association that he was reviewing 

policies regarding billet assignments, sexual harassment, and fraternization. 

But according to Untermeyer, Webb was “truly against women in the military 

and detests those who keep pushing the matter.”138 Webb changed the title of 

the Mobile Logistics Support Force to the Combat Logistics Support Force to 

emphasize the legal prohibition against women being assigned to ships that might 

be involved in combat. When the new Secretary of Defense, Frank Carlucci, 

supported consideration of assigning women to oilers, ammunition, and stores 

ships in the logistics force, Webb intimated to Untermeyer that the Secretary of 

Defense “is going to have to get Ronald Reagan to tell me to do it.”139 Despite his 

personal objections, in December 1987 Webb approved the assignment of women 

to 26 of the 37 ships in the force. Retired Master Chief Petty Officer James L. 

Leuci’s “Navy Women in Ships,” provides detailed information on individual 

women and the ships to which they were assigned and is an especially valuable 

resource.140

Webb took action to preempt the release of a report by DACOWITS resulting 

from a tour of naval bases in August 1987 that found many women complaining 

about sexual harassment, poor communication between female sailors and their 

superiors, and discrimination on the job. At Secretary Webb’s direction, Admiral 

Trost ordered an investigation that produced the Navy Study Group’s Report on 

Progress of Women in the Navy.141 The 28-member study group, half of whom 

were women and included 20 officers, four master chief petty officers, and a 

“steering committee” of four flag officers, looked at 1) the progress of women 

in the service during the first years of the all-volunteer force; 2) the Navy’s use 

and execution of relevant policies; 3) sexual harassment and fraternization; 

and 4) the quality of life for female sailors. The report emphasized that “Navy 

women officers and enlisted personnel have experienced significant growth in 
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both numbers and in career opportunities during the last 15 years.”142 The study 

group recommended assigning women to ships of the Combat Logistics Support 

Force and shore-based fleet air reconnaissance squadrons, an improvement in 

career opportunities, establishment of a permanent captain billet (OP-01W) for 

the oversight on women’s programs, and promulgation of a policy on fraternization. One troubling finding of the study group was that “over half of the 1,400 

women interviewed . . . indicated they had been victims of some form of sexual 

harassment in the Navy; nearly all those interviewed reported observing some 

form of sexual harassment.”143 In that regard, the study group recommended 

greater Navy efforts to improve male attitudes toward their female shipmates. 

That report and a 1990 Update Report on the Progress of Women in the Navy,144

both led by Rear Admiral Roberta L. Hazard, found that continued combat 

restrictions and the prevailing male-dominated Navy culture made it especially 

difficult for women to prosper in the service. The latter report bemoaned the 

“lack of acceptance, underutilization, and lack of equal treatment” of women in 

the service, one of the prime factors being the “highly emotional issues of pregnancy, single parenthood, and sexual harassment.”145 In short, there remained 

problems aplenty with regard to the service of Navy women.

Real or suspected instances of sexual harassment in the Navy could quickly 

become national news, as was the case when pre–Army-Navy Game revelry in 

1989 at the Naval Academy resulted in Gwen M. Dreyer being handcuffed to a 

urinal and photographed by male midshipmen. As related to this author in an 

interview with Joseph W. Prueher (2016), the Commandant of Midshipmen at the 

time, he considered the incident an issue for the academy to handle.146 He spoke 

with both Dreyer and her father and punished the individuals involved but did not 

expel them from the academy. The incident, however, soon became a major news 

item across the country with many commenters characterizing Prueher’s actions 

as insensitive and inadequate. In an interview with the Baltimore Sun newspaper, 

the officer later admitted that he was surprised by the media’s attention and that 

he “would have handled the Dreyer case differently today. Ms. Dreyer deserved 

more sympathy . . . and those responsible for the incident possibly deserved 

harsher punishment.”147 Convinced that Prueher had learned hard lessons from 

the experience and was an especially promising naval leader, Maryland Senator 

and woman’s advocate Barbara Mikulski helped keep the officer’s career on 

track. Joseph Prueher went on to serve as the Vice Chief of Naval Operations; 

Commander in Chief, Pacific; and the U.S. Ambassador to the People’s Republic 

of China. The episode is recounted in a balanced, well-researched chapter in 

John Hattendorf and Bruce Elleman’s Nineteen Gun Salute entitled “The Right 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Skill Sets—Joseph Wilson Prueher (1941– )” (2010) by Bruce Elleman.148 More 

over-heated and inaccurate coverage can be found in Greg L. Vistica’s screed, Fall 

From Glory.

149

By 1990, 331 officers and 7,803 enlisted women were serving afloat on board 

more than 100 naval vessels. Not unexpectedly, the new assignments could put 

women in danger, as occurred in 1987 when Iraqi air-launched missiles hit 

guided missile frigate Stark (FFG-31), operating in the Persian Gulf along with 

destroyer tender Acadia (AD-42) and her integrated crew. In this era of “firsts,” 

female officers became the first commanding officers and executive officers of 

training, recruiting, Military Sealift Command, and other commands. In 1987, 

Lieutenant Commander Deborah Gernes became the first executive officer of 

destroyer tender Cape Cod (AD-43) and later qualified for command at sea.150

Other Navy women took to the skies and shared with their male counterparts the risks of flying military aircraft. Lieutenant Commander Barbara Allen 

Rainey, the first woman to become a naval aviator and qualify in jets, was killed 

in a training accident in 1982. Other women became naval aviators and naval 

flight officers, test pilots, helicopter pilots, and training instructors, or served in 

aviation-related navigation, intelligence, and communications billets. In 1988, 

Commander Rosemary Mariner became the first executive officer of a naval 

aviation squadron and later the first commanding officer of that unit. By 1990, 

4,892 enlisted women served in aviation squadrons. Belying the observation of 

Captain Lenihan in the late 1960s, in 1984 Naval Reserve Commander Kathryn 

D. Sullivan, serving with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 

became the first woman to walk in space.151

HOMOSEXUALITY

Homosexuality and the Navy’s response to it is a subject that demands more 

comprehensive historical coverage. Homosexuality has gone down to the sea 

in ships from the dawn of time, but the issue gained nationwide attention in 

the late 1980s. Following an explosion that tore apart gun turret Number Two 

of battleship Iowa (BB-61) in April 1989, a Navy investigation concluded that 

sailor Clayton Hartwig had purposely triggered the blast with an electric or 

chemical detonator that killed him and 46 other sailors. The national media 

picked up rumors that Hartwig was a homosexual and had had a falling out 

with another homosexual sailor, an assertion never substantiated. Indeed, subsequent government-sponsored investigations contradicted the Navy’s findings and 
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blamed the explosion on a mechanical malfunction unrelated to human error.

The standard works on the U.S. Navy discuss homosexuality sparingly, if at 

all. Godson relates in several short paragraphs that until 1994 when President 

Clinton implemented the policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” lesbians and gays were 

routinely discharged from the service as a threat to good order, discipline, and 

national security.152 Ebbert and Hall provide a forthright, albeit short analysis of lesbianism in the Navy and how the service dealt with it during the late 

20th century. They relate two instances, which received media attention, where 

a number of female crew members on board tenders Norton Sound (AVM-1) 

and Yellowstone (AD-41) were investigated for homosexual activity and some 

discharged from the service. The authors contrast the Navy’s handling of those 

cases with its routinely secretive discharge of gay male sailors. Ebbert and Hall 

add that during the 1980s, “of all the services, the Navy had the highest overall 

rate of discharge for homosexuality for both men and women.”153

Randy Shilts’ Conduct Unbecoming (1993)154 and Joseph Steffan’s 

Honor Bound (1992)155 clearly support allowing homosexuals to serve in the 

military while Ronald D. Ray in his Military Necessity & Homosexuality

(1993)156 opposes that measure. E. Lawrence Gibson’s Get Off My Ship (1978),157

the Rand Corporation’s Sexual Orientation and U.S. Military Personnel Policy

(1993),158 and Gays and Lesbians in the Military (1994) edited by Wilbur J. Scott 

and Sandra Carson Stanley, provide useful information on government policies 

and relevant literature. Nonetheless, despite these most recent studies, much more 

needs to be done to gain a full understanding of homosexuality’s impact on Navy 

since the end of World War II.

THE UPS AND DOWNS OF THE INTEGRATED NAVY

Tens of thousands of Navy women took justified pride in their accomplishments 

during the 1990s. The standard texts on the Navy’s involvement in the Persian 

Gulf War focus for the most part on political-military issues, strategy and tactics, 

and combat operations, but document some contributions of Navy women. 

Seventy-five thousand American naval personnel, including 3,700 women, 

deployed to the combat theater. This author and Robert J. Schneller, in their work 

Shield and Sword (2001), relate the experience of Lieutenant Commander Diane 

Cangelosi in dangerous flight operations near Kuwait and how another military 

woman, Army aviator Rhonda Cornum, endured torture, including sexual abuse 

at the hands of her captors.159 Shield and Sword also makes the point that other 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

military women suffered death and injury when a Scud missile launched from 

Iraq killed or wounded 56 men and women of an Army Reserve unit at a support 

facility in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.160 Nonetheless, as with many histories of the 

Navy since World War II, Shield and Sword, Marvin Pokrant’s two-volumes on 

the war at sea (1999),161 and Norman Friedman’s Desert Victory (1991)162 do not 

provide in-depth coverage of female activities in the conflict. Perhaps this is a 

reflection of the fact that by 1990–91 many women were carrying out their duties 

in much the same way as their male counterparts.

For Jean Ebbert and Marie-Beth Hall, “the Gulf War . . . was a turning point 

for women in the Navy.”163 The courageous and professional performance of 

Navy and other military women in the Persian Gulf War invigorated Americans 

who wanted to redefine, if not rescind altogether the 1948 law that barred women 

from combat. Hence, in November 1993, Congress enacted a legislative measure 

that enabled women to serve on combatant ships, with the exception of submarines and mine warfare vessels.

The 1990s produced a flood of books on women in the Navy. One of the 

most insightful is More Than a Uniform (1997)164 by Winifred Quick Collins, 

who had served in World War II and the early Cold War and held the billet 

of Assistant Chief of Naval Personnel for Women from 1957 to 1962. Captain 

Collins made the point that “although the ‘woman’s revolution’ is often said to 

have begun in the early 1960s, we should recognize that at that time women in 

the Navy were already [original italics] performing important jobs which were 

unavailable to their civilian counterparts. The changes for women in the navy 

had become profound before the women’s revolution got under way.”165

Doris M. Sterner’s In and Out of Harm’s Way (1996) is a chronological 

compendium of people, events, and other information relevant to the Navy Nurse 

Corps from its establishment in 1908 to the last years of the 20th century.166

John P. and Marie C. Dever’s Women and the Military (1995)167 is a font of 

information on the women in the services as is Vicki L. Friedl’s Women in the 

United States Military (1996).168 The latter work provides a research guide and 

an annotated bibliography on the topic. The work specifically identifies archives 

and other repositories holding material on Navy women; congressional reports; 

relevant books, articles, and studies; and the best sources on such issues as family 

and pregnancy, sexual harassment, and women in combat. Margaret C. Devilbiss 

in her Women and Military Service (1990) uses a social science methodology 

to study the seminal policies relating to military women and analizes ten “key 

issue areas” to determine their underlying causes.169 A more specialized study 

is Deborah G. Douglas’ United States Women in Aviation (1990) that looks at 
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military and civilian women who made a mark in aviation.170 Individual chapters 

for the postwar period include the “Impact of the Women’s Rights Movement” of 

the 1960s and “Women with the ‘Right Stuff’” of the 1970s. Other useful sources 

include Lory Manning’s Women in the Military (2008) and Laurie Weinstein and 

Christie C. White’s Wives and Warriors (1997).171

SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND TURBULENCE 

IN THE NAVY

Navy women would remember the 1990s not only for their participation in 

combat operations and professional accomplishment but highly publicized and 

sensational episodes related to sexual harassment. The Tailhook scandal of 

1991–92 rocked the Navy as no other gender-related issue of modern times. 

The annual meeting in September 1991 of the Tailhook Association, a group 

that looked at issues related to the Navy’s aviation community, degenerated 

into raucous parties and lewd behavior fueled by alcohol in certain areas of the 

hosting Las Vegas hotel. Female officers reported that inebriated male aviators 

had groped and verbally abused them as they made their way through the hotel. 

Lieutenant Paula Coughlin, a helicopter pilot and an admiral’s aide, reported the 

egregious behavior to her superiors. Dissatisfied with the Navy’s investigation of 

the matter, she went public and the activities at the Tailhook convention soon 

became heated national news.

The passion generated by Tailhook is clearly reflected in the works that cover 

the episode. On one side are books like Gregory Vistica’s Fall From Glory that 

heap calumny on the Navy for all manner of transgressions, real or imagined, 

and its “bag of dirty tricks.”172 His sensational approach and obvious antagonism to the naval leaders who worked to deal with Tailhook severely limits the 

book’s usefulness. Journalist William H. McMichael’s The Mother of All Hooks 

(1997) is written in much the same vein.173 He regarded Tailhook as “a failure of 

leadership, deceptiveness, institutional entrenchment, loyalty over truth, abuse of 

power, [and] outright incompetence.”174

A more even-handed treatment of Tailhook can be found in Jean Zimmerman’s 

Tailspin (1995).175 She documents the entire episode with a focus on Lieutenant 

Coughlin’s role in it and the gross misbehavior that took place at the Las Vegas 

Hilton. For Zimmerman, a key issue was the combat exclusion law that prejudiced 

male aviators against their female shipmates and set them up for disrespectful 

treatment. Zimmerman, however, credits Admiral Frank B. Kelso, the Chief of 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Naval Operations—the villain in the piece for many antagonists—as the man 

who “effectively ushered the Navy into a new era of including women in combat 

duty”176 Admiral Stanley R. Arthur, the Vice Chief of Naval Operations under 

Kelso, in his interview with this author, provides significant insight into the leadership’s actions during Tailhook and especially those of Admiral Kelso.177 Both 

Godson in Serving Proudly and Ebbert and Hall in Crossed Currents provide 

short balanced summaries of Tailhook.

Another angle on the Tailhook episode is provided in William B. Breuer’s 

War and American Women (1997).178 The author of numerous popular military 

histories, Breuer praises the accomplishments of women throughout U.S. history 

but questions the wisdom of putting women in combat positions. He does not 

dispute the fact that sexual transgressions occurred in Las Vegas but rails against 

feminists and their supporters in Congress and the media who sullied the reputations of male officers who attended the convention but took no part in its misbehavior. He bemoans the damage done to the Navy in the scandal’s aftermath.

Malcolm Steinberg’s Admiral Boorda’s Navy (2011) is a misnomer in that the 

author has little or nothing to say about the Navy of 1994–96, instead focusing on 

the suicide of Admiral Jeremy Boorda, the Chief of Naval Operations following 

Kelso.179 Steinberg argues that the pressures of gender issues helped influence 

Boorda to take his own life. Many of the events associated with Tailhook and 

related issues are discussed in the pages of the U.S. Naval Institute’s compilation 

of articles entitled Women in the Navy (2015) by Thomas J. Cutler.180 The work 

provides an especially useful collection of articles that appeared in Proceedings 

from 1978 to 2014 and touched on women on ships, in naval aircraft, the combat 

exclusion legislation, and pregnancy.

Tailhook was not the only gender-related problem that commanded the 

Navy’s attention and received analysis in the sources identified above. In 1994, 

Admiral Arthur, who had commanded U.S. naval forces during the Gulf War and 

flown more than 500 combat missions in Vietnam, was compelled to withdraw 

his nomination to be Commander in Chief, Pacific. The principal reason was 

that he had endorsed an aviation command’s finding that Lieutenant Rebecca 

Hansen was unqualified for flight duty. Hansen charged that sexual harassment 

by a flight instructor, later disproven, had caused her failure.181 That same year, 

Lieutenant Kara S. Hultgreen became the first woman to qualify in the Navy’s 

top fighter, the F-14 Tomcat. Like many of her male counterparts over the years, 

Lieutenant Hultgreen was killed while recovering on board an aircraft carrier, 

an inherently dangerous maneuver. Some critics charged that to satisfy feminists 

the Navy put an unqualified woman in the pilot’s seat. Others said that a woman 
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should not have been exposed to such risk in the first place. In the end, the Navy 

determined that it mattered not in the least whether the pilot of that F-14 was 

male or female. Most of the sources treating Tailhook also include passages on 

Hultgreen’s Navy experience and death on duty. An especially compelling work 

was written by her mother, Sally Spears, who “conscious of that [familial connection] tried very hard not to paint her as a saint or a prude or always in the right, 

a plastic perfect heroine.”182 Spears’ book works especially well in that regard.

THE FOCUS ON DIVERSITY

The major efforts after the 1990s to improve the status of women and blacks 

and to end discrimination also inspired the Navy to pay much closer attention 

to its Hispanic, Asian-Pacific, and other minority sailors and their contribution 

to the service. An earlier work on a minority member of the Navy was the autobiography Carrier Admiral (1967) by Vice Admiral Joseph J. “Jocko” Clark, 

of Oklahoma Cherokee ancestry.183 Noted historian Clark Reynolds helped the 

admiral prepare the work on the latter’s service in World War II. A much more 

polished and interpretive work on the admiral is Reynold’s On the Warpath in 

the Pacific (2005).

184 Reynolds describes Clark’s early life and naval service, leadership in the carrier battles of World War II, and command of the U.S. Seventh 

Fleet during the Korean War. While Clark and Reynolds seem comfortable with 

allusions to Indian stereotypes, as depicted in the latter volume’s text and illustrations, readers may find the treatment less than sensitive to contemporary tastes.

More recent publishing efforts have included works on other minority Navy 

leaders, for instance Sarandis Papadopoulos’ chapter on Admiral Horatio Rivero 

Jr. in Bruce Elleman’s Nineteen-Gun Salute (2010).

185 Papadopoulos argues 

convincingly that the intellectual and diplomatic skills of this Puerto-Ricanborn officer served the Navy especially well. Rivero earned combat decorations 

in World War II and the Korean War, distinguished himself in leadership positions throughout the Cold War, and became the Navy’s first Hispanic four-star 

admiral as the Vice Chief of Naval Operations during the critical early years 

of the Vietnam War. He then served as Commander in Chief, Allied Forces 

Southern Europe, and U.S. Ambassador to Spain. The NHHC’s archive holds 

his papers and the U.S. Naval Institute has conducted an oral history with him. 

Rivero’s contributions to the Navy and the nation cry out for more comprehensive biographical treatment.

Naval historians have also devoted attention to the contributions of minority 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

sailors in the fight against global terrorism. Thomas J. Cutler’s A Sailor’s History 

of the U.S. Navy (2005) recounts the bravery and professional skill of petty officers Tayinika “Baby Doc” Campbell, an African American, and Ernesto Garcia, 

an Hispanic-American, in the successful effort to save guided missile destroyer 

Cole (DDG-67) after her attack by Al Qaeda terrorists in October 2000.186

The Naval History and Heritage Command, as tasked by the Navy Diversity 

Directorate (N134), has made a concerted effort to document the contribution of 

minority sailors who have served the Navy and the nation. Individual booklets 

published in 2010 and 2011 focus on Women, African Americans, Hispanics, 

Asian Pacific Americans, Native Americans, and religious diversity. We learn that 

41,500 Native Americans, more than 90 percent of them volunteers, served in the 

Navy and the other military services during the Vietnam War.187 Indicative of the 

advances Asian-Americans have made in the Navy, Harry B. Harris Jr., born in 

Yokosuka, Japan, to an American chief petty officer and a Japanese woman, in 

2014 became the Navy’s first officer of Asian ancestry to put on the four stars of 

a full admiral when he took the helm at the Pacific Command.188 In 2007, Adam 

M. Robinson Jr. became first black Surgeon General of the Navy and Chief of the 

Bureau of Medicine and Surgery.189 Rear Admiral Nora Tyson became the first 

woman to command a carrier strike group, which operated from aircraft carrier 

George H. W. Bush (CVN-77).190 Hispanic-American Jacqueline DiRosa became 

the first woman to serve as both a Force and Fleet Master Chief, billets at the 

top of the Navy’s enlisted ranks. While these booklets serve the purpose of highlighting the contribution of minority communities and individual leaders, and 

should be continually updated, they are no substitute for in-depth, thoroughly 

researched and analyzed histories and biographies that should be encouraged.

One individual who has distinguished herself in service to her country 

and warrants a full biographical study is Michelle J. Howard. She was the first 

African-American women to achieve four-star rank in the Navy when she became 

the Vice Chief of Naval Operations in 2014. Subsequent tours included command 

of U.S. Naval Forces, Europe, and Allied Joint Force Command, Naples. Earlier 

in her career, Howard led Expeditionary Strike Group 2 in anti-piracy operations 

in the Gulf of Aden and served as Chief of Staff to the Director of Strategic Plans 

and Policy on the Joint Staff. Oral histories and other supporting materials are 

available in the Navy archives and other repositories.
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CONCLUSION

Historical coverage and analyses concerning the integration of women, African 

Americans, and other minority sailors in the U.S. Navy of the Cold War and 

post-Cold War eras reflects the status of those groups at the time. During the 1950s 

and 1960s, when minority officers and enlisted sailors constituted a very small 

percentage of the personnel in the Navy and many of those minority members did 

not serve in the operating fleet, few works appeared in print to document their 

contribution. All that changed in the 1970s and early 1980s when the nationwide 

civil rights, feminist, and anti-establishment movements and opposition to the 

Vietnam War shined a spotlight on the status of African Americans and women 

in the Navy. Complementing the path-breaking works on African Americans by 

Morris MacGregor and Bernard Nalty were Frederick Harrod’s salient analysis, 

Herbert Northrup’s and Greenwood Press’ documentary works, and especially 

Admiral Zumwalt’s memoir On Watch. Scholars have also benefitted from the 

insider views of Joy Bright Hancock and Margaret Chase Smith through their 

autobiographies and the U.S. Naval Institute’s recorded interviews with key 

female and male leaders of the previous eras. The floodgates opened wide in 

the 1990s with regard to publications on Navy women and gender issues. The 

Tailhook scandal generated a number of works, including solid analyses by Jean 

Zimmerman, Susan Godson, and Ebbert and Hall, and heated works by Gregory 

Vistica, William McMichael, Malcolm Steinberg, and William Breuer. John and 

Maria Dever, Doris Sterner, Winifred Quick Collins, Vicki Friedl, Sally Spears, 

Margaret Devilbiss, Lory Manning, Sharon Disher, and Deborah Douglas 

produced creditable works on various aspects of women in the Navy of the time. 

The issue of homosexuality in the military came to the fore with publications by 

Randy Shilts, Joseph Steffan, and Ronald Ray. The three most useful overviews 

of Navy women in the last half of the 20th century are Crossed Currents by Jean 

Ebbert and Mary Beth Hall, Serving Proudly by Susan Godson, and Women in 

the Military by Jeanne Holm. Supported by in-depth research in primary and 

secondary sources, and oral history interviews, these authoritative works present 

a wealth of information and sharp analysis on gender issues.

The 21st century has witnessed the publication of several first-rate, scholarly 

books focused on key aspects of the social history of the modern Navy. Robert 

Schneller’s Breaking the Color Barrier and Blue & Gold and Black thoroughly 

document the integration of black Americans at the U.S. Naval Academy while 

John Darrell Sherwood’s Black Sailor, White Navy provides a cogent interpretation of the Navy’s racial troubles in the Zumwalt era. Finally, the Naval Institute’s 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

oral history interviews with admirals Stanley R. Arthur, Joseph A. Prueher, and 

other key leaders shed significant light on the social issues that shook the modern 

U.S. Navy.

In short, a solid body of information and interpretive works exist relating 

to the experience of minority sailors in the momentous decades since the end of 

World War II. Study of that subject and that era of the Navy’s history, however, is 

far from done. The American people and the naval service deserve a full-length, 

thoroughly researched and analyzed work on the social history of the late 20th 

century; and another that combines the strategic, operational, institutional, technological—and social aspects—of the Navy’s momentous 21st century history.

I would like to thank the Naval History and Heritage Command for sponsoring this historiographical project, and my friends and colleagues Drs. Michael 

Crawford, John Darrell Sherwood, and Regina Akers for their positive advice on 

the subject and careful reading of several drafts.
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Notes

1 Kenneth J. Hagan, This People’s Navy: The Making of American Sea Power (New 

York: The Free Press, 1991).

2 George W. Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power: The U.S. Navy, 1890–1990

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).

3 Paolo E. Coletta, The American Naval Heritage (Lanham, MD: University Press of 

America, 1987).

4 Nathan Miller, The U.S. Navy: A History (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press 

[Hereafter, NIP], 1997).

5 Michael T. Isenberg, Shield of the Republic: The United States Navy in an Era of 

Cold War and Violent Peace (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).

6 http://www.navyhistory.org/oral-history-index/.

7 http://www.womensmemorial.org/H&C/Oral_History/oralhistory.html.

8 David F. Winkler, Ready Then, Ready Now, Ready Always: More Than a Century 

of Service by Citizen Sailors (Washington, DC: Navy Reserve Commemoration 

Committee, 2015).

9 Cheryl Lynn Ruff, Ruff’s War: A Navy Nurse on the Frontline in Iraq (Annapolis, 

MD: NIP, 2005).

10 Heidi Squier Kraft, Rule Number Two: Lessons I learned in a Combat Hospital

(New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2007).

11 Gail Harris, A Woman’s War: The Professional and Personal Journey of the Navy’s 

First African-American Female Intelligence Officer (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow 

Press, 2010).

12 Regina T. Akers, “Doing Their Part: The WAVES in World War II,” PhD dissertation, 

Howard University, 2000.

13 Joy Bright Hancock, Lady in the Navy: A Personal Reminiscence (Annapolis, MD: 

NIP, 1972).

14 Ibid., 223.

15 Regina T. Akers, “Joy Bright Hancock: Pioneering Spirit,” in Joseph J. Thomas, 

Leadership Embodied: The Secrets to the Success of the Most Effective Navy and 

Marine Corps Leaders (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2013), 129.

16 Margaret Chase Smith, Declaration of Conscience, with William C. Lewis Jr. (New 

York: Doubleday, 1972).

17 Ibid., 85–86.

18 Elizabeth Allen Butler, Navy WAVES (Charlottesville, VA: Wayside Press, 1988).

19 Margaret Chase Smith interview with U.S. Naval Institute (USNI), 1969; Joy Bright 

Hancock interview with USNI, 1969–1971; Louise K. Wilde interview with USNI, 

1969; Winifred Quick Collins interview with USNI, 1969.

20 Interviews with USNI: Robin Quigley, 1976; Mildred McAfee Horton, 1969; Jean 

Palmer, 1969; Elizabeth Crandall, 1970; Frances Rich, 1960; Eleanor Rigby, 1970; 

Tova Peterson Wiley, 1969.
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

21 Quoted in Robin Quigley interview with USNI, 1976, 239.

22 Jean Ebbert and Marie-Beth Hall, Crossed Currents: Navy Women in a Century of 

Change (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 3rd ed., 1999).

23 Susan H. Godson, Serving Proudly: A History of Women in the Navy (Annapolis, 

MD: NIP and Naval Historical Center, 2001).

24 Ebbert and Hall, Crossed Currents, xvi.

25 Ibid., xv.

26 Ibid., xv–xvi.

27 The author of this historiographical study reviewed the manuscript while in preparation at the Naval Historical Center.

28 Susan H. Godson, Viking of Assault: Admiral John Leslie Hall Jr. and Amphibious 

Warfare (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982).

29 Jeanne Holm, Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution (Novato, CA: 

Presidio, 1982) and revised edition 1992.

30 Ibid., xiv.

31 Ibid., 330.

32 Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider, Sound Off: American Military Women Speak Out

(New York: Dutton, 1988).

33 Ibid., 245.

34 Sharon H. Disher, First Class: Women Join the Ranks at the Naval Academy

(Annapolis, MD: NIP, 1998).

35 Paul Stillwell, The Golden Thirteen: Recollections of the First Black Naval Officers

(Annapolis, MD: NIP, 1993).

36 Ibid., 267.

37 Dennis D. Nelson, The Integration of the Negro into the United States Navy, 

1776–1947, with a Brief Historical Introduction (Washington, DC: Navy 

Department, 1948).

38 Morris J. MacGregor and Bernard C. Nalty, eds., Blacks in the United States Armed 

Forces: Basic Documents (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1977).

39 Ibid., introduction.

40 Morris MacGregor and Bernard C. Nalty, eds., Blacks in the Military: Essential 

Documents (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1981).

41 Morris J. MacGregor Jr., Defense Studies: Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940–

1965 (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1981).

42 Ibid., ix.

43 Bernard Nalty, Strength for the Fight: A History of Black Americans in the Military

(New York: The Free Press, 1986).

44 Ibid., 2.

45 James T. Controvich, African Americans in Defense of the Nation: A Bibliography

(Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011).

46 Robert J. Schneller, Breaking the Color Barrier: The U.S. Naval Academy’s First 
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Black Midshipmen and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: New York 

University Press, 2005).

47 Ibid., x, 257.

48 Quoted in Bernard C. Nalty, Long Passage to Korea: Black Sailors and the Integration 

of the U.S. Navy in Edward J. Marolda, ed., in The U.S. Navy and the Korean War

(Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 2003), 28.

49 Quoted in Nalty, Strength for the Fight, 264–-65.

50 Theodore Taylor, The Flight of Jesse Leroy Brown (New York: Avon Books, 1998).

51 Lenwood G. Davis and George Hill, Blacks in the American Armed Forces, 1776–

1983 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 125–30.

52 Nalty, Long Passage to Korea.

53 Frederick S. Harrod, “Integration of the Navy (1941–1978),” U.S. Naval Institute 

Proceedings105 (Oct 1979): 40–47.

54 Ibid., 45.

55 Richard E. Miller, The Messman Chronicles: African Americans in the U.S. Navy, 

1932–1943 (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2004).

56 Godson, Serving Proudly, 183–87.

57 Nalty, Long Passage to Korea, 143; Ebbert and Hall, Crossed Currents, 144–45.

58 William B. Breuer, War and American Women: Heroism, Deeds, and Controversy

(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997).

59 James A. Field Jr., History of United States Naval Operations: Korea (Washington, 

DC: Naval Historical Center, 1962); Malcolm W. Cagle and Frank A. Manson, The 

Sea War in Korea (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 1957); Edward J. Marolda, ed., The U.S. 

Navy in the Korean War (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2007).

60 Jan K. Herman, Frozen in Memory: U.S. Navy Medicine in the Korean War

(Self-published, 2006).

61 Linda Witt, Judith Bellafaire, Britta Granrud, and Mary Jo Binker, eds., A Defense 

Weapon Known to be of Value: Servicewomen of the Korean War Era (Hanover, 

NH: University Press of New England/Military Women’s Press of the Women in 

Military Service for America Foundation, 2005).

62 Ebbert and Hall, Crossed Currents, 161–64, 167.

63 Ibid., 170.

64 Roberta Hovis, Station Hospital Saigon: A Navy Nurse in Vietnam, 1963–1964

(Annapolis, MD: NIP, 1991).

65 Jan K. Herman, Navy Medicine in Vietnam: Passage to Freedom to the Fall of Saigon

in series The U.S. Navy and the Vietnam War, Edward J. Marolda and Sandra J. 

Doyle, eds. (Washington, DC: Naval History and Heritage Command, 2010), 6, 7; 

Edward J. Marolda and Oscar P. Fitzgerald, From Military Assistance to Combat, 

1959–1965 in series The United States Navy and the Vietnam Conflict (Washington, 

DC: Naval Historical Center, 1986), 362, 482–83; Thomas J. Cutler, “Purple 

for Christmas” in Cutler, The U.S. Naval Institute on Women in the Navy: The 

Challenges (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2015), 170.

66 http://www.vietnamwomensmemorial.org/pdf/magallagher.pdf (2016)
260

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

67 Gallagher, “Memories of Navy Nursing: The Vietnam Era,” http://www.vietnamwomensmemorial.org/pdf/magallagher.pdf.

68 Quoted in Herman, Navy Medicine in Vietnam, 27.

69 Godson, Serving Proudly, 210.

70 Quoted in Godson, Serving Proudly, 206.

71 Godson, Serving Proudly, 204; Ebbert and Hall, Crossed Currents, 173.

72 Kathleen Broome Williams, Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea (Annapolis, 

MD: NIP, 2004).

73 Kathleen Broome Williams, Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. 

Navy in World War II (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2001).

74 Williams, Improbable Warriors, 153.

75 Charlene W. Bilings, Grace Hopper: Navy Admiral and Computer Pioneer (Hillside, 

NJ: Enslow, 1989).

76 Carmen L. Mitchell, The Contributions of Grace Murray Hopper to Computer 

Science and Computer Education (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1995).

77 Kurt W. Beyer, “Grace Murray Hopper: Technical Innovator” in Thomas, Leadership 

Embodied, 163.

78 Edward J. Marolda, “Cold War to Violent Peace: 1945–1991,” in The Navy

(Washington, DC: Naval Historical Foundation, 2000), 182; Navy Diversity 

Directorate (N134) (Washington, DC: Chief of Naval Personnel/Naval History and 

Heritage Command, Women in the United States Navy, 2011), 3.

79 Grace Hopper and Steve Mandell, Understanding Computers (St. Paul, MN: West 

Publishing, 1984).

80 See this Navy Department Library link: http://www.history.navy.mil/research/

library/bibliographies/hopper-grace-admiral-select-bibliography.html.

81 Quoted in Marolda, “Cold War to Violent Peace: 1945–1991,” 182.

82 John Lehman, On Seas of Glory: Heroic Men, Great Ships, and Epic Battles of the 

American Navy (New York: The Free Press, 2001).

83 Ibid., 324.

84 Nalty, Strength for the Fight, 270–86.

85 Robert J. Schneller Jr., Blue & Gold and Black: Racial Integration of the U.S. Naval 

Academy (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), 369–70.

86 Quoted in Schneller, Blue & Gold and Black, 117.

87 Nalty, Strength for the Fight, 287–302.

88 Paul Stillwell, “Samuel L. Gravely Jr.: Setting the Precedent” in Joseph J. Thomas, 

ed., Leadership Embodied:The Secrets to Success of Most Navy and Marine Corps 

Leaders (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2nd edition, 2013).

89 Ibid., 175.

90 Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., On Watch (New York: Quadrangle, 1976).

91 Larry Berman, Zumwalt: The Life and Times of Admiral Elmo Russell “Bud” 

Zumwalt Jr. (New York: Harper Collins, 2012).

92 Alex A. Kerr interview with USNI, 1984.
261

Social History

93 Howard J. Kerr, W. Lewis Glenn, Worth H. Bagley interviews with USNI, 1989.

94 Thomas J. Cutler, “Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr.: Hero or Heretic?” in James C. Bradford, 

ed., Quarterdeck and Bridge: Two Centuries of American Naval Leaders (Annapolis, 

MD: NIP, 1997), 415–32.

95 Ibid., 430.

96 Thomas J. Cutler, “Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr.: Innovation” in Thomas, Leadership 

Embodied, 182.

97 Norman Friedman, “Elmo Russell Zumwalt Jr.,” in Robert W. Love, The Chiefs of 

Naval Operations (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 1980), 376.

98 Ibid., 365.

99 Edgar F. Puryear Jr., American Admiralship: The Moral Imperatives of Naval 

Command (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2005).

100 Puryear, American Admiralship, 480.

101 John Darrell Sherwood, Black Sailor, White Navy: Racial Unrest in the Fleet during 

the Vietnam War Era (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

102 http://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/z/z-grams-list-policy-directives-issued-admiral-zumwalt/list-z-grams.html.

103 Davis and Hill, Blacks in the American Armed Forces, 131–50.

104 Sherwood, Black Sailor, White Navy, xiv.

105 Thomas H. Moorer, Kent L. Lee (1990), Robert L. J. Long(1995), Raymond E. Peet 

(1984), interviews with USNI; Moorer, Thomas H. Interviews with Edgar Puryear 

(2002; 2003), in Edgar F. Puryear Jr., American Admiralship: The Moral Imperatives 

of Naval Command (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2005).

106 Thomas B. Hayward interview with USNI, 2009, 247.

107 James D. Ramage interview with USNI, 1999, 343.

108 Gerald E. Miller interview with USNI, Vol. II, 1984, 735.

109 Thomas C. Hone, Power and Change: The Administrative History of the Office 

of the Chief of Naval Operations, 1946–1986 (Washington, DC: Naval Historical 

Center, 1989).

110 Ibid., 97.

111 James L. Holloway III, interviews with E. J. Marolda, for Naval Historical Foundation, 

Part II, December 2012, 58–59. Holloway repeated that story in his 2001 interviews 

with Edgar F. Puryear in American Admiralship, 448. For elaboration on Holloway’s 

evaluation of Zumwalt’s leadership and activist programs, see also 454–78.

112 Holloway interview with Edgar F. Puryear in American Admiralship, 453.

113 Holloway interview with E. J. Marolda, Part II, December 2012, 54–55.

114 Sherwood, Black Sailor, White Navy, 265.

115 Ibid., xvii.

116 Herbert R. Northrup, John A. Brinker, Steven M. DiAntonio, and Dale F. Daniel, 

Black and Other Minority Participation in the All-Volunteer Navy and Marine 

Corps (Philadelphia: Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 1979).

117 Ibid., 185.
262

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

118 Women in the United States Navy, 2011, 4.

119 Naval History and Heritage Command: http://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/

online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/z/z-grams-list-policy-directives-issued-a

dmiral-zumwalt/z-gram-116.html.

120 Loanne Johnson, Making WAVES: A Woman in This Man’s Navy (New York: St. 

Martin’s Press, 1986).

121 Zumwalt, On Watch, 262–64.

122 Quigley interview with USNI.

123 Ibid., 236, 274, 308.

124 Ibid., 296, 305.

125 Godson, Serving Proudly, 227.

126 Ibid., 240.

127 William J. Clinton, “Remarks at Funeral Services for Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., in 

Annapolis, MD, Maryland,” http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=58232.

128 Schneller, Blue and Gold and Black, 282, photo collection following pp. 238 and 368.

129 Nalty, Strength for the Fight, 354–55.

130 Navy Diversity Directorate (N134), African-Americans in the United States 

Navy (Washington, DC: Chief of Naval Personnel/Naval History and Heritage 

Command, 2011), 6.

131 African-Americans in the United States Navy, 3.

132 Godson, Serving Proudly, 251, 253, 256.

133 Regina Akers interview with Roberta Hazard, NHHC, 1994.

134 Navy Diversity Directorate (N134), Native Americans in the United States Navy, 

(Washington, DC: Chief of Naval Personnel/Naval History and Heritage Command, 

2011), 10.

135 Chase Untermeyer, Inside Reagan’s Navy: The Pentagon Journals (College Station, 

TX: Texas A&M Press, 2015). See especially 91, 142, 189, 210–11, 228, 244–45, 

260, 265–72, 277–80, 302–303.

136 Untermeyer, Inside Reagan’s Navy, 91.

137 James Webb, “Women Can’t Fight,” Washingtonian magazine (November 1979).

138 Untermeyer, Inside Reagan’s Navy, 266.

139 Ibid., 278.

140 Leuci, Women in Ships, http://www.navyhistory.org/navy-women-on-ships-adeployment-to-equality/.

141 Navy Study Group’s Report on Progress of Women in the Navy (Washington, DC: 

Navy Department, 1987).

142 Ibid., ES-1.

143 Ibid., ES-15.

144 An Update Report on the Progress of Women in the Navy (Washington, DC: Navy 

Department, 1990).

145 Ibid., ES-38.
263

Social History

146 Joseph W. Prueher interview with Edward J. Marolda, USNI, 2015–2016.

147 “Promotion restores shine to tarnished Navy career,” Baltimore Sun (9 April 1995).

148 Bruce A. Elleman, “The Right Skill Sets—Joseph Wilson Prueher (1941– ),” in John 

B. Hattendorf and Bruce A. Elleman, eds., Nineteen Gun Salute: Case Studies of 

Operational, Strategic, and Diplomatic Naval Leadership during the 20th and Early 

21st Centuries (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 2010). See also Joseph W. 

Prueher interview with Edward J. Marolda, USNI, 2015–16.

149 Gregory L. Vistica, Fall From Glory: The Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy (New York: 

Simon and Schuster, 1995), 292–97.

150 Godson, Serving Proudly, 256–71.

151 Ibid., 262, 272.

152 Ibid., 122–23, 221, 246, 275, 289–90.

153 Ebbert and Hall, Crossed Currents, 258. See also 208–11, 259.

154 Randy Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming: Lesbians and Gays in the U.S. Military: Vietnam 

to the Persian Gulf (New York: St. Martins Press, 1993).

155 Joseph Steffan, Honor Bound: A Gay American Fights for the Right to Serve his 

Country (New York: Villard Books, 1992).

156 Ronald D. Ray, Military Necessity & Homosexuality (Louisville, KY: First 

Principles, 1993).

157 E. Lawrence Gibson, Get Off My Ship: Ensign Berg vs. the U.S. Navy (New York: 

Avon, 1978).

158 Wilbur J. Scott and Sandra Carson Stanley, eds., Gays and Lesbians in the Military: 

Issues, Concerns, and Contrasts (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1994).

159 Edward J. Marolda and Robert J. Schneller, Shield and Sword: The United States 

Navy and the Persian Gulf War (Annapolis, MD and Washington, DC: NIP and 

Naval Historical Center, 2001)

160 Ibid., 108, 147, 312.

161 Marvin Pokrant, Desert Shield at Sea: What the Navy Really Did (Westport, CT: 

Greenwood Press, 1999); Pokrant, Desert Storm at Sea: What the Navy Really Did

(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999).

162 Norman Friedman, Desert Victory: The War for Kuwait (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 1991).

163 Ebbert and Hall, Crossed Currents, 289.

164 Winifred Quick Collins with Herbert M. Levine, More Than a Uniform: A Navy 

Woman in a Navy Man’s World (Denton: University of North Texas, 1997).

165 Ibid., xviii.

166 Doris M. Sterner, In and Out of Harm’s Way: A History of the Navy Nurse Corps

(Seattle, WA: Peanut Butter Pub., 1996).

167 John P. and Maria C. Dever, Women and the Military (Jefferson, NC: McFarland 

and Co., 1995).

168 Vicki L. Friedl, Women in the United States Military, 1901–1995: A Research Guide 

and Annotated Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996).
264

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

169 Margaret C. Devilbiss, Women and Military Service: A History, Analysis, and 

Overview (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 1990).

170 Deborah G. Douglas, United States Women in Aviation, 1940–1985 (Washington, 

DC: Smithsonian Press, 1990).

171 Lory Manning, Women in the Military (Arlington, VA: Women’s Research & 

Education Institute, 2008); Laurie Weinstein and Christie C. White, eds., Wives and 

Warriors: Women and the Military in the United States and Canada (Westport, CT: 

Bergin & Garvey, 1997).

172 Vistica, Fall From Glory, 389.

173 William McMichael, The Mother of All Hooks: The Story of the U.S. Navy’s 

Tailhook Scandal (Livingston, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997).

174 Ibid., 325.

175 Jean Zimmerman, Tailspin: Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook (New York: 

Doubleday, 1995).

176 Ibid., 286.

177 Stanley R. Arthur interview with Marolda, USNI, 597–98.

178 William B. Breuer, War and American Women: Heroism, Deeds, and Controversy

(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997).

179 Malcolm Steinberg, Admiral Boorda’s Navy (West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity 

Publishing, 2011).

180 Thomas J. Cutler, ed., Women in the Navy: The Challenges (Annapolis, MD: 

NIP, 2015).

181 Arthur interview with Edward J. Marolda, USNI, Jan 2016.

182 Sally Spears, Call Sign Revlon: The Life and Death of Navy Fighter Pilot Kara 

Hultgreen (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 1998), x.

183 J. J. Clark with Clark G. Reynolds, Carrier Admiral (New York: McKay, 1967).

184 Clark G. Reynolds, On the Warpath in the Pacific: Admiral Jocko Clark and the Fast 

Carriers (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2005).

185 See Sarandis Papadopoulos, “Partnership—Horacio Rivero Jr. (1910–2000),” in 

John B. Hattendorf and Bruce A. Elleman, eds., Nineteen Gun Salute: Case Studies 

of Operational, Strategic, and Diplomatic Naval Leadership during the 20th and 

Early 21st Centuries (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 2010), 145–55.

186 Thomas J. Cutler, A Sailor’s History of the U.S. Navy (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2005).

187 Native Americans in the United States Navy, 2–12.

188 Navy Diversity Directorate (N134) Asian Pacific Americans in the United States 

Navy (Washington, DC: Chief of Naval Personnel/Naval History and Heritage 

Command, 2011), 9–13; Edward J. Marolda, Ready Seapower: A History of the 

U.S. Seventh Fleet (Washington, DC: Naval History and Heritage Command), 151.

189 African-Americans in the United States Navy, 5, 9.

190 Women in the United States Navy, 5–12.
265

Social History

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Schneider, Dorothy and Carl J. Sound Off: American Military Women Speak Out. New 

York: Dutton, 1988. 

Schneller, Robert J., Jr. Breaking the Color Barrier: The U.S. Naval Academy’s First Black 

Midshipmen and the Struggle for Racial Equality. New York: New York University 

Press, 2005. 

———. Blue & Gold and Black: Racial Integration of the U.S. Naval Academy. College 

Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008.

Scott, Wilbur J., and Sandra Carson Stanley, eds. Gays and Lesbians in the Military: 

Issues, Concerns, and Contrasts. New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1994.
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Social History

Sherwood, John Darrell. Black Sailor, White Navy: Racial Unrest in the Fleet during the 

Vietnam War Era. New York: New York University Press, 2007. 

Shilts, Randy. Conduct Unbecoming: Lesbians and Gays in the U.S. Military: Vietnam to 

the Persian Gulf. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.

Smith, Margaret Chase. Declaration of Conscience, with William C. Lewis Jr. New York: 

Doubleday, 1972. 

Spears, Sally. Call Sign Revlon: The Life and Death of Navy Fighter Pilot Kara Hultgreen. 

Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1998. 

Steffan, Joseph. Honor Bound: A Gay American Fights for the Right to Serve his Country. 

New York: Villard Books, 1992.

Steinberg, Malcolm. Admiral Boorda’s Navy. West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing, 

2011. 

Sterner, Doris M. In and Out of Harm’s Way: A History of the Navy Nurse Corps. Seattle, 

WA: Peanut Butter Pub., 1996.

Stillwell, Paul. The Golden Thirteen: Recollections of the First Black Naval Officers. 

Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1993.

———. “Samuel L. Gravely Jr.: Setting the Precedent” in Joseph J. Thomas, Leadership 

Embodied. 175–78. 

Taylor, Theodore Taylor. The Flight of Jesse Leroy Brown. New York: Avon Books, 1998. 

Thomas, Joseph L., ed. Leadership Embodied: The Secrets to Success of the Most Effective 

Navy and Marine Corps Leaders. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2013.

U.S. Naval Institute, Oral History Collection. Annapolis, MD: Arthur, Stanley R.; Bagley, 

Worth H.; Collins, Winifred Quick; Glenn, W. Lewis; Hayward, Thomas B.; Kerr, 

Alex A.; Kerr, Howard J.; Lee, Kent L.; Long, Robert L. J.; Miller, Gerald E.; Moorer, 

Thomas H.; Peet, Raymond E.; Prueher, Joseph W.; Quigley, Robin; Ramage, James 

D.; and WAVES, 2 Vols.: Crandall, Elizabeth; Hancock, Joy Bright; Horton, Mildred 

McAfee; Palmer, Jean; Rich, Frances; Rigby, Eleanor; Smith, Margaret Chase; Wilde, 

Louise K.; Wiley, Tova P.

Untermeyer, Chase. Inside Reagan’s Navy: The Pentagon Journals. College Station: Texas 

A&M Press, 2015.

Vistica, Gregory L. Fall from Glory: The Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy. New York: 

Simon and Schuster, 1995. 

Webb, James. “Women Can’t Fight,” Washingtonian magazine, Nov. 1979. 

Weinstein, Laurie, and Christie C. White, eds. Wives and Warriors: Women and the 

Military in the United States and Canada. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1997. 

Williams, Kathleen Broome. Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea. Annapolis, MD: 

Naval Institute Press, 2004. 

———. Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in World War II. 

Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2001. 

Winkler, David F. Winkler. Ready Then, Ready Now, Ready Always: More Than a Century 

of Service by Citizen Sailors. Washington, DC: Navy Reserve Commemoration 

Committee, 2015. 

Zimmerman, Jean. Tailspin: Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook. New York: 

Doubleday, 1995. 

Zumwalt, Elmo R., Jr., On Watch. New York: Quadrangle, 1976. 
160130-N-CC806-282 U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Blagoj B. Petkovski

A bulwark in American Navy strategy, the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman

(CVN-75) transits the Persian Gulf. Her carrier strike group was deployed in support of Operation Inherent Resolve, maritime security operations, and theater security cooperation efforts in 

the U.S. Fifth Fleet area of operations.
Chapter 7

The U.S. Navy’s Role in National Strategy, 

Especially Between 1980 and Today

by Sebastian Bruns

Cat: Where are you going?

Alice: Which way should I go?

Cat: That depends on where you are going.

Alice: I don’t know.

Cat: Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.

—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

INTRODUCTION 

No matter whether you consider Lewis Carroll’s cat as the Navy and Alice as the 

corresponding national strategy, or whether you read it the other way around: 

The U.S. Navy’s role in national strategy and American strategy itself are so 

intertwined that it is nearly impossible to untangle enduring causal and reciprocal relationships. In fact, strategy making at a service level and the national 

level are complex, even chaotic processes with numerous elements, factors, and 

potentially disruptive influences that are highly likely to disappoint practitioners 

and researchers alike.

This is certainly challenging for the political scientist who might have 

happily retreated to complex and “ivory-towerish” theories and methods to 

analyze strategy making in complex environments. It can be equally difficult for a 
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naval historian, in particular one who is constrained by access to and availability 

of sources. Owing to the complexity of the subject, the political and military 

dynamics involved, and the observation that dominant sea power1 has a shaping 

function (and always has had in human history), there is hardly ever a desired 

end state for strategy. More so, strategy is a living and breathing, sometimes 

coughing, thing. In a Western democratic presidential or parliamentary system 

where the primacy of civilian politics is one of the fundamental golden rules, 

Carroll’s Alice and the cat thus could be seen as symbolic for the symbiotic relationship between a service and its political masters. If the path forward is unclear 

and the end goal is a mere set of ideas, then it does not matter whether one is on 

the right track. It is merely about not being incorrigibly wrong.

This paper discusses the Navy’s role in American strategy, or in other words 

the paths and frameworks. The Marine Corps and Coast Guard will only be 

touched upon in passing and allied or foreign perspectives will only be referred 

to peripherally. First, the essay sheds a light on the historiography of the subject, 

seeking to give an overview of who writes, why, and how about the issues at 

hand. Second, the paper identifies some key debates. Third, it will look at existing 

literature, available and accessible sources, and potential barriers to reckon with.2

Fourth, this chapter speaks on challenges and opportunities for assessing very 

recent Navy strategic history.

HISTORIOGRAPHY

A recent study found that each year between 2009 and 2013 close to 16,000 

history books were published in America alone. That equals more than 40 

books per day, ranging from popular histories to academic studies.3 Yet, even 

a cursory review reveals that there is little on Navy strategy and the service’s 

role in national strategy. Is this the infamous “sea blindness” at work with the 

American people, authors, and researchers? After all, it must be assumed that 

very few people and almost no professional naval or strategy historians write on 

modern strategy (that is, inside the 30-year limitation usually imposed on official 

documents before these are made available to historians). The Navy, even though 

“open ship” events and fleet weeks regularly draw tens of thousands of fascinated 

visitors, apparently does not lend itself to historians with an interest in strategy. 

The Navy’s strategic culture is difficult to transcend and the service has practiced 

forward operations since the end of World War II, which quite figuratively keeps 

them out of the eyes (and minds) of many Americans. The Navy and by extension 
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its approach to strategy are forward by definition—out of sight and out of mind 

for longer periods of time—and operationally focused by their own rationale. As 

retired Navy Captain Peter Haynes put it, “The institution’s locus remains these 

‘forces,’ termed ‘the fleet,’ which is the reason why the rest of the Navy exists. Its 

requirements are never questioned, its importance never rivaled. Like operations, 

the fleet’s salience is supposed to be self-evident.”4 Needless to say, this thinking 

hardly motivates individuals within the naval branch to take up study in modern 

naval strategy because they are focused elsewhere, and it creates problems of its 

own.5 Then again, if a huge military branch such as the Navy operates forward, 

should it not have a concise strategy to begin with?

For the purpose of this paper, strategy is considered the conditio sine qua 

non with which naval power cannot be exercised effectively. In other words, this 

is “the art of directing maritime capabilities to attain political ends.”6 It is both 

an art and a science. More so, from the social sciences point of view, it is imperative to understand strategy as fundamentally interdisciplinary. It includes—but 

is not limited to—political, historical, geographic, geopolitical, technological, 

sociological, and even psychological (rational) nuances. This, in turn, may scare 

off professional historians (and it also does not necessarily encourage political 

scientists either). Strategy is usually understood as a ways-means-ends linkage to 

achieve specific goals or objectives. For the Navy, more specifically OPNAV, this 

means “to formulate an organizational strategy that enables the Navy to support 

higher-level policy objectives.” This type of strategy ideally should be framed by 

a conceptual analysis of the future security environment and U.S. defense policy. 

For OPNAV, Navy strategy is transformative in the sense that it offers a plan 

to create the Navy of tomorrow out of the Navy of today.”7 The fundamental 

question that needs to be answered is this: Are you writing about war at sea—or 

the importance of the sea for strategic ends?

In principle, the literature of strategy is vast. The use of the term has expanded 

drastically, especially in the business sector since the 1980s. A November 2016 

cursory search at Amazon.com’s book department yielded more than 240,000 

titles for the keyword “strategy,” although these include anything from military 

strategy to business strategy, to self-help books for individuals seeking spiritual, 

financial investment, or relationship guidance. It is thus imperative to qualify 

what kinds of strategy are in the focus, and for the purpose of our profession and 

this paper these are: grand, military, and naval (or maritime) strategies.8

It is important to note that U.S. grand strategy, as opposed to the Navy 

strategy, is rather well reflected in the expert (academic) literature, although that 

should hardly come as a surprise given the United States’ dominant role globally 
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and its status as the world’s remaining superpower. Grand strategy considerations 

mandate a global analytical approach by virtue of the scope it takes.9 This is where 

many political scientists and scholars of international relations come into play. 

Consider, for example, Samuel Huntington’s groundbreaking essay from 1954 in 

which he identified three eras of U.S. policy: First, there was the Continental phase, 

followed by an Oceanic period, and finally the Transoceanic era.10 Huntington, 

who would later rise to write even more influential thoughts, remains such a key 

influence on the elements of a naval and maritime strategic concept that scholars 

have used his work as stepping stones to develop his concept further. Edward 

Rhodes, for instance, spoke of a fourth Cis-Oceanic era in 1999,11 which was 

later adapted for the 21st century by Austrian scholar Nikolaus Scholik, who 

added a fifth stage for the United States: the Post-Oceanic—or global—era.12

The past four years have seen an increasingly widening body of literature on 

Navy strategy, but very few actually written by trained naval historians. Rather, 

these authors often come from genuinely different, even outsider backgrounds 

(including this author’s own study). They include Swiss political scientist Larissa 

Forster, who published a quantitative study on U.S. Navy response from the sea 

in 2013;13 Captain Haynes, whose intellectual history of the Navy’s post–Cold 

War strategic development hit book stores in 2015;14 R. B. Watts’ book American 

Sea Power and the Obsolescence of Capital Ship Theory;

15 and Peter Swartz’ 

and Randy Papadopoulos’ chapters in the 2016 Routledge Handbook of Naval 

Strategy and Security.

16 Norwegian scholar Amund Lundesgaard’s recently 

completed PhD dissertation on U.S. Navy force structure after the Cold War17

and this author’s work complements that body of literature.18 Forthcoming is 

at least one more study titled Bearing the Trident: The United States’ System of 

Transoceanic Power Projection in Ascendancy and Crisis by Austrian national 

Michael Haas.19 Concurrently, a number of studies relevant to the subject of U.S. 

Navy strategy, the Navy, and its naval allies have recently been published or will 

be forthcoming.20

One may wonder why there is an increasing interest in more recent naval 

strategic history and the political use of sea power. Contextual trends, i.e., the 

reassessment of maritime strategic issues in this century in light of globalization, 

rise of other powers and a relative decline of U.S. power, and changes in the 

nature of war and warfare have also affected the U.S. role herein based on seeking 

an appreciation for the broader context of sea power. As Seth Cropsey noted, 

“Wide-ranging sea power is not so much an instrument of force [...] as a condition of stable commerce, effective diplomacy, and regional influence.”21 However, 

there have been vast gaps in research and application of recent naval strategic 
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events and developments if one looks beyond the vast stream of think-tank papers 

and blog posts.

Beyond the news that is driving the defense and security policy day, the 

rising interest in naval strategic matters has to do with the Navy itself. For the 

first time since “The Maritime Strategy” of the 1980s with the CS-21/CS-21R 

updates (2007/2015), the Navy has been able to develop a conceptual narrative of 

how to employ naval power to achieve political objectives. The Navy’s shrinking 

fleet size, a development that caught the attention of various senior leaders, has 

also led many to reconsider what the Navy offers for U.S. national security and 

defense—and how much it costs.22 The advent of ever-more sophisticated technology such as drones and unmanned vehicles accelerates military change and 

relationships, with sketchy strategic-operational ramifications still. For the first 

time since the end of the Cold War in 1990, the United States is also in danger 

of giving up its sea control, both in confined and shallow waters as well as on 

the high seas. Perhaps, in recognizing the systemic nature of maritime security 

in a grand strategic sense, as Peter Haynes has shown, and providing a very real 

illustration how the Navy serves political ends through such measures as sea 

control, showing of the flag, power projection, and deterrence, the Navy finally 

turned around the adverse momentum of the land-centric (read: Army, Air Force, 

Marine Corps) campaigns in the Middle East following 2001. A final hypothesis 

relates to the broader economic and political environment: Beginning with the 

2007 economic crises and accelerated by tectonic shifts in the international security environment from about 2014,23 some cost-benefit issues for pricy gadgets 

like aircraft carriers have gained some interest, with underlying strategic debates 

being conducted since.24

A number of recent doctoral dissertations on contemporary Navy strategy 

using methods of historical research have their foundation in CS-21 as an incentive to study the role of naval power in American policy. As a Norwegian colleague 

postulated, “With CS 21, the US Navy had an official strategy for the first time 

since the Maritime Strategy was published in 1986.”25 Also, CS-21 was specifically billed as a maritime, not just a naval strategy, which made it attractive to 

researchers outside of the Navy’s own immediate community. Surely the largest 

push came from an asset that was well used for research, the ready-presented 

capstone documents study by retired Navy Captain Peter Swartz. His concise list 

of numerous issues on the military strategies since 1970 emitted from an internal 

Navy workshop in 2005. The original request to analyze three Navy strategies 

soon morphed into a multi-volume PowerPoint presentation with thousands of 

slides, which is a chronology rather than a narrative, but has invaluable raw data 
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in it. Concurrently, since 2004, Professor John Hattendorf’s document collection 

has allowed researchers to follow the major naval strategic documents and the 

debate.26 That said, it is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the different 

views and finding of recent works on Navy strategy.

It is timely, though, to lay out some key debates and recurring themes in the 

literature. The following is a list of six broad groups of strands and lines. 

1. The Navy does not have a strategy/The Navy does not need a strategy. 

Among the most basic of debates, this issue was raised as early as the 1980s 

in the confrontation of then-Secretary of the Navy John Lehman and former 

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the Carter administration, Robert W. 

Komer. Komer became a very vocal critic of the 600-ship Navy idea pursued by 

Lehman and his disciples.27 Another example for such a fundamental dispute 

can be traced in the two essays by John Mearsheimer, who labeled the 1980s 

“Maritime Strategy” a strategic misstep, and Colin Gray’s emphatic support of 

such a maritime grand strategy.28

2. Should the Navy have a strategy at all? 

A related argument focuses on whether the service actually has a larger 

strategy, and a subset of strategies (such as for shipbuilding, retention, recruitment, etc.). Navy leadership would enthusiastically make the case that—of 

course—the Navy should have a strategy and that there is a strategy (like CS-21, 

CS-21R, “Forward... From the Sea,” etc.)—in addition to a subset of strategies 

for other fields (regional, functional). Samuel Huntington, in his landmark 1954 

essay, left no doubt that in his mind the Navy and the nation needed a strategic 

concept. A service strategy to describe and amplify global maritime aspects, 

recommend changes and professional judgements, and to organize, train, and 

equip is necessary. This was also reflected in some of the more academic debates 

of the 1980s.29

Among the more recent fundamentalist critics who thought services in 

general should not mingle in strategic conceptualizations was Bush administration Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Defense secretaries, especially those 

without a strong bond to the Navy, may favor the joint staff, the combatant 

commanders, and defense specialists inside and outside of government bureaucracy. Services could have visions or policies, but not strategies—a sentiment 

shared by those with a strict view on the primacy of politics over the military, or 

fans of the Goldwater-Nichols Act.

Note: There are important semantic differences between maritime and 
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naval and Navy strategies, or the names of capstone documents, a term coined 

by Swartz, then a senior researcher at the Center for Naval Analyses. As he 

put it, “USN [was] never rigorous in its approach to policy/strategy/concepts 

terminology. Definitions considered dull, unimportant, individual idiosyncratic 

approaches abound.”30 In fact, there have been, in no particular order, strategies, 

doctrines, concepts, concepts of maritime operations, visions, concepts of naval 

operations, philosophies, politics, guidance, analysis, and PR pieces.31

3. What is the best fleet design and force structure? What kind of conflict and 

future war should the Navy be prepared to fight? How “hard power” should 

a strategy be?

Broadly speaking, there is a tendency to discuss force structures delineated 

from the aircraft carrier, still the major asset in the Navy. That debate is recurring, both in its fundamental version (carrier proponents vs. carrier dismantlers) 

and its more nuanced sister, namely what kind of aircraft carrier the nation 

needs. In the 1970s, it was Admiral Elmo Zumwalt’s High-Low mix that advocated for a combination of platforms. Shortly thereafter, President James Earl 

Carter Jr.—a nuclear submariner—pushed for the sea control ship, a light carrier 

that was to replace the conventionally and nuclear-powered big-deck aircraft 

carriers. His counterpart, Admiral James Holloway, emphatically rejected the 

idea32 and under Carter’s successor Ronald Reagan, the big-deck carrier school 

won out. In the absence of a sea-control challenger and with the power-projection 

and close air support missions of the 1990s and 2000s, the role of the carrier 

was increasingly looked at through a budgetary lens. Even the Air Force–driven 

RAND Corporation chipped in, producing a report highlighting the utility of 

the aircraft carrier in the modern day and age.33 More recently, the debate came 

to light publically with the exchanges between retired Navy Captain Henry 

Hendrix (former director of Naval History and Heritage Command, now with 

the Washington-based think tank Center for New American Security) and retired 

Commander Bryan McGrath (team leader for the 2007 Cooperative Strategy 

writing process and deputy director of the Hudson Center’s Institute for American 

Seapower, Washington, DC). McGrath was also involved in a 2016 report on the 

validity of aircraft carriers.34 The uniformed strategists are markedly quiet on 

this issue, at least when it comes to the public, perhaps wary of a reprise of the 

1949 “Revolt of the Admirals.”

Roger Barnett’s 2009 postulate that a “fleet is like a hand of cards—you 

play the hand, not the individual card”35—speaks to the validity of warships 

other than 100,000-ton carriers. One need not return to the schools of thought 
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of Alfred Thayer Mahan and Julien Corbett to illustrate the debate between 

those favoring capital ships as the bedrock of strategy (Ticonderoga-class guided 

missile cruisers or Arleigh Burke- and Zumwalt-class destroyers) and those who 

lobby for smaller vessels (fast patrol boats, frigates, or littoral combat ships) for 

the modern Navy. This needs to be seen against the background of where the 

Navy faces the most significant challenges, by whom, and what it is being asked 

to do by the President. For instance, in the post-9/11 years, the focus increasingly 

was on navies combatting non-state actors such as pirates, terrorist, or human 

traffickers in the littoral and coastal, confined and shallow waters. That tide 

has turned with an increase in blue-water challengers, such as China. The early 

1990s saw a similar discussion between two camps.36

The third major strand of thought concerns the role of nuclear weapons 

at sea, although that discussion is, for the time being, largely confined to the 

1980s. It was nuclear escalation and the Maritime Strategy which concentrated 

seasoned analysts’ minds.37 Perhaps the pending replacement of the Ohio-class 

nuclear-powered ballistic and guided missile submarines (SSBN/SSGN) will bring 

fresh ideas to the role of nuclear weapons and the future of nuclear deterrence 

from the sea.

Below the threshold of devastating atomic war, the fourth strand relates to 

just how many conventional (or hybrid) conflicts the Navy should strategically be 

outfitted for. The range goes from one major war, to 1.5 (however one measures 

this) or to two. This obviously also concerns the kind of contingency that is 

expected, or as Edward Rhodes put it in 1999, if one is to fight a counter-military 

or a counter-societal campaign.38 Finally, just where these contingencies will take 

place is of note. After all, with two extensive and expensive U.S.-led land-centric 

campaigns in Southwest Asia and a perceived turn to asymmetric warfare 

perpetrated by terrorists, insurgents, and other non-state actors, riverine (or 

brown-water) warfare as well as force protection in the wake of the attack on 

Cole (DDG-67) was in increasingly high demand.39 A fifth strand focuses on peer 

competitors and their capabilities. China has notably gained significant attention 

here, although these works only rarely verbalize what the Navy’s strategy and 

U.S. national strategy should do in response.40

4. What is the Navy concerned about? What is its place in national strategy? 

In contrast to the few published works that look at broader strands, continuities and changes in Navy strategy, comparatively many more studies focus 

on particulars. For example, one could look at the Navy through a technology 

lens as a common denominator that shapes naval missions and the particular 
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utility of naval assets in a given area such as strike, ballistic missile defense, cyber, 

special operations, electronic warfare, or logistics.41 Another prism to use are the 

particular missions of the Navy, a term that is nowadays understood as the set of 

overarching tasks around which planners build balanced naval forces. It is a most 

helpful tool for analysts to focus their view of assessing the naval contributions 

to U.S. national security and interests.42 The mission set changes based on what 

political and military leaders deem important. Today, for example, the Navy’s 

missions include power projection, sea control, deterrence (both conventional 

and nuclear), and presence. Historically, the missions have included others such 

as coastal defense, humanitarian assistance/disaster relief, or amphibious assault, 

although this set has waxed and waned over time.

The focus on naval missions or technology is a debate that hardly ever is felt 

outside of expert circles. In fact, it is rare that the actual use of the Navy for political ends is discussed in public, with the argument between Secretary of Defense 

Ash Carter and Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus over presence vs. warfighting 

capabilities of the Navy in 2015/2016 a very recent exception to the rule. It was 

slightly different in the Cold War against the background of nuclear parity, as 

a number of books can attest to. Some of these works continue to inspire naval 

strategy analysts today.43

5. Who makes naval strategy? Who creates, who interprets, who modifies, who 

implements it? 

This leads to a major fruitful debate, one that seeks to answer who makes 

strategy as such. To John Hattendorf (2004), it is the President, the Secretary of 

Defense, and OPNAV, where he attributes no congressional role in it whatsoever 

(in this sentiment, echoing Winfried Stallmann [2000]).44 Peter Swartz, in his 

voluminous body of slides (2011), noted that it was various ranks who actually 

wrote naval strategy in OPNAV, ranging from lieutenant commanders to captains 

and even rear admirals. David Rosenberg, on the other hand, noted that process, 

rather than particularly gifted or empowered offices or individuals, was the key 

to understanding how strategy was formulated.45 To the researcher, this severely 

complicates identifying the particulars of the subject. A couple of years after 

his first analytical piece, Rosenberg—together with noted military historian Jon 

Sumida—narrowed the particulars down to a catchy quintet: According to the 

two authors, it was machines, men, manufacturing, management, and money that 

literally made naval strategy.46 The late German political scientist and German 

Navy Captain Wilfried Stallmann (2000) added a sixth “M”: (naval) mentality. 
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6. What is the value of naval history and the enduring relevance of the classics? 

In lieu of very recent theorists and in acknowledgment of the relatively high 

number of constants in sea power and naval strategy, some of the classics receive 

recurring attention. Alfred Thayer Mahan, for instance, has been the subject of 

at least three major naval strategy books since 1990.47 Julian Corbett, the British 

strategist of the early 20th century, has gotten less of such exposure, which may 

simply be due to his background rather than the enduring value of his theories. A 

similar fate can be diagnosed for Samuel Huntington, whose thoughts on the need 

for a strategic concept await rediscovery by academics and policy-makers alike.

A HARD LOOK AT SOURCES 

For those historians interested in researching the Navy’s role in national 

strategy, there are a number of starting points. First, there are the strategies themselves. Internet archives, but more importantly the collections in the Newport 

Papers, are formidable sources.48 In fact, of the 40 or so capstone documents that 

the Navy has issued since 1980, only a handful remains classified.

Oral histories and recorded interviews are another viable source of information, although for the very recent history there is a lack of oral histories and interviewees might be hard to track down owing to the fact that they are very often 

still in office or in an official position.49 The problems with this approach are 

manifold. These are, in essence, elite conversations with a particular narrow or 

too broad focus. Access to decision-makers willing to speak can be challenging, 

and interviews and a transcript are time-consuming undertakings. It is also challenging, in particular with charismatic interviewees, to assess the real impact of 

that individual’s work on the national level, especially when it comes down to the 

attribution of successes and failures. 

Existing literature can be broadly grouped into the classics, the more 

nuanced uses of maritime power in the Cold War, a reassessment for the post–

Cold War world, and a few operational histories. The reader is kindly referred 

to this presentation’s bibliography. Memoirs and (auto-) biographies are far and 

few in between. To date, the works on Elmo Zumwalt, Hyman G. Rickover, 

James Holloway, and John Lehman remain the only notable points of departure 

in this genre.50 At the same time, there are still only a limited number of analyses 

of Navy strategy. Interestingly, and perhaps worthy of enquiry, two of these are 

from Germany (this author’s forthcoming book will be the third).51

To reiterate a point made above, no dedicated study or research project, even 
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in the principally large field of legislative studies, exists on Congress’s role and 

influence on recent naval strategy-making, something that a close examination of 

House of Representatives and Senate records and qualitative interviews with individuals from both chambers, and others such as the Navy legislative liaison office 

or Ron O’Rourke of the Congressional Research Service could help eradicate. 

CHALLENGES AND BARRIERS 

Social scientists will often encounter different obstacles when researching recent 

and/or policy-relevant issues, and naval strategy is no exception. First, there is a 

distinct lack of documentation about processes. One can try to retrieve memos 

and drafts of strategy documents, for example, only at a significant research 

expense because these often do not make it into archives. The relative lack of attribution and the differing strategy formulation practices make a pattern difficult to 

discern and consequently to find the right people or institutions to whom to look 

for original source material. Second, classification is also an issue, as with any 

national security problem. Where strategic documents are often un- or declassified (after all, a strategy is meant to inform a larger audience), drafts thereof 

remain classified and the more recent, internally aimed capstone documents are 

still out of reach. Third, a challenge particular to historians is one that is deeply 

rooted in their academic upbringing and ethos: the inability or even unwillingness to engage with ongoing political processes. By virtue, historians often are 

accustomed to looking at details more than at patterns and at individuals more 

than at processes. They are trained to work on issues at least three decades old 

(the average time for archival sources to be made available) so that they need not 

necessarily interact with current policy-making messes. At the same time, political scientists are often too focused on a narrow problem or a method or theory 

in order to connect the larger dots and provide practical expertise. The question 

of just who writes strategy, and to interpret accordingly without setting a gold 

standard from decades ago for something entirely more complex today—as the 

Maritime Strategy became a gold standard for many capstone documents of the 

1990s, 2000s, and 2010s—is a very challenging one. 

Fourth, something very particular to academic work in the military realm 

is the problem of “Outsider vs. Insider.” Military processes are inherently 

complicated to trace and track. To complicate matters further, the abundance 

of acronyms and coinages in military lingo is fabulous. From ship designations 

to Department of Defense branches, this is sure to frustrate many analysts who 
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are not familiar with how the military works, how it thinks, and how it enacts 

orders or policy objectives. It does not help that there is a certain periodization of 

military history—the fifth challenge—which potentially confuses the strands and 

lines that cross systemic changes (e.g., before/after the advent of nuclear weapons 

at sea, during/after the presidency of Ronald Reagan, before/after the end of the 

Cold War, etc.). Sixth, it is challenging to measure successful strategies altogether. 

Was, for instance, “The Maritime Strategy” a success, did it even win the Cold 

War? Or was it a failure, for many of its key components were never tested in 

anger because the Soviet Union was already on its way out anyway? Did it harm 

the Navy’s own strategic culture given how challenged the service was after the 

demise of the Soviet Union? These are some of the substantial disagreements in 

the scholarly and practical community.52

Seventh, institutional learning is hard to measure because of the dynamics 

involved in how departments change, and the individuals who rotate through 

them. Eight, causation does not imply correlation: Disentangling reciprocal 

causality is the supreme discipline for the strategy researcher. To complicate 

matters, as Swartz, Amund Lundesgaard, and Peter Haynes have repeatedly 

stressed from different angles, the Navy is fundamentally about operations. It 

devotes finite energy and time to strategic excellence because it strives for operational perfection. Ninth, what prism does the analyst use to focus the research? 

Is, for example, the type of warfare—nuclear, conventional, and unconventional—a valid lens through which to focus the analyses? What if they are more 

intimately intertwined? Isn’t one of them perhaps used as a strawman? How can 

this be balanced? What is missing? It goes without saying that a narrative is not 

necessarily an analysis. 

Tenth, there is the issue of historical revisionism. Intentions and results are 

two very different cups of tea, but in hindsight things might make sense to the 

outside observer, especially when supported by evidence from oral histories or 

selective research. This also relates to the blame and praise assessments, especially in an era where bemoaning the lack of strategy is the rule, not the exception—except, naturally, at a given time in the past when strategy (to which the 

sender of such a message might often have a personal relationship!) was perfectly 

in place.53

Finally, analysts need to take a hard look at the established views of the 

policy-makers. If it holds true that the President, the Secretary of Defense, and 

the Navy are the most important players in developing and implementing naval 

strategy (Stallmann in 2000 and Hattendorf in 2004 made these points clear), 

then why is there so surprisingly little from their point of view? 
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OPPORTUNITIES AND AVENUES FOR FUTURE 

RESEARCH AND WRITING 

There is a vast field that demands research when it comes to naval strategy and 

its place in national strategy. It would be impossible to devise research questions 

for every single one of these, and some issues are arguably more pressing than 

others. Still, grant-making institutions, think tanks, universities, and research 

and dissemination institutions should look at these as possible prisms for work 

that really would make an impact in the naval strategic community:

■ Strategic shocks and their context: How have pivotal events such as the end 

of the Cold War, the demise of the Soviet Union, 9/11, or the financial crisis 

impacted naval strategy, the thinking about maritime means and ends, and the 

use of the Navy? What contextual factors need to be considered? 

■ Naval strategy and sea power as a foreign policy tool: Where, when, and how 

was the Navy used as a foreign policy tool, from maritime diplomacy to coercion, from naval deterrence (conventional and nuclear) to capacity-building 

and confidence-building measures? What is the political value of a navy? 

■ Navy strategy and U.S. Congress: What is Congress’ impact on naval strategy? 

Who were the major lawmakers for or against a strong Navy, how did they 

build networks, what tools do they have at their disposal? What’s the role and 

impact of the Navy’s legislative affairs shop on Capitol Hill, and how does it 

seek to influence the thinking about, and appreciation, of the Navy (from free 

pizza lunches for staffers to congressional delegations)? 

■ Navy strategy and the American public: What are the demographics of the 

Navy? Are there regional differences? How could the Navy’s public image 

relate to strategy and the acceptance of the Navy, anywhere from music videos 

to Top Gun? 

■ Navy strategic relationships with other branches, allies, adversaries: How has 

the Navy worked with (or against) the Air Force, the Army, the Coast Guard, 

the Marine Corps? Which programs were affected, and what strategic consequences did this have? What were some of the key relationships to alliances 

(such as in the shaping of allied maritime and naval strategy) and adversaries 

(such as versus the Soviet Union)? Where are some causal links between naval 

strategies, e.g., the German navy’s development since the 1980s in a strategic 

realm and how much was it informed/influenced by U.S. naval policy and 

strategy? 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

■ Correlation: What are the relationships between strategies and naval operations, and between operations and the crafting of strategy? Which individuals 

have been able to test strategies live (through exercises, etc.), and/or how have 

seasoned operators informed naval strategy? What is the role of (disruptive) 

technology as a prism to think about, and operationalize naval strategy? 

■ Institutional learning: How has the Navy (OPNAV) organized to craft and 

execute strategy? Where have naval strategic thinkers gone as part of their 

tours (perhaps as legislative fellows or associated to universities and think 

tanks) and after their careers so that the effects of an unforgiving military 

system of rotating billets could be lessened? 

CONCLUSION 

Naval strategy and the role of the Navy in national strategy are deeply rooted in 

the normative and political history of the country, and its role and place in the 

world. Quite simply, almost every major war that the United States was involved 

in began with an attack on a U.S. warship. 

Also, context is important if one attempts to make sense of the messy chaotic 

process that is naval strategy, and the place of the Navy and what it does in the 

national raison d’être. The current changing strategic environment needs historians who provide insights from the past to learn for the future and help address 

current problems. Thus stems the need to encourage younger colleagues to actively 

participate in the analysis and shaping of strategy: less sequential, more parallel, 

and in closest collaboration with other historians and political scientists, at home 

and in the English-speaking world abroad, for the very real ramifications of U.S. 

naval strategy and America’s maritime approach to world politics. Historians 

need to be encouraged to write on recent and very recent strategy so that, as 

Seth Cropsey wrote in 2013, the victories of sea power are no longer silent. Such 

historians will place themselves in a unique position to influence policy. 
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Strategy

Notes

1 As Geoffrey Till has remarked, sea power—sea power is American usage; seapower 

is British usage, but is also used by some Americans—is a relative concept. It should 

be understood as having an input or the means (such as navies, the defense industry) 

and an output or the ends (the capacity to influence other people or things by what 

one does at or from the sea). Geoffrey Till, Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-First 

Century (London: Routledge, 2013), 25. 

2 This is principally informed by the author’s own experiences as a German national 

studying potentially classified issues from 5,000 miles away for his PhD dissertation between 2010 and 2014—U.S. Navy Strategy & American Sea Power from 

“The Maritime Strategy” (1982–1986) to “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century 

Seapower” (2007): Politics, Capstone Documents, and Major Naval Operations 

1981–2011 (Kiel, Germany: Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel, 2014). The 

dissertation will be published shortly as a revised monograph, US Naval Strategy 

and National Security: The Evolution of American Maritime Power, 1981–2015 

(Routledge, Abingdon, UK, and New York, forthcoming 2017). 

3 Source: http://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicatordoc.aspx?i=393. This 

is only rivalled by books on literature. It is two-and-a-half times as many as books 

dealing with the arts, three times the number of books on language, linguistics, and 

religion, and eight times the number of new books in the fields of gender/ethnic 

studies, and philosophy. 

4 Peter Haynes, American Naval Thinking in the Post–Cold War Era: The U.S. Navy 

and the Emergence of a Maritime Strategy, 1989–2007 (Monterey, CA: Naval 

Postgraduate School, 2013), 20. 

5 Daniel Gouré, “The Tyranny of Forward Presence,” Naval War College Review 54, 

no. 3 (Summer 2001): 11–24; “The Maritime Strategy” of the 1980s acknowledges 

(or rather, states) that naval forces prevent major global war through controlling 

crises and containing limited wars by way of being on-scene.

6 Eric Grove, The Future of Seapower (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press 

[Hereafter, NIP], 1990), 11.

7 James Russell, James Wirtz, Donald Abenheim, Thomas-Durrell Young, and Diana 

Wueger, Navy Strategy Development: Strategy in the 21st Century (Monterey, CA: 

Naval Postgraduate School, 2015), 1. 

8 The setting is important for one can easily get confused in the different altitudes. 

In 1967, Liddell Hart proclaimed that “Grand strategy should control military 

strategy;” his contemporary Henry Eccles in 1979 added that “Policy must dominate strategy; strategy influences policy.” Strategy is perhaps best understood to be 

a loop series of questions that need to be answered (What do we want to do? How? 

What are we up against? What is available? What are the mismatches? Why do 

we want to do this?—see P. H. Liotta and Richmond Lloyd, “From Here to There: 

The Strategy and Force Planning Framework,” Naval War College Review 58, no. 2 

[Spring 2005]: 121–37, 122). This requires a significant degree of coherence, which 

is not always easy to accomplish. 

9 For very general considerations about the U.S. role in the world, see, for example, 

Barry Posen, “Command of the Commons,” International Security 28, (Summer 
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2003): 1, 5–46, in which he underlines that command of the commons was the 

fundamental base for a unilateral or multilateral hegemonic strategy of the United 

States and the source of American power and influence. 

10 Samuel Huntington, “National Policy and the Transoceanic Navy.” U.S. Naval 

Institute Proceedings 80, no.5, (1954): 483–93.

11 Edward Rhodes, “‘...From the Sea’ and Back Again. Naval Power in the Second 

American Century.” Naval War College Review 52, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 13–54.

12 Nikolaus Scholik, Seemacht im 21. Jahrhundert: Handbuch und Lexikon (Vienna, 

Austria: Caesar Press 2015).

13 Larissa Forster, Influence Without Boots on the Ground: Seaborne Crisis Response

(Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 2013).

14 Peter Haynes, Toward a New Maritime Strategy: American Naval Thinking in the 

Post–Cold War Era (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2015). 

15 R. B. Watts, American Sea Power and the Obsolescence of Capital Ship Theory

(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015).

16 Peter Swartz, “American Naval Policy, Strategy, Plans, and Operations in the Second 

Decade of the Twenty-First Century,” and Sarandis (“Randy”) Papadopoulos, 

“Having to ‘Make Do’: U.S. Navy and Marine Corps Strategic Options in the 

Twenty-First Century,” Joachim Krause/Sebastian Bruns, The Routledge Handbook 

of Naval Strategy and Security (London: Routledge, 2016), 229–67 and 268–82, 

respectively. 

17 Amund N. Lundesgaard, Controlling the Sea and Projecting Power: U.S. Navy 

Strategy and Force Structure After the Cold War (Oslo, Norway: University of 

Oslo, 2016). 

18 See note 2. 

19 Haas is currently preparing the manuscript for submission by summer 2017. 

20 CAPT Joseph Gagliano, USN, Congressional Policymaking in Sino-U.S. Relations 

During the Post–Cold War Era (London: Routledge, 2014), is a study on the legislature and foreign policy (vs. the conventional wisdom that the President is the dominant figure); Nikolaus Scholik’s Handbuch is planned to be available in English in 

2018; James C. Bradford, ed., America, Sea Power, and the World (Hoboken, NJ: 

Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), traces the relationship between the American Navy and the 

position of the United States on the global political stage over the past 250 years. 

Jeremy Stöhs’ The Decline of European Seapower (working title; Annapolis, MD: 

NIP, to be published in 2017) and a related dissertation project begun with the 

Institute for Security Policy/Center for Maritime Strategy and Security in 2016 will 

complement U.S.-centered works. 

21 Seth Cropsey, Mayday. The Decline of American Naval Supremacy (London: Gerald 

Duckworth and Co, 2014), 34.

22 Recall the 2012 presidential debate between incumbent Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney, which famously included a short debate on U.S. Navy ship 

numbers. Recently, President-elect Donald Trump’s plan for a 350-ship Navy has 

raised the issue to a higher echelon. 

23 Recall the rise of ISIS/Daesh in Syria and Iraq, Russia’s illegal takeover of Crimea 

and the ensuing war in Ukraine, and the accelerating migration pressure. 
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Strategy

24 Recent examples include debates and opinion pieces on the future of the (super) 

aircraft carrier as the principal force-generating platform of the U.S. Navy (CDR 

Bryan McGrath, USN [ret.] and CAPT Henry Hendrix, USN [ret.]), and an argument 

between Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter 

about presence vs. warfighting. 

25 Amund Lundesgaard,, US Navy Strategy and Force Structure After the Cold War 

(IFS Insights No. 4, November 2011) (Oslo: Institutt for Forsvarsstudier, 2011), 21

26 John Hattendorf, ed., The Evolution of the U.S. Navy’s Maritime Strategy, 1977–

1986 (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 2004); John Hattendorf, ed., U.S. 

Naval Strategy in the 1990s (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 2006) and U.S. 

Naval Strategy in the 1970s, (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 2007); John 

Hattendorf, Peter Swartz, eds., U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1980s (Newport, RI: Naval 

War College Press, 2008). Follow-up editions for the 2000s and the 2010s are highly 

anticipated. 

27 Robert Komer, Maritime Strategy or Coalition Defense? (Lanham, MD: Rowman & 

Littlefield, 1984). 

28 John Mearsheimer, “A Strategic Misstep: The Maritime Strategy and the Deterrence 

in Europe,” International Security 11, no. 2 (1986): 3–57; Colin Gray, Maritime 

Strategy, Geopolitics, and the Defense of the West (New York: Ramapo Press, 1986).

29 Linton Brooks. “Naval Power and National Security: The Case for the Maritime 

Strategy,” International Security 11, no. 2 (Fall 1986): 58–88. 

30 Peter Swartz, U.S. Navy Capstone Strategy, Policy, Vision, and Concept Documents: 

What to Consider Before You Write One (CQR D0020071.A1/Final, March 2009). 

Arlington, VA: CNA, 2009. https://www.cna.org/cna_files/pdf/D0020071.A1.pdf.

31 To a significant degree, the labelling also concerns the strategic culture and the audience one wishes to address. A strategist should answer questions such as “What is 

your audience?” “What do you want to say/achieve?” “How and where do you plan 

to implement it?” and “How do you hedge against self-fulfilling prophecies?” 

32 James Holloway, Aircraft Carriers at War: A Personal Retrospective of Korea, 

Vietnam, and the Soviet Confrontation (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2007). 

33 John Gordon IV, Peter Wilson, John Birkler, Steven Boraz, and Gordon Lee, 

Leveraging America’s Aircraft Carrier Capabilities: Exploring New Combat and 

Noncombat Roles and Missions for the U.S. Carrier Fleet. (Santa Monica, CA: 

RAND Corporation, 2006). 

34 Seth Cropsey, Bryan McGrath, and Timothy Walton, Sharpening the Spear: 

The Carrier, the Joint Force, and High-End Conflict (Washington, DC: Hudson 

Center, 2015). 

35 Roger Barnett. Navy Strategic Culture: Why the Navy Thinks Differently (Annapolis, 

MD: NIP, 2009), 79.

36 Jan Breemer, “The End of Naval Strategy: Revolutionary Change and the Future of 

American Naval Strategy,” Strategic Review 22, no. 2 (1994); 40–53. In this article, 

he noted that the U.S. Navy can focus directly on influencing events on land, thus 

moving from a strictly naval gray-ship focus to a broader maritime (littoral) leverage. 

Edward Rhodes, in “From the Sea... and Back Again,” took a contrary position. 

37 Barry Posen. “Inadvertent Nuclear War? Escalation and NATO’s Northern Flank.” 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

International Security 7, no. 2 (1982): 28–54; Geoffrey Till, Maritime Strategy and 

the Nuclear Age, 2nd edition (London: Macmillan, 1984); Robert Jervis, “Navies, 

Politics, and Political Science,” J. Hattendorf, ed., Doing Naval History: Essays 

Towards Improvement (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 1995), 41–49. 

38 Rhodes, Edward. “‘...From the Sea’ and Back Again: Naval Power in the Second 

American Century,” Naval War College Review 52, no. 2 (1999): 13–54.

39 Blake Dunnavent, Brown-Water Warfare: The U.S. Navy in Riverine Warfare and 

the Emergence of a Tactical Doctrine—New Perspectives on Maritime History

(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), traces the evolution of riverine 

warfare in U.S. military operations from its informal inception in the 18th century 

to its establishment as a formal doctrine in the 20th century. On Cole (DDG-67), 

see Kirk Lippold, Front Burner: Al Qaeda’s Attack on USS Cole (New York: Public 

Affairs Publishing, 2013).

40 Bernard Cole, The Great Wall at Sea: China’s Navy in the Twenty-First Century

(Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2010); James Holmes and Toshi Yoshiara, Red Star over 

the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy (Annapolis, 

MD: NIP, 2013); Sarah Kirchberger, Assessing China’s Naval Power: Technological 

Innovation, Economic Constraints, and Strategic Implications (Baden-Baden, 

Germany: Springer, 2014). 

41 Norman Friedman, Naval Institute Guide to World Naval Weapon Systems

(Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2006); VADM Arthur K. Cembrowski, USN, John H. Garstka, 

“Network-Centric Warfare: Origin and Future,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings

124, no. 1 (January 1998): 28–35. 

42 Stansfield Turner, “Missions of the U.S. Navy,” U.S. Naval War College Review 27, 

no. 5, (March/April 1974). 

43 James Cable, Gunboat Diplomacy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971) and its 

revised version, Gunboat Diplomacy 1919–1991: Political Applications of Limited 

Naval Force (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994); Edward Luttwak, The Political 

Uses of Sea Power (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), Sergej 

Gorshkov, Seapower and the State (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 1976 and 1979); Ken 

Booth, Navies and Foreign Policy (London: Routledge, 1977); Charles Allen, The 

Uses of Navies in Peacetime (Washington, DC: AEI Press,1980).

44 The congressional role in national and naval-strategy making would merit a 

policy-analytic study. 

45 David Rosenberg, “The Realities of Modern Naval Strategy,” J. Goldrick and J. 

Hattendorf, eds., Mahan Is Not Enough: The Proceedings of a Conference on the 

Works of Sir Julian Corbett and Admiral Sir Hugh Richmond (Newport, RI: Naval 

War College Press, 1993), 141–75.

46 Jon Sumida and David Rosenberg, “Machines, Men, Manufacturing, Management 

and Money: The Study of Navies as Complex Organizations and the Transformation 

of Twentieth-Century Naval History,” J. Hattendorf, ed., Doing Naval History. 

Essays Towards Improvement (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1995), 25–40.

47 Gary Anderson, a U.S. Marine Corps colonel, submitted Beyond Mahan: Proposal 

for US Naval Strategy in the 21st Century (Newport, RI: U.S. Naval War College 

Press, 1990), where Jon Sumida, Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching Command: 

The Classic Works of Alfred Thayer Mahan Reconsidered (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 
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University Press, 2000) and the very recent 21st-Century Mahan edited by LCDR B. 

J. Armstrong, USN (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2014) point to the enduring relevance of 

this strategist. 

48 The 2000s and 2010s volumes are eagerly awaited by the community of scholars, 

who in the meantime have to resort to internet or physical archives to retrieve the 

naval strategies of that time. 

49 This author, when conducting interviews with naval strategists in 2012, found only 

one interviewee declining to engage in an academic conversation or oral history at 

all, two interviewees who did not want the discussion to be on the record, and one 

gentleman unable to find time because of his busy schedule. 

50 Elmo Zumwalt, On Watch: A Memoir, (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1976); for a 

biography of Zumwalt, see Larry Berman, Zumwalt: The Life and Times of Admiral 

Elmo Russell “Bud” Zumwalt, Jr. (New York: Harper, 2012). On Hyman G. Rickover, 

the “father of the nuclear navy” whose relevance is uncontested because the fundamentally strategic nature of nuclear issues and their relation to the next war of the 

United States, see Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, Rickover: Controversy and 

Genius (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1981); Theodore Rockwell, The Rickover 

Effect: How One Made a Difference (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse Press, 2001); 

RADM Dave Oliver Jr., USN (ret.), Rickover’s Leadership Principles and the Rise 

of the Nuclear Navy (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2014); James Holloway, Aircraft Carrier 

at War: A Personal Retrospective of Korea, Vietnam, and the Soviet Confrontation 

(Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2007), which includes some autobiographic aspects of his 

time as CNO; John Lehman, Command of the Seas (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2001). 

Lehman, a poster child for the 1980s Maritime Strategy, was harshly criticized by 

people such as Gregory Vistica in his Fall from Glory: The Men Who Sank the Navy

(New York: Touchstone, 1997) 

51 Peter Rudolf, Amerikanische Seemachtpolitik und maritime Rüstungskontrolle 

unter Carter und Reagan (Frankfurt: Hessische Stiftung für Friedens- und 

Konfliktforschung, 1990); Wilfried Stallmann, Die maritime Strategie der USA nach 

1945: Entwicklung, Einflussgrößen und Auswirkungen auf das atlantische Bündnis

(Kiel, Germany: Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel, 2000). In addition, Peter 

Swartz’s draft dissertation manuscript on the lines and strands of U.S. Navy strategy 

needs to be recognized, even if unfinished. See also Paul Ryan, First Line of Defense: 

The U.S. Navy Since 1945 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Press, 1981). 

52 Specialists like George Baer and Joseph Bouchard noted separately that to be 

successful, naval strategy needed to align with national policy, whereas Roger 

Barnett and Sam Bateman, also independent from each other, saw alignment with 

the Navy’s own strategic culture and the persuasiveness in the political environment 

as key indicators. 

53 After the publication of “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower” (2007), 

former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman and former Undersecretary of the Navy 

Seth Cropsey engaged in praise and criticism of the new capstone document. Both 

agreed, however, that the 1980s Maritime Strategy, to which they were both contributors at various levels, remained a gold standard. 
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150421-N-YE579-301 U.S. Navy photo

One of the Navy’s most technically advanced ships, the guided-missile destroyer Zumwalt (DDG1000) is put to the test during acceptance trials with the Navy’s Board of Inspection and Survey. 
Chapter 8

The Historiography of Technology Since 1950, 

with a Focus on the Navy

by Mark D. Mandeles*

INTRODUCTION

I thank Dr. Mike Crawford and the Naval History and Heritage Command 

(NHHC) for the honor of its invitation to prepare an essay on the subject of 

historiography of technology in the Navy in its speaker series, “Needs and 

Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy.” Dr. Crawford charged 

me to consider three broad questions: What has been written? What has not been 

written? (Or, what has not been deemed important enough to consider in writing 

histories of naval and Marine Corps technology?) And, what should be written? 

Three themes inform my discussion of selected work on the history of technology. First, the end of World War II marks a period in which, as historian 

Barton Hacker observes, “military authorities have come eagerly to accept or 

even promote . . . the introduction of new weapons.” Military authorities’ adoption of the idea that “doctrine might drive and control technological change” 

makes the post–World War II period very different from the past 200 years of 

military history.1

 Indeed, the idea that military technological change might be 

* I thank the following individuals for providing thoughtful comments and suggestions: Larrie 

Ferreiro, Paul S. Giarra, Thomas C. Hone, Laura L. Mandeles, Norman Polmar, Adam B. Siegel, 

and John Sloan. Any errors that remain after I failed to accept good advice are mine. I also thank 

Professor (and retired USMC Maj.) Todd R. LaPorte, whose 1973 class on technological change 

first stimulated my interest in social and political issues concerning the development and uses of 

material technologies. I dedicate this essay to the memory of my late friend, U.S. Air Force military historian Dr. Daniel R. Mortensen.
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

controlled and directed had ample precedent in the development of new industries 

in the late 19th century organized around telecommunications, photographic, 

electrical, and chemical technologies that exploited then-recent scientific discoveries. Industrial leaders recognized their dependence on science, and established 

research components—industrial research laboratories—to routinize scientific 

research to develop improved processes and products.2 Post–World War II military leaders applied an existing and proven approach to improving products and 

processes.

The second theme concerns the post–World War II role of knowledge and 

analysis in making decisions and policy about public expenditures on inventive 

activity and technology development. The appropriate perspective on the role of 

knowledge and analysis in inventive activity concerns the co-evolution of institutions and military, social, political, and economic organizations; not whether 

a law-like generalization can be offered regarding the role of knowledge and 

analysis in individuals’ efforts to invent or apply technology.3

 This theme echoes 

the views of prominent military historians. For example, Barton Hacker notes 

that “the concept of military technology has grown beyond hardware to embrace 

ideas and institutions; organization, management, and doctrine have become as 

much a part of the field as weapon development.”4 Alex Roland adds that the 

military is a social institution and it “plays an enormously important . . . complex 

role in the development of science and technology.”5

My third theme concerns Frederick Pohl’s observation: “A good science fiction 

story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”6 In other 

words, insight comes from describing and tracing interactions and contextual 

relationships—not just the technology itself. Pohl, an acclaimed science fiction 

writer, implies a better story involves examining interactions among inventions, 

modes of behavior, cultural history, political and social institutions, military 

organizations, and legacy stock of equipment, infrastructure, and hardware and 

social technologies. 

Developing a capability—concepts, methodologies, organizations, and 

working relationships—to examine, assess, and predict “traffic jams” of naval 

(and, more broadly, military) operations requires overcoming challenges to the 

many ways the historical and analytical communities interact and work. This 

difficult task is worth pursuing to make discourse about national security questions more rigorous, and to increase the value to senior leaders of the products 

produced within the historical-analytical community. 
311

Technolog y

WHAT HAS BEEN WRITTEN?

Several contrasts channel this historiography of technology relating to the U.S. 

Navy and U.S. Marine Corps between 1950 and the present. First, fewer histories 

of naval technology7 have been written than general histories of technology and 

histories of technology related to ground combat.8 Second, the historiography of 

naval and Marine Corps technology encompasses many topics. Deciding how to 

frame this historiography involved a good deal of search and rejection of themes, 

frameworks, and approaches.9 I conducted a quick JSTOR digital library search 

of terms “Navy,” “naval,” “weapons,” and “technology” between 1950 and 2016 

and found more than 9,000 essays. I also reviewed every issue between 1959 

and 2015 of the Society for the History of Technology’s journal, Technology 

and Culture, in what turned out to be a vain hope that a clear theme had been 

articulated by academics. I flagged more than 300 articles and almost 500 book 

reviews that piqued my interest and seemed relevant to my topic after I read the 

first few paragraphs. Alas, these articles offered far too many potential themes to 

consider each in an essay-length discussion. 

I also decided against discussing nuclear weapons technologies for two 

reasons. First, although many unclassified memoirs, histories, and declassified studies of nuclear weapons technologies are available,10 detailed information about premises for decisions about specific technologies remain classified. 

Second, the literature on the development of nuclear weapons technologies 

provides essentially the same insights on inventive activity and technology development as could be found in unclassified literature on conventional naval and 

Marine Corps technology programs. I assume that impacts of administrative 

processes and bureaucratic organization on inventive activity and technology 

development would be similar for classified and unclassified programs begun at 

roughly the same time,11 and therefore, unclassified descriptions of organizations 

and administrative processes provide useful general insights about management 

of technology development programs.12

For example, Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist 

Harvey M. Sapolsky’s The Polaris System Development: Bureaucratic and 

Programmatic Success in Government contains a classic description of the use 

of a formal management tool to disguise informal and flexible decision-making 

in planning and managing the development program. The story concerns how 

Vice Admiral William F. Raborn and key subordinates dealt with ambiguities 

and various political and technological uncertainties in the development of the 

fleet ballistic missile (FBM) program. Sapolsky identifies the role of program 
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evaluation and review technique (PERT), a dedicated management and assessment process, in shielding the FBM from Department of Navy and congressional 

supervision and review. Admiral Raborn (and managerial subordinates) received 

current program status information by “picking up a telephone and calling the 

relevant technical group or by ordering tickets and flying to the relevant locations.” The PERT management tool was irrelevant to managerial decisions about 

how to develop the FBM; the use of PERT as an “integrated, uniquely effective 

management system was a myth.”13

Several colleagues directed me to look at the discussion of current technology 

programs, such as the Department of Defense’s (DOD) Third Offset program 

(discussed below). Others suggested a relatively safe approach of reviewing 

academic disputes about the relationship between science and technology in 

inventive activity,14 or assessing policy debates about whether basic or theoretical 

scientific research precedes inventive activity—a position Vannevar Bush takes in 

three books published before 195015—to justify the argument that more public 

funds should be expended on basic research, or examining the sources of technology in terms of the reorganization of labor,16 use of machines in manufacture, 

exploitation of manmade materials, and application of new sources of energy.17

With these thoughts in mind, what follows is an effort to provide context, synthesize, and summarize selected studies concerning technology related to Marine 

Corps and Navy missions.

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF MODERN MILITARY 

TECHNOLOGY BEGINS BEFORE WORLD WAR II

The historiography of military technology has largely concerned weapons, 

machinery, fortifications, and associated physical objects. Before World War II, 

some strands of thinking and research on institutions and social context of warfare 

complemented attention to physical objects. Sociologist William F. Ogburn 

proposed the hypothesis of cultural lag to explain a period of adjustment during 

which people become comfortable with, and learn how to use new technologies.18

Sir Charles Carter, in his 1982 presidential address to the British Association for 

the Advancement of Science, argues that British technologists and innovators too 

frequently attempted large leaps in technology—before the benefits of the new 

way of doing things became evident. Carter did not cite Ogburn’s cultural lag 

hypothesis, yet Carter’s argument broadly re-states Ogburn’s thesis and sociologist Arthur Stinchcombe’s observations about the “liability of newness”—the 
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period between the introduction of a physical or social technology and acceptance by users.”19 Needless to say, an understanding of the liabilities of newness is 

crucial to minimizing obstacles to the introduction and wide deployment of new 

technologies and operational concepts.

The pre–World War II work of two other scholars deserves mention. Historian 

and philosopher Lewis Mumford and sociologist Robert K. Merton examined 

social conditions under which technology—physical objects—were conceived, 

developed, and produced. They argued that technology advanced within a craft 

tradition, and that rapid technological advance was based on accumulating scientific knowledge.20

The Mumford/Merton thesis shaped American World War II science and 

technology goals for applying knowledge to challenges encountered in combat. In 

1941, the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) was established 

to mobilize academic researchers to develop weapons and associated technologies. 

OSRD’s efforts focused on the physics and engineering to develop new weapons 

and technologies and to improve existing technologies, leading to a vast array 

of devices and machines, many of which are described in more than 70 monographs produced by the OSRD. Some of these monographs discuss operational 

and technological issues relevant today to the Department of the Navy, including 

hypervelocity guns, recognition of underwater sounds, and subsurface warfare.21

Little, Brown and Company published some declassified OSRD monographs 

in its “Science in World War II” series in 1947 and 1948.22 Among these, my 

favorite is Lincoln Thiesmeyer and John Burchard’s Combat Scientists,

23 which 

contains a great deal of material directly relevant to “traffic jams” and present 

and future concerns, such as the diffusion of innovation, long-distance communications and policy coordination, and civil-military relations and cooperation in 

combat zones.24

The notion that engineering and technology were applied science guided 

policy literature during World War II and especially in the immediate post-war 

period when OSRD director Vannevar Bush advocated continuing federal support 

for basic research that would lead to technological advances. He argued for the 

establishment of the National Science Foundation to provide theoretical research 

to inform and guide invention, the general development of technology, and refinement of technologies for practical uses. The Manhattan Project was a clear exemplar of this “research push” argument; it was prewar basic research in nuclear 

fission that guided the design and construction of two types of atomic bombs.25 
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THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF MODERN MILITARY 

TECHNOLOGY FOLLOWING WORLD WAR II

In the years following World War II, historians recognized and examined infrastructural and organizational legacies of the conflict and changes in institutional 

rules, organizations, and conceptual approaches military and civilian leaders 

brought to problems and challenges of national security. For example, Barton 

Hacker and Alex Roland provide excellent summaries of academic research 

through the 1990s (see footnotes 4 and 5). Merritt Roe Smith argues that following 

World War II, armed forces “promoted, coordinated, and directed technological change and . . . sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly affected the 

course of modern industry.”26 The essays contained in Military Enterprise and 

Technological Change provide context and examples of the ways in which military requirements constrain and guide the organization and actions of large and 

small industry.27 Most of the essays focus on the pre–World War II period. David 

K. Allison, however, examines post–World War II technology policy technology 

regarding the Sidewinder missile program and the Navy Tactical Data System in 

“The U.S. Navy’s Research and Development Since World War II.”

Comprehensive surveys of naval and Marine Corps technologies include 

performance characteristics and details about system development and operational use. Norman Friedman (who earned a PhD in physics) and Norman Polmar 

(who earned a degree in journalism and history) have provided indispensable and 

vital contributions to the study of naval technologies. Isaiah Wilson III produced a 

weapons technology database tailored to questions asked by political scientists.28

The IHS Jane’s yearbooks cover many topics relevant to naval and Marine Corps 

systems, including IHS Jane’s Fighting Ships (first published in 1897), IHS Jane’s 

Defence: Platforms, IHS Jane’s Defence: Air and Space, IHS Jane’s Defence: Sea,

IHS Jane’s Defence: Sea Platforms, IHS Jane’s Unmanned Maritime Vehicles,

IHS Jane’s C4ISR & Mission Systems: Maritime, and IHS Jane’s Underwater 

Warfare Systems. In 1969, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute 

(SIPRI), began publishing another important yearbook series, Armaments, 

Disarmament and International Security. The SIPRI yearbook provides an overview of developments in international security, weapons and technology, military 

expenditure, the arms trade and arms production, armed conflicts, and efforts to 

control conventional, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.
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SELECTED POST–WORLD WAR II HISTORICAL 

RESEARCH ON NAVY WARFIGHTING SYSTEMS

In 1992, the Navy Laboratory/Center Coordinating Group and the Naval 

Historical Center began to collaborate on developing a comprehensive history 

of Navy research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E) and acquisition 

of Navy warfighting systems. The purpose of this joint effort was to “record 

Navy history associated with research, development, test, and evaluation and the 

acquisition of Navy warfighting systems.” The joint effort produced at least three 

publications on the Navy’s in-house technical capability and associated management and policy processes written by History Associates vice president Rodney 

Carlisle.29 The first publication of this collaboration effort was Management of 

the U.S. Navy Research and Development Centers During the Cold War Era.

30

This report complements a 1976 Booz Allen Hamilton report that reviewed Navy 

research and development (R&D) management between 1946 and 1973.31

In Management of the U.S. Navy Research and Development Centers, 

Carlisle focuses on reports produced by the Department of the Navy, Department 

of Defense, Congress, private consulting organizations, and blue ribbon panels 

of experts on the management of RDT&E centers during the Cold War period 

between 1973 and 1992, such as the 1969 Office of the Director, Defense 

Research and Engineering Project Hindsight. Project Hindsight’s author, 

Raymond Isenson, surveyed the development of more than 600 then-current 

weapons technologies and assessed the impact of basic research on each weapon 

system’s cost-effectiveness.32 He concluded that technological advances in more 

than 90 percent of the weapons surveyed resulted from mission-oriented R&D 

rather than basic science. In an extensive review, Karl Kreilkamp argues that 

Project Hindsight’s methodology generated an overly simple and basically inaccurate description the interaction between technology and science.33

In response to Project Hindsight, the National Science Foundation (NSF) 

funded Technology in Retrospect and Critical Events in Science (TRACES), 

a two-volume study prepared by the Illinois Institute of Technology Research 

Institute. TRACES did not apply the same methodology as Project Hindsight

to identify whether and how technologies were enabled by basic science. The 

key political outcome of TRACES and Project Hindsight was that the NSF 

lobbied Congress to amend the NSF Act to permit the foundation to fund applied 

research.34 Historian Edwin Layton concludes his discussion of Project Hindsight

by noting that science and technology should be treated as a “complex whole 

capable of functioning as a working system,”35 rather than treating either science 
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or technology as primary to the other. 

The Relationship of Science and Technology: A Bibliographic Guide is a 

40-page selected bibliography comprising more than 150 articles and books.36

It surveys post–World War II themes, such as World War II origins of U.S. technology policy, panels, and commissions that attempted to anticipate the rate 

and direction of technological development; historians’ views of technology and 

culture; mutual influences between scientific and technology development activities; establishment of research priorities; and Japanese industrial experience of 

relating science and technology. 

Carlisle’s Navy RDT&E Planning in an Age of Transition examines impacts 

on Navy policy and planning of international turbulence in the 1980s and 

1990s.37 His work in this period informed policy discussions of the 1990’s Base 

Realignment and Closure process regarding (1) the existence and character of a 

link between basic scientific research and technologies developed at Navy laboratories and development centers, and (2) effectiveness of R&D conducted under 

different organizational arrangements, such as a government-owned facility that 

conducts research through engineering and maintenance, or contractual relationships that assign components of a research program to industry, universities, and 

private laboratories. 

Two studies of note detail Office of Naval Research scientific and technological research: Ivan Amato’s Pushing the Horizon38 and Robert Buderi’s Naval 

Innovation for the 21st Century.

39 Then, in The Sound of Freedom, Carlisle and 

James Rife examine the evolution of Dahlgren Laboratory from a naval proof and 

test facility into a modern research and development center that contributes to 

many different naval weapons systems.40 Finally, the U.S. Naval Institute recently 

released an edited volume, The U.S. Naval Institute on Naval Innovation, which 

contains essays on cyber, unmanned vehicles, and future weapons systems.41

NAVAL HISTORY AND OFFICE OF NAVAL 

RESEARCH WEBSITES

The Naval History and Heritage Command website lists the three 

science-technology studies written by Carlisle during the late 1990s, but there are 

no links to digitized versions of the reports. No studies produced more recently 

were listed.42

The Office of Naval Research website contains interesting material, including 

the fourth version of the Naval Science and Technology Strategy,

43 and a list 
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of 61 Nobel laureates who received Office of Naval Research (ONR) funding 

support. Twenty-four Nobelists received the prize in physics, 26 in chemistry, 

nine in medicine and physiology, and two in economic science—Herbert A. 

Simon and Kenneth Arrow.44

NATIONAL ACADEMIES OF SCIENCES, ENGINEERING, 

AND MEDICINE 

The Department of the Navy has sponsored many hundreds of studies performed 

by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) since the NAS was established in 

1863. Political scientist Harvey Sapolsky provides details of the establishment 

and early operation of the Office of Naval Research in Science and the Navy: 

The History of the Office of Naval Research.45 For our purpose of examining 

the development of technology in the Navy and the Marine Corps, it is enough 

to note that in 1946, the newly established ONR requested that the NAS establish a standing committee to advise the Navy on submarine design and systems 

technology. The resulting Committee on Undersea Warfare drew its initial 

membership from the Subsurface Warfare Section of the World War II National 

Defense Research Committee. In 1955, the ONR requested that the NAS accept 

responsibility for the Mine Advisory Committee, which had been established 

in 1951 to advise the Navy on research to develop mines and effective mine 

countermeasures.46

These two proactive committees, composed initially of scientists and engineers, produced approximately 200 reports in the years between 1946 and 1973. 

In 1973, the Chief of Naval Operations asked the NAS president to extend the 

charter of its naval advisory committees beyond undersea and mine warfare and 

form an advisory organization “to which [the] Navy could turn for advice on any 

area of its responsibility involving the interplay of science and technology with 

other national issues.” The Naval Studies Board (NSB) was established in 1974 

and assumed the missions of the Mine Advisory Committee and the Committee 

on Undersea Warfare. The board—organizationally located in the National 

Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Division on Engineering 

and Physical Sciences—has advised the Navy on the basic and applied science 

associated with almost every area of the service’s overall mission.47 It conducts 

studies of technology relevant to the Department of the Navy’s missions, such 

as the status of unmanned underwater vehicles. Other recent studies of interest 

conducted by the Naval Studies Board explore Navy cyber defense capabilities, 
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naval forces’ response to capability surprise, and improving small unit leaders’ 

decision-making abilities. 

DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD 

Defense Science Board members are accomplished natural scientists, engineers, 

and mathematicians. The DSB website lists reports produced by the board from 

the 1970s to the present. The board considers many issues it believes should be 

brought to the attention of senior Defense Department and Service leaders, such 

as weapons systems, machinery, and associated objects, and topics that enable or 

support development of matériel. For example:

■ In 2006, it examined the current adequacy and future needs for specialized 

skills necessary to maintain, upgrade, and design replacement strategic nuclear 

and non-nuclear strike systems. The board found that it has been difficult for 

the DOD to attract the “best and brightest science and engineering” talent; and 

the industry and government talent base is “marginally thin” in many current 

systems, and “may not be available for potential next-generation systems.” 

Furthermore, the DSB concluded that exploration of new concepts and technologies for strategic strike of challenging systems in the far term is inadequate 

and will require access to a new talent base with different skills. Current skills 

may not be able to cope with unanticipated failures requiring analysis, testing, 

and redesign, and human capital management systems, and strategies to identify, track, and retain critical skills are not implemented effectively.48

■ A 2006 joint study of the DSB and the United Kingdom Defence Scientific 

Advisory Council on critical technologies examined five major transformational technology areas—advanced command environments, persistent 

surveillance, power sources for small, distributed networked sensors, high 

performance computing, and defense critical electronic components. The 

report assessed that commercial off-the-shelf technology is insufficient to meet 

defense needs, and the two powers’ lead in critical technologies is under threat 

from consolidation of the U.S. defense contractor base, migration off-shore 

of some critical manufacturing and design capabilities, and reduction in the 

numbers of personnel with experience in critical areas.49

■ In 2006, the DSB examined strategic technology vectors in a report comprising 

four volumes.50 The board reviewed the range of missions U.S. forces are called 

upon to perform, including major combat, counterinsurgency, stability and 
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reconstruction, countering weapons of mass destruction, homeland defense, 

and disaster relief. These missions present different challenges, and the board 

identified the following four operational capabilities and technologies to deal 

with the range of missions faced.

• Capability 1: Apply understanding of behavior of individuals, groups, 

societies, and nations to conduct of missions. Technologies include 

immersive gaming environments, automated language processing, and 

human, social, cultural, and behavior modeling.

• Capability 2: Observe people in varied environments and preserve data 

of observations. New suites of sensors enable this capability.

• Capability 3: Extract actionable information from data.

• Capability 4: Produce effects—offensive and defensive, kinetic and 

non-kinetic, lethal and nonlethal.

■ In 2008, a joint DSB and Intelligence Science Board task force examined integrating sensor-collected intelligence. The task force proposed improvements 

to tasking, collecting, processing, data storage, fusion, and the dissemination 

of information collected by intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance 

systems. The task force’s two primary recommendations were to deploy urgent 

communications improvements including Transformational Satellite System 

and to metadata tag sensor-collected data as close to the sensor as possible.51

■ In 2012, the board examined the role of autonomy in DOD systems, and 

reported that autonomy technology is underutilized. Contributing factors 

include poor design, ineffective coordination of R&D across military services, 

and operational challenges created by the urgent deployment of unmanned 

systems without adequate time and resources to refine concepts of operations 

and training. The DSB proposed establishing a “coordinated science and technology program guided by feedback from operational experience and evolving 

mission requirements.”52 

■ In 2013, the board developed a framework to analyze technology and 

investments to support military capabilities required in 2030. The framework consisted of four categories that support development of technically 

sophisticated, complex, and expensive systems: coping with parity, achieving 

superiority through cost-imposing strategies, achieving superiority through 

enhancing force effectiveness, and anticipating surprise.53

■ In 2015, the DSB released its report on strategic surprise, in which it examined 

how information about a potential adversary in eight domains may change 

DOD priorities and actions, and how DOD might regret its failure to 

respond. They are: countering nuclear proliferation; ballistic and cruise 
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missile defense; space security; undersea warfare; cyber; communications 

and positioning, navigation, and timing; counterintelligence; and logistics 

resilience.54

CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY, CONGRESSIONAL 

RESEARCH SERVICE, AND GOVERNMENT 

ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE 

Testimony provided to House and Senate armed services committees, House 

and Senate appropriations subcommittees, and House and Senate authorization committees include statements by administration and military services 

officials, and expert reviews of programs and operations from academia and 

think tanks. For example, on 9 December 2015, the House Armed Services 

Committee’s Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces received testimony on “game-changing innovations” from Bryan McGrath, Managing 

Director of The FerryBridge Group, and Jonathan Solomon, Senior Systems and 

Technology Analyst, Systems Planning and Analysis, Inc. On 12 April 2016, 

the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Emerging Threats 

and Capabilities received testimony on the progress of Third Offset Initiative 

projects from Stephen Welby, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and 

Engineering, William B. Roper Jr., Director, Strategic Capabilities Office, and 

Arati Prabhakar, Director, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) and the Government 

Accountability Office (GAO) are congressional independent, non-partisan agencies that produce reports and assessments of government programs, including the 

status of weapon systems programs, and issues related to weapons development. 

These reports may contain information gleaned from government or contractor 

sources, as well as empirical information developed by individual researchers. 

Naval analyst Ronald O’Rourke started working at CRS in 1984, where he 

writes reports for Congress on issues relating to the Navy. He briefs members of 

Congress and congressional staffs and has testified before congressional committees. Among the many naval technology topics he has examined include “Lasers, 

Railguns, and Hypervelocity Projectile,” “Navy Ford (CVN-78) Class Aircraft 

Carrier Program,” and the “Littoral Combat Ship.”55 O’Rourke updates reports 

after he receives information relevant to a current congressional discussion.

The GAO supports congressional oversight of federal programs by auditing 

agency operations, investigating allegations of illegality, reporting on how well 
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government programs meet their goals, and performing policy analyses. Its reports 

on Defense Department weapons systems programs typically include responses 

prepared by the Department of Defense Inspector General, and recommendations concerning how shortfalls and other program challenges may be fixed.56

In addition to official government sources, and academic articles, monographs, and books, there are think tank and FFRDC sources, too many to review. 

WHAT HAS NOT BEEN WRITTEN?

The question, “what has not been written?” invites a search similar to the one 

Sherlock Holmes undertook in the short story “Silver Blaze” regarding the 

“curious incident of the dog in the nighttime”—that is, the dog that did not 

bark. Historical studies of military technology have mostly ignored questions, 

approaches, and concepts used by economic historians and social scientists to 

identify and analyze human-organizational interactions that are critical to the 

development and deployment of new military technologies.

Since the end of World War II, military and civilian officials and academics—

including historians, social scientists, and policy analysts—have been keenly 

interested in technology related to military operations: how technologies operate, 

how technologies were developed, acquired, and deployed; and what impact 

various technologies would have on operations and outcomes. The development 

of nuclear weapons during World War II inspired additional questions and a 

large and growing literature. In 2016, the ongoing acceleration of scientific and 

engineering discovery, invention, and development has raised questions about 

whether the accelerating rate of invention might generate disruptive new military capabilities. For example, National Defense University analysts Jim Kadtke 

and Lin Wells argue that convergence of the rapidly advancing fields of biology, 

robotics, information, nanotechnology, and energy pose extreme national security policy challenges.57

The following sections provide examples of research subjects, concepts, 

and ideas that can inform or provide context for histories of human-machine/

technology-organization systems.
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CONTEXT FOR NAVAL AND MILITARY TECHNOLOGY: 

“PATH DEPENDENCE,” INSTITUTIONS, AND 

ORGANIZATIONS

In Men, Machines, and Modern Times, historian Elting E. Morison notes that 

it is a “poor sort of past that only deals with what has happened.”58 Historians 

have long known that some events and situations that occurred many years ago 

continue to exert an influence on the present and future. Military historian Ronald 

Spector notes, for example, that the struggles and triumphs in establishing the 

Naval War College continue to influence the entire Navy.59 Economic historians 

have proposed the concepts of “path dependence,” institutions, and organizations to trace the influence of the past on the present and future.60 This research 

presents a necessary empirical corrective to implicit and explicit “rational actor” 

models of decision-making about weapons development and employment. For 

instance, during the mid-1950s, Andy Marshall and Joseph Loftus criticized 

implicit RAND Corporation rational actor analyses of the placement of Soviet 

long-range bomber bases by citing Soviet military history of placing aircraft bases 

on the USSR’s periphery.61

We also can apply path dependence, institutions, and organizations to 

analyze the success or failure of militaries to alter their competitive positions 

through technological advancements.62 Path dependence explains how military 

systems differ, the extent to which they are sensitive to chance events or “initial 

conditions,”63 and how military services have resisted abrupt and discontinuous 

change. A path-dependence analysis is not a simple extrapolation of current 

trends. Rather, it focuses attention on the many systemic—and sometimes, 

dynamic—social or political factors (such as coordination costs in changing an 

information-processing technology) that structure and constrain choices individuals make in organizations.64

To describe initial conditions for particular paths, Nobel laureate in 

economic science Douglass North distinguishes institutions from organizations. 

He defines institutions as formal and informal rules that constrain and guide 

individuals’ decision-making in organizations. For example, constitutions and 

traditions are examples of “institutions”; constitutions are “formal” and traditions are “informal” rules. Institutions set the rules through which organizations 

and individuals act.65

In the context of rapid, accelerating, and converging scientific and technological developments, the key to higher military performance is not technology; 

it is the relationship between institutional rules and organizations—and the 
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opportunities and challenges they establish for people to learn about the outcomes 

of their actions; to invent and innovate; to organize production more efficiently; 

to recruit, select, and promote personnel on the basis of merit; to design, test, and 

correct operational concepts; and to align means to ends effectively.66

Institutions guide the way military organizations evolve, and more broadly 

determine the kinds of organizations that will arise in society as context for that 

evolution. For example, the laws and rules that reward productive economic 

activity created the conditions in the West whereby organizations such as partnerships and firms could emerge and succeed.67 Such organizations are intimately 

concerned in the process of military technology development and acquisition. 

In the words of North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast, such “organizations 

distinguish the Western European competition from military competition in the 

rest of the world.”68 Looking at the U.S. vulnerability to cyber-attacks makes 

the point. Industry spokesmen have argued that the United States is vulnerable 

to cyber-attacks not simply because of its dependence on computer systems, but 

because U.S. institutions—that is, the private-public division of responsibility for 

the provision of public goods (e.g., electricity) and legal restraints on computer 

network monitoring—contribute to vulnerability.69 Countries with closer ties 

between government and commercial sectors—e.g., the United Kingdom, 

Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Singapore—have coordinated faster 

government–business responses to cyber-attacks.70

These are not new phenomena. Economic historian Avner Greif found 

systematic differences in North African Islamic and Venetian trading societies 

traceable to contrasting beliefs about the role of the individual and institutions 

in society.71 Like China, the Islamic world was an early candidate for sustained 

economic growth. Its people possessed technological, architectural, literary, and 

scientific skills. At its peak, the Arab Empire exceeded the size of the Roman 

Empire, remaining a military threat to the West as late as the 17th century. Yet, 

with only a few exceptions, formal and informal institutions comprising the belief 

structure of the Islamic world mitigated intellectual evolution.72 As historian 

William McNeill writes, “by a curious and fateful coincidence, Moslem thought 

froze into a fixed mold just at the time when intellectual curiosity was awakening 

in Western Europe—the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.”73

In Western thought, we find a convergence of arguments from economics, 

political science, and philosophy of science regarding the impact on behaviors 

of individuals and organizations of epistemological assumptions embedded in 

institutions.74 The common threads are the long-term effect of institutional rules 

on individual and social behavior, and on human learning—what is learned and 
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shared.75 For example, operations research analyst Russell L. Ackoff, and philosopher of science Sir Karl R. Popper separately argue that unconscious assumptions about the growth of knowledge affect conceptions of politics—and designs 

of governmental organizations and programs.76

Describing the role of institutions over time in structuring decisions and 

decision-making has three implications for understanding the design process for 

Navy Department technology—and for a naval history research program that 

captures, documents, and contributes to internal feedback. 

First, a set of institutions can generate parallel groupings of organizations 

and that feature different sets of behaviors, leading to vastly different results. For 

example, during the interwar period, the Army and Navy operated under identical formal institutional rules—the checks and balances and separation of powers 

embodied in the U.S. Constitution. Yet, the naval aviation community—but not 

the naval munitions/torpedo community—was able to exploit these formal institutional rules by creating an interactive relationship among the General Board, the 

Fleet, the Naval War College, and the Bureau of Aeronautics.77 The primary effect of 

this multi-organizational arrangement was that the naval aviation community identified and reduced uncertainties in developing technology and operational concepts 

for the employment of aircraft carriers. Some early technological-operational 

options favored by high-level persons were rejected and not locked in, e.g., Rear 

Admiral William A. Moffett’s preference for the use of airships.

In contrast, the Army—not developing aviation and armor with an analogous set of organizations and patterns of interaction—was unable to identify and 

exploit the potential operational advantages of mechanized warfare and tanks.78 

In noting the failure of Journal of the U.S. Cavalry Association editors to pay 

attention to mechanization, Edward Katzenbach observed, “one cannot help but 

be impressed with the intellectual isolation” of the U.S. Army in the 1930s.79

Second, institutions and organizations can enhance prospects for success or 

hinder the invention, development, and successful employment of military technologies. Military organizations and patterns of interaction that can identify and 

exploit potentially revolutionary technologies and operational concepts are rare 

in the global population of military organizations that deal with acquisition and 

operations. 

Third, the institutions and organizations in play when a potential military 

innovation appears and is refined for combat exert a powerful influence over the 

types of knowledge required for its exploitation, the types of knowledge generated from its exploitation, and the subsequent evolutionary path followed by the 

technology and associated operational concepts. 
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TECHNOLOGY-HUMAN-ORGANIZATION SYSTEMS: 

HIGH-RELIABILITY ORGANIZATION

High-reliability organizations are an example of a topic that I believe has not 

received attention in military history. Sociologist Charles Perrow’s Normal 

Accidents was published in 1984. The book examined major systems failures 

and system damage that resulted from cascading “normal accidents”—small 

and random errors in organizations and processes designed to operate interdependently. Organizational processes that operate in a fixed and pre-determined 

sequence offer few opportunities to recover once an unexpected or unplanned 

sequence is initiated—errors cascade in time-dependent, interdependent, differentiated (low redundancy) systems and failures emerge elsewhere.80 Such failures 

can be costly and deadly. In a study published in 1987, Paul Shrivastava surveyed 

20th century industrial accidents involving the deaths of at least 50 people; 

half of these 28 accidents occurred in the years between 1977 and 1986, which 

suggests that the number of organizations operating hazardous and dangerous 

technologies has increased.81

To understand how some organizations have performed effectively while 

safely operating tightly-coupled and interactively complex technologies82 that 

present serious risks to operators and the public (or the potential for what Perrow 

called “normal accidents”), Todd LaPorte, Gene Rochlin, and Karlene Roberts 

conducted case studies of operations on aircraft carriers Enterprise (CVN-65),

Carl Vinson (CVN-70), and Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71),83 the Federal 

Aviation Administration’s Air Traffic Control System, and nuclear power operations (Pacific Gas and Electric’s Diablo Canyon reactor).84 Karl Weick, Paul 

Schulman, and others joined the research team, and additional organizations 

were studied, including the fire incident command system, and pediatric intensive 

care units.85

These studies emphasized that (1) reliable organizations feature redundant 

communications pathways, search processes, and means to review and oversee 

performance;86 (2) they operate in political and social environments intolerant of 

error; (3) the technologies individually and collectively are subject to potentially 

catastrophic error; and (4) the scale of possible consequences—such as nuclear 

war—precludes incremental learning through trial-and-error experimentation.87

A review of “high reliability organizations” case studies identified properties 

that contribute to extraordinary performance in the use of complex technologies 

in difficult task environments,88 including: (1) demanding technical and interpersonal selection criteria for positions;89 (2) continual training and continuous 
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improvement efforts; (3) the attitude of “mindfulness” of the importance and 

necessity of identifying potential errors before they occur; (4) development of 

latent networks of expertise that are activated at identification of an unanticipated 

event;90 and (5) alignment in organization structure of expertise and authority. 

Rear Admiral Dave Oliver describes the operation of these properties in his 

description of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover’s creation of the U.S. nuclear Navy.91

Some ongoing research on high reliability organizations, their properties, 

and mindful organizing focuses on how organizations become reliable and how 

mindful organizing emerges in organizations.92 This research places human error 

in a context similar to that described by statistician Ward Edwards Deming, 

when he argued that management should distinguish system error from individual error in industrial processes, because the vast majority of errors are a 

function of system-level structures, processes, and procedures.93 Other studies of 

high-reliability organizations compare learning and innovation in the U.S. Navy 

Los Angeles (SSN-688)-class nuclear attack submarine program to Russian/

Soviet navy nuclear attack submarine programs.94

DISTRIBUTED HUMAN-MACHINE TEAMS

Research on the organization of distributed configurations of human-machine 

teams conducting different tasks is related to studies of high reliability organizations—and to Marine Corps experimentation on distributed operations. Yanni 

Alexander Loukissas and David A. Mindell, in a study of data visualization 

to examine technologically mediated human roles and relationships, note that 

“the study of distributed computer-human relationships requires new methods 

that are capable of picking up on multi-channel interactions.”95 They developed 

methods to combine “individual, social, quantitative, and qualitative data in rich, 

graphical, real-time representations.”96

We should anticipate that new forms of automation would change the 

arrangement and coordination of activities in organizations, and historians 

should be alert to such changes. Loukissas and Mindell argue research on new 

organizational configurations of human-machine teams addresses issues beyond 

those considered in conventional human factors studies that “emphasize workload, interface, and situational awareness,”97 and include examination of the 

“social organization of human-machine teams and the cultural production of 

operator roles” that affect acceptance of new technologies.98
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BUREAUCRATIC CONFLICT: EXPERT AUTHORITY VS. 

POLITICAL AUTHORITY

Sociologist Max Weber examined conflict in bureaucracies between elected officials and technical experts, especially when officials issue decrees “ignored” by 

bureaucrats charged to implement them. In Weber’s words, “the political ‘master’ 

always finds himself, vis-à-vis the trained official, in the position of the dilettante 

facing the expert.”99 Admiral Hyman G. Rickover addressed this issue frequently 

in his interactions with his fellow officers, and in his 1974 speech, “The Role 

of Engineering in the Navy,” to the National Society of Former Special Agents 

of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.100 Admiral Rickover’s argument involved 

three issues. First, the Navy’s reliance on technologies of all kinds was increasing. 

Second, to take advantage of technology, the Navy must raise standards of 

knowledge and performance for all personnel. Third, the Navy was allowing 

receding standards of technical competence. In doing so, the Navy increased its 

dependence on industry, and relied on reorganizations and management fads to 

compensate for lower standards of technical competence. 

Admiral Rickover explains shortfalls in Navy leadership by arguing that the 

Navy’s leaders have, at potential historical turning points, “misread history.” They 

have misunderstood the necessity of applying empirical premises to all manner of 

problems that derive from the Navy’s purpose—to defend our nation. Rickover 

develops his observation about the necessity of applying an empirical attitude and 

demonstrable knowledge to many problems by presenting a conceptual history 

of Navy Department decision-making. He begins with the period following the 

Civil War when Navy leaders retained “faith in [Monitor-type vessels] as major 

combatant ships long after other nations had recognized that they were only 

a brilliant improvisation addressing a specific problem. The main line of naval 

progress remained in Europe. We had misread the naval results of the Civil War.” 

During the 1880s, when the Navy was rebuilding, “the worst errors were caused 

by the imposition of the opinions of line officers on technical matters.”

“The rising tide of technological complexity has engulfed the design engineer 

ashore as well as the line officer engineer at sea. In both areas, these men now face 

demands far beyond those which confronted their predecessors.” In Rickover’s 

view, young officers must be able to understand the technical details of their equipment; they cannot do this without learning the basics of engineering and science.

Of course, once one learns the basics, one must devote the time and effort 

to remain current. When Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman was a member of 

the Challenger shuttle investigation, he noted that managers, who earlier in their 
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careers had been engineers, estimated the likelihood of a shuttle failure at 1 in 

100,000, and working engineers estimated likelihood of failure at 1 in 100.101 The 

three-order magnitude difference in estimates made by working engineers and 

managers reflects the type of issue Admiral Rickover highlighted in his history 

of conflict—between line and engineering and engineering duty officers—over 

what premises should guide decisions about development and use of technology 

in the Navy.102

A crucial problem faced by Navy and Marine Corps commanding officers 

is that knowledge requirements for command have grown. All services face 

this problem. General Raymond T. Odierno explained the issue to me when I 

interviewed him in Baghdad in 2009. The increasing complexity of wartime 

decision-making involves overseeing and managing staff structures and processes 

to propose lines of operation and calculate and compare impacts, interactions, 

and tradeoffs of many policies and programs. The complexity of aligning the 

commander’s staff structures, processes, procedures, and lines of operation with 

the task environment requires developing approaches to operational assessments 

and analyses that help commanders understand their mission(s); organizational 

structures, processes, and people; the operational environment; the ways and 

means to achieve desired ends; and the feasibility and wisdom of mission goals.103

And commanders still have to defeat the enemy.

Rickover’s political battles with much of the Navy and its military leadership 

are one instance of the conflict between authority of knowledge and of rank. 

As military organizations increasingly employ technologies, organization, and 

tactics that must be operated “under the rule of expert knowledge,” it is inevitable 

that disagreements and conflicts will erupt between technical and non-technical 

officials. Practical implications of this conflict are revealed in the operation of the 

military personnel system, selection and promotion criteria, and the search for 

and accumulation of evidence by human capital professionals to justify criteria 

and premises for decisions. 

WHAT SHOULD BE WRITTEN?

Some historians of technology argue that historiography of military technology 

should consider factors beyond those examined in traditional studies of weapons, 

battle tactics, and strategy.104 Renowned historian Barton Hacker argues that 

“understanding technological change requires paying attention to interactions 

between technology and social institutions, because social change impacts 
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technology no less than technological change impacts society.”105 He cites Walter 

Millis’s Arms and Men as an exemplar of historical analysis that integrates military policy, institutional history of the armed forces, and consequences of social 

and technological change. Millis, writing in 1956, notes that there is little literature that considers the “economic, social and political factors which affect all 

issues of military preparedness and war.” In reviewing the field, Millis cites Harold 

and Margaret Sprout’s 1939 The Rise of American Naval Power as the first study 

examining impact of institutions—“continuous factors within the fabric of our 

society”—on the development and employment of naval military power.106

Future studies of naval and Marine Corps military technology should engage 

the concepts of path dependence, institutions, and organizations developed by 

economic historians, consider interactions of science and technology explicitly 

(under different conditions of synthesized, catalogued, and accessible knowledge); examine development, diffusion, and experimentation of technologies in 

military high-reliability organizations and distributed human-machine teams; 

and social, economic, and political factors cited by Walter Millis. Katherine 

Epstein’s Torpedo, published in 2014, is a recent example of a military history 

that examines development of a set of technologies with interpretation of events 

informed by six academic sub-fields of history: military, diplomacy, science and 

technology, business, legal, and policy.107

To conclude, I would like to consider three topics relevant to the question 

of what should be studied: the DOD’s Third Offset Strategy, the development of 

acquisition processes appropriate to the Third Offset, and the organization of 

interdisciplinary and team-oriented historical research. 

THE THIRD OFFSET AS A TOPIC IN NAVAL HISTORY OF 

TECHNOLOGY

In 2014, then–Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel proposed the “Third Offset 

Strategy,” a set of efforts to maintain American military superiority over current 

and potential foes by developing new operational concepts and technologies. 

Secretary Hagel saw the strategy as following two previous initiatives. During 

the 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed the First Offset, a program 

to build U.S. nuclear forces to deter and counter the USSR’s conventional forces’ 

numerical superiority. In the mid- to late-1970s, Secretary of Defense Harold 

Brown guided the Second Offset: stealth, precision-guided munitions, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems to counter the USSR and Warsaw 
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Pact’s improving military capabilities and numerical superiority of forces in central 

Europe. The proposed FY 2017 defense budget contains about $3.6 billion in Third 

Offset research and development funding to demonstrate various capabilities.

The technologies proposed for the Third Offset are exciting and ambitious, 

and have captured the attention of most observers. I’ve randomly surveyed more 

than 20 articles and essays about the strategy.108 Of these articles, almost all 

assume the technical goals are achievable and that higher technical performance 

is equivalent to higher operational capability; one article raises the possibility of 

glitches in the human-machine collaboration initiative.109 

Regardless of whether Third Offset human-machine collaboration capabilities involve learning machines that will “operate at the speed of light,”110 as Deputy 

Secretary of Defense Bob Work put it, individuals’ information processing and 

computational abilities are limited and may not match the size and complexity 

of their tasks in combat. The following summarizes relatively recent research:111

1. People have difficulty making decisions in unique and complex situations 

involving risk;

2. People have difficulty diagnosing the decision problem they face;

3. People perceive causality where none exists;

4. People have even more difficulty generating an adequate set of alternative 

actions from which to choose;

5. People’s preferences may be inconsistent, and small changes in the way the 

problem is posed may produce complete reversals of preferences;

6. Complex cognitive tasks involving conscious and focused thinking entail 

steps performed serially;

7. Little is known about decision-making under the stress of emergency 

conditions;

8. Little is known about judgment and decision-making under time stress;

9. Decreasing time available for making a decision leads people to reduce the 

number of factors they consider;

10. Understanding group-level decision-making is not a simple matter of scaling 

up from individual-level decision-making—group size and interactions 

among personnel introduce new properties; and

11. People may plan to use certain kinds of information in some future situations (e.g., directing forces in combat), but will actually ignore that information when it is received—that is, information seen as relevant during 

planning becomes less salient in the heat of battle, when there are new and 

unexpected cues, actions, or information.
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Appreciating the complexity of combat tasks is fundamental to a proper 

assessment of any organizational design for highly automated, rapid-response 

battle (and of selection criteria for high office and training to accomplish very 

complex and ill-structured tasks). Real-time interactions between human operators and complex computerized systems have an inherently higher probability of 

error in any unanticipated and unrehearsed crisis situation.112 

Knowledge of how people integrate information and make decisions in 

rapidly changing situations is necessary for historians and analysts. Otherwise, 

they cannot understand and report on how human-machine collaboration capabilities perform and align with organizational tasks, roles, command relationships, and communications channels, or minimize errors in operations. 

Historians would make a great contribution to knowledge about human 

decision-making in military organizations if they carefully described the Third 

Offset acquisition programs to design, experiment with, and test human-machine 

collaboration and automation. To automate a task, programmers must be able 

to state explicit rules and their sequence to accomplish it. Yet, for many tasks 

throughout a combat organization, such as those involving interpersonal interaction, or adaptability, or flexibility, and problem solving, the tasks are not 

amenable to mathematical treatment, and may never be so.113

Navy leaders have known for a very long time about what chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi called “tacit knowledge,” or knowledge that is difficult to 

transfer via written or spoken instructions. For example, no one in the Navy, or 

outside it, can specify the sequence of every task that must be performed to get 

an aircraft off the carrier flight desk. A portion of the knowledge in the minds 

of Navy personnel enabling aircraft to launch and land is tacit. Similarly, retired 

Vice Admiral Lloyd M. Mustin reflected that use of weapons systems technologies involves more than application of theoretical physical principles: 

Unfortunately, the basic knowledge of radar is really very simple, and what 

becomes critical in keeping this radar going at close to designed efficiency at 

sea has nothing to do with basic knowledge. It has to do with a whole host 

of minutiae, detailed technical specifics, and these are what the technician 

has to learn about. It takes time, and until he has learned them, it’s a much 

slower job for him to troubleshoot and to tune up and so forth. This has 

nothing to do at all with the basic theory of the thing, what you need in 

order for it to work. The problem lies in the detailed specifics of how do you 

go about achieving what you really need.114
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Knowledge of how people integrate information and make decisions in 

rapidly changing situations is necessary for historians and analysts. Otherwise, 

they cannot understand and report on how human-machine collaboration 

capabilities perform and align with organizational tasks, roles, command 

relationships, and communications channels; or how to minimize errors in 

operations.

ACQUISITION POLICIES APPROPRIATE TO THE 

THIRD OFFSET

The acquisition process and procedures used and created for the Third Offset 

Strategy also should be studied. This topic is rich in possible themes involving the 

social context of military technology. For example, a core element of the acquisition process problem is how to employ, exploit, and coordinate the information, knowledge, and products created by public and private sources of discovery, 

innovation, and analysis. Information and knowledge about military capabilities are limited and imperfect. To deal with this situation, a process is needed 

through which knowledge is communicated, acquired, and applied. The solution 

to the problem of organizing the acquisition processes is to harness and guide the 

interactions of people and companies—each of which possess, more or less, only 

partial knowledge about the task at hand.115

Commissions and blue ribbon study teams that developed recommendations 

to overhaul and modify the acquisition process conceived and justified their work 

as an effort to make the acquisition process rational—a process in which goals 

are set, ways and means are identified to achieve the goal, the courses of action 

compared, and the best solution chosen.116 The recommendations to improve 

acquisition developed in the “Weapons Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009” 

recapitulate the assumptions and logic used by previous commissions about the 

design of a rational process.

Yet, post–World War II American planning and management processes have 

not operated as their designers assumed and expected; many programs have 

suffered budget overruns, schedule delays, and performance shortfalls. In 2008, 

then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates observed,

When it comes to procurement, for the better part of five decades, the trend 

has gone towards lower numbers as technology gains made each system more 

capable. In recent years these platforms have grown ever more baroque, ever 
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more costly, are taking longer to build, and are being fielded in ever dwindling quantities.117

Budget overruns, schedule delays, and performance shortfalls occur because 

acquisition programs have been designed under the incorrect—but widely 

held—assumption that the future growth of scientific knowledge and technical 

know-how can be planned and scheduled. The assumption ensures that during 

the decades-long periods to develop new major classes of ships, aircraft, and 

ground vehicles, the platforms would be eclipsed by the tempo of technological 

development of command, control, communication, computer, and intelligence 

capabilities. By the time the platforms have been delivered, the technological 

capabilities originally associated with them have become obsolete. The logical 

impossibility of predicting the growth of scientific knowledge makes it equally 

impossible to accurately estimate program costs and to predict the schedule and 

tempo of work to create new capabilities.118

Describing and explaining the social context of the acquisition process 

provides senior leaders with the type of information they need to change the 

“demand signal” about the performance of the acquisition system,119 and to 

request alternative sources of data or to experiment on organizational processes 

and procedures.120

THE GHOST OF VANNEVAR BUSH IN A “TRAFFIC JAM”

Vannevar Bush, Robert Merton, Ted Gold, and many others cited above may 

have been correct that theoretical research guides and supports practical technological applications, and a growing body of knowledge necessarily underpins 

commercial and military technological innovation. One element of a predictable 

naval and Marine Corps technology traffic jam is continuing conflict over the 

justification for basic research in apportionment of R&D monies—until evidence 

is developed for some aspects of the science-technology relationship under specified situations, such as using high technology–readiness level components. Some 

arguments supporting the pivotal role of basic research in technology development primarily rely on assertions made by officials managing science and technology programs.121

In 2003, members of the congressional armed services committees and the 

authorization conference committee expressed concern about stagnant investment in basic research for DOD. The FY04 National Defense Authorization 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Act mandated an NAS assessment of the basic research portfolio of the Office 

of the Secretary of Defense, the three military departments, and the Defense 

Advanced Research Projects Agency to determine whether the portfolio includes 

adequate fundamental research. The conference committee report declared that 

DOD’s “investment in basic research provides the foundation upon which our 

modern military is built. It is critical the basic research investment remain strong, 

stable, and focused on the fundamental search for new knowledge.”122 In 2005, 

Assessment of Department of Defense Basic Research was published.123 Among 

the findings relevant to this essay were:

■ Ongoing discovery from basic research is often required through the applied 

research, system development, and system operation phases.

■ A DOD trend in basic research emphasis is less effort in unfettered exploration, which historically has been a critical enabler of the most important 

breakthroughs in military capabilities. 

■ DOD basic research has been focused more narrowly in support of specified needs.

The Missile Defense Agency’s shrinking R&D account is an example of an 

outcome whereby procurement and sustainment take “precedence over internal 

research and development because of contractual obligations and immediate 

needs.”124

Evidence from other domains regarding the science and technology interaction is anecdotal and may be subject to selection bias of choosing examples for 

review that support a thesis. For example, in 2012, the “Golden Goose Award” 

was established to 

recognize the tremendous human and economic benefits of federally funded 

research by highlighting examples of seemingly obscure studies that have 

led to major breakthroughs in biomedical research, medical treatments, 

and computing and communications technologies. [Since 2012 G]roups of 

researchers have been recognized each year for breakthroughs in the development of life-saving medicines and treatments; game-changing social and 

behavioral insights; and major technological advances related to national 

security, energy, the environment, communications, and public health.125

Evidence from academic studies of innovation over the last decade support 

the precedence of basic research for invention.126
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Previous studies of the interaction between basic science and technology 

development, such as the 1967 Project Hindsight and the 1968 NSF-sponsored 

TRACES, do not provide reasonable guidance to policy-makers or historians; these studies have been characterized as “cooked up”—that is, studies 

designed to prove a previously determined answer.127 One crucial contribution 

the historical community can make to current and future top-level policy is to 

develop evidence appropriate to informing policy discussions and debates. Such 

evidence would entail a program to investigate, describe, document, and assess 

the theory-technology relationship in current and planned research on modern 

weapons systems. Methodologies to assess and trace science-technology interactions have improved since Project Hindsight was written,128 and further methodological improvements are feasible by melding historical research and qualitative 

research methods into a study’s methodology. 

ORGANIZATION OF INTERDISCIPLINARY AND 

TEAM-ORIENTED HISTORICAL RESEARCH

The Third Offset Strategy’s impact on Naval History and Heritage Command 

involves challenges and opportunities. The opportunities entail a program of analysis in the history program to contribute to the Fleet and combatant commanders 

in ways no other history program has. Ultimately, this line of historical analysis 

may result in a transformation of government history programs. A model for this 

type of organizational transformation might be the RAND Corporation in the 

late 1940s and early 1950s when small groups of interdisciplinary thinkers influenced the development of ideas, policies, and world views of the U.S. national 

security community. Andy Marshall, the former director of Net Assessment, was 

a co-author of a 2015 essay describing the early years of RAND and the “flaring 

of intellectual outliers.”129 At RAND, three processes may have produced its 

early intellectual influence:

1. Independent, simultaneous generation of ideas through the imagination of 

individual scientists or historians or analysts;

2. Discoveries facilitated through processes that enable discussion and interaction; and 

3. A group culture that expects and demands imagination, interaction, and 

consciousness of the group members’ distinctiveness.130
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

BARRIERS TO RESEARCH

The opportunities are enticing to participate in a group intellectual effort. There 

are many obstacles and challenges to establishing such a group. Conducting 

research on ongoing technology projects requires knowledge and familiarity with 

technologies; organizational and sociological literature regarding the structure 

and performance of tasks, coordination, supervision, and feedback; and traditional historical research methods focusing on documents and tracing the development of ideas and actions over time. This research task imposes fundamental 

challenges to the researcher. First, the researcher must become well integrated 

into the organizations developing, deploying, or employing technologies. Even 

when the researcher has relevant knowledge of the technologies and technical 

issues and has been socialized and accepted in the organizations, the researcher is 

not a participant—in an operational sense—in the activity being studied. 

The challenges are similar to those encountered by researchers seeking to 

conduct ethnographic and grounded sociological inquiry—e.g., familiarity with 

the culture of a particular organization may mask identification of important 

factors.131

My own limited experience in the Gulf War Air Power Survey and at the U.S. 

Joint Forces Command has reinforced the idea that analyzing a recent military 

campaign places a heavy diplomatic burden on the author. There are no easy 

ways to heft this burden. The differences between operator and policy-analysis 

subcultures generates strained relations between the two groups. Military officers are responsible for operations; policy analysts look at these operations as a 

source of data or means to an end—i.e., understanding how particular outcomes 

occurred. If not put tactfully, the policy analyst’s probing and questioning—

which are necessary components of his task—can easily be construed by the 

operator as criticism of his decisions or performance. Documenting mistakes—

even minor errors—for hindsight analysis contains the implicit criticism that, if 

the policy analyst were in charge instead of the generals, these mistakes could 

have been avoided. 

Historians and analysts, by reviewing the minutia of operations, can cause 

information regarding activities at theater headquarters or other places to be 

known to national command authorities and others. This information can be 

troublesome on various matters, including disagreements about budget priorities 

before Congress, disputes over roles and missions, and so on. Thus, it is almost 

inevitable that on issues such as how reputations are made and how resources 

are divided up in Washington, DC, even non-partisan and objective analysis can 
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Technolog y

receive a political reception.132 In a poignant story, Bart Hacker described how 

Department of Energy (DOE) leaders imposed bureaucratic delays on the publication of Elements of Controversy due to agency leaders’ anxiety that Hacker had 

not read and incorporated comments from reviewers they trusted. DOE leaders 

could not refute Hacker’s book with evidence; they imposed delays until Hacker 

arranged to have the book published by the University of California Press.133

CONCLUSION

The Department of the Navy deals with growing practical challenges in management and leadership. Successful and sustainable performance in setting conditions to defeat the many threats and challenges facing the United States depend 

on conceptual clarity and quality of evidence underlying policies to organize, 

train, and equip military forces. 

Although historians of technology have participated in interdisciplinary 

research,134 any recommendation to historians to consider social science literature 

to complement and inform historical research and analysis must acknowledge 

only small successes alongside general failure to achieve research-based prescriptions for organizational design and practice. The store of social science knowledge 

grows slowly.135 To the extent that social science can inform historical research, 

it is in promoting thoughtful questions and clear specification of concepts for 

organizational analysis.136

Tasks of government military historians are not limited to collecting and 

organizing documents, and conducting oral history interviews. Historians 

embedded in operational units and at various headquarters echelons have the 

opportunity to observe and to collect participants’ observations. The latter task 

requires historians to apply empirical social science research methodologies to 

collect and organize observations. The larger implications to the Navy of an 

expansion of military historians’ professional skills involve building knowledge 

about the operation of human-technology-organizational systems to enable 

higher operational effectiveness of the Fleet. 
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Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Notes

1 Barton C. Hacker, “Review of Science, Technology, and the Military. Edited by 

Everett Mendelsohn, Merritt Roe Smith, and Peter Weingart,” Technology and 

Culture, Vol. 32, No. 3, July 1991, 645–46.

2 David A. Hounshell and John Kenly Smith Jr., Science and Corporate Strategy: 

DuPont R&D, 1902–1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). See also 

Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American 

Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); Leonard S. Reich, 

Making of American Industrial Research: Science and Business at GE and Bell (New 

York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

3 Margaret C. Jacob, The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European 

Economy, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Jacob examined detailed data to support her argument. Milton Kerker (and others) arrived at 

the same conclusion on the basis of less detailed evidence. See Kerker, “Science and 

the Steam Engine,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 2, No. 4, Autumn 1961.

4 Barton C. Hacker, “Military Institutions, Weapons, and Social Change: Toward 

a New History of Military Technology,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 35, No. 4, 

October 1994, 824–25; Barton C. Hacker, “Military Technology and World History: 

A Reconnaissance,” The History Teacher, Vol. 30, No. 4, August 1997, 461–62.

5 Alex Roland, “Science, Technology, and War,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 36, No. 

2, April 1995, 97.

6 Cited in Steven Grundman, “Opinion: Fictional Work Gives View Of Future Wars,” 

Aviation Week & Space Technology, 12 November 2015, http://aviationweek.

com/defense/opinion-fictional-work-gives-view-future-wars?NL=AW-19&Issue=

AW-19_20151112_AW-19_82&sfvc4enews=42&cl=article_5&utm_rid=

CPEN1000000920854&utm_campaign=4257&utm_medium=email&elq2=

d6785588eaff46d9a40c3e86f66f4ef8.

7 Barton C. Hacker, “Military Institutions, Weapons, and Social Change,” 773–74.

8 See, for example, David Edgerton, “From Innovation to Use: Ten Eclectic Theses 

on the Historiography of Technology,” History and Technology, Vol. 16, 1999; 

David Edgerton, “Innovation, Technology, or History: What Is the History of 

Technology About?” Technology and Culture, Vol. 51, No. 3, July 2010; Ronald 

Kline, “Foundational Stories,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 54, No. 1, January 

2013; Thomas J. Misa, “History of Technology,” in Companion to the Philosophy of 

Technology, Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen, Stig Andur Pedersen, Vincent F. Henricks (Eds.) 

(Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); John M. Staudenmaier, “Recent Trends in 

the History of Technology,” American Historical Review, Vol. 95, No. 3, June 1990; 

John M. Staudenmaier, “Rationality, Agency, Contingency: Recent Trends in the 

History of Technology,” Reviews in American History, Vol. 30, No. 1, March 2002; 

Steven W. Usselman, “From Sputnik to SCOT: The Historiography of American 

Technology,” OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 24, No. 3, July 2010.

9 Rosalind Williams, a recipient of the Society for History of Technology da Vinci 

medal, asked whether if it makes sense to bracket technology as a special topic 

in history because technology is pervasive in people’s activities. Rosalind Williams, 
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“Our Technological Age, from the Inside Out,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 55, 

No. 2, April 2014.

10 For example, Robert Serber, The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to 

Build an Atomic Bomb (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Richard G. 

Hewlett and Francis Duncan, Nuclear Navy, 1946–1962 (Chicago: The University 

of Chicago Press, 1974); Norman Polmar, Strategic Weapons: An Introduction (New 

York: Crane, Russak, 1982); Norman Polmar and Robert S. Norris, The U.S. Nuclear 

Arsenal: A History of Weapons and Delivery Systems Since 1945 (Annapolis, MD: 

Naval Institute Press [Hereafter, NIP], 2009); Richard Rhodes, The Making of 

the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986); Richard Rhodes, Dark 

Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); 

Graham Spinardi, From Polaris to Trident: The Development of US Fleet Ballistic 

Missile Technology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See, especially, 

the detailed work of Chuck Hansen, U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History

(Arlington, TX: Crown, 1988).

11 Sociologist Arthur L. Stinchcombe argued that for the existence of a “correlation 

between the time in history that a particular type of organization was invented 

and the social structure of organizations of that type which exist at the present 

time.” “Social Structure and Organizations,” in James G. March, ed., Handbook of 

Organizations (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1965), 143.

12 For example, Hone, Friedman, and Mandeles apply an organizational perspective 

to interpret the diffusion of technology from the United Kingdom to the United 

States. Thomas C. Hone, Norman Friedman, and Mark D. Mandeles, Innovation in 

Carrier Aviation (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 2011); Thomas C. Hone, 

Norman Friedman, and Mark D. Mandeles, “The Development of the Angled-Deck 

Aircraft Carrier,” Naval War College Review Vol. 64, Spring 2011, 63–78. For 

another example of insight generated by attention to organizational processes, see 

Donald MacKenzie and Graham Spinardi, “Tacit Knowledge, Weapons Design, and 

the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 101, No. 

1, July 1995.

13 Harvey M. Sapolsky, The Polaris System Development: Bureaucratic and 

Programmatic Success in Government (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 

1972), 106–108.

14 A. Rupert Hall, “The Scholar and the Craftsman in the Scientific Revolution,” 

in Critical Problems in the History of Science, Marshall Clagett, ed. (Madison: 

University of Wisconsin Press, 1959); A. Rupert Hall, “Engineering and the Scientific 

Revolution,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 2, No. 4, Autumn 1961; Milton Kerker, 

“Science and the Steam Engine,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 2, No. 4, Autumn 

1961; John B. Rae, “Science and Engineering in the History of Aviation,” Technology 

and Culture, Vol. 2, No. 4, Autumn 1961; Cyril Stanley Smith, “The Interaction of 

Science and Practice in the History of Metallurgy,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 2, 

No. 4, Autumn 1961; A. Rupert Hall, “The Changing Technical Act,” Technology 

and Culture, Vol. 3, No. 4, Autumn 1962; Robert L. Heilbruner, “Do Machines 

Make History?” Technology and Culture, Vol. 8, No. 3, 1967; Eugene S. Ferguson, 

“Toward a Discipline of a History of Technology,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 15, 

No. 1, January 1974; Edwin T. Layton Jr., “Technology as Knowledge,” Technology 

and Culture, Vol. 15, No. 1, January 1974; Robert P. Multhauf, “Some Observations 
340

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

on the State of the History of Technology,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 15, No. 1, 

January 1974; Reinhard Rürup, “Historians and Modern Technology: Reflections on 

the Development and Current Problems of the History of Technology,” Technology 

and Culture, Vol. 15, No. 2, April 1974; Derek de Solla Price, “On the Historiographic 

Revolution in the History of Technology: Commentary on the Papers by Multhauf, 

Ferguson, and Layton,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 15, No. 1, January 1974.

15 Vannevar Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier. A Report to the President (Washington, 

DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1945); Vannevar Bush, Endless Horizons

(Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1946); Vannevar Bush, Modern Arms and 

Free Men: A Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy (New York: 

Simon and Schuster, 1949). See also the discussion of actions of the scientists in the 

politics of funding of science in the United States in Don K. Price, The Scientific 

Estate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965).

16 Ted Gold and Rich Wagner, “Long Shadows and Virtual Swords: Managing 

Defense Resources in the Changing Security Environment,” January 1990. See 

also Vago Muradian’s video interview with RADM Matt Winter, outgoing Chief 

of Naval Research, in which Winter discusses the indispensable role of basic 

research in responding quickly to current operational problems. Vago Muradian, 

“Naval Research Chief Winter on Innovation, Lasers & Rail Guns,” Defense and 

Aerospace Report, http://defaeroreport.com/2016/11/16/naval-research-chief-winte

r-innovation-lasers-rail-guns/, 17 November 2016. 

17 A. Rupert Hall, “The Changing Technical Act,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 3, No. 

4, Autumn 1962, 501.

18 William F. Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, “Are Inventions Inevitable? A Note on 

Social Evolution,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 1, March 1922; William 

F. Ogburn, “The Hypothesis of Cultural Lag,” in Social Change with Respect to 

Cultural and Original Nature (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1923); William 

F. Ogburn, “Cultural Lag as Theory,” Sociology and Social Research, January–

February 1957. See also John H. Mueller, “Present Status of the Cultural Lag 

Hypothesis,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 3, No. 3, June 1938; Rudi Volti, 

“William F. Ogburn, Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature,” 

Technology and Culture, Vol. 45, No. 2, April 2004; Richard L. Brinkman and June 

E. Brinkman, “Cultural Lag: Conception and Theory,” International Journal of 

Social Economics, Vol. 24, No. 6, 1997.

19 Sir Charles Carter, “Conditions for the Successful Use of Science,” Science, Vol. 219, 

March 18, 1983, 1296; Stinchcombe, “Social Structure and Organizations,” 148.

20 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace and 

Co., 1934). See also Lewis Mumford, “History: Neglected Clue to Technological 

Change,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 2, No. 3, Summer 1961; Robert K. Merton, 

“Fluctuations in the Rate of Industrial Invention,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 

Vol. 49, No. 3, May 1935; Robert K. Merton, “Science and Military Technique,” 

Scientific Monthly, Vol. 41, No. 6, December 1935; Robert K. Merton, “Science and 

the Social Order,” Philosophy of Science, Vol. 5, No. 3, July 1938; Robert K. Merton, 

“Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England,” Osiris, Vol. 4, 

1938; Robert K. Merton, “The Role of Applied Social Science in the Formation of 

Policy: A Research Memorandum,” Philosophy of Science, Vol. 16, No. 3, July 1949; 

Robert K. Merton, “Singletons and Multiples in Scientific Discovery: A Chapter in 
341

Technolog y

the Sociology of Science,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 

105, No. 5, 13 October 1961.

21 All published in 1946 under contract by Summary Reports Group of the Columbia 

University Division of War Research/Columbia University Press. Summary Technical 

Report of Division 1, NDRC: Hypervelocity Guns and the Control of Gun Erosion; 

Summary Technical Report of Division 3, NDRC: Rocket and Underway Ordnance; 

Summary Technical Report of Division 6, NDRC: A Survey of Subsurface Warfare in 

in World War II Summary Technical Report of Division 4, NDRC: Radio Proximity 

Fuzes for Fin-Stabilized Missiles; Summary Technical Report of Division 5, NDRC: 

Guided Missiles and Techniques; Summary Technical Report of Division 6, NDRC: 

Principles and Applications of Underwater Sound; Summary Technical Report of 

Division 6, NDRC: Recognition of Underwater Sounds; Summary Technical Report 

of Division 7, NDRC: Gunfire Control; Summary Technical Report of Division 

13, NDRC: Direction Finder and Antenna Research; Summary Technical Report 

of Division 14, NDRC: RADAR: Summary Report and HARP Project; Summary 

Technical Report of the Committee on Propagation, NDRC: Historical and 

Technical Survey.

22 Irvin Stewart, Organizing Scientific Research for War: The Administrative History 

of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (Boston: Little, Brown and Co. 

1948); Joseph C. Boyce, ed., New Weapons for Air Warfare: Fire-Control Equipment, 

Proximity Fuzes, and Guided Missiles (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1947); John 

E. Burchard, ed.. Rockets, Guns and Targets: Rockets, Target Information, Erosion 

Information, and Hypervelocity Guns Developed during World War II (Boston: 

Little, Brown and Co., 1948). 

23 Lincoln R. Thiesmeyer and John E. Burchard, Combat Scientists (Boston: Little, 

Brown and Co., 1947).

24 For a British view of the issues discussed by Thiesmeyer and Burchard concerning 

interactions of military officials and civilian scientists, see R. Cockburn, “Science 

in War,” Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, Vol. 101, Issue 601, 1956. 

25 In the 1950s and 1960s, a fascinating historical debate emerged over the empirical 

basis for Bush’s hypothesis that grew to include research in related fields such as 

the history of the industrial revolution. These debates are ongoing. For example, 

economic historian Margaret Jacob argues against the conventional hypothesis that 

the tinkering of skillful, science-ignorant engineers generated the significant technological innovations of industrialization. Instead, she argues that English knowledge elites were aware of advances in sciences, and used that knowledge to invent 

various machines.

26 Merritt Roe Smith, ed., Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives 

on American Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 1.

27 Military historians would benefit from reading and applying the late Nobel laureate 

Herbert Simon’s treatment of goals to explicating the actions and interactions 

within and among military and civilian organizations. See Herbert A. Simon, “On 

the Concept of Organizational Goal,” Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 9. No. 

1, June 1964.

28 Isaiah Wilson III, “What Weapons Do We Have and What Can They Do?” PS: 

Political Science and Politics, Vol. 40. No. 3, July 2007.
342

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

29 I was unable to locate a fourth publication in the Navy Laboratory–Naval Historical 

Center joint effort, From Research to the Fleet: Sources of U.S. Naval Technology. 

This title did not have a George Washington University or a Library of Congress 

catalogue entry. 

30 Rodney P. Carlisle, Management of the U.S. Navy Research and Development 

Centers During the Cold War Era: A Survey Guide to Reports (Washington, DC: 

Department of the Navy, 1996).

31 Booz Allen Hamilton, “Review of Navy R&D Management, 1946–1973,” 1 June 

1976, DTIC AD A094033.

32 Chalmers W. Sherwin and Raymond S. Isenson, “Project Hindsight,” Science, 

Vol. 156, No. 3782, 23 June 1967; Raymond S. Isenson, “Project HINDSIGHT,” 

(Washington, DC: Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering, 

1969), DTIC accession number: AD0495905.

33 Karl Kreilkamp, “Hindsight and the Real World of Science Policy,” Science Studies, 

Vol. 1, 1973.

34 Carlisle, Management of USN R&D Centers, 48–49.

35 Edwin T. Layton Jr., “Technology as Knowledge,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 15, 

No. 1, January 1974, 38.

36 Rodney P. Carlisle, The Relationship of Science and Technology: A Bibliographic 

Guide (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, 1997). Carlisle also wrote a 

monograph on one of the Navy’s research centers: Where the Fleet Begins: A History 

of the David Taylor Research Center, 1898–1998 (Washington, DC: Naval Historical 

Center, 1998).

37 Rodney P. Carlisle, Navy RDT&E Planning in an Age of Transition: A Survey Guide 

to Contemporary Literature (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 1997).

38 Ivan Amato, Pushing the Horizon: Seventy-Five Years of High Stakes Science and 

Technology at the Naval Research Laboratory (Washington, DC: U.S. Government 

Printing Office, 1998).

39 Robert Buderi, Naval Innovation for the 21st Century: The Office of Naval Research 

Since the End of the Cold War (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2013).

40 James P. Rife and Rodney P. Carlisle, The Sound of Freedom: Naval Weapons 

Technology at Dahlgren, Virginia (Dahlgren, VA: Naval Surface Warfare 

Center, 2007).

41 John E. Jackson, ed., The U.S. Naval Institute on Naval Innovation (Annapolis, MD: 

NIP, 2015).

42 The three science-technology publications written by Rodney Carlisle are located 

under the “Navy Laboratory Series” at http://www.history.navy.mil/research/publications/series-colloquia.html.

43 Office of Naval Research, Naval Science and Technology Strategy, http://www.onr.

navy.mil/en/About-ONR/science-technology-strategic-plan.aspx.

44 All ONR-sponsored Nobel Laureates are listed at http://www.onr.navy.mil/

About-ONR/History/Nobels.aspx.

45 Harvey M. Sapolsky, Science and the Navy: The History of the Office of Naval 

Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
343

Technolog y

46 Naval Studies Board, Mainstreaming Unmanned Undersea Vehicles into Future U.S. 

Naval Operations: Abbreviated Version of a Restricted Report (Washington, DC: 

National Academies of Sciences Press, 2016); Naval Studies Board, A Review of the 

U.S. Navy Cyber Defense Capabilities: Abbreviated Version of a Classified Report

(Washington, DC: National Academies of Sciences Press, 2015); Naval Studies Board, 

Responding to Capability Surprise: A Strategy for U.S. Naval Forces (Washington, 

DC: National Academies of Sciences Press, 2013); Naval Studies Board, Improving 

the Decision-Making Abilities of Small Unit Leaders (Washington, DC: National 

Academies of Sciences Press, 2012).

47 This brief summary of the NAS Naval Studies Board is based on the NAS web page 

at http://sites.nationalacademies.org/DEPS/nsb/DEPS_046942. 

48 Defense Science Board, Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Future 

Strategic Strike Skills (Washington, DC: Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for 

Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, March 2006).

49 Defense Science Board, Joint U.S. Defense Science Board–UK Defence Scientific 

Advisory Council Task Force in Defense Critical Technologies (Washington, DC: 

Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, 

March 2006). 

50 Defense Science Board, Defense Science Board 2006 Summer Study on 21st Century 

Strategic Technology Vectors, Vol. I, Main Report (Washington, DC: Office of the 

Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, February 

2007). Vol. II, Critical Capabilities and Enabling Technologies; Vol. III, Strategic 

Technology Planning; Vol. IV, Accelerating the Transition of Technologies into U.S. 

Capabilities.

51 Defense Science Board, Report of the Joint Defense Science Board–Intelligence 

Science Board Task Force on Integrating Sensor-Collected Intelligence (Washington, 

DC: Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and 

Logistics, November 2008).

52 Defense Science Board, The Role of Autonomy in DoD Systems (Washington, DC: 

Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, 

July 2012).

53 Defense Science Board, Technology and Innovation Enablers for Superiority in 

2030 (Washington, DC: Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, 

Technology, and Logistics, October 2013).

54 Defense Science Board, Strategic Surprise (Washington, DC: Office of the Under 

Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, July 2015).

55 For example, see Ronald O’Rourke: “Navy Lasers, Railgun, and Hypervelocity 

Projectile: Background and Issues for Congress,” R44175 (Washington, DC: 

Congressional Research Service [CRS], 17 June 2016); “Navy Ford (CVN-78) 

Class Aircraft Carrier Program: Background and Issues for Congress,” RS20643 

(Washington, DC: CRS, 27 May 2016); “Navy DDG-51 and DDG-1000 Destroyer 

Programs: Background and Issues for Congress,” RL32109 (Washington, DC: 

CRS, 20 May 2016); “Navy Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) Program: Background 

and Issues for Congress,” RL33741 (Washington, DC: CRS, 20 May 2016); “Navy 

Littoral Combat Ship (LCS)/Frigate Program: Background and Issues for Congress,” 

RL33741 (Washington, DC: CRS, 18 April 2016); “Navy LX(R) Amphibious Ship 
344

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Program: Background and Issues for Congress,” R43543 (Washington, DC: CRS, 

27 May 2016); “Navy Ohio Replacement (SSBNB[X]) Ballistic Missile Submarine 

Program: Background and Issues for Congress,” R41129 (Washington, DC: CRS, 23 

February 2015); “Navy Virginia (SSN-774) Class Attack Submarine Procurement: 

Issues and Background for Congress,” RL32418 (Washington, DC: CRS, 14 April 

2016); “Navy Shipboard Lasers for Surface, Air, and Missile Defense: Background 

and Issues for Congress,” R41526 (Washington, DC: CRS, 7 February 2014); 

Navy Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) Program: Background and Issues for 

Congress,” RL33745 (Washington, DC: CRS, 26 May 2016); “Navy Irregular 

Warfare and Counterterrorism Operations: Background and Issues for Congress,” 

RS22373 (Washington, DC: CRS, 6 November 2015). 

56 For example, see U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), “Arleigh Burke

Destroyers: Delaying Procurement of DDG 51 Flight III Ships Would Allow Time to 

Increase Knowledge,” GAO-16-613 (Washington, DC: U.S. GAO, 4 August 2016); 

“Defense Acquisitions: Assessments of Selected Weapon Programs,” GAO-16-329SP 

(Washington, DC: U.S. GAO, 31 March 2016); “Military Readiness: Progress and 

Challenges in Implementing the Navy’s Optimized Fleet Response Plan,” GAO-16-

466R (Washington, DC: U.S. GAO, 2 May 2016); “Littoral Combat Ship: Need 

to Address Fundamental Weaknesses in LCS and Frigate Acquisition Strategies,” 

GAO-16-356 (Washington, DC: U.S. GAO, 9 June 2016).

57 James Kadtke and Linton Wells II, Policy Challenges of Accelerating Technological 

Changes: Security Policy and Strategy Implications of Parallel Scientific Revolutions

(Washington, DC: National Defense University, 2014).

58 Elting E. Morison, Men, Machines, and Modern Times (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 

1966), 68.

59 Ronald Spector, Professors of War: The Naval War College and the Development of 

the Naval Profession (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1977), 1.

60 See the following essays in W. Brian Arthur’s Increasing Returns and Path 

Dependence in the Economy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994): 

“Industry Location Patterns and the Importance of History;” “Urban Systems and 

Historical Path Dependence;” “Self-Reinforcement Mechanisms in Economics;” and 

“Path dependence, Self-Reinforcement, and Human Learning.” 

61 Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts, The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and 

the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy (New York: Basic Books, 

2015), 44–45.

62 Douglass C. North, “Epilogue: Economic Performance Through Time,” in Lee J. 

Alston, Thrainn Eggerston, Douglass C. North, eds., Empirical Studies in Institutional 

Change (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 349; Douglass C. 

North, “Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going?” http://econwpa.repec.

org/eps/eh/papers/9612/9612001.pdf; Douglass C. North, “Some Fundamental 

Puzzles in Economic History/Development,” in W. Brian Arthur, Steven N. Durlauf, 

David A. Lane, eds., The Economy as an Evolving Complex System II (Reading, PA: 

Addison-Wesley, 1997), 228.

63 Paul A. David, “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY,” American Economics 

Review, Vol. 75, May 1985, 332–37; W. Brian Arthur, Yuri Ermoliev, and Yuri 

Kaniovski, “Path-Dependent Processes and the Emergence of Macrostructure,” in W. 
345

Technolog y

Brian Arthur, Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy (Ann Arbor: 

University of Michigan Press, 1994), 33.

64 See David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge 

University Press, 1969); David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New 

York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999).

65 Douglass C. North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change (Princeton: 

Princeton University Press, 2005); Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional 

Change, and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 

3–9; Douglass C. North, “The Paradox of the West,” in R. Davis, ed., The Origins 

of Modern Freedom in the West (Stanford Research Park, CA: Stanford University 

Press, 1995), 7; Joel Mokyr, “Cultural Entrepreneurs and the Origins of Modern 

Economic Growth,” Scandinavian Economic History Review, Vol. 61, No. 1, 2013.

66 Herbert A. Simon, “Human Nature in Politics: The Dialogue of Psychology with 

Political Science,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 79, No. 2, June 1985, 301. 

See also Mark D. Mandeles, Military Transformation Past and Present (Westport: 

Praeger Security International, 2007).

67 North, “The Paradox of the West,” 7; North, “Some Fundamental Puzzles in 

Economic History/Development,” 225.

68 Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social 

Orders (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 241–43.

69 Robert O’Harrow, Jr., “Justice Dept. Pushes for Power to Unlock PC Security 

Systems,” The Washington Post, 20 August 1999, A1, A28.

70 George I. Seffers, “Nations Seek Defense Against Cyber Attack,” Defense News, 

Vol. 14, 9 August 1999, 6, 8. Europeans’ outrage that followed Edward Snowden’s 

disclosures of U.S. electronic interception of European leaders’ communications 

has subsided, and Europeans have recognized that their own governments conduct 

electronic surveillance and are subject to fewer legal constraints and less oversight 

than the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Michèle Flournoy and Adam I. Klein, 

“What Europe Got Wrong About the NSA,” Foreign Affairs, 2 August 2016, https://

www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/germany/2016-08-02/what-europe-got-wron

g-about-nsa.

71 Avner Greif, “Reputation and Coalition in Medieval Trade: Evidence on the Maghribi 

Traders,” Journal of Economic History, Vol. 49, No. 4, December 1989; Avner 

Greif, “Cultural Beliefs and the Organization of Society: Historical and Theoretical 

Reflections on Collectivist and Individualist Societies,” Journal of Political Economy, 

Vol. 102, No. 5, October 1994; Albert O. Hirschman, “Ideology: Mask or Nessus 

Shirt?” in Alexander Eckstein, ed., Comparison of Economic Systems (Berkeley: 

University of California Press, 1971).

72 North, “The Paradox of the West,” 7. See also Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of 

the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

(Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2011).

73 William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community

(New York: New American Library, 1963); see also Landes, The Wealth and Poverty 

of Nations, 392–415; Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong: The Clash Between Islam 

and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); 
346

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: 

Random House, 2003).

74 I believe that future formalization of the argument about the growth of knowledge 

may avoid the following three main obstacles to predicting the effects of constitutional level rule changes over a long period of time: (1) The interests of people 

change more rapidly than changes in constitutional rules, (2) strategies change as 

a result of rule changes, and (3) rules don’t operate in isolation. How a change in 

one rule will affect incentives and behavior over time depends on the configuration 

of rules in that set. Thus there is a calculation problem: The large number of single 

rules that can be altered and the great variety of rule configurations make the total 

number of possibilities very large. When interaction effects exist among the rules, it 

is difficult to study changes of one or a few rules in isolation.

75 North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change.

76 Russell L. Ackoff, “A Revolution in Organizational Concepts,” Naval War College 

Review, Vol. 24, January 1972, 4; Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The 

Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 4–5.

77 Thomas C. Hone, Norman Friedman, and Mark D. Mandeles, American and British 

Aircraft Carrier Development, 1919–1941 (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 1999).

78 Mark D. Mandeles, The Development of the B-52 and Jet Propulsion, 34–37; Mark 

D. Mandeles, Military Transformation Past and Present: Historic Lessons for the 

21st Century (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007), 28–47.

79 Edward L. Katzenbach Jr., “The Horse Cavalry in the Twentieth Century: A Study in 

Policy Response,” in Richard G. Head and Ervin J. Rokke, eds., American Defense 

Policy, 3rd Edition (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 419.

80 Charles S. Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (2nd 

edition) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999 [originally published in 

1984]); Eugene A. Rosa, “Celebrating a Citation Classic—and More,” Organization 

& Environment, Vol. 18, No. 2, June 2005.

81 Paul Shrivastava, Bhopal: Anatomy of Crisis (New York: Ballinger Publishing Co., 

1987). An extensive literature has developed on the industrial disaster at the Union 

Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, and can be accessed at Amazon.com.

82 Interactive complexity is defined in terms of (1) number of components, (2) high differentiation and low redundancy, and (3) interdependent and tightly-coupled processes

83 Gene I. Rochlin, Todd R. LaPorte, and Karlene H. Roberts, “The Self-Designing 

High-Reliability Organization: Aircraft Carrier Flight Operations at Sea,” Naval 

War College Review, Vol. 40, No. 4, Autumn 1987; Gene I. Rochlin, “Informal 

Organizational Networking as a Crisis Avoidance Strategy: US Naval Flight 

Operations as a Case Study,” Industrial Crisis Quarterly, Vol. 3, 1989; Karlene H. 

Roberts, “Some Characteristics of One Type of High Reliability Organization,” 

Organization Science, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1990; Karl E. Weick and Karlene H. Roberts, 

“Collective Mind in Organizations: Heedful Interrelating on Flight Decks,” 

Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 3, September 1993. 

84 Karlene H. Roberts, “New Challenges in Organizational Research: High Reliability 

Organizations,” Industrial Crisis Quarterly, Vol. 3, 1989; Paul R. Schulman, 

“The Negotiated Order of Organizational Reliability,” Administration & Society, 

Vol. 25, No. 3, November 1993; Gene I. Rochlin, “How to Hunt a Very Reliable 
347

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Organization,” Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, Vol. 19, No. 1, 

March 2011.

85 Peter Madsen, Vinit Desai, Karlene H. Roberts, and Daniel Wong “Mitigating 

Hazards through Continuing Design: The Birth and Evolution of a Pediatric Intensive 

Care Unit,” Organization Science, Vol. 17, No. 2, March–April 2006.

86 Martin Landau, “Redundancy, Rationality, and the Problem of Duplication and 

Overlap,” Public Administration Review, Vol. 39, No. 4, July–August 1969; Allan 

W. Lerner, “There Is More Than One Way to Be Redundant: A Comparison of 

Alternatives for the Design and Use of Redundancy in Organizations,” Administration 

& Society, Vol. 18, No. 3, November 1986.

87 Karlene H. Roberts, Suzanne K. Stout, and Jennifer J. Halpern, “Decision Dynamics 

in Two High Reliability Military Organizations,” Management Science, Vol. 40, No. 

5, May 1994; Timothy Vogus, “High-Reliability Organizations,” in Eric H. Kessler, 

ed. Encyclopedia of Management Theory (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 

Inc., 2013). 

88 Karl E. Weick and Karlene H. Roberts, “Collective Mind in Organizations: Heedful 

Interrelating on Flight Decks,” Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 3, 

September 1993; Karl E. Weick, Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, and D. Obstfeld, “Organizing 

for High Reliability: Processes of Collective Mindfulness,” in B. M. Staw and L. 

L. Cummings, eds., Research in Organizational Behavior, Vol. 21 (Greenwich, CT: 

JAI Press, 1999); Karl W. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, “Mindfulness and the 

Quality of Organizational Attention,” Organizational Science, Vol. 17, No. 4, July–

August 2006.

89 See discussion of the recruitment requirement for “renaissance men” (and women) 

in “network-centric”–type military organizations in Mark D. Mandeles, The Future 

of War: Organizations as Weapons (Washington, DC: Potomac Books Inc., 2005), 

122. Schulman adds undesirable personality traits for people who work in high reliability organizations, such as nuclear power plants, are hubris and headstrong, and 

desirable traits are preference for analysis before action and unexcitable. Schulman, 

“The Negotiated Order of Organizational Reliability.”

90 U.S. Navy damage control exercises are an example of very effective latent networks. 

See Mandeles, The Future of War, 167; Jennifer J. Halpern, “Cognitive Factors 

Influencing Decision Making in a Highly Reliable Organization,” Industrial Crisis 

Quarterly, Vol. 3, 1989; Gene I. Rochlin, “Informal Organizational Networking as a 

Crisis-Avoidance Strategy: US Naval Flight Operations as a Case Study,” Industrial 

Crisis Quarterly, Vol. 3, 1989.

91 RADM Dave Oliver, Against the Tide: Rickover’s Leadership Principles and the Rise 

of the Nuclear Navy (Annapolis, MD: NIP, 2014). 

92 Timothy Vogus, “High-Reliability Organizations.” 

93 W. Edwards Deming, “On Some Statistical Aids Toward Economic Production,” 

Interfaces, Vol. 5, No. 4, August 1975.

94 Paul E. Bierly III, Scott Gallagher, and J. C. Spender, “Innovation and Learning in 

High-Reliability Organizations: A Case Study of United States and Russian Nuclear 

Attack Submarines, 1970–2000,” IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 

Vol. 55, No. 3, August 2008; Paul E. Bierly III, Scott Gallagher, and J. C. Spender, 
348

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

“Innovation Decision Making in High-Risk Organizations: A Comparison of the US 

and Soviet Attack Submarine Programs,” Industrial and Corporate Change, 2004.

95 Yanni Alexander Loukissas and David A. Mindell, “Visual Apollo: A Graphical 

Exploration of Computer-Human Relationships,” Issues, Vol. 30, No. 2, Spring 

2014, 4–5.

96 Loukissas and Mindell, 4, cite Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to 

Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 

University Press, 1988); Gary Downey and Joseph Dumit, Cyborgs and Citadels: 

Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies (Santa Fe, 

NM: School of American Research Press, 1997); Lucille Suchman, Human-Machine 

Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions (New York: Cambridge University 

Press, 2007). In studies of high reliability organizations, Rochlin, LaPorte, et al., 

relied on a standard of sociological research methodology, Barney G. Glaser and 

Anselm L. Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative 

Research (Chicago: Aldine, 1967).

97 Raja Parasuraman, “A Model for Types and Levels of Human Interaction with 

Automation,” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Vol. 30, No. 3, 

2000; Thomas B. Sheridan, Humans and Automation: System Design and Research 

Issues (New York: Wiley Interscience, 2002). One of the best introductions to artificial intelligence and related topics is Pamela McCorduck, Machines Who Think

(Natick, MA: A K Peters, Ltd, 2004).

98 James Hollan, Edwin Hutchins, and David Kirsh, “Distributed Cognition: Toward 

a New Foundation for Human-Computer Interaction Research,” ACM Transactions 

on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 7, No. 2, June 2000. 

99 Max Weber, “Bureaucracy,” in Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds., Economy and 

Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 993, 991.

100 ADM H. G. Rickover, speech, “The Role of Engineering in the Navy,” presented to 

the National Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 

Seattle, Washington, 30 August 1974.

101 Richard P. Feynman, “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”: Further 

Adventures of a Curious Character (New York: Bantam Books, 1988).

102 There also is the related issue of the validity of managers’ perceptions—a topic about 

which there has been little written. See William A. Starbuck and John M. Mezias, 

“Opening Pandora’s Box: Studying the Accuracy of Managers’ Perceptions,” Journal 

of Organizational Behavior, Vol. 17, No. 2, March 1996.

103 Mark D. Mandeles, Memorandum, To Joint Center for Operational Analysis/U.S. 

Joint Forces Command, Subject: JCOA and Operational Analysis for US Forces and 

Their Commanders, 31 March 2011.

104 Hacker, “Military Institutions, Weapons, and Social Change: Toward a New History 

of Military Technology,” 788. See also Hacker, “Engineering a New Order: Military 

Institutions, Technical Education, and the Rise of the Industrial State”; Hacker, 

“Military Institutions and Social Order.” 

105 Barton C. Hacker, “Military Technology and World History: A Reconnaissance,” 

The History Teacher, Vol. 30, No. 4, August 1997, 461. See also Eugene M. Emme, 

“Technical Change and Western Military Thought—1914–1945,” Military Affairs, 

Vol. 24, No. 1, Spring 1960.
349

Technolog y

106 Walter Millis, Arms and Men: A Study in American Military History (New Brunswick, 

NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981), 5–6.

107 Katherine C. Epstein, Torpedo: Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex in the 

United States and Great Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 

See also Mark D. Mandeles, presentation to the Military Classics Seminar, 17 May 

2016, Fort Myers Officers Club. Review of Katherine C. Epstein, Torpedo: Inventing 

the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States and Great Britain.

108 Shawn Brimley, “Offset Strategies & Warfighting Regimes,” War on the 

Rocks, 15 October 2014, http://warontherocks.com/2014/10/offset-strategie

s-warfighting-regimes/; Jon Czarnecki, “Against a Tech-Centric Offset,” War on the 

Rocks, 29 October 2014, http://warontherocks.com/2014/10/against-a-tech-centricoffset/; Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., “Adversaries Will Copy ‘Offset Strategy’ Quickly: Bob 

Work,” Breaking Defense, 19 November 2014, http://breakingdefense.com/2014/11/

adversaries-will-copy-offset-strategy-quickly-bob-work/; Chuck Hagel, Speech, 

“‘Defense Innovation Days’ Opening Keynote (Southeastern New England Defense 

Industry Alliance),” 3 September 2014, http://www.defense.gov/News/Speeches/

Speech-View/Article/605602; Chuck Hagel, Memorandum, “Subject: The Defense 

Innovation Initiative,” 15 November 2014; Chuck Hagel, “A Game-Changing 

Third Offset Strategy,” War on the Rocks, 17 November 2014, http://warontherocks.com/2014/11/a-game-changing-third-offset-strategy/; Alexandra Sander, 

“Exploring a New Offset Strategy: What the Experts Say,” War on the Rocks, 

4 December 2014, http://warontherocks.com/2014/12/exploring-a-new-offse

t-strategy-what-the-experts-say/; Paul Scharre, “How to Lose the Robotics 

Revolution,” War on the Rocks, 29 July 2014, http://warontherocks.com/2014/07/

how-to-lose-the-robotics-revolution/; Bill Sweetman, “‘Third Offset’ Addresses 

Operational and Economic Challenges,” Aviation Week & Space Technology, 3 

November 2014, http://aviationweek.com/defense/third-offset-addresses-operationa

l-and-economic-challenges; Robert O. Work and Shawn Brimley, 20YY: Preparing 

for War in the Robotic Age (Washington, DC : Center for New American Security, 

January 2014); Andrew F. Krepinevich, “Testimony [Defense Strategy],” Senate 

Armed Services Committee, 28 October 2015; Marcus Weisgerber, “Pentagon Wants 

to Pair Troops with Machines to Deter Russia, China,” Defense One, 8 November 

2015, http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2015/11/pentagon-wants-pair-troop

s-machines-deter-russia-china/123498/?oref=defenseone_today_nl; Aaron Mehta, 

“Work Outlines Key Steps in Third Offset Tech Development.” Defense News, 14 

December 2015, http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/innovation/2015/12/14/

work-third-offset-tech-development-pentagon-russia/77283732/; Cheryl Pellerin, 

“DoD Seeks Novel Ideas to Shape its Technological Future,” DoD News, 24 

February 2015, http://www.defense.gov/News-Article-View/Article/604159/

dod-seeks-novel-ideas-to-shape-its-technological-future; Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., 

“People, Not Tech: DepSecDef Work On 3rd Offset, JICSPOC,” Breaking Defense, 

9 February 2016, http://breakingdefense.com/2016/02/its-not-about-technolog

y-bob-work-on-the-3rd-offset-strategy/; Daniel Gouré, “Directed Energy Weapons 

Will Be The Key To A Successful Third Offset Strategy,” Real Clear Defense, 29 

March 2016, http://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2016/03/29/directed_energy_

weapons_will_be_the_key_to_a_successful_third_offset_strategy_109199.html; 

“U.S. Department of Defense Third Offset, Standard Market Taxonomy,” Govini 

Analyst Report, 2016; Michael Hayden, “Video: Transformation and The Third Offset 
350

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

(NSA-CIA),” Real Clear Defense, 29 March 2016, http://www.realcleardefense.com/

video/2016/03/29/michael_hayden_transformation_and_the_third_offset_nsa-cia.

html; Aaron Mehta, “Pentagon No. 2: How to Keep Third Offset Going in the 

Next Administration,” Defense News, 2 May 2016, http://www.defensenews.com/

story/defense-news/2016/05/02/pentagon-no-2-how-keep-third-offset-going-n

ext-admininistration/83851204/; Luis Simón, “The ‘Third’ US Offset Strategy and 

Europe’s ‘Anti-access’ Challenge,” The Journal of Strategic Studies, 2016; Timothy 

A. Walton, “Securing The Third Offset Strategy: Priorities for Next US Secretary 

Of Defense,” Joint Force Quarterly, Issue 82, 1 July 2016, http://ndupress.ndu.edu/

JFQ/Joint-Force-Quarterly-82/; Josh Wiitala, “Seizing the Defensive: A Balanced 

Approach for the Third Offset,” The Strategy Bridge, 14 June 2016, http://www.

thestrategybridge.com/the-bridge/2016/6/14/seizing-the-defensive-a-balanced

-approach-for-the-third-offset#_edn1. My thanks and appreciation to CDR (ret.) 

Paul S. Giarra for identifying and finding the great majority of these references.

109 Czarnecki, “Against a Tech-Centric Offset.” For an uncritical description of plans 

to develop a human-machine collaboration capability, see Weisgerber, “Pentagon 

Wants to Pair Troops with Machines to Deter Russia, China.” 

110 Weisgerber, “Pentagon Wants to Pair Troops with Machines to Deter Russia, China.” 

111 Baruch Fischhoff and Stephen Johnson, “The Possibility of Distributed 

Decision-making,” in Zur Shapira, ed., Organizational Decision-making (New 

York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Baruch Fischhoff, Zvi Lanir, and Stephen 

Johnson, “Risky lessons: Conditions for Organizational Learning,” in Raghu Garud, 

Praveen R. Nayyar, Zur B. Shapira, eds., Technological Innovation: Oversights and 

Foresights (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Baruch Fischhoff, 

“For Those Condemned to Study the Past: Reflections on Historical Judgement,” in 

R. A. Shweder and D. W. Fiske, eds., New Directions for Methodology of Behavioral 

Science: Fallible Judgement in Behavioral Research (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 

1980); Baruch Fischhoff, Paul Slovic, Sarah Lichtenstein, “Knowing With Certainty: 

The Appropriateness of Extreme Confidence,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: 

Human Perception and Performance Vol.3, 1977, 552–64; Daniel Kahneman, 

“Bureaucracies, Minds, and the Human Engineering of Decisions,” in Gerardo R. 

Ungson and Daniel N. Braunstein, eds., Decision Making: An Interdisciplinary 

Inquiry (Boston: Kent Publishing Co., 1982); Stuart Oskamp, “Overconfidence in 

Case-Study Judgements,” in Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, eds., 

Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge 

University Press, 1982); Paul Slovic, “Judgment and Decision Making in Emergency 

Situations,” in D. Golding, J. X. Kasperson, and R. E. Kasperson, eds., Preparing 

for Nuclear Power Plant Accidents (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995); Paul Slovic, 

“Toward Understanding and Improving Decisions,” in William C. Howell and Edwin 

A. Fleishman, eds., Human Performance and Productivity (Hillside, NJ: Lawrence 

Erlbaum Associates, 1982); see also Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos 

Tversky, eds., Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge, 

UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Ronald N. Taylor and Marvin D. Dunnette, 

“Relative Contribution of Decision-Maker Attributes to Decision Processes,” 

Organizational Behavior and Human Performance Vol. 12, 1974, 286–98; Amos 

Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Causal Schemas in Judgements Under Uncertainty,” 

in Martin Fishbein, ed., Progress in Social Psychology (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence 
351

Technolog y

Erlbaum Associates, 1980); Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: 

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). 

112 Gene I. Rochlin, Trapped in the Net: The Unanticipated Consequences of 

Computerization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 166–68.

113 Herbert A. Simon, The Shape of Automation for Men and Management (New York: 

Harper & Row Publishers, 1965), 65.

114 “The Reminiscences of Vice Admiral Lloyd M. Mustin, USN (Ret.),” Vol. 2, interviewed by John T. Mason (Annapolis, MD: USNI, 2003), 852. My thanks to Dr. 

Thomas C. Hone for bringing this quotation to my attention.

115 F. A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review Vol. 

35, September 1945.

116 For example, The Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the 

Government, The National Security Organization (“First” Hoover Commission), 

15 February 1949; Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the 

Government, Business Organization of the Department of Defense (“Second” 

Hoover Commission), 20 June 1955; The Blue Ribbon Defense Panel, Report to 

The President and the Secretary of Defense on the Department of Defense (Fitzhugh 

Commission), 1 July 1970; Commission on Government Procurement, Report of 

the Commission on Government Procurement, Volume 1, 31 December 1972; 

The Office of the Secretary of Defense Task Force, The President’s Private Sector 

Survey on Cost Control (Grace Commission), 13 July 1983; The President’s Blue 

Ribbon Commission on Defense Management, A Quest for Excellence (Packard 

Commission), 30 June 1986.

117 Gates, “Speech,” 29 September 2008.

118 Karl R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (New York: Harper Torch Books, 1964). 

Popper develops a logical proof that shows “no scientific predictor—whether a 

human scientist or a calculating machine—can possibly predict, by scientific methods, 

its own future results” [emphasis in the original], vii.

119 Dr. Larrie D. Ferreiro referred to the requirement for military and civilian 

leaders to express a “demand signal” for the type of studies that would 

inform and improve effectiveness of acquisition decisions, decision-making 

processes, and organizational structures as a discussant at Dr. Thomas C. 

Hone’s 12 November 2015 presentation, “Programming and Operations 

of Acquisition for the USN: Historiographical Discussion” (https://www.

history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/

n/needs-opportunities-modern-history-us-navy/historiography-programmingacquisition-management-hone.html). It remains for the history/policy analysis 

communities to construct useful research programs and build knowledge to show 

civilian and military leaders what they need.

120 Mark D. Mandeles, “System Design and Project Management Principles to Meet 

the Needs of Operational Forces,” (Fairfax, VA: The J. de Bloch Group, 2011). 

This paper described an approach to weapons acquisition developed in the Office 

of Force Transformation (and its successor organization) that fused rapid fielding 

of state-of-the-art technology with adaptation to adversary strategies and tactics, 

and exploited the “patient accumulation of quiet successes” to produce effective 

capabilities.
352

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

121 Arati Prabhakar, “Strategy and Implementation of the Department of Defense’s 

Technology Offsets Initiative,” Senate Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on 

Emerging Threats and Capabilities, 12 April 2016; William B. Roper Jr., “Strategy 

and Implementation of the Department of Defense’s Technology Offsets Initiative,” 

Senate Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and 

Capabilities, 12 April 2016; Stephen Welby, “Third Offset Technology Strategy,” 

Senate Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and 

Capabilities, 12 April 2016.

122 National Research Council of the National Academies, Assessment of Department 

of Defense Basic Research (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2005), 

vii–viii, 2–4.

123 National Research Council, Assessment of Department of Defense Basic Research

(Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2005).

124 Jen Judson, “Missile Defense Agency Sees Its Research Focus Drop,” Defense News, 9 

August 2016, http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/2016/08/08/missile-defens

e-agency-sees-its-research-focus-drop/88290330/. My thanks to Dr. Larrie Ferreiro 

for bringing this article to my attention.

125 “The Golden Goose Award,” http://www.goldengooseaward.org/history/; Michael 

Franco, “Sex, maggots, castration and politicians lead to this year’s Golden Goose 

Award,” Gizmag, 22 June 2016, http://www.gizmag.com/golden-goose-award/43994.

126 For example, Gary B. Magee, “Rethinking Invention: Cognition and the Economics 

of Technological Creativity,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Vol. 

57, 2005; Morten Berg Jensen, Björn Johnson, Edward Lorenz, Bengt Åke Lundvall, 

“Forms of Knowledge and Modes of Innovation,” Research Policy, Vol. 36, 2007; 

Wilfred Schoenmakers and Geert Duysters, “The Technological Origins of Radical 

Inventions,” Research Policy, Vol. 39, 2010. See also Joseph Agassi, “The Confusion 

between Science and Technology in the Standard Philosophies of Science,” Technology 

and Culture, Vol. 7, No. 3, Summer 1966.

127 Derek de Solla Price, “On the Historiographic Revolution in the History of 

Technology: Commentary on the Papers by Multhauf, Ferguson, and Layton,” 

Technology and Culture, Vol. 15, No. 1, January 1974, 46; Kreilkamp, “Hindsight

and the Real World of Science Policy,” 1973.

128 Ronald N. Kostoff, “Research Impact Assessment,” Business Economics, Vol. 28, 

No. 1, January 1993; Ronald N. Kostoff, “Research Impact Quantification,” R&D 

Management, Vol. 24, No. 3, 1994; Kostoff, Ronald N. The Handbook of Research 

Impact Assessment, 7th edition (Arlington, VA: Office of Naval Research, 1997), 

http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD= ADA296021; Ronald N. Kostoff, Robert 

Miller, and Rene Tshiteya, “Advanced Technology Development Program Review: A 

US Department of the Navy Case Study,” R&D Management, Vol. 31, No. 3, 2001; 

Ronald N. Kostoff, “Encouraging Discovery and Innovation,” Science, Vol. 309, No. 

5732, 8 July 2005; Ronald N. Kostoff and Sujit Bhattacharya, “Identification of 

Military-Related Science and Technology,” Defense Science Journal, Vol. 60, No. 3, 

May 2010; William M. Trochim, Stephen E. Marcus, Louise C. Mâsse, Richard P. 

Moser, Patrick C. Weld, “The Evaluation of Large Research Initiatives: A Participatory 

Integrative Mixed-Methods Approach,” American Journal of Evaluation, Vol. 29, 

No. 1, March 2008. Note that much of Kostoff’s research cited above was conducted 

under the auspices of the Office of Naval Research.
353

Technolog y

129 Mie Augier, James G. March, and Andrew W. Marshall, “The Flaring of Intellectual 

Outliers: An Organizational Interpretation of the Generation of Novelty in the 

RAND Corporation,” Organization Science, Vol. 26, No. 4, July–August 2015.

130 Augier, March, and Marshall, “The Flaring of Intellectual Outliers,” 1157.

131 One of the standard texts for grounded research, which was used to guide research 

by the researchers studying high reliability organizations, is Barney G. Glaser and 

Anselm L. Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative 

Research (Chicago: Aldine, 1967). The literature on methods in ethnography 

includes tens of thousands of items. A couple of well-received recent books are Sarah 

J. Tracy, Qualitative Research Methods: Collecting Evidence, Crafting Analysis, 

Communicating Impact (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013); Karen O’Reilly, 

Ethnographic Methods, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2012).

132 Mark D. Mandeles, presentation to the Military Classics Seminar, 20 March 2007, 

Fort Myers Officers Club. Review of Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. 

Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New 

York: Pantheon Books, 2006). 

133 Barton C. Hacker, “Afterpiece,” The Public Historian, Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter 1996, 35.

134 Reinhard Rürup, “Historians and Modern Technology: Reflections on the 

Development and Current Problems of the History of Technology,” Technology and 

Culture, Vol. 15, No. 2, April 1974.

135 Herbert Goldhamer, “Fashion and Social Science,” World Politics, Vol. 6, No. 3, April 

1954, 394. For a complementary analysis that focuses on the proper application 

of metaphors and analogies in political analysis, see Martin Landau, “Due Process 

of Inquiry,” The American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 9, No. 2, October 1965. See 

also James G. March, “Administrative Practice, Organization Theory, and Political 

Philosophy: Ruminations on the Reflections of John M. Gaus,” PS: Political Science 

and Politics, Vol. 30, No. 4, December 1997. British historian N. A. M. Rodgers 

adds, “Our problem is not that we know too little history to understand the present 

but that we know too much, and most of it is wrong. Even when it is right, moreover, the history that is put to use is often the wrong history.” “The Hattendorf Prize 

Lecture,” Naval War College Review, Winter 2013, 8.

136 James G. March, “Administrative Practice, Organization Theory, and Political 

Philosophy”; Paul R. Schulman, “Problems in the Organization of Organization 

Theory: An Essay in Honour of Todd LaPorte,” Journal of Contingencies and Crisis 

Management, Vol. 19, No. 1, March 2011, 50.
354

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

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371

Acronyms

ACNP (W) Assistant Chief of Naval Personnel for Women

AD destroyer tender

AEC Atomic Energy Commission

AGR radar picket ship

AGS coastal hydrographic survey ship

AGTR technical research ship

AH hospital ship

AMC U.S. Army Materiel Command

AMCM airborne mine countermeasures

AO fleet replenishment oiler

ARG amphibious ready group

ASBM antiship ballistic missile 

ASCM antiship cruise missile 

ASW antisubmarine warfare

AVM guided missile ship

BB battleship

BUR bottom-up review

CA heavy cruiser

CBO Congressional Budget Office

CG guided missile cruiser

CIC Combat Information Center

CL light cruiser

CLF Combat Logistics Force

CMH U.S. Army Center of Military History

CNA Center for Naval Analyses

CNAS Center for a New American Security

CNO Chief of Naval Operations 

COCOM combat command

COMINWARCOM Commander Mine Warfare Command

CRS Congressional Research Service

CSBA Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments

CSG carrier strike group

CV aircraft carrier, multi-purpose
372

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

CVA aircraft carrier, attack

CVB aircraft carrier, large

CVBG carrier battle group

CVN aircraft carrier, multi-purpose (nuclear-powered)

CVW carrier air wing

DACOWITS Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services

DASH drone anti-submarine helicopter

DDG guided missile destroyer

DOD Department of Defense

DOE Department of Energy

DON Department of the Navy

DOPMA Defense Officer Personnel Management Act

DSB Defense Science Board

EOD explosive ordnance disposal

ESG expeditionary strike group

FBM fleet ballistic missile

FFG guided missile frigate

FFRDC Federally Funded Research and Development Center

FOIA Freedom of Information Act

GAO Government Accountability Office (formerly General 

 Accounting Office)

GURL general unrestricted line

ICBM intercontinental ballistic missile

ISB Intelligence Science Board

ISR intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance

JPME Joint Professional Military Education

JSTOR Journal Storage

LCS littoral combat ship

LMW littoral and mine warfare

LOC Library of Congress

LPD amphibious transport dock

LPH amphibious assault ship (helicopter)

LST landing ship tank

MCM mine countermeasures

MCMV mine countermeasures vessel

MDA Missile Defense Agency

MIW mine warfare

MRC major regional contingency
373

Acronyms

MSC Military Sealift Command

MSO ocean minesweeper

MSTS Military Sea Transport Service

MUW mine and undersea warfare

NAAP Navy Affirmative Action Plan

NAS National Academy of Sciences

NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NGA National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

NHHC Naval History and Heritage Command

NMWTC Naval and Mine Warfare Training Center

NPS Naval Postgraduate School

NRL Naval Research Laboratory

NROTC Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps

NSB Naval Studies Board

NSF National Science Foundation

NTDS Navy Tactical Data System

NWC Naval War College

OCS Officer Candidate School

OGLA Officer Grade Limitation Act

ONR Office of Naval Research 

OPA Officer Personnel Act

OPNAV Office of the Chief of Naval Operations

OPS operations

ORI Office of Research and Inventions

OSRD Office of Scientific Research and Development

PA&E Program Analysis and Evaluation

PB President’s Budget

PEO Project Executive Office

PERT program evaluation and review technique

PLA People’s Liberation Army

PPBS Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System

PRC People’s Republic of China

QDR Quadrennial Defense Review

R&D research and development

RDT&E research, development, test, and evaluation

RN Royal Navy

ROTC Reserve Officer’s Training Corps

SECDEF Secretary of Defense
374

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

SECNAV Secretary of the Navy

SIPRI Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

SLBM submarine launched ballistic missile

SOSUS sound surveillance system

SSBN ballistic missile submarine (nuclear-powered) 

SSGN guided missile submarine (nuclear-powered) 

SSN attack submarine (nuclear-powered)

TRACES Technology in Retrospect and Critical Events in Science

UPTIDE Unified Pacific Fleet Project for Tactical Improvement and Data 

 Extraction

URL unrestricted line

USNI U.S. Naval Institute

WAVES Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service

WHOI Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution


377

Index

Abunafeesa, Elsadig Yagoub, “The Post-1970 Political Geography of the Red Sea 

Region with Special Reference to United States Interests,” 60

Acadia, USS (AD-42), 248

Acker, David D., 167, 184n; Acquiring Defense Systems: A Quest for the Best, 168

Ackoff, Russell L., 324

Adams, Gordon, The Iron Triangle: The Politics of Defense Contracting, 168

Adams, John, U.S. President, 151n

Adriatic, 70, 80, 82

Adroit, US minesweeper (MSO-509), 50, 52, 59

Aegis weapon system, 14

Afghanistan, 73, 74, 80, 81, 87; U.S. combat operations in, 18; U.S. naval 

operations in, 20

Afghanistan War, 106, 119, 149n, 186n, 224; U.S. Navy women in, 224

Afloat Prepositioning Force, 16

Africa, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81; U.S. Navy and, 16, 24, 43, 45, 46, 85

Africa Station, 4

African Americans: at the U.S. Naval Academy, 237; discrimination against, in the 

United States, 229, 233; in the Naval Reserve, 229; in the U.S. Navy, 114, 116, 

118, 127, 148n, 152n, 221–22, 222, 223, 229–32, 237–38, 239–40, 244–45, 

253–54, 255–56

Air Force, U.S., 125, 129, 275, 277, 283; Air Power doctrine of, 143n; and 

intercontinental ballistic missiles, 172; and military acquisition, 173; and studies 

of development of aircraft and ballistic missiles, 167; B-52, 177; forward-deployed 

supplies for, 16; History and Museums Program, 167; in Afghanistan and Iraq 

wars, 149n; Materiel Command, 167, 177; rivalry of, with Navy, over aviation, 165

Akers, Regina T., 245; Doing Their Part: The WAVES in World War II, 225; “Joy 

Bright Hancock: Pioneering Spirit,” 225

Al Qaeda, 254

Albania, 73, 78, 83

Albion, Robert C., 144n

Aldridge, Edward C., Under Secretary of Defense, 171, 176

All Hands magazine, 110

Allen, Barbara, Lt., USN, 244

Allen, David G., 176

Allen, Elizabeth, Navy WAVES, 226

Allied Joint Forces Command, 254

Allison, David K., 202, 207, 214; “The U.S. Navy’s Research and Development Since 

World War II,” 314

Aluminaut, deep-diving submersible, 211
378

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Alvin, deep-diving submersible, 211, 214

Amato, Ivan, 213; Pushing the Horizon, 316

Amazon.com, 273

AMCM Helicopter Squadron Fourteen, 59

America, U.S. aircraft carrier (CV-66), 49

American Revolution, 231

Anderson, George W., Adm., USN, 241

Annapolis, MD, 124

Arab Empire, 323

Arabian Gulf, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81; mine operations in, 46; 

tanker war, 48; U.S. Navy operations in, 45, 84

Arabian Sea: as hub of U.S. naval deployment, 14, 15, 18; U.S. Navy activities in, 10, 15

Arabian/Persian Gulf War, 53

Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, 278

Army and Navy Journal, 111

Army and Navy Register, 111

Army, U.S., 115, 120, 275, 283; 442nd Infantry Regiment, 222; and military 

acquisition, 186n, 187n; Army Air Corps Materiel Division, 173; Bradley fighting 

vehicle, 172, 174; Center of Military History, 175, 229; Corps of Engineers, 124; 

defense responsibilities of, 5; doctrine of, 143n; forward-deployed supplies for, 

16; institutional rules governing, 324; intellectual isolation of, 324; Japanese 

Americans in, 222; M-1 tank, 174; Materiel Command: A Brief History of AMC, 

1962–2000, 167; military academy, 124; Nurse Corps, 126; Program Development 

Division, 167; Reserve, 250; Sheridan antitank tracked vehicle, 174; World War II 

history program of, 164

Army-Navy Game, 247

Arthur, Stanley, Vice Adm., USN, 56, 252, 256; Desert Storm at Sea: What the Navy 

Really Did, 54

Ash Shuabah, Kuwait, 50

Asia, 139; U.S. isolation from, 136; U.S. naval activities in, 20

Asian Americans: discrimination against, 233; in the U.S. Navy, 221, 223, 232

Asian-Pacific Americans: in the U.S. Navy, 253–54

Asiatic Fleet, 24; and sinking of Panay, 6; established, 5; in Inter-War Period, 6; in 

World War I, 6; reestablished, 7

Asiatic Squadron, 5

Asterias, research vessel, 208

Atlantic Fleet, 49, 245; deployments, 6; established, 5; in Inter-War Period, 6; in World 

War II, 7; reestablished, 7

Atlantic Ocean, 65, 115, 136; as hub of U.S. naval deployment, 18; in World War II, 

104; naval operations in, 3; privateers in, 3; submarine acoustic warning nets in, 

211; U.S. naval deployment in, 24; U.S. Navy activities in, 10, 14, 20

Atlantic Patrol Force, 7

Atlas Intercontinental ballistic missiles, 173
379

Index

Atomic Energy Commission, 166, 203

Augustine, Norman B., 189n

Australia, 6

Avenger, U.S. mine countermeasure vessel (MCM-1), 50, 52, 57, 59, 68n

Aviation Officer Candidate School, 128

Axis Powers, 202

Bab el Mandeb, 48

Baer, George, 289n; One Hundred Years of Sea Power, 223

Baghdad, Iraq, 328

Bagley, Worth, 238

Bahrain, 10, 15, 50

Bainbridge, USS (DLGN/CGN-25), 150n

Baldwin, Hanson W., 185n

Balkans, 72, 73, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83; U.S. naval operations in, 20, 45

Baltic, 70, 78

Baltimore Sun, 247

Bangladesh, 71, 75, 76, 77, 87

Barbary States, 4

Barnett, Roger, 277, 289n

Barth, Kai-Henrik, 204–5, 206, 214, 215

Base Realignment and Closure, 316

Bateman, Sam, 289n

Bates, Robert, Commodore, USN, 144n

Baucom, Donald R., 176

Baxter, James Finney, Scientists Against Time, 202

Belgium, 51, 56, 68n

Benevolence, USS (AH-13), 232

Bereiter, Gregory, 63

Berlin, Germany, 115

Berman, Alan, 211

Berman, Larry, Zumwalt, 238–39

Beyer, Kurt W., “Grace Murray Hopper: Technical Innovator,” 236

Bikini Atoll, 8

Billings, Charlene W., Grace Hopper, 235–36

Bing, online search engine, 44

Blaker, James, Transforming Military Force: The Legacy of Arthur Cebrowski and 

Network Centric Warfare, 177

Boggs, USS (DMS-3), 146n

Boorda, Jeremy, Adm., Chief of Naval Operations, 252

Booz Allen Hamilton, 315

Bouchard, Joseph, 289n
380

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Boynton, Colin K., Lt. Cmdr., USN, 52; “Operations to Defeat Iranian Maritime Trade 

Interdiction,” 61

Bradford, James C., Quarterdeck and Bridge, 239

Bradley, Omar, Gen., USA, 104

Brazil Station, 4

Breemer, Jan, “Intense Look: U.S. Minehunting Experience in the Red Sea,” 53

Breuer, William B., War and American Women, 232, 252, 255

Bridgeton, MV, tanker, 48

Brilliant Pebbles missile defense system, 172, 176

Brink Bachelor Officers Quarters, 234

British Association for the Advancement of Science, 312

Britten, Fred, U.S. Congressman, 102

Brodie, Bernard, 8

Brookings Institution, 168

Brooks, USS (DD-232), 146n

Brouillette, Marie Joan, Lt. Cmdr., U.S. Navy Nurse Corps, 234

Brown v. Board of Education of the City of Topeka, Kansas, 117, 237

Brown, Donaldson, 189n

Brown, Harold, Secretary of Defense, 329

Brown, Jesse L., Ens., USN, 231

Brown, Wesley A., 230, 237

Bruns, Sebastian, 274

Buderi, Robert, Naval Innovation for the 21st Century, 316

Burchard, John, Combat Scientists, 313, 341n

Burgos, Glenn, Engineering the F-4 Phantom II: Parts into Systems, 166

Burke, Arleigh, Adm., USN, 124

Burton, James G., 187n

Bush, George W., U.S. President, 276

Bush, Vannevar, 312, 313, 333, 341n

Bushnell, David, 47

Business Executives for National Security, 167

Butrica, Andrew J., 176

Buzzard’s Bay, 208

Cagle, Malcolm W., The Sea War in Korea, 232

Callwell, Charles E., Maj. Gen., British Army, 104

Cambodia, 73, 79, 87

Campaign Plan Granite, 143n

Campbell, Tayinika, Petty Officer, USN, 254

Cape Cod, USS (AD-43), 248

Cape Kennedy, FL, 235

Caribbean Sea, 4, 5, 6, 20

Carl Vinson, USS (CVN-70), 325
381

Index

Carlisle, Rodney, 315; Management of the U.S. Navy Research and Development 

Centers During the Cold War Era, 315; Navy RDT&E Planning in the Age of 

Transition, 316; The Sound of Freedom, 316

Carlucci, Frank, Secretary of Defense, 246

Carol, Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 271, 272

Carter, Ashton, Secretary of Defense, 21, 279, 287n

Carter, Charles, Sir, 312

Carter, Jimmy, U.S. President, 276, 277

Cathay Pacific Airlines, 11

CBO: See Congressional Budget Office

Center for a New American Security, 111, 145n, 277

Center for Naval Analyses, 44, 52, 53, 61, 63, 67n, 89n, 111, 145n, 161, 277; conference 

on the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System, 167; reports, 2, 3, 57–58

Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 3, 24, 33n, 177

Central America, 5, 24

Chad, 70, 76, 85

Chafee, John, Secretary of the Navy, 239

Challenger space shuttle, 327–28

Charleston, SC, 62

Cherokees, 253

Chicago, IL, 122

China, 73, 74, 77, 79, 86, 87; Nationalist Forces withdraw from, to Taiwan, 11; naval 

operations in, 6; U.S. Marines in, 8; U.S. naval activities in, 5, 6

China, People’s Republic of, 106, 247, 278, 323; aggressiveness of, 141; and U.S. Navy, 

11, 43; as threat to U.S. naval forces, 19; challenges to U.S. from, 18; counter-naval 

capabilities, 2; disassembles crashed U.S. intelligence aircraft, 29n; naval 

deployment patterns of, 26; navy of, as threat, 33n; number of mines held by, 47, 

65; rise of, 119; U.S. Navy downs army aircraft of, 11

Chinese Nationalist Forces, 11

Chisholm, Donald, 146n

Chisholm, William K., Lt. Cmdr., USN, 146n

Chosin Reservoir, Korea, 231

Churchill, Winston, 117

Civil War, American, 4, 47, 64–65, 103, 104, 120, 121, 132, 136, 139, 143n, 327

Clark, Bryan, Deploying Beyond Their Means, 3

Clark, Joseph J., Adm., USN, Carrier Admiral, 253–54

Clark, Vern, Adm., USN, Chief of Naval Operations, 119

Clemson-class destroyers, 7

Clinton, William J., U.S. President, 15, 122, 171, 244, 249

CNA: See Center for Naval Analyses

Coast Guard, United States, 18, 44, 272, 283; “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century 

Seapower,” 277, 289n
382

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Cold War, 2, 3, 47, 59–60, 65, 104, 106, 115, 119, 121, 123, 132, 136, 137, 139, 141, 

162, 180, 186n, 189n, 202, 253, 274, 275, 279, 280, 281, 283; and social history 

of the U.S. Navy, 221; and U.S. investment in basic research, 171; classification 

of documents during, 166; competition in digital technology during, 236; end of, 

175; military acquisition during, 164, 165, 166–67, 168, 170, 171, 173; minority 

sailors in, 255; oceanography in, 212; Office of Chief of Naval Operations during, 

177; post-war, 167; racial integration of the U.S. Navy during, 230; research and 

development during, 315; science during, 209; ship deployments during, 149n; the 

scientific community during, 204; U.S. naval strategy during, 8–15; U.S. Navy 

veterans of, 224; veterans of, 250

Cole, USS (DDG-67), 254, 278

Coletta, Paolo E., The American Naval Heritage, 223

Collins, Winifred Quick, Capt., USN, 226, 255; More Than a Uniform, 250

Combat Information Center, 130, 135

Combat Logistics Force, 16, 24

Combat Logistics Support Force, 246, 247

Commander Mine Warfare Command, 62

Commander Naval Air Forces, 62

Communism: in Greece, 9

Congressional Budget Office, 15, 110, 145n; Fiscal Year 2016 30-Year Shipbuilding 

Plan, 21; reports, 2, 3

Congressional Record, 110

Congressional Research Service, 145n, 281, 320

Consolation, USS (AH-15), 232

Constellation, USS (CVA-64), 240

Constitution, USS, 150n

Contovich, James T., African Americans in Defense of the Nation: A Bibliography, 230

Converse, Elliott V., III, Rearming for the Cold War, 1945–1960, 176

Cooling, B. F., 172

Coonts, Stephen: The Flight of the Intruder, 161; The Minotaur, 161

Copperfin, USS, 66n

Coral Sea, Battle of, 142n, 144n

Corbett, Julian, 104, 278, 280

Cordesman, Anthony, The Lessons of Modern War, Volume IV: The Gulf War, 55

Corpus Christi, TX, 62

Cote, Owen, The Third Battle: Innovation in the U.S. Navy’s Silent Cold War Struggle 

with Soviet Submarines, 177

Coughlin, Paula, Lt., USN, 251

Council on Economic Priorities, 168

Crandall, Elizabeth, 226

Crawford, Michael J., 43, 46, 63, 151n, 309

Crimea, 286n

Crisis magazine, 230
383

Index

Crist, David, Twilight Wars: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict 

with Iran, 55

Cropsey, Seth, 274, 284, 289n

Crumpton, Frances L., Lt. U.S. Navy Nurse Corps, 234

CS-21/CS-21R, 275, 276

CSBA: See Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments

Cuba, 70, 73, 77, 79, 80, 86, 104

Cutler, Thomas J.: “Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr.: Hero or Heretic,” 239; “Elmo R. Zumwalt 

Jr.: Innovation,” 239; “Purple for Christmas,” 234; A Sailor’s History of the U.S. 

Navy, 254; Women in the Navy, 252

Cyprus, 71, 80, 83

Daesh (Islamic State), 106, 286n

Dahlgren Laboratory, 316

Dalton, John, Secretary of the Navy, 245

Daniels, Josephus, Secretary of the Navy, 101, 113

Danish Strait, 65

Davis, Lenwood G., Blacks in the American Armed Forces, 231, 240

Davis, M. Thomas, Col., USA (Ret.), 167

De Wilde, Josef, Vice Adm., USN, “Mine Warfare in the Gulf,” 54

Defense Acquisition History Project, The, 171, 176, 178, 180

Defense Acquisition University, 168

Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, 232, 246

Defense Department Acquisition History, 176

Defense Science Board, 318–20

Defense Supply Agency, 173

Defense System Management College, 168

Deming, Ward Edwards, 326

Dennis, Michael, 206

Desert Saber, exercise, 50

Desert Shield, 46, 50, 53, 61, 67n, 72, 79, 84; mine countermeasures in, 57; 

publications about, 54

Desert Storm, 20, 46, 50, 53, 55, 61, 72, 81, 84, 143n; mine countermeasures in, 57; 

mine operations in, 47, 56, 57–58; publications about, 54; women in, 128

Dever, John P., Women and the Military, 250, 255

Dever, Marie C., Women and the Military, 250, 255

Devilbiss, Margaret C., Women and Military Service, 250, 255

Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, 250

Diego Garcia, 14, 16, 67n

Diem, Ngo Dinh, President of South Vietnam, 234

Dillard, John T., 177–78

DiRosa, Jacqueline, Master Chief, USN, 254

Disher, Sharon, First Class: Women Join the Ranks at the Naval Academy, 228, 255
384

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Distributed Human-Machine Teams, 326

Doel, Ronald, 207, 208

Douglas, Deborah G., United States Women in Aviation, 250–51, 255

Draper, Charles Stark, 205, 206

Dreyer, Gwen M., MIDN., USN, 247

Drucker, Peter, Concept of the Corporation, 179, 188n–89n

Duerk, Arlene B., 243

Duncan, Frank, 203, 215

Dunley, Richard, 65

Dutch East Indies, 7

East Berlin, East Germany, 49

East Germany, 49, 53

East India Squadron, 4

East India Station, 4

East Indies, 4

East Timor, 74, 77, 87

Ebbert, Jean, Crossed Currents, 226–27, 228, 233–34, 235, 249, 250, 252, 255

Eberle, Edward, Adm., USN, 102

EC-121 reconnaissance aircraft, 12

Eccles, Henry, 285n

Edlow, Sabrina, 57

Egypt, 48, 70, 78, 80, 82

Eighth Fleet, 7

Eisenhower, Dwight D., U.S. President, 115, 162, 225, 233, 329

El Salvador, 71, 80, 86

Elleman, Bruce: Nineteen Gun Salute, 247–48, 253

Enterprise, USS (CVN-65), 325

Epstein, Katherine, Torpedo, 329

Equal Rights Amendment, 242

Eritrea, 55, 73, 74, 78, 85

Ethiopia, 73, 78, 85

Eurasian continent, 1

Europe, 70, 78, 139, 173, 327, 330; electronic intelligence aircraft operate in, 12; Soviet 

activities in, 115; U.S. isolation from, 136; U.S. Navy activities in, 8, 10, 16, 20, 

43, 45, 88

Europe, Western, 323

European Squadron, 5

Evans, Ernest, Capt., USN, 222

Ewing, Maurice, 214–15

Expeditionary Strike Group 2, 254

F-14 Tomcat, 252–53
385

Index

F/A-18 Hornet, 171

F/A-18 Hornet squadron, 145n

Fair Employment Practices Committee, 148n

Faylaka I., 50

Federal Aviation Administration: Air Traffic Control System, 325

Ferreiro, Larrie D., 309n, 351n

FerryBridge Group, 320

Feynman, Richard P., 327

Field, James A., History of United States Naval Operations: Korea, 232

Fifth Fleet, 15

Filipinos, 114

First Fleet, 11

Fiske, Bradley A., “Naval Preparedness,” 52

Fitzgerald, Oscar P.: From Military Assistance to Combat, 234

Fleet Ballistic Missile, 311–12

Fleet Intelligence Center, 12

Fleet Problem, 6

Fleming, Richard, 214

Ford-class aircraft carriers, 320

Foreman, Paul, 205

Forrestal, aircraft carrier (CVA-59), 12, 118

Forrestal, James, Secretary of Defense, 225

Forster, Larissa, 274

Fortin, Ernest, Lt., USNR, “Those Damn Mines,” 54

Forward . . . From the Sea, 15–16

Forward Presence, 1–40; alternative approach, 23–25

Forward, Engaged, Ready: A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower, 18

Fourth Fleet, 7

Fox, J. Ronald, 168, 172; Defense Acquisition Reform, 1960–2009: An Elusive 

Goal, 175–76

Foxwell, David: “MCM and the Threat Beneath the Surface,” 54; “Mine Warfare 

in an Uncertain World,” 54; “Naval Mine Warfare: Underfunded and 

Underappreciated,” 54; “The Gulf War in Review: Report from the Front,” 54

France, 5, 48, 51, 56, 58, 68n

Franklin D. Roosevelt, aircraft carrier (CVB-42), 9

Friedl, Vicki L., Women in the United States Military, 250, 255

Friedman, Norman, 166, 181n, 239, 314, 339n; Desert Victory, 250; Innovation in 

Carrier Aviation, 177

Frosch, Robert, 211

Fuhrer, Julius, Administration of the Navy Department in World War II, 144n

Furst, Alan, 152n

Gaddafi, Muammar, 55, 69n
386

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Gansler, Jacques, Dr., 171, 172, 176

Garcia, Ernesto, Petty Officer, USN, 254

Gaston, Mack C., Rear Adm., USN, 224

Gates, Robert M., Secretary of Defense, 332–33; Memoirs of a Secretary at War,

169, 185n–86n

Geertz, Clifford, 206

General Accounting (Accountability) Office, 145n, 174

General Board, 148n

General Dynamics, 203

General Electric, 203

General Motors, 179, 189n

George H. W. Bush, USS (CVN-77), 254

Georgia, 75, 80

Germany: and cyber attacks, 323; and mine sweeping of Persian Gulf, 51; and threat to 

the North Sea, 25; and U.S. naval diplomacy, 5; in World War II, 229; navy of, 5–6

Gernes, Deborah, Lt. Cmdr., USN, 228, 248

Ghat, Libyan commercial ferry, 49, 55

Giarra, Paul S., 309n

Gibson, E. Lawrence, Get Off My Ship, 249

Gilbert, Jason, Lt. Cmdr., USN, “The Combined Mine Countermeasures Force: A 

Unified Commander-in-Chief’s Answer to the Mine Threat,” 61

Glenn, W. Lewis, 238

Global Force Management Allocation Plan, 32n

Godson, Susan H.: Serving Proudly, 226, 227–28, 235, 249, 252, 255; Viking of 

Assault: Admiral John Leslie Hall Jr. and Amphibious Warfare, 227

Gold, Ted, 333

Golden Goose Award, 334

Google Chrome, 44

Google Scholar, 44, 53

Gorshkov, Sergey, Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union, 13, 33n

Government Accountability Office, 110, 161, 169, 320–21

Grafton, Jake, Capt., USN, fictional character, 161

Granger, Lester, 231

Grant, Cary, 66n

Gravely, Samuel, Jr., Vice Adm., USN, 148n, 237–38

Gray, Colin, 276

Great Britain, 4, 25. See also United Kingdom

Great Depression, The, 115

Great Lakes, 4

Great Lakes Naval Station, 134

Great Lakes Naval Training Center, 224

Great White Fleet, 6

Greece, 9, 10, 13
387

Index

Greenert, Jonathan, Adm., USN, Chief of Naval Operations, 144n

Greenwood Press, 255

Greif, Avner, 323

Grenada, 70, 81, 85, 228

Grimes, Steven R., Col., USA, “PPBS to PPBE: A Process of Principles,” 167

Guam, 5, 10

Guardian, U.S. mine sweeper (MCM-5), 56

Gulf of Aden, 75, 77, 87, 254

Gulf of Aqaba, 79, 82

Gulf of Arabia, 71

Gulf of Suez, 48, 58

Gulf War Air Power Survey, 336

Gulf Wars, 106, 143n, 227, 252

Guttridge, Leonard, 149n

Haas, Michael, Bearing the Trident: The United States’ System of Transoceanic Power 

Projection in Ascendancy and Crisis, 274, 286n

Hacker, Barton, 309, 310, 314, 328–29, 337; Elements of Controversy, 337

Hagan, Kenneth J., This People’s Navy, 223

Hagel, Chuck, Secretary of Defense, 329

Haiti, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 86

Hall, Marie-Beth, Crossed Currents, 226–27, 228, 233–34, 235, 249, 250, 252, 255

Hall, Mary, Adm., USN, 245

Halsey, William, Jr., Fleet Adm., USN, 102

Hamblin, Jacob, 212–13

Hamilton, Andrew, 15; Peacetime Presence Mission, 2

Hancock, Joy Bright, Capt., USN, 226, 255; Lady in the Navy, 225

Hansen, Rebecca, Lt., USN, 252

Harkness, USNS coastal hydrographic survey ship (T-AGS-32), 49, 58, 59

Harris, Gail, A Woman’s War, 224

Harris, Harry B., Jr., Adm., USN, 254

Harrod, Frederick, 231, 255

Hart, Liddell, 285n

Hartington, Pauline, Rear Adm., USN, 245

Hartmann, Gregory, Weapons That Wait: Mine Warfare in the U.S. Navy, 55, 63

Hartwig, Clayton, 248

Harvard University: Underwater Sound Laboratory, 211

Harvard University Business School, 168, 172

Hassayampa, USS (AO-145), 240

Hattendorf, John, 276, 279, 281; Nineteen Gun Salute, 247–48

Haven, USS (AH-12), 232

Hawaii, 5, 6, 223

Hayes, Ira, 222
388

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Haynes, Peter D., Capt., USN, 273, 274, 275, 281; Toward a New Maritime Strategy: 

American Naval Thinking in the Post-Cold War Era, 180

Haystack Exercises, 13

Haywood, Thomas B., Adm., USN, Chief of Naval Operations, 241

Hazard, Roberta, Rear Adm., USN, 245, 247

Heinemann, Ed, 189n

Helicopter Support Squadron Four, 58–59

Hendrix, Henry, Capt., USN, (ret.), 277, 287n

Henry, Victor “Pug,” fictional character, 102–3, 112, 142n

Heritage Foundation, 111

Herman, Jan: Frozen in Memory, 232–33; Navy Medicine in Vietnam, 234

Hevley, Bruce, 214

Hewlett, Richard, 203

High-Reliability Organizations, 325–26

Hill, George, Blacks in the American Armed Forces, 231, 240

Hispanic-Americans, 114, 233, 253–54, 254

History Associates, 315

Hitch, Charles J., 168, 184n

Holley, Irving B., Jr., 169; Buying Aircraft: Material Procurement for the Army 

Air Forces, 164, 165, 180; Ideas and Weapons: A Study in the Relationship of 

Technological Advance, Military Doctrine, and the Development of Weapons, 164

Holloway, James L., III. Adm., USN, 241–42, 244, 277, 280

Holm, Jeanne, Maj. Gen., USAF, (ret.), Women in the Military, 228, 255

Holmes, Sherlock, fictional character, 321

Holy Loch, Scotland, 15

Homosexuality, 248–49, 255

Honduras, 71, 79, 86

Hone, Thomas C., 309n, 339n; Continuity and Change: The Administrative History of 

the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, 144n; Innovation in Carrier Aviation,

177; Power and Change, 241

Hoover Commission, 147n

Hoover, Herbert, U.S. President, 115

Hopper, Grace, Rear Adm., USN, 203, 235–36, 245; Understanding Computers, 236

Horton, Mildred McAfee, 226

Houston, USS (CA-30), 7

Hovis, Roberta, Lt. Cmdr., USN, Station Hospital Saigon, 234

Howard, Michelle J., Adm., USN, 254

Hudner, Thomas, 231

Hudson Center: Institute for American Seapower, 277

Hughes, Wayne, Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat: quoted, 101

Hultgreen, Kara S., Lt., USN, 252–53

Hunt, Frederick V., 211
389

Index

Huntington, Samuel, 274, 276, 280; and phases of U.S. strategy, 2, 3, 5; “National 

Policy and the Transoceanic Navy,” 2; on obsolescence of U.S. Army and Navy, 27n

Hussein, Saddam, 50, 224

Ibach, Maryanne Gallagher, Rear Adm., U.S. Navy Reserve, 234

Iceland, 10

Ignatius, Paul, Secretary of the Navy, 172

IHS Jane’s C4ISR & Mission Systems: Maritime, 314

IHS Jane’s Defence: Air and Space, 314

IHS Jane’s Defence: Sea, 314

IHS Jane’s Defence: Sea Platforms, 314

IHS Jane’s Fighting Ships, 314

IHS Jane’s Underwater Warfare Systems, 314

IHS Jane’s Unmanned Maritime Vehicles, 314

IHS Jane’s yearbooks, 314

Illinois Institute of Technology, 122

Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute, 315

Impervious, US minesweeper (MSO-449), 50, 52, 59

Incidents at Sea Agreement, 30n

Indian Ocean, 71, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80; Chinese naval deployment in, 26; forces of Union 

of Soviet Socialist Republics in, 13; U.S. aims in, 15; U.S. naval activities in, 13, 24, 

45, 49, 87

Indonesia, 73, 74, 77, 78, 87

Industrial College of the Armed Forces, 172; “Providing the Means of War” 

symposium, 171–72

Innovation, 177–78

Institute for Defense Analyses: “Exploring a New Defense Resource Management 

System,” 167

Intelligence Science Board, 319

International Court of Justice, 66n

Invincible, Sri Lankan Navy (A-520), 63

Iowa, USS (BB-61), 248–49

Iran, 70, 71, 78, 79, 81, 84; and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 9; as threat to U.S. 

naval forces, 19; challenges to U.S. from, 18; counter-naval capabilities, 2; number 

of mines held by, 47; U.S. combat operations in, 18

Iraq, 57, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 248, 250, 286n; and mining 

of Persian Gulf, 51–52, 56, 59, 63, 68n; as threat to peace, 15; attacks USS Stark,

66n; invades Kuwait, 15, 55; U.S. naval operations in, 20; war with, 119

Iraq War, 149n, 186n, 224

Iselin, Columbus, 204, 207–8, 214–15

Isenberg, Michael T., Shield of the Republic, 223

Isenson, Raymond: Project Hindsight, 315

ISIS, 212, 213, 286n
390

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Islamic culture, 224, 323

Islamic extremists, 140

Israel, 70, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83; forces of, attack Liberty, 12; Levi fighter 

aircraft, 168

Italy, 10, 13, 48, 51, 71, 81, 82

Iwo Jima campaign, 7, 222

Jacob, Margaret C., 338n, 341n

Japan, 72, 74, 79, 80, 86, 87; and cancellation of Fleet Problem, 7; and mine sweeping 

of Persian Gulf, 51; and sinking of Panay, 6; and U.S. naval strategy, 6; and World 

War II, 7; Empire of, 8; holds women prisoners, 126; navy of, 7; poses naval threat 

to United States, 6; U.S. Navy homeports in, 10, 13; U.S. occupation of, 8; U.S. 

opening of, 4; U.S. war with, 138

Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, 56

Japanese-Americans, 222

Jason, ocean research vehicles, 210

Jefferson, Thomas, 4

Jenkins, Neil, The Navy at the Tipping Point, 3

Jidda, Saudi Arabia, 49

John T. Hall, USS (FFG-32), 58

Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Laboratory, 68n

Johnson, Jay, 2

Johnson, Loanne, Making WAVES, 242

Johnson, Louis, U.S. Secretary of Defense, 12

Joint Chiefs of Staff, 123, 139, 147n

Joint Forces Staff College, 125

Joint Professional Military Training, 123, 124, 152n

Joint Strike Fighter, 161

Jones, Wilbur D., From Packard to Perry: A Quarter Century of Service to the Defense 

Acquisition Community, 168

Journal of Military History, 64

Journal of the U.S. Cavalry Association, 324

JSTOR (Journal Storage), 44, 52, 311

Juniper Point, MA., 208

Jutland, Battle of, 142n

Kadtke, Jim, 321

Kaminski, Paul, 172

Karsten, Peter, The Naval Aristocracy: The Golden Age of Annapolis and the 

Emergence of Modern American Navalism, 147n

Katzenbach, Edward, 324

Kelly, Orr, Hornet: The Inside Story of the F/A-18, 166

Kelso, Frank B., II, Adm., USN, 60, 177, 251–52
391

Index

Kenya, 74, 78, 85

Kerker, Milton, 338n

Kerr, Alex, 238

Kerr, Howard, 238

Key West Agreement, 10

King, Ernest J., Adm., USN, 101, 102, 126, 142n, 144n; War Instructions, 102

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 117, 237

Kiribati, 75, 77, 87

Kissinger, Henry, Secretary of State, 238

Kitchen, Etta Belle, 226

Kitty Hawk, USS, aircraft carrier (CVA-63), 118, 240

Klein, Burton H., 167

Klein, Maury, 186n

Knox, Frank, Secretary of the Navy, 148n

Knud Jesperon, Soviet-flagged merchant vessel, 48

Koistinen, Paul A. C., 176–77, 186n; Arsenal of World War II: The Political Economy 

of American Warfare, 1940–1945, 170; State of War, 1945–2011, 170

Komandorski Is., Battle of, 143n

Komer, Robert W., 276

Korea, 5, 8

Korean Strait, 65

Korean War, 28n, 47, 106, 115, 253; African-Americans in, 231; mentioned, 11; mines 

in, 47; mobilization in, 117; strategic lessons of, 12; veterans of, 237; women sailors 

in, 126, 227, 232–33

Kraft, Heidi, Rule Number Two, 224

Kreilkamp, Karl, 315

Kuwait, 15, 50, 51, 55, 56, 59, 66n, 71, 73, 79, 84

La Perouse Strait, 65

La Salle, USS (LPD-31), 49

Labs, Eric, Preserving the Navy’s Forward Presence with a Smaller Fleet, 3

Laird, Melvin, Secretary of Defense, 239, 243

Lake Champlain, 3

Lambert, Andrew, “The Naval War,” in The Gulf War Assessed, 57

LaPorte, Todd R., Maj., USMC, (ret.), 309n, 325

Las Vegas, NV, 128, 251, 252

Lassman, Thomas C., 175, 176

Lautenbacher, Conrad, Vice Adm., Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, 18

Layton, Edwin, Technology in Retrospect and Critical Events in Science, 315

Leader, US minesweeper (MSO-490), 50, 52, 59

Leahey, Catherine, 228

Leahy, William D., Adm., USN, 144n, 147n–48n

Lebanon, 5, 70, 71, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83
392

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Lee, Kent L., Adm., USN, 240

Lehman, John, Secretary of the Navy, 180, 245–46, 276, 280, 289n; Command of the 

Seas, 169; On Seas of Glory: Historic Men, Great Ships, and Epic Battles of the 

American Navy, 236; proposes 600-ship Navy, 14

Lenihan, Rita, Capt., USN, 235, 248

Leningrad, USSR Navy (CHG-103), 58

Leslie, Stuart, 205, 206, 215

Leuci, James L., Master Chief Petty Officer, USN, “Navy Women in Ships,” 246

Levi, Israeli fighter aircraft, 168

Levie, Howard S., Mine Warfare at Sea, 55, 63

Leyte Gulf, Battle of, 142n, 143n, 222

Liberia, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 78, 80, 85

Liberty (AGTR-5), 12

Library of Congress, 44, 52, 230

Libya, 69n, 70, 71, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85; acquires Soviet mines, 49, 53; and 

mine laying, 49, 55

Liliuokalani, Queen of Hawaii, 223

Lill, Gordon, 207

Little Creek, VA, 62

Little, Brown and Company, 313

Locher, James R., Victory on the Potomac: The Goldwater-Nichols Act Unifies the 

Pentagon, 169

Loftus, Joseph, 322

Logan International Airport, 208

Long Beach, USS (CGN-9), 150n

Long, Robert L. J., Adm. USN, 240

Los Angeles-class nuclear attack submarine program, 326

Loukissas, Yanni Alexander, 326

Love, Robert, The Chiefs of Naval Operations, 239

Loyola University, 122

LSM Group 37, 146n

Lukacs, John, 163, 164, 169, 171, 179, 180

Lundesgaard, Amund, 274, 281

Lyons, Dwight, Jr., “The Mine Threat: Show Stoppers or Speed Bumps,” 57–58

Mabus, Ray, Secretary of the Navy, 21, 279, 287n

MacGregor, Morris J.: Blacks in the Military: Essential Documents, 229, 255; Blacks 

in the United States Armed Forces: Basic Documents, 229; Defense Studies: 

Integration of the Armed Forces: 1940–1965, 229

MacKenzie, Donald, 215; Inventing Accuracy, 206

Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 5, 104, 278, 280

Maldives, 71, 80, 87

Mandeles, Laura L., 309n
393

Index

Mandeles, Mark D., 339n; Innovation in Carrier Aviation, 177

Mandell, Steve, Understanding Computers, 236

Manhattan Project, 313

Manning, Lory, Women in the Military, 251, 255

Manson, Frank A., The Sea War in Korea, 232

Marblehead (CL-12), 7

Marianas Is., 8

Marine Corps, U.S., 104, 272, 275, 283, 309, 326; 1st Division, 231; 4th Regiment, 

7; and technology, 309, 311, 312, 314, 317, 329, 333; deploys beyond its means, 

3; doctrine of, 143n; forward-deployed supplies for, 16; in China, 8; knowledge 

requirements for command in, 328; mentioned, 44; role of, aboard naval 

vessels, 134

Marine Times, 111

Mariner, Rosemary, Cmdr., USN, 248

Maritime Strategy, The, 179, 275, 276, 278, 281, 285n, 289n

Marlatt, Greta E., 53, 63, 89n

Marolda, Edward J., 108, 145n; From Military Assistance to Combat, 234; on mine 

countermeasures in the Persian Gulf, 51–52; Shield and Sword, 56, 249–50; 

The Navy, 236; The U.S. Navy in the Korean War, 232; Women in the United 

States Navy, 236

Marshall Is., 75, 77, 87, 232

Marshall, Andy, 322, 335

Marshall, George C., U.S. Secretary of Defense, 12, 115

Martha’s Vineyard, MA, 208

Martin, J. M., Capt., USN, “We Still Haven’t Learned,” 54

Martin-Marietta, 189n

Mason, John, 226

Mason, Ruth A., Lt., U.S. Navy Nurse Corps, 234

Mason, USS (DE-529), 148n

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 168, 205, 311

Massirah, Oman, 68n

Matthews, Francis P., Secretary of the Navy, 231

Maxwell, Arthur, 207

McBride, William M., 203

McGrath, Bryan, Cmdr., USN, (ret.), 277, 287n, 320

McKenna, Richard, 146n

McMichael, William H., Mother of All Hooks, 251, 255

McNamara, Robert, Secretary of Defense, 168, 173–74, 184n

McNaugher, Thomas L., New Weapons, Old Politics: America’s Procurement 

Muddle, 168

McNeill, William, 323

Mearsheimer, John, 276

Mecca, Saudi Arabia, 48
394

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Medal of Honor, 133, 231

Mediterranean Sea, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81; and U.S. naval 

deployment in, 15, 16, 18, 24; U.S. Navy activities in, 9, 10, 11, 12–13, 14, 20, 

45, 49, 82–83

Mediterranean Squadron, 5

Mediterranean Station, 4

Melia, Tamara Moser: “Damn the Torpedoes,” 55, 63; on Red Sea mine crisis, 49–50

Melman, Seymour, 170

Merton, Robert K., 209, 313, 333

Middle East, 12, 15, 275

Middle East Force, U.S. Navy, 49

Midway, aircraft carrier (CVA-41), 13

Midway, Battle of, 142n, 144n

Midwest, 134

Mikulcik, Joy D., 177

Mikulski, Barbara, U.S. Senator, 247

Military industrial complex, 162

Military Sea Transport Service, 12, 232–33

Military Sealift Command, 12, 14, 248

Military Times, 111

Military Women’s Memorial Library, 224

Miller, Doris, Cook, USN, 222

Miller, Gerald E., Adm., USN, 241

Miller, Nathan, The U.S. Navy, 223

Miller, Richard E., The Messman Chronicles, 232

Millis, Walter, Arms and Men, 329

Mindell, David A., 326

Mine Advisory Committee, 317

Mine Warfare Command, U.S. Navy, 49

Mine Warfare Plan: Meeting the Challenges of an Uncertain World, 53, 60

Missouri, Battleship (BB-63), 9

Mitchell, Carmen Lois, “The Contributions of Grace Murray Hopper to Computer 

Science and Computer Education, 236

Mitre Corp., 33n, 210

Mobile Logistics Support Force, 246

Moffett, William A., Rear Adm., USN, 324

Monitor, USS, 327

Monrovia, Liberia, 78, 85

Monterey, CA, 53

Moody, Walton S., 176

Moore, John, Capt., RN, “Red Sea Mines a Mystery No Longer,” 53

Moorer, Thomas H., Adm., USN, 240

Morison, Elting E., Men, Machines, and Modern Times, 322
395

Index

Morison, Samuel Eliot, 144n, 164; History of United States Naval Operations in World 

War II, 106

Morocco, 71, 80, 82

Mortensen, Daniel R., 309n

Mukerji, Chandra, A Fragile Power: Scientists and the State, 208–10, 212, 215

Mumford, Lewis, 313

Mustin, Lloyd, Vice Adm., USN, (ret.), 331

Nagle, R. J., Cmdr., USN, 54

Nalty, Bernard C., 245, 255; Blacks in the Military: Essential Documents, 229; Blacks 

in the United States Armed Forces: Basic Documents, 229; Long Passage to Korea,

231; Strength for the Fight, 230

Naples, Italy, 254

Napoleonic wars, 142n

Nassau, USS, 58–59

National Academy of Sciences, 317, 334; Assessment of Department of Defense 

Basic Research, 334; Committee on Undersea Warfare, 317; Engineering, and 

Medicine: Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences, 317; National Research 

Council, 208, 213

National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 214, 248

National Archives, 110, 144n, 223, 227

National Archives and Records Administration, 214

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 148n, 230

National Defense Research Committee: Subsurface Warfare Section, 317

National Defense University, 321

National Geospacial-Intelligence Agency, 202, 214

National Science Foundation, 313, 315; TRACES study, 335

National Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 327

National Urban League, 231

Native Americans, 221, 245, 253, 254

Naval Aircraft Factory, 173

Naval and Mine Warfare Training Command, 62

Naval Aviation Cadets, 112, 120

Naval Aviation Officers Candidate School, U.S. Navy, 121

Naval Communications Units, 12

Naval Consulting Board, 207, 208

Naval Expeditionary Combat Command, 62

Naval Forces Mediterranean/Northern European Force, 8

Naval Historical Center, 54, 227, 315; Operational Archives, 212, 213

Naval Historical Foundation, 111, 224

Naval History and Heritage Command, 43, 44, 46, 52, 63, 144n, 145n, 206, 211, 

227, 236, 239, 253, 277, 309, 316, 335; Navy Reserve Combat Documentation 

Detachment 206, 224; Operational Archives, 223, 233; oral history collection, 
396

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

223–24; studies of diversity in the U.S. Navy by, 254; Vietnam Command Files, 

240; Zumwalt Papers, 240

Naval Personnel, 100–159

Naval Postgraduate School, 44, 52, 53, 63, 124; Dudley Knox Library, 53, 89n

Naval Reserve, 137, 145n, 224, 229

Naval Reserve Midshipmen’s Schools, 120

Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps, 112, 120–22, 129, 146n, 230; banned from 

universities, 122; enrollments, 119, 122; opened to women, 127

Naval Science and Technology Strategy, 316

Naval Studies Board, 317

Naval War College, 44, 52, 63, 106, 111, 124, 144n, 223, 322, 324

Naval War College Review, 112

Naval Weapons Center, 166

Navy Department Library, 144n, 233, 234, 236

Navy Diversity Directorate, 236

Navy Laboratory/Center Coordinating Group, 315

Navy Officer Candidate School, U.S. Navy, 121

Navy Personnel Command, 110, 150n

Navy Study Group’s Report on Progress of Women in the Navy, 246–47

Navy Times, 111

Navy, British Royal, 53, 57, 65, 68n, 124, 130; and fleet actions, 142n; and naval 

strategy, 25; as source of U.S. Navy culture, 135; division of labor in, 151n; enlisted 

sailors in, 134; officer organization in, 132

Navy, Continental, 4, 124

Navy, German, 283

Navy, U.S., A-12 acquisition, 178–79, 188n; acquisition management, 161–97, 315; 

activities in Europe, 8; activities in the Mediterranean Sea, 9, 11; activities in 

the Pacific Ocean, 8, 9, 11; activities near USSR home waters, 30n; adopts the 

Maritime Strategy, 179; Affirmative Action Plan, 242; African-Americans in, 115, 

116, 118, 148n, 152n, 223, 229–32, 237–38, 239–40, 244–45, 253–54, 255–56; 

and Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr., 238–44; and Africa, 43; and China, 43; and 

counter-piracy operations, 43; and earth sciences, 201, 207; and education, 143n; 

and Europe, 43; and fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 15; and fleet 

actions, 142n; and joint strategy with Coast Guard, 18; and jointness, 123–25; and 

Korean War, 11; and marine biology, 208; and nuclear weapons, 8, 10, 13; and 

oceanography, 201, 208, 209, 212; and officer training, 123–25, 139; and physics, 

201; and professionalism, 142n; and science, 201–19; and secrecy, 206; and South 

America, 43; and Southeast Asia, 43; and studies of innovation, 177; and Suez 

Crisis of 1956, 11; and technology, 10, 13, 128–31, 139, 201, 278–79, 309–68; 

and the Indian Ocean, 13; and the Maritime Strategy, 190n; and the Union of 

Soviet Socialist Republics, 9–11, 13; and underway refueling, 28n; and “up or out” 

rule on officer retention, 123; and Vietnam War, 11; Asian Pacific-Americans in, 

253–54; Asian-Americans in, 223, 232; aviation community, 324; ballistic missile 
397

Index

submarine program, 168; Bureau of Aeronautics, 132, 144n, 189n, 225, 324; 

Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, 234, 254; Bureau of Naval Personnel, 110; 

Bureau of Navigation, 144n; News Bulletin, 110; Bureau of Personnel, 237; 

Bureau of Steam Engineering, 132; Chaplain Corps, 127; Civil Engineer Corps, 

127; combat operations, 81; command histories, 58–59; contingent positioning 

operations, 80; “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower,” 277, 289n; 

Corps of Mathematicians, 120; counter-piracy operations, 45, 77; damage 

control exercises, 347n; DASH maritime unmanned aerial vehicle, 172; defense 

responsibilities of, 5; deployment hubs, 15; deployment strategy, 4; deploys beyond 

its means, 3; deploys intelligence units, 12; deploys mine countermeasure resources, 

49; desegregates, 237; Destroyer Squadron 15, 67n; deters Chinese aggression 

against Taiwan, 11; deters Nationalist Chinese invasions of Mainland China, 11; 

develops nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, 10; develops supercarriers, 

10; Diversity Directorate, 254; diversity in, 253–54; division between officers 

and enlisted in, 133–36, 139; doctrine of, 143n; “don’t ask, don’t tell,” 249; 

eliminates destroyer tender forces, 16; eliminates repair ship forces, 16; established, 

4; establishes forward-deployed stations, 4; FFG-7 frigates, 172; Fleet Cyber 

Command/Tenth Fleet, 133; fleet exercises, 6, 11, 13, 14, 16; Desert Saber, 50; 

Fleet Problems, 6; fleet reorganized, 7; force structure, 274, 277, 278, 287n; Force 

Structure Assessment, 20, 24; Forward . . . From the Sea, 2, 60, 276; forward 

officers in, 151n; Freedom of Navigation Operations, 77; gains right to control 

its own aviation assets, 10; General Board, 324; General Unrestricted Line, 132; 

grows during World War I, 6; Hispanics in, 253–54, 254; homosexuals in, 117, 

122, 223, 248–49, 255; Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief Operations, 

76–77; Hydrographer, 214; Hydrographic Office, 204; in Afghanistan and Iraq 

wars, 149n; in the Cold War, 180; in the Vietnam War, 240; in World War I, 6, 

203; Information Warfare community, 132–33; institutional rules governing, 

324; integration in, 221; knowledge requirements for command in, 328; length 

of deployments in, 137; line and staff in, 131–33, 135, 203; loses measure of 

independence, 115–16; maritime intercept operations, 77; mine countermeasures, 

46–65, 55–56, 56, 57, 59–60, 60, 63; mine operations, 57; minorities in, 114, 

152n, 253–54, 255–56; missions, 279, 317; missions during World War II, 7; Native 

Americans in, 253, 254; Naval Air Systems Command, 189n

Naval Research Laboratory, 207, 208, 210; and space flight, 214; historian of, 214; 

history of, 213–14; role of, in science, 213–14

Naval War College: Newport Papers, 280

Navy Information Forces, 133; Noncombatant Evacuation Operations, 77–78; nuclear 

power in, 203; number of operations, 1980–2010, 44–45; Nurse Corps, 126, 225, 

232–33, 233, 234–35, 243–44, 250

Navy, USSR: activities near home waters, 30n; and forward deployment, 33n; as threat 

to U.S. Navy, 13; expands, 13; introduces nuclear-powered attack submarines, 13

Nazi empire, 8
398

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Nelson, Dennis H., II, 229; The Integration of the Negro into the United States Navy, 

1776–1947, 229

Netherlands, The, 48, 51, 58, 323

New York Times, 111, 185n

Newlands Resolution, 5

Newport Asylum for the Poor, 124

Newport, RI, 110, 121, 144n

Nicaragua, 66n, 70, 71, 78, 80, 85, 86

Nielubowicz, Mary, Adm., USN, 245

Nimitz, Chester, Fleet Adm., USN, 126, 225

Nixon, Richard M., U.S. President, 118, 241

Norfolk Journal and Guide, 230

Norfolk, VA, 50, 52, 62, 111

North Africa, 323

North American Aviation, 184n

North Atlantic Squadron, 5

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 48, 56, 65, 69n

North Korea, 72, 73, 74, 79, 80, 86, 87, 231; as threat to peace, 15; invades South 

Korea, 115; number of mines held by, 47; seizes Pueblo, 12; shoots down U.S. Navy 

reconnaissance plane, 12

North Sea, 25, 65

North Sea Mine Barrage, 65

North Vietnam, 54

North, Douglass, 322–323

Northeast Asia, 16

Northrup, Herbert, 255

Northwestern University, 122

Norton Sound, USS (AVM-1), 249

Norway, 10

Nuclear weapons, 165, 203, 221, 278, 313, 321, 329; and utility of U.S. Navy, 8; U.S. 

Navy deploys, 10

O’Hara, Timothy, Dr., 53, 63, 67n, 89n

O’Rourke, Ronald, 66n, 281, 320

Obama, Barack, U.S. President, 24, 286n

Odierno, Raymond T., Gen., USA, 328

Office of Naval Research, 201, 207, 208, 209, 210, 212, 213, 215, 316–17; 

history of, 213

Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation, 167

Office of Research and Inventions, 207

Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), 313

Office of the Director, Defense Research and Engineering, 315

Officer Candidate School, U.S. Navy, 121, 230
399

Index

Ogburn, William F., 312

Ohio-class nuclear-powered ballistic and guided missile submarines, 278

Okinawa, 142n

Okinawa, Battle of, 144n, 146n

Oklahoma, 253

Oliver, Dave, Rear Adm., USN, 188n, 326

Operations, 43–88; Able Vigil, 73, 77, 86; Achille Lauro Rescue, 71, 81, 82; Al-Biqa 

Missiles I, 70, 77, 82; Allied Force, 74, 76, 83; Allied Protector, 75, 77, 87; 

Arabian/Persian Gulf MCM Ops, 50; Assured Delivery, 75, 80, 88; Assured 

Response, 73, 77, 85; Autumn Shelter, 73, 77, 85; Avid Response, 74, 77, 83; 

Balkan Calm, 74, 76, 83; Balkan Calm II, 74, 77, 83; Basra-Kharg I. Crisis, 71, 

77, 84; Bevel Edge, 73, 79, 87; Bevel Incline, 73, 77, 87; Bold Samaritan, 74, 77, 

87; BP Oil Spill, 77, 87; Candid Hammer, 46, 50–52, 53, 54, 57–58, 59, 61, 63, 

67n, 68n, 72, 84; books on, 55–56; Caring Response, 75, 77, 87; Chad, 70, 76, 85; 

Classic Resolve, 71, 79, 86; Continued Hope, 46, 72, 76, 85; Creek Sentry, 70, 77, 

88; Decisive Edge, 45, 72, 79, 83; Deepwater Horizon BP Oil Spill, 75; Deliberate 

Force, 45, 72, 81, 83; Deliberate Forge, 46, 72, 79, 83; Deliberate Guard, 45, 

72, 73, 79, 80, 83; Deny Flight, 45, 72, 79, 83; Desert Clean Up, 50; Desert Fox, 

73, 74, 80, 81, 84; Desert One, 70, 81, 84, 123; Desert Shield. See Desert Shield; 

Desert Storm. See Desert Storm; Desert Strike, 73, 81, 84; Desert Sweep, 50; 

Desert Thunder, 73, 80, 84; Desert Viper, 74, 80, 84; Determined Falcon, 73, 80, 

83; Determined Response, 74, 77, 87; Display Determination, 71, 80, 82; Distant 

Runner, 72, 77, 85; Dynamic Response, 74, 76, 83; Early Call, 70, 77, 82; Earnest 

Will, 50, 71, 84; East Timor Stabilize, 74, 77, 87; Eastern Exit, 72, 77, 85; Egypt 

Air Hijacking, 71, 80, 82; El Dorado Canyon, 81, 83; Eldorado Canyon, 71; ELF 

Sentry, 70, 80, 82; Embassy Show of Force, 71, 79, 82; Enduring Freedom, 74, 

80, 87; EP3 Incident, 74, 77, 87; Eritrea Noncombatant Evacuation Operations, 

74, 77, 85; Golden Pheasant, 71, 79, 86; Goodwill-Kaibigan, 75, 77, 87; Greece/

Turkey Tension, 73, 83; Guardian Retrieval, 73, 77, 85; Gulf of Sirte I, 70, 77, 

82; Gulf of Sirte II, 71, 77, 83; Hot Rock, 72, 77, 83; Hurricane Hugo, 71, 76, 

87; Impressive Lift, 72, 76, 85; Infinite Reach, 74, 81; Intense Look, 46, 48–50, 

50, 53, 57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 71, 79, 82, 88; books on, 55; Iran Maritime Intercept 

Ops, 84; Iran-Iraq War 1981–1982, 70, 77, 84; Iran-Iraq War 1984, 70, 77, 84; 

Iraq Maritime Intercept Ops, 72, 77; Iraq Nuclear Facility Strike, 72, 81, 84; Iraq 

TLAM Strikes, 72, 81, 84; Iraqi Freedom, 47, 63, 74, 81, 84; Israeli Invasion, 70, 

77, 82; Jittery Prop, 71, 80, 86; Joint Endeavor, 45, 72, 76, 83; Joint Forge, 46, 72, 

79, 83; Joint Guard, 45, 72, 76, 83; Joint Guardian, 74, 76, 83; JTF Katrina, 74, 

77, 87; Just Cause, 71, 81, 86, 123; KAL007, 70, 77, 86; Korea/Nuclear Tensions, 

72, 79, 86; Lebanon Hostages 1986, 71, 80, 82; Lebanon Hostages 1987, 80, 83; 

Lebanon Hostages 19887, 71; Lebanon War, 70, 80, 82; Lebanon War II, 75, 77, 

83; Lebanon Withdrawal, 70, 81, 82; Linebacker II, 118; Maersk Alabama, 75, 77, 

87; Maintain Democracy, 73, 76, 86; Maldives Coup, 71, 80, 87; Marine Barracks 

Bombing, 70, 81, 82; Maritime Guard, 45, 72, 79, 83; More Care, 46, 72, 76, 
400

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

85; New Dawn, 75, 81, 84; Nimble Archer, 71, 81, 84; Nimrod Dancer, 71, 79, 

86; Noble Anvil, 74, 81, 83; Noble Obelisk, 73, 77, 85; Noble Safeguard, 74, 80, 

83; North Korea Nuclear Crisis, 74, 80, 87; Northern Watch, 73, 79, 84; Nuclear 

Reactor Negotiations, 73, 80, 86; Ocean Shield, 75, 77, 87; Operation Monitor, 73, 

80, 86; Pakistan Air Hijacking, 71, 80, 83; Passive Oversight, 73, 80, 86; Pegasus 

Venture, 74, 81, 84; Pneumatic Hammer, 71, 79, 84; Praying Mantis, 71, 81, 84; 

Provide Comfort, 72, 79, 84; Provide Promise, 45, 72, 80, 83; Quick Draw, 46, 

72, 76, 85; Quick Response, 73, 77, 85; Resolute Response, 74, 77; Restore Hope, 

72, 76, 85; Sadat Assassination, 70, 80, 82; Safe Departure, 73, 74, 77, 85; Saudi 

Hijacking, 71, 80, 84; Sea Angel, 71, 76, 87; Sea Angel II, 75, 77, 87; Sea Horse, 74, 

81, 84; Sea Signal JTF, 73, 77, 86; Seaward Explorer Rescue, 70, 80, 86; Sentinel 

Safeguard, 73, 79, 86; Shadow Express 1998, 73, 77, 85; Shadow Express 1999, 

74, 77, 85; Sharp Edge, 71, 77, 85; Sharp Guard/Decisive Enhancement, 72, 79, 

83; Sharp Vigilance, 45, 72, 79, 83; Sheltering Sky, 74, 77, 85; Shining Express, 

74, 80, 85; Shining Hope, 74, 76, 83; Ship Escorts, 71, 79, 84; Show Care, 46, 72, 

76, 85; Silent Assurance, 73, 87; Silver Knight, 73, 77, 83; Silver Wake, 73, 77, 

83; Southern Watch, 72, 76, 84; Support Democracy, 72, 79, 86; Support Hope, 

73, 77, 85; Surveillance Ops, 70, 77, 85; Syria Attack, 70, 81, 82; Taiwan Flexible 

Deterrent, 73, 79, 86; TWA 847 Hijacking, 71, 80, 82; Unified Assistance, 74, 77, 

87; Unified Response, 75, 77, 86; United Shield, 73, 77, 85; Uphold Democracy, 

73, 86; Urgent Fury, 70, 81, 85, 123; USLO Withdrawal, 73, 77, 85; USS Samuel 

B. Roberts, 71, 81, 84; USS Stark, 71, 81, 84; Valiant Boom, 71, 79, 86; Victor 

Squared, 72, 77, 86; Vigilant Sentinel, 73, 84; Vigilant Warrior, 73, 79, 84; 

Yemen Civil War, 71, 77, 87; Yugoslav Unrest, 70, 80, 82; operations by region, 

82–88; operations in Africa, 46; operations in Somalia, 46; overseas homeports 

of, 10, 13; pay and benefits in, 140; peace operations, 76; peacetime missions, 

3; personnel policies, 103–51; petty officers in, 151n; procurement strategy of, 

11–12; programming, 161–97; race relations in, 117–18, 241–42, 245; racism in, 

240; relations of, with scientists, 214, 215; religious diversity in, 254; reorganized 

from squadrons to fleets, 5; “Revolt of the Admirals,” 277; rivalry of aviators and 

battleship sailors in, 143n; rivalry of, with Air Force, over aviation, 165; sabotage 

in, 118; sailing masters in, 151n; sealift requirements of, 12; sexual harassment 

in, 251–53; ship design, 166; ships of, operate independently, 4; show of force 

operations, 78–80; size of, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 20, 21, 114, 115, 117, 119, 275, 

286n; social history of, 221–69; squadrons of, 5; Staff Corps: Chaplain, 132; Civil 

Engineer, 132; Dental, 132; Judge Advocate, 132; Medical, 132; Medical Service, 

132; Nurse, 132; Supply, 132; Steward Branch, 231–32, 237; strategy of, 5; strategy 

of, during the Cold War, 8–15; strategy of, post-World War II, 7–8; supports 

rescue of downed airliner, 11; takes anti-reconnaissance measures, 14; threats to, 

by adversaries’ mines, 47; training and education in, 139–40; women in, 114, 117, 

126–28, 150n, 152n, 204, 221, 223, 224, 225–28, 232–33, 233–36, 239, 242–44, 

245, 249–53, 251–53, 255–56. See also U.S. Department of the Navy

Operation Destination Tokyo (movie), 66n
401

Index

Operation End Sweep, 54

Operational Evaluations Group, 57

Oregon, 210

Oreskes, Naomi, 210–12

Outer Air Battle, 14

Owen, William, Adm., USN, 177

Pacific Fleet, 5, 6, 7

Pacific Fleet, USSR Navy, 65

Pacific Gas and Electric: Diablo Canyon reactor, 325

Pacific Is., 8

Pacific Ocean, 65, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 115, 136; as U.S. Navy 

deployment hub, 15; electronic intelligence aircraft operate in, 12; in World War 

II, 103, 104, 106; naval forward presence in Western, 5; naval operations in, 4; 

submarine acoustic warning nets in, 211; U.S. naval activities in, 6–7, 8, 9, 11, 

12–13, 14; U.S. Navy activities in, 10, 24, 45, 86–87

Pacific Squadron, 5; and Panama, 5

Pacific Station, 4

Pacific Theater, 143n

Packard, David, Deputy Secretary of Defense, 174, 175

Palmer, Jean, 226

Panama, 5, 71, 79, 81, 86, 228

Panama Canal, 6

Panay (PR-5), 6

Papadopoulos, Sarandis, 253, 274

Passarelli, Ralph, Desert Storm Reconstruction Report, Volume IV: Mine 

Countermeasures, 58

Path-Dependence Analysis, 322–24

Paullin, Charles Oscar, 144n; Paullin’s History of Naval Administration, 

1775–1911, 144n

Paymaster Corps, 131

PC-1264, USS, submarine chaser, 148n

peacetime missions, 3

Pearl Harbor, HI, 112, 148n; Japanese attack on, 7

Peck, Merton J., 185n; The Weapons Acquisition Process: An Economic Analysis, 168

Peet, Raymond E., Adm., USN, 240

Pensacola, FL, 121

Pentagon, 169

People’s Liberation Army, China, 11, 19

Perrow, Charles, Normal Accidents, 325

Perry, Matthew, 4

Perry, William J., Secretary of Defense, 175
402

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Persian Gulf, 248; as hub of U.S. naval deployment, 15, 18; mine countermeasures in, 

50–52; mine operations in, 46; U.S. naval deployment in, 24; U.S. naval operations 

in, 20; U.S. Navy activities in, 15

Persian Gulf War, 59, 60, 228; mine countermeasures in, 53; women in, 249–50

Philippine Sea, first Battle of, 144n

Philippine Sea, second Battle of, 144n

Philippine Sea, USS (CV-47), 231

Philippines, 71, 75, 77, 79, 86, 87; in Spanish-American War, 104; naval operations off, 

5; U.S. Navy homeports in, 10; United States acquires, 5

Pilling, Donald L., Rear Adm., USN, Competition in Defense Procurement, 169

Piraeus, Greece, 9

Pirate, USS (AM-275), 142n

Pittsburgh Courier, 230

Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System, 168

Pledge, USS (AM-277), 142n

Pohl, Frederick, 310

Pokrant, Marvin, 250; “Desert Storm at Sea,” 54; Desert Storm at Sea: What the Navy 

Really Did, 54, 56

Poland, 70, 78

Polanyi, Michael, 331

Polaris program, 168, 210

Polaris-class submarines, 10

Pollitt, George, 62, 63, 68n

Polmar, Norman, 63, 309n, 314

Poole, Walter S., Adapting to Flexible Response, 1960–1980, 176

Popper, Karl R., Sir, 324, 351n

Porpoise-class submarines, 7

Port Chicago, CA, 116, 128

Port Lyautey, Morocco, 12

Port of Assab, Eritrea, 55

Port Said, Egypt, 58

Port Suez, Egypt, 58

Powell, Adam Clayton, U.S. Congressman, 231

Prabhakar, Arati, 320

Presidential Proclamation 4771, 118

Preston, Anthony, “Allied MCM in the Gulf,” 54

Price, Michael, The Navy at the Tipping Point, 3

Princeton, USS (CG-59), 51, 52, 56

Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT), 311–12

Project Artemis, 211

Project Ceasar, 211

Project Executive Office, 62; Littoral and Mine Warfare, 62; Littoral Combat Ship, 62; 

Mine and Undersea Warfare, 62
403

Index

Project Hartwell, 210, 212

Project Hindsight, 335

Project Jezebel, 211

Project Michael, 211

Project Nobska, 210, 212

Project UPTIDE (Unified Pacific Fleet Project for Tactical Improvement and Data 

Extraction), 13–14

Project Vela Uniform, 204

Providing the Means of War: Historical Perspectives on Defense Acquisition, 1945–

2000, 172–73, 175

Prueher, Joseph W., Adm. USN, 247–48, 256

Pueblo (AGR 2): seized by North Korea, 12

Puerto Rico, 253; United States acquires, 5

Pulitzer Prize, 202

Purdon, Eric, 148n

Purple Heart Medal, 234

Puryear, Edgar F., Jr., American Admiralship, 239

Quadrennial Defense Review, 16

Quasi-War with France, 4

Quigley, Robin, 226, 242–43

Raborn, William F., Vice Adm., USN, 311–12

Rainey, Barbara Allen, Lt. Cmdr., USN, 248

Ramage, James D., Adm., USN, 241

RAND Corporation, 19, 111, 145n, 161, 181n, 184n, 277, 322, 335; Gays and Lesbians 

in the Military, 249; Sexual Orientation and U.S. Military Personnel Policy, 249; 

studies of military research and development, 167

Randolph, Philip, 229

Ranger, USS, aircraft carrier (CV-61), 57, 118

Ras Shukheir, Egypt, 58

Ray, Ronald D., Military Necessity & Homosexuality, 249, 255

Reagan, Ronald, U.S. President, 14, 169, 246, 277, 281

Reason, Paul, Adm., USN, 245

Red Sea, 71, 79, 82; mine countermeasures in, 49, 58; mine crisis in, 46, 48, 49, 53; U.S. 

Navy operations in, 45, 88

Red Star, Soviet military newspaper, 48

Reed, Juden Justice, “‘Damn the Torpedoes!’: International Standards Regarding Use of 

Automatic Submarine Mines,” 60

Repose, USS (AH-16), 232, 234

Retention Study Groups, 149n

Revelle, Roger, 214

Reynolds, Ann Darby. Lt. (j.g.), U.S. Navy Nurse Corps, 234
404

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Reynolds, Clark, On the Warpath in the Pacific, 253

Rhodes, Edward, 274, 278

Rich, Frances, 226

Rickover, Hyman G., Adm., USN, 129, 177, 187n–88n, 203, 280, 289n, 326, 327, 328; 

and Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., 238

Rife, James: The Sound of Freedom, 316

Rigby, Eleanor, 226

Rivero, Horatio, Adm., USN, 253

Roberts, Karlene, 325

Robinson, Adam M., Jr., Adm., USN, 254

Rochlin, Glen, 325

Rockwell International, 184n

Rodgers, N. A. M., 353n

Roland, Alex, 310, 314

Roman Empire, 323

Romney, Mitt, 286n

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 229

Roosevelt, Franklin D., U.S. President, 6, 116, 147n, 148n, 229; “The Future of the 

Submarine,” 52

Roosevelt, Theodore, U.S. President, 5, 133

Roper, William B., Jr., 320

Rosenberg, David, 279

Rosie the Riveter, 222

Rota, Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Is., 15

Routledge Handbook of Naval Strategy and Security, 274

Ruff, Cheryl, Ruff’s War, 224

Rumsfeld, Donald, Secretary of Defense, 149n, 276

Rush-Bagot Agreement, 4

Russia, 75, 80, 106, 286n, 326; aggression by, 20; as threat to U.S. naval forces, 

19; challenges to U.S. from, 18; counter-naval capabilities, 2; mines of, 46; 

naval deployment patterns of, 26; number of mines held by, 47, 65; resurgence 

of, 119, 141

Rutgers University, 184n

Ruttan, Vernon W., Is War Necessary for Economic Growth?, 170–71, 186n

Sagittaire, French Navy mine hunter, 56

Saigon, South Vietnam, 234

Salmon-class boats, 7

Samoa, 75, 77, 87

Samuel B. Roberts, U.S. frigate (FFG-58), 48

San Diego Union-Tribune, 111

San Diego, CA, 62, 111, 118, 243

San Francisco Bay, CA, 232
405

Index

Sanctuary, USS (AH-17), 127, 228, 234, 242

Sandinistas, 66n

Sangley Point, Philippines, 12

Sapolsky, Harvey M., 168, 213; Science and the Navy: The History of the Office 

of Naval Research, 317; The Polaris System Development: Bureaucratic and 

Programmatic Success in Government, 311–12

Sargo-class boats, 7

Saudi Arabia, 48, 49, 51

Savo I., Battle of, 144n

Scandinavia, 14

Scherer, Frederic M., 185n; The Weapons Acquisition Process: An Economic 

Analysis, 168

Schneider, Carl J., Sound Off, 228

Schneider, Dorothy, Sound Off, 228

Schneller, Robert J., 237, 244; Blue & Gold and Black, 255; Breaking the Color 

Barrier, 230, 255; Shield and Sword, 56, 249–50

Scholik, Nikolaus, 274

Schulman, Paul, 325, 347n

Science: and the U.S. Navy, 201–19

Scotland, 10

Scott, Wilbur J., 249

Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 208, 210, 212, 213, 214

Sears, Mary, 204

Second Fleet, 11, 14

Secretary of Defense: authority of, 173

Secretary of Defense, Office of, 167, 175, 176, 184n, 185n, 187n, 334

Selective Service, U.S., 118–19, 242

Seventh Fleet, 7, 8, 13, 253

Shea, Frances, Adm., USN, 245

Sherman, Forrest, Adm., USN, Chief of Naval Operations, 60

Sherwood, John Darrell, Black Sailor, White Navy, 239–40, 242, 255

Shilts, Randy, Conduct Unbecoming, 249, 255

Shiman, Philip L., 176

Shreveport, U.S. amphibious transport (LPD-12), 49, 58

Shrivastava, Paul, 325

Sicily, 72, 77, 83

Siegel, Adam B., 309n; The Use of Naval Forces in the Post-War Era, 2

Sierra Leone, 73, 78, 85

Sigler, James W., “Repeating NASA’s Mistakes,” 144n–45n

Simon, Herbert, 341n

Singapore, 323

Sino-Japanese War, 6

Sixth Fleet, 13
406

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Sixth Task Fleet, 11

Skelton, Ike, U.S. Congressman, 125

Sloan Foundation, 213

Sloan, Alfred, 189n

Sloan, John, 309n

Sloman, Jesse, Deploying Beyond Their Means, 3

Smith, Allen E., Rear Adm., USN, 46

Smith, Margaret Chase, U.S. Senator, Declaration of Conscience, 226, 255

Smith, Merritt Roe, Military Enterprise and Technological Change, 202, 314

Snowden, Edward, 345n

Social Studies of Science, 206

Society for the History of Technology, 311, 338n

Solomon Is., 75, 77, 87, 143n

Solomon, Jonathan, 320

Somalia, 46, 72, 73, 76, 77, 78, 85

South America, 5, 16, 24, 43

South Atlantic Squadron, 5

South Korea, 70, 72, 73, 74, 78, 79, 80, 86, 87; invaded by North Korea, 115

South Vietnam, 235

South West Pacific Area Command, 7

Southeast Asia, 16, 43

Southwest Asia, 16, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 80, 278; U.S. Navy operations in, 45, 87

Spain, 10, 253

Spanish-American War, 3, 5, 28n, 47, 104, 133, 142n

Spears, Sally, 253, 255

Special Assistant for Women’s Policy, 243

Special Service Squadron, 6

Spector, Ronald, 322

Spinney, Franklin C., 185n; Defense Facts of Life: The Plans/Reality Mismatch, 169

Sprout, Harold, The Rise of American Naval Power, 329

Sprout, Margaret, The Rise of American Naval Power, 329

Spruance, Raymond, Adm., USN, 102

Sri Lankan navy, 63

Stallmann, Winfried, Capt., German Navy, 279, 281

Standard Oil Co., 6

Standley, William, Adm., USN, 102

Stanford University, 205

Stanley, Sandra Carson, 249

Stark, USS (FFG-31), 66n, 248

Station Hospital Danang, 234

Steffan, Joseph, Honor Bound, 249, 255

Steinberg, Malcolm, Admiral Boorda’s Navy, 252, 255

Sterner, Doris M., In and Out of Harm’s Way, 250, 255
407

Index

Stillwell, Paul: “Samuel L. Gravely Jr.: Setting the Precedent,” 237–38; The Golden 

Thirteen, 229

Stinchcombe, Arthur, 312–13, 339n

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI): Armaments, Disarmament 

and International Security, 314

Stockton, C. H., “The Use of Submarine Mines and Torpedoes in Time of War,” 52

Strategic Defense Initiative Office, 176

Strategic Studies Group, 110, 144n

Strategy, American National, 271–307

Strategy, U.S. Naval, 1, 4, 271–307; deployment strategy, 4; during the Cold War, 8–15; 

in World War II, 7; Mahan on, 5; post-World War II, 7–8; Samuel Huntington on 

phases of, 2, 3

Submarine Force Pacific, 7

Sudan, 74, 81

Suez Canal, 49, 55, 58

Suez Crisis of 1956, 11

Suisun Bay, CA, 116

Suitland, MD, 209, 210

Sullivan, Kathryn, Cmdr., USNR, 248

Super Servant III, Dutch heavy-lift ship, 50

Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Command, 62

Surgeon General, 254

Surigao Strait, Battle of, 143n

Swartz, Peter, Capt., USN, (ret.), 179, 190n, 274, 275, 277, 279, 281; Addendum 

to “Contemporary U.S. Naval Strategy: A Bibliography,” 179; on U.S. naval 

deployment strategy, 19; on U.S. Navy deployment models, 32n; Sea Changes: 

Transforming U.S. Navy Deployment Strategy, 1775–2002, 2; The Navy at the 

Tipping Point, 3

Sweden, 323

Syria, 20, 70, 78, 82, 286n; war in, 119

Systems Planning and Analysis, Inc., 320

Tailhook Association, 251

Tailhook scandal, 128, 150n, 223, 227, 251–52, 255

Taiwan, 11, 73, 79

Talmadge, Caitlin, 52, 68n

Tamil Black Tiger commandoes, 63

Tanker War, 57, 66n

Taylor, Hoyt, 214

Taylor, Theodore, The Flight of Jesse Leroy Brown, 231

Technology and Culture, 212, 311

Texas Tech University Vietnam Archive, 238

Thailand, 74, 77, 87
408

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

The Relationship of Science and Technology: A Bibliographic Guide, 316

Theodore Roosevelt, USS (CVN-71), 325

Thiesmeyer, Lincoln, Combat Scientists, 313, 341n

Third Fleet, 11, 14

Third/Fifth Fleet, 7

Thomas, Joseph J., Leadership Embodied, 237–38

Thomason, Timmy H., 182n

Thresher, USS (SSN-593), 211

Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers, 278

Till, Geoffrey, 285n

Tillman, Barrett, 166

Titan Intercontinental ballistic missiles, 173

Tomahawk cruise missiles, 16

Tonga, 75, 77, 87

Top Gun, movie, 283

Total Package Procurement, 173–74

Trident SLBM, 15

Tripoli, USS (LPH-10), 51, 56

Trost, Carlisle A. H., Adm., USN, Chief of Naval Operations, 245, 246

Truman, Harry S, U.S. President, 115; and women in the armed services, 225; 

desegregates the armed forces, 116; encourages female enlistments, 232; integrates 

the armed services, 230–31, 237; issues Executive Order 9981, 116; signs Women’s 

Armed Services Integration Act, 126

Trump, Donald, U.S. President, 286n

Truver, Annmarie, 63

Truver, Scott C., Weapons That Wait: Mine Warfare in the U.S. Navy, 55, 63

Turkey, 71, 74, 77, 80, 82, 83; and the United States, 9; and Union of Soviet Socialist 

Republics, 9; U.S. naval activities in, 5

Turkish Strait, 65

Turtle, submersible, 47

Tuskegee Airmen, 222

Twelfth Fleet, 7

Tyson, Nora, Rear Adm., USN, 254

U.S. Army War College, 167

U.S. Central Command, 68n

U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, 66n

U.S. Civil Rights Commission, 237

U.S. Congress, 110

Acts: Army-Navy Nurses, 126, 225; Civil Rights, of 1964, 117; Competition 

in Contracting, 174; Defense Acquisition Improvement, 174–75; Defense 

Acquisition Workforce Improvement, 172, 175; Defense Officer Personnel 

Management, 122–23, 125, 139; Defense Procurement Improvement, 174; Defense 
409

Index

Reorganization, 1958, 32n; Department of Defense Authorization, of 1984, 174; 

Department of Defense Reorganization, 173; Equal Employment Opportunity, 

242; Equal Rights Amendment, 126; Fair Housing, 117; Federal Acquisition 

Reform, 175; Federal Acquisition Streamlining, 175; Freedom of Information, 213; 

Goldwater-Nichols, 32n, 123–25, 139, 179, 189n–90n, 276; Gramm-Rudman 

Deficit Reduction, 174; Information Technology Management Reform Initiative, 

175; National Defense Authorization, 2016, 33n; National Security Act of 1947, 

171; National Security, of 1947, 112, 115; Naval Reserve, 126; Officer Grade 

Limitation, 117, 122, 123; Officer Personnel, of 1947, 116, 122, 123, 139; 

Two-Ocean Navy, 120; Voting Rights, of 1965, 117; Weapons Systems Acquisition 

Reform, 332; Women’s Armed Services Integration, 126, 225; allows women to 

serve in combat ships, 250; and defense budget priorities, 336; and Department of 

Defense, 139, 178; and integration of the U.S. Navy, 222; and military acquisition, 

168, 170, 175; and military acquisition during World War II, 165; and military 

officer education, 125; and military technology, 320; and naval strategy, 281, 283, 

288n; and research and development, 315; and the Naval Research Laboratory, 

207; armed services committees, 333; eliminates Department of Defense’s 

Technology Reinvestment Program, 186n; excludes women from combat roles, 222; 

feminist supporters in, 252; funds military, 174; interaction of, with the Executive 

Branch, 169; legislates on aviation officers, 150n; limits numbers of military 

officers, 117; limits numbers of naval officers, 148n; on petty officers, 151n; RY04 

National Defense Authorization, 333–34

U.S. Constitution, 242, 324

U.S. Department of Defense, 107, 115–16, 139, 162, 163, 281; 37th Annual Department 

of Defense Cost Analysis Symposium, 167; and Congress, 178; and desegregation, 

237; and investment in basic research, 333–35; and military acquisition, 169, 171, 

173, 174, 175, 176, 329–33; and research and development, 315; and the Defense 

Science Board, 318–20; Bottom-Up Review, 15–16, 20; Comptroller, 168, 184n; 

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, 320, 334; Deputy Under Secretary 

of Defense for Acquisition Reform, 175; Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for 

Planning and Resources, 168; Final Report to Congress: Conduct of the Persian 

Gulf War, 59; First Offset program, 329; Inspector General, 321; invests in 

technological advances, 170–71; Missile Defense Agency, 334; on merging of 

defense firms, 189n; Second Offset program, 329; sexual preference and gender 

identity and, 122; Strategic Capabilities Office, 320; Technology Reinvestment 

Program, 186n; Third Offset program, 312, 320, 329–33; Under Secretary of 

Defense for Acquisition, 171; Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and 

Technology, 172; weapons systems programs, 321

U.S. Department of Energy, 337

U.S. Department of the Air Force, 116

U.S. Department of the Army: assistant secretary, 172; Chief of Military History, 164; 

Global Logistics and Strategy, 1940–1943, 165; U.S. Army Aviation and Missile 

Command: Chronological Highlights, 167
410

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

U.S. Department of the Navy: and administrative histories of World War II, 164; 

and integration of African-Americans, 229; and research and development, 315; 

and technological design process, 324; and technology, 313; and the National 

Academy of Sciences, 317; Assistant Chief of Naval Operations, 60; Chief of 

Naval Operations, 60, 110, 144n, 317; Assessment Division, 33n; authority of, 

32n; Director of Expeditionary Warfare, 61; Office of, 144n, 177, 190n; Strategic 

Concepts Group, 179; The United States in “Desert Storm/Desert Shield,” 59–60; 

decision-making in, 327; Net Assessment Office, 335; OPNAV, 273, 279, 284; 

options for force planning, 21–23. See also Navy, U.S.

U.S. East Coast, 71, 76, 87

U.S. Executive Branch, 169

U.S. Gulf Coast, 74, 75, 77, 87

U.S. House of Representatives, 126; and naval strategy, 281; Armed Services 

Committee, 240, 320; Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces, 320; 

Naval Affairs Committee, 102

U.S. Joint Forces Command, 336

U.S. National Security Agency, 345n

U.S. Naval Academy, 107, 112, 120, 121, 124, 129, 131, 142n, 231; African-Americans 

in, 230, 237, 244; enrollments, 119, 122; limits on admissions to, 148n; Native 

Americans in, 245; sexual harassment in, 247; women in, 128, 237, 243, 245

U.S. Naval Academy Library, 223

U.S. Naval Forces, Central Command, 56

U.S. Naval Forces, Europe, 254

U.S. Naval Institute, 111, 144n, 223, 225, 226, 252; oral histories, 235, 238, 240–41, 

253, 255–56; Proceedings, 53, 54, 106, 112, 144n, 231, 252; Proceedings, “Mines 

of August,” review article, 53; The U.S. Naval Institute on Naval Innovation, 316

U.S. President, 139

U.S. Secretary of Defense, 33n

U.S. Senate, 126; and naval strategy, 281; Armed Services Committee, 320; 

Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, 320

U.S. Supreme Court: and desegregation, 237; Brown v. Board of Education of the City 

of Topeka Kansas, 117

Ukraine, 286n

Undersea Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), 172, 210, 211

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 70, 78, 86, 173, 283; activities of, in Europe, 

115; and arms control, 205, 238; and Berlin blockade, 115; and competition in 

digital technology, 236; and Iran, 9; and nuclear testing, 204; and the Indian 

Ocean, 13; and The Maritime Strategy, 281; and threats to U.S. naval forces in the 

Mediterranean Sea, 15; and Turkey, 9; and U.S. competition in space flight, 214; 

armed forces of, 329; as antagonist of U.S. Navy, 9–11, 136; as threat to Europe, 9; 

deploys mine sweepers, 49; detection of submarines of, 205, 211; fall of, 15, 122, 

140; long-range bomber bases, 322; mine technology of, 49, 53, 55; Navy: nuclear 
411

Index

attack submarine programs, 326; Soviet Naval Task Force, 58; reconnaissance 

capabilities of, 14; threat of, and U.S. Navy, 60; U.S. Navy deployment against, 14

United Kingdom: and cyber attacks, 323; and mine countermeasures in the Red Sea, 

58; and mine sweeping of Persian Gulf, 51, 53, 56; and the Indian Ocean, 13; 

arms-limitation agreements, 4; Defence Scientific Advisory Council, 318; deploys 

mine sweepers, 48; recovers Soviet mine, 49; U.S. Navy homeports in, 10. See also

Great Britain

United Nations, 47; Security Council, 69n

United States: acquires colonies, 5; and arms control, 205; and Greece, 9; and growth 

of federal government, 115; and mine sweeping of Persian Gulf, 51; and Turkey, 

9; and warfare, 136–37; arms-limitation agreements, 4; attack on, of 11 Sept. 

2001, 169; current challenges to, 26; global role of, 273–74; invests in science, 204; 

maintains forward-deployed warships, 1; racial discrimination in, 117, 233; sexual 

discrimination in, 233; U.S. Navy operations in, 45, 87; vulnerability of, to cyber 

attacks, 323

United States, aircraft carrier (CVA-58): canceled, 12

University of California Press, 337

University of California, Berkeley, 146n

University of California, San Diego, 208

University of Chicago, 122

University of Illinois, 122

University of North Texas, 236

University of Pennsylvania: Wharton School: Black and Other Minority Participation in 

the All-Volunteer Navy and Marine Corps, 242

University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, 207

Untermeyer, Chase, 245; Inside Reagan’s Navy, 245–46

Update Report on the Progress of Women in the Navy, 247

V-12 Program, 120–21, 121

V-7 Program, 121

van Keuren, David, 214

Vanguard Program, 214

Vaughan, Thomas Wayland, 214

Venice, 323

Veri, Rinaldo, Vice Adm., Italian navy, 69n

Viet Cong, 234

Vietnam War, 47, 106, 205, 252, 253; Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. and, 238; 

African-Americans in, 229; effects of, on U.S. Navy personnel, 140; medals 

awarded during, 234; mentioned, 11; Native American sailors in, 254; opposition 

to, 118–19, 122, 255; racial unrest during, 240; U.S. Navy in, 118; U.S. Navy 

nurses in, 234; veterans of, 237, 246; women sailors in, 227, 234, 235

Vine, Allyn, 208–10, 211, 214, 215

Virginia Pilot, Hampton Roads, VA, 111
412

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 184n

Vistica, Greg L., Fall from Glory, 248, 251, 255

Waghelstein, John D., 143n

Wagner, Abraham R., The Lessons of Modern War, Volume IV: The Gulf War, 55

Wainwright, Ronnie Anne, “Navigation through Three Straits in the Middle East: 

Effects on the United States of Being a Nonparty to the 1982 Convention on the 

Law of the Sea,” 60–61

Wakelin, James, 212

Wallis, John, 323

War Instructions of 1924, 142n

War of Independence, American, 3

War Plans, 6; War Plan Black, 5; War Plan Orange, 104, 190n

Warsaw Pact, 65, 329–30

Washington National Records Center, 209

Washington Post, 111, 169

Washington state, 210

Washington Treaties, 28n

Washington, DC, 175, 243, 277, 336

Washingtonian magazine, 246

Watergate Scandal, 241

Watkins, James, Adm., Chief of Naval Operations, 14, 245

Watts, R. B., American Sea Power and the Obsolescence of Capital Ship Theory, 274

Webb, James, Secretary of the Navy, 245–46; “Women Can’t Fight,” 246

Weber, Max, 327

Weick, Karl, 325

Weigley, Russel F., 136; The American Way of War, 147n

Weinberger, Caspar, Secretary of Defense, 245: Fighting for Peace, 169

Weingast, Barry, 323

Weinstein, Laurie, Wives and Warriors, 251

Weir, Gary E., Dr.: An Ocean in Common, 206, 208, 214; career, 201

Weir, Gary E., Mrs., 208

Welby, Stephen, 320

Welles, Gideon, Secretary of the Navy, 104

Wells, Lin, 321

West India Station, 4

West Point, NY, 124

Western Hemisphere, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81; U.S. Navy operations 

in, 45, 85–86

Westinghouse, 203

White Oak, MD, laboratory, 166–67

White, Carle, 54

White, Christie, Wives and Warriors, 251
413

Index

Whitehead torpedo, 135

Whiteneck, Daniel, 32n; The Navy at the Tipping Point, 3

Widmayer, Raymond, Dr., “A Strategic and Industrial Assessment of Sea Mine Warfare 

in the Post-Cold War Era,” 61

Wilde, Louise K., 226

Wiley, Tova Peterson, 226

Williams, Kathleen Broom, 203–4, 215; Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea, 235; 

Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in World War II, 235

Williams, Rosalind, 338n

Wilson, George C., This War Really Matters: Inside the Fight for Defense Dollars, 169

Wilson, Isaiah, III, 314

Winkler, David, Ready Then, Ready Now, Ready Always, 224

Winter, Matt, Rear Adm., USN, 340n

Wolters, Timothy, 64

Women: at the U.S. Naval Academy, 237; in science and technology, 203–4; in the 

Korean War, 232–33; in the Persian Gulf War, 249–50; in the U.S. Navy, 114, 117, 

126–28, 150n, 152n, 204, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225–28, 232–33, 233–36, 239, 

242–44, 245, 249–53, 255–56; excluded from combat roles, 233; in the Vietnam 

War, 234, 235; in World War II, 222

Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES), 126, 204, 225, 

226, 233, 243

Women in Military Service for America Foundation, A Defense Weapon Known to be 

of Value, 233

Women Officer’s Professional Association, 246

Women’s Reserve, 126

Wonsan, North Korea, 46, 60, 142n

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, 204, 207, 208, 210, 212, 213, 214

Wooster, Barbara, Lt. U.S. Navy Nurse Corps, 234

Work, Robert O., 177, 330

World War I: and administrative histories of U.S. Navy, 144n; and mine warfare, 47, 

62; and naval enlisted training, 135; and North Sea Mine Barrage, 65; battles, 

142n; enlisted sailors in, 133; Great Lakes Naval Station in, 134; minorities in, 

127; postwar, 136, 139, 214; reporting on, 185n; sources of U.S. Navy officers 

in, 120; U.S. Navy in, 6, 203; underway refueling in, 28n; women in, 126; 

Yeomen F in, 225

World War II, 3; African-Americans in, 229; and forward presence, 1; and investments 

in naval materiel, 139; and naval war instructions, 102; and nuclear weapons 

development, 321; and spy novels, 152n; as watershed in U.S. naval history, 138; 

as watershed in U.S. society, 140; Axis Powers in, 202; cost/schedule control 

systems in, 185n; end of, 141; fleet actions in, 142n; Japanese militarists in, 229; 

Joint Chiefs of Staff in, 147n; military acquisition during, 164, 165, 167, 173; 

military procurement in, 185n; military technology in, 313; mine warfare during, 

47; minorities in, 127; mobilization, 186n; National Defense Research Committee 
414

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

in, 317; naval personnel functions during, 112, 113; naval technology in, 129, 130; 

naval women in, 126; Navy line and staff in, 131; Nazis in, 229; oral histories 

of, 223; personnel problems in, 105; postwar and minorities in U.S. Navy, 256; 

postwar and women in the U.S. Navy, 250; postwar classification, 110; postwar 

forward presence, 1, 2, 3, 103, 107, 145n; postwar government funding for science, 

208; postwar homosexuality in the U.S. Navy, 249; postwar integration of the 

U.S. Navy, 222; postwar military acquisition, 162, 163, 171, 172, 173; postwar 

naval histories, 144n; postwar naval innovation, 177, 221; postwar naval personnel 

functions, 114; postwar origins of naval officers, 136; postwar planning and 

management processes, 332; postwar racial integration in U.S. Navy, 230; postwar 

reductions in U.S. Navy, 104; postwar strategic context, 272; postwar technology, 

309–10, 314, 315, 321; postwar U.S. military, 147n; postwar U.S. naval strategy, 

7–8; postwar U.S. Navy, 221; postwar U.S. Navy warship crew composition, 

135; prewar, 115, 221; and military technology, 312–13; requirements for U.S. 

naval officers in, 120; science during, 210, 214; strategic lessons of, 9; studies of 

naval personnel during, 106; submarine movies of, 66n; submarines in, 201–2; 

technology in, 316; think tanks in, 111; U.S. Army history program in, 164; U.S. 

mobilization in, 170; U.S. naval deployment strategy in, 7; U.S. Navy leaders in, 

253; U.S. Navy training in, 124; underway refueling during, 28n; V-7 and V-12 

programs in, 121; veterans of, 207, 237, 250; warplane design in, 189n; women in, 

204, 225, 227

Worzel, J. Lamar, 214

Wouk, Herman, 102, 142n

Wyoming, 115

Yanbu, Saudi Arabia, 49

Yangtze River, 4, 6

Yangtze River Patrol, 6, 7

Yellowstone, USS (AD-41), 249

Yemen, 71, 74, 77, 78, 87

Yokosuka, Japan, 13, 232, 254

Yugoslavia, 70, 80, 82

Zaire, 73, 78, 85

Zakheim, Dov S., 15, 168; Peacetime Presence Mission, 2

Zimmerman, Jean, Tailspin, 251–52, 255

Zumwalt, Elmo R., Jr., Adm., USN, 188n, 255, 277, 280; and deployment of U.S. 

naval forces, 13; and racial minorities in the Navy, 118; and social change in the 

U.S. Navy, 238–44; and women in the U.S. Navy, 126–27, 242–44; as Chief of 

Naval Operations, 118; issues Z-grams, 118, 126–28, 149n, 223, 239–41; On 

Watch, 238, 255

Zumwalt, USS (DDG-1000), 129

Zumwalt-class destroyers, 278


417

About the Authors

Sebastian Bruns, PhD, heads the Center for Maritime Strategy & Security 

(CMSS) at the Institute for Security Policy, University of Kiel (ISPK), Germany. 

He is the editor of The Routledge Handbook of Naval Strategy and Security

(London, 2016) and father of the Kiel Conference, a maritime security challenges 

conference on the occasion of Kiel Week. After two successful iterations during 

which the conference became one of the leading annual forums to discuss maritime security challenges in Europe, 2017 saw a collaboration of ISPK|CMSS and 

the Center for Naval Analyses (Arlington) to conduct the “Kiel International 

Seapower Symposium,” also during Kiel Week.

Donald Chisholm, PhD, is the Stephen B. Luce Professor of Naval Strategy at 

the U.S. Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island. He teaches in the Joint 

Military Operations Department. His areas of interest include naval and military history, organization theory, administrative behavior, policy analysis, and 

American political institutions. In addition to articles in a variety of professional 

journals, he has published two books: Waiting For Dead Men’s Shoes: Origins 

and Development of the U.S. Navy’s Officer Personnel System, 1793–1941

(Stanford University Press, 2001), which received the 2001 Rear Admiral Samuel 

Eliot Morison Award for Distinguished Contribution to Naval Literature; and 

Coordination Without Hierarchy: Informal Structures in Multiorganizational 

Systems (University of California Press, 1989). He deployed to Afghanistan in 

2011 and 2013 in support of II MEF in Regional Command Southwest, and 2014 

in support of 18th Airborne Corps in ISAF Joint Command.

Thomas C. Hone, PhD, has had long experience as an executive in the Office 

of the Secretary of Defense and is an award-winning author of many papers 

and books on naval subjects, including American and British Aircraft Carrier 

Development, 1911–1941. He has taught at the Naval War College and the 

National Defense University among other institutions. Among his publications 

are Power and Change: The Administrative History of the Office of the Chief 

of Naval Operations, 1946–1986 (Naval Historical Center, 1989), and, with 

Trent Hone, Battle Line: The United States Navy, 1919–1939 (Naval Institute 

Press, 2006).
418

Needs and Opportunities in the Modern History of the U.S. Navy

Thomas G. Mahnken, PhD, is president and chief executive officer of the Center 

for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a senior research professor at the 

Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul 

H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. He previously taught for 20 

years at the U.S. Naval War College, where he served as the Jerome E. Levy 

Chair of Economic Geography and National Security. Dr. Mahnken served as the 

Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning from 2006 to 2009. In 

2009, he received the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service.

Mark D. Mandeles, PhD, is president of J. de Bloch Group, a defense consulting 

firm. He is an adjunct professor at The Elliott School of International Affairs at 

George Washington University. His most recent book is Military Transformation 

Past and Present: Historical Lessons for the 21st Century (Praeger, 2007), which 

examines how different military services are organized to learn, accumulate, and 

retrieve knowledge, and how their particular organization affected the equipment they acquired and the quality of doctrine and concepts used in combat. His 

most recent co-authored work is Innovation in Carrier Aviation (Government 

Publishing Office, 2011), with Thomas C. Hone and Norman Friedman.

Edward J. Marolda, PhD, served for many years as the U.S. Navy’s Senior 

Historian at the Naval History and Heritage Command in Washington, DC. 

He earned an MA at Georgetown in European Diplomatic History and the PhD 

at The George Washington University in U.S. History. He has authored, coauthored, or edited 15 books on the history of the U.S. Navy with a focus on the 

Cold War in the Far East. His dissertation treated the U.S. Navy and the Chinese 

Civil War. A U.S. Army veteran of the Vietnam War, he has presented numerous 

lectures in the United States and overseas.

Scott C. Truver, PhD, is director of TeamBlue, Gryphon Technologies’ center 

of excellence for articulating and communicating strategies, policies, plans, and 

programs. He has 40 years’ experience in research, analysis, program advocacy, 

and writing/editing/publishing complex printed and electronic publications. Dr. 

Truver has supported U.S. Navy mine warfare and explosive ordnance disposal 

since 1979, when he prepared for a law-of-war assessment of an advanced 

submarine-launched remote-control mine concept. He wrote the first definitive 

unclassified assessment of the 1984 Libyan mining of the Red Sea, published 

in the May 1985 U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, and is the co-author of the 
419

About the Authors

revised edition of Weapons That Wait: Mine Warfare in the U.S. Navy (Naval 

Institute Press, 1991). 

Gary E. Weir, PhD, is Chief Historian, Office of Corporate Communications, 

National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and author of path-breaking studies 

of the history of modern naval science and technology, including An Ocean in 

Common: American Naval Officers, Scientists, and the Ocean Environment 

(Texas A&M University Press, 2001). He was also the principal investigator for 

You Cannot Surge Trust: Combined Naval Operations of the Royal Australian 

Navy, Canadian Navy, Royal Navy, and United States Navy, 1991–2003 (Naval 

History and Heritage Command, 2013).
Michael J. Crawford retired at the 

close of 2017 as Senior Historian 

at the Naval History and Heritage 

Command after a 35-year career 

as a Navy historian, during which 

he specialized in the age of sail, 

served as an editor of the Navy’s 

award-winning documentary series, 

Naval Documents of the American 

Revolution and The Naval War of 

1812: A Documentary History, and 

produced a distinguished record of 

publication of books and scholarly 

essays. He earned his bachelor’s and 

master’s degrees in history at Washington University, in his native St. 

Louis, Missouri, and his doctorate 

in American History at Boston University. In 2015 and 2016 he organized a series of talks on the historiography of the modern U.S. Navy 

by notable scholars of which this 

collection of essays is a byproduct.
An MH-60R Sea Hawk helicopter assigned to Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron (HSM) 71 

prepares to land aboard the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis (CVN-74) as the guided missile destroyer 

Chung Hoon (DDG-93) follows behind during a force transit, 11 August 2015.

F as ro el t yb eh S epu ir tn e edn tn 

I tn re en :t tskoob ro e ohP vog.opg. 

aF :x ( aM 4012-215 )202 i 

ISBN 

ISBN 978-1-943604-11-1

9 781943 604111

90000

150811-N-XX566-010U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Andre T. Richard