The following article was contributed to Information Dissemination by Phillip Scott Wallace. P. S. Wallace is a Lieutenant Commander in the Individual Ready Reserve who served ten years on active duty. A graduate of Georgia Tech, he was an enlisted sonar technician on the USS Columbia (SSN-771) before being commissioned. Winged as a Naval Flight Officer, he has 1100 flight hours, flew with VF-103 "Jolly Rogers" in the fleet, and was the last Operational Test Director for the Tomcat at VX-9 Detachment Point Mugu before leaving active duty. A graduate of the Naval War College's College of Distance Education, he is currently a flight test engineer with the F-35 Integrated Test Force at NAS Patuxent River.
In his famous 1965 letter to the then-President of the Naval War College, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz said that there was nothing that had happened in the Pacific war that had not been predicted or studied prewar by students and faculty at that institution [1]. While some may care to argue the exact particulars of that point of view, it is true that during those interwar years students played tactical war games and also planned whole campaigns as they figured out how to defeat the Japanese threat; and thus were fairly familiar with many issues at a broad level when they later had to make flag-level decisions during the real war. It shouldn’t be too hard to see that it was this combination of study at both the tactical and strategic levels by many of its future Admirals that helped lay the groundwork for the success of the United States Navy in World War II.
Today’s Naval War College JPME I curriculum focuses on the operational level of war, especially in joint environments. This is not to be slighted, not by any means, not in the least--for it is a first-class education; an absolutely necessary one; one that is highly critical to being both a commanding officer (at any level) and a staff officer for a joint command; and one that is valued by any who holds it. But it is not enough.
The naval tactical level—and especially exploration of the concepts of fleet tactical employment as a combined arms whole [2]--needs to be brought back as a serious item of study in the curriculum at the War College and elsewhere. This need becomes more imperative if we think that we may one day face a challenge on the seas as in days of old.
This is because for a sea service, great changes in strategic fortune can come from single tactical events, unlike modern land war [3]. The Battles of Midway and Savo Island are exemplars of this fundamental truth. Sunken ships cannot be sent replacements from the training battalions, nor can their depleted motor pools be refilled from rear depots. Once gone, they are gone.
In addition, like the Air Force, the fate of the Navy in combat is more heavily tied to the relative quality of its equipment vis a vis the enemy (ships, airplanes, and weapon systems) than is correspondingly true for the Army (which can at times rest on the fighting spirit of ill- or under-equipped infantry units, such as in the 1944 defense of Bastogne by the 101st Airborne). The proper selection of naval equipment (including aerial vehicles) is therefore heavily reliant upon a proper understanding of the tactical environment that equipment will operate in; because far more than in land warfare, in naval and air warfare tactical success means strategic success—and it is far harder to quickly re-equip a Navy or Air Force with the right gear once war has begun than it is for land forces. Tactical study and innovation matter, and they pay off most if done in interwar years[4].
Regarding today’s professional military education, a credible case can be made that sometime after the McNamara years of the 1960s the Navy started distancing the officer corps from a continuous study of war at all its levels, in part because of the need to compete with academic national security experts who had influence over civilian leaders and had greater prestige because of those academic credentials. Advanced military study became focused on the operational and higher levels, including those larger national security issues that the academics specialized in. The lack of a peer naval competitor with a credible battle fleet threat may also have played an initial role in this trend. In addition, there has been the fracturing of the Navy into the three main warfare communities, each of which at times has perhaps shown no desire to learn about the other (except in how to counter opposing budget proposals).
This has meant that senior and mid-level military professional education has became increasingly divorced from intense study of the lower levels of war, with the study of employment at the tactical level being often left to fleet training schools and/or small centers. Much good work is done there. The problem with this approach, though, is that tactical innovation often becomes left to highly capable personnel at the O-3 and O-4 level who are nevertheless still only beginning their warfare educations at the higher levels (if at all); personnel who might not yet have the vision and experience to make large jumps like a Jackie Fisher made with the Dreadnought; personnel who can often only innovate with what is already in the fleet or can be made available on a short time line; personnel who also often don’t have the time or credibility to get their ideas heard at the senior levels (meaning that perhaps new ideas and new equipment proposals increasingly start coming from think tanks and DOD civilians instead of from the service itself); and personnel who in today’s combined arms environment are from one branch of the service, say aviation, and may never become familiar with the tactical employment of another branch—say the Submarine Force—to any great depth, because they never had a chance to do so in a serious, formal manner.
It also means ideas for tactical employment of the fleet as a whole (including the maritime patrol aircraft element) may not get the study they need, and certainly may not get widespread propagation or the familiarization needed for immediate use in war from day one.
This is simply a poor way of doing business for an organization heavily dependent upon tactical outcomes. If today’s Navy thinks tactics and tactical innovation are mainly the province of the O-3 and O-4 in training schools, with the higher ranks, after they have earned their marks of excellence as operators, going on to focus on other things (operational staff items, personnel, administration, budgets, etc.) it is wrong. The above opinion is based upon the author’s own familiarity with Naval Aviation, and he acknowledges affairs may be different in than he thinks, especially in other communities—but does not feel it to be overly so such as to make the larger point irrelevant.
Innovation naturally does occur in fleet training schools but may get stifled if a “schoolhouse answer” approach starts reigning. Ideas generated in the schools may also have difficulty breaking out upward through the chain of command; or in being able to get new equipment delivered to the fleet—and the same goes more than double for ideas generated outside the schools or any specialized study centers. The potential solution is that tactical study at academic institutions will serve as a way around these kinds of choke points if they occur, especially for studies of unified fleet combat operations.
It should also be obvious that a nation that has prospered under a free enterprise system will benefit if competition in ideas occurs in an orderly way in its naval establishment. The heritage of Proceedings shows that. Competition is good, and so is exposing broad numbers of officers to concepts in a way that asks them to not just learn, but to think and innovate—for in creative thought as well in war, numbers can tell out. The more officers you have looking at an issue throughout their career, the more innovative ideas you will have, and the more the unrestricted line officer corps will think of themselves as samurais of the Naval Art and not just members of a warfare community.
Therefore, my argument is that it is simply not enough to study grand strategy, national security, and operational warfare at the more senior levels (O-4 and above). In both battle itself and, in war overall, the tactical, the operational, the economic, the technological and the grand strategic all merge—each influencing the other in a way that cannot always be neatly separated into non-interfacing bins segregated by rank or level.
Serious, formal, on-going thought about tactical fleet employment concepts needs to be part of formal professional military education all the way to the O-5 level, to provide a proper base for later decisions and tactical innovation as well as to demolish barriers between the Navy’s warfare branches. The O-5, O-6, and O-7 should be just as ready and able to compete in the game of tactical innovation as the O-3 and O-4.
For it was Nelson—the “battle group” commander--who innovated at the Battle of the Nile; and it was Admirals Joseph Reeves and William Moffett who did so much to advance Naval Aviation during the Golden Age. It is vitally important that senior personnel be interested in tactical innovation (especially at the combined-arms fleet level), for pre-war concepts of tactical action play a large role in making funding decisions and naturally impact the way the later battle play out[5].
As an example, the actions in the Slot during the Guadalcanal and Solomons campaigns were in part predetermined before they ever occurred by the Japanese pre-war emphasis of the Long Lance torpedo and night action; and by the emphasis by the American navy on using the naval gun in daylight action. These pre-war funding and training decisions heavily influenced the tactical outcomes of the individual night action battles; whose outcomes then heavily determined the operational and strategic flow of the war as a whole for a while[6].
The inability of American surface forces to decisively halt Japanese resupply efforts, in part because of the kind of Navy that was created before the war relative to the one the Japanese created, resulted in the Guadalcanal campaign lasting six months and in the diversion of some supplies from one theater to another. The tactical, economic, political, organizational, and strategic all affected each other—a truth then and now. The Southwest Pacific campaigns were not just a live-fire exercise in the Operational Art, nor a reading in National Security—as genuinely important as both those fields are. The campaigns of 1942-3 were tactical, operational, and strategic problems, all at the same time, and each level affected the other.
The naval tactical thus needs to be brought back into the systematic study of war at all levels—including the Naval Academy and NROTC via Naval Warfare courses--so that it can shed light on many factors necessary for flag-level decision makers and civilian leaders to consider as they make force-level decisions; so that it can create a common naval warriors ethos; and so that it can hopefully result in a steady sharpening of the tactical level sword by more-senior personnel who add the additional years of study in comparative warfare they have (hopefully) made during their careers to the tactical operational familiarity of more junior personnel who actually operate the equipment.
The fleet tactical should not be divorced from the operational or strategic, either in planning or study or thought or training. The flag-level commander and the plebe should be as enthusiastic and interested in the fleet tactical as the operator. War is a seamless whole—the tactical affects the grand strategic, and vice versa. Especially for navies[7].
Therefore, the different levels of war are interlinked, and in the Navy flag-level decision makers are really making tactical decisions when they make budget decisions. They should thus have a life-long interest in tactics and tactical innovation, and tactics should not be just considered an issue for the individual boat or CRUDES squadron or aviation formation commander and the respective training establishments behind them—for fleet employment as a whole will fall through the cracks, if nothing else. We may face a peer competitor at sea one day. We might want to be ready. Serious, widespread study of tactics and tactical innovation, especially on a fleet level, should be reintroduced to places like the Naval War College and Naval Academy, as well as continue in the places where it is happening today.
[1] Letter of 19 September 2024 from Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, USN to Vice Admiral Charles W. Melson, USN; Source (among others): Carrier Battles: Command Decision in Harm’s Way by Professor Douglas V. Smith, United States Naval Institute Press, 2006, p. 8.
[2] See page 10 of the first edition of Fleet Tactics: Theory and Practice by Captain Wayne P. Hughes, USN (Ret.) for a useful definition of what is meant by the phrase “fleet tactics”. The book is recommended as a must-read in its entirety.
[3] Consider for example Winston S. Churchill’s famous comment that “Jellicoe was the only man on either side who could lose the entire war in an afternoon.” Quote found in The Leverage of Sea Power: The Strategic Advantage of Navies in War, Colin S. Gray, 1992, p. 19.
[4] A recurring theme in Why Air Forces Fail: The Anatomy of Defeat, Robert Higham and Stephen J. Harris, eds., 2006, is that the air forces presented as case studies failed the test of combat once it began because at some level—technological, economic, material, doctrine, etc.—those combat arms were “not ready” when the war occured—and that the cause of not having the right service at the right time for the right war often had its roots in pre-war long-term conditions.
[5] In their book Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War, 1990, Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch highlight the role “Failure to Learn” has in military disaster, and recommend robust studies in empirical history as palliatives. Their concept of “Failure to Anticipate” is also pertinent here, especially in consideration of the need to think about possible enemy tactics in relation to our tactics and strategy.
[6] For narratives and discussion of these very illuminative campaigns and battles, see RADM Samuel Eliot Morrison’s History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Volume V: The Struggle for Guadalcanal, August 1942—February 1943 and Volume VI: Breaking the Bismarcks Barrier 22 July 1942—1 May 1944; as well as CAPT Hughes discussion in Chapter 5 of his book.
[7] A quote from Clausewitz’s on p. 386 of the Michael Howard and Peter Paret translation of On War, 1976 is very pertinent: “That is why we think it is useful to emphasize that all strategic planning rests on tactical success alone and that—whether the solution is arrived at in battle or not—this is in all cases the fundamental basis for the decision. Only when one has no need to fear the outcome—because of the enemy’s character or situation or because the two armies are evenly matched physically and psychologically or indeed because one’s own side is the stronger—only then can one expect results from strategic combinations
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