(Ted N. “Twig” Branch, nominated for the rank of Vice Admiral and duty as the N2/N6 on the OPNAV Staff. Photo USN).

I had not thought about “Twig” Branch in a few years- 2008, in fact.

It was evening then in Arlington, I cooked some dinner in the little kitchen and called a friend to find out about how her dog was doing. No answer.

“Carrier,” the PBS show about life on the USS Nimitz (CVN-68), lead ship of the most powerful warship ever to steam the world ocean. It was on at nine, and I sat resolutely to watch what a six-month deployment in the Fleet was like these days. It is a volunteer Navy, just as mine was. Everyone on the Boat made the choice to be there.

The opening credits have a profile of the Captain, and his face towers above his mighty ship. I thought about how our choices in life had brought us together, rafting down life in the Fleet. His choices had made him the master of USS Nimitz, named for Mac’s favorite boss. Mine had not, and I was OK with that.

Ted’s career was a rich one, and it is getting better. He just was nominated to get a third star and become King of the Spooks in the Naval Service. That is sort of a curious thing, since Twig is a Light Attack pilot- A-7s and F/A-18s, and also a graduate of the Naval Reactor School, and a decorated commander of deep-draft ships of the line.

He commanded the Bulls of VFA-37:

He has been selected to preside over the institutional product of over seventy years of bureaucratic infighting so intense that at one point the turf battle could have cost us victory in the Pacific War. I sincerely wish him the best on that.

The Good Doctor always reminds me that the Service has a sort of collective amnesia about its real history. Not the Public Affairs version it likes to trot out, but the real deal, the one based on budgets, priorities and misunderstandings, and conducted by men and women who carried the fires of Hell with them as part of their daily duties.

I think the amnesia makes it easier to handle, since each class of new Admirals is expected to believe impossible things by whatever flavor Administration happens to have been elected most recently. The institution must survive.

Our pal Mac had the 411 on all that real history, since he lived it. I listened in fascination to the tales of mendacity that went along with the heroism. The Navy has finally had enough of that, and a long slow process of integration has brought us the final few feet around the rosebush, and we are right back to the organizational structure the Navy enjoyed in 1940.

You know, the one that led direct to disaster. Mac would sip his Virgin Bloody Mary and shake his head about it. Those were the days when Richmond Kelly Turner owned radio intelligence and dismissed the considered opinions of the Office of Naval Intelligence. Turner owned the planning process to deal with Japan, and he based those plans on the radio intercepts that he got so desperately wrong.

Turner was a line officer, a battleship sailor with a serene and impermeable sense of himself, and a reputation as a bully. Mac would grin when I called him “Richmond Kelly Fucking Turner,” since he got away from the whole mess with his reputation intact. Not so much for the thousands of Sailors and Marines who died as a direct consequence of his actions.

It helped that he also had a good record in action, leading the Amphibious Force across the Pacific, island hopping in support of Doug MacArthur’s War to retake the Philippines, and Chester Nimitz, who was orchestrating Plan Orange, the attack across the broad Pacific to spear the Home Islands.

When the war was won, the contribution of the Spooks was still a secret so dark that it could not be breathed for another quarter century.

There had been an inquest in the immediate aftermath the Pearl Harbor attack. They had to have scapegoats, and ADM Husband Kimmel and Lt. Gen. Walter Short were the designated fall guys.

If you want the real guy on whom to pin the surprise of Pearl Harbor, it would be Richmond Kelly Fucking Turner. The war years featured great sacrifice, but much work was done to prepare for the real inquiry about how it all came to pass. File were mysteriously shredded, stories coordinated. When Mac’s boss Eddie Layton was summoned to talk to Congress in 1946 about what he knew, the stories were all worked out, and those responsible hid behind classification to ensure that by the time the truth came out, their careers and lives would be over.

It worked.

One of the loose ends was the stark divide between the code-breaking tribe and the intelligence tribe. The code breakers- later known as Cryptologists and now as Information Professionals were always a problem for the Navy, since they had a life-line to an Agency outside the control of the Admirals- the institution we now know as the National Security Agency. NSA had its own funding stream and autonomy from the military departments.

The other tribe- the intelligence weenies- did fairly well, but they too had allegiances and funding outside the control of the Service, and it was an irritation to generations of men who occupied the office of the Chief of Naval Operations. The matter came to a head in the Obama Administration. The Tailhook scandal had marginalized the Aviation tribe within the Navy, and with it the special relationship between pilots and their air intelligence officers.

The Ship Drivers who ran the Navy in the wake of the scandal had little experience with the Intel weenies, and much more with the embedded cryptologic personnel who went with them on collection missions they were rarely cleared to fully understand.

In the end, it was money and billets and flag authorizations that caused a brilliant scheme to be developed. One of the brighter members of one of the warring tribes was empowered with a third star, and a charter to knock heads and consolidate the cats and dogs into a Corps of Information Dominance.

As with many intractable problems, it was a good idea. An intelligence officer presided on the consolidation of the communities, and then the office was turned over to…an amiable helicopter pilot. Lacking only the amiable part, we are now right back to 1940.

The helo driver, in turn, will be relieved by Twig, the Hornet guy with nuclear credentials. I like Twig, and have a history with him. I think he is a good guy, a smart guy, and a talented guy. He has done it all, from launch and recovery on a pitching deck on a black-ass night to driving a nuclear-powered Supercarrier. Twig is the man.

I will have to tell you about the times we shared tomorrow- they were fun, and given the times, this is probably as good as it gets for the Community of which I was part.

I wish Mac was still alive. I would ask him what they thought about that in 1941.

(ADM Richmond Kelly Turner on one of his better days. Photo USN).

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com