Rickover's Lessons

Countering the Soviet Union in Europe had the advantage that the countries were accustomed to an existing alliance and working together. In the western Pacific, South Korea, Japan, the Philipines, Australia, etc. are not at all used to working together. Many are traditional enemies with long-termm animus. And the distances are enormous.

The top US foreign policy goal since 2020, arguably, has been to bind them together with each other and with the US to counter China. The US has been amazingly successful for such a short time, but it's still far from NATO levels of integration.

IMHO, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover article is a much more balanced take.

> Governments don't lose power unless they lose a war, a rare event today that was common 100 years ago.

A good point, but of course they do lose power with every election - that's the point, a peaceful transition of power.

> During [the 1960s], Schratz believed, he lost his opportunity for major command because he published a facetious story in 1963 about Vice Admiral H. G. Rickover's burial plans.

Furthermore, he either is unaware of, or elides parts of stories that would refute his implications:

> Having achieved brilliant success with the pressurized water coolant system in the Nautilus installation, innovation in other types of plants was stifled. The USS Seawolf plant, developed in tandem with Nautilus, utilized liquid sodium as coolant, promising much smaller and more compact reactors. Because of limitations in metallurgy, the system was unsuccessful. The program was scrapped, and its obvious superiorities were never again reexamined, even after twenty years of further progress in nuclear technology.

The S2G reactor used in the Seawolf (SSN-575, not SSN-21) was, to quote Rickover, “expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair.” First of all, you're running liquid sodium as a coolant; famously, sodium and water are not friends. Second of all, this choice now puts a hard limit on the time you have at sea to be shutdown for emergent repairs, maintenance, etc., because if the plant temperature drops below (or even near, realistically) the melting point of sodium (admittedly fairly low, at ~98 C), you're now stuck.

So I think it's less that the "obvious superiorities" were left alone due to fear of Rickover's wrath, and more because no one wants a cantankerous and potentially explosive reactor in the middle of the boat they're operating.

Similarly:

> When nuclear power was adapted to surface use for large combatants such as aircraft carriers and missile cruisers, new systems apparently were not examined. For instance, a smaller and more efficient combination of nuclear power for normal cruising plus an overdrive of conventional gas turbine plants for high speed use had been proposed but was not investigated further.

The Enterprise (CVN-65), the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, was fast. Really fast. During initial sea trials, she outran her escort [1], which had a listed top speed of 34 knots. And she can maintain that effectively indefinitely. I see no reason why other proposals _should_ be investigated.

But it's this line that really paints the picture:

> The cult of personality and the dominance of the Rickover program tended increasingly to isolate the nuclear Navy officers from the real Navy.

"the real Navy." And there we have it. A bitter officer, angry that he was passed over at even a chance for nuclear command, lashing out at the fact that the organization's newest shiny toys got all the attention.

It was and I'm sure remains a common complaint while I was in that nukes stay in their own world, that they don't participate in general work like stores loads (which is bullshit; I definitely did my share of them), etc. Our retort was always "I'll trade my $5/day propay for your schedule," and no one ever took us up on it (propay is the method by which the Navy gives additional pay for certain jobs; all nuclear trained personnel get $150/month extra, with qualified supervisors getting $450/month extra – also, there are non-nuclear personnel who receive more, like the Assistant Navigator).

During my time at Electric Boat while my boat was being built, I was frequently in shift work. Navy nuclear shift work is ostensibly 8 hours, with 3 shifts, but by the time you factor in pre-shift training, pre-shift brief, shift handover, post-shift cleanup, and any other administrative actions deemed necessary, it's about 12 hours. 12 hours a day (or night, more accurately – I was on the midshift), 7 days a week, for months. Zero days off. The non-nuclear personnel, in contrast, were not in shift work, and since all of their equipment didn't exist yet, their job mostly consisted of showing up to the building we had assigned, puttering around for a few hours, and calling it a day. And yet, their leadership would harangue us during the brief time we spent passing each other for petty details like boots not being shined, uniform being wrinkled, etc. So yes, nukes generally develop a hatred of non-nukes, while the non-nukes often regard nukes as being elitists.

> Nuclear enlisted men never stand nonengineering watches, rarely if ever help load stores and weapons, never have mess-cook duty. As a result, second-class petty officers from the "front end" pull mess-cook duty, serving nuclear-trained third class from the engineering department.

Not only do we not stand non-engineering watches, if we try to qualify for them, we're told no, because "it would demoralize the other watchstanders," quoth a non-nuke Chief to my buddy when he went for the final checkouts on a non-nuke watch station. Apparently demonstrating that someone's job is actually incredibly easy, and they're just not that great at it is mean.

We absolutely load stores; see previous comment. We absolutely do not load weapons, but then again, nor does anyone else who isn't in the weapons department. This is an absurd strawman. Finally, while I'm sure it depends on the command, on my boat, nukes had to crank (mess duty). Joke's on the crew, though; we viewed it as a vacation. You mean all I have to do is wash dishes and listen to music, or serve food a few times a day? Sign me up! Also, at least on submarines, rank doesn't really matter. Generally, E1-E6 can all talk shit to each other, and if you're good at your job, you can talk shit to O1-O3 and get away with it, maybe at most getting a reprimand from the Engineering Officer (who is an O4). In fact, even the nukes would be delighted when we got a JSI (Junior Staff Instructor; some students who graduate the final part of training are extended an offer to stay for 2 years as a sort of initial shore duty, and as part of this, they frequently manage to hit E-6 by the time they're at their first command) who was too big for their britches. I distinctly remember a fully qualified E-2 A-Ganger (auxiliary mechanic, non-nuclear) yelling at our brand new non-qualified E-6 to stop reading a book and qualify something so he'd be useful. The guy tried pulling the "you can't talk to me like that..." card, which was immediately shot down by everyone around him, including the nukes. Your ability, which is formalized in your qualifications, is the only thing that matters.

I'm not denying that Rickover was abrasive, nor that he had little to no regard for the chain of command, Naval tradition, etc. Nor am I saying he didn't have his ethical problems – he absolutely did, especially near the end of his career. However, IMO he had good reason for his beliefs, he created a legacy that still stands, and he advanced the USN into the 21st century.

[0]: https://www.usni.org/press/oral-histories/schratz-paul

[1]: https://usnhistory.navylive.dodlive.mil/Recent/Article-View/...

> I've had a very successful career considering my origins, and I attribute a lot of that success to that fact I hold myself strongly accountable in a way that is rare, both in my generation /and/ in older generations. Managers trust me, even in dysfunctional organizations, because I am razor sharp about what I do know, what I reasonably believe/assume, and what I do not know, and I have no qualms whatsoever about speaking the truth to anyone, regardless of title or position.

I've been at a few tech companies now, and what I've consistently found is that people far above me tend to respect my opinion and listen to me, while often times, people at my level or just above it resent me for having the audacity to know things, and to figure things out from first principles, and to demonstrate this ability quite publicly in incidents and the like. I think part of it is an unwillingness to be wrong, which is idiotic. I will frequently state a hypothesis, my basis and assumptions for it, and then test it. I'm sometimes wrong. This is not something to be ashamed of at all, but people seem to treat being publicly wrong as the worst imaginable outcome. So you were wrong - great, now you have more information. Continue, folding this new data into your next hypothesis.