ed are not enough, or gentlemen would not need
the danger of losing money to make card games interesting; but
any game that brings in all three elements will rouse the utmost
interest and activity of which a man is capable. Games involving
these three elements are known by many names; one name is "poker,"
another name is "business," and another name is "politics." There
are many other games besides, but the greatest of all is strategy.

Now in the endeavor to prepare a fleet by training, no lack of
means for exciting interest will be found; in fact no other training
offers so many and so great a variety of means for introducing
the elements of competition, chance, and danger. The problem is
how best to employ them.

To do this successfully, it must be realized, of course, that the
greatest single factor in exciting interest is the personal factor,
since comparatively few men can get much interested in a matter
that is impersonal; a boy is more interested in watching a baseball
game in which he knows some of the players than in watching a game
between teams neither of which he has ever seen; and the men in
any ship are more interested in the competition between their ship
and some other than between any other two; feeling that _esprit de
corps_ by reason of which every individual in every organization
personifies the organization as a living thing of which he himself
is part.

_Strategic Problems_.--The training of the fleet, then, can best be
done under the direction of a trained staff, that staff generously
employing all the resources of competition, chance, and danger. The
obvious way to do this is to give out to the fleet for solution a
continual succession of strategic problems, which the entire fleet
will be engaged in solving, and which will be the starting-point
for all the drills of the fleet and in the fleet. (Some officers
prefer the word "maneuver" to "problem.")

The arranging of a continual series of war problems, or maneuvers
to be worked out in the fleet by "games," will call for an amount
of strategical skill second only to the skill needed for operations
in war, will deal with similar factors and be founded on similar
principles.

Naturally, the war problems, before being sent to the fleet for
solving, would be solved first by the staff, using strategical
and tactical games, and other appropriate means; and inasmuch as
the scheme of education and training is for the benefit of the
staff itself,