21st Century Sims: Innovation, Education, and Leadership for the Modern Era

INTRODUCTION

The Gun Doctor

In 1900 William Sowden Sims was a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, fresh off staff duty in Europe. He had orders to China Station to join the USS Kentucky , lauded in the press as the United States’ newest and most powerful battleship. His duties at the U.S. embassy in Paris had included traveling across Europe to study the battleships and gunnery practices of both potential adversaries and potential allies. In the pre-dreadnaught era, he became a self-taught expert on battleship design and gunnery, and he arrived on board his new ship with a perspective far different from that of your average officer.

Sims checked on board and discovered that the newest and most powerful may have been new, but it certainly wasn’t that powerful. It didn’t take long for him to determine that the ship had a number of serious design problems. The gun turrets had huge openings, which made it easier to traverse the guns but also meant they were relatively unprotected by armor. The gun decks were low to the waterline, and when the ship was fully loaded and took to moderate to heavy seas, water would pour in through those large gun ports. In addition, there was no separation of the magazines and the gun decks, so a hit from an enemy shell could penetrate directly to the magazines with catastrophic effect.

Sims was incensed. He set about recording these deficiencies and others, and he put together a report to send back to the Navy Department. He felt strongly about the issues, and in a letter to a friend he wrote, "Kentucky is not a battleship at all. She is the worst crime in naval construction ever perpetrated by the white race."

A Junior Officer and an Idea

Yet the lieutenant was part of Kentucky’s crew, and he realized that he couldn’t really change the design of the ship while they were on China Station. So as he began standing his bridge watches, he looked for a way to make the ship better through what today are called tactics, techniques, and procedures. While steaming through the South China Sea and visiting the coastal cities of China, he met a man from the Royal Navy who would serve as an inspiration.

Percy Scott was a captain in the Royal Navy in 1901 and the commanding officer of HMS Terrible. Considered something of a pariah, Scott wasn’t known for getting along with his peers—or with his superiors (later in life he started a notable feud with a senior admiral). On board his previous ship, HMS Scylla, Scott had developed something he called continuous-aim fire. Working with the concept on board both Scylla and Terrible, he concluded it was a gunnery technique that would revolutionize naval warfare. But he couldn’t get anyone to listen to him or understand that the idea was important.

Gunnery hadn’t changed much since the days of USS Constitution battling it out with the British frigates in the War of 1812. The gun director would estimate the distance to the enemy ship, set the elevation of the gun, and then each time the ship rolled, try to time the firing so that the shell would hit the enemy. The technique was the reason most decisive sea battles in the age of sail took place at very close range. This was neither an accurate way to shoot nor a rapid way to engage the enemy.

Scott regeared the elevation gear on his heavy guns and added new telescopic sights. The new gearing allowed the gun directors to move the gun continually as the ship rolled. Along with the new sights, this enabled them to keep the weapon aimed directly at the enemy ship. This meant that gun crews could fire as fast as they could reload. As Sims watched Terrible conduct gunnery practice, he realized this new technique would change naval tactics forever. A battleship using continuous-aim fire might be able to take on an entire enemy squadron if that squadron wasn’t using the technique. With it, accuracy increased by orders of magnitude and the rate of fire could quadruple. Sims immediately sat down and wrote a report on what he had seen and sent it to the Bureau of Ordnance in Washington, D.C.

Sims befriended Scott and observed how the British crew was accomplishing their dramatic results. He set about learning how to modify the elevation gear on American ships and how to train gunners in the new techniques. Soon he had an American gun crew performing nearly as well as Terrible’s crew. Sims wrote another report to Washington detailing his crew’s experience with continuous-aim fire, outlining how to modify American guns while laying out the procedures to be used for training gun crews. He sent it to Washington, waited for a response, but heard nothing.

The Forces of the Status Quo

Sims’ reports arrived at the Bureau of Ordnance at the Washington Navy Yard. They were read, but to the experts on the staff the claims of the lieutenant out on China Station appeared outlandish. Nobody could improve gunnery that dramatically and in such short a time. The reports were filed away in a basement cabinet and forgotten. The Bureau of Ordnance had developed the procedures that were in use throughout the fleet and had designed the guns that were mounted on American battleships. Everyone believed that American hardware and American sailors were the best in the world. Nobody even wondered if Sims’ reports were true. They simply couldn’t be.

Lieutenant Sims was not the kind of officer who would give up. Even though he received no response from Washington, he continued to write reports to the bureau as he worked with gun crews. He updated his findings, refined the techniques, and suggested new tactics that could be developed. He still heard no response. Sims knew what was happening. He knew that the bureau was ignoring him because he was simply a lieutenant, and one that was deployed on the other side of the world. He had never served on the bureau staff and wasn’t a known expert whom they regularly consulted. Writing to a friend and fellow officer, he noted, With every fibre of my being I loathe indirection and shiftiness, and where it occurs in high place, and is used to save face at the expense of the vital interests of our great service (in which silly people place such a child-like trust), I want that man’s blood and I will have it no matter what it costs me personally. Sims respected those who were senior to him, but rank alone wasn’t enough to impress him. Navy staffs that stood on bureaucracy and focused on building bullets for their own fitness reports instead of on the combat effectiveness of operating forces were his enemy.

The rear admiral in command of the Asiatic Squadron, George Remy, read Sims’ reports and added his endorsement. Impressed with the work Sims was doing and realizing its importance, he cut orders for Sims to leave Kentucky and join him on board USS Brooklyn as a special intelligence officer. In his new position, Sims pressed ahead in his work on continuous-aim fire and continued writing reports. The language in the messages he sent back to Washington became more dramatic as he pointed out the risks involved in ignoring the techniques he was developing. Besides sending his reports to the bureau, on his own initiative he also began to send them directly to American battleship captains and senior officers.

The word spread through the fleet, and the Bureau of Ordnance realized it needed to do something. Captains were writing messages back to headquarters and asking questions. In order to respond, the staff at the bureau developed a test to prove that continuous-aim fire wouldn’t work. After the test, they wrote a report that declared Sims’ claims a mathematical impossibility. However, they had conducted the test without making the modifications to the guns that Sims required, and they had completed the test on shore—for a gunnery practice designed for a rolling ship at sea. The bureau submitted its report and circulated it in message traffic to the entire fleet. Belief in Sims’ claims evaporated overnight.

Sims submitted a total of thirteen reports on continuous-aim fire over the span of two years, each one continually improving the method and technique. When he heard that the Bureau of Ordnance had completed a test and claimed to prove that what he was doing was impossible, he finally had enough. He knew that if the United States Navy went up against a force that was using continuous-aim fire it would be decimated. Lt. William Sims did something that he later characterized as the rankest kind of insubordination. He wrote a letter to the president.

Fighting Back

President Theodore Roosevelt had once been Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt. He was a navalist in the truest sense of the word. At age twenty-four and just out of Harvard, he authored the seminal book The Naval War of 1812, which is still considered a standard history of that war. He was personal friends with naval historian and strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan and would later deploy the Great White Fleet. As presidents sometimes did a century ago, he actually read the letter from the lieutenant on China Station, and he was shocked. If Sims was right and continuous-aim fire worked, then he was also right that it was an issue of the highest importance.

Roosevelt had ordered a gunnery exercise in order to demonstrate the existing state of American naval skill. The results were worse than anyone could have predicted. Five ships from the Atlantic Fleet each fired for five minutes at a former lightship at a range of about three-quarters of a mile. After twenty-five minutes of firing, only two shells had gone through the lightship’s sails and none had struck the hull. Roosevelt told the Navy to bring Sims back from China Station. In his bluster at the White House, he was reported by Sims’ biographer as saying, Give him entire charge of target practice for eighteen months; do exactly as he says. If he does not accomplish anything in that time, cut off his head and try someone else.

While he had the power of the bully pulpit, what President Roosevelt didn’t technically have was the ability to cut orders. That power resided with the chief of the Bureau of Navigation, Rear Adm. Henry Taylor. Taylor was known as a reformer. Before taking over at the bureau he had been a member of the General Board, which at the time was in essence the Secretary of the Navy’s Red Team, used to develop, second-guess, and test new ideas. Before that he had been Mahan’s hand-selected successor as president of the Naval War College.

When Roosevelt suggested that Sims be put in charge of gunnery, Taylor talked to his senior officers in the bureau and asked for their advice about giving Sims the job of inspector of target practice. If necessary, he told them, they could recommend another officer to the president. The senior men in the bureau advised him not to bring Sims into the job. They said he was a loose cannon and too much of a troublemaker. Taylor, however, wasn’t done looking for advice. He started asking the junior members of his staff, the lieutenants and lieutenant commanders, what they thought. Almost to a man they told Taylor to bring Sims in and give him the job. He was, in the words of one of his peers, the real deal. Taylor sided with the junior officers and cut orders for Sims to take the vital position.

William Sims returned to the United States from China Station and assumed the responsibilities of the U.S. Navy’s inspector of target practice. He held the position for about six years and was given a staff of two junior lieutenants. Tasked with revolutionizing naval gunnery, he began by circulating his reports to the fleet and instituting mandatory practice for gunnery. He didn’t make his method of continuous-aim fire mandatory, he simply sent out the reports for gunnery officers to read. He traveled to the ships of the fleet and briefed wardrooms and taught gun crews. He established a yearly fleet-wide gunnery competition in which every ship in the Navy would compete, using any system or technique they wanted. They were all welcome to start with continuous-aim fire.

The winning ship would be identified to the Navy and the country, and the winning gunnery officer was responsible for writing a report on his techniques and procedures. Each year, the gunnery officers across the fleet would pour over that report, and the reports that came before it, and make constant refinements and adjustments to gunnery methods. They sent their own reports out and wrote articles for the U.S. Naval Institute’s place for disruptive thinking, a journal that still exists today called Proceedings.

The winning ship each year received a pennant it could fly on its yardarm, a pennant with a large E emblazoned on it for gunnery excellence. This was the birth of the competition that would become known as the Battle E, an annual contest between ships and squadrons that in an expanded form has been conducted ever since in the U.S. Navy.

Promoted to lieutenant commander and joined by his two assistants, Lt. Ridley McLean and Lt. Powers Symington, Sims was in constant demand to visit the ships of the fleet. He was given the nickname the Gun Doctor, and he and the lieutenants were frequently invited to visit wardrooms for what were called silent dinners. These events were like a Dining In or Mess Night, with rules like Vegas: what was discussed at a silent dinner stayed at a silent dinner. On nights like these, William Sims spread the insurgent spirit and inspired junior officers toward innovation. At the end of his time as inspector of target practice, one gunner on the winning ship made fifteen hits in one minute at a target seventy-five by twenty-five feet at the same range as the test ordered by President Roosevelt years before; half of the hits were in the bull’s eye.

The U.S. Navy arguably overtook the Royal Navy as the best gunners in the world. Once the United States adopted continuous-aim fire, the Brits realized that Percy Scott, their own gritty revolutionary, had been onto something all along. Even Adm. Newton Mason, chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, admitted, The renaissance in gunnery which came about chiefly through the instrumentality of Commander Sims, has . . . led to great improvements in ordnance. In the fleet, Lieutenant Commander Sims became known as the man who taught us how to shoot.

A Team Effort

William Sims was the driving force, both the brains and the brawn, leading the movement that revolutionized naval gunnery. However, innovation is rarely something one man can do on his own. President Roosevelt, Rear Admiral Remy, and Rear Admiral Taylor all played important roles in opening doors for Sims and, sometimes, helping to keep his opponents at bay. Supportive senior officers, or open-minded bosses, are an important but underrecognized part of successful innovation, either in the military or in industry.

There was another group that directly contributed to the success of the gunnery revolution. Sims’ peers, friends, and staff officers across the globe helped as well. Sims had a wide network of allies, many of whom wanted to develop their own innovations alongside his. Communication had been revolutionized with the introduction of the telegraph and steam-powered ships, and unlike the U.S. Navy in the age of sail, junior officers could now write letters to one another that would travel from the United States to China Station relatively quickly. They worked together, writing letters that traveled across the globe, passing ideas back and forth, sharing criticism to make their innovations stronger, and relaying intelligence on their opposition.

This informal network included men such as Bradley Fiske, who as a lieutenant in the 1890s had invented the telescopic sight, which Sims’ new gunnery techniques used to great advantage. Fiske wrote numerous articles for Proceedings supporting Sims’ ideas and putting forward his own. A constant tinkerer and inventor, he had more patents than any other line officer in the navy. As the two became more senior, Fiske went on to help develop the very first tactics and procedures for dive-bombing and aerial torpedo attacks on ships, supported by Sims’ later work at the Naval War College.

Ridley McLean served with Sims on China Station and was called back to Washington to serve as his assistant in the Target Practice Office. It was McLean who took on the task of writing the procedures in the navy’s gunnery manual, organizing and formatting Sims’ ideas in a useful way. He also authored The Blue Jacket’s Manual, the first guidebook for enlisted men (to this day it is updated and issued to sailors). He commanded a battleship in World War I and was one of the first commanders of the newly created submarine force, advocating for their wider adoption and advancement. Both Mclean and Fiske became admirals.

There was also Philip Alger, one of Sims’ classmates at the U.S. Naval Academy. Despite being in the top of his class at Annapolis, Alger got out of the Navy after his first enlistment and returned to his alma mater to work as a gunnery and ordnance instructor. He was frequently brought in at the Bureau of Ordnance as an expert consultant. When the bureau was faced with the crazy ideas of the lieutenant on China Station, Alger was invited to the navy yard to consult. He wrote letters to Sims, sending them to him in the Pacific, sharing the internal discussions at the bureau. He warned Sims about who was opposing and supporting him in Washington. Once he returned from overseas, Sims worked with Alger on articles for Proceedings, which Alger would then publish under his own name in order to reduce the heat on Sims.

Military innovation depends on new ideas from junior leaders, men and women with expertise and grit who are willing to challenge the system and fight the status quo. However, it also requires senior leaders who are willing to nurture those new ideas and the people who have them, even if they border on the insubordinate or, as Gen. James Mattis once said, they look like a bag of mud. And innovation requires a group of peers, friends, and staff officers who are supportive and can help fight the bureaucracy.

Insurgent or Intellectual?

When Vice Admiral Sims arrived