The Navy as a Fighting MachineFiske, Bradley A. (Bradley Allen)
History
The Navy as a Fighting Machine
Fiske, Bradley A. (Bradley Allen)
Naval art and science; Naval strategy; Navies; Sea-power; United States. Navy -- Management
When a man can do this well in the ordinary affairs of life, he
is said to be "a man of good judgment"; when he can do it well
in a certain line of work--say investments in real estate--he is
said to have good judgment in real estate. The use of the word
"judgment" here is excellent, because it expresses the act of a
judge, who listens patiently to all the evidence in a case and
then gives his decision. And the act of the judge, and the act
of any man in coming carefully to any decision, consist mainly
in estimating the relative values of all the factors, and their
relations to each other ("sizing them up" is the expressive slang),
and then perceiving with more or less correctness what the answer
is. Some men do not have good judgment; some men highly educated,
brilliant, and well-meaning, seem never to get quite the correct
answer to any problem in life. They are said to be unsuccessful
and no one knows why. Perhaps they lack that instinctive sense
of proportion that some men have--a sense as real as an "ear for
music"; or perhaps they lack a willingness or a capability to think
about a situation with sufficient intentness to force a clear picture
of the situation with all its various features upon the mental
retina.
The ability to make a mental picture, be it of a machine, of any
group of material objects, such as the various units of a fleet
organized as such, or of any other situation, varies with different
men; but like every other kind of ability, it can be strengthened
by practice, and assisted by appropriate means. In the engineering
arts, the practice is gotten by observing and remembering actual
machines; and the assistance is given by drawings of different kinds.
In strategy, the practice is given by observing and remembering the
movements of actual fleets; and the assistance by means of drawings
of different kinds, and by war problems, and the game-board. The
game-board represents a number of successive pictures, and is not
very different in principle from moving-pictures. In fact, the
suggestion has been made repeatedly for several years and is now
in process of development that the various situations in tactical
games might advantageously be photographed on films and afterward
projected in rapid succession on a screen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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