Command at Sea: Naval Command and Control Since the Sixteenth Century (review)

For thousands of years, military thinkers have pursued the key to successful battlefield leadership, but serious efforts to distill similar lessons for naval warfare have emerged only over the past four centuries. In Command at Sea, Michael A. Palmer provides an effective overview of the evolving command process, examining major fleet actions over the past four hundred years to discern leadership traits that made the difference between success and failure. Using an impressive combination of printed primary and secondary sources, Palmer goes beyond simple collective biography or battle narratives to examine contemporary strategy, tactics, traditions, and communications technology, while incorporating historiographic insights and challenging accepted interpretations.

Palmer's analysis of naval warfare between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries identifies several themes, viewing commanders either as centralizers, who sought to bring order into battle's chaos while micromanaging their subordinates, or decentralizers, who favored working with their subordinates to outline objectives, while relying upon the initiative of individual commanders for execution. The theoretical battle between centralizers and decentralizers continues to the present day. Palmer's book begins with a vignette of Admiral Horatio Nelson's dramatic 1798 victory over the French at the Battle of the Nile, presenting Nelson, a decentralizer, as an ideal naval commander who achieved decisive victories of the sort that eluded so many of his predecessors and contemporaries.

Roughly two-thirds of the book concerns command and control during the age of sail, and especially the evolution of signal systems. Through the seventeenth century, with the Anglo-Dutch Wars and the later intermittent struggle between Britain and France, the standard battle formation was the line ahead. While making tactical sense by maximizing firepower, this formation proved a command and control nightmare. Although navies developed rudimentary signal flags, the commander's flagship, located in the center of the line, could not easily be viewed by the bulk of his forces, especially when battle lines stretched for several miles and the smoke and confusion of combat undermined control. Signals were missed, ignored, or misinterpreted, paralyzing a centralized command, making the pursuit and destruction of an enemy fleet nearly impossible. Many historians have linked the unyielding devotion to this strict tactical doctrine to the string of indecisive battles, but Palmer argues that additional factors also shaped victory or defeat. Decentralized commanders, though often more successful, risked foolhardy action by their overly aggressive or timid subordinates. In examining dozens of battles, a slowly evolving paradigm emerged as commanders studied success and failure and gradually developed more effective systems. Although prominent commanders played a central role, so did theorists such as French Jesuit Paul Hoste, whose 1697 treatise on naval warfare rationally examined the impact of the military revolution at sea.

The tremendous technological changes during the nineteenth century revolutionized naval warfare, but had little initial impact upon command and control. With few fleet actions, most command systems remained theoretical until tested under fire. By the 1890s, steam vessels armed with modern rapid-fire guns altered warfare by accelerating the speed at which forces closed and by extending decisive ranges from hundreds of yards to several miles. Upon sighting the enemy, time for deliberation shrank from hours in Nelson's time to minutes a century later. A growing global telegraph network allowed home governments more opportunity to manage far-flung forces and provide intelligence about enemy movements, as demonstrated during the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War. During that conflict both navies made use of primitive wireless sets, but Japanese Admiral Heihachiro Togo preferred traditional signal systems during battle. During the First World War, Germany equipped its submarines with excellent radio transmitters that allowed the sharing of intelligence, but the British intercepted, decoded, and jammed German messages and used information gained to attack or avoid enemy patrols, a feat repeated during the Second World War.

While Palmer does an excellent job analyzing naval command and control through the early twentieth century, he has difficulty...