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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.”

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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).

[…]

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

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.”

[…]

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.

[…]

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

[…]

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.

[…]

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

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

When World War II ended, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations explains, the U.S. Navy shifted its focus from battle tactics to a wide array of fleet operations that included an unprecedented long-term presence in the European and East Asian theaters:

The new war-at-sea component might well have been called “operational logistics” because the huge geographical span typical of operations at sea entailed the movement of maritime forces over vast distances. A map of a maritime theater usually covers an area at least ten times as large as that of a typical ground campaign, and some 80 percent of the planning and effort in a modern naval campaign—or even a peacetime “presence” operation—involve supplying vessels and air fields with the supplies and ammunition that they need.

Over the centuries the foremost objective of sea power has been to influence events on land by delivering ground forces and supplies to the battlefield via the oceans and, more recently, by conducting air strikes against targets on land and destroying enemy resistance when necessary. Only secondarily have naval forces conducted operations exclusively for a narrowly maritime purpose, such as protecting fishing and offshore oil rigs.

[…]

Uhlig emphasizes three ways that the Navy has contributed to U.S. success: (1) to ensure “that friendly shipping [in the broadest sense] can flow”; (2) “to ensure hostile shipping cannot”; and (3) having accomplished these two things, “navies can risk landing an army on a hostile shore, supporting it with fire and logistics.”

[…]

The oceans are a vast two-dimensional highway, and historically the shipping that traverses them has required naval protection. Whichever country has controlled the seas has enjoyed a great advantage; invariably, losing that edge has led to dire consequences. There is uncontestable historical evidence that naval powers usually defeat land powers. That was the theme of Mahan’s work, beginning with The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783.

[…]

Professor John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School has provided a recent, more quantitative book in his landmark treatise, Dubious Battles, in which he offers evidence of an even bolder assertion—that in conflicts since 1815, land powers not only have usually ended up being defeated by sea powers, but they almost always have started the wars they later lost.

[…]

A navy is a means to the end of controlling an enemy land force. Although there have been some exceptions, rarely has the center of a military conflict been on the oceans or in the air. Sea power’s greatest payoff comes from the highly efficient movement of goods and services into either friendly or hostile territory.

[…]

A battle fleet of capital ships and accompanying forces meets and destroys the enemy’s battle fleet.

[…]

Cruisers attack enemy commerce or help defend it from attack.

[…]

A third category for today’s fleet is a flotilla that operates in littoral waters that are too dangerous to expose a battle fleet of large capital ships. Since the beginning of the twentieth century maritime powers have used a distinctively different fleet of small combatants, usually armed with torpedoes, to fight the enemy in the coastal waters of the Baltic, North Sea, and Mediterranean Sea, and in the Dardanelles.

[…]

First, sea power prevents the enemy from attacking from the sea. Second, it gives a maritime state the freedom to choose the scene of action anywhere on a land power’s coast. The reason, Bubke explained, was the operational movement advantage that ships have over almost any form of ground transportation. At sea an amphibious force will move around five hundred nautical miles a day. Fast containerships will move farther still, but in the twentieth century the norm for merchant ships was more like four hundred miles a day. By contrast, on land an army moving at operational speed against weak opposition will advance only about twenty-five miles a day. The famous German blitzkrieg in Poland and France in 1939 and 1940 moved no faster than that. In operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 the American army took three weeks to reach Baghdad, which was hailed as a swift advance against moderate opposition of fifteen miles a day.

Thus, in terms of speed, ships involved in an operational movement have at least an order-of-magnitude advantage over an army advancing against light resistance on land. In terms of the number of logistical personnel required to move a force to the scene of action and sustain it, the advantage of ships over land transport is one or two orders of magnitude. In the weight of combat potential carried to the scene of action per unit of energy expended, the ships’ advantage can be two or three orders of magnitude.

[…]

Nevertheless, Bubke shows clearly that because a sea power cannot be invaded it does not have to maintain a large standing army in peacetime, and often it can find and fund allies for coalition operations against the dominant land power that threatens them.

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Any encyclopedia of war will show that there have been far fewer sea battles than land battles throughout history.

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Until the twentieth century surface raiders and pirates routinely evaded searchers for months at a time. The onset of aviation enabled army (and later navy) scouts to cover wide swaths of ocean and report the raiders’ positions by wireless radio. Within a decade, the raiders had all but disappeared.

[…]

Historically, naval strategists have sought to equip more and more ships, including commercial vessels, with weapons. In the Anglo-Dutch wars, for example, both sides employed armed merchant ships, which could be built quickly in large numbers and armed with the best weapons of the day. Today missiles of various ranges and homing characteristics can be placed in manned and unmanned ships and aircraft at a relatively low cost. With the onset of information-warfare concepts, this looks like the beginning of a lasting change in naval warfare.

[…]

In the seventeenth century the Dutch and English fought repeated campaigns that were almost completely restricted to the seas. This phenomenon was tied to technology. At the time, an entire fighting fleet could be built in a few years. A country’s whole navy could be lost in a crushing and decisive battle, yet it could be restored and ready for action within a few years. Hence a fleet was more often risked.

The eighteenth century marked a transition period in which ships became larger, more heavily armed, and more expensive. There were fewer battles, and naval commanders became more cautious, partly because it took much longer and cost more for a defeated state to replace its losses or build a new navy.

During the battleship era of the early twentieth century the number of battles continued to decline. Between 1890 and 1910 the world’s sea powers built seventy-four pre-dreadnought classes of battleships; yet, during the entire battleship era, from roughly 1885 to 1935, there were only seven fleet actions for command of the sea. 11 The statistics provided strong evidence to support the maxim that arms races do not lead to war, but rather that the prospect of war leads to arms races.

[…]

Part of the reason for the decline in the incidents of major sea actions was the dominance of Great Britain, with its policy of enlightened self-interest, during the nineteenth-century era of Pax Britannica. Under British policy, the Royal Navy protected the trade of all friendly nations. As a result, the number of naval battles fought on the high seas (and those fought near land) remained low from 1815 to 1894.

[…]

Our own review suggests that using quantitative operations analysis techniques has yielded greater benefits in achieving wartime success than employing tactical analysis, which relies on highly variable hit probabilities, damage estimates, casualty ratios, Lanchester and Salvo equations, and other measurements to evaluate combat performance.

Radar and radar countermeasures were the most important of the sensory tools that came of age in World War II, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations explains:

This category also includes the proximity fuze—a tiny, shock-resistant radar that significantly improved the effectiveness of weapons of many kinds. Used in shells fired against aircraft by a 5-inch, dual-purpose gun, the proximity fuze not only increased the allowable fire-control dispersion error by two or three times, it also simplified a three-dimensional fire-control problem by effectively turning the target area into a two-dimensional challenge.

[…]

Britain established the first five radar stations, on the east coast of England, in December 1935.

[…]

The radiation laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, increased its hiring a hundredfold—from forty to four thousand—to accommodate research in the new field of technology.

[…]

As a tool of war, radar was ubiquitous. By the end of 1939 shipboard prototypes were being tested for long-range aircraft detection, antiaircraft fire control, and surface tracking. British and American collaboration produced a series of remarkable breakthroughs beginning in 1940. Centimeter-wavelength radars were ready for production in 1942, offering sufficient definition to be used for detection of single aircraft, for fighter direction, day or night, and for accurate gun-laying for both surface and AAW targets. By 1943 radar had been fitted in enough reconnaissance aircraft to have a major influence on search-and-attack missions against surface ships, and in enough antisubmarine patrol aircraft to reverse the momentum of the U-boat campaign in the Atlantic. From 1940 on, radar was vital to fighter defenses over land, and it was the key to the effectiveness of the offensive fighter and bomber sweeps before the Normandy invasion. For antiaircraft defenses, radar was just as important over land as at sea.

Radar quickly became an indispensable navigating tool as well. It permitted high-speed surface operations in narrow seas, and it came to be relied upon so much that when a ship lost her radar at night she was literally and psychologically lost.

[…]

From the outset, Japanese tactics usually called for approaching in short, multiple columns, getting all ships into action at once, and maneuvering in defense against torpedoes. Sometimes destroyers would be positioned ahead as pickets to avoid ambush. When the pickets detected an enemy force, they would close, pivot, fire torpedoes, and turn away. Sometimes they would not fire their guns at all.

The U.S. tactic was to use a long, single, tightly spaced column. The Navy expected and achieved first detection and tried to position its columns so that all guns would bear across the enemy’s axis of approach, crossing its T.

[…]

It was at the Battle of Vella Gulf on 6 August–7 August 1943 that U.S. tactics came together.

[…]

Both divisions would move in, their bows to the enemy torpedo threat, wheel around, and launch their fish. As with Japanese tactics, all this would be done stealthily, without gunfire. After the shock of the torpedo barrage was over, gunfire and aggressiveness could be used in proportion to the damage done, but at that stage the destroyers would have to watch out for the death-sting of the now alerted enemy.

[…]

The firing range was just 6,300 yards for a running range of 4,000 yards—as good a setup as could be expected, and all one could ask for. A minute later, a “turn nine” order came from Moosbrugger. His division executed a simultaneous 90-degree turn to starboard to clear out, combing the wakes of the predictable enemy torpedo counterattack. At the same time, Simpson wheeled his three destroyers to port and bored in.

[…]

As in all good naval battles, the outcome was determined by the adoption of a feasible plan whose tactical cohesion came from training, good scouting, and the swift thrust of a killer weapon.

[…]

They could now beat the Japanese with torpedoes—their adversary’s superior weapon. Good sensors, tactics, and scouting could overcome better firepower. And the United States would win with small ships because the destroyers carried the big weapon. It was the destroyers’ torpedoes—not the cruisers’ guns—that ruled at night. Hit-and-move was the answer, not crossing the T; units had to be nimble rather than fixed in a sturdy, steady, cohesive—and suicidal—column.

[…]

In the conditions under which these battles were fought, crossing the T meant very little. The best tactic was to approach on a broad front, bows on (short columns abreast in practice), wheel anywhere within range and fire a barrage of two or three dozen torpedoes, then point all sterns toward the enemy’s reply. One of the American errors was to forget that combat is two-sided competition. Line tactics were based on the strength of the broadside, which nominally had twice the firepower that could be unleashed end-on. Line tactics overlooked the fact that a beams-to column exposed ten times as much hull to torpedoes as a line abreast pointed toward or away from the enemy. In force-on-force computations, by using the line-ahead formation the U.S. Navy imposed a fivefold penalty on itself.

There was a no-man’s-land of at least five miles in which no cruiser belonged. Experience had shown that with a torpedo barrage a handful of small ships could destroy a force that was larger and superior in killing power, at least by conventional reckoning. Somewhere in the Valhalla of warriors, Jellicoe must have looked down on those dark nights punctured with the violence of the torpedo and with a thin smile, shaking his head at the Americans who took so long to learn what he knew in 1916.

[…]

If one counts large, light, and escort carriers together, then during World War II the aircraft of all countries sank twenty carriers, totaling an aggregate 342,000 tons. By comparison, submarines sank fifteen carriers amounting to 306,000 aggregate tons. For their part, surface warships sank only two carriers, for a total of 30,000 tons.

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Nazi Germany missed a golden opportunity to exploit land-based aircraft at sea. After the fall of France, a few sorties by the Luftwaffe demonstrated that its medium-range bombers could attack Allied Atlantic convoys effectively. But Hermann Goering’s penchant for attacks on land targets ruled out the development, production, and commitment of German aircraft to attack shipping in great numbers. The possibility that Germany might wake up to the opportunity haunted the harried Royal Navy through much of the war.

The phenomenal shift in tactics during World War II took almost everyone by surprise, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations explains:

Even the airpower zealots, who professed to have foreseen the tactical revolution, had been too conservative in their predictions.

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To illustrate: in 1940 two German battleships caught the British aircraft carrier HMS Glorious in the open sea and sank it; by 1944 U.S. Fleet anti-air warfare (AAW) defenses were so impregnable that Japan had to abandon bombing attacks and instead resort to kamikaze missions. Land-based horizontal-bomber attacks against warships—the original mission of the B-17—proved not to be effective. The torpedo bomber, while scoring successes, came to be a kind of unintentional kamikaze. In the end only the dive-bomber spelled the difference.

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For one thing, aerial bombing tests in the early 1920s against the old U.S. battleships Indiana (BB 58), New Jersey (BB 62), and Virginia (BB 64), and the new but uncompleted Washington (BB 56), along with Billy Mitchell’s rigged attacks on the Ostfriesland, proved not so much that heavy bombs could sink warships as that the aircraft of that day would have great difficulty sinking a moving, well-defended, buttoned-up warship.

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Between 1922 and 1925 the budget for naval aviation held steady at 14.5 million dollars while that for the Navy as a whole shrank 25 percent. From 1923 to 1929 the naval air arm increased by 6,750 men, while Navy manning overall decreased by 1,500—and those figures do not include the crews of the manpower-intensive USS Lexington (CV 2) and USS Saratoga (CV 3).

In an astonishing sleight-of-hand, all five major signatories of the Washington Disarmament Treaty of 1921 were permitted to maintain substantial total carrier tonnage—135,000 each for the United States and Great Britain; 81,000 for Japan; and 60,000 each for France and Italy—at a time when “no naval power … possessed a single ship that could be applied against the allowed carrier tonnage.”

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In sum, the Washington Treaty and those that followed it over the next several years did not impose a constraint on airpower, but rather provided an incentive for expanding it.

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In the delicate balance of interactions it is noteworthy that the greatest swing factor in the battleship versus carrier issue may have been the actual performance of the newly introduced technology of radar. If [radar] had proven more effective in directing heavy AA guns [or if, as others have said, the proximity fuze had come along a few years sooner], the effectiveness of tactical strike aircraft might have been largely neutralized. If it had been markedly less effective for early warning and fighter direction, carrier vulnerability might have been too great to bear. In either case, the fleet would have been dramatically different in 1945.

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Aircraft were essential as scouts and—not to be overlooked—acted as spotters for gunfire in those days before radar.

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“Opposing carriers within a strategical area are like blindfolded men armed with daggers in a ring. There is apt to be sudden destruction to one or both.”

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In large measure the fleet tactics anticipated for World War II were similar to those that had been used in the previous war, except that aircraft, the new mad dogs of their day, would finally fight one another in the air. This outlook prevailed in all navies. After the war actually broke out, tacticians had to adapt so extensively that by the end of the war every major category of warship that the U.S. Navy was deploying—except for minecraft—was being used for a different purpose from the one for which it had been built. The striking and supporting roles of battleships and aircraft carriers were reversed; heavy cruisers, designed in part for fleet scouting, did almost everything but that; light cruisers, designed as destroyer-leaders, became AAW escorts for carriers; destroyers, conceived for defending the van and rear of the battle line against torpedo attacks from other destroyers, were adapted to function as antisubmarine warfare (ASW) and AAW escorts; and submarines, designed for forward reconnaissance and attacks on warships, were diverted to attack merchant ships and the sea lines of communication.

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The Japanese solution was three-fold—to seek qualitative superiority in battleships, naval aircraft, and submarines; to outnumber the U.S. Navy in cruisers and destroyers; and to develop complicated but coherent tactics that would whittle down the American battle line before the decisive battle, which would then be fought in the western Pacific.

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Thanks to prewar experimentation, both U.S. and Japanese naval aviators understood the advantages of the circular formation for the defense of a carrier.

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The increasing maximum range of attack aircraft opened up the possibility of mounting joint sorties from two or more carrier formations that were physically separated by hundreds of miles. In practice, the need for radio silence hampered—perhaps even spoiled—this possibility, and the United States never entertained it.

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Carriers dominated the daylight hours, but they were sitting ducks for gunfire at night.

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Typical American planning before the war would have held that the U.S. battle fleet steaming west to relieve Guam and the Philippines would be met by the Japanese battle fleet and a great decisive action would take place. It is true that as logistical considerations intruded, this simple tactical paradigm was complicated by the need for bases and the fleet train. But guarding the train or an invasion force was not yet a mission about which fleet tacticians worried much.

The airplane changed that. Until there was a threat of invasion by the navy on the strategic offensive, a weaker battle fleet on the defensive could not be induced to fight. But an invasion force had the responsibility of protecting amphibious assault ships, and with aircraft in the offing this presented new and complicated problems. Aircraft had to cover the transports as well as attack the enemy.

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Fiske envisioned a mutual exchange of salvoes that would erode the residual strengths of both sides simultaneously. His aim was to show the cumulative effectiveness of superior firepower; how a small advantage could dominate the action if it could be exploited with coherent maneuvers; and how the inferior force would inflict disproportionately scant damage no matter how well the battle was handled tactically. Gun range was a matter of indifference to Fiske because both sides faced essentially the same range. He felt free to disregard (at least for purposes of illustration) the possibility that one side could out-range the other and maintain a significant advantage. In effect, the pace of the battle would accelerate as the range closed, but the final ratio of losses would not change.

His model took into account the “staying power”—that is, warship survivability—in accordance with the assessments of his day: a modern battleship would be reduced to impotence in about twenty minutes by unopposed big guns within effective range.

The gunfire model of simultaneous erosive attrition does not work for the World War II carrier offensive force. That force is best represented as one large pulse of firepower unleashed upon the arrival of the air wing at the target.

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So in carrier battles, the crucial ingredients were scouting effectiveness and net striking power.

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The wisest conclusion is probably that in 1942 single-carrier screens were best because defenses were poor, aircraft could be launched and landed more efficiently when carriers had their own screens, and attacking first was the primary objective. Single carriers separated by even as little as ten or twenty miles might escape attack, as the carriers Zuikaku in the Coral Sea and Saratoga in the eastern Solomons did.

By 1944, however, U.S. tacticians had concluded that they could give up something in offensive efficiency to exploit the potentially withering defenses of the tight AAW circle. U.S. formations enclosed three or four carriers, and the entire disposition was kept close enough so that the entire fleet could be protected by a massed CAP.

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As the war progressed, the U.S. Navy strengthened its carrier defenses. First, it increased the number of fighters at the expense of bomber totals. Second, it steadily added AAW batteries, it began using the Atlanta-class AAW cruisers, and, starting with the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, it integrated fast battleships into carrier screens. Third, it emphasized and improved damage-control procedures and equipment on its warships. As a result, defensive considerations came to dominate and ultimately the destruction of aircraft became more significant than the destruction of carriers.

By 1944 the simple but elegant model of the carrier battles in use for the two previous years was beginning to fail. It asserted that one carrier air wing would, throughout 1942, sink one enemy carrier if and when it found a carrier:

CVs out of action = Attacking airwings

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In 1944, when the U.S. Fleet swept across the Pacific from Pearl Harbor to the Philippines in less than twelve months, it was so strong that it could accompany the landing force and dare the Japanese to come out. It had a two-to-one numerical advantage in carriers, decisive in itself, and an even greater advantage when the quality of pilots and screening ships was factored in. Moreover, it no longer was necessary for U.S. forces to attack first. Mass and unity of action were the keys to effective application of force.

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Although we are not likely to see the Pacific war over island air bases reproduced, we can anticipate the recurring tactical problem that a commander with superior forces faces when pitted against enemies who know their own inferiority and decline battle. When mounting an attack on a land target is the decided-upon way of drawing out an inferior enemy, it is too easy for planners to permit the land attack to become the end itself and to forget that the attack is but the means to a greater end—in this instance that of destroying the enemy’s seagoing forces.

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The Japanese had to attack effectively first. A simultaneous exchange of attacks with similar losses on both sides would ruin them in the long run because they could not afford to exchange carriers on a one-for-one basis. They had to attempt stealth, deception, and divided forces as a calculated risk. They gambled, likely even believed, that one carrier could sink two. Even though they were wrong, it was still a good gamble at the beginning of 1942; by the end of 1942, it was a very bad gamble.

There were many reasons for the resurgence of defense. True, AAW guns alone could have been enough to cause it, but the final and decisive factors responsible for the success of American defense were two factors that the Japanese could not possibly fold into their early planning—radar and cryptanalysis. Except in the Battle of Britain, nowhere was radar more quickly put to decisive use than in the Pacific carrier battles. Cryptanalysis for its part almost eliminated the chance of the Japanese achieving surprise. Stealth and deception were foredoomed.