Jannar\' 17, 191S 
LAND & WA5TER 
r 
havf* rfallj' duplicated naval war by making an under-siirfai o 
as wpH as a i.urface war possiblo, and asked ourselves wlun- 
the study of the use of these weapons led us in our preparations 
for hostilities. We should have nsked ourselves what is 
left to an enemy doomed to defeat or impotence in the war ol 
surface ships? Will under-water war help liim to redress the 
balance of sea power f The elements were all well known, 
and had long been familial'. The te.xtbopks on toqicdoes, 
submarines and mines that existed before the fateful fourth ot 
August will no doubt all need extensive rewriting. But there 
will be no need to restate any fundamental theory nf the 
employment of these weapons. 
Admiral Aube's Doctrine 
For over thirty years it has been a commonplace amongst 
naval writers that the ne%v element introduced into naval 
war by the torpedo was a form of attack — assumed to be 
neccssarilv fatal in each instance, when brought home — almost 
impossible to avoid, because made by an agent enjoying the 
magic gift of invisibility. That a maritime nation could 
be defeated in war by bringing its sea supplies to naught, antl 
that torpedo attack might achieve this nullification, despite 
all that surface ships could do, were the main contentions set 
out bj' Admiral Aube in his famous j^amphlets of 1885 and 
iS8b. The submarine added no new -principle to Aube's 
theory. It only substituted the literally invisible submarine 
for the virtually invisible swift torpedo boat. But, while no 
new principle was adde<J, a means so far more effective was 
substituted that naval thinkers and writers at once perceived 
that the logical development of the submarine would conv^ert 
.\ube's guerre- de course from a dream to a working theori'. 
What then, our postulates a.s to sea war on the surface being 
a,s we have seen, were the obvious deductions to which a 
study of under-water craft and under-water weapons would 
have le<l us? We should .surely have realised that here was 
the only hope of an enemy hopeli^ssly disadvantaged in the 
war of battleships and cniisers. And e<iually that here was 
a field in wtiich we stood to gain least by the offensive, for 
the e.xcellent reason that we should have no targets to attack. 
.\ud, consequently, just as the perfection of long range gunnery 
'•n action conditions would ha\e been our dominant pre- 
occupation if we would develop offensive in normal sea war 
to the full, so too it should, in the abnormal war beneath the 
sea, have been our main purpose to have preoccupied our- 
selves with the defensive. But, as all the world knows, we 
lot gunnery take care of itself, setting our main fleet to a purely 
defensive r61e. And.wc leapt into the van in developing 
the submarine and long range torpedo, forcing the pace which 
our enemy was bound to follow, ami then neglected to prepare 
i-ven the most elementary of coimter measures \o meet the 
weapons we had forged against ourselves. 
No organisation preparing a navy for war which had in- 
cluded a section for the study of the technique of weapons 
could possibly have fallen into two blunders so glaring and 
disastrous as these two have proved. And it was because 
the Churchill War Staff of 1912 set an enormous number of 
officers and clerks to work on plans of war without reference 
to the means by which those plans were to be pvjt into effect — 
for the staff was altogether severed from the study of weapons, 
that is the study of fighting, that is the whole purpose for 
which fleets exist ! — that we drifted into the great and 
hazardous confiisioh of hostilities wholly unprovided with 
the first essential to success. • 
We went on in this nuiddled and happy-go-luckv way, 
learning nothing from the ominous failures to make hits at 
the l-alkland Islands and the Dogg.r Bank affair, blind to the 
appalling ler>sf)nsof Gallipoli, until Jutland made it clear even 
t(j the Kast observant that modern long range gunnery, as 
exemplified by the two fleets in action that day, was afmost 
altogether impotent. Then another year passed, and we 
found that just as forty battleships and battle cruisers could 
not, in a sea action lasting from a quarter to four till eight at 
night, make hits enough to disable more th.an one of their 
twenty opponents, so too our other sea forces were altogether 
unable to i)roter.t our nierciiant shipping frum the submarines. 
^ et that the attick would be exactly what it Wius, there had 
been, if possible, even less doubt, than that the gunnery of 
the fleet would fail when it came to battle. Tor the German 
threat of ruthless under-water attack on tha largest scale 
which Germany could prepare, was specifically given within 
t.n days of our hearing that von Spec's squadron had been 
<lestroyed, and had been repeated again and again in the 
intervening months. ICven to those, then, who liad not 
the mtelligence to realise that our enemy would inevitablv 
adopt the Aube theory of war because it was the onlv form 
of war open to him, the enemy's actions, no less than his per- 
fectly frank warnings, sholild have brought enlightenin.nt. 
Why were ail warnings as to the inefticiency of our guimerv 
and the virtual non-existence of an anti-submarine organisa- 
tion consistent! v ignored 
the answer is obvious. There 
was no staff dei)artment to point out to the chief command 
what were the right methods of using the gtui, or what followed 
irom the enemy emiiloying the right method —for his purpose — 
of using the torpeclo. 
The system of Admiralty administration under which 
we had suffered since 1904 — -the system of autocracy — 
was necessarily responsible for these misfortunes. The 
\ice of autocracy is that its actions cannot be impartially or 
authoritatively reviewed. In the sphere of civil government 
it breeds injustice and inefticiency. In the \a\y it bred 
inefticiency because it did injustice to the truth. In civil 
affairs the humaner peoples have preferred democracy to 
uut(XTacy. because they rightly ^Jut justice to the individual 
as the first care of the State, and because justice cannot 
prevail where a government's actions cannot be reviewed. 
\'ou cannot administer a service like the Navy democratically, 
that is by allowing the individuals composing it to elect their 
officers. But you can secure that justice to the truth — 
and incidentally to the individuals that advocate it — shall 
prevail by seeing that the trained intellects of the service 
are employed impersonally and impartially to examine every 
main departure in policy. 
Goinmand and Supply 
Fourteen months ago the Commander-in-Chief of the 
Grand Fleet became First Sea Lord and brought with liim 
various officers recently under his command. But he made no 
change in Admiralty organisation. Its two main defects 
remained. Command and Supply or, as the official phrase 
has it, Operations and Maintenance, were still muddled 
together. .\nd there was no Staff. Five months of this 
regime revealed total failure. Last May came the first recon- 
struction. In July Sir Eric Geddesr became First Lord, and 
we have just seen the reconstruction completed. The first 
step was a real effort to separate Command and Supply, but 
it was the only advance made. For not only was the organisa- 
tion wrong, but it had been worked by the dynasty that had 
governed us since 1904, whose inadequacy for the task was 
proved, not only by failure in the field, biit by their content- 
ment with a system that, even if energetically worked, would 
have made success difficult. Critics welcomed Sir Eric 
Geddes and Sir Rosslyn Wemyss because they hoped the new 
organisation would be worked in a new spirit. They also 
hopetl for the completion of the reorganisation and for new 
men to operate it. What has just been accomplLshed is that 
the reforms of last May have been carried to their logical 
conclusion. 
1 said at the outset of this paper that historically the general 
staff derived from the organisation through which the Com- 
mander-in-Chief in the field could employ the numerous and 
various imits that composed his forces, and that its growth into 
an impersonal brain force, to cover the whole field of war, was 
an after development. It is the first of these stages of staff 
development that seems to be realised in the changes 
announced last week. I mean by this, that the First Lord 
has not attempted the construction of a complete staff on 
scientific lines ; method and technic are not provided for. 
It is an organisation created to deal with the imrhediate 
difficulties of the day and to deal with them immediately, 
.'\nd so far as it goes, both in the division and subdivision o£ 
functions and in the choice of officers to preside over the 
various branches, the work seems to be exceedingly well 
done. This is not to say that there are not both inclusions 
and exclusions which in the first case surprise, and in the other 
disappoint. But this after all is inevitable and, while we 
may be sure that the First Lord's new scheme of work is 
intended to be the foundation of a permanent fabric, we can 
be equally sure th?it such a fabric will call for a continual 
change in personnel as the needs of the situation and the 
aptitudes of different oflicers are . revealed. 
To a great extent no doubt the most vital problems of all — 
those that arise in settling the use of weapons — while not 
specifically provided for in the new arr^mgement by new 
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