Last week the Naval War College convened its second “Breaking the Mold” workshop in an effort to unshackle the U.S. Navy from orthodox thinking about strategy, operations, and fleet design. Many “novel and radical” ideas came out of the gathering, to quote my boss, Rear Admiral Jeff Harley. But one troublesome refrain repeated itself throughout the two-plus days of deliberations. Namely, the claim was that freethinkers had already advanced this or that offbeat idea—shifting the bulk of the fleet to unmanned vessels, buying and arming merchantmen or fishing craft, harnessing joint implements of maritime might, you name it—and the navy leadership knew all about it.
And then what? What became of these ideas if they’re so well known? Were they put to the test and found wanting, or just shelved?
If officialdom has ordered fleet experiments held to test out these ideas, it’s a closely guarded secret. Which could be. Inventors hate to broadcast their undertakings lest rivals pilfer their ideas. The same goes double for weaponeers squaring off against the likes of China and Russia. For example, the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office repurposed the navy’s SM-6 interceptor missile on the down-low a few years back. Fielding the SM-6 upgrade will give the fleet a long-range anti-ship capability it desperately needs to match up against China’s navy. Similarly, the navy regenerated a Tomahawk anti-ship cruise missile to help correct the range mismatch. Engineers again did so with little fanfare. The service could be taking the softly, softly approach with mold-breaking ideas as well. I hope so.
But if the leadership hasn’t ordered pathbreaking ideas subjected to field trials, we have a bigger problem: a collapse of the experimental ethos that once enlivened the service. Steam-propelled men-of-war once seemed outlandish, as did aircraft carriers, nuclear-powered submarines and cruisers, and on and on. They became working platforms because someone championed them, played around with them under real-world conditions, and convinced naval chieftains to embrace them. If the U.S. Navy has lost that experimental habit of mind, an additional mold needs to be smashed: the barrier between conceiving of a concept and acting on it. An untried idea is just that: an idea. It’s of little use to anyone.
After all, Archimedes did have his Eureka! moment in the bathtub. But then the Greek mathematician took that flash of insight and used it to formulate his law of buoyancy. He put his idea to the test of reality, found that it worked, and turned it to practical use. Breaking the Mold deliberations have yielded some Eureka! moments. Now let’s get out of the bathtub, towel off, and test them out at sea—the arbiter of what works and doesn’t work in naval affairs. It’s the Greek way.
