For most of the 19th century, Britain lacked a great power competitor capable of mounting a serious and sustained challenge at sea and as a consequence was able to maintain its naval supremacy with a small navy made up of a mixture of old and new ships. Annual spending on the navy was thus low. Between 1889 and 1904, however, the increased naval construction of France and Russia, who were informal and then formal allies, posed a major threat to Britain's ability to defend its maritime interests, compelling it to respond with large building programs of its own. During the 15-year period in question, Britain created and supported a numerically large force consisting of up-to-date warships. Annual naval expenditure, as a consequence, sky rocketed by 1904 to more than twice the figure for 1889, an increase that far outstripped the growth in state revenue.
In 1904, Britain's naval financial situation reached the point of crisis. The year before, the economic boom stimulated by high government spending during the Boer War collapsed, and tax revenue, as a consequence, fell sharply. This problem was compounded by the naval loan situation. From the mid 1890s, the policy of “pay as you go” for the construction of shore facilities on the south coast and abroad to meet the needs of a naval war with France and Russia had been replaced with what amounted to a mortgage system. This had initially eased the burden of funding what were known as naval works out of current income, but a decade of borrowing increased the size of debt repayment out of the navy estimate (that is, monies voted for the navy out of annual tax revenue) to a substantial figure. In 1904, the Conservative government in formed the Admiralty that borrowing for naval works would soon be ended, even though no less than three-quarters of the shore building program depended upon such financing, and that further heavy expenditure on existing base development and new construction in the North Sea was required to deal with the rising German threat.
The government at the same time insisted upon a large reduction in the next year's navy estimate. Although this was to be cushioned by the passage of one last naval works loan, the Admiralty was confronted by the prospect of having to deal with the combined effects of a smaller estimate, no income from borrowing, heavy debt charges, and demand for increased spending on base construction. These circumstances prompted Lord Selbome, the First Lord, to appoint Admiral Sir John Fisher, who had made known his willingness to economize, to the post of First Sea Lord. Admiral Fisher assumed office in October 1904 and over the next two years imposed a wide range of administrative reforms and changes in force deployments that resulted in substantial savings. Russian naval losses in the war with Japan and better relations with France, moreover, made it possible to cut the new construction program. These actions enabled Admiral Fisher to reduce annual spending on the navy by 10% in the first year of his administration, but the naval fiscal horizon remained darkly clouded nonetheless for several reasons.
Over the preceding 15 years, improvements in warship design and equipment increased the construction cost of a first-class battleship by more than 50%, while that of first-class cruisers more than tripled; there was every reason to believe that this trend would continue. During the same period, the size of the fleet doubled, resulting in a commensurate increase in the number of naval personnel— whose expense was high—because Britain, unlike foreign navies, met its manning requirements with long-service professionals rather than conscripts. There was no guarantee that the dissipation of the Franco-Russian naval challenge would be permanent; Germany was a growing danger; and the rapidly expanding navies of the United States and Japan were cause for a degree of uncertainty if not outright concern. Admiral Fisher had good reason to believe, therefore, that the building, servicing, and manning of more expensive ships in larger numbers would soon be needed to maintain British naval supremacy, which was bound to result in very much higher expenditure.
The prospects of obtaining the money to support a bigger fleet made up of costlier warships, however, were virtually nil. The electorate was then unprepared for the radical changes in tax structure that would have been required to expand the state's revenue by the amount necessary. Under these circumstances, even the Conservative government, which had long championed the cause of naval supremacy, had to insist upon a substantial reduction in the navy estimate. In late 1905, the navy's fiscal position worsened when Conservative rule was replaced by a Liberal administration that was determined to balance the budget while introducing a comprehensive program of social reform through major reductions in defense spending. Admiral Fisher could have held no hope of improvement in the funding of the navy in the foreseeable future and, as it turned out, was forced over the next three years to accept estimates that were considerably smaller than his own reduced first naval budget of 1905.
Fiscal reality alone might have prompted Admiral Fisher to seek a radical alternative to the steady expansion of Britain's conventional battle fleet and armored cruiser squadrons. But there were other factors besides finance that worked in this direction as well. Admiral Fisher was convinced that there was no defense against the newly invented submarine and that troop transports would be vulnerable in the future to torpedo attacks by even the oldest and least capable underwater attack craft. The immunity of the submarine to rapid obsolescence was important to him, because he counted upon being able to saturate the waters around the British Isles with a numerically large force, which could be built up only over an extended period. Admiral Fisher believed that submarines deployed in that manner and augmented by fast surface torpedo craft would be just as effective a barrier to invasion as a battle fleet, whose value seemed increasingly questionable for other reasons.
Large formations of battleships—which were relatively slow and unmaneuverable because of the unwieldiness of flag signalling that was keyed to a voluminous codebook— had become increasingly susceptible to attack by torpedo craft. The advent of much more efficient armor-piercing explosive projectiles, moreover, meant that even the thickest battleship armor was easily perforated at existing battle ranges. And finally, without a substantial superiority in speed, which existing British battleships did not possess over their foreign counterparts, a British fleet was incapable of imposing a decisive action upon an opponent that was unwilling to stand and fight. Battleships, in short, could be regarded as not only strategically unnecessary but also tactically vulnerable and, in the event that the enemy declined engagement, ineffective.
There was much to be said, on the other hand, for the construction of faster and more heavily gunned armored cruisers, which were to become known as battle cruisers. With fire power comparable to that of a battleship and superior speed, such vessels would be much more capable of bringing a retreating battle fleet to action than a force that consisted of conventional battleships. Battle cruisers operating singly or in small groups, that because of their size could respond more quickly to orders than a large fleet, would be fast and maneuverable enough to reduce the torpedo threat to negligible proportions. And with submarines and surface flotilla units capable of securing home waters, battle cruiser squadrons, with their high speed and great endurance, and directed by the new wireless communications, could be deployed rapidly to protect trade routes and distant imperial territory.
The fiscal benefits of substituting flotilla units for a battle fleet in home waters, and a mobile fire brigade of battle cruisers for scattered station fleets and cruiser squadrons abroad, were thought to be several. Submarines were relatively cheap to build and man, and their military worth was less likely to be devalued by technological change. The number of battle cruisers required to defend the trade routes and empire would be significantly fewer than the combined total of conventional battleships and large cruisers, which would produce substantial savings in new construction, maintenance, and manning. Finally, the development of a reliable means of preventing invasion that was distinctly different from that required for the control of distant seas meant there was no need to strengthen land defenses as insurance against the weakening of surface forces in home waters to meet imperial necessities, which would reduce the intensity of interservice competition for funding.
Convinced of the fiscal and operational advantages to be gained by the implementation of fundamental change, Admiral Fisher at the start of his administration called for the replacement of the battleship and the armored cruiser by the battle cruiser and increased support for submarine development. Admiral Fisher succeeded in raising expenditure on submarines considerably, but his efforts to promote the battle cruiser were only partially successful. The construction of three battle cruisers of the Invincible class was authorized in 1905, but Admiral Fisher was unable to prevent the construction of a much improved battleship, the famous Dreadnought. In early 1905, he unsuccessfully opposed the proposal to build the Dreadnought, and a year later failed to secure the reversal of the policy of continuing the construction of the type when the issue was again raised for discussion.
The Dreadnought was more or less as well protected as a conventional battleship and was somewhat faster and much more heavily armed. The potential greater long-range effectiveness of its uniform battery of big-guns—which were easier to aim than the mixed-caliber armaments that previously had been standard—promised the ability to fight at distances that were beyond those of the torpedo and that were sufficiently great to diminish the effectiveness of armor-piercing projectiles. These factors led to the development of a strong constituency in favor of the new model battleship among Admiral Fisher's own following.
But the Dreadnought was neither swift enough to take over the tasks of an armored cruiser—which meant that vessels of that type were still required to protect trade—nor capable of deploying rapidly to defend far-away colonial waters. In other words, however impressive the new capital ship was in comparison with its conventional predecessors, it was not a suitable basis for the kind of fundamental change in force structure, tactics, and strategy envisioned by Admiral Fisher. In the short run, the disruption of foreign building programs by the sudden advent of a significantly better battleship design enabled Britain to reduce her own new construction and thus achieve substantial savings. But in the long term, the move to a more expensive battleship did nothing to address the problem of fiscal constraint and, indeed, exacerbated it.
After 1906, Admiral Fisher's efforts to remove certain serious technical uncertainties about his radical program met with considerable success. Turbine machinery of unprecedented power had to be developed for the battle cruisers, and in spring 1908 the first unit to be completed demonstrated the practicability of rapid long-distance deployment when it crossed the Atlantic at sustained high speed. That same year, the Royal Navy accepted delivery of a prototype D-class submarine, which unlike earlier underwater craft was capable of reliable operation for reasonably long periods. While increasing torpedo ranges had forced Admiral Fisher to reconceptualize battle cruiser tactics in terms of firing at much greater distances, work on highly innovative mechanical methods of fire control seemed close to providing a solution to the problem of hitting at long range. Admiral Fisher also had grounds to believe that the Royal Navy would enjoy a monopoly of the new gunnery inventions, which would mean that the weakness of battle cruiser protection would not matter because they would be able to damage heavily or destroy their targets before being hit in return.
In 1909, the combination of the advances in battle cruiser and submarine technology on the one hand and the Conservative campaign to bring down the Liberal government through calls for greater capital ship construction to meet the threat of the German navy on the other offered Admiral Fisher an opportunity to achieve his force structure revolution. Admiral Fisher supported the Conservative demand for a six- rather than four-large-ship program in the coming fiscal year with the intention that all would be battle cruisers. The six new ships in combination with the four battle cruisers already built or building would have given the Royal Navy ten such units, two more than the eight dreadnought battleships ordered so far. The Liberal counter-proposal to build two more large warships than demanded by the Conservatives if circumstances warranted doing so (which ultimately came to pass), would only have magnified the effect of Admiral Fisher's scheme so long as he got his way with regard to the type of capital ship constructed.
But Admiral Fisher's plan for an all-battle cruiser program was defeated within the Admiralty, and six battleships and only two battle cruisers ordered instead, an outcome that shifted the dreadnought battleship to battle cruiser ratio much further in favor of the former. This result was mitigated by agreements with Australia and New Zealand that provided for the construction of two more battle cruisers, which Admiral Fisher intended would serve as the nucleus of a reconstituted Pacific Fleet. But the maintenance of a battleship to battle cruiser ratio of nearly two to one amounted to a decisive defeat of his initiative nonetheless, and beset by other major political difficulties, Admiral Fisher retired as First Sea Lord in early 1910.
Four of the battleships and both battle cruisers of the British program were much more heavily armed than their predecessors, and the latter were significantly faster. These improvements did not, however upset German new construction as Admiral Fisher had hoped. As a consequence, Britain had no choice but to continue building large armored warships that were much more expensive per unit than the Dreadnought and in numbers that exceeded those of the first three years of the Liberal government. Naval expenditure thus climbed sharply: in 1910 rising above the peak that had been reached in 1904, and thereafter moving upwards steadily until the outbreak of war in 1914. The initial surge of increased spending on the navy did not pose insuperable financial problems for the Liberals, because virtuoso political leadership had enabled them to increase taxes in 1909 without alienating the electorate. This action, when combined with an end to economic recession, had expanded the revenue of the state by some 25%, which proved to be enough to provide over the short-run for significantly larger expenditure on both the navy and social welfare. By 1913, however, the largess of the 1909 financial revolution had been consumed. With fiscal crisis imminent, Admiral Fisher's radical proposals were resurrected.
The agent of change was Winston Churchill, who had assumed office as First Lord in fall 1911. Churchill was a committed social reformer and economist but had been a great admirer of Admiral Fisher and his ideas since 1907. Although political circumstances had divided the two in 1909, Churchill had sought Admiral Fisher's counsel immediately after taking up the navy portfolio. Admiral Fisher's political unpopularity precluded his participating formally in Admiralty deliberations, but by the end of the year he had convinced Churchill to build battle cruisers rather than battleships and to increase submarine construction. Both initiatives were blocked or otherwise subverted, however, by Churchill's official advisers. His other attempts to keep naval expenditure within bounds failed in the face of the rapidly rising costs of new construction and manning.
In late 1913, Churchill's proposals for additional spending on the navy, which was required mainly to support the construction of battleships, brought him into bitter conflict with David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a long-time political ally. By this time, the performance in maneuvers of submarines of the D and E class had favorably impressed the Royal Navy's leading officers. Moreover, after unsatisfactory experience in fleet exercises that involved large numbers of ships, many admirals had come to the conclusion that a numerically large battle fleet could not be controlled effectively in a real action. In January 1914, Churchill thus was able—with the support of service members of the board of Admiralty—to reach an informal agreement with Lloyd George and H. H. Asquith, the Prime Minister, that canceled two out of the four battleships planned under the 1914-15 estimates and replaced them with an enlarged submarine program whose total cost would be substantially less than that of the unbuilt heavy units.
The abandonment of a strict battleship standard by the Admiralty and the modification of the 1914-15 program approved by the Liberal leadership were kept secret. Insofar as external appearances were concerned, British capital ship policy remained intact, and larger amounts of future tax revenue were committed to the navy. In reality, the Admiralty had altered its conception of force structure and by so doing met the Treasury demand for economy. Concealing the change served both naval and domestic political purposes. The Admiralty was convinced that Germany, on the assumption that the full British battleship program was going forward, would continue the construction of heavy surface units that would be useless in war because of the presence in the North Sea of large numbers of British submarines. The Treasury, for its part, could look forward to the prospect of using funds raised largely in the name of promoting national defense for further extensions of social reform.
The placement of much greater reliance on submarines was accompanied by significant changes in the deployment of battle cruisers. In 1912, Churchill had announced his intention to substitute battle cruisers for the pre-dreadnought battleships of the Mediterranean Fleet. By 1913, three out of the four units intended for the Mediterranean were on station. Although the transfer of battle cruisers from the North Sea to the Mediterranean was justified as a temporary measure, their future replacement by a large force of dreadnought battleships depended upon two unlikely conditions, neither of which in the event materialized: substantial contributions from the Dominions or much increased naval spending by Britain. In early 1914, moreover, the Admiralty decided to create a battle cruiser force in the Pacific, and was in the process of implementing the plan when the war broke out in August.
The transformation of Royal Navy force structure and deployments was greatly accelerated when Churchill brought Admiral Fisher back to the Admiralty in October 1914 as First Sea Lord. Within days of taking office, the admiral had ordered three battle cruisers to be sent to the western and southern Atlantic to deal with a marauding squadron of German cruisers, while three battle cruisers were stationed in the Mediterranean and Pacific. This left only four battle cruisers in the North Sea. At the same time, Admiral Fisher insisted that battleships were not to be operated in the North Sea because of the danger posed by German submarines. By the beginning of 1915, Admiral Fisher had initiated the construction of many new submarines and no fewer than five additional battle cruisers, but his resignation over the Dardanelles in May 1915 aborted plans for further battle cruiser construction. The credibility of his radical ideas was shattered the next year when three British battle cruisers were sunk after catastrophic explosions at the battle of Jutland.
The battle cruiser losses of 1916 were in part caused by the inability of the British vessels to wreck their opponents before they could be hit in return—as Admiral Fisher had intended—and this deficiency was attributable to shortcomings in gunnery equipment. These weaknesses were the result of stringent economies that had been imposed as a response to general conditions of financial restraint in 1908 and 1912, which had in turn severely exacerbated the effects of personality conflicts, administrative confusion, faulty tactical planning, and over-reliance on intelligence. The result was not only the adoption of less than state-of-the- art fire control gear but also deceptions that prevented Admiral Fisher from realizing that the British monopoly of long-range hitting, upon which his faith in the battle cruiser depended, did not exist. This prevented him from taking steps that might have rectified what were, from the standpoint of his view of naval tactics, bad decisions.
The battle cruiser losses at Jutland and the near victory of the German submarine campaign against British merchant shipping created impressions of battle cruiser defectiveness and submarine efficacy as a commerce-raider that made it difficult to perceive that they had been developed before the move by Admiral Fisher to take over the primary functions of the conventional battleship and armored cruiser. Comprehension of their intended leading roles was made ever harder by the rise of the aircraft carrier—which overshadowed the development of the fast battleship deployed in independent squadrons—and the invention of sonar and depth charges—which prompted the post-1918 abandonment of the concept that submarines alone could prevent the passage of an invasion fleet. But to regard the battle cruiser and submarine as having been nothing more than secondary players is to misunderstand fundamentally the nature of high-level British naval problem-solving in the dreadnought era.
In the early 20th century, Britain's ability to maintain her naval supremacy, upon which her national and imperial security depended, was threatened by the sharply rising costs of building and maintaining a large and up-to- date fleet, and shortcomings in existing naval materiel and methods of use that raised doubts about their successful application in war. To address these issues, Admiral Fisher called for radical changes in force structure, tactics, and strategy, which he believed would be both less expensive and much more effective than continuing the gradual expansion and modernization of the existing fleet and preservation of traditional techniques of exercising naval power. These changes represented a sharp break with past practice, but the full measure of Admiral Fisher's intended “revolution in naval affairs” can be taken only by considering certain characteristics of his program as a whole.
Prior to the early 20th century, the Royal Navy's strategy had been based upon the maintenance of a numerical superiority in warships that were qualitatively the equal of foreign rivals. This meant that it generally had kept pace with technological change and occasionally led the way only if circumstances favored doing so. Admiral Fisher, in contrast, intended to deploy fewer but far more capable units. The decisive qualitative advantage in warship design required by such a course was to be obtained at an affordable cost through technological innovation achieved, if necessary, through government-supported research and development efforts. Admiral Fisher also extended the concept of forced-draft technical change to include the repeated introduction of new model warships of significantly greater capability as a means of disrupting the building programs of opponents. This amounted to a grand strategy of continuous technical revolution that to a far greater degree than ever before shifted the focus of naval combat from the oceans on the day of combat to the engineering drawing boards during the years preceding the outbreak of hostilities.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the defeat of the enemy battle fleet by a comparable British force was considered to be a primary strategic objective that could be obtained only through a trial of offensive strength and defensive endurance at short distances. Admiral Fisher's conception of the ends and means of naval operations was practically the reverse. Submarines were to use underwater concealment to attack slow and therefore highly vulnerable troop transports with impunity, whose sinking would eliminate the threat of invasion even if the enemy's battle fleet remained intact. Battle cruisers, for their part, were to exploit their superior speed to keep the range long to avoid enemy torpedoes and gunfire, while depending upon their bigger guns and advanced gunnery equipment to hit their opponents before they could be struck in return. The essence of submarine and battle cruiser action as envisioned by Admiral Fisher, therefore, was the evasion of enemy offensive power—and in the case of the submarine, the destruction of soft rather than hard targets.
Short-range naval combat had been based upon guns aimed independently by human judgment. The long-range shooting of battle cruisers, on the other hand, depended upon the centralized action of highly sophisticated mechanized methods of measuring, transmitting, and manipulating data. Large formations of battleships were difficult to maneuver and therefore vulnerable to torpedoes because of the slowness of flag and signal book control. The operation of submarines as single units and battle cruisers in small groups rendered the problem of low speed order transfers irrelevant. The lack of any means of sending commands over long distances quickly had made it necessary to defend the empire with station fleets. But with the invention of wireless, effective imperial defense could be secured by mobile squadrons whose movements were directed and coordinated from afar. Admiral Fisher's tactical and strategic innovations in short, were based upon basic changes in the role and nature of naval communications, which may be regarded as the first of several 20th-century revolutions in information warfare.
The actual soundness of Admiral Fisher's extraordinary vision as a practicable approach to the maintenance of British naval supremacy is open to serious question on a number of grounds. In general, his presumptions that Britain could retain a technological lead over all other nations indefinitely, that mechanical innovation would always be readily translatable into tangible tactical and strategic advantage, or that deploying advanced equipment would invariably be cheaper than soldiering on with conventional gear were all highly problematical. In particular, the large part played by financial stringency in the upset of British fire control development, which was critical to the tactical viability of the battle cruiser, illustrated the dangerous vulnerability of necessarily protracted research and development efforts to disruption by fluctuations in funding caused by unpredictable changes in political and economic circumstances.
That said, however, the reality is that between 1904 and 1914, a combination of important technological advances— that is, high-power turbines, wireless, submarines, and mechanized fire control—and fiscal necessity increased the plausibility of Admiral Fisher's ideas and weakened his opposition to such an extent that his revolutionary program reached the point of de facto, if not de jure, implementation.
In other words, because the operational problems that Admiral Fisher was trying to address were real, the improved capabilities of new equipment substantial, and the rise in the costs of providing for an ever-expanding up-to- date fleet unsupportable, there ultimately was no alternative to the replacement of the conventional naval force structure by something else. What Admiral Fisher offered the Royal Navy, therefore, was not necessarily a guarantor of naval supremacy but was technically, tactically, and strategically expedient nonetheless—and perhaps most of all, the only financially and therefore politically practicable option available.