In 1942, the US Navy relieved a third of its submarine captains rather than test a torpedo.
I keep coming back to this story, and I want to tell you why.
Through the first year of the Pacific war, submarine commanders came home with the same report in different words: torpedoes that ran too deep, detonated early, or thudded against an enemy hull and did nothing. The Bureau of Ordnance — the Navy’s own weapons authority, and the maker of the Mark XIV — had its answer ready. The weapon was fine; the shooters were failing. Roughly thirty per cent of America’s submarine commanders were relieved that year. It took twenty-one months of war before the Navy conceded, and corrected, three separate design faults in its standard torpedo.
What makes the story sting is which navy this was. The interwar US Navy was, by most accounts, the best learning organization then in uniform anywhere. At Newport in 1923 its officers gamed massed carrier strikes — Midway, nineteen years early — and its fleet exercises reported honestly on what the games had got wrong. In Williamson Murray and Allan Millett’s study of interwar innovation, this navy is the star pupil. The torpedo scandal sits in the same book.
So here is the finding I cannot put down: a culture of honest assessment is not a property an institution has. It is an achievement each part of the institution makes, or doesn’t — a fragile island, defended bureau by bureau. The navy that umpired its own wargames without mercy could not bring itself to test its own torpedo against the evidence of the men firing it. Relieving the captains was, institutionally, the cheaper experiment.
This is what I want Field Notes, this newsletter, to be about — and it is a good moment to say so plainly: not weapons, but what institutions do with their own lessons. Every army today has a Mark XIV somewhere — a system whose failure reports arrive from the people using it and get filed as user error. A drone, a piece of decision-support software, a new command network. The question is never whether the reports exist. It is who is allowed to test.
So, a question to carry into your next meeting: which bureau holds your Mark XIV — and who is allowed to test it? If you have an answer, reply to this email. I collect these.
Since the last letter (all on brauer.dev)
Every future-war book is also a procurement document — Brose, McCain’s office, and why you read the acknowledgements first.
https://brauer.dev/notes/every-future-war-book-is-a-prospectus/
The bicycles of Storskog — 5,500 migrants, a NATO border, and the threshold that turned out to be political.
https://brauer.dev/notes/bicycles-of-storskog/
Ten weeks to Kinzhal — why the pacing item is the syllabus, not the missile.
https://brauer.dev/notes/ten-weeks-to-kinzhal/
One thing worth reading
Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett (eds.), Military Innovation in the Interwar Period (1996). The book the torpedo comes from: seven studies of how armies, navies and air forces of the 1920s and 1930s did or did not adapt, written by historians who checked the archives rather than the legends. Read it for the pattern, not the cases — innovation, the editors conclude, was the rule, not the exception; and so, inside the very same organizations, was its opposite.
Next letter in around two weeks. Reply if you disagree — that is what this is for.
Christoph