Developing Naval Doctrine.From the Sea

• Main Author: Tritten, James J.
• Other Authors: NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIV WASHINGTON DC INST FOR NATIONAL STRATEGIC STUDIES
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1995
• Subjects: Military Operations; Strategy and Tactics; *JOINT MILITARY ACTIVITIES; *MILITARY DOCTRINE; NAVAL PLANNING; MILITARY TACTICS; NAVAL WARFARE; MILITARY HISTORY; REPRINTS; NDC(NAVAL DOCTRINE COMMAND); JOINT DOCTRINE; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/ADA527764; http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?&verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA527764

Following their victories in the Spanish-American War, Admirals William T. Sampson and Winfield Scott Schley engaged in a lively public debate over their respective records at the Battle of Santiago in July 1898. The Spanish admiral, Pascual Cervera, outmaneuvered the North Atlantic Squadron and managed to enter the Cuban harbor at Santiago where he maintained a fleet-in-being. After several failed attempts, a combination of joint actions ashore and at sea lured the Spanish fleet out of the harbor. Cervera was defeated in the ensuing battle. The argument over how the battle should have been fought lasted for years; a Presidential order was needed to stop the debate. The acrimonious enquiry into tactics and doctrine following the Spanish-American War deterred frank and open discussion of doctrine in the Navy for years. One might conclude that the Sampson-Schley debate virtually banished the term doctrine from the naval lexicon, inhibiting a generation of officers from exploring the nature and content of doctrine. Lieutenant Commander Dudley W. Knox wrote a prize-winning essay in 1915, published in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, that attempted to revive doctrine as an issue. While Knox failed to bring doctrinal debate to the fore, doctrine was no longer a forbidden subject. It appeared in tactical publications whose readership was almost exclusively Navy officers. It also took root in the unwritten but extremely powerful form of shared experiences derived from service at sea, fleet exercises, and war college courses. Doctrinal debate resumed in wardrooms and classrooms rather than in professional journals. By World War II there was a mature, formal, and centralized system for developing and evaluating doctrine in the Navy, one that guided rather than directed the fleet commander on how to fight. While conventional wisdom says that the Navy has never had a centralized military doctrine, the U.S. fleet in World War II operated under a series of hierarchical doctr Published in Joint Force Quarterly (JFQ), p110-115, Autumn 1995.