Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

120 • The Navy– signaling – would play the primary role in destroying that outward-focused ThirdGeneration culture in the Royal Navy. 1Reforming the U.S. Navy’s personnel requires, above all else, adopting the institutionalculture of the Third Generation. The late 18th century Royal Navy can serveas a useful prototype. We want that navy’s iron men in today’s iron ships. Attainingthat goal means we must put the engineers back in the engine rooms (and the aviatorsback in their cockpits) and have tacticians and strategists, not technicians, commandingour ships and fleets.This should begin with a wholesale reform of the Naval Academy. Not only is Annapolisnow overwhelmingly an engineering school, it is also oppressed by a stultifyingatmosphere of political correctness, itself largely a product of adding women tothe Brigade of Midshipmen and then trying to forbid what happens naturally amongyoung men and young women. It is hard to imagine a worse atmosphere for creatingthe officers of strong character, those always looking for opportunities to take initiative,that a Third Generation institutional culture requires. Reform requires separating thewomen from the men, perhaps educating them somewhere else; revamping the curriculumto replace the focus on engineering with a focus on warfare; and introducingopportunities for the midshipmen to make military decisions. (Paintball at sea in theAcademy’s dinghies would be a good start.)One additional personnel reform is urgently required. At present, any time aU.S. Navy ship touches ground, the commander is relieved. This leaves Navy shipcaptains terrified and timid when operating in coastal waters. There should be nopenalty for running a ship aground as a consequence of handling her in a bold mannertactically.IdeasIn the realm of ideas, the principal reform to the U.S. Navy should be reorientingthe service away from blue-water warfare and toward controlling green and brownwater, i.e., coastal and inland waters, places where the United States is fighting FourthGeneration, non-state opponents.This reorientation does not contradict what we said at the outset, namely that theNavy must retain its ability to control the seas. Rather, it reflects the fact that neithernow nor in the foreseeable future do we face a potentially hostile navy that can contestcontrol of either the Atlantic or the Pacific. The only two navies that come close arethose of Russia and China. Both are roughly our equal in number of capital ships, i.e.submarines, although only 25 of the Russian navy’s 46 attack submarines are nuclearpowered, and only five of China’s. The Russian submarine force may also be our approximatepeer qualitatively. The Chinese submarine fleet is far inferior qualitativelyto our own, both in personnel and in materiel.Overwhelming any comparison of fleets is the fact that war with either Russia or