Of course, I very much wanted to be chosen, but it became clear to me early in the selection process that I would not be acceptable to either President Carter or Secretary of Defense Harold Brown because of my uncompromising position on the large-deck carrier. When I testified before Congress and made my appeals to the SecDef in the defense budget process, I was conscious of the stigma of persona non grata I was creating for myself. But I did not see that I had any alternative either as CNO in support of an essential Navy program or in the pursuit of my own professional convictions.
Interestingly enough, two years before in 1976, during the Ford administration, I had been informally told to nominate my relief as CNO because I was shortly to be appointed chairman of the JCS to take Gen. George Brown’s place. He was not being reappointed to a second two-year term because of some unfortunate political remarks he had made following a speech at the University of North Carolina. At the last minute, though, the White House decided it would be politically smarter to avoid the cause celebre that would be perceived by a decision not to renew a nonpolitical appointee for political reasons.
Essentially ruled out of consideration in the 1978 chairman appointment, I applied myself to tidying up the programs and projects that I, as CNO, felt personally responsible for. In particular, I wanted to institutionalize certain processes within OpNav for the orderly translation of naval requirements into substance — the numbers and characteristics of ships and aircraft needed in the fleet to carry out the Navy’s responsibilities within its roles and missions. The Battle Force Organization had been a first step, but more needed to be done.
After the experience of three wars and four years as CNO, it seemed almost a waste not to preserve as much as was reasonable in the form of lessons learned. As has been previously pointed out, such documents as the posture statement become personal trademarks of a CNO, and each new incumbent wants to put his particular cachet on the character of his administration. Yet there were doctrines and procedures, something like the NATOPS concept but at the CNO level, that were sterile and procedural but still essential underpinnings to the overall philosophy of a naval service.
The Battle Force Organization had been an opening gambit in this area, but it only went so far into fleet organization. The basic strategic concepts of the Navy needed, in my view, a relatively permanent documentation, and that would become the basis for my long-term legacy to the Navy as CNO.
To provide a professional character to this doctrine, I cast it in the format of a publication titled Naval Warfare Publication No. 1: Strategic Concepts of the U.S. Navy (NWP-1). Initially, I outlined the publication and turned it over to a young officer assigned to the immediate office of the CNO as a “CNO Fellow.” He did an excellent job, but I soon found out that if I wanted to preserve the lore and lessons learned in thirty-five years of a naval career in my own style of expression, I would have to do it myself. And I did.
NWP-1 was written in longhand in pencil on ruled paper in the evenings at Quarters A in the Potomac Annex, the CNO’s quarters. Others may have considered it a chore, but to me it was pure relaxation, disgorging the accumulated thoughts that I had sorted out in my mind over time but had never committed myself to transcribe. As the document progressed, I shared it with Capt. John Poindexter, and he was most helpful in his encouragement.
By the time June 1978 rolled around and I needed to involve myself with a turnover of my duties to Tom Hayward, I had finished really most of what I wanted to record for the guidance of future naval planners, Part I: Generation of Naval Force Requirements, and Part II: Planning Employment and Readiness Doctrine for Naval Operating Forces.
This material was enough to constitute a usable volume in the NWP series of warfare publications, so I turned it over to the deputy chief of naval operations for plans and policy, then Vice Adm. Bill Crowe, later to be chairman of the JCS and then U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom under President Bill Clinton. His staff then had the document published in NWP format and distributed with the other naval warfare publications throughout the Navy.
Years later, in 1985, I received an official White House document titled “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” prepared by the office of the national security advisor to President Ronald Reagan. The national security advisor at that time was Vice Adm. John Poindexter. He had inscribed the publication to me with the words “It all began with NWP-1.”
As a final footnote, NWP-1 again came to light on 27 June 2006, during a symposium sponsored by the Center for Naval Analyses in Washington, D.C., on the subject of “U.S. Naval Strategy: Past, Present and Future.” The symposium traced the history of those official publications that had, over the years, promulgated statements of the strategy of the U.S. Navy. Among the earliest documents in this series was NWIP-1 (A), Strategic Concepts of the U.S. Navy, notable because it was the first of the official tactical doctrine publications in the Naval Warfare series to deal with strategy per se. I discovered it was the original 1978 publication, updated with some additions to the original. It was still being used as a reference in the curriculum of the Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island.
21
The Joint Chiefs of Staff
In 1974 one of the two principal duties of the CNO was to serve as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was generally agreed that the JCS responsibilities of the chiefs of service was their primary responsibility and being the uniformed head of their respective military service came second. This is indicative of the high regard in which the JCS, as a body, was held. The recorded histories of U.S. involvement in military affairs after the Armed Forces Unification Act of 1947 have generally emphasized the role of the Joint Chiefs as the principal military advisors to the president in virtually every critical national security decision.
The reasons for this are several. In his duties as a member of the JCS, the service chief was independent of the service secretary. As CNO, my operational chain of command to the president, the commander in chief, was directly to the National Command Authority — the president and the secretary of defense. The secretary of the navy was not in this chain of command. As CNO, I reported to the SecNav only in administrative matters concerning the Department of the Navy.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff were fully involved in national security policy matters at the very highest levels of government. We met three days a week on schedule, once each week in executive session with the secretary of defense. Both President Ford and President Carter held meetings with the JCS and the SecDef as a group in the White House, usually for lunch, at least once every three to six months. President Carter came to the Pentagon to meet with the JCS in their windowless conference room, known as the “tank,” on one occasion, and again in the JCS Command Center in the Pentagon to participate in a JCS “Command Post” exercise involving a general war scenario.
When President Ford left office, the former president and former first lady, Betty Ford, entertained the Joint Chiefs of Staff and our wives at a private dinner party in the White House in which the only other guests were the secretary of defense and his wife. A particularly memorable part of that evening was when President Gerry Ford graciously danced with each of our wives, and we each had the opportunity to dance with Betty Ford.