board of inquiry conducted aboard New Mexico and presided over by her commanding officer, Captain Yates Stirling, Jr., delivered its findings of "unavoidable accident" to Vice Admiral Wiley and made recommendations to avoid such future accidents, including greater precautions in handling the magazine powder and equipping gun turrets with escape hatches. On October 30, 1924, Wiley shifted his flag from New Mexico to the recently constructed battleship . The following month, both Wiley and Koehler gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times for an article titled, Coast Defenses Planned to Make Southland Safe- War Dept. Expects to Have Los Angeles Invulnerable to Enemy Attack. "As long as the Battle Fleet is out here, Los Angeles is as safe as Omaha. Take away the fleet and I wouldn't give a nickel for it," Wiley stated. Koehler, referred to in the article as Wiley's aide and "one of the Navy's best men on military strategy", expanded on the statement, "As long as this fleet is in being the Pacific Coast needs no coast defenses. The point of defending our country is not in waiting until the enemy crosses the sea, but to get out and whip the tar out of him before he gets here. No amount of coast defenses, however modern or of what immense range, would save the Pacific Coast if the fleet were not in being. It was thought in 1914 that the defenses of Namur were absolutely invulnerable, that they were the most modern in the world, yet the Germans cracked them in forty-six hours. The same was true at Liège and Verdun. On the other hand, land fortifications are sometimes essential. They are essential at Hawaii because Hawaii is vital to the existence of the Battle Fleet and they are vital at Gibraltar because they can forbid the passage of the Mediterranean." During Koehler's time aboard West Virginia, the battleship made a cruise to the South Pacific. He held that assignment until September 1925. Thereafter, he remained at Balboa, Panama, where he directed the Balboa Naval Transmitting Station, a VLF-transmitting station for relaying orders to submarines that had begun service around 1915. While in Panama, Koehler's mother, Mathilda, visited him. He was assigned as an instructor at the United States Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island on April 17, 1926, and remained there until October 1927. In this capacity he was able to share the