The Chief of the Bureau of Navigation, the General Board, the Secretary of the Navy and President Roosevelt all call attention to a serious condition that confronts the navy. Congress as a body has had its attention called to this condition in a mild way on several occasions but it is doubtful if the mass of the people are aware of its existence. The condition referred to is the growing shortage of officers and men to man the ships.
Since the Spanish War, the people have appreciated the navy and have been in favor of building it up to a point commensurate with our standing and influence as a nation. It is a rare occurrence to meet and talk with an educated man who does not express opinions of this general tenor. It is curious then that so little has been done to strengthen the personnel, which is so admittedly weak.
A thing that everybody wants is apt to become a fact in course of time but its accomplishment may be delayed through a failure to take account of some detail that is not plainly in sight but which may be nevertheless essential. Such is the relation of personnel to the navy. When people think of the navy, the prominent idea is not the officers and men but the ships, in other words the term navy connotes ships. We say the British navy consists of so many battleships, so many cruisers, so many gunboats, so many torpedo boats. Even well informed people would have to go and look up authorities if asked how many officers and men there are in the British navy.
With the army it is totally different. There the unit is the man. For instance, the United States Army at war strength consists of say 100,000 men. In this contrast, I believe lies the whole difficulty. It is the reason the people do not know the personnel is short and it is the reason nothing has been done to remedy the difficulty.
Now there is no trouble about ships. Sometimes through disagreements in Congress the building program falls through but in such cases it is apt to be made up at the next session. The people want a navy, they want ships, the shipbuilders want ships and it must not be forgotten that to the influence of this last class more than to any other is due our present strength in ships. Without reflecting at all on Congress, one can easily understand that the influence of a number of large shipbuilders will make itself felt in keeping before Congress the necessity of a strong navy. But the officers and men in the navy are nobody's constituents. Here is another reason why the personnel receives no attention.
In casting about for a plan to keep the trained personnel abreast of the completed materiel, it seems evident that there must be some natural relation between the ships and the men to man them or what is the same thing a ratio of men to tons of ship. Now as everybody thinks of the navy as composed of
ships and as the first action looking to an increase in naval strength is the authorization of ships, and as the shipbuilders are a powerful influence in keeping the necessity for ships always before the public, why not hitch personnel automatically to materiel, at a fixed ratio of so many men to every 1000 tons of ship? In other words the strength of the navy would be what Congress should authorize in ships, the personnel would have no fixed limits but would be so many officers and men to every 1000 tons of authorized shipping. The whole matter would be thus always in the hands of Congress but it would not be necessary each year to struggle to have Congress authorize the additional officers and men needed for the additional ships. The authorization of the ships would carry with it automatically an authorization of the men to man them. The time to build the ships would be available for recruiting and training the men.
Now to go a little more, though not fully, into detail, at this moment there are completed and building, according to the Navy List, July 1901, 749,994 tons of shipping or in round numbers 750,000 tons. The Chief of the Bureau of Navigation states in his annual report that there will be needed 1026 additional line officers by the time these vessels are all finished, which with the number on the list makes 2068, say 2000 in round numbers or 2 2/3 officers per 1000 tons of shipping. He recommends an increase of 3000 men for the current year or a total of 28,000 men and boys. As there will be in the neighborhood of 500,000 tons of shipping completed by the end of the year, the ratio may be taken as 56 men per 1000 tons. This estimate is exceedingly low but it may be assumed to illustrate
the working of the scheme.
To find the ratios of the various grades of officers, a list may be assumed in accordance with the terms of a bill already introduced for the increase of the personnel, that is 4 Vice Admirals, 14 Rear Admirals, 350 Lieutenants, 600 Lieutenants, Junior Grade, and Ensigns, and the remaining grades as at present. Leaving out the Admiral, the percentages in the other grades would be as follows:
Vice Admiral ………………………………………………………………………0.3
Rear Admiral ………………………………………………………………………1.1
Captain ……………………………………………………………………………….5.5
Commander ……………………………………………………………………….8.7
Lieutenant Commander …………………………………………………..13.0
Lieutenant ………………………………………………………………………..26.3
Lieutenant, Junior Grade and Ensign……………………………...45.1
100.0
The staff corps could be similarly worked out. Then all that would be needed would be an act of Congress ordaining that at the beginning of each fiscal year, July 1, the finished and authorized shipping should be ascertained and the personnel for the ensuing year should bear a relation to the total tons as expressed in the foregoing figures. There would be some little thought required to work out all the details. For instance, the strength of personnel as above determined could hold for the whole of the fiscal year and would contemplate promotions through the year to fill vacancies by casualty and retirement, as at present. If in any year the tonnage should fall off, the quotas could mark time at their then strength, for it is not assumed that the navy is going to be permanently decreased at any time in the near future.
As to the source from which the new material is to be obtained, no trouble will be experienced in the higher officers. Our youngest commanders are now 51 years of age. In the British service if a man is not promoted to commander before he is 36 or 38 he feels that he has no chance of ever flying his flag. We can without doubt make promotions as needed for some time to come right down to the junior grades but then comes the difficulty. The training of a naval officer is very technical and the four years course at the Naval Academy is entirely needful in fitting the young man for a commission. If we are to continue our building program, about which there can be no doubt, it will be necessary to increase tremendously the output of midshipmen from the Naval Academy. There are 120 vacancies now at the foot of the ensign's list and under the present system the number is nearly stationary. Each member of Congress is now allowed one appointment every four years. He should begin at once to make one every three years and later one every two years and even one every year if necessary. Under the present law of one every four years and with the proposed age of admission of 15 to 18 years, a boy who is just under 15 when a vacancy in his district is filled will be over 18 when the next vacancy occurs. In other words 25 per cent of all the boys in the district will be ineligible to appointments in the natural course of events. Each Senator could well have the same prerogative as Congressmen and the number allowed by the President could be increased from the present 22 a year to four times that number. But it is imperative that a start should be made at once. To bring up the personnel to the requisite numbers in the next five years, there would have to be about 250 graduates per year or more than half the strength of the present cadet battalion. Assuming that the normal rate of appointment is one from each district every two years, Congress could grant to the Secretary authority temporarily to assign extra appointments to all the districts in equal quotas within the limits that the Naval Academy could accommodate, until the vacancies at the foot of the Navy List should be filled, after which such authority would lapse.
With regard to the enlisted men, a whole book could be written but the following is a brief synopsis of the main requirements in that regard. In the first place the seafaring population is nothing like sufficient properly to recruit the navy. Any boy should be accepted for training as an apprentice without limit of numbers, at least if he is up to the mental, moral and physical standard now required. But that will not keep the quotas full. Considerable effort has been made lately to enlist desirable landsmen from interior parts of the country. Here is an unfailing source. It will be necessary to go among the people with recruiting parties, a band wagon if necessary, small craft and torpedo boats up the navigable rivers in other words to make a very persistent effort by every legitimate means to obtain desirable men for this most commendable purpose.
As to the training of these men, there are two general methods. One is to maintain a special training service for landsmen, passing the men through it as rapidly as possible; the other is to train them in the regular service. Both methods have their advocates. The pros and cons are in brief as follows:
For training in special ships the limit of numbers possible to train is very soon reached. If the ships are suited to the requirements for training, they are needed for general service. The officers and men employed in training are also needed for general service. Hence the possibilities are very limited. On the other hand if every possible serviceable ship is placed in regular commission, the recruits can be distributed through the whole service and the trained officers and men will soon leaven the mass. There is no limit to the capabilities of this system, except the limit of ships, which are now in excess. The new recruits would naturally be held in barracks or receiving ships until uniformed and taught to take care of themselves. Thus all the ships would become training ships, which they are now to a great extent and the new men would learn their duties side by side with the old, which is the method in nearly every walk in life. An ever present drawback would also be overcome, the irksomeness mature men feel when subject to the restraints of an admitted training system. The above refers only to landsmen for training and not to the very fine body of youthful apprentices who are more receptive and flexible and reflect great credit on a system that has been in effect for many years. There is one branch in their vocation landsmen will not find in battleships, and that is the seamanship of sails. And there are many duties in a battleship which are the better done for knowledge of this very sort. The solution lies in attaching to our squadron of drill and evolution that is the North Atlantic Squadron, one or two purely sailing ships with crews made up from time to time from the battleships. But there should be no training as such aboard these sailing ships. The men would simply pick up from actual practice knowledge of the duties needful to the handling of the ships.
We naval officers as a class can each do a little towards advancing the good of the service by judicious missionary work at times when some effect is likely to be produced. A steady and uniform pressure in the right direction must be productive of results. And we may all do just a little more than consider our immediate needs from day to day. What a contrast in our naval position of today and that of say thirteen years ago, just before the first White Squadron appeared! And it requires no stretch of imagination to predict a progress more than equal to that of the past in the next equal interval of time. The navy is bound to increase in importance and strength from day to day. That we need then is a system of growth which shall be more or less automatic in its practical working and as to the efficiency of the service as it grows, nothing more is needed than just to keep on with our drills and exercises in some common sense, matter of fact way, without too much worry about trifles and the difficulties will be found to smooth themselves out almost before we recognize that they are blocking us.