Even though I was in the Army at the time, I had the same feeling in 1998 when the Naval Academy stopped teaching celestial navigation.
Wow, when basic navigation is no longer taught, a heading is figured out by a machine and a sextant is a word in the dictionary. What is the result when you have battle damage or electrical failure reducing the “navigator” to a pile of junk?
If I remember the stories of my father in law, 93 years young and a 26 year navy vet from 1935 to 1961, young sailors learned how to use the sextant