The following is part of Dead Ends Week at CIMSEC, where we pick apart past experiments and initiatives in the hopes of learning something from those that just didn’t quite pan out. See the rest of the posts here.
These days, the Spanish-American War is mostly remembered for Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, “Remember the Maine!” and America’s emergence upon the world stage. Within the maritime domain, we also remember it as a showcase for the United States’ new steel navy and the technical innovations which laid the groundwork for the Great White Fleet and beyond. All the basics were there – steam power, electricity, large-caliber guns, and armor plating.
But they also had some things that didn’t quite make it.
Among them was the USS Vesuvius. Vesuvius was commissioned in 1890 as a unique animal in the navies of the world – a dynamite gun cruiser. The 900-ton ship’s main battery was composed of three guns that fired dynamite-filled rounds using compressed air. The rationale for the pneumatic system was a reduced chance of prematurely detonating the ordnance from the shock of firing. Depending on the weight of ordnance launched, Vesuvius’s range was anywhere from 2000 to 4000 yards. A major drawback was that the guns were fixed, so aiming required maneuvering the entire ship.
Dynamite gun muzzles aboard Vesuvius
Despite the weapons’ short range and difficulty with targeting, Vesuvius still saw remarkable success during the war in Cuba. Although primarily used as a dispatch vessel, owing to her small size and high speed (21 knots!), Vesuvius still participated in eight shore bombardments of Santiago. It would quietly sneak near shore under cover of darkness and, with no more noise than a sound “like a cough,” would launch several dynamite rounds into the city. Because of the silence of the guns, there was no warning before the explosions came. It is doubtful the bombardments had much practical effect on Spain’s technical ability to fight, but it had a devastating psychological effect on Spanish troops in the city –troops who went on to lose the war at the Battle of Santiago.
The dynamite gun didn’t last past the war in the U.S. Navy, though. USS Vesuvius was removed from service in September 1898 and repurposed as a torpedo-testing vessel. Torpedo tubes replaced the pneumatic tubes, and the ship enjoyed a happy life plying the waters off of Newport, Rhode Island, into the 1920s.
The three dynamite guns below deck on Vesuvius
And with that, the dynamite gun’s brief chapter in naval history was closed. But, whether intentional or not, it still managed to demonstrate two principles that would only grow in importance as time passed.
At a technical level, the same basic pneumatic technology that launched rounds packed with dynamite is also what launches torpedoes today, from both surface ships and submarines – just one of a myriad of systems to which compressed air is critical.
Vesuvius underway in 1891
At a strategic level, the dynamite gun’s employment in the Spanish-American War anticipated, at a very small scale, the use of terror weapons such as the Paris Gun, area bombing, V-1 and V-2 in later decades. Vesuvius clearly had no ability to hit a specific target, but its ability to impact a general area was unrivaled due to its “stealth” qualities. Whether any Spanish troops were actually killed by Vesuvius is tough to say – but without a doubt, the city of Santiago feared the night.
Matt McLaughlin is a Navy Reserve lieutenant who has fired air guns before, but none quite this big. His opinions do not represent the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense or his employer.
Welcome to Dead Ends Week at CIMSEC, where we will pick apart past experiments and initiatives that just didn’t quite pan out. Some of them you may have heard of – others will be quite obscure. All will be informative, and hopefully a little entertaining.
A couple of ideas inspired Dead Ends Week and inform all the pieces to a certain extent. First, success is an iterative process. A lot of different things will get tried along the way to a winning solution, and many of them just won’t work out – but even those dead ends offer lessons in how to succeed later. Where appropriate, these posts will attempt to capture at least some of the lessons learned.
And second, to invert a famous quote, failure was an option in most of the examples examined here. Obviously no one likes to fail – however, failure in any one of these small initiatives would not have doomed an entire country or military strategy (with a possible exception in czarist Russia, as you’ll see later this week). The point being, if a prerequisite to success is some educational failure, then failure needs to be affordable. And if it’s affordable, then chances are you have the resources to hedge your bets and have a parallel project with a different approach to the same problem.
The paradoxical upshot: if failure is truly not an option at the macro level, be prepared to accept some failure at the micro level.
Over the coming week, you will see genius, idiocy, gallantry, cowardice, sailing ships, steam ships, circles, sonar domes, gun decks, poop decks, trapeze acts and Nigel Tufnel.
And if that doesn’t sound like a parade of spectacular failure… well, I guess my writing ability has hit a dead end.
Matt McLaughlin is a Navy Reserve lieutenant and strategic communications consultant who grew up on a cul-de-sac, which isn’t quite a dead end but is pretty close. His opinions do not represent the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense or his employer.
A. Denis Clift, former Naval Officer, president emeritus of the National Intelligence University, and Vice President for Operations of USNI, joins us to talk about his reflections on his time in the Antarctic, Cold War intelligence, life, and the United States Naval Institute. This is the first of a bi-monthly series that will be investigating his career during the Cold War.
We are available on Itunes, Stitcher Stream Radio, etc… Remeber to subscribe, leave a comment and a 5-star rating.
One does not need to look to far into the history of maritime operations to discern a pattern of importance: you are always attempting to locate and fix your adversary in order to destroy them, while simultaneously, your adversary is attempting the same. The sea provides a certain ubiquity that cannot be reduced in any aim of contestation by the other domains or more directly via control. Yet, when one considers the problems of a domain, there is interplay of practical constraints, which are: tactics, technology, organization, and doctrine. Here, I would briefly like to focus the reader’s attention on the latter item—doctrine—although there will be references to the other aspects throughout. Specifically, I would like to highlight the importance of the 1943 Pacific Fleet Tactical Orders and Doctrine, also known as PAC-10, and its possible relevance to the Air -Sea Battle Concept (ASBC).
The proper usage of naval aviation, and especially its carriers, has been debated since the days of Eugene Ely’s first flights launching and recovering on rudimentary aircraft carriers in 1910-11. During the interwar years between the World Wars there was vast variance in doctrine recursively revised as result of technological improvements, experimentation, and exercises. Doctrinal development and revision did not stop there, even as World War II unfolded in the Pacific, but in 1943, PAC-10 provided both timely clarity and flexibility to commanders in that theater.
Vice Admiral Richard “Terrible” Turner (Wikimedia Commons)
Prior to World War II, specifically in 1937, U.S. Navy Captain Richard K. Turner presented a lecture at the Naval War College titled “The Strategic Employment of the Fleet,” and produced an associated pamphlet entitled “The Employment of Aviation in Naval Warfare.” While his lecture maintained a decisively Mahanian tenor, Turner’s pamphlet stated that “nothing behind the enemy front is entirely secure from observation and attack,” which provides rhyme to today’s “attack in-depth” in the ASBC.
According to Thomas Hone, before and during 1942, aircraft carrier doctrine focused upon three things: raids, ambushes, and covering invasion forces. Where raids attempted to fix Japanese forces in particular areas, ambushes would seek to attrit Japanese ability to control the seas, and invasion forces sought to add cumulative strategic effect by maneuvering amphibious forces to occupy specific islands for follow-on usage against Japan by joint forces.
A Japanese “Val” Dive-Bomber is shot down over the USS Enterprise on October 26, 1942 during the Battle of Santa Cruz (Wikimedia Commons)
The major shortfall of the doctrinal precursors to PAC-10 was that, while useful for thinking (and spurring debate) about the control of the maritime domain and maximizing the contest of the air and land domains, they fell short of effectively suggesting to commanders how to best employ aircraft and carriers operationally in task forces. This shortfall came into clear focus during the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. Enter the innovation of PAC-10.
PAC-10 was a dramatic innovation. It combined existing tactical publications, tactical bulletins, task force instructions, and battle organization doctrine into one doctrinal publication that applied to the whole fleet. Its goal was to make it “possible for forces composed of diverse types, and indoctrinated under different task force commanders, to join at sea on short notice for concerted action against the enemy without interchanging a mass of special instructions.” PAC-10’s instructions covered one-carrier and multicarrier task forces, and escort- or light-carrier support operations of amphibious assaults. It established the basic framework for the four-carrier task forces—with two Essex-class ships and two of the Independence class—that would form the primary mobile striking arm of the Pacific Fleet. However, it did this within the structure of a combined naval force, a force composed of surface ships— including battleships and carriers….
PAC-10 solved two problems. First, “the creation of a single, common doctrine allowed ships to be interchanged between task groups.” Second, “shifting the development of small-unit tactical doctrine to the fleet level and out of the hands of individual commanders increased the effectiveness of all units, particularly the fast-moving carrier task forces.”
PAC-10 was truly a watershed moment in operationally considering complement of sea and air capabilities en masse for strategic effect. It moved beyond the oversimplified “duty carrier” (self defense combat air patrol and/or antisubmarine warfare) and “strike carrier” (maritime strike and/or support to land forces ashore) concepts. “Whether a task force containing two or more carriers should separate into distinct groups . . . or remain tactically concentrated . . . may be largely dependent on circumstances peculiar to the immediate situation,” the doctrine stated, where “[no] single rule can be formulated to fit all contingencies.” Unsurprisingly, context was key in the application of PAC-10. Ultimately, PAC-10 focused commanders upon unified effort by maximizing strike, whether that is raids, ambushes, or amphibious attack, while also mitigating the risk of destruction via advanced detection.
Account of the valiant engagements off of Sumar during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. (Wikimedia Commons)
There are several similarities and differences that need to be drawn from PAC-10 to now for consideration with the ASBC. First, and most importantly, the doctrinal concept did not and could not divine strategic victory. It was neither easy to accomplish, nor did it ignore the necessary requirement for termination to be chosen by the adversary, and furthermore, many heroically died in its use. However, and this is a fundamental truth that cynical detractors of the ASBC chose to ignore, many more would have died had PAC-10 not been developed. Rather, and it was apparent to them at the time, PAC-10 provided commanders an improved tool for use towards strategic effect. So say we all with concern to the ASBC.
U.S. Army Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) Launch (SMDC Photo)
Tactical proficiency and operational effectiveness, are best measured in peacetime from the potential ideal, with the acknowledgment that fog and friction will chew away at that ideal in exercise and practice; whereas, strategic effect is best measured relative to a status quo and desire for continued advantage. The ASBC is focused clearly upon the former, and will only contribute limited strategic effect towards the latter. Clear-eyed strategists must admit that limited effect may be sufficient, but then again it may not as determined by context. However, neither is cause for rejection of an operational concept like the ASBC as a useful tool.
U.S. Marine Corps Amphibious Assault Force (Wikimedia Commons)
Third, the tactical combination of air and sea forces in PAC-10 combined with amphibious land attack, contributed to numerous successes in the Pacific. Similarly, a balanced ASBC, that includes a naval economy of force (relative to World War II), along with concomitant of air and land component forces, will create a complicated problem for mounting a successful defense at any one place; just like the PAC-10 doctrine similarly achieved at the Marcus, Gilbert, and Marshall Islands and elsewhere in World War II. In recent, yet more modern times, fleet defense may have been sufficient with only carrier-based aircraft. But at present, both the smaller number of available carriers, an inability to replenish weaponry while underway in the current submarine and destroyer forces, not to mention the basic prudence of joint capability, means that combined arms by way of only one service is no longer a prerogative that the United States can afford to ignore. Similar to the PAC-10 doctrine of yore, the modern ASBC doctrine of the near-future must be able to more effectively balance all joint forces. Needless to say, even if service prerogative still dominates, using carrier aviation alone will diminish strike potential in fleet defense. Dissimilar to the PAC-10 doctrine of yore, the modern ASBC doctrine of the near future must effectively raise its doctrine above that of the fleet and into the joint realm. This means finding effective ways to use Air Force assets and Army assets in roles of fleet defense and sea control just like disparate forces from various carriers in PAC-10 effectively formed a coherent and formidable task force.
As a guide for the ASBC, the interoperability between air forces (of all types) and land forces (of both traditional and amphibious focus) have benefited from the development of joint doctrine from the combined capabilities and tactics of the Air Land Battle Concept (ALBC). Despite some cynical “easy war” views of ASBC, the ALBC provides a useful scorecard for joint action. The latter has proven unquestionably effective in both mission success and preserving lives in battle from Operation DESERT STORM to the current fight in Operation ENDURING FREEDOM; but its equal in terms of joint combined effect does not yet exist to the same fidelity in the maritime and littoral environments. Our ability to project power, achieve strategic effect by joint combined arms, and experiment with doctrine costs relatively little compared to operational failure. Instead of playing politics — actual joint thinking costs nothing. After all, history and pragmatic thinking proves the obvious, you can’t finish without access.
Major Rich Ganske is a U.S. Air Force officer, B-2 pilot, and weapons officer. He is currently assigned to the U.S. Army Command and General Staff Officers Course at Fort Leavenworth. These comments do not reflect the views of the U.S. Air Force or the Department of Defense. You can follow him on Twitter at @richganske and he blogs via Medium at The Bridge and Whispers to a Wall. Tip of the hat to “Sugar” for the reference to an old idea (or book).
