Innovating Victory: Naval Technology in Three Wars

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Technological advantage in warfare is often due to integration and codevelopment with other technologies.

In relation to submarines, it is concluded that: “There is reason to think that they would be even more effective now, given the relative states of submarine and ASW technology. O’Hara is an independent naval historian and the author of thirteen works, including Six Victories: North Africa, Malta, and the Mediterranean Convoy War, November 1941–March 1942, and Clash of Fleets: Naval Battles of the Great War, 1914–18, with Leonard R. It then looks at the way navies discovered and developed the technology’s best use, in many cases overcoming disappointed expectations.

The exploration of a half dozen key naval innovative technologies covers all major navies; no one nation has a corner on innovation.

The authors set themselves a bold purpose, to examine six technologies (two weapons, two tools, and two platforms), chart their influence on naval warfare, and provide "new perspectives and insights" into how technological innovation develops and progresses. Businesses like Firestone, Goodyear, Goodrich, and US Rubber Company, which had all been working on different formulas for synthetic rubber, agreed to share patents and scientific information with one another so that they could help solve the nation’s rubber crisis. In the Second World War the early advances by both the German and Japanese forces also meant that a large proportion of their military assets were diverted to maintain control of captured territory, and were not necessarily available for offensive operations. When considering the title of the book I had expected some discussion of how innovation in certain countries resulted in victory in the wars considered. Naval professionals throughout the long decades of peace leading up to 1914 expended great effort trying to keep pace with the tactical implications of rapidly changing capital ship technology.As Professor Irving Holley wrote in the early 1950s, The greatest stumbling block to the revision of doctrine was probably not so much vested interests as the absence of a system for analyzing new weapons and their relation to prevailing concepts of utilizing weapons.