by Larry Berman
Project Sixty also reflected Bud’s philosophical approach to institutional change. On his own initiative, he circulated to all flag officers a 1950 article written by Elting E. Morison titled “A Case Study of Innovation.”59 The essence of the article was that an entrepreneur “imbued with an overriding sense of social necessity” was needed to lead revolutionary change in the navy. Otherwise, the bureaucrats and naysayers would win. Bud saw himself as that type of agent and envisioned his flag officers as joining the brigade. Bud also knew that if he went through normal channels, Project Sixty would need to be renamed Project 365 because it would take at least a year to get a report through the OPNAV bureaucracy’s “chop and approval” process. Moreover, whatever emerged would be diluted of anything worthwhile. The freedom for strategic creativity that he had in Vietnam when designing SEALORDS did not exist in Washington, where each branch had its own lobby and interest in Congress. Bud therefore directed Project Sixty to the secretary of defense rather than OPNAV. He would make his case first to Secretary Chafee for the buy-in and then to Secretary Laird for the commitment.
Bud wanted his longtime associate and friend Worth Bagley, a destroyer man and not an aviator or submariner, to lead the study. But Bagley needed a few weeks to disengage from the Seventh Fleet. Bud could not wait, so he asked Captain Stansfield Turner to serve as interim manager until Bagley came aboard. Turner was a destroyer officer, a captain already selected for rear admiral then serving as executive assistant to Secretary Chafee. Turner became one of Bud’s strongest advocates for revolutionary change. “Just before becoming CNO, Bud called me in and told me what he wanted me to do, what he was going to call Project 60. It was overwhelming, as I sat there and listened to him with my four stripes on and two stars in my back pocket,” recalled Turner. “I said to myself, ‘What this man wants me to do is to tell him what the shape of the Navy should be, its rationale, its definition, its purpose, and its composition for years to come.’ ”60
Turner had been keeping a binder of suggested changes and ideas for Chafee, with recommendations like developing antimissile defenses, lessening strategic submarine vulnerability, increasing the length of command tours for commanding officers, improving wartime fleet exercises, and eliminating the intense competition among warfare communities. “I would sit home at nights and work up ideas for the Secretary when I was working for him. Then, when I saw Zumwalt coming on the horizon, it was just a marvelous opportunity to get my ideas to the front man,” recalled Turner, who gave the binder to Bud.
As Turner later recalled, “There was absolutely nothing that one would possibly want to say about a navy that wasn’t in the charter that he gave me to do in sixty days.”61 Bud urged his associates to “work against the mindset” prevalent in the navy and to ask questions “that fell between the cracks” of the surface, air, and submarine officers’ fiefdoms.
Turner described the forty or so days he worked on the project as the “most frantic” period of his career. He was asked to develop both general and specific proposals. The general proposals involved ones of philosophy and direction for the future that would fit with the CNO’s views but were also practical enough to find consensus in the ranks. Turner would often send Bud a two-page decision paper, the first page laying out the problem, the next page presenting a few courses of action. Bud would then call small group meetings that included only himself, Turner, the flag officers affected, and Emmett Tidd, the newly appointed coordinator of decisions. Tidd would be responsible for monitoring the implementation process, which Bud knew was the burial ground for many good projects. Over the years, Tidd had developed a system for tracking staff work and expediting program development. Using multicolored tasking directives, each color signifying a different level, staff officers were given a specific and strictly allotted time to act on a directive. Everyone in OPNAV staff was expected to march to Tidd’s drum because he had the CNO’s complete backing. Tidd became Zumwalt’s SOB. Implementation meant convincing the action officer to get it done. A green strip on the edge of a piece of paper indicated a CNO/VCNO decision, based on Arleigh Burke’s advice to Bud that “if you really want a decision carried out, send for the action officer after you have made it and convince him it’s a good idea.”
Project Sixty identified and prioritized four major missions for the navy of the future: assured strategic retaliatory potential, sea control, projection of power ashore, and overseas presence in peacetime. “The significance of this mission prioritization should not be missed.”62 Power projection—carrier and strike aviation—had previously dominated the navy’s thinking. By moving sea control ahead of power projection, Zumwalt was signaling “his intent to shift the Navy to the direct Soviet maritime threat and to U.S. dominance at sea.”63 From Project Sixty came the concept of sea-control ships. A high-low concept of weapons-system procurement was developed, whereby the navy would purchase small numbers of highly effective ships and aircraft—such as another nuclear carrier, nuclear submarines, and high-performance jet aircraft—while at the same time developing a new family of low-cost ships—such as the patrol frigate and sea-control ship, giving the navy new offensive weapons platforms and systems to meet global commitments. A Resources Analysis Group was created in the office of the CNO to provide overall review and analysis of major weapons systems, get better control of costs, and improve credibility with Congress. Secretary Laird thought the system worked so well that he imposed it on all services.
There was always one formidable exception when it came to building consensus for the programs and priorities outlined in Project Sixty. Vice Admiral Rickover came to meeting after meeting with point-by-point arguments favoring nuclear propulsion for most vessels. The surface navy was the greatest sufferer under what Bud described as “the Rickover malady.”64 Project Sixty planners had endorsed inexpensive gas-turbine propulsion systems, believing that nuclear power for low-capability ships was too costly. Rickover’s main concern was that new programs for combatant ships might not fall into the Rickover criteria for mandating nuclear power. And the sea-control ship was one of those. “I was rather familiar with all of the fine grain of the points that Admiral Rickover had made because he and his staff had thrown them at me in spades during that period in 1967 when as the navy’s director of Systems Analysis, I was responsible for the major fleet escort force level study supplement on endurance.”65
Bud offered to support two nuclear programs in return for Rickover’s support on Project Sixty. “In my position, I could and did try to minimize contacts with Admiral Rickover,” recalled Bagley. “I dealt with him necessarily at times, but it was always difficult and usually unproductive to have a discussion with him. You often had to listen to a unilateral discourse rather than reason on an issue. His mind was always made up.”66 Admiral Moorer had another way of dealing with Rickover. “Moorer never called Rickover and whenever Rick called him he’d say, ‘Yes, Rick, Yes, Rick, Yes, Rick,’ and then hang up and never do anything about it.” Bud’s style “was to take him on, take Rickover on, if I disagreed. It caused a hell of a lot more friction.”67
The climax of Stan Turner’s six weeks on Project Sixty came on August 26, 1970. In the CNO’s conference room, Turner led the briefing of general conclusions and specific recommendations of Project Sixty to a group of navy flag officers, including Rickover. “Bud had me put on a one-man, unsupported, unhelped slide show presentation to all of the admirals in Washington, including Rickover—not all, but all who could fit into the conference room at OpNav, all the barons and czars of the Navy. Here I was, still a captain, wearing captain’s insignia. I got up and presented what we had come to in Project 60.”
Turner was departing the next day for his daughter’s wedding and to a flotilla command in the Mediterranean. He received few questions or comments from the assembled group of admirals because “they knew Zumwalt was behind this.” Few had any desire to challenge the new CNO. “I walked out of that room into a car,” recalled Turner, “and drove to the air
port and literally changed my shoulder boards myself in the automobile. I got on the airplane as a rear admiral and flew to my daughter’s wedding.” A few months later, Bud wrote to Turner, saying that “much of what we are doing each day here is following the sound precepts you set forth in the Project 60 Concept and supporting program. Your work is of the highest importance in setting a new direction and I am tremendously grateful for the outstanding job you did. It reflects faithfully your energy and intellectual capacities which I look forward to relying on again before too long.”68
Between August 26 and September 10, Worth Bagley took charge of preparing Bud for his briefing of Secretary of Defense Laird and Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard. In a memo dated September 16, 1970, to all flag officers and marine general officers, Zumwalt reported that Project Sixty had been completed, that Secretary Chafee and he had made the presentation on September 10 to Laird and Packard. “I consider that the substance of this presentation sets forth the direction in which we want the Navy to move in the next few years. The decisions that we make, and implement, at the command levels of the Navy should be consistent with these concepts.”
The September 10 briefing covered philosophy, missions, capabilities, and problems, with the backdrop of the substantial Soviet naval and nuclear threat. Bud emphasized the declining state of American naval power in the first official navy paper to explicitly articulate these four types of capabilities—assured second strike potential, sea control, projection of power ashore, and overseas presence in peacetime. Bud endorsed increasing navy force levels to a point “commensurate with two-ocean needs.” In reviewing the wartime role of the navy, the CNO emphasized sea control over the projection of power ashore and proposed specific initiatives, like development of a type of aircraft-capable ship smaller than most carriers, the sea-control ship (SCS); development of patrol frigates; development of a deep-ocean mine with integrated sonar, able to fire an encapsulated torpedo (CAPTOR) when it detects a foreign submarine; and development of an antiship missile system that came to be called the Harpoon.69
The Project Sixty paper offered a dynamic statement of the direction that the navy would move in order to ensure that a balance of power at sea was maintained and that a navy of adequate size existed for the future. “Implicit in achieving this goal was reversing the trend in the cost of weapons systems and the implementation of the high-low balanced-force concept. Project Sixty provided a rationale and codified priorities that made more efficient the manner in which the navy adapted to unavoidable reductions.”70 The navy declined from an active fleet of 769 ships in 1970 to 512 by the end of Bud’s tenure. Bud liked to joke that “Admiral Moorer and I sunk more U.S. ships than any enemy admiral in history.”71
Bud would be disappointed with his degree of success because “he had hoped to put his stamp on the navy and shift its direction and especially change the navy’s orientation from carrier battle groups and the power projection mission towards increased emphasis on sea control during a period of declining force levels.” The Project Sixty recommendations were referred to the CNO Executive Panel (CEP) program-analysis group “as the primary guideline for their deliberations in advising me on actions we should take and on the suitability of current programs.” At the first meeting of CEP on October 24, 1970, the CNO said that Project Sixty “expresses some changes of direction, but not as many as I would have liked.”72 Most of the changes were the product of hard-fought bureaucratic battles and political compromises with the Pentagon. Two major innovations—the air-capable or sea-control ship and the surface-effects ship were never authorized or funded.73
Détente had become a household word by 1970, but the possibility persisted of major big-power confrontations involving U.S. military forces. American dependence on overseas sources of raw materials increased while the historically land-oriented Soviet Union deployed an oceangoing navy second in fighting power only to that of the United States. As Bud Zumwalt assumed command, major decisions loomed as to the size and composition of American naval forces. Long-overdue fleet modernization delayed by the extended war in Southeast Asia was complicated by the increased cost and complexity of replacement ships and aircraft.
After a decade of burgeoning military spending and entanglement in foreign conflict, the nation welcomed the vision of lower defense budgets balanced by a reduction in American involvement overseas. For the new CNO, the challenge was fulfilling obligations with fewer resources. The cuts forced the navy to look carefully at its goals and how to accomplish things with fewer resources. Divesting itself of obsolete ships and aircraft, discarding procedures of less value, and enhancing the quality of its people through greater attention and sensitivity were the goals.
A window of opportunity existed for the navy. The Nixon Doctrine assigned the navy greater responsibilities and prominence in furthering American foreign policy.74 As the Nixon Doctrine evolved, the navy was at the forefront of American foreign policy designed to repel Soviet geopolitical adventures. The Nixon Doctrine presented an opportunity to restore naval sea and air power to its place in national strategy and foreign policy. With the drawdown of national forces and the reduction of land bases in other countries, a new navy could be the best and most logical vehicle for the protection of our national interests, the display of national power, and the implementation of foreign policy.75
The president had articulated a national defense concept that maintained the nuclear deterrent and called for a conventional arms capability to deal with one major and one minor war simultaneously. This step down from the traditional concept—two major and one minor—was clearly a recognition of restraints on resources. These restraints required a strategy of quick-reaction forces, deployed from a minimum number of centrally located positions with assurance that lines of communication could be made secure.
The Soviet Union was placing a high priority on development of strategic offensive and defensive forces, especially the deployment of antiballistic missiles (ABMs), new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs), and construction of nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines. The remarkable thing was the quantity of resources the Soviets managed to put into sea-based forces. Both the United States and the Soviet Union were enhancing their strategic strength by investing heavily in ballistic missile submarines along with an increasing dedication of resources to conventional naval forces since they learned their bitter lesson in the Cuban Missile Crisis. This included not only their growing nuclear-powered submarine fleet, but also their impressive buildup of multimission surface forces. This sea power was being deployed in all oceans and seas, supported by naval logistical forces that afforded these ships long endurance at sea relatively free from reliance on land bases.76
By turning to the sea, the Soviet Union had leaped beyond its land frontiers. For the first time since the missile crisis of 1962 the Soviet Union had accepted the risk of direct confrontation with the armed forces of the United States. This was a reversal of policy, illustrated by multination naval exercises in which the Soviets had deployed over 180 ships and submarines under centralized control and coordination. Bud did not see the Soviet Union as a power preoccupied with the idea of employing naval forces in defensive roles. The change in strategy meant that “for the first time in a quarter of a century U.S. capability to control the seas is challenged. . . . If the Soviets ever felt that they could defeat the United States Navy in a war limited strictly to the seas, they could place us in a very difficult position between economic strangulation on the one hand and resort to full scale nuclear war on the other.”
All these factors weighed heavily on Bud as he prepared for his first meeting with the president on August 18, 1970. During a JCS meeting on July 29, the “true measure of the need for me to pay great personal attention to the strategic situation [was] driven home to me.” The chiefs were briefed by General Bruce Holloway, commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command and of the Joint Strategic Target P
lanning Staff, on the results of his latest evaluation in the field of strategic war—outcomes of strategic exchange based on very detailed computer war-gaming. The briefing covered threat and force levels, damage analysis, and the consequences of an exchange of nuclear weapons. “It painted a grim picture on the relative strengths of the two sides on the outcome and on the relative position of great disadvantage that we would have after an exchange,” recalled Bud.77
For Holloway’s calculation, the assumption was made that no weapons would be held in reserve; that is, there was no planned strategic reserve. Bud thought it dangerous to assume that those weapons that did not get off would then be held in reserve. “It seemed to me to be quite clear that after a massive exchange if one side had weapons left, knew where they were and knew it could control them, and the other side did not, that would be the side that won. And I set myself the task of getting this national assumption changed.”78
Admiral Moorer was already forecasting that the meeting with President Nixon was likely to be more important than any in his previous four years on the JCS. In preparing for the meeting, Bud worked with Laird, Moorer, Charles DiBona, now president of the Center for Naval Analyses, and Rear Admiral Rembrandt Robinson, military liaison between the JCS chairman and Henry Kissinger in the White House.79 Bud’s analysis of the data showed that the United States had a 55 percent chance of winning a major conventional war at sea, and he forecast a 45 percent chance by July 1, 1971, and a considerably smaller chance by July 1972. Using probabilities on prospective outcomes in war with the additional forecast cuts, the chances of winning would be reduced 30 percent.
