If that connection is lost, we may draw the wrong conclusions from current observations. For example, many have said that any future Navy would necessarily take a long time to achieve, that anyone who wants to know what the Navy of 2015 might look like need only go to the piers at Norfolk or San Diego today. This perception is flawed. The factors that cause the Navy to change so slowly are all under human control. That is, the pace of change is a result of choices we have made, consciously or otherwise.
History shows that navies can change quickly.
For example, shortly after the turn of the nineteenth century, Sir John Fisher, First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy, rendered his navy and all others obsolete when he produced HMS Dreadnought in the course of a year. Of course, it takes a long time to mature the requisite technologies, concepts, and underlying strategy, but that maturation is not what is holding us back now. In 1935 there were no panzer divisions, but in 1939 they were in Poland. None of these examples is technologically insignificant. Perhaps most striking, the shape and mode of operation of the United States Navy was dramatically altered on one Sunday morning in December 1941.