Unbelievable Incompetence: The U.S. Navy’s Achilles Heel
Saratoga in 1943 or 1944 – Public Domain
To many American nationalists and militarists, the U.S. Navy has long held the reputation of being the best and most capable navy in the history of the world. In popular culture, movies like Top Gun, The Final Countdown, and The Hunt for Red October, all made with the consent and support of the Navy, fill people’s heads with what I believe are delusions of grandeur, but in recent years, the Chinese military has made great strides, and many now consider it to be a serious threat to America. This article, however, is not going to be yet another that repeats the same old story about the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy’s emergence as the U.S. Navy’s peer rival on the seas. The way I see it, the Navy does not really need to worry about how many ships the other side has, their hypersonic missiles, and their attempts to intimidate their neighbors. No, the real threat to the U.S. Navy is its own history of bewildering incompetence that might well lead to military defeat by ANY well-trained enemy, be they big or small.
I will begin by quoting Rear-Admiral Jeffry V. Brock, Royal Canadian Navy (Ret.), who in the pages of his 1983 autobiography The Thunder And The Sunshine: With Many Voices, Volume II, described the U.S. Navy of the 1950s, when it was still basking in the glow of victory in World War II, as simply inept and militarily worthless in many ways. He commenced with this statement after the conclusion of a multinational naval exercise: “The chronicling of this chapter of my life would not be complete without recounting another type of experience I had during a large-scale NATO exercise in company with the United States Atlantic Fleet. The exercise plan called for my own participation as Fleet Commander Atlantic in control of my own forces for a large part of the time, after which we were to enter a different phase. The gigantic United States Second Fleet was under the command of an Admiral, whose name I cannot now recall, but I can very clearly remember that during the first phase of the exercise he and his staff were judged to have lost almost two-thirds of their own forces. Furthermore, the exercise referees concluded that most of the damage to the United States Atlantic Fleet had been brought about by disastrous mismanagement and misdirection of their own attack forces.” (pp. 71-72)
That was bad enough, but there was more. While visiting the carrier USS Saratoga, the captain of the American ship asked Brock if he would like to speak to the commanding U.S. Navy Admiral, and he agreed. “The American Admiral quizzed me closely about our system of navigational charts, their issuance, correction, and the management of our chart depot system. I laid bare to him all the details of an age-old system within the British and Commonwealth navies, and disclosed to him that it was very seldom any of Her Majesty’s ships left harbour without complete sets of chart folios covering every place in the world where one might suddenly be sent. He was much impressed and asked if the Canadian ships in company were similarly outfitted. I assured him that was so.” (Ibid.)
The Admiral then asked Brock to transfer some charts for the voyage to the UK, and he was happy to help his blood ally and senior partner. A few hours later, however, and to his horror, the Canadian noted that he saw helicopters from the carrier distributing copies of his charts to ALL the other USN ships in the exercise and said “It was now clear to me that the whole United States Atlantic Fleet had sailed without proper charts of their destination. I was appalled.” (Ibid.)
This actually happened, and even though it was decades ago, recent scandals and accidents confirm that this sort of inexcusable negligence and lack of professionalism at the highest levels are still alive and well in the U.S. Navy. On that note, I would like to conclude by saying that perhaps America should worry less about China, for it is just one country, albeit a big one, and more about being truly competent to deal with ALL potential foes, of which there are many. Before building even more aircraft carriers, which I believe will be sunk quickly in a war, the Navy needs to get its act together, start learning its lessons like the highly proficient forces in other countries do, get rid of its horrible up-or-out promotion system, and finally become a genuinely professional fighting force. Until that happens, our American allies would be well-advised to sleep with one eye open and be ready for the next disaster on the high seas. In this example, nothing happened because it was just an exercise, but the next time, the U.S. Navy, with all its arrogance, might not be so lucky.
Roger Thompson is a Fellow of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, a Research Fellow at Dalhousie University’s Centre for the Study of Security and Development, the author of Lessons Not Learned: The U.S. Navy’s Status Quo Culture, and a former researcher at Canada’s National Defence Headquarters.
Notes
Jeffry V. Brock, The Thunder and the Sunshine: With Many Voices, Volume II (Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 1983).
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