Cutler

Thomas J. Cutler is a former petty officer second class and retired lieutenant commander who has been serving the U.S. Navy in various capacities for more than fifty years, including a combat tour in Vietnam and service in aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and patrol craft. The author of many articles and books, he is the Gordon England Chair of Professional Naval Literature at the U.S. Naval Institute and Distinguished Fleet Professor of Strategy and Policy with the Naval War College. He has received the William P. Clements Award for Excellence in Education as military teacher of the year at the U.S. Naval Academy, the Alfred Thayer Mahan Award for Naval Literature, the U.S. Maritime Literature Award, the Naval Institute Press Author of the Year Award, and the Commodore Dudley Knox Lifetime Achievement Award in Naval History.

Articles by Thomas Cutler

Admiral Evans and President Theodore Roosevelt on board Roosevelt’s yacht, the Mayflower. On Evans’ death in 1912, Roosevelt proclaimed the Navy had never had a man “who more thoroughly and joyously welcomed a fight.”

Fighting Bob Evans

By Lieutenant Commander Thomas Cutler, U.S. Navy (Retired)
August 2024
“Even the American Navy, fertile though it has been in gallant fighting men, has never had any man who more thoroughly and joyously welcomed a fight.”
The American Frigate Chesapeake. NHHC

Growing Pains for the U.S. Navy: The War of 1812

By Lieutenant Commander Thomas J. Cutler, U.S. Navy (Retired)
April 2024
Just 30 years after the official end of the American Revolution, the British and the Americans again went to war—and this time the stakes were not about independence, but national ...
Ghost Ship

Superstitions and the Sea

By Lieutenant Commander Thomas J. Cutler, U.S. Navy (Retired)
February 2024
Superstition will likely remain tucked away in the sailor’s sea bag to emerge when strange happenings seem to defy logic.
USS Little Rock CG-4 in Harbor

The U.S. Navy in the Yom Kippur War

By Lieutenant Commander Thomas J. Cutler, U.S. Navy (Retired)
October 2023
An officer’s firsthand account of the Mideast conflict that led to “the largest naval confrontation between the U.S. Navy and the Soviet Navy in the entire Cold War.”
The U.S. Naval Academy’s Physics & Chemistry building: The first headquarters of the U.S. Naval Institute.

Fifteen Founders

By Lieutenant Commander Thomas J. Cutler, U.S. Navy (Retired)
October 2023
It was June Week 1879 at the U.S. Naval Academy, a time that normally would be marked by much happiness and loud celebration, but the only sounds were the somber ...

Books by Thomas Cutler