Sailing True North

by Admiral James Stavridis, USN (Ret. )

  In the end, Mahan’s genius was not that of the explorer, warrior, or master organizer. Rather, he was an intellectual—a position that does not formally exist in the Navy, and with which the Navy has traditionally been uncomfortable. Nevertheless, Mahan succeeded first in creating a career in spite of the institution (and often despite himself), and ultimately in teaching the Navy, politicians, and the public to think about sea power in a fundamentally new way. The Navy never quite knew what to make of Mahan, but it was never the same after him. Despite the dismal results of his earliest efforts to reshape his fellow midshipmen and the Naval Academy, all midshipmen since Mahan—and especially all students of the Naval War College, which still keeps the flame Mahan kindled—have been shaped by his thinking and writing, whether they realize it or not. Mahan might not have been much of a leader, but he was and remains immensely influential.

  He retired from active duty at the turn of the twentieth century, and the accolades poured in—including honorary degrees from leading universities around the world, the presidency of the American Historical Society, and invitations to speak and consult in the United States and abroad. Promoted to rear admiral by an act of Congress, he lived mostly in Washington, DC, until the early days of the First World War, and commentary continued to flow from his prolific pen until the very end. Today, USS Mahan, the fourth ship bearing his name, sails the oceans—a powerful Arleigh Burke–class Aegis guided missile destroyer. I am sure that as he roams the endless library stacks of heaven he is hoping that the officers manning “his” ship have a good wardroom library at their disposal. He would think that vastly more important than a good sextant and chronometer.

  Being an intellectual in uniform has never been an easy calling, and it was essentially unheard of in Mahan’s day. With his icy personality, Mahan never seemed to make things easier on himself, either—particularly at the beginning of his career, when he was at his most idealistic and inflexible. Most leaders will have the good sense to go with the flow a little bit more than Mahan did, but it is essential to remember that—like most visionaries—Mahan made his defining contribution over the system’s howling objections (as Admirals Bud Zumwalt and Grace Hopper would do in later years). Many people with better political sense would take the hint on receiving a performance review with the reproach “the business of naval officers is not to write books,” but it is hard to imagine the Navy growing and succeeding as it did had Mahan conceded the incompatibility of being a naval officer and writing books. Such doggedness—politely called perseverance—always looks better in retrospect. It is a hallmark of strong character.

  Perhaps in part because he was barely a mariner and not much of a leader—at least in the sense that the Navy traditionally prizes those roles—Mahan understood better than any before and many since the true purpose of a navy, and its vital role for any nation with a serious coastline. Today’s culture is hardly less enthralled with individual bravado and derring-do as opposed to the unglamorous, eye-straining work of the intellectual in the library, but victory must be conceived before it can be achieved. Many leaders see strategy as too soft or inherently uncertain or just plain difficult, preferring the busyness of the moment to the hard, sustained work required to step back, see their work in context, and develop a theory of success. Every so often a Mahan comes along who understands the context better than anyone and then changes it for everyone, forever.

  Visionary leadership is very hard to cultivate or emulate. However, leaders are ultimately responsible for ensuring their organizations’ success in context, which requires stepping back from time to time and attempting to see the big picture as well as possible. There is no need to spend months in the library—or to get into the business of writing books—to realize the benefits of occasional reflection and the clarity that comes from disciplined thought and writing (even if only for your own benefit).

  In my own case, I learned early that in order to exercise vision, you need the qualities of character that underlie it—patience, diligence, and a willingness to send your ideas into the world knowing they will be battered and belittled more often than not.

  The first time I tried to shape a vision was as a young antisubmarine warfare officer in my first ship. I was asked to brief the wardroom on how we would go about using all the tools of finding and killing submarines in an open ocean context. Drawing on my coursework at Annapolis and subsequent Navy schools, I sketched out a theory that was perhaps a bit beyond what my quite senior captain and the rest of the wardroom were willing to accept—a very risky mix of relying on long-range aircraft, our own embarked helicopters, and signals intelligence (listening for the subs’ transmissions). I thought it was pretty good, and I suppose it was—in theory.

  Unfortunately, that night, a US exercise submarine managed to penetrate my visionary formation, surface in our wake, and shoot an exercise torpedo that knocked us out of the fight. My captain justifiably reamed me out, and I learned that any vision has to survive contact with the real world. But over the next couple of years in that destroyer, my experience began to match my theories, and the two came together to create a reasonably successful vision for conducting the principal mission of our ship. It was a small victory in a small universe, but a powerful lesson for me that our visions need both theory and experience to be valid.

  Mahan was a teacher every day of his life. The qualities in a life that give rise to a desire to teach are varied—to some degree it takes a strong sense of self-confidence, often bordering on arrogance. But it is also often a selfless act of service, as the rewards of teaching are usually vastly less than those that can be earned through other pursuits. And at times, for some, teaching is a refuge from the hurly-burly of the “real world.” In the nineteenth-century US Navy, the monetary rewards were not great for anyone, but the psychic value of being a recognized “leader of sailors” in a heroic profession were great compensation. The majority of officers drawn to the Navy were there for the pride of service that derived from commanding ships, sailing into battle, and inspiring a crew—all earned at sea. But Mahan chose to be a teacher. Though he is remembered as a writer due to the lasting fame of his books, it is worth remembering that Mahan’s real calling was as an educator. The Influence of Sea Power upon History was begun as the outline for a new course in naval history and strategy and remained the centerpiece of the Naval War College curriculum for generations. Mahan is still read and taught today, both in the Navy and in civilian schools like the Fletcher School, where I served as dean.

  All leaders, especially in today’s media environment, are in some sense educators: both their ideas and their delivery will teach the people in their organizations what the leader is thinking and how he or she communicates and will educate outsiders about the organization and its work. Leaders who demonstrate intellectual courage inside and outside their organizations can make a real difference in their organizations’ success today through better communications and tomorrow through educating the next generation of leaders. And let’s face it, teaching is not always regarded as the most important, or glamorous, or glory-filled endeavor. When I meet a good teacher, I often think of the screenplay for A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt. He imagines a conversation between Sir Thomas More and his ambitious son-in-law in which the younger man rejects the idea of teaching, because if he were a teacher, he says, “who would know it?” The exchange goes like this:

  Sir Thomas More: Why not be a teacher? You’d be a fine teacher; perhaps a great one.

  Richard Rich: If I was, who would know it?

  Sir Thomas More: You; your pupils; your friends; God. Not a bad public, that.

  Great teachers shape our lives, are men and women of true character, and Mahan was indeed a teacher of enormous importance to our Navy and the nation. And he was a fine teacher, building on the foundation of his intellectual capital and enabled by his endless determination to inspire the Navy and the nation to set our sights on the world’s oceans.
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  Like every leader in this book, Mahan had his flaws. His relationships with people and organizations were notably tenuous. A visionary is often a frustrated person; the righteousness of his or her ideas is much easier to see and accept in retrospect than in the visionary’s own time. Mahan’s lingering reputation for iciness bespeaks his lifelong inability to leave work at the office and come home to a different kind of real life.

  Every leader has her or his own temperament, which can prove difficult or impossible to change. When difficult, highly driven personalities succeed, it is hard to prove a counterfactual about whether they could or should have taken things a little easier in some way or other. (Could Steve Jobs have done what he did if he had just relaxed a little? It’s impossible to say. I’d guess not.) Still, just as in Mahan’s day, there seem to be far more needlessly ill-tempered leaders than true visionaries. Vision and drive are good qualities for a leader to possess, but condescension and browbeating are not often hallmarks of successful or sustainable leadership. Vision and perseverance often result in a certain amount of isolation. Anyone would do well to minimize the difficult edges of their personality, even in the pursuit of high levels of accomplishment.

  In the end, Alfred Thayer Mahan’s qualities of character derived directly from his determination and intellectual power. He was simply unwavering in his determination to communicate a new strategic vision of his nation—one that fitted the times and turned America’s gaze to the world. He said, “whether they will or not, Americans must now begin to look outward. The growing production of the country demands it.” Despite the dangers and challenges of the world, then and today, we cannot hide from it. Mahan expounded a vision that remains a significant part of US global power today—that a strong and capable Navy is crucial to our nation’s security and prosperity. He has sailed alongside me in the long voyage of my career, not always a friendly voice, but one in whose counsel I have always taken great stock. And his character of mind and utter determination to read, think, and write exactly what he thought important have inspired me and many others on the long voyage of our nation over the past two centuries.

  All quotations in this chapter are sourced from Robert Seager II, Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Man and His Letters (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1977), or from Benjamin F. Armstrong, ed., 21st Century Mahan: Sound Military Conclusions for the Modern Era (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2013).

  CHAPTER VI

  Rum, Buggery, and the Lash

  Admiral Lord John Arbuthnot Fisher

  BORN RAMBODA, CEYLON, JANUARY 25, 1841

  DIED LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, JULY 10, 1920

  I first heard of Jacky Fisher when I was at graduate school in Boston at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. This school of international diplomacy was a somewhat ironic place to initially learn about the admiral, as he was easily one of the most undiplomatic leaders in military history. Like Alfred Thayer Mahan before him, Jacky Fisher never saw a windmill at which he could resist tilting, nor a contemporary he was unwilling to lambaste for some disagreement large or small; his career was therefore a long history of confrontation and (usually successful) argumentation. He was a revolution in a bottle, and the taste could be bitter indeed despite being sugared with a great deal of personal charm when he chose to deploy it.

  I encountered him on the pages of assigned readings in 1981 while taking a course in European diplomatic history from one of the most distinguished professors at Fletcher, Dr. Alan Henrikson, a silver-haired Rhodes scholar with a gifted style in the classroom. He introduced the admiral by outlining his tempestuous relationship with Winston Churchill in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It was Churchill who charged that the traditions of the Royal Navy were “rum, buggery, and the lash,” which he meant as a shot across the bow of the hidebound Admiralty. On that point, at least, the two of them were in agreement. Churchill and the older, established Admiral Fisher shared a sensibility that for the British Empire to survive, it would have to change, and change dramatically, in regard to its management of its expensive global fleet. As Professor Henrikson guided us through the complexities of global geopolitics in the run-up to the First World War and beyond, I became fascinated less with Churchill than with Fisher.

  Throughout my career, I would dip repeatedly into his oddly constructed memoirs—really a series of jottings without much structure—to find inspiration as I, in a smaller way, tilted at my own share of windmills. I tried consciously to be Jacky Fisher without the bitter bark and managed in a much more limited way to effect some changes here and there as a result. But even today I think we are poorer for lacking the kind of dynamic change agents in our military that Lord Fisher represented. Our time could use a few more Fishers, frankly, if we are to reshape our armed forces for a new era of complexity—from cybersecurity to unmanned vehicles to elite special forces.

  Born to a middle-class family in Ceylon in 1841, Jacky Fisher was a precocious child. His father, William, was a minor army officer who eventually bankrupted the family as a coffee grower. William also served as a local superintendent of police, all the while raising a large family with eleven children total, only seven of whom survived infancy. Due to the family’s financial straits, young Jacky was packed off to his paternal grandfather in England at the age of six and never saw either of his parents again. His father died when Jacky was fifteen years old and just starting out in the navy; and while his mother, Sophie, lived a long life, he did not pursue further contact with her. He did send her a small amount of money annually until she died. Oddly, his father was a handsome, strapping man nearly six feet two inches tall, and his mother was likewise tall and attractive—yet Jacky was quite short at just five feet seven and had an oddly “Asiatic” cast to his features (in the more racist terms of the time). All of this gave rise to a variety of disparaging comments and nicknames (mostly notably, “The Malay”). The rumors were inflamed after a bout of malaria in middle age gave a faintly yellowish tint to his skin (and almost killed him). The cover of Jan Morris’s beautifully written biography, Fisher’s Face, captures the degree to which his facial features were a part of his persona. Set apart physically, he sought to set himself apart in thought and deed as well.

  He began his naval career at the age of thirteen as a young naval cadet, the initial entry point for many young men in those days. Fisher was inducted into the Royal Navy on Lord Nelson’s final flagship, HMS Victory, then stationed in Portsmouth, and sent to HMS Calcutta, captained by a “traditional” British commander who firmly believed in the lash. Legend has it that he fainted on his first day of duty after witnessing the flogging of half a dozen sailors. Service on Calcutta included a brief stint in the Crimean War, and he was subsequently transferred to HMS Agamemnon, another of Lord Nelson’s former flagships. Promoted to midshipman in 1856, he was assigned to Asia for the next five years, serving on the China Station of the Royal Navy, first on the oddly named HMS Highflyer, a twenty-one-gun steam corvette, where he became an expert navigator and caught the eye of the captain. This was a pattern throughout Fisher’s lengthy career—he was always noticed, appreciated, given extra attention and training, and he rewarded those mentoring him with superb performance at every level.

  Fisher was not part of the naval aristocracy of the day, to say the least. As he said later in life, “‘Your great career was when you were young,’ said a dear friend to me the other day. I entered the Navy penniless, friendless, and forlorn. While my messmates were having jam, I had to go without. While their stomachs were full, mine was often empty. I have always had to fight like hell, and fighting like hell has made me what I am.” Finances would be a problem throughout his life, and he would become resentful toward the end, pointing out often how much he had sacrificed on behalf of his nation, and mentioning lucrative offers he received to enter the private sector along the way. He constantly groused about how much more money he could be making outside the n
avy, and he was probably right. This, by the way, remains a not uncommon syndrome among senior military officers on both sides of the Atlantic in my experience. Yet there are very few admirals or generals who would actually trade away that rank and title for millions if offered the choice. So it was with Jacky Fisher.

  In China he saw brief action in the Second Opium War, and served in HMS Chesapeake, a steam-powered frigate. He also briefly commanded a steam paddle gunboat, HMS Coromandel, and ended up by serving in and then sailing home in HMS Furious, a paddle sloop. The captain in the latter was a true martinet, with a highly abused crew, in significant contrast to the leadership Fisher learned from his first captain in HMS Highflyer. Even so, Fisher was the apple of the harsh captain’s eye in HMS Furious and was recommended for promotion to lieutenant. His captain sent him off with a set of cuff links engraved with the captain’s motto on them—“Loyal au mort” (Loyal to Death)—and Jacky Fisher wore them faithfully for the next sixty years and more. His was a sentimental nature in many ways, and I suspect the cuff links were more about his self-view than about the memory of his captain.