Week 8 Seminar: Buying it back

Reinstatement has a price, and the US Naval Academy's return to celestial navigation is a rare chance to read the invoice.

12 April 2027

Open the slides

The case, or the argument#

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 around the decision 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. It 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.

That itemised cost is why this case matters to the course: most of this syllabus documents a loss. This one documents what buying it back actually required, in public, with numbers attached — the closest thing the course has to reading an invoice for reinstatement rather than just an announcement of intent.

What we do in the seminar#

Read the Naval Academy 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 rather than a hypothetical? Compare that argument to the one FOGBANK’s reinstatement effort had to make after the fact.

One reading#

Military Times (2015) — read for the specifics: which class, how many hours, and what the stated justification was, not just the headline decision.

A question left open#

FOGBANK (week 4) and the F-1 (week 5) were both reinstated only once the capability was urgently needed. The Naval Academy reinstated celestial navigation as a hedge, before the loss was forced. What would it take for an institution to reinstate something on that basis more often — and is the Naval Academy case rare because it’s hard, or because most institutions never notice the gap while there’s still time to hedge?