"King was unsympathetic with Marshall's dilemma in dealing with the imperious MacArthur, who had been a prewar Chief of Staff of the Army when Marshall still been a colonel. Marshall, he believed, "would do anything rather than disagree with MacArthur." (Nimitz was unquestioningly an obedient subordinate to King, but MacArthur's association with Marshall would be tenuous and tempestuous throughout the war.) King also suspected that Stimson uncritically supported MacArthur and pressured Marshall to appease the Southwest Pacific commander. This made King dislike Stimson even more. Marshall left his element and began foundering in uncharted waters when he argued that MacArthur should control fleet movements in his own area. His ignorance of naval communication procedures, for example, was glaringly exposed in a memorandum to King. "His basic trouble," King later said, "was that like all Army officers he knew nothing about sea power and very little about air power.""