Simulation and sea power: The United States Navy Fleet Problems, 1923--1940

From 1923 to 1940 the U.S. Navy held twenty-one major exercises, known as "Fleet Problems." While only part of annual fleet training, these exercises differed from routine maneuvers and gunnery exercises. All available fleet units were integrated into a single major action. At the conclusion of the exercises, representatives from participating units and staffs would gather for a post exercise critique, which provided an opportunity for all to see events in their entirety, as well as offering a forum for senior commanders to discuss their perspectives and lessons learned. While historians have not ignored the interwar period, in general their interpretations have cast the interwar navy as little more than a proving ground for a doctrine first articulated by Alfred Thayer Mahan in the late-nineteenth century. The literature characterizes the navy as tradition-bound and overly conservative, reluctant to break from Mahan's emphasis on decisive battles fought between lines of battleships. An examination of the documents relating specifically to the fleet problems, as well as reports from fleet commanders-in-chief, the Navy General Board, and articles in professional journals, offer and excellent model that addresses the historical problem of determining what was actually going on in the exercises. The conclusion reached is that the fleet problems, which took the form of sophisticated warfare simulation, provided an empirical means of testing Mahan's historicist-based warfare doctrine against new technology. Naval officers displayed a willingness to adapt or abandon important tenets of Mahanian doctrine in the face of tacit knowledge gained from the exercises. Concepts such as dive-bombing, independent submarine operations, antisubmarine warfare, and amphibious operations were explored in a medium that stressed the thinking of naval officers as how best to fight a naval war with modern weapons. An examination of the fleet problems serves to intervene in the established literature by revealing a different perspective on the interwar navy. While the vision they crafted was imperfect, naval officers demonstrated that they were not all catechismal throwbacks. Through simulation they developed a good, though incomplete, understanding of the new tools of naval warfare and a reasonable strategic scheme for applying them.