John M Lillard

What this crisp little monograph does well is to look in detail at the war-gaming culture of the U.S. Naval War College of the 1920s and 1930s and consider what its real impact was. Never meant to offer cook-book solutions to the operational and strategic problems that concerned the United States Navy, they really were student-driven exercises in command decision and contributed to building a doctrine and mind set that contributed to ultimate victory in the 1940s. The interesting point is that the real blind spot of the whole enterprise was not so much a fixation on the battle line, as the importance of naval aviation was recognized very early on, but there was a real failure to recognize the importance of submarine warfare in an age where it was thought that the unrestricted submarine offensive of Wilhelmine Germany against commerce was a one-time nightmare, not the standard operating procedure of the future.… (mer)