In fact, knowledge of outside requirements hinders in some ways rather than advances training of this kind.
Knowledge, for instance, of the requirements of actual battle is a distinct brake on many of the activities of mere target practice.
But while it is easier to train in this way all the various bodies of men that must be trained, it is obvious that by training them wholly without reference to the requirements of the fleet as a whole, the best result that we could expect would be a number of bodies of men, each body well trained as a unit, but the combined units not trained at all as component elements of the whole.

The result would be a little like what one would expect from the efforts of an orchestra at playing a selection which the whole orchestra had never played before together, but of which each member of the orchestra had previously learned his part, and played it according to his own ideas, without consulting the orchestra leader.
By approaching the subject from the other direction, however, that is, from the top, the training of each organization within the fleet is arranged with reference to the work of the fleet as a whole, the various features of the drills of each organization being indicated by the conditions developed by that work.

If this plan be carried out, a longer time will be required to drill the various bodies of men; but when it has been accomplished, those bodies will be drilled, not only as separate bodies, but as sympathetic elements of the whole.
Of course the desirability of drilling separate divisions of a fleet, ana separate ships, turret crews, fire-control parties, and what-not, in accordance with the requirements of fleet work does not prevent them from drilling by themselves as often as they wish--any more than the necessity of drilling in the orchestra prevents a trombone player from practising on his instrument as much as the police will let him.
Thus the fact of keeping a fleet together does more than merely give opportunity for acquiring skill in handling the fleet itself, and in handling the various ships so that they will work together as parts of the fleet machine; because it shows each of the various smaller units within the ships themselves how to direct its training.
For this reason, the idea so often suggested of keeping the fleet normally broken up into smaller parts, those parts close enough together to unite before an enemy could strike, is most objectionable.
It is impossible to keep the fleet together all the time, because of needed repairs, needed relaxation, and the necessity for individual drills that enable a captain or division commander to strengthen his weak points; but nevertheless since the "mission" of training is to attain fighting efficiency in the fleet as a whole, rather than to attain fighting efficiency in the various parts; and since it can be attained only by drilling the fleet as a whole, the decision to keep the fleet united as much as practicable seems inevitably to follow.

Besides, the statement cannot be successfully controverted that difficult things are usually not so well done as easy things, that drills of large organizations are more difficult than drills of small organizations, and that in every fleet the drills that are done the worst are the drills of the fleet as a whole.

How could anything else be expected, when one considers how much more often, for instance, a turret crew is exercised at loading than the fleet is exercised at the difficult movement of changing the "line of bearing"?
The older officers remember that for many years we carried on drills at what we called "fleet tactics," though we knew they were only tactical drills.