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.