Bradley Fiske, Reformer

Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske is best known for his role in creating the post of Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) and his extensive technical contributions around the turn of the century to America’s new steel Navy. Historians tend to concentrate on Fiske’s legendary arguments with Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels over war preparation and the creation of a naval general staff. These historians disagree concerning Fiske’s actions. Some see him as a man heroically fighting against a moribund and obsolete system. Others see a self-aggrandizing, egotistical officer interested only in usurping civilian authority over the Navy.¹ Neither interpretation is entirely fair to Fiske, primarily because both neglect his reasons for defying the wishes of the Wilson Administration and working to create a naval general staff. Fiske’s understanding of the phenomenon of war led him down the path of insubordination to cooperate with reform- minded congressmen and to craft the legislation creating the post of CNO, despite the risk to his career and the norms of civilian control of the military.

Fresh out of Annapolis in 1874, Fiske joined a Navy that was a national disgrace. By the time he retired in 1916, the Navy had become a national symbol of strength and pride. Fiske’s career mirrored the Navy’s rise. He supervised the electrification and arming of the new ships: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and Dolphin; served with Commodore George Dewey at the Battle of Manila Bay in 1898; attended the Naval War College during one of its more creative periods under the direction of Henry Taylor; was appointed to the General Advisory Board; was elected president of the U.S. Naval Institute (a post he held longer than anyone); and eventually became Aide for Operations to Secretary Daniels from 1913 to 1915. After his retirement, Fiske continued to comment on naval and military affairs until his death in 1942.

It was during his time as Aide for Operations that Fiske confronted Daniels over the need for national preparation in advance of the war breaking out in Europe. The Wilson Administration resisted taking substantive steps until 1915 on the grounds that preparation for war made it more likely. Thus, Daniels kept the fleet dispersed in Latin American waters, pursuing Wilsonian gunboat diplomacy. Fiske and the naval reformers argued that war would come regardless of America’s level of preparedness. This made it critical that the fleet be upgraded, expanded, and concentrated for training in order to deal with the likely European antagonists. Unreadiness would only increase the risk of defeat or raise the cost of victory once war began.

Fiske’s organizational solution to naval shortcomings was a naval general staff modeled after that of the Prussians. The desire for a general staff dated back to the late 1800s, when naval officers traced technical problems in ship design and construction to the diversified decisionmaking centers of the bureau system. But Fiske saw the need for a naval staff in strategic terms. A central authority was not only necessary to improve individual ship design, but also to develop strategy and build the appropriate fleet. Under the bureau system there was no strategic vision guiding the Navy, so the fleet grew up as a collection of hodgepodge vessels designed by committee. Fiske complained that congressional amateurs designed the naval machine, while the experts merely created its parts.² Fiske was certain that a general staff would eliminate this problem by developing a coherent strategic blueprint and by providing better advice to the civilians who made the decisions.

Daniels resisted the notion of a staff, as did many legislators, on the grounds that such a device was incompatible with democracy and civilian control of the armed forces. The Secretary was less than genuine. After Fiske’s congressional allies made public their proposal for a Chief of Naval Operations, Daniels intervened to water down the legislation and then claimed credit for creating the post. Fiske had won a partial victory, but he paid a price for such insubordination. Daniels chose Admiral William S. Benson as first CNO, a clear slap at Fiske, who was the front-runner. Furthermore. Fiske was forced to defend himself against a smear campaign from some of the Secretary’s political allies who were visibly upset at what they considered Fiske’s flouting of civilian authority. Fiske must have known political retaliation would come, but he was willing to pay the price because his understanding of strategy made reform imperative.

There were three major influences on Fiske’s strategic thinking. Commander Henry C. Taylor, one of Fiske’s professors at Annapolis and later president of the Naval War College, taught Fiske that strategy consisted of unchanging principles and that the study of history had uses in contemporary decision-making.¹ Those who possessed historical knowledge would better anticipate the likely unfolding of similar events than those who didn’t. As president of the Naval War College from 1893 to 1896, Taylor moved it toward a staff system in war planning because he thought future wars would be decided quickly with the instruments on hand, making advance preparation vital.

From Rear Admiral Stephen Luce, founder of the war college, Fiske learned to think about the Navy as a whole and to treat weapons as mere tools of war. Luce also convinced Fiske that war was simply a means of deciding issues between nations with different ideas and that the one with the clearest purpose, the best methods, and the best machines must win. Like Taylor, Luce held that strategy was bound by certain principles and that just as laws of behavior governed the physical universe, so too must they govern relationships among people. It was with this in mind that Luce brought the study of military history to the Navy in order to discover such laws.⁴

Fiske took these lessons to heart, but he differed from Taylor and Luce in one key aspect. Where his two mentors argued that strategic principles were immutable and weapons merely the tools of war and strategy, Fiske argued that technological change affected the practice of strategy by altering the medium through which strategic principles were applied. This is clearest in considering Fiske’s critique of the third influence on his strategic thoughts, Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan.

Fiske believed Mahan had discovered universal laws that govern human behavior in warfare. In an essay for the North American Review, he bluntly compared Mahan to Sir Isaac Newton. As Aide for Operations, Fiske’s advice to Daniels against dividing the fleet in Latin American waters was classically Mahanian. Nevertheless, Fiske was not dogmatic, and worked through Mahan’s principles on his own. He refined Mahan’s definition of sea power, arguing that the force affecting history was actually naval power, which did not include commerce.⁵ Fiske then traced the roots of naval power to mechanical power, which provided the basis for his break with Taylor and Luce over the immutability of strategic laws. Technological change affected mechanical power, which was the root of naval power. The resulting qualitative change in naval power altered the practice of strategy. For Fiske, the result was that weapon systems interacted with strategic principles to form strategy, which, until that point, was thought to be governed by unchanging laws.⁶ Fiske also worked through a concept that Taylor and Luce had introduced. He wrote in the preface to the second edition of The Navy as a Fighting Machine:

When two machines meet in war the best machine must win. Human beings simply may not know which one will win, but that is simply because they do not know, in advance of trial, which is the best machine. It is desirable for us, therefore, to produce the best machine we can.⁷

An implication of this statement, which Fiske recognized, was that strategy had little role in contests between machines of disparate value. In such cases, actual fighting did not determine the results of combat, but only revealed the predetermined outcome. Strategy operated only when the belligerents had equal systems for making war.

In order to reduce uncertainty in creating the national war machine, Fiske even reached toward the concept of a uniform military unit much like our own notion of an “armored division equivalent” for comparative purposes. Thus he sought to develop an analytical means of determining the likely results of combat before it took place and constructed a forerunner of modern systems analysis.

Fiske’s approach contains obvious shortcomings, however. His notion of a predetermined, if unknown, victor left little room for brilliant, inspired leadership or incompetence, and it ignored the very real role that politics plays in war. Fiske stressed the importance of preparing personnel in strategic thought as part of designing the war machine, but he attributed the victories of Caesar, Napoleon, and Moltke to their superior armies, not their individual generalship.

As a military and naval strategist, Fiske’s views were fairly conventional. He held that the Navy’s primary purpose was to defend the national economic order and disrupt the enemy’s. This was best accomplished through blockade, which he considered a more efficient means of compulsion than invasion.⁸ Fiske further held that combat was necessary to resolve issues; mere maneuver was inadequate. He also subscribed to the principle of concentration, but preferred to call it the principle of isolation.  The point was to concentrate one’s resources to bring overwhelming force to bear against inferior portions of the enemy’s forces with sufficient speed to prevent the remaining parts from coming to the aid of the attacked part.⁹ Always a technical leader, Fiske seized on the revolutionary potential of air power. His ideas for defense of the Philippines by air were rejected as fanciful, however, and it fell to others to build naval aviation. Fiske had to settle for being the first admiral to fly in an airplane.

While Fiske’s views on naval strategy were important in determining his advice on naval policy, his understanding of the phenomenon of war itself provides the best explanation for his confrontation with the Wilson Administration. Fiske’s study of history led him to conclude that fighting was inherent to humanity and that nothing would end man’s practice of war.¹⁰ He dismissed popular notions that civilization, economic interdependence, and even Christian brotherly love could end war, since the former actually increased society’s ability to organize for war, the second was a prime cause of war, and the last had not prevented war among the Christian nations of Europe.

Since war could not be made obsolete, Fiske needed to understand its role in effecting change. He believed that competition among nations drove progress, and that war resulted when “barbarians” resisted progress by force. Because war resolved such differences, it was also the instrument of dynamic change in the international system. More often than not, that change was the rise or collapse of entire nations." Thus, war in the international system placed America’s very existence at risk.

In his later years Fiske would earn the enmity of women’s groups by blaming the feminization of the United States for causing it to lose the martial skills necessary for survival, but in 1915 he stressed the tendency of advanced states to turn to the arts, philosophy, etc., as the factors that made them less prepared for war and usually resulted in their decline. He wrote in the midst of World War I:

Every nation that has attained and then lost greatness, has lost it by losing the proper balance between the military and peaceful arts; never by exalting unduly the military, but always by neglecting them, and thereby becoming vulnerable to attack.¹²

Fearing that the United States was losing its martial skills, Fiske turned his energies to convincing Americans of the necessity of remaining prepared in a dangerous world. Therein lies the crux of his disagreements with Daniels and his reasons for supporting the creation of a naval general staff.

Like Henry Taylor, Fiske believed that future wars would be decided quickly, utilizing the military systems that the belligerents had on hand at the beginning of hostilities. Fiske was one of the first to think about national security in terms of a nation’s whole mechanism for waging war, including force structure, a mobilization plan, industrial base, and the like. If wars would be decided quickly, it was necessary for states to have the best war machine possible before the outbreak of hostilities in order to avoid decisive defeat early in the war. A situation such as the ones that prevailed during the Civil War or World War I would not do in the industrial age. His favorite examples of the risks of inadequate preparation were the Franco-Prussian War, the Spanish- American War, and the Russo-Japanese War. In each case, shortcomings in the military machines of the vanquished (resulting from inadequate preparation) led to decisive early defeats at the hands of better-prepared states. Once such defeats had been inflicted, it was impossible for the unprepared to recover. Fiske wrote:

The strategists of the principal European armies and navies, ever since the day of Moltke, have realized that when a nation enters into war the preparations she has made before the war in designing, building, and preparing her national defense machines are the determining factors, and the only determining factors, as to the way in which that machine will operate during the war. After a war has begun, the two contesting machines are like two pugilists who have started to fight. It is too late then to rectify any mistakes or supply any omissions.¹³

A naval general staff and Council of National Defense were the best means of preparing the necessary national war machine. By centralizing decision-making authority in the hands of experts, these reforms would reduce the shortcomings that historically plagued the creation of America’s military forces. Fiske still expected civilians to decide when, where, and why the nation would fight. He believed that his reforms would create the means to give civilians better advice on the implications of their decisions and place the authority to answer the question of how the nation fought in the hands of individuals trained in that field.

Fiske undoubtedly overstated his case, for World War II would definitively demonstrate the value of preparation, the costs of unpreparedness, and the ability to rectify mistakes. While arguing that “Perfect preparedness of personnel and material is essential because events follow each other so rapidly in war that no preparation can be made after it has begun,” Fiske admitted that it was impossible to achieve.'⁴

When designing the war machine, one did not always know how it would be used in the decades to come. Furthermore, he accepted the possibility of rectifying mistakes in creating the war machine after the outbreak of hostilities. The Civil War was a prime example of that possibility and of the costs of being unprepared. Fiske faulted the Union’s inadequate preparation for the war’s long duration and the resulting loss of life, both of which could have been avoided had the U.S. government paid closer attention to the problems of national security.¹⁵

This is a contradiction in Fiske’s thinking. His theory on the short war—with no margin for error in preparation—did not mesh with the realities of the American Civil War or World War I. It was a tension the admiral did not resolve, but he nevertheless finessed his way through the issue in order to make his point: The United States must pay better attention to defense planning before entering conflicts, because the price of failure in the modern age could be extremely high.

In Fiske’s view, the Wilson Administration’s approach to international affairs prior to World War I risked early defeat, or, at a minimum, promised to raise the costs of victory. In lieu of the cataclysm that rocked Europe in 1914, America’s lack of a systematic means of designing, building, and preparing its national defense machines and national security system was dangerous and unacceptable. A naval general staff would do much to rectify that situation for the Navy, but Fiske went one better and proposed a Council of National Defense to integrate all the necessary factors in preparing the nation for war. It was not until 1947, when the Truman Administration reorganized the national security apparatus, that Fiske’s recommendations would be fulfilled.

In the end, Fiske’s break with Secretary Daniels was inevitable. The Wilson Administration’s resistance to organizational reform and rearmament flew in the face of everything Fiske believed essential for national survival. The chasm between the admiral and the administration was so great that it could not be papered over or compromised. It placed Fiske in the difficult position of accepting military inadequacy or facing off against his superior and violating U.S. standards of civil-military relations. It was a difficult dilemma for Fiske, but his views on the nature of warfare made action imperative, even at the cost of insubordination.

Fiske’s efforts to create the post of CNO were not driven by a desire to usurp civilian authority, but by his belief that the national security infrastructure then in existence was inadequate and placed the nation’s survival at risk. Modern war had given early battles greater significance and made them more decisive, placing a premium on peacetime preparedness. His calls for a naval general staff and Council of National Defense were designed to force the government to think about war when it created the national war machine during peacetime, not after the outbreak of hostilities, and to graft strategic thinking onto force planning.

The President finally heard the calls for preparation from Fiske and others and submitted a budget that increased military spending in 1915. To the extent that Wilson took some modest steps to prepare the United States before its official entry into World War I, he shortened the war and saved many lives. Fiske deserves much of the credit for sounding the warning then and afterwards; the approach of World War II and the Cold War eventually demonstrated to everyone the soundness of his wisdom.