In the past two decades, our Navy has racked up an impressive string of own-goals, self-owns, and facepalm moments. They have ranged from the tragic: such as the 2017 ship collisions that left 17 dead and exposed serious flaws in Navy readiness; to the unforgivably expensive: such as the endless money pits of the LCS and DDG-1000 programs; to the farcical: such as the abortive 2016 decision to trash a centuries old rating system for enlisted sailors.

Nothing, however, has symbolized the Navy’s complete lack of self-awareness quite like the struggles with uniforms.

Our fleet, which in 1945 bestrode the world in its moment of supreme victory in white, khaki, navy, and light blue, began the 21st century by trading in the images of its past for a second rate facsimile of our Marine Corps brethren. We ditched the easy functionality and iconic design of blue utilities for “digital cammo” and dumped black and white service uniforms for another spin on a Marine uniform, giving our sailors a khaki-over-black outfit that would (briefly) blend in at Parris Island.

We tried blue camouflage not fit for shipboard use, lime green cammo not fit for maritime aesthetics, yellow see-through physical training gear, all gold chevrons as participation trophies for enlisted Sailors, flight suits for non-aviators, equal wear rules for flight suits and blue cammo, cammo in the Pentagon, cammo not in the Pentagon, dress khakis, women-in-mens uniforms despite feedback to the contrary (called gender neutral, but really a subordination of one gender’s aesthetic to another), and probably myriad other initiatives lost in the continuous uniform shuffle. Uniform policy has been, to say the least, a mess.

I’ve written before about our failure to dress for the job we have, i.e., an ocean-spanning, tradition guided, technologically innovative guarantor of the global commons, and of the tendency of peacetime brass to muck with uniforms as an effort to show that they are doing something, but news over the weekend brought into crystal focus the levels of parody to which our Navy has sunk.

Navy personnel are now authorized to wear alternate rank on their Type III Navy Working Uniform, the lime green cammo utilities that are not fit for shipboard use, nor, we discover, are they fit for displaying the basic building block of the chain of command: the rank of the wearer.

Sailors have expressed discomfort at the need to stare at someone’s chest to determine how to address them, and in a half-step reminiscent of the half-steps taken to remedy problems in a dozen other areas, the Navy has decided to allow full-color ranks on the NWU. This follows a decision earlier in the year that allowed O-6s to wear silver insignia on their NWUs, solving a problem that was probably not identified by the E-4 mafia…

Unfortunately, the ultimate solution to this parade of uniform silliness is to do the one thing sailors say they don’t want: change the seabag once more and scrap the NWU Type III, scrap the black-and-tan service uniform, and get back to basics on Navy Uniforms. Khaki, white, blue: the palette is simple. Collar insignia, shoulder boards, rating badges on the left sleeve: these design principles tie us to our history and draw the attention of the observer to the intended point of focus better than a tiny black rank in the center of the sternum.

The Navy should adopt the two-piece flame resistant working uniform fleetwide. Rank insignia should be moved from the breast to the collar or shoulders. The NWU 3 and enlisted service uniform should persist only in the fever dreams of those who think a sea-going Navy should look more like a knock-off Marine Corps than the world’s greatest Navy.

And the Navy should foot the bill for every sailor who has been made to pay out of pocket for uniform “solutions” that have solved nothing and have left us looking foolish. Incremental uniform changes designed to make us less ridiculous have only increased the absurdity, and the only solution is a wholesale turn back to the type of uniform that Americans and sailors expect from a world class Navy.