Secretary to the Joint Board Jarvis Butler pointed out the following in 1930: “Hence it is that all governmental organizations, especially those charged with the problems of national defense, must be guided by sound judgment and administered by master hands. . . . Herein lies the vital value of the [General] Board to the Navy and the nation.”1
A number of recent Proceedings articles have sounded warnings about the course of U.S. Navy Fleet design.2 In addition, others have taken the Navy to task intellectually, examining the basis and framework for the service’s institutional understanding of sea power and its utility.3 These are worthy efforts, but concepts, theory, and Fleet-building policy must be addressed by institutions and their subordinate organizational executors.
Building the wrong ships, mismanaging acquisition and building programs, or mismatching these with operational doctrine and naval strategy necessarily happen within organizational and institutional contexts. Therefore, organizational reform is as worthy of examination—perhaps even more so—as are Fleet design or new conceptions of sea power. Certainly, they should be examined in concert. In this area we also need clear-headed thinking and reflection and perhaps some meaningful change and reform. To accomplish this, the Navy needs to look no further than its own history.
Butler’s article in Proceedings 80 years ago about the General Board of the Navy shed light on its role and influence. Then, as now, confusion reigned over what sort of Fleet to design and how to build it. As his epigraph makes clear, the General Board was the “balance wheel,” or nexus, for bringing together coherent strategy and Fleet design.4 More and more frequently today, naval thinkers are looking back to the General Board and longing for a similar organization to bring coherence to the processes of designing the Fleet and developing strategy.5
America’s First General Staff?
The board was arguably the nation’s first modern general staff. It emerged from the trends and developments of the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its creation was very much a reflection of the reformist spirit of the times that would later give birth to the Army War College, the Army General Staff, and the Chief of Naval Operations.6
As with most military innovation, the General Board was born out of an honest study of the lessons learned from a recent war. They were learned the hard way, from a conflict that had been poorly managed by both the Army and to a lesser degree, the Navy—the Spanish-American War.7 One of the few bright spots in its conduct at the strategic level was the establishment by Secretary of the Navy John D. Long of the Naval War Board of 1898, which included as its members Alfred Thayer Mahan, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, and several senior Navy captains.
Long freely acknowledged that since he lacked “professional experience and the Navy being without a General Staff, it was necessary that he should have the assistance of such a Board.” Based on these factors, and at the urging of the Chief of the Bureau of Navigation, Admiral H. C. Taylor, Secretary Long issued General Order 544 on 13 March 1900, establishing the General Board of the Navy. Its purpose was “to insure efficient preparation of the fleet in case of war and for the naval defense of the coast.”8
The board’s early years were dominated by its one and only president, the hero of the Battle of Manila Bay—Admiral George Dewey. Dewey served in this capacity until his death in January 1917. Its charter was as broad or as narrow as the Secretary of the Navy chose to make it, since he determined the agenda. The position of the board was always precarious, since its creation had not been the result of congressional legislation but of executive fiat. Nonetheless, the longer it existed the more it came to be recognized as an institutional authority on large strategic issues in the Navy, including in the language of legislation. Until 1909, the board was overwhelmingly concerned with fulfilling its role as a strategic and operational planning entity, as envisaged by Admiral Taylor and others.9
The Board and Fleet Design
In 1908-09 during the design battles over the United States’ first dreadnoughts, the General Board finally became preeminent in Fleet design. Up to that point, the process had been dominated by the often bickering and semi-autonomous Naval Bureaus—Engineering, Ordinance, and Construction and Repair. A conference convened at the Naval War College in 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt set out to resolve these problems. Participants concluded that line officers should be more intimately involved in the process of warship design, and they decided that the General Board would fulfill this function.
This decision had the force of a presidential order.10 Navy Regulations later formalized it so that by 1930 these read: “When the designs are to be prepared for a new ship, the General Board shall submit to the Secretary of the Navy a recommendation as to the military characteristics to be embodied therein.” By this process the General Board became the final arbiter in the design of warships and, by extension, the Fleet.11
It took time for this to happen, but once the precedent of this expansion of the General Board’s authority had been established, its influence in Fleet design gradually increased. The establishment of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (OPNAV) by congressional legislation in 1915 and 1916 has been regarded by naval historians as the beginning of the end of the influence of the board. Although OPNAV replaced the General Board as the principal war-planning entity in the Navy, the board retained its authority over Fleet design and building policy. In fact, its role was to connect the two, since it was still required to remain cognizant of the war plans. “The General Board shall be furnished, for information, with the approved war plans, including cooperation with the Army and employment of the elements of naval defense.”[Emphasis added]12
The Business of Building Ships
By 1922 the Washington Naval Treaty had been signed. The execution of its terms were delegated to—who else?—the General Board, which promptly issued the Naval Policy of 1922. This document, issued in handbill fashion to the entire Fleet, furnished the “Building and Maintenance Policy” that formalized a system of Fleet design. Practically speaking, this policy resulted in the annual production of building-policy studies that established construction priority recommendations for congressional funding. In addition, the General Board’s processes during the period between the world wars were dominated by design hearings on every class of ship, from floating dry docks to submarines.
Because of the constraints imposed by the Washington and London Naval Treaties, the board influenced every major design decision during the period. At the same time, the General Board routinely brought in OPNAV planners to testify during its design hearings on the suitability or shortfalls in the Fleet regarding capabilities required for existing war plans—especially War Plan Orange, the contingency plan for war with the Empire of Japan.13
During this time, the CNO, the President of the Naval War College, the Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Commandant of the Marine Corps all served as ex-officio permanent members of the General Board, lending an incredible collaborative element to its hearings and proceedings. Although there was no longer a president of the board, its senior member was usually an officer coming from command of a Fleet (either Commander-in-Chief (CINC) U.S. Fleet or CINC Asiatic Fleet—both four-star billets). This officer was neither the CNO’s subordinate nor his superior, although he usually outranked the serving CNO in terms of date of rank. Ironically, the accession of the brilliant Admiral William V. Pratt, fleet commander, former War College president, and longtime member of the board, to CNO in 1930 proved both the high point and real beginning of the end of the General Board’s influence.14
In a move probably designed to increase the independence of the board from the influence of the CNO, Pratt eliminated all ex-officio memberships in 1932. Nonetheless, he did not eliminate the collaboration of his own organization, the Naval War College, or the bureaus with the board. In fact, he encouraged it. This collaboration continued until World War II, with the General Board continuing to draft its yearly building policies under the enlightened leadership of admirals such as Mark Bristol, Thomas Hart, Ernest King, and, during the war, A. J. Hepburn.15
The Demise of the General Board
World War II and the towering presence of King as both CINC, U.S. Fleet and CNO proved to be the agents that transformed Pratt’s reforms into the vehicle that fatally undermined the General Board’s role and influence within the Navy. During and after the war, the board diminished in influence, becoming almost a leper colony of discredited admirals or those serving their twilight tours, including J. O. Richardson, Thomas Hart (serving for a second time), Frank Jack Fletcher, and Robert Ghormley.
The General Board may have further hastened its demise when member Rear Admiral Frederick Horne wrote a 1941 study advocating a Joint General Staff. Although this proposal went nowhere with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration or with the Navy, it found support within the Army and its Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall. The idea became a major element in national security reform after the war that resulted in the creation of the Joint Staff under a Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS).16
However, the fortunes of the General Board appeared to wax again during the unification battles leading to the passage of the National Security Act of 1947, as Secretaries of the Navy James Forrestal (later the first Secretary of Defense) and John Sullivan attempted to reestablish the power and influence of the board. John Towers, one of the organizational architects of victory in World War II, replaced Fletcher as chairman of the General Board, and talented younger officers such as Vice Admiral Charles H. McMorris and Captain Arleigh Burke also joined the membership.
This proved to be too little, too late, however. The long-term damage had been done and, in the wake of the “Revolt of the Admirals,” the General Board became a casualty of the new national security structure dominated by Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson and the powerful new Department of the Air Force. The General Board seemed a relic of a bygone age, and its Fleet design function migrated to the Naval Sea Systems Command entity (the combination of the old Bureaus of Construction and Repair and Engineering) within OPNAV. Another way to look at this is that the General Board had done such a good job of integrating Fleet design with strategy and war plans that it put itself out of a job when no peer competitor remained at the end of World War II—excepting of course the U.S. Air Force.17
A recent Center for Naval Analyses study that looked at reorganizations of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations from 1970 to 2009 found that “Long-range planning and concept development have been particularly hard for CNOs to organize for.” The same study identified a focus “. . . primarily on current operations [and] . . . near term program [and] budget decisions” among the institutional and service culture. It seems clear that the Navy as an institution has lost its way regarding Fleet design and that the trend toward addressing this requirement via coherent institutional and organizational methods is not positive. It is time, perhaps, to return to an earlier model wherein OPNAV, the Naval War College, ship designers, and line officers all had an honest broker, one with the authority and credibility that previously resided in America’s first General Staff—the General Board of the Navy.18
What Does All This Mean?
Re-creation of the General Board in the current defense and political environment is nearly impossible. In fact, an attempt to resurrect it in another form might already have occurred with the creation of the CNO’s Strategic Studies Group (SSG) by Admiral Thomas Hayward in 1981. The original group looked very much like a General Board and performed one of the board’s routine functions. It put on its organizational thinking cap and helped devise the basic framework for the Cold War Maritime Strategy in the 1980s.19 Since 1995 the SSG has been under the leadership of retired four-star Admiral James Hogg. However, the group’s mission seems to have changed substantially over the years and is now focused on “revolutionary innovation.”20
The key organizational challenge facing the SSG performing a General Board-like role is the fact that it is the CNO’s SSG, even though it is co-located with the Naval War College. One suspects that was why it was originally located in Newport in the first place—to remove it to a degree from Washington. It might have been better to have made it the “Naval War College SSG” since that institution is still technically independent of the Chief of Naval Operations. Remember, the General Board at one point included the CNO as a member, but it was never headed by the CNO or an organization formally subordinate to OPNAV. It answered directly to the Secretary of the Navy. Herein lies a much larger problem beyond the scope of this article: the larger issue of massive organizational reform that I broached a few years ago in discussing overall Department of Defense (DOD) reform. In a perfect world (at least from my viewpoint) any organizational attempt to recreate the General Board or some facsimile organization would mean a radical DOD reform that would eliminate the Secretary of Defense and turn the service secretaries of the Army, Air Force, and Navy back into the full-fledged cabinet officers of old.21
Of course, this kind of dramatic organizational and institutional change at the highest level of government is not feasible at this time. However, the issue of OPNAV’s relationship with any such group is not something that requires such a major change. As a sort of first step, the Navy might consider moving the SSG from under the CNO and OPNAV and have it answer directly to the Secretary of the Navy. This move might have a beneficial two-edged effect. First, it would lead to more independence by the SSG. It would also have the additional function of bringing the Secretary of the Navy (and Marine Corps) back into the world of grand strategy—one of the most unfortunate second-order effects of the National Security Act of 1947. In addition, such an organizational re-shuffling would need to include a Fleet-design advisory role somewhat like the old Ships Characteristics Improvement Board that once resided within OPNAV. Again, this would also pull a piece of ship design oversight out of OPNAV and lead to more independence.22
Whatever the final decisions on these matters, action is needed and may soon be removed from the Navy’s control. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ question-and-answer session in May with the students at the Army Command and General Staff College emphasized his frustration with the Navy’s ship-acquisition process. Such public and for-attribution displays of the Defense Secretary’s frustration are usually a harbinger of change.23
These arguments may be moot—or overcome by events. The current force structure may soon find, in the Yellow Sea off Baengnyeong Island near North Korea, how efficacious Fleet design, the 1,000-ship Navy, and ossified antisubmarine and conventional naval tactics really are. The closest thing to a real war-at-sea of a type the General Board would have recognized and was prepared for is perhaps already under way.24
1. Jarvis Butler, “The General Board of the Navy,” Proceedings, Vol. No. 56, No. 8 (August 1930), p. 700.
2. See CDR Henry J. Hendrix, USN, “Buy Fords, not Ferraris,” Proceedings (April 2009), pp. 52-57; and Milan Vego, “Finding Our Balance at Sea,” Proceedings (February 2010), pp. 22-26.
3. Barrett Tillman, “Fear and Loathing in the Post-Naval Era,” Proceedings, June 2009, pp. 17-21; see also CAPT R. B. Watts, USN “The End of Sea Power” Proceedings (September 2009), pp. 40-44.
4. Butler, “The General Board of the Navy,” p. 700.
5. Peter M. Swartz with Michael C. Markowitz, “Organizing OPNAV: 1970-2009,” prepared for the U.S. Naval History & Heritage Command (Center of Naval Analyses, January 2010), p. 104; see also Robert G. Keane, Howard Fireman, and Dan Billingsley, “Leading a Sea Change in Naval Ship Design: Toward Collaborative Product Development,” in SNAME Journal of Ship Production, August 2007; see also Norman Friedman, “The South Carolina Sister: American’s First Dreadnought,“ Naval History (February 2010), pp. 16-23.
6. Philip L. Semsch, “Elihu Root and the General Staff,” Military Affairs, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Spring 1963), pp. 16-27; Ronald H. Spector, Professors at War: The Naval War College and the Development of the Naval Profession (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1977).
7. Williamson Murray and Alan Millett, “Innovation: Past and Future,” Military Innovation in the Interwar Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 313-14.
8. Butler, “The General Board of the Navy,” p. 701.
9. John T. Kuehn, Agents of Innovation: The General Board and the Design of the Fleet that Defeated the Japanese Navy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2008), chapter 2 passim.
10. Friedman, “The South Carolina Sister.”
11. Kuehn, Agents of Innovation, chapter 3, passim; Butler, “The General Board of the Navy,” p. 703.
12. Ibid.
13. Kuehn, Agents of Innovation, Chapters 3 and 4, passim, and Appendix 2, “U.S. Naval Policy 1922.” See also Edward S. Miller, War Plan Orange (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1991).
14. John T. Kuehn, “The Influence of Naval Arms limitation on U.S. Naval Innovation During the Interwar Period, 1921-1937,” (Ph.D. diss., Kansas State University, 2007), pp. 51-2.
15. Ibid.; See also Kuehn, Agents of Innovation, Chapter 2 and pp. 175-177. Membership of the General Board, Roll 1 (microfilm), Proceedings and Hearings of the General Board of the Navy, RG 80.
16. Kuehn, Agents of Innovation, ibid.; and Jeffrey G. Barlow, From Hot War to Cold: The U.S. Navy and National Security Affairs, 1945-1955 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 61-69.
17. Kuehn, Agents of Innovation, pp. 175-77; and Proceedings and Hearings of the General Board of the Navy, Roll 1. See also, Jeffrey G. Barlow, The Revolt of the Admirals: The Fight for Naval Aviation, 1945-1950 (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 1994), pp. 277-289; and George W. Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power: The U.S. Navy, 1890-1990 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 299-301.
18. Swartz and Markowitz, “Organizing OPNAV: 1970-2009,” pp. 103-5.
19. See http://198.7.238.201/newportlinks/ssg/history.aspx (Accessed 28 May 2010).
20. See http://www.usnwc.edu/About/Chief-Naval-Operations-Strategic-Studies-Group.aspx (Accessed 28 May 2010).
21. John T. Kuehn, “Abolish the Office of the Secretary of Defense?” Joint Force Quarterly, Issue 47, 4th Quarter 2007, pp. 114-16.
22. The author is grateful to Robert Keane of Ship Design, USA for his help in understanding the SCIB’s relationship to ship design and the building of the “600-ship” Navy of the 1980s.
23. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates spoke at Fort Leavenworth’s Command and General Staff College in a for-attribution speech on 14 May 2010. Author was present.
24. “The Aftermath of the Cheonan,” http://csis.org/publication/aftermath-cheonan.