Fighting the Fleet: Operational Art and Modern Fleet Combat. Jeffrey R. Cares and Anthony Cowden. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2021.

In Fighting the Fleet, Jeffrey Cares and Anthony Cowden persuasively assert that current American joint operational doctrine fails to properly explain how a fleet works, leaving a dangerous gap in the practical knowledge of current military leaders.[1, 2] Fleets, they argue, have four functions—striking, screening, scouting, and basing—and proper naval operational art is the ability to defeat an opponent by appropriately combining all four. While Cares and Cowden make no bones about the fact that this work is a math-heavy textbook intended for current naval officers, the two retired captains nevertheless succeed in crafting an accessible entry into the world of modern naval command and planning in a text that is a spare 101 pages, plus technical appendices.

Fighting the Fleet is split into five main chapters. The first four chapters (“Naval Power,” “Search and Surveillance,” “Logistics and Maneuver,” and “Control”) each conclude with essential lessons for planners and flag officers. The fifth chapter (“Fighting Fleets in the Robotic Age”) relates how Cares and Cowden believe their ideas will remain relevant in the future. Each chapter builds upon the preceding text to advance the reader from a basic conception of sea power to an understanding as to why fleets have four separate functions that are critically interdependent such that they must be exercised in tandem to be effective.

In concisely distilling the nature of naval power, the authors rely on the writings of three naval thinkers whose ideas they argue have largely been forgotten despite their continued relevance: Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske’s The Navy as a Fighting Machine (1916), Rear Admiral J.C. Wylie’s Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control (1967), and Captain Wayne P. Hughes Jr.’s Fleet Tactics (1986). These works, Cares and Cowden argue, are particularly important today due to the popular preoccupation with, “function, organizational block diagrams, or lists of principles, not unlike cookbook authors more concerned with dictating proper kitchen procedure than with making the best meal.”[3]

Cares and Cowden argue that “making the best meal” as an admiral begins with an understanding of the naval (as opposed to commercial or maritime) aspect of sea power. This is, in its very nature, fundamentally different from land-based or air power, as fire and maneuver are inseparable concepts at sea. As technology has evolved in the last century, this uniqueness of naval power gave rise to Wayne Hughes’ concept of “salvo warfare,” which posits that modern naval combat consists of a series of interactions between pulses of offensive power and defensive power.[4] While there are important lessons that can be learned from this approach to understanding combat, Cares and Cowden make a point of explaining the limitations of mathematical prediction in this manner, as well as how the very concept of salvo warfare depends on the ability of fleets to find each other in the crowded yet vast oceans of the world. In reducing the oft-redefined concept of C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) to simply “search” and “surveillance” for naval purposes, Fighting the Fleet demonstrates through search theory that merely setting the right circumstances to find an enemy for an exchange of salvoes is a daunting problem even with modern systems.

Complicating finding and engaging enemy fleets is the fact that navies must carry their ordnance and fuel over great distances. They must also be able to replenish effectively before and after combat, a task that might have to be accomplished while remaining at sea. To break down this daunting problem, Cares and Cowden propose reconceptualizing maneuver in the three phases of Fiske’s day. In the authors’ reconception, properly integrating logistical considerations into our thinking on naval power means planning operations in terms of cruising, approach, and attack, corresponding to strategic, operational, and tactical levels and terms, respectively. In portraying how logistics must be handled at each stage of this process, Fighting the Fleet asserts that combat, maneuver, and logistics are inseparable concepts that must be planned in concert with one another.

With these concepts in mind, Cares and Cowden ultimately turn to four functions of fleets derived from J.C. Wylie: strike, scout, screen, and base. Building on their discussion of Hughes and Fiske, the authors argue that these three theories “are the fleet commander’s tools for controlling the pattern of tactical events in a naval campaign…fleet commanders can wield the four functions to achieve, sustain, and leverage control at sea for victory.”[5]

Interestingly, Fighting the Fleet only briefly addresses why the ideas of Fiske, Wylie, and Hughes have largely been forgotten:

Indeed, as it is presented today at the Naval War College, naval operational art is joint operational art, which is at its core Army operational art. It is as if Wylie and Fiske never existed. Today a “joint sailor” is not someone who thinks like a sailor at all but one who thinks almost entirely like a 1980s-vintage Army planner.

This is harsh criticism but not unwarranted. The services play their own unique roles within the context of a joint campaign. Universal, Army-derived joint language is twice insufficient: it is too generic for services’ use in planning their idiosyncratic missions, and it fails to give the joint planner a complete understanding of how the unique parts fit into a complex whole.[6]

While joint doctrine is problematic for the reasons laid out throughout the book, Cares and Cowden argue the Navy’s principal problem is that it has no way of expressing its own doctrine to itself before translating it into joint language. Rediscovering that vernacular is, ultimately, the mission of this work. This is an important argument which is only briefly outlined in the introduction. An earlier presentation of some of these details would have made the impact even more powerful.

With the common use of drone surveillance and attacks in Ukraine, it appears the world may very well be moving from what Fighting the Fleet calls the “Missile Age” to the “Robotics Age.” Rather than obviating the lessons the authors seek to teach, Cares and Cowden instead assert that in all likelihood the previously discussed concepts will continue to be important:

[B]uoyancy, power, search, surveillance, movement, logistics, and control will all continue to operate in their same, uniquely naval ways in the robotic future. The fundamental difference—a difference of degree, not of character—will be the extent to which future naval forces become even more controllable, versatile, adaptive, and survivable as these new technologies are perfected and embraced. This is simply a step further along a continuum in the evolution of naval combat theory.”[7]

The difference of degree that Cares and Cowden describe is portrayed in their fifth chapter as enabling distributed combat as the successor concept to salvo warfare. While this is a term familiar to many in the warfare community, Fighting the Fleet specifically portrays distributed combat as the decentralization of command and offensive power enabled by robotics. With the ability of an overall commander to both rapidly consolidate and disperse their forces, the enemy can be continuously kept off-balance by obfuscating one’s intentions until the very moment a first salvo is loosed. The combat scenario then proposed which utilizes these ideas is a uniquely enlightening exercise the likes of which has been lacking in virtually all past descriptions of distributed combat.

Fighting the Fleet bucks the expectation that many might have for a self-declared textbook involving the use of statistical analysis and theoretical probability, even for the uninitiated. Indeed, the book offers more than just a valuable primer for staff officers and fleet commanders. The clear, concise, and lucid flow of the authors’ ideas make Fighting the Fleet an ideal way for any historian with an interest in understanding the basic problems faced in modern naval command.

Tyler A. Pitrof is a historian with the Naval History and Heritage Command working in support of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. Holder of a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, Tyler’s research focuses on the relationship between U.S. Navy command culture and technological change in the twentieth century interwar period. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect the official position of the Department of the Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

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Header Image: U.S. Navy ships conduct a refueling-at-sea, Atlantic Ocean, 2019 (Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Jarrod A. Schad).

Notes:

[1] Jeffrey R. Cares is currently the CEO of Alidade Incorporated, a consulting firm for the U.S defense industry. A retired Navy captain, he frequently lectures at U.S. service colleges on the future of combat.

[2] Anthony Cowden is a retired Navy captain who spent time in the Naval Reserve as well as the active force. A surface warfare officer, he has both worked in the defense industry and served as a member of the faculty at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.

[3] Jeffrey R. Cares and Anthony Cowden, Fighting the Fleet: Operational Art and Modern Fleet Combat (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2021), 5.

[4] Cares and Cowden, Fighting the Fleet, 15-19.

[5] Cares and Cowden, Fighting the Fleet, 60.

[6] Cares and Cowden, Fighting the Fleet, 69.

[7] Cares and Cowden, Fighting the Fleet, 82.