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In the corridors of the Pentagon and elsewhere, the Navy needs strategists of its own lest it: (1) blunder through decisions on weapons acquisition without realizing the strategic constraints it is imposing upon itself for future decades or (2) get sandbagged by one or more of its sister services. The need for strategists, then, is a real one. But do they have to be uniformed?
In a provocative Proceedings article last year, Commander Thomas B. Buell asked the Navy, . . where will we get our future strategists?”1 Both Buell and two subsequent commentators, Vice Admiral John T. Hayward and Captain John E. La- couture, turned their criticisms on the current emphases in the education of future flag officers.2 This writer sympathizes with the eloquent statements of these retired officers, but in their framing of this discussion, they have presumed an affirmative answer to a more fundamental question. It is the contention of this article that the discussion should focus on this question, “Is there a role within the naval officer corps for the imaginative strategic thinker?”
Background: In 1949, Bernard Brodie, citing French statesman Georges Clemenceau’s maxim that war is too important to be left to the generals, implied that in the nuclear age, strategy is too important to be left to the generals and admirals.3 Two generations of civilian defense intellectuals have taken Brodie quite literally. In their quest to become the nation’s legitimate strategists, these “interlopers” have been greatly assisted by an organizational setting which seems to have provided them a legitimate role while discouraging strategic thinking among active duty officers.
Prior to 1947, both the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy were Cabinet officers; the Army and the Navy had separate budget appropriations and their own attentive congressional com- » mittees. In such a setting, independent, -service- I based strategic thinking had a practical rationale: it | could be used to justify an executive department’s I budget. There were distinct boundaries to each ser- I vice’s area of cognizance, and Congress would vote I appropriations without requiring integration of the \ separate strategies and resolution of conflicts in their I conception. Under such a system, the Secretary of P the Navy could rely on the General Board to provide 1 adequate strategic thinking. Not being tested against f outside “objective” standards, naval officers were £ educated and matured in their own particular milieu, I using their own vocabulary and strategic and op- I erational concepts.
The change in the ground rules commenced during World War II, when the Navy was forced to defend its strategic and operational concepts in the forum of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A severe clash occurred between the Navy and the Army Air Forces over the operational control of land-based aircraft assigned to antisubmarine patrol operations. The deadlock, which continued for several months during the worst of the German attrition of Allied shipping, cast the Navy in a particularly bad light and helped to convince some outsiders of the need for unified planning and strategy.
Unification in 1947 changed the environment for strategic thinking. While the three services retained Cabinet status for an additional two years, Congress truly forced the issue by providing unified treatment of both budgetary authorizations and appropriations. Together with “requirements” which exceeded the individual services’ proportional shares of a limited defense budget, the new situation demanded a single national strategy to justify the spending, during peacetime, of historically unprecedented sums.
The last heroic attempt by the General Board to formulate a naval strategy came in 1948. Captain Arleigh A. Burke, then secretary to the General Board, recognized that the Navy’s position in the multifaceted interservice dispute was not only misapprehended by the public, but was both internally contradictory and without firm strategic foundation.4 This attempt to bring consensus within the
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
Navy on a coherent concept of the Navy’s mission ar)d its role in national defense foundered, in 1949, when the arbitrary cancellation of the flush-deck carrier by Secretary of Defense Louis A. Johnson rekindled the acrimonious “battle of the aviators.” Offered a simplistic panacea of security under the Protective wing of the atomic-bombing Strategic Air Command, the nation’s political leadership chose jae genocide option as a means of controlling detense spending.5 The defeat which was administered lo the Navy’s strategic concept following congres- Slonal unification and strategy hearings was so com- P‘ete that the Navy abandoned both the use and the pfinition of the word “strategic” to the Air Force.6
order to cover the targeting of land-based, fixed- Slte enemy installations which were to be attacked ln the conduct of a naval campaign, the phrase “tar-
Aar as rejustifying the Navy’s emphasis on flexible Soneral purpose forces, they were mistaken. A sur- ‘eit of funds had merely permitted divergence be- Lveen the declaratory, targeting, and acquisition doctrines espoused within the Department of Defuse. After Korea, the reduction of defense spend- ln8 to more tolerable peacetime levels was rationalized by the Eisenhower Administration’s “New l~pok” doctrine. Once again, the Navy was faced 'v,th an inhospitable intellectual milieu, although the offending concept was promoted by one of its own, Admiral Arthur W. Radford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
At the beginning of 1954, Admiral Robert B. Carney, the Chief of Naval Operations, asked his staff for a 15-year shipbuilding and conversion plan. The various divisions within OpNav which were responsible for drafting the regular 5-year shipbuilding plan submitted their ideas of what the 15-year plan should be, but these submissions were parochial and lacking in long-range vision. The lack of an overarching strategic concept and the disinterest in truly long-range planning was evident as the divisions began to quarrel over the first five years of the plan and left major gaps to contend with vague statements regarding the later periods.7 This failure of the regular machinery within OpNav forced Carney to convene an Ad Hoc Committee to Study Long Range Shipbuilding Plans and Programs, since the General Board which had previously addressed such questions had been abolished in 1951.
Under the chairmanship of Vice Admiral Ralph A. Ofstie, the ad hoc committee struggled with the assigned task. But the lack of suitable strategic studies which might give the committee useful predictions of the distant future led to the creation of yet another staff position, OP-93, and the assignment of Rear Admiral-selectee Charles D. Griffin as director of studies for the ad hoc committee. Griffin, who had to provide both a rationale for the fiscal year 1957 shipbuilding and conversion program and a basis for long-range force planning, asked Captain Edward M. Day of OpNav’s Strategic Plans Division to draft the latter paper. After nearly a year of such ad hoc operation, Admiral Griffin received an adequate staff, composed of both the Long-Range Objectives Group and the supporting Naval Warfare Analysis Group.8
Formed by Admiral Carney to solve a specific problem, the Long-Range Objectives Group was institutionalized during the six-year tenure of Admiral Arleigh A. Burke, the last CNO who had previous service with the General Board. The Secretary of the Navy, who had been reduced by 1955 to a mere functionary in the expanding civilian bureaucracy of the Department of Defense, no longer had a real need for the strategic advice which had been available from the General Board. But the Chief of Naval Operations, as a participant in Joint Chiefs of Staff debates over ballistic missile strategy, did require imaginative, innovative thinking in order to present
Certainly, the increased involvement in the Vietnam conflict gave the more immediate problem of fighting a war a higher priority than that assigned to long- range planning. Further, “ticket-punching” by officers seeking promotion now required a tour of duty in Vietnam. The concomitant decline of the Long- Range Objectives Group was evidenced by its being subordinated to the Office of Navy Program Planning in 1963 and its being deprived of the direct support of the Naval Warfare Analysis Group.
Long-range planning and the coincident opportunity to fashion a new strategic concept for the Navy has been resurrected by the creation in January 1980 of OP-OOX, the Long Range Planning Group.9 Unlike the various ad hoc boards and committees which both preceded and postdated the General Board, the new group has—as did the General Board—a prime advantage in the continuity which is conferred upon it through its formal establishment as a permanent organization. Casual reading of the records of the General Board shows the broad strategic sweep to which the members were exposed in
a realistic alternative to the dominant version of national strategy.
The value of the Long-Range Objectives Group as a formulator of strategic options declined during Robert S. McNamara’s tenure as Secretary of Defense. Perhaps “flexible response” and increased budgets reduced the perceived need to keep naval strategy under review. Possibly, the systems analysis procedures introduced by McNamara preempted and vitiated any debate over basic strategic concepts. (Whoever makes the initial assumptions in operations research or systems analysis frames all further discussion. McNamara’s “whiz kids” controlled the fundamental strategic assumptions.) the course of hearings which were conducted on the widest range of subjects. Nevertheless, the organizational context within which the Long Range Planning Group functions is a far cry from that surrounding the General Board.
The Problem: No matter who fills the role, the Navy does need strategists. As one scholar states: “the choice among weapons projects is the choice among defense strategies.”10 Without its own strategists, the Navy may blunder through decisions on weapons acquisition without realizing the strategic constraints it is imposing upon itself for future decades. But this does not answer a fundamental question: “Does the Navy need uniformed strategists?”
The data which Commander Buell presents on the decline in status of the Naval War College itself and °n the seeming irrelevance of that institution’s curriculum to the promotion of the Navy’s flag officers indicates that either by conscious design or by default, the naval high command has answered that question in the negative. To all appearances, the Navy’s current solution to its need for strategists is far more cost-effective—in the short term. These strategists obtain their own qualifying education at |ne nation’s top universities and colleges and then nire on as consultants to certain of the various private firms (either nonprofit or commercial) more Popularly known as “think tanks” or, in the national Capital area, as “beltway bandits.”
This unofficial generation of a “Corps of Naval Strategists” in mufti is, in part, in the mold of an ancient naval tradition.[1] Most of the Navy’s various communities of staff corps officers had their origins among civilian professionals who were trained and qualified outside the naval service. The long-extinct Engineer and Naval Constructor Corps and the surging Civil Engineer and Medical Corps commu- mties arose from the expedient of placing civilian exPerts in uniform.[2] But what is radical about the current emergence of the “Corps of Naval Strate- Sists” is that the Navy’s unrestricted line officers have not perceived the scope of the threat which mis “corps” poses to their former claim of being me Navy’s generalists and the actual commanders °f the fleet.
It is not sufficient to say that this so-called “Corps °f Naval Strategists” is merely hired help. Of course, if the product of their work does not mea- ?Ufe up to the Navy’s expectations—either in qual- llV or in policy content—their contracts can be terminated. But these individuals are members of the wider “defense intellectual community” and, thus, may be encountered at another “think tank,” on me staff of a congressional committee, in an agency °f the executive branch, within the Defense Department itself, or even on the staff of the National Security Council. It is people from this stratum, certainly not the Chief of Naval Operations, who advise the President on naval weapons, strategy, and even tactics.[3]
But aside from the discomforting potential not °nly that national strategy may change with each fluadrennial presidential election, but also that top advisors may not comprehend the operational dif- dculties which their tactical advice may cause units at sea or in the field, does the Navy’s lack of uniformed strategists bode ill for the sea service? An assessment of the historical experience of the deduct Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd) suggests that the development of top-notch unrestricted line officers ''nth postgraduate training in strategic studies would oe beneficial. The cycling of BuOrd’s ordnance specialists between sea duty and assignments in the bureau, its factories, and its laboratories brought operational experience ashore to address developmental problems in ordnance material and took technical expertise back to sea for application to problems of maintenance and tactics. By extension, one might suggest that officer specialists in strategic studies would bridge the current gap between the defense intellectuals and the operating forces. The forces afloat are currently the major losers. While retiring and resigning naval officers bring operational experience ashore—where it must gradually lose touch with current doctrine and equipment —there is in this process no commensurate infusion of strategic concepts into the fleet.
In part, the success of the Navy’s development of officer specialists in strategic studies depends upon the acquiescence, if not the outright support, of senior civilian officials. But in large part, unrestricted line officers will have to decide what their role is to be within the Department of the Navy. Will they become uniformed engineers and managers and retreat to the effective status of a staff corps, while civilian defense intellectuals become the operators, the true officers of the line? Assuming that Commander Buell, Admiral Hayward, and Captain Lacouture do articulate the aspirations of a majority of the line community, the next question is where does one go from here?
Prescription: As was noted earlier, the formation of OP-OOX, the Long Range Planning Group, offers the Navy an opportunity to form a consensus on a new strategic concept. Whether the current opportunity will be realized is open to question. In the first place, the evolution of the initial ideas into a comprehensive, coherent, and agreed-upon concept of what the Navy’s role and mission will be well into the 21st century requires time. For example, it took nearly three years for Captain Edward M. Day’s 1955 paper, “Basis for Long Range Force Planning,” to mature into the widely distributed document “The Navy of the 1970 Era,” a statement which reflected a consensus of the naval high command and promised to provide not only the context by which policy discussions would be framed, but also the content for indoctrination of the Navy’s junior officers.[4]
A second prerequisite for the successful long-term reinnovation of a naval strategic planning process is adequate support within the naval high command against the twin temptations either of assigning the most talented officers only to the solution of immediate crises or of transforming the Long Range Planning Group into the CNO’s “fire brigade.” Organizationally, the General Board had the independence to separate itself, if it so wished, from the day-to-day crises in order to focus on the “big picture.” Furthermore, the members of the General
Board typically were senior enough that the opinions they rendered could not adversely affect their promotion opportunities, opportunities which were often nil because the assignment to the General Board frequently was a “twilight cruise.”
Perhaps the most critical factor, from the perspective of the Navy’s potential strategists, is the existence of proper incentives for the best and the brightest officers to devote their time and effort to a study of strategy. Because of the unified structure of the Department of Defense and the requirement that naval strategy be firmly integrated into national strategy, the naval officer-strategist will have to broaden his perspectives beyond those which can be obtained by duty assignments within the service. But does the road to flag rank really involve such alien experience? Or, like the successful civilian politician, is the aspiring naval bureaucrat rewarded for tending to and learning the intricacies of “domestic politics,” and not for becoming expert in “foreign relations”?
A further problem is symbolized by the evolution of the OpNav staff. Not only does a naval strategist require inter-service experience, but he also needs intra-service, cross-community practical knowledge. But it appears that the trend in the Navy is for greater specialization. In 1946, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the Chief of Naval Operations, opposed the creation of a Deputy CNO (Sub-Surface Warfare), which would parallel the billet of Deputy CNO (Air), as an undesirable act which would factionalize the Navy. He argued that the integration of the submariners with the rest of the officer corps, particularly at the headquarters level, provided much needed intellectual cross-fertilization. Nimitz also hoped that the naval aviators would become well enough integrated with other officers that the Deputy CNO (Air) billet could be disestablished and OpNav could be restored to a functionally organized staff.[5][6] [7] [8] [9] * * * 14 [10] This hope was not fulfilled and now we find that each of the “three unions,” as former CNO Elmo Zumwalt described the communities of aviators, submariners, and surface sailors,[11] is represented in OpNav by its own vice admiral at the DCNO level. Certainly, this top-level reinforcement of differentiation by combat vehicle within the unrestricted line officer corps does decrease the probability of the intellectual cross-fertilization necessary to the compleat naval strategists.
Of course, it is possible that this plea that the Navy reform itself is pointless. The defense budget is controlled through the Planning Programming and Budgeting System (PPBS), Defense System Acquisition Review Council (DSARC), and other management techniques by the Department of Defense. The closest uniformed officers get to the strategic debate is in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The services are left with more or less administrative details and the responsibility to keep the equipment operating.
Since officer fitness reports and, thus, naval promotions are controlled by neither DoD nor the JCS, is it any wonder that emphasis has been placed on engineering, which, after all, is relevant to those day-to-day tasks which remain within the purview of the career naval officer?
To properly assess the issue, naval officers should ponder the following question: If you were to advise a young man who wished to grow up to maneuver armies, to direct the movements of fleets and aircraft, and to hold the awesome responsibility for advising the President on the use of the most powerful weapons, would you recommend that he seek appointment to a service academy and seek the highest military and naval ranks? Or would you advise him to attend a prestigious university, to study national security policy, to fill in his resume with service in a “think tank” or on a congressional staff and with a political appointment in the Department of Defense, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, perhaps the State Department or the CIA, and then to seek appointment to the staff of the National Security Council?
§A former unrestricted line officer and an occasional contributor to the Proceedings, Dr. Bruins received his doctoral degree in political science from Columbia University in the autumn of 1981. His dissertation is entitled U. S. Naval Bombardment Missiles, 1940-1958: A Study of the a Weapons Innovation Process. He is now a mem
ber of the faculty of Occidental College in Los Angeles.
"The phrase “Corps of Naval Strategists" was coined by Dr. Thomas C. Hone of Delex Systems in Arlington. Virginia.
"Rear Admiral Julius A. Furer, USNfRet.), Administration of the Navy Department in World War II (Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1959), pp. 234-236, 400, 480-483.
"Love, The Chiefs of Nava! Operations, p. xxi.
[4]CNO confidential letter of 13 January 1958, subject: "The Navy of the 1970 Era." GMD Records.
'"The Education of a Warrior," Proceedings. January 1981, p. 45. "Hayward, Proceedings, April 1981. pp. 21-23; Lacouture, Proceedings, June 1981, pp. 77-78.
'“Strategy As a Science,” World Politics. July 1949. pp. 467-488.
'David A. Rosenberg. “Arleigh Albert Burke,” in The Chiefs of Nava! Operations, edited by Robert W. Love, Jr. (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1980), pp. 270-271.
'See Herbert York, The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1976), pp. 150-159. '’OPNAV Conference Report, DCNO AIR Planning Group, 21 November 1949. Records of DCNO(Air), Operational Archives, Naval Historical Center, Washington Navy Yard.
[6]OP-5i secret memo to OP-03D. 15 January 1954; OP-51 secret memo to OP-03D, !2February 1954. Records of OpNav's Guided Missiles Division: National Records Center, Suitland, Maryland. (GMD Records). “Rosenberg, "Historical Perspectives in Long Range Planning in the Navy, Part I: The Planning Process in Overview, 1900-1978” (a draft study for the Naval Research Advisory Committee, May 1979).
"See Commander Gordon G. Riggle, USN, “Looking to the Long Run,”
Proceedings, September 1980, pp. 60-65.
[9]Harvey M. Sapolsky, The Polaris System Development: Bureaucratic and Programmatic Success in Government (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 237.
L’CNO memo to SecNav of 15 May 1946. Records of Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. Record Group 80, National Archives.
[11]“High-Low," Proceedings, April 1976, p. 48.