Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

by Andrew Gordon

The basic import of this book is how, while the Royal Navy was undergoing its fifty-year conversion from oak and canvas to steel and turbines, its once-clear, empiricist understanding of ‘product’ was pilfered from the lay-apart store by the vested interests of ‘process’, and how both the symptoms and the cost of that felony may be discerned, in various ways, at Jutland in 1916. To insist, glibly, that history always repeats itself is to reduce it to a set of unintelligent, negative superstitions.46 However, history, at the least, comprises an echo-chamber in which past and present voices can mingle; and, no less than any other human activity (and more than most), the military professions are susceptible to enduring pressures and syndromes.