The classic collection of articles from the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings.

This is the exciting story of the American Navy and its important role in our nation’s history from the Revolutionary War to the dawn of the New World Order. Presented in two volumes, Robert Love shows how the interplay of international affairs, foreign policy, partisan politics, changing technology, and Navy views has shaped the American fleet and continues to define its missions and operations.

The United States Navy evolved from an ill-formed collection of merchant vessels, privateers, and small frigates into the most capable maritime force in world history . The author employs an historical narrative that describes this evolution of American warships, technology, and force structure as opposed to the battles or tactics in which they engaged. He examines the history of the U.S. Navy from the perspective of the American people and their elected and appointed political leadership—the President, the Congress, the Secretaries of the Navy— and the captains, commodores, and admirals who carried out their directives, as well as the changing nature of the naval establishment, physical infrastructure, and human capital that constituted the industrial base in each era. The U.S. Navy is our nation's first line of defense, composed of the most capable aircraft carriers, surface ships, submarines and naval aircraft ever built. It represents an enormous investment of our nation's treasure, but is designed, built, and operates largely out of the public eye. Naval professionals and students of naval history should learn the forces that determine ‘how’ and ‘why’ we build the ships and aircraft we do, and their true value to the American taxpayer.

This monumental study provides an innovative and powerful means for understanding institutions by applying problem solving theory to the creation and elaboration of formal organizational rules and procedures. Based on a meticulously researched historical analysis of the U.S. Navy’s officer personnel system from its beginnings to 1941, the book is informed by developments in cognitive psychology, cognitive science, operations research, and management science. It also offers important insights into the development of the American administrative state, highlighting broader societal conflicts over equity, efficiency, and economy. Considering the Navy’s personnel system as an institution, the book shows that changes in that system resulted from a long-term process of institutional design, in which formal rules and procedures are established and elaborated. Institutional design is here understood as a problem-solving process comprising day-to-day efforts of many decision makers to resolve the difficulties that block completion of their tasks. The officer personnel system is treated as a problem of organized complexity, with many components interacting in systematic, intricate ways, its structure usually imperfectly understood by the participants. Consequently, much problem solving entails decomposing the larger problem into smaller, more manageable components, closing open constraints, and balancing competing value premises. The author finds that decision makers are unlikely to generate many alternatives, since searching for existing solutions elsewhere or inventing new ones is an expensive, difficult enterprise. Choice is usually a matter of accepting, rejecting, or modifying a single solution. Because time constraints force decisions before problems are well structured, errors are frequently made, problem components are at best only partially addressed, and the chosen solution may not solve the problem at all and even if it does is likely to generate unanticipated side-effects that worsen other problem components. In its definitive treatment of a critical but hitherto entirely unresearched dimension of the administration of the U.S. Navy, the book provides full details over time concerning the elaboration of officer grades and titles, creation of promotion by selection, sea duty requirements, graded retirement, staff-line conflicts, the establishment of the Reserve, and such unusual subjects as “tombstone promotions.” In the process, it transcends the specifics of the personnel system to give a broad picture of the Navy’s history over the first century and a half of its development.

This study examines how intellectual and institutional developments transformed the U.S. Navy from 1873 to 1898. The period was a dynamic quarter-century in which Americans witnessed their Navy evolve. Cultures of progress—clusters of ideas, beliefs, values, and practices pertaining to modern warfare and technology—guided the Navy's transformation. The agents of naval transformation embraced a progressive ideology. They viewed science, technology, and expertise as the best means to effect change in a world contorted by modernizing and globalizing trends. Within the Navy’s progressive movement, two new cultures—Strategy and Mechanism—influenced the course of transformation. Although they shared progressive pedigrees, each culture embodied a distinctive vision for the Navy’s future.