US Congress Report admitted that USA coward spoil brat baby Navy No Longer Know how to War With PLA!

[Ang4MohTrump]

https://mil.news.sina.com.cn/china/2018-11-26/doc-ihpevhck7069416.shtml

美国会报告：美军已基本忘记该如何与中国军舰作战

美国会报告：美军已基本忘记该如何与中国军舰作战



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艺术家绘制的“福特”号核航母航行设想图。

锈迹斑斑+布局杂乱！近距细拍美军访港宙斯盾驱逐舰1/10
查看原图图集模式
近日，美国海军里根号航母及多艘宙斯盾战舰停靠香港。有网友发布了近距俯拍的美军阿利伯克级驱逐舰照片。照片显示，该艘驱逐舰锈迹斑斑，舰上各装置布局、摆放，也使该舰显得有些杂乱。


　　参考消息网11月26日报道 美国《国家利益》双月刊网站11月23日发表迈克尔·佩克的文章《美国需要大规模加强军备，才能确保打赢对俄或对华战争》称，如果说关于美国国防的一份新报告有什么主题词的话，那就是“更多”。美国需要更多坦克、更多潜艇，更多隐形战斗机。
文章称，美国需要做好与俄罗斯——以及中国——打仗的准备，同时还要维持对中东的投入。有人会说，这样的措施早该实施了，因为之前削减国防预算导致五角大楼丧失了必要的工具。也有人觉得这属于夸大国家安全重要性的妄想症。
文章认为，不管怎么说，由美国国防战略委员会（由美国国会指定的这一跨党派委员会负责评估特朗普政府2018年《国防战略报告》）编纂的这份报告，的确证实了许多人业已相信的观点：俄罗斯与中国对美国安全构成最大威胁。
然而，国防战略委员会质疑美国有没有能力打败俄罗斯或中国。报告警告说：“由于我们近来将重点放在反恐和平叛行动上，由于我们的敌人研究了击败美军的新方法，因此美国正丧失在力量投放、防空与反导、网络战与太空战、反舰战与反潜战、地面远程火力、电子战等重要作战领域的优势。针对强大对手（尤其中国与俄罗斯）策划及实施军事行动的诸多必要技能已经萎缩了。”
在国防战略委员会看来，问题的罪魁祸首是国会《预算控制法》。该法案限制了包括国防预算在内的自由裁量开支的上限（也可以通过海外军事行动特别拨款等机制绕过该法案的限制）。
报告认为，在近20年专注于追击伊拉克沙漠地区及阿富汗山区的叛乱分子之后，美军已经基本忘记该如何与俄罗斯坦克和中国军舰作战了。不过，美国国防战略委员会提出的建议涵盖范围之广还是让人吃了一惊。当然，如果放在冷战高峰时期，尤其是里根大规模增加国防开支的那些年头，这样的建议并不会显得不合时宜。
针对太平洋地区，国防战略委员会建议增加潜艇，增加远程打击监视系统，提高空运、海运和空中加油能力，以便威慑中国与朝鲜。
作为对抗俄罗斯的堡垒，美国应当将一个重型机械化师调回欧洲，同时加强电子战、防空、远程火力、工兵工程、指挥控制等方面的能力。
与此同时，国防战略委员会认为美国不能减少对中东的投入。事实上，美国应当做好继续打击“伊斯兰国”组织（或许还有伊朗）的准备。此类任务需要大量特种部队、空中力量和情报手段，还需要能够支持当地军队的顾问队伍。此外，美国应当推进核力量现代化。

说到这里，美国碰见一个无法回避的问题：将需要花费多少钱？报告写道：“具体需要多少资金才能充分满足美军的需求？明确这一数字超出了我们的工作范围。”但委员会同时建议，今后几年的国防预算应当在通胀基础上每年增加3%到5%。这样的增幅与国防开支大大增加的里根时期相比，似乎并不突出。不过，鉴于现在的国防预算已经达到7000亿美元左右，3%到5%的实际增幅意味着要增加数百亿美元投入。
国防战略委员会提出的最令人担忧的问题，或许在于美国将如何使用这些新式武器。报告建议说：“美国国防部应当更加明确地回答一个问题：他们打算如何实现国防战略的核心主题，即如何在竞争和战争中击败大国对手。如果缺乏一套赢得对华战争或者对俄战争的可靠方针，国防部的努力将是徒劳的。”
或者换句话说，假如不制定关于如何利用它们的有效方案，新武器又有什么用呢？



The US will report that the US military has basically forgotten how to fight against Chinese warships.
The US will report that the US military has basically forgotten how to fight against Chinese warships.
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The artist draws the "Ford" nuclear aircraft carrier navigation plan. The artist draws the "Ford" nuclear aircraft carrier navigation plan.
Rusty + layout messy! Close-up fine shot US military visit to the Aegis destroyer 1/10
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Recently, the US Navy's Reagan carrier and a number of Aegis warships docked in Hong Kong. Some netizens released photos of the US military Alibek-class destroyers in close-up shots. The photo shows that the destroyer is rusty and the layout and placement of the various devices on the ship make the ship look a bit messy.

Reference News Network reported on November 26 that the US "National Interests" bimonthly website published Michael Peck's article on November 23, "The United States needs to strengthen its armaments on a large scale to ensure victory in the war against Russia or China." If there is any key word in a new report on US defense, it is "more." The United States needs more tanks, more submarines, and more stealth fighters.

The article said that the United States needs to be prepared to fight against Russia, as well as China, while maintaining its investment in the Middle East. Some would say that such measures should have been implemented since the previous cut in the defense budget led to the Pentagon losing the necessary tools. Some people think that this is a paranoia that exaggerates the importance of national security.

The article believes that, in any case, the report compiled by the US Defense Strategy Committee (the cross-party committee appointed by the US Congress to evaluate the Trump Administration's 2018 Defense Strategy Report) does confirm that many people have believed The view: Russia and China pose the greatest threat to US security.

However, the National Defense Strategy Committee questioned whether the United States has the ability to defeat Russia or China. The report warned: "Because we have recently focused on counter-terrorism and rebel operations, because our enemies have studied new ways to defeat the US military, the United States is losing its power, air defense and anti-missile, cyber warfare and space warfare, and vice The advantages of warfare and anti-submarine warfare, ground-based long-range firepower, electronic warfare and other important operational areas. The necessary skills for planning and implementing military operations against powerful opponents (especially China and Russia) have shrunk."

In the opinion of the National Defense Strategy Committee, the chief culprit of the problem is the Congressional Budget Control Act. The bill limits the upper limit of discretionary spending, including the defense budget (which can also be bypassed by mechanisms such as special allocations for military operations abroad).

The report believes that after nearly 20 years of focusing on the pursuit of insurgents in the desert areas of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, the US military has basically forgotten how to fight Russian tanks and Chinese warships. However, the wide range of recommendations made by the US Defense Strategy Committee is still surprising. Of course, if you put it in the peak of the Cold War, especially in those years when Reagan has increased its defense spending on a large scale, such a proposal would not seem out of place.

In response to the Pacific region, the National Defense Strategy Committee recommended the addition of submarines, the addition of long-range strike surveillance systems, and improved air, sea and air refueling capabilities to deter China and North Korea.

As a bastion against Russia, the United States should transfer a heavy mechanized division back to Europe, while strengthening its capabilities in electronic warfare, air defense, long-range firepower, engineering, and command and control.

At the same time, the National Defense Strategy Committee believes that the United States cannot reduce its investment in the Middle East. In fact, the United States should be prepared to continue to fight against the "Islamic State" organization (and perhaps Iran). Such missions require a large number of special forces, airpower and intelligence, as well as a team of consultants capable of supporting the local army. In addition, the United States should promote the modernization of nuclear power.

Having said that, the United States has encountered an unavoidable question: How much will it cost? The report writes: “How much money is needed to fully meet the needs of the US military? It is clear that this figure is beyond the scope of our work.” But the committee also recommends that the defense budget for the next few years should increase by 3% to 5 per year on an inflation basis. %. Such an increase does not seem to be prominent compared to the Reagan period, where defense spending has increased significantly. However, given that the current defense budget has reached around $700 billion, the actual increase of 3% to 5% means an increase of tens of billions of dollars.

Perhaps the most worrying issue raised by the National Defense Strategy Committee is how the US will use these new weapons. The report suggests: "The US Department of Defense should answer a question more clearly: how they intend to achieve the core theme of the defense strategy, namely how to defeat big rivals in competition and war. If there is a lack of a set to win the war against China or the war against Russia. A reliable approach, the efforts of the Ministry of Defense will be futile."

Or in other words, what is the use of new weapons without an effective plan on how to use them?

 

[Ang4MohTrump]

https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-02/have-we-forgotten-how-fight

Have We Forgotten How to Fight?

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Proceedings Magazine - February 2018 Vol.
144/2/1,380


By Captain Pete Pagano, U.S. Navy
(Retired)

When Vice Admiral "Hammerin Hank" Mustin, shown here discussing the details of a Second Fleet exercise with Captain Frank Lugo, wrote the 1986 fighting instructions for his commanders, the Navy had almost 600 ships available to train, maintain, deploy, and - if necessary - fight.


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https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/how-us-navy-forgot-fight-32307




October 1, 2018 Topic: Security Blog Brand: The Buzz Tags: U.S. NavyStrategyTrainingReformCIMSEC
How the U.S. Navy Forgot to Fight

The U.S. Navy is suffering from self-inflicted strategic dysfunction across the breadth of its enterprise.

by CIMSEC Dmitry Filipoff


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Series Introduction
“Fleet level processes and procedures designed for safe and effective operations were increasingly relaxed due to time and fiscal constraints, and the ‘normalization-of-deviation’ began to take root in the culture of the fleet. Leaders and organizations began to lose sight of what ‘right’ looked like, and to accept these altered conditions and reduced readiness standards as the new normal.” –2017 Strategic Readiness Review commissioned in the aftermath of the collisions involving USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) and USS John S. McCain (DDG-56)
The U.S. Navy is suffering from self-inflicted strategic dysfunction across the breadth of its enterprise. This series seeks to explore the theme of the normalization of deviation in some of the most critical operations, activities, and attributes that prepare the U.S. Navy for war. Because the U.S. Navy is the senior partner in its alliance activities many of these problems probably hold true for allied navies as well.

Part One below looks at U.S. Navy combat training and draws a comparison with Chinese Navy training.
Part Two will examine firepower relating to offense, defense, and across force structure.

Part Three will look at tactics and doctrine with an emphasis on network- and carrier-centric fleet combat.
Part Four will discuss technical standards.

Part Five will look at the relationship between the Navy’s availability and material condition.
Part Six will examine the application of strategy to operations.

Part Seven will look at strategy and force development, including force structure assessment.
Part Eight will conclude with recommendations for a force development strategy to refocus the U.S. Navy on the high-end fight and sea control.

Combat Training

“This ship is built to fight; you’d better know how.” –Former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke (ret.) at the commissioning ceremony of the destroyer USS Arleigh Burke (DDG-51)

The training strategy of a military service is one of its most fundamental responsibilities. Training is central to piercing the fog of war as much as possible before combat exacts its price. Training is what forges people into warfighters.

Soon after the Cold War ended the Navy announced a “change in focus and, therefore, in priorities for the Naval Service away from operations on the sea toward power projection.” A new operating focus on low-end missions such as partner development missions, striking land targets, and deterring rogue regimes came to dominate its focus. Different training followed. This training and operating paradigm replaced the high-end threat focus the Navy was originally made for in an era of great power competition against the Soviet Union. But the shift was wholesale, and did not attempt to preserve a responsible minimum of important skills that still held relevance. Perhaps worst of all, somehow this shift allowed U.S. Navy training to fall to incredible lows and remain there for most of a generation.

So much valuable corporate memory has evaporated. Extremely unrealistic training exercises starved Sailors of opportunities to learn important skills and prove themselves. And while the U.S. Navy slipped for years its latest rival, the Chinese Navy, made strong gains in the very same skills the U.S. Navy was losing.

“The mission of the fleet in time of peace is preparation for war, and in this preparation tactical training heads the list of requirements…No matter how perfect we are in every other respect, if we cannot make good here we might as well not exist.” –Captain William S. Sims, “ Naval War College Methods and Principles Applied Afloat ,” 1915.

For years the Navy’s training exercises took on a scripted character where the outcomes were generally known beforehand and where opposing forces were usually made to lose. Scripted training is not inherently wrong if it is used as a stepping stone to more open-ended and complex exercises. However, such events were very few and far between. As a result most U.S. Navy high-end combat training remained stuck at an extremely basic level that barely scratched the surface of war. As a report from the Naval Studies Board described Navy training, “There is little free play, and exercises are typically scripted with little deviation allowed.”

One of the most important methods of making exercises realistic is facing off against opponents that can win. Going up against a thinking and capable adversary creates a level of challenge that simple target practice cannot approach. Red teams and opposing forces can be highly specialized units that incorporate key intelligence insights to make their behavior more like that of a foreign competitor. Opposing forces can also be more simple when using scratch teams where training units can be divided into opposing sides and told to challenge each other. Scratch opposition forces are not as realistic as using teams informed by intelligence on competitors, but scratch teams can pose a real challenge because it is still troops competing against troops.

It appears Navy exercising was devoid of opposition forces that stood a chance. In “ An Open Letter to the U.S. Navy from Red ,” Captain Dale Rielage, the intelligence director of U.S. Pacific Fleet, writes from the perspective of an opposing force commander to the U.S. Navy and offers insight into how the Navy minimized challenge in its training by handicapping its Red teams:

“Your opposing forces often are very good, but you have trained them to know their place…our experience is that they have learned to self-regulate their aggressiveness, knowing what senior Blue and White cell members will accept. As one opposing force member recently told us during a ‘high-end’ training event, their implied tasking included not annoying the senior flag officer participating in the event. They knew from experience that aggressive Red action and candid debriefs were historically a source of annoyance. They played accordingly.”

Rielage invoked the infamous Millennium Challenge exercise. This exercise was a massive warfighting experiment that became a controversy after the opposing force commander Lt. Gen Paul van Riper quit in protest. Riper at first inflicted devastating losses on the Blue team through unconventional means, but subsequent rounds cemented parameters that forced Red to lose. According to Rielage, “The entire event generally is remembered as an example of what not to do…The reality is that we repeat this experience on a smaller scale multiple times each year.”

Rielage then goes on to suggest the problem is extremely pervasive and longstanding:

“You talk about accepting failure as a way to learn, but refuse to fail. It is instructive to ask a room of senior officers the last time they played in—or even heard of—a game or exercise where Red won.”

If the Red teams of Navy exercising are so constrained they rarely ever win then what are they being used for? Admiral Scott Swift, recent commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, gives a clue in “ A Fleet Must be Able to Fight .” Swift points out that “Our warfighting culture focuses on kill ratio—the number of enemy losses we can inflict for every loss we take.” However, Navy exercising usually results in extremely favorable tradeoffs. Swift argued that the Navy’s “reliance on high kill ratios” causes it to focus on “exquisite engagements,” or “firing from a position of minimum uncertainty and maximum probability of success (emphasis added).” Swift concludes that in high-end operations “it is not possible to generate the number of exquisite engagements necessary to achieve victory.”

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[Ang4MohTrump]

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/13/the-u-s-navy-has-forgotten-what-its-like-to-fight/


Argument
The U.S. Navy Has Forgotten What It’s Like to Fight
The U.K.'s defeat at Jutland is a reminder of how a victorious force can get lazy.

By James Holmes | November 13, 2018, 10:37 AM

A painting of the World War I Battle of Jutland shows the sinking hit of the British battlecruiser HMS Indefatigable shortly before its explosion on May 31, 1916. (Willy Stöwer/ullstein bild via Getty Images)


The popular imagination remembers World War I as a tale of trenches, m&d, rats, and barbed wire. But the grinding ground war between the entrenched armies in France wasn’t the only conflict. In the east, Russia and the Central Powers fought a war of movement over vast plains. In the south, Italian and Austro-Hungarian troops froze in the white war of the mountains. On the periphery of Europe, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk frustrated the Allied thrust at Gallipoli, while far away German cruisers wreaked havoc along the South American coast.
If there was one thing shared in all these theaters, it was a leadership struggling to comprehend how quickly war had changed, and to reconcile the lessons they’d been taught with the grim realities of the ground. For most, it was a drawn-out education. But for the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy, which had assumed it would win the glory it saw as its birthright, it was a single sharp shock—one with lessons that the U.S. Navy should be heeding today.
The Great War’s maritime battle has much to teach a U.S. Navy that has faced no peer in battle since World War II, and not even the prospect of an enemy since the Soviet Navy’s demise in 1991. The U.S. Navy has fallen into some of the same vices that bedeviled the Royal Navy by the turn of the 20th century, and that were exposed at the Battle of Jutland in 1916.
The Royal Navy had been anticipating a clash with the German Imperial Navy since the beginning of the war, in the confident knowledge that it would prevail. But at Jutland, off Denmark’s North Sea coast, the upstart German High Seas Fleet gave worse than it got against Britain’s Grand Fleet. The battle was inconclusive, but for an Admiralty that took British victory as the natural state of affairs, that was as bad as losing. Prewar British policy had been that the navy should be able to take on its two largest competitors at the same time. Yet so effective were German gunners, and so inept British maneuvering, that Battlecruiser Fleet commander Vice Adm. Sir David Beatty quipped: “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.” That blood was quite literal; the British lost 14 ships and more than 6,000 men—double the price the Germans paid.
There was, indeed, something wrong with the bloody ships, but the Grand Fleet’s woes were more cultural than material. Ship design was one problem; handling was a worse one. Since the Napoleonic Wars a century beforehand, Royal Navy commanders had taken to scripting out fleet movements in minute detail. The Admiralty published signal books explaining how: The signals crew in a flagship would encode an order from the admiral in a complex series of signal flags, hoist the flags up the yardarm on ropes, wait for signal crews on other ships to read and decode the message, then execute the order by hauling down the flags.
This system sounds awfully intricate for saltwater surroundings, and so it was; its efficacy was dubious even during peacetime maneuvers. Fleets mainly consisted of steam-powered surface ships whose boilers burned coal or thick oil. They belched forth black smoke, sometimes deliberately made by skippers to obscure their movements. Inadvertent smoke, hazy skies, or winds that twisted flags could blind the fleet just as easily, disrupting the nautical choreography that gladdened admirals’ hearts.
The sea is unfriendly to parade-ground efficiency by its nature. Few formations survive first contact with the enemy. They scatter amid the clangor of arms. Fighting degenerates into melees that pit individual ships or flotillas against each other. The battle’s outcome is the sum of many small-scale engagements. Tactical choreography hurts the cause if ship or fleet commanders are unused to operating off-script—and off-script is where single-ship encounters take place. Individual enterprise and derring-do, not orders from central authority, decide between triumph and defeat.
None of this should have come as news to British tars, but by 1916 the Royal Navy had in effect forgotten about the rigors of war against a peer competitor. Combat is the arbiter of what does and doesn’t work in naval affairs. But 19th-century Britain had no maritime rival to provide a reality check. Conflicts were limited to gunboat diplomacy, hunting slavers, and bombarding weak states. Fresh complexity encrusted each edition of the Signal Book as the 19th century went on, but few noticed that the system was unfit for a combat setting.
Tranquil times let Royal Navy officers indulge their proclivity for authoritarian command. Control freaks gravitate to the naval officer corps. What do officers do if there’s no one to fight? They obsess over scripted ship movements, strict obedience to orders, administrative busywork, spit and polish, and sundry other matters that do little to hone battle efficiency. One of Murphy’s Laws of Combat holds that no combat-ready unit has ever passed a peacetime inspection. But if the leadership talks itself into believing combat will never happen, a navy spends its time preparing for peacetime inspections.
At Jutland, history issued a grim verdict on British administrative prowess. Germany had only started building an oceangoing battle fleet around the turn of the century. Consumed with administrative trivia, the vaunted British Navy—which had ruled the waves for a century since the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805—came off worst against a fledgling navy crewed by landsmen reared on continental combat.
Perversely, the Royal Navy performed poorly at Jutland in 1916 in part because it won big at Trafalgar that long century before. In October 1805, an outnumbered fleet commanded by Lord Horatio Nelson, Great Britain’s god of sea warfare, crushed the combined fleets of France and Spain off the Andalusian coast. In doing so, Nelson’s force eliminated all peer opposition for the balance of the 19th century.
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The Royal Navy had a busy 19th century, but it spent that century prosecuting imperial police actions rather than dueling rival navies. The aftermath of Trafalgar left the service unprepared when a formidable adversary appeared on the scene. Britain was a victim of its own success.
Admirals and sea captains long to vanquish their opposition in Nelsonian fashion, earning their own counterparts to Trafalgar Square. But smashing success dulls their competitive skills and reflexes for when a new challenger emerges—as it will, sooner or later, in the course of human events.
The 18th-century philosopher-statesman Edmund Burke marveled at this paradox. “Difficulty,” Burke wrote, “is a severe instructor … He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance with our object and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial.”
In a sense, Burke noted, my enemy is my friend. Competition demands that I make myself physically and intellectually fit and strive toward constant self-betterment. Lord Nelson had the French and Spanish navies to contend with. He knew he had to empower subordinate commanders to prevail over an adversary force stronger in raw numbers. He also understood the shortcomings of flag signals and told ship captains what to do if the system faltered: “in case Signals can neither be seen or perfectly understood, no Captain can do very wrong if he places his Ship alongside that of an Enemy.” French skippers liked to stand off and wage gunnery duels at a distance; Royal Navy doctrine exhorted British skippers to close the distance and blast into enemy hulls from knife-fight range.
Nelson’s instructions amounted to: if in doubt, get ‘em!
The hands-off approach worked. It unlocked the energy and ingenuity of individual seamen. As historian Andrew Gordon observes, though, Lord Nelson’s hands-off system started decaying even as he became Britain’s great national martyr, falling on the quarterdeck of his ship at Trafalgar. His immediate successors, such as the dramatic Lord Thomas Cochrane, kept the Nelsonian spirit alive during the wars. But the fetish for elaborate signals and administrative minutiae set in after the downfall of Napoleonic France, when danger no longer loomed. The Royal Navy could afford bad habits.
The result was something Gordon terms “the long, calm lee of Trafalgar.” In maritime affairs the lee is an illusory calm on the downwind side of some bulky object, whether it’s a ship or a landmass. The hull or shore blocks out the wind and elements—but only till the wind shifts or the ship changes course. Then the elements return with a vengeance. But if beneficiaries perchance shelter under a long lee, they may come to assume calm conditions are the natural state of things. They stop preparing for heavy weather because they think it no longer exists. And then a storm comes, and it buffets them with extra force because they’re bewildered and unready.
This phenomenon was on display at Jutland. Is the U.S. Navy impervious to the lee of victory? Hardly. In January 1941, Atlantic Squadron commander Vice Adm. Ernest King issued a memorandum condemning control freakery in the navy. King, who was promoted to admiral the following month, took senior officers to task for dictating not just what their subordinates should do but exactly how they should do it. He demanded they stop it and empower subordinates for the war he saw on the horizon. He sought to instill Nelsonian initiative throughout the officer corps, not just among admirals.
In effect, King concluded that the U.S. Navy of 1941 languished in the long calm lee of triumph in World War I. His message seemed to get through. The U.S. Navy acquitted itself admirably after suffering severe early setbacks from the December attack on Pearl Harbor through mid-1942. Submarines fanned out into the Western Pacific while the battleship fleet still burned in Hawaii. Carrier task forces launched hit-and-run raids against Japanese-held island bases.
By mid-1942, the navy amassed sufficient strength to halt the Japanese offensive at the Battle of Midway and seize the offensive. Victory followed victory from then on, and as a result World War II cast a long lee of its own. The last fleet engagement for the U.S. Navy was against the Imperial Japanese Navy in October 1944, at Leyte Gulf off the Philippine coast. Like Trafalgar, the Battle of Leyte Gulf was decisive; it spelled the end of the Japanese fleet as a fighting force. Nor did the Soviet Navy ever test its American rival in action. Forty years of cold war did little to banish the long calm lee of Leyte.
Like the Royal Navy at Jutland, the postwar U.S. Navy forgot about the chaos and uncertainty of fighting an equal foe.

Like the Royal Navy at Jutland, the postwar U.S. Navy forgot about the chaos and uncertainty of fighting an equal foe.​

It lacked the ruthless instructor of whom Burke wrote. Where British officers grew dependent on intricate flag signals, American officers have come to lean on satellite communications, GPS, and other electronic crutches. Traditional implements of seamanship—paper nautical charts, compasses, sextants—have fallen into neglect.

Nor have senior commanders resisted the temptation to use high-tech communications to micromanage. World War I-era technology allowed commanders to encroach on subordinates’ freedom of action; modern technology positively encourages it. Fleet bosses can pick up the phone or keyboard and meddle to their hearts’ content. Combine naval magnates’ natural penchant for control freakery with technology that enables them to micromanage and you have a recipe for disappointment and defeat at the hands of a dynamic foe.
That foe might well be China. Like Imperial Germany, Beijing has been pouring resources into the navy in anticipation of a challenge from the global hegemon. A fight on China’s home ground, along coastlines bristling with ship-killing missiles, requires the United States to up its game. But like Great Britain, the United States has been concentrating on the material challenge posed by the new foe and not thinking about how its own culture might end up hampering—if not crippling—real action. The U.S. Navy would do well to ditch that hubris now, lest its future admirals be forced to wonder if there’s something wrong with their bloody carriers.