If the creators of weapons keep themselves to date, if those who supply them see to it that the supply is sufficient, if those who work the weapons are efficient, the part of those in chief control resolves itself into little save achieving victory with the minimum of loss. The day may yet arrive when someone discovers that a good deal of what has been written about the genius of various famous admirals of the past is verbiage rather than fact, that they were a part of one great whole, rather than the sole controlling organisation--at any rate, once battle was engaged. In the future, if the submarine “Dreadnought” becomes an actuality, this is probably likely to be so to a greater extent than anything which obtained in the past. So far as we can to-day conceive of such future fights, much of the battle, at any rate, will entail more or less blind work under the surface, individual enemies engaging one another, the leader compelled to rely more and more upon the efficiency of his individual units and less and less upon his own tactical combinations. Of course things may turn out otherwise. Inventions yet undreamed of may come to the fore, and the nether waters present no greater obstacle to regular operations than the surface does to-day. Plunging may offer no salvation to a beaten enemy. We can only make idle speculations now. Yet, however things may shape, success or failure, victory or defeat must assuredly depend in a great measure on the makers of the weapons and the efficiency of those who work them--the tools, on the reliability of which every admiral must trust for victory. When this war started there were roughly thirty German submarines to something like seventy British. At the moment of writing (June, 1915) at least twenty of those German submarines have gone below. How and why cannot be published: but they have gone under in one way or another. Means of defeating submarines are being developed. Where big ships are concerned the principle means in use are high speed and a zig-zag course, the combination making it difficult for the relatively slow submarine to arrive at the correct striking point. In this connection it has to be remembered that the vision of a submarine is limited; and so that though the range of modern torpedoes is something like five miles, the actual effective range of a submarine’s torpedoes is nearer a mile or less. So much is this the case that German submarines are fitted with a torpedo which has a range of only a thousand yards or thereabouts, the reduced range being compensated for by a greatly increased charge. This charge, 420 lbs. of very high explosive instead of the usual charge of 300 lbs. or less, accounts for the devastating effects of German torpedoes fired from submarines.