What is 53 Years in the Life of a Navy?

it is always darkest before it gets a little more dark, but then the dawn comes - usually

A few weeks ago, I had multiple people forwarded an email to me for comment. I was not on this guy’s email list, so I won’t mention his name or those who forwarded it to me, partially out of proper online manners, but mostly because I’m pouting I wasn’t on the email’s distro.

The email referenced an article from the March 1971 issue of Proceedings titled, A United States Navy for the Future, by Capt. Robert H. Smith, USN, a 1947 graduate of USNA.

Back up a bit and soak in that date. Time and place. In reading all things, the context of time and place is important, a topic that I’ll return to later in this post.

In addition to the emails from the extended Salamander network (I love you guys and gals) it popped up in private group chats.

It is fascinating when something that’s been around for decades find sudden purchase in the present day. As such, I wanted to bring it to the front porch for y’all to chew on.

To get things started, I’d like to pull some of the reactions to it from those venues mentioned above from people whose opinions I value. Most were along these lines;

“…one of the more powerfully written critiques of the U.S. Navy I've yet seen.” … “Although written in 1971, it reads like it was written yesterday.”

There was also this contrary opinion.

“Everyone loves the "iconoclast" who "speaks truth to power", but the Navy of that emerged in the two decades after his essay utterly undercuts much of what he asserts.”

Which is it? I’ll summarize where I stand downpost, but for now, let’s look at some pull quotes from the 1971 article.

I’m going to crib from one of my email replies, slightly edited from the original:

Thank you for forwarding this to me. I was discussing this earlier today with a friend and I generally agree with your take, but these are the corners of my thoughts on the article I outlined in my earlier discussions:

Much of what he writes about then applies to some of the challenges we have now because we have a large institution that is designed by and run by humans who bring with them all the good and not-so-good parts of the human condition; pride, sloth, ambition, loyalty, drive, envy, greed, love… all the good and bad. Institutions can drift towards the bad parts of the human condition that populates it, or the good side - or drift between the two - depending on how the forces of the day, humans or events, exert force on it. This is where the leadership “people are policy” comes into play, as good leaders can dampen the natural oscillations and help guide the drift towards the good. Poor leadership usually does the opposite, and inattentive leadership simply lets the oscillations increase in amplitude with the resulting chaos one sees in such. So, yes, things seem familiar because human institutions through time at their core are similar.

Time and place: This was written in 1971. The first half of that decade was dominated by the demoralization of Vietnam, social upheaval, and cultural chaos of the last half decade of the 1960s that metastasized into the malaise and decay that characterized the 1970s. You have to read that article understanding the miasma in which it was written and how that shaped its perspective.

A Beacon of Optimism: What has dominated much of the naval news of the last nine months or so? It is the super performance of our surface force in the Red Sea, specifically Aegis and the Standard Missile family. It did not happen by accident, nor did it happen because of a recent initiative. It took decades.

Two years before this article, “Aegis” was started. Wayne Meyer took over in 1970. TICO Hull-1 was ordered in 1978 and commissioned five years later, a dozen years after that article was written. So, in the background in 1971, our Navy was developing the technology that would dominate the air around our surface force over half a century later … and will continue to do so. SM-1 entered service in 1967 as a development of the Tartar missile in service a decade earlier … and here we are with SM-3 & SM-6 that did not sprout from Neptune’s Head. They came from generations of sustained effort.

So, yes - this article is a good one to review, but I think in the end it doesn’t produce a dark cloud today so much as, with the glory of hindsight, reminds us that odds are, with all the challenges we have, there are smart people in hard jobs working on important things that will - despite the trouble we see, push through it all with what we need.

All leaders need to do is support them, help clear barriers as they appear - and work tirelessly to find the roots of dysfunction hindering an effective organization and scrape away the accretions around our bureaucracy to make sure we will have by 2050 that time and place’s version of what in 1971, smart people with hard jobs thinking a dozen POM cycles ahead of them, brought us in 2024.

The hard part is knowing what is today’s “Aegis” and not the USMC intra-war gyrocopter.

See…Sal the optimist. :)

Yes, we have challenges - some like we discussed on yesterday’s Midrats border on existential - but all is not lost, even in the darkest times.

Yes, 1971 was the start of what was really a horrible decade for the US military - but we were ready to take off quickly when conditions changed in under a decade. The key in dark times is to make sure the good is not strangled in the cradle, but lifted up by those good people in hard jobs who all of a sudden find access to a lever of power.