I. ON OBTAINING A DECISION

Whatever the nature of the war in which we are engaged, whether it be limited or unlimited, permanent and general command of the sea is the condition of ultimate success.  The only way of securing such a command by naval means is to obtain a decision by battle against the enemy’s fleet.  Sooner or later it must be done, and the sooner the better.  That was the old British creed.  It is still our creed, and needs no labouring.  No one will dispute it, no one will care even to discuss it, and we pass with confidence to the conclusion that the first business of our fleet is to seek out the enemy’s fleet and destroy it.

No maxim can so well embody the British spirit of making war upon the sea, and nothing must be permitted to breathe on that spirit.  To examine its claim to be the logical conclusion of our theory of war will even be held dangerous, yet nothing is so dangerous in the study of war as to permit maxims to become a substitute for judgment.  Let us examine its credentials, and as a first step put it to the test of the two most modern instances.

Both of them, it must be noted, were instances of Limited War, the most usual form of our own activities, and indeed the only one to which our war organisation, with its essential preponderance of the naval element, has ever been really adapted.  The first instance is the Spanish-American War, and the second that between Russia and Japan.

In the former case the Americans took up arms in order to liberate Cuba from Spanish domination—­a strictly limited object.  There is no evidence that the nature of the war was ever clearly formulated by either side, but in just conformity with the general political conditions the American war plan aimed at opening with a movement to secure the territorial object.  At the earliest possible moment they intended to establish themselves in the west of Cuba in support of the Colonial insurgents.  Everything depended on the initiative being seized with decision and rapidity.  Its moral and physical importance justified the utmost risk, and such was the conformation of the sea which the American army had to pass, that a strictly defensive or covering attitude with their fleet could reduce the risk almost to security.  Yet so unwisely dominated were the Americans by recently rediscovered maxims, that when on the eve of executing the vital movement they heard a Spanish squadron was crossing the Atlantic, their own covering force was diverted from its defensive position and sent away to “seek out the enemy’s fleet and destroy it.”