By Franz-Stefan Gady
The history of the Italian navy offers great lessons why overestimating your enemy’s capabilities is dangerous.
As I pointed out in January (see: “Problems of Estimating Military Power”), it is inherently difficult to assess military strengths and to accurately predict how one’s opponent will behave in battle. More often than not, estimating military power is a guessing game, camouflaged by pseudo-scientific quantity and qualitative analyses, often punctuated with alarming bits of intelligence about the growing technical capabilities of a likely future adversary.
The history of the inter-war Italian navy, the Regia Marina, which faced a strategic outlook similar to the PLAN and was also confronted by technologically superior naval opponents, provides a great lesson in why overestimating your enemy’s capabilities is maybe just as dangerous as underestimating military power.
In short, miscalculating the fighting strengths of Mussolini’s navy prior to and during World War II diverted precious allied resources from dealing with more important military challenges (and as a consequence it inadvertently contributed to various allied defeats in the first three years of the war, such as during the Battle of France, and especially during the campaigns in North Africa). It also influenced policy making by granting Italy too big of a say in European politics (e.g., look up the history of the signing of the Munich Agreement) in comparison to the country’s real military capabilities.
Like the PLAN today, the Italians were engaged in many military innovations throughout the 1930s. For example, one article notes: “The Italian navy was impressive for its pioneering naval research into radar and its prowess in torpedo technology — the latter resulting in powerful aerial and magnetic torpedoes and contributing to the maiali, or small human-guided torpedoes — the ultimate weapons in asymmetric naval warfare.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat