rn.

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CHAPTER FOUR

METHODS OF EXERCISING COMMAND

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I. DEFENCE AGAINST INVASION

In methods of exercising command are included all operations not directly
concerned with securing command or with preventing its being secured by the
enemy. We engage in exercising command whenever we conduct operations which
are directed not against the enemy's battle-fleet, but to using sea
communications for our own purposes, or to interfering with the enemy's use
of them. Such operations, though logically of secondary importance, have
always occupied the larger part of naval warfare. Naval warfare does not
begin and end with the destruction of the enemy's battle-fleet, nor even
with breaking his cruiser power. Beyond all this there is the actual work
of preventing his passing an army across the sea and of protecting the
passage of our own military expeditions. There is also the obstruction of
his trade and the protection of our own. In all such operations we are
concerned with the exercise of command. We are using the sea, or
interfering with its use by the enemy; we are not endeavouring to secure
the use or to prevent the enemy from securing it. The two categories of
operation differ radically in conception and purpose, and strategically
they are on wholly different planes.

Logically, of course, operations for exercising command should follow those
for securing command; that is to say, that since the attainment of command
is the special object of naval warfare, and since that command can only be
obtained permanently by the destruction of the enemy's armed forces afloat,
it follows that in strictness no other objects should be allowed to
interfere with our concentration of effort on the supreme end of securing
command by destruction. War, however, is not conducted by logic, and the
order of proceeding which logic prescribes cannot always be adhered to in
practice. We have seen how, owing to the special conditions of naval
warfare, extraneous necessities intrude themselves which make it inevitable
that operations for exercising command should accompany as well as follow
operations for securing command. War being, as it is, a complex sum of
naval, military, political, financial, and moral factors, its actuality can
seldom offer to a naval staff a clean slate on which strategical problems
can be solved by well-turned syllog