How 'The Rules of the Game' Can Help the U.S. Navy

James Holmes

Security, Americas

Historian Andrew Gordon's naval strategy book warns about how maritime security can lead to culture decay.

Why would any sane naval commander execute an order sure to bring about catastrophe?

That’s among the questions historian Andrew Gordon investigates in his masterful work The Rules of the Game. Ostensibly about the 1916 Battle of Jutland, The Rules of the Game is really about the perils of winning too big in sea combat. The history of Jutland is there, and in abundant detail. But it mainly serves to frame the author’s meditations on how a culture of automatic obedience dulls individual enterprise and derring-do to the detriment of battle effectiveness.

Gordon’s verdict: winning too big—as the Royal Navy did at Trafalgar in 1805—makes a navy intellectually flabby over time. It debilitates the institutional culture. Victory begets cultural decay by sparing the navy the rigors of future combat, the truest test of martial adequacy.

A smashing triumph, then, is a perverse thing. It permits and encourages the victors to entertain illusions about their profession. Seafarers come to believe command of the sea belongs to them by birthright. Trouble is, it’s doubtful the next ambitious maritime power that comes along, intent on making itself master of the briny main, will consent to permanent inferiority. It will mount a challenge—as powers on the ascent have since time immemorial. It could prevail. Even newcomers that fall short can prove troublemakers of the first order.

High-seas battle is a harsh teacher. Adm. John Richardson, America’s chief of naval operations, or top uniformed naval officer, hopes to spare the U.S. Navy the teacher’s rod by restoring its competitive instincts and habits in peacetime. Admiral Richardson reports embracing Gordon’s appraisal so fervently that he opened his own checkbook to put Rules of the Game back into print after it had lapsed. A career nuclear submariner, that is, went out of his way to make a chronicle of steam-propelled dreadnoughts pummeling one another in the North Sea available to today’s generation of readers.

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