The Navy as a Fighting Machine

by Bradley A. Fiske

Despite the great gulf normally fixed, however, between the engineer and the inventor, most of the definite progress of the world for the past one hundred years has been done by the co-ordination of the two; a co-ordination accomplished by "the man of business."

Now the inventor and engineer type do not exist only in the world of engineering and mechanics, though it is in that world that they are the most clearly recognized; for they exist in all walks of life. In literature, inventors write novels; in business life, they project railroads; in strategy, they map out new lines of effort. In literature, the engineer writes cyclopædias; in business, he makes the projected railroads a success; in strategy, he works out logistics and does the quantitative work.

In that part of strategy of which we are now thinking—the designing of the naval machine—the inventor and the engineer clearly have two separate lines of work: one line the conceiving, and the other line the constructing, of strategic and tactical methods, and of material instruments to carry out those methods. Clearly, these two lines of work while independent are mutually dependent; and, if properly carried out are mutually assistant. The coworking of the inventor and the engineer is a little like that coworking of theory and practice, which has been the principal factor in bringing about the present amazing condition of human society commonly called "Modern Civilization."

The shortcomings of human speech are most evident in discussing complicated matters; and for this reason speech is supplemented in the engineering arts by drawings of different kinds. No man ever lived who could describe a complicated machine accurately to a listener, unless that machine differed but little from a machine with which the listener was acquainted. But hand a drawing of even a very complicated machine to a man who knows its language—and the whole nature of the object is laid bare to him; not only its general plan and purpose, but its details, with all their dimensions and even the approximate weights. So, when the forces representing a complicated naval situation are placed upon the game-board, all the elements of the problem appear clearly and correctly to each person; the imagination has little work to do, and the chance for misunderstanding is almost negligible. Of course, this does not mean that the game-board can decide questions with absolute finality. It cannot do this; but that is only because conditions are represented with only approximate realism, because the rules of the game may not be quite correct, and because sufficient correct data cannot be procured. The difficulties of securing absolute realism are of course insuperable, and the difficulties of getting absolutely correct data are very great. The more, however, this work is prosecuted, the more clearly its difficulties will be indicated, and therefore the more effectively the remedies can be provided. The more the game-board is used both on ship and shore, the more ease will be found in getting correct data for it, and the more correctly conclusions can then be deduced.

These remarks, while intended for tactical games, seem to apply to strategical games as well; for both the tactical and the strategical games are simply endeavors to represent actual or probable situations and occurrences in miniature, by arbitrary symbols, in accordance with well-understood conventions.

War games and war problems have not yet been accepted by some; for some regard them as games pure and simple and as academic, theoretical, and unpractical. It may be admitted that they are academic and theoretical; but so is the science of gunnery, and so is the science of navigation. In some ways, however, the lessons of the game-board are better guides to future work than "practical" and actual happenings of single battles: for in single battles everything is possible, and some things happen that were highly improbable and were really the result of accident. After nearly every recent war there has been a strong move made toward the adoption of some weapon, or some method, that has attained success in that war. For instance, after our Civil War, many monitors were built, and the spar torpedo was installed in all our ships; after the battle of Lissa, the ram was exploited as the great weapon of the future; the Japanese War established the heavily armed and armored battleships on a secure foundation; and the early days of the present war caused a great rush toward the submarine. Yet, in most cases, the success was a single success or a very few successes, and was a little like the throw of a die, in the sense that the result was caused in great measure by accident; that is, by causes beyond the control of man, or by conditions that would probably not recur.

The game calls our attention to the influence of chance in war, and to the desirability of our recognizing that influence and endeavoring to eliminate it, when reasoning out the desirability or undesirability of a certain weapon or a certain method. Of course, every thoughtful person realizes that few effects in life are due to one cause only, and that most effects are due to a combination of many causes; so that, if any weapon or method succeeds or fails, it is illogical to infer from that one fact that the weapon or method is good or bad. A common illustration is the well-known fact that a marksman may hit the target when his aim is too high or too low, provided that he has erroneously set his sight enough too low or too high to compensate; whereas if he had made only one error instead of two, he would have missed. "Two wrongs cannot make a right," but two errors can compensate each other, and often do. The theory of the Probability of Errors recognizes this. In fact, if it were not true that some errors are plus and some minus, all errors in gunnery (in fact in everything) would be additive to each other, and we should live in a world of error.

The partial advantage of the game-board over the occurrences of actual war, for the purpose of studying strategy, lies largely in its ability to permit a number of trials very quickly; the trials starting either with identical situations, or with certain changes in conditions. Of course, the game-board has the tremendous disadvantage that it presents only a picture, and does not show a real performance; but the more it is used, and the more fleets and game-boards work together, the more accurate the picture will become, and the more correctly we shall learn to read it.

One limitation of the game-board is that it can represent weather conditions only imperfectly—and this is a serious limitation that mayor may not be remedied as time goes on. The theory of the game-board is in fact in advance of the mechanism, and is waiting for some bright inventive genius for the remedy. Until this happens, the imagination must do the best it can, and the effect of a certain kind of weather under the other conditions prevailing will have to be agreed upon by the contestants.

The term "war game" is perhaps unfortunate, for the reason that it does not convey a true idea of what a "war game" is. The term conveys the idea of a competitive exercise, carried on for sport; whereas the idea underlying the exercise is of the most serious kind, and has no element of sport about it, except the element that competition gives. A war game may be simply a game of sport—and sometimes it is so played; but the intention is to determine some doubtful point of strategy or tactics, and the competitive element is simply to impart realism, and to stimulate interest. When two officers, or two bodies of officers, find themselves on different sides of a certain question, they sometimes "put it on the game-board," to see which side is right.