Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) (Source: ONI WebSite) In 1882, the United States Navy was emerging from the post civil war period and facing an enormous explosion in the technological base of other world class navies. The Office of Naval Intelligence, ONI, was established to seek and report on these advancements to assure that our Navy also shared in this revolution.
Naval attaches and military affairs officers began a systematic collection of technical information about foreign governments and their naval developments. This formed a library of data for the Department of the Navy from which vast amounts of information began to flow. Reports of foreign technology advances began to circulate between the various bureaus of the Navy, stimulating new interest in naval matters. Additionally, ONI’s close association with the newly founded Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, resulted in war game modeling, and testing of new strategies and naval theories took shape for future leaders.
LT Theodorus B. M. Mason was the First Director of Naval Intelligence in 1882.
What began as a small office of borrowed officers from other naval staffs came into its own as the tiny office grew to assume the larger role of war planning for the Navy.
Following the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor, Cuba, and the declaration of war with Spain, the Navy was realizing the nation’s responsibilities extended far beyond our shores and across the oceans. ONI provided vital information that had great value in shaping naval strategy as well as details about the Spanish fleet capabilities and harbor defenses.
By the time the nation entered the First World War, it clearly recognized the importance of continuing the collection of technical information to help improve fleet capabilities. While the war planning function was transferred to another staff, Naval Intelligence took on new responsibilities for all aspects of security for war materials plants, security checks for Navy personnel, censorship and ferreting out spies and saboteurs.
Following World War I, the Navy was scaled down, but many of the wartime functions remained part of the duties of ONI. Nonetheless, the primary duties for the collecting, evaluating and disseminating of information were retained. The Chief of Naval Operations in 1929 codified these functions as permanent, thereby defining the ONI mission.
As the Navy and the nation became troubled by the possibility of involvement in another war, the Navy was debating who should control the dissemination of decoded Japanese diplomatic communications-derived intelligence. The decoding function was controlled by the Office of Communication, but the translation, evaluation and dissemination fell to ONI. The logic of combining the two important functions for greater effectiveness was an outgrowth of getting the information to the field as fast as possible.
One of the biggest breakthroughs in the Pacific Theater was the breaking of the Japanese naval code, which gave the Navy its first major victory at Midway in June of 1942. Sadly, the code was not broken in time to prevent the surprise attack on the fleet in Pearl Harbor on the morning of 7 December 1941.
Following the end of World War II, demobilization of manpower and downsizing of the Navy occurred. Nonetheless, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz recognized the need to maintain a professional corps of intelligence personnel and strongly endorsed strengthening the Office of Naval Intelligence. The importance of that plea soon became apparent as the nation and the Navy entered the era of what would be known as the Cold War. The first round was fought in Korea, and the Navy was in the thick of it.
Admiral Nimitz's foresight enabled the Navy to again marshal its intelligence resources to meet the challenge. This effort to collect, evaluate, and disseminate useful information to the warfighters continued throughout this period, including Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War, and today.
ONI is the oldest continuously operating intelligence service in the nation. While its mission has taken many different forms over its evolution, the main purpose has not changed from its inception. ONI’s primary mission remains to keep the fleet, national leaders and decision makers informed with critical war fighting information to assure a winning margin over any navy that would challenge this country’s interests.
Located in the Federal Center in Suitland, Maryland, the National Maritime Intelligence Center, or NMIC, is the home and nerve center of ONI. NMIC also supports the United States Coast Guard Intelligence Coordination Center, the Naval Information Warfare Activity, and the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity.
ONI is a cutting edge institution providing an excellent environment for the technically proficient who wish to maintain a state of the art knowledge in communications, engineering and analysis. There are many areas of particular interest at ONI for young professionals of nearly every discipline from English major to chemistry. For example, under the topic of engineering might be found theoretical analysis, structural studies in measuring the tensile strength of metals, deformation resistance and perhaps the chemical analysis of an alloy sample.
In a nearby area, a naval architect might be found running a simulation program on his computer to determine a ship’s propulsion, displacement or theoretical limits to speed. Assisting him might be a mathematics specialist or a physicist calculating the probabilities and limits of a system being studied.
Communications and electronic signals is yet another area where might be found a physicist and an electronics engineer sorting through electronic emissions to determine source, acuity effectiveness, or the differences within the signal which, much like a human fingerprint, would differentiate one signal from another.
In the area of open ocean acoustic studies, the main problem is that sound can travel great distances. The question to be answered here is whether the source of the sound was marine life, or was it mechanical, or was its origin in the vast seas covering three-fourths of the globe?
For all of these studies to be useful, reports must be written, and ONI turns out a lot of them on a yearly basis. Not only do the reports need library research, but also writing, editing, and electronic production with the information instantly disseminated to thousands of users in real time through state of the art communications technology. ONI is a large house under whose roof can be found nearly any kind of professional that can be imagined.
If you are interested in more information, you can visit the ONI WebSite at
