The composition of the United States Fleet is well known and lately, as the result of the government’s policy of building to the limits agreed upon at the London conference of 1930, has been the subject of so much public interest that I shall not repeat the often published lists of tonnages and characteristics of the various categories of ships of which the fleet is composed.
The various types of ships in all navies correspond fairly closely from the lay point of view in their essential characteristics. A very brief statement of their general qualities will suffice to give a broad view of a modern fleet and, incidentally perhaps, of the complex problems of operating so many units of such widely varying characteristics to the highest effectiveness of the whole.
There is first the battleship, the floating fortress, carrying the heaviest guns and protected by the thickest armor, comparatively slow; the gun is her major weapon. Against any other type of ship employing the gun as her principal weapon, the battleship is invulnerable.
Next in size is the aircraft carrier, a floating aerodrome, with a spacious landing deck upon which planes may land and take off, very fast, carrying a battery of medium caliber, not heavily armored. The aircraft she carries and not the gun are her major weapon.
Then the cruisers, heavy and light, varying considerably in certain characteristics but alike in being of high speed, good sea-keeping ships, not heavily protected, with the gun as their major weapon but also generally carrying torpedoes. The cruiser is a threat to the aircraft carrier, to cruisers of a lighter type, to the destroyers, and if she can get within torpedo range under cover of darkness, her torpedoes are a threat to the battleship.
Smallest of all surface craft is the destroyer, the highest powered and the most heavily armed fighting ship, size considered, in existence, of superlative speed and practically without any other protection. The torpedo is her weapon and she is a major threat to ships of any type within torpedo range. Late design has emphasized gun power as well as torpedoes. Ton for ton it may almost be said that the destroyer will “lick her weight” in any other class afloat.
Finally, the submarine, which hardly needs any explanation even to the most uninformed, is the concentrated essence of mechanical ingenuity and skill in design. Most submarines carry a gun or two which can be used only on the surface, but as a surface ship the submarine is about the least effective type that could be designed. It is her weapon, the torpedo, and her ability to submerge that make her the threat she is.
In addition to the aircraft carried by carriers, three or four are carried by each battleship and cruiser, which serve greatly to extend and re-enforce the functions of these types. Another type in the United States Fleet is the large patrol plane, capable of proceeding long distances overseas and of landing on and taking off from the water even when it is somewhat choppy. This type is too large to be carried on board ship except when disassembled.
These are the most important types of fighting craft. There are others, differing somewhat in glory perhaps, but important for their special purposes. They range from the mine layers down to the smallest mosquito craft which are needed in swarms in time of war in submarine-infested waters. Behind all is the great auxiliary fleet of a total tonnage comparable with that of the combatant fleet, without which the latter could operate at only a small fraction of its designed efficiency—tankers, tenders, repair ships, mine sweepers, and tugs: a great fleet whose functions are highly specialized naval technicalities for all the rather ordinary occupations they suggest.
Such are the general types in all navies; but the technical differences between ships of different navies and the causes for them, as well as national predispositions for or against certain types and the reasons for them, form one of the most interesting and important phases in the study of naval policy.
In determining the size and composition of its naval fleet, each nation has its own particular problems to solve, some of which are quite obvious. If we look upon navies merely as combatant forces, the function of which is to settle such naval issues as may arise in time of war by combat with a hostile navy, it is easy to see a few problems common to all nations perhaps but having very special applications to each. Who is to be the enemy? What has he in the way of a navy and, equally important, what is the relative depth of his pocket-book? What are the geographical considerations? About what are we going to fight? If even these simple questions could be answered with assurance by every nation in time of peace, the problems would be very much simplified. A definite answer would immediately place each nation in an offensive or defensive role. This so-called “combatant” view of naval forces does exist. It marks the naval policy of an important group of nations. In contrast with it, though not necessarily opposed to it in all points, is a conception of naval policy in which the combat function becomes in a sense almost incidental.
The growth of naval power was well on its way toward its present modern development before Mahan gave formal expression to some fundamental military and political principles about it which, until then, had been appreciated only as a hazy mixture of instinct, expediency, and conflicting experience. Broadly speaking, Mahan’s contribution lay in the conception of naval power as “control of the sea,” and, essentially, control of water-borne merchant traffic. From this point of view, were there no such thing as sea-borne commerce in goods, mails, and passengers, it would be as senseless to send navies afloat to fight each other as it would be to send belligerent armies into some unoccupied region to settle their differences without disturbing the rest of the world. Mahan’s demonstration of the tremendous effect of naval power on commerce appealed to different nations in the measure that their commerce was important to them. It is not surprising that in Great Britain, with its colonies and dominions encircling the globe, with its dependence upon sea-borne importation of food and exportation of manufactures, Mahan’s writings were at first more appreciated than in his own country. Even in that day Great Britain was supporting a “3-power standard.”
The United States then owned neither the Panama Canal, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, nor the Philippines. Our foreign commerce was carried for the most part in foreign bottoms, and there was no “problem of the Pacific.” Our consciousness of the value of naval power and our naval establishment had sunk to a very low level. Yet the experience of the Civil War, and some influence from earlier days when the nation was more naval-minded, were sufficient even from the beginning to bring our naval policy into the same category as Great Britain’s, that is, the “control of the sea” attitude rather than the strictly “combat” conception of the navy’s function.
These two terms, “combat” and “control of the sea,” should be expanded far beyond the limits of this article accurately to appreciate all they signify. To my mind they do indicate fundamental differences in national character and national feeling which serve largely to explain some of the difficulties that have been met in bringing armaments under a limitation agreement. These differences extend not only to the type and design of ships, character of armament, preference for a preponderance in this or that category, and similar technical points, but also to such political conceptions vaguely termed “prestige,” “manifest destiny,” “national aspirations,” “place in the sun,” “security,” and the like. During the rapid expansion of the German Navy late in the last and early in this century, the type and design of ships led naval experts to characterize the German Navy as “the spearhead of her Army.” During the same period the first of our then modern cruisers, the Minneapolis and Columbia, were known popularly and, if I remember correctly, officially also as “commerce destroyers.”
The lesson of “control of the sea” with respect to commerce, together with the types of ships to which it gave rise, becomes particularly apparent from a study of the maritime wars in which Great Britain, Spain, Holland, and France were engaged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The type of ship required for the purpose is obvious—a fast sailing craft able to overtake the merchantmen of that day and large enough to mount a sizable battery and to carry a crew sufficient in number to provide prize crews or to undertake boarding operations, in short, the prototype of the modern cruiser. To be sure many privateers of minuscule dimensions participated in these operations but, in comparison with the lesser prey with which they had to be contented, their relative characteristics were the same.
It has been said that from the “control of the sea” view of naval policy the combatant activities of navies became, in a sense, incidental. It is easy to see how, nevertheless, this incidental employment became a sine qua non. If both belligerents entertained a policy of control of commerce, which is to say protection of one’s own commerce as well as destruction of the enemy’s, it is apparent that these armed vessels would be under the necessity of fighting each other in the pursuance of their primary mission. This led to the same development that has governed naval design down to these days of “limitation of armaments,” viz., the building of larger, faster, and more heavily armed ships than those possessed by a possible enemy. The frigates or cruisers of the early years of the nineteenth century were probably much more formidable ships than were required for purposes of commerce control alone, except for that vital “incidental” of fighting it out with an enemy similarly engaged. Cruisers since the age of steam have shown the same evolution.
This same development of naval policy gave zest to another type of naval vessel that has persisted to this day, the battleship. The development of supercruisers in size and armament on account of combat necessities naturally led to a type of ship inherently unsuited by reason of its uneconomical size, slow speed, and inordinate armament, to commerce protection and destruction—the line-of-battle ship. On the contrary it could go whither it pleased unless opposed by greater force of its own kind and could thus act as a strong support or sort of advanced base for the lighter cruisers operating in waters where they would otherwise have been outnumbered.
The old line-of-battle ship became the modern battleship. It has been a logical development of the control of the sea policy. It is now, as it has always been, the heaviest armed and the most strongly protected vessel which it is possible to build, whether the limitations be the technical state of the art, the cost, or an arbitrary limitation adopted by international agreement, subject however to two important qualifications: (1) that the gun is regarded as the major naval weapon, and (2) that it is neither economical nor good policy to increase size and power by too radical an advance in fighting power over existing types in the possession of possible enemies.
Apart from these two types, the cruiser and the battleship, which logically developed from a control of the sea policy with respect to commerce, all other naval types may be regarded as purely combat weapons designed to prey upon these two major types, or to protect them against the predatory efforts of similar combat types. These are the destroyer, the submarine, and naval aircraft. Generally speaking, each of these threats to the supremacy of the two fundamental types of ship can be met only by opposing craft of the same class; but there are many complexities in modern warfare, arising not only from the rapid and tremendous development in the power of weapons and the advance in mechanical arts in late years but also from the changes in the political and ethical attitudes about war, which may make so simple a solution of a country’s naval necessities far from being a sound one. As a single illustration, the submarine is probably the poorest answer to a hostile submarine as far as combat effectiveness is concerned. The battleship is traditionally “the backbone of the Fleet,” and yet it is no secret that Germany nearly won the war without the use of them, or even in spite of their defeat in the greatest of all naval battles. The use of the torpedo against merchant craft leads into matters which it is far beyond the scope of such an article as this to discuss.
It must not be supposed from what has been said that the development of the “Control of the Sea” policy took no account of one form of combat activity in which every nation, regardless of its interest in commerce, is vitally concerned. That is, resistance to invasion of the homeland; or conversely, conquest of territory abroad. There is one exception to the statement about the senselessness of navies if there were no such thing as a water-borne traffic in goods, passengers, and mail. That exception is the transport of troops by sea. Even to countries without a seacoast that question may be, as it was in the World War, a matter of as grave import as a hostile army on its frontier. To all countries with distant dependencies it is a naval question of primary importance. As it happens, however, it was not a factor in the development of naval types of ships.
Control of the sea is rarely exercised absolutely and completely by either of two contending powers. Even in the World War the greatly preponderant naval strength of the allied powers was unable to secure the unchallenged use of the sea. Thus we see two aspects of the control of the sea; one in denying its use to the opponent and the other in securing its use to ourselves.
In denying the use of the sea to opposing belligerents, it becomes necessary to interfere seriously with its use by neutrals. The extent to which a belligerent can afford to interfere with such neutral use of the sea depends largely on the strength of the navy of the neutral involved. It was our need of the Navy to maintain our neutral rights on the sea that stimulated our building program in 1916.
This building program, modified by international treaties and by later programs, has resulted in the United States Fleet as composed at present. Its composition is designed to obtain such control of the sea as our interests may require and to prevent the denial by others of our use of the sea, whether we are at war or are preserving neutral rights as we see them.