Great Britain, have established
bases all over the world and built up great naval establishments.
These books lay bare the reasons for the large successes that good
naval strategy has attained, both in peace and war, and constitute
nearly all there is of the science of naval strategy.

These books and this method of treating naval strategy are valuable
beyond measure; but officers find considerable difficulty sometimes
in applying the principles set forth to present problems, because
of the paucity of data, the remoteness in time and distance of
many of the episodes described, and the consequent difficulty of
making due allowance for them. Now, no study of naval strategy can
be thoroughly satisfactory to a naval officer unless it assists
him practically to decide what should be done in order to make the
naval forces of his country, including himself, better in whatever
will conduce to victory in the next war. Therefore, at the various
war colleges, although the student is given books on strategy to
study, the major part of the training is given by the applicatory
method, an extension of Clerk's, in which the student applies his
own skill to solving war problems, makes his own estimate of the
situation, solves each problem in his own way (his solution being
afterward criticised by the staff), and then takes part in the
games in which the solutions presented are tried out. This procedure
recognizes the fact that in any human art and science--say medicine,
music, or navigation--it is the art and not the science by which
one gets results; that the science is merely the foundation on
which the art reposes, and that it is by practice of the art and
not by knowledge of the science that skill is gained.

This does not mean, of course, that we do not need as much knowledge
of the science of naval strategy as we can get; for the reason that
the naval profession is a growing profession, which necessitates
that we keep the application of the principles of its strategy
abreast of the improvements of the times, especially in mechanisms;
which necessitates, in turn, that we know what those principles
are.

The applicatory method bears somewhat the same relation to the
method of studying books and hearing lectures that exercises in
practical navigation bear to the study of the theory. There is
one difference, however, as applied to strategy and navigation,
which is that the science of navigation is clearly stated in precise
rules