But if any country—­say the United States—­finds herself involved in war with—­say a powerful naval Power or Powers of Europe, and the realization of the fact comes with the suddenness that characterized the coming of war in August, 1914, and we hear the same day that a fleet of battleships, battle cruisers, destroyers, submarines, aircraft, and auxiliaries has left the enemy’s country, followed by a fleet of transports carrying troops—­there will be immediate need for strategy of the most skilful kind; and this need will continue until either the United States or her enemy has been made to acknowledge herself beaten, and to sue for peace.

As such a war will be mainly naval, and as naval wars are characterized by great concentration of force, by each side getting practically all its naval force into the contest, by each side staking its all on the issue of perhaps a single battle (as the Russians and Japanese did at Tsushima) one fleet or the other will be practically annihilated, and its country will be exposed naked to the enemy.

The first effort on hearing of the departure of the hostile fleet will be, of course, to get our fleet out to sea, reinforced as much as practicable, by our reserve ships; and to get the coast-guard on their patrol stations.  As we should not know the destination of the enemy, we should either have to assume a destination and send our fleet to that place (leaving the other places undefended) or else send our fleet out to sea to some position from which it would despatch scouts in different directions to intercept the enemy, in order that our fleet might meet it and prevent its farther advance.

Of course, the latter procedure could not be carried out reasonably, unless we had a great enough number of trained scouts to make the interception of the enemy fleet probable; because otherwise the probabilities would be that an enemy having the battle cruisers and scouts that European navies have, would succeed in evading our fleet and landing a force upon our shores; and it could not be carried out reasonably either, if we knew that our fleet was markedly inferior to the coming fleet; because to send out our fleet to meet a much more powerful one in actual battle would be to commit national suicide by the most expeditious method.

In case the departure of the enemy fleet occurred in the stormy months of the winter, we might feel warranted in guessing that its immediate destination was the Caribbean; yet if our fleet were in the Caribbean at the time, and if our coast lacked shore defenses as at present, we might argue that the enemy would take the opportunity to make a direct descent upon our coast, seize a base—­say on the eastern end of Long Island—­and march directly on New York.  It would be very difficult to plan the development of a line of scouts in such a way that the scouts would intercept an attack directed at some unknown point between Boston and the West Indies, perhaps in the southern part of the West Indies—­say Margarita Island.  In fact, it would be impossible; with the result that, unless we intercepted it by simple good luck, the enemy would succeed in landing a force on our eastern coast, or else in the seizing of a base in the West Indies or the southern part of the Caribbean Sea.