IN AN economic sense, two extreme types of nations may be recognized: the nation which produces and exports raw materials and imports manufactured articles; and the nation which does not produce raw materials but imports them, manufactures from them, and exports the manufactured product. Of course, no nation is a perfect representative of one or the other type. Every nation represents a combination of the two, leaning, however, toward one of the two extremes.
The first, or producing type of nation has nothing serious to fear from isolation, provided she can defend her boundaries. Her people can feed and clothe and house themselves, perhaps not with the degree of luxury to which they have been accustomed, but at least sufficiently to sustain life. The second, or manufacturing type cannot stand isolation, whether or not she can defend her boundaries. In war they must fight for free avenues of import or export, failing which they are thrown into economic disorder through the stoppage of manufacture and the resultant numbers of people thrown out of work, and finally cannot subsist their populations.
During the first century of its existence, the United States was primarily a producing nation. It is a producing nation still, to the extent that with a degree of economic reorganization (forced, of course) she could subsist and clothe her population. But she has progressed rapidly in the matter of manufactures to the point where this necessary reorganization would be a severe upheaval. And this progress, to judge from the “go and get it” standard of American salesmanship, will continue, rendering isolation in an economic sense more and more serious a problem. A foreign cotton expert, quoted in the press some time ago, said,
The capacity of the United States for raw cotton is incredible. It is growing by leaps and bounds. Can you imagine a United States importing cotton? That condition is a probability.
This cotton is not to be used, finally, by the people of this country; it will be manufactured and a great part of it exported for sale.
The United States is becoming an importer of raw materials. As this importation grows, with its accompaniment of sales of exports abroad, our problem of national defense becomes an involved one. The policy of accepting isolation, and shutting ourselves up, China-wise, behind an impregnable boundary, becomes more and more impracticable, if not impossible, because of the grave economic and social disturbances which would follow in its wake.
We face the problem of defense of our avenues of communication with our sources of raw material and our customers. The very bulwarks of our defense as a producing nation, the oceans, render our defense as a manufacturing nation difficult. Thousands of miles of sea communications must be guarded, that is, means of defense (or tactical offense) must be available all along the trade routes. And then, of course, there is the problem of the defense of, and the furnishing of supplies and munitions to, the Philippines, Hawaii, Alaska, Porto Rico, and others. This problem merges with the first one.
In European countries these problems are faced in a matter-of-fact fashion. The cost of building new cruisers is discussed in terms of the cost of trade protection per mile of trade route, of communications per mile of sea travel. Battles such as Coronel, the Falklands, the Alabama vs. the Kearsarge, and the results of such cruises as those of the Alabama and the Emden, have such a powerful effect on the economic situation of nations at war that they approach decisiveness much more than did Jutland, where the situation after the battle was much the same as at the time of mobilization of the two fleets. Coronel and the cruise of the Emden boosted marine insurance rates, fostered German support in South America, and interfered with the precious food supply to the Allies. The battle of the Falklands and the sinking of the Emden had the opposite effect.
It will be noted that all these battles took place far from the countries whose fleets were engaged. It is certain that the point at which an enemy attempts to cut our trade routes or lines of communication will be a point where we are weakest, that is, a point farthest from our bases.
In the air service controversy now raging in the press, the words ‘National Defense” are frequently used—apparently misused or used with an appreciation of only a part of their meaning. The ultimate idea of the proponents of a separate air service seems to be a close girdle of air stations built around the country which will attack any invading enemy who comes within their radius of action.
No ideas are expressed, usually, on the subject of the use of aeroplanes in mid-ocean to defend lines of communication. The best defense is a good offense, of course—seeking the enemy out and fighting when we find him. If he is elusive we must at the same time fall back on the passive defense—a waiting game—all along our lines of communication. Defeating commerce raiders is a long drawn out affair, involving the use of numerous dispersed forces. Can the aeroplane or airship, unaided, remain in the air long enough to seek the enemy or can it remain in mid-ocean doing convoy or patrol work? Not at present nor apparently in the near future.
It will be noted that the one agency in this country which has most consistently pushed the distance and duration element in flying, has been the Navy, and that its recent attempts in this direction have been the target of attack by the leading proponents of a united air service.
The aeroplane in protracted operations in mid-ocean must be based on naval vessels or their equivalent. Now, supposing that we have a separate air service and that it works in conjunction with the Navy, the strategical and tactical elements in this cooperation must be controlled by one or the other. Dual control is fatal. Will the air force take charge or will the Navy? And if the Navy, which has the strategic experience, takes charge, will there be avenues for objection to naval strategical decisions via the Air Department? Or, if the air force takes charge, will there be any possibility of delay due to naval objections via Washington? And how about the well-known passing of the buck?
The largest program of actual military operations in which two governmental departments took part during the late war was the Gallipoli campaign, which was decidedly not a success. And success was lacking, according to Churchill’s World Crisis, because of lack of coordination between the fountain heads of authority, the War Office and the Admiralty. Dual control is a delicate, tricky method of operation. History speaks for unified command, the last great instance being Pershing’s support of Foch and the resulting unified command in France. The bare fact that an organized naval transport force carried our Army to France successfully and smoothly—a task of magnitude but not of great complication—has been the subject of surprised comment. Amphibious operations are generally regarded as delicate subjects.
One department, one chain of command, should control naval and aerial cooperation at sea.
The historical precedents for the establishment of separate services point to the axiom that if an arm (as cavalry, artillery) can be used without dependence on other arms, it stands by itself and becomes a service. Take the cannon, for instance. It makes its appearance in European history in 1346, in the battle of Crecy, surrounded by a group of learned operators who are not soldiers, and cooperates with longbowmen, arbalisters, pike-men, armored knights, and so forth. Now if the cannon, unaided by these various foot and horse soldiers, could have taken the field and fought unaided, we would undoubtedly have seen the expansion of the group of civilian gunners into an “artillery department” conducting its own strategy. The cannon on land, however, to this day depends for its successful use on the cooperation of infantry, cavalry, and recently, aeroplanes, and each of these arms depends on it. (Artillery, properly speaking, cannot occupy, any more than can the aeroplane. Discussion of this, however, belongs in a military rather than a naval paper.)
Ships were once regarded as appendages of an army. The known seas at that time were restricted and navigation* was just becoming distinct from piloting.** Generals commanded fleets, which furnished decks, as a substitute for land, upon which soldiers could engage in hand-to-hand fighting. Enter the cannon, and the world is informed by the defeat of the Spanish Armada that a new independent method of fighting—the gun on a ship platform—has been evolved. There follows the divorce of army and navy, because the navy, conducting campaigns independently of the army, has no need of continuous army support. The navy takes charge of the strategical control of its own affairs.
* i.e. cruising out of sight of land.
** i.e. cruising along coast.
The same course of reasoning will hold good for the air forces, if history is a guide. When aeroplanes keep the air and control areas of ocean by themselves without help from naval vessels, then the time for a separate air department will have come. But not now.
(It is the writer’s personal opinion that in time, undetermined, aeroplaning will become about as usual as automobiling, and that a plane may some time be able to cruise about the Pacific or Atlantic for weeks. When this time comes the navy will be found to have changed. The change will not have been a sudden one, but will have been a growth, as was in a much more limited way the change from sail to steam. The navy may then be mainly the naval air service, applying the old strategical principles with new gear.)
A veteran who had served in the ranks during the Civil War said to the writer: “Esprit dc corps starts at the bottom. At first we had company spirit, exemplified in near-riots between companies. Then came regimental spirit, with much parade of regimental insignia. Next, after going through several battles, we acquired an esprit d’armce, and then,” he said earnestly, “we had a wonderful war machine.”
Esprit de corps is a great thing. All branches of the Navy have it—air force, destroyers, submarines, and so on. It is shown by a love of, and deep belief in, the weapons the branch in question uses. To the thinking man it becomes merged with what may be called the naval spirit—the feeling of comradeship for the Navy as a whole. This naval spirit, in peace-time, is a thing of slow growth. Partisanship for one’s branch is natural. The torpedo school graduate emerges upon a cynical world, “breathing, eating, and sleeping” torpedoes. And the better man he is, the better work he does with his torpedoes, the more firmly does he believe that the gun is an obsolescent weapon, and should be properly subordinated to the beloved “whale.” He argues, writes long screeds to this end, and on occasion has been known to engage in fights with other ensigns, caused by differences in opinion. His partisanship renders him blind to the difficulties involved in a successful torpedo attack, and to the progress being made in torpedo defense. He either bends facts to do service to his theories or else ignores the facts. Later on he leaves torpedo duty, is ordered elsewhere, and sees the other side of the shield. He learns to discriminate between insurmountable obstacles and those which can be mastered. The guns and the torpedo and other weapons appear to him in proper perspective. He becomes balanced, rounded out.
Esprit de corps in the air forces is at an extremely high level. Numbers of officers in these branches have had no experience other than in aviation. They exult in their ability as pilots, delight in the feeling of danger involved in flying, and regard their machines with the same affection which the cavalryman bestows upon his horse. A fierce pride renders them contemptuous of other less spectacular methods of making war. They delight in the mastery of engine technique, and this commendable absorption in the details of their immediate duties, while making them excellent pilots, renders them, to an extent, blind to the larger view of aviation cooperating with other branches. They gladly accept arduous tests as a form of athletic exercise, without seeing that the test is dictated by a forward reaching strategy. These men have ambition. It was not with the idea of encouraging recruiting that Napoleon made his famous remark “Every private carries a marshal’s baton in his knapsack.” It was with the realization that an ambitionless man is little more good than a dummy. Every ranking officer looks forward, or should, to command of a fleet or army. Ambition burns within the breasts of these aviators, they face the prospect of tours of duty with other branches, which is the one thing to round them out and fit them for the coordination required in the higher ranks, and they ask themselves, “Is there not some way to avoid this additional study and work away from our chosen specialty, and still hold our chances of high rank? And the united air service project shows them the way. “No need to study the ways of the navy that floats or the army that walks! Aviation can wage a war all by itself!” And an esprit dc corps so strong that a close analyst will find it used as a substitute for certain forms of discipline, comes to the aid of this decision.
Self-preservation is the first law of nature. It works openly in the lower orders of creation, but more quietly and surreptitiously in man. One would say that the private charging from the trench with his bayonet had conquered the instinct of self-preservation. He has only smothered it. When he has crossed no man’s land and actually meets an enemy it comes forth all the more sharply for its internment, and he fights like a tiger. Which explains the fact that men usually timorous are often terrible in action.
This instinct is present in our daily life. It colors our actions, and inclines us to those directions in which an advantage to ourselves may be found, though we may not be conscious of its workings.
A man’s opinions result from the workings of his reason, constantly adding, substracting, balancing cause against cause, fact against fact, effect against effect. A man’s mind may be compared to a cauldron in which are to be brewed his opinions. The man himself adds various ingredients, and then, quietly, probably without his knowledge, in slips the ingredient of self-preservation. It colors the brew, the opinion, almost unconsciously.
In weighing the pros and cons of a separate air service, does this instinct of self-preservation affect us? The writer is of the opinion that it does. It takes a sturdy-minded man to see promotion, high promotion, coming for himself with the advent of a separate air service, and not be influenced by it. Generals will be created, lieutenant generals, major generals, and brigadier generals, also colonels of the air. And all to be selected from a body of comparatively young fliers. The prospect is enough to turn a man’s head, particularly those to whom the senior commissions will fall. On the one hand, years of being a comparatively minor cog in a military machine; on the other, immediate recognition as one of the elect.
The hard part of all this for the Navy is that the ranking officers in the proposed separate air service will practically all be out of touch with the aims of naval strategy. To them the enemy to be defeated at sea lies a hundred instead of possibly a thousand miles off shore. National defense means to them shore defense, if their chief advocate’s arguments be interpreted correctly. But will the Navy get the service it needs from a flying personnel trained to think in terms of the land?
The naval officer is of course also influenced by this instinct of self-preservation. He is working for his advantage. He sees himself at sea lined up against an enemy enjoying unified command, himself with what fliers and machines an air control on the beach will allow him, and the best he can see in the situation is a sort of “Alphonse-Gaston” relation between himself and the representatives of the air department; the worst is that bane of the conference method, a divided council and a wavering decision. He is revolted at the prospect.
The naval air service, fortunately, is full of officers who see eye to eye with the rest of the Navy, who welcome their alternating tours of duty afloat and in the air as a means of developing them-serves broadly in the science of fighting at sea. The writer is indebted to several such officers for some of the ideas contained herein.
In the recent attacks on naval administration of the naval air service there is a great deal of what may be described as “bunk.” This includes the good, old-time barnacle-encrusted attack on an alleged bureaucracy contained in the press reports of one of General Mitchell’s statements, and, above all, the proposed remedy. The bureaus of the Navy Department have been changed and modified from time to time and may be again. Proposed changes have been discussed in the Naval Institute. The writer is not here concerned with them but desires to call attention to the fact that if a person considers that there are too many bureaus or that they are of the wrong type, that person would naturally suggest decreasing the number or altering the type. The remedy suggested is to establish a new department with undoubtedly many more bureaus, perhaps called “sections” or “subdivisions,” or some other name, to lift the curse!
Again, the policy of the Navy in bending every effort to produce planes or airships which can remain in the air long enough to traverse the oceans has been assailed. This policy is the only one which in any way looks to the replacement of ships by planes, and should receive the support of air enthusiasts. But no: the leader of the movement for a separate air force brands the Hawaiian flight as a bit of unnecessary risk. And so on.
There is one thing about these attacks: Whether or not they obtain support for the untried method of control of the seas by air, they undoubtedly, through their catchy phraseology and their sensational appeal to a public mainly interested in other things, weaken the support the country should give its Navy. The tested, sure methods of far-flung national defense, which cannot be jettisoned casually, suffer. In fact, if any agency outside of the country desired quietly to render our communications with foreign countries unsafe, and to hold down our growing foreign trade in manufactured exports, one method of doing so would be to cause the United States by one means or another to weaken one sure means of commerce and communication defense and to rely on another means, as yet untested.
The proposal to take control of flying at sea away from the Navy has yet to be presented in terms of strategic control. It is presented in terms of production and training, principally. Production is the first step in logistics and as such is entitled to great consideration. But logistics, and production with it, is called in as a subordinate aid to strategy. It is a necessary aid; logistics failing, strategy must be modified. But, nevertheless, it is a subordinate part of the art of war-making. To establish control of the war-making organization on a basis of production is to introduce the mechanical element so dear to the inventive mind of the American and so fatal, if carried to excess, to unified command. Production is a very necessary element. It is properly represented in war by the sub-organization to which the unified command turns and says, “Produce tools of such and such quality in such and such time.” Production does not say “you must use only these tools selected by us.” It suggests new tools but does not dictate. H. Q. may make a wrong demand, as when Kitchener stocked France with shrapnel instead of high-explosive. Production may fall down on the job, as when the Navy said “Give us a sure and certain method of detecting the presence of a submerged submarine in fairly rough weather.” When headquarters fails, an unerring finger can usually be placed on the error, and headquarters knows it. When production fails, the error is not usually so apparent, and may be due, as in the above instance, to failure of the scientific laboratories of the country to overcome natural obstacles. Responsibility is much more clear-cut in the former case than in the latter. Place production in the saddle and it carries with it into the high places a weakened responsibility, a dulled spur. Most of the objection to the present bureau system that has been voiced is based on the belief that a mechanical subdivision carried out too thoroughly tends to deify material to the detriment of strategical (and tactical) requirements. The resonant shout of “Bureaucracy! Bureaucracy!” is a most unusual reversal of these objections. Not enough control by material—down with strategy!
One great objection to the separation of the Navy and its air service is the rather general apprehension that the Navy may demand a type of aeroplane with certain qualities deemed necessary for use far at sea, and that the air department may reply, “Very well, but not just now. All our funds are obligated for construction for boundary defense, which is our primary object. Bye and bye, maybe, we will comply.” And that the Navy may find itself charged with a certain duty without the means of performing that duty, and will have to return unsuccessful with the alibi that its requests for material were not granted. Nobody wants an alibi.
We now hear of the terrible risks to which the Navy subjects its fliers. Certainly there are risks—much greater than the additional 50 per cent indicated by the pay tables. Pioneering has always been a risky business. But there are other risks, less spectacular, being taken in the Navy. Here are some examples of cause and possible effect which should surely stand or fall together:
CAUSE EFFECT
The Shenandoah is destroyed Establish a separate Air Department
The F-4 sinks off Honolulu Establish a separate Submarine Department
A gun explodes on the Mississippi Establish a separate Gun Department
and so on ad infinitum. Risk is a burden of the naval profession, always has been, and always will be; and as with the doctor, taking chances in his germ-stocked laboratory, so with the naval officer in his experimental work.
Training, like production, is usually carried on by an organization subordinate to the head which will have the direction of the branch of war-making concerned, in order that proper indoctrination prevail.
The question of copying a foreign government in taking naval aviation away from the admiralty can hardly be brought up as a precedent. It is an experiment, as yet untried in war. Already there are rumors of too crowded aeroplane carriers due to each service carrying what may be called overhead personnel with it. And a series of compromises seems to be going into effect tending to place control of naval flying back in the hands of the navy. Of the unified-command side of the experiment the writer has heard nothing, and an authoritative pronouncement will probably be heard only after a war test of the present arrangement.
Movement, investigation, controversy, all of these prevent stagnation and are therefore healthy signs of activity. The Navy has so far in this matter welcomed investigation. The naval attitude in the present controversy, as the writer understands it, is that it is not concerned with whatever disposition outside the Navy the powers-that-be desire to make of aerial affairs, any more than it was with the single rank vs. double rank cavalry controversy which raged some years ago in the columns of the service papers. However, with changes inside the Navy it is deeply concerned, especially with any change which deprives the Navy of full control over all the weapons it requires in carrying out its appointed tasks.
May he paraphrase a well-known slogan? “When better implements of war are used, the Navy will be found using them.”
As in the past, so, let us hope, in the future.