Size doesn't matter; getting over our big-ship envy.

• Author: Shuger, Scott

Scott Shuger is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly.

* This People's Navy: The Making of American Seapower. Kenneth J. Hagan. Free Press. $27.95.

In concluding that the battleship Iowa explosion could only have been the result of a demented mind, the official investigators probably weren't mindful of the Princeton episode of 1844. On February 28 of that year, Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur, who in his previous job as secretary of the Navy had been a vigorous advocate of naval weapons development, was a guest aboard the frigate as it cruised down the Potomac to conduct a demonstration firing of a new 12-inch gun called the "Peacemaker." Due to faulty engineering, the gun blew up when it was fired, decapitating Upshur.

Such overlooked parallels indicate that the U.S. Navy is now old enough to suffer severe memory loss. In this book,* Kenneth Hagan-a professor of history at the Naval Academy as well as its archivist and museum director-shows what's been forgotten. Hagan's a contrarian about the Navy's hallowed theme that its purpose is to command the seas with capital ships designed to engage and defeat those of our enemies. His point is that a careful reading of history shows that a big-ship battle fleet has never been that well justified by combat results. His survey suggests that big-fleet fever has always been less a matter of raison d'etre than of raison de budget and raison de looking good.

Basically, there are two different ways to make war with ships. You can let them operate individually to attack enemy merchant vessels and small individual warships (the nautical term for this is guerre de course), or you can have them work together in fleets designed to engage the counterpart main fleets of the enemy, which are trying to do the same (that's called guerre d' escadre). Guerre d' escadre has many of the features of conventional army warfare: massed firepower, difficult logistics, and less than optimal maneuverability-all achieved at great expense. On the other hand, guerre made course suggests guerrilla war: hit-and-run tactics made possible by a low profile and self-sufficiency-costing much less.

The godfather of the big battle fleet idea in America was a 19th-century naval officer named Alfred Thayer Mahan, an original faculty member and the second president of the Navy's think tank, the Naval War College. Mahan's 1890 opus, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, set forth the Royal Navy of Horatio Nelson...