Four Principles to Lift the Academic Fog Around War and Be More Realistic about Battle

For the 30 years following the 1866 Austro-Italian Battle of Lissa in the Adriatic Sea, navies placed ram bows on nearly all newly designed capital ships. The only significant warship sunk during the battle was sunk by ramming, and no other major fleet engagement occurred until the Sino–Japanese War of 1894–95; naval architects therefore assumed the ram bow would be the principal weapon of future naval warfare.

Of course, the ram bow did not portend the future of naval warfare. Rather, as the age of steam surpassed that of sail, navies around the world competed for advantage by experimenting with various hull designs, armor thickness, and guns. The history of warfare is littered with similar examples of technology or doctrine that, at one point, experts uniformly assumed signaled the dawn of a new, unprecedented age in military affairs but proved to be little more than an aberration.

At the same time, analysts often overlook obscure platforms with immense potential in favor of systems they are familiar with. Before World War II, students at the US Naval War College assumed a future conflict between the United States and Japan would end in a single, decisive engagement between fleets of battleships. (The Japanese came to the same conclusion.) The role of carrier aviation and submarines, both of which would dominate the coming war in the Pacific, received little attention. The neglect of submarines’ offensive potential was particularly bewildering given their devastating use by the Germans in World War I.

The wars in Ukraine and Iran—the two most significant conflicts in the post–Cold War period—are particularly ripe for both identifying lasting shifts in the changing character of war and, more likely, faddish misanalysis. Indeed, a number of apparently inevitable yet conflicting trends that will supposedly dominate the future of warfare have emerged from the two wars. The tank is dead; no, maneuver warfare is only possible with armor. Long live the drone; actually, most drones have already been effectively countered. Large surface ships no longer have any utility if in range of adversary anti-ship missiles; on the contrary, the United States could not have struck Iran as swiftly as it did without aircraft carriers, demonstrating that the United States needs more carriers, not less.