“There is something wrong with our ships, and something wrong with our system”—Admiral Sir David Beatty reflecting on the destruction of three battlecruisers and escape of the German fleet at Jutland. (Chalmers 1951).
Abstract
Using the performance of the Royal Navy as an illustration, this paper shows that systems of systems break apart at the perilous edge where human behavior meets engineered systems. The development of accurate long-range naval gunnery enabled rapid, fundamental, and interrelated changes capital ship design, known today as the “dreadnought revolution.” The engineered technical systems for rangefinding, aiming, armament, centralized direction, and speed were integrated into new complex ships—the dreadnought battleship and the battlecruiser. These complex machines were in turn integrated into massive fleets. These fleets posed a challenge for the social order of the Royal Navy, which met the challenge through the development of rigid and formalized techniques for command and control (C2). The rules of command and control represent the practitioners’ efforts at systems thinking, and are heavily influenced by the social context of the institution. When subject to the stresses of war, the Royal Navy’s system broke down, resulting in poor performance and tragic losses. Ultimately, systems theorists need to have an understanding of the social context in which technological systems operate that goes beyond rational choice models of human behavior if they want to better understand the performance of systems of systems.
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Notes
At Lissa (Italio-Austrian War, 1866), around 50% of shells fired hit targets, and one ship was set ablaze by gunfire and later exploded, while a second ship was rammed and sank. Ranges were point blank, or < 100 yards, and no more than 1000 yards. At Santiago Harbor and Manila Bay (both Spanish-American War, 1898), only about 3% of shells hit targets at ranges between 1000 and 2500 yards. Fire was opened at greater ranges but no hits were scored. At Ulsan (Russo-Japanese War, 1904), < 2% of shells hit targets, and that overstates because many of the hits were made on the crippled and stationary cruiser Rurik. Excluding these, accuracy was barely 1%. Fire was opened at 8500 yards but closed to 4000. Ulsan was a running battle between fast ships, and showed the problems of hitting targets in motion and especially in managing a running engagement. In the battle of the Yellow Sea (Russo-Japanese War, 1904), accuracy was < 2% at ranges between 8000 and 3000 yards (Wilson 1898, 1926; Custance 1912).
Gordon makes the provocative argument that signal complexity grew because signaling technology allowed it to grow. In Nelson’s day, it would have been impossible to send detailed and comprehensive signals, and so initiative had to be encouraged. Gordon concludes with a brief assessment of the Royal Navy during the Falkland Islands War (1982) in which he argues that wireless and SATCOM nearly overwhelmed the commander of the naval task force, Admiral Sandy Woodward. Woodward succeeded by ignoring most signaling traffic.
Jutland was not the first battle where these flaws were exposed. There were warnings of the brittleness British command and control in the earlier battles of Dogger Bank, Helgoland Bite, and the Scarborough raid, but these relatively small and early engagements were dismissed as wartime teething troubles, in which the Royal Navy still came out well given the relative losses of each side. It was Jutland that launched soul searching and recriminations.
Beatty would damage his own case by trying to change the evidence after the fact, alleging first that the order was made executive at the appropriate time, and later that if it was not made executive, it was the fault of Beatty’s flag captain. This self-serving revisionism has been attacked, and shifted the debate from whether Evan-Thomas should have known better irrespective of the signal, to whether Beatty’s flag captain sent the signal correctly and Beatty’s own culpability in the error (Brooks 2016; Gordon 1996).
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Acknowledgements
The author thanks participants at 16th annual Conference on Systems Engineering Research (CSER), generously hosted by the University of Virginia in May 2018, for their thoughtful comments and suggestions for improving this argument. This paper was greatly improved as a result of insightful comments from Alan Easterling, Bill Sweetman, and three anonymous reviewers from Environment Systems and Decisions.
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Vacca, W.A. The social context of technological systems: dreadnoughts, computers, and flags. Environ Syst Decis 39, 154–162 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10669-019-09722-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10669-019-09722-6