Radar fundamentally altered the character of war at sea. Yet when engineers at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) first detected a ship using radio waves in 1922, Navy leaders dismissed the technology as “a wild dream with practically no chance of real success.”1 Two decades later, Allied victories in the Battles of Britain and the Atlantic and Pacific naval campaigns could all be attributed in part to radar. As one physicist put it, “The atom bomb ended the war, but it was radar that won it.”2
Today, U.S. sailors rely on comically outdated software, a Pentagon office culture stuck in the 1960s, and officers who must beg senior military leaders to fix the computers. Naval innovators need a new plan, and the history of radar offers lessons for developing one.
In September 1922, Navy physicists Leo Young and Hoyt Taylor stood on the bank of the Potomac River with a shortwave radio. When ships passed between its transmitter and receiver, the steady tone of the radio doubled in volume. They discovered that the increase was the result of radio waves reflecting off the ships. Eight years later, Young and another NRL engineer, Lawrence Hyland, were testing a radio transmitter near an airfield. Aircraft flying overhead caused the same signal disruption Young and Taylor had observed earlier. The engineers immediately saw the naval potential of their discovery, but no money was allocated for more than eight years because the Bureau of Engineering believed radios were for communication, not detection.
Innovator Archetypes
An innovation navigation plan (nav-plan) takes an idea from development by an innovator, through acceptance by the Navy’s bureaucracy, and ultimately to adoption by sailors at sea. Innovation aids to navigation—(nav-aids)—guide ideas around the Navy’s bureaucracy.
There are three innovator archetypes.
Engineers believe their creations should speak for themselves. They rarely know how to transition their technologies from development to adoption—bridging the “valley of death” in today’s lexicon. For naval/government innovation, there is an intermediate step before adoption: acceptance by the bureaucracy. This requires outmaneuvering the rank-and-file bureaucrats who do not necessarily oppose innovation, but also will not authorize funding.
Champions are the senior leaders who see contrarian ideas as more than a challenge to the status quo. Champions shield nascent ideas from “organizational antibodies” inside innovation bastions—organizations within the Navy with the resources and independence to pursue contrarian ideas.3 Champions fight the battles that engineers seldom have the time or institutional know-how to win—specifically funding, the Navy bureaucracy’s most powerful tool. An innovation’s warfighting potential is often less important to its acceptance than its champion’s ability to navigate the budget process.
Radar’s champion was Captain Edgar G. Oberlin. The director of NRL, Oberlin understood the importance of the phenomenon NRL’s engineers observed in 1930, so he authorized discretionary funding to continue experimentation.4 On 1 November 1931, Oberlin wrote to the Secretary of the Navy: “Although [radar] was found feasible over a year ago, it has been impossible to secure Bureau [of Engineering] support.” To sustain research, Oberlin pleaded his case to Congress, which provided independent funding for the lab. But, unsurprisingly, the Navy transferred Oberlin to the symbolic role of Technical Aide to the Secretary of the Navy.5
Visionaries, most often junior officers or sailors with an understanding of a technology and a clear, experience-derived idea of its naval application, facilitate adoption. Young, Taylor, and Hyland may have developed early radar, but it was Lieutenant (later Rear Admiral) William “Deak” Parsons who operationalized it.
Parsons established himself early as a hybrid scientist-naval officer early. As gunnery officer on board the USS Idaho (BB-42), Parsons had questioned assumptions about the dispersal pattern of ships’ large-caliber guns. His analysis led to new gunnery tactics, techniques, and procedures.6 In May 1933, he received orders perfect for a maverick innovator—to serve as a liaison between NRL and the Navy Bureau of Ordnance.7
Soon after arriving at NRL in 1933, Parsons learned of the radar research. He took it an intellectual step beyond detecting ships and aircraft, suggesting it could track artillery shells in flight. Armed with passion, persistence, and a disregard for his career, Parsons pursued radar, in the words of one observer, “as a boy’s dream, that is, with great fervor and lack of discouragement. That was one of his strengths. He helped push people on.”8
Eventually, in December 1938, the USS New York (BB-34) conducted the first successful at-sea demonstration of radar, detecting aircraft at a range of 50 nautical miles. After World War II, Rear Admiral Frederick Entwistle, head of the Navy’s antiaircraft fire-control desk, gave Parsons credit for the Navy having operational radars at the start of World War II.9
Parsons did three things to enable radar’s success. First, he generated enthusiasm among NRL’s engineers as they worked on a seemingly unwanted project in their free time.10 Second, he used his experience as a gunnery officer to make radar seem more concrete. Using radio waves to detect distant objects seemed mystical, but improving gunnery accuracy solved a known tactical problem. Parsons also communicated to the Bureau of Ordnance through the director of the lab, with the understanding that a Navy captain was less likely to be ignored than a lieutenant who lacked “water under the keel.” And Parsons remained committed to radar despite early rejections.
Today’s innovators should likewise remain resolute in the face of bureaucratic adversity. To be considered successful, it is not enough for an innovative technology to be installed on board a warship. Innovative ideas change the character of naval warfare when early adopters apply it to a tactical problem. As the late naval tactician Captain Wayne Hughes put it, “Tactical and technological developments are so intertwined as to be inseparable.”11
On the night of 8 August 1942, Allied surface ships were screening a landing force near Savo Island; 14 of their 23 warships were equipped with surface-search radars.12 Meanwhile, the Japanese Navy relied on primitive night optics for detection. Despite the Allies’ obvious advantage, they were surprised by a squadron of Japanese warships. The ensuing action led to the loss of four Allied cruisers and more than 1,000 sailors—the single greatest defeat in U.S. Navy history.
One year and three major battles later, the Allies had married tactics to technology.13 At Vela Gulf on the night of 7 August 1943, Commander Frederick Moosbrugger sank three of four Japanese destroyers by employing radar-enabled tactics then-Commander Arleigh Burke had developed. Three months later, at the Battle of Empress Augusta Bay, radar-directed antiaircraft batteries fired shells equipped with miniature radars in the warheads, destroying nearly a quarter of the Japanese aircraft in seven minutes.14 The proximity fuses were designed by none other than Deak Parsons.
An Innovation Nav-Plan
The best way to retain innovators is to let them innovate. Today’s Navy is bleeding war-winning talent, and recruiting is not making up for the losses. To stop the talent exodus, the Bureau of Personnel must assign promising innovators to innovation shore assignments using a by-name-request system. Parsons spent his entire career alternating between traditional seagoing billets and innovation tours.15 Today’s innovators should do the same.
The Navy should not reestablish the CNO’s Rapid Innovation Cell, or any other “innovation” task force, however. Instead, innovators need to inject new life into existing program executive offices, NRL, Naval Sea Systems Command warfare centers, etc. Likewise, visionaries can be detailed to type commander staffs or Pentagon teams such as the OpNav Digital Warfare Office.
Ultimately, an innovation nav-plan must bring innovations to the fleet. Former chief executive officer of Google Eric Schmidt has lamented that the Department of Defense “does not have an innovation problem; it has an innovation adoption problem.”
Despite some welcome reforms, more can be done at the service level. Congress should mandate that resource sponsors allocate a portion of their budgets to low-cost, high-impact ideas sourced from tacticians in the fleet. For example, warfare tactics instructors should inform combat systems acquisitions. Above all else, senior uniformed and civilian naval leaders must collaborate on an ends-means maritime strategy to focus innovation efforts on emerging national security threats. Failing to alter the Navy’s course will jeopardize its ability to defend U.S. interests and the post–World War II international world order.
1. Al Christman, Target Hiroshima: Deak Parsons and the Creation of the Atomic Bomb (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1998), 49.
2. Radar: A Report on the Science at War by the Joint Board on Information Policy, for the Office of Scientific Research and Development, War Department, and Navy Department, MIT Libraries, 1 April 2011.
3. Mitra Best, “Get the Corporate Antibodies on Your Side,” hbr.org, 14 May 2012.
4. Daniel Parry, “NRL History—RADAR,” U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, 4 November 2010.
5. David Allison, New Eye for the Navy: The Origin of Radar at the Naval Research Laboratory (Washington, DC: Naval Research Laboratory, 1981), 68–78.
6. Christman, Target Hiroshima, 25.
7. Al Christman, “Deak Parsons: Officer-Scientist,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 118, no. 1 (January 1992).
8. Christman, “Deak Parsons.”
9. Christman.
10. Allison, New Eye for the Navy, 62.
11. CAPT Wayne Hughes Jr. and RADM Robert Girrier, USN (Ret.), Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations, 3rd ed. (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2018), 16.
12. R. W. Madsen, “Radar in the South and Southwest Pacific as at Savo Island in August 1942,” Naval Historical Review, January 2019, www.navyhistory.au.
13. Hughes and Girrier, Fleet Tactics, 109–13.
14. Hughes and Girrier, 116.
15. Al Christman, “The Atom Bomb: Making it Happen,” Invention & Technology (Summer 1995).
