Strategic Flux and Technical Failure

Abstract

The years between Sir John Fisher’s departure from the Admiralty and the outbreak of war were ones of considerable strategic flux. The Royal Navy struggled to work out exactly how it intended to fight a war with Germany, and it explored a number of different mining strategies in order to facilitate this. Its eventual success in developing a strategy was undermined by the discovery that the mining materiel was largely defective, something that deprived the service of a mining strategy on the outbreak of war.