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The U.S. Navy is abdicating its responsibilities in the fields of tactics and technology and no good will come of it. Tactical development and evaluation should be the natural avocation of naval officers. The Navy laboratories should serve as technical consciences of the Navy and the creative source of much research and development. These were the traditional policies that gave the Navy the circular formation, carrier strike warfare, sonar, and the Sidewinder. Unfortunately, in-house creative intellectual initiative in both tactics and technology is being surrendered. If the trend continues, naval tactics and technology will be almost completely conceived and developed by civilian contractors.
Tactics and technology are linked together in an iterative process central to military science. However, since the demise of the Navy’s in-house control and participation in each area differs, they will be considered separately.
Thoughtful commentary, original concepts, and lively controversy appearing in the pages of the Proceedings are visible indications that naval officers are still appropriately interested in naval tactics. Coupled with this interest and background of professional expertise is a high-level realization of the importance of tactical development and evaluation. Funding for such programs, if not lavish, is substantial. The problem is not in the current status of tactical development but in who performs it. Most tactical development tasks are being performed by civilian contractors. The relatively few naval officers in the field function primarily as administrators, not as tacticians.
In spite of other important competing requirements for officer manpower, it is hard to conceive of a more important task than fashioning the tactics and doctrine that will guide the composition and employment of our naval forces. An indication of the prevailing and misguided lack of appreciation of the naval officer as a tactician is reflected by the roster of flag and general officers in this year’s Naval Review issue of the Proceedings. Very few of these outstanding, if rather numerous, naval leaders probably made their reputations as sound and innovative tacticians. There are no Evan Paul Aurands in the current group, and they are likely to be as rare in the future.
Admittedly, some outstanding tactical development and evaluation is being done by contractors and the Center for Naval Analyses, and the disparaging connotations of “beltway bandit” and “think tank” are largely unwarranted. Contractor tactical analysts tend to be an effective mix of young mathematicians and retired naval officers. Ironically, officers with a bent for tactics often are able to more directly influence naval tactics as contractors after their retirement. Active duty officers are more typically engulfed in PEBs, retention, inspections, and other commitments.
Disadvantages of the contractors’ preemption of tactical development are not based on the quality of their work. It is generally good, although expensive. The specific problem is that contractors inevitably influence the direction of tactical development by selecting the areas of tactical concern to conform to their organizations’ expertise. Clever marketing often distorts the priority of requirements. And, naval officers are not actively participating in a vital part of their military profession and cultivating a basic understanding of naval warfare.
One encouraging reversal of this dismal trend has been the outstanding tactical development work done by student officers in the Center for Advanced Research at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. The resurgence in intellectual naval professionalism being realized there should be extended to the entire naval tactical development and evaluation establishment. It is patently wrong and unnecessary for the U.S. Navy to contract civilians to do most of its thinking on naval tactics, a matter at the very heart of the naval profession.
A similarly unfortunate and even more debilitating situation exists in the Navy laboratory community.
Until a few years ago, Navy laboratories routinely conceptualized, designed, fabricated, and evaluated prototype systems. They were highly productive organizations of scientists, engineers, technicians, artisans, and support people who produced concepts, workable hardware, and data. Sometime during the Nixon years things began to unravel. Emphasis began to shift from actual research and development to the monitoring of contracts for research and development let by the Naval Material Command to civilian contractors. Instead of being centers of thinking, the labs were increasingly charged with observing the thinking of people outside the Navy community.
Accompanying this not-very-subtle change in direction has been a sharp decline in technical expertise and morale within the Navy laboratories, no appreciable change in costs, and an increase in the total cost of bringing an idea to fruition as a working naval system.
Navy laboratories should serve as the technical consciences of the Navy and have strong ombudsman ties to the operating forces. There is a danger that as more actual research and development is diverted from the Navy laboratories they will lose the necessary expertise and experience to perform even a contract-monitoring function and become useless appendages of Naval Material and private industry-
Another loss is the diminution of creative ideas initiated in Navy labors' tories. In spite of lip service to “new initiatives,” ideas are not the business of the new contract managers who have replaced the old technical leaders, and some tend to react to new
■deas the same way a vampire reacts to a silver cross. Navy laboratories had, and retain to a diminished but significant extent, a remarkably efficient capability of having an idea for a sys- or technique that met a naval requirement and developing it through the workable prototype stage. They were not in competition with industry but uniquely assisted industry because °f their strong position of impartial technical competence gained through hands-on experience. The Navy laboratories are Navy assets that must not be allowed to rust by wasting their Primary research and development
capabilities.
There is no shortage of intelligent, motivated naval officers and Navy laboratory employees who are capable of doing the most important part of this work within the Navy, where it belongs. It is a mistake for the Navy to Pay outsiders to do most of its tactical and technological thinking. Let's do more of our own thinking.
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By Regis A. Courtemanche
This is the story of the operation of the North American and West Indian Station during the years 1860-1864, and of the man whose firm, tactful leadership enabled Great Britain to maintain a policy of neutrality in the American Civil War. The station, one of eight foreign naval bases maintained by Britain in the nineteenth century, was commanded by Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Milne. Milne found himself in the precarious diplomatic and physically dangerous position of assuming responsibility for a sea area that touched both Northern and Southern states, the Atlantic and Gulf coasts along which the Union had declared a blockade.
The major crisis of Milne’s tenure on the station was the Trent affair. This incident, in which two Confederate officials were forcibly removed from a British mail steamer by a Union warship, produced the most serious rift in Anglo-American relations since the War of 1812. The affair intensified anti-Union sentiment among the British, and was resolved only through the cool-headed discretion of Milne and other British and American officials.
The account of Milne’s tenure provides a vivid and detailed picture of the day-to-day operation of the North American and West Indian Station, and its procedures and problems. This was a period of rapid and far-reaching change in naval weapons, ships, and strategy—changes which eventually revolutionized naval warfare.
A Naval Institute Press Book
1977. 224 pages. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index.
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