i6 
LAND & WATER 
June 7, 1917 
Reorganisation of the Admiralty 
Admiral W. H. Henderson, in this carefully considered 
Idler to the Editor of Land & Water, deals uilh a very 
impurtant aspect of Admiralty reorganisation. 
The Conditions of Success 
Sir,— In 1902. I addressed a letter to tlie Committee on 
the Training, Promotion and Retirement of Executive Officers, 
of which Lord Goschen was the Chairman ; in which I 
stated that, in addition to sound professional and pliysical 
qualifications, the three attributes required of a Flag Officer 
were (i) Strategical, U) Tactical, (3) Administrative, and I 
suggested means of securing and employing these. With 
the advance of scientific knowledge all professions tend to 
become more and more a system of specialised groups, super- 
imposed on a foundation and training which is common to all 
of them. The Navy is no exception to this rule ; its specialia- 
sations which, in the middle of Irst century, numbered only 
three — navigation, gunnery and the then nascent steam 
engineering — now number a dozen, all tending to difterentiate 
more strongly from each other, as do the specialities in 
modern medicine, law and engineering. But, whereas in 
these and other professions, except to a certain extent in the 
army, they remam specialities practically for the whole period 
of an individual career, in the navy they arc conhned to the 
junior ranks until they coalesce again on to the common 
loundation — the main "function of which is command of a 
ship— when Captain's rank is reached, especially in tl;e 
junior employments of that rank, becoming reaccentuated as 
seniority increases. As promotion to Captain terminates 
the first part of an officer's career, so does promotion to Flag 
rank terminate the second, and then begins the third, when 
these attributes come into play. The development of these 
should be carefully watched during service as a Captain, so 
that, as I stated in my letter in Land & Watkr of the 13th, 
'■ the right pegs may be put into the right holes." 
These three qualifications are of an entirely different 
psychological order. There are hardly any instances in 
history where all three are found combined in the same 
individual ; sometimes two are : generally only one exists 
in a prominent degree. The efficiency of a cohesive whole, 
such as the Navy, depends on this factor of " attributes " 
being recognised and applied. This has not hitherto been 
done, and it has been assumed and acted upon, that because 
an individual showed special capacities in one of these factors, 
therefore he must be good at any of the others, which is against 
both nature and human experience. 
1 now come to a consideration of these attributes and 
their application. The strategical is the rarest, the most 
difficult and requires the greatest amount of time and study. 
It can only be developed by means of a Staff College and a 
ir)perly organised War Staft. When found, its possessor 
should be stuck to at all hazards, even if he is deficient in the 
other two. The tactical requires rapidity of decision, courage, 
determination, all the qualities of leadership in the. highest 
degree, for i's task is the application of forces for their ultimate 
purposes, the principles of which are to be found in history, 
though the methods may vary with the development of 
weapons. In " The Transformations of War," Introduction 
P. a\'., Commandant J. Colin, of the French War School, 
says : 
" It cannot be too often repeated that the phenomena of war 
arc by nature and by reason of their material, intellectual 
ami nioral elements, so complicated that it is difficult to form 
an e.Nact idea of them. They provoke endless discussions in 
which it is impossible to mark error down. History tdonc 
leads us to solid conclusions which nothing can shake ; and 
whence convictions spring." 
It is tlie combination of correct strategy with right tactics 
that results in the successful prosecution of war. The admini- 
strative is of a different order and is the complement of tlie 
other two ; its application is not a mere matter of routine as 
so many seem to imagine, but requires organising faculties 
and a study of the latest business methods. It was the 
development of these in the United States, a couple of decades 
ago. that made us sit up and is the reason why most of our 
methods nowadays are of .\merican origin. 
Officers reach high positions through acquaintance with 
subjects which have nothing to do with war. either in its 
strategical or tactical aspects. The doctrine of command is 
not studied. No text books exist or have been i)reparcd, 
and no portion of the .study of war is included in any ])art 
of the training of an officer" Training is an integral part of 
staff work ; it is the soul without which, plans, shipbuilding, 
gunnery ct line nentis omuc, are mere words and practices. 
The matcri.ilist school lia\e never understood statt work, 
and their failures aie deeper even iu their own suhere of 
technique. Not only was their failure to ascertain the best 
use of weapons, but the effects of long range fire, which was 
so much advertised, were not even considered and defence 
provided against it by a redistribution of armour which, up 
to the war, provided protection only from short range and 
low angle fire. There was no security against explosions in 
magazines and there was defective under-water protection. 
The foregoing will explain why the princijjles of naval war 
are not now clearly understood and it is due, largely, to this 
fact that we have no organised and trained War Stalf for the 
study of war problems and the application of true principles 
to them. Without such a staff and without such a doctrine, 
the Admiralty is not fitted to command in war. Hetween 
1900 and 1904 a great wave of opinion, really anxious for 
reform on true principles, swept tlirough the Service. This 
movement was crushed and diverted from its purpose by 
those who became the directing minds of the Navy at that 
date. The Service fell under an autocracy which had all the 
defects and limitations of autocracy. It hpynotised a press 
which did not realise its responsibilities, and forced popular 
opinion to the sole contemplation of viewing naval ])ower in 
terms of material only. Thus, the Service and the public got 
to think of naval war in terms of Dreadnoughts, super- 
Dreadnoughts and big guns only. And this occurred at that 
period when the development of the long range toijiedo and 
the submarine should have warned people that the big ship, 
could never again be the sole unit o| naval power. It was a 
cardinal mistake for that nation, to whom sea power meant 
most, to inaugurate so great and so reckless experiments. 
We should have confined ourselves to seeing that our ships 
were as good as those produced by other Powers and more 
numerous. In 1904. this was our position, and the 
superiority we thus enjoyed was thrown away. 
The success of any Admiralty organisation wilt mainly 
depend upon the special aptitudes and suitability of officers 
appointed for operational duties. An officer writing on this 
subject before the war said : 
The Navy has plenty of clever men, but cleverness docs lu.t 
mean the intensive power of thinking or creative thought. 
The great defect in the Navy, a defect largely charactcrisiug 
all authoritative systems, is the strangling cf tree th< uglit 
and expression of opinion and so the thought facidtics bcecnio 
atrophied. The mildest criticism under the word " submit" 
comes back to be reworded. 
The German military mind, chastcnoii by its Napolccnic 
experience, "was fertilised by Moltke and learned to put its 
faith in intelligence, and Moltke established a precedent imd 
circles of intelligent men who in their turn handed down the 
torch, and intelligence bred and encouraged intelligence. 
A department has a heredity just as much as a liunian being. 
Mediocrity breeds mediocrity and the mediocre man surrcuiuls 
himself with mediocre men. 
Now in peace time the Navy placed a very high premium 
on a certain kind of naval officer — the great executive type 
who kept his ship clean and smart, got in the coal ijuickly 
and made a few more hits on the taig't than his next door 
neighbour. It is a very valuable type in any war service 
but it does not necessarily include any special aptitude for tne 
operational side of naval war. Power of creative thought, 
trained judgment, and reasoned imagination enter into every 
problem of strategy and tactics, and such faculties are blighted 
and destroyed by a continual concentration on the every day 
round of executive, administrative and technical work. 
In peace time some of the Navy's finest intellectual capital 
was thrown on the scrap heap because it did not conform to 
the accepted standards. There was confusion between the 
meaning of discipline in executive work, which is necessary, 
and conformity in thought and suggestion which is fatal to 
all progress. It was not understood that the critical faculty 
is the obverse of constructive thought and that if one is sup- 
pressed the other ceases to exist. 
Are the Admiralty sure that such ideas have been aban- 
doned and that officers arc being employed according to tlu:ir 
special aptitudes, or does like still call to like ? In his far;;- 
well orders to the Manchiirian army, Kuropatkin wrote : 
Men of strong in<lividuality are' with us, untDrtunately, often 
l)ass^d over intcal of receiving accelerated promotion. 
l^-!cause they rtirc a source of anxiety ti) some otlicers in peace 
tim?, they get suppressed as being headstrong. The result 
is that they leave the service : whilst others who possess 
neither force of character nor conviction, but who are sub- 
servient and always ready to agree with their superiors, are 
liromoted. 
After looking back on the v;ist drama in which he had played 
so great and melancholy a part, he jironounced the final 
dictum : " There is only one thing that matters and that is 
the truth. " 
May 31st, 1917. W. H. Henderson. 
