Richard Jernigan -> RE: Late night shop drawings (Mar. 10 2015 18:22:10)
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Rickover's and LeMay's influenced survived their departure from the organizations they shaped. My work with the Navy Strategic Systems Program Office ("SP" in the Navy) began in 1975. Rickover was head of the Navy's Nuclear Reactors Branch, and was responsible for the development and deployment of nuclear power throughout the Navy. The first project was the development of the nuclear powered ballistic missile submarine, the Polaris Class. Rickover retained strong influence over the strategic submarine fleet, up through at least the Trident boats. A friend, vice president of the sonar group of a defense contractor showed me a set of accommodation plans, the internal layout of the boat, from an early design iteration of the huge Trident class. The boats are 560 feet long, nearly the length of two American football fields. On the large sheet of drawings was the comment, in red ink, "S.O.B. will not sink--HGR." [S.O.B. = son of a bitch, HGR = Hyman G. Rickover] Out of several government and military organizations I dealt with, SP was the most capable. The civilian engineers knew as well as their defense contractor counterparts how to design, build and operate submarines, submarine launched ballistic missiles, and nuclear warheads. The civilian and military components of SP were closely integrated, efficient and active in managing the civilian contractors they oversaw. In my first experience with SP, I was a consultant on a Lockheed Missiles and Space Company Reentry Systems Division project. Financially it was a relatively small part of the overall Trident Missile development effort, but it was at the cutting edge of technology. The manager of one of the subprograms was replaced. The subprogram was one in which the subcontractors possessed the world's leading technical expertise, by a wide margin. The Lockheed subprogram manager's role was seen largely as a housekeeping job. The new man showed little interest in learning the technical details. Within weeks of his appointment the subprogram manager was told to come to Washington DC to give a review to SP. He brought three people with him, including me. After the formal presentation the subprogram manager was bombarded with questions. He deferred the answer to every technical question to one of us. At the end of the meeting he was told to return to Washington the next week, alone. I heard that at the next meeting he was again peppered with technical questions, which he flubbed. The following week he was reassigned by Lockheed to supervise buildings and grounds: literally the crews mowing lawns, trimming shrubbery and painting stripes on the parking lots. The 3-star admiral leading SP had always been the skipper of both a Fleet Ballistic Missile Boat and an attack submarine. He always had advanced degrees in engineering. The first time I briefed the 3-star, he asked if I had time to stop by his office at lunch. Of course I did. I had briefed a computer simulation of a battle between U.S. strategic missile forces and the Soviet strategic missile defenses. The simulation ran to tens of thousands of lines of code. In his office the admiral offered me a sandwich, and said, "A lot of people that do these simulations are really good on the details, and on their good qualities. I was wondering whether you could take ten minutes to describe the major strengths and weaknesses of your approach, then answer a few questions. He pulled a legal size envelope out of his pocket and passed it over to me. He expected me literally to put my summary on the back of an envelope. Every naval officer and every civilian I ever talked to about it attributed SP's technical excellence and efficiency to the strong influence of Rickover. It was a pleasure to work with them. LeMay was transferred from the 8th Air Force in Europe to the Pacific Theater to command the B-29 raids on the Japanese homeland from the Marianas Islands near Guam. The operation had not been particularly effective. LeMay had made a name for himself in the 8th Air Force, but he knew that if he didn't produce results in short order, he would be replaced as well. LeMay tried a couple of strategies, before settling upon low altitude night time fire bombing. The fire bombing of Tokyo alone caused the most deaths of any bombing raid of WW II. A hundred thousand people died, almost as many as the combined totals from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fire bombing destroyed forty percent of the area of 67 cities. At least another 120,000 people died. Some put the total much higher. My father never spoke about specific experiences during the time he served under LeMay, but he did say LeMay was the most effective combat leader of the Air Force. LeMay began the operation of the Berlin Airlift in 1948, when the Soviets blocked land access to the city. My father served there after his time at the beginning of the Japanese Occupation. My brother served as a flight surgeon in the Strategic Air Command (SAC) in the early 1960s, shortly after LeMay had moved on to other jobs. LeMay had taken SAC from a small not particularly effective force to being one of the two major U.S. strategic players in the Cold War. He combinied a massive force of long range heavy bombers with nuclear ballistic missiles. Training was constant and rigorous. Flight surgeons were periodically assigned to practice missions. My brother spoke of his first experience flying from Oklahoma to Morocco on a practice bombing run. He was impressed by the efficiency and esprit de corps of SAC, even after later having been a part of the Apollo program, which exhibited those qualities at the very highest level. LeMay rose to be Chief of Staff of the Air Force. It eventually became public that during the Cuban Missile Crisis LeMay strongly clashed with President Kennedy, his brother Robert and Secretary of Defense McNamara. They were looking for a way to de-escalate the most dangerous crisis of the Cold War. LeMay advocated bombing the Soviet missile installations. It later became clear that the installations had enough nuclear missiles, capable of reaching as far as Washington DC, to have killed millions of Americans. The Soviet high command had delegated launch authority to their missile commander in Cuba, the only such case. Even after the missiles were removed and the U.S.A had promised not to invade Cuba, LeMay strongly advocated invasion. When I brought this up with my father, he paused for a while, then said, "LeMay showed good judgment when he got out of the Airlift and turned it over to a logistics expert. I thought he sometimes showed poor judgment. When he did, the determination and stubbornness that helped make him a great combat leader worked against him. He was a good man to go to war with. Not such a good man trying to keep one from getting started." RNJ
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