Shipbuilding

Design, Decide, Forget: Why the Navy Needs a Lessons-Learned Center for Shipbuilding

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By Marcus Jones

In March 2025 testimony before the House Armed Services Committee’s Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, Ronald O’Rourke, naval analyst for the Congressional Research Service since 1984, sharpened an excellent recommendation he has raised over more than a decade: the U.S. Navy should establish a dedicated institutional mechanism for systematically capturing, analyzing, and transmitting lessons learned from its shipbuilding programs.1

Although the U.S. Navy has accumulated an extraordinary body of experience in ship design and construction over more than two centuries, it continues to make avoidable mistakes in major acquisition programs such as proceeding into construction with incomplete designs, integrating immature technologies, projecting unrealistic cost and schedule estimates, and eroding accountability structures once a program becomes politically or industrially “too big to fail.” These errors are not unique to the Navy, but they are particularly consequential in the context of shipbuilding, where program timelines are long, platforms are few and expensive, and consequences are measured in strategic as well as fiscal terms.

O’Rourke’s solution is a “lessons-learned center” for naval shipbuilding: a dedicated, continuous, and institutionalized effort to capture knowledge from past programs, distill it into accessible form, and ensure it informs future design, acquisition, and oversight decisions. The value of such an entity, he argues, would lie in its ability to prevent repeated mistakes, reduce waste, improve program outcomes, and help sustain the Navy’s long-term force design and industrial base goals. It addresses key features of the Navy’s acquisition environment: the discontinuous and generational nature of major shipbuilding programs; the structural fragmentation of knowledge across commands, contractors, and government agencies; and the absence of an educational or doctrinal home for critical institutional memory.

Unlike weapons or aircraft programs, which may see dozens or hundreds of iterations within a single career, major ship classes are often designed and constructed once every 20 or 30 years. The effect of this long cycle time is that most individuals involved in a new class of ships – whether program managers, naval architects, flag officers, or congressional staffers – may have had no direct role in the last one. What should be institutional memory therefore becomes diffuse personal recollection, vulnerable to retirement, reassignment, or obsolescence. Moreover, the knowledge necessary to understand past program outcomes is distributed across a complex web of organizations: Program Executive Offices, NAVSEA and its affiliated labs and centers, shipyards and primes and sub-tier contractors, OPNAV resource sponsors, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and various congressional committees and watchdogs. Each retains only partial and often incompatible records, and there is little incentive or mechanism for aggregating these into a unified analytic understanding. While internal program reviews, GAO reports, and RAND studies may document lessons after the fact, there has never been an entity within the Navy tasked with curating, synthesizing, or teaching these insights.

Interestingly, O’Rourke does not propose a narrowly bureaucratic mechanism but envisions a range of possible instantiations, from a structured repository of documents to a more active, curriculum- and wargame-integrated enterprise. But what matters in his framing is not form but function: the institutionalization of a reflective capacity for learning from experience and applying that learning prospectively in ways that materially improve outcomes.

Such a capability, if properly implemented, would amount to a kind of strategic memory for the Navy, one able to withstand changes in leadership, budget, and political context, while enabling the service to treat shipbuilding not as a sequence of isolated procurements but as a continuous and evolving system of practice. It is not, therefore, a technocratic fix for acquisition inefficiencies, but a cultural transformation within the Navy’s approach to its own history of design, development, and production. It holds out the prospect that the Navy would not only save money and avoid failure, but reaffirm its preferred identity as a thinking, adaptive, and strategically serious organization. It is this deeper institutional value – far beyond process improvement – that makes O’Rourke’s proposal for a naval shipbuilding lessons-learned center important and long overdue.

Joint Lessons on Lessons Learned

The idea has modest precedent and ample justification. One of the most robust models of institutional learning in the defense sector is the U.S. Army’s Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL), established in 1985 in response to the operational shortcomings revealed during Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada. CALL’s mission was to systematically collect, analyze, and disseminate operational and tactical lessons. Over time, it became fully integrated into Army doctrine and planning, fielding collection teams, producing analytic bulletins, and shaping professional military education. But of particular relevance to the Navy’s shipbuilding enterprise is a less widely known but equally instructive initiative: the Center for Army Acquisition Lessons Learned (CAALL), housed within the Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity.2

Established following the 2010 Army Acquisition Review, which cited the absence of a centralized mechanism for analyzing acquisition successes and failures, CAALL provides an authoritative source for acquisition-specific lessons across the Army’s program offices. It operates a web-enabled Acquisition Lessons Learned Portal (ALLP) through which project teams submit concise, structured, and searchable lessons, each tagged by acquisition phase, milestone, cost and schedule impact, and functional category.

These are not vague observations, but distilled from real program experience and embedded in metadata-rich formats that support both searchability and trend analysis. CAALL analysts conduct deep-dive studies of recurring issues, such as documentation burden, Earned Value Management failures, or test duplication, and prepare “just-in-time” lesson packages for project managers entering specific acquisition phases. The Center also engages in outreach, publishes bulletins, curates spotlight topic zones, and supports internal Army decision-making with synthesized data on the top five systemic challenges facing Army programs. It demonstrates that institutional learning is within reach but requires structured data, a deliberate submission pipeline, professional analytical support, and educational integration. It also shows how lessons can be transformed from static reflections into dynamic inputs for decision support, policy revision, and curriculum development. Most importantly, CAALL demonstrates that such a capability can be sustained over time, through leadership endorsement, modest staffing, and the aggressive use of digital tools.

A shipbuilding-focused counterpart – scaled appropriately to the Navy’s size, resourced modestly, and empowered to draw insight from both current and historical programs – would not need to reinvent the wheel. It would only need to learn how others have made their institutions learn.

Other models further underscore the feasibility and necessity of such a capability. The Joint Lessons Learned Program (JLLP) applies a five-phase process – discovery, validation, resolution, evaluation, and dissemination – to lessons arising from joint exercises, operations, and experiments. Its information system, JLLIS, acts as a system of record for tracking, archiving, and analyzing lessons that affect force development and joint capability planning.3

A more technical and directly relevant precedent is found in NASA’s Lessons Learned Information System (LLIS).4 NASA’s LLIS arose from the hard-won awareness, following the Challenger and Columbia disasters, that high-stakes engineering efforts demand not only risk management tools but a durable culture of reflection and improvement. NASA’s system integrates lessons into program planning and design reviews and allows for long-term traceability of decisions and failures. The agency’s approach, emphasizing root cause analysis, organizational memory, and education, aligns with the intended mission of an NSLLC to translate the history of naval shipbuilding experience into anticipatory guidance for future programs. Like NASA, the Navy deals with one-off, bespoke, high-cost platforms with life cycles spanning decades. The discipline required to learn systematically from such endeavors is the same.

Even in the commercial sector, complex system integrators such as Boeing, Airbus, and multinational energy firms have turned to lessons-learned systems, both formal and ad hoc, to analyze catastrophic failures and to course-correct future programs. The Construction Industry Institute’s lessons-learned repositories, used by engineering and construction firms to improve execution of large-scale infrastructure projects, is still another model for post-project analysis and feedback. These efforts are often grounded in shared technical taxonomies, design decision trees, and “causal maps” that allow construction organizations to relate performance outcomes to earlier architectural or managerial choices. The Navy’s shipbuilding community, which is distinguished by even greater system and technological complexities and similar exposure to path-dependent design choices, lacks such a coherent and systematized mechanism. An NSLLC would hold out the promise of that capability.

Of course, these precedents cannot simply be imitated wholesale, but they offer essential lessons in form, function, and value. Each succeeds not by relying on passive documentation and informal processes, but by embedding structured learning into the decision cycles and professional cultures of their organizations. What an NSLLC must do is adapt this logic to the particularities of U.S. naval shipbuilding: its long timelines, institutional fragmentation, industrial dependencies, and strategic visibility. It must provide an analytic and educational platform that helps naval leaders and engineers reason more effectively about cost, capability, risk, and design. It must produce continuity across ship classes and across generations of acquisition professionals. And it must do so not as a retrospective archive alone, but as a living resource embedded in professional education, program governance, and future planning.

Over the past several decades, the U.S. Navy has been the subject of repeated and increasingly urgent calls to establish a formal mechanism for doing just that, all of which have, time and again, failed to take root. While the service has often acknowledged the recurrence of major programmatic mistakes – most notably in high-profile acquisition efforts such as the Littoral Combat Ship, the Zumwalt-class destroyer, and the Ford-class aircraft carrier – it has not developed a durable, institutionalized capacity for engineering and acquisition-oriented organizational learning. This failure has not gone unremarked. A lineage of initiatives, proposals, and critiques – some internal, some external, some aspirational, others postmortem – has identified the absence of such a capacity as a root contributor to the Navy’s persistent shipbuilding troubles.

Perhaps the most compelling of these efforts is a 2022 MIT thesis by naval engineer Elliot Collins, which deserves attention not only for its technical sophistication but for its diagnosis of a deep institutional shortcoming.5 Collins, a Navy officer serving in the DDG(X) design program, observed firsthand what he describes as a structural absence of organizational memory in Navy ship design and acquisition. His thesis, written under the auspices of MIT’s Naval Construction and Engineering program, proposes the creation of a Navy Design Notebook System (NDNS): a digital, structured, and lifecycle-aware framework for recording and organizing design decisions, assumptions, lessons, and engineering rationale across a ship’s development. Drawing inspiration from both Toyota’s engineering notebook practice and the best traditions of systems engineering, Collins lays out a clear taxonomy and architecture for capturing knowledge in real time and rendering it useful across multiple programs and decades. Crucially, the NDNS is not just a data storage concept, but a model for how design reasoning can be institutionalized so that the lessons of one generation are accessible and intelligible to the next.

The significance of Collins’s proposal lies in the lineage of failed or underdeveloped efforts that it implicitly seeks to redeem. As far back as the 1970s, the Navy undertook an informal initiative known as the REEF POINTS series, pamphlet-style reflections on acquisition experience intended to help incoming program officers.6 But the REEF POINTS effort lacked formal backing, consistent authorship, or archival permanence, and it quickly faded as personnel rotated out and no office assumed responsibility for sustaining it. Later assessments, including a 1993 Department of Defense Inspector General report, found that the Navy lacked a centralized system for capturing acquisition lessons learned, and more critically, that it made little practical use of the systems it did possess. Data were gathered, but not applied; observations made, but not preserved; patterns noted, but not internalized.7 The diagnosis repeated itself in a 2002 analytical review commissioned by the Army’s War College, which found that across the Department of Defense, lessons-learned programs often failed not for lack of insight but for lack of organizational stewardship, cultural support, and procedural integration.8

Why, then, despite these longstanding recognitions, has the Navy failed to institutionalize a lasting lessons-learned capability in its shipbuilding enterprise? The reasons are multiple and reflect a misalignment between the operational culture of the Navy and the administrative and engineering demands of ship design. Unlike the tactical communities of naval aviation or undersea warfare – where debriefing, checklist revisions, and iterative training are ingrained – the acquisition enterprise lacks a comparable feedback loop. Moreover, the Navy’s engineering education pathways, from undergraduate technical training to postgraduate systems curricula, have not systematically incorporated acquisition case studies or design failures into their pedagogy. There is no consistent mechanism to bring shipbuilding experience into the classroom, the wargame, or the design studio. Lessons remain tacit, siloed, and anecdotal.

That the Navy has lacked such a capacity for so long is a failure of imagination and institutional design, but it not an irremediable one. The architecture of such a capability already exists in other domains, from NASA to the Army to the commercial nuclear sector. The Navy does not need to invent a solution from whole cloth; it needs to adapt proven models to its own technical and cultural context. What is required is not another ad hoc study or retrospective review, but the establishment of a permanent Naval Shipbuilding Lessons-Learned Center, a durable institutional home where technical memory, engineering reasoning, and acquisition insight can be collected, structured, and applied. The central question, then, is not whether such a center is needed, but what it should consist of, how it should function, and where it should reside.

The Devil in the Details

To be more than a bureaucratic corrective or another forgotten archive, a shipbuilding lessons-learned program must fulfill a set of core functions as intellectually rigorous as the failures it seeks to prevent and not just catalog what has gone wrong in previous programs or indulge in generalities about process improvement. The first and most essential function is to identify and preserve actual lessons: not loose observations or platitudes, but knowledge with clear causal content, derived from real program experience, and supported by traceable evidence.

To qualify as such, a lesson must demonstrate causal specificity: what precisely caused the outcome it describes, and why. It must be replicable or at least transferable across contexts, suggesting how it might inform other ship types or acquisition models. It must be traceable to primary sources – engineering drawings, test data, milestone reviews – so that its logic can be reconstructed and its authority verified. It must be actionable, capable of informing future decisions, whether at the level of design margin, contract structure, or policy architecture. And ideally, it should possess counterfactual depth: the ability to show not only what happened, but what might have happened differently under other choices.

When filtered through this lens, the lessons that matter and that a center must preserve fall broadly into five categories. First are design integration lessons, insights into how complex systems interact within the hull, and how early design assumptions or immature technologies can generate cascading failures, as in the DDG-1000’s power system or the Ford-class’s EMALS launch mechanism. Second are construction and manufacturing lessons, which speak to the translation of design into physical product: the timing of block assembly, the thresholds at which digital coordination outperforms paper-based workflows, the effects of workforce experience on productivity. Third are program management and acquisition lessons (perhaps the most politically fraught) concerning contract type selection, milestone pacing, and the dangers of concurrency. Fourth are industrial base and supply chain lessons, which trace how changes in the broader defense industrial ecosystem—supplier attrition, workforce bottlenecks, fragility in the materials base—constrain program execution in ways the Navy and its private shipbuilders often fail to anticipate. And finally, there are historical, strategic, and doctrinal lessons, which reveal how misalignments between strategic ambition and industrial reality (fleet design concepts that outpace build capacity, for instance) can derail even well-managed programs.

Still, it is not enough just to identify them; lessons must be preserved and organized within a structure that allows them to be used. Here, the Navy can draw on models such as that proposed by Collins in his thesis: a digital, lifecycle-aware knowledge framework that tags and stores design decisions, assumptions, and lessons in a manner that makes them accessible not only to current program staff but to future generations. Such a system would form the backbone of the NSLLC’s information architecture: structured, searchable, phase-referenced, and durable. It would allow engineers working on SSN(X) to understand not just that the Virginia-class succeeded or stumbled in certain areas, but why, under what constraints, and according to which tradeoffs. It would enable program sponsors to distinguish between lessons that were context-specific and those that reflect deeper structural patterns.

Ultimately, the most critical function of the NSLLC, however, is not archival but pedagogical. Lessons, to be meaningful, must be taught as part of a living curriculum, and not simply as dry memoranda or summary slides. The center must work directly with educational institutions to embed lessons into the professional formation of officers, policy officials, engineers, and acquisition professionals. This means developing decision-forcing cases that place students in the shoes of historical program leaders, confronting them with the actual dilemmas and constraints those leaders faced. It means designing wargames and exercises that test tradeoffs in acquisition, industrial surge, and fleet composition. It means seeding capstone projects, research initiatives, and faculty development efforts with questions drawn from real program history. And it means, above all, creating a culture in which experience is not simply remembered but used as a guide to reasoning, as a check against institutional hubris or forgetfulness, and as a source of comparative advantage in a strategic environment where time and resources are finite. Finally, the Center must function diagnostically on behalf of Navy decision-makers, as a resource for the review of future program plans, bringing to bear its corpus of structured knowledge to identify early warning signs of known failure modes, or to highlight opportunities for constructive borrowing across ship classes. This is not a matter of punitive oversight, but of anticipatory guidance and bringing past reasoning to bear on present decisions in a way that deepens accountability and reduces risk.

What this amounts to is a knowledge institution, not in the narrow academic sense but in the most operationally vital sense of the term. The NSLLC would exist to ensure that the U.S. Navy no longer builds its ships without memory. It would translate past pain into future prudence, and costly failure into usable foresight. And it would mark, at last, the point at which naval shipbuilding began to behave not just as a procurement function, but as a learning system worthy of the stakes it bears.

The Way Ahead

What would such a center look like in practice? If the value of a Naval Shipbuilding Lessons-Learned Center lies in the integrity and usability of its knowledge, then its organizational structure must be equally deliberate. It should not replicate the diffuse and stovepiped landscape of existing program oversight offices, but rather bridge engineering, acquisition, policy, and education communities. And in keeping with the realities of today’s defense fiscal environment, it must be lean, digitally enabled, and architected from the start to minimize overhead. The NSLLC should be organized as a small, hybrid analytical and educational unit with as small a group of affiliated personnel as circumstances permit, including naval engineers with experience in major design and production programs; acquisition professionals familiar with contracting and program management dynamics; historians of technology and naval policy who can trace institutional lineages and doctrinal consequences; and digital knowledge architects to manage its structured repository and analytic tools. Core activities would be augmented by short-term fellows – rotating billets for officers, civilians, or academics on sabbatical or detail – who would conduct targeted case studies, contribute to curriculum development, or lead diagnostic reviews of current programs. Rather than attempt to recreate or replace existing program data flows, the Center should connect to them and draw from NAVSEA, PEO Ships and Submarines, CRS, GAO, and DoD IG reports, but synthesize across them with the purpose of creating pedagogically and analytically coherent insights.

To reduce cost and footprint, the Center must leverage digital tools aggressively. A cloud-based digital architecture, modeled in part on the NDNS framework, would form the heart of the operation: a searchable, metadata-tagged, phase-referenced archive of lessons that supports analysis, instruction, and red-teaming of future programs. Visualization tools like interactive timelines, decision trees, and traceability matrices should be prioritized over staff-intensive publishing or editorial operations. Whenever possible, the Center’s materials should be reusable across formats: a single case study might underpin a midshipman seminar, an acquisition wargame, and a policy memo to ASN(RDA). In this sense, the Center is less a physical institute than a virtual and modular capability: one that enables reflection, instruction, and anticipatory decision support wherever shipbuilding is debated or taught.

As to its location, the author will admit to a conflict-of-interest, being a longtime member of the U.S. Naval Academy faculty. It may, therefore, sound parochial to suggest that the NSLLC be housed at Annapolis. That said, there are good reasons, symbolic and practical, why the Naval Academy may be a fitting institutional home. The Academy is the Navy’s enduring schoolhouse, the place where generations of officers are introduced not just to the fleet, but to the long arc of naval experience. It offers a rare confluence of technical education, historical reflection, and leadership formation.

Moreover, it sits proximate to the Washington-area institutions with which the NSLLC would regularly interact – NAVSEA, the Navy labs and warfare centers, OPNAV and the Secretariat organization, and the various acquisition and oversight bodies headquartered in the capital region. Perhaps most importantly, the Academy is a place not just of training, but of memory. To locate the Center there would signal that lessons are not just compliance artifacts or after-action musings, but a core component of professional identity. It would allow the Center’s work to be integrated directly into engineering coursework, capstone design, fleet seminars, and acquisition electives. And it would give midshipmen, from the beginning of their careers, access to a body of knowledge that has existed until now only in fragments.

But what matters is not the administrative chain but the Center’s function: to make memory usable, to make learning permanent, and to help the Navy move from a culture of crisis improvisation to one of cumulative, adaptive competence. Wherever it is housed, a Naval Shipbuilding Lessons-Learned Center should embody the values it seeks to cultivate: frugality, clarity, and strategic discipline. And in doing so, it may just help the Navy build not only better ships, but a better institution.

Dr. Marcus Jones is an associate professor in the history department at the United States Naval Academy

Endnotes

1. Ronald O’Rourke (11 March 2025), “Statement before the Armed Services Committee Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, U.S. House of Representatives, Hearing on ‘The State of U.S. Shipbuilding’” (Congressional Research Service Report 7-5700) pp.1-3.

2. Iracki, Jill, 2014. “Army acquisition lessons learned,” Defense AT&L (September–October 2014) pp.36-40.

3. Thomas, J.T. and Schultz, D.L. (2015), “Lessons about Lessons: Growing the Joint Lessons Learned Program.” Joint Forces Quarterly 79, pp.113-120.

4. Ganopol, A., Oglietti, M., Ambrosino, A., Patt, F., Scott, A., Hong, L. and Feldman, G., 2017. “Lessons learned: an effective approach to avoid repeating the same old mistakes.” Journal of Aerospace Information Systems, 14(9), pp.483-492; Also Miller, S.B., 2005. “Lessons Learned or Lessons Noted: Knowledge Management in NASA.” In ASTD 2005 Research-to-Practice Conference Proceedings (p. 140).

5. Collins, E.J., 2022. “A Method for Organized Institutional Learning in the Navy Shipbuilding Community” (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

6. Wellborn Jr, R.M., 1976. “Formulation and Use of Lessons Learned in NAVSEASYSCOM Acquisition Programs” (Project Report, Defense Systems Management College)

7. Reed, D.E., Gimble, T.F., Koloshey, J.L., Ward, E.J. and Alejandro, J.K., 1993. “Acquisition-Type Lessons-Learned Programs Within the Military Departments” (No. IG-DOD-93173).

8. Snider, K.F., Barrett, F.J. and Tenkasi, R., 2002. “Considerations in acquisition lessons-learned system design.” Acquisition Review Quarterly, 9(1), pp.67-84.

Featured Image: The USS Harvey C. Barnum Jr. under construction at Bath Iron Works in July 2023. (Photo via Bath Iron Works)

Podcast

Sea Control 585: Imperial Germany and China’s Basing Ambitions with Chuck Ridgway

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By Jonathan Selling

Retired USN Commander Chuck Ridgway joins the podcast to discuss his article “What Imperial Germany Teaches About China’s Naval Basing Ambitions,” which appeared in the May issue of Proceedings.

Commander Ridgway is a retired U.S. Navy surface warfare and a reserve Africa foreign area officer. After leaving active duty, he worked for 10 years as a NATO international civilian at the NATO Joint Analysis and Lessons Learned Centre in Portugal while also serving as a Navy reserve officer with Naval Forces Africa.

Download Sea Control 585: Imperial Germany and China’s Basing Ambitions with Chuck Ridgway

Links

1. “What Imperial Germany Teaches About China’s Naval Basing Ambitions,” by Chuck Ridgway, Proceedings, May 2025.

Jonathan Selling is Executive Producer of the Sea Control podcast. Contact the podcast team at Seacontrol@cimsec.org.

Brendan Costello edited and produced this episode.

Fiction

Call for NavyCon 2025 Presentations: The Influence of Navies on Science Fiction, NASA, and Space

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By Claude Berube

Proposals Due: September 22, 2025
Virtual Event Date: December 6, 2025
Presentation Length: 15 minutes
Submit to: Content@cimsec.org

Navies have had a major influence on science fiction for decades. From the fleets of Star Trek and Star Wars, to the warships of Battlestar Galactica and The Expanse, naval power has often been used to express visions of humanity’s future in space.

The first NavyCon was held in person in 2017. The Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC), King’s College, and the Naval War College are partnering to present NavyCon 2025. The theme of this year’s NavyCon will be: “The Influence of Navies on Science Fiction, NASA, and the Future of Space.” From 20th century navy authors to astronauts and engineers, the Navy has had a direct impact on space exploration, both imagined in fiction and in reality.

CIMSEC and our partners invite contributors to present on these topics at NavyCon. Presenters will have an opportunity to discuss how these naval influences have occurred historically and how navies might continue to shape activities in space in the near and far future.

The selection panel will include:

  • CDR Claude Berube, USNR (Ret.) PhD, NavyCon Founder.
  • James Smith, PhD, King’s College.
  • CDR David Kohnen, USNR (Ret.) PhD, Naval War College.
  • Major Eric Muirhead, USA, West Point, former co-host Joint Geeks of Staff podcast.
  • Ian Boley, PhD, former co-host, Joint Geeks of Staff podcast.
  • Clara Engle, former co-host Joint Geeks of Staff podcast.
  • Colonel Cory Hollon, USAF, Air University, former co-host Joint Geeks of Staff podcast.

If you are interested in presenting, please submit a one-page proposal by September 22 that includes a proposed topic, research approach, and contributor biography. Individual presentations will be 15 minutes and the event will be virtually presented on December 6, 2025. Send all submissions to Content@cimsec.org.

View past editions of NavyCon here.

Claude Berube is a Senior Editor for CIMSEC.

Featured Image: Republic Acclamator-class assault ships load Clone Troopers and vehicles before departing Coruscant. (Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, 2002)

Education

U.S. Naval Academy Admissions and the Meritocracy Ideal

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By Bill Bray

In July 1944, at the height of the greatest naval war in human history and arguably the U.S. Navy’s finest hour, a Secretary of the Navy “Board to Study the Methods of Educating Naval Officers” concluded that the process to award appointments to the U.S. Naval Academy was failing to produce “the best possible officer material.” This report agreed with the Academy Superintendent’s Special Post-War Curriculum Committee and the Naval Academy Board of Visitors reports for 1943 and 1944—the Navy must “improve [its] present method of selecting candidates if [it is] ever to obtain the best possible officer material.”1

In researching the history of the Naval Academy admissions process, I found this not an anomaly—a mere case of the process temporarily falling short, veering off track, or failing to keep pace with changes in American society. In fact, until the latter decades of the 20th century, both Academy and Navy leaders were consistently frustrated at the obstacles they faced in selecting the best and brightest applicants.

This past May, the Secretary of Defense directed the service academies to cease considering race, ethnicity, and gender in admissions—candidates must be evaluated “exclusively on merit.”2 This order implied, although did not explicitly state, that at some point in the past “merit-based” admission was the norm and only politically-driven considerations of race, ethnicity, and gender forced the academies to lower the standard and, by extension, weaken the U.S. military’s warfighting capability.

However, no pure merit-based admissions process ever existed—and never will. Set aside the difficulty of agreeing to criteria for a merit-based “whole-person standard” (an Academy goal from its earliest days), a partially subjective admissions process will remain the case even if the new directive did not include a major exception to ensure the Naval Academy’s 36 varsity athletic teams can recruit the talent they need. And some subjectivity in forming each Academy class is a good thing.

Historically, the Academy never selected—indeed could not select—only the best candidates based on merit. Two main reasons for this are the statutory requirement for Academy classes to be geographically diverse and the inevitability of political patronage in the nomination process. In one sense, one could claim the Naval Academy admissions process has always been a Congressionally-mandated diversity, equity, and inclusion program.

Geographic Diversity and Academic Qualifications

From its founding as the Naval School in 1845, Congress took into law the Naval Academy’s system for nominations and appointments, ensuring young men from all states and territories had a fair chance at admission—a specific kind of geographic diversity baked into the process at inception. The first legislation, approved 3 March 1845, stated:

“That midshipmen shall hereby be appointed from each State and Territory with reference and in proportion, as near as may be, to the number of representatives and delegates to Congress; that in all cases of appointment, the individual selected shall be an actual resident of the State from which the appointment purports to be made, and that the District of Columbia be considered as a Territory in this behalf.”3

For the citizens of the republic, this type of equity (fairness) was accepted without debate. It did, however, prevent the Naval Academy from selecting the best candidates for admission. First, schools across the nation varied greatly in quality, as did state education laws and standards. There also was no national education department in place to hold states to minimum standards in return for federal support. Many states had no reliable method to certify secondary school completion and proficiency. Because of this, the Academy required candidates with nominations to pass an entrance exam to secure an appointment (later known as the Regular Method of admission). The exam originally tested reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography. It was revised several times and by the 1920s included more advanced subjects, such as plane and solid geometry, physics, and chemistry.

The goal was to ensure candidates could reasonably pass the four-year curriculum (first introduced in 1851 and reformed to something similar in kind to civilian colleges after the Civil War when the Academy returned to Annapolis from Newport). This seemed a reasonable and efficient method to select the most qualified candidates. However, to ensure candidates from all parts of the country had a realistic chance of passing, the examination had to be elementary enough.

By the 1870s, it was clear that simply passing the exam was a poor predictor of subsequent academic success. According to Lieutenant Commander W. G. Greeman, “In 1873, the Board of Visitors found that, during the past ten years, 36 percent of the midshipmen admitted were dropped before they reached the second-class year and less than 46 percent of those remaining graduated.”4 The 1879 Board recommended harder exams and the 1884 Board appointed a special committee to investigate the standard of entrance to the Naval Academy.

 By 1897, the Academy, which had followed the advice of later Boards and made the entrance exam more rigorous still, was the target of backlash from members of Congress who believed the exam had been made too difficult and were advocating “adjusting standards of entrance to the average high school curriculum of four years.”5 This is another early example of Congress championing fairness in the process—Americans from poorer areas with substandard schools should not be disadvantaged at no fault of their own in gaining an appointment. The exam was not changed substantially again until the 1920s.

By 1920, the Academy was accepting a modest number of fleet sailors and Marines each year (usually from its preparatory school, established in 1915), along with some sons of World War I veterans. Many, if not most, of these candidates would not have competed well against regular candidates from quality high schools or colleges, yet Congress felt it important to give them a “boost” and reward them for their service or their families for their sacrifice. This is laudable and generally uncontroversial, but make no mistake—not all fleet candidates would make it through the rigorous program and those that did not took spots from others who likely would have.

While Academy officials ostensibly had found the right balance for an entrance exam by the early 1900s, another problem had reached a point at which they and Congress felt change was needed—“the evils of cramming in the fitting schools.”6 Using previous Naval Academy entrance exams, private tutors offered cramming to prepare candidates for the next exam. They were not cheap, and candidates from affluent families took advantage. Cramming services also created headwinds for another Academy effort to attract higher-quality applicants. Young men already attending college were reluctant to cease their studies for months to relearn material from high school just to pass the exam. Therefore, the Academy was unable to attract many of these better-qualified candidates as well.

The Certificate Method

As the quality of U.S. public education was improving in the early 20th century, the Academy began considering a school certification process as an alternative appointment path to the Regular Method. In 1904, the Board of Visitors recommended “a certificate of graduation from a high school accredited by one of the standardized associations or agencies of the country to be accepted as evidence of the requisite education.”7 This recommendation was not formally adopted until 1920, although the Academy did so that year only after it did not have enough applicants to fill the class of 1924. Beginning in 1925, those opting to use the certification method also had to take a substantiating exam in mathematics and English because several states still had unsatisfactory high school certification programs. Nevertheless, two academic paths to an appointment now existed and the Academy again began to incrementally increase the rigor of the entrance exam to try and level the two methods and ensure the quality of candidate each produced.

The 1930s saw substantial changes to the Academy’s academic program, beginning with Superintendent Rear Admiral Thomas C. Hart’s reforms that coincided with the Academy being finally accredited to grant the bachelor’s degree. But the problems of geographic diversity and education disparity persisted. Writing in Proceedings in February 1945, the Secretary of the Academic Board at the Academy, Captain Walter C. Ford, had much to say on this topic that is worth quoting at length:

“The methods of qualifying to the Academy, together with the congressional system of appointment, at a glance appear to be very just and reasonable. The general objective of the system is that every boy in the United States, whether from the city, hamlet, or farm, from the university, college, private or public school, or the fleet, will if he desires have a fair and equal opportunity to attend the Naval Academy. The specific objective of this system is to secure for the Navy the best qualified officer material that can be found in the United States, regardless of the candidate’s economic status, social position, race, creed, previous educational opportunities, or political connections. Our democratic form of government as well as the Navy would not tolerate differentiation of any kind. The objectives as stated, therefore, are considered desirable and essential. The question is, however, ‘Does the present system really accomplish its objectives?’ From the point of view of the general objective-of equal representation from all parts of the country—the answer is ‘Yes.’ The present system, however, fails to a considerable extent in the accomplishment of the specific objective. This failure can be largely attributed to three causes: (1) The unequal educational opportunities available to the youth throughout the nation; (2) the present system of Naval Academy entrance examinations; and (3) the lack of authority on the part of the Naval Academy to exercise judgment in the final selection of a candidate…It is a well-known fact that two candidates, one from New England and the other from the South, for example, who submit high school certificates showing the completion of courses in United States History, English, Science, and Mathematics, neither possess knowledge of, nor have covered, the same body of subject matter.”8

In the 1930s and 40s, the Academy was consistently required to accept candidates far inferior academically to those from states with better secondary school systems and, despite many initiatives to remediate them while at Annapolis, contributed to a stubborn attrition rate of greater than 25 percent. Given the urgent need for naval officers during these years, a high attrition rate correlated to a flawed admissions process rather than validating the program’s rigor. Ford wrote:

 “. . . 8,358 entered the Academy in the classes from 1934 to 1947, and only 6,232 were graduated. These figures alone reveal that something must be definitely wrong with our present system of selection. If our system were really selecting the best qualified of the 43,547 applicants—which we should assume would be the 8,358 who were admitted—surely the attrition at the Academy should be far less than the approximately 25 per cent which has existed for the past ten years.”9

In the decades after World War II, the adoption of better state certification standards, national standards, widespread use of the College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB; and later the SAT and ACT), and a general improvement in U.S. secondary school education combined to minimize the problem that so alarmed Ford. The Academy class of 1963 was the first to be admitted on CEEB scores instead of entrance exam scores.10

In 1962, the Academy began a more formal process to evaluate a candidate’s character and motivation—the Naval Academy Information Program (known more commonly as the Blue and Gold Program), which began more as a recruiting program before evolving into a character-evaluation interview, the result of which becomes part of a candidate’s whole-person multiple. Evaluating candidates’ moral character prior to 1962 relied on the nominating Congressperson’s judgment and recommendations from teachers and coaches. While hardly scientific, a Blue and Gold Officer interview added another component to the admissions calculus.11

Politics and Patronage

The other built-in facet of the Academy admissions process that makes a pure “merit-based” system impossible is political patronage. This applies not only to the congressional nomination process as defined in statute, but also to the non-congressional appointment allocations, also in statute (the president, vice president, Secretary of the Navy, and few Superintendent nominations). Undoubtedly, any process that relies in part on the judgment of elected politicians who always have favors to repay risks falling short of a merit-based standard. And that is exactly what plagued the Academy for decades.

In 1935, the Superintendent, Rear Admiral David Foote Sellers, received a letter from a 16-year-old boy asking for information on how to gain admission. In the letter, the boy wrote, in part: “I hope you can help me get to Annapolis. Does one gain entrance through competitive examinations, by ‘pull’ with some congressman, through early application, or how?”12 The boy’s suspicion that gaining admission to the Academy might require gaining favor with a congressman was understandable, precisely because that is exactly how many candidates acquired nominations. In fact, in the 1930s and 1940s, approximately 200–300 appointments a year were given to congressional nominees who had not even applied to the Academy.13 They were young men who had come to the member’s attention, often through a political donor or other well-connected parent, and nominated to repay a favor or campaign support. This was not always the case, and many of these nominees went on to be fine naval officers, but more than one superintendent petitioned Congress to only designate as their principal nominees the best-qualified as opposed to the best-connected. The refusal of many in Congress to do that, however, was a recurring source of frustration to Academy leaders.

Principal nominees always have had to meet the minimum admission requirements, including passing the entrance examination or meeting the certification standard, and passing a physical examination on arrival (many did not and were sent home), so it is not as though the Academy had to accept clearly unqualified nominees. It was often the case, however, that the Academy preferred alternates who had done far better than the principal on the entrance examination or who were far superior in other categories, only to be forced to accept the principal nominee.

Congress has never relinquished this privilege, and while the process of competing for nominations varies markedly by member, it is often opaque and vulnerable to influence by political donors. In fact, a 2014 USA Today investigation found that nominations often went to:

“children of friends, political supporters and donors to the lawmakers’ campaigns. . . . It is not always a meritocracy. The nominations are open to political influence. There are no consistent standards for nominations. The requirement that each congressional district be represented means that better candidates in more competitive districts sometimes lose out.”14

Of note, only the Coast Guard Academy does not require congressional nominations and can select the candidates it finds best qualified, regardless from where they come. There is no reason to believe Congress will ever allow the other military service academies to do the same.

Varsity Athletics

While stationed in Newport, Rhode Island, in 2015 as a Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Fellow, I researched officer education and, in that capacity, visited the Naval Academy Preparatory School, from which I had graduated in 1984. As mentioned previously, it was established in 1915 to prepare sailors and Marines in the fleet to attend the Naval Academy. In 1968 it was opened to all candidates. This coincided with a new age in college athletics—now a multibillion-dollar industry in which Division I coaches are paid to win. Coaches need athletes to win, and the “recruited” athlete often, though not always, gains admission ahead of more qualified “whole-person” candidates.

In 2015, there were approximately 250 students (midshipmen candidates) at the prep school and approximately 50 percent of those were recruited athletes (53, or more than 20 percent of the school, were recruited football players). About 35 percent of the most recent prep school class are recruited athletes.15 The Naval Academy has 36 varsity sports (tied with Stanford and Ohio State for the most, though with a far smaller student body size at 4,400; Stanford has about 7,800 undergraduates and Ohio State 46,000), and approximately 15–20 percent of each incoming class comprises recruited athletes. All recruited athletes must meet a minimum standard to complete the program, and many excel academically and as leaders. In addition, as Navy leaders regularly remind the public, the Academy, unlike a civilian college, has a physical mission. Yet it remains unavoidable that many recruited athletes would not gain an appointment under a process “based exclusively on merit.”16

The Academy Today

Given this history, the years-long Academy policy to, in limited cases, consider race, gender, or ethnicity in admissions (as a factor but never the factor) should be understood in this context, regardless of one’s views about its justification. Unlike political patronage, which was often blatant corruption that resulted in weaker candidates with nominations gaining appointments, the goal in the affirmative action era was to give extra consideration to candidates from historically marginalized groups to rectify past wrongs and, perhaps more importantly, to ensure an officer corps that represents the nation it serves. A military alone does not go to war—a nation does. Having a broad representation of a nation’s society leading the military increases the will of the population to support the war (no less than Carl von Clausewitz made this point). Should this type of diversity include race, ethnicity, and gender is debatable, but what has been clear from 1845 is that there are larger, good-of-society objectives to consider in recruiting the nation’s military officer corps.

It also should be noted that, despite service academy efforts to increase the percentage of Black and other racial minorities, the results have been somewhat underwhelming for those who place a premium on demographic percentages. Recent Naval Academy classes have been between 6 and 8 percent Black, well under the nearly 14 percent of the population from which they come. This owes to many causes, including the fact that nearly 20 percent of Black Americans (and 17 percent of Hispanic Americans) live in poverty and do not have reliable access to better schools and many other resources that could make them more competitive for service academy appointments.17

Both parties in Congress are responsible for this as well. In 2021, the Connecticut Veterans Legal Center in collaboration with Yale Law School’s Veterans Legal Services Clinic concluded congressional service academy nominations are far less diverse than U.S. society at large:

“Using nearly 25 years of nomination data obtained from admissions offices at the United States Military Academy (USMA, commonly known as West Point), the United States Naval Academy (USNA), and the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA), the report reveals a drastic gap between the nominations of White students and those of students of color to the academies. Black and Hispanic students are distinctly underrepresented, receiving only 6 percent and 8 percent of sitting congressional members’ nominations, respectively. White students, on the other hand, receive an outsized 74 percent of nominations. The report ranks members of the current Congress based on their record of promoting students equitably to these prestigious, taxpayer-funded institutions. The rankings, which include each current member of Congress who has made more than 10 nominations since taking office, reveal that 49 members had not nominated a single Black student as of early 2019.”18

With the service academies under pressure to increase its population of minority (particularly Black) midshipmen, many Congresses gave academy leaders limited opportunities to do so.

Better Than Ever

Academy leaders, for the most part if not always, have sought to admit the best candidates to form a highly talented brigade. Indeed, from class after class great naval leaders have come, including many who lead the Navy and Marine Corps to victory in World War II. While the debate over what best constitutes the right mix of accomplishments and skills to form a whole-person, merit-based multiple likely will never be settled, the Academy succeeds in seating extremely talented classes each year. These classes are not only geographically diverse but diverse in many ways beyond race, ethnicity, and gender. Most military leaders with whom I served agree that a force populated with Americans from all backgrounds and experiences, who bring different ideas and skills, is a better force and worth pursuing even without considering race, gender, and ethnicity.

Moreover, evaluating character and leadership ability is necessarily subjective and does not account for an individual’s growth potential while at the Academy. All Naval Academy graduates know classmates who struggled mightily in their first year or two only to flourish later in the program and go on to be superb naval officers. No whole-person, merit-based multiple can predict this potential with a high degree of accuracy.

Considering race, ethnicity, or gender in admissions may never have been justifiable or wise, or perhaps it was at one time but is no longer needed, or perhaps it was justifiable and is still needed to a degree. Whatever one believes, an argument against considering race, ethnicity, or gender should not be based on returning the admissions process to a purely “merit-based” system that never existed in the first place. Could such a system one day be designed in a way that could gain enough support in Congress to be written into law? I have my doubts. What I know is that contemporary Naval Academy classes have more than 1,000 talented, intelligent, motivated, patriotic midshipmen from all backgrounds and regions of the country. That’s a lot better than it used to be.

Bill Bray is a 1988 U.S. Naval Academy graduate and an adjunct professor at the U.S. Naval Academy. The opinions in this article are expressed in a personal capacity and do not constitute official views of the U.S. government, U.S. Naval Academy, or U.S. Naval Institute.

References

1. CAPT Walter C. Ford, USN, and CDR J. Burrough Stokes, USNR, “The Selection and Procurement of Better Candidate Material for the Naval Academy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 71, no. 2 (February 1945): 131–45.

2. HON Pete Hegseth, “Memorandum for Senior Pentagon Leadership, Defense Agencies, and DoD Field Activities: Certification of Merit-Based Military Service Academy Admissions,” 9 May 2025. 10 U.S. Codes 7442, 7443, 8454, 8456, 9442, and 9443 govern the Congressional and non-Congressional nominating and appointment processes for the U.S. Military Academy, U.S. Naval Academy, and U.S. Air Force Academy. These statutes do not direct or constrain how each Congressperson’s office manages their nomination processes—they are free to identify principle nominees, rank-order their alternates, or simply submit a list of (now) 15 nominees to each academy and allow the service academies to select the best qualified and grant appointments to the number of vacancies each Congressperson will have that year (each Congressperson can only have five nominees in each academy at any one time).

3. Ford and Stokes, “The Selection and Procurement of Better Candidate Material,” 132.

4. LCDR W. G. Greenman, USN, “Entrance Requirements, United States Naval Academy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 53, no. 6 (June 1927): 722–32.

5. Greenman, “Entrance Requirements,” 727.

6. Greenman, 727.

7. Greenman, 730.

8. Ford and Stokes, 134.

9. Ford and Stokes, 135.

10. Jack Sweetman, The U.S. Naval Academy: An Illustrated History, 2nd ed. (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995), 215–16.

11. CDR Roger Lindsay, USNR, “The Blue and Gold Officer—His Naval Academy Commitment,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 96, no. 3 (March 1970): 113–15.

12. CDR A. H. Rooks, USN, “Entrance Requirements of U.S. Naval Academy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 61, no. 10 (October 1935): 1468–8.

13. Ford and Stokes, 134–5.

14. Gregory Korte and Fredreka Schouten, “Pride and Patronage,” USA Today, 15 September 2014.

15. Email from CAPT Tom Clarity, USN, commanding officer of the Naval Academy Preparatory School, 30 May 2025.

16. Hegseth, “Certification of Merit-Based Military Service Academy Admissions.”

17. Emily A. Shrider et al., Report Number P60-273: Income and Poverty in the United States: 2020 (Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, September 2021).

17. “Congressional Nominations for Military Service Academies Fail to Reflect Nation’s Diversity,” Yale Law School,17 March 2021, law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/congressional-nominations-military-service-academies-fail-reflect-nations-diversity.

Featured Image: ANNAPOLIS, Md. (June 30, 2022) The U.S. Naval Academy welcomes the midshipman candidates, or plebes, of the Class of 2026 during Induction Day 2022. (U.S. Navy photo by Stacy Godfrey)

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.