While it may seem presumptuous for a reserve officer to hold forth in the august pages of the Proceedings with proposals affecting the careers of regular officers, let it be noted that with the wind-up of World War II the whole Navy Department has been subjected to public scrutiny of an intensity unprecedented in its long and honorable annals. It brings us the spectacle, not always elevating, of luncheon-club orators, politicians, and newspaper columnists freely animadverting on every arch and beam of the naval structure. Of late, too, “authoritative” testimony and “eyewitness” rhetoric have taken on so recriminatory a tone that one might infer the Navy had just lost a war, and that in any event it had been grossly negligent in failing to heed instanter every item of advice proffered by the commentators whose scope also includes morals, political economy, art, science, and the transportation of dogs. Into this milieu, then, perhaps the observations of a reserve officer with a strong sense of loyalty to his service and a constructive intent can be admitted without further apology. Some of my notions may, for all I know, be based on error; some of my suggestions may prove impracticable: but if this paper can provide even a modicum of stimulating ideas to the policy-makers of the Navy Department it will have fulfilled the sole purpose in the writing of it. The basic tenets it contains have been discussed at length with a number of naval officers and men, and revised in the light of their comment, but I do not claim for it any more than a personal approach to a vast and complicated problem.
The melancholy fact is that the Navy has got itself a hostile press at the moment; the historical reaction against the military after peace is restored has set in once again. But there is small consolation in the inevitability of it, or in the reflection that the Army has acquired an even more onerous burden of criticism. Nor is it wise to dismiss the clamor simply because it is inevitable. The Navy faces basic alterations from without; if it can meet those alterations with concurrent improvements from within it will immeasurably fortify its administrative position in the Government and will present to the body politic a flexible, efficient instrument which will surely attract approval and support.
To a degree, the Navy’s unfavorable publicity has been, and will continue to be, aggravated by reserve components-—both commissioned and enlisted—upon their separation from active duty. There are the familiar charges of maladroitness and hidebound thinking, of superfluities and shortages, of frictions and injustices; but much of it is a hearsay stuff, chewed up in its passage from mouth to mouth, and is relatively easy to controvert, explain, or ignore, depending on the kind of sense it makes. Since any particular reservist’s view of the Navy is circumscribed by his own experience; since the things that happened to him will appear of much greater significance than the things that happened to somebody else (however fantastic the latter items may be in the telling), his disaffection resolves itself ultimately into a pattern of personal recollections. As a rule, the grievances he retains in this fashion will be so negligible that, once he has flapped his civilian wings a few times and emitted a few squawks, we may confidently expect him to settle down as a mellow ex-tar and a staunch Navy man. Meanwhile, however, his squawks are achieving considerable amplification in the press and radio from the more emotional type of commentator. Amid the cacophony there is, of course, much legitimate complaint, and it should be explored by responsible naval officials. Indeed, it customarily has been! It would be difficult to single out an abuse or maladjustment in naval life that has not been fully analyzed, at one time or another, in the Proceedings. But if there is one element of naval organization that has not yielded to the ameliorative influence of open discussion—one element shared by officers and enlisted men, regulars and reserves, that runs like a common denominator through all the unhappy equations brought to light— it is the ancient, underlying antagonism between professional Navy men and their citizen-colleagues of wartime. I propose to address myself to that puzzle from the one standpoint which, it seems to me, promises a solution.
The astonishing thing, in a wartime Navy composed so overwhelmingly of nonprofessionals, is that there has been so little enmity and cross-purposing between Academy men and temporary officers. Almost everywhere, under almost all conditions, “USN” and “USNR” worked together with understanding and unanimity, frequently augmented by genuine comradeship. So very often, especially in combat situations (when mutual regard means most), officers lived and fought together for months on end, learning only inadvertently in a long-delayed respite that the one was a Yale man, the other an Annapolis man. In point of fact, junior Academy officers made excellent ambassadors of good will as a general rule, proving themselves conscientious, smart, friendly, and altogether without affectation; it was normally in the older and higher-ranking regulars that prejudices, inadequacies, and misunderstandings were manifested.
Yet anybody who is looking in this direction for a diatribe against the old Annapolis spirit had better look elsewhere. It is my conviction that the more senior regulars are precisely as broad or as narrow of mind as their civilian counterparts of the same age— especially such civilian counterparts as are likewise the products of a rigorous and somewhat cloistered educational process. The Academy officer is as much the creature of his training and environment as any other man; his virtues and his limitations are as largely preordained.
However-—and this is the nub of the problem—it is expected of him that he evidence a much more pronounced distinction and versatility than any sort of civilian professional whatsoever, and in a much wider and more diversified field. The feeble argument adduced in support of this injustice runs approximately as follows: Has not the professional officer been filtered through the most delicate of meshes, has he not been subjected thereafter to the keenest and most pitiless of regimens, has he not been exposed to the most urgent of educational systems, has he not been conditioned by the most elaborate of traditions and usages?
The answer, at best, is a qualified affirmative. His training has certainly been as intensive as a lawyer’s or doctor’s or priest’s or engineer’s, but it has lacked the one essential that promotes maximum competence in those other pursuits: specialization. The day is long past wherein a lawyer could expect to get very far in general practice; today he is a trial lawyer, or corporation lawyer, or divorce lawyer, or criminal lawyer, or one of many other specialized categories; it is practically impossible to find an attorney, even in a small town, who will take any kind of case, and probably it is completely impossible to find one who is qualified to do so. Thus, also, has the contemporary physician chosen a single specialty within medicine or surgery in which to devote himself: and the world of ailing people is infinitely better off for that. Even the priest, with the universe as his domain, follows a bent; he belongs to a given order and dedicates himself to a given mission in life. The engineer, finally, most closely analogous to the naval officer, confines himself to a specialized function even within the classified divisions of civil and mechanical engineering and so on; he would not dream of professing a tenth of the technical scope assigned so matter-of-factly to the Academy graduate.
In spite of this established trend in the professions, in spite of the mounting perplexities and complexities of the atomic age, and in spite, finally, of the prodigious ramifications of a modern navy, it must be acknowledged that the Government is still turning out career officers in the hopelessly obsolete mold of “general duty.” The harassed regular with a few tours under his belt is expected—nay, ordered—to take over a communication officer’s billet with all its new complications of radar, radiotelephony, supersonic devices, electronic gear, and Lord knows what else; and he is expected to fill that billet with the same ability and assurance demanded of him in his previous assignment as a navigator or engineer or shore-side administrator. Fortunately for all hands, the concept of “general duty” did not have too rigid an application in wartime. At any rate, a U. S. Navy gunnery officer was usually left at the job long enough to learn the rudiments of the latest mechanisms— long enough to acquire the knack of conversing more or less intelligibly with his warrant gunner or leading chief (doubtless a man of many years’ experience). With luck, a seasoned naval aviator could perhaps effect the transition from commanding officer of an air station to commanding officer of a fleet carrier or auxiliary without losing that precious self-confidence born of know-how, although he had probably been immersed long enough in the airman’s business to have forgotten all he ever knew of ship-handling and Rules of the Road.
The unwieldiness of this antique placement system as it concerns naval operations, however, is but half the evil. The other half is the grave injustice it imposes on the officer himself, who is presumed to know more, do more, be responsible for more than the most versatile scientist, doctor, lawyer, or clergyman in the entire civil economy. And it is precisely this inequity which caused so much of the friction that did manifest itself, during the past few years, between regulars and reserves.
There were such curious situations as Academy officers in charge of a body of high- priced lawyers enrolled as legal officers; Academy men in charge of famed engineers and researchers; Academy men in charge of top-flight writers, artists, and editors: Academy men in charge of all sorts of trained specialists who could more appropriately have been teaching than taking orders. It required a great deal of wisdom, subtlety, and tact to be adequate to such stewardships, and Annapolis officers measured up to the challenge as often as not—about as often as would Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, or Podunk graduates of comparable age and station, and with a comparable “general” education. Nonetheless it was frequently a false and untenable position. If the U.S. Navy “director” happened to be involved in a public relations project, for instance, and didn’t know as much about public relations as the Bong of Wong, he was in danger of being irreverently labeled a numbskull by expert underlings who, in their turn, didn’t know as much about naval affairs as a herd of bison; and if his exercise of the authority vested in him ran counter to the notions of his subordinates, he could expect to be a most unpopular numbskull indeed.1 By an absurd but effortless process of association, all Academy officers were thereupon open to suspicion, and they had little opportunity to vindicate themselves, because the attitude was always implicit rather than explicit. Occasionally they reacted to the temperamental vagaries of reserve officers by adopting, in self-defense, an arrogant and vindictive demeanor. Being as a rule of no more analytic mind than their underlings, they did not reason that the maladjustments were a consequence of too diffuse a function, rather than of inherent flaws in themselves-—or in their juniors. And they suspected, for their part, that reserve officers were intractable wise guys, whose loud hopes of “getting out of the Navy” could be quietly but fervently endorsed by regular Navy men themselves.
To demonstrate how awkward the Navy’s career-officer program is, it might be pointed out that not one Academy graduate, be he ’06 or ’46, can possibly know so much as he is supposed to know about ship design, aerodynamics, engineering-—civil, mechanical, industrial, marine, aviation, electrical, steam, ballistic-—the tidal characteristics in Baffin Bay, law—international, admiralty, military, civil, criminal, commercial—quantum mechanics, atomic physics, comparative philosophy, protocol, personnel management, the liberal arts, rivers and waterways, business administration, statecraft and politics, rocket- and jet-propulsion, athletics, tactics and strategy and logistics, history, applied psychology, et alii ad infinitum.2 This sounds like satirical exaggeration, but is on the contrary a sober, literal, hopelessly incomplete transcription of some of the varied branches of human knowledge in which U. S. naval officers are charged with a competence, and are so burdened because they are being primed for a John Paul Jones navy instead of a Chester W. Nimitz navy.
A practical advantage of wartime reserve officers over regulars was that the former were not expected to be omniscient and omnipotent. It was rationally arranged that they would undertake commissioned duty in certain limited fields-—nearly always, in the case of older reserves, fields in which they had achieved proficiency as civilians, or in which their civilian proficiencies could be utilized in more or less congruent functions. And it should be stressed that the Navy’s placement of reserve officers, especially of the men taken in as officer-specialists, was as a rule both expedient and consistent. There were fumbles in the beginning, but latterly it was the normal thing to find civilian personnel managers billeted as personnel officers, attorneys billeted as legal officers, hotel executives billeted as BOQ officers, newspapermen billeted as public information officers, policemen billeted as shore patrol officers, and so on. Almost always, too, individual reservists were permitted a comfortable latitude as to assignments, and thus they almost always ended up by doing approximately what they wanted to do or could do best. The malleable youngster fresh from school provided excellent material for midshipman or flight training; the older man, no longer so adaptable, was fitted into a job where his experience and talents had the freest scope. The taint of bureaucracy and so-called “brass hat thinking” was notably absent from BuPers’ enlightened control of reserve officer assignments, and the new reserve classifications instituted in 1944 served admirably to define an officer’s area of utility.3
No such deference has ever been shown regulars. They have been compelled to take what they get in the way of duty and like it, or to hunt up a classmate in Washington who might have his fingers on a few strings; but one way or another, they get almost everything eventually. The Academy man with a genuine aptitude has little chance of devoting himself to it; even the naval aviator, surely a specialist if there ever was one, is committed to ship-handling sooner or later. He cannot project himself wholly into fleet aviation, for some day he must face the enormous responsibilities of a command afloat—perhaps after years of flying duty. The fact that he is given a ship related in some fashion to the air arm does nothing to lighten the handicap thrust upon him. And for all that his heart may be in 200-knot patrol planes, his feet remain planted on the bridge of a 20-knot auxiliary. Meanwhile, an officer pining away for just such a seagoing command languishes behind a desk in some bureau: and another officer, who has proved himself a crack administrator, gazes sadly at orders which will take him off to a yard oiler as navigator and first lieutenant. So it goes under a billeting system that has no duplicate elsewhere in the world.
Allow one reserve officer, then, to suggest on behalf of regulars what they cannot say for themselves: Give them a break! Give them the opportunity every other professional man receives as a matter of course—a specialized career, and the choice of that specialty. Nowadays the professional officer knows less and less about his work as he pursues it through the years of expanding scientific and industrial development; making a specialist of him will permit him to learn more and more about his chosen field. To keep abreast of a tremendous naval establishment constantly advancing on all fronts is now impossible for regular officers; under a policy of specialization, however, it will not only be feasible but will very likely produce creation and invention within the service itself, which has traditionally incorporated most of its improvements from the outside, where men have time for such endeavor, and the specialized knowledge. To take an admittedly extreme case, the scientists who produce the atom bomb could never have done so if, in the mode of naval officers, they had been obliged concurrently to take a hand in animal husbandry, political debate, and the manufacture of synthetic eyelashes. Should somebody cite the naval officers detailed so successfully to radar research and development, my response would be that by this time next year, those of them who are regular Navy will be skippering submarines or managing navy yards.
An officer corps of specialists would appear to call for massive alterations in the syllabus of the Naval Academy, but actually most of the changes would be effected elsewhere than in that eminently satisfactory institution. It is to be remembered that the Military Academy at West Point trains officers for numerous branches of the Army under one syllabus. The newly fledged second lieutenant gets most of his postgraduate specialization on active duty; he leaves West Point as an officer in the Signal Corps, Infantry, Corps of Engineers, Field Artillery, etc., and serves his apprenticeship learning his chosen specialty under the best possible conditions; duty in the field.
As Naval Academy graduates selected for aviation go elsewhere for that training, so might communications officers be “farmed out,” as it were, to an appropriate technical school, and engineering officers to an engineering school, and supply officers (now non- Academy) to a school of accounting and business administration. The postgraduate courses could be deferred until officers had served a year or two of active duty, or could be applied immediately upon receipt of commissions. The Navy already has postgraduate curricula for officers, into which this expanded technique of education could be readily absorbed through a broadening of the pattern to include more and more accredited schools and colleges. Nor would this program interfere in any way with the establishment of a naval academy on the west coast, if that is being contemplated.
If all officers are to be specialists, the question arises as to what will become of the line corps, in the form it now assumes. The form it now assumes is amorphous; it includes everything from WAVES officers to limited-duty officers assigned as factory inspectors, artists, lecturers, photographers, and whatnot. It is difficult to justify the line designation and military precedence which, at least technically, locates an authority in some of these people exceeding that of so- called staff officers—Supply Corps and CEC officers in particular. While specialization presupposes certain changes, those changes are more apparent than real; and they would undoubtedly operate toward clarifying and simplifying the theory of line duty, which with the influx of reserves during the war lost nearly all meaning. My proposals would place in the line corps, in peace or in war, all specialist officers grounded in military training—i.e., all Academy and NROTC personnel, plus (in a wartime complement) all male graduates of midshipmen schools, flight schools, indoctrination schools, and other such naval institutions which furnish the fundamentals of military discipline, usage, and law. Men commissioned directly from private life without any military training would, along with women reservists, be classified as limited-duty officers, and their rank insignia would indicate their status.
The matter of rank insignia itself would be predicated on the various specialties and their cognizant bureaus, as outlined below. It is so largely a question of taste and convenience that I restrict myself to only the merest possibilities. For example, the Deck Officer might wear blue fabric stripes with a fouled anchor above; the Communications Officer, black stripes with a lightning-bolt insigne; the Personnel Officer, green stripes with a quill and scroll—and so on. As in the Army, collar ornaments would consist of one rank bar and, on the other tab, one specialty device. Gold braid and brass buttons, together with the gold sleeve star, would belong only to officers of flag rank, who of course drop their specialist designation for a general duty designation. (Limited- duty and non-line officers could be distinguished by wavy stripes, as the British distinguish their fleet reserves.)
The following outline of a proposed Bureau structure is of course tentative at best, and is advanced only with the object of producing criticisms and amendations. It represents my ideas regarding the nature and extent of officer specialization in a manner economical of both space and wordage; I could elaborate on my notions, but my purpose is not to make changes myself, or even to formulate them, but rather to provide material for the policy-makers whose task it will be to reorganize the Navy, and perhaps to stimulate even better plans on the premises of these admittedly modest ventures. „
The Bureau of Personnel.—To function much as at present. The related officer specialist is the Personnel Officer, whose province includes billets, complements, promotions, welfare, education, military and physical training, administration, etc. (So far as officers are concerned, promotions of all other specialists would be cleared through this “senior” Bureau, which retains over-all cognizance of commissioned as well as enlisted personnel. The Chief of this Bureau might rank above, or with but above, the Chiefs of other Bureaus; but the Personnel Officer as such would claim no precedence over other line officers.)
The Bureau of Navigation (restored but altered).—Control of all Deck Officers. The specialty includes navigation, seamanship, piloting, first lieutenancies, damage control, etc. (Here, isolated and defined once more, is the true seagoing naval officer, who during the war years has been almost lost in the shuffle.)
The Bureau of Aviation (or Aeronautics).— There would appear to be no motive for any considerable changes in this Bureau. With respect to its commissioned personnel, however, the identification of Flight Officer might be fitting, for the reason that the large majority of naval aviators need not, in my opinion, hold officer rank. That opinion will be amplified in the second part of this paper.
The Bureau of Engineering.-—Cognizance of civil, marine, industrial, and aviation engineers, and all research and development. So far as I know, there is no good reason why the Engineering Officer should be restricted from such military duties as officer of the day, conducting musters, and the like, inasmuch as he, too, will first have had the background of Academy or NROTC training before enrolling at an engineering school.
The Bureau of Communications.—Radar, electronics, radio, telegraphy, telephony, signals, codes, etc. The related officer is a Communications Officer.
The Bureau of Ordnance.—More or less as presently constituted. The Ordnance Officer specializes in ammunition, gunnery, fire control, anti-aircraft, bomb disposal, and the strategy and tactics of his field. Included in this category is aviation ordnance.
The Bureau of Intelligence.—This would be the general authority under which the Intelligence Officer functions. It might consist of two sub-bureaus: (1) information division—investigatory,4 historical, statistical, public relations, combat information, intra- and inter-service liaison, and (in wartime) press and mail censorship. (2) legal division—courts and boards, enforcement, discipline, shore patrol, masters-at-arms, and security in all its aspects. (Officers in the Legal Division would for the most part be attorneys; in war there might also be a sprinkling of experienced police officers. Officers in both divisions of this Bureau would, with selected Personnel Officers, be the most likely candidates for staff and command schools as administrative assistants to commanding officers and, in more senior rank, as staff and flag aides.)
The Bureau of Supplies and Accounts.—To remain very much as at present, except that all Supply Officers (including those posted at disbursing duty) would be graduated from the Naval Academy or an NROTC prior to taking postgraduate studies in their specialty. And here again, given an officer with adequate military training, there seems to be no point in barring him from full military status.
The Bureau of Matériel.—Incorporating as “Divisions” the present Bureau of Ships and Bureau of Yards and Docks, this component would draw officers as required from other Bureaus-—notably Engineering, Communications, and Personnel.
This précis accounts for all corps of the line. The term “staff corps,” when used to indicate nonmilitary constituents, appears unnecessarily misleading. Some alternative designation-—perhaps “coadjutive corps,” or even “non-line corps”—might well be apposite here. At any rate, the existing Medical, Dental, Nurse, and Hospital Corps would continue intact under the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. The Chaplain Corps, taken with a Women’s Corps and a Special Service Corps (the latter embodying officers enrolled for limited duty without military preparation), could be included under a new Bureau of Special Services. These two Bureaus would contain all nonmilitary officers. (If the WAVES, loathe to part with their “line” designation, demur at this suggestion, let me say that while I am not unmindful of their splendid record during the war, I think that unless or until the day comes when they are certified to stand sea watches and engage in combat, they cannot be properly described as line officers—not if that expression is to make any sense at all.)
An officer may be deemed qualified for general duty, as I have ventured, when he is elevated to the rank of commodore or rear admiral, thus paralleling the Army’s interpretation of a general officer. He will have spent his naval career up to that time in a specialized role, and will have acquired a real mastery of it; upon promotion to flag rank he will still be able to pursue his bent if he wants to, and to exert the unquestioned influence of an expert. Moreover, the wisdom, the experience, the polish he has acquired in his long service—especially the knowledge he will have gained by that time of broad co-ordinative principles in the naval establishment-—will tend to amplify his prestige and usefulness in a manner that can hardly be expected of current policy, wherein the flag officer, for all his excellence, must rely on a patchwork foundation of “good” duty and “bad” duty, with much of his native resourcefulness being wasted in fitting his square edges to round holes, or vice versa.
Instead of an officer being distracted by a variety of unrelated assignments, and struggling up to the eminence of a flag against every conceivable impediment that can get in a man’s way, why not provide for an officer who can follow a unilateral occupation of his own choosing, who can acquire more and more of a grasp on his job as he progresses, who can emerge in starred rank as a recognized authority in his sphere?
It is not the Navy’s mission to provide the nation with technical genius, inventive skill, or intellectual acumen, but it has the material for that kind of contribution to society, and if it will accept the contribution as a collateral duty, it can exercise a moral leadership and good will in peacetime quite as pervasive as that it enjoys in wartime. Every year, from every part of the United States and from every stratum of democratic civilization, the Navy attracts to Annapolis the very best of young manhood. I do not agree with the familiar charge that once having acquired this superior material, the Navy cramps it into a narrow mold; I do believe, nonetheless, that it should have a better chance to assert its marvelous wit, ingenuity, and talent—and that such a chance is available only through voluntary specializations. There is nothing in military life per se-—and again I depart from a popular assumption-—that inhibits a man’s maximum development; the inhibitions lie rather in the innumerable ramifications of “general duty” under which the junior officer has two strikes against him before he gets up to the plate, and the third is often called before he can even take a good grip on his bat. For the men who comprise what is beyond doubt the finest officer corps in the world, it would seem that the privilege and dignity of serving where they serve best is not too much to ask.
1. In the December, 1945, Proceedings, Lieut. W. H. Long, U.S.N.R., discusses public relations (now somewhat loosely retitled “public information”) in a manner that reflects the growing confusion over “general duty.” An experienced publicist himself, he urges that other officer-specialists, similarly qualified, be retained or acquired for the permanent naval establishment. So far, so good. But he goes on to advocate that the already overloaded Annapolis midshipman be saddled with studies in public relations. Sooner or later somebody will suggest a course in bee-keeping during swab year, and then the general duty concept will be complete.
2. As one unhappy Annapolis junior officer observed: “We are taught all there is to know about everything, but outside of that we don’t know a damned thing.”
3. I do not recall having seen any public comment on this phase of naval administration, nor of any other where the job to be done was done exceedingly well. Those “routine” performances vastly outnumber the fumbles, but one must conclude from the publicity accorded the latter that it’s not news unless it’s bad news. Hence the cogency of Lieut. Long’s thesis favoring a permanent naval news agency.
4. I employ this term comprehensively, to embrace the work of the present Office of Naval Intelligence and also inspector-general units, together with officer-couriers and other secret or confidential elements of the service. (The Information Division, incidentally, would come under the Inspector General, and the Legal Division under the Judge Advocate General.)