Some of the Navy's most senior officers and a few of its future senior officers were among those paying close attention as then-Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig began to speak at the Naval War College Current Strategy Forum in June 1999. Others on the stage had been talking about the difficulties of accurate prediction. One said the problem probably stemmed from "our deficiency in imagination." But the Secretary said no; that the difficulties lie "in the great number of variables." He added, "People are the most important of the independent variables" and then asked, "Do we favor zero-defect people or mavericks?"
Referring to contributions from the floor on this subject—including such questions as Where in the Navy is our expertise on Japan? On China? Who among our senior officers is fluent in French? In German?—Mr. Danzig said that we need to expose our officers to other worlds, and we need to reward our innovators, not punish them.
In the first half of the 20th century, the Navy was better able to expose potential leaders to "other worlds" than it is now. It was not only more likely to reward innovators, but also less likely to punish those whose concepts did not work out. For example, in the years between the world wars, the U.S. Navy provided itself with more than 60 unrestricted line officers who spoke and read Japanese. (The best known was that central figure in the victory at Midway, Commander Joseph Rochefort.) Service as an attaché was viewed as part of the maturing process for those who might rise to high command—such as William F. Halsey (Berlin) and Thomas C. Kinkaid (Rome), who both became fleet commanders in World War II. Nowadays how many unrestricted line officers have been educated as linguists? How many "front runners" are able to gain experience as attaches?
Chester Nimitz spent nearly half the time between 1910 and 1930 in submarines. However, in the same period he spent part of 1913 in Germany studying diesel engines. From then until 1916, he helped design and build the Navy's first "big-ship" diesel for the oiler USS Maumee (AO-2). Though all her steam-driven sisters stayed active in the fleet after World War I, the Maumee was consigned to idleness and not returned to duty until re-engined with steam in 1942. Clearly, the Maumee's engine was a failure. Yet Nimitz became a battleship executive officer, Naval War College student, and assistant operations officer to the Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Fleet. Commander Nimitz (and his boss) introduced the tactical concept of the circular formation. After they departed, the fleet rejected the concept—another failure. But Nimitz was not rejected. He was assigned to "other worlds" as the first professor of naval science at the University of California, and went on to great wartime accomplishment and five-star rank. And, in time, both the diesel engine and circular formation proved to be of great value to the Navy.
Other innovators flourished at the same time. Bradley Fiske and William S. Sims are well-known. But it was two less well-known former battleship skippers, William A. Moffett and Joseph Mason Reeves, who laid the foundations of U.S. naval aviation. Moffett served as first chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics from 1921 to 1933. He protected naval aviation from the zealotry of Brigadier General "Billy" Mitchell and his adherents, and gained from Congress both important legislation and substantial appropriations for aviation. He died in an airship disaster.
Reeves, an engineer in the USS Oregon (BB-3) in 1898, served as gunnery officer in both the Asiatic and Atlantic fleets, commanding officer of the Navy's first electric-drive ship, naval attaché in Rome, and as both student and faculty member at the Naval War College. In 1925, the 52-year-old captain became an aviation observer (that era's naval flight officer) at Pensacola. While head of aviation afloat, he turned the first carrier, the USS Langley (CV-1), from an aviators' plaything into an effective combat ship and fostered development of dive bombing as a highly practical form of naval warfare. As a rear admiral in 1929, with two powerful carriers under his control, he led the famous raid by the USS Saratoga (CV-3) on Panama during Fleet Problem IX. As a full admiral, he continued to advance fleet aviation in his roles as Commander Battle Force and Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Fleet.
Although the modern Navy has a much wider variety of career specialties than ever before, the field of experiences open to each officer is much narrower than ever before. This tends to weaken the Navy as a whole and provide us with leaders who have not escaped the effects of ever-more-confining particularisms. In light of this, and keeping in mind that perfection has always eluded us, the Navy and the other services—at the same conference, Army Major General Robert Scales remarked that "our problem is to find the right person to command"—might profit from examining the first half of the last century. Perhaps they could discover the factors that, in spite of small numbers of officers and small budgets, allowed the Navy, through unending innovation, to develop a fleet in 1917 that was much different both materially and operationally from that of 1900—and radically different in 1942 from that in 1917. Just as important, they might find out how the Navy developed senior officers capable of acting effectively in a fleet—and a world—far different from the one in which they grew up.
After all, the Navy can be certain that it will need to be able to do comparable things in the future.
Frank Uhlig, once senior editor of Proceedings and then editor of The Naval War College Review, teaches at the Naval War College. He is the author of How Navies Fight (Naval Institute Press, 1994).