If a routine could be devised whereby such problems could be solved by practical games, say once a month, and the results analyzed and recorded in moving-picture form by the staff in Washington, we could see our way in a few years' time to a degree of efficiency in strategy which now we cannot even picture.

It would automatically indoctrinate the navy and produce a sympathetic understanding and a common aim, which would permeate the personnel and make the navy a veritable organism.
It would attain the utmost attainable by any method now known.
Attention is respectfully invited to the fact that at the present time naval strategy is mainly an art; that it will probably continue so for many years; that whether a science of naval strategy will ever be formulated need not now concern us deeply, and that the art of naval strategy, like every other art, needs practice for its successful use.

Naval strategy is so vague a term that most of us have got to looking on it as some mystic art, requiring a peculiar and unusual quality of mind to master; but there are many things to indicate that a high degree of skill in it can be attained by the same means as can a high degree of skill in playing--say golf: by hard work; and not only by hard work, but by doing the same thing--or similar things--repeatedly.

Now most of us realize that any largely manual art, such as the technic of the piano, needs frequent repetition of muscular actions, in order to train the muscles; but few of us realize how fully this is true of mental arts, such as working arithmetical or strategical problems, though we know how easy it is to "get rusty" in navigation.

Our mental muscles and whatever nerves co-ordinate them with our minds seem to need fully as much practice for their skilful use as do our physical muscles; and so to attain skill in strategy, we must practise at it.