The object aimed at by those who favour great size
of individual ships is not, of course, magnitude alone. It is to
turn out a ship which shall be more powerful than an individual
antagonist. All recent development of man-of-war construction has
taken the form of producing, or at any rate trying to produce,
a more powerful ship than those of earlier date, or belonging to
a rival navy. I know the issues that such statements are likely
to raise; and I ask you, as naval architects, to bear with me
patiently when I say what I am going to say. It is this: If you
devise for the ship so produced the tactical system for which
she is specially adapted you must, in order to be logical, base
your system on her power of defeating her particular antagonist.
Consequently, you must abandon the principle of concentration of
superior numbers against your enemy; and, what is more, must be
prepared to maintain that such concentration on his part against
yourself would be ineffectual. This will compel a reversion to
tactical methods which made a fleet action a series of duels
between pairs of combatants, and--a thing to be pondered on
seriously--never enabled anyone to win a decisive victory on the
sea. The position will not be made more logical if you demand both
superior size and also superior numbers, because if you adopt
the tactical system appropriate to one of the things demanded,
you will rule out the other.
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