Charles Yang is the Executive Director of the Center for Industrial Strategy.
Admiral Hyman Rickover, also known as the Father of the Nuclear Navy, built the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine and the first civilian nuclear power station in the U.S. How did this lifelong naval officer manage to harness the power of the atom, while ensconced within a massive DoD bureaucracy?
Rickover was abrasive, exacting, and ruthlessly demanding. He was also one of the most effective industrial bureaucrats in American history. Before the full potential of nuclear power was even understood, he built an institution—Naval Reactors—jointly housed within the Navy and the Atomic Energy Commission. He created technical standards, designed training pipelines for an industry that didn’t yet exist, and reshaped how the government managed contractors. His legacy endures in Naval Reactors, which continues to safely operate nuclear propulsion systems while much of the civilian nuclear sector has stalled.
Rickover's career offers a rare window into the kind of institutional craftsmanship that most reformers only theorize about. At a time when America is once again struggling with military production, nuclear reliability, and the sclerosis of its defense industrial base, it’s worth revisiting his playbook.
That’s why I launched the Rickover Corpus—a searchable digital archive of more than 2,500 pages of Rickover’s speeches, memos, and congressional testimony. Much of this material has never been available online, and most of it hasn’t been read in decades. We built the archive to serve as a living library for anyone trying to rebuild functional public institutions. Rickover’s writings don’t just outline his views—they carry his working style and persona. They’re blunt, detailed, obsessive about accountability, and animated by a clear theory of change: institutions improve only when people inside them assume full, personal responsibility for outcomes.
If you’re trying to build the engine of American industrial capacity and statecraft—whether in defense procurement, nuclear energy, or even your own startup—this archive was built for you. My hope is that the Rickover Corpus will help shape a new generation of reformers willing to shoulder responsibility with the same relentless clarity Rickover demanded of himself and others.
Here are a few selected excerpts from the corpus, chosen because they illustrate key principles of the Defense Reformation:
Productivity is more lethal than weapon stockpiles.
“Any comparison of the Soviet and U.S. Navy must be viewed from the context that we are a maritime power dependent upon being able to maintain sea lanes of communication necessary to conduct military operations overseas and to support our allies. The mission of our navy is a far more difficult one than that of the Soviets of denying us free use of the seas.
We have given up any chance of matching the Soviet Navy in number of ships. Therefore the quality of our ships must be superior. It is axiomatic that a nation dependent on the quality of its weapons must design its forces around an offensive strategy if it is to prevail over a numerically superior foe”
Congressional Research Service, Defense Breakfast Seminar, 1980
The person is the program: the primacy of people.
“A person doing a job—any job—must feel that he owns it and that he will remain on that job indefinitely. If he feels he is a temporary custodian, or is using the job as a stepping stone to a higher position, his actions will probably not take into account the long-term interests of the country. Lack of commitment to the present job will be perceived to those who work for him and they also will tend not to care. If he feels he owns his job and acts accordingly, he need not worry about his next job. He should exercise devotion to his work as if his children were the direct beneficiaries of what he is doing, as indeed they are. Too many spend their entire lives looking for the next job. We need to make it challenging and rewarding for managers to remain in one organization for more than a few years. Thereby the organization will benefit from their knowledge, experience, and “corporate” memory…
Unless the one person truly responsible can be identified when something goes wrong, then no one has been really responsible”
“The first step toward accomplishing anything is to have a goal. Goals are set by people and not by organizations. At some point, sooner or later, organizations lend their names to a project, but the concept and the initial work is always started by an individual. This is difficult for military people to comprehend, because they are used to operating under a relatively rigid impersonal system. Official letters, for example, are written in the third person; the appearance is that a Bureau or an Office does something. It should be obvious that Bureaus and Offices are inanimate, and therefore cannot generate ideas or do things.”
Administering a Large Military Development Project, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, 1954
Put the pebble in the right shoe.
“I am not wearing any hat right now. I never know which hat I am wearing. I understand there are job descriptions in the Navy and in the [Atomic Energy Commission] which say what I am supposed to do, but I have been too busy to read them. I only know that I am responsible. That’s enough.”
Testimony before Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, 1961
Conway’s Law: you ship your org chart.
“The development of naval nuclear-propulsion plants is a good example of how one goes about getting a job done. It is a good subject to study for methods, because it involves not only the accomplishment of a recognized difficult technical operation, in which expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars is necessary, but also because it involves the intimate working together of two large governmental organizations, the Navy on the one hand, and a civilian organization, the Atomic Energy Commission on the other. It has involved the establishment of procedures and ways of doing government business for which there was no precedent, and which I believe will be necessary in future for similar large projects.”
Administering a Large Military Development Project, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, 1954
That’s just a small sample. You can access the rest of the Rickover Corpus here.
 |
|