Buying it back#

the decision#

In 2015, the United States Naval Academy reinstated instruction in celestial navigation, having dropped it from the core curriculum decades earlier on the reasoning that satellite positioning had made it unnecessary. The public reporting is unusually explicit about why: concern that satellite navigation could be degraded or denied, and a judgement that the backup skill needed to exist in people, not only in policy.

the itemised cost#

The reporting is also unusually explicit about the cost of getting the capability back — new instruction hours, a specific class year to start with, instructors who had to relearn or newly learn a skill the institution had spent decades treating as obsolete.

why this case matters here#

Most of this syllabus documents a loss. This one documents what buying it back actually required, with numbers attached — the closest thing the course has to reading an invoice for reinstatement rather than just an announcement of intent.

discussion#

• Read the case as a proposal document: what would you have had to argue, and to whom, to get this funded before satellite denial was a live concern?
• Compare that argument to the one FOGBANK’s reinstatement effort had to make after the fact.
• FOGBANK and the F-1 were both reinstated only once urgently needed. The Naval Academy reinstated as a hedge, before the loss was forced. What would it take for institutions to reinstate on that basis more often — and is this case rare because it’s hard, or because most institutions never notice the gap while there’s still time?

activity: write the reinstatement proposal#

Setup (5 min). Recap the case as if it were a funding proposal, not a finished decision.

Groups (20 min). Draft the pitch you’d have had to make, years before any denial event, to a budget committee: who’s the audience, what’s the ask, what’s the resistance you’d expect.

Share-back (15 min). Compare your pre-emptive pitch to what FOGBANK’s after-the-fact reinstatement ask must have looked like.

debrief#

What’s structurally harder about the pre-emptive pitch than the reactive one? Does the Naval Academy’s itemised cost make a future pre-emptive ask easier to argue elsewhere, or is each institution starting from zero?

wrap-up#

Reinstatement has a price, and this is the rare case where the invoice is public before the crisis, not after it. Week 9 asks a question this whole syllabus has been quietly skipping: how would you know a loss claim is even true?