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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…
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American Sea Power Project Panel Remarks
With my new American Sea Power article coming out soon, I thought it would be worthwhile to post my opening remarks from American Sea Power Project Panel at the Defense Forum Washington last December. In my article, “Sea Control and Command of the Sea Remain Essential,“ I emphasized the continuing relevance of sea control and…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Learning War is Coming!
I haven’t written here in some time, but I have been doing plenty of writing. My book on organizational learning in the U.S. Navy of the early twentieth century is being published by the U.S. Naval Institute this June and I’m very excited about it. What’s it About? Learning War: The Evolution of Fighting Doctrine…
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2017 McMullen Naval History Symposium
I thoroughly enjoyed being part of the “extraordinary breadth” of scholarship presented at the McMullen Naval History Symposium last week at the U.S Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD. It was a wonderful conference, and Cdr. B.J. Armstrong deserves a lot of credit for its success. I’m very glad I finally got to meet him. I…
Trent Hone 