Information at Sea: Shipboard Command and Control in the U.S. Navy, from Mobile Bay to Okinawa

Notes

Notes Introduction Epigraph. William F. Halsey Jr., foreword to Frederick C. Sherman, Combat Command: The American Aircraft Carriers in the Pacific War (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1950), 8. 1. Humankind’s use of technology to manage information is centuries old, of course, but only in the 1950s did the term “information technology” become part of the English lexicon. For the earliest-known definition of the term, see Harold J. Leavitt and Thomas L. Whisler, “Management in the 1980’s,” Harvard Business Review 36, no. 6 (November –December 1958): 41–48. 2. David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994). 3. See esp. Clifford L. Lord and Archibald Turnbull, History of United States Naval Aviation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949); Vincent Davis, The Admirals Lobby (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967); Waldo H. Heinrichs, “The Role of the United States Navy,” in Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations, 1931– 1941, ed. Dorothy Borg and Shumpei Okamoto (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 197–223; and Robert L. O’Connell, Sacred Vessels: The Cult of the Battleship and the Rise of the U.S. Navy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 4. O’Connell, Sacred Vessels, 4; Davis, Admirals Lobby, 75. 5. Thomas C. Hone, Norman Friedman, and Mark D. Mandeles, American and British Aircraft Carrier Development, 1919–1941 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1999); William M. McBride, Technological Change and the United States Navy, 1865–1945 (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Thomas C. Hone and Trent Hone, Battle Line: The United States Navy, 1919–1939 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2006); and Craig C. Felker, Testing American Sea Power: U.S. Navy Strategic Exercises, 1923–1940 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007). 6. Recent syntheses by distinguished naval historians Michael Palmer and Norman Friedman are notable exceptions to this rule. See Michael A. Palmer, Command at Sea: Naval Command and Control since the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), and Norman Friedman, Network-Centric Warfare: How Navies Learned to Fight Smarter through Three World Wars (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2009). 7. Although command and control entered the American military lexicon after World War II, I use it throughout the book for two reasons: contemporary understandings of 232 Notes to Pages 3–5 the phrase are consistent with command, the word early to mid-twentieth century naval officers would have used to describe what is now known as command and control; and the term is employed widely today and therefore sounds better to the modern reader. Specifically, command and control captures succinctly the following idea: the exercise of authority and direction through an arrangement of personnel, equipment, facilities, and procedures employed by a commander to plan, direct, coordinate, and control forces and operations. For a discussion of how and why command and control became a subset of command, see Thomas P. Coakley, Command and Control for War and Peace (Washington : National Defense University Press, 1992), 34–38. 8. This expression is from McBride, Technological Change, 7. Elsewhere, McBride argues that the battleship was an “obdurate exemplary artifact,” one that served as the “technological basis of the navy” from the early 1890s to the early 1940s. William M. McBride, “The Unstable Dynamics of a Strategic Technology: Disarmament, Unemployment , and the Interwar Battleship,” Technology and Culture 38, no. 2 (April 1997): 388. 9. I use the phrase “warfare at sea” in a broad sense, to include not only combat operations but also preparations for combat at sea. 10. David Kirsch and Paul Maglio, “On Distinguishing Epistemic from Pragmatic Action,” Cognitive Science 18, no. 4 (October–December 1994): 513–49; Andy Clark, “Embodied, Situated, and Distributed Cognition,” in A Companion to Cognitive Science, ed. William Bechtel and George Graham (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998), 506–17; and Richard Menary, “Dimensions of Mind,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9, no. 4 (December 2010): 561–78. 11. For a useful discussion about the social distribution of cognitive labor in a naval context, see Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). 12. Samuel Eliot Morison, New Guinea and the Marianas, March 1944–August 1944, vol. 8 of History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (New York: Little, Brown, 1953), 260. Even when historians acknowledge the importance of command and control systems, they usually make no effort to explain how these systems actually functioned. See, e.g., Nathan Miller, War at Sea: A Naval History of World War II (New York...