Sea Control - Sea Control 209 - Learning War with Trent Hone & Sebastian Goldstein

Episode Date: November 1, 2020

Links:1. Learning War: The Evolution of Fighting Doctrine in the U.S. Navy, 1898-1945, Trent Hone, Naval Institute Press, June 15, 2018.2. "Learning War and the Evolution of U.S. Navy Fighting Doctrine with Author Trent Hone," Chris Nelson, CIMSEC, July 23, 2018. 

Hey folks, Jared here. Thanks for tuning back into Sea Control. This week we have author Trent Hohn on board to discuss his book Learning War with me and the German Navy's own Sebastian Goldstein. A lot of different topics and angles here and I encourage you to purchase the book if you can. It's phenomenal. I promise an announcement coming soon and I'm going to go ahead and drop it right now that we'll be transitioning to a podcast team here. I will still do the occasional episode but your regular hosts are going to be a mix of four podcasters with varied backgrounds but notably from all three naval services. Some more to follow on that, but our first new host is set to make her debut next week,

and that's going to be Andrea Howard interviewing Dr. Stephen Goff on his article, The U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Space Force, an Essential Partnership in Maritime Security, and that appeared on the USNI blog. I want to highlight another CIMSEC collaboration with our friends and colleagues at the Yokosuka Council on Asia-Pacific Studies. CIMSEC will be co-sponsoring, together with YCAPS, the November 2nd edition of the Indo-Pacific Maritime Hour. The topic is Smaller Power, Strategic Signaling, and Multilateral Naval Exercises, featuring Dr. Ali Swarza.

I'll apologize now if I'm mispronouncing the name, but you can find more information on the YCAPS website, ycaps.org. And as always, I want to advertise and strongly recommend our friends in the SimSec Podcast Network and our second podcast, Feed the Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Drack, Jamie, and a pile of empty iron brew bottles on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and wherever else you download your podcast. It's a more low-key, slightly less serious approach to current events in the maritime domain and naval history. Check them out wherever you download. They're back in the Falklands for their most recent episode. With that, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control.

Today we are hosting another book club, and today's book is Learning War with the author Trent Hone and Commander Sebastian Goldstein of the German Navy. Gentlemen, thank you both for joining us. Thank you for having me. Same here. Thank you. So, Trent, I'd like to start with you. Would you mind providing the audience with a bit of your background, please? Absolutely. Learning War is the product of two major threads in my background, and it was really nice to be able to have an opportunity to bring them together. I've been interested in the history of the Navy, particularly the frame of tactics and doctrine for a very long time. I remember being inspired by Wayne Hughes's first book on fleet tactics in the 1980s.

I read that, I guess, as a kid and really liked it, was really inspired by it. And so in the late 90s, started digging into the history of U.S. Navy's tactics and doctrinal development, really in a semi-professional way as a historian. And as that journey continued, I realized that there were trends in how the Navy was approaching organizational learning in that period, in the first half of the 20th century, that resonated with things that we're trying to do today. And I made my career in technology, started out as a software engineer, and then was advising organizations how to get better at the practices surrounding that, particularly how to organize better for doing software engineering. And a lot of the things that we try to encourage organizations to do today to innovate faster, to learn better, and to embrace new technologies effectively are similar to what the Navy was doing. And I thought this was a really important story to tell. I tried to weave these two together in learning war, and it was a real pleasure to do that, and then to see how some people have responded so positively to the book.

I've been very grateful for that. Yeah, it's been tremendous, and I think you will actually see from some of the writing from our flag officers that they've really taken the book on board. I'm watching, I think, the Navy try to incorporate some of the lessons from learning war right now. If you'll permit me a follow-up, how did you come to read Wayne Hughes as a child? one of the things that my father and i used to used to do together you and other people listeners probably have noticed that there's two of us in homes who do this naval history thing and the other one is thomas and my father and we would play naval war games when i was young

and so i was looking for ways that i could gain advantages when we were having those contests Well, I'm insanely jealous of you now having that background. Sebastian, before I let you introduce yourself, I'll explain a little bit for our listeners of why you're on the program today. You and I were at the Führungsakademie, or the German Armed Forces Staff College, in Hamburg, Germany, together. You were a student in the 58th convening of the General Admiral Staff Officers Course, and you took my seminar, Solomus.

As part of that seminar, you gave one of my favorite presentations on Guadalcanal. Hence, I wanted to bring you on today to discuss learning more. much of which centers around Guadalcanal. Could you give the listeners a little bit more of your professional and personal background? Yeah, sure. Let me start off by saying again, thank you. And I'm pretty happy again that I put some effort into that presentation on Guadalcanal because it gave me the opportunity to be here tonight. I'm looking at 18 years of service in the German Navy. I have rotary wing background i fly the ceilings and spend quite some time in nordholz where we're based got the chance to visit the 58th agrn as you pointed out and after that i returned to my

squadron as co currently i'm a father of four kids that i have with frauk and my wife and actually really paid attention to the part of trend playing with his father naval strategy games i think i'm going to pick up on that. And most recently, I embarked on FGS Lübeck, protecting the French CVN Charles de Gaulle, during which I had the chance to read about war. And I have to say that it was quite an experience and was really entertaining and brought a lot of my thinking quite forward. So thank you for that. Well, thank you both again for appearing here. Trent, as I read your bio at the back of the book, I was surprised to see that you'd begun your academic career studying religion. How has that served you as you study the Navy, and what sort

of parallels have you seen, if any? I really appreciate that question. Yes, I was very interested in philosophy and discovered that the best way to gain exposure to Eastern philosophies, which were more interesting and intellectually stimulating to me, was to study religions of that part of the world and so i adopted a particular focus on on buddhism and hinduism religions of the indian subcontinent and i think they've been very useful both in my work and in my study of history because they embrace a very non-linear frame they talk about a lot about the interdependency of things there's a term called dependent co-arising basically what that means is you know you can't have a concept of darkness without a concept of light, and the two emerge together.

That interdependence has given me new ways to, I think, approach problems, talk about them, and try to understand them, particularly when we talk about complexity and complex adaptive systems, which are a frame that I used in the book. Thanks. So the foreword of Learning War goes right in on the traditional narrative of the U.S. Navy's evolution in World War II. So could you explain to us a little bit, what is that traditional narrative? How did it come to be? And what's led you to believe that narrative is incorrect and what you think it should be? Absolutely. I've been calling this, when I talk about it, sort of the Midway narrative, because it emphasizes the idea that, well, battleships were starting to come out of style and no longer being the dominant platform for naval combat. But the United States Navy hadn't recognized this yet. It takes the strike on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese Navy for the Navy to recognize it. They quickly pivot, start using their carrier forces effectively, win the victory at Midway, carrier battle, and that's it. And the tide turns and off we go. Now, I know it's not that simple. And even in the traditional narrative, it's not quite that simple. But that's the basic framing that has come down to us. And one of the reasons I think it's come that way is because so many of those very talented and capable officers who emerged from the Second World War were associated with the carriers.

And they had a rich history that had been written in the decades following by people like Clark Reynolds and others that emphasized the importance of carrier air power to the victory. And absolutely, they were important. But one of the things that I've noticed when looking at the history before the war, carries were extremely important already. They were recognized as such. The Navy was working through how best to develop a combined arms approach, borrowing a term from land warfare, that would allow it to use all the factors of strength that were available. And I think that holistic view is much more accurate in terms of how the Navy approached the war and how it planned for it coming. And I think that's supported by – there's been an article that came out recently in the Journal of Military History by James R. Fitzsimmons, and it's a little sensationalist, but basically he says aircraft carriers versus battleships in war and myth is his title, and he goes right at the narrative as well. I think my approach is a little bit more nuanced, but it's nice to see that other people are picking up kind of the same standard and arguing that we should have a more nuanced view of not just the war, but the interwar period leading up to it. Well, thank you for calling out the Fitzsimmons article, because one of the things I started doing, and you probably couldn't see it, but I'm frantically scrolling through my phone because I remember that article. And as you started answering the question, it reminded me of the article I was going to ask you what you thought of it. So thank you for providing some background on that. And we'll link it in the show notes for the listeners. How would you define a complex adaptive system? You mentioned that a couple times. And then why did you choose to frame the Navy that way for the purposes of the book?

I'll answer the second half of that first. I chose that frame because I thought it was the best way to understand and conceptualize what the Navy was doing and how it was approaching things. I think it's probably the most accurate model that we have for understanding human systems and how change happens in human systems. It gives us a new paradigm for understanding that. And the characteristics of complex adaptive systems are one of the reasons why. There is a more traditional view that organizations or processes are fairly linear. Their behavior can be predicted, broken down into component parts, and put back together. And if you've tried any substantial change in an organization, you've learned pretty quickly, I think, that it doesn't quite work that way.

It's a lot messier. There's a lot more interdependence. And it's a lot more difficult to get something to go from A to B, whether that's making a process faster or more efficient or reducing the number of people who have to be involved in it. And complexity gives us an opening to understand that a little bit better, because a complex adaptive system is irreducible. It can't be broken into component pieces. If you do that, if you segment it, then you lose some nuance, some understanding, and some fidelity. Complex adaptive systems are also path-dependent. I heard the example before that it's like pouring cream or milk in your coffee.

Once you take that step, it's in there. You're not getting it back out. So the steps that you take, the history that a complex system has been through, are part of its future, the influence of the future. And there are tipping points that will occur in complex systems because of the way feedback occurs and because of the behavior that people engage in. You will occasionally get to a point where you've crossed into a new paradigm or a new way of operating. Like, for example, the introduction of effective aircraft carriers. Path dependence, you can't go backward. And now, well, we have a new paradigm, we have a new frame, we have to get accustomed to that. That's something else that complexity has with it. Thanks. So Fisk's N-square law featured prominently in the beginning of the book. Can you explain what that was and its influence on naval thinking?

Sure. Yeah, Fisk is interesting because I really liked using his work, the Navy, as a fighting machine. He was agitating very much for an improved approach in the early years of the 20th century. He wanted to shake up the Navy Department, make it more effective, and to some degree bristle the amount of civilian control. But his book, The Navy as a Fighting Machine, is interesting because he uses a mechanistic frame, at least for the title, and tries to use the engineering terms that are prevalent at the time and rigorous analysis to try to understand what the Navy can and cannot do. But in some of his passages, he talks about the Navy as an organism with the Admiral at the head of it as its brain, or at least him and his staff. And I think that that speaks to the challenges of a mechanistic frame, and I think Fisk would have acknowledged that. But to the Ant Square Law, what he was trying to do is conceptualize how the fighting strength of different forces are going to vary. and using the normal tangible asset of fleets at a time, let's say a battleship,

he would argue that the fighting strength of fleets is relative to each other as to the square of their size or the number of battleships that they have. So if you have a squadron that has nine battleships in it, then your strength would be the 81. And if I have a squadron with 12, then, well, my relative strength is 144. And what this does, it's a very useful conceptual frame, and it can be proved if you have simplistic war games. You can illustrate this. And Fisk does that in his book.

He has charts and tables that illustrate how this theory would work out. What it pushes you towards is the value of concentrating your forces. right so you want to make sure that if you if you have a battle line of 12 ships or nine or whatever it is you bring them into action as a cohesive unit so they're a single group they can't get overwhelmed by being dispersed and sort of sunk in turn you've got to remain concentrated remain focused and bring all that fighting strength to bear right away otherwise if you get groups of fewer ships isolated, the enemy might sink one small group, then sink another small group, and then finally turn to the third and manage to destroy it as well, even

if you start out with a larger force at the beginning. And so this mindset, this importance of concentration, based in the N2 law, influenced wargaming and thinking at the Naval War College from the early part of the 20th century up and through World War II, and that it was also reflected in the rules that the Navy developed for fleet problems. So the N-square law has a great deal of influence. I would say, as you described it just now and as I read about it, FISC really reminded me a lot of the back half of Wayne Hughes' work, which the back half, for those who aren't familiar, is really he starts to go into the equations and doing analysis of salvos. Does that line up to your

way of thinking as well it does it does it's the same sort of thing Hughes is applying the same kind of frame to missile salvos and other things he's trying to understand how does you know how is naval combat going to work in a in a way that is detailed enough to give us valuable insights but not so complex that we can't easily talk about it and get our minds around it and that's much like what Fisk was trying to do. The difference, of course, with Hughes is he comes from a frame where it's so much more important to attack effectively first. This is something that was missing from Fisk's thinking,

at least in how the N-square law was structured, right? It assumes a gradual reduction of strength. You're going to wear the enemy down with salvos. And I think they were just looking for something that would work And B, as I said a few moments ago, easy to get your head around, because they recognized that battle likely would not work out that way. There were going to be unanticipated effects. Certain hits were going to be much more damaging than others. Later on, this is after Pisk was writing, but later on, you can witness the Battle of Jutland and what happens to British battle cruisers. some of them disappear very quickly. So real battle, it's going to be much more important

to gain an initial advantage. And Hughes's equations reflect that along with his concept of attacking effectively first. Thanks. And shifting gears a little bit, what's the estimate of the situation and how has that shaped the Navy's approach? Another excellent question. The estimate of the situation is a, I like to think of it as a shared or a structured problem-solving approach. So this was something that was taught at the Naval War College. It was a way to get officers acquainted with coming to a problem, and they often called these problems.

But really, it's a situation. You have a certain number of forces with certain attributes. The enemy is likely, in your estimation, to have other forces with other capabilities, and you have a mission, that's the problem that you want to try to solve, right? Maybe it's occupy an island with an amphibious assault. Maybe it's ensure a reinforcement convoy that makes it to its destination. Maybe it's an offensive sweep through enemy-held waters. And you want to figure out what options do I have to accomplish this mission?

What threats can the enemy make to prevent me from accomplishing this mission? and which of those are most threatening or most likely. And then how do I go through these various alternatives in a structured way so that I can arrive at a decision about the action I'm going to take and then frame orders for subordinates? And I think that latter piece is extremely important because one of the things that Navy was trying to emphasize throughout this time period was make sure that you tell your subordinates

the outcomes you want them to achieve, the what, but not the how. And that's a piece of this structured problem solving, the estimate of the situation. It embraced, you know, this is how I look at it, but I think it's very clear if you look at the historical record, the term that we would use today to think about that is mission command, right? It's tell your subordinates what you want them to accomplish. Don't somehow allow them to go through their own estimate of the situation. So it's fractal. It's the same process at multiple levels throughout the Navy's organization to try to figure out how to develop plans and orders to accomplish objectives. Thanks. So then how would you define doctrine? I think doctrine is a little tricky. I really like the way the Navy seemed to approach it in this time period.

And it comes out of the work at the Naval War College that Dudley Knox was doing before the American entry into World War I. He was looking for a way to solve what was becoming a difficult problem because fleets were getting larger, ships were more capable, radio was an emerging technology, but not as advanced and reliable as people might have liked. And so it was important to figure out, well, how do we act cohesively in an environment like this where you might be out of visibility? You may, someone might jam your radio systems, the signal flags might not be visible. How do you make sure that you can have a cohesive approach to battle? And what Knox thought was, well, we need to develop this common viewpoint, not a rigid, structured viewpoint. And this is where I think doctrine is a little bit different than it may be now. Knox wasn't thinking of a doctrinal manual that's 100 pages long that specifies how to behave. He was thinking of a more contextually sensitive approach where different officers would come together on a regular basis, think about how they would behave in certain situations, and then be able to do that through repeated training and practice.

So it's a shared frame for how to approach tactical action. And in the book and since I've kind of likened it to a sports game, I know this is kind of an accessible analogy because even though most of us are not professional in terms of our approach to sport, we have played on teams where you develop a sense of how your fellow players are going to behave. Certain circumstances, they're going to do certain things, like maybe you play basketball and you get accustomed to a certain tall member of your team cutting to the basket in certain circumstances. And once you develop a familiarity with that, you can anticipate where they're going to be and get them the ball at the right time. It's very similar to that. So through practice, repetition, and trust that develops, you can use these patterns of behavior, this doctrine, to have greater cohesion in combat without the need to share a lot of information or signals. That's what Knox was after. And when he and William Sims came to the Atlantic Fleet's torpedo flotilla after their time at the Northern Naval War College, they tried this out. And they experimented with it and it was very successful.

Thanks. Sebastian, I didn't prep you for this question, so if you want to wave off on an answer, that's fine. But I'm going to ask anyway. Is the German view of doctrine any different? Trent, back to you. What was tactical plotting? How did it develop and what did the Navy learn about it in World War I? Tactical plotting is really keeping track of the situation.

And you can imagine how in an environment where you can't reliably send signals and it's relatively difficult to navigate pre-GPS world, it's not the most reliable mechanism. But the goal is to try to develop a shared view, if you're commanding a fleet or some subdivision of it, of what's going on around you, right? You want to have a sense so that you're not just relying on your eyes or the eyes of lookouts on your ship. You're beginning to understand the action as it develops. And according to Norman Friedman, the British were more advanced with this, the Royal Navy were more advanced with this in World War I being, and the United States Navy was. The United States Navy had done some of it, but wasn't really familiar with all the challenges and all the techniques necessary to keep a substantial plot in a modern fleet action or its equivalent up to date, and then how to make sense of it. And Friedman argues that this is something that helped the Royal Navy, particularly Admiral Jellicoe at Jutland, make sense of what was happening, even though there were some flaws with the plot that he developed, and outmaneuver the German high seas fleet. And so the United States Navy emerges out of World War I with the recognition that this is a really powerful capability, and they need to get better at it.

They need to develop more skill with it, and that's something that they did through the interwar period. Thanks. So as I was prepping for this podcast, I consulted one of my friends. He has an operations analysis background as well as a history background, and he asked me specifically to commend you on your work on interwar surface ship tactics in Battle Line and other papers. He also argued that the Navy officer culture and thought structure was the most important interwar development. Would you agree with his assessment there, and then why or why not? I think I would.

And let me just say, you know, pass on my gratitude, my thanks to your friend, because it's very nice to hear that. Yes, I think the officer development and the culture that the Navy's officer corps developed in the interwar period is extremely important. And I spent some time talking about it in the book. I think the attitude of David Zellers, who was one of the commanders-in-chief, after Fleet Corporal Number 15, he talked about this specifically in his debrief. And he said that the officer corps was the greatest naval asset that the Navy had at that day, at that time. And I think that is one of the reasons why you could argue it was the most important interwar development. because the Navy thought it was one of the most important things that they were doing. It was one of the most important weapons that they could develop and own, and they tried to do so.

Some of the things that we've talked about, exercises, flea problems, the estimate of the situation, these were all things to try to refine the skill and experience of the officer corps, get them better at what they were doing. Sellers was really interested in ensuring that there could be a sort of running development of estimate as the battle was going on, right? So don't apply any root solutions, keep track of what's happening, and then devise the best approach that you can based on your training experience and the information available to you. And I think it worked pretty well. Yeah. So as we get to World War II and the Navy specifically approached Guadalcanal, how would you describe the state of its doctrine and the preparations for combat? this could take its own podcast uh but i'm glad you're asking the question the i i i would say

that there is a real solid foundation and that foundation is in the training of the officers this mindset this culture of thoughts excuse me thought structure that has developed But there are some significant flaws to it. And I think these flaws, they have some resonance with, you know, earlier we were talking about sort of the established narrative about battleships being no longer the primary piece of naval combat. And I think that's similar, but not exactly it. The challenge was that the Navy was very focused on the idea of a decisive battle, because if you lose a decisive battle, you could lose the war. So you had to be prepared for a decisive battle. But that influences tactical development, and it diminishes somewhat the emphasis on smaller, more emergent actions. So there was a lot of trading for destroyers, for example, and cruisers in terms of the role that they would play in a major fleet action or in a night battle leading up to one and less about, all right, if we're just a detachment of destroyers and cruisers, a small task force sent on a mission in the littorals like Guadalcanal, how are we going to fight? And that was pushed down to relatively low-level commanders, those squadron and division commanders, to prepare tactics and doctrine for those kinds of engagements. And that worked well enough when the fleet's structure was in place, when those divisions and squadrons could practice and work together.

But Guadalcanal comes in August 1942, and by that point, the United States is involved in a two-ocean war. It's trying to maintain supply lines in the Atlantic, and it is desperately trying to prevent further Japanese advance in the Pacific, and those structures have had to break down to allow ships to be where they are most needed. And so the Navy goes into the fighting at Guadalcanal with one of its fundamental assumptions about how tactics and doctrine will be developed for combat undermined, invalidated. And I think that's one of the keys to understanding why that campaign at Guadalcanal progressed the way it did. Yeah, we talk a lot about the battle for Guadalcanal, but it's really a months-long campaign with several distinct large-scale sea battles to include multiple carrier battles. The U.S. really struggled, even as the Navy writ large incorporated a lot of the improvements that you mentioned to cope with the Japanese. What made Guadalcanal so difficult, and why did the Navy struggle to improve its local situation, even as it's making this massive strategic progress in the way it's preparing its ships? I think one of the things that's really important to understand with Guadalcanal is the strategic background to it.

And so there is the victory, and this creates an opportunity. The center of the Japanese carrier force has been lost and destroyed. They still have two very capable carriers in their air wings. But Admiral King, as Commander-in-Chief and also Chief of Naval Operations, sees that now there is an opportunity. He wants to make sure that the supply lines from the American West Coast to New Zealand and Australia can be maintained and aren't threatened. and wants to take the offensive. And so he directs Nimitz, Admiral Nimitz, the commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet, to initiate an invasion of the anchorage at Tulagi, which is across the town from Guala Canal,

and also to seize the northern shore of Guala Canal, where it turns out the Japanese are building an airfield. So timing, getting there before the Japanese get their airfield operational, is an extremely important factor. And so the frame is we have to get the initiative. We have a momentary opportunity. Midway has given us that. The Japanese will regain the initiative if we don't act. So we need to act, and they do.

But the Navy isn't fully prepared for it. I've talked a little bit about tactics and doctrine, but logistics is also a key piece here. There really was insufficient pre-war preparation, but also insufficient infrastructure in the South Pacific for the kind of sustained campaign that Guadalcanal turned into. And it has to be developed on the fly. So there's rapid learning and adaptation, both from a tactics and doctrine standpoint and a logistical support standpoint. And it's not until those all begin to come together, particularly the logistics piece, that you see Guadalcanal emerge from the month-long campaign into an allied victory. Thank you. So, Sebastian, I'm going to turn to you now.

And first, I'll talk a little bit about the presentation that you wound up doing for class. I still tell people about the presentation. presentation. For those amongst us who would decry the use of PowerPoint, I think you had just a handful of slides with the bare minimum of information on them. But otherwise, it was all these wonderful tactile aspects where we were all seated around this massive chart. It was like a World War II flag plot with overlays that you took on and off the chart to show ranges of different aircraft and ships that were operating in the area. The seating was really a didactic masterpiece. I know it wasn't just you. You had a team working with you as well. But how did this book, which you wouldn't have read at the time, but how did the book change your understanding of Guadalcanal?

I really have to say that the book really gave me a deeper understanding and a holistic view as we had this talk. And you've pointed out that it was really a hands-on presentation that I gave. I pointed out to you that I think that there is a Pacific blindness on German naval officers. So working on Guadalcanal at that point was just grasping the situation. And I stayed on reading about it. And when I came across Learning War, it was really the first time I had an appreciation of the whole situation, what was leading up to it. And as Trent just pointed out, how many different facets there really are, and that it's not just the Navy really entering war or something similar, as some of the authors I read in the presentation or for preparing the presentation try to put it down. So what the book really helped me on Guadalcanal was why certain battles, even though the odds of the forces clashing were rather even, why they would go out in one direction or the other. And that's really a thing that helped me. So I came back to being prepared and the idea of this, of fighting as a cohesive unit.

Trent talks about the lack of indoctrination by the different OTCs in certain battles. And I found that very, very interesting because as soon as the units enter battle, you can see how important that is and how decisive it will be for the outcome of the single battle. Thanks. And for the listeners who aren't familiar, OTC, Officer in Tactical Command, so that's the commander, the very local commander for a specific battle. Sebastian, then one of the other things that you and I discussed in class, and then I think we had some conversations outside of class about it as well, was how the Navy prepared itself for World War II. Do you feel like you left the book with a better understanding of the preparations? Definitely. What I had already read about was the war plans and the large-scale war games. I knew about the industrial preparation, the fleet programs, the building.

So I think I had a good idea of what was on the surface, but what was beneath the surface, what was just described as the interwar culture of the officer corps, the learning culture, I really hadn't appreciated that until I read the book. Especially the really long-term stuff, the insurgency, which is described at the beginning of the book, the really individuals or a group of individuals trying to change things for the better and really having to have a really long breath to see that through. That was something that really made me happy, because if you're trying to change something and you really think that you have a better understanding of what the problem is and what the solution is, and you fail in changing in your organization the way people work, this can be very frustrating. So I was quite happy to see that the U.S. Navy had a hard time getting to where it was and getting to the successful organization that it was in World War II. Thanks. Trent, I'll come back to you. Sebastian, also, I appreciate you dropping the German in there. That was tremendous. Trent, I'll come back to you for the next question. And there are two really significant things that came out of Guadalcanal, to my mind, and they're the development of the Combat Information Center, or CIC, and then PAC-10.

So could you tell us what those are and how they developed? Absolutely. I agree with you that these are really significant things that come out of Guadalcanal. And one of the things that I was really trying to drive home in the book is that, certainly in my professional experience, this is often true, that you really have to begin to come to grips with a problem before you can understand how it might be solved. So I think there's been some criticism of the U.S. Navy in the interwar period, failing to anticipate some of the nature of World War II. And I think some of that is appropriate,

but I think some of that is misguided in this place because the lessons don't necessarily emerge until you can actually be in the experience and see the way forward. So the Combat Information Center, I think many of your listeners are going to be familiar with what it is today, but really its origins start as a way to help ensure that the commanding officer or the officer in tactical command, the OTC, understands what's going on. World War II was part of a sensory revolution, right? We have radar, sonars, other new sources of information, like the TBS radio, which allowed more rapid communication in between individual ships. And the traditional way that all this information was managed is that the commanding officer would make sense of it, try to get his brain around it, and understand what was happening. And off Guadalcanal and in some of the earlier fighting, it becomes clear that is deficient. There is there's too much information coming to the commanding officer.

He cannot keep track of it. He gets overwhelmed by the pace of it. And this is becoming apparent from action reports. And so Admiral Nimitz and his staff at the headquarters at Pearl Harbor are starting to understand this problem. And right at about the same time that the Guadalcanal campaign is reaching what would be its climax in November 1942, Nimitz issues a directive. It's fairly brief, and in the initial draft, it calls for a combat operations center. It's changed later to a combat information center. But basically, every ship needs to create a facility where all the information from all these different sources are going to be collected, synthesized, analyzed, and then provided in an actionable way to the commanding officer. And that's what the CIT starts at.

And what I think is very interesting about Nimitz's approach is he frames this as a challenge that all the ships need to step up to. He explains what he wants done, but not how to do it. And most people today, when I tell them that, they're surprised because I think today we have this expectation that if there's going to be an instruction like that, it's going to come with some procedures along with it. This is much more brief. Didn't have any of that. And I think Nimitz is deliberately capitalizing on the learning system that the Navy had developed in the years before and putting it into action. So different ships start to experiment with different approaches. And in parallel with those instructions, one of the initial approaches is being trialed on destroyer Fletcher.

The lieutenant commander, Joseph Wiley, is the ship's executive officer, and he is basically the first destroyer CIC. He stands basically in a bulkhead with one foot on either side of the door looking at the PPI display of the ship's SG radar, trying to understand where potential targets are, where friendly ships are, and then is talking to the ship's captain, a man named Cole. And coaches essentially call to guide Fletcher through one of the most confusing night battles on record, the naval battle of Guadalcanal on the night of the 12th, 13th of November. And Fletcher emerges from that fight unscathed. And when the action report about what Cole and Wiley did comes back to Pearl Harbor, Nimitz and his team look at it and go, you know, that, we want more of that. So let's get Wiley back here to help us understand how we could begin to develop Combat Information Center procedures. Pact 10 is a new doctrinal manual that comes out in June 1943. three. And I had alluded earlier to the problem of the Navy's doctrinal development on the eve

of World War II, how the squadron division commanders are responsible for developing their own tactics and plans. And this builds off of what had been done for years, but it's flawed because the Navy can't preserve its organizational structure. It needs something that is a little bit more rigid. So in the interwar period, plans had been developed kind of like a playbook, essentially. These different plans had a coded letter and number system to indicate them, but they were for major fleet action, for large battles. What PAC-10 did is it extended that vocabulary to small actions. So now a ship could get familiar with the plans that were in PAC-10 and then join a task force and join the fleet and have a strong sense of how that was going to

operate if they had to fight a surplus action. It also had a lot of instructions for other aspects of naval warfare, like carrier maneuvering and other things. But essentially what it did is it bridged the gap between what doctrine had been before, which is very contextual, very emergent, very individually driven, and what we think about doctrine today, where it is a bit more rote, a bit more structured, and a bit more broadly applicable. So Pac-10 was a way in which the Navy could solve the problems with the pre-war approach that Guadalcanal had surfaced, but then also grow because the Navy was expanding extremely rapidly by orders of magnitude over World War II.

You have many new officers joining the fleet who have not been through the kinds of training and indoctrination, for lack of a better term, that would come through years in the Navy or attending the Naval Academy and the Naval War College. They have to be effective. They have to be able to command ships and they have to be able to operate in this new larger fleet. And Pac-10 provides the grounding for that.

Sebastian, were you surprised at how many concepts from the book you recognize almost 80 years later? I definitely was, especially because you have to understand the point where i'm coming from the cic as well as pac-10 does get or will be further developed and further differentiated so more or less i grew up in this really really complex further developed stage of those two concepts now i'll touch on that in a second and again reading it i got a really better understanding of what was actually happening around me. Touching on the CIC first, as I told you, I was reading the book on Lübeck

and when I was going through that chapter, I actually really had a lot of fun going down into the CIC of Lübeck and really looking at that organization from a completely different standpoint. And I'd like to say I was also very, very surprised when I read about the approach Nimitz chose to give such big freedom to the single ships and single ship COs in developing that. Because as Trent has pointed out, we're now at a very more rigid, structured approach. And I think it shows a lot about the trust Nimitz must have had in his COs doing that. So, again, CIC, really surprised, but also happy again, because it does make a lot of sense. Because if you think about it now, CIC, 20 to 25 people, maybe a data link to that, that's really taking it a step further than what Cole and Weil did some years ago.

And also, if you look at PAC-10, this gave me, again, a better insight at what we're doing now. If you think about the ATPs, the Allied Tactical Publications, which are, from my point of view, a further development of something like that to bring forces together and let them work effectively on a very short notice. I was talking about the carrier group Charles de Gaulle. So we had Portuguese, we had Spanish, we had French, German ships all working together on short notice, sometimes on a day's notice to form an effective battle group. So this again gave me a good idea. And also, again, growing up in such a system, you don't really appreciate how good it is. So learning about why PAC-10 was introduced and that there was a big lack that had to be filled or a big gap that had to be filled really gave me an understanding why it's important to look into those and to have them by heart when you go out. just out of curiosity did you get to have any conversations about the book while you were underway with your shipmates in the wardroom actually I did because I do read a lot about military leadership and the time when we were sailing was rather interesting due to the fact that COVID-19 was picking up and we were basically interned on the ship we were not allowed to go ashore anymore so a lot of stuff i read again touching on limits and leadership actually was

something where i could wave with the book and said well why don't you read one or two pages of this and you'll have a better understanding of what's happening thank you very much for doing that uh it is it's a joy to me to hear not not just the people are reading the book but they're getting value out of it and sharing it with others in a way that helps them get better at what they do. That's wonderful to hear. Yeah, Trent, you're international now. There's no turning back. The last big evolution that you mentioned in the book was how the U.S. started operating large numbers of aircraft carriers. If you're a Brian McGrath fan, and I am, he's talked about the need to practice operating multiple carriers together to include building purpose-built facilities

specifically for that. So we're also seeing the Navy do that more frequently to include very recently in the South China Sea. How did that process evolve through the early efforts in the marshals, then through the Marianas, Leyte Gulf, and subsequent campaigns? This is something that I think is really interesting and speaks to the past dependency of complex systems. It gives us a good frame for understanding this. I think everyone knows that the Japanese in the run-up to World War II, decided that they were going to put all their large carriers together, create a very powerful striking force, and then use it, you know, attack Pearl Harbor, attack Darwin, attack what was then called Ceylon. And the United States, interestingly enough,

doesn't do that. And I think one of the reasons is that throughout much of the interwar period In the fleet problems, there's really two large carriers, the Lexington and Saratoga, and so to gain experience and to test different theories of how to operate those carriers as well as the rest of the fleet, in a lot of the fleet problems, those two carriers are on opposite sides. They operate independently, and there is still an assumption that is prevalent early in the war that carriers are going to operate better. They're going to be more survivable if we keep them distributed, because if you concentrate them and the task force is found, then the enemy can attack the task force and they knock out all the flight decks that are in that group. So really, the United States Navy doesn't work out how it wants to operate multiple carriers together in a single task force until early 1943. Pac-10 is part of that training and that work. And in the run-up to the initiation of the Central Pacific Offensive with the invasion of the Gilbert Islands in November, there's a lot of exploration. There's a number of different carrier raids on the Gilberts, on Wake Island and other places to try to determine, well, what is the best way to configure a task force with multiple carriers in it?

How do we maneuver it? How do we operate the different planes? And they have to figure that out. And so I think today the problem is most likely very similar. I'm not sure. I haven't read analyses of how we're working out how to operate multiple carriers together now. But I suspect if you haven't trained for it, if you haven't looked at different ways for how to configure them, operate them together, and make sure that they're cohesive, then that's something that you have to learn through the doing. And so I suspect that if that's something that the Navy today wants to do, we need to invest more time and effort in training and making sure that we're being creative with different approaches to it and arriving at the best alternative. It's going to be really important to practice.

Thanks. Now, we haven't spent a lot of time talking about the Japanese in this, but I'll just ask one question. Did the Japanese just fail to adapt, or was that quote-unquote failure a result of the pressure generated by the Navy's granite campaign? Another very good question. I think one of the things that's really important to understand with World War II and the Pacific is the Japanese are very capable. One of the unfortunate aspects of the Midway narrative is usually what that does is imposes this filter or assumption that, well, actually, Midway, the Allies have the initiative and the advantage, and it's all downhill for the Japanese. But that is not at all true, particularly in the carrier battles off Guadalcanal. They are extremely effective in the night battles. They are extremely aggressive.

Their formations are often more cohesive. And they do adapt and they do evolve. They are still winning night battles after Guadalcanal and the Solomons. They shift to tactics that emphasize stealthy torpedo launches, It's something that Wayne Hughes spent a lot of time thinking about and writing about. And then they continue to adapt. For large-scale tactics, they start thinking about how they can offset American numerical superiority. And so they think about feints.

This is probably most visible at Lakey Gulf. What in the American history books is called the Northern Force and Ozawa's carriers. That's essentially a feint to the diversion. It works very well in the sense that it draws Halsey's Third Fleet north so that other forces could penetrate to Lyddy Gulf and optimistically, if not necessarily realistically, destroy the transport forces that had invaded the island. And so they're trying different things. They're very challenged, but their tactics are evolving. And the last great dramatic evolution of that is the adoption of suicidal tactics. kamikaze planes and ships and submarines and that becomes a very significant threat what i think is

really important is to understand some of the things that the japanese were trying to do what were unable to do and this gets back to the latter part of your question so the granite campaign is a nemesis planning organization creates the granite campaign plan in late 1943 as a draft and it's issued early the next year. And it is intended to facilitate a very rapid offensive. And one of the reasons that they wanted to move so quickly was to get inside the Japanese decision cycle, keep them off balance, and prevent them from executing the operations that they wanted to. And in many respects, it works. The Japanese are intent on trying to prevent the initial incursion into the Gilbert Islands that initiates the Central Pacific Campaign. They're thrown off balance

because they have to try to defend Orval in the south when Admiral Halsey moves to Mugentil and invades Empress Augusta Bay. And so there are a series of different operations that move faster than the Japanese are anticipating or come at them from multiple fronts. The offensive in the Southwest Pacific from MacArthur and then in the Central Pacific from Nimitz. I forget exactly the word that Admiral King used for this, but he had, oh, whipsaw. That's what he called it. The intent was to whipsaw the Japanese between one offensive and the other and keep them from being able to adapt. And I think it's important to keep track of that because it's not just an overwhelming amount of numbers. It's not just new tactics. It's also this pace of operations,

the sustained pressure that keeps the Japanese from doing what they want. Thanks. We're about out of time here. So, Sebastian, final question for you. You've seen where we are with Doctrine Today from a NATO perspective. Does the book make you feel better or worse about it? I have to say, really, that this is a good question in the sense that it's a very tough question because, again, coming from the rather recent deployment that I've been on, I think that NATO really is well-trained when it comes to TTPs, techniques, tactics, and procedures. But what really hit me reading the book, and Trent has pointed it out, the definition of doctrine. And I think we do have a long way to go. If I compare that, the Navy, this little core U.S. Navy in the interwar period, where you really had the chance to build a core team, a cohesive officer core that trusted each other.

I can't stress enough how much NATO units have to work together and how much personal connection you need on a regular basis to build that trust, to really have a common doctrine, because that's what it'll all be about when it gets interesting, that the trust amongst one CO to the next one will be there. Thank you both very much I'd like to thank my guests Trent Hone and Sebastian Goldstein Trent, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? Online, I'm pretty active on Twitter and I have a website

which I haven't kept very up to date lately but I try to put speaking engagements and other things on there One of the reasons that I haven't kept it up to date is because of the next project It's been consuming a lot of time lately In Learning War, I purchased the Navy as a system And now I want to shift, use a similar frame, still talk about complex adaptive systems, but refocus on the individual.

And so I'm looking at how Admiral Nimitz approached command as commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet and commander-in-chief of Pacific Ocean areas in World War II. So I think that it was a very interesting approach that he took with the CIC. And I want to go beyond that and look at how he approached other things and the consequences for the war in the Pacific of his behavior. Thanks. And Sebastian, same questions to you. Where can we find you online? Do you have any projects you'd like to tell us about? I'm sad to say not that much due to the fact that we're preparing the squadron to migrate to the next helicopter. So I'm pretty, pretty into that. But other than that, trying to get some young officers to do some more reading and to adapt more of that learning culture. Well, thank you both again for your time, gentlemen. And to our readers, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next week. Sea Control is produced and edited by Keegan Ingersoll, Ed Salo and William McQuiston.

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