This is not exactly convincing. Battleships, far from being a ridiculous idea, were a logical and necessary step for any navy wishing to project power at sea. They were so heavily armoured and gunned that for a long time, from the late 19th Century to just before WWII, the only realistic defence against a battleship was another battleship.
While the Battle of Jutland may seem silly, the alternative would have been a bunch of smaller ships duking it out (probably for a similar result) or only one side possessing battleships and annihilating the other side.
Manoeuvre warfare with a lighter fleet was not an option, as smaller vessels had smaller guns that frequently could not even penetrate a battleship's armour. So a battleship would've been able to pick off opponents at ease while they struggled to cause any damage. It's no good getting inside your opponent's OODA loop if you can't cause any damage.
And the technology that would have permitted another nation to bypass the idea of a battleship altogether and attack it from a different angle just did not exist at the time. It was only decades after Jutland that naval aircraft and aircraft carriers became fast and advanced enough to make the aerial bombing and torpedoing of enemy vessels a real possibility. These days missiles are the great equalisers.
Manoeuvre warfare is fantastically effective when the circumstances allow for it, but the available conditions, technology and personnel can sometimes make it ineffective. For instance, the German Blitzkrieg was extraordinarily effective against the static French defences in 1940, but the same forces and tactics came unstuck in 1941 when faced with a vicious winter and the Russian scorched earth style of defence.
With reference to the hacker context, the lesson is that simply moving quickly isn't enough. You also need to understand what a competitor's real weaknesses are as well as understand which parts of their strengths you're incapable of attacking. If your enemy has battleships and all you have are frigates, then maybe you shouldn't be fighting them at sea.
And the author overlooks the long, long history of bigger ships with bigger guns bringing victory to European forces.
In the Battle of Lepanto the Christian alliance was able to use big ships with cannons mounted on them to crush the Ottoman force before the Ottoman's flanking force was able to get in position.
In the European expansion into the Indian Ocean large boats with big guns were able to easily defeat hordes of smaller, lighter ships that they faced letting the Portuguese, then the Dutch and English take control of some of the most valuable trade lanes in the world.
In the Opium War the British were able to easily win because of big guns that could out-range anything the Chinese had and fast steam engines that let them set the pace of engagement.
And if things at Jutland had gone just a little bit differently it might have been the Germans who had won the war.
"Manoeuvre warfare is fantastically effective when the circumstances allow for it, but the available conditions, technology and personnel can sometimes make it ineffective. For instance, the German Blitzkrieg was extraordinarily effective against the static French defences in 1940, but the same forces and tactics came unstuck in 1941 when faced with a vicious winter and the Russian scorched earth style of defence."
Nah, the reason it came unstuck is because the Germans ran out of fuel and because overrunning Stalingrad became a point of pride with Hitler and the Wermacht...there were not tactical/strategic reasons to occupy the city when they could have encircled and passed.
Encirclement and passage was one of the lessons the American military learned (sort of) from Stalingard that they later executed in the island hopping campaigns of the Pacific. Rather than invading every island, they just bypassed those without strategic value, cut the shipping lanes, and let the occupying forces starve.
Not just running out of fuel but general supply line issues.
Blitzkrieg (around which the German forces had been designed) was predicated on the assumption that you could quickly overrun a territory before the defenders could react to it. Which works fine in Poland and, to a degree, France (though that was partly due to some interesting internal politics in France at the time) but where's the first defensible border you could run to and hold in Russia? The Urals. Waaaaaaay too far to go. Even if you're starting from Konigsberg (as was then) and aiming at Moscow, that's still further than the whole width of France.
Germany was faced with supply lines that grew too long and a front that rapidly fanned out and thinned their forces. They ended up moving supplies by rail but had to lay their own rails as they went because the pre-existing Russian lines didn't match what they had and could feed from Germany. They needed supplies at such a rate that they couldn't afford the track time of sending cars back, so cars were abandoned at the front instead. The supply lines just became too long to service.
Then partisan campaigns started breaking out in captured territory requiring manpower to keep that land placid enough to support the front. Yet more supply issues.
Then.... winter came. German troops were faced with weather so cold that when they were fed soup it froze on their spoons before they could get it into their mouths. Yet Russian troops would hide in the snow all day and come out to attack by night. No doubt helped by convict armies which had regular army guns trained on them from behind and were under no illusions that returning in any condition to still fight would have them shot by their own side.
I don't believe there's been a single successful western land invasion of Russia since the Vikings. The country has demonstrated itself well able to simply absorb and tire out attackers by going back into the ample available space, safe in the knowledge that if they could somehow overcome the horrendous logistical challenges, they'd be so weak by the time winter came that it woudln't matter anyway. A brutal strategy, but apparently effective.
I have heard this kind of storytelling before, where the outcome of the WW2 is attributed to the failure of the German army on the eastern front and the discussion is focused on finding factors for that failure.
However such a storytelling tends to discard or fade the importance of Russian endevaours, ingeniuity and sacrifice. Another kind of storytelling would focus in finding factors which made Russia the ultimate victor. Such a discussion would prove far more interesting in my opinion. Then one could touch on questions such as how to withstand a strong inital attack, regroup, learn from your enemy and prevail.
Russia's success hinged on two things: their massive geographic advantages and the use of scorched earth tactics.
I don't want to minimize the fact that Russia bore a lot of casualties (more than any other country) in the process of defeating the Germans and pushing east, but frankly most wars are won and lost by the factors that existed before the first shot is fired, including population, logistics, and geography. If Stalin had done a better job, maybe Russia wouldn't have suffered so many casualties; if Hitler had done a better job, maybe they would have suffered even more. But there's no way Germany could have actually won, just as there's no way the South could have actually won the American Civil War.
Yes. The last chance for the Germans to win was in the first world war. And that would have been only by keeping Britain and America out of the war, and minimizing involvement with France.
The South certainly couldn't have won the Civil War in the sense of invading and subduing the North. I think odds are good they could have "won" a political victory, in the sense of dragging the conflict out with superior generalship (which they had) until people in the North got tired enough of it and the North simply gave up and recognized the Confederacy, which was all they really wanted in the first place.
It's one thing to concede defeat and peacefully coexist with a tiny country in southeast Asia. That's not a hard sell, politically. A country that represents half of your former territory, borders your capital and has a very long border with you, and has a history of warfare against you is not so easy.
The South had enough of an industrial base to sustain a 1:1 kill ratio for years. Their mistake was to provoke a hot war instead of a cold war, causing most of their capacity to be diverted to fighting, instead of to industrial build-up and R&D. The time was ripe to replace slavery with automation, and instead they blew it all on a swinging dick attack on Fort Sumter.
The time was ripe to replace slavery with automation
Remember the Jevons paradox--any technological advance that increases the efficiency a given good can be utilized (including labor) results in an increase in the demand for that good. This is why slavery was even around back then--it was on its last legs until the cotton gin made it profitable again.
> Their mistake was to provoke a hot war instead of a cold war
True, except I'd replace 'cold war' with 'continued legislative compromise'; the North was damnably willing to compromise with the South, allowing them to get much of what they wanted with rather little sacrifice. There was, in fact, a compromise in the works when the South attacked Fort Sumter and, from a larger perspective, a lot of 19th Century American politics prior to the Civil War was an increasingly desperate dance done by the North to placate the South to prevent the inevitable war.
> The time was ripe to replace slavery with automation
Read the Cornerstone Speech, given by the Vice President of the CSA. It lays out the reasons they wanted to secede and slavery was foremost among them. Slavery, by that point, wasn't just an economic engine, it was a cultural imperative. Preserving slavery was so ingrained in the Southern mindset that I feel fairly certain the plantation owners would have gone through a certain amount of economic dislocation if that meant keeping the slaves and the social system built on slaves.
Besides, even if you're right, the CSA still would never have allowed former slaves equal rights. Not without a race war that successfully toppled the post-slavery CSA establishment by force of arms. In the real world, it took the direct threat of Federal force of arms to ensure the reality of Civil Rights in the South nearly a century after the Civil War. (Admittedly, this is at least partially because Reconstruction didn't go on long enough or go nearly far enough.)
> Besides, even if you're right, the CSA still would never have allowed former slaves equal rights.
Was the civil war a better outcome? After the war former slaves were still agricultural workers, working long days in the fields. Only now they faced random violence and Jim Crow laws. Lynchings occurred well into the 20th century. Oh and the cost of the civil war was 600,000 lives, unbelievable destruction and a complete abandonment of all of the principles this nation was founded on(self-determination).
> Not without a race war that successfully toppled the post-slavery CSA
Why not? It almost happened before the invention of the cotton gin. Slavery was in serious decline.
> After the war former slaves were still agricultural workers, working long days in the fields. Only now they faced random violence and Jim Crow laws.
This happened because Reconstruction was stopped too early. There was a period, from 1865 to 1876, where blacks were in state-level political office across the South, there were no Jim Crow laws, and the Klan was killed off by focused Federal action.
Secondly, slavery was horrible. Slavery involved much of what went on in the Jim Crow era, plus it meant a slave's life to try to escape the South. The Jim Crow South never managed to track down and forcibly return all the blacks who escaped to Detroit or Harlen.
> complete abandonment of all of the principles this nation was founded on(self-determination).
No. No. No. No. We fought this war and as it turns out, self-determination has to include everyone, not just the people lucky enough to be born rich and white. Read the Cornerstone Speech if you still doubt the primary cause of the Civil War was the CSA's insane determination to hold on to slavery.
> It almost happened before the invention of the cotton gin. Slavery was in serious decline.
If it's the CSA doing the inventing, there would have been another invention that saved slavery. And another. And so on. (After all, can't slaves work in assembly lines?)
Just so you know, I imagined you yelling this and slamming your shoe on the table.
> We fought this war and as it turns out, self-determination has to include everyone
What about the first civil war? The one between Great Britain and its american colonies? At the time the colonies had slavery and GB eliminated the slave trade in 1807 and all slavery in 1833. Why were the slave-holding american colonies justified in rebelling in 1775 but a different group of slave-holding americans not justified in rebelling in 1861? Was that self-determination for all?
How did the Second Civil war ensure self-determination for everyone? The fact is that it did not. Many blacks in the south were denied the right to vote for decades through a variety of tactics including literacy/law tests and threats of outright violence.
> After all, can't slaves work in assembly lines?
It's way cheaper to employ people for industrial work than it is to enslave them. Slaves are expensive and are a major capital investment, with significant risk of loss if they become injured or killed on the job. With employees you just replace them when they cannot work and you do not have to invest capital in buying them.
If you believe that the US invaded the south to free the slaves, the only reasonable conclusion is that they failed, at an enormous cost of lives, liberty, and property.
"Preserving slavery was so ingrained in the Southern mindset that I feel fairly certain the plantation owners would have gone through a certain amount of economic dislocation if that meant keeping the slaves and the social system built on slaves."
Yes, and that's OK. Free men with tractors were about to tear out the foundations of slavery. We know that slavery was economically infeasible by 1920, and that's with a decade or two of lost progress due to War losses. With a balls-out effort for industrial independence, that could probably have been accelerated to 1890.
That didn't happen because the abolitionists decided that it was better to kill one man today than to free two men tomorrow, and because the CSA let the abolitionists choose the terms of the conflict.
"Besides, even if you're right, the CSA still would never have allowed former slaves equal rights."
And that's OK too. In a Christian nation, the master is responsible for his estate's dependents, even if there is no use for them. After farm automation, most plantation owners would have freed them in desperation to escape the room and board costs. (In short order there would have been nothing left but lifestyle slaveholders and the obscenely rich, and the Southern abolitionists would have taken care of them.)
"Admittedly, this is at least partially because Reconstruction didn't go on long enough or go nearly far enough."
It has been argued that Reconstruction had to wait for the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, which diverted vast amounts of resources into Southern industrialization.
> Free men with tractors were about to tear out the foundations of slavery.
Slaves can build tractors.
> We know that slavery was economically infeasible by 1920
This was a generation after it was abolished and the South had had to do something else. It's my contention that had the South been able to hang on to slavery, it would have found ways to work it into niches it never filled in the real world. Assembly line labor, for example, or mining, or fishing.
> the CSA let the abolitionists choose the terms of the conflict.
The abolitionists, by and large, thought they could win enough seats in Congress to outlaw slavery if they could prevent slavery from expanding into the new Western territories. That's why such expansion was the main topic of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and why Bloody Kansas was so bloody, and so on. There were certainly militant abolitionists, but they were the minority; the CSA chose its own war.
> In a Christian nation, the master is responsible for his estate's dependents, even if there is no use for them.
In a Christian nation, slavery either doesn't exist or is infinitely gentler than what actually occurred.
> After farm automation, most plantation owners would have freed them in desperation to escape the room and board costs.
Farm automation means machinery, and slaves can make machinery. Maybe that would involve plantations being turned into factories, but it isn't a slam-dunk that it would involve freeing slaves.
> It has been argued that Reconstruction had to wait for the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, which diverted vast amounts of resources into Southern industrialization.
I doubt they can do it well. Machinery is hard enough for enthusiastic people who are being showered in money.
> It's my contention that had the South been able to hang on to slavery, it would have found ways to work it into niches it never filled in the real world.
Perhaps. My experience is that skilled industrial jobs are hard. Even in the time of Henry Ford, high wages had to be paid to attract good enough people. If slaves could get the job done, then auto workers at minimum wage could do it, which seems absurd to me.
> In a Christian nation, slavery either doesn't exist or is infinitely gentler than what actually occurred.
Southern slaves were not treated nicely (slavery, duh), but they were treated well in comparison to many other examples of slavery. Elderly, worn-out slaves were a reasonably common sight, despite the fact that their economic output was near zero. Slaves were given the very important job of child care (creating the Southern accent in the process), which is not a job given to a sullen, mistreated drudge. Compare this to the Arabs, who use slaves completely up and plow the bodies under as fertilizer. (See Dubai for a modern example.)
> This is an interesting idea. Who argues that?
TVA, Oak Ridge, Huntsville, and so forth. Huge amounts of resources were poured into creating technology projects from scratch. By the time of Apollo, Southern senators were good at bringing home the money and economic development.
I'm not at all saying the Russian army didn't do a very good job in the end; rather, being willing and able both to retreat nearly 1,000 miles from your starting position while more than doubling the width of your front line - and still retaining essentially undiminished capacity to fight and supply the campaign - gives you an enormous advantage.
> being willing and able both to retreat nearly 1,000 miles from your starting position
The Russian army did not do this in WWII -- the Russian army that faced the Germans at the border was entirely annihilated. Those who didn't die at the front mostly died in German POV camps. The Russians won the war because they had the manpower and industrial capacity to raise entire new armies to fight the Germans at a rate faster than the Germans could destroy them.
I don't see that anyone is discarding or fading the role of the Russian military, but without General Winter (a coin termed by the Russians) the outcome would have been different.
> I don't believe there's been a single successful western land invasion of Russia since the Vikings.
Not considering the first World War as a successful invasion seems rather unfair. After all, Russia did get knocked out of the war and ceded huge tracts of land.
> Encirclement and passage was one of the lessons the American military learned (sort of) from Stalingard that they later executed in the island hopping campaigns of the Pacific.
I was just reading Machiavelli's "Discourses on Livy" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourses_on_Livy) last night, more exactly a chapter called "Fortresses are generally more injurious than useful":
> But when the prince has not a good army, then fortresses whether within his territory or upon the frontiers are either injurious or useless to him; injurious, because they are easily lost, and when lost are turned against him; and even if they are so strong that the enemy cannot take them, he will march by with his army and leave them in the rear; and thus they are of no benefit, for good armies, unless opposed by equally powerful ones, march into the enemy’s country regardless of cities or fortresses, which they leave in their rear. We have many instances of this in ancient history; and Francesco Maria did the same thing quite recently, when, marching to attack Urbino, he left ten hostile cities behind him without paying the least attention to them.
You can very well replace "fortress" with "battleship" and the idea is the same.
Anyway, I highly recommend the book, and you're mentioning somth about the US Army learning from the Germans' mistakes. Well, I can tell you that they certainly did not learn anything from reading Machiavelli, otherwise they wouldn't have trusted Karzai in Afghanistan (there's a chapter called "How dangerous it is to trust to the representations of exiles"), not to mention trying to conquer peace by bribing everyone involved in ruling present Afghanistan (there's also a chapter for it: "Republics and princes that are really powerful do not purchase alliances by money, but by their valor and the reputation of their armies") or not doing anything about Abu Ghraib ("How dangerous it is for a republic or a prince not to avenge a public or a private injury").
> You can very well replace "fortress" with "battleship" and the idea is the same.
No, you can't, because the battleship can move and attack your supply lines.
Battleships won the first world war. Not because of any engagement they participated in, but because the Royal Navy stopped German merchant shipping entirely, while the Kriegsmarine only managed to harass British shipping. You cannot go around a battleship when one of the primary points in it's design is to be fast enough to interdict anyone.
A strong defensive emplacement (such as a fortress) provides some advantages, even to a mobile army. If your opponent chooses not to attack it, he has granted you the initiative -- you can move your forces out to attack his at the time of your choosing.
Of course, a battleship, being mobile, does not suffer from the disadvantage of being easy for your opponent to bypass. And a battleship, carrying a stupidly large armament, has the advantage of being able to blow up lots of your opponent's stuff. Its primary disadvantage is its expense, which is why you don't see fleets consisting of only battleships.
That's a fair point, the pointless focus on Stalingrad was folly and a big contributor to the defeat. But the lack of preparedness for the Russian winter (and the impact it would have on the speed of movement) and the inability to capture supplies as they captured terrain both played big roles as well.
Ok come on, there was no need for them to go to war with Russia AT ALL, if Hitler had focused on Britain and waited until the West was completely defeated (a few years at the most), he would not have lost. Russia divided the Germans in a way that was unnecessary.
Britain had the naval and air power to hold off Germany. Russia had sprawling territory and the winter; Britain had the English Channel. Germany would have been better served to win the North Africa campaign; that might have actually left Germany with a defensible position.
On the other hand, the entire purpose of the Nazi regime was to conquer eastern Europe, enslave or exterminate its population, and resettle Germans there. Victory required a successful invasion of Russia.
Point of order: In retrospect we can clearly see that the RAF was losing the Battle of Britain. It was within weeks of being completely eliminated by the Luftwaffe, when Hitler, quite unexpectedly for the British, switched to a strategic bombing campaign of major population and industrial centres. If the Luftwaffe had air supremacy, then naval supremacy and invasion would have followed. Invasion would have left very few credible options for any D-Day like operations.
The United states was already giving overt aid to Britain at that point. Had RAF lost and the German invasion of Britain seemed realistic, the USAF would have joined in to prevent that. While it would have taken only weeks to end the RAF, Germany didn't have the shipping capacity to maintain an invasion, and it would have taken months to build.
Also, few considered air power to be actually capable of fighting battleships until the Battle of Taranto, where the effectiveness of air raids surprised almost everyone. The German planners almost certainly didn't believe in the capability of Luftwaffe to destroy the Royal Navy.
The US Navy was actively fighting the Kriegsmarine on the North Atlantic as early as late 1940, and even before that, US had started providing armaments to bolster the British war effort, and took over the defense of various British holdings to free up forces. They also provided entire cohesive units of equipped volunteers to fight against the Germans on the British Isles, and the Japanese in China. None of these actions were neutral under international law -- the United States was in a state of undeclared war against the axis powers for nearly two years before Pearl Harbor. This all can be found in any reasonably comprehensive history of the second world war, including the wikipedia articles on the Atlantic War and the Sino-Japanese war.
The reason USA didn't join outright was that there was serious domestic opposition to the war, and Roosevelt understood well that he needed his Lusitania to be able to bring America fully into the war. The Germans took all pains to avoid this, and USA only managed to declare war after the Pearl Harbor.
In reality, history rarely contains black-and-white narratives where the one side is the clear aggressor. Had the USA not been actively engaging in combat operations against the Germans and the Japanese, they never would have been stupid enough to pick a fight with the Americans.
Exactly. From where could the USAF operated? I agree that the Americans would liked to have helped resist an invasion but at that time I don't think they would have had the required platform.
> Britain had the naval and air power to hold off Germany. Russia had sprawling territory and the winter; Britain had the English Channel. Germany would have been better served to win the North Africa campaign; that might have actually left Germany with a defensible position.
I firmly believe that the only possible route to German victory would have been capture of Gibraltar soon after the French campaign. German industries sorely needed raw materials, and it's war machine sorely needed oil. The Mediterranean could have provided both, and all the Germans needed to completely secure it would have been the Rock and Suez.
Was the capture of Gibraltar in any way realistic? With Franco joining on the German side, perhaps. The Germans had siege cannons that should have been able to reduce the foundations that Gibraltar stands on into rubble. But Franco had already won his war -- he had little to gain from joining, and a lot to lose.
Without an axis Spain, taking the Rock would essentially have required first attacking Spain. And they had a large, experienced and well-trained army, which would have had good defensive positions on the Pyrenees. I don't know.
The entire Rock of Gibraltar was turned into a fortress during the war. The civilian population was evacuated, and additional tunnels and artillery placed in the rock. I am not sure that the German siege weapons could have reduced a block of granite into rubble.
With sufficient heavy artillery, while you might not be able to breach into the fortifications, you can certainly mess it up enough to stop it from shooting back.
It would not have been necessary to actually take Gibraltar -- only to silence it's guns, and place enough artillery west of it to block the strait.
Yes, if they had taken North Africa, then swept up through the Middle East they would have endless oil, and then it could have been a short hop into Russia from the South.
Encirclement was by no means discovered at Stalingrad! The Germans themselves created plenty of kessels in '39-'43. And the classical example is, of course, Hannibal's strategy at Cannae.
> They were so heavily armoured and gunned that for a long time, from the late 19th Century to just before WWII, the only realistic defence against a battleship was another battleship.
German U-Boats demonstrated battleship's obsolescence during very early WWI (U-9 sank 3 battleships in under an hour in September 1914...), and this was confirmed in the early 20s with aerial torpedoing (which Admiral Percy Scott had predicted would end battleships in 1914).
The only thing which let battleships "survive" into the 40s were navy brass conservatism and inertia, and the lack of military conflicts.
Yes, submarines managed to sink a few battleships when they had the element of surprise on their side. As soon as anti-submarine tactics adapted, the battleships were again reasonable safe against torpedo delivery systems. (Even in the 1890s, battleships had been vulnerable to torpedo boats, a challenge surmounted by the adoption of secondary, quick-firing armament.) It was only with the arrival of strong naval aviation that battleships lost their supremacy.
Battleships, far from being a ridiculous idea, were a logical and necessary step for any navy wishing to project power at sea. They were so heavily armoured and gunned that for a long time, from the late 19th Century to just before WWII, the only realistic defence against a battleship was another battleship.
Or, playing the "wolf card" amidst the fog of war and a resourcefully laid smokescreen with a bunch of smaller ships. (Causing the enemy commander to think, "They must have larger ships back there." This was destroyers vs. cruisers, not battleships, though.)
I suspect that the future belongs to drones. Autonomous Air Independent Propulsion submersible drones would be far less expensive than an aircraft carrier, but very likely to be able to lie in wait for a carrier and torpedo it.
EDIT: Correction -- one could actually say those American destroyers engaged the Yamato, which was the biggest, baddest battleship ever.
Not just drones, but -swarms- of drones. I make that point because its important to differentiate between what could be massive, battleship (or, likely, crusier) sized drones, and collections of very small drones.
There's reasons this makes sense, even in the context of a fight against battleships (please assume similar technical capability, since a WWII Battleship would likely not fair well against a 2020 drone swarm..) A battleship, even a big automated one, has a series of weak points, such as sensors, removal of which can cripple the ship, and a swarm doesn't lose effectiveness at a blast from heavy weaponry...it may get a hole punched through it, and have only a few drones taken out...
You've actually got a really good idea. The author touches on it VERY briefly when he says "If the nations of the world had the equivalent cost invested in submarines or destroyers, maybe the same thing would have happened.", but I get the feeling that that is more lip service than him providing (what he thinks is) a legitimate counterpoint.
"in their heyday of displacement speed vessels, [battleships] were the fastest things on the high seas"
Cruisers and destroyers were always faster than battleships (they had to be), displacement hull and all. It gives no confidence when you start the article with a glaring factual error.
"The idea of battleships duking it out in the high seas is pretty ridiculous when you stop to think about it. It never really happened unless you count the Battle of Jutland."
If you write such an article, you should do a bit of research and be at least dimly aware of the battles of Tsushima, Heligoland Bight, Moon Sound etc. etc. etc. Battleships were indeed a bit slower, but when they showed up they instantly dominated the field with their range and firepower. Even in WW2, when the carrier greatly reduced their importance, battleships fought a few very important engagements, e.g. Denmark Strait and second battle of Guadalcanal.
It's easy to deride things you don't understand as "tumescent penii". But the historical fact is, for about half a century after 1890, battleships were indeed the most effective (and also expensive) naval weapons system in existence.
Actually a pretty good article, despite the inaccuracies noted here in other comments. The author uses some hyperbole and makes some errors, but still an interesting discussion regarding phalanx vs. maneuver warfare.
While we're picking on individual parts, though -
> For missile silos, just target the enemy’s silos with lots of missiles and you can duke it out and win (just like the phalanx). If he puts his missiles on rail cars, you haven’t got a chance of hitting them all.
Technically that's true, but I think the reason countries use missile silos and stationary bases is actually for ability to protect key installations and arms during domestic unrest and rioting, which is a statistically much more likely problem for a world power than getting hit with a first strike from another major world power without any warning or preparation time.
Still, even with some errors and exaggerations, it was quite an interesting read.
He misses the point entirely with missile silos. The backbone of the modern nuclear arsenal is the ballistic missile submarine. Far more mobile and far harder a target than any railborn missile.
Subs aren't necessarily such a hugely expensive option though. A single typhoon or ohio class missile boat can carry up to about 200 total warheads. That's on the order of the entire nuclear arsenal for the average nuclear power (e.g. France, China, Israel, India). Considering the massive survivability boost of a submarine, it's one of the better bets as a nuclear deterrent backbone, provided you have the technology to build such things.
It sort of depends on the latest and greatest technology to be stealthy. For example, China, by putting all of its warheads in 2 or 3 subs would be putting all of its eggs in one basket. Those subs becomes the weakest link.
US probably has the capability to track other countries' subs, but it is a little harder to do that with hundreds of always moving launch platorms. Those are much cheaper to build and if they carry MIRV warheads, they can be very dangerous. It is of course possible to see them from a satellite but because they are always moving targetting them like one target a stationary silo is very different.
> I think the reason countries use missile silos and stationary bases is actually for ability to protect key installations and arms during domestic unrest and rioting, which is a statistically much more likely problem for a world power than getting hit with a first strike from another major world power...
You are very mistaken. The only reason domestic unrest is a more likely danger for a world power is because the country we are speaking of already has missile silos and stationary bases in the first place. Ownership of missile silos with nuclear warheads reduces chances of attack by a foreign power by such a huge amount that domestic unrest becomes a more realistic threat.
> You are mistaken. The only reason domestic unrest is a more likely danger for a world power is because the country we are speaking of already has missile silos and stationary bases in the first place.
Actually, I think you're mistaken, but let's think this through -
There's 200 countries in the world, roughly. Call the current world powers America, China, UK, Russia, and maybe a couple other European countries.
In any given year, there's a lot more chance of any given country having a riot/unrest than there is an attack by America, China, UK, or Russia. Like, much higher. And usually, there's considerable advance warning before attacks so you could prepare.
If you like, you can add in places with a decent mix of either high troop strength or very technologically advanced military - even adding in places like North Korea, Iraq before losing its various recent wars, and Israel doesn't seem to change the numbers that much. The chance of serious unrest in any given country in the world is much higher than the chance of attack by a militarily powerful nation.
We could check actual numbers if this isn't convincing, but the number of domestic insurrections every year are much higher than attacks by a major world power. And also, those usually come with more telegraphing beforehand than domestic unrest does.
You didn't take even a minute to think through before writing.
> And usually, there's considerable advance warning before attacks so you could prepare.
The key word is "usually". How usually is usually? When Nazis attacked the USSR, was there an advance warning? There was none. True, major attacks are rare, but when they do come, I would say about 50% of them are without warning. Yes, they are usually preceded by some diplomatic hostility, but not always. There were some 45 years of diplomatic hostility between the US and the USSR, yet there was no attack.
But the biggest thing you are missing is this: attacks on a major power by another major power are rare precisely because the country being attacked is a major power. Attacks of a major power on a minor country happen about every five years or so if recent history is any guide.
I'm not even sure what you guys are arguing about (though from a casual scan it appears to be something to do with the security of nuclear arms, and relative risk of those arms being compromised in a domestic uprising, versus destroyed by a foreign power) - but on HN, we have a tradition of civil discussion, so the comment, ""You didn't take even a minute to think through before writing."" is inappropriate here.
You may have a delightfully convincing and logical treatise on this topic, but if you lose your audience in the first sentence, we won't get the benefit of it.
A casual scan of the parent's commentary indicates some semblance of cognitive analysis of the issues at hand, so it's not even clear to me your analysis of their (lack of) thinking before exposition is accurate, and, regardless, you could have worded your position somewhat more politely - perhaps by identifying the flaws in their logic, rather than making a claim of lack of thought on their part.
A civil apology would go a long ways towards recovering traction in your discussion with them and convincing the readers of this thread of your good will.
"When Nazis attacked the USSR, was there an advance warning?"
Stalin had plenty of advance warning - there were even people defecting from the German ranks and telling them that the Germans were coming (they were probably shot for their troubles).
Even after the invasion started Stalin refused to believe the reports coming from frontline units for a long time after the invasion started.
>You didn't take even a minute to think through before writing.
Side note from the referee: writing is a form of thinking things through, and even if it isn't you're distracting from the issue. 5 yard deduction and 2 minutes in the penalty box, plus parent gets a free shot.
They all have their advantages and disadvantages and strategic uses. Taken together they are a complete package of nuclear strike capabilities. Nothing about it is obsolete as the author suggests.
Battleships also are hardly obsolete and also have advantages and disadvantages. For instance, when the Missouri class battleships were retired in the 90's, it was met with a great deal of opposition by the marines. No other weapon in the military arsenal could provide beach bombardment like the battleship; and certainly not for the low cost. The marines were promised a replacement - they are still waiting.
I think missile silos are stationary is pretty easy to understand. They're easier to guard and if you look at when they were built rather than their current functional use (its debatable if there is one when looking at SLBM and B-52/B-2 dropped nuclear weapons). In the 1950s, when ICBM projects began, the threat was not thermonuclear weapons, but fission weapons. It was thought that the silos might survive a direct/indirect attack on a facility.
After the advent of the hydrogen bomb, no harden target can really be called safe. Coupled with modern military GPS and you have a super-precise, super-powerful weapon.
The silo parks in USA are still nuke-proof. Because they are far enough apart that you can't get more than one per hit, and it has to be a low or groundburst, but close enough together that the first hit causes a cloud of dust that the subsequent missiles would have to go through to hit their targets. And a nuclear warhead in re-entry has no chance of surviving hitting that dust cloud.
This means that the silos are protecting each other -- you'd need to wait hours between hits to be able to land nukes on all of them. (Or hit them all within the minute.)
So why the need for launch on warning? If you are confident that your missiles are going to be safe from a first strike you could sit there and take the damage.
What you describe sounds more like Dense Pack - which I don't think was ever implemented:
I'm not sure what you mean by this. "Real-world data show that some high-quality GPS SPS receivers currently attain better than 3 meter horizontal position accuracy" [1], and military GPS is even more accurate.
Umm, that back in the time the missile silos were planned, there was no GPS? That combined with the relatively low-yield warheads meant that hardened silos were a viable weapon - they were likely to survive a first-strike.
Big warships could accomodate bigger cannons. Bigger cannons could deliver bigger shells further, enabling your warships to hit the enemy while keeping out of their range.
These capital ships aren't being built today because missiles and fighter planes suddenly negated their advantage, not because they weren't a good idea to begin with.
IMHO it's an overwhelming act of condescension pretending to be smarter than thousands of admirals and military advisors, many of them with lots of real world experience fighting wars and stuff.
> IMHO it's an overwhelming act of condescension pretending to be smarter than thousands of admirals and military advisors, many of them with lots of real world experience fighting wars and stuff.
I thought the same thing, but then I remembered that the military leadership and tactics during The Great War were pretty damn lousy (e.g. trench warfare). For some reason it seems like it's surprisingly common for wide varieties of armies to repeat history.
then I remembered that the military leadership and tactics during The Great War were pretty damn lousy (e.g. trench warfare)
What's so lousy about trench warfare? I mean, yes, it sucks, but it's a Nash equilibrium given the technology at the time (very good machine guns, lousy tanks and aircraft). If your enemy has trenches, you need trenches too. What else would you have done?
Oh, you could have stayed in the trenches---but don't order any attacks. Just wait for your enemies to be dumb enough to attack first. Just bleed them dry with defence.
(I heard that the Belgian king was held in high esteem by the normal Belgians for not ordering those suicidal attacks.)
But then when they don't attack you have 2 armies sitting and waiting until the supplies run out (assuming the other learns you are not going to attack back). So when one realizes they will run out first, or another army is coming to cut their lines, or the city behind them is starving, or one side drops mustard gas into the other trench ... what do you do?
It wasn't a symmetric situation though. The Germans generally held better ground because they were the ones who initially made the decision to entrench after First Marne. They chose the best defensive positions they could find, and the French and British had to make do (although I guess there would have been exceptions, such as the Verdun sector). Politically, the French and British couldn't just sit there and do nothing or sue for peace because they had a vast enemy army encamped on their territory -- what terms do you think the Germans would have imposed when they were clearly at the advantage? Under these circumstances they had to launch offensives, and given that they were at war and in stalemate, this was not a mad decision although it seems like it to us a hundred years on. The real madness was in letting the war happen in the first place, and the real tragedy was the criminally slow pace at which the general staff on both sides learned the errors of their pre-war doctrines.
Yes, peace would be the best outcome, but there is probably some overarching reason for the war that won't be solved by two armies deciding not to fight for tactical reasons.
I don't think it's necessarily condescension to second guess decisions made 100 years ago. I can think of plenty of examples of clearly horrible decisions agreed upon by the consensus of elite thinkers 100, 50, 20, 10, or 5 years ago...
Big warships could accomodate bigger cannons. Bigger cannons could deliver bigger shells further, enabling your warships to hit the enemy while keeping out of their range.
In hindsight, if the ability to deliver more ordinance a longer distance was the thing, the aircraft carrier should have been a shoo-in.
The relevant part (to us hackers) is the use of maneuver warfare vs "phalanx" fighting.
Think of Msft, Oracle, IBM, Apple as the phalanx fighters. They lock shields and charge, spending millions (billions) of dollars (instead of soldiers).
The problem is their tactics are clumsy. Imagine all the Microsoft VP's circling the wagons around really bad _implementations_ (the ideas aren't bad) - I'm sure you can thing of some.
If you are lean agile Mongol (hacker) you can easily run around them and attack them from the back.
Your OODA loop is much tighter. You can maneuver and decide much better than a big hierarchical organization.
The phalanx was a really bright idea for its day. The Greeks were able to defeat much larger Persian armies (Marathon, Plataea) with their phalanxes. And the phalanx was a crucial part of Philip II and Alexander's combined arms system and their maneuver warfare. "Phalanx" vs. "maneuver warfare" is, at best, a false dichotomy.
Indeed, this was my main issue with the article. As technology has developed, the advantage has switched back and forth from attackers to defenders, and from big heavy stuff to rapid manueverable stuff.
>"The relevant part (to us hackers) is the use of maneuver warfare vs "phalanx" fighting."
As the author points out, the battleship was the fastest thing afloat which makes it more akin to Stonewall Jackson's foot cavalry and the first principal of maneuver doctrine - "get there fastest with the mostest." It is only in hindsight and perhaps anachronistically that one classifies battleships as the phalanx rather than the mongol horde - or perhaps more appropriately Viking Longship. I will add that the scale and costs of aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines dwarf those of the battleship - there is some evidence that pouring money into holes in the water such as the Alpha and Typhoon classes played a significant role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
[edit] All this to point out, that the distinction between maneuver and phalanx isn't always obvious and neither is the choice as a matter of tactics - when the enemy masses on your front, digging in and calling for aircover is may be the preferred alternative - even for highly mobile force.
I've observed a principle that militaries build to win the last total war they fought. This is why guys like Billy Mitchell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell) were ignored about the importance of air power leading up to WWII. The status quo was to gear up for another WWI, complete with entrenched and barely mobile front lines.
But of course the German Blitzkreig, a brilliant archetype of maneuver warfare, overran these emplacements, the fixed system of defense built by the French being the best example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_Line).
The US military has been developed for the last 60 years to re-win World War II; even the Cold War was really just the US and Russia building to re-win WWII until Russia ran out of cash.
As one can see given the issues that the US military has had in Iraq and Afghanistan the WWII methods of battle, which have devolved back to phalanx warfare, are struggling (again) to defeat maneuver warfare.
But it was the Siegfried Line[1] in WWII that let the Germans concentrate their whole army against the Poles and defeat them before turning west, and that let them attack where the French weren't rather than have to defend the current border. So German tactics in WWII were dependant on the same static defenses that the French used, but they took that and added a maneuver component instead of replacing it entirely.
Manuever warfare often relies on a static force to pin the enemy in place while the mobile elements do their thing. Saying "Maneuver good, static bad" is just as silly as the reverse, whats needed for success is to understand the advantages and disadvantages of the various tools available and intelligently choose the right tool or combination of tools for the task at hand.
I was thinking exactly this. As I recall modern tactics call for suppressing fire to pin the enemy down while friendlies maneuver. It would seem that static and maneuver warfare are intertwined. Additionally, I believe the rule of thumb is that it takes five times as many people to capture a position as it does to defend a position. Like many things, there is probably an element of balance here.
The Siegfried Line was made enormously more effective by general malaise in the Western armies (then under French command) though; in spite of being relatively weak and unfinished it went largely untroubled. There were some small incursions into western Germany but they weren't substantial.
What makes this particularly galling is relative strengths of the two armies at the time; the Allied forces in northeastern France had significantly more tanks (for example) available there than the Germany army had in total, let alone defending the western front. It's far from impossible that a serious, concerted attack on western Germany in the 1939-1940 'phoney war' period could have had enough success to significantly alter the course of the war and turn it significantly into a land war in western Germany for much of the period.
Its very true that it wasn't yet as strong as it was designed to be nor was it as strong as the Maginot line. It only had to be enough, though. If Germany's western border had been completely unfortified there would have been no way that the Allies wouldn't have attacked. And even the unfinished wall represented a huge investment for Nazi Germany. If you haven't already I'd recommend reading "The Wages of Destruction" on the economy of Nazi Germany, its a fascinating book for a number of reasons.
I don't know how much I agree with the statement "even the Cold War was really just the US and Russia building to re-win WWII until Russia ran out of cash". Not that it matters for this discussion, because I think its clear that the U.S. military is still trying to design itself for a Cold War scenario, and encountering huge problems when faced with asymmetrical opponents.
I believe the article misses the point that America, through it's complete dominance of the air and seas, has made naval warfare largely irrelevant for 99% of countries - hence their lack of will or desire to build them. The world saw centuries of naval proliferation up to WW2.
I had an interesting conversation with Martin van Creveld not long ago about fighter jets. Since he is one of the more famous military historians out there, he often gets asked for advice by senior defense personnel. Lots of European governments asked him if they should purchase F22s, etc. from the US. His advice, get UAVs, fighters don't matter any more (He just wrote the definitive book on the history of Air Power, btw).
Anyways, no one actually takes his advice. Acquisitions are always busy buying supplies for the last war. Surprise, surprise.
I don't think anyone has pointed this out in a comment yet...
What is better with very expensive but obsolete machinery than to people use their machinery to duke it out. Will things explode and sink "at great cost" ? Well yes, that's sort of the point. It is even more costly to keep them afloat and maintained.
To those who think this is cruel, European powers periodically fought wars with each other for thousands of years before 1914, they just never were quite as catastrophic (enter chemical weapons and, later, nukes). Hell, the Catholic church tried to ban jousting many times since... you guessed it, people frequently died trying to poke each other with sticks for the sake of scarves from pretty ladies.
I don't think that postcard picture is giving a wholly realistic view of the Grand Fleet at the time. It seems like there's twice as many capital ships in the picture as there should be according to the text.
EDIT: Actually, if you click on the picture, the description does mention it's "likely an artist's vision".
The Mongols could defeat regular armies because they had many thousands of men who lived their lives on horseback, with bow in hand. It's not that they were smarter, it's that they had the option.
It's also worth noting that the Mongols were turned back by the Germanic tribes because, well, compound bows simply don't work in damp European forests whereas francesca _do_. Phallanx tactics versus maneuver, as the author has it, is meaningless in the face of the inability or unwillingness to adapt to your environment.
Some guy called Napoleon seemed to know a little bit about maneuver warfare, and he was around before battleships. There was this little thing called the Battle of Austerlitz[1] that the author may be interested to read about.
Napoleon kind of knew what he was doing. His use of position and movement is actually mentioned in the Wikipeda's article on maneuver warfare [2].
He also misrepresents the view of Victor Davis Hanson-- I think he's referring to "Carnage and Culture", which has a much more nuanced (and thus far different) argument.
Any battle tech that's an order-of-magnitude cheaper to kill than to produce is destined for obsolescence. You can see this happening now with main battle tanks, which are easily knocked out by IEDs and increasingly sophisticated man-portable missiles. It will be interesting to see what happens to the manned air superiority fighter over the next couple of decades now that unmanned drones are being deployed on a wide scale.
Few M1s have been destroyed or badly damaged by insurgents in Iraq. Their use has declined since the invasion not because they are too vulnerable, but because they are less useful without enemy tanks to engage and using them against infantry in urban environments risks heavy civilian casualties.
I was thinking less about the conflict in Iraq than the conflict in and around Israel, where small groups of insurgents have over the past decade mounted increasingly sophisticated attacks on Israeli armor in the open. The deterrent factor here is just as important as the ability to blow stuff up.
Probably nothing. Remember that unmanned drones were used in combat in Vietnam. They were quite short ranged of course, and could only be used for one mission: Sidewinders.
except they are extremely expensive and hard to defend. They are great for projecting power against countries that can't defend against them, but extremely ineffective against a remotely comparable force. They are an obvious high priority.
Ever see Independence Day or, more recently, Battle LA? Didn't you find it stupid that once the command ship are destroyed, the enemy essentially dies? This is what aircraft carriers represent.
Take the $23 billion dollars it takes to build the first Gerald R. Ford Carrier and invest that into various decentralized, independent, small technologies, and your army is considerably better for it when it comes to any serious threat.
It's like our military planners never read Ender's Game.
except they are extremely expensive and hard to defend. They are great for projecting power against countries that can't defend against them, but extremely ineffective against a remotely comparable force. They are an obvious high priority
There are 190-odd countries in the world. The US Navy's aircraft carriers are extremely effective against at least 185 of 'em.
All the countries with a "remotely comparable force" also have nuclear weapons, so if the US ever winds up in a full-on shooting war with one of them then it's all over for both sides anyway.
No aircraft carrier has actually been sunk since World War 2. So they can't be that vulnerable.
1000 anti-ship missiles cost far less than an aircraft carrier with crew and aircraft aboard. There are a number of non-nuclear powers with the ability to launch 1000 anti-ship missiles against an American task force.
How would you launch a thousand anti-ship missiles? And how would you get that launch platform within range of a US aircraft carrier?
Bear in mind that anything capable of launching a thouand anti-ship missiles will be one of the things the USAF will destroy within the first few hours of the war.
> How would you launch a thousand anti-ship missiles?
With a hundred small boats
> And how would you get that launch platform within range of a US aircraft carrier?
With civilians on board
> Bear in mind that anything capable of launching a thouand anti-ship missiles will be one of the things the USAF will destroy within the first few hours of the war.
Yep, nothing better to start a war on the right foot than civilian massacre.
Hmm, but a carrier can do a lot of different stuff. It's about nuance. Sometimes you just want to float there quietly on the horizon looking like 90,000 tonnes of badassery while the diplomats do their thing. Didn't Sun Tzu say something about avoiding the need to actually fight whenever possible?
Take the $23 billion dollars it takes to build the first Gerald R. Ford Carrier and invest that into various decentralized, independent, small technologies
A fleet of Sea Shadow type vessels and Air Independent Propulsion submarines combined with a good land-based air force would make life very difficult for carrier battle groups.
This isn't the scale I'm talking about. You don't need a fleet of $500 million USD submarines.
11 US aircraft carriers? 11 missiles. $100+Billion vs $15 Million. 30000 soldiers vs 0.
During the cold war this is the strategy that Russia took - let the US build expensive ships, they build [relatively] cheap missiles. The Chinese are doing the same with the Dong Feng missiles.
One missile won't get through. You don't encounter a carrier by itself--it has a combat air patrol, one or two Aegis cruisers, and two or three Aegis destroyers. Each Aegis system can track 100 targets at a time and launch countermeasures.
However, missiles do scale well. Even 1000 missiles will cost much less than the carrier and will almost certainly take it down.
Yes, but if China also built the fleet, then it would be in a position to project power farther from its shores. If all you wanted to do is keep the carrier group away from your own shore, then capable missiles would suffice.
Carriers of today hold 90 aircraft, 2 RAMs, 3 Phalanxs and 2 Sea Sparrow launchers (specs from Wikipedia page on George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier). I'm pretty sure with all this they can defend themselves pretty well.
China, Russia India and France have stockpile of supersonic cruise missiles. India is mass producing hypersonic cruise missiles, while Russia and the US are prototyping.
In comparison, most of the cruise missiles we hear about (Tomahawk for example) are subsonic (though the US does have a few old supersonic ones).
The effectiveness of missile defense systems isn't 100%. It's hard to shoot something travelling at 3600mph. It takes a lot of power, a lot of accuracy, generates a ton of heat, and a requires dash (or two) of lady luck. The defensive system can be overwhelmed for a fraction of the price.
However, they are extremely expensive to build and keep running, and (perhaps) even more vurnerable than battleships which atleast had armour. And modern silent submarines, for instance those of the Swedish, German, and Norwegian navies reportedly often "sink" modern US and UK carriers in war games.
>nobody wanted to risk their big expensive battleships in such an engagement again
This is his only proof that they're useless? Sorry, I need a lot more than that. Anybody who's played Civilization will know that you keep your battleships safe due to their cost, but they're supremely powerful nonetheless.
"Just as Western Civilization staggered and faded after the fall of Rome, Western Civilization has never really recovered from the shock of the Great War. Cultures which endured and developed over a thousand years were wiped out, never to return again. Western culture, abstract thought and artistic development: nothing important has developed since 1919; we’re still reeling from the shock."
What a load of bollocks. The author hasnt heard of the situationism, dada-ism, Zerzan or Sartre but for sure the western civilization has.
Further on "The Mongols never had the societal organization the West did, so they could never take advantage of their successes, and their various empires only served to make the Russians and Chinese paranoid, and Eastern European women more exotic looking.".
This is also bollocks, the mongols successfully ruled a vast area from China to Europe, the silk road was again revived, you could travel from Poland to Peking and not get robbed. The mongols collected all the taxes from such a vast region, even after Djenghis Khan died, thats some hell of organization right there.
On manuvre warfare, Alexander The Graeat (or as persions like to call him Alexander the Gay) certanly knew about this.
> This is also bollocks, the mongols successfully ruled a vast area from China to Europe, the silk road was again revived, you could travel from Poland to Peking and not get robbed. The mongols collected all the taxes from such a vast region, even after Djenghis Khan died, thats some hell of organization right there.
They successfully ruled.. for a very short period of time even by empire standards, before splitting up into various dynasties and going native and whatnot.
Why did Subutai stop in Eastern Europe, after destroying all opponents and units on par with the best Western Europe could offer, and with every prospect of conquering the Holy Roman Empire and extending the Mongolian empire to the Atlantic? Because Ghengis Khan's successor, Ogedei, had died and the succession process was so ill-defined and chaotic that Subutai had to stop everything and travel a continent back to Mongolia.
Succession and peaceful transfers of power, among other things, was never something the Mongols managed to deal with competently. We can admire them for their military prowess, we can admire individuals like the sinicized Kublai Khan for being good peace-time rulers, but we can't admire them for ruling competently 'from China to Europe' because they didn't.
I don't find this article applicable to hacking at all. Maybe running a business, but I don't follow the necessary relationship between hacking and business.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
If he puts his missiles on rail cars, you haven’t got a chance of hitting them all. So it was, metaphorically, with the actual battlewagon; when it was at the peak of its capabilities, it was overcome by the manoeuvre warfare tactics of the aircraft carrier (which is itself probably made obsolete in real modern warfare by the cruise missile, the internet and the satellite).
Don't forget robots! Man, you think the guided missiles in the first Gulf War were cool? Now we can kill people entirely by electromechanical proxy, staying out of the line of fire and incurring little to no risk ourselves! Man, we're living in the future! What a bunch of pussies we are.
Like Bill Hicks said, why can't we use this technology to shoot food into the mouths of hungry people instead?
While the Battle of Jutland may seem silly, the alternative would have been a bunch of smaller ships duking it out (probably for a similar result) or only one side possessing battleships and annihilating the other side.
Manoeuvre warfare with a lighter fleet was not an option, as smaller vessels had smaller guns that frequently could not even penetrate a battleship's armour. So a battleship would've been able to pick off opponents at ease while they struggled to cause any damage. It's no good getting inside your opponent's OODA loop if you can't cause any damage.
And the technology that would have permitted another nation to bypass the idea of a battleship altogether and attack it from a different angle just did not exist at the time. It was only decades after Jutland that naval aircraft and aircraft carriers became fast and advanced enough to make the aerial bombing and torpedoing of enemy vessels a real possibility. These days missiles are the great equalisers.
Manoeuvre warfare is fantastically effective when the circumstances allow for it, but the available conditions, technology and personnel can sometimes make it ineffective. For instance, the German Blitzkrieg was extraordinarily effective against the static French defences in 1940, but the same forces and tactics came unstuck in 1941 when faced with a vicious winter and the Russian scorched earth style of defence.
With reference to the hacker context, the lesson is that simply moving quickly isn't enough. You also need to understand what a competitor's real weaknesses are as well as understand which parts of their strengths you're incapable of attacking. If your enemy has battleships and all you have are frigates, then maybe you shouldn't be fighting them at sea.