Prestige is a fine but fragile thing. It is called the power to command admiration. It is hard to get, easy to lose, and even harder to get back after it has once been lost. This is every bit as true for navies as it is for individual men.
Sparked by the Secretary of the Navy, there is much thought being given these days to the “prestige of the Navy man and his family.” Some believe the trend is about the same as always—high in war when we are needed, and low in peace when we are merely very expensive insurance. A few think we are riding a wave of favorable public opinion. Many of us who have been proud to wear the blue naval uniform the better part of our lives think the prestige of the Navy man and his family has plunged so low in recent years that something had better be done in a hurry or we shall find our great Navy in very dangerous waters.
As for what should be done, most people seem to feel the answer lies mainly in better pay, improved housing, and similar material rewards. Agreed, these would help, but there is more to the problem, and to its solution, than mere dollars and cents.
Let us start by considering whether or not the prestige of the Navy is really a problem worth our attention. Surely, if prestige is the power to command admiration, the U. S. Navy has it. Ours is the Navy to which our friends around the world look with respect and hope. Ours is the Navy which for nearly 20 years no nation has dared to challenge in a major engagement at sea. Ours is the Navy that has kept the oceans and our country free. Yes, doing all this has been a creditable accomplishment.
Think next of the men who have made it possible. Think of the hard grind of the sailor’s life: of the endless cycle of his watches, work and drills at sea, day and night, in fair weather and foul; of the months he spends, year after year, away from home and family; of his inability to predict or control where he will be next week or next year, or to plan an ordered life for himself and his family. Think of the dangers faced by the young pilot who is daily catapulted from his carrier in a screaming jet, and who must regularly plunge back on board that rolling flight deck, often in the darkest night, with his life hanging in the balance. Think of the destroyer captain who routinely spends 18 to 20 hours a day on his bridge, bearing on his shoulders sole responsibility for all that is done, or that may have to be done, by some 300 men and a complex fighting machine that has cost more to build than the Empire State building. Think of the Thresher. Think of the Navy wife who, every two or three years, must again take her children out of school, pack the battered furniture, sever all the ties she has made, and move to a new and strange community, all because this is a part of helping her man serve his country. Surely, in all these things there is much to command the deepest admiration.
But now let us look at some other facts. Isn’t something happening to the respectability of this career when during a period of marked national prosperity Navy families in some sections of our country are forced to go on relief? Certainly something is wrong when, in this age of Cold War danger and complex military technology, the American public esteems an enlisted man in the armed forces as sixteenth in order after a plumber and a garage mechanic. Is there not patent injustice in the never-ending flow of loaded news items telling the public “SAILOR ASSAULTS LOCAL MAN” or “EX-NAVY MAN SHOOTS WIFE,” as though the Navy, itself, were a crime syndicate? Surely it hurts our prestige as well as our self-respect when many thousands of the families of our enlisted men and junior officers must live in substandard or slum-level housing, raising their children in the most deplorable surroundings. More injurious still, too often we are labelled by our neighbors as transients and “second-class citizens” because we rarely stay long enough in any one community to really become a part of it.
Each of these ills not only reflects the low esteem in which we seem to be held, but causes our prestige to be lowered still more.
These are just a few of the external symptoms of the trouble. The internal signs are just as disturbing, if not more so, for the problem goes deep into the Navy itself. How many of our young officers and sailors wear their uniforms ashore with real pride today? What has happened to our discipline? Ask this of any officer or chief petty officer whose service dates back to pre-World War II days, and it is a good bet that he will tell you the trend has been steadily and deplorably downhill. On board ship, what has happened to the authority and respect that once was due the captain, not to mention the division officer and the petty officer? Moreover, isn’t something seriously out of kilter when at every level of responsibility, from the lowest to the highest, the authority that goes with responsibility is being steadily whittled away?
What do all these developments reflect and what are they causing if not a dangerous deterioration of the prestige of the Navy, both in the eyes of the public and as we see ourselves?
The truth is saddening beyond words. Our fine officers and men and their families simply do not command the admiration and respect we know in our hearts they have earned. We care because we in the Navy look after our own. But we care even more because we know that if this great country of ours is to remain free, our Navy must stay strong and proud.
But it must be added emphatically: Let us not sit around moaning in self-pity. Let us analyze the problem, figure out what we can do about it, and turn to!
It would be easy to say that the blame rests with the public and the press, or maybe with the Public Information Officer. It would be easy to say that only our so-called “image” is what needs to be altered. While there is certainly room for improvement in some of these areas, the roots of the problem do not fie there. For if we are to succeed at “selling” something (and I am sorry I must resort to that language) the one absolute essential is a good product.
We must start by taking a cold hard look, not at the public or the Navy’s image, but at ourselves. Image be damned. Let us look straight at the facts, the truth, and the grim realities of what this man’s Navy must actually be, before we consider what it may, or may not, appear to be to others.
First, the Navy exists for but one basic reason, and that is to fight. If we in the Navy do nothing else, we must prepare ourselves to the best of our ability for victory in battle.
Today in the Fleet too much of our time is spent on paperwork and frills that have little or no bearing on who will be sunk and who will survive when general quarters is next sounded. Our ships are so deluged with administrative burdens that, to borrow a term from the business world, it has long been common practice to “sub-optimize” on some of our responsibilities, even to the extent of deliberately ignoring them. How can this be? Simply because there are only 24 hours in a day. You do what you can in the time available, using your own best judgment as to what is most important or what superficial splash has to be made first to please a V.I.P. or satisfy a demand for “immediate command attention.” The rest has to wait, and it often remains undone forever.
There are at least three things very wrong about this growing practice of sub-optimizing, but the worst is that we are now sub-optimizing on combat readiness. We are doing this because too many people seem to have forgotten why the Fleet really exists. There are too many influences and interruptions which divert the Navy’s resources toward something other than fighting ability. Let us get rid of them. Just to mention a few, let us knock off: the money, manpower, and effort that perpetuate our paperwork empire; our magnificent on-paper training programs; our mass of canned and meaningless reports; our obsession with safety that can only make us shun harm’s way; our drills that are designed merely to impress rather than to teach men to fight; our superficial painting that only hides the rust on a ship and wastes the effort of the crew. Just who, if anyone, is being fooled by all of these enervating practices?
Let us quit wasting our resources and corrupting our sense of purpose. Let us concentrate our ability and energy on the maintenance and improvement of the fighting Fleet and fighting men.
What has fighting ability to do with prestige? Well, it simply comes first. First, because we must have a Navy that will win in war, whether it has prestige or not. First, because if this Navy of ours could not fight, you may be sure its prestige would be measured in decibels of ridicule. First, because if the image of the Navy were a little less that of a fraternity house, and a whole lot more that of a tough, hard-fighting machine without equal in the business of defense, deterrence, and devastation, nobody we need care about would worry about our prestige.
This brings us to discipline. How can an undisciplined man learn self-discipline? Without this, how can he have self-respect? How can a man who lacks self-respect be respected and admired by others? There goes our prestige.
Consider this case history: In 1954, General Lemuel Shepherd, then Commandant of the Marine Corps, startled his staff with these terse words: “The re-enlistment rate at Camp Lejeune has dropped from 79 per cent to 7 per cent in three months. Do something about it!”
The first thing to do was to find out exactly why. Opinions that had been given by a cross-section of well-meaning experts at Camp Lejeune blamed the trouble mainly on the following causes: the new Code of Military Justice; the inaccessibility from Camp Lejeune of any good liberty town; the prolonged absence from home of Marines serving in the Sixth Fleet; and a mixture of gripes which added up to inadequate pay, housing, commissaries, transportation, and other living conveniences. The latter group of causes was a favorite, but all were likely and reasonable, and certainly they were honest complaints.
Fortunately, General Shepherd knew better than to base his conclusions on hearsay evidence. He called in some real experts. A few weeks later he had his answer in the results obtained at Camp Lejeune from 300 personal interviews and 3,000 meticulously worded, 8- page questionnaires. It was heartbreaking, especially to a top Marine. Without question, the reason for the decline in re-enlistments was nothing more or less than a disintegration of discipline.
General Shepherd picked up the phone and called General L. B. “Chesty” Puller on the West Coast. He ordered him to come east immediately and take over at Camp Lejeune. If there ever was a hard-boiled, hard-driving Marine, it is General Puller. By the time he had the brig loaded and every Marine on the base with his gut sucked in and his hat squared, the problem was well on the way to disappearing. Five months later the re-enlistment rate was back up to 70 per cent, proving the validity of the startling conclusion.
All of the business about pay, housing, commissaries, UCMJ and the Sixth Fleet were true, and most are just as true today. But that was not the reason Marines were not shipping over at Camp Lejeune. Basically, deep down inside, too many of them had not found there the kind of challenging, demanding, make-or- break, hard-handed discipline for which they had joined the Marines. Since all that seemed to have gone out, they wanted out, too.
Now the Navy is not the Marine Corps, and it cannot be made to achieve the same ends in exactly the same way. This example, however, throws much light on the problem of prestige in the Navy. Prestige is akin to pride, and pride begins with a taut bridge and runs all the way down through the quarterdeck and the galley into the steering engine room. The principle is universal. Somehow the Navy has lost or misplaced the hard officers who can handle equally hard men so as to make them proud of themselves. Nevertheless, the answer is here for every officer who will squarely face the fact that we must quit striving just to be popular. For the good of the Navy, we must have the guts to be hard- boiled.
And this brings us to leadership, on which the following observation is merited: we have had in recent years too many officers who, early in their careers, had only a fleeting exposure to the basic leadership experience of serving as a division officer on board ship. Though unavoidable, this has had far-reaching consequences. It all began with World War II, with the rapid promotion we had in those days. Many went all the way from ensign to lieutenant commander in less than four years. Today there are still literally thousands of officers in the ranks of captain and commander whose experience as a division officer was inadequate. There is no better leadership school and, except for command, no more challenging or rewarding experience in the Navy than ordering the daily work and dealing with the day-to-day problems of a division of blue-jackets. It is at that level and not in any school that an officer learns, if he is ever to learn, not only how to lead men, but how to make petty officers lead their men.
The fact that so many of our present day senior officers never really learned leadership at the level of the turret, the fireroom, and the mess deck is very largely responsible for most of the inadequacies of our leadership ever since the War. It explains many things that cannot otherwise be explained. It explains why many of our even more senior officers kept on acting like division officers through most of their careers. They did it because they had to. It explains why the chain of command down through the junior officers, the chiefs, and the petty officers to the seamen has been so muddled and corrupted. It helps explain why a lot of the authority that used to go hand in hand with responsibility has been taken away from the officers and petty officers who ought to be exercising it. It helps explain what has happened to our discipline. It goes a long way toward explaining why a man with a “crow” on his sleeve or an officer with just a stripe and a half no longer has quite the pride he used to have in his uniform and himself. And this brings us back to prestige, helping to explain why that, too, has declined.
What do we do about leadership? Fortunately, the aspect of the matter discussed here is solving itself with time. Hopefully, it will serve as a lesson to the Navy that every junior officer must have a full measure of division officer experience before he is advanced. Our leadership is now improving, slowly but steadily. General Order 21 and the various leadership training programs that have proven themselves better than mere paper castles have done tremendous good. Most of the officers who are now beginning to come into the more important command assignments have what it takes to lead and to get real leadership from their officers and petty officers. They need encouragement rather than criticism. But they do need to be reminded from time to time of the points we have considered in previous paragraphs: the ultimate aim of their leadership is a proud and disciplined Navy that is supreme at the business of war at sea.
Before we move on to consider some of the externally-controlled factors that hurt our prestige, such as inadequate pay and housing, we should touch on a few more areas in which we, ourselves, can do more. There is just too much that is true about the popular conception—the image, if you will—of the Navy man and his family: that he is a hard-drinking, irresponsible, immoral hellion always after somebody’s daughter; that he is a bad financial risk; that he is prone to marry and start a family before he can afford it; that Navy families are comprised of less than good citizens because so many are disinterested in the problems of their communities.
These problems have always been with navies and always will be to some extent. It would be wishful thinking to suppose otherwise. However, here are a few steps we can take which would help: The recruiter must stop bringing in the beatnik and the teen-age delinquent, just to fill his quota. Just one of these trouble-makers wastes more of the time and effort of the entire chain of command right up to the commanding officer than most of them will ever be worth to the Navy. It is better to have a ship with only 80 per cent of her allowance, all reliable men, than have 100 per cent of whom 5 per cent are bad apples, repeatedly at mast. It is these, and not typical Navy men, who are responsible for most of the damage done to our reputation and our prestige ashore.
We must devote more attention, and this must be at division officer and senior petty officer level, to counseling our younger men on the subjects of morals, manliness, money and marriage. No one on the outside will do it for us, and these young men simply must be helped to learn more responsibility in these areas. They must be counseled to wait until they are ready before they plunge into marriage. They must be taught to live within their means and within accepted boundaries of social and moral propriety. We should not try to erase what is left of the age-old image of a swashbuckling, hard-fisted, happy-go-lucky, sea-going man who walks ashore in wonderment and a certain disdain. A sailor is a sailor. We should help him, however, learn that there is a great deal more to being a responsible, mature man than mere fun and games with booze and dames.
Our sailors should be cautioned more than they are to shun the parasitic credit corporation and the cheating loan company that see the hapless, gullible sailor as their meat. This is one of the main causes of the damage that has been done, both to the sailor’s actual financial solvency and to his low reputation for financial responsibility; and this has hurt us all.
Improvement in our participation in community affairs should be expected not from the Fleet—the Fleet is too far removed and has enough to do without this; it should be dealt with by our shore establishment, generally under the co-ordination of the district commandants. The commandants, themselves, are ordinarily extremely involved and effective in community relations—but only at their high level. At lower levels, we often fall short of the mark. And here we come back again to leadership and example. We have P.C.O. schools to prepare prospective commanding officers to take over ships. Why don’t we have P.C.O. indoctrination for officers preparing to take command of our shore stations? How, otherwise, except through trial and error, can they learn a business in which few of us have had any prior experience— the complicated and subtle business of living and working in harmony with the local community, and encouraging Navy families to become a more active and respected part of it? This is where grass roots prestige is made or lost. This is where most can be done to dispel the image of the “transient” Navy family called “second-class citizens.” We can and must prove that this conception is false.
In the spirit of our fine tradition that “the Navy looks after its own,” we must do more to bind our Navy family together into a cohesive body of men, women, and children who know what the Navy is doing and are proud to be a part of it. No vehicle has been proven more effective in doing just this than the “Familygram.” I think it should be made mandatory for every ship and shore station in the entire Navy.
There is one final point worth mentioning that is within the exclusive power of the Navy to control, and which is thought by some to detract from the dignity and prestige of the enlisted man. And that is his traditional sailor’s uniform, with its jumper and neckerchief, its white hat, and its bell-bottom trousers. Some would have us do as the other services have done and make all hands appear to be chiefs. As others have said, is nothing sacred any more?
Moving on in this survey of what is wrong and what should be done about the prestige of the Navy man and his family, we are now about to examine an area of divided responsibility between what we have said needed improvement within the Navy and what is wrong outside our ranks. And we now address ourselves to the much maligned P.I.O., who bridges this gap, and who, like the communicator in every fleet exercise, is so often blamed for every ill.
Let us start with the loaded news stories that flood the press with everything wrong that a sailor or ex-sailor ever does ashore, and which so pointedly stress the culprit’s service connection. Can’t something more be done to persuade the publishers and editors of our newspapers that in constantly stressing the Navy affiliation they are hurting their Navy and damaging America? Would it not help occasionally to remind the press and the public that the crime rate of Navy and Marine Corps personnel is very much lower than that of our adult population in general. Let us offset some of the loaded stories with stories about the creditable and admirable things that Navy people are doing. Here we are not thinking of the big news stories that deal with fleets, flag officers, or forensics in the Pentagon. We mean the things that individual Navy men and women do all the time that show their dedication and their personal sacrifices and their willingness to devote their lives to the service of our country in a time of peril. Please think about this, in particular, for it is solid gold.
The American people do not really know their Navy. Probably they never really can, separated as we are from them so much of the time by salt water on which few of them would ever care to live as we do. How can they imagine what it is like to eat, sleep, live, and work, 24 hours a day, in a rolling, pitching, steel neighborhood in which all your muscles ache because everything you stand on, sit on, try to sleep on, work on, or are thrown against, is in a constant state of unpredictable motion? We can never hope to make others know what it is to live this way, or why we are willing to endure it; but there are many other things we can make them understand better than they do, through good Navy public information.
For instance, it is surprising how many Americans still think service men do not pay income taxes. In Fiscal Year 1963, the Navy Finance Center in Cleveland withheld for Federal income tax from the pay of active duty and retired Navy personnel exactly $313,735,689.00. Payment of these taxes is only our duty, for it is mere compliance with the law. But let us see that the people know we do it.
In response to the tendency of a segment of the public to consider Navy families as something less than first-class citizens, would it not help if Navy public information officers did a little more to let the public know how deep down into his pocket the typical generous Navy man reaches whenever someone passes the hat for charity? In 1963, the Navy community afloat and ashore in the Norfolk area gave nearly half a million dollars to the United Givers Fund. This was mentioned in the local press, but similar naval generosity is often not reported in other communities. One reason for the public’s misconception is that, because a Navy man usually contributes to charity drives in his ship or station, he is not prepared to pay again when his neighbor knocks on his door to collect for the same drive in the civil community. The Navy family, accused of not helping, unjustly gets a black eye. Explaining this is a job for local public information at community level. Let us do it.
When it comes to giving, consider the matter of blood. In 1960, the men and women of the Armed Forces gave 160,000 pints of blood to the National Red Cross. This figure does not include a lot more that was given, on which records are not readily available—such as that doned in emergencies or by the Sixth and Seventh Fleets overseas. The blood our uniformed men and women gave in 1960 to the Red Cross alone meant that the 1.3 per cent of the population that is military gave 6.6 per cent of the total blood collected. We do not want headlines about this, but it belongs in the record whenever we are criticized for not doing our part as citizens.
We come now to the great American people and the Congress whom we serve and who control our destiny. We come to a consideration of how they esteem us and how they measure our value to the nation. To them I would respectfully say this: The typical Navy professional does not want to stick out as someone who really “has it made” financially. He does not want to be rewarded above others of comparable individual accomplishment. He is concerned, deeply concerned, about the basic integrity and worth of his Navy and of his own worth within it. He wants to be proud of his Navy, proud of his family and his home, and proud of what he is making of himself. Having dedicated his life to the service of his countrymen, he wants to be able to look those same countrymen in the eye as their equal.
Is this too much for him to ask?