The U.S. Navy has only recently recognized that there is both an art and a science to leadership and that higher command at the flag and general officer level requires a unique approach in professional military education. As understanding slowly developed, the navy began by using history and biography, then they used applied social science theories and business management applications. In the early twenty-first century, the Naval War College began a new approach, a previously untried method of individual flag officer development.

In the late eighteenth century, the United States of America took form in the context of ideologies from the Enlightenment that informed not only the political context and debate over the purposes and functions of a navy but also how Americans initially viewed naval officers. At the outset, Americans did not like the title of “admiral,” which they thought inappropriate to their new republic. Primarily because of the Royal Navy's name, Americans viewed it as a product of the monarchical and aristocratic values they were trying to avoid. Many thought military and naval education a danger to the new republic, believing in the militia and the innate abilities of Americans as militiamen and privateers.

At the same time, they had no corresponding distaste for the rank of “general,” which Congress gave to George Washington and others, associating it with Cromwell and the militia rather than the aristocracy.

The American Continental Navy of 1775–1785 and the United States Navy, established in 1794, used the rank of captain, not admiral, for its most senior officers. On 22 December 1775, Congress appointed Captain Esek Hopkins commander in chief of the Continental Navy with the courtesy title of commodore – the Dutch term that King William III had introduced into the Royal Navy in 1689. Congress overwhelmingly voted to deny Hopkins the perquisites of an admiral, such as table money for expenses. Hopkins's career was short and unsuccessful. When Congress dismissed Hopkins from service, no one replaced him as commander in chief.

On 15 November 1776, the Continental Congress had created a table of equivalent ranks for the officers of the army and navy that included the naval ranks of admiral, vice admiral, rear admiral, and commodore.