Innovating Victory: Naval Technology in Three Wars studies how the
world's navies incorporated new technologies into their ships, their
practices, and their doctrine. It does this by examining six core
technologies fundamental to twentieth-century naval warfare including
new platforms (submarines and aircraft), new weapons (torpedoes and
mines), and new tools (radar and radio). Each chapter considers the
state of a subject technology when it was first used in war and what
navies expected of it. It then looks at the way navies discovered and
developed the technology's best use, in many cases overcoming
disappointed expectations. It considers how a new technology threatened
its opponents, not to mention its users, and how those threats were
managed. Innovating Victory shows that the use of technology is more
than introducing and mastering a new weapon or system. Differences in
national resources, force mixtures, priorities, perceptions, and
missions forced nations to approach the problems presented by new
technologies in different ways. Navies that specialized in specific
technologies often held advantages over enemies in some areas but found
themselves disadvantaged in others. Vincent P. O'Hara and Leonard R.
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.
