‘In a Far More Thorough Manner'

Professionalization is the process of converting a craft or occupation into a higher level of activity through the use of education and training to establish standards and to raise the general level of activity. Navies have been involved in improving their standards of professionalization for several centuries. Samuel Pepys’s great contribution in formulating the Royal Proclamation that instituted the first formal qualifying examination for Britain’s naval lieutenants in 1677, with his description of the basic requirements for the then-lowest rung of commissioned officers, specifying minimum sea time and essential experience, certainly stands as a seamark in the history of the development of naval professionalization, as does the establishment of the U.S. Naval Academy, nearly 170 years later, in 1845.

Between these two dates, the foundations of naval professionalization were well established during the age of sail and involved some of the fundamental and enduring concepts of how a naval officer should conduct himself as an individual professional. Complementing these personal professional standards were equally important standards and procedures that developed for warfighting doctrine, methods of command and control, financial management, and bureaucratic structure, which have evolved over time. Together, these are a central element of professionalization.

In the mid-19th century, the United States had one of the world’s smaller navies. Nevertheless, the rise and application of new naval technologies already was apparent in the Civil War, and although the U.S. Navy did not permanently adopt all the new technological innovations the Navy itself used during that war, it was clear at the time that technological innovation was fundamentally changing the face of the world’s major navies. No longer were navies exemplified by the age-old formula of wind, wood, iron guns, and muscle. Progressive cycles of rapidly changing technological innovation brought iron, steam, paddlewheels, steel, propellers, and electricity.

This series of progressively more complex technological changes in the world’s major navies was a fundamental stimulus that led some in uniform to begin to think about the nature and character of their profession and to ask broad questions about what new kinds of knowledge were needed, what different kinds of education and training most appropriately prepared men for the naval profession, and what revisions of administrative and command structures were needed in this new technological environment. In the U.S. Navy, this kind of very broad thinking was neither led nor managed nor even encouraged by the Navy Department. What initially developed was a series of scattered individual initiatives that dealt with various specific aspects of professionalization that eventually began to merge into a holistic appreciation of the naval profession.

In addition to the general growth of technological applications within navies, there were two conflicts that had an enormous impact on U.S. naval thinking at the end of the 19th century. The first was the U.S. Navy’s own experience during the Civil War between 1861 and 1865. The second was the perceived success the Prussian general staff achieved during the series of brief wars that led to Germany’s unification: the Second Schleswig War with Denmark in 1864, the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, and the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-71.

In the late 19th century, the Civil War was the most recent major war U.S. naval officers actually had experienced, and it was one of the very first of the modern naval wars that involved improved naval gunnery and armored ships with steam propulsion. This experience, paralleled by reports of the technical advances that were rapidly taking place in the world’s major navies (particularly the Royal Navy and the French Navy), led to demands within the U.S. naval officer corps for more technical knowledge, particularly in the area of steam engineering, ship construction, and weapons. With these areas of development in their infancy, Congress and the Navy Department took some steps toward modernization; but with both fiscal and political constraints, they initially were satisfied in maintaining the Navy with sailing ships designed for the protection of trade and single ships on foreign stations to protect U.S. interests abroad. In 1864, even while the Civil War still was in progress, Congress authorized the Naval Academy to start a two-year course for educating assistant engineers, who would be selected by competitive examination among 18- to 22-year-old men with some previous experience in this area. The course was taught intermittently from 1866.²

Beyond steam engineering, the main focus for professional education toward modernization centered on the new technologies surrounding the torpedo. With the establishment of the Naval Torpedo Station on Goat Island in Narragansett Bay in 1869, this single weapon dominated much professional naval thinking, leading to a wide influence in terms of ship construction and design, as well as tactical thinking.

Thus, the initial—and dominant—reaction in naval professionalization was toward education and training in specific technological applications. In this, the tendency was to follow the technological imperative that incremental improvements in these technologies presented. The most famous resulting conundrum involved the USS Wampanoag: in 1869, she proved to be the fastest steamship afloat, yet she was condemned and placed out of service by a board of officers for being far too advanced a warship to build in peacetime.³

The feeling there was something bigger and more important than technology to consider motivated a largely different group of officers from those who led technological innovation. The first important step in this direction was taken by a group of 15 naval officers who met at the Naval Academy in 1873 to establish the U.S. Naval Institute. In its original conception, it was an outgrowth of a well-established approach to adult education in the United States called “the lyceum system.” In this case, however, it became a professional forum for discussion about the future of the naval service. The early meetings were characterized by a member reading a paper on a subject of naval interest—the very first being a discussion of the Battle of Lepanto—and those in attendance commenting on it, much in the fashion the Royal United Services Institution had been using in London for nearly 40 years. From such meetings, the Institute very quickly was able to begin publishing its papers, annually at first, and on a more regular basis by 1879-80. Its Proceedings soon became a real professional journal.⁴

One of the things almost entirely lacking in the U.S. Navy of this period was a body of specialized material that could be identified as professional literature. In 1861, young Lieutenant Stephen B. Luce had told the Commandant of Midshipmen at the Academy, “Compared to the Army with their wealth of professional literature, we may be likened to the nomadic tribes of the East who are content with the vague traditions of the past.”⁵ As U.S. military and naval officers watched what was going on in Europe in the late 1860s and early 1870s, it is not surprising they were deeply impressed with the events that led to German unification and, particularly, with the success of the Prussian Army’s general staff. The Americans who admired it and wanted to adapt it to U.S. institutions were favorably impressed with what they took to be a German system that provided progressive professional military education, established shared common professional understanding, created effective central planning, and was able to provide the professionally informed command authority to coordinate powerful agencies and forge them into effective, mutually supporting warfighting institutions. The vision that U.S. proponents developed was, to a degree, an idealized view, and even a misunderstanding, that failed to appreciate the flaws in the German Army’s system that became obvious in later wars: a disconnect between operational effectiveness and strategic understanding, excessive elitism, and counterproductive militarism.⁶

Nevertheless, the U.S. Army’s leading proponent of German ideas, Colonel Emory Upton, had a direct influence on the U.S. Navy. The Commanding General of the Army, William Tecumseh Sherman, had sent Upton on a two-year world tour in 1875 to study world military trends. He came home and took command of the Artillery School at Fort Monroe, Virginia, and began to formulate ideas and develop a plan to reform the U.S. Army along the lines of what he had learned about German Army staff methods. Shortly after Upton’s return to Norfolk in 1877, he met the commanding officer of the USS Hartford, Captain Luce. These two shared a common way of thinking and each, in his own way, was responsible for laying the intellectual foundations for professionalism within his separate service.

Luce was involved in a wide variety of activities aimed at improving the level of professionalization of maritime affairs. As early as 1866, he had proposed the establishment of civilian nautical colleges that could provide seamen for both the Navy and the merchant marine. By 1875, this had developed into a plan with the Education Department of the City of New York to provide the USS St. Mary’s as a training ship in New York (a duty the ship carried out until 1908), thereby creating the foundation for what today is known as the State University of New York Maritime College at Fort Schuyler.

By an extension of the Land Grant Act that established a number of the nation’s great midwestern universities, Luce was closely involved in the movement that went to establish maritime colleges in several states, and he even wrote textbooks for them, as well as for the Navy. From 1877 to 1883, Luce was involved in a variety of initiatives with naval training vessels. Eventually transferred ashore at the Naval Station at Newport, Rhode Island, these activities grew to become what is today the Navy’s Recruit Training Command, now located in California, Florida, and Illinois.

Out of the educational and training reforms that were begun by individual initiatives for entry-level officers and seamen came other demands for wider approaches to professionalism in the realm of naval policy making. Not surprisingly, these demands began with calls for new technology and were, at first, narrowly focused along those lines.

Congress had neither the incentive nor the interest in authorizing the building of a modernized Navy in the late 1860s and 1870s, but naval officers saw the need to observe what was going on in other parts of the world to prepare for the day when they could build new ships. Technical information about weapons, ship-design techniques, materials for construction, and propulsion methods all were matters of great interest. Various bureaus and commands sent investigating teams abroad in this period. Chief Engineer James King of the Bureau of Steam Engineering traveled four times to Europe to monitor progress with compound steam engines. Soon, these investigations spread into other areas: naval instructor James Soley of the Naval Academy surveyed European naval education in 1878-79; Lieutenant Commander Dennis Mullan was sent to observe the Latin American War in the Pacific in 1879-81; and Lieutenant Commander Caspar Goodrich observed the British bombardment of Alexandria in 1882.

At about the same time, Lieutenant Theodorus B. M. Mason took an extended leave of absence from active duty in 1877-79 and went to Europe on his own, systematically gathering information on the latest trends in naval science. On his return to active duty, Mason began to advocate for an office in the Navy Department that specialized in obtaining foreign information. Acting on his recommendations, Secretary of the Navy William H. Hunt established the Office of Naval Intelligence in March 1882 and made Mason the Navy’s first Chief Intelligence Officer, the precursor of the modem Director of Naval Intelligence. This new agency was partnered with the Navy Department Library, where intelligence specialists could be supplied with the current professional naval literature from around the world and also have ready access to the archives of Navy Department offices.⁷

Closely associated with the initiative to obtain and use current information about worldwide naval affairs more effectively was the realization there was a need to know and analyze the U.S. Navy’s own experiences. Little was done to promote this idea until Congress was moved in July 1884 to authorize the publication of the Navy’s operational records from the Civil War. The eventual result was the monumental 30-volume series, The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, which continues to be used today as the preeminent, permanent historical record of the naval aspects of war. As the Secretary of the Navy told Congress in 1888, in support of that project, “The civil war is not only the first war in which naval operations on a great scale have been conducted since the introduction of steam, but it is the only war in which those modern appliances have been used which revolutionized the art of naval warfare.”⁸

With this congressional authorization as its central focus, the Superintendent of the newly created Office of Naval Records and Library, Professor James Soley, the former head of the Naval Academy’s Department of English Studies, History, and Law, used the opportunity to begin gathering the Navy’s scattered official records, and by doing so established the direct forerunner of today’s Naval Historical Center.

One of the most unusual individuals in the U.S Navy’s corps of instructors, Soley was a product of the Roxbury Latin School in Boston and Harvard, before he entered naval service. Employed at Annapolis as a uniformed instructor and then as a civilian, he initiated the first courses in naval history at the Academy before heading the tripledecked Department of English, History, and Law. Soley was unusual for his day as a master and practitioner of them all. The author of a number of well-received books, he was among the early pioneer figures in developing naval history for the Navy.

In October 1884, Secretary of the Navy William E. Chandler formally approved the recommendations of Commodore Luce to establish the Naval War College as a place of original research and postgraduate professional naval education:

A place where our officers will not only he encouraged but required to study their profession proper— war—in a far more thorough manner than has ever heretofore been attempted, and to bring to the investigation of the various problems of modern naval warfare the scientific methods adopted in other professions.⁹

In Luce’s thinking, the term “scientific methods” did not mean burgeoning developments of technology and science that were altering the face of the naval service. Instead, he was referring to a wider rational and systematic approach to understanding the highest levels of the profession: the nature and character of war and statesmanship involved in the conduct of war, the formulation of peace, and the prevention of conflict. Intimately tied to that broad level of understanding was the need for naval officers to understand the context, purposes, uses, roles, and limitations of naval force. By defining the role of the Naval War College in this way, Luce was suggesting that all the focus on technological change and transformation was a focus on the means of war and not on the central issue of war itself. Luce believed it is the phenomenon of war at sea in human experience—past, present, and future—that defines the naval profession, not merely the changing means of fighting such wars.¹⁰

In searching to place the naval profession and its occupational realm in perspective and context, Luce wanted naval officers who were fully competent in the changing means and innovative new methods of war, to see through the wider lenses that such fields as history, political science, economics, international relations, and law provided. Luce’s approach brought together four interconnected approaches to form a new basis for a professional understanding of navies. To begin this process, he turned to the more advanced situation in the Army and the contributions of both German and French military thinkers. First, he asked an Army officer to teach the military approach to naval officers. For this, he chose Tasker Bliss, who later became the first president of the Army War College and eventually the Army’s Chief of Staff during World War I. To provide the broad naval element, he chose Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan to examine the history of navies and to make a new contribution to thought by linking naval operations to the broad strands of foreign policy in a way that Luce hoped would “do for naval science what Jomini did for military science.”¹¹

To the comparison of armies and navies, Luce added two more elements. One of these was international law. To teach this subject, Luce turned to the versatile Soley, who became not only the Naval War College’s first faculty member in this discipline, but also the college’s first civilian professor. Finally, to bring all these elements together, Luce worked with a volunteer staff member, Lieutenant William McCarty Little, to adapt for naval use the German Army’s concept of kriegspiel or war gaming. Through this newly developing analytical tool, naval officers could envisage how new applications of technology could actually operate, while linking these applications to likely naval situations in the context of international affairs and to the means and practice of executing naval command and control.

As the highest level of professional military education for the naval service, the Naval War College attracted students who would become the brightest and most innovative thinkers and leaders the naval services possessed at the dawn of the 20th century. They included young officers whose names later would become well known, such as Henry Taylor, Bradley Fiske, William Sims, and William Veazie Pratt of the Navy; Earl Ellis of the Marine Corps; and Ellsworth Bertholf of the Coast Guard.

In the first 30 years of its existence, the Naval War College created a body of like-minded professionals who began to see the Navy in terms of its larger context and lead the Navy toward a higher level of professionalization in its operations and command structure. Yet, there was a major roadblock in carrying through this development and the vision Luce had for the contributions of advanced professional military education to the naval services. The problem was the knotty question of how to frame the standards for a naval career in terms of what criteria were used to determine professional advancement, how the Navy selected its leaders, and who got to the top and who did not. In short, the fundamental problem was how to define the profession of a naval officer in the context of the new technological environment for navies.¹²

The issue primarily was debated in the context of the bitter and deep feud between engineers, who were technological experts, and line officers, who were trained in the traditional methods of seamanship and navigation. Over several decades, this conflict reached such proportions that it created serious issues of discipline on ships at sea and internal political conflict ashore that undermined authority. In the end, the Navy was unable to resolve the professional issues by itself, and it was necessary for Congress to redefine completely the naval officer personnel system and, with it, provide a new definition of the naval officers’ profession.¹³ In the 1890s, serious effort was devoted to resolve these matters with the work of several boards, the investigations of congressional subcommittees, and innumerable proposals. The most far-reaching and sweeping change occurred when Congress passed the Naval Personnel Act of 3 March 1899 that amalgamated the engineering corps with the line, established a voluntary retirement system, and created a board to select officers for involuntary retirement based on their performance.

In the next decade and a half, these reforms were continued and refined. In 1911, Secretary of the Navy George Meyer proposed a new general approach when he noted that all naval officers should be line officers, but “it is not the intent that each officer should take up all specialties, but that each officer should take up at least one specialty.”¹⁴ Above all, the fundamental aim was to produce the sea officers best capable of commanding the country’s ships and fleets.

Further acts of Congress increased the numbers of those authorized as midshipmen and junior officers in 1903, and adjusted pay for sea and shore duty and for comparability with the Army’s pay scales in 1906 and 1908. Under the administration of Josephus Daniels as Secretary of the Navy, Congress established the permanent grades of admiral and vice admiral in 1915 and passed a keystone piece of professional legislation in the Line Personnel Act of 1916. This act established, for the first time in the U.S. Navy, a comprehensive system of selecting officers for promotion to the grades of commander and above based on merit, created lengths of sea service time for promotion, specified the age in grade for retirement, created systems of graduated retirement pay based on longevity, distributed officers in different grades on the basis ratios for each grade, and established the Naval Reserve.

As the Navy’s officer personnel problems were gradually alleviated, the series of reforms that was growing out of the Navy’s attention to advanced professional education could take place more effectively. For example, the Naval Personnel Act of 1899 facilitated the further development of graduate education in established technical and scientific disciplines. In the first decade of the 20th century, the Navy was faced with the question of whether it was best to rely on the nation’s civilian universities or to provide for its own technical and scientific education. In 1909, the issue was resolved by the establishment of a graduate School of Marine Engineering at Annapolis, forerunner of the Naval Postgraduate School, and also by supplementing the Postgraduate School’s resident technical instruction with the use of selected civilian university programs to stimulate the Navy’s technological development.

Meanwhile, the focus on applied research and advanced professional education at the Naval War College had begun to bear fruit in several areas. The pioneering work done in naval history contributed to the wider understanding of the Navy’s role and, with it, an increase in public support for the Navy, while actual historical experience informed professional naval thought on a wide range of subjects. The college’s focus on international law produced in 1900 the world’s first Code of the Law of Naval Warfare, and that document quickly became the basis for international conferences and further professional standards for the 20th century.

The early attention to the approaches used by the German general staff had multiple professional effects for the U.S. Navy. The combined use of the approach called “the estimate of the situation” and war gaming was a key element in the development of the Navy’s first operational contingency plans used for the Spanish-American War and then the Color Plans (War Plan Orange against Japan, War Plan Black against Germany, and others) that became famous in the 20th century. This aspect of professionalization led to further thinking about the needs of a commander in exercising command at sea. Through this, Naval War College graduates applied their classroom thinking to create the first afloat staff for an operational commander as Captain William Sims did in his Atlantic Destroyer Flotilla in 1913; promoting the first concept for the U.S. Navy’s operational doctrine as Dudley Knox did in a Proceedings article in 1915; and implementing the U.S. Navy’s first major staff for a commander-in-chief that Admiral Sims created in London in 1917-19.

The most difficult and complicated process of all was the Naval War College’s effort to put in place a professional advisor to the Secretary of the Navy. The pressure from the uniformed members of the Navy to implement this change was met by strong opposition from Congress, many of whose members saw it as an erosion of civilian control. The creation of the Navy’s General Board under Admiral of the Navy George Dewey in 1900 was the first successful step in this process of professionalization, and it was followed in 1909 with the establishment of a group of four coequal rear admirals, who were responsible under the Secretary of the Navy for their respective areas: operations, materiel, personnel, and inspections. Finally, in 1915, Congress agreed to create the Chief of Naval Operations as the service chief, with a staff to support his work, and paralleled this with the creation of the permanent grades of admiral and vice admiral, all steps Congress had long resisted, but which the increasing threat of war now made reasonable to adopt.

The professionalization of the naval services that came to fruition at the dawn of the 20th century was the result of a long and drawn out process that lasted for half a century. Beginning with the uncoordinated initiatives of “young Turks” who had been stimulated by the applications of new technology to criticize the establishment, professionalization took place as innovative ideas were slowly institutionalized and widened as their progenitors in two successive generations of naval officers rose in rank, position, and authority. The fundamental change that new technology brought to the Navy was the catalyst for a reevaluation of the nature of the naval profession. Although it was clear the acquisition of technological knowledge and practice was essential to a naval professional, it was an incomplete basis on which to ground mastery of the naval profession.