Epilogue
FOURTEEN years have passed since the last of the Axis powers surrendered o the Allied nations in World War II. Much has happened since then to the administrative machinery of the Armed Services at the headquarters level in Washington. It is not the intention of the author to depart from the terms of reference under which this work was undertaken. The terms are summarized in the Foreword, Introduction, and Preface to the book and limit its scope to a history of the administration of the Navy Department in World War II.
It is certainly not part of the task assigned to the author to enter into the reasons for Unification nor to trace the development of the Department of Defense since its establishment. Any such attempt would lead far afield; it would, for example, require an explanation of why, in the name of "Unification," three Armed Service departments emerged from the process, where had been only two before, and how it came about that the sponsors of "Unification" made such a poor estimate of the personnel needed to staff the new organization. It will be recalled that its sponsors visualized the headquarters organization of the Defense Department in Washington as requiring perhaps a few hundred people. counting both civilians and those in uniform, whereas thousands have actually been found necessary.
To carry this history further than the end of World War II would make it necessary also to lead the reader through the mazes of Defense Department reorganization that have taken place since 1947. This would have to include a description of the reviewing and control machinery that has been superimposed, layer on layer, on the original mechanism.
It is appropriate, however, to summarize briefly the trends since the close of World War II in the never-ending preoccupation of the Navy Department with reorganizations and with problems of administration. The thinking along these lines has presumably been influenced, to some extent at least, by the experiences of World War II. The first thing to be examined is whether the concepts of naval policy and the mission of the Navy held in ted past have been reaffirmed or substantially modified in the national security plans of the Department of Defense.
Mission of the Navy. An official Department of Defense definition of naval policy and of the Navy's mission was given in the "Report of the
Committee on Organization of the Department of the Navy" dated 16 April 1954, usually referred to as the Gates Report, which reads as follows:
"The Secretary of the Navy has made the following declaration in furtherance of the purpose for which the Department of the Navy exists, and of the functions of the United States Navy and of the United States Marine Corps, as set forth by law and in the "Functions of the Armed Forces and the Joint Chiefs of Staff," issued by the Secretary of Defense:
"It is fundamental naval policy to 'maintain the Navy as a thoroughly integrated entity in sufficient strength on the sea and in the air to uphold, in cooperation with out other Armed Forces, our national policies and interests, to support our commerce and our international obligations, and to guard the United States, including its overseas possessions and dependencies.'"1
A more recent Department of Defense statement, dated December 31, 1958, defines the Navy's mission in a directive prescribing the "functions of the Department of Defense and its major components."2 Nowhere in the directive, nor in the section defining the "primary functions of the Navy and the Marine Corps" are the traditional terms "mission of the Navy" or control of the seas" used, but the statement of the primary functions assigned to the Navy and the Marine Corps make it clear that control of the seas is still considered to be the principal reason for having a Navy.
a number of events and situations have, in fact, occurred since the end of World War II which have underlined the crucial importance to the United States of being able to control the seas, and have made it clear that the Navy is uniquely qualified to perform this function. For instance, in Korea, Formosa, and Lebanon, the Navy was the key to preventing war-fomenting situations and incidents from developing into worldwide conflagrations.
This capability springs from the around-the-clock readiness of the Navy, with its naval aviation on aircraft carriers, its Fleet Marine Force, and its integrated logistic support facilities to exercise mobile and immediate military power over large areas of the globe. This is an advantage not possessed by other branches of the armed services, due to their lack of complete integration within themselves of all of the elements that are necessary for exerting military power at a distance and for self maintenance with their own logistic facilities. The ubiquitous nuclear powered
submarine with its Polaris missile falls in the same category of mobile power and capability of self maintenance for long periods of time.
Recent revolutionary changes in weapons, weapon systems and other instrumentalities of warfare have not diminished the importance of the Navy's special functions in national defense; meither has the unification of the armed services altered the mission of the Navy, nor the role it must play in controlling the seas.
Organization. To the casual student of the history of naval administration it must seem that the organization of the Navy Department has been in na constant state of flux since about the turn of the century. Hardly a year has passed without some change in Navy Department organization and procedures being recommended by a board or a committee, appointed specifically for that purpose, or forming part of the existing organization of the Navy Department.
Until World War II, the working members of such groups were usually career naval officers. Beginning with World War II, the Boards or Committees have consisted in varying proportions, depending on the nature of the matters under consideration, of career naval officers, civilian officials of the Navy Department, and civilian experts brought in from the outside. Management firms and other specialists were also employed by the Navy Department from time to time during and after the war to study current organizations and to submit recommendations for betterments and for improving operating procedures. In addition, a full-time Management Office was included in the Executive Office of the Secretary. it is clear from the record that the Navy Department has never been complacent about its organization and procedures and that it has frequently sought the advice of civilian experts in such matters. [But has it followed that advice? This reader's reaction to the last two paragraphs--based entirely upon the author's "glowing" account--is that these constant reorganizations have been the result of attempts to reform naval administration being fought tooth and nail by vested interests in the Bureaus and shore commands intent on preserving their feudal empires. "We know best! Outsiders don't understand the special needs of the Navy, and should mind their own business." --HyperWar]
The adoption of the General Staff system for the administration of the Navy Department seems in recent years to have been dropped form serious discussions on organization, although the system occupied the center of thinking of those advocating organizational reforms at the turn of the century. This has come about partly because of the limitations of the army General Staff system revealed by the experiences of World Wars I and II, and partly because there is now a better understanding than formerly by Congress, the public, and in fact by the Navy itself, of the vast difference between warfare on land and on the sea. This difference lies at the root of the unsuitability of the General Staff system for administering the affairs of the Naval Establishment. The addition of a Chief of Naval Operations in 1915 to supplement the Bureau System met the requirements for exercising the military command function in the Navy Department during World Wars I and II and other hostilities better than would a General Staff system often advocated.
The various committees that have studied the subject since 1915 have
seen no reason for making drastic changes in the structure of Navy Department organization. This does not mean, however, that the organization, and improvements in its procedures have stood still. Many modifications of an evolutionary, rather than a revolutionary, character have been found necessary, and have been made in order to correct the mistakes of the past and to improve the handling of a vastly more complex Navy than the Navy of World War II.
The overall effect of the changes might be summarized by saying that the modifications have increased the authority and the importance of the roles played by the Chief of Naval Operations and of the Executive Offices of the Secretary, and have decreased the authority of the Bureaus, but have left them with the same, and even greater, responsibilities than before. This is, of course, an oversimplilfied statement of a very complicated problem in administration. Many factors have contributed to the development of the current practices besides shifts in authority and responsibility.
The greater powers of the Chief of Naval Operations derive in part from recognizing consumer logistics as a major task of that office, thereby strengthening his coordinating and control functions vis-à-vis the Bureaus. This has resulted in adding a number of two, three, and four-star flag billets to that organization, with a corresponding increase in the lower naval personnel echelons.
The Executive Offices of the Secretary have grown in power and authority through changes in the structure of appropriation acts, making possible greater fiscal control of naval expenditures by the Secretary, Procedures for reviewing and changing programs at any stage of progress were added, but have increased the advance planning problems of the Bureaus. A number of activities which originated in World War II, such as the Administrative Assistant, the Office of Naval Research, the Office of Naval Material, and the Office of Industrial Relations, were given permanent status, and in some cases are performing functions formerly exercised by the Bureaus. Salaries of civilians, especially at the upper levels, were increased throughout the Navy Department to attract Civil Service personnel of higher caliber than formerly.
A closer look at these developments can best be had by summarizing briefly the reports and action thereon of the principal boards and committees that have dealt with the subject of Navy Department reorganization and administration since World War II.
Gates Board. The first of these studies was made by a so-called "informal" board known as the Gates Board (not to be confused with the Gates Committee of a later date), appointed on 18 August 1945 by Secretary fo the Navy James Forrestal, to study the "organization of the Navy Department and related matters."3
The Board made its report under date of 7 November 1945, and "concluded that while the present executive organization represents a satisfactory basic framework for the administration of the post-war Naval Establishment, the division of duties and responsibilities among the official comprising this organization should be readjusted and clarified in three principle respects."
The readjustment of duties proposed by the Board revolved around the performance of the four tasks, particularly the logistics task which came to be recognized during the war as basic to sound Navy Department administration. Thee tasks were described in Chapter 1, and are referred to frequently in other places in this work. The three spheres of responsibility with respect to which readjustments or clarification were considered necessary by the Gates Board were: (a) clearer and more logical distribution of responsibilities and authority in logistic matters between the Chief of Naval Operations and the civilian executive assistants of the Secretary of the Navy; (b) concentration of business administration under one of the Secretary's civilian executive assistants, (the Under Secretary of the Navy was recommended by the Board for this assignment); (c) reduction in the number of permanent boards and officers reporting direct to the Secretary by assigning their immediate supervision to the Under Secretary or to one of the Assistant Secretaries; thus relieving the Secretary of the Navy to the fullest extent practicable of non-policy administrative duties.
In order to give effect to its conclusions, the Board prepared for the Secretary a General Order covering the proposed organizational changes and assigning to its executive personnel their primary duties. During the deliberations of the Board, the President, buy virtue of the authority vested in him by the First War Powers Act, had on September 29, 1945, promulgated Executive Order No. 9635, entitled "Organization of the Navy Department and the Naval Establishment." The draft of this order had been prepared for the President by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, in collaboration with Admiral E.J. King. The Gates Board held that the readjustments could be made Under the authority of the Executive Order, but felt that its provisions should be given definite legal status by a legislative program aimed at perpetuating by law many of the war emergency procedures that had been found necessary during the war [i.e., perpetuating a permanent "wartime" government, even in peacetime--the "national security state" that now places "the common defense" above all other considerations. --HyperWar].
Practically all of the recommendations of the Gates Board were carried out. The Report of the Board, with its appendices and comments, provide valuable source material for the student of naval administration. The report is, in effect, a bridge between wartime and immediate post-war administration of the Navy Department before unification.
"the United States Navy"--a brochure. The Secretary of the Navy has, from time to time since World War II, prepared information for the use of the Naval Service and for release to the press on the organization,
policies, and procedures of the Navy Department. One such release was a brochure of 86 pages prepared under the direction of Secretary of the Navy Dan A. Kimball in October 1952, entitled "The United States Navy--A Description of Its Functional Organization."4
The pamphlet is a valuable source of information with respect to the organization and procedures of the Navy Department that went into effect after the establishment of the Department of Defense.
It consists of five parts covering the Organization for National Security, the Naval Establishment, the Navy Department, the Shore Establishment, and the Operating Forces as of 1952. Charts showing the various components of the Navy Department, the flow of authority to carry out the Secretary's responsibilities and the Command relationships of the Operating Forces form part of the text. Included are eight Appendices to provide knowledge with respect to the origin of the Department of Defense, the legal background for changes in the organization of the Navy Department and certain of its activities, the charter of the Comprtoller of the Navy Department, and other matters of interest to the Naval Service.
The following are the subjects of the eight Appendices mentioned:
The National Security Act of 1947, as amended.
Public Law 432--80th Cong. 2d Session, Certain Changes in the Organization of the Navy Department.
Allocation of Duties and Responsibilities among the Civilian Executive Assistants.
Charter of the Comptroller of the Department of the Navy.
OpNav Instruction 5410.1--Functions of the Armed Forces and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
General Order No. 5, Distribution of Authority and Responsibility for Administration of the Naval Establishment.
General Order No. 9, as amended, Organization of the Operating Forces.
General Order No. 19, as amended, Shore Activity Relationships and Functions.
The pamphlet is of particular value because it brings together in one place laws and other documentary material that had a direct bearing on the establishment of the Department of Defense and on the implementation of its administrative machinery up to the date of the publication of the brochure in 1952.
Gates Committee. Under date of 30 June 1953, the Department of Defense by its Directive 5105.1 placed in effect the President's
Reorganization Plan No. 6, which, in turn, was based on the Report of the Rockefeller Committee on Department of Defense Organization, dated 11 April 1953. In his message to Congress, transmitting the Reorganization Plan the President had indicated that improvements could be made in the Department of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force.
In order to explore the possibilities for improvement, Secretary of the navy, Robert B. Anderson, appointed a Committee on 14 October 1953, with Under Secretary of the Navy, Thomas S. Gates as its Chairman, to "... review the organizational structure of the Department to identify areas of overlapping or duplicating functions if such exist and to ascertain any organizational problems or difficulties which adversely influence the efficient performance of assigned tasks and missions."
The membership of the Committee is given in the footnote at the beginning of this chapter. It consisted of four naval officers, an officer of the Marine Corps, and three civilians with wide experience in management matters. The officer personnel represented, in a measure, a cross-section fo the major activities of the Navy Department. The technical activities of the Navy Department, for example, had a representative in Vice Admiral Earle W. Mills, who had been Deputy Chief of the Bureau of Ships during World War II, and later, Chief of that Bureau.
The review was made in some detail and included the background in laws and regulations of the existing organization and administrative procedures of the Navy Department. It included also a statement of fundamental naval policy quoted earlier in this chapter.
The Committee arrived at two major conclusions in its report, namely, (a) that the current organization of the Navy Department was basically sound and compatible in a high degree with the organization of the office of the Secretary of Defense, thus permitting it to be responsive to the direction, authority, and control of the Secretary of Defense; and (b) that clarifications and reassignment of the responsibilities of high level civilian and military executives was desirable. The Committee made two broad recommendations: (a) that the Under Secretary of the Navy be designated in charge of the business and production activities of the Department of the Navy; (b) that two new Assistant Secretaries be authorized with a view particularly to having one of them assume responsibility for the performance of the Comptrollership function currently assigned to the Under Secretary of the Navy, and the other for handling personnel functions.
The Committee made some further observations in areas that it considered to be of major significance, such as (a) the inconsistencies found to exist between the statutes on the one hand and the practices of the Navy Department on the other in assigning duties and responsibilities to the Chief of Naval Operations; (b) it commented that additional formal
mechanisms were needed to assure full coordination of what were necessarily joint responsibilities of civilian and military executives at all operating levels; (c) also that centralized functions relating to the inspection and survey activities of the Naval Establishment should be responsive to civilian guidance and direction, but that the Office of the Naval Inspector General should be equally responsible to the Chief of Naval Operations and the Secretary of the Navy. In the body of the report, the Committee made specific recommendations to carry out these observations.
The Committee endorsed the principle which underlay a reorganization of the Department of Defense that had been put into effect a short time before, whereby staff rather than operating responsibilities were assigned to nine Assistant Secretaries of Defense.
Franke Committee. As of this writing, the most recent report on Navy Department Reorganization was made by the Franke Committee, appointed by Secretary of the Navy, Thomas S. Gates, on 26 August 1958.5 In establishing the Committee, the Secretary took note of the Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1958 approved 6 August 1958, and of the great advances in weapons since the last major review of Navy Department organization by the Gates Committee, described in the preceding pages. He requested the Franke Committee to study the existing organization of the Navy Department in the light of the proposed D.O.D. reorganization and of current technological advances.
In the matter of its personnel, the Committee differed somewhat from former committees of this kind. As given in the footnote, it consisted of three civilian officials of the Navy Department, a Lieutenant General of the Marine Corps, and three unrestricted line flag officers, two of whom were aviators and one who had a communications background.
The Secretary requested the Committee to direct its efforts primarily toward (a) recommending an organizational structure which would insure maximum combat effectiveness of the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps; (b) toward proposing such organizational adjustments as necessary to maintain an effective pattern of responsibility and authority, proper lines of communication, clear accountability, and proper liaison, both internal and external; all with a view to insuring for the Department of the Navy effective, efficient, and economical administration.
The Committee submitted its report on 31 January 1959, and stated that "in accordance with your instructions, the Committee has studied the
present organization of the Department of the Navy for the purpose of making such recommendations to you as will insure maximum combat effectiveness and administrative efficiency, with further consideration having been given to the possibility or necessity of changes in organization as a result of the enactment of the Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1938."
A word is desirable at this point with respect to the "Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1958," approved on 6 August 1958.6 The Reorganization Act made no changes in the roles and missions of the Armed Services. However, it placed the special and unified commands of the operating forces in a new command structure responsibly only to the Secretary of Defense and reporting to him through the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Formerly, special and unified commands took their orders through the Military Department under which the Commanding Officer, himself, served. In the case of the Navy Department, the new arrangement reduced the scope of the authority and of the responsibilities of the Secretary of the Navy.
The Act increased the authority of the Vice Chief of Naval Operations and of the Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps, so as to give their chiefs more time to devote to their augmented duties as members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A directive of the Secretary of Defense stressed that members of the Joint Chiefs should delegate appropriate duties to their Vice Chiefs, and the number if Assistant Secretaries of the Department of Defense and of the Military Departments was reduced. The new Defense Department organization and the roles and functions of each Service were given in Directive No. 5100.1 issued by the Secretary of Defense under date of December 31, 1958, quoted in full as an appendix in the Report of the Franke Committee.
The Report of the Franke Committee is a long one, consisting, with appendices and charts, of some 185 pages. It reviews, describes, and makes observations at considerable length, on the background, mission, objectives, current organization, and method of operation, at the Washington Headquarters level of the Department of the Navy and of some of its component elements.
A review in detail of the Report would serve no useful purpose, as the entire Report can be obtained readily by anyone. It would furthermore be inappropriate to comment on the Report in detail or as a whole, because much of its meat lies in observations and recommendations that are still under consideration by the Secretary of the Navy. It would however, be appropriate and helpful to the student of naval administration to cover
briefly the principal recommendations that have been approved by the Secretary, and are in the process of being put into effect.
Bureau of Weapons. The Committee made a study of the capabilities of the Bureau System to meet promptly and with efficiency and economy the logistic needs of the Navy and the Marine Corps. It will be recalled that the determination of consumer logistics is one of the tasks assigned to the Chief of Naval Operations and the Commandant of the Marine Corps, whereas producer logistics is the task of the Bureaus. The Committee studied in particular the procedures followed in the design and procurement of aircraft and airborne weapons, including their controlling and launching equipment. These had become so complex and interrelated that the Committee came to the conclusion that aircraft and their weapons must be designed and developed as complete systems. This involved, however, a redistribution of Bureau functions.
One of the strongest arguments in favor of the Bureau system has always been and still remains its flexibility. The distribution of duties among the Bureaus can be altered, and the number of Bureaus can be decreased or increased to meet new conditions without making radical changes in the structure of the organization of the Navy Department as a whole.
In its study of the work of the three technical Bureaus--Ships, Ordnance, and Aeronautics--the Committee drew on this flexibility in making its recommendations for improving the administrative situation with respect to weapons and aircraft. The Committee proposed to leave undisturbed the functions of the Bureau of Ships, but to merge the Bureau of Ordnance and the Bureau of Aeronautics to form a Bureau of Weapons, so as to facilitate the development and procurement of aircraft and of naval weapons in general. Merger of the two Bureau is now under consideration by the Navy Department and by Congress. Success of the merger will depend on the soundness of the measure taken to meet the exacting engineering and technical requirements of this sector of producer logistics. [This paragraph--which has absolutely nothing to do with the administration of the Navy Department, during or after World War II, (the Bureau of Weapons never happened)--is a perfect example of why the Navy should invest a few dollars in an Editor for all its publications to avoid the embarrassment of prolix, but barely literate verbiage. This online edition has (in my humble opinion) been rendered intelligible by the liberal addition of punctuation and formatting; the bizarre capitalization usage has been left untouched. --HyperWar]
Research and Development. It is a long step indeed from the status of Research and Development in the Navy Department twenty years ago to the place it holds today. A chapter is devoted in this work to the history of "Research and Development" before and during World War II. The harnessing of the forces of nature and the use of the scientific method in solving man's problems has grown since then to the point where these approaches are playing a major role in planning the security of the United States. There has, consequently, been on dearth of funds for explorations in the realm of the physical sciences.
It has come to be recognized, also, that only because of military
necessity were the enormous sums made available for carrying on research at the fate found necessary during and after the war. There is, however, a growing awareness that the military research ushered in by World War II advanced American industrial progress by many decades. This at least represents some useful return [to the "Merchants of Death", not to the taxpayers --HyperWar] from the vast sums that must be spent in making war.
The Franke Committee, after painstaking study, recommended that one of the three authorized Assistant Secretaries of the Navy be designated s Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research and Development, with cognizance over all such matters, and that he exercise the overall control of the appropriation "Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation, Navy." The Office of Naval Research and the Bureaus individually were to perform the detailed accounting for the funds allocated to them under that appropriation, with the Office of the Comptroller of the Navy doing for the Assistant Secretary the budgeting, accounting, and reporting of the funds. The Navy Research and Development Committee was also to be continued to assist the Assistant Secretary in formulating policies and developing procedures in administering the overall research and development programs of the Navy Department. These functions had formerly been handled by the Assistant Secretaries of the Navy for Air.7
At the Chief of Naval Operations level, the Committee recommended that the Assistant Chief of Naval Operations (Research and Development) be disestablished, and that the personnel and functions assigned to that Office be transferred to a proposed Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Development) having the rank of Vice Admiral. The new Deputy Chief has been added and has been assigned the function of integrating and coordinating the overall Navy Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation programs. To that end, he is to direct the efforts of the Bureaus and the Offices of the Navy Department in meeting the requirements of approved research and development programs with a view to insuring a continuously responsive approach to long range objectives, immediate requirements, fiscal limitations, and advancing technology. Some of the functions formerly performed by the Office of Naval Research will be transferred to the new DCNO (Development).
The Department of Defense also has a Director of Defense Research and Engineering, with a staff of considerable size, who plays a part in passing on and coordinating research and development programs for all three Armed Services. The exact nature of his responsibilities and authority has, however, not been clearly established.
Thus, in twenty years, scientific research and development in all of its many phases and aspects ha gone from practically no overall supervision and coordination at the highest level to control and supervision by an Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research and Development; integration and coordination of the overall Navy Research, Development, Test and Evaluation programs by a Deputy CNO (Development) with the rank of Vice Admiral; and additional coordination by the Department of Defense.
Summation. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, there have been many modification of an evolutionary but minor character in the organization of the Navy Department since the last major change was made in 1915. The changes were usually made to meet the demands of new situations. However, the unquestioned success of the Navy Department in carrying out its mission over the years has been due to the type of men who comprised and led the organizations more than to the organizations themselves.
The overriding importance of the human element should be obvious, yet it is often obscured by man's hope that he will be able to reach perfection through something less elusive than leadership or by something measurable, such as the expenditure of huge sums of money on the armed services.
A major consideration in making changes should be to continue to attract men of outstanding ability, foresight, integrity, and competence as leaders in all parts of the complex structure of the Navy Department necessary to produce and to operate a superior modern Navy.
Admiral Arleigh Burke, the Chief of Naval Operations [1955-1961] gave apt expression to this truth when he said, "... The basic element of military capability is man, individual man, with his personal dignity, and his pride. no matter what machines, what weapons evolve, they will be a product of man. Man will maintain them, and above all, man must control them. ..."8
We must have leaders in the line with the traits of vigorous men of action who can train their forces, make decisions, and carry them out with equal competence in peace and in war. There has never been any dearth of competent leaders in that branch of the naval service and there never will be. The source form which they spring will never dry up. The appeal which the combat branch of the Navy makes to the youth of the country will keep that source replenished with gifted men who wish to make a career of the naval profession. However, very few youths, when they begin to think of the Navy as a career, or even during the years devoted to their naval education, are aware that there are branches of the Navy other than the line, that also require high competence and the endowments of
leadership, and for which they may be better suited--the branches engaged in supplying the logistic needs of the fighting Navy.
The evolution of warfare since the beginning of World War II has been in the direction of increasing the importance of matériel. This has underlined, as never before, the need for efficient personnel to provide the matériel for the Navy, and has stressed the indispensability of high caliber personnel to perform the logistics task of the Navy Department.
It has been the policy of the Navy Department, based on a century of experience, to place the responsibility for the performance of this task in the hands of career naval officers. The policy has resulted in a Navy that stands in the forefront of the navies of the world in the superiority of its ships, aircraft, weapons, and its other matériel elements. The system that has brought this about has received high praise from naval missions sent to the United States by foreign governments to study the Navy Department's administrative methods in this field.
This is no disparagement of the distinguished part played by civilians in Naval Administration. The role of civilians in policy and fiscal control and the growing contribution made by them to the technical and management aspects of Navy Department administration were summarized in earlier pages in this Epilogue and were covered in some detail in Chapter 1 of this history.
Continued matériel superiority of the United States Navy should not, however, be taken for granted. It was not achieved by accident, but by the intelligent and continuous efforts of career naval officers working in the sundry fields of naval logistics, especially by those who in the past, and who in the future, must continue to carry the main responsibility for the engineering work of the Navy Department. Such work has lost part of its former attractiveness because there are no longer promotion and financial advantages in taking it up, and the morale of its personnel is, in the opinion of many, suffering from the reduction, made right after World War II, in the rank of the Chiefs of the technical bureaus from Vice Admiral to Rear Admiral.
A great virtue of the United States Navy's officer personnel structure has been that it provides appropriate intermingling of the command and staff groups of the Navy, thus facilitating teamwork between progressive line officers and farseeing, highly-trained career naval officers specializing in the various logistics fields of the Navy.
To reduce the stature of either, as over the years some have proposed, would harm the whole naval body, perhaps irreparably. Organizational changes of the future should not derogate any of its essential elements. The Navy in the future, as in the past, will depend first of all on the quality fo the men it attracts to line, engineering, and other staff duties, and especially on the type it selects for top leadership.
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Footnotes
1. Report of the Committee on Organization of the Department of the Navy, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 16 April 1954), p. 7 (hereafter cited as the Gates Report, after Under Secretary of the Navy Thomas S. Gates.) Other members of the Committee were Admiral D.B. Duncan, USN; Gen. G.C. Thomas, USMC; Vice Adm. Earle W. Mills, USN (Ret); Vice Admiral John Gingrich, USN; Rear Admiral Ruthven E. Libby, USN; Mr. Hobart C. Ramsay, and Mr. Richard M. Paget.
2. SecNav Instruction 5410.3A of 7 January 1959, forwarding Department of Defense Directive Number 5100.1 of December 31, 1958, subject: "Functions of the Department of Defense and its Major Components." Referred to hereafter as "Department of Defense Functions."
3. The composition of the Gates Board in given in footnote 9 of Chapter 1.
4. The United States Navy--A Description of Its Functional Organization, prepared by the Office of the Management Engineer, Navy Department, October 1952. Published by U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C.
5. Report of the Committee on Organization of the Department of the Navy 1959. William B. Franke, Under Secretary of the Navy, Chairman; Fred A. Bantz, Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Material); John H. Dillon, Administrative Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy; James S. Russell, Admiral, USN; M.B. Twining, Lieutenant General, USMC; E/P. Holmes, Rear Admiral, USN; T.H. Moorer, Rear Admiral, USN. Published by the U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1959.
6. Public Law 599--85th Congress, 2d Session. 72-Stat. 514, approved August 6, 1958.
7. Dr. James H. Wakelin was sworn in as the first Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research and Development on 8 July 1959.
8. Introduction by Admiral Arleigh Burke, USN, to Navy Public Statements, July 1959, published by the Chief of Information, Department of the Navy, Washington 25, D.C.