{"id":58970,"date":"2016-05-30T10:59:46","date_gmt":"2016-05-30T15:59:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=58970"},"modified":"2016-05-30T11:09:58","modified_gmt":"2016-05-30T16:09:58","slug":"somethings-wrong-with-our-bloody-ships-today-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=58970","title":{"rendered":"“Something’s Wrong With Our Bloody Ships Today”, Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

The term “arms race” is almost – sort of – falling into disuse these days.<\/p>\n

I’m sure it won’t last forever.<\/p>\n

Those of us of a certain age well remember the ultimate arms race – the race to build nukes \u00a0between the US, the USSR, China, and their various proxies and allies in the Cold War. \u00a0The goal of that arms race – it almost seems counterintuitive – was to build weapons that’d deter their use by others. \u00a0So far so good.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t the first arms race. \u00a0Far from it.<\/p>\n

But 100 years ago today, one\u00a0of the history’s\u00a0biggest, most expensive arms races was coming to a violent, explosive, and yet fitful and indecisive conlusion in the chilly waters of the North Sea.<\/p>\n

And along with the arms themselves, and the men who worked them, other things were being weighed and found wanting; grand strategies, and the the technocrats who conceived them.<\/p>\n

Brittania Rules The Waves<\/strong>: \u00a0In 1588, an armada from Spain attempted an invasion of England; the fledgling Royal Navy defeated and scattered it. \u00a0It was the kind of victory that launches – and did, indeed, launch – myths and legends around which nations build themselves.<\/p>\n

And indeed, that’s what happened; for the next 350 years, the Royal Navy thwarted every attempt to invade Britain, and eventually became the glue that held together the British Empire,\u00a0the tarp that’d smother any brushfires that might break out,\u00a0and the shield that kept it safe from any who’d dare try to bite off a chunk.<\/p>\n

The end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 set the pattern for the next century; the British Navy, with no rivals anywhere on the planet, was in effect the world’s beat cop; with it, the British Army – highly professional by the standards of the day, and extremely small\u00a0for the world’s dominant superpower – could be carried to the scene of the Empire’s countless little brushfire wars in safety, to fight with the aid of colonists, mercenaries and proxies to put down the insurrection.<\/p>\n

At the twilight of the Age of Sail, as the technology of the iron cannon\u00a0and\u00a0the sail-powered ship drew to a close, the Royal Navy dominated territory that made Alexander and Rome’s legions green with envy.<\/p>\n

Disruption<\/strong>: \u00a0Marketing weasels today are fond of talking about “disruptive innovation”. \u00a0 And 21st century westerners are often of the conceit that we, here and now, live in an era of unparalleled disruption.<\/p>\n

But the world between 1815 and 1865 went through a spasm of technological, cultural and social revolutions that were in many ways the underpinning of our entire world today (and I strongly recommend Paul Johnson’s\u00a0The Birth Of the Modern<\/em> to go into them in wondrous depth); from trousers (yes, a revolutionary development) to the consumer piano to the steam and internal combustion engines\u00a0to the notion of serious art to the idea of direct election of representatives to the asphalt road to the to the rise of Social government to Edinburgh Renaissance to the mechanical analog computer, the age was perhaps the most amazing in history.<\/p>\n

Several of those disruptions brought changes that threatened to completely disrupt the world order – indeed, some of them led to the changes that brought about World War I in the first place.<\/p>\n