Technology was hardly the only force that shaped naval warfare in the twentieth century, but it was a force that navies always had to take into account. It affected naval warfare from the most tactical level to the grandest national strategies. This study, then, looks at how six technologies facilitated and frustrated navies in their pursuit of victory. Animals fight with horns, teeth, and claws. Humans can bite and scratch as well, but to win, they use technology. The word technology is a compound of two Greek roots, tekhne (craft) and logia (learning). In essence, technology is the practical application of knowledge expressed through the use of a device. This book examines six specific technologies that came of age in twentieth-century naval warfare and considers the way navies applied these technologies and adapted to their use. Technical details are not the focus here. What matters is the process by which each technology’s possibilities were first recognized, tested, and then used, or not used, to best advantage. This book will explore the principles that govern this process and consider whether these principles apply across platforms, nations, and technologies, and whether, if observed, they lead to victory regardless of the period or the technology in question and thus can be expected to apply to the technologies of today, as yet untested in peer combat. As part of this exploration, this book will also consider how human factors such as established practice, politics, and policy complicated the process. The book is organized into eight chapters. The lead chapter, “Use, Doctrine, Innovation” provides an overview of the previously mentioned human factors. This is followed by six chapters exploring the historical development of mines, torpedoes, radio, radar, submarines, and aircraft. The closing chapter, “Conclusions,” lays out what the authors discovered as principles. Based on the scope of the bibliography and the well-documented endnotes, it is apparent that the chapters are thoroughly researched. The bibliography is well-organized, showing that the authors made liberal use of official histories and primary documents and hundreds of articles, chapters, and books by well-respected scholars. Moreover, the chapters are provided with useful illustrations, pictures, and graphics that emphasize the authors’ points.

In our current era of artificial intelligence/machine learning, unmanned vehicles, and drones these histories of past significant technologies present lessons to be learned. This thoughtfully innovative, well-written and well-researched synthesis of key technologies – tools, weapons, and platforms – is fact-filled and a wonderful primer useful for understanding the history of the individual technologies and their interrelationships with others, even beyond the six detailed in this unusual and welcome book for navy bookshelves. Innovating Victory: Naval Technology in Three Wars studies how the world’s navies incorporated new technologies into their ships, their practices, and their doctrine. It does this by examining six core technologies fundamental to twentieth-century naval warfare including new platforms (submarines and aircraft), new weapons (torpedoes and mines), and new tools (radar and radio). Each chapter considers the state of a subject technology when it was first used in war and what navies expected of it. It then looks at the way navies discovered and developed the technology’s best use, in many cases overcoming disappointed expectations. It considers how a new technology threatened its opponents, not to mention its users, and how those threats were managed. Innovating Victory shows that the use of technology is more than introducing and mastering a new weapon or system. Differences in national resources, force mixtures, priorities, perceptions, and missions forced nations to approach the problems presented by new technologies in different ways. Navies that specialized in specific technologies often held advantages over enemies in some areas but found themselves disadvantaged in others. Vincent P. O'Hara and Leonard R. Heinz present new perspectives and explore the process of technological introduction and innovation in a way that is relevant to today’s navies, which face challenges and questions even greater than those of 1904, 1914, and 1939. Users have valuable input. Scientists and experts in general, believe that they know best and have a poor record of accepting user contributions. For a long time complaints from submarine and destroyers crews about torpedo performance were ignored, epecially in the US and German navies. by the organizations that developed, refined, and employed them.” —Trent Hone, author of Learning War: The Evolution of Fighting Doctrine in the U.S. Navy, 1898-1945 and co-author of Battle Line: The United States Navy, 1919-1939 “This is a marvelous book! O’Hara and Heinz have produced aInnovating Victory: Naval Technology in Three Wars, studies how the world's navies incorporated new technologies into their ships, their practices, and their doctrine. It does this by examining six core technologies fundamental to twentieth-century naval warfare including new platforms (submarines and aircraft), new weapons (torpedoes and mines), and new tools (radar and radio). Each chapter considers the state of a subject technology when it was first used in war and what navies expected of it. It then looks at the way navies discovered and developed the technology's best use, in many cases overcoming disappointed expectations. It considers how a new technology threatened its opponents, not to mention its users, and how those threats were managed. The twentieth century was a time of profound technological change. In naval terms, this change came in four major waves, with the first three climaxed by a major naval war. The first wave started in the mid-nineteenth century as coal-fired steam engines replaced sail, armor was developed, guns and mines were improved, torpedoes appeared, and radio was introduced. This wave peaked in the Russo-Japanese War. In the second wave, which started in 1905 and ran through World War I, naval warfare became three-dimensional with the development of practical submarines and aircraft. The armored gunnery platform reached its acme of power and influence and imperceptibly began to fade in importance. The third wave, which lasted through the end of World War II, moved naval warfare fully into the electromagnetic spectrum as technologies such as radar and sonar expanded perceptions beyond the horizon and beneath the waves, revolutionized the collection and use of information, and saw the introduction of practical guided weapons. The fourth wave is under way. Naval warfare has entered another dimension—starting with the splitting of the atom and progressing to satellites, computers, drones, data networks, artificial intelligence, and a new generation of weapons using magnetic and directed energy. The fourth wave has lasted the longest, not because the pace of invention has slowed—it has in fact accelerated—but because since 1945 there has been no major peer-to-peer naval war—that is, a total war between opponents with similar technological resources—to prove these new technologies in all-out combat. There’s an old saying that necessity is the mother of invention. That sentiment was definitely the case during World War II, a massive global conflict that presented the United States with a variety of tactical and logistical challenges. At every turn Americans seemed to need more of everything—more supplies, bigger bombs, faster airplanes, better medical treatments, and more precise communications. In response, scientists, technicians, and inventors supplied a steady stream of new products that helped make victory possible. Many of these innovations transformed the very nature of warfare for future generations and also had a significant impact on the lives of civilians as well. O’Hara and Heinz have now collaborated in writing Innovating Victory: Naval Technology in Three Wars, an innovative comparison of the world’s major combatant navies through three significant major conflicts (Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II – the Russo-Japanese War has an occasional appearance) illustrating how nations incorporated – or failed to incorporate — new technologies into their ships, their practices, and their doctrines. The authors examine six core technologies fundamental to twentieth-century naval warfare including new weapons (mines and torpedoes), new tools (radio and radar), and particularly new platforms (submarines and aircraft). They demonstrate how technology influences naval warfare, and vice versa. An “Introduction” and “Chapter 1: Use, Doctrine, and Innovation” provide appropriate context to the six chapters in which they examine the technological advances. The authors’ stated goals for this volume is (pp. 3-4): 1) briefly consider the nature and history of each of the six technologies; 2) consider the state of the technology when it was first used in war and how different navies expected to use it; 3) explore how major navies subsequently improved or modified their use of the technology; 4) examine the development of countermeasures; 5) discuss how navies developed doctrine and incorporated ancillary technologies to improve the core technology’s effectiveness. O’Hara and Heinz do point out that their book is “not intended to be a complete history of naval technology in the period covered” (p. 4). O’Hara and Heinz studied the development of weapons (mines and torpedoes), tools (radio and radar), and platforms (submarines and aircraft). The guiding idea was to focus, not on technical details but to explore “the process by which each technology’s possibilities were first recognized, tested, then used, or not used, to best advantage” (2). Aside from the specific technologies, the book also considers the effects of human factors such as prior established practice, politics, and policy. The goal was to divine any principles that governed the process and determine whether those principles applied across platforms, technologies, and nations. The authors also wanted to know whether any identified principles led to victory irrespective of the time in history or the specific technology pursued. This would help answer the question of whether those principles were generalizable enough to apply developing technology today.

A theme that runs throughout the book is the idea of network effects. One radio is a novelty. Many radios in a network allow rapid communications for a variety of tasks and common understanding of the situation. Other technologies are similar. For instance, many radio direction-finding antennas provide more accurate locations and greater resilience against damage. Many mines are far more effective in constraining ship movement than a few that can be avoided. If Germany had fielded 50 more submarines when World War II began, the outcome may have been quite different. The limited application of technology produces a small effect, but massive proliferation produces a great effect. Vincent P. O’Hara is the author or co-author of more than 10 books, mainly on topics of World War I and II naval warfare. In this latest book, Innovating Victory: Naval Technology in Three Wars, O’Hara has teamed up with Leonard Heinz, an experienced designer of wargames and simulations with emphasis on tactical naval problems. The authors use their expertise to explore six case studies that analyze technological developments in the twentieth century. Obviously, radio, radar, and aircraft are not technological developments exclusive to naval warfare so the authors found it necessary to discuss the development of these key innovations in broader terms that included the development of land-based systems. Those cases readily showed the complications that arose from politics, interservice rivalry, national competition, and policy decisions—particularly on the priority of capital investment. These human factors all contributed equally, or more so, than the science and engineering did in developing these technologies into effective weapon systems. discuss how navies developed doctrine and incorporated ancillary technologies to improve the core technology’s effectiveness. The dreadnought battleship provides an example of how combat experience can confound expectations. The dreadnought battleship was, in 1914, the alpha naval technology upon which victory at sea was supposed to depend. In the event, the technology produced results far different than those envisioned by politicians, admiralties, and the public: dominance without decisive victory for the British, and the seedbeds of revolution for the Russians, Germans, and Austro-Hungarians. Within forty years of its 1906 introduction, the dreadnought battleship had been supplanted. The last few heavily modified examples of the type are thirty years out of service while submarines and aircraft carriers dominate the seas of the twenty-first century. Why was the dreadnought superseded? Because it no longer had a use that justified its cost.Identifiers: LCCN 2021052331 (print) | LCCN 2021052332 (ebook) | ISBN 9781682477328 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781682477335 (epub) A goal of this book was to set forth the principles that govern the successful development, introduction and use of naval technology. It concludes in this context that: