A fleet, to be effective, must be so constituted, organized, and trained as to benefit in the highest degree from team work. It must be able, like a baseball team, to act with the precision of a machine. In addition to battleships, a fleet must have an appropriate number of battle-cruisers, smaller cruisers, transports, scouts, destroyers, submarines, colliers, tank-ships, supply ships, repair ships, mine-laying ships, tenders, and gunboats. Hospital ships should not be forgotten. Admiral Fiske says: * * * * * "_We have only one mine-layer. We need five additional mine-layers. On board that one mine-layer are only 336 mines. Germany had 20,000 mines when the war started_." * * * * * A fleet without fuel-ships is like a fleet without stokers. A fleet without scouts is blind. It cannot see the enemy's movements, while its own movements lie under the eyes of the enemy. The videttes are called the eyes of an army. Similarly, the scouts of a fleet are the eyes of the fleet. A fleet without these eyes, when hunted by a fleet that has them, is in the same position as a hunted ostrich with its head hidden in the sand. Of these fast scouts, with minimum speed of 25-30 knots an hour, we have only three; Germany has 14, and Great Britain has 31. Two fleets maneuvering for attack--one provided with scouts and the other without them--are relatively in the position of two men, armed with revolvers, fighting in a room, one blindfolded and the other with eyes uncovered. As Admiral Knight has observed, battleships alone do not make a fleet, much less a navy. Our fleet is greatly weakened by our lack of destroyers. A fleet should always be accompanied by a large number of these vessels to support the scouts, and also to do scout duty themselves. They stiffen the screen about the battleships, and, when an opening is present, they are ready to dash against the enemy. In the Civil War and in the Spanish War we were able largely to employ improvised merchant vessels for fuel-ships and scouts; for the sole reason that our enemies were even more miserably unprepared than ourselves. Had we, at the time of the Spanish War, been called upon to fight a really first-class Power, we should have been swept off the seas. Fuel-ships and scouts cannot be improvised under modern conditions. They must be ready before war comes. It is just as fallacious to imagine that we can strengthen our Navy with improvised ships and personnel after war is declared, and get it in trim to meet a modern fleet in the pink of condition of preparedness, as it would be for an invalid cripple to imagine that he could train and get into condition for a victorious fight with a John L. Sullivan after entering the ring. Of all arts and sciences, that of war is the most highly specialized. The greatest intelligence and skill are called into play to produce special tools, and to render their use highly efficient.