e film records of a few hundred such games
could be conveniently arranged, a very wide range of situations that
would probably come up in war would be portrayed; and the moves
made in handling those situations would form valuable precedents
for action, whenever situations approximating them should come up
in war.

It must be borne in mind that in actual life, our only real guide
to wise action in any contingency that may arise is a memory, more
or less consciously realized, of how a similar contingency has
been met, successfully or unsuccessfully, in the past. Perhaps
most of us do not realize that it is not so much experience that
guides us as our memory of experiences. Therefore in the training
of both officers and enlisted men in strategy, tactics, seamanship,
gunnery, engineering, and the rest, the memory of how they, or
some one else, did this well and that badly (even if the memory
be hardly conscious) is the immediate agency for bringing about
improvement.

Imagine now a strategical system of training for the navy, in which
a body of highly trained officers at the department will continuously
regulate the exercises of the fleet, guided by the revelations of
the _Kriegspiel:_ the commander-in-chief will direct the activities
of the main divisions of the fleet, carrying out the department's
scheme; the commander of each division will regulate the activities
of the units of his command in accordance with the fleet scheme;
the officer in command of each unit of each division will regulate
the activities of each unit in his ship, destroyer, submarine,
or other craft in accordance with the division scheme; and every
suborganization, in every ship, destroyer, or other craft will
regulate likewise the activities of its members; so that the navy
will resemble a vast and efficient organism, all the parts leagued
together by a common understanding and a common purpose; mutually
dependent, mutually assisting, sympathetically obedient to the
controlling mind that directs them toward the "end in view."

It must be obvious, however, that in order that the navy shall
be like an organism, its brain (the General Staff) must not be a
thing apart, but must be of it, and bound to every part by ties
of sympathy and understanding. It would be possible to have a staff
excellent in many ways, and yet so out of touch with the fleet
and its practical requirements that co-ordination between the two
would not exist. Analogous conditions