If you look to the performance of the US Navy in World War II – the ships that made victory happen came out of the shipbuilding programs of the 1920s and 1930s. At a time with no computers or modern communication equipment – and working through naval treaty limitations as well as the financial challenges of the Great Depression – we saw incredible innovation and steadily improving ship designs. Why?

A lot of the credit is given to something the Navy had then, but does not have now; The General Board.

What was The General Board, what did it do, and is the Navy today suffering for the lack of one?

Join fellow USNI Bloggers CDR Salamander and EagleOne this Sunday, 10 JUL at 5-6pm EST to discuss the issue and more for the full hour with CDR John T. Kuehn, USN (Ret.), PhD – author of the USNI Press book, Agents of Innovation, and and earlier Sterling book Eyewitness Pacific Theater with Dennis Giangreco.

If you can’t join us live, you can always listen to the archive at the link, or subscribe to the free podcast on iTunes.

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Posted by CDRSalamander in Books, Hard Power, Maritime Security, Navy
Tags: Maritime Strategy, Shipbuilding, WWII
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• Tom

  Any chance of an ebook edition for “Agents of Innovation” coming out?

• Byron

  Amazon has it for Kindle….

• http://www.usni.org admin

  You can see a full list of our books in eBook format here: http://www.usni.org/store/books/ebook-editions

  We are publishing on Amazon, Google, Apple, Barnes and Noble platforms.

• John T. Kuehn, CDR USN (retired)

  Ebooks, that is a good one for the Naval Institue Press folks. I would not recommend an audio book due to lawsuits by injured people who fall asleep at the wheel while listening on a drive!

  vr, John T. Kuehn

• Byron

  CDR Kuehn, I’ll be getting the ebook tonight, sounds like an interesting read. Shame we can’t revive those fellows, they might have kept LCS from happening…

• UltimaRatioRegis

  CDR Kuehn,

  Great show, by the way. Your book just moved up several places in the high pile of things I have on deck to read. As soon as I finish with Herr Bismarck, I will get yours from USNI and dig in!!

• EIT

  If one where to become a naval ship designer or a NAVSEA engineer today what would be the USNI’s recomendation for books to read and/or subjects to know? As one would expect an engineer at google to know computer networking, computer languages, etc what should we expect that the Naval engineers of today to know and be expert at? Thank you.