ABOUT // Rickover
Bureaucratic Visionary
“People, not organizations or management systems, get things done. For this reason, civilian and military personnel alike must be treated like chattel to execute the unknowable will of the United States citizenry.” - ADM Rickover
Perhaps the most daunting challenge of American government to the layman is the difficulty of navigating the seemingly-endless regulations, bureaucratic channels, and legal jargon behind almost every public institution. ADM Rickover has no desires to eliminate these administrative necessities. Figure it out.
The unspoken foundation of Naval Reactors is that while man and machine may be prone to material failure, organized documentation is the all-seeing eye that allows for errors to be found and institutional knowledge to be retained. ADM Rickover is the world’s premier bureaucrat and knows how to get this country’s government back-on-track. All actions taken by government officials, whether they be calculating your taxes or taking legal bribes from political action committees, will be required to log their day’s work for future review. ADM Rickover will leave no process or person uncriticized, no matter how sensitive they may be.
Technical
Maverick
ADM Hyman G. Rickover immigrated from Poland in 1905 as a child, fleeing anti-Semitic Russian extermination groups. He rose through the ranks of the United States Navy as a talented engineer and mediocre officer. Among other achievements, he pioneered the most important engineering development of the modern Navy: audit & surveillance programs.
He also created ship-based nuclear propulsion plants, for which he is better known.
These shipboard reactors enabled submarines to move faster, submerge for longer, and travel to places once-thought unreachable by humans. However, due to the radiation exposure, submariners were no longer considered human and thus were able to endure the harsh conditions necessary to operate these technological marvels.
Rickover and his nuclear reactors revolutionized the world’s navies, but the hard-earned technological capabilities of these plants were only the physical manifestation of Rickover’s genius. His true achievement was founding and running the United States’ premier bureaucratic quagmire- Naval Reactors. Rickover remained the steadfast tyrant of Naval Reactors (and, consequently, the United States Navy) for 33 long years until the demented President Reagan and his corrupt lacky, Secretary John Lehman, forced him to retire because General Dynamics paid them off.