A roadmap for US military innovation based on the Navy’s history of success through civilian-military collaborations

The US military must continually adapt to evolving technologies, shifting adversaries, and a changing social environment for its personnel. In American Defense Reform, Dave Oliver and Anand Toprani use US naval history as a guide for leading successful change in the Pentagon.

American Defense Reform provides a historical analysis of the Navy during four key periods of disruptive transformation: the 1940s Revolt of the Admirals, the McNamara Revolution in systems analysis, the fallout from the Vietnam War, and the end of the Cold War. The authors draw insights from historical documents, previously unpublished interviews from four-star admirals, and Oliver’s own experiences as a senior naval officer and defense industry executive. They show that Congress alone cannot effectively create change and reveal barriers to applying the experience of the private sector to the public sector

Ultimately, Oliver and Toprani show that change can only come from a collaborative effort between civilians, the military, and industry, each making vital contributions. American Defense Reform provides insights and practical recommendations essential to reforming national defense to meet future demands.

The greatest shipwreck disaster in the history of the Cayman Islands
 
The story has been passed through generations for more than two centuries. Details vary depending on who is doing the telling, but all refer to this momentous maritime event as the Wreck of the Ten Sail. Sometimes misunderstood as the loss of a single ship, it was in fact the wreck of ten vessels at once, comprising one of the most dramatic maritime disasters in all of Caribbean naval history. Surviving historical documents and the remains of the wrecked ships in the sea confirm that the narrative is more than folklore. It is a legend based on a historical event in which HMS Convert, formerly L’Inconstante, a recent prize from the French, and 9 of her 58-ship merchant convoy sailing from Jamaica to Britain, wrecked on the jagged eastern reefs of Grand Cayman in 1794.
 
The incident has historical significance far beyond the boundaries of the Cayman Islands. It is tied to British and French history during the French Revolution, when these and other European nations were competing for military and commercial dominance around the globe. The Wreck of the Ten Sail attests to the worldwide distribution of European war and trade at the close of the eighteenth century.
 
In Cayman’s 1794 Wreck of the Ten Sail: Peace, War, and Peril in the Caribbean, Margaret E. Leshikar-Denton focuses on the ships, the people, and the wreck itself to define their place in Caymanian, Caribbean, and European history. This well-researched volume weaves together rich oral folklore accounts, invaluable supporting documents found in archives in the United Kingdom, Jamaica, and France, and tangible evidence of the disaster from archaeological sites on the reefs of the East End.
 

An overdue reassessment of one of the US Navy’s most decorated—and divisive—early commanders, whose legacy remains teetering between heroism and scandalous.

A Double-Edged Sword: The Biography of Commodore Jesse Duncan Elliott, 1782–1845 is a comprehensive and long-overdue portrait of one of the most polarizing figures in early US naval history. Written over the course of a decade and completed shortly before the author’s death, this meticulously researched biography revisits the career of a man once hailed for his military exploits—and later condemned for a myriad of personal controversies—including his perceived missteps while in command.

David F. Long traces Elliott’s rise from promising young officer to commodore, chronicling his leadership during key moments such as the capture of the brig Caledonia, the defense of Fort Erie, and his central—but contested—role in the Battle of Lake Erie. Despite notable contributions to the Navy’s early successes, including his diplomatic work and restoration of the USS Constitution, Elliott’s legacy was clouded by scandal: accusations of cowardice, a notorious duel, a contentious command style, and a drawn-out court-martial that ended his career in disgrace.

Serving as both biography and reflective historical analysis, Long paints a vivid picture of the early US Navy—its rivalries, growing pains, and evolving institutional identity. His balanced account of Elliott’s life, neither excusing his faults nor downplaying his achievements, places the commodore’s story in direct conversation with the challenges and ambitions of a rapidly expanding American maritime power. This is a must read for scholars of naval and military history, early American politics, or anyone interested in the brazen albeit controversial legacy of a forgotten national hero.

A revealing study on the little-known and misunderstood provincial navies established by North American British colonists.

In The First Fleets, Benjamin C. Schaffer reveals how, contrary to widespread beliefs, the American colonies had a long tradition of independent naval defense decades before the Revolution. He demonstrates that Anglo-American governments established and maintained significant provincial naval forces and that the history of provincial navies illuminates broader aspects of colonial history and the colonies’ ultimate break with the British Crown.

Based on meticulous research, Schaffer recounts the sea-borne threats that American colonies faced from the French, Spanish, pirates, and others. He reviews colonial governance and the relationships between colonial governments and Great Britain. Highlighting Britain’s scant naval power in North America, Schaffer demonstrates how the vulnerable coastal colonies undertook their own self-defense.

Schaffer’s readable study offers many fascinating episodes from colonial history. Establishing a navy was controversial in pacifist-minded, Quaker-dominated Pennsylvania. South Carolina deployed its scout-boat navy to pursue enslaved Africans who fled colonial capture. The first paper money issued in North America was an initiative to pay for a naval expedition against French Quebec in 1690. These and other episodes show the intimate connection between these little-known provincial navies and the major sociopolitical developments of their day.

The First Fleets will be of great interest to historians and readers of early American history, particularly colonial maritime and naval activities. Readers interested in the political and military dynamics of pre-Revolutionary America, as well as enthusiasts of naval history and maritime trade, will find The First Fleets both a valuable resource and an engrossing narrative.

Second Place, Presidio La Bahia Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas

The Gulf Coast has been a principal place of entry into Texas ever since Alonso Alvarez de Pineda explored these shores in 1519. Yet, nearly five hundred years later, the maritime history of Texas remains largely untold. In this book, Richard V. Francaviglia offers a comprehensive overview of Texas' merchant and military marine history, drawn from his own extensive collection of maritime history materials, as well as from research in libraries and museums around the country.

Based on recent discoveries in nautical archaeology, Francaviglia tells the stories of the Spanish flotilla that wrecked off Padre Island in 1554 and of La Salle's flagship Belle, which sank in 1687. He explores the role of the Texas Navy in the Texas Revolution of 1835-1836 and during the years of the Texas Republic and also describes the Civil War battles at Galveston and Sabine Pass. Finally, he recounts major developments of the nineteenth century, concluding with the disastrous Galveston Hurricane in 1900. More than one hundred illustrations, many never before published, complement the text.

A Great and Rising Nation illuminates the unexplored early decades of the United States’ imperialist naval aspirations.

Conventional wisdom holds that, until the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States was a feeble player on the world stage, with an international presence rooted in commerce rather than military might. Michael A. Verney’s A Great and Rising Nation flips this notion on its head, arguing that early US naval expeditions, often characterized as merely scientific, were in fact deeply imperialist. Circling the globe from the Mediterranean to South America and the Arctic, these voyages reflected the diverse imperial aspirations of the new republic, including commercial dominance in the Pacific World, religious empire in the Holy Land, proslavery expansion in South America, and diplomatic prestige in Europe. As Verney makes clear, the United States had global imperial aspirations far earlier than is commonly thought.

Lincoln’s Trident is the definitive account of the US Navy’s West Gulf Blockading Squadron’s quarantine of the Confederacy in the central and western Gulf of Mexico and adjacent river systems.

In Lincoln’s Trident, Coast Guard historian Robert M. Browning Jr. continues his magisterial series about the Union’s naval blockade of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Established by the Navy Department in 1862, the West Gulf Blockading Squadron operated from St. Andrews Bay (Panama City), Florida to the Rio Grande River. As with the Navy’s blockade squadrons operating in the Atlantic, the mission of the West Gulf Blockading Squadron was to cripple the South’s economy by halting imports and disrupting cotton exports, the South’s main source of hard currency. The blockade also limited transportation within the South and participated in combined operations with Union land forces.

The history of the squadron comprises myriad parts and players, deployed in a variety of missions across the thousand-mile-wide Western Theater. From disorganized beginnings, the squadron’s leaders and sailors had to overcome setbacks, unfulfilled expectations, and lost opportunities. Browning masterfully captures the many variables that influenced the strategic choices of Navy commanders as they both doggedly pursued unchanging long-term goals as well as improvised and reacted to short-term opportunities.

Notable among its leaders was David Glasgow Farragut, believed by many to be America’s greatest naval hero, who led the squadron through most of the war and the climactic Battle of Mobile Bay. Under his legendary leadership, the squadron not only sealed Confederate sea ports, but also made feints and thrusts up the Mississippi River as far north as Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Knowing the Navy’s role in isolating the Confederate economy and preventing the movement of troops and supplies within the South is crucial to understanding of the outcomes of the Civil War, as well as the importance of naval power in military conflicts. With thirty-five maps and illustrations, Lincoln’s Trident expounds upon an essential part of the Civil War as well as naval and American history.
 

New details about the founding of China’s Navy reveals critical historical context and insight into future strategy

From 1949 to 1950, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) made crucial decisions to establish a navy and secure China’s periphery. The civil war had been fought with a peasant army, yet in order to capture key offshore islands from the Nationalist rival, Mao Zedong needed to develop maritime capabilities. Mao’s Army Goes to Sea is a ground-breaking history of the founding of the Chinese navy and Communist China’s earliest island-seizing campaigns.

In this definitive account of a little-known yet critical moment in China’s naval history, Toshi Yoshihara shows that Chinese leaders refashioned the stratagems and tactics honed over decades of revolutionary struggle on land for nautical purposes. Despite significant challenges, the PLA ultimately scored important victories over its Nationalist foes as it captured offshore islands to secure its position.

Drawing extensively from newly available Chinese-language sources, this book reveals how the navy-building process, sea battles, and contested offshore landings had a lasting influence on the PLA. Even today, the institution’s identity, strategy, doctrine, and structure are conditioned by these early experiences and myths. Mao’s Army Goes to Sea will help US policymakers and scholars place China’s recent maritime achievements in proper historical context—and provide insight into how its navy may act in the future.

Paddle through the watery history of the Midwest’s Cream City. 

The success and survival of Milwaukee lies in the rivers that meander through its streets and the great lake at its eastern boundary. The Indigenous peoples of the region recognized the value of an abundant, clean water supply for food and transportation. Generations of immigrants, entrepreneurs, innovators, and recreationists used the same waters to travel greater distances, power million-dollar industries, and even have a bit of fun. 

In Milwaukee: A City Built on Water, celebrated historian John Gurda relates the history of the waters that gave Milwaukee life—and occasionally threatened the city through erosion, invasive species, and water-borne diseases. Telling tales of brewers, brickmakers, ecologists, and engineers, Gurda explores the city’s complicated connections with its most precious resource and greatest challenge. You’ll meet the generations of people, from a Potawatomi chief to fur traders and fishermen, who settled on the small spit of land known as Jones Island; learn how Milwaukee’s unique water composition creates its distinct cream-colored bricks; visit Wisconsin’s first waterparks; and see how city leaders transformed the Milwaukee River—once described as a “vast sewer” with an “odorous tide”—into today’s lively and lovely Riverwalk. 

Now available in paperback, Milwaukee: A City Built on Water is the sweeping chronicle of a critical natural resource that has weathered heavy use and flagrant abuse to emerge as a focal point of both celebration and concern in the twenty-first century.

Following the 1808 French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, an unprecedented political crisis threw the Spanish Monarchy into turmoil. On the Caribbean coast of modern-day Colombia, the important port town of Cartagena rejected Spanish authority, finally declaring independence in 1811. With new leadership that included free people of color, Cartagena welcomed merchants, revolutionaries, and adventurers from Venezuela, the Antilles, the United States, and Europe. Most importantly, independent Cartagena opened its doors to privateers of color from the French Caribbean. Hired mercenaries of the sea, privateers defended Cartagena's claim to sovereignty, attacking Spanish ships and seizing Spanish property, especially near Cuba, and establishing vibrant maritime connections with Haiti.

Most of Cartagena's privateers were people of color and descendants of slaves who benefited from the relative freedom and flexibility of life at sea, but also faced kidnapping, enslavement, and brutality. Many came from Haiti and Guadeloupe; some had been directly involved in the Haitian Revolution. While their manpower proved crucial in the early Anti-Spanish struggles, Afro-Caribbean privateers were also perceived as a threat, suspected of holding questionable loyalties, disorderly tendencies, and too strong a commitment to political and social privileges for people of color. Based on handwritten and printed sources in Spanish, English, and French, this book tells the story of Cartagena's multinational and multicultural seafarers, revealing the Trans-Atlantic and maritime dimensions of South American independence.

A meticulously researched account of how the US Navy evolved between the War of 1812 and the Civil War
 
The 1830s is an overlooked period in American naval history and is usually overshadowed by the more dramatic War of 1812 and the Civil War. Nevertheless, the personnel, operations, technologies, policies, and vision of the Navy of that era, which was emerging from the “Age of Sail,” are important components of its evolution, setting it on the long path to its status as a global maritime power. On Wide Seas: The US Navy in the Jacksonian Era details the ways in which the US Navy transformed from an antiquated arm of the nation’s military infrastructure into a more dynamic and effective force that was soon to play a pivotal role in a number of national and international conflicts.
 
By Andrew Jackson’s inauguration in 1829, the Navy had engaged with two major powers, defended American shipping, conducted antipiracy operations, and provided a substantive, long-term overseas presence. The Navy began to transform during Jackson’s administration due in part to the policies of the administration and to the emerging officer corps, which sought to professionalize its own ranks, modernize the platforms on which it sailed, and define its own role within national affairs and in the broader global maritime commons. Jackson had built his reputation as a soldier, but he quickly recognized as president the necessity for a navy that could foster his policies. To expand American commerce, he needed a navy that could defend shipping as well as conduct punitive raids or deterrence missions.
 
Jackson developed a clear, concise naval strategy that policymakers and officers alike could seize and execute. He also provided a vision for the Navy, interceded to resolve naval disciplinary challenges, and directed naval operations. Also, given Jackson’s own politics, junior officers were emboldened by the populist era to challenge traditional, conservative thinking. They carried out a collective vision that coincided with the national literary movement that recognized America’s future would rely upon the Navy.
 

On September 28, 1863, the Galveston Tri-Weekly News caught its readers' attention with an item headlined "A Yankee Note-Book." It was the first installment of a diary confiscated from U.S. Marine Henry O. Gusley, who had been captured at the Battle of Sabine Pass. Gusley's diary proved so popular with readers that they clamored for more, causing the newspaper to run each excerpt twice until the whole diary was published. For many in Gusley's Confederate readership, his diary provided a rare glimpse into the opinions and feelings of an ordinary Yankee—an enemy whom, they quickly discovered, it would be easy to regard as a friend.

This book contains the complete text of Henry Gusley's Civil War diary, expertly annotated and introduced by Edward Cotham. One of the few journals that have survived from U.S. Marines who served along the Gulf Coast, it records some of the most important naval campaigns of the Civil War, including the spectacular Union success at New Orleans and the embarrassing defeats at Galveston and Sabine Pass. It also offers an unmatched portrait of daily life aboard ship. Accompanying the diary entries are previously unpublished drawings by Daniel Nestell, a doctor who served in the same flotilla and eventually on the same ship as Gusley, which depict many of the locales and events that Gusley describes.

Together, Gusley's diary and Nestell's drawings are like picture postcards from the Civil War—vivid, literary, often moving dispatches from one of "Uncle Sam's nephews in the Gulf."

WINNER OF THE LYMAN BOOK AWARD FOR MARITIME AND NAVAL SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND ENVIRONMENT

Argues that the US Navy’s commitment to high-steam propulsion for its World War II fleet was a tactical, technological, and bureaucratic failure

In Too Far on a Whim, Tyler A. Pitrof presents a high-spirited revision of the US Navy’s commitment to high-steam propulsion systems, the mainstay of its World War II fleets. Pitrof’s research persuasively demonstrates that in its war against the Imperial Japanese Navy, the US Navy succeeded despite its high-steam propulsion systems rather than because of them.

War with an aggressive Japan and a resurgent Germany loomed in the dark days of the late 1930s. Rear Admiral Harold G. Bowen Sr., head of the US Navy’s Bureau of Engineering, advanced a radical vision: a new fleet based on high-steam propulsion, a novel technology that promised high speeds with smaller engines and better fuel efficiency. High-steam engines had drawbacks—smaller operational ranges and maintenance issues. Nevertheless, trusting its engineers to resolve these issues, the US Navy put high-steam propulsion at the heart of its warship design from 1938 to 1945.

The official record of high-steam technology’s subsequent performance has relied heavily on Bowen’s own memoir, in which he painted high-steam innovation in heroic colors. Pitrof’s empirical review of primary sources such as ship’s maintenance records, however, illuminates the opposite—that the heroism lay in the ability of American seamen to improvise solutions to keep these difficult engines running.

Pitrof artfully explains engineering concepts in layman’s terms and provides an account that extends far beyond technology and into matters of naval hierarchies and bureaucracy, strategic theory, and ego. He offers a cautionary tale—as relevant to any endeavor as it is to military undertakings—about how failures arise when technical experts lack managers who understand their work. Admiral Bowen wielded excessive power because no one else in the US Navy knew enough to countermand him.

Compulsively readable, Too Far on a Whim is a landmark for those interested in naval history and technology but also for readers interested in the interplay between innovation, decision-making, and engineering.