How does the Navy learn to wield a revolutionary new technology? Does it develop a corps of specialists? Does it try to ensure that nonspecialists can employ the weapon the specialists actually operate? To what extent can it learn without disclosing what it has learned?
The questions apply to cyber warfare, but if you look backward, you may recognize them as much the same questions the interwar Navy faced in developing naval airpower.
Contrary to much received wisdom, the interwar Navy was quite air-minded; most observers considered it the most advanced air navy in the world. It was no accident the officers who grew up in this period were adept at using the new weapon during World War II. Some had been trained as aviators, but others, such as Admiral Raymond A. Spruance—who won at Midway and at the Philippine Sea—had never had aviation training. Yet these officers had learned what naval aviation could achieve, and they used it very effectively.
Looking back at other navies can identify some pitfalls to avoid. The Royal Navy entered the interwar period with a much greater investment in carriers and with actual naval air experience gained during World War I, and it maintained a substantial carrier force between the wars. The Admiralty bought the carrier aircraft and even paid many of the aircrew, even though they were subordinate to the Royal Air Force. Yet abundant evidence shows that few senior Royal Navy officers or staff understood carrier operations.
As for the Japanese, the split between carrier- and surface-minded officers was apparently deep and vicious. The Imperial Japanese Navy had a powerful air arm in 1941 only because a single air-minded officer, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, had managed to press for its creation. But he failed at creating the necessary support infrastructure and the development of new aircraft after 1941. Serious tactical errors in battles like Midway can be attributed in part to command exercised by senior officers without much sense of carrier operations.
Getting It Right
What did the U.S. Navy do right, and can it do it again?
The answer is that it made use of gaming (simulation) widespread as a learning tool. The interwar Navy was a lot smaller than today’s, so the small number of officers who passed through the U.S. Naval War College was a relatively large percentage of the officer corps. The War College’s main learning tool was simulation of battles, especially the trans-Pacific campaign the Navy expected to fight. Of course, officers all heard lectures, and it is easy to read them and see in them the sum of official education. But it seems far likelier that officers learned mainly by fighting simulated battles. As early as 1923, the battles employed carriers and hundreds of aircraft.
Because of this, all officers who passed through the War College learned what aviation could do—and what its basic limits were. Some students decided to become aviators, but the nonaviators learned enough to understand what to do in an air-sea war.
Joseph M. Reeves is a case in point. He went to Newport as a surface officer, and his student thesis was concerned with battle line tactics. However, in one war game, he acted as Blue air commander. It occurred to him that, to maintain air control, he had to keep as many of his fighters as possible in action. This required they be kept fueled. Reeves found that his carriers could not take fighters on board quickly enough; he lost aircraft because they had to ditch when they ran out of fuel. Even so, he managed to keep enough of them in the air to protect his carriers. Reeves was rewarded with a second tour at the school as head of the tactics department, after which he went to Pensacola for flight training. He emerged as Commander, Battle Fleet Air Squadrons—i.e., the squadron on board the prototype carrier USS Langley (CV-1). There he devised deck operations that enabled the Navy to pack about one-third more airplanes on each carrier than other navies could. That is why three U.S. carriers fought four Japanese ones at Midway on more or less equal terms.
The years of study allowed Admiral Harris Laning (a surface officer and War College president who later commanded the battleship fleet) to provide vital advice that shaped the very important Yorktown class. These big U.S. interwar carriers were, in effect, prototypes for the wartime Essex class. For example, war gaming showed how important it was to be able to repair flight decks in combat. If that seems obvious, the reader should note that neither of the other major carrier navies did anything similar. But the Yorktown and her sisters were designed to be capable of this.
In most armed forces, gaming was used as a means of visualizing combat, but games were fought one-sided. That is, they were used to review plans, to test whether they made sense and could be executed. The games at Newport were different. Officers played on both sides; the stated objective was to learn how to out-think an intelligent enemy, forcing players to adapt to enemy reactions. Because Newport was isolated, games could be played secretly, and any conclusions drawn were not publicized.
One 1933 game, for example, showed that the Navy’s war plan that called for a fleet movement directly from Pearl Harbor to the Philippines was unworkable. Apparently uniquely, a report of the game and its outcome went to the Chief of Naval Operations. The result was changes to the war plan calling instead for a step-by-step advance across the Pacific, the fleet setting up forward bases as it went. This new war plan was accepted by the Army, even though it meant that any troops caught in the Philippines at the outbreak of war would ultimately fall into Japanese hands. In general, however, the Navy used gaming as a means of learning, not to draw conclusions for the wider Navy to follow.
What of the other major navies? The Royal Navy’s senior officer war college was much more like a conventional school, emphasizing lectures and paper-writing. Officers received a single lecture on the Fleet Air Arm, in much the way they were lectured on protection of shipping or gunnery. They played a single game, a weeklong effort at the end of the term that tested some aspect of the Far East war plan. No accounts of such games have survived, but it seems almost certain they were single-sided games to ensure the plan was practicable. To the extent the plan survives in archived documents, it was concerned mainly with the serious logistical problem of bringing the fleet from the Mediterranean and the North Sea all the way to the Far East; for most of the passage the obstacles would have been inherent, not imposed by the Japanese. British discussions of what would happen as elements of the interwar arms control system fell apart suggest they did not habitually ask about the motivations of other navies—as the U.S. Naval War College gaming system led Americans to do.
The British did use two-sided gaming extensively in their Tactical School, but mainly to train officers in approved tactics. A centerpiece of the Tactical School was a pair of dioramas. One showed what had happened at Jutland, the other how more-modern techniques and weapons would have affected the battle. Again, details are lacking, but it does not appear the second diorama included the use of massed aircraft. That would have changed the battle beyond recognition.
Better known as an interwar Navy training tool were full-scale maneuvers using real ships and aircraft—the Fleet Problems. These certainly made it possible to see how weapons, including aircraft, could be expected to perform; but airplanes were changing so fast that many lessons quickly became obsolete. Moreover, officers concerned with getting the best performance from their own ships and aircraft would have less time to observe the contributions of other kinds of ships and aircraft to the overall performance of the fleet. Gaming was a much better tool for that.
That leaves us today with the beginning of cyber warfare, details of which are necessarily closely held. Cyber specialists know how to use the new capabilities they have developed. However, in war, what counts is whether decision-makers know how to wield what they have. The history of the employment of secret weapons is bleak. The most famous example might be the French mitrailleuse, a primitive machine gun that French Emperor Napoleon III thought would crush his enemies. It might have done so, but the secrecy that surrounded its development hindered its potential. It looked like an artillery piece, and so that is how it was used in 1870. It did little to prevent the Prussians invading and defeating France.
Fortunately, the same technology that allows us to create and wield cyber weapons also allows us to simulate their use, without any need to disclose exactly how anything works or exactly what current weapons can do. And it allows for collaborative gaming with numerous participants, unlike the very limited number the interwar War College could handle. Surely this is the time to revisit gaming, not merely as a means of analysis but—much more—as a tool to learn how to fight a new kind of war.