Admiral Jack Fisher, the Royal Navy's Disruptor-in-Chief
By Arthur Herman
“The person is the program” has become common wisdom in discussions of what ails, and what can heal, a broken defense industrial base. We need rules that allow the best officers, Program Managers, and Program Executive Offices to stay with the programs they’ve built, until they are completed. That’s been the pattern with successful programs in the past, when the best had the best driving them across the finish line, whether we’re talking about Hyman Rickover and nuclear subs, Bernard Schriever and ICBMs, or John Boyd and the F-16.
Even more impressive, perhaps, are those rare figures who have managed to leave their personal stamp not just on a program or programs, but on an entire institution. In this country we can point to James Forrestal as the first Secretary of Defense and John Lehman as Secretary of the Navy with his implementation of the 600 ship navy.
But the Royal Navy’s Admiral Jack Fisher may be the most impressive of all. As First Sea Lord (roughly the British equivalent of Chief of Naval Operations) in the decade before the First World War, Fisher will forever be linked to his most famous shipbuilding program, the HMS Dreadnought.
But during his six years at the Admiralty, Fisher also single-handedly transformed the strategic outlook of an entire armed service. He did it by acting as Disruptor-in-Chief, i.e. through his relentless pursuit of bringing new personnel, new technologies, and a new strategic vision to a navy that was already the largest and most respected in the world, but which had grown complacent after nearly a century of naval supremacy. Thanks to Fisher’s reforms, the Royal Navy was at last ready to face the challenges of 20th century sea warfare, and to prevail against its most formidable opponent since Trafalgar—imperial Germany.
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As I point out in my book To Rule The Waves: How The British Navy Shaped the Modern World, everything about Jack Fisher cut against the grain. He was born in Ceylon—modern Sri Lanka—which prompted his enemies to suggest his unusual physical appearance with his yellow complexion (after suffering for years from malaria and jaundice) and almond-shaped eyes, owed something to “Oriental blood.”
Fisher had a ferocious temper and an ingrained tendency to be outspoken in the genteel Victorian age. His scribbled hand-written notes to subordinates and friends would end “Burn This!” or “Yours Til Charcoal Sprouts.” His unpredictable ways inspired fear as well as respect. Whenever he appeared on deck the word would spread throughout the ship: “Look out, here comes Jack.”
Unlike most naval officers of the time, Fisher had chosen gunnery, not navigation, as his professional specialty. It was working on the gunnery range that Fisher made his first important discovery, i.e. the operational possibilities of the torpedo. Few others did. As one old admiral told him, there hadn’t been torpedoes when he first went to sea, and he saw no need for the “beastly things” now.
But Fisher saw at once the torpedo could be a weapon that would decisively level the naval playing field, and make even the biggest battleship vulnerable to attack. “What is the use of battleships as we have hitherto known them?” he once wrote (the kind of question someone might ask of aircraft carriers today). “NONE! Their one and only function—that of ultimate security of defense—is gone—lost!”
Fisher’s favorite maxim was, “History is a record of exploded ideas.” One might almost add, exploded technologies, especially in warfare. When he became Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean fleet in 1899, at age fifty-eight, Fisher saw a service that had become overladen with outmoded assumptions as well as ships and weapons, and had grown complacent about what it took to remain the world’s dominant navy. He set out to sweep away the old and obsolete, and bring in the new and effective, in order to create the modern technological navy he had in mind for the twentieth century.
As one officer remembered who served under him at that time: “Everything was about tactics, strategy, gunnery, torpedo warfare, it was a veritable renaissance and affected every officer in the fleet.” Fisher accepted no standard below that of excellent. When one of his officers failed in an exercise, he told him point-blank, “If this had been wartime, I would have had you shot.”
When Fisher was made First Sea Lord in 1904, he saw an opportunity to shake the service up from stem to stern. Over the next six years, he forced the navy to undergo a series of major reforms and changes—changes that made it a service ready to face a world war when it finally broke out in 1914.
Fisher started by broadening the service’s social and intellectual base, by smashing the old class barrier that had separated the navy’s engineering and executive officers, and having them learn and work together at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth.
Besides the torpedo, the other new technology Fisher passionately fought for was the submarine. Like the torpedo, the submarine was a direct challenge to the thinking and mindset of more traditional officers and sailors (one admiral even pronounced them “underhanded, unfair, and un-English”).
But Fisher saw their significance in resetting the strategic balance at sea. Armed with torpedoes capable of hitting a target at one mile distance, “My beloved submarines,” he wrote, “will magnify the naval power of England seven times more than present.” He envisioned a Royal Navy “saturating” the seas around Britain with one hundred submarines and a hundred torpedo-wielding fast destroyers. Fisher never had time or money to realize his bold plan, but when World War I broke out in 1914, Britain’s D-Class submarine did set the international standard for undersea warfare.
Fisher also rammed home a new emphasis on accurate gunnery as the sine qua non of a modern navy. He found his man in Captain Percy Scott, who had been training gun crews to achieve on-target accuracy at unprecedented ranges of 5000-6000 yards, and on moving targets as well. Fisher created a position for Scott as Inspector of Target Practice, and put Scott to work creating shooting competitions between ships and fleets, as well as introducing new range finder technology. Before Scott and Fisher were finished, Royal Navy gunners could regularly hit the mark at more than four miles, while steaming at 14 knots. The superior gunnery of British ships at the battle of Jutland owed everything to Fisher and Scott’s reforms.
More accurate firing opened the way for bigger and better guns, and the ships to put them on. Like the United States and China today, Britain found itself locked in a race with imperial Germany for naval dominance. And like China, Germany had the industrial base capacity needed to outbuild Britain’s shipyards, unless Britain found a way to sprint ahead.
Fisher found his answer with the HMS Dreadnought, which was launched at Portsmouth in 1906. It represented a quantum leap forward in naval technology, one that left the German naval buildup far to the stern.
Dreadnought’s construction demanded top security. Sitting on my desk is the 1906-7 edition of Jane’s Fighting Ships, the final word on the state of the world’s navies for more than a century. At that point, Dreadnought’s specifications regarding her guns, armor, and other fittings were so secret that most of the discussion of the Dreadnought in Jane’s had to be left blank.
The key secret, however, was Dreadnought’s steam turbines, which made her the fastest capital ship afloat, able to do 21 knots—faster than any existing submarine that might threaten her. She carried ten 12-inch guns; her biggest German competitors carried only four. This meant that the firepower of a fleet of ten Dreadnought-class vessels could match the forward-firing firepower of thirty pre-Dreadnought battleships.
By March 1909 Great Britain had forty-three old style battleships, while the Germans had twenty-two and none of the new Dreadnought class. Britain, meanwhile, had finished two Dreadnoughts and three of Fisher's fast battle cruisers, with seven more Dreadnoughts on the way. The Germans gamely worked to catch up, building their own version of the Dreadnought class. But Fisher had leaped ahead of them with his other pet project, the fast battle cruiser, and then the Queen Elizabeth class battleship, first launched in 1912. Armed with 15-inch guns, and driven with oil-fired engines, the HMS Queen Elizabeth moved the goal posts for naval supremacy further and further away from Germany’s reach.
By 1914, when war finally came, Britain’s navy was equipped with no less than 22 modern-class battleships and 14 fast battle cruisers—plus 22 older battleships and 160 cruisers and destroyers. Germany was stuck with just 14 Dreadnoughts, and four modern battle cruisers. The world’s first great naval arms race had ended firmly in Britain’s favor, thanks to Jackie Fisher. Germany’s surface navy was taken out as a decisive factor in the world war.
Fisher had retired when war came, but he left one more important legacy for Britain’s naval future: his protégé Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty. Like his mentor Fisher, Churchill understood how technological advances carried the possibility of decisive victory. He pursued them relentlessly, expanding the use of wireless communication and developing the navy’s air arm, including dirigible airships and the first naval aircraft carrier, HMS Argus. He even developed an early helicopter.
His other enthusiasm was in code-breaking, and the Admiralty office he would sponsor and set up, Room 40, would crack the German naval code as well as the Zimmermann Telegram—probably the single most important contribution to the course of the war Churchill and the Royal Navy ever made.
By then, Fisher was out and out of favor. He had come back into service when war broke out, but instead of working with his friend Winston Churchill, they quarreled, just as Hyman Rickover would quarrel with Navy Secretary John Lehman. Giants don’t easily tolerate the presence of other giants. When the Cabinet okayed Churchill’s plans for the Dardanelles expedition, Fisher—who had opposed the plan—resigned in disgust.
By the time he died in 1920, however, Fisher’s reputation as the creator of the modern British Navy was secure. Of course, he had made mistakes. During the First World War his beloved battle cruisers proved fatally under-armored compared to their German counterparts, while the weapon he saw as saving the future of seapower for Britain—the submarine—would be turned by Germany into an existential threat against Britain, in not one but two world wars.
Fisher’s career is signal proof that it’s not the technology itself, but the one who seizes its full potential, who can ultimately prevail in a military contest. It’s a lesson American strategic thinkers need to keep in mind as they think about the applicability of AI and even quantum technology—as well as hypersonics and directed-energy weapons—to decisively tipping the strategic balance with China, in America’s favor.
But overall, we can say that Fisher’s career demonstrates how a single individual can reshape the destiny of an entire armed service—that is, if he’s bold enough, ruthless enough, energetic enough, and willing to be Disruptor-in-Chief.
ARTHUR HERMAN is Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas-Austin, and author of Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.