"Always go right at 'em"

Photon Courier on why Admiral Nelson could beat the tar out of his opponents, and on the disquieting trend in the U.S. to follow rules and regulations rather than do what makes sense.   He quotes a 1797 Spanish naval official about why he always got his butt kicked:
An Englishman enters a naval action with the firm conviction that his duty is to hurt his enemies and help his friends and allies without looking out for directions in the midst of the fight; and while he thus clears his mind of all subsidiary distractions, he rests in confidence on the certainty that his comrades, actuated by the same principles as himself, will be bound by the sacred and priceless principle of mutual support. . . .  Experience shows, on the contrary, that a Frenchman or a Spaniard, working under a system which leans to formality and strict order being maintained in battle, has no feeling for mutual support, and goes into battle with hesitation, preoccupied with the anxiety of seeing or hearing the commander-in-chief’s signals for such and such manoeuvres.
Following the links at Photon Courier takes us to this 2005 article at WaPo bemoaning the lack of "insurbordination and freelancing" witnessed in the stumbling aftermath of Katrina:   "Everyone coloring inside the lines -- it's a great system until the wind starts blowing really, really hard."

5 comments:

Grim said...

Interesting article. The helicopter story is one of those things that make you ask, "Couldn't they have dropped the water and worried about whose jurisdiction it was later?" But the answer is, "No, they couldn't afford to do that," because the Federal bureaucracies and courts can't be relied upon to provide a rational standard.

As for 'always go right at 'em,' I respect the spirit of the advice very much. As a practical matter, however, the English navy has sometimes profited from keeping their distance!

Texan99 said...

The funny thing about that helicopter article was that a 325-gallon load of water is a trivial contribution to a brush fire. Even our dinky little operations, when assisted by the occasional TexDOT helicopter, require multiple drops of many hundreds of gallons each, several times an hour. Each of our little brush trucks dispenses more than 325 gallons, and we have to fill those up constantly. Our tankers and engines hold closer to 2,000 gallons. For fire outside the hydrant system (as many of ours are), the water-shuttle operation back and forth to the nearest hydrant is the most time-consuming part of our task.

Grim said...

Yeah, my father was a captain in the volunteer fire department when I was a teenager. I helped fight some several brush fires, back before we had a hydrant system. The main tool isn't water at all, in that case; the water is just to slow it down for you. The main tools are bulldozers and shovels, to dig a fire break wide enough to contain it.

bthun said...

"The main tools are bulldozers and shovels, to dig a fire break wide enough to contain it."

Along with praying for rain and no wind...

bthun said...

Well, that and setting a backfire.