Isegoria

One of our most realistic ways to teach ground tactics, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations notes, is on instrumented ranges that substitute lasers for deadly bullets and shells:

English tactical analyst David Rowland, however, discovered the troubling fact that in infantry battles the difference between casualty rates inflicted in actual combat and those estimated on an instrumented range was less by a factor of seven. Soldiers are more cautious when excessive boldness results in death rather than embarrassment.

Harvard professor Barton Whaley’s study of strategic deception, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations explains, led him to make certain recommend­ations:

Most deception in the twentieth century was supported by commun­ications and other electronic media. Only 23 of the 115 deceptions that Whaley investigated from 1914 to 1968 involved naval operations, such as Pearl Harbor and Midway, and most of those dealt with amphibious assaults, such as the Normandy invasion.

Nevertheless, many of Whaley’s general conclusions regarding successful deception are robust for fleet tactics and campaigns as well. His prescriptions include

• Reinforcing preconceptions or expectations of the enemy commander; then do something different.
• Using deception, which he says is a low-risk endeavor, whether it works or not.
• Using multiple false clues—say up to six—because some clues will not reach the enemy decision-maker, and using more than one clue adds credibility to the ploy.
• Employing strategic deception does not cost much in forces or dollars, but it involves some devoted thinking by the deceiver and his staff. It is not certain that tactical deception will be similarly inexpensive in terms of the number of forces that are needed to achieve it.

Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations discusses the great variables in naval warfare:

In his book Discussion of Questions in Naval Tactics, Russian Vice Admiral Makarov related a remark that Napoleon made to the Russian ambassador to France in 1812: “All of you think that you know war because you have read Jomini. But if war could be learned from his book, would I have allowed it to be published?”

True, if theory won battles, theory would be a state secret. But it does not win battles. Even Communist regimes publish military theory openly in the interest of fostering a unified purpose. Theory falls short because it cannot predict the variables that decide battle tactics and outcomes. Theory sees trends and constants, but not the contexts of time, place, and policy—that is, those determinants of tactics that are unknown in advance of war and those variables in each commander’s equation that change from battle to battle, region to region, season to season.

[…]

Peacetime commanders are the professional ancestors of men who fight. In the Navy’s inner circles we honor leaders such as William Moffett, Joseph Reeves, and William Pratt who helped prepare for our battles, but who were never privileged to lead them. Charitably, we forget others—officers who were devoted to inspections, paperwork, freshly painted hulls, and elegant wardroom appointments.

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Having been so heavily committed over the years to widely dispersed operations in small detachments around the world with the aim of preventing or containing war, the U.S. Navy of today will be ill-prepared to fight as a coordinated fleet of many ships.

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A fleet fights on the momentum of two flywheels. One is fleet doctrine; the other is stability in the fighting force. Woe is the fleet that is sent into battle with neither.

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Mission and forces should match hand and glove. The U.S. Navy invented task forces years ago to coordinate the two. The task force is a marvelous concept—an assembly of just the right forces in the right numbers to carry out a specific task.

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The basic premise of naval strategy is that the destruction of the enemy’s fleet opens all doors. In practice, a great battle for command of the sea seldom occurs unless both sides choose to fight. What Clausewitz said of war applies here to decisive naval battles—that the decision for war originates with the defense, not with the aggressor; the ultimate object of the aggressor is possession, not fighting. Naval history is replete with examples of one side deciding to avoid decisive battle, which helps explain why there have been so few battles at sea.

There was a time when a group of ships was kept in port as a “fleet-in-being.” The idea was to prevent the defending force from being defeated without having inflicted enough damage on the attacking force to deny them the opportunities they could otherwise enjoy after winning. A survey of modern naval weapons suggests that keeping a fleet-in-being is more difficult than it once was, but that it is not yet an outmoded strategy in conventional war.

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Yet, these operations are unique to World War II. From the centuries spanning Hannibal’s campaign and Tsushima, one searches in vain for an example of an overseas operation succeeding on the ground without the attackers having gained control of the intervening sea.

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In the European and Central command regions, from 1970 until 1990 the average of new crisis responses involving naval forces was 2.9 a year. From 1990 to 1996 the average was 5.0 crisis responses a year. (In all, there were 91 crisis actions over 27 years, or an average of 3.4 a year.) At the same time, the active fleet shrank by 40 percent. Perhaps even worse, the duration of each crisis increased by more than an order of magnitude, from a median length of less than a month through 1989 to more than a year from 1990 on.

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The shore facility is more survivable in theater war, but in general war it will be pre-targeted, so a mobile afloat facility is preferable. Airborne command posts are survivable, but ingenious provision must be made for their logistic support after a matter of only a few hours. A seaplane command post—a craft that can sit on the water but also move quickly to avoid attack—is a better way to combine survivability and greater logistic endurance.

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What have been the options of the inferior navy? One is to maintain a fleet-in-being, as the Germans did with their High Seas Fleet after Jutland and the French often did with their sailing navy. But the competence of an inactive navy withers away and over time the superior navy will be able to take successively greater risks to exploit its command of the sea.

A second possibility is to try to whittle the enemy down to fair odds in decisive battle. That was the wartime objective of the High Seas Fleet before Jutland and the training objective of the Imperial Japanese Navy before World War II. The High Seas Fleet developed tactics that emphasized deception and trickery to gain an advantage in battles between small detachments. The peacetime Japanese developed tactics appropriate to inferiority—and later exercised them from habit during the war, when Japan actually enjoyed superiority.

A third approach, when the ratio of forces gives the smaller fleet a chance, is to catch the enemy with a temporary vulnerability and exploit it to gain command of the sea. The inferior navy cannot base its actions on enemy capabilities, but must be prone to accepting risk and willing to act on an estimate of enemy intentions. Doubtless that was what Nimitz had in mind before the Battle of Midway, when the American fleet was outnumbered. His orders to Fletcher and Spruance were to fight on the basis of calculated risk. 5 An inferior navy should put unstinting emphasis on superior scouting. Nimitz and his two combat commanders based their battle plans on good intelligence from code work. To attack effectively first, an inferior force must overcome its limitations by some combination of initiative and surprise.

A fourth approach is to establish local superiority, as the Germans did in the Baltic during much of World War II and the Italian navy and air force did at times in the Mediterranean.

The fifth possibility for an inferior navy is simple sea-denial. The goal of sea-denial is to create a vast no-man’s-land. Why should command of the sea be necessary for a continental power to achieve its purpose on land? Denying the coast to the enemy may suffice. The U-boat campaign against British shipping in two world wars was an unambiguous attempt at sea-denial in the service of continental aggrandizement. The British submarine, surface, and air campaign against Rommel’s sea line of communication is another, less pure, example. Sea-denial, extended long distances at sea by air and submarine attacks, was the core Soviet naval strategy against NATO and the U.S. Navy.

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There is another possibility that Mahan’s disciples tend to slight. The continental power may achieve a maritime objective by action on land.

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In World War I, when France survived with Britain’s help, Germany had to base its fleet and U-boats in the North Sea. In World War II, after France was overrun, the U-boats were unleashed from the Bay of Biscay, and if Hitler had chosen he could have devastated Allied shipping with aerial attacks from French airfields.

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Sir Francis Bacon’s hoary dictum, “He who commands the sea … may take as much or little of the war as he will,” has to be considered next to Clausewitz’s observation that when one takes little of a war, one is in peril of giving the enemy what he seeks.

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If the strategic commander has an abundance of forces available, as was the case at Grenada, time and timing come to dominate the calculations. The assembly and deployment of more force always takes more time, and time is as precious to strategists as it is to tacticians.

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There is another way to look at forces vis-à-vis mission: for the strategic commander to tailor the task to an existing force. The advantage of this is coherence of operations.

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The term “correlation of forces” is so concise and expressive that it is a wonder how military officers have been able to communicate without it.

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Most tacticians accept Thomas Carlyle’s philosophy that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men,” and they reject George Orwell’s notion that leadership is only doing what is expected of a nominal leader—merely “shooting an elephant” to please the crowd.

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The untried commander should assume that he or she has average skill and not presume that he can overcome disadvantage with talents he may not possess. If a commander has talent, it will grow. A good reputation may be worth more on the battlefield than good attributes, and a bad reputation will mute even the best attributes. That is why Napoleon sought “lucky” generals.

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A Navy study in the 1960s concluded that ASW ships escorting military convoys across the Atlantic could easily run out of torpedoes by firing at false contacts—a prognostication that was corroborated during the Falklands War, when the British navy fired hundreds of ASW weapons against an effective Argentine order of battle that contained only one submarine. After the U.S. Navy’s study, torpedo magazine capacity was tripled in the ship class involved. Tactics are affected when there is a real danger of running out of weapons—missiles, for example.

In the October War of 1973 the Israeli navy’s fast patrol boats were able to close and sink Egyptian craft that carried missiles with nearly double the range of the Israelis’ own by inducing the Egyptians to empty their missile magazines without effect.

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It is important to assess fuel capacities in battle planning. The Battle of the Eastern Solomons in August 1942 gave us a memorable example of what happens when this area is neglected. Instead of three carriers, Fletcher had only two in the battle, because he had sent the USS Wasp south to fuel. She missed all the fighting and was sunk by a submarine soon after. Tactical endurance hardly ever enters into amateur force correlations, and, being a distraction, an aggravation, and a great source of friction, it is rarely given the place it deserves. Knowledge of the enemy’s endurance deficiencies can lead to a decisive tactical advantage, as Togo demonstrated at Tsushima.

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A theme of this book is that sea battles differ from land battles because there is less influence of geography at sea. The closer the battle is to land, the more the shape of the land and the continental shelf change this general truth.

After discussing great trends in naval warfare, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations goes on to discuss great constants. On maneuver:

One problem of combat theory is how to define the beginning and end of a battle. Does the exchange of lethal force—firepower—open the battle? Consider the story of the cobra and the mongoose, told by Norbert Wiener in his book Cybernetics. The mongoose has the peculiar ability by some combination of mental and physical agility to stay ahead of the cobra’s capacity to strike. At the right moment the mongoose attacks behind the cobra’s head and the fight is settled. Did the battle consist of one leap by the mongoose? No. Nor does combat begin when the first shot is fired.

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In a proper battle, firepower is preceded by maneuver, which bears on the outcome. In Mahan’s words, tactics is “the art of making good combinations preliminary to the battle as well as during its progress.”

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We know the situation today: with a potentially huge battlefield and fast-acting weapons, maneuvers of even the most agile ships appear to be carried out at a snail’s pace.

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In peacetime tacticians usually have overrated the wartime advantage of more speed in combatant ships. High speed is expensive in money, weight, and space. Peacetime planners too often overlook the tactical reality that a formation is tied to the slowest ship in the force, whether due to its design or incurred through malfunction or damage.

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Neither the hydrofoil nor the surface-effects ship has proven its case; the speed of these vessels brings too many penalties in its wake.

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Uhlig points out that carriers must be swift to operate aircraft. It is fascinating to speculate what their speed ought to be if this were not so. The question is not idle: we may see the widespread use of very short takeoff and landing (VSTOL) aircraft in the future. The cost penalty of vertical lift—which is the VSTOL’s greatest liability—could be offset substantially by reducing the propulsive power of the entire formation. We should remember that with half the propulsive power a ship can travel about 80 percent as fast. In addition, speed creates noise in the water, and noise draws submarine missiles.

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History tells us that that extra bit of speed in ships and speed and maneuverability in aircraft is dearly purchased and has not increased in fifty years.

On firepower:

At sea the essence of tactical success has been the first application of effective offensive force. If the tactician’s weighty weapons substantially out-range the enemy’s, then the objective is to stand outside effective enemy range and carry out the attack with sufficient concentration of force to destroy the enemy. If the enemy out-ranges the attacker, then the tactician’s aim is to survive any blows with sufficient residual firepower to carry out the mission.

It is all the more important now for a tactical commander to have the means to concentrate effective firepower and deliver enough of it to accomplish the mission before the enemy can bring decisive firepower to bear. Without such means, one should not wish to engage the enemy, for the attacker is likely to lose with very little to show in damage to the enemy.

The second great constant of offensive force applies here: Other things being equal, a small advantage in net combat power will be decisive and the effect will be cumulative. The necessary margin of superiority, however, widens when the enemy seems likely to deliver a first, but inconclusive, attack. An inferior force cannot assume a defensive position and exact a substantial toll, as can be done in ground combat. An inferior fleet must be disposed to risk and must find a way to attack effectively first. Otherwise, it should be ordered to avoid battle and to adopt a strategy of evasion, survival, and erosion, which it must hope to achieve with skill and good fortune.

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Our own numerical estimate is that superiority in net combat power of four to three has been conclusive at sea, except in the case of an effective enemy first attack. An advantage of three to two will crush the enemy.

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Another recurring tendency, perhaps common enough to be called a constant, is to overestimate the effectiveness of weapons before a war. The abysmal ineffectiveness of naval gunfire in the Spanish-American War came as a shock. By 1915, after ships’ fire-control problems had been largely straightened out, ten or twenty minutes of accurate gunfire was conclusive. Nevertheless, at Jutland the High Seas Fleet escaped destruction because the British battle line was unwieldy, the German fleet maneuvered skillfully, and smoke obscured the scene of action.

Before the Pacific carrier battles commanders were too sanguine about the effectiveness of air power. And the chaotic night surface actions did not at all reproduce the clean, decisive battles that had been played out in prewar board games because firepower was not as effective as expected.

This rule abides: Watch for the fog of war, and do not underestimate the propensity of the enemy to survive your weapons. In the next war at sea we will see ships with empty missile magazines and little to show for the expenditure of what should have been the decisive weapon.

When Admiral Burke, the last of our World War II tacticians, was asked what he would change in the new class of guided-missile destroyers—his namesake, the Arleigh Burke class—he said he would add a brace of cutlasses.

On counterforce:

Another constant of maritime warfare is that navies are difficult to replace. For this reason ships of the line did not engage forts with the same number of guns, battleships did not venture into mineable waters, and aircraft carriers did not attack airfields that based similar numbers of aircraft.

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Compared with damaged aircraft carriers, damaged airfields can be reconstituted quickly. In conventional war, there is less possibility of concealment, survivability, and recuperation at sea than on land. The compensatory virtues of warships have been their greater mobility and potential for concentration.

Should nuclear war come, it will alter these generalities. Surface warships will be more durable than land-based forces because of the capacity for both strategic movement away from the threat and for tactical movement out from under a missile attack. The capacity for survival of submarine-based submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) through concealment exceeds that of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Nuclear war also changes the replacement equation: conventional naval forces are more difficult to replace than conventional land-based systems, but in nuclear war, when no warheads are replaceable, this liability disappears altogether.

On scouting:

Naval commanders have always sought effective scouting at a range consistent with their weapon range. That is, they have sought data about enemy forces far enough away—or soon enough away, remembering the time-movement relationship—to deploy for effective offensive and defensive action. And the data have included a plot of the commanders’ own forces. An amateur who imagines a chessboard war cannot conceive of the frustrations of keeping this plot. It is not rare in peacetime exercises for a commander to target his own forces. Every professional should reacquaint himself or herself with the hazard and reread Morison’s detailed accounts of the Solomons night actions, including the Battle of Cape Esperance, in full and sobering detail. The choice of tactics must be compatible with force proficiency. Unpracticed, widely dispersed forces on a modern battlefield that is dense with long-range missiles run great risk of self-destruction. Some planners assert that the widespread use of the global positioning system (GPS) will end fratricide. If so, then GPS will have changed all previous experience in war at sea.

The great constant of scouting seems to be that there is never enough of it. In the days of sail commanders deployed a line of frigates ahead to conduct strategic search (in those days the great naval problem was to find an enemy at sea).

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Without enough frigates, fleets under sail could be caught in disarray.

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A good guess is that the next “radar” will be small, unmanned vehicles, especially aerial devices. Yet, the difficulties of integrating these into a scouting network should not be underestimated.

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At sea, better scouting, more than maneuver, as much as weapon range, and often as much as anything else, has determined who would attack—not merely who would attack effectively, but who would attack decisively first.

On command and control:

Generally, when he or she is defending, a good commander reinforces weakness; when attacking he or she reinforces success.

How does this constant of tactics apply today? It means that on offense, modern networking permits a highly coordinated strike in time and space at a critical point from widely dispersed forces. After damage assessment, initial success can be followed with other deliberate, measured attacks. That is the essence of the American operations called dominant battlefield awareness and precision strike.

It also means—and this is what needs the greater attention—that on defense, when the initiative is the enemy’s, the formation and C2 doctrine should be designed for rapid, independent response by any ship at the instant it is threatened.

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After one of his first engagements then-commander Arleigh Burke wrote in his after-action report, “There is no time in battle to give orders. People must know what they do before they go into battle.”

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The time killers are lethargy, befuddlement, physical exhaustion, and disintegrating morale. Most likely many more disastrous tactical decisions than the history books tell us have been made by leaders whose spirit was used up and by fighters who were exhausted.

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Burke has been quoted many times as saying that the difference between a good leader and a bad one is about ten seconds.

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Tactical complexity is a peacetime disease. After the transition from peace to war, a marked simplification of battle tactics occurs. The tactical theorist underestimates the difficulty of executing complex operations in the heat of battle, and military historians are too quick to point out opportunities that could never have been exploited.

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Cleverness, ingenuity, and complex maneuvers work best for solo performers such as submarines and small units that can be highly trained.

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Since the enemy can be expected to know about anything that has been practiced very much, complex fleet tactics must work even when the enemy is aware of them.

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U.S. naval warfare publications should compare in tightness, focus, and readership with the old fleet tactical publications that preceded them. Articles on tactics should dominate Naval Institute Proceedings, as they did in the period from 1900 to 1910. The hard core of the Naval War College curriculum should be naval operations, as it was in the 1930s. War games should stress not merely training and experience but the lessons learned from each game’s outcome, as in the 1920s and 1930s. In intellectual vigor our modern tactical writing should compare with the best in the world.