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Leadership Lessons of the First African American Father and Son to Serve at Top in the U.S. Navy

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Two high-achieving African-Americans in the U.S. Navy share their leadership experiences over nearly sixty consecutive years of service. Melvin G. Williams Sr. served in the Navy from 1951 to 1978 with a final assignment as a Command Master Chief. His son, Melvin G. Williams Jr., served from 1978 to 2010 with a final assignment as Commander, U.S. Second Fleet. Their book describes how they navigated through the ranks by employing what they call the Seven Cs of leadership: Character, Competence, Courage, Commitment, Caring, Communicating, and Community. The authors contend that their leadership principles can be learned, practiced, and refined for any profession.

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The Strategic Concepts of John Warden and John Boyd

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Airpower Reborn offers a conceptual approach to warfare that emphasizes airpower's unique capability to achieve strategic effects. Six world-leading theorists argue that a viable strategy must transcend the purely military sphere, view the adversary as a multi-dimensional system, and pursue systemic paralysis and strategic effects rather than military destruction or attrition.  The book is divided into three parts. The first section presents a historical perspective on airpower theory and airpower strategy, tracing their evolution from the 1920s to the 1980s. The second section contains in-depth examinations of the strategic concepts that John R. Boyd and John A. Warden developed in the 1980s and 1990s, with an emphasis on their contemporary relevance. The final section provides further context on modern airpower theory and strategy. Theory, in this setting, serves as the basic paradigm, strategy represents its generic, mechanisms-centered application, and plans of campaign constitute the specific steps for any given situation.  In short, the authors look beyond the land-centric, battlefield-oriented paradigm that has continued to dominate military theories and strategies long after airpower offered new options. The book acknowledges the essential role of advanced technology in improving airpower capabilities, but emphasizes that air services must cultivate and harness the intellectual acumen of airmen and encourage officers and men to think conceptually and strategically about the application of aerospace power. Modern airpower can offer political decision-makers more and better options-provided the underlying strategy coherently links the application of airpower directly to the end-state objectives rather than limiting it to the battle.  The book recommends that all countries should consider establishing a dynamic and vibrant environment for mastering aerospace history, theory, strategy, and doctrine; a milieu for cultivating broader knowledge of and insight into airpower; and a setting in which airpower experts have the opportunity to communicate their narrative to politicians, the media, and fellow officers, and to interact to mutual benefit with experts from all sectors of governance. This effort should emphasize the potentially unique contribution of airpower to political objectives and joint operations, and in turn connect to operational headquarters that do operational planning. Mastering such strategic thought lies at the heart of the military profession, but it requires in-depth knowledge and understanding of theory, strategy, and airpower, and transcends traditional metrics.

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China, the United States, and 21st-Century Sea Power

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Defining a Maritime Security Partnership

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Chinas reaction to the United States new maritime strategy will significantly impact its success, according to three Naval War College professors. Based on the premise that preventing wars is as important as winning wars, this new U.S. strategy, they explain, embodies a historic reassessment of the international system and how the United States can best pursue its interests in cooperation with other nations. The authors contend that despite recent turbulence in U.S.-China military relations, substantial shared interests could enable extensive U.S.-China maritime security cooperation, as they attempt to reach an understanding of competitive coexistence. But for professionals to structure cooperation, they warn, Washington and Beijing must create sufficient political and institutional space.

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Andrew S. Erickson, Lyle J Goldstein, Nan Li

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The Office of Naval Research Since the End of the Cold War

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The Office of Naval Research, known widely as ONR, was formed in 1946 largely to support the pursuit of basic science to help ensure future U.S. naval dominanceand as such, it set the model for the subsequently created National Science Foundation. But everything changed after the Cold War. The U.S. entered a period of greater fiscal constraints and the concept of warfare shifted from conventional land and sea battles and super-power conflicts to an era of asymmetric warfare, where the country might be engaged in many smaller fights in unconventional arenas.   Naval Innovation in the 21st Century is a narrative account of ONRs efforts to respond to this transformation amidst increasing pressure to focus on programs directly relevant to the Navy, but without sacrificing the seed corn of fundamental science the organization helped pioneer. Told through the eyes of the admirals leading ONR and the department heads who oversee key programs, the book follows the organization as it responds to the fall of the Soviet Union, the terrorist attack on the USS Cole in 2000, and subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.   These events are inspiring an array of innovations, for land and sea. Consider unmanned undersea vehicles that can patrol strategic coastlines for months on end, novel types of landing craft that can travel up to 2,500 nautical miles without refueling, and precision shipborne rail guns whose GPS-guided shells can hit targets from hundreds of miles off. Other efforts include advanced electronics designed to swap out scores of antennas on ships for two solid-state apertures, greatly increasing speed and stealth and speed; virtual training methods that spare the environment by avoid the need to fire tons of live shells, and new ways to protect Marines from improvised explosive devices. All these programs, some pursued in conventional manner and some set up as skunk works designed to spur out-of-the-box thinking, are part of an ongoing evolution that seeks to connect scientific investment more directly to the warfighter without forsaking the Navys longer-term future.   Naval Innovation in the 21st Century is a narrative history, and a story of organizational change, centered around the struggles of management and key personnel to adapt to shifting priorities while holding on to their historic core mission of supporting longer-term research. As such, it holds great lessons and insights for how the U.S. government should fund and maintain military R&D; in a new era of small ball conflictsand how the country must prepare for the future of warfare."

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Caught off Okinawa in the fiercest typhoon in history at the end of World War II. Elmer Renner, then a young officer aboard a US minesweeper, recounts the horror of his ship sinking. Renner and eight other sailors clung to a small raft for days, battling thirst, hunger, shark attacks and, eventually, madness. Renner and co-author Ken Birks describe the men's panic as distant ships seemingly ignore their desperate calls, the sea turning blood red when one of the men loses his life to a shark, and how another slips silently away into the unforgiving Pacific.

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Eisenhower and the Quest for Aerospace Security

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The Other Space Race is a unique look at the early U.S. space program and how it both shaped and was shaped by politics during the Cold War. Eisenhowers New Look expanded the role of the Air Force in national security, and ultimately allowed ambitious aerospace projects, namely the Dyna-Soar, a bomber equipped with nuclear weapons that would operate in space. Eisenhowers space policy was purely practical, creating a strong deterrent against the use of nuclear arms against the United States.  With the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, the political climate changed, and space travel became part of the United States national discourse. Sambaluk explores what followed, including the scuttling of the Dyna-Soar program and the transition from Eisenhowers space policy to John Kennedys. This well-argued, well-researched book gives much needed perspective on the Cold Wars influence on space travel and its relation to the formation of public policy.

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In 1972, following the huge success of Run Silent, Run Deep, Edward L. Beach's second novel of submarine warfare was published to great acclaim. Like its predecessor, Dust on the Sea was lauded for its authentic portrayal of what it meant to be a submariner during the desperate years of World War II. Tense, dramatic and rich in technical and tactical detail, the book draws on Beach's experience as a submariner in the US Navy to describe the commander and crew of the fictitious USS Eel as they battle overwhelming odds to destroy Japanese ships and save American lives. With no margin for error, the men withstand storms, depth charges and even hand-to-hand combat to defend their boat and themselves. Mistakes, as the title reminds us, result in the debris which serves as a brief grave maker for sunken ships: dust on the sea.

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The Battle of Tassafaronga, November 30, 1942, was the fifth and last major night surface action fought off Savo Island during World War II s Guadalcanal campaign. It ended a string of Japanese victories, but it was also a horrible embarrassment to the U.S. Navy, which had three heavy cruisers damaged and one sunk to enemy torpedoes. After the battle, American commanders erroneously reported that multiple enemy ships had been sunk or seriously damaged, leading Admiral Nimitz to focus on training as the missing ingredient. Not until more than half a century later did Captain Russell S. Crenshaw, Jr., the destroyer Maury s gunnery officer during the battle, discover that the outcome hinged instead on critical shortcomings that had been built into the U.S. Navy before the war defective torpedoes, poor intelligence, blinding gunfire, over-confidence, and a tendency to equate volume of fire with effectiveness of fire factors that turned the battle into a crucible in which the very nature of the U.S. Navy and its weapons was tested [and] a miniature of what might have been, under other circumstances, a truly devastating defeat.

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In early December 1941 in the Philippines, a young Navy ensign named Kemp Tolley was given his first ship command, an old 76-foot schooner that had once served as a movie prop in John Ford's "The Hurricane." Crewed mostly by Filipinos who did not speak English and armed with a cannon that had last seen service in the Spanish-American War, the Lanikai was under top-secret presidential orders to sail south into waters where the Japanese fleet was thought to be. Ostensibly the crew was to spy on Japanese naval movements, but to Tolley it was clear that their mission was to create an incident that would provoke war. Events overtook the plan, however, when Pearl Harbor was bombed before the Lanikaicould get underway. When Bataan and Corregidor fell, she was ordered to set sail for Australia and became one of the few U.S. naval vessels to escape the Philippines. In this book Tolley tells the saga of her great adventure during these grim, early days of the war and makes history come alive as he regales the reader with details of the operation and an explanation of President Roosevelt's order. Tolley's description of their escape in Japanese warship-infested waters ranks with the best of sea tales, and few will be able to forget the Lanikai's 4,000-mile, three-month odyssey.

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Written by two World War II veterans who later became well-known war correspondents, this biography records the inspiring life of one of America's great naval heroes. Popularly referred to as "31-Knot" Burke, Admiral Arleigh Burke fought savage battles at sea and won every decoration a grateful nation could bestow, yet his service to his country was not in combat alone. This book is at once a stirring testament to Burke's World War II record as a combat leader and to his talents as a diplomat at the armistice table in Korea and as a politician in Washington. It details his legendary victories with DESRON 23 in the Pacific and his development of high-speed night tactics for destroyers that resulted in what many call the perfect naval engagement at the Battle of Cape St. George.  Burke's most enduring contributions occurred during his unprecedented three terms as chief of naval operations when he directed the Navy's technical development during its revolutionary change from steam and gunpowder to nuclear concepts in ships, weaponry, strategy, and tactics. Published soon after Burke's retirement from the Navy in 1961, the book has remained a standard reference for four decades.

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Women Join the Ranks at the Naval Academy

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When Sharon Hanley Disher entered the U.S. Naval Academy with eighty other young women in 1976, she helped end a 131-year all-male tradition at Annapolis. Her entertaining and shocking account of the women's four-year effort to join the academy's elite fraternity and become commissioned naval officers is a valuable chronicle of the times, and her insights have been credited with helping us understand the challenges of integrating women into the military services. From the punishing crucible of plebe summer to the triumph of graduation, she describes their search for ways to survive the mental and physical hurdles they had to overcome. Unflinchingly frank, she freely discusses the prejudice and abuse they encountered that often went unpunished or unreported. A loyal Navy supporter, nevertheless, Disher provides a balanced account of life behind the academy's storied walls for that first group of teenaged women who charted the way for future female midshipmen. Lively, well researched, and amazingly good humored, the book seems as fresh today as it was when first published in hardcover in 1998.

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Eisenhower, the CIA and Cold War Aerial Espionage

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Dino A. Brugioni, author of the best-selling account of the Cuban Missile crisis, Eyeball to Eyeball, draws on his long CIA career as one of the world's premier experts on aerial reconnaissance to provide the inside story of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's efforts to use spy planes and satellites to gather intelligence. He reveals Eisenhower to be a hands-on president who, contrary to popular belief, took an active role in assuring that the latest technology was used to gather aerial intelligence. This previously untold story of the secret Cold War program makes full use of the author's firsthand knowledge of the program and of information he gained from interviews with important participants. As a founder and senior officer of the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center, Brugioni was a key player in keeping Eisenhower informed of developments, and he sheds new light on the president's contributions toward building an effective and technologically advanced intelligence organization.  The book provides details of the president's backing of the U-2's development and its use to dispel the bomber gap and to provide data on Soviet missile and nuclear efforts and to deal with crises in the Suez, Lebanon, Chinese Off Shore Islands, Tibet, Indonesia, East Germany, and elsewhere. Brugioni offers new information about Eisenhower's order of U-2 flights over Malta, Cyprus, Toulon, and Israel and subsequent warnings to the British, French, and Israelis that the U.S. would not support an invasion of Egypt. He notes that the president also backed the development of the CORONA photographic satellite, which eventually proved the missile gap with the Soviet Union didn't exist, and a variety of other satellite systems that detected and monitored problems around the world. The unsung reconnaissance roles played by Jimmy Doolittle and Edwin Land are also highlighted in this revealing study of Cold War espionage.

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Pacific Fleet Strategy December 1941 June 1942

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On May 7 and 8, 1942, fast carrier task forces from the United States and Imperial Japanese met in combat for the first time in the Battle of the Coral Sea. A strategic victory for the U.S. despite the loss of the carrier Lexington, the battle blunted the Japanese drive on Port Moresby, a valuable Allied air base on the island of New Guinea.  Lundstrom offers a detailed analysis of the fundamental strategies employed by Japan and the U.S. in the South Pacific from January to June 1942, the efforts of Adm. Ernest J. King to reinforce the area in spite of Roosevelts Europe First grand strategy and Adm.Chester Nimitz's aggressive plans to fight in the Coral Sea. Now in paperback, The First Pacific Campaign provides a superb overview of the crucial first six months of the naval war in the South Pacific.

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This new edition of a classic work on British battleships is the most sought after book on the subject. Containing many new photographs from the author's exhaustive collection this superb reference book presents the complete technical history of British capital ship design and construction during the dreadnought era. Beginning with Dreadnought, all of the fifty dreadnoughts, 'super-dreadnoughts' and battlecruisers that served the Royal Navy during this era are described and superbly illustrated with photographs and line drawings.

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Nimitz called this book about the USS Aaron Ward on the radar picket line in the Pacific, "the finest story of the war that I have been privileged to read."

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Mobile Artillery Observers and the Battle for Okinawa

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Although it was the largest and final battle of the Pacific War, the Battle for Okinawa has long been overshadowed by other dramatic events in 1945. The books that have been written about it emphasize the role of infantrymen, armor, and U.S. Marines. This work takes a fresh perspective and focuses on the vital role played by the U.S. Armys forward artillery observersthe eyes and ears of American artillery who were among the least recognized heroes of the war. According to Rodney Earl Walton, U.S. artillerymen matched Japanese gunners in intensity and surpassed them in effectiveness because their forward observers were able to provide a much shorter response time to requests for artillery support. Divided into teams consisting of four or five men led by an artillery lieutenant, these observers would spend three days on the front lines directing artillery against enemy positions, return to their artillery battery for three days, and then rotate up to the line of battle again. While trying to maximize the damage inflicted on the enemy, the men had to deal with the ever-present possibility of firing on their own forces. The ability to shift artillery fire throughout the battlefield was a new development in World War II, and its evolution is fully examined in the book. Walton, the son of one of the forward observers on Okinawa, spent more than twenty years investigating what happened to his father and other artillerymen during the conflict. Interviews with the artillerymen and the infantrymen they supported are central to his story, which is filled with gripping and sometimes humorous accounts of what happened. The work stands as a stirring tribute from the baby boom generation to the greatest generation.

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Innovation, Education, and Leadership for the Modern Era

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For more than two decades William S. Sims was at the forefront of naval affairs. From the revolution in naval gunnery to his development of torpedo boat and destroyer operations, he was a central figure in preparing the U.S. Navy for World War I. During the war, he served as the senior naval commander in Europe and was instrumental in the establishment of the convoy system. Following the war his leadership as president of the Naval War College established the foundation of the creative and innovative Navy that developed the operating concepts for submarines and aircraft carriers leading up to World War II. Despite his dramatic impact on the U.S. Navy, Sims books and articles are often overlooked. His lessons are especially important for todays military, facing budget cuts as well as missions in transition. This book is a collection of Adm. William Sims written work, and it investigates his relevance in addressing the questions facing todays military personnel and policymakers.

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The Combined Chiefs of Staff in World War II

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Awarded NASOH's 2012 "John Lyman Book Award for Best U.S. Naval History," Allied Master Strategists describes the unique and vital contribution to Allied victory in World War II made by the Combined Chiefs of Staff.  Based on a combination of primary and secondary source material, this book proves that the Combined Chiefs of Staff organization was the glue holding the British-American wartime alliance together.  As such, the Combined Chiefs of Staff was probably the most important international organization of the Twentieth Century.  Readers will get a good view of the personalities of the principals, such as Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke and Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King.  The book provides insight into the relationships between the Combined Chiefs of Staff and Allied theater commanders, the role of the Combined Chiefs regarding economic mobilization, and the bitter inter-Allied strategic debates in regard to OVERLORD and the war in the Pacific.  This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the British American alliance in World War II. Careful attention is paid in the book to the three organizations that contributed the principal membership of the Combined Chiefs of Staff; i.e., the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, the British Chiefs of Staff Committee, and (in the case of Sir John Dill) the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington.  After providing a biographical background of the principal member so the Combined Chiefs of Staff, Rigby provides information on wartime Washington, D.C. as the home base for the Combined Chiefs of Staff organization.   Detailed information is given regarding the Casablanca Conference, but the author is careful to distinguish between the formal nature of the big Allied wartime summit meetings and the much less formal day-to-day give and take which characterized British-American strategic debates between the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington and the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.  Indeed, it is a major contention of the book that it is critical to remember that more than half of the meetings of the Combined Chiefs of Staff took place in Washington, D.C. in a regularly scheduled weekly pattern and not at the big Allied conferences such as Yalta. The role of the Combined Chiefs of Staff in directing the war in the Pacific and in planning the OVERLORD cross-channel invasion of western Europe, respectively, is covered in detail.  These were the two most contentious issues with which the Combined Chiefs of Staff had to deal.  Rigby attempts to answer the question of why two combative, fearless, warriors like Churchill and Brooke would be so unwilling to go back across the Channel, and to explain the tug-of-war the British Chiefs of Staff had to conduct with Churchill before a British battle fleet could join the American Central Pacific Drive late in the war. The book also provides a wealth of information on the role played by members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff in the spheres of economic mobilization and wartime diplomacy.  Most of all, what Allied Master Strategists does is to give the Combined Chiefs of Staff what they have long deserveda book of their own; a book that is not weighted towards the U.S. Joint Chiefs on the one hand or the British Chiefs of Staff on the other; a book that is not strictly a naval book, an army book, or an air book, but a book that like the western alliance during World War II, is truly combined in an international as well as an interservice manner.

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Thomas Holcomb and the Making of the Modern Marine Corps, 1936-1943

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Preparing for Victory explains how and why Commandant Thomas Holcomb successfully supervised the dramatic expansion of the Marine Corps from 18,000 officers and men in 1936 to 385,000 in 1943.  Not only did Holcomb leave the Corps much larger, but he also helped establish it as the United States premier amphibious assault force and a major contributor to victory over Japan. Despite Holcombs successes, he has been ignored or given short shrift in most histories of the Marine Corps. No book-length study of his commandancy exists until now. Drawing on a wide range of printed and archival sources, my book contends that Holcomb expertly guided the Corps preparations for war during the last years of the Great Depression and then provided his Leathernecks with astute direction during the first harrowing twenty-five months of World War II. When measured with principles of organization theory and leadership studies, Holcombs abilities and achievements match those of such outstanding American military managers as Dwight D. Eisenhower, Chester W. Nimitz, and George C. Marshall.  Like these unassuming yet efficient officers, Holcomb shied away from the limelight and therefore never garnered the attention that Chesty Puller or Howlin Mad Smith have. This book fills a void and tells the story of one of the key leaders in World War II. More than any other marine, Holcomb molded his Corps into the modern force-in-readiness that would eventually help fight the Cold War and the Global War on Terror.

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With all the immediacy of an eyewitness account, Anthony Pitch tells the dramatic story of the British invasion of Washington in the summer of 1814, an episode many call a defining moment in the coming-of-age of the United States. The British torched the Capitol, the White House, and many other public buildings, setting off an inferno that illuminated the countryside for miles and sending President James Madison scurrying out of town while his wife Dolley rescued a life-sized portrait of George Washington from the flames. The author's gripping narrative--hailed by a White House curator, a Senate historian, and the chairman of the National Geographic Society, among others--is filled with vivid details of the attack. Not confining his story to Washington, Pitch also describes the brave, resourceful defense of nearby Fort McHenry and tells how Francis Scott Key, a British hostage on a ship near the Baltimore harbor during the fort's bombardment, wrote a poem that became the national anthem.