VEGA CONFLICT FLEET BAY PROFESSIONAL
VEGA CONFLICT FLEET BAY SERIES

Simultaneously, changes in the technology of naval warfare-steam power, steel hulls, rifled artillery, chemical propellants, torpedoes, and mines-raised questions about how naval wars were to be fought and what naval officers needed to know. Belief that nations were in a struggle for survival, a struggle that required the mobilization of all of a nation’s resources, including its intellectual resources, intensified international rivalries. This was a period of intense economic rivalry between European states and of imperial expansion overseas. The modern study of naval history and the attempt to use that study to understand strategic principles developed in the last decades of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries. The Study of Naval History and Theories of Sea Power 5 The committee began by preparing a plan for war with the United Kingdom, submitting the plan, which was mainly Mahan’s handiwork, to the secretary in December 1890. Tracy appointed navy Captains Mahan and William Folger (chief of the Bureau of Ordnance) and Assistant Secretary of the Navy James Soley to a secret committee to produce plans for naval operations in case of war with various European powers, including France, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. In conjunction with these developments, in 1890 Secretary of the Navy Benjamin F. Rentfrow’s recently published Home Squadron examines how the US Navy’s officers envisioned themselves commanding battleships in a battle line and fighting fleet battles long before the vessels that could fulfill that vision ever existed. Herrick Jr., in his classic The American Naval Revolution, cites in identifying the period as marking “America’s emergence as a great international power.” In November 1889, the armoured cruiser Maine was launched in May 1890, Alfred Thayer Mahan published his Influence of Sea Power upon History in June Congress rescued the Naval War College from obscurity by returning it to Coaster’s Harbor Island from its exile on Goat Island and by the Navy Act of 1890 Congress endorsed continuing the project to build a modern battle fleet.

VEGA CONFLICT FLEET BAY SERIES

The years 18 witnessed a series of events that historian Walter R. 2īy 1890, besides the drive to professionalize, two major developments shaped the aspirations and vision of the US Navy’s officer corps: the rise of US naval power and the development of a strategic outlook. As the army and navy pondered logical potential opponents, the United Kingdom came to the fore as the most dangerous potential enemy and took prominence in America’s first professionally developed war plans.

VEGA CONFLICT FLEET BAY PROFESSIONAL

War planning allowed soldiers and sailors to apply theory to practical problems and thus improve their professional skills. 1 The plans that resulted from these efforts, among the US Navy’s first formal war planning exercises, represent a compromise between the new strategic vision of the American naval profession and a pragmatic understanding of the limitations of the US fleet.įormal war planning, along with the establishment of war colleges and professional journals, was a feature of professionalization of the US Army and Navy.

In 1890, a small group of US naval professionals drew up plans for war in case of hostilities with the United Kingdom, and a few years later the Naval War College classes of 18, as their Problem in the Art of War, a new annual exercise, elaborated plans for war with the British.

Vega conflict fleet bay