In 1942, submarine commanders across the US Pacific Fleet reported the same failure in different words: torpedoes that ran too deep, detonated early, or thudded against enemy hulls without exploding. The Bureau of Ordnance — the Navy’s own weapons authority, and the maker of the Mark XIV torpedo — had its explanation ready. The weapon was fine; the shooters were failing. Roughly thirty per cent of America’s submarine commanders were relieved that year. It took twenty-one months of war before the Navy conceded, and corrected, three separate design faults in its standard torpedo.
What makes the story sting is which navy this was. The interwar US Navy was arguably the best learning organization then in uniform anywhere. At the Naval War College’s Newport games of 1923, its officers played out massed carrier air strikes — the concepts of Midway, nineteen years early — and its fleet exercises reported honestly on what the games had got wrong. In Williamson Murray and Allan Millett’s comparative study Military Innovation in the Interwar Period, this navy is the star pupil; innovation in those decades, they conclude, was “the rule, not the exception”. The torpedo scandal sits in the same book as the control experiment: the opposite, evidently, was also the rule — inside the very same organization.
That is the uncomfortable finding. A culture of honest assessment is not a property an institution has. It is an achievement each part of the institution makes, or doesn’t — a fragile island, defended bureau by bureau. The navy that umpired its own wargames without mercy could not bring itself to test its own torpedo against the evidence of the men firing it. Relieving a third of its commanders was, institutionally, the cheaper experiment.