METHODS OF EXERCISING COMMAND
I. DEFENCE AGAINST INVASION
In methods of exercising command are included all operations not directly concerned with securing command or with preventing its being secured by the enemy. We engage in exercising command whenever we conduct operations which are directed not against the enemy's battle-fleet, but to using sea communications for our own purposes, or to interfering with the enemy's use of them. Such operations, though logically of secondary importance, have always occupied the larger part of naval warfare. Naval warfare does not begin and end with the destruction of the enemy's battle-fleet, nor even with breaking his cruiser power. Beyond all this there is the actual work of preventing his passing an army across the sea and of protecting the passage of our own military expeditions. There is also the obstruction of his trade and the protection of our own. In all such operations we are concerned with the exercise of command. We are using the sea, or interfering with its use by the enemy; we are not endeavouring to secure the use or to prevent the enemy from securing it. The two categories of operation differ radically in conception and purpose, and strategically they are on wholly different planes.
Logically, of course, operations for exercising command
should follow those for securing command; that is to say, that since the attainment of command is the special object of naval warfare, and since that command can only be obtained permanently by the destruction of the enemy's armed forces afloat, it follows that in strictness no other objects should be allowed to interfere with our concentration of effort on the supreme end of securing command by destruction. War, however, is not conducted by logic, and the order of proceeding which logic prescribes cannot always be adhered to in practice. We have seen how, owing to the special conditions of naval warfare, extraneous necessities intrude themselves which make it inevitable that operations for exercising command should accompany as well as follow operations for securing command. War being, as it is, a complex sum of naval, military, political, financial, and moral factors, its actuality can seldom offer to a naval staff a clean slate on which strategical problems can be solved by well-turned syllogisms. The naval factor can never ignore the others. From the outset one or more of them will always call for some act of exercising command which will not wait for its turn in the logical progression. To a greater or less extent in all ordinary cases both categories of operation will have to be put in motion from the beginning.
Hence the importance of realising the distinction between the two generic forms of naval activity. In the hurry and stress of war confusion between them is easy. By keeping a firm grip upon the difference we can see at least what we are doing. We can judge how far any given operation that may be called for is a sacrifice of security to exercise, how far such a sacrifice may be justified, and how far the one end may be made to serve the other. By applying the distinction as a test much error may be avoided. The risk we take may be great, but we shall be able to weigh it accurately against the value of the end, and we shall take it with our eyes open and of set purpose. Above all, it will enable the Staff to settle clearly for each squadronal commander what is to be his primary objective,
and what the object or purpose of the operations entrusted to him. It is above all in this last consideration, and particularly in the determination of the objective, that lies the main practical value of the distinction.
This will become clear the moment we begin to consider defence against invasion, which naturally takes the first place amongst operations for the exercise of control. Of all the current assumptions, not one is so confusing for the finer adjustments of strategy as that which affirms that the primary objective of our fleet is always the enemy's fleet. Of the battle-fleet and its attendant units it is of course true, so long at least as the enemy has a battle-fleet in being. It is true, that is, of all operations for securing control, but of operations for exercising control it is not true. In the case we have now to consider-defence against invasion-the objective of the special operations is, and always has been, the enemy's army. On this fundamental postulate our plans for resisting invasion have always been constructed from the year of the Armada to 1805.
In the old service tradition the point was perfectly well established. Admirals' instructions constantly insist on the fact that the transports are the "principal object." The whole disposition of the fleet during Hawke's blockade in 1759 was based on keeping a firm hold on the transports in the Morbihan, and when he sought to extend his operations against the Rochefort squadron, he was sharply reminded by Anson that "the principal object of attention at this time" was, firstly, "the interception of the embarkations of the enemy at Morbihan," and secondly, "the keeping of the ships of war from coming out of Brest." Similarly Commodore Warren