Glittering generalities, like epigrammatic utterances, quite frequently by their apt expression carry far more semblance of truth and basic fact than analysis will bear out, and, as a result, those who seldom analyze or are not interested particularly in the subject discussed, accept such utterances at their face value and thereby blind themselves and those whom they influence to the realities of the case.
Such a condition, it appears to the writer, is shown by the service's placid acceptance of essays and articles having to do with specialization. That the subject is vital to our future success in a naval way seems not to have seriously disturbed the even tenor of our thought, when in reality there is no more important subject for our earnest consideration to-day than our attitude toward specialization and the methods which should be used to accomplish our needs in that line.
The pro-specialists seem to be on the increase in the service, although they still are in the minority, and no one would seek to discourage them utterly but only to control them and guide their footsteps so as to give us the kind of specialization that will be of real use and not act merely as an augmentor of corps or class animosities and disagreements.
None of the articles which have so far appeared have attempted to describe what kind of specialist is needed for naval use, and while it is probable that each of the writers had in the back of his mind some idea of what kind of a specialist he was talking about, it is not without the bounds of possibility that such an idea was in a very vague state, which would account for a great deal of the indefiniteness and lack of instructive information in the various papers.
When the term "specialist" is used, one has in mind an individual who knows more on some one subject than the average individual who has to use the particular art in his business. In other words, it indicates a particular knowledge where the average individual has only a general knowledge. Therefore, in our service, it has been our habit to designate certain individuals from among the younger generation to take certain designated postgraduate courses to form a foundation for various specialties. These schools include courses in naval construction, electrical engineering, steam engineering, and ordnance.
The selection of young men for these various postgraduate courses, with the exception of those selected for naval construction, is rather loosely made, since the young men designated are permitted to apply for the designation, and the appointments are made from these. The average young officer, who is ordinarily bright and passingly energetic, can get sufficient recommendation from the officers with whom he is working to make a fair showing as to his fitness for appointment to the postgraduate course. Frequently, however, and quite properly, the number assigned each year to postgraduate courses is much greater than the number required to fill any particular specialist class which the service might need, so that a weeding out of the less fit is always possible: but it is questionable if much weeding out is done.
Having completed the postgraduate courses, all the graduates except those assigned to naval construction are sent to sea, and they, from then on, have recurring terms of sea and shore duty until they come to command rank, when, if they have applied and been assigned for engineering duty, they are relegated to "engineering duty on shore only" for the rest of their natural lives, unless they happen to be ordered to sea as fleet engineers. Those who are given a postgraduate course in ordnance do not have this "for shore duty only" tag applied to them, but, quite the reverse, they continue up through the ranks doing their recurring terms of sea and shore duty.
As is well known, the naval constructors do not go to sea after their appointment to the postgraduate course, except as they are called upon to go on trial trips or as attachments to the admiral's staff of the fleet.
It does not appear to the writer that such procedure can, with the wildest stretch of the imagination, be expected to produce the kind of specialists which the navy is in need of. There would appear to be two basic reasons for this: (a) The navy is approximately 75 per cent an operative and 25 per cent a building and repair problem, (b) Specialists who depend upon their work for a livelihood, and the monetary return from whose efforts fluctuates with their ability to please their clients with their work, are usually amenable to a suggestion from those who have to operate the product of their especial training; in other words, they meet the conditions imposed by their clients as far as it is possible to meet them.
Considering the first reason, due to the fact that the navy is to such a large extent an operative problem, the relegating of our specialists in construction and repair and our specialists in engineering to "shore duty only" is, to say the least, a peculiar method of maintaining specialists for our purposes. While appreciating that the construction corps of the navy seems to honestly believe that a constructor can learn little by recurring tours of sea duty, yet it is difficult to see on what they base any such belief. It is notorious that a ship turned over from the builders to the operating navy is practically never complete and is almost never completed. In other words, there is a great deal of evolution in arrangement and in equipment which goes on from day to day and the necessities for which are made evident by observation. Consider, for instance, the item of ventilation in ships. The ventilating system is designed, laid out and installed by the construction corps, and supposedly, theoretically each compartment of the vessel received its proper amount of calculation, and the amount of ventilation provided supposedly bears proper relation to such computation. That vessel is put into commission and taken to sea, and from that time on, 75 per cent of her time is spent in operation, and sea-going conditions immediately suggest changes. The ventilation as installed does not do what the calculations stated it would do. Recommendations are made for these changes, and it has been our experience, and it is not believed that the constructors themselves will question this, that the acceptance of such recommendations has in most cases been slow, and in many very notable cases the recommendations have not been accepted at all.
The same thing is true of all other items on board ship for which the construction corps is responsible, whereas if each first-class ship had a naval constructor on duty on the ship in any one of several capacities, he would be a representative of the Bureau of Construction and Repair, whose special training in naval construction would so strengthen such recommendations as to cause at least a fair percentage of them to receive proper attention.
In the realm of engineering we are rapidly approaching the same condition, as we are building up a corps of engineering officers who, upon arrival at the approximate age of 35, cease to be ordered to duty with the operative navy, as they are then tagged with the "for shore duty only" label.
In ordnance only do specialists continue to go to sea and take part in the evolution of their art, because it must be admitted by the most skeptical that it is the operations at sea which force evolution in the various arts which make up ship operation. Our specialists have not the incentive to receptiveness from outside Experience and suggestion that the specialist in civil life has. Their livelihood is in no way influenced by their attitude toward the seagoing personnel and its ideas. They may in fact be just as obstructive, high-handed and dictatorial as they please under ordinary conditions, and experience has shown that they do tend to become just that wherever anything like a corps is concerned. It should be quite unnecessary to dwell on this point if the average officer had studied corps systems and their effect on military or naval service, and in order to point the way to light on the subject, a study of the following is recommended:
(a) Condition of naval ordnance prior to 1899.
(b) Condition of naval engineering prior to 1899.
(c) Condition of army ordnance up to and through the World War.
(d) History of naval construction to date.
(e) Relations between the army engineers, ordnance, and artillery corps as affecting the efficiency of the artillery arm, and particularly that of the coast artillery.
Such a study, of course, must be made with the idea in mind of discovering how far the corps system is a basic reason for any inefficiency which may be found to have existed in these various activities. It will be noted that the activities mentioned in the army organization are those which have to do with the building and operation of artillery equipment, including emplacements, location of magazines, shell rooms, hoists, etc., and which correspond to our construction engineer and line corps in their relation to the ship.
It will be found that our naval ordnance was of such flimsy construction and so inaccurately built as to make it almost useless.
It will be found that our engineering departments on board ship were in a deplorable condition, although each ship had a number of specialist engineers to operate the machinery.
It will be found that army ordnance was far behind the times in design, greatly below par in weight of metal thrown in a given time, and deplorably slow in production.
It will be found that our naval constructors were behind hand in developing under-water hulls whose performance at sea could be considered in any way as approaching satisfactory results, and that for years we had been laboriously pushing ahead of us the water which was only too anxious to get by, and we had been likewise for years gravely calculating the necessary horsepower to drive hulls at a given speed only to find when we actually drove the hull at the designed speed that the horsepower necessary bore no relation to that we had calculated.
It will be found that the Engineer Corps of the army designed and erected the emplacements for our coast artillery; placed magazines far from the guns they were to serve; placed ammunition hoists of an antiquated type at an unnecessary distance from the guns to be served, thus preventing any attempt at rapidity of fire. That the Ordnance Corps designed and built the guns and mounts with practically no attention to suggestion from artillerists of long experience; provided slow and antiquated methods of loading and handling the mechanism long after the navy and foreign gun builders had brought their guns up to date, and as a crowning achievement accomplished the feat of so redesigning the French 75, which had stood the test of four years of war, as to prevent the arrival of a single battery of American built 75's at the front before the Armistice.
These things were true, not because the individual personnel was not up to the work, but because basic organization requires that in any combination of design, construction and operation, where the three are essential parts necessary to produce one definite result, they are too intimately connected and too interdependent to admit of separate control by three different units or agencies where one agency (the operative) is alone responsible for the result, and where the others can and do in such frequent cases load what should be their need of responsibility on the former's shoulders.
An objection will undoubtedly be registered against the inclusion of naval ordnance under the head of corps, but the writer is convinced that the methods pursued by the Ordnance Bureau during the years immediately prior to the Spanish War made what was practically a corps out of the Bureau and its activities, in that the Bureau became a self-perpetuating body with a permanent head, with the result that it had all the mystery and obstruction of the other corps, and this mystery and obstruction retarded naval ordnance evolution immeasurably. Nothing but a tidal wave from the sea-going personnel could have broken it up. Fortunately, we received the impulse for such a tidal wave from Admiral Sims' introduction of the Percy Scott method of training, and the condition of naval ordnance was quickly shown to be far behind the necessities of actual battle conditions. This rejuvenation of naval ordnance forced an awakening to some extent in all other naval lines of endeavor, and this was notably the case with naval architecture, with particular reference to the changes found necessary to protect handling rooms and magazines from fire dangers due to explosions in turrets; and the lack of knowledge of the necessity of this change by the British constructors seems to have accomplished the destruction of three battle cruisers of the British fleet in the Battle of Jutland.
This is a glaring case of the necessity of specialists seeing with their own eyes the results of their arrangements. Had the British constructors seen what happened on the Missouri, Kearsearge, and Georgia, they would not have placidly sat down as they did, saying "That poor American powder," and have sent three such death traps to sea as the battle cruisers proved to be.
A greater change in an engineering way had previously been made when the Engineer Corps was legislated out of existence by the Amalgamation Law of 1899. In ordnance we had no law in the way of opening up the Ordnance Bureau to outside influence, and, therefore, the Sims agitation was all that was needed for that, but it is a practical certainty that if we had had an Ordnance Corps established by law, the improvement in ordnance due to the efforts of Admiral Sims and other sea-going officers would not have had anything like the same impetus given it.
The ostensible reason for doing away with the Engineer Corps was to do away with the antagonism which had grown up between the line and engineers on board ship, for it was realized that the ships could not be really efficient when such disruptive conditions existed. There was no realization at that time that engineering in the service was at a very low ebb, and it was not until the results of having a mutual ground from which to view the ships' efficiency as a whole began to make the various activities on board ship show in their true perspective in their relative importance to the ship's efficiency, that the evil effects of the corps system became really evident.
In this discussion, the corps which have to do with the building, operation and repair of the fleet are the only ones considered, thus eliminating the Medical, Supply, and Civil Engineer corps as unnecessary to the discussion. The relation of the three corps mentioned is of a nature which has so little effect on the general design, construction, operation and repair of the ship as to make it unnecessary to consider them.
The fact that we were able to show up the condition of our naval ordnance by the Sims method does not assure us of being able to do likewise with other corps, because after all the personnel of the Ordnance Bureau was made up of sea-going officers, who had merely lost some of their open-mindedness through being returned each recurring shore duty to their old positions in the Bureau, and who, through the peculiar kind of loyalty they thought they owed to ordnance, whose chief had been a fixture for 12 years or so, had that much incentive to be intolerant of suggestion from those who had not the inspiration which exists in the atmosphere surrounding the chief of the corps.
In other words, line officers in ordnance had much less of a gulf between themselves and the "run of the mine" line officers at sea, than was true either in the case of the Engineer Corps before it was abolished, or of the Construction Corps up to date.
Again, it must be stated that we did not abolish the Engineer Corps because it was not efficient as an engineer corps but because its continuance meant constant friction on board ship and the consequent lowering of the all-round efficiency of the ship. In this we succeeded in accomplishing our purpose, but we at the same time introduced a new element, that is, "Officers for engineering duty on shore only." The reason for this separate designation was that the older officers in the Engineer Corps were not required to qualify for the line, and those who did not qualify were placed on the "shore duty only" list. This arrangement at the time was, of course, necessary and quite proper, but it also placed a small foundation stone in the naval organization upon which could be built a practical Engineer Corps without designating it as such.
In 1916 such a corps was established by a clause in the Naval Appropriation Bill of August 29, which authorized the formation of a list of officers "for engineering duty only,'' who, after reaching the rank of commander, would, with the exception of fleet engineers, be "Officers for shore duty only." The proposition was not a service proposal in the sense that the service generally had been consulted, nor was it a service proposal if a majority of the service could be considered as having any right to a knowledge of what legislation was being considered with relation to the service personnel. It was entirely a star chamber proceedings as far as any service need or desire was concerned, and was, I believe, diametrically opposed to the general idea in the service at that time.
Coincident with the above, another much more serious proposal was prepared to be urged on the secretary. This second proposal amounted to a division of the line of the navy under two headings: (a) Officers for Command; and (b) Officers for Industrial Duty. The text of the proposal was such as to cause any officer who read it to believe that his chances to command ships at sea would be sadly jeopardized if he were seen to glance at a monkey-wrench or other industrial implement without openly manifesting the greatest aversion to it, in that it stated that any officer who accepted duty in the industrial side of the service on shore, should by that act be relegated to the list of industrial officers, and could not thereafter be considered eligible to command. Fortunately for the service, a few officers who knew that a knowledge of the machinery which operates the ship was a necessary part of the naval officer's equipment, and who at the same time could tell the difference between a jib and a topsail, got wind of the affair and by vehement expression of opinion were able to have the proposal consigned to the oblivion which it deserved, but the point to be remembered is that such a revolutionary proposal, fraught with such far-reaching effect on the whole service, could have been seriously prepared for submission to a civilian secretary, who could not have sufficient knowledge of the naval game to appreciate what the effect would be, and this proposal was prepared by an officer of such high rank and of such position in the departmental organization as to give his proposal all the earmarks of service need and service approval.
This proposal, if acted upon, would have divided the service more completely into two corps than it was divided in the days of the old Engineer Corps, and would have engendered in the service the same old antagonisms which made our ships inefficient in the time prior to amalgamation, greatly augmented, however, by the outraged feelings of hundreds of officers who have carefully trained themselves in both the industrial and the upper deck sides of the service, in the belief that a knowledge of the mechanics of the ship is essential to proper decision on the bridge.
To-day we have a clause in the Navy Regulations which prevents officers who have taken the postgraduate courses in engineering and who have been assigned to the list of "officers for engineering duty only" from taking command of a ship when all others in authority above them are out of the ship, and already we have the beginning of heart burnings caused thereby and a tendency of the younger officers to look askance at following their natural desire to know about the machinery which makes the fighting of the ship possible. The above regulation, of course, refers only to those engineer officers who are designated as "officers for engineering duty only," but it is not beyond the bounds of probability, and in fact, is certain to happen, that one of the junior engineer officers who is not designated "for engineering duty only" will be left in command of the ship over the senior engineer officer who has been so designated. A more dangerous situation from a disciplinary standpoint could not well be imagined.
As to the importance of the senior engineer officer in the activities of the ship outside of his own particular department, there should be no question. His assistance in caring for and increasing the efficiency of the mechanical part of the ordnance game on board ship alone makes it essential that the closest kind of association and coordination be maintained between himself and the ordnance officer, and such sympathetic coordination would appear impossible if we are to separate him from a participation in all the functions which go with the rank he holds.
The members of the old Engineer Corps who did not qualify for line duties are rapidly becoming very few in number, and with their passing goes the only real reason for distinction being made between officers of the line, regardless of what course their duty may take, and we should abolish the "shore duty only" iniquity.
The fact that the engineer officers of the younger generation were able to qualify for the line duties has proven conclusively that going to sea in regular order is all that is necessary to keep an energetic officer in touch with all departments of the ship, regardless of what duty he may be performing in the ship, and when it is remembered that we now have quite a number of ships whose purpose is to a great extent industrial, the solution of sea duty for those of too exalted rank to make it proper to assign them as engineer officers of ships, and who still desire to follow comparatively exclusively the engineering game, seems in our hands, for certainly the commanding officer of a repair ship, if the ship is to be efficient, must be an officer who knows the intimate details of operative, engineering, and the repair game, and should have the most vital interest in them.
A specialist in the navy to be really successful must not only have a postgraduate course but also must have practical experience on the operative side of the game, and this practical experience must be spread over the whole period during which the particular individual can safely be considered by the service as a specialist. This is true because of the rapid evolution in the naval profession, which evolution makes a back number of yesterday.
The above mentioned practical experience must also be general experience and not just confined to the narrow limits of his specialty, because it is the general conditions surrounding his specialty, or rather surrounding the use of the product of his specialty, which have the determining effect on the success of that product in the service. Herein lie the real reasons for the sea-going element insisting on the requirement of sea service for our specialists, whether they be constructors, electrical engineers, marine engineers or ordnance men.
It is easy to cite instances illustrating loss of touch with operative conditions by "officers for shore duty only." One is as follows:
In one of our large ship yards there was an inspector of machinery, who was probably one of the best of the old school engineers. One of his assistants, a sea-going officer, objected to the boiler installation on a vessel which was building, for very definite practical reasons, which reasons, however, would not have been true if the boilers had been Scotch type instead of water-tube type. The inspector said: "I have never had experience with water-tube boilers, but I will take your word for it," and the changes advocated by the young officer were made. The inspector had been an officer "for shore duty only" for about 10 years, and in that time had so lost touch that he had to take the advice of an officer who had, as compared with him, very limited engineering experience, merely because "for shore duty only" had prevented him from keeping up to date from an operative standpoint.
Another illustration of the necessity of experts, or specialists, acquiring an intimate knowledge of operating conditions to permit them to properly do their work is as follows: At a meeting of the Naval Consulting Board, where the matter under discussion was the location of the Board's experimental station, a note was written to one of the Board by a naval officer present, saying that the plant should be located near one of our large seaports where it would be more easily accessible to officers who sent in suggestions, in order that they might assist in the development of their ideas by their practical experience. The answer he got was: "All we want is for the navy to tell us what they want to accomplish and we will give them the answer damn quick."
The same member of the Board later became interested in a naval problem and failed utterly to make any headway until a young naval officer was sent to work with him to answer his questions with regard to conditions and antecedent experience in the same line.
The ship is so much of a unit that everyone in the ship, and in particular every officer in the ship, has a complete running knowledge of the activities of all departments, and it is a matter of history that one of the greatest assistants in the evolution of equipment for proper training in gunnery in the early days of Admiral Sims' epoch-making crusade was a sea-going paymaster, and it is further a matter of history that by far the greater number of the improvements in naval ordnance at that time and since have been initiated at sea and pushed to satisfactory conclusion by practical sea-going officers.
While on this subject, it might be stated that it is exceedingly probable that had the first-class ships of the navy each had a naval constructor attached to it, the improvement in stream lines of battleships would have been made very much earlier than was the case, as they would have had daily and practical demonstration of the remarkably inefficient stream lines of all our battleships up to the evolution of the dreadnought. It is true, and it must be appreciated, that the everyday occurrences on board ship in all lines of endeavor are the guides by which future improvement in construction, arrangement and equipment of ships to do the work for which they are designed must be based, and it is believed that any constructor who went to sea from day to day in vessels of the Wyoming class and who observed the motion of the vessel when being driven into a heavy head sea, would immediately be interested in evolving schemes to reduce the whipping tendency of the bow after it had buried itself solid to No. 2 turret. His tendency to investigate the possibilities of a fuller bodied forward section to reduce pitching, and at the same time not to reduce the speed elements of design, could not but have been more earnest than if handled by him merely as an academic subject.
The fear is always expressed that the time necessary to gain practical experience in the use of the product of the specialist, while a good thing, would prevent him from being a specialist on account of lack of time in one short life to collect the necessary knowledge to both design and operate any particular product. This, to be frank, is plain and unadulterated poppy cock. The caliber of brain which will be of use as a specialist will have to delve into many outside arts and sciences in order to keep itself properly warmed up and operative, and the operative side of the art affords the opportunity to improve as nothing else can improve the resultant output of such a mentality.
The truth is that many more weaknesses in any structure develop in use than develop on first test. When they develop on test, the builder of the structure sees the test and immediately remedies the defect, but when such defects develop in service it is frequently next to impossible to make the designer believe that it is not the crass ignorance of the operator rather than the weakness of the structure which is at fault.
On the other hand, given a certain piece of equipment which is designed to do certain things, turn it over to the sea-going personnel and have them report against it for certain defects; if the specialist has had practical experience with that particular design of equipment, he is in much better position to put his finger on the seat of the trouble, whether it be carelessness on the part of the operating forces or inherent defect in design, than he would be without such experience, and if it be the fault of the operating force the specialist will have much less trouble in clearing up the fault than would one who had no practical experience under conditions of operation and is known by the sea-going personnel to have had no such experience. In other works, one is much more liable to accept the dictum of a specialist when he knows that the specialist has had the same kind of practical experience as he himself has had, than he is when he knows that the opposite is the case. The kind of naval specialist who does not have experience with the operation of the product of his specialization cannot but become a stumbling block to progress and a theoretical parasite on what is a problem 75 per cent of which is practical.
In all the above, the writer holds no brief for the line, because what has been said of constructors and engineers would be just as true of a line officer who insisted on sea duty only. Good professional duty on shore at intervals is just as necessary for the seagoing officer as terms of sea service are. Fortunately, we do not have many officers who make the mistake of remaining always at sea, and especially is this true at the present time when rotation in duty is more or less required by the Bureau of Navigation.
There has been a cult in the line of the service who have rather systematically refused to take their turn on duty in connection with the material side of the service, for the same reason which is taken to bolster up the supposed necessity of "officers for shore duty only," that is, the lack of ability of one brain to know thoroughly all sides of the service. These officers blind themselves to one element in naval life which makes it different from that of many civil occupations, and that is the fact that the whole navy is trained and operated to one particular end, efficiency in battle, and in moving from one organization to another the basic system of the new organization is similar to the old. Each new occupation to which the officer is assigned has some coordinating link with that which he has just left. His basic education, not only at the Academy, but in general service in his association, necessarily close on board ship, with all the activities which go to make up ship life, cannot but be general, and as long as he goes to sea at recurring intervals, cannot but keep him more or less up to date on the changes, not only in equipment but in method, without impairing but on the other hand increasing his efficiency in the particular activity in which he may be temporarily engaged. It takes nothing from his opportunity to think upon and study any specialty to which he may be inclined, but rather energizes his thought to the enlargement of application of his specialty in coordination with others to increase the general efficiency of the ship for battle.
There is no profession in which conditions change more frequently and in which requirements increase more rapidly, both as to equipment and method, and to properly meet such changes and requirements ah intimate knowledge of the operative side of the service is the first essential, and such intimate knowledge cannot be acquired without recurrent duty in the operative service.
An officer returning to shore duty from sea should have at his finger tips the results obtained in the use of his specialty aboard ship, and his ability to do this should not have been impaired by his assignment to other duties than those of his specialty if he is properly energetic and has the interest in his work which is a prerequisite of the true specialist, because it must be thoroughly realized that interest in certain lines of thought and endeavor, and not education, is what makes the true specialist. Education in special lines increases the ability of the individual in those lines only when this interest is present, and his limitations then are measured by the energy he possesses to drive him on.
Daily life on board ship brings to the attention of inquiring minds thousands of small ways in which the design of the ship or her equipment could have been improved; a door should have been cut here and not there, hatches here and not there, doors to swing inboard here and outboard there, ventilation here should have been thus and so, this arrangement is all right in port when so and so is true but is impossible at sea, etc., ad infinitum. Take these to the "for shore duty only" officer, and what do you get? There appears to be no real need for these changes, etc., also ad infinitum.
This would not be so serious in many cases if the "for shore duty only" officer would put the item down where it would for a certainty be considered by competent authority when the next ship was being designed, but this he does not do because he personally has never had experience with the particular item which would stamp it on his memory as it is stamped on the memory of the operative personnel.
A case in point: An assistant inspector of machinery, just from sea, found on his first inspection of the fire-rooms of a ship that was building at one of our best shipyards, that the valve stems of all main and auxiliary steam lines were pointing downward. Investigating as to why this condition should be so universally true, he found that it was because the original type drawing giving simply the general arrangement of the machinery in sufficient detail to permit bids to be made by contractors, had all valves indicated with stems down. He also found that a ship just completed at the same yard had had the same situation and the stems had been turned up afterwards, by the contractors, at great cost to the government, but no notation was made at the time in the drafting room to prevent a recurrence of the error, which error would have been instantly picked up by any competent operating engineer who had not been kept away from the operative side of the service by the "for shore duty only" mark on his record.
The memory of man is short and full of inaccuracy and in a profession where evolution never sleeps, memory, however tenacious of things of yesterday, cannot be of prime use in things of to-day, and is just one step farther removed from things of to-morrow.
Failure to appreciate the needs of fast flying evolution caused by operative requirements, obstinate refusal to recognize improvements when suggested by those who inhabit the less rarified atmosphere of the operative world, obstruction, procrastination, and ultimate ossification of the whole system of naval activities, will be the sure result of such a segregation of specialists from the "run of the mine'' naval service.
This tendency of the present is all the more astonishing when one looks back on the quite recent war and the practical result of naval operations of our own service based on the general service idea, and of others based on the segregation idea. In whatever light one may view it, if the basic idea of the efficiency of the ship, which after all is the unit from which we work, be considered, one is inevitably forced to the conclusion that the corps system wherever it touches the operation of the ship is an utter drag on efficiency, and that any specialization which does not expressly feature operative experience rather than technical education and design, is a serious perversion of a proper naval perspective.
Any engineer officer of the army who was on duty at the front during the war will state emphatically that he found he had to have an intimate knowledge of infantry and artillery tactics and strategy in order to permit him to do his proper part in the operations with any measure of intelligence since his work made the movements and tactics of the two other corps possible, and what is true of the army is in no measure less in the navy, but is rather increased by the isolation incident to sea going.
To recapitulate:
Naval constructors should be amalgamated with the line for the following reasons:
(a) By segregating them into a corps and assigning them to shore duty exclusively we lose the benefit of their trained minds on board ship in the almost daily conferences of the officers to increase the efficiency of the ship for battle.
(b) They lose the opportunity to observe constantly the points in which design, construction and equipment can and should be corrected to meet the rapid march of evolution, and they lose the incentive which the spirit of the ship inevitably imparts to greater endeavor to achieve excellence in their part of the game of preparation for war.
(c) They lose all the incentive which being in line of succession for command inevitably gives, and in addition they cannot but feel the soreness which comes from not being eligible for the highest and most satisfying position in the service, that of commanding units of the fleet and in time the fleet itself.
(d) Isolated in their work, they become intolerant of suggestion to a greater or less degree, and therefore frequently obstruct where they should assist development,
(e) Passing from one position to another on shore means only physical change of scene and environment, the association being a duplicate of that just quitted, and the work usually exactly the same. Such a life cannot but tend to discourage effort and lead the mind into narrow lines of thought which inevitably limit efficiency.
(f) Questions of promotion, precedence, and jurisdiction which at the present time are so irritating would be entirely eradicated.
(g) The number of officers assigned to postgraduate courses in naval architecture could be made commensurate with the needs in those lines instead of being, as is now the case, held to a certain number.
(h) The service would gain the continuous use of this specially selected class of mental attainment for general use in solving service problems instead of curtailing its use to the narrow limits of naval architecture, and at the same time the ability of these minds would be increased by broadening their field to include the operative side of naval life.
All other specialties which have to do with the building, operation and repair of the fleet are in the same category, and it follows that the abolishment of "for shore duty only" among constructors and engineers is an essential to increasing service efficiency, and while it will undoubtedly be opposed by some, the service would do well to look with care at the true reason for such opposition.