METHODS OF EXERCISING COMMAND

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I. DEFENCE AGAINST INVASION

In methods of exercising command are included all operations not directly concerned with securing command or with preventing its being secured by the enemy.  We engage in exercising command whenever we conduct operations which are directed not against the enemy’s battle-fleet, but to using sea communications for our own purposes, or to interfering with the enemy’s use of them.  Such operations, though logically of secondary importance, have always occupied the larger part of naval warfare.  Naval warfare does not begin and end with the destruction of the enemy’s battle-fleet, nor even with breaking his cruiser power.  Beyond all this there is the actual work of preventing his passing an army across the sea and of protecting the passage of our own military expeditions.  There is also the obstruction of his trade and the protection of our own.  In all such operations we are concerned with the exercise of command.  We are using the sea, or interfering with its use by the enemy; we are not endeavouring to secure the use or to prevent the enemy from securing it.  The two categories of operation differ radically in conception and purpose, and strategically they are on wholly different planes.

Logically, of course, operations for exercising command should follow those for securing command; that is to say, that since the attainment of command is the special object of naval warfare, and since that command can only be obtained permanently by the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces afloat, it follows that in strictness no other objects should be allowed to interfere with our concentration of effort on the supreme end of securing command by destruction.  War, however, is not conducted by logic, and the order of proceeding which logic prescribes cannot always be adhered to in practice.  We have seen how, owing to the special conditions of naval warfare, extraneous necessities intrude themselves which make it inevitable that operations for exercising command should accompany as well as follow operations for securing command.  War being, as it is, a complex sum of naval, military, political, financial, and moral factors, its actuality can seldom offer to a naval staff a clean slate on which strategical problems can be solved by well-turned syllogisms.  The naval factor can never ignore the others.  From the outset one or more of them will always call for some act of exercising command which will not wait for its turn in the logical progression.  To a greater or less extent in all ordinary cases both categories of operation will have to be put in motion from the beginning.