Leadership: September 1, 2001

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As the U.S. Navy looked around for ways to make service more tolerable, and thus keep more sailors from leaving, they discovered one irritant that has been around for so long that everyone assumed that it was just the way things are. Namely, that the Atlantic and Pacific fleets each have very different ways of doing things. Many work rules and procedures are different in the two fleets, the result of over a century of each fleet developing its own bureaucracy. During World War II, the two fleets fought quite different wars. In the Atlantic, the major operations were against German submarines. In the Pacific, over a hundred aircraft carriers and half a dozen marine divisions roamed vast distances attacking Japanese held islands. Sailors would often spend their entire careers with one of the two major US fleets. Any that were transferred to the other fleet soon realized that they were in a different organization. Past attempts to resolve these differences have failed. 

 

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