The goal was to divine any principles that governed the process and determine whether those principles applied across platforms, technologies, and nations. He has authored articles and designed war games on naval topics with an emphasis on tactical naval simulations. Successful innovation as Innovating Victory, depends not just on technical expertise, but imagination, perseverance and a constant focus on the true strategic and operational goals to be achieved. He holds a history degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in Chula Vista, California. By 1945, within the span of a Jutland officer’s service career, basic naval technologies included radar and guided weapons.

That sentiment was definitely the case during World War II, a massive global conflict that presented the United States with a variety of tactical and logistical challenges. As Professor Irving Holley wrote in the early 1950s, The greatest stumbling block to the revision of doctrine was probably not so much vested interests as the absence of a system for analyzing new weapons and their relation to prevailing concepts of utilizing weapons. Heinz present new perspectives and explore the process of technological introduction and innovation in a way that is relevant to today's navies, which face challenges and questions even greater than those of 1904, 1914, and 1939. For navies, the ultimate criterion is whether the weapon/tool/platform effectively advances the task of securing power at sea and contributes to ultimate victory.Naval technologies present in 1905 that had been unknown at Trafalgar included torpedoes, radio, moored contact mines, and (barely) practical submarines.

Equally weighted chapters provide balance to the book and ensure it is readable to generalists yet informative and thought provoking for all; it is filled with histori­cal examples, well written, and engaging . It then looks at the way navies discovered and developed the technology’s best use, in many cases overcoming disappointed expectations. A secret memorandum from a British destroyer captain to his superior officer dated 26 December 1942 noted that he had at his disposal Type 285, 286, and 271 radars, sonar, a radio interception device, very high frequency radio, shore radar plots, enemy reports from remote sources, an automatic plotting device, and several binocular-enhanced sets of eyes. If they are used in the same old way, it is legitimate to repeat the question that opened this paragraph: Where is the innovation? The evolutionary path from Victory to Dreadnought implies that victory favors superior arms, but is it really that simple?In 1940, for example, the US Army set out to modernize its transportation equipment in case the nation should be drawn into the war.

The most famous naval action of the nineteenth century, the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, was fought by the British and Franco-Spanish navies with wooden, wind-propelled line of battle ships and guns that fired solid shot weighing up to forty pounds out to four hundred yards. O’Hara and Heinz chart the influence of six innovative technologies and recount how the combat potential of those technologies was enhanced or constrained by the organizations that developed, refined, and employed them. Time was of the essence, and scientists and engineers – backed by governments – rose to the challenge.International products have separate terms, are sold from abroad and may differ from local products, including fit, age ratings, and language of product, labeling or instructions. The battleship, the preeminent naval platform of 1805, 1905, 1914, and 1939, had been superseded in general utility and overall importance by the aircraft carrier and the submarine, platforms that hardly existed at the turn of the century. S. Navy Against the Axis (2007), The Struggle for the Middle Sea (2009), Dark Navy (co-author 2009), On Seas Contested (editor, 2010), In Passage Perilous (2012), To Crown the Waves (editor 2013), Black Phoenix (co-author 2013), Torch: North Africa and the Allied Path to Victory (2015), and Clash of Fleets: Naval Battles of the Great War (co-author 2017), and Six Victories, North Africa, Malta, and the Mediterranean Convoy War November 1941-March 1942 (2019). It is not our intention to judge how such technologies might fare in a future war; instead, the purpose of this book is to consider basic principles.

In the course of doing so, the authors tell how these "six technologies facilitated and frustrated navies in their pursuit of victory" (p. Radio expanded the volume and range of naval communications, while radar allowed platforms to see at great distances and in poor visibility. The section describing the exploitation of the technology in World War II is followed by a summary of postwar developments and a brief review of the technology’s current state.Here it was apparent that top-down, centralized oversight of technological development was most useful when scientific and engineering attention were needed along with large amounts of capital. In general, navies strive to win wars with better versions of existing weapons, tools, and platforms rather than use novelties in the front line. However, history has shown that combat, and combat alone, ultimately determines a technology’s utility. For mines, torpedoes, and radio, this is the Russo-Japanese War; for submarines and aircraft, World War I; and for radar, World War II.