No naval policy can be wise unless it takes into very careful account the tactics that ought to be used in war.
Commander Bradley A. Fiske, USN, 1905
A Second Edition for the Missile Age
In the decade since the appearance of the first edition of Fleet Tactics the world turned upside down. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. strategy was built afresh, defense spending was throttled back, joint and coalition operations were given primacy, and the phrase of the day in the Department of Defense became “a revolution in military affairs.” When the Soviet Union crumbled, prophecies were heard of a great outbreak of peace; never mind that the disjunction of a major state has rarely been the path to stability in other states. What ensued was predictable: after the bonds of Soviet-American bipolarism dissolved, other nations fragmented as long-suppressed grievances boiled over.
In American policy circles a popular view is that naval operations have changed radically as a result. Doubtless this is true insofar as missions and orientations are concerned. But it is more apt to say that the focus of U.S. naval operations only returned to its roots, as attention was directed more closely to the world’s coastal regions. Contemporary operations, as disparate as the recent war over Kuwait, the interdiction of shipping in the Adriatic, efforts to stabilize countries such as Panama and Haiti, and activities to intercept both drugs and illegal immigrants in the Caribbean, have all taken place in littoral waters. The policy significance for the United States is articulated in a concept called joint littoral warfare, which envisions tautly drawn operations concerted by joint commanders who conduct wide-ranging operations in the “narrow seas” around the globe.
In a deeper sense, the U.S. Navy never left the littorals. The blue-water navy we in theory maintained to confront the Soviet Union was actually employed unceasingly since the end of World War II in contingencies similar to those above. The faceoff between the U.S. Navy and the forces of the People’s Republic of China in 1996 was only the latest in a series of demonstrations that trace back forty years or more and recall to mind the choppy seas plied by the Taiwan Patrol of yore. One will find in any compendium of sea battles, say Helmut Pemsel’s A History of War at Sea, that naval battles large and small have almost without exception been fought in proximity to land. In his fine book, How Navies Fight, Frank Uhlig demonstrates that the same point applies over the U.S. Navy’s entire history. The extent to which navies directly influenced and were influenced by events in littoral waters was ably described by a British army officer, Charles E. Callwell, in the heyday of the Pax Britannica. His book, Military Operations and Maritime Preponderance, first published in 1905, was recently reissued by the Naval Institute Press for its relevance to current American naval operations. A writer could adopt the subjects of Callwell’s chapters just as they appeared almost a century ago and describe contemporary littoral warfare comprehensively merely by using examples of U.S. Navy and Marine Corps involvement around the world since 1950.
Fleet Tactics was written to abide, and so not much of a fundamental nature has had to be altered with respect to tactics in this new edition. “The seat of purpose is on the land” cannot be expressed more forcefully and remains unchanged as a cornerstone on page 34 of this edition. The World War II tactics of the night actions in the Solomon Islands described in chapter 5 were evolved by American navy tacticians in a year-long campaign that exhibits to perfection the supposedly new phenomenon, joint littoral warfare. The book’s original example of a modern fleet against the shore, now in chapter 11, is if anything more apt for present circumstances than it was before for representing an attack against a Russian, Chinese, or Iranian coastal bastion. The first edition concluded that Mahan was wrong to say there are fewer abiding principles and constants of tactics than of strategy. Changes since the first edition affirm this: the dramatic ones have been in policy and strategy. The most startling “revolution in military affairs” has emerged not out of technological possibilities but out of new political realities, abrupt, dramatic, and irreversible.
This is not to say tactics are not changing; it is merely that the present age of modern missile warfare could be foreseen and arose independently from the political scene. The importance of missiles as the primary instruments of naval tactics was anticipated in the first edition.
On the other hand, the fundamental importance of missiles in littoral warfare was not then given the attention it now deserves. With one exception,* every missile attack against merchants or warships in naval history has been in coastal waters. Increasingly land targets have also been attacked by warships. In February 1991 sea-based Tomahawk cruise-missile strikes played a key role in the Desert Storm air victory. Even earlier, ships began to face missile attacks from land to sea. A milestone occurred during the South Atlantic War in June 1982 when an Exocet put the Royal Navy’s destroyer Glamorgan out of action for thirty-six hours and inflicted thirty casualties.
The emergence of missile warfare in the narrow seas is the foremost reason why a revised edition is timely. Land-sea missile attacks have added to the already prevalent strikes by aircraft to and from the sea to blur the tactical distinction between sea and land combat. The most instructive modern naval engagements for control of coastal regions have been fought by land, sea, and air forces acting in concert, with missiles as the principal weapons. Perhaps the navies of the world should no longer refer to “naval” tactics at all. It is more reasonable to think in terms of littoral tactics that include warships.
This is change indeed. The characteristics and tactics of the ships that have fought in coastal waters since World War II are the subject of this edition’s newly minted chapter 6. With sufficient examples now accumulated, the chapter surveys the historical record of tactics in the “missile era.” Over 450 ships have been hit by ASCMs, or antiship cruise missiles, since the first salvo struck the Israeli destroyer Eilat in 1967. These statistics are instructive. In recent years mines have been harmful, submarines have been influential, and both have constrained naval operations out of all proportion to the numbers engaged and damage achieved. We have even seen old-fashioned bombs dropped on ships. Nevertheless the evidence is unassailable that missiles of all descriptions from land, air, sea, and beneath the sea (and, in a sense, from space) dominate modern warfare at sea. Even disregarding nuclear, chemical, or biological warheads, we are in the missile age.
What about the Information Age?
Many words have been splashed in business and defense journals to the effect that the “information age” is now altering civilization as well as the ways of war. A concise response is that the information age is nothing new to the navies of the world. The role of information (scouting) reached fruition in the 1930s with the fusion of air-search and radio communications. Information warfare and operations are indeed evolving with technology, but in most respects they are an extension of what is described in chapter 5 with only minor changes to the first edition. What we have seen in naval tactics is a new weapon—the well-aimed long-range missile—to take advantage of the sensing and communicating technology, and vice-versa.
Admittedly we may be on the leading edge of a new age of tactics. Call it the “age of robotics.” Unpeopled air, surface, and subsurface vehicles have a brilliant, if disconcerting, future in warfare. To appreciate the possibilities, think of future unmanned combat aerial vehicles in the same relationship to the manned combat aircraft as the present precision-guided Tomahawk land-attack vehicle has with respect to the scarcely aimed V-1 cruise missiles of late World War II. Alternatively visualize the programmed activities of future unmanned vehicles as the culmination of possibilities represented by the sophisticated but far simpler guidance program in today’s Exocet missile. This book is not about predictions for the future, but the most likely revolution in military affairs is not in information acquisition, transfer, and processing, the beginnings of which are already fifty years behind us at least insofar as naval tactics are concerned. The revolution will be in uninhabited robots that search and shoot under amazing modes of self-control.
Today’s scientists, engineers, and naval officers will introduce the robotic age before the middle of the twenty-first century. Navies devoted to technological possibilities will be the pacesetters. But navies are not there yet. Navies are now in the midst of the missile age. Chapter 11 will examine the tactical consequences more closely than did the first edition. We have the combat data to do so now.
The last American book on the subject of naval tactics was written more than sixty years ago. It was a history by Rear Admiral and Mrs. S. S. Robison. For a study by an American of the art and science of tactics, one must go back almost to the turn of the century, when tactics was the subject debated by naval officers. In the Naval Institute Prize Essay of 1905, “American Naval Policy,” then-Commander Bradley Fiske devoted twenty-three of eighty pages exclusively to tactics. It was a time when naval officers aggressively asserted that policy and strategy were not wishes but well-founded plans that derived from a calculated capacity for tactical success. As one French officer, frustrated by the irresolution of his government toward the Kaiser’s naval buildup, wrote, “Let us be economical but let us be honest. . . . It is by objectivity—that is, with reference to the possible opponent—that we proportion our arms. . . . If we cannot have the navy estimates of our policy, then let us have the policy of our navy estimates.”* These are watchwords for the twenty-first-century American navy. After fifty years of maritime supremacy during which Americans have become accustomed to a navy that can do everything asked of it, a basic understanding of modern tactics and how fleets win battles will help to avoid a heedless assumption that the seagoing forces have more capabilities than they do.
The onset of the twentieth century was also a time when tacticians governed the direction of warship technology, so much so that at least one American and one Russian author incorporated technology in their definition of tactics. Issues such as the size and placement of guns, the location and thickness of armor, and the location of the conning station and signal bridge were central concerns of tacticians. Naval Institute Proceedings issues at the time abound in prize essays dominated by tactics. In the 1920s the U.S. Navy’s General Board of senior officers fused strategy, tactics, and the characteristics of new warships in its deliberations and used the Naval War College’s gaming facilities as a principal tool to resolve design disputes. A new book by Tom Hone, Norman Friedman, and Mark Mandeles, American and British Aircraft Carrier Development, 1919–1941, illustrates in detail how war games, fleet exercises, the General Board, and the Bureau of Aeronautics all collaborated in the development of U.S. Navy air power.
The heated discourse in the world’s navies during that golden age of tactical thought paid off in World War I. The great surprises were strategical, not tactical. Alfred Thayer Mahan asserted that the principles of strategy were “laid upon a rock,” but the principles of tactics were obscure because tactics depended on technology, and technology changed. He failed to see that strategy would also be affected by new weapons. By contrast, Clausewitz thought that useful principles could be applied more frequently to tactics, and these principles could be transformed into doctrine more readily than strategic principles.*
This book has little new to say about the principles of warfare. It concentrates on tactical processes, trends, constants, and contexts. Although the tactical significance of these four elements will be our subject, the reader may conjecture that also in strategic studies the pursuit of processes, trends, constants, and contexts will bear richer fruit than reliance on principles alone. The biggest revolution in military affairs occurred with the fall of the Soviet Union. All technological and tactical changes are dwarfed in comparison with that seminal event. All American navy planning and operations have been affected by it, and all navy tactics have had to be reconfigured for littoral operations.
The etymological root of the word tactics is the Greek taktika, meaning “matters pertaining to arrangement.” The traditional definition of tactics is the art or science of disposing of or maneuvering forces in relation to each other and the enemy, and of employing them in battle. In this book, tactics refer to the handling of forces in battle. Tactics are not studies but techniques, not an art or a science but the very actions of men in battle. Thus strategists plan, tacticians do.
The definition is deliberately fuzzy. The key words are handling, forces, and battle. Both specifically and contextually the book will clarify these terms. Some say tactics are deployments to win battles. But this may be too much to expect from tactics of inferiority. Moreover, not all navy missions are narrowly directed at battlefield victory. Sound tactics aim to achieve the full potential of forces.
The phrase fleet tactics, synonymous with naval tactics in many studies, for example those by the Robisons and by Fioravanzo, deal with operations involving coordination between multiple ships and aircraft, and the sensors that support them. Sometimes single-unit tactics are discussed, but only in contexts incidental to fleet tactics. In the nomenclature of ground combat, fleet tactics are similar to combined-arms tactics, grand tactics, and air-land battle.
Perhaps naval officers stopped writing about tactics after World War II because they associated tactics with maneuvers. We junior officers wondered at tactics drills in the 1950s; corpens and turns at five hundred yards were exciting stuff, but they were by then no more related to sea warfare than a parade ground drill was related to land warfare. When tactics were scheduled, the schedule meant maneuvers, not battle practice. These evolutions were a vestige of the day when maneuvers of warships were at the very heart of a battle. As recently as 1972 John Creswell, in his preface to British Admirals of the Eighteenth Century, wrote, “The era of fleet tactics, the period during which the major results in sea warfare were influenced by the maneuvering in battle by rival fleets of big ships, lasted for something under two centuries.”* Creswell marks the end of the era with the Battle of Jutland. But since tactics are the employment of forces in battle, then tactics exist whether or not the forces are maneuvered. Although Creswell is right about maneuvers losing the central function they once served for weapon delivery, position relative to the enemy is still a vital tactical ingredient, and maneuvering is still the tool of command in establishing the position for an effective attack.
Another source of confusion is that substantial portions of modern fleets are land-based. Much of the Soviet navy was in the form of long-range bombers tasked to sink American warships and shipping. The NATO nations’ fleets incorporated maritime patrol aircraft operating from airfields on land. Fleet tactics concern combat in which maritime issues are at stake, in other words, with battles for sea control or command of the sea. The sensors and weapons of modern navies of some coastal states may be so predominantly shore-based that the true strength of such a fleet is literally and metaphorically invisible. The ships of a seagoing navy will enter into their coastwise battle space only at great peril.
In the first edition the term fleet tactics excluded the special tactics of amphibious operation, or the naval support of ground warfare with air and missile strikes. Since there is no fleet to challenge American navy supremacy in the oceans except along an enemy coastline, it will be necessary in this edition to study coastal operations and the special hazards of fighting in littoral waters. The first edition was careful to distinguish the purpose of the naval battle, namely control of the sea space so that other forces could safely do their work. These other forces are, first, a flotilla of coastal forces that clears out the enemy’s clutter of coastal shipping and fishing fleets. They are also minecraft. They are amphibious forces, made safe by the fighting fleet from across the oceans right to the landing sites. They are merchant ships providing reinforcements and resupply, safeguarded all the way into port against air, surface, and subsurface attacks. They are the submarines conducting their guerrilla war against the sea lines of communications and the antisubmarine forces that stop them.
The focus on achieving primacy over the enemy battle fleet permitted an important and simplifying feature of the first edition: success was measured in ship casualties and a comparison of the numbers put out of action on the two sides: numbers of ships, of tonnage, occasionally of elements carried such as guns, aircraft, or personnel. Territory gained or lost was an important campaign-level consideration, but when fleets met in battle it was force-on-force, and enemy warships incapacitated was the aim and satisfactory measure of effectiveness.
But when the fleet’s role is to influence events ashore—and that is its contemporary focus and often its reason for being—then the simplicity vanishes and a new measure of achievement is required. The tactics and operations of the campaign become intermingled. Full treatment of navy operations requires a book—a contemporary version of such superb classics as Philip Colomb’s Naval Warfare, Romeo Bernotti’s Fundamentals of Naval Strategy, or Callwell’s Military Operations and Maritime Preponderance. These books, written a century ago, clarified campaign planning and execution, for Bernotti’s book was in fact about operations, not strategy. The books dealt with actions to take and, even a century ago, stressed the necessity of securing an information advantage—what today we call “dominant battlefield awareness.” Operational and tactical scouting takes place in the land, sea, and aerial domains. In the minds of fore-sighted tacticians, dominance must also occur in the domain of an information battlefield that includes cryptology, cellular telephones, computers, e-mail, and the World Wide Web.
Fleet tactics and littoral warfare exist in a matrix of all navy operations, which may be described as four functions performed by navies. A navy’s purposes deal with the movement and delivery of goods and services at sea; in contrast, an army’s purpose is to purchase and possess real estate. Thus a navy is in the links business, while an army is in the nodes business. Seen that way, a navy performs one or more of four functions and no others:
At sea, it |
(1) assures that our own goods and services are safe, and |
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(2) that an enemy’s are not. |
From the sea, it |
(3) guarantees safe delivery of goods and services ashore, and |
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(4) prevents delivery ashore by an enemy navy. |
Saying that navies don’t “purchase and possess real estate” as armies do is to emphasize the navy as a means toward the end of controlling an enemy on the ground. Rarely is the center of gravity of a conflict on the sea or in the air. Sea power’s greatest payoff comes from the highly efficient movement of “goods and services” on the high seas and into friendly or hostile territory. In fact, this array of functions is almost pure Julian Corbett, except that Sir Julian spoke of the protection or denial of trade at sea.
Since the 1950s the American navy has described its functions as sea control, power projection, deterrence, and presence. Apart from a past that is somewhat checkered (one Chief of Naval Operations denied that “presence” was a mission) the terms that served the U.S. Navy well during the Cold War are now too particularized for general use. The above two pairs of symmetrical functions are applicable in all circumstances and apply to navies and nations of all sizes and descriptions, not just to a maritime power like the United States. A coastal navy does not have to be a sea power to be competent and tough within its own domain. Most navies of the world emphasize the fourth function, denial of enemy delivery of goods (soldiers, marines, and their means of war) and services (missile and air strikes from the sea). In coastal waters a little navy may not be able to stop a big navy dead in its tracks, but it can make the delivery a staggering burden.
Sea control is usually associated with winning fleet battles in blue water against a first-class opponent. After the Soviet Union collapsed, many people said, “What’s the U.S. Navy for except to deliver air strikes, which the Air Force does more efficiently?” The answer is that air strikes are a small part of only one function. Denying a coastal state the use of its own littoral waters is a worthy task of a big navy, as is safeguarding the movement of our goods and services into an enemy’s home waters where he makes his goal-line stand.
A fleet may sweep the enemy fleet from the seas only to find the sea lanes threatened by a guerrilla campaign in its rear. At sea all warfare is nonlinear warfare. Submarines that threaten shipping are countered by antisubmarine forces that employ tactics distinct from fleet tactics. Throughout history guerre de course, the French term meaning literally “war of the chase,” was conducted by surface raiders, and later by submarines and aircraft. The raiders survived by stealth and profited by the cumulative, slow erosion of the enemy, using solo or small-group operations. The tactics of attackers and defenders in guerre de course are as different from the fleet tactics as are the tactics of a decisive ground battle from a guerrilla campaign behind enemy lines.
While the American navy is skilled at antisubmarine tactics, amphibious operations, air strikes, and missile strikes, it is unaccustomed to defending against attacks in littoral waters. In addition, as I write we are relearning an old lesson in the Persian Gulf and Adriatic, namely that blockade and inspection are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and thankless tasks.
In chapter 6 I will relate the important features of these functions to fleet tactics. The chapter introduces a new measure of force effectiveness: net delivered combat power over the combat life of the force. This measure makes clear that a ship’s on-board capacity—in units of missiles, aircraft, Marines, or army tanks—must survive enemy attack and be delivered or it counts for naught. The old purity and simplicity of measuring success by counting ship carcasses is lost when the purpose of a fleet is not limited to putting an enemy fleet on the bottom. Chapter 11 will deal in detail with a sixth cornerstone of tactics introduced in chapter 1. It is the famous aphorism, “A ship’s a fool to fight a fort.” All of coastal operations struggle to deal with this venerable truth, which seems even more apropos when long-range air and missile attacks can be launched from modern forts. Yet to perform its tasks the U.S. Navy sometimes can do no other than to risk attacks from the land. It will be a difficult discussion.
Prominent among the terms I use is scouting, by which I mean reconnaissance, surveillance, and all other means of ascertaining and reporting tactical information to a commander and his forces. The Russian word razvedka means the same thing for all practical purposes. Screening, another word of distinguished lineage, is very similar to antiscouting but includes the possibility of attacking a threatening enemy. The terms in general use today, information warfare (IW) and information operations (IO), are weighted down with too many meanings and have lost precision. In some nascent form at one time they meant actions of scouting and antiscouting. Later, IW referred narrowly to the attenuation of an enemy’s means of information application. Now the domain of IW and IO includes operational and strategic as well as tactical activities.
Antiscouting refers to all measures to frustrate the enemy’s scouting effort, escorting to acts of ships and aircraft that accompany and defend valued units from enemy weapons. Escorting is a form of counterforce. An antisubmarine screen defends a convoy or formation of warships that have few if any means to defend themselves. But by threatening enemy submarines and complicating their attempts to close and target the escorted force, the screening ships and aircraft also perform an antiscouting function, to inhibit the submarine’s own search and warn away the screened units when and if the submarine is detected.
Command and control (C2) is the term used for the functions variously referred to as command; command, control, and communications (C3); C3 and Intelligence (C3I); and so on. Specifically, C2 refers to the correlation of information received from scouting, the commander’s acts of decision, and the dissemination of orders to his forces. I use C2 to encompass all information-based decision support systems, and other command support to include all means of communicating orders, but I exclude scouting systems and the scouting process. C2 countermeasures (C2CM) are actions taken to inhibit effective enemy C2. Signals warfare is an important and useful term that crosses the line between scouting, antiscouting, C2, and C2CM. Signals warfare is information warfare without the latter’s acts of violent destruction.
The definition of C2 herein is not universally accepted, but it is becoming more and more common. It has many advantages. One is to ensure that C2 does not narrowly refer to hardware. Another is to rid the text of the excessively comprehensive sense of C3I, which can easily come to include all tactical actions above a one-on-one engagement. C2 denotes not only the uses of scouting information but also the direction of or influence over the allocation of scouting resources. Thus, the C2 process directs the search effort: its direction, depth, intensity, and duration. Since a great constant of tactics is that there is never enough scouting capacity, these are some of a tactical commander’s most critical decisions. In recent times tactical commanders have come to know that the task of directing their search efforts can be oppressive and time-consuming.
One unsatisfactory term, strategic weapons, does not appear in these pages. The concepts of strategic warfare and strategic bombing and the transfer of those concepts into the realm of ICBMs are understandable but not entirely consistent. The text illustrates the tactical properties of long-range nuclear weapons. When and if such weapons are used, handling them on a world-girdling, intercontinental battlefield will involve special tactical skills. In such a ghastly battle the National Command Authority would be a tactical commander with the problem of effectively coordinating the use of air-, land-, and sea-based weapons. We may be comforted that a general nuclear war is now remote without forgetting that local use of weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, has risen as a possibility. It seems to me that the paradigm of naval combat (emphasizing destruction) lends itself much more to an understanding of the tactics of WMD than the ground combat paradigm (emphasizing position and maneuver).
There are few new things to say about the readership of the revised edition. As before, the most important reader is the American naval officer. I know his keen interest in tactics because I teach lieutenants and lieutenant commanders at the Naval Postgraduate School. The disconcerting truth, however, is that a modern naval officer is buried in reports, inspections, and lectures on the issues of the day that deal with everything but how to fight. I want him to have a book that can compete with peacetime distractions. The U.S. Navy ended World War II with battle-tested tactics formulated in fleet doctrine and embedded in the minds of leaders who had participated in its sea battles. That doctrine and those leaders are no more. A half a century has passed since the American navy fought a fleet action. Close to an enemy coastline it may face competent air, sea, and land opposition that is fully capable of giving it a bloody nose. Do we have the right ships and the right combat doctrine to take on a battle fleet that has trained assiduously to fight in its own home waters? Or will we be like the Pacific Fleet of 1942, accustomed to thinking that its superior numbers will prevail, only to be shocked again and again in fleet actions by the Japanese navy’s superior tactics to which it was slow to adapt?
My navy is the U.S. Navy, but Fleet Tactics is also intended for an international readership. Even if my navy continues its mastery of the high seas and is able to exert its influence into coastal waters and over the land unchallenged, that will not be so for all the world’s navies. There have been fleet actions since World War II which are “small” by American standards but with all the chips in the pot for those involved. The fighting ships involved in the Arab-Israeli wars, the South Atlantic War, and the Indo-Pakistani war were small or smallish, but the stakes were large and the tactics were crucial. This book is also for them. The rights to translate Fleet Tactics have been purchased in Argentina, Brazil, and Italy. It seems no happenstance that in their most recent wars at sea the navies of two of these states were found wanting. Everyone makes mistakes and can learn from them, but the armies and navies of the losers are the most eager to learn what they did wrong. The Argentine navy will be no easy mark next time. The Italian navy has produced some of the world’s best tactical thought and its ship designs are well endowed to make them formidable opponents in the future.
C. S. Lewis, the late scholar and writer, referred to himself as a layman in theological matters. Similarly, there is a layman in naval matters with things to say. He speaks with more eloquence than the navy’s blue-uniformed theologians and is capable of wise and detached insights. But if he is going to play a constructive role, then he needs a better grounding in naval tactics than is often the case. This book is not a comprehensive guide to all the lessons of modern naval warfare, but anyone who reads it will be better equipped to reach sound conclusions about modern combat at sea. For example, laymen who observed British and Argentine ships being sunk during the South Atlantic War predicted a dire future for surface warships because they had no memory of the deadliness of all naval battles of the past. In chapter 6 I have juxtaposed ill-founded amateur opinions next to what I think were the lessons that would have been drawn from a better understanding of naval combat and tactics.
The fourth and last reader for whom this book is intended is the youngster of about thirteen years, which is the age at which the future commander at Jutland, John Jellicoe, all four feet six inches of him, entered the Royal Navy and reported aboard the old wooden line-of-battleship Britannia. Genius in mathematics, music, and other fields flowers early, and I want to fill the present void in the literature of tactics to stimulate interested young readers. Since there are now so many competent computer battlefield games, at least one book ought to help explain to some Nimitz or Spruance of the future why his tactics succeeded or failed.
As a boy I learned tactics from Lee J. Lovette, Fletcher Pratt, Bernard Brodie, C. S. Forester, and anyone else whose books appeared in the 359 and 940.5 sections of the Chicago Public Library. On rainy days I would round up friends to correlate forces composed of Tootsie-toy ships and fight housewide battles. Without knowing it we conducted “littoral operations” in which the furniture were islands and doorways were straits. Since we couldn’t afford all the ships to build a fleet—destroyers cost five cents and cruisers ten—we made huge armadas with toothpicks glued to strips of cardboard bearing the name and combat characteristics of each denizen of the seas. It was a great way to spend a rainy Saturday, but I for one would have bartered my whole Tootsie-toy navy for a book like this if it had existed, and all the more quickly because it is written for the professionals. At Marshall Field’s I invested twenty-one silver dollars given to me by my grandfather to buy a copy of the 1944 Jane’s Fighting Ships. On that day Mother and King Neptune foresaw my navy destiny.
Today’s youth with captivating electronic equipment seem more fortunate and sophisticated than we were with our ten-cent models. But lest the electronic generation grow cocky with its advantages, a warning should be voiced. The formulation of good tactics on a home-video screen is no more the measure of battlefield prowess than it is in the game rooms of the Naval War College. Tactics deal with things that are necessary but not sufficient. The execution of tactics on the battlefield is a matter of leadership that captures the hearts and minds of seamen. What Edison said about inventive genius—I percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration—is just as true of success on the battlefield.
Insofar as possible the organization of the second edition follows the pattern of the first:
Chapter 1. The six cornerstones are illustrated by the timeless example of the Battle of the Nile, which is a near-perfect example of sea battle fought up against a coastline for a purpose deeply rooted in operations ashore.
Chapters 2 through 5. These historical chapters lay a foundation for the material that follows and give the reader who knows naval history or thinks he does a chance to compare his own interpretations of tactical development with mine. In particular, these chapters contrast the methods of maneuver, of control, of tactical scouting, and above all of concentrating force practiced by (1) ships of the line, (2) battleships, and (3) aircraft carriers. Three different models of battle help the reader visualize the dynamics of naval actions and the changes that took place.
New Chapter 6. This chapter covers fleet tactics in the era of missile warfare: how battles have been fought since World War II, with natural emphasis on the sea-land interface and, especially regarding the South Atlantic War, how victory came to the side best prepared and equipped to conduct joint littoral operations.
Chapters 7, 8, 9, and 10. As before, the chapters cover the trends, constants, and contexts (or variables) of tactics. We organize and apply the historical lessons from four eras to describe and understand the key processes of naval action: firepower, maneuver, scouting, and C2. There are new entries to treat the land-sea interface and comprehend it.
New Chapter 11. This chapter absorbs material found in old chapter 10 in discussing modern tactics, but extends it to cover joint operations. It develops some tactical conclusions by applying a new “salvo” model of combat in the missile age.
Chapter 12. The concluding chapter is much as before, but the imaginary future Second Battle of the Nile against the Soviet navy is replaced by the Battle of the Aegean with a new opponent, in order to provide a richer discussion of the relationship between a campaign and the fleet tactics within it.
* The Argentine Exocet attack on Atlantic Conveyer, May 1982.
* Baudry, pp. 16–17.
* Clausewitz, pp. 147, 152–54.
* Creswell. p. 7.