Commissioned ensign, he served four years aboard the battleship Tennessee before being dispatched to the Asiatic Station with the destroyer John D. Edwards to participate in the Yangtze River Patrol.

'"[2] Sides returned to sea in October 1944 in command of Mine Division 8 for combat duty in the Pacific theater, where the Navy credited him with "contributing materially to the success of the Okinawa invasion."

In June 1948, he began two years as deputy to the assistant chief of naval operations for guided missiles, Rear Admiral Daniel V. Gallery.

[1] As deputy assistant chief of naval operations for guided missiles, Sides risked his career by participating in the Revolt of the Admirals, an episode of civil-military conflict in which high-ranking Navy officials publicly clashed with their Air Force counterparts and civilian superiors over the future of the United States military.

Testifying as a guided-missile expert before the House Armed Services Committee on October 11, 1949, Sides warned that the Air Force's B-36 strategic bomber would not be able to penetrate Russian defenses to deliver its nuclear payload as claimed, since the United States already possessed supersonic guided missiles that would "seek out and destroy the really fast jet bombers now on the drawing boards" and the Russians had likely inherited a similar capability from the German Wasserfall missile development program and personnel they had captured at the end of World War II.

Sides had hoped to captain the first guided-missile cruiser, which the Navy had expected to put in operation by that year, but its development schedule had slipped due to problems with the sound barrier.

Keller ordered the services to shift from experimentation to production on five missile projects: the Army's Nike; the Air Force's Matador; and the Navy's Terrier, Sparrow, and Regulus.

In 1954, Freitag and his colleagues at the Bureau of Aeronautics (BuAer) again tried to engage the Navy in FBM development by funneling their research to a secret study committee chaired by Massachusetts Institute of Technology president James R. Killian.

This external endorsement by a distinguished independent evaluator persuaded the chief of BuAir, Rear Admiral James S. Russell, to fully commit the bureau to FBM development.

However, Russell exercised his statutory prerogative as bureau chief to appeal directly to James H. Smith, assistant secretary of the Navy for air, who kept the project alive until Carney was succeeded by Burke on August 17, 1955.

Within 24 hours of being sworn in, Burke summoned Sides, Freitag, and other Navy missile experts to his office for a briefing on the FBM research studies.

By the end of the meeting, Burke had reversed Carney's veto and committed the Navy to an all-out FBM development program, directing Sides and Freitag to work out the operational details.

On September 13, 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower accepted the Killian Committee recommendations and directed the Navy to design a sea-based support system for Jupiter.

[6] In response, Burke created the Special Projects Office, a new organization with a mandate to develop a submarine-launched solid-fuel fleet ballistic missile.

At the long-delayed commissioning of the Navy's first guided-missile cruiser, Boston, in November 1955, Sides declared that the new ship marked a fundamental change in sea warfare because it was now possible to defend the fleet against bombers without losing several fighter planes in the process.

"[1] Sides commanded the cruiser division for only four months before being recalled to Washington in April 1956 to become deputy to the special assistant to the Secretary of Defense for guided missiles, Eger V. Murphree.

The impression was unwittingly created that we were really on our uppers, when, as a matter of fact, each one of these so-called unsuccessful missiles yielded a great deal of the very information it was fired to obtain.

In November 1961, en route to Bangkok to repay a visit to Pearl Harbor by the commander in chief of Thailand's Navy, Sides stopped overnight in Saigon with his wife.

"[18] He died of a heart seizure on the Coronado golf course near San Diego, California at the age of 73, and was buried in Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery.