Hunters and Killers, Volume 1: Anti-Submarine Warfare from 1776 to 1943. By Norman Polmar and Edward Whitman. Naval Institute Press, Annapolis MD, 2015.
Reviewed by Dr Gregory P. Gilbert
The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.
Winston Churchill, 1944
Such is the U-boat war – hard, widespread and bitter, a war of groping and drowning, a war of ambuscade and stratagem, a war of science and seamanship.
Winston Churchill, 1939
EVERY few decades or so the emphasis of naval strategy changes to reflect real world events and likely future warfighting scenarios. The end of the Cold War and the early 1990s heralded a turn towards naval operations ‘… from the sea’ and maritime power projection. Over recent years there has been a return to a multi-polar world with increased competition between global and regional powers, coupled with an associated turn towards ‘at sea’ naval operations and increased potential for deterrence tasks and/or high-end warfighting. Under such circumstances a return to the partially forgotten study of anti-submarine warfare (ASW) is both relevant and timely.
