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Constructing Ships: Testing Ideational Explanations for Capital Ship Design

-by-

W. Alexander Vacca Ph.D. Northrop Grumman Corporation [email protected]

The views in this paper are strictly those of the author, and are not necessarily reflective of the Northrop Grumman Corporation, its employees, its shareholders, or its customers.

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With two wars concluding and defense expenditures in Europe and the under scrutiny, there is no shortage of speculation about “the lessons of history” with respect to military performance. Only slightly less popular than speculating about the lessons of history is speculating why others ignore lessons of history in their own actions.

There is a tendency in analysis of military forecasting to understand “why they got it wrong” (or right). Methodologically this is problematic, because the analyst writing today cannot expunge the benefit of hindsight. This hindsight may color the interpretation of results, or even taint the research design. Thus I choose a different approach, and one not focused on finding out who was right and who was wrong, but instead documenting which lessons were drawn.

But how do military leaders actually perceive the effectiveness of weapons in combat? Analysing the lessons of history in the Russo-Japanese War on land, General Sir Ian Hamilton wrote that “on the actual day of battle naked truths may be picked up for the asking; by the following morning they have already begun to get into their uniforms”1. Erskine Childers, a contemporary of Hamilton, viewed the same battlefields and wrote. “I propose to discuss this question, avoiding so far as possible everything tending to cloud the vision with prejudice or bias. When I illustrate from recent facts it is not with the barren and invidious purpose of apportioning blame or praise, but with the single aim of elucidating the truth”2. And Sir Julian Corbett wrote that “The general failure to appreciate the situation correctly is only to be explained by the darkening effects which are caused by the abuse of maxims, by the endemic tendency to use them crudely as solutions, instead of reasoning by the principles they purport to condense”3.

This paper seeks to test contending approaches to how motivated learners assimilate new information into their beliefs by examining the writings of high level naval policymakers on technical matters of capital ship design following the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-19054.

1 -General Sir Ian Hamilton, A Staff Officer’s Scrap Book During the Russo- Japanese War (volume one) (Edward Arnold, 1905), page i.

2 Erskine Childers War and the Arme Blanche (Edward Arnold, 1910), p 20

3 Sir Julian Corbett Maritime Operations in the Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905 (Volume 2) (originally a confidential publication of the Committee on Imperial Defence, 1914, republished by US Naval Institute Press, 1994), p 174

4 For a review of learning theory see Jack S. Levy, “Learning and Foreign Policy: Sweeping A Conceptual Minefield,” International Organization 48:2 (Spring 1994) page 283

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I look at contending approaches to learning and see what they predict diverse learners should learn given exposure to the same data. Will their organizational or cultural affiliations distort learning according to predictable patterns? Will they converge on similar lessons? Will individual biases and heuristics thwart convergence as a whole or within specific groups? By focusing on predicted and actual patterns of lesson drawing, I can eliminate the effects of hindsight and evaluate the explanatory power of the predictive approaches to learning. The first section of the paper will outline these approaches to learning.

Approaches to Learning

There are two traditions with sharply contrasted differences and very little overlap, these are the rational choice theories and cognitive theories5. Briefly, rational choice assumes that individuals are efficient calculators of information that seek and are able to make the best estimates of the probabilities of events and the underlying causal mechanisms that govern interactions. Cognitive theories explicitly reject these claims. Instead individuals are flawed calculators (though in predicable ways), they inefficiently search for information, and they do not make valid estimates of probability6. In addition, two other often used approaches overlay the rational and cognitive research programs. Using cognitive and rationalist microfoundations, they superimpose the notion of organizationally structured or ideationally constructed groups that shift the level of analysis from the individual to the group interest or shared idea. Organizational theories look at the formal rules and incentives of interaction, which are imposed by formal groups, and which govern an individual’s decision making process7. Cultural theories look at the equally compelling, though often less formalized, rules of interaction that function within social groups8.

5 The controversies over rational choice theory and its discontents have filled many a special issue of academic journals and led to many books. Often the debates can get a bit heated, and the participants enthusiasm for the topic occasionally overwhelms proper debate etiquette. For good overviews of the theory, some of its more prominent applications, its critics, and its response to those critics see Kristin Renwick Monroe (editor), The Economic Approach to Politics: A Critical Reassessment of the Theory of Rational Action (Harper Collins, 1991); Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (Yale University Press, 1994); and Jeffery Friedman (editor), The Rational Choice Controversy (Yale University Press 1996).

6 Kahneman, Daniel and Amos Tversky “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” Science (1974). This was refined as Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky (editors) Judgment Under Uncertainty- Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge University Press, 1982).

7 Kaufmann, Chaim, “Out of the Lab and into the Archives: A Method for Testing Psychological Explanations of Political Decision Making,” International Studies Quarterly, 38:4 (December 1994) pages 557-586; Nancy Kanwisher, “Cognitive Heuristics and American Security Policy,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 33:4 (December 1989)

8 International Security 19:4 (Spring 1995) contained an entire forum entitled “Does Strategic Culture Matter” which included Stephen Peter Rosen, “Military Effectiveness: Why Society Matters,” Alastair Iain Johnston, “Thinking About Strategic Culture,” and Elizabeth Kier, “Culture and Military Doctrine: France Between the Wars,”. Shortly thereafter these became Rosen Societies & [sic] Military Power: and Its Armies, (Cornell University Press, 1996); Iain Johnston 4

Confusion arises because cognitive and rational choice theories seek to be universal explanations of human behavior in their own right and are pressed into service as the operational microfoundations for more complex theories of social and structural organization. By itself organizational theory says very little. Instead, it is by coupling organization theory with concepts such as a cognitive desire to minimize inconsistency (dissonance), or to seek out confirming data rather than disconfirming evidence, or to believe that the “necessary is possible”; and conversely linking the organization to rational microfoundations, explaining through principle-agency why organizations do not behave as rational unitary bodies but instead exhibit pathologies that produce suboptimal outcomes above the organization level, or why information flows are distorted to benefit vested interests that real explanatory leverage is achieved9. In the same way, culture by itself has difficulty formulating a distinct causal argument, at least in a positivist social science framework. Instead, merging culture with psychology suggests an emphasis on socially shared reference points which serve as cognitive anchors that inhibit rational updating of beliefs. Shared symbols become decision heuristics which allow individuals to simplify complex environments and classify phenomena. The critical insight is that these anchors and symbols are shared by social groups, and thus different social groups respond differently to identical external stimuli.

In his original formulation of strategic culture, Jack Snyder was quite explicit about the cognitive microfoundations of his theory.

[s]trategic culture can be defined as the sum total of ideas, conditioned emotional responses, and patters of habitual behavior that members of a national strategic community have acquired through instruction or imitation and share with each other with regard to nuclear strategy. In the area of strategy, habitual behavior is largely cognitive behavior. This is true not only of the development of strategic doctrines but also of the weapons acquisition process and of crisis decisionmaking, during which the possible use of nuclear weapons might be considered. Because analytic argumentation lies at the core of such behavior, this report will emphasize the cognitive component of the Soviet strategic culture. In particular, it will discuss the body of attitudes and beliefs that guides and circumscribes thought on strategic questions, influences the way strategic issues are formulated, and sets the vocabulary and conceptual parameters of strategic debate… We assume that strategic cultures, like cultures in general, change as objective conditions change. But we also assume a large residual degree of continuity. Individuals are socialized into a mode of strategic discourse and acquire a fund of strategic concepts that evolve only marginally over time… Pre-existing strategic notions can strongly influence doctrinal and organizational adaptation to new technologies.

Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton University Press, 1995); and Kier Imagining War: French and British Doctrine Between the World Wars (Princeton University Press, 1997).

9 Yaakov Y. I. Vertzberger, “Bureaucratic-Organizational Politics and Information Processing in a Developing State,” International Studies Quarterly 28:1 (March 1984) 5

Rationales can outlive the conditions under which they were developed and to which they were most appropriate10.

Very broadly then these four traditions; rational choice, cognitive psychology, organizational politics, and cultural theory overlap and support each other in many key respects and with some clearly delineated differences (see chart below).

Rational Cognitive Individuals

Bayesian Unmotivated Bias Updating Flawed Probability Formal Organization Formal

“Machiavellian” Motivated Bias Competition Quest for Simplicity Social Groups Social

Shared Anchors Deconstructive Symbolic Heuristics Anthropology

Figure 1-1 Contending Research Programs

My more detailed discussion of these theories is guided by this conceptual framework. Rational choice and cognitive psychology are capable of being microfoundations to other theories and complete theories in and of themselves. Bureaucratic politics can be driven by either cognitive or rational microfoundations, but with different manifested behaviors. Positive political science suggests that cultural theories are driven by cognitive microfoundations as well, although there is a separate research program based in deconstructivist anthropology. The categories therefore yield six different theoretical approaches, five of which can be tested.

10 Jack L. Snyder, The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limited Nuclear Operations, (September 1977) RAND Corporation: Project Air Force R-2154-AF, pp 8-9

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The rational choice perspective holds at its base a Bayesian model of learning. Bayesian theory holds that as each new datum arrives it is weighed according to its reliability and used to revise estimates of prior beliefs. These new estimates become priors as more data arrive, which update the prior in their turn. Very quickly Bayesian learners converge on a true estimate of an unknown parameter.

Importantly for rational choice theory, Bayesian learning is universal. Thus different Bayesian learners, who do not necessarily share the same initial estimate of the unknown parameter, will converge, and converge quickly11. It is this convergence which gives rational choice its power over rival perspectives.

In this case, military theorists are not trying to guess a number, but arrive at conclusions about the importance of various attributes of naval weaponry. Thus we will not be able to find numerical calculations. However, the key indicator of Bayesian updating is convergence. Learners should, when exposed to the same data set, converge in their views no matter what their prior views were or why they held them. Because of its simplicity and universality, Bayesian updating makes an excellent null hypothesis for rival explanations.

Organizational theories superimpose incentives provided by the institution over the individual. While rational unitary models presuppose that groups of individuals learn rationally and aggregate into the broader interests of the state, organizational models suggest that individuals, especially high level decision makers, rationally pursue utility as defined by the structure of organizations12. These include maximizing the power of the institution over competing institutions or maximizing the individual’s career prospects within the institution. Concepts such as principal-agency problematize rationality, showing how individually rational choices are not necessarily collectively rational13.

The cognitive heuristic perspective has been put forward as an alternative to Bayesian updating. Cognitive approaches diverge from rational approaches in a number of significant ways. First, they hold that prior beliefs are resistant to change. Priors act as cognitive “anchors” that are changed only slowly, if at all, by the arrival of new data. Second, they hold that not all data are equal. Instead individuals will overweight data

11 Eugene Fama, “The Behavior of Stock Market Prices,” Journal of Business 38 (1965) pages 34-105; Eugene Fama, Lawrence Fisher, Michael Jensen, and Richard Roll, “The Adjustment of Stock Prices to New Information,” International Economic Review 10 (1969) pages 1-21

12 Graham Allison, “Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” American Political Science Review 63:3 (1969) pp 689-718

13 Terry Moe, “The New Economics of Organization,” American Journal of Political Science 28 (1984) pp 739-777 and Jonathan Bendor and Terry Moe, “An Adaptive Model of Bureaucratic Politics,” American Political Science Review 79 (1985) pp 755-774.

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because it is more vivid, more in harmony with existing beliefs, or is liked with other things believed to be true. The problem is that different cognitive theories stress different heuristics or biases. Thus cognitive approaches suffer from a perceived lack of universality at best, or the charge that they are purporting to be a theory on the basis of a collection of ad hoc anomalies14.

The cognitive approach still makes measurable predictions. Individuals will be slow to update their beliefs based on the arrival of new data. This updating will be inhibited by one or more of the following:

• Anchoring on the last war (availability)15. Data that are supportive of lessons gleaned from the most recent war will be overweighted, while discrepant data should be underweighted. • Attribution error. Choices made by the winner should be seen as correct because the winner won the war and battle, while choices made by loser should be seen as incorrect because they lost the battle and the war. • Availability Heuristic Particularly vivid data should be given more weight than would otherwise be assigned.

When the interests of the institution are superimposed on the individual, a fourth bias, confirmation emerges. In this case it is not a Machiavellian utility maximizer that prioritizes institutional goals over collective goals, but it is the cognitive blinders of institutions that create motivated biases that inhibit rational decision making and result in divergence. Nancy Kanwisher explicitly states that “psychological accounts are most useful in their ability to supplement (rather than supplant) explanations at other levels… Thus an understanding of the role of cognitive processes in generating and sustaining fallacies can lend plausibility to economic and organizational accounts of why flawed policies are implemented”16. In contrast to the purely cognitive approach, without the institution it would not be possible to predict the bias of the individual.

14 Donald Wittman, “Contrasting Economic and Psychological Analyses of Political Choice: An Economist’s Perspective on Why Cognitive Psychology Does Not Explain Democratic Politics,” in Kristin Renwick Monroe (editor), The Economic Approach to Politics: A Critical Reassessment of the Theory of Rational Action (Harper Collins, 1991)

15 Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton University Press 1976), p. 266 establishes “Last War” as a specific heuristic, although it seems more of a specific application of the more general Tversky and Kahneman propositions. It is an extension of the availability heuristic, but is not identical due to a blending with the anchoring heuristic. Data on the last first hand war may perhaps be a generation behind, and data on vicarious wars may be readily available. However a military will revert back to its own organizational “first hand” experience, and not to the vicarious recent experience.

16 Nancy Kanwisher, “Cognitive Heuristics and American Security Policy,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 33:4 (December 1989) page 673.

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• Confirmation bias. Data that are supportive of current policy should be overweighted, while discrepant data should be underweighted.

Finally, the ideational approach emphasizes the importance of shared values or ideas that may transcend or cross cut organizational (including state) boundaries. In Ed Rhodes’ phrasing, “‘the name of the game’ is not politics, but the competition of ideas for intellectual hegemony”17.

It is the anchoring heuristic which serves as a link between strictly cognitive and ideational models. Anchors explain how ideas persist, and culturally shared ideas offer fertile ground for anchors. Rhodes actually terms the ideational model the “cultural-cognitive” model18.

It is possible today to grasp organizational incentives and structures from the . But with the passing of more than a century, the ideas contending for intellectual hegemony at the time of the Russo-Japanese War may not be immediately known to the reader.

Contending Approaches to Naval Architecture

By the turn of the century naval architecture had bifurcated. Advances in materials science, mechanical engineering, optics, and chemistry seemed to offer tremendous avenues for development. The question for naval architects was whether these paths were worth the expense, or whether they represented costly diversions from efforts to perfect the capital ship.

These arguments came to the fore in a series of articles published in the major international naval journals in the first years of the century. In 1903 General published in Jane’s All the World’s Fighting Ships an article postulating a fast, all big gun, battleship19. In that same year Homer Clark Poundstone published two articles in the Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute in which he laid out three ships

17 Edward Rhodes, “Do Bureaucratic Politics Matter?: Some Disconfirming Findings from the Case of the US Navy,” World Politics 47:1 (October 1994), pages 1-41.

18 Edward Rhodes, “ Change: Interest Based Versus Cultural-Cognitive Accounts of Strategic Choice in the 1890s,” Security Studies 5:4 (Summer 1996) pages 73-124.

19 Vittorio Cuniberti, “An Ideal for the British Fleet,” in Fred T. Jane (editor) All the World’s Fighting Ships 1903 (Sampson Low, 1903).

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representing design options for using modern technology. He christened them the Feasible, the Probable, and the Possible, and the later was a fast, all big gun, battleship20.

In addition, advances in the and mine threatened to upend naval combat. The torpedo, then fired by small surface ships, offered the promise of sinking capital ships without having capital ships of one’s own. The mine restricted naval freedom of maneuver, especially in shallower waters, and seemed to require minesweepers to clear fields before capital ships could be risked.

What came to be known as the “Materialist” approach argued that naval architecture was poised for a revolution. This revolution was made possible by a confluence of technological (material) developments, the most important of which took place in the engine room of ships. First, the emergence of turbine engines allowed for ships to reach a much higher speed than the older triple expansion engines. Second, improvements in rangefinding optics and the introduction of integral calculus allowed guns to be effectively aimed over long distances. Third, improvements in metallurgy and chemistry allowed larger and more complex projectiles to be fired over these long distances.

Importantly, these technical factors converged on a theory of battle. That theory was that fast well armed ships could sink an adversary’s ships from a distance. Speed was essential, because speed allowed a fleet to choose the range, timing, and deployment for any engagement. The faster ship could always refuse battle until more favorable circumstances could be obtained. And the faster ship could always maneuver into favorable position with respect to visibility, sunlight, and wind.

All of this meant that the capital ship became larger and more expensive. The hullform necessary to support large caliber guns and turbine engines had to be both lengthened and widened. Turbine engines not only took up more room than traditional engines, they required complex reducing gear to convert the high speed rotation of the turbine into a slower rotation for the propeller shaft. Turbine engines used fuel in more prodigious quantities and at faster rates than older engines, and thus more space was required for fuel storage.

Since speed and range were the decisive factors in a hypothesized naval engagement, other attributes of the ship were traded away. First to go were guns of lesser caliber. They lacked the range of the longest guns, and they lacked the hitting power to sink a ship. Worse, they confused spotters and thus interfered with fire control for the decisive large caliber guns. Next went all but the most basic armor plating. Armor plating

20 Lt. Homer Clark Poundstone, “Size of for US Navy,” PUSNI XXIX, 105 (1903) pp 161-174; and “Proposed Armament for Type Battleship of US Navy, with Some Suggestions Relative to Armor Protection,” PUSNI XXIX, 106 (1903), pp377-412.

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slowed down ships and did not generate hitting power, and was thus doubly wasteful. The final expression of this thinking was the fast battlecruiser, which had heavy single caliber guns, large engines, and very little armor protection. For Fisher, this was HMS Invincible21.

What became known as the “Historical” school opposed almost every one of these tenets. They believed that ships were beaten, rather than sunk, i.e., their propulsion was destroyed, their ability to effectively fire their guns was degraded, and their crew demoralized or incapacitated. Beaten hulks would be taken as prizes of war, left to burn, leisurely sunk as target practice, or scuttled to prevent capture. They were skeptical of advances in fire control at extreme ranges, and believed that in the natural course of battle fleets would converge. The whole notion of the faster ship engaging an adversary just outside of the adversary’s gunnery range and then landing decisive blows from heavy caliber weapons struck them as fanciful and unrealistic. The pointed out that ships had generally gotten faster over time, and a cohesive fleet moved at the speed of its slowest ship, making it impossible for the newest ships to remain in formation and use maximum speed. Ships were susceptible to mechanical breakdown, hull fouling, or battle damage that would reduce maximum speed.

The theory of naval victory for members of the Historical school was “volume of fire”. The fleet that could generate the highest volume of fire on its adversary would win. It would win not by sinking ships, but by beating fleets. Damage to smokestacks would degrade speed, while damage to masts and open bridges would destroy the ability to command the ship and signal other ships, wrecking fleet cohesion. The degradation of speed and breakdown in communications would lead an enemy fleet to disintegrate, allowing it to be destroyed piecemeal. Even if the vital systems of a ship were protected, hits to less vital systems would inflict a gruesome human toll and disrupt combat operations, further degrading the effectiveness of individual ships.

To generate volume one needed guns, and guns of multiple calibers. Heavy guns were effective, but slow firing. Medium caliber rapid firing guns would be just as effective on open areas of a target, and could generate a higher volume of fire. With maximum speed unrealistic in combat conditions, and equipped with mixed batteries, armour plating became more desirable in ships. Armour could protect against a chance hit from the larger guns, and minimize the disruption from medium caliber guns.

Importantly, proponents of the Historical approach were concerned that the higher price of advanced capital ships would lead to a reduction in their number. Because of the central importance of volume of fire,

21 Nicholas Lambert, Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution, (University of South Carolina Press, 2002).

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reducing firing platforms was very dangerous. Chance events were more damaging to fleets of small numbers.

Underpinning the entire debate was the question of the role of the sailor in modern warfare. In the Materialist worldview, the individual sailor had been subordinated to the capital ship. Incased in steel, sailors fed the boilers, loaded and aimed the guns, and steered the ship. But the ship itself was bigger than any of its sailors, and could only be defeated by a more powerful ship, that would sink its adversary, and with it the men onboard. This was a break from the historic tradition of navies, whereby great captains could with tactical acumen and inspired leadership, perform great feats of seamanship and win battles.

In contrast, the Historical view was one of essential continuity. The great captains in 1904-05 had far more capable ships to be sure, but these ships were guided by the same principles of . In particular ships were beaten long before they were sunk, and beating a ship was as much about breaking the spirit of its crew and its as disabling physical attributes.

Research Design

The Russo-Japanese War naval evaluations make up a particularly hard case for the pure psychological and psychological-cultural explanations of learning and adjustment, and a correspondingly easy case for the rational choice and the rational bureaucratic politics model22. This situation arises because the circumstances under which the data were produced were broadly favorable to rational choice theories and unfavorable to cognitive theories.

In February 1904 war broke out between and . The Russo-Japanese War would include a series of naval engagements, culminating in the , which would provide evidence for naval architects and policy makers seeking to design modern .

The Russo-Japanese War was the first naval combat since the unequal Spanish American War at the turn of the century, and the first war with a major naval battle between equal fleets since the battle of Lissa in the Italio-Austrian War23. While not all ships were modern, the four Russian battleships of the Borodino class were

22 For a discussion of hard and soft cases and their relative utility in different research designs see Harry Eckstein, “Case Study and Theory in Political Science,” in Fred Greenstein and Nelson Polsby (editors), Strategies of Inquiry: The Handbook of Political Science Volume 7 (Addison-Wesley 1975).

23 H. W. Wilson, Ironclads in Action: A Sketch of Naval Warfare from 1855 to 1895, With Some Account of the Development of the Battleship in (Sampson Low, 1896).

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considered excellent representatives of French design theory, while the six modern battleships of the Japanese Navy drew on modern British design and were built at British yards.

The major powers all sent observers to the Russo-Japanese War, with very specific instructions to study the battle tactics and weapons performance of the belligerents. These observers filed reports, many of which were circulated at the highest levels of naval and political power24. In addition, the participants themselves published official and unofficial histories. Finally, a large international contingent of war correspondents, with varying degrees of military knowledge, went to cover the war and produced a voluminous literature on the war.

These reports and histories fed into high level debates about the changes in naval technology. The official observers and commentators were not on the periphery of naval debates. Even those officers of low rank, or retired from active service, exerted tremendous influence in deliberations about capital ship design. The fora for debate on both sides of the Atlantic included the prestigious professional journals such as the Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute, the United Service Journal, and annuals such as those prepared by Thomas Allnut Brassey, Fred T. Jane, and the Institution of Naval Architects25. There was a vibrant specialized international scholarship surrounding the historiography of the Russo-Japanese War. Rational choice critics of cognitive approaches argue that anomalous results from single events are corrected as individuals interact, discuss, and debate the facts surrounding a judgment and divide complex problems into smaller, more specialized and manageable, topics26. It was under precisely these rationality inducing conditions that the data points under analysis were generated. The professional literature was published and subject to professional scrutiny. All of the official histories and follow on discussions made use of Japanese and Russian material, both original and in translation. Much of the professional literature drew on these histories and observations, and engaged in the comparison of the quality of the narrative in the different sources27. The iterative scrutiny by subject matter experts, some of whom directly observed events in Manchuria, others of whom brought different experiences, should ensure that the event data should have

24 No less a personage than the King of England read reports from his observers, commenting “I have never read a more splendid, interesting and workmanlike account”. Philip Towle “The Evaluation of the Experience of the Russo- Japanese War,” in Bryan Ranft (editor) Technical Change and British Naval Policy: 1860-1939 (Hodder & Stoughton, 1977) page 67

25 Proceedings of the US Naval Institute will be abbreviated PUSNI. The Institution of Naval Architects and the United Service Institute both became Royal Institutions.

26 Wittman, “Contrasting Economic and Psychological Analyses,” (op cit) p 409.

27 See, for example, “A British Officer” (sic) “The Literature of the Russo-Japanese War I,” The American Historical Review 16:3 (April 1911) pages 508-528; “The Literature of the Russo-Japanese War II,” The American Historical Review 16:4 (July 1911) pages 736-750.

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been amalgamated rationally, and that idiosyncratic cognitive failure on the part of one or two observers did not contaminate the entire professional discourse on the subject.

These naval commentators had a strong incentive to “get it right”. In the United States, the Navy was emerging from a century of continental defense and regional power projection and assuming a role in global affairs. Beginning in the 1890s the US built ocean going battleships, a policy that was accelerated after the defeat of Spanish naval forces in the Spanish American War. The building of a new Navy represented tremendous new expenditures, and was central to the US emergence as a global power28.

For the the was crucial to the maintenance of their global position. Because they were the global hegemon they had to seriously plan for war against Russia, , France, , Japan, and the United States- or some combination thereof. By the early 20th century diplomacy had sidelined warplanning against Japan and the United States, but the four European powers remained a concern. Since Britain could not outspend the combination of all four, they had to build a qualitatively superior navy capable of beating hypothetical coalitions while protecting the sea trade on which empire depended29.

The US built for Japan and Russia, and Great Britain designed and built the capital ships of the Japanese battle fleet. The US and Great Britain had more than a passing interest in the performance of various new technologies.

While the stakes were high, the stress was low. Psychologists have found that the tendency to rely on heuristics is greater under times of stress, when individuals need to make snap decisions and may be distracted or preoccupied with other matters. In general, increased stress leads to a higher propensity for cognitive defects30. Theories of stress are based primarily on historical studies, as professional ethics prohibit researchers from creating situations that induce severe stress on subjects31. The observers and the professional historians and commentators were able to draw up their narratives in their relative leisure. In the

28 Baer, George W. One Hundred Years of Sea Power: The US Navy, 1890-1990 (Stanford University Press, 1993)

29 While they disagree about the origin of the threat, both Marder and Lambert agree that Britain was clearly planning against a threat. Arthur Marder, The Anatomy of British Sea Power: A History of British Naval Policy in the Pre- Era, 1880-1905 (Knopf, 1940) and Nicholas Lambert, Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution, (University of South Carolina Press, 2002).

30 Ole R. Holsti, “The 1914 Case,” American Political Science Review 59:2 (June 1965), pages 365-378

31 The famous “obedience to authority” experiments of Stanley Milgram helped social science to establish a set of rules to regulate experimentation on human subjects. See Thomas Blass, The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram (Basic Books, 2004)

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case of Great Britain, the official history was completed after the First World War, or more than a decade after the conclusion of hostilities in the Russo-Japanese War. The publications were considered documents, and the products of thoughtful reflection.

The Naval observers and commentators under examination were skilled in strategy, operations, and tactics, and the variables are precise, if not entirely numeric. Cognitive theories tend to work best when individuals lack familiarity with their subject, undergraduates contemplating insurance schemes or medical students contemplating statistics32. Rational choice theorists argue that subject matter experts will be far less susceptible to cognitive factors which may confuse a novice. They also argue that decision making is eased by making comparisons between precise categories such as technical data, as opposed to subjective concepts like “freedom”. In this research design we are examining subject matter experts who are rendering expert opinions on technical matters in their professional field. In particular, debates focused around the following set of questions.

• Was long range gunnery accurate? • What was the relative value of heavy versus quick firing medium caliber guns? • How important were speed advantages? • How effective was armor? • Were ships more often sunk by critical hits or beaten by a volume of fire? • Should capital ships be increased in size at the expense of fewer ships? • Was the surface fired torpedo a significant threat to capital ships? • Was the mine a significant threat to capital ships?

The Lessons of the Russo-Japanese War

The views of the observers and commentators on naval warfare in the Russo-Japanese War are shown in the chart below33.

32 Wittman “Contrasting Economic and Psychological Analyses,” (1991 op cit) page 413. However note Schlesinger and Lau who note that policy metaphors guide the responses of both experts and novices. Schlesinger, Mark, and Richard R Lau “The Meaning and Measure of Policy Metaphors,” American Political Science Review 94:3 (September 2000) . Lau and Redlawsk also find that experts may be unjustifiably overconfident, and thus more prone to misestimating probabilities. Richard R. Lau and David P. Redlawsk “Advantages and Disadvantages of Cognitive Heuristics in Political Decision Making,” American Journal of Political Science 45:4 (October 2001) pages 951-971. While this may be true within the cognitive research program, expertise should not be an inhibitor to learning within the rationalist research program.

33 (later Admiral Sir) Reginald Bacon was an aide to Fisher on technical matters, and would supervise construction of and then command HMS Dreadnought. Black Joke was a pseudonym for an editorial writer in the United 15

Surface Warfare Characteristics Country Service Author Title Dates Volume Armament Range Size Speed Mine Torpedo GB Navy Bacon Battleship of the Future 1910 No ABG Long Yes Yes Yes No Discussions 1905- GB Navy Black Joke A.B.G.B.S 1907 Yes Mixed Short No No GB Navy Bridge The Naval Campaign 1905 Yes Mixed Short No No Yes No Tactical Ideas 1911 GB Civilian Corbett Strategical Value of Speed 1907 ABG Long Yes Yes Yes No Maritime Operations in 1914 GB Navy Custance / 1912 Barfleur Naval Policy Yes Mixed Short No No Yes No Design GB Navy Fisher Correspondence 1905-1911 No ABG Long Yes Yes Yes GB Navy Jackson Reports 1904-05 No ABG Long Yes Yes No GB Navy Jellicoe Gunnery Report No ABG Long Yes Yes GB Navy Pakenham Reports 1904-05 ABG Both Yes Yes Yes No GB Staff Staff Official History of Russo-Japa1910 No ABG Both Yes Yes No GB Navy Wm White State of the Navy 1907 Cult of the Monster Warship 1910 Yes Mixed Short No No Discussions 1905- USA Navy Fiske Compromiseless Ships 1905 No ABG Long Yes Yes USA Navy Goodrich Discussion of Fiske 1905 Yes Mixed Short No No Yes USA/ Sweden Civilian Hovgaard Discussion of Bridge 1911 Yes Mixed No No USA Navy Mahan Size of Battleships 1907 (retired) Naval Strategy 1911 Yes Mixed Short No No Yes No Correspondence 1908-12 USA Navy McCully Reports 1906 Yes Mixed No No Yes No USA Navy Sims Inherent Tactical Qualities 1907 No ABG Long Yes Yes USA Navy Wainwright Battle of the 1905 No ABG Long Yes Yes No USA Navy R. W hite With the Fleet at Tsushima 1906 No ABG Long Yes Yes

Volume: Is volume of fire the critical attribute of naval gunfire? Armament: Mixed battery or "all big gun" (ABG)? Range: Ideal range at which capital ships should engage Size: Should capital ships be increased in size? Speed: Is speed an important tactical advantage? Mine: Was the mine a threat to capital ships? Torpedo: Was the surface fired torpedo a threat to capital ships?

Quite clearly, these results are a problem for Bayesian updating. With the exception of torpedo and mine, about which more later, the observers and commentators disagreed on range, speed, size, armament and fire effects. Despite two years of war, a number of fleet on fleet naval engagements, and prolific writing,

Service Journal whose true identity is unknown to me. That he was published and cited on both sides of the Atlantic indicates that his views were widely circulated among naval cognoscenti. Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge commanded the Australian and squadrons of the Royal Navy, and had retired in 1904. He was considered an authority on Asian naval matters and was a naval historian. Sir Julian Corbett was a professor of strategy and advisor to the Admiralty, and wrote the confidential study of the Russo-Japanese War for the Royal Navy. Admiral Sir Reginald Custance (sometimes writing as Barfleur) was Director of Naval Intelligence and a widely published naval historian. Admiral Sir John Fisher was First Sea Lord, and responsible for the design and construction of Dreadnought and Invincible. Captain Thomas Jackson was an accredited observer from the Royal Navy to the Japanese Navy, and was stationed on Japanese warships during the fighting. Captain (later Admiral Sir) John Jellicoe was Director of Naval Ordnance and prepared a classified report on gunnery during the Russo-Japanese War. Captain (Later Admiral Sir) William Packenham was an accredited observer stationed on Admiral Togo’s flagship. The three volume Staff History of the Russo-Japanese War was written by many officers under the direction of Major General Sir E.D. Swinton. Sir William White (sometimes writing as Civis) was Chief Constructor of the British Navy. Lieutenant (later Admiral) Bradley Fiske worked for Sims in the Bureau of Ordnance. Admiral Caspar Goodrich ran the Philadelphia, New York, and Portsmouth Naval Yards and commanded the US Navy’s Pacific Squadron. William Hovgaard was a Swedish naval officer, professor of Naval Architecture at MIT, and consultant to the US Navy’s Constructor’s office. was Alfred Thayer Mahan. Captain (later Admiral) Newton McCully was an accredited observer with the Russian forces in the Russo-Japanese War. He was not at sea with the fleet. Lieutenant (later Admiral) William Sims was director of gunnery for the US Navy. Commander (later Admiral) Richard Wainwright was a line officer for the US Navy. Lieutenant R.D. White translated the Russian first hand accounts for the US Navy. 16

observers and commentators had not converged in 1905, nor would they converge in the balance of the decade.

The climactic naval battle of the war was Tsushima, in which the Japanese fleet under Admiral Togo annihilated a Russian fleet under Admiral Rozhestvensky that had steamed from the Baltic Sea through the Indian Ocean with the objective of reinforcing the Russian Fleet in Port Arthur. Port Arthur was captured and most of the fleet sunk prior to the arrival of the relief force, and so it was redirected to , to join a small Russian squadron. It was Tsushima that was the subject of most of the naval analysis, because it was a major fleet on fleet gunnery action.

There was broad agreement about the characteristics of the ships which took part in the battle of Tsushima. The chart below shows the relative speed and range advantages, as well as the count of broadside guns of various calibers available to each fleet. These facts come from Brassey’s The Naval Annual and Jane’s All the World’s Fighting Ships, two reputable handbooks of naval intelligence published before, during, and after the Russo-Japanese War, as well as from the writings of Sims and Custance, who otherwise took extremely distant positions on just about every item of significance. The armament was distributed as follows.

Tsushima Fleets Japanese Russian Speed Advantage Disadvantage Range Advantage Disadvantage Heavy Guns (10-12 inch) 17 41 Medium Guns (6-8 inch) 110 59 Broadside Light Guns ( <6 inch) 0 11

Calculated from Custance/ Barfleur (1907), Sims (1907), Jane (1906)

The Japanese capital ships had the advantage in range and speed. The Russians carried 41 heavy guns to the Japanese’ 17, while the Japanese had 110 medium guns to the Russian’s 59.

Some argued that the triumph of the Japanese (110 medium and 17 heavy) over the Russians (59 medium and 41 heavy) showed that the medium caliber gun was decisive, and the superior number or Russian heavy guns showed the limitations of heavy guns. Others argued that the Japanese were able to use superior speed to achieve tactical concentration of heavy guns, and it was during these periods of concentration that the critical damage was inflicted on the Russian fleet.

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Sir William White, Chief Constructor of the Royal Navy, argued that Russian ships were both overweight and rolling in the water. This allowed the secondary battery of the Japanese to inflict fatal damage firing broadside-to-broadside above the normal waterline belt of armor in the Russians. Because of the deeper draught and rolling these holes became submerged, allowing in water and leading to the capsizing of damaged Russian ships.

It is equally unsatisfactory to concentrate on armour perforation as is done by advocates of big gun armaments, and throw out of account the greater and more destructive ‘volume of fire’ from 6-inch, 8-inch, and 9.2-inch guns… All accounts practically agree in this: the heavily laden Russian battleships which were sunk by gun-fire foundered because of the entry of water through openings in the thin sides above the armour and not because of perforation of the armour. The lesson ought not to be neglected34.

That this damage was decisive was disputed. In the lead article for Proceedings following Tsushima, Captain (later Admiral) Richard Wainwright wrote

The old theories of “a smothering fire” and “a greater number of units” must be allowed to die; as one or two hits from big guns can destroy soft ends and wreck weak battery spaces, and such guns are only to attack the life of a ship. Look at the Orel! What use is there in having a large intermediate battery if its power is destroyed before the ship can come into the effective range of the lighter gun… Big ships with big guns are necessary to success35.

Rear-Admiral Sir R. H. C. Bacon presented a paper at the 1910 proceedings of the Institute for Naval Architects entitled “The Battleship of the Future,” which provoked discussion from the audience. Bacon argued that

It must be appreciated that a 6-in. gun at long range is of no use at all against thick armour, and against the lighter armour and superstructures the small burster and the light weight of the militate against much real damage being done to the ship, even by a large number of such projectiles. It is held that ‘a hail’ of such projectiles is liable to damage communications, &c. This might possibly have some weight provided that ‘the hail’ really exists in practice, or that if it exists ‘the hail’ hits the ship. As a matter of fact, when gun fire is handled so as to attempt to obtain hits, rapidity of fire falls very much below the possible rapidity of fire of the gun… It is generally considered that 6-in. fire at ordinary battle range may be discounted when accompanied by 12-in. gun fire36.

34 Sir William White, “The Cult of the Monster Warship,” The Nineteenth Century and After, XLIII, (June 1908), pp 903- 925, 915

35 Richard Wainwright, “The Battle of the Sea of Japan,” PUSNI 31, 116 (1905)page 779-805

36 Rear-Admiral R. H. S. Bacon, “The Battleship of the Future,” in R. W. Dana (editor), Transactions of the Institution of Naval Architects, LII: (Henry Sotheran & Co. 1910) page 5. While ostensibly a defense of the Dreadnought class, the lengthy discussion of armoring and speed tradeoffs make it clear that Bacon was as concerned with the Invincible class battle cruiser as he was with the battleship.

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This provoked a response from Sir William White, who had retired as Chief Constructor for the Royal Navy and sat in the audience as Vice President of the Institution. He shot back that he

had the advantage of holding conversations with men of the highest position in the Japanese naval service, who know all about the Russo-Japanese War. They confirm the opinion which I personally have maintained, viz., that it is worth while [sic] to have a powerful secondary armament in a battleship… I am informed by those who are in possession of the facts, by naval officers of great experience, who know all about the battle practice of the Navy, that the analysis of that practice shows that there can and will be such a hail of fire from 6-in. guns on a ship in action37.

In writing, Mahan made the point that Russian ships were incapacitated by the destruction of their funnels. Funnels are more than cosmetic. Proper ventilation of a ship’s boilers allows for greater speed. Moreover, if fumes and smoke are not vented properly, they can make fleet communication via flags impossible. Mahan’s point, in noting funnel damage, was that quick firing medium guns could inflict damage in vulnerable parts of a ship and degrade speed38. This degrading of speed is bad in any case, but fatal for a ship whose protection and fighting capacity was dependent upon speed, not armor or number of guns. Sims specifically rebuts this point in his rejoinder to Mahan, writing, “Captain Mahan lays great stress upon the alleged effect of the loss of funnels… This appears to me to be a great exaggeration”39.

Black Joke offered vivid evidence about the importance of funnels, describing the loss of the modern Russian battleship Suvorov in his rebuttal to Sims.

Let us now notice the case of the Suvorov at Tsushima. She lost both funnels; her engines were not damaged; she was not short of coal; her engine room complement was untouched; we know that before the fleets came in contact she was steaming at 12 knots. Yet as soon as her funnels were gone she became helpless, and could only crawl. What is still more important is that the smoke, after the loss of the funnels, not only cleared the bridge and made the deck uninhabitable, but also shrouded the ship in a dense pall, and eventually suffocated practically the whole ship’s company… The ventilators carried smoke instead of air below, with the result that when the admiral left the ship there remained of a crew of 900 men only about 50 living, and those were the men who were in the open and on the weather side. It would appear that Captain Mahan and others did not exaggerate the effect of loss of funnels; they did not even grasp how serious it might be40.

37 White, Sir William H., comments on Rear-Admiral R. H. S. Bacon, “The Battleship of the Future,” in R. W. Dana (editor), Transactions of the Institution of Naval Architects, LII: (Henry Sotheran & Co. 1910) pages 12-14.

38 Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, “Reflections, Historic and Other, Suggested by the Battle of the Japan Sea” Congressional Testimony, Committee on Naval Affairs 14 January 1907, 59th Congress, 2nd Session, Document 213, bound as Size of Battle Ships (no date, no publisher).

39 Lieutenant Commander William S. Sims, “The Inherent Tactical Qualities of All-Big-Gun, One Caliber Battle Ships of High Speed, Large Displacement and Gun Power” Congressional Testimony, Committee on Naval Affairs 14 January 1907, 59th Congress, 2nd Session, Document 213 bound as Size of Battle Ships (no date, no publisher), page 24

40 Black Joke, “A.B.G.B.S.,” PUSNI 33:1 (1907), page 678. A.B.G.B.S., the title, stands for All Big Gunned Battle Ship.

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In his analysis of the , fought prior to Tsushima, Custance drew three conclusions. The first was that was neither necessary nor sufficient for victory. He also noted “(2) the mistake of wasting time at ‘long bowls’. (3) The risk from chance hits during a prolonged action at long range”41. These later two lessons stressed close action. Long range fire reduced accuracy, so that the probability of hitting was mere chance. This meant that ammunition consumption increased, battles risked being indecisive, and that either side had a chance of striking a lucky hit, irrespective of their advantage in fire control at shorter ranges. Custance returned to this theme in his analysis of Tsushima, arguing that the most important task of the gun was to hit the enemy. Hitting depends

firstly, on closing to ranges sufficiently short to make the fire decisive. On the 10th of August [the battle of the Yellow Sea], and at Ulsan, the ranges were too long, but at Tsu Shima Togo, profiting by experience, closed at once, and fought the battle at shorter ranges… Secondly, on counteracting the errors inseparate [sic] from firing at a moving object, either by firing a large number of rounds, which involves a more or less numerous battery, or by the use of accurate weapons and appliances42.

Did not the Japanese ability to close the range demonstrate the tactical utility of superior speed? Here again, the answer was mixed. Custance, Mahan, and others argued that Rozhestvensky made tactical errors in choosing his course in the early phases of the battle. This allowed the Japanese to close, but it needn’t have been so. These errors came from Rozhestvensky’s muddled strategy. Almost until his fleet was sunk, he was not sure if he was deploying to fight the Japanese or deploying to avoid an engagement and complete his voyage to Vladivostok, where he could overhaul his ships and join with the remnants of the first before seeking a decisive engagement with the Japanese fleet. It was this strategic confusion which caused him to choose courses that allowed the Japanese to close.

Black Joke went further, and drawing on Russian sources argued that the Russians only allowed ranges to close once their rangefinders were disabled. The loss of rangefinding gear meant that Russian heavy guns were no longer effective, and so the Russians had to close to improve accuracy. This allowed the Japanese superiority in medium caliber guns to carry the day. “The Russians had a great preponderance of heavy guns. They opened fire at long range, before Togo fired a shot, thus showing that they expected to gain by doing so; and did in fact do most of the damage they inflicted by this distant fire”43.

Others were having none of this. Commander Sims, in a published rejoinder to Mahan, argued that Mahan’s navigation information was incorrect, and produced his own track charts showing that Togo had the speed to

41 Sir Reginald Custance, The Ship of the Line in Battle (William Blackwood & Sons, 1912) page 142

42 Custance, The Ship of the Line in Battle (op cit) page 186

43 Black Joke “A.B.G.B.S.” page 673.

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inevitably close on Rozhestvensky, and choose the most favorable approaches for concentrating his fewer big guns against Russian ships. In particular, Togo was able to repeatedly execute a maneuver called “crossing the T”, in which be brought the Japanese line broadside across the bow of the leading Russian ship.

The leading Russian ship was a narrower target, but the “danger space”, ie, the degree of elevation error tolerable in gunnery, was larger44. The Japanese fleet could bring all of their heavy guns against the Russians, while the Russians were limited to the forward guns if the forward ship. Far from being outnumberd 41 to 17 in broadside, they outnumbered the Russians by 17 to 2 by crossing the T. Moreover, that the fatal damage was inflicted while crossing the T indicated that the hits were not broadside hits by medium caliber guns against soft areas of the side of the hull, but armor piercing hits by large caliber projectiles plunging into the target ship itself. The inferno and early sinking of the battleship Oslyabya, flagship of the second division of the Russian fleet, and the catastrophic explosion of the modern battleship Borodino, were cited as evidence of this type of damage. Sir Julian Corbett, who produced the two volume confidential study of the Russo- Japanese War for the Admiralty, concurred publicly, as well as confidentially45.

Alternative Explanations of Patterns in Observations

In this section I will briefly examine the contending hypotheses for non-convergence derived from cognitive, organizational, and cultural perspectives on learning.

Observers should be biased in favor of views that enhance their autonomy and claim on resources. Autonomy of the navy in capital ship design was not really an issue. The crucial issue was money, and here there were grounds for concern. Since their peak in 1903, ie a year prior to the outbreak of the Russo- Japanese War, naval estimates (budgets) had fallen in Great Britain. In particular the ship construction budget went from a high of £11.4M to a low point of £7.5M in 190846. In the United States budgets were more robust as the country built its first ocean going fleet. For navalists, the weak budget in Britain was certainly cause for concern, and there were reasons for naval writers to argue for more resources47.

44 Danger space is a function of the height of the target and the degree of elevation of the gun. It can be thought of as vertical error. Given the rolling of ships and their guns, danger space is a crucial topic. Norman Friedman, Naval Firepower: Battleship Guns and Gunnery in the Dreadnought Era (Naval Institute Press, 2008), pages 18-39.

45 Corbett, “The Strategical Value of Speed in Battle-Ships,” Journal of the Royal United Services Institution (1907), pages 324- 339

46 Thomas Allnut Brassey (editor), The Naval Annual 1910, (J Griffin & Co., 1910), page 412

47 Bernard Semmel, Liberalism & Naval Strategy: Ideology, Interest, and Sea Power during the Pax Britannica, (Allen & Unwin, 1986) 21

One of the striking elements of the debate over capital ship design was that both sides claimed to be serving the needs of economy. Advocates of the large, fast, all big gun battleship argued that a smaller number of these ships would suffice for mastery of the , and wanted to pay for their program through the scrapping of a large number of inadequate capital ships and cruisers. They argued that since these ships were of limited utility in battle, any expenditure in their direction was superfluous.

In contrast critics of the design emphasized that these new fast large ships were unaffordable48. Whatever the tactical merits of the ships, their cost was such that they could be procured in small numbers, and these small numbers meant that the ships could not be deployed in an effective manner.

The argument came to a head in a sharp exchange between Custance and Bacon at the 1905 meeting of the Royal Society of Naval Architects. To celebrate the centenary of the , Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge and Sir Philip Watts both presented papers on ship design and tactics at the time of Nelson. Custance noted the similarity of tactics at Trafalgar with Tsushima, and inveighed against building large expensive ships, arguing that a larger number of small ships could defeat a smaller number of large ships. Bacon argued that Custance’s hypothetical missed the point, in that the crucial issue was that each large ship was more powerful than the smaller ship, the discussion of money being outside of the scope of naval architecture. Custance shot back:

The money is the root of the matter. Even in rich England it is a question of how best to apply a sum of money. If you have a given sum of money which will provide you with a fleet of thirty battleships of moderate size, and the same sum of money will provide you with a fleet of twenty-four ships of large size, what we have to decide is, which is the more efficient fleet49.

Custance left no doubt where his preferences lay. He would later write, “every guinea diverted from fighting power to speed will be bitterly regretted on that great day [of battle]”50. He was concerned that a small number of expensive ships would be susceptible to chance events, breakdowns, or even catastrophic battle damage, degrading speed and then invalidating the entire tactical theory for which the fleet had been built. As

48 Civis (pseudonym for Sir William White), The State of the Navy in 1907, A Plea for Inquiry (Smith, Elder, & Co., 1907).

49 Captain Reginald Bacon and Admiral Sir Reginald Custance, discussion on Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge, “Naval Strategy and Tactics at the Time of Trafalgar,” and Sir Philip Watts, “The Ships of the Royal Navy as the Existed at the Time of Trafalgar,” in R.W. Dana (editor) Transactions of the Institution of Naval Architects XLVII, part 2, (Henry Sotheran & Co., 1905), pp 306-307.

50 Admiral Sir Reginald Custance (under the pseudonym “Barfleur”) Naval Policy: A Plea for the Study of War (William Blackwood & Sons, 1907) page 188.

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Sir William White argued, fast all big gunned battleships were the naval equivalent of “putting all one’s naval eggs into one or two vast, costly, majestic, but vulnerable baskets”51. Both sides claimed to be on the side of economy, and both sides had a plausible story. While the British Naval Estimates (budgets) were declining, neither side used the Russo-Japanese War to argue for an increase in naval expenditures, rather they used it to argue for and against specific shifts in construction plans.

Naval Constructors should favor the fast, all-big-gun, large battleship because of the need to rebuild the entire fleet and the additional resources required for construction. Some of the most striking evidence against the fast all-big-gun large battleship comes from Sir William White, Chief Constructor of the Royal Navy, and Admiral Andrew Capps, Chief Constructor of the US Navy. As Constructors these men ran the design teams and dockyards for their respective navies. They supervised the design teams, approved ships for construction, and managed the relationship with private yards. When ships were built in navy dockyards, the Constructor also managed those yards directly.

If anyone stood to benefit from rebuilding the Royal Navy, it was the shipbuilding industry52. Yet White was outspoken and prolific in his opposition to the large, fast, all big gun battleship. In a 1908 piece for The Nineteenth Century and After, White wrote a piece called “The Cult of the Monster Warship”. This was after Dreadnought had been completed and Invincible had been laid down, and as Germany and the US had begun to lay down of their own.

Whether the gain of 1 ½ to 2 knots in speed gives the strategical and technical advantages commensurate with the increase in cost and the drawbacks incidental to an exceptionally deep draught when laden, still remains a matter of debate. Many high naval authorities, British and foreign contend that it does not…. Both sides claim the battle of Tsu-Shima as proof of the soundness of their opinion; in the writer’s judgment the ‘Noes’ have it, and the price paid for speed has been too great53

As in the debate about size and armament, again it was a paper by Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge that prompted a debate between Bacon and the Constructors, this time in 1911, and once again the crucial issue was the marginal cost of the improvement in speed. Dreadnought and Invincible had both been built, and the US, German, Italian, and Japanese navies had all begun building similar ships. In his paper Bridge traced the

51 Manning, Frederic, The Life of Sir William White (John Murray, 1923) page 471.

52 D.K. Brown, A Century of Naval Construction: The History of the Royal Corps of Naval Constructors (Conway Maritime Press, 1983), especially chapter 2 “The Late Victorian Navy: Sir William White,” and chapter 3 “The Dreadnought Era: Sir Phillip Watts”.

53 Sir William White, “The Cult of the Monster Warship,” The Nineteenth Century and After, XLIII, (June 1908), pp 903- 925, quotation from pages 911-912.

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performance of ships in combat during the Austro-Italian, Spanish-American, and Russo-Japanese Wars, and argued that the evidence suggested that neither speed nor large caliber guns were decisive. Now in the audience, Admiral Bacon attacked.

Whenever we mention the word ‘tactics’ we ought never to forget that the one sole and only object of tactics is to place the guns of your fleet in the most effective position as regards the enemy; there is no other object in tactics. Therefore tactics is, and must be, solely the handmaiden of the gun… To effect this the main factor which influences tactics is the mobility of the ships. Without mobility or with increased mobility tactics must vary, so the two main causes that vary tactics are, one, the development of the gun; the other, the mobility of the fleet.54

This time it was Admiral Washington Lee Capps (Chief Constructor to the US Navy), Admiral Wilhelm Dyrssen (President of the Swedish Admiralty Board), and William Hovgaard (a Danish naval officer, professor of naval architecture at MIT, and technical advisor to the US Navy Constructor’s office) who defended Bridge from the audience. Capps, Hovgaard, and Dyrssen, along with Bridge, presented a united front in the debate with Bacon55.

Of the people who had the most to gain from a massive naval building program, it was only Fisher who favored such a program. The higher Admirals and Constructors were mostly concerned about the high cost of these warships, and simultaneously believed that the less costly, more numerous, mixed battery warship performed better in combat.

Officers should follow the lead of their superiors on matters of policy to enhance their careers. In Great Britain the career incentives were unclear. Fisher was First Sea Lord, and he favored the fast, all big gunned, large battleship, as well as the larger, faster, battlecruiser56. His trusted colleagues were part of what was known as the “fish pond”, and clearly Bacon was a member of this inner circle, serving as the First Sea Lord’s aide. Despite his relatively junior rank, he ran point on the debate over capital ship design, writing rejoinders to Custance, Bridge, and others in professional journals and submitting formal comments on their presentations. Bacon benefitted personally from this defense, and would be entrusted with command Dreadnought when she was completed57. Packenham and Jackson both received higher command, Packenham

54 Rear Admiral R. H. S. Bacon, Comments on Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge, “Fifty Years’ Architectural Expression of Tactical Ideas,” in R. W. Dana (editor), Transactions of the Institution of Naval Architects, LIII: Jubilee Meetings Part II (Henry Sotheran & Co. 1911) pages 44-45.

55 See remarks of Hovgaard, Capps and Dyrssen in response to Bacon’s critique of Bridge, “Fifty Years’ Architectural Expression of Tactical Ideas,” (op cit).

56 Nicholas Lambert, Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution, (University of South Carolina Press, 2002).

57 Bacon’s close relationship with Fisher would prove to be his undoing, as letters he had written to Fisher discussing other officers were made public. Bacon retired in 1911. He would be recalled in 1914 (as was a retired Fisher), before 24

eventually rising to succeed Admiral Sir David Beatty in command of all British battlecruisers in the First World War. Corbett was commissioned to write the official history of the First World War, and was a clear influence on naval strategy of the period.

Despite these benefits, there was also clear organizational risk to these relatively junior officers in support of Fisher. In 1911 Bacon, by then a Rear-Admiral, presented a paper on the battleship of the future, outlining the design of battlecruisers. This provoked a stinging ad hominem attack at the Institution of Naval Architects 1911 meeting, from Admiral of the Fleet Sir Gerald Noel, who noted that “Rear Admiral Bacon is particularly conversant with and capable of discussing the construction of the original Dreadnought, and I believe he had a great deal to say on the matter. I have known him many years, and I know him to be a man full of ideas, some of them sound, but not all”58.

Fisher may have been First Sea Lord, but he had powerful adversaries within the Navy and government. Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, who commanded the Channel Fleet (responsible for the defense of Great Britain, and the most prestigious fleet command) also sat in Parliament, representing Portsmouth for the Conservatives59. Custance was close to Beresford, and also served as Director of Naval Intelligence.

In the United States there was no equivalent of Fisher backing the fast, all-big-gun, large battleship. Sims, White, Fiske, Wainwright and Poundstone were all of relatively junior rank during the crucial period of Russo-Japanese War debates. Not only were they arguing with their seniors, Sims had the audacity to take on Alfred Thayer Mahan himself. It is hard to overestimate how bold this was at the time. Modern historians, looking back on the debate, are no less impressed60. While Mahan was himself gracious in the debate, many of the published replies to Sims from others on both sides of the Atlantic were fairly pointed. Black Joke, for example, wrote “I have left myself no space to examine Lieut.-Commander Sims’s conception of fleet tactics, and frankly there is no need to do so in detail, for he shows himself to be quite ignorant of the first principles of the art”61.

being dismissed on New Year’s Day 1918. A.B. Sainsbury, “Sir Reginald Hugh Spencer Bacon,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online

58 Noel, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Gerald H., comments on Rear-Admiral R. H. S. Bacon, “The Battleship of the Future,” in R. W. Dana (editor), Transactions of the Institution of Naval Architects, LII (Henry Sotheran & Co. 1910) page 9

59 The Beresford-Fisher rift is covered more thoroughly in Robert K. Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War (Random House, 1991).

60 Elting E. Morison, Admiral Sims and the Modern American Navy (Houghton Mifflin, 1942) especially chapter 11, “Sims vs. Mahan, 1906”.

61 Black Joke, “A.B.G.B.S.,” (op cit) page 681. 25

With respect to the naval debates over caliber and speed, there could be no higher US Navy establishment figure than Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan. Much of what we know about Mahan’s views on the Russo- Japanese War comes from private correspondence with , the sitting US President. Yet junior officers, such as Sims and Fiske, had no qualms about opposing Mahan, not just in broad principles, but in point by point refutations of his published writings about Tsushima62. Indeed, Fiske not only lined up against in print Mahan, but also provoked a reply from a Rear Admiral, to which Fiske further replied in print63. Mahan could count among his political allies the US Navy’s Chief Constructor, Admiral Capps, and William Hovgaard, a senior technical advisor to the Constructor and a world renowned authority on capital ship design who literally wrote the book on naval architecture64.

Sims and Fiske would go on to have illustrious careers with the US Navy, but in 1905 this was by no means clear or assured. They were challenging the powers in the US Navy, and they were doing it without much domestic support. Sims would become cordial with Fisher, and even finagled a tour of Dreadnought during construction, after publication of his rebuttal of Mahan’s article65. That some of these young officers would have great success does not mean that they took these positions with the foreknowledge of an illustrious career.

Observers and commentators should be vulnerable to the “confirmation bias” with respect to their own doctrine, ie, they should highlight those factors that support their own Navy’s approach to naval design. By 1905, when the Russo-Japanese War ended, the British had begun construction of Dreadnought, a fast all- big-gun large battleship. The United States had not built such a ship, nor did they have plans for such construction. Poundstone had written in 1903 about such a ship, but was opposed by Constructors and the

62 Sims (op cit) “Inherent Tactical Qualities,” and Commander Bradley A. Fiske, “American Naval Policy,” PUSNI 31 (1905) pages 1-80

63 Given the size of the peace time US Navy at the time, a Rear Admiral was a rather more imposing figure in 1905 than one would be today. Commander Bradley A. Fiske, “American Naval Policy,” PUSNI 31 (1905), pages 1-80 and “Compromiseless [sic] Ships,” PUSNI 31 (1905) pages 549-533, and the response from Rear Admiral Caspar F. Goodrich (who was responsible for the Pacific Fleet and later the New York Navy Yard), “Response to Fiske,” US Naval Institute Proceedings 31 (1905) pages 693-98. Fiske would himself be promoted to Captain in 1907, and Rear Admiral in 1911. In 1913 he became “Aide to Operations” (known today the Chief of Naval Operations). He would retire from the Navy as Rear Admiral before the US entered the First World War.

64 William Hovgaard, Modern History of Warships: Comprising a Discussion of Present Standpoint and Recent War Experiences for the Use of Students of Naval Construction, Naval Constructors, Naval Officers, and Others Interested in Naval Matters [sic] (Unwin, 1920, republished by United States Naval Institute, 1971)

65 Morison, Admiral Sims (op cit).

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senior Admirals. This would suggest that British writers would highlight evidence in favor of such a ship, while American writers would not.

There was no such relationship between the construction program of the host navy and the views of the observers and commentators. Writers in both Britain and the United States used Russo-Japanese War experience to both defend and attack their respective naval policies.

Throughout the debates both sides were finding evidence to support their position in the record of naval battles. Very clearly the reports should groupings of beliefs supporting or disputing every tenet of fast, all-big- gun, large battleships. But these groups exist in writers from both navies. In a sense they were confirming something, but it was clearly not derived from the policy of their own navy.

Observers and commentators should seek confirmation of the lessons of the last war in current data. Like the prior hypothesis, this is a form of anchoring and confirmation. But here it is not the consistency with current policy that forms the anchor, but with the last war. In the case of the British, the last naval battle had been Trafalgar, which had just celebrated its centenary. Togo, steeped in naval history, actually mimicked Nelson’s famous “England Expects” signal in his own orders to his fleet before Tsushima. Some of the British writers did pick up on the essential continuity between Trafalgar and Tsushima, and Nelson and Togo. Cyprian Bridge actually used a paper on Trafalgar to weigh in on current debates of speed and armament after Tsushima66.

But just as clearly, many British observers did not see this continuity. In a note to Viscount Esher after a heated cabinet meeting discussing naval construction, Fisher wrote “We sat to nearly 7, with Custance spitting venom all the time… Custance went back to Cornwallis and Keith, etc. That damned him! Why not Noah!” and a few days later, “Custance completely obfuscated both himself and the committee”67. In Bacon’s discussion of Bridge’s paper on Trafalgar, he cautioned “there is one thing which I think we ought to be very careful to remember… We may theorise about the future, but the great danger to avoid, if we study history, is that of drawing false deductions from it, or straining the deductions that we draw one hundred years afterwards”68.

66 Bridge, “Naval Strategy and Tactics at the Time of Trafalgar,” (op cit)

67 Fisher to Esher, 12 June 1909 and 15 June 1909, in Arthur Marder (editor) Fear God and Dread Nought: The Correspondence of Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher of Kilverstone, Volume II: Years of Power, 1904-1914 (Jonathan Cape, 1956), pages 251-252. Cornwallis and Keith were contemporaries of Nelson.

68 Bacon, comments on Bridge “Naval Strategy and Tactics at the Time of Trafalgar,” (op cit) page 304.

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In the case of the United States, the “last war” was more recent, and more superficially relevant. At the turn of the century the US Navy had won decisive naval victories at Santiago and Bay against Spanish fleets. In both those battles gunfire was of mixed caliber and highly inaccurate. Yet the US Navy triumphed decisively, smothering both Spanish fleets in a hail of fire. The Spanish ships at Manila Bay were obsolete, even by the standards of American naval construction, and the fleet at Santiago was still much weaker than those of Russia or Japan.

Yet as in the British case, there was no clear parallel. The division of the US commentators suggests they were not being anchored to any belief that was derived from national experience, just as they were not anchored to anything derived from national policy.

Observers and commentators should be vulnerable to attribution error, i.e., they will unquestioningly accept the attributes of the Japanese fleet as desirable because of its victory, and similarly dismiss the Russian fleet because of its loss. This hypothesis is not supported by the data. The Russians were noted for their success at long range gunnery early in Tsushima, and then criticized for making tactical errors allowing the Japanese to close range. For some, this closed range allowed the greater number of secondary guns on the Japanese fleet to overwhelm the Russian defenders, while for others it allowed the Japanese to concentrate their heavy guns on Russian ships during successive crossings of the T. Believers in the big gun believed that superior speed allowed the Japanese to minimize their time under fire from Russian long range heavy guns, and subsequently concentrate fire on the Russians.

At Tsushima particularly, but also in other engagements, Pakenham and Jackson commented on the tendency of shots from the mixed battery to confuse fire control, due to the inability to distinguish between an eight inch and a ten inch shell splash. This, according to these observers and those who cited the reports, was a key argument against the mixed battery. Sims and Pakenham in particular argued that the Japanese held back medium caliber fire, while the Russians fired rapidly, and thus the Russians complicated their own fire control. Pakenham noted that when the Russians were able to fire their heavy guns at long ranges they came close to inflicting critical hits upon the Japanese, and since they could not fire their medium guns from such ranges, their fire control issues were simplified and accuracy was better69.

69 Pakenham report 16 entitled “The Battle of the Sea of Japan” no date, Great Britain Admiralty Intelligence Office The Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905: Reports from Naval Attachés (republished by Battery Press, no date), page 365 and page 406.

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Bacon argued that much of what was learned, including the complications for spotting and fire control, was learned from Japanese experience. He attacked “reference to the Russo-Japanese War, and the value of secondary armaments… Those battles were not fought with Dreadnoughts, but with the old type of ship, which merely had four big guns intermixed with a lot of small ones… Had the actions been carried out with Dreadnoughts, we should now hear a good deal less about 6-in. guns”70.

In his summary of the battle, Captain Wainwright of the US Navy noted of the four modern Borodino class battleships “in all except speed, in which they were slightly inferior, they were equal if not superior to the Japanese. Their protection was probably a little stronger than the Japanese…”71. The Japanese may have won the battle decisively, but the Russians had their merits.

The most vivid and first hand examples will be overweighed in subsequent narratives and exert an influence out of proportion to their actual significance. In this case we have a few vivid examples of battle damage. At short range aboard the Japanese battleship Asahi during before Tsushima, British naval observer Pakenham had the vivid experience of having a medium caliber shell explode near his position, killing Japanese sailors, including a friend of Pakenham’s, and spraying Pakenham with gore and a jaw bone72. His colleague, Captain Jackson aboard the Adzuma, had a similar experience when a light gun casement under the bridge was blown up scattering “bits of raw flesh” around the conning tower, where they were “adhering to the outer wall” and obscuring Jackson’s view of the compass, from which he was trying to maintain accurate navigation data for his narrative73. The effect must have been tremendous to provoke graphic description, as most of Jackson’s reports are a dry narration of course changes, times, and ranges. Unlike Pakenham, who devoted substantial space to writing explanations, musings, and conjectures to accompany his observations, Jackson was normally a dispassionate recorder of tactical data. He broke narrative style in his final report to relay this incident.

70 Rear-Admiral Reginald H. S. Bacon, “The Battleship of the Future,” in Transactions of the Institution of Naval Architects, pages 18-19.

71 Wainwright, “Battle of the Sea of Japan,” PUSNI (op cit)

72 Pakenham report, “The Battle of the Sea of Japan”, undated, Great Britain Admiralty Intelligence Office The Russo- Japanese War 1904-1905: Reports from Naval Attachés (republished by Battery Press, no date), page 368. The passage is exceedingly graphic. The Japanese, in their account of the battle, report that Pakenham promptly went below and put on a fresh white uniform, returning to his station and continuing his observations. Richard Connaughton, The War of the Rising Sun and the Tumbling Bear (Routledge 1991), pages 266-267.

73 Jackson report 28 June 1905, Great Britain Admiralty Intelligence Office The Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905: Reports from Naval Attachés (republished by Battery Press, no date), pages 403-404.

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This pair of vivid experiences did not, however, seem to influence the reports prepared by these officers present at Tsushima. On the contrary, on the critical issue of volume of fire, which held that crews would be demoralized by being subject to a heavy barrage and seeing the destruction of unarmored parts of the ship and the deaths of exposed sailors, both Pakenham and Jackson disagreed with Mahan74. Their accounts emphasized the destructive efforts of large caliber guns to sink ships, and not the disruptive efforts of medium caliber guns to cause havoc and break the morale of crews. They had been subject to the very sort of morale breaking fire that Mahan argued justified the 6”-8” medium caliber battery. Not only did they not witness morale breaking, they did not themselves become fixated on these graphic events. Nor did it affect Sir Julian Corbett when he prepared the Admiralty’s classified official study based on these reports, or the British naval and military staffers who prepared the joint official history of the Russo-Japanese War.

The third vivid example was the smothering of the crew of the Suvorov, as reported in Semenov’s account of the battle and retold in Black Joke’s rebuttal to Sims. Like the shell burst on Asahi, this incident seems to show the power of the mixed battery. And like the shell burst on Asahi, this did not figure heavily in other narratives of events or the evaluation of weapons.

The three vivid examples, two of them first hand and one second hand, demonstrated the effects of medium caliber guns. But no commentator supported the mixed battery that did not also support other attributes of the smaller, more numerous capital ship fleet. While the vivid examples made for exciting reports, they did not seem to unduly sway the commentators.

Constructing Ships

In his study of decisionmaking, George noted that beliefs provide policymakers with “a relatively coherent way of organizing and making sense of what would otherwise be a confusing and overwhelming array of signals and cues picked up from the environment”75. In his own study on strategic choice, Rhodes builds on George to explicitly define these ideas as a shared cultural set of ideas, in what he terms to be a “cultural- cognitive” explanation for strategic choices by the US government in the 1890s76.

74 Jackson report 28 June 1905, Packenham report “The Battle of the Sea of Japan,” in The Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905: Reports from Naval Attachés (op cit).

75 Alexander L. George, Presidential Decisionmaking in Foreign Policy: The Effective Use of Information and Advice (Westview 1980), page 57

76 Edward Rhodes, “Explaining Strategic Choices in the 1890s,” Security Studies 5:4 (1996) pages 73-124. Rhodes’ specific argument draws on the influence of Mahan’s concept of international power on civil and military policymakers.

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It is striking how the contending approaches to capital ship design served as powerful cognitive anchors that shaped the way that new information was assimilated. In particular, observers fit into two patterns. One set believed in a long range, single caliber, heavy gun mounted on a large, fast, battleship designed with the objective of sinking other battleships. The other set believed in precisely the opposite- a medium range mixed battery mounted on a larger number of medium sized vessels maneuvering to smother the enemy under a volume of fire.

Knowing any observers view on any of these salient points, it is possible to predict what their views are on any of the other points. These coherent and linked beliefs were resilient to any information provided by the Russo-Japanese War.

As far as wars go, the naval battles of the Russo-Japanese War were pretty unambiguous. At Tsushima the Japanese annihilated the Russian fleet and suffered negligible losses to their own. The British had first hand observers, and the Americans had access to these observers as well as testimony from survivors from both sides. Even these circumstances included enough ambiguity to have both approaches to capital ship design finding vindication and proof in the results.

The data on mines and torpedoes is here suggestive. Neither theory of capital ship design had much to say about torpedoes or mines. Holding a belief about the effectiveness of mines did not necessarily imply anything about gun caliber or speed.

Lacking a cognitive anchor, observers were free to Bayesian update. Even though there were questions before the war on how these weapons would influence the naval campaign, these questions were resolved by experience. Both the Russians and the Japanese lost capital ships to mines, a fact noted with varying degrees of surprise by observers and commentators.

Torpedoes were noted as well. Though neither side lost capital ships to them, it was fear of torpedoes that influenced some tactical decisions, including range and course. To advocates of the long ranged all big gun fast battleship, this proved the wisdom of longer ranges and speed77. To advocates of the traditional capital ship, this showed the risks of reducing the number of ships and the inability of fleets in action to maintain theoretical top speed and optimal range and course with respect to the enemy’s fleet78. The conclusion, however, was the same. The torpedo threat could be seen off by capital ships.

77 Wainwright, “Battle of the Sea of Japan,” PUSNI (op cit)

78 White, discussion on Admiral Sir Reginald Custance, “Some Military Principles Which Bear on Warship Design,” Transactions of the Institution of Naval Architects, LIV (Henry Sotheran & Co., 1912), pages 1-22. 31

In the introduction to the material and historical approaches to capital ship design, I noted that the debate often seemed to turn on the role of the individual. Rhodes argues that while culture is sticky, it is not inviolate. Specifically, “significant changes in material realities which yield social crisis may stimulate a reappraisal of beliefs and that, when core beliefs have been challenged, these realities may lend strength to one competing set of beliefs over another”79. It is the role of the individual in an increasingly complex, sophisticated, and technologically shaped environment that provides spark for the formation of contending ideas.

Remarkably, the commentators themselves kept returning to the point. After a spirited debate on the value of speed and armament at the 1911 meeting of the Institution of Naval Architects, Sir Cyprian Bridge noted that “the superiority it held for a very, very brief period, so that I do not know that we could take that as being a governing factor or a factor of any great importance in modern naval tactics. I need scarcely say that I accept with complete agreement what Admiral Dyrssen said about the importance of the personnel [emphasis original]”80.

In his discussion of Tsushima, Mahan pointed to the effects of medium caliber fire on Russian bridge crews and spotters. “This result being upon the personnel, goes far to establish the actual superiority of the secondary battery, in which the Russians had little more than half the number possessed by the enemy, while in the heavier calibers they had more than double”81.

Custance would ruefully make the same point, writing

to teach reliance on superior materiel is to encourage neglect to acquire skill. The ideas underlying the ship big enough to ‘lick creation,’ as well as those embodied in the ship fast enough to run away, lead not to great deeds, but straight to ‘regrettable incidents’. The policy of the Materiel School is entirely opposed to the principles and practice of our forefathers, who owed their success not to any superiority in the size and speed of their ships, but to their own skill and valour. Bad will be the day for Britain when her Navy falls away from their great traditions82.

79 Rhodes, “Explaining Strategic Choices” (op cit) p 78.

80 Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge, “Fifty Years’ Architectural Expression of Tactical Ideas,” in R. W. Dana (editor), Transactions of the Institution of Naval Architects, LIII: Jubilee Meetings Part II (Henry Sotheran & Co. 1911) pages 34-49 quotation on page 48.

81 Mahan, “Reflections Historic and Other” (op cit), page 15.

82 Admiral Sir Reginald Custance (under the pseudonym “Barfleur”) Naval Policy: A Plea for the Study of War (William Blackwood & Sons, 1907) pages 228-229

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Custance was no luddite. As second in command of the Channel Fleet he supervised testing of Arthur Hungerford Pollen’s analog clock, which was an early fire control computer and far superior to anything available to any navy at the time. Custance reviewed it favorably, and recommended its adoption83. Accuracy was important to him. But he parted company when it came to trading away armor and numbers for heavy guns and high speed.

In their writings, Fisher, Bacon, and Sims could barely control their exasperation with the historical school. Modern gunfire, speed, and accuracy over long ranges changed everything. It was worth while to trade numbers for speed, to trade armor for speed. And to command such a modern ship required not a knowledge of fleet tactics at the time of Salamis or Trafalgar, but mastery of technical disciplines, subdivided into relevant engineering functions84.

Conclusions

The Bayesian approach, framed as a null hypothesis, performed poorly. Observers and commentators did not converge on the crucial metrics of capital ship design. Not only was there no convergence, there were very clear patterns of sustained divergence, patterns that do not seem haphazard or coincidental. There were results consistent with convergence on the role of the mine and the surface fired torpedo. The sharp debate between advocates of the all-big-gun fast capital ship and their detractors was not settled by even the lopsided victory of Japan at Tsushima. Both sides found enough data to build a case supporting their beliefs. But what were the sides?

The organizational approach did not explain these patterns. Individuals did not advocate the point that would have increased navy budgets, indeed they seemed so acutely aware of limits that one tactic was to accuse opponents of raising naval expenditures unnecessarily85. Some officers had career success because of their agreement with superiors, but others had success despite disagreeing with superiors. And agreement was no guarantee of success either.

83 Jon Tetsuro Sumida, In Defence of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology, and British Naval Policy, 1889-1914 (Unwin Hyman, 1989) and The Pollen Papers: The Privately Ciruclated Printed Works of Arthur Hungerford Pollen 1901-1916 (Naval Records Society, 1983).

84 Elting Morison, Men, Machines, and Modern Times (MIT Press, 1966).

85 It might be possible to argue that these were all just tactical feints, but if so what does that say about the utility of interest based explanations? If every policy can be explained ex post facto as somehow utility maximizing, what can be said ex ante? And if two explicitly contradictory groups within an organization can both simultaneously be justified as utility maximizing while advocating diametrically opposed policies, certainly something is awry! 33

Blending organizations with cognitive theory, as opposed to rational self interest, offered no improvement. Because the splits were internal to organizations, it is unlikely that agreement or disagreement with stated policy can explain the views of individuals. The observers and professional writers had no qualms about pointing out errors in their own naval approaches. Whether an individual was agreeing with or disagreeing with naval policy, they found evidence for their position in the Russo-Japanese War. While the US and Great Britain were pursuing different construction policies early in the decade, the same split was demonstrated in writers of both nationalities. Individual anchors, if they existed at all, were not set by current policy.

Purely cognitive approaches also have shown weakness. They also freely criticized the Japanese, and even offered praise for the Russians, disconfirming the predictions of attribution error. The particularly vivid firsthand accounts did not seem to carry any undue weight. Pakenham and Jackson themselves, despite being in danger from medium caliber shell bursts and seeing the gruesome results of enemy fire, believed that medium caliber guns were not useful. US and British writers occasionally returned to the “last war”, but some were quite specific in challenging these historical references. The last war did not consistently anchor beliefs.

The ideational perspective shows better explanatory power. Specifically it is the contending ideas of ship design and strategy that serve as cognitive anchors for observers who had expressed prior beliefs, as well as attractors for those who did not go on record with previous ideas. These ideas transcend nationality and organizational position.

Ultimately, the debates about technical aspects of capital ship design came down to a debate about the role of the individual within the modern technologically advancing navy. Mahan, Bridge, Custance, and their supporters feared that the pursuit of technological advancement would come at the expense of skill, bravery, and the traditions of the navy. High speed, if it could be maintained at all (and there were many practical reasons to believe it could not), conferred the power to run away, not to close. Long range guns sapped offensive spirit, resulting in “long bowls” and chance events rather than closing with the enemy to inflict decisive damage. The lack of armor, traded away to increase speed and large caliber guns, meant that closing would be disastrous, and thus reinforced the need to fight at maximum distance or flee. Ultimately, critics argued, it would result in a passive battlefleet that could not win a Mahanian contest for dominance of the world’s oceans.

Fisher, Bacon, Sims, and their allies argued that such a theory of battle was outmoded. The great captains had been subordinated to greater ships, and the names Dreadnought and Invincible were not chosen randomly. Offensive tactics from the age of sail were suicidal given the hitting power of modern guns and the threat of 34

surface fired torpedoes. Technical proficiency, not great feats of seamanship or knowledge of historical battles, was necessary to command modern warships.

For today’s analyst, it is important to react with caution to the lessons of history. Even as lopsided and well recorded a battle as Tsushima provided evidence for two contradictory positions. The fight between sides had little to do with nationality, or organizational interests. It wasn’t colored by universal human biases, but by biases induced by transnational shared ideas. In this case, the ideas were about naval warfare. Today we are not arguing about gun caliber or the speed of battleships. But we do argue about the revolution in military affairs, about the exercise of strategic airpower, and about theories of pacification and capacity building. As we prepare the lessons of modern history for posterity, it would be wise to consider the role that ideational bias plays in the evaluation of even very technical and seemingly impervious to bias matters.