Hugh Zabriskie is a Product Manager, Defense & Aerospace, at Applied Intuition.
To create a military system with a lasting advantage, you need more than just smart ideas—you need innovators willing to take large, almost unreasonable risks. Because it takes a heretic to build something radically different when the stakes are so high.
Today, AI and unmanned system technology are advancing by leaps and bounds, and their role in future combat is becoming impossible to ignore. Will we take the bold steps to develop software-defined machines with transformative potential, or opt for incremental upgrades to legacy systems? Those choices now have long-term outcomes.
At the dawn of the United States, a comparable reckoning shaped the birth of the US Navy. Joshua Humphreys—now celebrated as the 'Father of the American Navy'—faced widespread skepticism when he proposed a class of warships designed to outmaneuver any contemporary fleet. The brilliance of his designs would become evident during the War of 1812, when the U.S. won multiple decisive victories against the nearly undefeated British Royal Navy—a feat few believed possible.
What truly set Humphreys apart was not merely his technical expertise in naval architecture but his strategic foresight. Unlike many within the War Department and White House, he understood that America needed to secure a “lead in naval affairs” to safeguard its booming maritime economy. While the nation’s immediate focus was on combating piracy and preserving neutrality, Humphreys anticipated the looming threat of conflict with European powers. He believed that, with the right innovations, America’s relatively small Navy could still deliver decisive blows against larger adversaries.
America’s First Major Acquisition Program
When Congress passed the Act to Provide a Naval Armament in 1794, Humphreys was 42 years old. The act authorized the War Office to build or buy six frigates. Despite having never seen a European battleship in his entire life, Humphreys had consumed virtually every piece of literature on shipbuilding and had worked on over 300 vessels since he became an apprentice at 12 years old. During the American Revolution, he had helped build frigates for the Continental Navy. That Navy had since been disbanded and its ships sold off. Now, the U.S. wanted a new fleet built to last.
The shipbuilding experts of the day were a guild of Quakers congregated in the nation’s capital of Philadelphia. In discerning the right design for the new frigates, Secretary of War Henry Knox sought the opinion of these rival shipwrights. Humphreys was the misfit of this crew. During the Revolution, he had rejected the Quaker principle of pacifism and dedicated himself to helping build the Continental Navy. And his proposed model for the Navy’s warships shocked his colleagues.
It’s important to know that in the late 1700s, naval architecture had generally stalled in innovation. Frigates had become the middle tier of warships in speed and firepower, typically armed with 36 or 38 cannons across two decks. They could outrun a 74-cannon battleship or chase down smaller merchant ships or privateers. The British Royal Navy, the undisputed hegemon of the seas, was building vessels exclusively to these “ratings” – and at scale. Their combat effectiveness was also proven. Before 1812, the British had not lost a single frigate to another equally rated warship in over a decade.

Humphreys’ novel design blended the firepower of a battleship with the speed of a frigate, featuring an extended hull and more cannons on the lower deck than the upper one. The increased firepower and stability (cannons on the upper deck raised the center of gravity) gave his frigates the advantage over European ones, and even against battleships in heavy seas, when the lower cannon ports would need to be closed.
His rival shipwrights scoffed and “unanimously” rejected it. Because of this project, Humphreys would become bitter enemies with colleagues like Jonathan Penrose, whose father he had apprenticed under, and Josiah Fox, who, despite being ordered to work within Humphreys’ department at the War Office, is suspected to have changed the hull design of the USS Chesapeake to his own preferences. The other Quakers leveled a number of critiques against the proposed frigate’s structural risks, but the underlying current of consensus was clear: no one believed that Humphreys could out-innovate the shipyards of Europe. Humphreys would defend his position with Knox by pointing out that a squadron of conventional frigates would offer no tactical advantage against a major adversary while also being vastly outnumbered.
Even though the vessels were officially meant to defend against piracy from the Barbary States in the Mediterranean, Humphreys foresaw the politically sensitive reality that the US also needed to deter the European countries that might threaten America’s merchant fleet and coastline. Republicans had only begrudgingly agreed to the bill, seeing a standing Navy as a massive expense that invited a conflict with Europe simply by existing.
Fortunately, Knox and the administration would side with Humphreys. In doing so, the US would embark on building its first of many “exquisite” weapons, designed to create an asymmetric advantage with the Great Powers of the era.
Building the Exquisite Frigate
The advanced nature of exquisite systems often demands the procurement of entirely new raw materials, tools and processes in order to achieve the previously impossible. Lockheed’s Skunkworks division under Kelly Johnson would later face similar challenges in designing an aircraft that could withstand airframe temperatures of over 600°F that would be generated at speeds above Mach 3.
Humphreys’ frigates were no different. As part of his blueprint, he required particular types of wood for each section. His most emphatic requirement was using live oak for critical components of the frame, given its exceptional strength and ability to last up to five times longer than white oak. Procuring enough live oak would be a massive undertaking. It would call for several hundred live oak trees to be cut down and transported from a small coastline region to the six shipyards building frigates.

Live oak’s appeal was also a two-sided coin. The trunk of a live oak can grow to over 5 feet in diameter, and its root system is exceptionally strong. Standard axes simply “bounce” off of them, requiring specialized tools and techniques to fell each tree. To make matters worse, live oaks grow exclusively along the humid, mosquito-ridden coastline of the Southeast. Harvesting them meant teams of lumberjacks had to sail down to Georgia and labor deep within the swamps under grueling conditions. One contemporary observer likened the lumberjack camp to “an army field hospital after battle.” Disease claimed several lives, while others fled, unwilling to wait for their turn to fall ill.
Humphreys’ costly requirements, however, would pay off in the durability and longevity of his frigates. A sailor aboard the USS Constitution once described seeing British cannonballs literally bouncing off the side, earning the ship its nickname, “Old Ironsides.” You can imagine the morale boost that sight would give a sailor who is used to seeing cannonballs rip through a ship and the people inside of it. Old Ironsides still floats today in the Boston Harbor, earning the title of the oldest commissioned ship in the US Navy.
The Psychological Impact of Asymmetrical Advantage
Humphreys’ prediction of conflict came true with the War of 1812. If the US had decided to build its frigates after the war began, it would have been too late to matter.
In the years leading up to 1812, US relations with both France and Britain deteriorated. Neutral American vessels continued to be harassed at sea by both countries, leading to the Quasi-War with France (1798-1800). The British had also struggled to recruit enough sailors to staff its navy, which had exploded to almost 15x its original size since 1792. To solve for that, British captains had increasingly resorted to impressing American sailors, who, as far as they were concerned, were basically British anyways. In turn, American ships were happily accepting British sailors who defected for better wages and treatment. Impressment became a tipping point for war.
Despite British vessels hovering off the American coast and harassing US vessels, President Thomas Jefferson was reluctant to build more of Humphreys’ frigates. Republicans continued to insist that the US should remain neutral and doubted any positive outcome of war with Britain. Instead, Jefferson promoted a more politically palatable alternative: the gunboat. These small vessels, armed with a single forward-facing cannon, were designed for coastal defense and would likely sink in open seas—a limitation that Jefferson considered a virtue. Manned by local militias rather than professional sailors, gunboats reflected the Republican vision of decentralized, minimal military power. In 1807, a friendly Congress approved the construction of 180 gunboats.
On its face, Jefferson’s theory of defense may seem to resemble the Air Force strategy of “affordable mass.” Perhaps large numbers of low-cost gunboats could effectively overwhelm fewer, exquisite battleships. But gunboats were half-measures. A frigate could easily run down a squadron of them. Additionally, gunboats were only seaworthy in calm waters, and they were liable to sink after a single cannon shot (a frigate could often withstand well over 50 shots). Equally important, it was impossible to recruit sailors to live inside their cramped quarters.

While the gunboat program and its cost overruns could have funded a large squadron of Humphreys’ frigates, the existing frigates proved their worth in their first duels with British frigates. On August 19, 1812, the Constitution ran down the British frigate Guerriére. The British captain, like the British public, assumed they would win any fight and told his crew that he would be disappointed if they didn’t dispatch of the American ship within thirty minutes.
Instead, after the first broadsides, the Guerriére had lost critical sections of its masts, “rolling her main deck guns under water” and causing the ship to steer into favorable positions for the Constitution to rake it with more broadsides. The return of the Constitution to Boston with a captured British frigate in tow generated national celebration.
Two months later, the USS United States captured the British frigate Macedonian in an even more lopsided victory. The loss of not one but two frigates, to the Americans no less, sent a shockwave through the British public and military leadership. The upset had broken the “sacred spell of invincibility,” in the words of the future British Prime Minister George Canning. Something was deeply wrong. The Royal Navy ordered its captains to avoid confrontation with US frigates without at least a 2:1 numerical advantage.

While these victories did not decide the outcome of the war, they gave the Americans a major psychological advantage. Their most important contribution was in shifting Republican opinion away from an untenable policy of neutrality. America had discovered, thanks to Humphreys’ heresy and capable commanders, that its little Navy could actually win. And winning felt good. Just weeks after the Macedonian’s capture, Republicans enthusiastically authorized four new 74-gun battleships and 6 new 44-gun frigates.
Thomas Jefferson acknowledged the ineffectiveness of his gunboats during the war. In an 1813 letter to John Adams, his presidential predecessor who had ardently fought for the Navy’s creation in 1794, he gave credit where credit was due.
I sincerely congratulate you on the successes of our little navy, which must be more gratifying to you than to most men, as having been the early and constant advocate of wooden walls.
Further Reading
Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy, by Ian Toll (2006)