The Navy as a Fighting Machine

by Bradley A. Fiske

A navy being a machine composed of human and material parts, it is clear that the work of designing it correctly should take account of all the parts at the outset; and not only this—the whole design should be completed before any parts are made and put together if the best results are to be obtained. This is the practice in making material machines in manufacturing establishments—and no other practice there could be successfully pursued. It is the outcome of the experience of tens of thousands of men for many years—and the result of the expenditure of tons of money.

This remark as to manufacturing establishments does not include the development of new ideas, for which experimentation or original research is needed; because it is sometimes necessary, when venturing into untrodden fields, to test out by mere trial and error certain parts or features before determining enough of their details to warrant incorporating them in the drawing of the whole machine. Similarly, some experiments must be made in the methods, organization, and material of the naval machine; but in this, case, as in the case of manufacturing establishments, the experimental work, no matter how promising or alluring, must be recognized as of unproved and doubtful value; and no scheme, plan, or doctrine must be incorporated in the naval machine, or allowed to pose as otherwise than experimental, until successful trials shall have put it beyond the experimental stage.

The naval machine consists obviously of two parts, the personnel and the material; these two parts being independent, and yet mutually dependent, like the parts of any other organism. Obviously, the parts are mutually dependent not only in the quantitative sense that the more numerous the material parts the more numerous must be the personnel to operate them, but also in the qualitative sense that the various kinds of material determine the various kinds of personnel that must be provided to operate them with success. Gunners are needed to handle guns, and engineers to handle engines.

In this respect, personnel follows material. In the galley days only two kinds of personnel were needed—sailors to handle the galleys (most of these being men merely to pull on oars)—and soldiers to fight, when the galleys got alongside of the enemy. Ship organization remained in a condition of great simplicity until our Civil War; for the main effort was to handle the ships by means of their sails, the handling of the simple battery being a very easy matter. Every ship was much like every other ship, except in size; and in every ship the organization was simple and based mostly on the necessities of handling the ship by sails.

The first important change from this condition followed the departure of the Confederate ironclad Virginia (Merrimac) carrying 10 guns and 300 men from the Norfolk Navy Yard on the 8th of March, 1862, and her sinking hardly two hours afterward the Union sloop of war Cumberland, carrying 24 guns and 376 men; and then destroying by fire the Union frigate Congress, carrying 50 guns and 434 men. The second step was taken on the following day, when the Union Monitor, 2 guns and 49 men, defeated the Merrimac. These two actions on two successive days are the most memorable naval actions in history from the standpoint of naval construction and naval ordnance, and perhaps of naval strategy; because they instituted a new era—the era of mechanism in naval war.

The next step was the successful attack by the Confederate "fish-torpedo boat" David, on the Union ironclad Housatonic in Charleston harbor on February 17, 1864; and the next was the sinking of the Confederate ironclad Albemarle by a spar torpedo carried on a little steam-launch commanded by Lieutenant W. B. Cushing, U. S. N., on October 27, 1864.

These four epochal events in our Civil War demonstrated the possibilities of mechanism in naval warfare, and led the way to the use of the highly specialized and scientific instruments that have played so important a part in the present war. During the half-century that has intervened since the Monitor and Merrimac ushered in the modern era, since the five brave crews of the David lost their lives, and since Cushing made his amazing victory, a contest between the sailor and the scientist has been going on, as to which shall be deemed the ultimate master of the sea. As in many contests, the decision has gone unqualifiedly to neither; for he who sails the sea and braves its tempests, must be in heart and character a sailor—and yet he who fights the scientific war-craft of the present day cannot be merely a sailor, like him of the olden kind, but must be what the New York Times, a few years ago, laughingly declared to be a combination quite unthinkable, "a scientific person and a sailor."

Each year since the fateful 8th of March, 1862, has seen some addition to the fighting machinery of navies. Some appliances have been developed gradually from their first beginnings, and are to-day substantially what they were at first—but of course improved; among these are the turret, the automobile torpedo, the telescope-sight, the submarine, and the gyrocompass. Many other appliances found favor for a while and then, having demonstrated the value of what they attempted and did perform, were gradually supplemented by improved devices, doing the same thing, but in better ways; in this class are many forms of interior-communication apparatus, especially electrical. Still other appliances are adaptations to ship and naval life of devices used in civil life—such as the telephone, electric light, and radio.

Each of these appliances has required for its successful use the educating of men to use it, and frequently the creation and organization of entirely new branches of the service; an illustration is the radio corps in each of our large ships. At the present time the attitude of officers and of the department itself is so much more favorable to new appliances that a clear probability of a new device being valuable is a sufficient stimulus to bring about the education of men to use it; but a very few years ago many devices were lost to us because they were considered "not adapted naval use." Now we endeavor to adapt them.

The present complexity of our material is therefore reflected in the complexity of the organization of our personnel; and as it is the demands of material that regulate the kind of personnel, and as a machine must be designed and built before men can learn to use it, it follows that our personnel must lag behind our material—that our material as material must be better than our personnel as personnel.