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The Politics of Strategic Adjustment: Ideas, Institutions, and Interests
Peter Trubowitz, Emily O. Goldman, and Edward Rhodes (ed.)
1999
7. Technological Change and the New Calculus of War: The United States Builds a New Navy
Jan S. Breemer, U.S. Naval Postgraduate School
The battleship, engine of destruction, compact of scientific law’s inevitable resultants, steel-chilled to defy severest impact, perfectly controlled, moved at instantaneous wish, responsive to the slightest velvet-finger pressure to annihilate...”
Edward Kirk Rawson, Twenty Famous Naval Battles: Salamis to Santiago (1899)
Earlier contributors to this volume have focused on the role of cultural and domestic political forces in stimulating and shaping American strategic adjustment. At best, however, the resulting spotlight on ideas and domestic interests illuminates only part of the historical tableau, and reveals only a partial picture of how and under the influence of what forces the United States will likely adapt to the circumstances confronting it as the twenty-first century opens.
To understand the phenomenon of strategic adjustment it is necessary to appreciate the process by which change occurs; this must include an exploration of the dynamic interaction between evolving technological, economic, and external political realities on the one hand and political institutions on the other. When it comes to strategic adjustment, the most important of these institutions are the military services themselves. In the two chapters that follow Emily Goldman and Ed Smith examine the capacity of the military services to adapt to changes in their environment and initiate and implement strategic adjustment. This chapter considers the other side of the relationship: it looks at the power of technological change to alter how individuals and institutions think about and prepare for war. There is a cautionary note here, especially as the United States explores the potential for new communications and computer technology to create a “Revolution in Military Affairs.” Culture and politics may well be consequential, as earlier contributors have argued, but the logic implicit in technological developments may have the power to override both. To understand the ability of technology to shape national strategy, it is useful to return, once again, to the late 1880s.
America Builds a New Navy
In 1898, thanks to its victory in the war with Spain, the United States became a “complete” great power. Realists would argue that, after a century of “free security,” the nation had finally acknowledged and come to terms with the zero-sum rivalry they claim marks the relations between nations; that the United States had finally recognized that survival in such a world demanded a military prowess commensurate with its growing economic and industrial strength. The country’s transition to great power status, complete with overseas possessions, was made possible by the guns of the “New Navy,” born only a decade before.
National strategy-making is about balancing the relationship between national goals, national interests, and national resources, including military. The rational model of strategy-making proposes that states adjust their strategies, that is to say, redefine their aspirations and/or recalculate the resources required to support those aspirations, when the two sides in the equation are found to be out of balance. Also rationally—and ideally—strategic adjustments, especially changes in military force postures, are made in a top-down fashion, i.e., as the logical product of changes in national goals, which themselves are commonly thought of as the result of changes in the external security environment. As rational, but less than ideal, is the obverse, bottom- up, relationship between ends and means. In this case, resources, or better put perhaps, changes in resources, can drive a state to raise or lower its external ambitions. The relationship between America’s new naval prowess and the country’s “imperial urge” is a case in point: the New Navy created the opportunity for the United States to expand its aspirations beyond safeguarding the continent and the adjacent seas. To paraphrase Harold and Margaret Sprout, the New Navy became the means that “launch[ed] the American ship of state upon [a] much bolder and more comprehensive program of politico-naval imperialism” than most of its creators had envisaged ten years before. 1 But what were the strategic goals that prompted the transformation of the U.S. Navy from a motley collection of obsolete coastal defense craft and cruising ships to a fleet of battleships that was patently offensive? Why was it that a board of six naval officers convened by Secretary of the Navy Tracy could conclude in 1890 that the United States faced no plausible threat, yet recommended the immediate construction of more than 200 warships, including battleships with sufficient range to attack “points in the other side of the Atlantic”? 2 It is true that Tracy quickly disavowed his board’s ambitious building plan; suddenly, his own call for a two-ocean navy with eight battleships in the Pacific and twelve in the Atlantic seemed modest. Yet, he too urged that a modern American fleet must be designed for offensive operations off the enemy’s coast. Even more, such operations might have to be launched pre-emptively for, Tracy concluded, “The nation that is ready to strike the first blow will gain an advantage which its antagonist can never offset.” 3
In the end, the Naval Act of 1890 approved the construction of three “sea-going coast-line battleships” with only one-third of the 15,000 nautical miles’ endurance the Tracy Board had asked for. 4 Nevertheless, the act was a victory for big navy proponents. The country had finally turned its back on the Navy’s “dark age,” and taken the first step toward a “proper” fleet, complete with the high-technology guns and armor plating that had long made the navies of Europe’s great powers the envy of most American naval officers. Secretary Tracy could rightfully boast in an interview in 1891 that, “The sea will be the future seat of empire. And we shall rule it as certainly as the sun doth rise.” 5 In an amazingly few short years, the United States Navy gave itself a brand new purpose, rethought its strategy, doctrine and concepts of operations, and revolutionized its force structure. 6
Explaining American Navalism
The literature on this period of American naval history is dominated by three explanations for the transformation of the U.S. Navy from a fleet meant largely for commerce protection to one aimed at underwriting national security. 7 The first cites what may be called the power of the idea, that is to say, mainly Alfred Thayer Mahan’s idea of sea power as the royal road to national glory and greatness. George Baer, for example, reports that, “The transformation of the Navy from a force of cruisers to one of battleships, from a defensive force to an offensive one, was based on arguments put forward by a group of navalists who sought no less than to change the country’s strategic culture.” 8 Most historians acknowledge Mahan’s contribution to the era’s navalism, but propose that his writings were merely a symptom of national and naval professional expectations that, in Kenneth Hagan’s words, “change was in the air.” 9 Their basic thesis is that Mahan’s discovery had less to do with unlocking the secret to what he claimed was the historical decisiveness of sea power than the timing and cogency of his argument. 10
The claim that Mahan was merely the most persuasive spokesman for the expansive navalism that pervaded the era’s esprit du temps is central to the other two explanations that have been offered for the New Navy. The first, which is associated with the Realist school in international relations, proposes that the decision to build a blue-water fleet was a logical and necessary adjustment to shifts in the external security environment. Baer, for example, reports that the U.S. Navy was “forced” to rethink its purpose because of related changes in naval engineering and international affairs. The advent of the steamship, he writes, triggered a race for overseas coaling stations, which put America’s vulnerable coastlines within reach of heavily armed foreign fleets, thus compelling the Navy to transform itself from an instrument for the protection of commerce to one designed for the defense of the nation’s security. 11 Hagan, too, cites destabilizing changes in the international system, or what he termed “geopolitical realignments,” as a key reason for the Navy’s transformation. 12 In the Far East, Japan was “awakening” but, more important, on the other side of the globe, Germany had emerged as Europe’s leading Continental power, upsetting the Continent’s traditionally Franco-British dominated balance of power. This shift had worldwide implications. Not satisfied with continental dominance, Germany’s leadership aspired to Weltpolitik—and global power meant overseas colonies and a fleet. The first hint that German-American relations, which had so far been amicable, were taking a turn for the worse came in 1889 in the harbor of a small atoll in the southwest Pacific. Warships of three nations—the United States, Britain, and Germany—watched each other warily in the Samoan harbor of Apia while the three nations’ diplomats met in Berlin to negotiate the partition of the archipelago. The standoff ended without a shot being fired, but attentive Americans concluded that, like it or not, their country could no longer stay aloof from the Old World’s rivalries. 13 More than that, Congressmen and Senators who were outraged by Germany’s alleged insults in Samoa insisted that it was nothing less than dishonorable for the United States not to underwrite its expanding overseas economic interests from behind the barrel of a naval gun. Only “sufficient naval power,” said New Jersey Congressman William McAdoo, could protect the United States against foreign insults. “If the United States were a naval power...Bismarck would never have allowed the landing of a single German soldier on the Samoan Islands.” 14
George Quester’s book, Offense and Defense in the International System, offers an interesting variant to the Realist argument that the decision to build a battlefleet was spurred by changes in America’s external security environment. He does not deny that competition among the great powers was on the rise, but points out that the technical characteristics of the machine-age fleets in the late nineteenth century had actually served to make the United States much safer from attack. He notes how the replacement of sails by coal-fueled machinery had severely restricted the warship’s strategic reach, and, as a consequence, had made the United States much less vulnerable to the projection of European military power. Quester proposes that the relative decline of Europe’s global reach created the opportunity for newcomers, such as Japan and the United States, to build up locally superior fleets. 15
Students of the domestic determinants of military policy have offered a third explanation, citing the lobbying influence of America’s industrial interests, notably the iron and steel industry. 16 This line of reasoning is only partially convincing. It is true that a big fleet clad in iron and steel could be a profitable source of income, but this alone does not explain the long-range offensive navy the United States chose to build. Ton-for-ton, it made little profit-making difference whether coastal monitors for defensive purposes or high-seas battleships were built. 17
More persuasive perhaps, but still incomplete, is the bureaucratic explanation with the proposition that a fleet of battleships was brought about by the professional naval officers’ desire for a “dream navy” that emulated the British fleet. It suggests that the New Navy was less the product of professional concern over future imperialistic clashes than a symptom of puberty— the wish to match, better yet outmatch, the fleet of the nation that had given birth to the United States. 18
Clearly, historians and political scientists have seen the emergence of the U.S. Navy as a European-style battle force as the result of multiplicity of external systemic and domestic influences; all are part of the truth. This chapter proposes a further variable that has received comparatively little attention, at least in the way it is treated here. It proposes that the creation of the New Navy was the response, in part, to an American perception of technological insecurity. It argues that American naval planners in the 1880s and 1890s were reacting to a new, technology-induced “system” of insecurity that had little or nothing to do with the politics of interstate relations per se. To paraphrase Glenn H. Snyder, the U.S. decision to pursue major power status at sea had much less to do with a reassessment of the “balance of power” than a new “balance of terror” that contemporaries believed had been created by the technological revolution at sea. 19
The notion that technology can be an independent source of national insecurity and military planning is not a new one. It is central to much of the arms race literature, and it is the cornerstone of Barry Buzan’s distinction between the study of international relations and national security studies. 20 This chapter subscribes to Buzan’s thesis that, “The development of military means follows a technological logic which is separate from the pattern of amity and enmity among states.” 21
Technological change in the means of warfare is as old as war itself. However, it was not until the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century that this became a determinant of interstate relations and part of a nation’s calculation of the possibility of war. Rapid and unpredictable naval-technological change during the fifty years or so that led up to World War I was at the bottom of the tendency of military planners to estimate the threat of “capabilities” as opposed to “intentions.” The fear that an international competitor might use a fleeting technological advantage to spring a surprise attack was at the heart of the “permanent insecurity” that dominated the condition of the great powers before World War I.
There is a contemporary policy-relevant reason as well for paying attention to the influence of technological insecurity on American strategic decisions one century ago. Specifically, if any of the host of variables that arguably shaped the New Navy then is to offer “lessons” for students of U.S. force planning now, technological insecurity is the variable-of-choice. The point may be put in the form of this general proposition: as the war-making intentions of potential opponents become more ambiguous, technological “threats” will tend to become the focus of military force planning.
“The Spirit of the Age”
Between 1850 and 1890, fleets changed beyond all recognition. The technology of ship-of-the-line in 1850 was little different from the sailing man o’ war that fought the sea battles of the seventeenth century. The ironclads at the end of the nineteenth century already embodied most of the technologies that would be found on the dreadnoughts of World War I and even the battleships of World War II. The only thing the navies of 1850 and 1890 still had in common was that their power rested with large surface ships and cannon fire.
Students of naval history have long been fascinated with this period, mostly so with an eye on the naval strategic and tactical changes it wrought. The writers of the “golden age” of navalism—Mahan, Corbett, Colomb, and others—were concerned with the material implications of the revolution at sea to the extent that they reaffirmed or falsified the “principles” of warfare under sail. I propose that the era’s technological revolution had a much more profound impact: rapid technological change in the means of war at sea introduced a wholly new and destabilizing factor into the relations of nation-states. In the first place, the very notion of technological change, or at least change that seemed to occur almost on a daily basis, was unprecedented. In the second place, and most disturbing from the perspective of military planners, technology appeared to have upset the old calculation of the balance of forces based on numbers; for the first time, the quality of material had become a potentially decisive factor in the outbreak and outcome of war at sea. And thirdly, the rapidity of change, combined with the planner’s uncertainty how well his new weapons would perform, yet the certainty that they would soon be obsolete, introduced a novel, technology- inspired, sense of insecurity into the relations of the major powers.
In his book The Anatomy of British Sea Power Arthur J. Marder commented on the “spirit of the age” during the last two decades before World War I. He cited in particular the prevailing belief that, unlike an earlier era, the next war would be sudden, without a formal declaration, and probably begun with a surprise attack. 22 Volatile naval war-making technology was the material basis for this “spirit.” The central characteristic of this technology was the ability to inflict an unprecedented level of destruction.
“The Great Race”
The New Navy was a latecomer to what was then called the “Great Race” between gun and armor manufacturers. In one sense, the American timing was fortunate; by 1890, some thirty years of expensive experimentation in Europe with “one off” types had finally concluded with a standard design battleship, the British Magnificent class.
The competition had opened in 1858 when the French built the Gloire. She was the world’s first seagoing ironclad, and was armed with explosive shell-firing guns. The British reluctantly followed suit and completed their first ironclad, the Warrior, three years later. British reluctance was motivated by two concerns. First, it had long been Whitehall’s golden rule that it was better “to follow and overtake than to initiate.” 23 This had been an eminently sensible policy while technological innovation was slow, its impact on battle performance marginal, and, most important, as long as foreign navies modeled themselves after the British. However, a few shell-firing ironclads had the power to literally sink the Royal Navy’s numerical superiority in wooden ships armed with solid cannon balls. In the second place, those responsible for the design of warships were particularly unhappy with the French for forcing a race between guns and protective armor, when it became evident soon enough that this could not be won by the latter. The Royal Navy’s chief constructor thus lamented that the French decision to protect their warships with iron plating was made, “Unhappily for England...and unhappily for herself.” 24
The Gloire and Warrior were the starting point for history’s first technological arms race. The competitors came in different hues and colors. They included Europe’s principal powers and their navies (mainly Britain, France, and Italy), the gun manufacturers vs. the producers of armor, gun makers vs. gun makers, armorers against armorers, and the “push” of technology versus the “pull” of the naval professionals. This last phenomenon was obvious to one contemporary participant: “There was not...any real pressure on the part of the foreign navies to force the hands of our own, and it is by no means certain that any decided course followed by the British Navy would not have been generally adopted by others. The real pressure came from the inventor acting on powers that were outside the Navy, forcing it to change its mind in spite of itself.” 25
The Gloire and Warrior were the first and last ironclads in which designers sought to preserve the balance of offensive gunfire capabilities and defensive hull protection that characterized the sailing ship of the line. Even as the two ships were being completed, it was obvious that heavier guns already being tested demanded more protection than the 4.5 inches of wrought iron wrapped around the Warrior. By 1865, British and French ships were covered with 6 to 7 inches of iron. Five years later, 9 inches were the norm, and 14 inches or more were common by 1870. The use of iron for protection reached its peak when the Inflexible was launched in 1881. The ship’s central “citadel” area that housed the guns was surrounded by iron plating two feet thick.
The citadel ship was the culmination of a design philosophy which held that offensive gunfire was the ship’s best protection, and that therefore all protective efforts should concentrate on making certain that a single enemy blow could not knock out its guns. Gun makers promptly exploited the ship’s vulnerability elsewhere, and invented the quick-firing gun. Defensive countermeasures were made possible by the newly developed ability to mass- produce steel and the invention of lighter weight compound armor: designers reverted to full or near-full belt armor. Nevertheless, the best efforts of the metallurgical industry could not reverse the obvious trend: the penetrative power of the gun had beaten the resisting power of armor. A report by the British Admiralty in 1871 had already drawn the inescapable conclusion. So far, it said, “the powers of offence, represented by artillery, and of defence, by armour, have advanced pari passu, sometimes one, sometimes the other, slightly in advance.” Now, however, “we appear...to be closely approaching a period when the gun will assert a final and definitive superiority.” 26 The best to be said for providing armor protection was that it was better than no protection at all. 27
The point of no return had already been reached in 1865. In that year, the standard British 9-inch heavy gun was capable of penetrating 10 inches of iron plating at a range of 1,000 yards. Ships were then protected by up to 6 inches of armor. Six years later, when the heaviest armor afloat measured 12 inches, the standard 12-inch gun penetrated 15 inches of iron at 1,000 yards. By the late 1880s, ships were protected by up to 18 inches of so-called “compound armor,” but the 16.25 inch gun at the time was capable of penetrating 19 inches at 2,000 yards. 28 In short, from 1865 on, the destructive power of shipboard artillery consistently outperformed the heaviest armor afloat. Put in another way, every capital ship launched after the Gloire and Warrior was sinkable by its own guns: warships had become offensive ship killers! This itself was a revolutionary development, for despite all its guns, the sailing ship of war had always been a defensive platform first; thanks to its thick oaken hull, it was much better at resisting gunfire than at sinking its like. 29
The rapidity of technological change and the uncertainty which direction it would take made the Victorian naval planner’s job much more difficult than his predecessor’s. The slow, evolutionary change of ships and their armaments during the preceding centuries meant that rivals fought with similar fleets and weapons that changed little from one war to the next. Both sides knew the quality of the other’s materiel, if for no other reason than captured ships were commonly recommissioned into one’s own navy. 30 It followed that the balance of power at sea, and therefore the prospect of victory in a next war, were mostly a matter of calculable numbers. Slow and predictable change also meant there were few naval “secrets” to keep or ferret out. Since warships were impossible to hide, it took few specialized intelligence-gathering activities for all sides to be reasonably confident about each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
The technologization of naval war changed this: qualitative asymmetry became a potentially decisive factor in war planning. The fear that a few ships with new-and-improved weapons might get the best of a larger but “obsolete” fleet prompted the systematization of intelligence collection and analysis as a continuous peacetime activity. The British navy created a Naval Intelligence Department (NID) in 1870, and the U.S. Navy formalized its technical intelligence-gathering activities with the establishment of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in 1881. 31 By the late 1880s, all the major naval powers maintained permanent naval attachés abroad. London and the Royal Navy were the focal point of their attention, for it was here, wrote the U.S. Navy’s Chief Engineer, James W. King, in the 1870s that “may be found naval attachés of nearly every important nation, watching and studying with endless vigilance the principles and science of naval architecture and engineering.” 32
The industrial revolution at sea confronted naval planners with the problem of technological obsolescence for the first time in history. Fred T. Jane (of Jane’s Fighting Ships) thought that “a different ideal every year” was a “blessed thing” that arrested “naval decay;” 33 the strategic consequences were profoundly disturbing, however. The slow pace of technological change in the past had allowed ships that were only partially completed at the end of one war to be left on the “stocks” and wait for a new threat of war. It could be years before the ship was finished, but that rarely affected the state-of-the- art of its fighting capacity. 34 A reserve of stocked ships also meant that last year’s loser in battle could oftentimes make a quick comeback. Rapid technological change signified that fleets were now built to fight a come-as-you- are war in which only the latest “reply ships” counted. With no reserves to draw on, battle would therefore be a single roll of the dice with no chance of recovery for the loser. An “initial naval disaster,” Admiral “Jackie” Fisher warned Royal Navy officers in the 1890s, will be “irretrievable, irreparable, eternal.” 35
The rapid pace of “block obsolescence” had systemic consequences that went beyond balance of power calculations between traditional rivals, such as Britain and France. For the British in particular, it triggered the equivalent of the modern nuclear “Nth country problem.” With the genie of technology out of the bottle and readily for sale, it became possible for second- and even third-rank nations to leapfrog the Royal Navy’s hard-won advantage in numbers and experience, and acquire the latest trappings of great-power status overnight. The most prominent newcomers were the United States, Germany, Italy, and Japan. 36 Unable to keep up a modern fleet large enough to offset the global proliferation of “emerging threats,” the British were compelled to give up “splendid isolation,” and conclude regional partnerships of power and influence instead. 37 Technology had reshaped the international system.
A “Bolt from the Blue”
The Warrior’s main armament in 1862 boasted 48 68-pounder guns. Each gun fired projectiles weighing 64 pounds that were delivered with a “muzzle energy” of 570 foot/tons. 38 The ship’s total deliverable destructive energy therefore amounted to 27,360 foot/tons. Twenty-eight years later, the Benbow carried two 16.25-inch plus ten 6-inch guns with a combined muzzle energy of 141,472 foot/tons, i.e. more than a fivefold increase. By way of comparison, the brute firepower of Nelson’s Victory was about one-fifth of the Warrior’s, or one-twenty-fifth of the Benbow. Parenthetically, the Dreadnought of 1906 delivered 438,160 foot/tons of muzzle energy, i.e., the equivalent of about 80 Victories.
Considering that this enormous increase in firepower took place during a single generation of naval officers, it is no wonder that the battleship was seen by contemporaries as a weapon of mass destruction. Although written a few years later (1916), Rear Admiral Fiske’s portrayal of the battleship’s destructive power is eerily prescient of a nuclear scenario. He wrote how one battleship had enough firepower, to “whip an army of a million men just as quickly as it could get hold of its component parts..., knock down all the buildings in New York afterward, smash all the cars, break down all the bridges, and sink all the shipping.” 39
The analogy between the battleship and nuclear weapons carries further than this specter of destruction: improvements in weapons design brought “nuclear plenty” in the early 1950s; improvements in guns, shell design, and propellants made the ability to destroy at sea progressively cheaper. It is quite true that warships became increasingly expensive (due largely to their heavy armor)—the Warrior cost £252,000, and the Benbow £764,000. But the unit cost of hitting power went down. The Warrior’s cost of 1,000 foot/ton of muzzle energy was £9,211, whereas the Benbow’s was £5,400. The trend continued through the development of the dreadnoughts and super-dreadnoughts of World War I. The Dreadnought could deliver 1,000 foot/tons at a cost of £4,071; the Orion could do the same for £3,264. 40
While guns offered increasingly more bang-for-the-buck, the cost of ship protection went up. The Warrior’s iron cladding was responsible for 6.2 percent of her total displacement. By the 1890s, the ship’s main armor accounted for some 25 percent. The upshot was that it made economic sense for fleets to stress the offensive. The choice was not much different from the dilemma that was central to the ballistic missile defense debate of the late 1960s and again in the 1980s: each improvement in defensive strength could quickly be offset by a cheaper increment in offensive strength.
The superiority of gunfire over protection made truly annihilating sea battles possible for the first time in history. True, “decisive” battles had been fought before, but sailing fleets had rarely lost a battle because of catastrophic losses due to gunfire. Sailing fleets had also been “annihilated” before, but the term did not then have its modern destructive connotation. In fact, the sinking of an enemy ship was, as one writer put it, “a matter of regret.” 41 A much better way of “annihilating” the enemy was to “nullify” him by capturing his ships. This not only diminished his strength, but it also added to one’s own. 42 The ship-killing capacity of modern guns had effectively eliminated this option. 43
The prospect of utter destruction turned the thoughts of naval planners to ways of avoiding “irretrievable, irreparable, eternal” destruction. One “solution” was to avoid the enemy’s first blow by striking first. Survival, wrote Fisher, dictates an “instant offensive,” preferably “five minutes before war breaks out.” The whole affair would be over in less than one-half hour. 44 The British press aired the theme of preventive attack in 1897&-;98 with the suggestion that upstart European navies be destroyed à la Copenhagen. 45 It re-surfaced a few years later, apparently at Fisher’s instigation, and this time was more specific about the “target”— Germany’s emerging High Sea Fleet. 46 On the British side too, the specter of a bolt-from-the-blue began to preoccupy naval planners. In The World Crisis, Winston Churchill writes extensively about his concern as First Lord of the Admiralty over the “extraordinary rapidity and suddenness the Prussian nation was accustomed to fall upon its enemy.” 47 He thought that the chances and consequences of a naval attack without warning were much more serious than a German invasion of France. Armies took time to mobilize, thereby giving the victim time to prepare his defense. In any case, divisions lost in battle could easily be replaced; not so battleships. 48 The latter were always mobilized—itself another break with the past. 49 Their constant readiness meant, to repeat Churchill, that the British “must not assume that if it made the difference between victory and defeat, Germany would stop short of an attack on the Fleet in full peace without warning or pretext.” 50 He and his adversaries across the North Sea had discovered the “reciprocal fear of surprise attack” long before Schelling made it part of the vocabulary of strategic studies. 51
There was another way that the era’s security managers sought to manage the devastating power of the new weapons—a way also familiar to modern strategic studies: exploit the specter of devastation to deter others from using their destructive capacity. Deterrence, not war-fighting, was at the heart of Admiral Tirpitz’s “risk theory,” and, though unspoken, the Royal Navy’s two- power standard as well. The problem was the “solution’s” credibility. The efficacy of the threat to use overwhelming destruction hinged on the threatener’s willingness to risk his own instruments of destruction. The superior battlefleet might “win” in the sense that it sank more ships than it lost, but the losses might be unacceptable. One British commentator in 1875 put his finger on the dilemma when he warned against concentrating the fleet’s firepower in a few expensive ships: “In the numerous fleets of the olden times, the fate of an individual ship was a less momentous question. But if you concentrate the whole power of the Navy in a few ships...you throw upon the officers in command an intolerable weight of responsibility. You will restrain and chill that gallant and almost reckless ardour with which the great battles of the past were fought and won.” 52
The commentator, Sir Thomas Brassey, had discovered the problem of “self-deterrence.” Nearly forty years later, the leaders of the British and German fleets fully expected that their opposite numbers would quickly seek the North Sea Armageddon that fifty years of technological upheaval had made possible. But instead of expanding the naval planner’s range of strategic choices, technology had actually conspired to limit his freedom of action. Both sides turned their engines of destruction into “fleets in being,” hoping that the other would be the first to make a mistake. 53 The creator of the High Sea Fleet at least thought that, in the end, not technology but “the old traditional English naval prestige” decided the outcome. 54
Conclusion
Technological innovation during the Victorian years revolutionized more than war at sea: it introduced a radically new variable into interstate relations. Clausewitz had summarized the “old,” pre-industrial calculus of war and peace with the dictum that war is an extension of politics—a deliberate choice by statesmen in the furtherance of specific political goals. The political nature of war meant that statesmen could reasonably anticipate its possibility. There would probably be some kind of dispute in progress, notes and protests would be exchanged, preliminary military movements would be observed next, and there would be, as Churchill put it, “financial perturbations in the Exchanges of the world indicating a rise of temperature.” 55 If war did break out, its tools and the tactics would be familiar to both sides.
“Runaway technological revolution,” especially at sea, overturned these certainties. 56 As naval planners sought to come to grips with the new technologies in their strategies and tactics, they were of two minds. On the one hand, they welcomed the “decisive edge” of bigger guns and thicker armor. On the other, they felt out of control: technology, not professional judgment, produced weapons. Most naval officers in the 1870s preferred “handy ships” with medium-caliber guns over the behemoths that were being produced. But since they could not prove that bigger might not turn out better, and while other nations retained the capacity to build big gun ships, there was “no choice in the matter.” Technological hedging (“friendly rivalry” in the era’s words), not fear of impending war, dictated that other powers be met “on equal terms.” 57
History’s first technological arms race set the stage for a new set of expectations about war and the circumstances that could trigger its eruption. The alarming words of one young U.S. Navy officer in 1883 were symptomatic. The United States, he warned, was totally unprepared to defend against Italy’s new monster ironclad, the Dandalo. With her 100-ton guns, the world’s biggest, the ship could lie off Coney Island and bombard New York at will. 58 The United States and Italy had no political cause for war; even if they had, the Dandalo’s 3,700 nautical miles range would have kept her far away from America’s eastern seaboard. But what mattered was the existence of a technical capability to hurt that the United States could neither offset with similar weapons nor defend against. The New Navy was the country’s “accommodation with technology.” 59
Endnotes
Note 1: Harold Sprout and Margaret Sprout, The Rise of American Naval Power 1776– 1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944), 222. Back.
Note 3: Report of the Secretary of the Navy, 1889. Cited in Sprout and Sprout, Rise of American Naval Power, 207. Back.
Note 5: James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897, vol. 9 (Washington, D.C.: 1900), 200–1. Cited in Walter LaFeber, The New American Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion 1860–1898 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), 127. Back.
Note 6: See George W. Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power: The U.S. Navy, 1890– 1990 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 11. Back.
Note 7: The author is indebted to George Baer for the observation that the purpose of U.S. naval power shifted from commerce protection to national security. See Ibid., 11. Back.
Note 9: Kenneth Hagan, The People’s Navy: The Making of American Sea Power (New York: the Free Press, 1991), 185. Back.
Note 10: See, for example, Robert Seager II, “The Years Before Mahan: The Unofficial Case for the New Navy, 1880–1890,” in The Shaping of American Diplomacy, Vol. I: 1750–1900, ed., William Appleman Williams (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1956), 338–43. Back.
Note 11: Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power, 10. Back.
Note 12: Hagan, People’s Navy, 193. Back.
Note 13: For the diplomatic history of America’s Samoan entanglement, see Samuel Flagg Bemis, A Diplomatic History of the United States, 5th ed. (New York: Holt, 1967), 453–59. Back.
Note 14: Cited in Holger H. Herwig, Politics of Frustration: The United States in German Naval Planning, 1889–1941 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 15. Back.
Note 15: George H. Quester, Offense and Defense in the International System (New York: Wiley, 1977), 87. Back.
Note 16: The U.S. Congress decreed in 1886 that U.S. Navy ships only use domestically produced materials. This was done largely to foster an indigenous steel industry. The Sprouts have observed that this gave the steel industry a vested interests in a “continuous and progressive development of the Navy,” thus becoming “active lobbyists and propagandists for naval expansion.” Sprout and Sprout, Rise of American Naval Power, 194. Back.
Note 17: Although these are British costs, there is no reason to believe that the differential would have been much greater for U.S.-built ships. The British Inflexible battleship of 1881, with a displacement of 11,880 tons, cost £68 per ton of displacement, compared with £64 per ton for the 9,150-ton Colossus coastal defense ship of 1879. Back.
Note 18: This argument is implicit in, for example, Warner Schilling’s claim that the Navy’s building proposals from 1890 to 1917 were keyed to the size of various other navies, and not navy war plans against those navies. “Admirals and Foreign Policy, 1913–1919,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1953). Cited in Vincent Davis, The Admirals Lobby (Chapel Hill: the University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 123–24. Rear Admiral Bradley A. Fiske was even more explicit in 1916, when he argued that the growth of American economic power to match Great Britain’s meant that the country should have a fleet “exactly equal to the British navy.” See his The Navy as a Fighting Machine (New York: Scribner’s, 1916). Back.
Note 19: Glenn H. Snyder, “The Balance of Power and the Balance of Terror,” The Balance of Power, ed. Paul Seabury (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965), 184– 201. Back.
Note 20: Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear, 2d ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1991) and An Introduction to Strategic Studies: Military Technology and International Relations (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). Back.
Note 21: Buzan, People, States and Fear, 2d ed., 271. Back.
Note 22: Arthur J. Marder, The Anatomy of British Sea Power: A History of British Naval Policy in the Pre-Dreadnought Era, 1880–1905 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1940), 21–22. Back.
Note 23: Oscar Parkes, British Battleships: “Warrior” 1860 to “Vanguard” 1950: A History of Design, Construction and Armament (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1970), 420. Back.
Note 24: Nathaniel Barnaby, Naval Developments in the Century (Toronto: Linscott, 1904), 62. Back.
Note 25: Vice Adm. P.H. Colomb, Memoirs of Admiral The Right Honorable Sir Ashley Cooper Key (London: Methuen, 1898), 340. Cooper Key was captain of the Royal Navy’s gunnery training ships HMS Excellent from 1863 to 1866. In this role, he was responsible for the test and evaluation of the navy’s guns. He was First Sea Lord from 1879 to 1886. Back.
Note 26: Cited in ibid., 521. Back.
Note 27: Captain Philip Colomb offered this interesting piece of “operations analysis” in support of armor in 1873: “I have always looked at it in this way—that the value of armour is simply this—‘to compel your adversary to fire so many fewer shots at you in any given time,’ and I am satisfied that every inch of armour you put on the ship effects that purpose. You compel him to carry heavier guns, and by compelling him to carry heavier guns, you compel him to fire fewer shots per minute ...” Cited in Sir Thomas Brassey, The British Navy: Its Strength, Resources, and Administration, vol. 3. (London: Longmans, Green, 1883), 346–47. Back.
Note 28: Data are derived from various sources and are available from the author. They are contemporary estimates, based on results obtained at the time at land- based firing ranges. The Spanish-American War proved that improvements in accuracy had fallen far behind improvements in smashing power. In the Battle of Manila, only 142 out of 5,895 shells fired at virtually point-blank range hit the Spanish ships, Two months later at Santiago Bay, the Americans scored 129 hits out of 8,000 rounds fired against stationary targets between one-half and three miles away. Peter Padfield, Aim Straight: A Biography of Sir Percy Scott, the Father of Modern Naval Gunnery (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1966), 85, 87–88. Back.
Note 29: Empirical evidence of the sailing ship’s “unsinkability” is readily found in the very few ships that were actually sunk by gunfire. For instance, of the 137 warships the French lost to the British during eighteenth century War of the Austrian Succession and Seven Years War, only three appear to have been due to gunfire. Date based on William Laird Clowes, The Royal Navy: A History from the Earliest Times to the Present, Vol. 3 (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1903), 312–14. Back.
Note 30: More than 200 captured enemy ships were recommissioned into the British fleet during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. See Otto von Pivka, Navies of the Napoleonic Era (London: Newton Abbot, 1980), 221– 38. As late as 1850, one-third of the 150 ships on the Royal Navy’s “Navy List” were reportedly “foreign models.” Capt. S. Eardley-Wilmot, RN, The Development of Navies During the Last Half-Century (New York: Scribner’s, 1892), 2. Back.
Note 31: For the origins of the NID and ONI, see Thomas G. Fergusson, British Intelligence, 1870–1914: The Development of a Modern Intelligence Organization (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1984), and Jeffrey M. Dorwart, The Office of Naval Intelligence: The Birth of America’s First Intelligence Agency, 1865–1918 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1979). Back.
Note 32: Cited in Dorwart, Office of Naval Intelligence 7–8. King made three trips to Europe between 1869 and 1876 to report on progress in naval technology. He later published his findings in an influential book, The War-Ships and Navies of the World (Boston: A. Williams, 1880 and 1881). Back.
Note 33: Fred T. Jane, Heresies of Sea Power (London: Longmans, Green, 1906), 294– 95. Back.
Note 34: Few ships remained on the stocks as long as the nine 74-gun ships that were authorized by the U.S. Congress in 1816. The act empowered the President to keep the vessels “on the stocks, and kept in the best state of preservation” until a “public exigency” required their activation. The first two ships were laid down in 1817 and launched in 1820. The next four were started in 1818, two of which were completed between 1845 and 1864. The third ship, the New York, was still on the stocks when she burnt in 1861, and the fourth, the Virginia, was broken up on the stocks in 1874. See, Sprout and Sprout, The Rise of American Naval Power, 88–89, and Stephen Howarth, To Shining Sea: A History of the United States Navy, 1775–1991 (New York: Random House, 1991), 129. Back.
Note 35: Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, Records (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1919), 94–95. Back.
Note 36: See also Bernard and Fawn M. Brodie’s From Crossbow to H-Bomb (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 162 for this observation. Back.
Note 37: By the early twentieth century, “the Western hemisphere was left to the United States; Japan assumed the task of protecting British interests in the Far East; even the Mediterranean, the ‘windpipe’ of the Empire, became a French naval responsibility after 1912.” Paul Kennedy, Strategy and Diplomacy 1870–1945 (London: Fontana, 1989), 56. Back.
Note 38: “Muzzle energy” measures the amount of working energy that is released at the point of a gun barrel. It is a function of initial shell velocity and shell weight—the greater the velocity and/or shell weight, the more muzzle velocity and therefore hitting power is produced. The term made its appearance in ordnance manuals in the 1870s, and became the common reference in contemporary estimates of comparative gun power. Back.
Note 39: Fiske, The Navy as a Fighting Machine, 60. Back.
Note 40: Calculations based on multiple sources. They are available from the author. Back.
Note 41: Eardley-Wilmot, Development of Navies, 61. Back.
Note 42: When, a few hours before Trafalgar, Nelson and one of his captains discussed what would constitute a “glorious victory,” they spoke of captures. In his final instructions, Nelson made it clear that the enemy’s ships were only to be destroyed as a last resort if they evaded capture. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Life of Nelson: The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain, vol. 2 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1897), 373. Back.
Note 43: Curiously, one late-century author, who should have known better, still thought that battlefleet action would conclude with boarding and capture. In a little-known book of his, Fred T. Jane gave a fictional account of an Anglo- French battle which ends with both sides ramming each other, and the victorious British crews boarding the French ships to take them home as prizes. Blake of the “Rattlesnake” or the Man Who Saved England (London: Tower, 1895), 44–52. Back.
Note 44: Records, 90–92. Back.
Note 45: Ruddock F. Mackay, Fisher of Kilverston (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 319. “Copenhagen” referred to the British seizure of the neutral Danish fleet in 1807 in order to prevent it from joining Napoleonic France. Back.
Note 46: Ibid., 319–20. Scholars are divided on whether Fisher was serious about a preventive strike against the German fleet at Kiel. Marder writes that he was “convinced” Fisher was never serious [From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher Era, 1904–1919, Vol. 1: The Road to War, 1904– 1914 (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 113]. Mackay, on the other hand, believes that Fisher “was almost certainly serious,” and he cites the comment of Lord Selborne, the admiral’s political master at the Admiralty, that, “He meant it.” Mackay, Fisher of Kilverston, 319, 320. In any event, German naval planners took Fisher’s threat seriously enough to declare the next ten years the Navy’s “danger zone.” Afterward, the fleet would presumably be too strong for the British to risk attack. Back.
Note 47: Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis 1911–1918, vol. 1 (London: Odhams Press, 1938), 116. Back.
Note 48: The French naval attaché in Berlin wrote in 1906: “If the fleet is lost it is irreparable. Army corps can be replaced in a week; ships cannot.” Cited in P.K. Kemp, The Papers of Admiral Sir John Fisher, Vol. 2 (London: Navy Records Society, 1964), 297. Back.
Note 49: As late as the 1830s, it reportedly took the British navy three to six months to collect a crew for a large frigate or ship-of-the-line, and another six months to “bring order and discipline.” Sir Henry Briggs, Naval Administrations 1827–1892 (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1897), 58. Back.
Note 50: Churchill, World Crisis, vol. 1, 118. Back.
Note 51: Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 208–29. Back.
Note 52: Thomas Brassey, The British Navy: Its Strength, Resources, and Administration, vol. 3, (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1882), 203. Back.
Note 53: See Jan Breemer “The Burden of Trafalgar: Decisive Battle and Naval Strategic Expectations on the Eve of the First World War,” The Newport Papers (October 1993), especially 33–37. Back.
Note 54: Grand Admiral Von Tirpitz, My Memoirs, vol. 2 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1919), 31. Back.
Note 55: Churchill, World Crisis, Vol. 2, 117. Back.
Note 56: The term “runaway technological revolution” is borrowed from William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since AD 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 277. Back.
Note 57: Brassey, British Navy, 21. This is a good source for professional naval opinion on big vs. small ships in the 1870s. Back.
Note 58: Cited in Dorwart, Office of Naval Intelligence, 17. Senior U.S. military planners, including Navy Secretary Tracy, employed similar scenarios to justify American naval preparedness. For Tracy’s call for a fleet to “prevent a fleet of ironclads from shelling our cities,” see Sprout and Sprout, Rise of American Naval Power, 207. Back.
Note 59: Robert L. O’Connell, Sacred Vessels: The Cult of the Battleship and the Rise of the U.S. Navy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991), 71. Back.
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