8 
LAND A WATER 
Tanuarv 17, 1918 
have to rely upon very iiupcrkct gucsswin k u> estimate the 
<ffcGt this would have upon his power of resistance. Such 
tilings arc only calculable where they concern the absolute 
necessities of "an armed force, and where those stocks of 
necessities are near exhaustion. The situation of the enemy 
does not Icml itself to anv.sucii calculation. He is not short 
of coal or of iron or of material for explosives. What he is 
short of is the means of conducting tlu- general life of the State. 
M'e also arc short of it. but not in the same degree as he is. \\ c 
do not know the degree of perfection of his organisation, but 
no milter how high that degree, it is clear that Uii present 
situation is imposing a =.u.iiii Iki gudUi ihau anything \et, 
suffered among the Western Allies. On whether that strain 
will reach a breaking point or not mainly depend the fortunes 
of the coming season. It^ is wiser to scale down the advan- 
tages in our favour upon the enemy's side, moral and material, 
and to believe that the enemy can hold, so far as mere supply 
is concerned, throughout the open season of ic)i8. We may 
well believe that before the end of it his state wiU be desperate, 
but we have no warranty to conclude that it will bring about 
a break in his whole organism before next >\inter. Russia 
has changed all. U. BiiLLuc 
The Admiralty Changes 
By Arthur Pollen 
WHEN the historian of the Great War is able in 
some dispassionate future to appraise this 
nation's successive steps in its struggle for 
efliciencv, he will surely regard those announced 
during the last three weeks as amongst the most significant 
and the most curious. They are significant bccaiise they 
arc a measure of our previous inefiicienc\- : curious as meas- 
uring the time neces.-ary. before the results of common know- 
ledge can be expressed in common action. 
.\ \en,- cursory rereading of the comments on naval affairs, 
written bv the "better quahlied writers during the last three 
years, woiild remind those who hav(; maintained their 
interest in this vital matter that the various governments 
that have controlled our destiny since the beginning of the 
>\ar have never lacked remembrancers to warn them that 
war cannot be carried on scientifically except through an 
organisation scientificially calculated to achieve its purpose. 
Not, of course, that the necessity of a Naval Staff was pointed 
oiit for the first time after war had begun. It was, indeed, 
the first reform urged by Lord Beresford when he was almost 
the only reformer, and it w-as the most urgently pressed by 
those who supported and succeeded him. There were innocent 
and hopeful souls who thought that Mr. Churchill's Memoran- 
ilum of January ist, 1912, realised the advance which pro- 
gressi\-e thinkers had desiderated. They did not realise the 
fatal omission from Mr. Churchill's professed policy ; they 
did not appreciate his incapacity to carry out c^'cn the policy 
that he announced. 
The theory of a staff organisation is not really very difficult 
to understand. Historically, the staff derives from the 
organisation put at the disposal of the commander-in-chief 
in the field for securing the unified action of all the scattered 
and diverse units of his force, so that by synchronous move- 
ments and a universally understood system of wording and 
obe\"ing orders, all couJd combine for the achievement of a 
common object. It supplied the means of co-ordinating 
information which alone made co-operation possible. It 
was at once a mental extension and the physical executive of 
the supreme commander. In origin then the staff is a 
necessary element to command. And it inevitably grew 
until it covered all the problems, executive as well as 
intellectual, that war propounds. 
.\ right conception of naval war shows at a glance the main 
f mictions of a staff necessarj- to prepare for it in peace and to 
deal with it when it comes. Sea power is brought into being 
for one purjjose only— -to destroy the sea jwjwcr of the enemy. ■ 
Its single objecti\e then is to fight. It may be thwarted 
of its purpose, because the enemy has it in his power to with- 
draw liis forces from the sea and to place them where sea 
power cannot reach them. The navy that is denied battle 
must then proceed to seize — so far as is possible — all the advan- 
tages that victorious battle would have given, and to inflict 
upon the enemy all the disadvantages which, by defeat, he 
Avould have incurred. The ad\-antages gained by \-ictory are 
freedom to use the sCa, the ability to invade directly or 
indirectly, immunity from the threat of invasion. The' dis- 
advantage of defeat is a siege which the v'ictorious fleet can 
inflict by blockade. But it is an error to suppose that the 
justification of a blockade is the gradual sapping of the 
enemy's civil endurance and military strength effected by the 
stringency it creates. The real rnilitarv- justification of a 
blockade is that the disadvantages of "this stringency will 
<ompel the enemy to fight. There is in. theory— and all the 
facts of history support it— no possible alternative to fighting 
being the primary purpose for which navies exist. 
It follows that, if the General Staff is the mental extension 
of the chief command, fighting must be the only concern of 
the most important section of staff organisation. " War." 
said an American general, " is fightiug, and fighting i.s killing." 
At sea it means the employment of weapons, dmi-lly in ships, 
for the destruction of the cncniy'ji weapon-carrying bliips and 
other defences of his sea forces. Sea war then is primarily'an 
affair of the choice and use of weapons. For practical pur- 
poses there arc three naval w'capons : the gun, the torpedo 
and the mine. Ttie guns in praetical use in the British ll^rt 
alone are verj^ various. Tlicre are anti-submarine patrol 
boats armed with twelve pounders and even smaller w'capons ; 
and battleships and battle cruisers armed with 15-inch guns 
and, if rumour is to be trusted, with larger weapons still. 
Torpedoes vary as do guns, but to a less degree. And there 
arc several types of mines and depth charges. In selecting 
the armament for any particular ship and in detailing any 
partiailar ship for any particular operation, two intellectual 
functions must be exercised. There is the choice of the 
weapon and jircscribing the method of its use. And, insepar- 
able fi'om these two is the third — the design of the ship that 
is to carrj- the weapon. What is true of guns is true of 
torpedoes, mines and dejith charges. It is hardly necessary' 
to add that in all war the science of the use of weapons is 
twofold. It has an offensive and a defensive side to it. You 
must master your weapon for the purpose of attacking the 
enemy ; you must master the defensive means the enemy's 
use of the weapon imposes upon you. According, therefore, 
as circumstances make the use of one or other kind of weapon 
likely to be predominant by your own forces or by the enemy's, 
so will the staff grade the offeilsive or defensive aspect of its 
preparations. 
The general theory behind the British pre-war conception of 
sea povvcr, was that so long as we possessed a battle fleet 
excelling in numbers the combined fleets of all our probable 
enemies, and composed of units each individually more j>owcr- 
ful than those any enemy w'as known to be preparing, v\e 
should not only be perfectly safe from naval defeat, but would 
in all probabilit\- not even have to fight for safety, for the 
excellent reason that no enemy not absolutely desperate 
would provoke a contest in which the odds would 
be hopelessly against him. Our theor\- of war, there- 
fore, was generally that the enemy's main forces would have 
to keep to their harlxiurs, leaving us free to carrv' on the 
transport of troops and to employ our own and Allied and 
Neutral mercliant ships in sujiplv, practicallv as if no enemy 
naval force existed. If we test this theory by the two prin- 
ciples laid down above — namely, that fleets exist only to 
light and that in preparing for this, regard must be had to 
the special weapon each side will rely upon, we shall, I think, 
notice a very curious contradiction in our conduct. For our 
theory being that with a battle fleet as big as ours, neither 
the enemy's main fleet^ — nor any of his merchant men — t^ould 
ever put to sea cxcejJt upon some desperate adventure, 
when it would obviously be our object to destroy him, 
we should ha\-c placed our main reliance on our longest range 
weapon to effect his destruction. For, ex liypothesi, the enemy 
would generally be fugitive. Our first care then should have 
been to have brought our battleships' gunnery to the highest 
perfection, and hence to have exhausted our capacity for analy- 
sis so as to anticipate every condition of action, and then to 
have entrusted to the best scientific talent we possessed the 
])roduction of whatever optical, mechanical or electrical devices 
that were recpiired for overcoming the difiicultics which right 
anticipation showed would arise in battle. Only so could wc 
have hoped to give a logical expression to the offensive theory 
on which. battleship;^ are designed. .'\nd, conversely, assum- 
ing our policy of driving the enemy within his harbours by fear 
or defeat to have succeeded, we should have rendered the naval 
gun in his hands a weapon of which we need not be afraid — 
for it was always clear that with the advance m the speed of 
ships and in rapidity of communication brought about bv 
steam and wireless, the neutralisation of a battle fleet must be 
followed by an absohitt- command of the sea in the sense in 
v\hich old writers used it. 
W'v. .should then have looked into the possibilities of the other 
naval weapons, new comers in thq field of war, weapons that 
