Early last year the Board of Control of the U. S. Naval Institute decided that Naval Review, which has been published annually since 1962, should be distributed to all the members of the Institute.
In order to make this possible, it was decided that, every year, Naval Review would be substituted for one of the regular issues of the Proceedings. Thus, not only is Naval Review its old self, it is also the May 1970 issue (Volume 96, number 807) of the United States Naval Institute Proceedings, which first went to press in 1874. To meet the needs of some users of Naval Review, a limited number of copies are being bound in hard covers, as were all those published hitherto.
Articles in Naval Review differ in several essential ways from those in the regular Proceedings: they are commissioned works; they are much longer and consequently allow considerably more depth of analysis and thoroughness of detail; most of them have taken at least a year to prepare. The aim of this effort is to help the reader survey the naval, military, and maritime world with more clarity than before. Because of the nature and size of its contents, it might be best to consider this issue as one to be read, not in the course of a month, but in the course of a year.
Comments and discussions from the members concerning what follows in this issue are invited.
Two articles in this issue have been written largely because of the importance oil has to the world’s great powers. This is a curious thing a quarter of a century into the atomic age, but it is still oil which powers the machines we use for work, for war, for play, for almost all the activities of industrialized civilization. Hence, the interest in Arctic Alaska and the Indian Ocean, for in the one, huge quantities of oil have been found only recently and, on the shores of the other, is the largest supply of oil yet known.
Arctic Alaska is “cold, harsh, and unforgiving of those who are not prepared to deal with it,” as Captain J. W. Moreau says in his “Developments and Problems in Arctic Alaskan Transportation.”
Because this fierce “environment dominates operations” every effort made is difficult, expensive, and dangerous. Last summer the largest and most powerful tanker under the American flag, the SS Manhattan, made a voyage through the Northwest Passage, from the East Coast to the Arctic Alaskan oil field at Prudhoe Bay, and back. Although she was accompanied by two icebreakers, one Canadian and one American, and she made her voyage in the mildest season, she was unable to take the most desirable route, through McClure Strait, for the ice was too thick for her. Indeed, she was unable to make the voyage without damage to herself. How this ship would have fared during the winter can be surmised. If the Arctic is to be conquered by commerce, ships far more powerful than the Manhattan, or those which avoid the ice altogether, will have to be used.
During the Manhattan’s westward voyage the accompanying American icebreaker fulfilled the prediction made in Naval Review 1969 by Commander Keith B. Schumacher in his “Studies for the New Icebreakers.” Commander Schumacher wrote that “We keep taking on tougher missions, but unless we also get bigger, more powerful ships than were sufficient in the past, we will fail.” This mission was too tough and, far from assisting the Manhattan, the icebreaker became a ship in need of aid. Perhaps it is reasonable to hope that the United States will not long continue to embarrass herself in this fashion.
In an environment so hostile to human survival, and so close to the Soviet Union, how can one protect ships and military and commercial outposts in time of war? Perhaps the commercial activity must stop and the Arctic should be left to small numbers of submarines and airplanes, bent on reconnaissance missions or commando raids. But it is conceivable that the tankers could continue to sail, for a tanker’s best defense may well be her full cargo tanks. To sink a tanker and cause one hundred thousand tons of sticky oil to float clockwise around the Arctic Ocean for the rest of time, fouling all it touched, would not be to win a victory.
Oil routes that are far more important to Japan, Europe, and the United States than any that lead from Prudhoe Bay originate in the Persian Gulf and drive through the Indian Ocean, eastward to the Strait of Malacca or south and around Cape Town. When one looks at the long passages that the huge, slow, unwieldy tankers must make through those waters, he may ask, how do we protect such ships? Perhaps, again, their ability to pollute the seas so destructively would be their best defense. But in the warm, distant waters of the Indian Ocean, the Soviet Union might be less reluctant to sink the tankers upon which her opponents depend than she would in the cold, neighboring Arctic Ocean. Of course, it would not be necessary to sink merchant ships if they could be captured and taken to a friendly or neutral port, as belligerents used to do till the middle of the nineteenth century.
How does the West protect those ships? If we do it at all, we do it in the narrow seas of the northern hemisphere—in the Turkish Straits, the Danish Straits, and the Norwegian Sea—and in the straits of Northeastern Asia. Except for those operating out of Murmansk, Soviet commerce raiders, whether submarines or surface ships, must pass through a succession of restricted waterways before they can reach the open ocean. Speaking of one of the Soviet fleets in his “Strategic Analysis of the Baltic Sea and the Danish Straits” in Naval Review 1969, Rear Admiral Edward Wegener commented that “this vast maritime potential is linked with the oceans only by the needle’s eye of the Baltic Approaches.” And, of course, if Soviet warships ever got through the barriers of the narrow seas, it would be easier for them to attack the tankers when they arrived at their destinations in the North Atlantic or North Pacific than when they were setting out from the distant Indian Ocean.
An Indian naval officer, Captain A. P. S. Bindra, says in his “The Indian Ocean as Seen by an Indian” that war experience shows “as long as the power centers are ranged across the Atlantic, only residual forces may be diverted to the Indian Ocean. Not all the bases or the needs of their security would invite the instruments of sea power from the critical areas of conflict in the Atlantic.” He says the same about the other side of the world: “When the power centers are situated on the Pacific and the trial of strength is to take place in that arena, only marginal forces may be devoted to the Indian Ocean and these only if control of the critical straits is assured.”
An examination of the past supports this view for, so far as naval activity was responsible, it was in the Bay of Biscay and the English Channel that Britain won and maintained her empire on the shores of the Indian Ocean, and it was in the Mediterranean and the South China Sea that she lost it.
So much for a hypothetical conventional war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
What do we do now, when Soviet ships individually or in small squadrons cruise the Indian Ocean? That they “call at numerous ports to spread the Soviet message is but natural and may be countered by similar visits by the U. S. Navy,” says Captain Bindra. That, in fact, is what the U. S. Navy has been doing, and there appear to be more invitations to visit than our small number of ships in the Indian Ocean can accept. That is a happier situation than its reverse. As to the granting of bases to one or the other of the great oceanic powers, Captain Bindra writes: “The new nations of the area are wary and the factors that oppose the establishment of U. S. bases are equally valid when applied to the USSR.”
Though those with oil or iron trade with the industrial giants of Europe, North America, and northern Asia, among themselves the nations of the Indian Ocean trade very little, and their relations seem to be either hostile—which a clever outsider might exploit—or indifferent. For example, India, much of whose domestic trade and almost all of whose foreign trade “comes and goes in ships,” is on rather icy terms with Ceylon, that island nation which might be termed the strategic heart of the Indian Ocean, over “the future of the nine per cent to ten per cent of those Ceylonese who are of Indian origin.” India’s relations with Pakistan are, for well known reasons, far worse.
Above all, so far as India is concerned, “There remains the problem of China, which casts a shadow over the Himalayan heights. . . . It is only a matter of time before China begins to concentrate on maritime expansion in the same way as she set out to dominate the Indians, Burmese, and other South Asians across her land frontiers. . . . It is not difficult to visualize a movement to envelop Southeast Asia, including the eastern gates to the Indian Ocean.” Perhaps with that in mind, and the thought that China might be able to make use of a base at the head of the Bay of Bengal, India has used some of her scarce capital to develop a naval base at Port Blair in the Andaman Islands. Indian ships and aircraft operating therefrom could close the Strait of Malacca to hostile ships. Of course, the same forces which would tend to keep the United States and Soviet fleets in areas more crucial to them than the Indian Ocean would also tend to influence a Chinese fleet, should such ever come into existence.
But if, of all the things in the Indian Ocean, the tankers concern us most, whose are they? Certainly, though many are financed by American money, it is a rare one that flies the American flag. The “Maritime Program Proposed to Congress” by President Nixon on 23 October 1969 contains a proposal to “extend construction differential subsidies to bulk carriers, ships which usually carry ore, grain, or oil and which are not covered by our present subsidy program.” But even if that program is accepted and put into operation, it is not likely that there will be a substantial increase in the number of American tankers or dry bulkers in foreign trade, for even if construction subsidies made it as cheap to buy a new ship built in this country as one built elsewhere, it would still be cheaper to man and operate her under almost any flag other than our own. Hence, the multitude of ships flying the “flags of convenience” of Panama and Liberia will probably continue to do so. The President’s plan urges "a new, direct subsidy system” for the operation of bulk carriers, but that refers only to those carrying government cargoes. Furthermore, as U. S. interest in providing foreign aid declines, and as developments such as the “miracle seed” take hold, and countries that now depend on outside sources for their food become self-sufficient, direct operating subsidies to bulk carriers are not likely to have much significance.
About 400 flag-of-convenience ships, most of which are tankers, belong to the Effective United States Control, or EUSC, fleet. According to Lieutenant (junior grade) S. W. Emery, one of the few people in or out of the Navy who appears to understand this fleet, the ships in the Effective Control Fleet are flags-of-convenience ships “which have some specific connection with the United States, either because their owners are U. S. citizens, or because their owners have made financially and legally binding commitments” to the United States. About 60 per cent of the EUSC ships, Mr. Emery tells us, are owned by U. S. citizens. Most of the rest are “owned by Greek, Nationalist Chinese, or PanHonLib interests.” Mr. Emery asks, “What nation would want or even need to bind itself to such a collection of foreign-flag—and often foreign-owned—vessels . . .?” The answer is obvious, of course. But the reasons for it are not. They are “suggested by: maritime labor strikes, the structure of international shipping cartels, government subsidy, and the all-important details of chartering agreements. It is again revealed in legislative disputes over financial support for American ships . . .”
The effectiveness of the control the United States claims to have over these ships has been questioned. Our experience is “thin at best,” for few EUSC ships have been chartered to make voyages to Vietnam, but of those that have, “not a single crew has ever protested against sailing its ship to Vietnam.” Be that as it may, the fact is that few of the ships in the EUSC fleet are suitable to be used effectively in direct support of military or naval operations. Rather, “the effective control fleet makes supporting the needs of a civilian economy, even one that is mobilized, easier to solve, which is just what the effective control principle is all about.”
Direct support of military and naval operations would have to come from a very different fleet, indeed, one which includes great numbers of container ships; conventional freighters; roll-on, roll-off ships; passenger ships; and tankers of modest size.
The need for ships suitable for such direct support is ever-present. When he gave his defense program and budget to Congress early in 1969, Mr. Clark M. Clifford spoke of the sealift for the Marines’ Short Airfield for Tactical Support (SATS) in an amphibious operation, and said: “Previously, we had planned to carry the men and equipment associated with two of the three prefabricated airfields . . . in the amphibious ships of the Assault Echelon. We now plan to transport all three SATS in the MSTS-controlled ships of the Assault-Follow-on Echelon . . .” These MSTS-controlled ships will, of course, have to be merchant ships—some form of freighter, conventional or otherwise. Moreover, “two additional ships will be needed to lift the ground support personnel associated with the SATS airfield operation for the air wing of a Marine Expeditionary Force . . .” The “two additional ships” will be troop transports, a type of ship Mr. Clifford’s predecessor, Mr. McNamara, tried for seven years to abolish. Of course, the transports MSTS has are as old as most of the other ships in the U. S. Navy and merchant marine and, if the type is needed, we cannot long delay either in building new ones or in acquiring passenger liners no longer wanted by U. S. flag commercial operators.
Mr. Clifford’s successor as Secretary of Defense, Mr. Melvin R. Laird, did not have time between his assumption of office on 20 January 1969 and his reports to Congress, the first of which was made on 19 March, to formulate a defense program of his own. Consequently, all that he and his Deputy Secretary of Defense, Mr. David Packard, could do was to make a series of alterations to the program already prepared by Mr. Clifford and his deputy, Mr. Paul Nitze. “As a matter of fact,” Mr. Laird reported, “Mr. Packard and I were quite impressed with the work done by Mr. Clifford and Mr. Nitze in formulating these budget requests.”
And so it is that the defense program of the United States is still, though to an ever-decreasing degree, the program of men now out of office for over a year.
Meantime, what Captain Charles J. Merdinger describes as an “unplanned, unwanted, undeclared, and unpopular” war goes on. The Marines landed at Da Nang in I Corps Tactical Zone early in 1965. That year is now long in the past but the Marines are still there. Brigadier General Edwin H. Simmons provides the third installment of his narrative of “Marine Corps Operations in Vietnam,” that for 1968. As that year opened one North Vietnamese division was operating along the eastern half of the DMZ, posing a danger to the supply route up the Cua Viet River. Another enemy division was in the west, “threatening Khe Sanh. To counter this threat, most of the 3d Marine Division was strung out in a series of combat bases and strong points along the general line of Route 9, tied in large part to the defense of the anti-infiltration barrier,” a barrier known more informally as the McNamara Wall. By the time the year was half over, Mr. Clifford had replaced Mr. McNamara, the battle for Khe Sanh had been fought and won, and both Marine and Army commanders in I Corps had “recommended that modifications be made to the strong point obstacle system.” Moreover, with the battle won Khe Sanh was abandoned, partly because “the Marines now had enough troops and helicopters,” but also because they at last had "enough latitude of action, so that they could operate in a mobile mode, dominating the whole region, rather than being tied to the fixed defense of a base in the center of it.”
Another view on this war came from General Leonard F. Chapman, Commandant of the Marine Corps. As reported by General Simmons, the Commandant told the Senate on 23 July 1969: “The Marine Corps has consistently advocated the principle that the war in South Vietnam can be conclusively won only through convincing the South Vietnamese people in the villages and hamlets that their hope lies with freedom, not with communism.” Readers of General Simmons’ earlier installments will remember that General Chapman’s views are, as he says, not new ones to the Corps.
Opinions on how to conduct the war at sea have varied as much as those on how to conduct it on the ground. In his Sea Power Commentary, “Patterns of American Sea Power, 1945-1956: Their Portents for the Seventies,” Rear Admiral John D. Hayes brings to our attention the opinion expressed half a century ago by Sir Julian Corbett, a British naval historian: “Freedom of the seas cannot exist so long as naval warfare is allowed to exist, since without substantial permission to command the seas, navies, except as mere adjuncts to armies, cease to have meaning.”
Obviously, the U. S. Navy has commanded the seas to the extent that North Vietnam’s Soviet allies have bot attempted to interfere with U. S. shipping in support U. S. operations in Vietnam. But, according to Admiral Hayes, as a result of a precedent set in the Korean War when, even though we were fighting China, we chose not to blockade her, “the powerful U. S. Navy, in the undeclared war situations that have characterized the last two decades, has been unable to deny the use of the seas to an enemy. In this Cold War period, the concept of freedom of the seas has triumphed over that of command of the seas.”
In any event, the blockade has not been used, and the opportunity to inflict on our foes in Vietnam damage that they would be helpless to counter has been lost. With specific reference to blockade, the late Sir Basil Liddell Hart wrote that “Helplessness induces hopelessness, and history attests that loss of hope and not loss of lives is what decides the issue of war.”*
In place of the silent, bloodless blockade, conducted by ships far beyond the view of those they affect, we chose to bomb the enemy’s supplies while they were in his cities, on his roads, or piled up on his piers. The enemy was not helpless to counter that effort, and knew he was not, for he could see the wreckage of the hundreds of our aircraft he shot down. The rightness of our choice may be judged against Captain Carl O. Holmquist’s comment in “Developments and Problems in Carrier-Based Attack Aircraft,” in Naval Review 1969, that though we have “dropped more tonnage of ordnance in the Vietnamese conflict than in Europe during all World War II . . . our efforts to date to deter the enemy with bombs appears less than successful.”
The apparent ineffectiveness of our bombing effort and, perhaps, a growing revulsion against the bombing of any targets which could be termed civilian, have resulted in an interesting reversal of the effect on morale that we were told to expect from a bombing campaign against our enemies. It is not his willingness to continue the fight that has crumbled, but ours.
If we are going to send bombers anywhere, leaving aside one-shot nuclear missions, we must be prepared to send fighters with them—at least that is what our experience in every war so far teaches us. However, says Captain Holmquist in “Developments and Problems in Carrier-Based Fighter Aircraft,” [“]if we are forced by the tactical situation to fly long distances and engage enemy fighters over his territory, and if the enemy, with the same technology, chooses to design and build short range fighters, we can expect that his fighters will have somewhat higher performance and maneuverability than ours.” Obviously, then, the design of a new fighter has to start with an accurate understanding of the nation’s foreign policy and its national strategy.
But there are many other factors in the success or failure of a fighter aircraft in combat, and one of these is the age of the aircraft’s design. With that in mind, it is important to know that the basic design of the United States’ prime fighter, the F-4, was completed a long time ago, in 1955. Normally, a successor to the F-4 would already have been in the air for some years. There was to have been such a successor flying from carrier decks, the F6D, but this was cancelled early in 1961 in favor of what was to become the F-111B. The latter failed as a naval fighter and now we are pinning our hopes on the F-14 which, if all goes well, “will become operational in 1973.” To what degree this delay has contributed to the declining American success in aerial combat is difficult to determine. But in World War II, Navy fighters shot down their Japanese opponents at a rate of 14 airplanes for every U. S. Navy fighter lost; in Korea the Air Force’s F-86s had a 10:1 superiority in results over their opponents. In Vietnam, “our kill ratio advantage has been about three to one against the improved, highly maneuverable Mig-17 and Mig-21.”
The design of airplanes is only one of a multitude of military and naval matters affected by the nature of American foreign policy. Currently there seems to be a general agreement that there must be “no more Vietnams,” and our political and uniformed leaders are likely to structure our armed forces accordingly. However, there are dangers in all this. In November 1916, we reelected President Wilson because “he kept us out of war,” and the next April we went to war. In January 1950, Secretary of State Acheson made it clear that nothing that happened in Korea would in any important way affect the security of the United States, and six months later, U. S. forces were committed to the defense of that country. President Johnson was reelected on a comparatively peaceful platform in November 1964, and in March 1965 our Marines were landed at Da Nang. Clearly, later events caused the perceptions of these men to change. Without being able to forecast such changes, the Navy must be prepared for them.
* Churchill: Four Faces and the Man, page 164, London, 1969.
Obviously there are limits to what naval forces can be prepared to do in peacetime, and, as money gets scarcer, the limits become narrower. Nevertheless, Commander S. A. Swarztrauber in “River Patrol Relearned,” makes a valid point when he says of our experience in Vietnam “We certainly have learned one thing: not having a river patrol force is no guarantee that we will not have to fight a river war.” Interestingly, in Vietnam, it has been the river forces, almost alone, which have attempted to carry out the full spectrum of activities associated with “control of the sea.” In the Mekong Delta and the Rung Sat Special Zone, American fighting boats have tried both to make the rivers and canals safe for friendly use—whether the users were local sampans and junks or seagoing freighters and tankers—and unsafe for hostile use. Not only have they fought for control of the narrow waterways, but they have used that control to launch amphibious assaults on enemy forces.
But it was not only in the approaches to Saigon and in the Delta that the river boats have fought their war. Far to the north, just below the DMZ, the Marines have been engaged in a fierce and protracted struggle, as General Simmons so amply demonstrates. But, Commander Swarztrauber points out that about “90 per cent of all logistics headed north moves in small vessels from Da Nang up the coast, and then by way of the Perfume River . . .or the Cua Viet River,” which are “narrow and easily interdicted by mines, rocket grenades, and automatic weapons.” When the foe took advantage of the waterborne traffic, Lieutenant General Lewis W. Walt, commanding III MAF, asked for 30 or 40 boats to protect the traffic on these two rivers. Later on, during the siege of Khe Sanh, because the Cua Viet “was virtually the sole means of resupplying Khe Sanh, ships and boats using it were subjected to intense attack by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army, both by mining and by river-bank ambush. Even an LST had been sunk on the Cua Viet.” Hence, General William C. Westmoreland was asked to supply “still more naval presence, particularly on the Cua Viet.”
Da Nang was the logistical heart of the Marines’ operations in I Corps, and was run by the Navy. “How did the U. S. Navy get landlocked in such a place anyway?” asks Captain Merdinger in “Civil Engineers, Seabees, and Bases in Vietnam.” Just as it was for the whole nation, he says that “Navy involvement was piecemeal and gradual, planned almost on the spur of the moment. Certainly the top deep water sailors of the Navy had no intention of committing large numbers of Navy men ashore in a place like Vietnam. Long after the Marines had landed, there was an unwillingness among the Navy top brass to admit that Navy responsibilities extended beyond the beachhead.” Yet, there the Marines were, with very little engineering support of their own. True enough, farther down the coast was the Army and they had engineers, but none to spare. So it was up to the Navy to provide the men to build and operate the bases the Marines needed, and to get the supplies as close to the combat units as water could carry them.
Why, then, was the Navy reluctant? There might have been more important reasons for its reluctance, but one certainly was that “under the force levels imposed by the Pentagon, every sailor ashore in Vietnam meant one less sailor in a ship or a vital shore station somewhere else.” That seems a curious way to have to run a Navy at war. Nonetheless, the Navy now has the trained talent to build and operate a complex base such as Da Nang. We would be wise to consider carefully whether—irrespective of political opinions of the moment—the Navy is likely again to have to build and operate such an installation.
The same rule on force levels affects naval medical support of the Marines in Vietnam, as brought out in Commander F. O. McClendon’s “Doctors and Dentists, Nurses and Corpsmen in Vietnam.” In view of the “austere peacetime staffing, a reduction in the U. S. facilities was necessary to insure that deploying units were fully staffed” with the necessary medical personnel. Indeed, throughout the Navy, “the major deterrent in delivering medical services is a shortage of billets.”
Before the war in Vietnam began, Captain Carl E. Pruett noted in his “Naval Medicine and Modern Sea Power” in Naval Review 1965, we had “not a single modern hospital ship in the Navy ready for sea.” Presumably, the wounded were to be brought back to the United States by air. But after the Marines landed in Vietnam that very same year, one of the first requests was for the reactivation of a hospital ship. This was brought to pass and, in fact, two hospital ships eventually were on the line.
Neither ship, however, was modern and, though a great deal was done to bring them up to date, the fact is that the problem is not one “of reconfiguration or arrangement, but rather one of obsolescence . . .” For example, the ships were built in World War II, and neither one had, or even needed, a helicopter platform. One has since been added, but a platform suitable for an H-34 helicopter is dangerous for its replacement, the H-46.
Commander McClendon’s comment that “While the Navy has a good record in Vietnam, it remains to be seen if we will benefit from experience,” was made in relation to one aspect of the Navy’s share of the war, and one worth serious scrutiny, but it applies to the entire experience: the carriers, the river and coastal gunboats, the support activities ashore, and all the rest.
Meanwhile; as the conventional forces grapple in combat, the Polaris submarines continue their daily patrols out in the oceans. In “The Development of Navy Strategic Offensive and Defensive Systems,” Captain Dominic A. Paolucci says that any future “wars between major powers would probably be settled not by invasion and occupation, but by the total destruction of the enemy’s resources, including the people.” Because of that possibility, with the exception of the Soviet mis-step which led to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the United States and the USSR have been extremely careful about seriously offending one another. The days of one missile, one warhead, constituted a period of stability in which neither side was in a position to destroy the other’s missile force; hence, neither side could both destroy his opponent’s cities and protect his own. The advent of MIRV, with its many warheads per missile, has tended to undermine that stability, since a cloud of nuclear warheads can be aimed at each enemy missile still in its silo with the expectation that at least one will hit.
That ability certainly will increase the concern of those responsible for missiles in silos and will tend to make them anxious to get their weapons in the air before the enemy’s warheads can destroy them. The only missiles that MIRV cannot reach are those that are constantly moving in the secrecy of the oceans; hence, it is through them, and only them, that stability can be retained. Consequently, the movement of the deterrent forces into the sea appears inevitable. That movement which, despite opposition not only from the Air Force, but also from within the Navy, began at the end of World War II, is Captain Paolucci’s story.
As always, Naval Review carries a great deal of factual material arranged in tables or chronologically. Lieutenant Douglas Strole and Lieutenant William E. Dutcher have compiled a comprehensive chronology titled “Naval and Maritime Events, 1 July 1968-31 December 1969.” One of the most significant items in the tabular material, furnished from many sources both at home and abroad, is found in the ranking of the world’s merchant fleets. The United Kingdom, with 1,810 ships, has been displaced from the leading spot by Japan, which has 1,843. This is a natural thing and not likely to be reversed, for Japan’s geography in some important ways resembles that of Great Britain, and her people are twice as numerous. The United States remains in seventh place, after Greece, but she is likely soon to drop another notch, as West Germany threatens to overtake her. There are now 19,415 merchant ships in the world of at least 1,000 gross registered tons each.
For the first time the names, billets, and photographs of the flag and general officers of the three maritime services are shown in Naval Review. Altogether, there are about four hundred such officers. But, partly because some jobs are so closely related to others, and partly because there are more billets to be filled than there are flag officers to fill them, quite a number of faces appear twice, or even more often.
One important aspect of the “Naval and Maritime Prize Photography” is that most of the winners in this year’s judging were members of the Navy; it has not always been so. This improvement may reflect the happy influence on Navy photography of its program in photo-journalism conducted by the school of journalism at Syracuse University.
The names of the members of the Naval Review staff appear on page 2 of this issue.
The Naval Institute believes it will be plain to the reader that, in preparing their critical examinations of one aspect or another of the Navy and the world in which it operates, the authors of Naval Review 1970 have not been required either to approve or disapprove present doctrine, present action, or present trends in the fields they discuss. Each was asked to express his views on his subject, whatever those views might be.
/s
Frank Uhlig, Jr., Editor
11 February 1970