The Trends and Constants of Technology
Technological Pace and Tactical Change
This chapter is a postscript to the subject of the great trends and constants of tactics. Technology is renowned for the way in which it changes tactics: tactical trends develop because of technology, and tactical constants abide in spite of new technology. Of course, technological advancement and its periodic overthrow of tactics themselves comprise a central constant of warfare. The question is whether the increased rate of scientific discovery today translates into a military trend. Do we see more than just the continuing influence of technology on tactics? Do we see acceleration of that influence as well?
We need to know whether the faster rate of technological change gives way to more rapid introduction of potentially revolutionary weapons and sensors in order to answer two tactical questions:
—How often will the effect of new technology be great enough that, exploited in a series of battles, it will affect the outcome of a war? That is, what is likely to be the frequency and magnitude of technological opportunity?
—How well will these technological opportunities be seen and acted on when they arise, so that they may actually be exploited in battle?
Trevor Dupuy in his unpublished papers accumulated evidence that in ground combat the impact of a new weapon on a war’s outcome usually was local and nearly always transitory. He believed that a technological surprise by itself has never won a war on land, but that technology accompanied by a tactical revolution has. Napoleon’s tactical use of mobile artillery was revolutionary; the field artillery itself was not new. It is ironic that the Germans exploited tanks so effectively with their Blitzkrieg, for one of their victims, the French, possessed more and better tanks, and another, the British, had invented them. In these instances the new tools, artillery and armor, were no secret at all. In contrast, when tanks were a surprise weapon and first used in substantial numbers by the British at Cambrai in World War I, they had local successes but could not exploit them. Tank technology, it has been argued, was prematurely squandered by the British, before the tactics had matured. There is the first issue. Is it possible in wartime to develop a weapon—along with the tactics and training—in secret and in such numbers that it will serve as a war breaker? Or will the technological impact of the weapon almost inevitably be local and transitory?
Secret Weapons and Wartime Surprise
Because there are fewer big battles at sea, the potential for decision by technological surprise is greater. At least one weapon is comparable in decisiveness to cryptanalysis, which wrought the great increase in Allied scouting effectiveness: it is the Korean admiral Yi Sun-Sin’s kwi-suns, or turtle boats, which in 1592 won two decisive battles at Pusan and in the Yellow Sea against the Japanese.
Another secret weapon sprung long after its prewar invention was the Japanese Long Lance torpedo. As late as the summer of 1943, the American navy did not know exactly what the Japanese weapon was or why it had been so effective. The Long Lance had been developed in the early 1930s, and Japanese cruiser and destroyer men had trained to the teeth with it. Scorn for Japanese technology takes much of the blame for America’s overconfidence at the start of the Pacific war, which was almost as foolhardy as German and Japanese overconfidence in the immunity of their ciphers.
Then there is the atomic bomb, though it was not specifically a naval weapon and not numerous enough to be regarded as tactical. The bomb was the shocking weapon that administered the coup de grâce to Japan in 1945. The science and technology took four years to develop and only two bombs were built. Is it possible to keep the development of an “ultimate weapon” a secret in peacetime? Evidence suggests that it is not possible, at least not in the United States. Many people in this country believe secret weapons are proper public news. With his book On Strategy, Colonel Harry Summers has helped revive an awareness that a country cannot fight effectively for very long without accounting for the temper of its people. The message would not have seemed so new or fresh if more journalists had read Mahan, the Soviet Russian laws of war, Clausewitz, or even Sun Tzu. Now, the nature of a free population, its society, and its government will also decide the extent and kind of secret weapon developments that are possible. The reader should pick up a thirty-five-year-old book, Vannevar Bush’s Modern Arms and Free Men. Bush concludes that the open society with its greater exchange of knowledge outperformed the closed Fascist societies of Germany and Italy in the exploitation of science and engineering during World War II.* Surely, however, to win the technology war one must have either better science or greater secrecy. One cannot concede both to a foe.
In most instances the hoped-for surprise of new weapons in wartime has been muted in some way. Here are examples of weapons, mostly naval, that brought disappointment in World War II:
—Magnetic influence mines. Germany introduced them against shipping in the estuaries of the British Isles. They were effective but, used prematurely, turned out to be vulnerable to countermeasures.
—Magnetic exploders in American torpedoes. Developed before the war, they worked badly and were a great setback to U.S. operations. In a short war American torpedoes would have been an unmitigated disaster. The British and Germans also had early problems with their sophisticated torpedoes.
—Proximity fuzes. For much of the war they were restricted to use over water out of fear that the Germans would recover one and adopt the technology against U.S. strategic bombers.
—Night fighters. Highly effective, these were too few in number to be decisive.
—Submarines. They were powerful in effect, but their role against warships was well recognized before World War I.
—Sonar. This was a crucial response to the submarine, developed in secrecy. To neutralize the threat it was not enough.
—“Window,” the strips of aluminum foil used to jam enemy fighter-direction radars. The Germans had window early in World War II, but they delayed its application until the Allies used it in the bombing of Hamburg in July 1943. Both sides appreciated the fact that window was a doubled-edged tool of war.
—Jet aircraft, V-1 and V-2 missiles, and snorkeling submarines. All arrived too late in the war to have much effect.
The following are reasons new weapons, secret or known, do not always deliver what they promise:
—Production limitations, as with magnetic mines.
—Testing limitations, as with torpedo exploders.
—Great complexity, requiring skilled operators and integration into fleet tactics, as with radar and night fighters.
—Great simplicity, threatening adoption and exploitation by the enemy, as with window.
—The risk of failure after introduction, as with the U.S. magnetic torpedo.
—Exaggerated expectations, as with sonar.
—The penalty for maintaining secrecy during a lengthy period of development, as with Nazi Germany’s secret weapons.
We may conclude that decisive technological surprise at sea is hard to achieve in wartime. Thus there is little purpose for the inventing side to hold back a new weapon in wartime until the numbers, tactics, and training exist to make it decisive. Certainly the instinct of wartime leaders is to rush a tool of war into the fray. Perhaps it is wrong to venture an opinion on this subject without more written on it, but I do think their professional instincts are correct. To the other side, the side responding to a new technology, I can only suggest that it adopt an attitude of wartime wariness but not paranoia.
Peacetime Evolutions and Revolutions
The situation in peacetime is a sharp contrast. New weapons technology is discovered in plenty of time for the enemy to react to it before war arrives. (For secret sensors the evidence is shakier.) But will the tactical significance of a new weapon, developed in peacetime, be grasped in wartime? When a new enemy weapon is underestimated, failure to invest money in countermeasures and failure to expend enough tactical thought and training on an adequate response seem equally to blame. Obviously the tactician’s province is to do what he can with his own tools. Should he use them for dispersion? Evasion? Preemptive attack? Should he deemphasize the victimized weapon system and emphasize the use of what is left in new or better ways? If he does not see the threat and prepare, then perfectly visible peacetime developments will turn out to be decisive wartime weapons which might as well have been secret. Therein lies the real danger. What are these weapons? New chemical, space, laser, stealth, unmanned vehicles, and mine warfare technologies are all on the horizon. Do we see them?
We have a recent example in Desert Storm, fought in 1992, of one side’s technology and tactics having been unanticipated by the other. Since the war there have been many interpretations of the results and differing emphases on American weapons, sensors, and C2 systems. The brilliant tactical application of them all in concert was even criticized as imperfect! It is not the place of a naval theorist to interpret the interpretations; suffice to say the results illustrate my theme. Attacker success was, like the Blitzkrieg, in proportion to defender unreadiness, even though the defender knew about nearly all the innovations he would face, such as stealthy aircraft, cruise missiles, and satellite surveillance. The defender just could not conceive how these elements would be so crushing when applied in a tactically integrated way. In addition to the massive direct effect on Iraqi forces, the Soviet Union seems to have been awed and humbled by the tactical superiority of the U.S. Army and Air Force as far beyond anything they had imagined was possible.
Now we come to the more subtle issue, the quickening pace of scientific research. Doubtless this acceleration may be called a trend. But there is little evidence that it has been translated into better weapons any faster now than before. We see in this country slower gestation periods for warships, warplanes, and the weapons and sensors of war. In the Anglo-Dutch wars whole fleets were built in a year or two. If the English or Dutch had invented a new naval weapon during those wars, they could have put it to sea in that same space of time. Today in this country it takes fifteen years to conceive a new warship design, marshal support for it, get the appropriations, and build the first prototype. If modern war is decided by the pace of modern technology, then why do we ascribe a useful combat life of thirty years to our warships and half that length of time to our fighters and attack aircraft? Why do the Russians, who seem to be able to deploy new designs faster than the Americans, nevertheless keep obsolete ships and aircraft in inventory for so long? Decisive tactical surprise is not likely to derive from the acceleration of scientific research, at least not in this country. High tech is the enemy of speedy exploitation.
Nevertheless, let us postulate a new weapon of war that has the potential to change the face of battle—to break open the war. The long-range cruise missile and homing mine serve to illustrate. The navy first experimented with submarine-launched cruise missiles in the 1950s and deep-sea homing mines in the late 1960s. The question facing the community that understands technological promise is how to transform the technology into combat reality at sea. The answer is that technology should be introduced by evolution instead of revolution. The evolutionary approach can work in a free society. Yet Americans persist in haggling over and redesigning every ship and aircraft and sensor on paper to the point of exhaustion before they are produced. In the case of the cruise missile, the navy decided to hold up production for thirty years because it couldn’t demonstrate an efficient method for targeting the weapon. Develop the weapon and the targeting system will follow! It would have been sad indeed if development of the major-caliber gun had been deferred until the details of its fire control had been worked out by W. S. Sims.
U.S. treaty cruisers are the perfect example of a successful evolutionary approach. The limits on heavy cruisers prescribed by the naval armaments treaties negotiated between the world wars were eight-inch guns in a ten-thousand-ton standard-displacement hull. The design aim under the treaties became, instead of cost effectiveness, “tonnage effectiveness.”* Two ships of the Pensacola class were “designed to weight.” They were called dogs, top-heavy and poorly armored. Even while the Pensacolas were under construction, design lessons were being incorporated into the second class, and every couple of years a better class was authorized. The culmination of the series of four cruiser classes, each an improvement, was the magnificent Astoria class of seven superb and much-admired ships. In World War II the Pensacolas fought side by side with the Astorias, and it would be difficult to say which class performed better in combat. The Pensacolas may have been prototypes, but they were not merely prototypes. They were imperfect but effective warships. And they showed the way to something better: the real breakthrough came with the heavy-cruiser designs produced in wartime, the Baltimore, Oregon City, and Newport News classes, fully outfitted with AAW weapons, search and fire-control radars, and ultimately semiautomatic eight-inch guns.
There are many examples of important hidden improvements in the combat capability of a weapon. One is the rifling of gunbarrels. Another is the improvement made to fire-control systems in dreadnoughts. New engines can barely be detected from an aircraft’s appearance but can vastly change aircraft performance. Any change in computer reliability or cryptology is invisible, and any scouting system in space is invisible, at least to an amateur observer. Karl Lautenschläger asserts that the most important characteristic of the Soviet Oscar-class submarine was not its great size but the likelihood that its missiles were guided by space-based sensors.† Submarines that depend on acoustic stealth are in a continuing duel to operate more quietly than the enemy, and the quieter they become the more “invisible” they are. All of these important alterations were possible because there was a combat ancestor to improve upon.
When a technology is revolutionary in potential, as the sail was during the age of oars, steam during the age of sail, and the aircraft carrier during the age of the battleship, the practical matter of exploiting the new opportunity is exceedingly complicated, even after you know where you want to go. The objective of an orderly phase-in is not to evade the attention of the guardians of the status quo. The Old Guard sees real threats while they are still wisps of smoke on the horizon and many threats that do not even exist. No, the objective is to solve a monstrous transition problem. If new tactics for new systems are difficult to develop, tactics that blend the old and the new are even more difficult. (Consider the false starts that were made when the new roles for carriers and battleships in mutual tactical support had to be worked out.) Building a new navy from scratch, as the United States did with the New Navy of 1881–1914, is simplicity itself compared with the job of transforming a navy that already exists and plays a vital defense role, as the U.S. Navy does today.
Assuming the technical development of an astounding new weapon system can take place in an orderly fashion, there is still everything else that follows: retraining, integrating old tactics with new, handling logistic support, and attending to a host of mundane details. These are the substantive problems. Arranging such transitions is not the technologists’ responsibility, but it is the problem with revolutionary technology. Moreover, it is not likely that a less expensive new weapon with greater capability can save much in the defense budget. First, during its introduction, the costs of new production, and of temporarily duplicated training and logistic support, will add to the budget. Second, the advantage to us of a new weapon will soon be an advantage to the enemy, and on what basis do we suppose that he will not budget the same on defense as before and buy more units than we?
But the central technology problem remains how to make the transition from an old navy to a new one. It is a huge problem, as the situation in America today shows. There are two contending schools of U.S. naval thought. On one side are the American aircraft carrier proponents (let it be noted that other navies are starting to build their own carriers), on the other side is almost everyone else in Washington. Critics say the navy should restructure itself in some new, imaginative way. But it is not that easy. Former Under Secretary of the Navy R. James Woolsey once complained there are more views on the correct composition of the U.S. Navy than the navy has warships. Admiral Isaac Kidd is supposed to have said during his incumbency as chief of naval material, “Our navy is being nibbled to exhaustion by a flock of ducks. The bites aren’t fatal, but you spend all your time fending them off.” Too many people in Washington can say no to an innovation and no one can say yes. When Vannevar Bush said that the unity of decision under a totalitarian regime was a recipe for making colossal technological mistakes, whereas there was relative efficiency in the prevalent confusion of decision making in a democracy, he could not have anticipated the tortuous system of procrastination that characterizes modern American defense procurement.* Still and all, frustrated tacticians should understand that even in better times there were great burdens on the men who had to choose where defense dollars would go. The noise of modern Washington’s quarrels is duck quacks compared with the roars of the old-time lions. In his writings Bernard Brodie reminds us of the difficulties that confront men in the best of worlds:
Men who have been condemned out of hand as unimaginative or unprogressive may simply have been much more acutely aware of technical difficulties to overcome before a certain invention could be useful than were their more optimistic contemporaries. The mere circumstance that one man was proved wrong in his predictions and another right does not prove that the latter was the more discerning observer. . . .
This question is closely related to the whole issue of conservatism in high military or naval circles, upon which there has been a good deal of dogmatic writing. It is natural that inventors or cranks should inveigh against the persons or political bodies whom they believe to be capaciously placing obstacles in the way of their own recognition. In the aggregate such condemnation mounts up to such a hue and cry that even the disinterested observer is likely to take it up. Writers vie to surpass each other in hurling invectives at the “big-wigs” or the “brass-hats.”
In 1842, Sir Robert Peel, defending the Board of the Admiralty against charges of having ignored Captain Warner’s torpedo invention [the whole Warner scheme was commonly referred to in later years as the “Warner hoax”], pointed out some of the problems facing a public body in respect to the adoption of a new invention. “I think,” he said, “that on the one hand a public man is culpable if he wholly disregards suggestions of this nature, and on the other, equally culpable if upon slender grounds he lends himself too unreservedly to their support. . . . Every man in office has been in the habit of receiving applications of this nature—not a day passes without something of the sort.”*
Elting E. Morison has been at once a sympathetic interpreter of naval conservatism and a critic of it. In one of his essays he tells the story of the Wampanoag, astonishing product of the technological genius of Benjamin Isherwood which the Old Navy laid up to rot.† On her sea trials in February 1869 she made seventeen knots in heavy seas, and later, returning to New York in calm water, she made twenty-three.‡ The fastest ship outside of the United States at that time was the British Adriatic, which once ran a measured mile in calm water at a speed of fifteen knots. No other ship would match the Wampanoag’s speed for twenty years.
The Wampanoag was fast because she was designed by Isherwood as a whole ship, with a mission. The mission was to hunt down Confederate raiders, or else, and as an afterthought, to act as a raider herself, preying on British commerce. She was a sprinter. Therein lay the problem. To the westward-looking, insular, Indian-fighting, railroad-building American nation of 1870–90, the Wampanoag and in a sense the whole navy seemed to be superfluous. Morison speaks out against a reactionary navy that wanted to follow the old ways and was blind to the future even when it lay tied up in New York Harbor. He is right about the blindness. He is wrong to assign blame to the navy alone; the whole nation was responsible. The grizzled old sea dogs of the secretary of the navy’s board who rejected the Wampanoag on absurd grounds (Morison lists them) were guilty of being inarticulate—it is an old problem with naval officers—but that is all. They were practical men working with a budget that had been all but eaten up by government apathy, and worse, they were trying to run a navy that was maintaining a distant and poverty-stricken presence around the world. The Wampanoag could go like a flash for five hundred miles or cruise for a few days on coal, but what good was that on the African station? With a shallow draft, slender lines, and the ability to move nimbly as a greyhound under steam, under sail she was awkward as a seaman recruit. In the 1870s navy ships had to have endurance to execute their pathetic little mission. It is true that navy leaders might have been more indignant. Instead Vice Admiral David Dixon Porter, hero of the Civil War, champion of sail, and enemy of engineers, would order cruises under sail for economy and to “instruct the young officers of the Navy in the most important duties of their profession.” While the West was being won, nobody cared about a navy. For most of two decades an unarticulated national policy decreed that there was no place for Wampanoags. The decision to lay her up seems sad, but inevitable.*
We are not quite finished with the story of this remarkable ship, so pregnant with technical and military implications. The effectiveness of raiders was on the wane. From the days of Francis Drake to Raphael Semmes and James Waddell, the payoff of guerre de course trended downward. In 1875 the smoke of twenty knots could be seen a long way off, and one ship under steam did not evade squadrons of two or three for long. Imagine how a navy of commerce raiders would have affected the New Navy a decade later, around 1889. You can hear the Old Guard complaining: Fine thing this fancy new doctrine of Mahan’s about command of the sea, cultivated by that academic Stephen B. Luce up there in Newport, Rhode Island! We have the fastest cruisers in the world, we have, all descendants of the master-engineer Ben Isherwood’s first greyhound! We know our mission—it’s commerce raiding. Let’s have speed, battle cruisers will be next, then the USS Indefatigable, the USS Hood, the USS Repulse. The children of the Wampanoag could have been a navy like Mussolini’s, fastest in the world, but with never enough fuel to train, hardly enough fuel to go to battle, and not even enough speed to run away.
Everyone should read Elting Morison. He is almost always right about the U.S. Navy. His examples of its technological myopia are withering. He explains with magnificent understanding why this is:
And the Naval service of that time [mid-nineteenth century] was more than a set of regulated routines, ordered procedures, and prescribed tables of organization. If not quite a whole society, it was, at least, almost a complete culture. . . . It can seem at times arbitrary, discriminatory, elitist, insensitive. . . . And, like any closed system, it was limiting on the higher flights of imagination and longer reaches of intelligence.
But there were great and redeeming features, some of which, perhaps, it would be nice to have today. . . . The whole structure of the Navy was shrewdly designed to enable men to deal effectively with that unforgiving, incalculable element, the sea. Furthermore, it was imaginatively designed to enable men to live and work together in confined spaces, in uninsulated intimacy, for long periods of time in isolation from the rest of the world. . . . The meaning of this relationship of the man to the service, to the authority of culture, had in it something of that governing power that moves the churchman.*
In all his writings Morison expresses well why the modern navy needs a research and development base, the vision to see what that base offers, and the power to act on insights. And yet there is the Wampanoag, the ship without a mission, to remind us that technological anticipation is not enough. With it go a naval policy compatible with technology, a strategy, a competitive price, and last but not least, an appreciation of the tactical context into which more speed, or more armor, or more endurance, or more firepower, or a better sensor is going to fit.
Usually more than one piece of technology is required to create a revolution. Sail and cannon together replaced the oared galley. Steam power alone was not enough to replace the ship of the line. It took the steam engine, the screw propeller, and the metal hull all together, which in turn made possible the big gun and the marriage of rifling, breech loading, and an effective fire-control system. Big aircraft carriers were nothing without powerful aircraft engines to lift bombloads worthy of the name, and big aircraft required powered elevators, catapults, arresting gear, and the science of long-range navigation over water. The big naval revolutions depended on both a polyglot of technologies and a synthesis of leadership. Even the Polaris submarine, the embodiment of a naval revolution as neat and swift as we are likely to see, would not have arrived without the inspired marriage of two technologies, nuclear propulsion and solid-fuel rocketry; the work of two great technical leaders, Hyman Rickover and Red Raborn; and a chief of naval operations who understood warfare, politics, and the value of swift action, Arleigh Burke.
When the big-deck aircraft carrier that has been the mainstay of American sea power passes from the scene, the change will be grand and intricate—technologically, strategically, fiscally, and tactically. I do not say Elting Morison’s truism about navy conservatism does not apply, for indeed even among businesses like the steel and automotive industries, which do know the direction they should be taking, there is powerful inertia, a tendency always to defer things for just one more year or two. But in the navy’s case there is no clear direction. Besides STOVL and VSTOL aircraft (and all they imply), there are at least three other major technologies that might serve as the basis of a new force structure. When the nature of System X, as I will call it (it will really be a web of systems), becomes clear, the navy must work out its transition problem, for carriers will remain useful instruments of sea power long after System X becomes the sword point of battle. During transitions old technologies linger, and for good reason. This was the case with the battleship—it abided, though it was prematurely maligned after having been almost undone by neglect during the Washington Treaty years. It was the case with small guns, which were still used after the advent of the big gun, whose propitiousness in the beginning was overrated. It was the case with wood and sail when steel and steam were in the offing but not geared to the American mission. It is even now the case with diesel-powered submarines; there were many kinks to work out of the first nuclear submarines, and even today, after thirty years, nuclear submarines have not and should not totally supplant their nonnuclear counterparts in the world’s navies.
Strategically, System X must guard the surface and allow the continued movement of commerce and military force across it; and guarding the surface means dominating the air space above it. These are special American national interests, which represent at once both vulnerability and opportunity.
Fiscally, the transition to System X must be endorsed with more understanding than current carrier critics have, whose argument rests on the proposition that a carrier battle group is terribly expensive. Navies have always been expensive. The unspoken reason that drove the Washington Conference to a treaty was that none of the signatories could afford an arms race. Each already knew it would probably have to abandon much of its own construction because of tremendous shipbuilding costs. As I have said, a new navy that replaces 12 aircraft carriers with 120 Systems X is not likely to be cheaper, and the cost of the transition will, or should, exceed “normal” budget levels. The biggest contribution the advocates of a new navy can make is to lay to rest the myth of a cheaper fleet.
Technology, strategy, and budget are all contributions that friendly outsiders may make to the great transition. Fleet tactics for System X will be the navy’s own unique contribution. However the system works, naval officers will need to shape it imaginatively, not simply by updating old operational requirements for missile cruisers, fighter aircraft, or communications satellites. The transition from oar to sail was more than a change from line abreast to line ahead; the change was veritably from old tactics like those on land to unprecedented new tactics at sea. Although a column under sail looked like a column under steam, the tactical rationale for one column was vastly different from that for the other. If this book helps lay the groundwork for the new tactics that accompany System X by unfurling some professional sails in the imagination of officers who will someday work them out, it will have served a better purpose than the one intended, which is to spawn a debate over the tactical employment of current weapons and the development of tighter doctrine for them.
In any event, System X will not be imposed on the navy from outside. Technologists may offer a menu of alternatives, strategists may propound the policy context, comptrollers and congressional committees may cajole or threaten, foreign navies may offer new threats to render obsolete old means of sea power, but in the end the U.S. Navy must find its own way. The aim of this section has been to make clear to the civilian that a major transition is a deep maze. While there is no guarantee that the navy will find its way through the maze in good time, evidence suggests the amateur zealot will only lead the navy into blind alleys.
Tactical (and strategic) change wrought by technology is a great constant. There does not seem to be an acceleration in the advent of new and revolutionary weapons to correspond with the accelerating pace of technology itself.
Occasionally the introduction of a remarkable new weapon developed in the midst of war has had a decided effect on the outcome of a campaign. Usually the effect is limited because of the need for secrecy, testing, complexity, production, and training, and because of the threat of enemy discovery. When a new weapon system is developed during war, it should be put into action quickly.
New weapons and scouting systems developed overtly in peacetime can win wars when they are accompanied by sound tactics and suitable doctrine and used by well-trained forces. Weapons and scouting systems developed carefully but secretly in peacetime can be expected to have important consequences, but these are limited to the extent that production, doctrine, and training are curtailed by secrecy. To respond to clandestine and not so clandestine enemy instruments of war, doctrine must be adaptable at war’s outset. Someone outside of the navy’s regular training and operating establishment must be thinking about the tactical ramifications of surprises, so that new tactics may be swiftly introduced, practiced, and put into action.
New weapons often require the development of new tactics by men of great vision. Both weapons and tactics will be perfected more quickly if a series of similar fighting machines are built, each model following rapidly on the heels of its predecessor. It is impossible to design the perfect weapon for large-scale production and employment without practicing with it; even then, it takes three or four generations of hardware before a weapon realizes its potential. Observers looking for great breakthroughs and ultimate weapons may miss important changes in capability that are not manifest in a weapon’s external appearance.
Tactical hopes and technological opportunity are separated by an invisible wall, which is a source of friction and frustration. Naval tacticians have been guilty of trying to fit new capabilities into the tactical framework with hidebound lack of imagination. Inventors have been guilty of advocating new capabilities, like the Wampanoag’s speed, which are too fragile, too narrow in their purpose, or too expensive for tactical adaptation.
As for the great transitions in naval warfare, these take longer than expected, not only because of the time required to perfect a new instrument of war and build it in numbers, but also because a shakeout of tactics takes time. While the new manner of warfare shapes up, plans must be formulated for a transition, during which the old and the new both have combat roles to play. These roles are decided by evolutionary tactics, doctrine, and training—that is to say, by the warrior-customers. But the ultimate impact of a great transition in the hands of a master tactician may be felt like a bolt from the blue, even when technology has introduced the new weapons in front of our very eyes.
Great transitions require the engineering insight to fuse several scientific potentialities into a dramatically different weapon or sensor, the tactical insight to see how the weapon will change the face of battle, and the executive leadership to pluck the flower of opportunity from the thorns of government. The inspiration for these transitions often comes from outside a navy. The perspiration always comes from within it.
* Bush, pp. 193–232.
* Rear Admiral Stalbo, in the Red Navy’s Morskoy Sbornik, writes that even now this is the most important criterion of warship construction. See Stalbo, no. 5, p. 25.
† Lautenschläger, p. 57. A former naval air intelligence officer, Dr. Lautenschläger was on the research staff of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
* Bush, p. 193.
* Brodie (1943), pp. 438–39.
† E. E. Morison (1966), pp. 98–122.
‡ Pratt (1941), pp. 343–46.
* For more on the nadir of the U.S. Navy, also see Albion, pp. 199–204. I am less pro-Wampanoag than the historians, who seem enchanted by technology for its own sake. Until 1902 the British, who also had many remote stations to patrol, built one-thousand-ton sloops of war to cruise under sail.
* E. E. Morison (1977), p. 14.