CNO—Past, Present, and—Future?

For almost half a century the highest aspirations of a U.S. naval officer were focused on the pinnacle of his profession—either CNO or CinCUS.

The office of the Chief of Naval Operations and—while the title was in existence—that of the Commander-in-Chief, U. S. Fleet, (also known by the abbreviation CominCh) were the senior jobs in the naval hierarchy, endowed with great power and matching responsibility. Many aspired but few achieved. The names of those who made it have been perpetuated in naval history, with Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, like Abou Ben Adhem, heading the list as the only man who wore both hats simultaneously.

The title of Commander-in-Chief, U. S. Fleet, though it is redolent of nautical grandeur, has been a transitory one, but the Chief of Naval Operations, ever since the establishment of the office, has often been defacto, if not dejure, the Commander-in-Chief.

The legal and the actual responsibilities and duties of the CNO have varied from era to era but, to the men who wear the blue, the four-star job has always personified the head of the Navy, the maker of professional policy, the moulder of professional morale, the buffer and liaison between politicians and civilian leaders and uniformed personnel, the broad-striped Jehovah who rewarded outstanding virtue and punished outstanding error, the naval court of last resort. The CNO has been to the Navy what the poor bewildered Cuban campesino today calls Fidel Castro—the “Supreme Leader” —but not, of course, in the same sense as the term is applied in Cuba. The CNO as “Supreme Leader” of a seagoing fraternity, part of the armed forces of a Western democracy, is not the arbitrary judge of life or death, freedom or slavery, but he is the top, and the ultimate, purveyor of Navy doctrine, the preservatory of Navy customs and traditions —both within and without the Navy—and he sets, more than any other single naval officer, the Navy’s moral and professional tone.

The office of the Chief of Naval Operations grew out of the so-called “Naval Aide System.” The Navy Department, just prior to World War I, was divided into four general divisions, and each division was headed by a senior line officer, each called an “Aide” to the Secretary of the Navy. This system was succeeded in 1915 by an act which created a “Chief of Naval Operations.” The original act, contrary to the plans of its proponents, limited the power of the CNO, but subsequent legislation and practice greatly strengthened it. In 1916, Congress gave the office great prestige and inherent power by providing that the incumbent should hold the rank of Admiral and declaring that “all orders issued by the Chief of Naval Operations . . . shall be considered as emanating from the Secretary and shall have full force and effect as such.”

Admiral W. S. Benson, the first Chief of Naval Operations, exercised great power during World War I, chiefly because he enjoyed the complete confidence of Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels. As a result, Admiral Benson was in charge of naval planning and, in general, of naval operations.

Between World War I and World War II, the controversial issue was the authority of the Chief of Naval Operations over the Bureau Chiefs, each of whom had exercised almost sovereign power over his domain by reason of legislative fiat and the appropriations which each controlled. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934 strengthened the hand of the CNO in this controversy by, in effect, giving him executive power to “coordinate” the work of the bureaus, but FDR who knew and loved the Navy and liked to exercise direct control over it, specifically declined to delegate to the Chief of Naval Operations the power to issue direct orders to the Bureau Chiefs.

After Pearl Harbor, this debate became academic and, during World War II, the Office of CNO reached its peak of power, with tacit authority over the bureaus, and indeed, over the entire Navy. This was because of specific delegation of authority to the CNO, because that office and that of Commander- in-Chief, U. S. Fleet, were held by the same man, Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, because Admiral King was a strong man and dealt directly with the President, and because it was wartime. The establishment of the Office of Procurement and Material, under the Secretary of the Navy, checked to some extent the extension of the power of the CNO, particularly in the postwar period, when “The Chief of Naval Material” was given Congressional sanction primarily at the urging of Secretary Forrestal and charged, under the Secretary, with “effectuate[ing] policies of procurement, contracting, and production of material throughout the Naval Establishment. . . .” Mr. Forrestal hoped to make the bureaus more responsive to operational needs, but whether the change actually contributed to this objective is debatable. But there was, nevertheless, no doubt who was the number one man in naval uniform during World War II; it was “Ernie” King.

Co-ordination with the Army was effected chiefly by direct contact between the CNO and the Army Chief of Staff and through the new Joint Chiefs of Staff, which had intimate associations with the President, and which, under the Commander-in-Chief, planned the grand strategy of World War II.

The history of the office since World War II is familiar, and the trend consistent. The National Security Act of 1947 established a third military department, that of the Air Force, and formalized and legalized the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Various modifications to the original act centralized power more and more in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and tended to reduce the authority—particularly the operational authority—of the CNO. The 1958 modifications specifically altered the chain of command to by-pass the CNO (and also the chiefs of the other services). Full operational command of the forces assigned to them was vested in the unified and specified commanders, and the chain of legal command ran directly from the President through the Secretary of Defense to those commanders. (In practice this command is often, though not invariably, exercised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a corporate body.)

The duties of the Chief of Naval Operations were redefined as follows:

Under the direction of the Secretary of the Navy, the Chief of Naval Operations shall exercise supervision over such of the members and organizations of the Navy and Marine Corps as the Secretary of the Navy determines. Such supervision shall be exercised in a manner consistent with the full operational command vested in unified or specified combatant commanders . . .

The Chief of Naval Operations is the principal naval adviser to the President and to the Secretary of the Navy on the conduct of war, and the principal naval adviser and naval executive to the Secretary on the conduct of the activities of the Department of the Navy ...

Thus, the history of the postwar years has been towards more and more centralization of authority in the office of the Secretary of Defense. As compared to World War II, the Joint Chiefs collectively and individually occupy positions at least one echelon lower than those of two decades ago. The secretaries of the individual services are no longer Cabinet members; the services are merely “military departments,” part of a great and increasingly monolithic Department of Defense. The office of the Secretary of Defense, with all its tremendous size and power, now intervenes between the President as Commander-in-Chief and the individual heads of the services. The office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has assumed some of the collective duties of representation and advice formerly held by the Joint Chiefs. It has indeed been said— in stretching to one extreme the legal interpretation of his duties—that the CNO today is a commander without a fleet, an admiral without seamen.

But this is over-simplification, as an examination of the CNO’s present duties shows.

The Chief of Naval Operations today has two primary duties (and “operations,” per se, is not one of them). He is still the professional head of the Navy, with all that this implies, legally and psychologically, and he is still the naval member of a collective or corporate group, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged legally with providing the Secretary of Defense and the President with strategic advice and with strategic and logistic planning, with creating unified commands and providing strategic direction and with developing joint training and educational polities for them.

These two jobs—professional head of the Navy and member of the nation’s professional “board of strategy”—complement, but complicate, each other.

For the professional head of the Navy, the actual or legal “supervision” (the word, “command” was removed from the law) over various components of the Navy depends upon the “direction” and “determination” of the Secretary of the Navy. Virtually all of the Navy’s combatant forces are now assigned to unified and specified commanders, and they cannot be shifted, without the knowledge of the unified commander and “only by authority of, and under procedures established by the Secretary of Defense, with the approval of the President.” Forces not assigned to the unified commands, which now normally mean new ships “working up,” ships under extended overhaul, mobile logistics forces (through the fleet commanders), shore facilities, and certain special forces or units, are still under the “supervision” of the CNO. The naval components of the unified commands are also administered through the Navy Department, and CNO communicates directly with the naval commander on purely naval matters. He prescribes guidelines and policies for the employment of naval forces, and has general, over-all responsibilities for training and maintaining the Fleet.

In this area—the development of naval doctrine, tactics and technique for combat— the CNO still retains one of his most important and far reaching professional responsibilities.

Thus, the term “supervision” has usurped de jure and largely in fact the “command” functions formerly exercised by law or delegation, not only by the CNO, but by the other chiefs of the four services. No chief now “commands” anything under the law.

But in practice, this supervision sometimes becomes—by virtue of the authority delegated by his civilian superiors—a command or over-all executive function. Despite the fact that the chain of command now runs legally from the Secretary of Defense directly to the unified commanders, despite the fact that the former system of assigning a military department as an “executive agent” (in behalf of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense) over a unified command has been abrogated, the CNO may, nevertheless, assume such a function. Actually this occurred in the fall of 1962 during the Cuban crisis when the Chief of Naval Operations was designated as the executive agent, or delegated responsible commander, to carry out the orders of the President and the Secretary of Defense for the operation of a “quarantine” around Cuba.

The CNO’s precise authority over the various bureaus of the Navy Department is still fuzzy legally. There is, indeed, a dualism, or perhaps a better word would be a parallelism, between the bureau structure and the present structure of the CNO’s office. The various functional assistants for personnel, research, aeronautics, and so on in the office of the CNO are in effect staff assistants or co-ordinating agencies whose duties may often overlap that of several bureaus, but who sometimes (as in the Chief of Personnel) parallel, or complement the executive work of the bureaus with the (essentially) staff and administrative functions of the CNO’s office. The material bureaus are responsive, too, to the Secretary of the Navy, through the Office of Naval Material and various other assistants. In fact, therefore, the CNO’s authority over the bureaus has been considerable for some functions, minor (as in contracting procedures) for others, and has been shared with a parallel line of responsibility which runs directly from the various bureaus to the Secretary of the Navy’s office.

The new organization of the Navy Department, announced recently, may ultimately further reduce in fact, if not in intent and in law, the authority of the CNO over the bureaus. The establishment of a supervising office over the material bureaus headed by a senior admiral, answerable to the Secretary of the Navy, sets up an administrative and operating chain of command in the material, contracting, procurement, and design field parallel to, but independent of, the CNO. The CNO will still be able to influence, though not to determine, through his staff assistants for research and development, ships’ characteristics, and so on.

The new organization, which in some ways parallels changes already made in the other services, may complicate the job of the CNO. From the point of view of the Defense Department, it certainly “tidies up” the logistics chain of command and may bring the hydraheaded monster—the bureau system—under effective control. But the bureaus, in fact most of the shore establishment of the Navy, have existed for one supreme purpose: to serve the Fleet. Responsiveness to the needs of the Fleet may be discouraged or retarded by what some critics have called “the divisive effect” of the new organization. It will be even more essential, but possibly more difficult, for the CNO to influence, for instance, ships’ characteristics and weapons designs with his professional judgment than it is today. In fact, some opponents of the new organization believe that a “Chief of Naval Support”¹ would become, in effect, another CNO for material matters, “and then the CNO will have nothing left under his own control but training men with weapons and equipment devised by somebody else, to conduct operations to be controlled by somebody else.”

This point of view represents one pole of naval thinking about the new organization. The opposite pole, including the civilian heads of the services, some Congressmen and some naval officers, holds that the new organization will enable the CNO to be more effective in influencing the bureaus than he has been in the past. These opinions are irreconcilable.

In practice, the effectiveness of the new organization is likely, as always, to depend more upon the characteristics and personalities of the CNO, “the Chief of Naval Material Support,” the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of Defense—and upon how they blend and mesh—than upon organizational blueprints of charters.

As a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CNO has duties that are distinct from, yet articulated with, those of professional head of the Navy.

He shares collectively many duties and responsibilities specifically assigned by law and/or by executive authority of the President and the Secretary of Defense. These duties include preparation of strategic plans and of joint logistics plans; establishment of unified commands; review of major material and personnel requirements or “force levels”; formulation of policies for joint education and training; providing U. S. representation on the Military Staff Committee of the United Nations and (a catch-all phrase) “such other duties as the President or the Secretary of Defense may direct”-—all “subject to the authority and direction” of the President and the Secretary of Defense. This is, obviously, a very large order, indeed.

In practice, it has become larger and larger, as the JCS have been brought into the formulation of the military budget; the debate on weapons systems; the curriculum of the National War College; the military effects of a proposed reorganization; the consequences in the politico-military field of such and such a policy; the kinds and amounts of foreign aid; and so on. The problems and the details are astronomical and highly complex; the JCS of 1963 are required to tackle far more, and far more esoteric, problems than those men who directed successfully the grand strategy of the greatest war in history. And the problems of today transcend the purely military; the major ones have wide ranging political, economic, or psychological consequences.

Between the CNO as professional head of the Navy and the CNO as a member of the JCS there are bound to be conflicts, despite— some would say because of—the fact that the same man wears both hats.

There is, first and foremost, a competition for time. The problems are so many and so numerous that a modern CNO could, literally, work 24 hours a day. To solve the problem of time, the CNO has had to delegate and select— delegate work loads to others, select the most important problems for major attention. The 1958 revisions of the “unification” act, in fact, authorized the delegation of duties by the CNO and the chiefs of the other services to their vice chiefs, and provided that orders issued by the vice chiefs would “have the same effect” as those issued by the chiefs. This merely set the legal seal of approval upon what had already become practice.

There is, second, a conflict of service interest within the JCS. Each of the members is a specialist in his own field of military professionalism. As the head of his service, he naturally arrives at value judgments based on his own past training, education, and experience, and he is subject, too, to the pressures which are bound to stem from his service. The CNO knows that his fellow officers in blue watch with the keenest interest his actions in the JCS, since those actions could have a profound effect upon the Navy and upon each officer’s individual career. Sometimes— in the most extreme cases—the CNO as a member of the JCS may feel this form of conflict so deeply that he may think he is suffering from a split personality. His judgment as a part of the collective strategic “brains” of the nation may dictate a course of action which he knows his service may abhor. Such black- and-white cases are rare, but they are part of the occupational hazards of the job.

Differing emphasis upon weapons systems, and differing military theories are bound to produce differing opinions and judgments—sometimes in matters of supreme importance; viz., General Mathew B. Ridgway’s unilateral dissent in opposition to suggested U. S. military intervention in Indochina at the time of the siege of Dien Bien Phu.

The present collective body of theJCS includes the CNO precisely because he is the professional chief of his service. As originally envisaged, theJCS was to embody the collective wisdom of the individual experts of the services; this organization has been endorsed specifically many times by Congress on the basis that planning and the responsibility for execution of plans should go hand in hand. The CNO still retains, as a member of the JCS, responsibility for planning. Yet the CNO and other chiefs have now been all but stripped of responsibility for executing plans, since they no longer have direct command authority over operating forces. And there has always been another school of thought; i.e., that the nation’s top strategic planners should insulate themselves from any service point of view, should become “senior statesmen” divorced from administrative and operational functions, and should plan from a “lofty” plateau of so-called Defense Department, or national, interest. There is, therefore, in the minds of some observers a clear-cut dichotomy in the present role of the CNO as a member of theJCS.

Nevertheless, the original concept of the JCS role—that responsibility and authority, planning and execution should go hand-in- hand and collective strategic judgments rather than a Pentagon “single-voice” are desirable—is still the dominant one. The CNO, therefore, must live with and compromise some of the conflicts of his two-hat job.

These conflicts, in the minds of most students, are necessary and inescapable; any “solution” that would eliminate such conflicts would probably establish a far greater evil. For, if the Joint Chiefs are no longer the professional heads of their services and become “Senior Military Advisers,” they will inevitably lose their present usefulness. They will soon be subject to the charge of “Ivory Tower” thinking, and they will become an appendage of—not a cog in—the tremendous Pentagon machine. It is “precisely because the Chief of Naval Operations is a naval expert that he is a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” His specialized knowledge, his lifetime in the Navy, his daily contacts with his service qualify him to advise the President.

Whether or not it will be possible, in any meaningful way, for the Chief of Naval Operations to continue to occupy the top professional pinnacle of the Navy and to represent, not only the Navy, but also the nation in the JCS will depend, in large measure, upon current and future developments and trends in and outside of the Pentagon. The Navy and the CNO can influence some of these trends; some of them appear to be beyond the Navy’s control, or indeed, beyond the control of any of the services. The fatalist who endorses Tolstoy’s theory of history, might go so far, indeed, as to assert that no man can influence today or tomorrow, that leaders, like followers, are but chips on the waves of history. The opposite point of view will, however, hold with William E. Henly (in his famous “Invictus”), that man determines his own destiny:

“I am the Master of my fate I am the Captain of my soul. . .

What are some of the trends that are already influencing the office of the Chief of Naval Operations?

The trend toward Big Government, and toward the centralization of power within government is probably the most important. The nation has grown from less than a one- billion-dollar federal budget to a 100-billion- dollar budget in less than a lifetime. About one in four families depend directly on government (federal, state, and local) payrolls.

Rapid communication has tended to centralize power politically as well as militarily; the power of the Presidency and of the executive branch of government has increased tremendously vis-a-vis the legislative branch. Congress, directed by the Constitution “to raise and support armies ... to provide and maintain a Navy,” exercises today far less detailed control over the armed services than it did prior to World War II. The Defense Department has grown too big, the Presidency too powerful, and Congress itself, with its plethora of committees, its few staff assistants, and its own sweeping legislative grants of power to the executive, has all but abdicated its constitutional right to “rule” the services. There are few “king-makers” left, like Carl Vinson of Georgia, whose longterm knowledge, experience, and political “savvy” still greatly influence the Pentagon.

In addition to an increased concentration of power within the executive branch of government, there has been a concentration of power within units of that government.

In the Defense Department the focus of power is the office of the Secretary of Defense.

In 16 years, a National Military Establishment, with one Secretary of Defense and three “special assistants” (salary of the latter, $10,000 per year), which was to “integrate” policy and co-ordinate the services, has grown to a Defense Department, with tremendous and all-powerful top echelons in—or under— the office of the Secretary of Defense. Today, in addition to the Secretary, there are one Deputy Secretary and eight Assistant Secretaries of Defense; 26 Deputy Assistant Secretaries; one Director of Research and Engineering; five Deputy Directors, and (throughout the Pentagon, including the services) no less than 3,950 (as of 1 June 1962) civil service jobs in the GS-14 to GS-18 categories, each paying from $12,845 to $20,000 per year. The Joint Staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has increased from a limit of 100 officers to 400, and hundreds of others are assigned to the “Organization of the Joint Chiefs.” Even so, under consideration is a suggestion that the Joint Staff be further increased.

Secretaries of the individual services have lost more than their cabinet status. Not only policy-making but budgets, personnel, pay, housing, weapons systems, force levels, daily administration and even operations are now directed—often in detail—by the Secretary of Defense or his assistants.

“Super” defense agencies, like the Defense Supply Agency (which has 23 general or flag officers assigned at headquarters and 11 more in the field) and the Defense Intelligence Agency, have taken from the services many of the functions they formerly exercised. Some of these agencies are answerable directly to the Secretary of Defense, or jointly to the Secretary and to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Thus, the individual powers of the services and the functions supervised by the CNO have been reduced, and the responsibilities have been diffused.

At the same time, the closely centralized command and control exercised by the Secretary of Defense and the reports required by the top echelons in the Defense Department have immensely increased the workload and the paper-load of many branches of the CNO’s office and of many parts of the Navy Department. Assistant Secretaries of Defense, if authorized by the Secretary and acting in his name, can, legally, cut across service lines and administrative channels. In practice, whether authorized or not, they do so. Moreover, the new centralized system of “The Book”—the “Five Year Force Structure and Financial Program” instituted by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara—imposes an additional workload upon the services, and upon the office of the CNO. Any major deviation from the five-year plan requires justification and authorization all the way up to the top of the towering pyramid in the Pentagon, with a consequent increase in administrative load, particularly upon the lower echelons.

This trend in closely centralized control has been accompanied by a pronounced shift towards the new managerial concepts.

These managerial concepts, as developed in the past two years, place considerably less reliance than in prior administrations upon professional judgments and military experience, and considerably more upon quantitative and qualitative analyses, engineering and scientific judgments, computer calculations, and cost-effectiveness yardsticks. Efforts have been made—they have been at least partially successful—to equate functional components of the armed services “across-the-board” and to weigh, for instance, a Navy Polaris submarine, as a strategic weapons system, against an Air Force hardened Minuteman, or a B-52 bomber. There has been a great reliance upon theoretical figures and presentations. The TFX contract, for instance, was awarded to Convair and Grumman, not— as often in the past—on the basis of the selection of the best of two or more aircraft actually tested in flight, but upon predicted performances and theoretical figures listed in engineering calculations and slide-rule statistics. “Brochure-manship” has become a new art form in winning military contracts.

With this emphasis upon analytical management and “cost-effectiveness”—much of it perforce theoretical—there has come a demand for more and more details from the services. Lowest echelons are kept busy answering questions of all sorts and filing progress reports or revised estimates. In the Cuban crisis, for instance, the Office of the Secretary of Defense even required information on cargo loading of all vessels loaded with Marines assigned to the Cuban emergency forces, even though the ships were already at sea, and could not have been reloaded.

Command and control, like management and administration, has been tightened and greatly centralized, and new communications systems to speed the voice of Washington even to the first lieutenant in Vietnam are being perfected. In considerable part this trend toward improved communications and tighter control, toward the centralization of all authority in the Secretary of Defense, and ultimately in the President, is a product of the atomic age, of the fear that accident or incident, or an irresponsible junior commander in some far-flung outpost might precipitate nuclear holocaust.

With the emphasis upon the Machine, which the Technological Revolution had already encouraged long before this decade, and upon computer calculations, operational analysis, and abstract theory has gone a trend toward conformity, an attempt to fit all the services into roughly the same type of organization (even into the same type of uniform), and to force, where possible, not only common use and common item procurement, but also common item design of weapons systems. A deliberate effort to discourage inter-service competition which, technologically, yielded such important products as the air-cooled and liquid-cooled aircraft engines prior to World War II, has gone as far as the TFX—a compromise Air Force-Navy aircraft. Other common-design aircraft are planned; the trend is in the direction of Department of Defense weapons systems, rather than specialized Army, Navy, or Air Force designs, engineered to provide the best performance for each type. This trend towards “commonality” may in time inhibit the fulfillment of service requirements.

Man has not been unaffected by this trend toward conformity. Man, the original and still the ultimate, fighting machine, has been in many ways, the neglected element, in recent years, in our military establishment. Common personnel policies, usually keyed to the mass rather than to the needs of an elite corps or service, have handicapped the production of the “Quality Man.” There are now belated, but inadequate, evidences that Man’s importance as the ultimate dictator of battle, the master of the Machine rather than its servant, is being recognized. But the old aura of professionalism, of service and unit individualism, of the elite corps, of a job worth doing and a job well done, of men in whom the nation bestowed “special trust and confidence” has not been recreated.

Obviously the office of the Chief of Naval Operations is caught in the flux of change, and the future holds for it unknown and unforeseeable developments.

There are many potential dangers to the office and to the Navy which looks to the CNO as its professional head.

Politics is the Scylla of the uncharted seas of Washington for the CNO. Unlike the uniformed personnel of the Royal Navy, who are never directly answerable to Parliament, the U. S. officer serves two masters. He can never forget that Congress has the Constitutional duty of raising and maintaining armies and navies and that Congress is a jealous mistress. For the CNO, the cultivation of Congressmen is part of the job. His appearances before Congressional committees, time-consuming though they may be, are a major part of his duties, and he must answer Congressional queries as fully and frankly as possible.

But this sometimes presents a problem; indeed the multiplicity of masters and the dual roles he serves dog the CNO wherever he turns. For the Chief of Naval Operations is directly answerable to the executive department of government; the President is his Commander-in-Chief. And sometimes the executive and the legislative branches do not see eye to eye; the CNO may be, and often is, “in between.”

This dual loyalty, with the inevitable conflicts it creates, has been a mounting problem in recent years, and promises to be more so in the future. For inevitably there has been a trend by each administration and by Congressmen in both parties to use the professional prestige of the CNO to bolster their political case. To avoid being drawn into partisan politics, to be loyal to his Commander-in- Chief and civilian superiors, and yet to give an honest account of his stewardship to the Congress is a task which calls for diplomacy, tact, moral courage, and prescience.

Reconciliation of these conflicting loyalties has become harder by far in recent years because of two factors. One, the alteration of the period of appointment from the traditional four, to two, years, makes the office more susceptible to political pressures than ever. A four-year term, such as that of the Commandant of the Marine Corps (provided by law), would serve to bridge administrations, and make the civilian executives in power less likely to try to cram a policy down the throat of a CNO. A recalcitrant Chief can, of course, be removed at the will of the President, but most chief executives would hesitate to use such drastic political surgery unless absolutely essential. A two-year term, on the other hand, tends to make the CNO more pliable and brings the office more into the arena of partisan politics. Congress could do much to reduce the impact of partisan politics upon the office, and could at the same time strengthen the prestige of the CNO and its own weakening control over the Pentagon by providing, by law, for four-year terms for the Chief of Naval Operations (and for the Chiefs of Staff of the Army and Air Force). Mr. Vinson has emphasized the importance of a four-year term by preparing enabling legislation. It is essential that the professional heads of our services be a-political, or beyond or above politics; this legislation would help that end.

Another factor that makes the reconciliation of conflicting loyalties difficult has been the tendency of chief executives in the Pentagon—a tendency particularly pronounced in the current administration—to call upon the CNO to witness in writing to Congress his satisfaction with the naval portion of the defense budget. Such a required testimonial can only be considered by the Congressional opposition for what it is—an enforced testimonial, subject to searing cross- examination. But either way, the CNO walks a high wire; the fall into the morass of partisan politics could be a fatal one, not only for him but for the Navy.

This is the first danger.

The second is likewise a conflict in loyalties and responsibilities.

The CNO’s dual role as a member of the corporate Joint Chiefs of Staff and as the professional head of the Navy carries with it built-in conflicts. As the CNO concentrates more upon his JCS role, he runs the risk of slow alienation from his service, the risk of professional isolation, of ivory-tower thinking. On the other hand, if he reflects purely a service point of view, he risks the prison of parochialism. The dualism, the conflicts must be lived with; for the sake of the Navy, in fact for the sake of the country, the CNO must meet these conflicts head on. For, unless all the services are to be merged in one great amorphous mass, unless all the military departments are to be eliminated, (which God forbid!) there is no other way to avoid the final, fatal diffusion of responsibility, which separation of the jobs of CNO and naval member of the JCS would entail. Here, too, is another high wire that is certain to become higher, given present trends in the Pentagon.

In addition to these two death-defying high-wire acts, the modern CNO must be prepared to be a skillful bareback rider. For today’s Navy, even more than the vanished one, has its factions, its submarine, air, and amphibious enthusiasts, its black-shoe and brown-shoe Navy, its Rickover supporters and Rickover Rejects. The CNO must be prepared to ride herd on them all, to keep them happy, to keep them mutually informed, to harness them all in a seapower team.

There is, finally, the danger of diminishing authority coupled with continuing responsibility. The trend towards closely centralized control at the Secretary of Defense or Commander-in-Chief level, the merging of former naval organizations and functions (intelligence and supply, for instance) into super Defense agencies beyond the control of the CNO, the creation of a high-ranking Chief of Naval Materiel or Support over the bureaus and responsive to the Secretary of the Navy, the creation of unified commands and a new strike command for limited war, and a prevalent philosophy of management which relies heavily upon the scientist-manager-operational analyst, rather than upon the military professional—all these combine to reduce, restrict, limit, or handicap the prestige, power, and position of the CNO.

Perhaps the greatest danger of all is one that is not limited to the Pentagon or to the services, but is a danger to the nation. This danger can be defined in a number of varying ways: emphasis upon quantity or mass rather than quality; a growth of laissez-faire morality and work habits; the pressures of conformity and the consequent development of the new idol of our times, the “organization man;” the crisis of values which is the great crisis of our civilization.

Can any man born of woman be expected to meet such challenges, surmount such dangers?

I think it is possible to find professional leaders qualified to bear these burdens of leadership. I think it is possible for a CNO to lead in the highest sense of the word and to shape and to mould despite the hobbles and handicaps.

The CNO of tomorrow must be—first and foremost—a man of great moral strength; indeed, character is still—in any office—the primary virtue of a public servant. He must believe deeply in his country, its fighting services, the Navy, himself; but most of all, in his country. He must be willing to “stick his neck out;” the forgotten careers of “yes-men” litter the byways of history. He must be willing to cut through red tape, anticipate instructions, even—sometimes, but rarely— disobey orders. He must have Nelson’s “blind eye;” he must, on occasion, disregard protocol and procedures as “Ernie” King did in World War II, as Forrest Sherman did when he sent the Marines to Korea, as Arleigh Burke did in the Lebanon crisis.

Second, the CNO of tomorrow must have breadth of knowledge and vision. Though he may well worship at the shrine of Neptune, he must be able to see beyond spume and spindrift. The old shibboleth that “What’s good for the Navy is good for the Nation,” is no longer—if, indeed, it ever was—valid. The good of the Navy may coincide with the good of the Nation most of the time, but there will be exceptions, and the great CNOs of tomorrow must have the courage and the vision to distinguish the exceptions.

Third, the CNO of future years must, it goes without saying, possess the professional qualifications, the technical knowledge to back the positions he takes. It will be his role, in fact his vital obligation, to “sell” to the hierarchy of civilians in the Pentagon, to the Secretary of Defense and the President, the military-naval point of view, the professional idea, the judgment of seagoing experience. Unless he does this the nation may suffer. As Professor Warner R. Schilling of Columbia University noted in his article entitled “Scientists, Foreign Policy, and Politics,” in the June 1962 issue of The American Political Science Review, British scientists in World War II “were in the final measure but ready tools. [Emphasis supplied.]

“They were good tools, but the use to which they were put was the result of the kind of ideas the military men had about war.”

To temper the judgments of “cost-effectiveness,” computer calculations, and scientific, political, and management points of view with naval professionalism is a primary duty of the CNO of today and tomorrow.

But more important, he must be able to project his positions to the Fleet; he must have not only power of personality and qualities of leadership, but also a warm and genuine belief in Man—in this Technological Age—as the ultimate arbiter of battle.

A great naval leader, who in his career exemplified leadership, has expressed the importance of this regard for Man in the following concrete terms:

Men must be inspired to do their best work, and this is true from the top of an organization down to the very bottom. Inspiration usually comes from other men. If the inspiration . . .congeals, then an organization goes flat ... A fighting force loses its spirit. There are navies in the world now which don’t have inspiration, and they become a tool of their politicians for furtherance of their political careers, or they become recalcitrant, or, more likely, they simply lose the energy and enthusiasm which is so necessary to an effective Navy. . . . Their leaders do not exercise initiative—they wait to be told ... if the senior officers become “yes men” . . . the spirit will go out of the Navy or any other fighting force very fast.

Finally, it is clear that the future power and prestige of the office of the Chief of Naval Operations will depend tomorrow as yesterday, more upon the quality of the man than upon the semantics of legislation.

The future relationship of the CNO to the Secretary of the Navy, to the Secretary of Defense, and to the President will determine the success or failure of the Chief’s tenure. The CNO can, indeed, continue to be the professional head of the Navy in custom and its actual “Supreme Leader” in fact only if he demonstrates wisdom, knowledge, strength, tact, and the essential marrow of them all— the art of getting along with human beings.