The Navy as a Fighting Machine

by Bradley A. Fiske

In a preceding chap01 endeavored to show why it is that the necessities of the naval defense of a country have caused the gradual development of different types of vessels, each having its distinctive work. If those different types operated in separate localities they would lose that mutual support which it is the aim of organization to secure, and each separate group could be destroyed in turn by the combined groups of an enemy. For this reason, the types or groups are combined in one large fleet, and an admiral is placed in command.

The command of a fleet is the highest effort of the naval art. Its success in time of war demands in the admiral himself a high order of mind and nerve and body; and it demands in all the personnel, from the highest to the lowest, such a measure of trained ability and character that each shall be able to discharge with skill and courage the duties of his station.

In order that the material fleet shall be efficient as a whole, each material unit must be efficient as a unit. Each ship must be materially sound; each pump, valve, cylinder, gun, carriage, torpedo, and individual appliance, no matter how small, must be in condition to perform its expected task. The complexity of a fleet baffles any mental effort, by even those most familiar with it, to grasp it fully. Each dreadnaught, battle cruiser, destroyer, submarine, collier, tender, hospital ship, scout, supply ship, and what-not, is a machine in itself, and is filled with scores—in some cases, hundreds—of highly specialized machines, operated by steam, oil, air, electricity, and water. A superdreadnaught is a machine which, including the machines inside of her, costs $15,000,000; a battle cruiser more.

The personnel is nearly as complicated as the material. Not only are there all the various ranks of commissioned officers in the line, medical corps, pay corps, marine corps, etc., but there are ten kinds of warrant officers besides; while in the enlisted personnel there are ninety-one different "ratings" in the navy, and thirteen in the marine corps, besides temporary ratings, such as gun-pointer, gun-trainer, gun-captain, etc. Each rank and rating carries its rigidly prescribed duties, as well as its distinctive uniform and pay. That such a multitudinous host of types and individuals, both material and personnel, can be actually combined in one unit fleet, and that fleet operated as a mobile directable organism by its admiral, is a high achievement of the human intellect.

How is it done?

By discipline, by training, by knowledge, by energy, by devotion, by will; by the exercise of those mental, moral, and spiritual faculties that may be grouped under the one term "mind": the same power that co-ordinates and controls a still more complex machine, the organism of the human body.

Despite its relative crudeness, a fleet possesses, more fully than any other fruit of man's endeavor, the characteristics of an organism, defined by Webster as "an individual constituted to carry on the activities of life by means of parts or organs more or less separate in function, but mutually dependent." And though it must be true that no fleet can approximate the perfection of nature's organisms, nevertheless there is an analogy which may help us to see how a complex fleet of complex vessels has been slowly evolved from the simple galley fleets of earlier days; how its various parts may be mutually dependent yet severally independent; and how all must be made to work as one vast unit, and directed as one vast unit by the controlling mind toward "the end in view."

The common idea is that an army consists of a number of soldiers, and a navy of a number of ships. This idea is due to a failure to realize that soldiers and ships are merely instruments, and that they are useless instruments unless directed by a trained intelligence: that the first essential in an army and the first essential in a navy is mind, which first correctly estimates the situation, then makes wise plans to meet it, then carries out those plans; which organizes the men and designs the ships, and then directs the physical power exertable by the men and the ships toward "the end in view."

Owing to the enormous mechanical power made available in ships by the floating properties of water, machinery is more used by navies than by armies; but this does not mean that machinery can take the place of men more successfully in navies than in armies, except in the sense that navies can use more mechanical power. The abundant use of machines and instruments in navies does not mean that machinery and instruments can take the place of trained intelligence—but exactly the reverse. Under the guidance of trained intelligence, a machine or instrument can perform wonders. But it is not the machinery that does the wonders; it is the trained intelligence that devised the instrument or machine, and the trained intelligence that operates it. Let the trained intelligence err, or sleep, and note the results that follow. The Titanic, a mass of 40,000 tons, moving through the water at 20 knots an hour, a marvel of the science and skill of man, crashes into an iceberg, because the trained intelligence directing her errs—and is reduced at once to an inert mass of iron and brass. The mighty fleet of Russia meets the Japanese fleet in Tsushima Straits; and because the trained intelligence that directed its movements seriously erred, in an engagement decided in less than an hour, is stripped of its power and glory, and transformed into a disorganized aggregation of separate ships—some sunk, some sinking, some in flight. The Japanese fleet, on the other hand, because it is directed with an intelligence more highly trained than that which directs the Russian fleet, and because, in consequence, the officers and enlisted men perform their various duties not only in the actual battle, but in preparation for it, with a skill greater than that used in the Russian fleet, suffers but little damage in the fight—though the advantage in number and size of ships is slightly with the Russians. As a consequence of that battle, the war between Russia and Japan was decided in favor of Japan, and terms of peace were soon agreed upon. Russia lost practically all the ships that took part in the battle, and several thousand of her officers and sailors—and she lost the whole object for which she went to war.

The difference between the Russian and Japanese fleets that gave the victory to the Japanese was a difference in trained intelligence and in the relative degrees of preparedness which that difference caused.