Naval Service Culture

A new piece on USS Constellation

Earlier this week I was pleased to see an article I co-authored appear in Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute. Here’s a link; if for some reason you meet a paywall, please let me know.

The 1854 Constellation in Baltimore.

The article tells the story of USS Constellation, which was one of the U.S. Navy’s original six frigates. Built in Baltimore in 1797, she served with distinction in the Quasi-War, the Barbary Wars, and the War of 1812. She was broken up in 1853 and replaced the next year by a different USS Constellation, built using different wood and to a different design. That ship—the last all-sail ship built by the Navy—spent her career on the Africa Squadron and then as a training ship, mostly in Newport, RI.

So far, so good.

But in 1909, someone (and we never figured out who) changed the official records of the Secretary of the Navy to show that the second USS Constellation was in fact the first—that she was built in 1797, not 1854. That would have made her like her sister ship USS Constitution, which in turn made her a ship worth preserving and celebrating.

For the next eighty years, the Navy obfuscated the evidence of Constellation’s actual origins. The article has the sordid details, and you should check it out.

It was a coincidence that this article appeared just a week or so after I had the privilege of speaking at a conference at Yale on “The Great War and Grand Strategy.” The central theme of both the article on Constellation and my remarks at the conference was the same: navies need to acknowledge the importance of organizational culture, or, more specifically, naval service culture.

Here’s what I said about that at the conference, drawing on the work of my co-author, John Hattendorf:

Naval service culture is, put simply, what the navy knows. Organizations of course cannot know things; people know things. And in any case, the navy is too large to know anything. One former boss of ours identified seventeen different sub-cultures or communities in the U.S. Navy today [i.e. aviation, submarines, surface warfare, etc.]. What we mean is that naval service culture is all the things that members know about the navy or about their community without thinking about it. They often don’t say these things out loud and they often don’t write them down. Naval service culture is the navy’s conventional wisdom, its common sense. Nobody needs to ask the question because everybody knows the answer.

One key part of that knowledge is historical, what we might call naval service heritage. I, a professional historian, use the word heritage deliberately. It’s related to what I do, but often at odds with it. It is the unique, inherited sense of service identity created by people and events in the past. It represents the values, traditions, practices, and artifacts handed down through previous generations of professionals. Those who serve in navies absorb their sense of heritage throughout their service lives as they observe and experience what makes their navy distinctive. Naval service heritage is often meant to inspire the best professional performance in officers and ratings, even if it is not necessarily historically accurate.¹

A good example of naval service heritage is what Secretary of the Navy Kenneth Braithwaite said in 2020 about his decision to name a new class of frigates after Constellation, while standing on the deck of the 1854 ship in Baltimore:

Recalling [Constellation’s] long history, Braithwaite said, would emphasize “the importance of heritage in the Navy and Marine Corps” because when sailors “serve on a ship that has such a glorious history in its name, that stuff just bubbles to the top and makes people feel proud and makes them feel that they are a part of something special and part of something that’s greater than self.”

Braithwaite did not confuse the two ships, to be clear, and nobody was obviously hurt by the U.S. Navy’s decision to lie about the 1854 Constellation. But the point we made in the article was that lies like that are corrosive. Navies (or any large organizations) need to tell the truth about their own history.

It’s difficult to predict the consequences of not understanding your own service history and of allowing yourself to be carried along by service myths that everybody knows without thinking critically about them.

With that in mind, I was interested to read how the newest Constellation was coming along since Braithwaite’s announcement in 2020. The idea with the Constellations, known as the FFG-62 program, was to buy an existing design from an Italian-French company and modify it slightly; instead, the Navy has kept modifying the design so that the next Constellation will bear much less resemblance to the original Italian-French design. That has had predictable results:

Delays in completing the ship design have created mounting construction delays. The Navy acknowledges that the April 2026 delivery date, set in the contract at award, is unachievable. The lead frigate is forecasted to be delivered 36 months later than initially planned. The program office tracks and reports design progress, but its design stability metric hinges largely on the quantity—rather than quality—of completed design documents. This limits insight into whether the program’s schedule is achievable. If the Navy begins construction on the second frigate without improving this metric, it risks repeating the same errors that resulted in construction disruptions and delays with the lead frigate.

I’m not arguing that you can connect the Navy’s lies about the 1854 Constellation to delays in designing and building the new class of frigates, but we do make the point in the article that the Navy’s recent track record of producing major new ship classes is not stellar (the littoral combat ship is the obvious example). A haphazard acquisition process that fails to investigate the history of a ship name might also fail to investigate more important things, like whether the Italian-French design really is what the U.S. Navy wants.

1. At the conference at Yale, John and I focused on the role that Trafalgar played in shaping British naval service culture on the eve of the First World War. British officers thought that there would be a great battle in the North Sea within a week of the beginning of the war in 1914. They thought this, we argued, in part because of the way that the myths of Trafalgar had permeated British naval service culture. They thought it was only logical that both sides would seek out a “decisive” battle. Naval service culture shaped officers’ decision-space on the eve of the war.