He was an unlikely candidate to begin a revolution in shipbuilding. With an undergraduate degree from Evangel College, a small Christian school in Missouri, and an MBA from the University of Arkansas, he hardly fit the mold of a chief of naval operations prototypically groomed for leadership from his earliest days at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

A self-professed “radical,” at times irreverent and impassioned, he wanted to run the Navy like a business, streamlining training, rooting out misspent dollars, retaining sailors who shined and getting rid of those who did not.

Our national ideology is sabotaging everything.