The Future of the Naval Sea Services

摘要

For centuries, the role of the world's navies has been to control the seas as a means to protect maritime and land-based interests. The time and investment of national treasure to deploy and sustain a navy, by its very evolutionary nature, creates a legacy of hardware, policy, tactics, and institutions. None of these legacies are easily or quickly changed, even when new technology is developed that has the potential to alter the fundamental calculus of naval warfare. Cannon fire was the dominant source of power projection for navies under sail propulsion from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, and continued successfully well into the twentieth century with the advancement of naval gunnery under steam propulsion. The launch of the HMS Dreadnought in 1906 marked a watershed moment in combatant design that navies worldwide would continue through the end of World War Ⅱ. Navies delivered ever-larger battle combatants with ever-greater guns in both caliber and numbers, culminating with the deployment of the American Iowa class (16-inch), the Japanese Yamato class (18-inch), and the German Bismarck class (15-inch), among many others. The age of the battleship with a gunnery-dominated ship design had reached the end of a very long and successful evolutionary path. This evolution was eventually halted by the introduction of manned aircraft, the mastery of aerodynamic flight, and the operational extension that the air platform brought to surface warfare on the high seas.