This entry is a subentry of Tactics.
Tactics are the handling of forces in battle. Maneuver, meaning movement, was once a near synonym for tactics, but over the past half century naval “maneuvers” have come to mean any set of tactical actions intended to gain a combat advantage. Currently encompassed in the term naval tactics are effective search and detection (or scouting), the command and control of forces, and countermeasures that neutralize or degrade enemy actions, all of which have become as important as formations and firepower.
For roughly 400 years, guns were a fighting fleet's decisive weapon and a tightly spaced column was its advantageous formation. The tactical aim was to bring the maximum number of guns to bear on the enemy; massed forces was the tactical means. Then, in the twentieth century, aircraft introduced the possibility of massing the striking power without physically concentrating the aircraft carriers that launched the planes. To that end, in World War II the Imperial Japanese Navy developed tactics based on separated carrier formations, sometimes supplemented with strikes from island airfields.
Nevertheless, by 1944, both sides in the Pacific War saw that concentration was still the superior tactic, principally for purposes of antiaircraft defense based on counterfire from air and sea rather than primary reliance on protective armor plate. American ship defenses became so formidable that the Japanese resorted to kamikazes: manned aircraft acting as missiles on suicidal one‐way missions.
At the end of World War II, defense through counterfire ended abruptly with the threat of air‐dropped nuclear bombs. Dispersed formations were designed to conceal warships amid merchant shipping long enough for them to launch their own nuclear strikes. By the 1960s, this desperate tactic that was modified as counterfire was resumed through surface‐to‐air missiles of the Terrier, Talos, and Tarter programs, and air‐to‐air missiles such as those of jet fighters like the F‐14 “Tomcat.” Tactics were further altered as the likelihood of nuclear war at sea waned and the principal threat to ships became conventional warheads in air‐to‐surface missiles instead of aerial gravity bombs.
By the 1960s, Soviet submarines were armed with ASCMs of such great range (some more than 300 miles) that American fleet defenses developed many layers, beginning with aerial surveillance and protection. But survival depended on adequate warning, plenty of sea room, depth of fire, and the absence of neutral aircraft and shipping.
As the reach and lethality of firepower increased, so did the need to detect the enemy at longer and longer ranges. In fact, the threat of large pulsed attacks from torpedoes, aircraft, and missiles made apparent the enormous advantage of finding the enemy first and attacking before he could respond. In World War II, nothing but aerial scouts could hope to reach far enough to find the enemy, target him, and strike first. Submarines off enemy ports and straits gave strategic warning of enemy movements (and attacked if they could), but tactical detection and tracking were achieved by an unstinting aerial search. After World War II, aircraft continued their crucial scouting role, but concurrently highly sophisticated earth‐orbiting satellites grew in significance, as did electronic search, both active and passive, conducted by ships, submarines, and land sites. Some sensors are able to detect ships and aircraft far over the horizon at ranges of thousands of miles. The moves and countermoves across the electromagnetic spectrum have become so intricate that the tactics of nonlethal “information warfare” have become as important as the missiles themselves in determining who will attack effectively first.
All naval warfare since World War II has been closely connected with conflict ashore. Thus, joint littoral operations have consistently defined modern naval warfare. Land‐sea missile attacks such as a 1982 attack during the Falklands/Malvinas War on British warships by an Exocet missile launched from a land site in Argentina have added to the already prevalent strikes by aircraft to blur the tactical distinction between sea and land combat. More such littoral engagements seem certain, for the U.S. Navy's most important contribution to future war overseas will be, as in the past, the safe delivery and sustainment of army, air force, and Marine elements that will engage the enemy on the land.
Because missiles are swift, accurate, lethal, and long‐ranged, naval battle maneuvering has shifted from warship to weapon. Survivability is now largely dependent on quick defeat of attacking missiles. Counterfire with defensive missiles has had an insignificant effect, but chaff, jamming, and other defensive countermeasures have been highly successful when a defender was alerted. Thus, a scouting advantage and application of superior electronic tactics and technology has become vitally important as an advantage.
Over 400 guided missiles have been fired at merchant vessels and warships since 1967, when an Egyptian patrol craft launched 4 Soviet‐made Styx missiles and sank the Israeli destroyer Eilat. Since 1967, torpedoes, mines, aerial bombs, or shellfire have had considerable consequences, but ASCMs have inflicted by far the most damage and are the central weapon of naval tactics today.
Many in American policy circles believe that naval operations have changed radically since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Contemporary operations as disparate as the Persian Gulf War, the interdiction of shipping in the Adriatic, and efforts to intercept both drugs and illegal immigrants in the Caribbean have all taken place in littoral waters. Consequently, a new concept called joint littoral warfare has developed, in which army, navy, air force, and Marine forces are concerted by joint commanders who conduct wide‐ranging operations in the coastal regions of the world. The focus of U.S. naval operations has returned to its roots because throughout history most naval battles have been fought within 100 miles of land. Furthermore, during the Cold War, a dichotomy existed between U.S. Navy war plans and actual force deployment. War plans were drawn to gain sea control, support a major NATO war in Europe, and attack the Soviet homeland directly, with or without nuclear weapons. The plans envisioned battles fought against Soviet submarines, long‐range aircraft, and surface warships over the vastness of the ocean. Simultaneously, and paradoxically, the actual profitable deployment of American naval forces took place close inshore in a wide variety of circumstances and locales, involving air strikes, amphibious landings, and sustainment of forces fighting on land. The “new” littoral warfare tasks of the U.S. Navy at the end of the twentieth century are no different from those actually carried out in coastal waters by naval forces for the past fifty years, such as air strikes against North Vietnam and Libya, amphibious landings in Korea, Lebanon, and Grenada, coastal blockades, and naval gunfire support.
Changes in tactics wrought by missiles are as far‐reaching tactically as the shift from sail to steam or from battleship to aircraft carrier. Moreover, the great range of missiles coupled with the proximity to land creates a combat environment of intensified tactical interaction between the sea and the land in which force on force is no longer exclusively, or even primarily, fleet against fleet.
Starting in World War I, mines, torpedo boats, and coastal submarines forced surface fleets to back away from close coastal blockade. In World War II, aircraft extended the air‐land interaction, as ships used planes to attack land targets and land‐based planes attacked ships. In the missile age, while ships become targets of land‐based missiles, ship‐based missiles are used against land sites. Since the 1950s, submarines armed with nuclear ballistic missiles have been capable of striking deep inland. In the Persian Gulf War of 1991, nearly 300 American sea‐launched cruise missiles struck military targets in Iraq with conventional warheads.
The revolution in naval tactics wrought by missiles, however, is far more extensive than a change in the principal weapon. Until World War II, fleet maneuvers were designed to achieve a positional advantage relative to the enemy. In the age of fighting sail, the weather gauge (upwind of the opposing fleet) was such a crucial advantage. In the battleship era, crossing the “T” (alignment of one's column across the head of the enemy's column) was the relative position sought. Then, in World War II, maneuvers by ships in formation were supplanted by the swifter movement of raids by aircraft carrying bombs and torpedoes or salvos of torpedoes launched from destroyers and light cruisers. These outperformed gunfire from heavy cruisers and battleships. Today, small maneuverable missile craft have the capacity to put much larger warships out of action, especially in confined coastal waters; large salvos of fifty or more missiles can be rapidly and accurately launched against land targets from a comparatively small warship, as they were in the U.S. retaliatory attacks on purported terrorist sites in the Sudan and Afghanistan in August 1998. Aircraft carriers—so fragile and frequently sunk in World War II—now use their mobility to position themselves out of danger, yet where their aircraft can deliver telling, repeated attacks.
[See also Strategy: Naval Warfare Strategy.]
Bibliography
- SirJulianS. Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, 1911; reissued 1988.
- Wayne P. Hughes, Fleet Tactics: Theory and Practice, 1986.
- Eric Grove, The Future of Sea Power, 1990.
- Brian Tunstall, Naval Warfare in the Age of Sail: The Evolution of Fighting Tactics 1650–1815, 1990.
- John C. Schulte, An Analysis of the Historical Effectiveness of Antiship Cruise Missiles in Littoral Warfare, 1994.
- Wayne P. Hughes, Jr., A Salvo Model of Warships in Missile Combat Used to Evaluate Their Staying Power,
Naval Research Logistics , 1995. - Craig Symonds, Historical Atlas of the U.S. Navy, 1995.
- Martin S. Navias and E. R. Hooton, Tanker Wars: The Assault on Merchant Shipping During the Iran‐Iraq Conflict, 1980–1988, 1996
