The Navy as a Fighting Machine

by Bradley A. Fiske

It is the story that the final order to the British navy in the early part of August, 1914, was the word "Go." All the units went immediately, understandingly, unitedly; and the greatest machine the world has ever known was almost instantly in operation at full speed. No such stupendous feat, physically considered, had ever been done before. The mobilization of the Prussian army in 1870 and of the German army about August 1, 1914, were as great performances mentally and strategically, but not physically, by reason of the relative feebleness of the forces set in motion. This relative feebleness was due, of course, to the insignificance of muskets compared to navy guns, of railway-trains compared to battleships, etc.—an insignificance far from being neutralized by the greater number of the units, for one 14-inch shell has an energy equal to that of about 60,000 muskets, and no army contains anything approximating the powerfulness of a battleship.

Not only, however, must the strategist make plans in peace for preparations that culminate in mobilization, and simply insure that the navy shall be ready in material and personnel when war breaks; he must also make plans for operating the navy strategically afterward, along each of the various lines of direction that the war may take. In other words, the work of preparation strategy in making war plans may be divided into two parts—mobilization and operation.

The plans of mobilization deal naturally with all the activities concerned, material and personnel, and endeavor to arrange a passing from a state of peace to a state of war in the quickest possible time, and with the least chance of errors and omissions. A considerable degree of imagination is required, an almost infinite patience, and a perfect willingness to work indefinitely without any reasonable expectation of getting tangible results. A more hopeless task can hardly be given any man or body of men than that of working out plans, general and detailed, day after day, for contingencies that will probably never happen, and to guard against dangers that will probably never come; preparing tables, diagrams, and schedules which are almost certainly doomed to rest forever in the sepulchre of the confidential files.

Yet this work is basic. Perhaps it is for that reason, that it is obscure and dull; basic work is apt to be so. The spectacular success of an individual in any walk of life is often but the crowning of the unrecognized, and often utterly unknown work—of other men.

Strategy is not a science only; it is an art as well; and although the art cannot be practised in its perfection until after the science is well comprehended, yet the art of strategy was born before the science was. This is true of all those departments of man's activity that are divided into sciences and arts, such as music, surgery, government, navigation, gunnery, painting, sculpture, and the rest; because the fundamental facts—say of music—cannot even attract attention until some music has been produced by the art of some musician, crude though that art may be; and the art cannot advance very far until scientific methods have been applied, and the principles that govern the production of good music have been found. The unskilled navigators of the distant past pushed their frail craft only short distances from the land, guided by art and not by science; for no science of navigation then existed. But the knowledge gradually gained, passing first from adept to pupil by word of mouth, and afterward recorded on the written and then the printed page, resulted first in the realization of the fact that various apparently unrelated phenomena were based on the same underlying principles; and resulted later in the perception, and still later in the definite expression, of those underlying principles. Using these principles, the navigator expanded the limits of his art. Soon we see Columbus, superbly bold, crossing the unknown ocean; and Magellan piercing the southern tip of the American continent by the straits that now bear his name.

But of all the arts and sciences, the art and science that are the oldest and the most important; that have caused the greatest expenditure of labor, blood, and money; that have been the immediate instruments of more changes and greater changes in the history of the world than any other, are the art and the science of strategy.

Until the time of Moltke the art of strategy, like most arts, was more in evidence than the science. In fact, science of any kind is a comparatively recent product, owing largely to the more exact operations of the mind brought about by the birth of the science of measurement, and the ensuing birth and development of the mechanic arts. Before Moltke's time campaigns were won by wise preparation and skilful execution, as they are now; but the strategical skill was acquired by a general or admiral almost wholly by his own exertions in war, and by studying the campaigns of the great commanders, and reflecting upon them with an intensity that so embedded their lessons in his subjective mind that they became a part of him, and actions in conformity with those lessons became afterward almost automatic. Alexander and Napoleon are perhaps the best illustrations of this passionate grasping of military principles; for though both had been educated from childhood in military matters, the science of strategy was almost non-existent in concrete form, and both men were far too young to have been able to devote much time or labor to it. But each was a genius of the highest type, and reached decisions at once immediate and wise, not by inspiration, but by mental efforts of a pertinacity and concentratedness impossible to ordinary men.

It was because Von Moltke realized this, realized the folly of depending on ability to get geniuses on demand, and realized further the value of ascertaining the principles of strategy, and then expressing them so clearly that ordinary men could grasp and use them, that he conceived and carried into execution his plan; whereby not only actual battles could be analyzed, and the causes of victory and defeat in each battle laid bare to students, but also hypothetical wars and battles could be fought by means of problems given.

The first result of a course of study of such wars and battles, and practice with such problems, was a skill in decision a little like that developed in any competitive game, say tennis, whist, chess, poker, boxing, and the like—whereby any action of your adversary brings an instantaneous and almost automatic reply from you, that you could not have made so skilfully and quickly before you had practised at the game; and yet the exact move of your adversary, under the same conditions, you had never seen before. Of course, this skill was a development, not of the science, but of the art, as mere skill always is; but as skill developed, the best methods for obtaining skill were noted; and the principles governing the attainment of success gradually unveiled themselves, and were formulated into a science.

Naturally, strategy is not an exact science like mathematics, physics, or engineering—at least not now. Whether it ever will be cannot be foretold. The reason that strategy (like medicine and most other sciences concerning human beings) is not an exact science is simply because it involves too many unknown quantities—quantities of which our knowledge is too vague to permit of our applying exact methods to them, in the way in which we apply exact methods to the comparatively well-known quantities and elements in the so-called "exact sciences." But a science may be a science even if it is not an exact science; we may know certain important principles sufficiently well to use them scientifically, even if we do not know them with sufficient exactness to permit us to use them as confidently as we should like. We may know, for instance, that it is folly to divide a military force in the presence of an active enemy into such small forces, and at such distances apart, as to let the enemy defeat each small force, one after the other, even if we do not know exactly how far it would be safe to separate two forces of a given size, in the presence of an enemy of a given power. It is well to know a fact in general terms, even if we do not know it in precise terms: it is well to know in general terms that we must not take prussic acid, even if we do not know exactly how much is needed to kill.