Hornby resisted calls to prescribe one future fighting formation, drawing on the Royal Navy's history of tactical rigidity before Nelson. A known formation would also hand an opponent valuable advance knowledge. He considered authoritative prescription presumptuous because steam-era combat had not yet supplied enough experience to justify certainty. His alternative was a modern fleet in which battleships, cruisers, and flotilla craft supported one another, with commanders adapting formation and method to circumstances rather than obeying an inherited template.
Notable Point · 1:05:30-1:07:22
Hornby rejected a single prescribed battle formation
Hornby argued that rigid battle formations revealed intentions to the enemy and could not govern a modern fleet of mutually supporting ship types.