only are oceans becoming more important as arenas for strategic and 
tactical military operations, but operations themselves are pressing 
into less familiar or understood portions of the marine environment. 
The twofold growth of the Navy’s oceanographic program over the 
fiscal year 1965-67 period, presented in section 5.3 testifies to the 
degree of recognition given by the Navy and Congress to increasing 
military need for knowledge of the marine environment and for carry- 
ing out service operations within it. This trend apparently will not 
be deemphasized in the future; if anything, the overall Navy oceanog- 
raphy program may accelerate. 
The priorities which determine the bulk of the Navy’s oceanographic 
efforts are primarily military, and certain of these considerations are 
paramount, involving specialized requirements for both research and 
surveys, as well as engineering developments. We therefore recom- 
mend that the program remain solely under Navy direction rather 
than consolidated with perhaps somewhat similar programs of other 
agencies such as ESSA or a new civilian agency of ocean development 
such as the one proposed in this report (see’sec. 10.4). 
Support figures discussed in section 5.3 indicate that basic research 
has remained relatively constant while the overall Navy oceanography 
program has approximately doubled. It is not entirely clear to us 
that the great increase in ocean-engineering effort associated with such 
new programs as the Deep Submergence Systems Project should pro- 
ceed indefinitely without a corresponding increase in the Navy’s basic- 
research support. A proportionality between research, particularly 
basic research, and the total R & D effort in the given fields should 
probably be maintained if brute-force engineering solutions are not to 
be inadvertently substituted for what ought to be more discriminating 
deployment of operational requirements made possible by greater en- 
vironmental knowledge. Such knowledge generally requires consid- 
erable lead time for development and a long-term investment attitude 
toward research programs that produce it. It is in this connection 
that we wish to emphasize the importance of strengthening the tradi- 
tional Navy tie with the oceanographic research and educational com- 
munity, which appears to be jeopardized at present by stronger bonds 
with industry. Prompt and effective assistance from the ocean-science 
community to such urgent needs as the Thresher search and the recent 
successful weapon-recovery operation off Spain are, we feel, dramatic 
and by no means isolated examples of the beneficial, responsive nature 
of this tie. Both direct evidence from budgets and indirect evidence 
from excellent research proposals for basic studies which have been 
refused suggest the need for increased Navy support of the basic 
oceanographic sciences and technologies. 
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