Andrew Gordon > Quotes

“(28) “Doctrine draws on the lessons of history”
― 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

“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

“Thus was obscured the fact that his most essential contribution to British naval mastery was as a trainer of Collingwoods, Blackwoods and Hardys: his greatest gift of leadership was to raise his juniors above the need of supervision.”
― 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

“(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

“(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

“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

“Many of the more ghastly and idiotic aspects of the Great War were made possible by the coincidence of mass-production and the social religion of deference.”
― 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

“Some of the most highly trained and successful military forces – Nelson’s fleet, Montgomery’s 8th Army, Wingate’s Chindits – were worked up to excellence in remote environments, undistracted by the comforts of normal life.”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“The one lesson to be learned is the necessity for every officer to cultivate belief in his own judgment, so as not to be afraid of acting correctly when the day of trial comes. This incident has provided the Navy with a lesson of the duty owed by juniors towards senior officers that it is well for officers to ponder over and digest. 105 [underlining”
― 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

“(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

“My comments are directed at the system which was responsible for their poor performance, not at the officers concerned. I do not recall ever having taken part [before the war] in an exercise that was other than a set ritual, which, while not without value, certainly did little to prepare us for our wartime activities.”
― 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

“By the close of the Victorian age Britain’s officer classes were increasingly the inheritors, rather than the winners, of empire.”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“In all aspects of shipboard life, “guides, tables, reports, logs, books, inspection provisions and other methods of supervision were developed, mostly in the 1860s, to ensure compliance and uniformity”.56 But with the defining of boundaries and performance criteria, the broader conceptual sense of duty was all but eclipsed by the narrow hierarchical sense.”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“Many notorious military blunders have been set up by poor personal relationships (if not wilful taciturnity) between key participants, the need for whose informal collaboration seems, in retrospect, to have been blindingly obvious. “It is instructive to mark how the squabbles of historic admirals with their Admiralties and with their captains have played into the hands of the enemy.”
― Gilbert Andrew Hugh Gordon, Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

“At a time of deep naval peace, when social connections were a means to the top, when royal yachts brought career advantage, and when officers had to use whatever leverage they could to stand out from the crowd – when obedience and paintwork, pomp and circumstance, were what made the Fleet tick – it was a simple matter for the Craft to step onto the quarterdecks of the Royal Navy’s flagships. And there it found an ample supply of recruits.”
― 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

“The promise of signalling fosters a neglect of doctrine.”
― 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

“Fisher said, “to be a good admiral, a man does not need to be a good sailor. That’s a common mistake. He needs good sailors under him.”65”
― 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

“(21) Heavy signalling, like copious orders, is symptomatic of doctrinal deficiency,”
― 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

“Uniformity distinguishes men by rank rather than character; and “as ships became divided [in departure from central batteries] and gun positions more isolated, did we take enough trouble”, William Goodenough wondered later,       to teach the mass of men a feeling of individual responsibility? – or did we fall into the easier custom of considering it necessary to have a commissioned officer in every isolated position and creating more and more petty officers and leading seamen, so that each small compartment had its leading hand? The known opinion is that we erred in over-inspection and did not, when the chance was first made, pay sufficient attention to individual responsibility.59”
― 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