orce--not of units but of organized fighting fleets--is generally a
better disposition than extreme concentration. But it is a fatal error
in strategy so to disperse your fleets as to expose them to the risk of
being overpowered by the enemy in detail.

The fleets of capital ships thus organized, and disposed as occasion may
require and sound strategy dictate, are not, however, by any means to be
regarded as autonomous and self-sufficing organisms. They are rather to
be regarded as the moving base of a much larger organization, much more
widely dispersed, consisting of lighter vessels not fit to lie in a
line, but specially adapted to discharge functions which capital ships
cannot as such discharge, yet which are indispensable either to the full
efficiency of the latter or to the maintenance of an effective command
of the sea. The first of these functions is the collection and rapid
transmission of intelligence as to the enemy's dispositions and
movements over as wide an area of the waters in dispute as is compatible
with communication rapid enough to allow of counter-movements being made
before it is too late. The development of wireless telegraphy has
largely extended this area, but it is not without limits in practice,
and those limits are already narrower than the extreme range of a single
transmission by wireless telegraphy. For example, a warship in the
Levant might, if the conditions were exceptionally favourable,
communicate by direct wireless with another warship in the Orkneys. But
the information thus transmitted would hardly be likely directly to
influence the movements and dispositions of the latter. If it did it
would probably not be through the immediate initiative of the Admiral
commanding in the North Sea, but through the supreme control of all the
naval forces of the belligerent affected, exercised through the General
Staff of the Navy at the seat of Government. It may here be remarked in
passing that the development of wireless telegraphy will probably be
found in war to strengthen this supreme control and to weaken to that
extent the independent and isolated initiative of individual
Commanders-in-Chief. But that is not necessarily a disadvantage, and
even so far as it is disadvantage at all it is more than balanced by the
immense corresponding advantage of keeping the War Staff at all times in
direct touch with every part of the field of naval operations, and
thereby making it the focus of all availab