As the Navy struggles with the challenges of transformation, it needs both the scientist and the philosopher.
America's armed forces are in the midst of an extraordinary shake-up. Planners are focusing on new technologies, operational concepts, and restructured relationships to carry out military strategy. Borrowing well-established business practices and capitalizing on superior information technology, speed, mobility, automation, and accuracy, we expect to defeat our adversaries with forces that are smaller, more responsive, and more effective.
It is not surprising that the Navy, considered by some to be one of the planet's more hidebound organizations, has been slow to embrace some of these changes. Some of the Navy's decision makers are concluding that our inertia is attributable to officers who lack the technical expertise necessary to grasp all of transformation's constituent parts. Consequently, young men and women who major in the humanities and the social sciences might soon find it more difficult to earn a commission. Further, as we place renewed emphasis on systems engineering, command and control, and operations analysis, mid-grade officers might see their graduate education options skewed largely toward technical disciplines. Will such changes in officer education tip the scale in transformation's favor? More to the point, should a philosophy major who forsook calculus in favor of business math have a home in tomorrow's technocratic Navy?
We always have leaned heavily on our uniformed technical experts. They maintain and operate existing systems, and work with industry to develop new ones. Were it not for senior and flag officers who speak the language of research, development, and acquisition, we would find ourselves at the utter mercy of industry. But the oversimplified question is: should the Navy, as a matter of priority, pursue engineering majors at the expense of liberal arts majors? Those who answer in the affirmative make two assumptions. The first is that an officer who receives a technical education will be better prepared to transform the Navy than his counterpart who lacks a technical education. The second is that the Navy will make technical education a trump card in the officer assignment calculus. Both assumptions merit scrutiny.
Building a Better Box
[Author's Note: Please excuse the stereotypes that appear in the following paragraphs. They are designed to illustrate and, like most caricatures, tend to exaggerate the strengths and foibles of their respective subjects.]
Let us examine the notion that officers who spent their undergraduate days computing the resistance of small appliance bulbs and heating test tubes over Bunsen burners are better suited to accelerate change than are their colleagues who spent an equal but opposite amount of time studying the collected works of the world's humanists, social scientists, writers, and philosophers.
The Navy's nuclear power training program remains its most demanding technical curriculum. Eligibility requirements are fixed and stringent. Each officer applicant is interviewed and vetted. Theoretical and practical training are extensive and unforgiving. So let us choose as today's transformation catalyst a magna cum laude physics graduate from State Polytechnic U who opted for nuclear power training. This dynamo installed a local area network in his fraternity house and designed and built the winning entry in the school's solar-powered car contest. During his first-class midshipman cruise, he rewrote the algorithms for the Mk-86 gunfire-control system after he noticed that the fall of shot was constantly 1.3% short of the target's range. But as a nuclear power student, he was instructed that everything he needed to know about his propulsion plant already had been identified, analyzed, and documented in the reactor plant manual. No substitutions, please.
Our nuclear engineer subsequently has acquitted himself honorably. He has earned outstanding scores on operational reactor safeguards exams and proved his mettle as an operator and tactician. But is our engineer, who grew up inside the machine, better qualified to challenge the machine? Is unflinching obedience the best training regimen for a Young Turk? How suited is the average military technocrat for leading the charge against business as usual? He might make that box go faster; he might make it more efficient. He might line it with fire-resistant fur and install a surround-sound system and one of those designer coffee makers. But in the end, there's a lot riding on keeping the box intact—a fact he's grown to appreciate.
It is true that Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of nuclear power, took on City Hall and won. So what happened to nuclear power after the birth of the USS Nautilus (SSN-571)? Strangely enough, it began to resemble 19th-century mainstream Protestantism. The Reverend Charles Hodge, a luminary at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1820 to 1878, allegedly was fond of boasting that no new idea entered the seminary during his tenure at the school. American Presbyterianism then, like nuclear power today, remained quite predictable. While some relished that stability, others believe that Hodge's theological conservatism sacrificed spiritual vigor in exchange for security—becoming, in the end, its own worst enemy. Rigid adherence to nuclear safeguards is a small price to pay for nuclear safety. Yet, the well-being of our nuclear power program, to which many unrestricted line officers will devote an entire career, depends heavily on the Navy's ability to convince junior officers of the hazards of deviating from well-established protocols. (This should not convey the misperception that nuclear-trained officers are incapable of high-spiritedness or innovative thinking. I witnessed these and other forms of deviant behavior continuously during my first sea tour in the USS Arkansas [CGN-41]).
Who's Writing My Transformation Speech?
Meet today's transformation Luddite. A student of western civilization, this officer believed that sidestepping Physics 101 in favor of a semester on the Peloponnesian War was one of the better decisions that he made as an 18-year-old. He later stumbled through the demise of the ancient world, the spread of Christianity, the awakening of Europe, the crumbling of Christendom, the rise of the nation-state, the end of colonialism, and the emergence of the superpower. Along the way, he developed a rudimentary understanding of the factors that make individuals, groups, institutions, and governments tick. By the second semester of his sophomore year, he realized that it had been a long time since anyone had done lunch with a Carthaginian or played 18 holes with a Sumerian. Through his pursuit of philosophy, literature, and foreign language, he discovered how some of civilization's most brilliant minds had depicted bravery, cowardice, intrigue, candor, success, and failure.
Through his study of classical Greek, our humanities major honed his ability to memorize vast quantities of information, and developed a keen appreciation for brevity and irony. Even today, these qualities are highly sought by most directorates. In economics, he encountered the notion of the sunk cost—the theory that expended assets cannot necessarily be recovered by the injection of additional resources. Only later would he appreciate that this simple concept continues to elude some of America's best minds. By chance, he stumbled on linear regression, a mathematical tool that, in layman's terms, minimizes the collective pain felt by all elements in a data field. If there is a more universal model for making public-sector decisions, it has yet to be articulated.
Between naps in the library basement, this man of letters managed to pick up quite a few survival tips. An officer who needs to do a better job of managing his boss might glean some insights from Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste. Anyone who relishes the prospect of taking on an unresponsive, all-powerful division can learn a trick or two from Martin Luther. Those who prefer indirect confrontation understand that there is no substitute for knowing how to send and receive subtle bureaucratic signals. Madame de La Fayette, a kindred spirit, wrote their training manual: La Princesse de Cleves. Staff officers who would rather fight that next battle by proxy so they can focus on issues closer to home should borrow a chapter from the life and times of Oliver Cromwell. Anyone contemplating a run on a rival's pet program should not make the first move until he has reacquainted himself with Machiavelli, who will convince his readers to shoot to kill, lest they commit the cardinal sin of inflicting a flesh wound. Any supervisor who is looking for a few suggestions on handling a disgruntled crew that has been asked to do the impossible might enjoy Xenophon's Anabasis.
It's About Change
Predictably, the greatest challenges confronting Navy transformation are social, not technical. We have proved that we can recognize and capture enabling technologies—technologies that now arise largely in the commercial sector. But unless we convince the skeptics that the Old must make way for the New, transformation will take its place in the long, blue line of aborted innovations.
Forcing change down the throat of an organization that uses its past as prologue requires a compelling rationale, effective internal and external sales campaigns, and relentless oversight—not just the ability to read a wiring diagram or increase bandwidth.
If we were interested in returning to sail power, vacuum tubes, and smooth bore guns, we would face challenges identical to the ones that confront us now. We still would have to address the research-and-development aspects, the strategic, operational, and tactical aspects, and the bureaucratic aspects. The bonds linking these seemingly disparate processes are an understanding of human motivation, a broad familiarity with organizational cultures, and the ability to know when and how to influence the process in a town where the process often matters more than the product.
As it turns out, developing a better understanding of people, institutions, and institutional processes is one of the greatest benefits of a liberal arts education. If the Navy should now conclude that its officer education and distribution mechanisms are not adequately supporting transformation, I hope that those designated to run the cognizant steering groups will enlist the services of a few lieutenant commanders who majored in English.
Commander Harris is the commanding officer of the USS Arleigh Burke (DDG-51). He did not major in philosophy, a decision he regrets to this day.