Rules of the Game Quotes

“(28) “Doctrine draws on the lessons of history”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“(27) The key to efficiency lies in the correct balance between organisation and method.”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“(26) Peacetime highlights basic ‘primary’ skills to the neglect of more advanced, more lateral ‘secondary’ abilities, the former being easier to teach, easier to measure, and more agreeable to superiors. If it is in the interests of the country that our military”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“(25) Every proven military incompetent has previously displayed attributes which his superiors rewarded. Almost every”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“(24) Properly disseminated doctrine offers both the cheapest and the most secure command-and-control method yet devised by man.”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“(23) War-fighting commanders may find themselves bereft of communications faculties on which they have become reliant in peacetime training. Most forms of radio-transmissions can”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“The promise of signalling fosters a neglect of doctrine.”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“(21) Heavy signalling, like copious orders, is symptomatic of doctrinal deficiency,”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“(20) There is an inverse law between robust doctrine and the need for signalling.”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“(19) Signalling promotes the centralisation of authority.”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“(18) The ‘centre’ must subject its own transmissions to the strictest self-denying ordinance, and, in this, seniority is critical. Admirals no doubt imagine that they are always curbing signals traffic (or,”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“(16) Incoming traffic can act as a brake on decision-making,”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“Signals’ prioritising mechanisms become dislocated in times of overload.”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“Signals ‘capacity’ tends to be defined by how much the senior end can transmit, rather than by how much the junior end can conveniently assimilate. In Operation”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“The volume of traffic expands to meet capacity, is”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“A service which neglects to foster a conceptual grasp of specialised subjects, will have too few warriors able to interrogate the specialists. This is especially important in spasms of technical change, for”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“that (11) Purveyors of technical systems will seek to define performance criteria and trials conditions.”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“(10) Innovations adopted in accordance with peacetime doctrine, may lock the Fleet into both systems and doctrine which will fail the empirical test of war – for “the harsh lessons of combat will always be a world away”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“(7) In long periods of peace, ‘ambient’ doctrine may be no more than the habits of the years in which war has been forgotten. From this we derive the warning that, while taught-doctrine can, of course, be wrong, (8) If doctrine is not explicitly taught, vested interests will probably ensure that wrong doctrine is ambiently learnt. We have just performed our first circle, and this is where technology re-enters the argument, for (9) In peacetime, doctrine is vulnerable to commandeering by ‘systems lobbyists’. Examples”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“The literal meaning of ‘doctrine’ is “what is taught within a group as its corporate beliefs, principles or faith”52 – although “what is learnt . . .” would be more useful to us, since (6) Military cultures impart doctrine by corporate ambience as much as by explicit teaching”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“(5) The training establishment may try to ignore short bouts of empirical experience to preserve its ‘rationalist’ authority.”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“steam-tactics saga illustrates that (4) Rationalism, unlike empiricism, tends to assume an accretion of vested interests.”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“Some of them are blinding glimpses of the obvious (BGOs), several overlap, and I make no claims of discovery. The fundamental proposition – and the one from which most others flow – is certainly a BGO: (1) In times of peace, empirical experience fades and rationalist theory takes its place. This trend, we may aver, is most marked in periods of major technical change, for, (2) The advent of new technology assists the discrediting of previous empirical doctrine. Furthermore, through both myopia and self-interest, (3) The purveyors of new technology will be the most evangelising rationalists.”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“The way Jellicoe fought Jutland had to be consistent with the action-principles with which he had imbued his forces, and with the narrow range of tactical options he had made available to himself thereby.”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“that the shaky premiss on which British fleets had, for two generations, been practised and led – the assumption that tactical signals could be relied upon to ‘get through’ in action – was fallacious, and that conditions might obtain in which manoeuvring without signals would “become essential”.”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“Vice-Admiral Scheer’s own confidential report to Wilhelm II. Here he made the tendentious, and highly questionable, assertion that “even the most successful outcome of a fleet action will not force England to make peace”, and he advised the All Highest that “a victorious end of the war within a reasonable time can only be achieved through the defeat of British economic life – that is, by using the U-boats against British trade.”59”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“The sudden disproof of the reassuring, structured assumptions about the formula for naval mastery, which had accumulated during the untesting age of Victoria, was real enough for the RN’s senior officer corps.”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“would have been venturing into what Tryon had tried to reintroduce as their ‘secondary-syllabus’ duties, whereas all too many of them owed their rank to their ‘primary’ accomplishments.”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“can therefore attribute the many reporting failures at Jutland to a cocktail of factors, including: (a) lack of initiative, and ‘seniority knows best’; (b) fear of being direction-found; and (c) insidious organizational flaws. Perhaps all senior officers, not just Goodenough, should have gone to their cabins at nightfall on the 31st of May, had a glass of port, and thought through the enemy’s options. But that”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“Without a dedicated naval staff to define requirements and shape policy in technical matters, and, where appropriate, tap civilian expertise, the Navy was bound for trouble in the twentieth century. It is no doubt easier to see this now than it was then. It happened to be over the problem of long-range fire-control, the ‘nuclear physics challenge’ of the Edwardian age, that the service first fell victim to the corruptibility and hand-to-mouth nature of the Admiralty’s appraisal and acquisition processes – and to Fisher’s caprice in matters incidental to his capitalship revolution.”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command