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Still Serving

By Vice Admiral Robert F. Dunn, USN (Ret.)
June 1990
Proceedings
Vol. 116/6/1,048
Article
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This html article is produced from an uncorrected text file through optical character recognition. Prior to 1940 articles all text has been corrected, but from 1940 to the present most still remain uncorrected.  Artifacts of the scans are misspellings, out-of-context footnotes and sidebars, and other inconsistencies.  Adjacent to each text file is a PDF of the article, which accurately and fully conveys the content as it appeared in the issue.  The uncorrected text files have been included to enhance the searchability of our content, on our site and in search engines, for our membership, the research community and media organizations. We are working now to provide clean text files for the entire collection.

 

It is time to stand up and be counted. Unless we do we may passively surrender a freedom that has served our country well, a freedom for which many have given their lives: Freedom of Speech. This free­dom must not be withheld from the uniformed servants of a people who so cherish this right to have made it the First Article in the Bill of Rights.

The active-duty military professional has always had to live with some restrictions on publishing and speak­ing in public to ensure that classified information was not inadvertently released. Unfortunately, there have also always been those officials who would use security review to censor.

The need for security review is acknowledged, even though such review must be dramatically streamlined. Policy review, on the other hand, must be seen as cen­sorship, plain and simple. Very often, people sub­merged in an organization have important ideas. Very often it’s important to have free-wheeling discussion of concepts. When the emperor has no clothes, it must be pointed out. Free and polite expression is one way to be sure these things can happen.

This philosophy notwithstanding, a new and harsher prepublication review regulation is now making its way through the “chop” chain, slowly and narrowly distrib­uted. Those who fear public controversy in the first place are holding this process close to their vests. The “chop” avoids those who might take an opposing view. From what is known of it, military academia and other bodies that strive to be forums for education and advancement of the military profession, while maintain­ing close and non-adversarial relationships with the or­ganizations they attempt to serve, have good reason to tremble for their future. Indications are that the new regulation, and its interpretation by those who fear con­troversy, will censor for policy deviation as well as security.

Censorship such as that now under consideration will permit the active-duty writer to serve up only the kind of puff and pap so often seen in official publications, filled with public affairs handouts, party lines, sea stor­ies, and writings which have been so altered along a laborious “chop” chain that they are virtually unrecog­nizable by the author. The muzzling of active-duty writers wrought by ponderous prepublication review requirements could well bring about a Proceedings filled with contributions by out-of-touch retirees and civilian armchair strategists.

The question, then, is what would be the effect on the Naval Institute should the censors and the thought police prevail? The answer might well be the demise of the Naval Institute as it has been known and has served the sea services these past 117 years.

Lieutenant Colonel G. Murphy Donovan, U.S. Air Force, makes a good case that Air University Review was killed because it sometimes diverged from official Air Force policy. He describes how active-duty military authors are bedeviled by “thought police” in the guise of security review which is really policy review {Air- power Journal, Winter 1988). If the term “thought police” sounds far-fetched, consider that in the Navy it is indeed the “police,” the same organization that commands the Naval Investigative Service (NIS), that conducts security (and policy?) reviews of articles and speeches.

The continuation of the Naval Institute as the profes­sional society for naval people, encouraging free dis­cussion but remaining ever loyal to the sea services was the topic of Captain G.V. Stewart’s “The Admira­ble Servant, Occasionally Obsequious,” reprinted in part in this issue. In his article, Captain Stewart writes, “There is no reason why the Institute should ‘ever work tactfully and gracefully’ to avoid censorship. At its first hint of application, censorship should be halted with a warning shot across the bows which, if not heeded, should be followed by a broadside. ...”

It’s time for a shot across the bows.

By Vice Admiral Robert F. Dunn


Vol. No. 74, No. 10__________________ October, 1948                                   Whole No. 548

The Admirable Servant, Occasionally Obsequious

By Captain G.V. Stewart, U.S. Navy (Retired)


. . . From the very beginning of the U.S. Naval Institute the question of censorship has been held to be a delicate one and it has been approached most tactfully and with a light touch: a rather timid way to consider that which trespasses upon the greatest of all freedoms of mankind—free speech and free press.

In order to show the state of mind of the charter


Proceedings / June 1990

Digital Proceedings content made possible by a gift from CAPT Roger Ekman, USN (Ret.)

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