THE EXPERIENCED HEAD OF A CRITICAL OFFICE that helps organize important technical research and disburse billions of dollars in funding for the U.S. Navy is being replaced by a 33-year-old former DOGE employee with no apparent naval experience.
Rear Admiral Kurt Rothenhaus was recently removed from his post as chief of naval research, the top post at the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and replaced by Rachel Riley, a former partner at McKinsey & Company and Rhodes Scholar recipient who has been serving since January in a DOGE-related roles inside the Trump administration.
“Usually the head of Naval Research is a very senior member of the military or the senior executive service with an extensive experience in technology, science, engineering,” Kelly, a former naval aviator and NASA astronaut, said in a brief interview. “
Partner at McKinsey, the world famous consulting firm, looks good to me. She should be expert at learning the Navy and trying innovative improvements. And an excellent place to try it.
Navy has a long tradition of being bound to the old ways. So many examples. Slow to adopt aviation. Battleships preferred. Slow to adopt radio. Flag signals and lights preferred. Slow to adopt radar.
We should be watching closely. Some new thinking seems to be in order.
Rear Admiral Kurt Rothenhaus likely now won’t be able to transition to a sweet job at a defense industry job to further enhance his future retirement.
Slow? The US adopted aviation earlier than anyone else. The US may not have been first in adopting radio and radar, but they weren’t that far behind.
Agreed! Putting someone with a background in People / Organizational Performance in a technical leadership role is an interesting choice.
Seems like she’d fit in better with the Office of Warfighting Advantage, if she fits in at all.
But then again, what do I know? I’m not a weekend talk show host who clearly has the expertise in these things…
On aviation, they bombed a captured German battleship from World War I to demonstrate that air attack was a threat. Wasn’t it Billie Mitchel who championed the need for naval aviation. And at least we had aircraft carriers ready for WWII. But battleships continued to be the prestige command assignment–well into the war.
On radar, there was a famous WWII battle in which command did not trust radar results resulting in a major battle at close range. Command resented radio and radar and resisted using it. Before radio, commander at sea could make his own choices. Radio made him accept orders from higher authority.
Yes. But Navy brass was not the Office of Naval Research. I doubt that even existed at that time. Brass still envisioned great battleship battles, like Jutland.
I would be interested if you could name that battle. I was unfamiliar with it (which is unusual…WWII was my hobby when I was younger). I googled it (no shame in looking it up!). The only reference I could find is what I already knew: the land-based radar on Oahu detected incoming raiders on Dec 7, but command ignored it and/or thought it was “friendlies” being ferried over from the mainland.
There were surprisingly few ship-ship battles in WWII. And only two battleship-battleship battles (Surigao Strait is the famous one, but there was another at Guadalcanal), though neither involved the heavy dreadnoughts. The Germans used raiders (pocket battleships) in the Atlantic early in the War, mostly hunting transports/cargo. They were all sent to Davy Jones (most pretty early…I think Tirpitz made it until 1944, but the rest were mostly gone by 1942).
Edit: without looking it up, I do think there was one battleship-battleship battle with the Germans…but we were talking about the US Navy. Do British battlecruisers count as battleships? They were a bit smaller. More like pocket battleships. Bismarck engaged and sank the Hood in (I think) 1939).
The office of naval research is one of the premier research institutions in the world and is responsible for advances with both military and civilian applications. Oceanography, GPS, and multiple Nobel prizes.
I would say all aviation.
He could forsee the future effectiveness of aviation. Let’s face ww 1 aircraft were not very effective except as observation platforms. And he did indeed that battleship.
But Mitchell was very pushy and strident in his criticism of superiors.
“Billy, take it easy,” warned Major Henry “Hap” Arnold, the future chief of the U.S. Army’s Air Forces in World War II. “Airpower is coming.” But Mitchell could not silently stand by, claiming that his aviators were going to die in the “old flaming coffins” that they had to fly in the absence of more modern aircraft. “When senior officers won’t see the facts,” he replied to Arnold, “you’ve got to do something unorthodox, perhaps an explosion.”
Mitchell was eventually forced out of his job as assistant chief of the Air Service. He was reduced to his permanent rank of colonel, but he remained in the army in an out-of-the-way posting in San Antonio, Texas. The loss of the navy airship USS Shenandoah,* which had crashed on September 3, 1925, marked the beginning of the end of his army career. The ship had run into a squall while on a nonmilitary mission to visit state fairs in the Midwest, and 14 men, including the dirigible’s captain, had perished. Three navy seaplanes had also recently been lost in a separate series of accidents. Mitchell’s opinions on the disasters were sought by the press, and on September 5,Mitchell told reporters that the calamities were “the result of the incompetency, the criminal negligence, and the almost treasonable negligence of our national defense by the Navy and the War Departments.”*
Mitchell was court martialed.
Guilty-but a light punishment. Mitchell resigned from the US Army.
As part of the Fighter Mafia, Boyd inspired the Lightweight Fighter program (LWF), which produced the General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon and preceded McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet.