Technically, I was in the post-Zumwalt Navy as he retired in 1975. But I joined in 1975 and his policies were still in effect. At the time our work uniform was dungarees (and the flight suit while flying, but the Navy considered those coveralls not a uniform). Our dress uniforms were a new white thing that looked like a glorified milk man, since the Navy had done away with the traditional "crackerjacks" for enlisted men, much to virtually everyones' dismay except AFEES who made a fortune off the deal. Yeah, moral could be low in those days, but it wasn't because of the uniform. It was post-Vietnam and everybody was still getting the "baby killer" treatment from the hippie types if you were in uniform in public. All of the services had an active drug problem and the Navy had the whole beard thing going, but mostly it was the unappreciation from the public. That seemed to change after Desert 1 and the ascension of the Reagan administration and fortunately it hasn't gone back to the low morale of those times..not to say everyone's moral was lower, but it was lower force-wide.
We had a similar issue in the Air Force when I retired in 1994. The Chief of Staff at the time, Merill McPeak, had these crazy uniform changes going on every other month or so. Hey, it was post-Desert Storm and he had to have a legacy, right (considering the CINC at the time wanted one, too)? He changed the Air Force officer dress uniform to what was called the Airline Pilot or Navy officer uniform--much like Navy dress blues, but with silver versus gold sleeve ranks. Most USAF officers hated it--I had no problem with it myself--but what everyone objected to was the removal of the "U.S." from dress uniform collars. At the same time, we went through some crazy changes in BDUs--first we had subdued metal ranks, then sewn-on cloth rank, then no rank at all only on the velcroed name tags--and we had first brown shirts, then black -t-shirts, yada, yada. It seemed like a new uniform change every other month. You couldn't get one set of uniforms into standard before he changed it again. This was true even on flight suits (which the USAF does consider a uniform). It settled back down to a basic USAF officer uniform after he left office, but I was retired by then. The only winners of that fiasco were again AFEES uniform stores, which made a bundle selling personnel new uniforms. I considered it a back-end funding of AFEES in a non-traditional manner. But the uniform never really affected morale. That was made--or broke--by decent leadership and common sense decisions.
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Topic: Army ditches berets for caps (Read 1106 times)