This certainly is important; for if the personnel are to be so trained that the actual fleet shall be handled with maximum effectiveness in battle, training in handling that actual fleet must frequently be had; the fleet is a machine, and no machine is complete if any of its parts is lacking.
It may be objected that it is not necessary for the staff at the department to devise such training, because drills of the entire fleet can be devised and carried out by the commander-in-chief; in fact that that is what he is for.

This, of course, is partly true; and it is not the idea of the author that the staff in the department should interfere with any scheme of drills that the commander-in-chief desires to devise and carry out; but it is his idea that the staff should arrange problems to be worked out by the fleet, in which the tactical handling of the fleet should be subordinate to, and carried out for, a strategic purpose.
A very simple drill would be the mere transfer of the fleet to a distant point, when in supposititious danger from an enemy, employing by day and night the scouting and screening operations that such a trip would demand.

Another drill would be the massing of previously separated forces at a given place and time; still another would be the despatching of certain parts of the fleet to certain points at certain times.

The problems need not be quite so simple as these, however; for they can include all the operations of a fleet under its commander-in-chief up to actual contact; the commander-in-chief being given only such information as the approximate position, speed, and course of the enemy at a given time, with orders to intercept him with his whole force; or he may be given information that the enemy has divided his force, that certain parts were at certain places going in certain directions at certain speeds at certain times, and he may be directed to intercept those supposititious parts; that is, to get such parts of his fleet as he may think best to certain places at certain times.
Of the strategic value to the staff of the practical solutions of this class of problems by the fleet, there can be little question; and the records made if kept up to date, would give data in future wars for future staffs, of what the whole fleet, and parts of it acting with the fleet, can reasonably be expected to accomplish, especially from the standpoint of logistics.

And it has the advantage of dealing with only one thing; the actual handling of the actual fleet, uncomplicated by other matters, such as interference by an enemy.