When the Iranians seized members of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines in Shatt-al-Arab, the British reaction turned into Hornblower’s nightmare:
To understand just how bad the whole business is, one must first know a bit about Hornblower’s navy. In the latter half of the 18th century, the Royal Navy developed and institutionalized what we now call maneuver warfare or Third Generation war. By the Napoleonic Wars, it was all there — the outward focus, where results counted for more than following orders or the Fighting Instructions; de-centralization (Nelson was a master of mission-type orders); prizing initiative above obedience; and dependence on self-discipline (at least at the level of ship commanders and admirals) . It is often personified as the “Nelson Touch,” but it typified a whole generation of officers, not just Nelson. In the 19th century, the Royal Navy lost it all and went rigid again, for reasons described in a wonderful book, Andrew Gordon’s The Rules of the Game. But Hornblower’s and Aubrey’s navy was as fast-acting, fluid and flexible at sea as was the Kaiserheer on land.
I told Andrew Gordon that I would someday love to write the intellectual history of that first, maritime incarnation of maneuver warfare; he replied that the source material to do that may not exist, since Royal Navy officers of that time were not writing things down. He may be right, but I think one incident holds the key to much of it: the execution by firing squad, on his own poop deck, of Admiral John Byng.
In 1756, at the beginning of the Seven Year’s War, the French took the island of Minorca in the Mediterranean from the British. Admiral Byng was sent out from London to relieve the island’s garrison, then under siege. He arrived, fought a mismanaged battle with the attending French squadron, then retired to Gibraltar. Deprived of naval support, the garrison surrendered. Byng was court-martialed for his failure, found guilty, and shot.
The reason Byng’s execution played a central role in the development of maneuver warfare in the Royal Navy is the main charge laid against him. The capital charge was “not doing his utmost” in the presence of the enemy. In other words, Byng was executed not for what he did, but for what he did not do. Nothing could have done more to spur initiative in the navy. As Voltaire famously wrote, “Sometimes the British shoot an admiral to encourage the others.” Encourage the others to take initiative and get the result the situation demands is exactly what it did. Without Byng, I doubt there would have been a Nelson.
Don Domingo Perez de Grandallana, a Spanish naval official, incisively analyzed (in 1797) the reasons why Britain tended to win battles and his own country tended to lose them: summarized here.
Of course, the fact that a country (or a corporation) once had the characterstics that lead to victory does not by any means imply that it will automatically always have those characteristics…