
Between 1919 and 1941, the U.S. Navy transformed itself from a powerful if unsophisticated force into the fleet that would win a two-ocean war, from a fleet in which the battleship dominated to one based on carrier strike groups. The great puzzle of U.S. naval history is how this was accomplished. Norman Friedman trenchantly argues that war gaming at the U.S. Naval War College made an enormous, and perhaps decisive, contribution. For much of the inter-war period, the Naval War College was the Navy’s primary think tank. War gaming was the means the college used to test alternative strategies, tactics, evolving naval aviation, and warship types in a way that the Navy’s full-scale exercises could not. The think tank perspective taken by this book is a new way of looking at the inter-war Naval War College and the war games that formed the core of its curriculum. Although the influence of both the Naval War College’s gaming and of the college itself declined after 1933, most of the key decisions shaping the wartime U.S. Navy had already been taken. In this historical book, you will find the two most important ones were on the role of naval aviation and the form the U.S. war plan against Japan ultimately assumed. As shown here, U.S. naval commanders successfully applied the lessons learned from war gaming to victorious operations in World War II.
Introduction
1. Naval Transformation
Exercises: Full-Scale Fleet Problems and Games at Newport
Naval Aviation as a Driver Toward Transformation
The Inter-War Navy and Its World
The Strategic Problem
Naval Arms Control
Ships
2. The Naval War College and Gaming
3. War Gaming and War Planning
The “Applicatory” System
War Gaming
War Gaming at the Inter-War War College
Simulation
Some Limits of Gamed Reality
Using War Gaming
War Gaming and War Planning
4. War Gaming and Carrier Aviation
Guessing What Aircraft Could Do
Gaming and Early Carriers
Reeves and Operating Practices
Putting It Together—the Yorktown Class
Aftermath
5. The War College and Cruisers
Evaluating Alternatives
Cruisers at War: Three Years of Red-Blue Warfare
Postscript: The Fate of the Flight-Deck Cruiser
6. Downfall
7. Conclusion: Games Versus Reality in the Pacific
Appendixes
A: Playing the Games
B: War Game Rules—Aircraft
The Airplanes
Carrier Air Operations
Bombing
Bombs Versus Carriers
Torpedo Bombing
Air-to-Air Combat
Anti-Aircraft Firepower
Aircraft Navigation and Reliability
Notes
Bibliography
Military analysts, educators, Naval history educators, interested veterans and citizens, contractors of the Naval establishment, war gaming enthusiasts.
Product Details
- Friedman, Norman
- War Gaming and Victory in the Pacific War
- War Gaming
- World War II
- Naval History
- Military history