Two-thirds of the 20th century is gone, 66 of the most violent, progressive—and regressive—years in the history of mankind. There are men alive today who were boys among men whose memories recalled. Appomattox and the Indian wars of the West. Technology has shrunk the world and increased in all a people an awareness of a common humanity. Yet, it is a world, too, in which the disparity between the affluent and the disadvantaged grows ever greater. Stone Age, doomed societies coexist with space-conscious people, many of whom suspect that man’s ultimate destiny may not lie on earth.
In a world of such contrasts it is inevitable that tensions and turmoil abound. The accompanying knowledge that man has now the weapons to decimate populations and destroy civilizations prompts a sense of desperate urgency, an impatient questioning of all the settled forms of mankind’s habits, his beliefs, his traditions, even his age-old, methods of settling disputes.
In such a world, possessed of a dual perspective of past and future, stands a conscience-troubled America, the majority of its citizens prosperous beyond any knowing of it by man before—mightily armed and burdened with a responsibilities around the globe—a fabled land still full of growing pains, embattled and flourishing, proud and yet uneasy, looking out over a turbulent and changing scene.
It is against this background that we must assess the career of the U. S. naval officer.
What is a naval career? It may last a bare 20 years, or it may go on longer than 40. It includes individuals who spend most of their lives at sea and others who move only from land to land, rarely seeing a ship. A rapid scan across the wide spectrum of a naval officer’s activity would reveal him busy at a variety of tasks. He might be an officer of the deck peering towards the coast of Vietnam; a carrier pilot, senses taut, ready for the catapult to hurl him into flight; a Polaris submarine’s navigator concentrating on the precise determination of position; a chaplain delivering a sermon; a baffled fire-control officer studying the circuit prints of an inoperative system; a supply officer telephoning some distant point on the trail of an obscure but vital part, and, somewhere on the Washington scene, in conference, an over-worked officer, bounded by flip charts and multi-colored graphs and the iron rules of program planning, trying to decide the best course of action through the wreckage-strewn fields of R.D.T. & E.
From these images, and a thousand more, evolves a definition almost as broad as the sea itself. The naval career, then, consists of a portion of an individual’s lifetime spent in the naval service and dedicated to projecting U. S. power and influence upon, and across, the seas.
Without any derogation from the many important supporting naval roles, let us focus next upon that career which is central to the naval mission: the career of the naval officer who aspires to command at sea.
What a mission it is! Building upon its magnificent record in World War II, the U. S. Navy in the decades since has played a role without precedent in the annals of sea power. Its capabilities have been felt through every one of that succession of crises whose familiar litany of names—Berlin, Greece, Korea, Suez, Syria, Lebanon, Quemoy- Matsu, Berlin (again), Cuba, Dominican Republic, Vietnam—are first, of course, testimony to U. S. commitment to freedom. But, they are also milestones in memory by which the career officer reckons time.
Over the years, the far-scattered ships of our Fleet have brought to nations around the world continual, visible evidence of U. S. strength and concern. It is a measure of the complexity of events and the altered times in which we exist that military events of the postwar decades have been exercises less in force than in restraint, the attainment of fixed and limited objectives. And it is this combination of power and restraint, the intertwining of military and diplomatic moves, that has given the Navy such weight in the nation’s political and international affairs. In its most vaunted expression of naval power, undreamed of by Mahan, the Polaris submarine occupies a unique position in national strategy. It is not new, of course, this relationship between the Navy and the nation, but never before has it been so close, nor the stakes so high.
The U. S. Navy today, then, is busily engaged not only in the historic tasks of navies but in pioneering new forms as well. It offers not only opportunities of adventure and technological challenge but, at the higher levels, a sense of participation in the formulation and execution of national policy. Unhappily, the U. S. Navy is seriously lacking in the quality and numbers of officers it needs.
The shortage in numbers of officers in the Navy is well known and documented. Under the pressures of the Vietnam war, critical areas stand out in bold relief. When we approach the matter of officer quality, however, with its many inseparables of talent, character, and motivation, we move into an area where statistics cannot tell us as much. Certainly, it can be deduced that where numbers are insufficient that selectivity, and hence quality, must diminish. It can be held, too, that quality is not down so much, as that in the modern navy its demands are higher. Either way, of course, the effect is the same. More felt, and perhaps most telling, are those reiterative instances, known to all, of the premature retirement of admired seniors whose act, by virtue of the talents and loyalties they command, send tremors radiating far. On an even more personal scale are those losses to the Navy—which every commanding officer must witness regretfully—of young officers whose promise to the Navy had seemed at one time to be large.
One difficulty in assessing quality, the subject’s resistance to generalization, is that the picture is uneven. In the case of the nuclear- powered submarine Navy there is clear evidence of the harmonious workings of motivation, extra incentives, and selectivity. In the surface Navy, the over-all quality is undeniably lower, but even here there is no officer who cannot offer examples where outstanding leadership has created proud and effective ships. But, over-all, we see a force pressed beyond the talents of those that serve it. That our ships keep going, under the burden of operational commitments more severe than any “peacetime” Navy has ever experienced, is a tribute to the hard work and leadership of a comparatively small percentage of career officers and enlisted men, coupled with the innate pride and patriotism of the majority of the willing, if non-career, personnel who man them.
But if the ships can still steam, if our planes can still fly; if the Fleet can still meet its commitments, no matter what may be the personnel problems, is this not evidence, after all, that quality and numbers are sufficient? Unfortunately, this plausible picture is gravely flawed. The truth is we are not very good. Experience and training are woefully weak. We can’t shoot. Engineering plants, in ships both new and old, are vexed by troubles that keep the question of their operability a matter of continual, nagging concern. Our ships are surfeited with marvelous equipments which are inoperative and, in many instances, unmaintainable. Images of grace and beauty, a delight to the eye, most of our ships nevertheless, by the statistics of the Fleet, are evaluated as far below standards. The Fleet can operate, it can do some things very well, it can meet the challenge of a limited war situation such as Vietnam, but in terms of a general emergency, it is unready for war.
When we take the journey from sea to shore, from ship to desk, we are in a field where assessment of quality, and the consequences of its lack, is even more difficult. Here judgment becomes inferential, evidence more tangential. In the labyrinths of the Pentagon and the material commands, the gauges of how well we are doing become harder to find, but not impossible. For, this officer submits, between that unreliable, ill- designed ship, and the aviator wedged in the cockpit of his multimillion-dollar aircraft by unworkable black boxes, and the technician puzzling over an inadequate instruction book, and the supply officer on the trail of that part which should have been on board ship in the first place, and that senior officer at the conference table trying to choose the correct decision amidst a fog of speculation and paucity of facts, there runs a strong connective chain of casual relationship whose story gives the answer. That answer is that our Navy is not able to come to grips with, nor to control, the technological revolution which in the past decade has mounted like a giant wave.
The evidence is that there is neither the talent nor the experience, in the numbers of officers necessary, to cope with the problem. Bright spots of achievement there have been— not alone, but most notably, nuclear propulsion and the Special Projects Office—which have gained a deserved world fame and have shown what the U. S. Navy can do. But such achievements glow all the brighter for the larger background of programs which have failed to measure up.
Presuming choices must be made, it is perhaps at least debatable that the consequences of inexperience in the Fleet can be accepted and indefinitely borne. What clearly cannot be accepted, however, is serious diminution in the level of talent necessary to guide the Navy’s progress into the future. For every incident of Fleet damage ascribable to substandard shiphandling, the effect is small compared to the implications at the decisive levels of the Navy, where the impact of faulty judgment is multiplied many-fold and the result is always costly. And, given the circumstances of modern times, where the initiation of conflict can be sudden, and its pace swift, the consequences of laggard or misdirected technology may be not merely awkward, but fateful.
At this point it is pertinent to observe that the causes of the Navy’s well known problems in effectively harnessing modern technology are spread over wide ground that embraces a fair portion of both the scientific community and U. S. industry. But the past has only been brought up to illuminate the future. The problem of management of the Navy continues, and it is a central premise of this essay that, in the final reckoning, the Navy’s problems are the Navy’s responsibility and from naval officers must come the initiatives and direction to solve them.
How is the Navy, then, to ensure the numbers of professional officers it needs—and how do we keep them—this judicious blend of operator and manager, equally at home on the sea and in the shore environment? If the Navy cannot obtain them, what will be the consequences?
The declining attractiveness of the naval career is inarguable. The reasons for the decline have been exhaustively analyzed and forcefully presented from many viewpoints. Let us detour around this well-covered ground and concentrate on certain aspects which are crucial.
Most importantly, there is an understandable national weariness with the perpetual atmosphere of war and crisis. It has gone on too long—a perpetual dark shadow over American life.
An unsettled world seemingly being an inescapable fact of our times, so the huge military organization required inevitably is susceptible to, and partakes of, some of the attitudes with which America regards the struggle between the free and totalitarian world. For the military, like the struggle itself, is immense, old, and established. Far from being the small, comparatively remote, elite organization that once used to beckon to youth with a strong romantic appeal, the military is familiarity itself. It is everywhere, known to everyone. And the national attitude toward the military, receding from high points it has known, seemingly has reached a least common denominator of acceptance as a burdensome necessity.
The attitude of the career military man towards the state of the world is not dissimilar to that of the private citizen. He, too, would be glad to see it settle down. The promise, once held out, of the Navy’s reverting to peacetime status, a moderate and stable operating schedule, has long vanished. The very phrase, “Peacetime Navy,” if it is heard at all, merely evokes an ironic smile. Men retiring today after a quarter century of service have never known a peacetime Navy; men beginning their careers will probably never see one. The career we offer a man today is one in the forefront of his nation’s involvement in a great, but ill-defined, struggle, possessing many characteristics of a war situation and too few of true peace, holding out the certitude of hard operating periods, long deployments, uncertain schedules, and ashore work pressures that are geared to those of the operating forces. Because the U. S. Navy is largely manned by transient citizenry serving only their few years of obligated time, upon the career professional there falls a burden of leadership, training and supervision far beyond that of normal times. And because the nature of the struggle appears to be one whose settlements will be political and diplomatic, the military experiences it as a series of confrontations without resolution, accommodations shy of victory, which seem to have no end. Given the present conditions of service, its sustained demands which exceed the normal quota of motivation and enthusiasm, and the absence of any clear call to patriotism, the Naval Service can scarcely expect to hold strong attractiveness.
In assessing the diminishing appeal of the naval career, a fundamental philosophic questioning of the military itself, currently so prevalent, cannot be ignored. In its most irresponsible state, it manifests itself as the barren protests of a youthful minority whose limitless freedoms would not endure but for the will and valor of men whose actions they noisily condemn. At the most responsible levels, it reveals itself in former President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s statement that war itself has become an anachronism. And among the young, particularly, there is still that search for what William James described perfectly as “the moral equivalent of war.” That few find it, that most young men very early become occupied in various useful, if not ennobled, roles in our society does not deny the nagging sense of an unfulfilled idealism. The Vietnam war, with its tangled complications, the difficulty of distinguishing friend from foe, and the widespread suffering of innocence, has heightened appreciation of the moral ambiguities implicit in any human effort, no matter how worthy, where force must be used to achieve its objectives.
A traditional antimilitary strain in the American culture finds continuity and strong nourishment in a portion of the academic world among those whose Utopian hopes for the world have generated a sanguine view of human nature for which the evidence is thin. Many persons are dismayed by the limitations on individual freedom they see in a military organization, but cannot perceive their essential rationale. There is a widespread blurring of cause and effect, an inability to distinguish between militarism and the military. Contributing to this lessening of the military’s moral and intellectual respectability, as it were, has been a lack of support and defense by many sources from whom one would expect it to be most ringingly stated. There is a persistent downplaying of our military forces, as if their very strength is vaguely shameful. Voices in praise of dissent are numerous and the voices of affirmation are curiously muted, even to the withholding of a full measure of honor from those men who are doing the fighting in Vietnam.
The effects of the low attractiveness of the naval career are not likely to reveal themselves soon in any dramatic fashion. Because it has gone on for so long and because it is chronic, it is even possible to believe that the Navy can safely live with the situation indefinitely. This is a delusion. There are trends, derivatives of the inability to gain and hold the officers it needs, that foreshadow a future in which the Navy’s capability to serve national policy to the full potential of sea power must decline.
The increasingly technological nature of the Navy and past failures in major programs, have emphasized the necessity for co-ordinated management of the total effort needed to bring a major new system into the Fleet. But sufficient naval officers being unavailable, the expanded management is achieved primarily by augmentation of civilian numbers and the contracting of outside help. Up to a point this may be desirable, but when the numbers of civilians in the organizational group become large in proportion to the number of naval officers then control—real control and influence—inexorably shifts to the civilian side of the house. Theoretically the power of decision resides with the military man, but it grows progressively more difficult for him to get a handle on matters; he is swamped with paper he does not have time to read; his touch with facts grows more tenuous, and his approving signature on decisive pieces of paper represents less positive direction than an acquiescence in matters only imperfectly understood.
Harnessing technology, however, is but one facet of that most basic of all the Navy’s responsibilities, which is to determine, to justify, and to plan the kind of a Navy we shall have in the future. It is time, therefore, to cross the river and examine the crucial milieu of the Pentagon.
The predominant military fact in the world for some years has been the so-called nuclear stalemate between the United States and Russia. But since nuclear weapons have not been employed—and hopefully never will be—the nature of their possible employment is primarily a theoretical exercise. The questions of delivery systems and defenses, the endlessly ramified hypotheses of the circumstances, timing, and gradations of extent to which their power might be unleashed, are so complex that their study has become a busy, profitable sub-industry of defense. It is a new kind of contest, a chess game with an infinitude of moves and pieces, and one in which the bright amateur who dedicates himself can shine. Since the type of warfare envisioned is equally foreign to the direct experience of the military themselves, in a sense there are no professionals. And in this demi- world of pitted hypotheses, deadly serious and yet not quite real, the military have not been trained to compete. Given the unique importance of nuclear weapons, it is seen that the dialogues concerning them have conferred a strong intellectual prestige and influence to those who could effectively participate. This influence, once peripheral, has grown steadily more central and today, armed with new techniques, an emphasis on operations research, and computer capabilities serving probabilistic studies, it is felt to the farthest ends of the military establishment. For a time the military’s reluctance in adapting to new methodology obscured perhaps the more fundamental question of whether it could. The evidence is, unfortunately, that while many officers have been able to prevail and pull their weight amidst new ways of doing business, far too many cannot.
That new, and still changing, methods of management demand a radically new kind of officer would be a mistaken response. But that superior officers are needed, educated, trained, and adaptable, is more true today than ever before. For when shorn of the sizable resentment factor, we see that the new methodology is to systematize choices and, amongst many unknowns, provide a way of minimizing the risks in those choices. There is no suggestion that most of our officers must become steeped in computer lore and abstruse analysis. A computer is only a servant of logic. To refute the answers of a pretentious and ill-founded computer-waged war game it is not necessary to crank up one’s own IBM 7194 and toss it into the fray. A few well chosen questions by a probing observer may suffice to puncture its validity.
This is not to endorse freely everything about the new methodology. It has its share of foolishness. But the point is that the officer needed must be able to appreciate the good, and not be discommoded by the bad, and possess both the sophistication and the naval understanding to keep in perspective the young man whose light baggage consists mainly of a knowledge of the chi-square test and confidence levels. Transcending specific battles, the fundamental problem is how the Navy shall best marshal and direct the resources available to it.
It is not enough, not nearly enough, that there be capable flag officers. There must be excellence in depth at the many backup levels, officers who can argue their views and see them prevail in the deliberations of numberless offices, boards, study groups, and joint committees, wherever decision and policy have their roots. The variety of the skills required and the decades that must go into its building make the Navy the most professional of our services, and yet it is the least known. Partly this is because of the inherent isolation of its operations from outside eyes. Man is a land animal in whom there is no instinctive knowledge of the sea; it must be acquired. Partly, too, it results from the heritage of the American people themselves, whose vision and experience and history has been primarily consumed in the conquest of the spaces of a continent. There has always been an extraordinary difficulty in communicating full understanding of the value of sea power. Time and again, even in recent years, it has taken the sweep of eventful crisis to reemphasize dramatically the old lessons of the Navy’s immense and versatile capabilities. The crash of events keeps bringing amazed rediscovery of the virtues of the Navy’s unique mobility, of such old-fashioned, but indispensable, techniques as blockade, and the recurringly forgettable truth that when you want to move much across an ocean, you need ships to move it.
An age has passed when successful military leaders, the glow of victory upon them, could speak with the added weight of the prestige of their names. The names of tomorrow will be less well known. If they are to be able to uphold the military point of view, they must achieve their ends out of the soundness of their homework, the cogency of their logic, and the force and clarity of their language.
Because the needed officers are not there, civilian influence at many levels of defense grows, and the influence of the military is correspondingly reduced or displaced. Choice of arms, strategy, and even tactics, are provinces that are no longer firmly the military’s own. But what is really wrong with it, then? What is wrong with this idea that management of defense can reside primarily in a civilian hierarchy and that the level of military talent and breadth of understanding need not exceed that essential to control operational forces in execution of detailed instruction radiating from Washington?
Almost everything is wrong with it.
The basic wrongness is that effective direction and control of the destinies of any great organization cannot reside in persons outside it. The military is the career, the service, to which military men dedicate their lives. It is they who care most. On the civilian side there is no comparable service, no career as such, no abiding, deep-rooted loyalties. There is no system to ensure that knowledge and experience linger. The defense intellectual may choose to move on whenever a better job or a new interest beckons. There cannot be the same esprit de corps, that personal concern which animates the military man’s decisions because he knows that men—his comrades, his friends, a destroyer crew, a company, a pilot—bear the consequences of his judgment. The ultimate responsibility for success or failure belongs to the military; it can belong nowhere else. It is they who use the weapons, train the men, organize the forces; and it is they who may have to employ them. Their influence cannot be trimmed or their voices subordinated.
The question cuts to the heart of military prestige and the availability of those honored places in the highest councils of the nation to which excellence will always aspire. If those places cease to exist, if their status diminishes, becomes less substantive and more ceremonial, then something vital is removed and the top-grade young officer talent we seek will look elsewhere than the military career for fulfillment. And, inevitably, the lessening prestige and authority at the top will only further deepen and strengthen that penetration of civilian influence into areas where it does not belong. It is beside the point that in some disputes the military has been wrong and the civilian viewpoint proven correct. The solution is not to displace the military influence still further. For civilian control of the military is by nature regulatory and negative; it can bar and cancel, impede and alter, but it does not create. The enduring sources of military progress must be the wellsprings of thought, imagination, and drive within the military’s own members. It is imperative, then, that the conditions of service exist that will insure the caliber of officers from whom such initiatives come.
It is time to put to rest forever the notion that the man we have driving the ship or flying the aircraft need not possess talents greatly in excess of those necessary to keep port and starboard firmly in mind during moments of stress. For the variety of situations that can arise are endless and, far from Washington, it is still possible to feel very much alone. Previous instructions have not yet been written for everything and the singlesideband radio can be a tardy and imperfect substitute. The man on the scene responsible for the interests of the United States had better possess intelligence and judgment equal to the challenge.
What must be done to reverse present trends lies somewhat within the realm of the Navy, but mostly in the will of the nation it serves. First and foremost, military pay, for enlisted men and officers, must be sharply increased. It is futile to pretend otherwise. The quality of men and the talents that are needed simply cannot be had at current scales.
The professional military man does not exist in isolation from the main stream of American society. He is no part of a militaristic caste system; the roots of his ideals and outlook and aspirations are deep in American beliefs and traditions. He is in the military because he wants to be there but, in serving, he does not move far in awareness from the civilian world.
The naval officer, more often than not, lives in a civilian neighborhood. He knows his neighbor’s job, his talents, his standard of living, and he can weigh these facts against those of his own life. He does not, of course, necessarily expect to be living as well as his neighbor. The gap he sees, when it is not unreasonably large, historically has been bridged by the ideals and satisfactions of service. But today the gap between what his talents and effort and dedication earn him in the service and what those qualities are bid outside is far too wide. How much more pay is needed is beyond the scope of this article. Certainly not needed, however, is yet another study, neatly calculated to include the exact value of free burial prorated over a standard lifetime, allegedly proving the comparability of military and civilian pay. Such things merely insult intelligence and deepen wounds.
Inseparable from the subject of pay is early retirement. Appealing as it is to the individual, its long term effects are counter to the best interests of the Navy. Since the option of early retirement is the primary justification of the low pay that the officer endures, he is usually compelled to plan in terms of it in order to reap the benefits. But a system in which most officers carry away their experience and knowledge when still possessed of their full vigor and mental keenness is intolerable. It makes no difference whether it be 20, or 26 years, it is still too soon if that officer has something significant to contribute to the Navy. Worst of all, it is responsible for that affliction of the spirit that comes to the middle-aged like a warm, sad wind on a fine spring day. Attention turns from the pile of papers on the desk, away from the difficult and tangled problems of the job they represent, and the officer’s thoughts drift to speculation on how it might be to teach history in a small private school, or to dreaming of the home he would like to build, the garden he has put off growing, or to pondering the almost impossible problem of paying for his children’s education in present circumstances. Though he may perceive solutions to some of the problems that beset his own particular field of responsibility, once he realizes that before long he will be retiring and will not be around to finish those battles he ought to begin, the will and the vigor to pursue them wanes. And one more good officer has succumbed to that fateful Washington malaise that is not precisely disenchantment nor cynicism nor defeat—but borrows something of each. It is not proposed that the 20-year retirement be abolished. Rather, what should be done is to provide additional incentives for the worthy officer who still has much to contribute. It will take a lot, however, for at this stage the grass grows very green on the other side of the fence.
There is need, too, for major revision of current selection policy. The present circumstance whereby every officer, ranging from second rate to outstanding, is virtually assured of advancement to lieutenant commander, ought to cease. There is no factor more demoralizing to excellence than seeing mediocrity plod up the promotion ladder side by side with the man who has much to give. Present deep-selection policy is too restrictive; it disappoints far greater numbers of worthy officers than it rewards. Realizing that grades must be filled, it is nevertheless submitted that the proper solution lies in identifying excellence early and moving it ahead more rapidly and, equally early, selecting out officers who do not measure up. Few steps could have such an immediate tonic effect in upgrading the prestige of naval service among naval officers themselves.
Another essential of promotion policy must be full recognition and reward of those officers who excel in technical, analytical, and research and development billets. Fortunately the old rigid system of the accumulation of “brownie points,” too long the sine qua non of selection, has begun to crack. It should be cracked wide open. The Navy needs excellence in its managerial direction no less than that in its operating forces. We must throw out mandatory criteria that often have doomed an officer’s career because he spent too long in some technical billet and thereby missed the accumulation of some qualification without which his selection') seemingly was not possible. With the longer periods of time in certain technical billets necessary to gaining the experience essential for mastery of program direction and the consequent disruption of normal rotation patterns, a naval officer must not be penalized for meeting the very conditions needed for the performance required.
At the risk, but without the intention, of provoking pointless argument it is urged that the U. S. Naval Academy continue to be resolutely defended and strengthened as the primary source of career officers. The naval service, in its growth from a once small, cohesive organization, has been transformed essentially from a society into a more corporate structure where close ties and common loyalties diminish. And to the extent that it departs from its nature as a society, the more as an occupation it will be judged. And the average young American, savoring that brief and heady illusion that all roads lie open at his feet, will be inclined to weigh its merits as an occupation, and less as a way of life. When he sees available in virtually any occupation he chooses, at the cost to himself of no great talent nor exertion, an existence in which the material things of the good life flow easily and naturally from the seemingly limitless cornucopia of his nation’s bounty, it is apparent that the naval career, considered in such lights alone, cannot compete. However, when a youth enters the Naval Academy, he is trained to think in terms of a naval career, his early idealism is more likely to be captured, and the essential bonds of loyalty are forged that must be preserved if the Navy is to be differentiated from a business.
Last—and it should be first—there must be a nation’s appreciation. The world regrettably, but visibly, is not a very nice place. Unsayable as it is in some quarters, the pen is seldom mightier than the sword. Violence and aggression threaten peace with unabating pressure; all too often, force, at the service of morality and reason, is the only suitable response. In the postwar decades, freedom could not have survived without the military strength of the United States. And realistically, while discounting neither the hopes of mankind nor the efforts of those who work for a world of peace and good will, the evidence around the globe does not suggest early arrival of the day when that strength can safely be reduced. Rather there looms clearly an indefinite period of struggle, trying the resolve and patience of the American people, in which the military will be called upon again and again in obedience to national policy. In a relativistic world there are still some very solid things to hold onto. It is possible that what was once called war has become an anachronism. But defending freedom will never be.
Fortunately the business of going to sea, the core of the Navy’s appeal, endures. When the land drops below the horizon, it is a recurring pleasure to realize how quickly awareness of the clutter and sensations of land-bound civilization fades. It is still possible for a man to feel extraordinarily on his own, savoring the knowledge that the sea is the earth’s last untamed and—he hopes—untamable wilderness. To travel far in a ship is to learn again that it is a wide world still and that on the ocean a mile remains worthy of respect. The vistas, the fine feeling of making a strange and distant landfall, can only be experienced by going to sea. And in this era of group-oriented effort, the authority and responsibility of the captain of a naval ship stand out as an almost unique antidote to an age of diminishing individualism.
One thinks of other good things, too, the grace and ceremony that still survives, the sense of belonging, the fellowship of wardroom life and, one suspects, more fun than most lives offer. The friendships, the quality of one’s memories, are not to be compared.
Many splendid career officers and men are serving in the U. S. Navy today. If cost-effectiveness studies ever got around to considering them, they will be found to be one of America’s great bargains. But there are not enough of them. The causes and the consequences, both in terms of an unready fleet and a future of diminishing American sea power, have been discussed. Partial measures and half steps cannot cure this. It will require the United States itself to face the reality of a world situation of prolonged danger and struggle and to accept the full implications, and the cost, of the indefinitely sustained military readiness that is needed.