Trent Hone

Category: Naval History

  • Critical Thinking

    These are my remarks from the Naval Institute’s Critical Thinking Conference on 25 October 2023. A century ago, the Navy created a learning system capable of systematically introducing new tactics, doctrines, and operational concepts. That learning system was the result of a cognitive revolution that began in the late nineteenth century. That revolution had several…

  • John Lyman Book Award

    I’m very pleased that Mastering the Art of Command has received an Honorable Mention for the 2022 John Lyman Book Awards in the category of U.S. Naval History. It is a great honor and a nice recognition of the effort that went into the book. I tried to provide new insights and a valuable perspective…

  • Conway’s Law and Radar

    Conway’s Law is a useful paradigm for thinking about system design and a valuable perspective for understanding the evolution of the U.S. Navy’s use of radar in early World War II. Conway’s Law states that “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s…

  • Learning to Win, a Hudson Institute Report

    I was pleased to contribute to a recent Hudson Institute report on operational innovation and the importance of learning to today’s U.S. Navy. The whole report is available in PDF at this URL. In my section, I focused on the importance of creating a learning organization by coupling individual learning outcomes to the Navy’s operational…

  • Is War Getting More Complex?

    In a recent Modern War Institute series on Leadership in Future War, Dr. Cole Livieratos discussed the “changing context of war” and emphasized the importance of recognizing its complexity. The article is quite good; however, Livieratos’s emphasis on “increasing complexity” raised some hackles. Subtweets, like the one below, led to an active Twitter discussion about whether…

  • Wait… wut?

    Twitter can be an amazing place. I happened on this tweet the other day and knew immediately what my response would be, but I also knew I couldn’t fit that response in a tweet. My biggest “Wait… wut?” moment came in the Naval War College (NWC) Archives. I was looking at a series of “fighting…

  • Author of the Year

    I’m very pleased to announce that the U.S. Naval Institute has awarded me Author of the Year for 2018. It’s a great recognition of the value of Learning War and the work that went into it. The award ceremony was 25 April. I was fortunate to be able to attend, accept the award in person, and express…

  • Learning War in New York Times

    I mentioned that Learning War has been getting some good press in my last post. Since then, it has appeared in the New York Times Book Review. I was humbled to be honored along with a series of other new military history books on 11 November, the 100-year anniversary of the end of World War…

  • SMH 2018 and “Cross Functional” Officers

    I’ve been distracted by the publication of Learning War and the warm welcome its received, so this follow-up post on the Society of Military History’s Annual Meeting (SMH 2018) is later than I intended. What strikes me as I review my notes from the meeting is how “cross-functional” U.S. naval officers of the early twentieth…

  • Strategy from “Inherently Erroneous” Conceptions

    A brief review of David G. Morgan-Owen’s The Fear of Invasion: Strategy, Politics, and British War Planning, 1880-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2017) I am very grateful for this book. David G. Morgan-Owen’s narrative provides much-needed clarity on one of the fundamental questions of World War I: How did the Royal Navy, the most dominant naval…