Navy

The Navy is the sea service, and its work is organized around ships, submarines, aircraft and the shore commands that support them. Enlisted sailors enter a rating; officers are commissioned through the Naval Academy, the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps at a civilian university, or Officer Candidate School.

In the record’s first generation, 1977 to 1989, the Navy was still built against the Soviet fleet. It kept carriers forward in the Mediterranean and Japan, ballistic missile submarines on patrol, and a fleet that grew past 500 ships. A ship’s company ran on watches: the deck, the bridge, the engineering plant and the combat systems were manned around the clock, and a junior officer stood watch, learned the ship’s systems and led a division of sailors.

The second generation, 1990 to 2000, is the drawdown. The fleet began the 1990s with more than 500 ships and ended them with fewer than 320. Base closure rounds in 1991, 1993 and 1995 closed or realigned dozens of shore installations, and the officer corps built for a larger fleet was cut with the fleet. The ships that remained deployed more: to the Gulf, the Adriatic and the Western Pacific. Amphibious ready groups carried a landing force and its support, and the staff work that moved a battalion from a ship to the shore was as much the Navy’s as the Marines’.

The third and fourth generations, 2001 to 2015, asked the Navy for support to land wars. The fleet supplied carriers, air wings, surveillance and the staffs that ran two theaters, and individual sailors were sent to fill billets in Iraq and Afghanistan that had no ship attached to them. The Seabees built and repaired roads, bridges, airfields and structures, and the construction battalions were in demand for exactly the work they had been formed to do in 1942. Reserve sailors drilled through the same years, and a Reserve career ran alongside a civilian one.

The fifth generation, 2016 to the present, has been a fleet asked to be present in the Pacific and the Gulf at the same time, without growing to do it. The work is still watches, maintenance and qualifications: a ship is a machine that has to be kept running, and a sailor’s advancement depends on schools, sea time and a qualification signed off by a senior. The Navy also sends sailors to joint commands, to embassies and to staffs ashore, where the work is answerable to someone other than a ship’s captain.

The work asks for a watchkeeper’s attention: the round logged, the reading taken, the discrepancy reported. It asks for a qualification earned on a ship and for the patience to keep a machine and a crew running together.