If a paintbrush is better at painting than a hammer, should one throw their hammer away before they paint? In the case of the U.S. Navy, a recent article by The Drive announcing their plans to ditch the recently acquired Mark VI patrol boats answers this question with a quiet yes. However, this decision fails to foresee that an individual can change from painting to construction where the hammer is necessary. Removing the Mark VI patrol boats from the fleet because they are not beneficial to fleet-on-fleet warfare is similarly single-minded and would be a significant mistake since patrol boats have proven potential in irregular warfare situations. The Dogger Bank incident in 1904 and the Oleg’s sinking in 1919 are excellent historical examples of patrol boats’ effectiveness in major conflicts and whose lessons can still be seen in modern Iranian and Chinese naval strategy.

The Dogger Bank

Of the many examples of small boat warfare, the Dogger Bank incident stands out. Taking place during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, the Russian Empire’s Baltic fleet was navigating “a large shoal sixty miles east off the coast of England” named the Dogger Bank in October 1904.¹ Commanded by Admiral Zinovy Petrovich Rozhestvensky at the behest of desperate Tsar Nicholas II, the fifty-ship Baltic Fleet needed to steam from its naval base at Kronshtadt on the Baltic sea to aid the besieged defenders of the Port Arthur Naval Base located on the Liaodong Peninsula after the Japanese destroyed the Russian Pacific Fleet. Facing the imposing task of steaming over 18,000 miles, Admiral Rozhestvensky’s flotilla struggled with low crew morale, a lack of charts, and his penchant for tossing binoculars overboard in fits of rage.

Throughout the Baltic Fleet’s long journey from Kronshtadt to the Tsushima Strait, a fear lingered in the minds of ship’s crew and officer corps: Japanese torpedo boats. Rozhestvensky received word before his voyage that “the Japanese were preparing an ambush” for his fleet. ² “Dispatched to the Baltic Sea Coast,” Japan supposedly had six torpedo boats “hidden in secret inlets” and “ready to attack Rozhestvensky as soon as he left Russia.”³ These ships were “incredibly small at 350 tons,” lacking the firepower of even Russian cruisers like the Oleg. Yet, their dangerous payload meant that, with some luck, “several torpedo ships could sink a squadron.”⁴ The idea of the Baltic Fleet sinking in the Northern Atlantic because of small Japanese ships terrified the Russian Tsar and nearly transformed the Russo-Japanese war into a world war.

“At 12:55 a.m. Rozhestvensky saw dark silhouettes” approaching his flagship the Suvorov, compelling him to make a split-second decision.⁵ Scanning the water, he suddenly gave the command to open fire upon what he believed to be a torpedo boat. Ten minutes of frantic shelling later, the fleet’s only confirmed kill was a British fishing ship in addition to shelling their own battleships. Fearing more torpedo ships, Rozhestvensky’s armada left immediately without stopping “to pick up the fishermen it had sent into the drink.”⁶ The Russian attack outraged the British public, and their government soon echoed newspapers’ headlines calls for war on Russia. Tsar Nicholas II became equally outraged at Britain’s refusal to acknowledge the torpedo boat threat. Named after the fishing shoal where their fleet opened fire, the Dogger Bank incident was a disaster for the Russian Empire. Although the Russians eventually averted war by paying compensation to the widowed families of the fishermen, Admiral Rozhestvensky’s hasty decision to open fire on phantom torpedo boats isolated Russia internationally during an already humiliating war with Japan.

The Baltic Fleet’s later destruction at the Battle of Tsushima overshadowed this humiliating affair but the Dogger Bank demonstrated the possible impact of small ship warfare in larger conflicts. The Japanese torpedo boat threat impacted Rozhestvensky’s decision-making ability, cornering him mentally to the point he fired upon unarmed fishing ships. Small boats hidden in littoral areas force an opponent to be extra cautious in planning operations and curb potential aggression. A navy with small, swift ships has this deceptive option in its arsenal and can pressure its opponent into making rash decisions like Admiral Rozhestvensky did when he fired on English fishing ships at the Dogger Bank.

Sinking the Oleg

The Russian cruiser Oleg survived the Baltic fleet’s annihilation at Tsushima and eventually returned to its homeport of Kronshtadt. Limping through the First World War, her crew supported the Bolsheviks during the October Revolution. When the Bolsheviks invaded Estonia in late 1918, the Oleg provided fire support to their land forces. Unfortunately for the 6,975-ton Oleg, her career ended when a 5-ton British vessel sank her in 1919.⁷ Unlike at the Dogger Bank, the British fleet brought the torpedo threat to life during their 1918–19 naval intervention in the Baltic Sea.

The most memorable British commander during this post-war conflict was Admiral Sir Walter Henry Cowan. His overstretched forces needed to protect the newly independent Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The Red Army campaigned with the goal of reattaching these breakaway states to Russia. In addition, White Russian armies and Baltic German Freikorps divisions operated in these Baltic territories without supervision with a combination of Russian Monarchists and German adventurers promoting their own agendas. Without any of their own ground forces, Cowan’s fleet had the mammoth task of juggling these forces and helping align them against their mutual Communist enemy without infighting.⁸

The small size of Cowan’s fleet limited their capability to aid friendly Baltic forces, especially given their extended supply lines and the danger of unmarked German and Russian minefields. To supplement their main force, the fleet brought a small squadron of Coastal Motor Boats (CMBs) with them on their expedition. The CMB was a forty-foot-long vessel designed with defending the British Isles in mind, having only a rear-facing torpedo and light machine gun for armaments.⁹ Powered by an aircraft engine, the boat raced at speeds up to forty knots with a draft shallow enough to pass through dreaded minefields unscathed.¹⁰

Cowan empowered his subordinate Lieutenant August Agar to lead the CMB squadron in offensive operations. His CMB squadron initially served as an advance guard for the main British fleet, giving Cowan additional intelligence about Bolshevik ship movements. Agar then proved that the CMB was capable of offensive operations on the night of 16 June 1919. On that evening, Bolshevik naval forces were bombarding the Russian fortress of Krasnaya Gorka, whose garrison had recently turned against the revolutionaries. Since the defenders could not hold out much longer under this bombardment, Agar decided his vessel CMB-4 needed to destroy the ship shelling the fortress, the cruiser Oleg.¹¹

CMB-4 sneaked past two destroyers guarding the cruiser and quietly approached within five hundred yards of the Oleg. Agar quietly gave the order for his five-man crew to fire and CMB-4 launched its torpedo before quickly turning around to dash madly back towards safety. The destroyers opened fire on the CMB-4, but the vessel’s swift speed allowed it to return undamaged. On the other hand, the torpedo launched at the Oleg hit true and killed the entire 576-man crew. For this action, Lieutenant Agar received the Victoria Cross. He later convinced Admiral Cowan to launch an assault on Kronshtadt with multiple CMBs attacking the anchored Red Fleet with a coordinated air bombardment. These operations against the Red Fleet illustrates that even tiny ships with barebones armaments are capable of successfully engaging and enemy cruisers if applied correctly. Although small crafts may be almost useless in regular combat, they excel at waging irregular warfare using fast hit and run tactics to raid overextended or at harbor ships. While not the primary cause of the respective Japanese and British victories over the Russian/Bolshevik fleet, small vessels raised their chance of victory by undermining their opponents’ decision-making ability and destroying much larger ships.

Small Vessels in the Modern Navy

As mentioned earlier, the U.S. Navy is now removing smaller boats, including the Mark VI patrol boat (Mk IVs) and the larger Cyclone-class patrol boats, from service without any replacement. “In wargaming scenarios against peer nations [such as Russia or China],” Marine Major General Tracy King remarked, “the Mk VIs were deemed not really needed (given their small size and limited missile firepower).” The current budgetary needs of the Navy make this decision to phase out the Mark IVs understandable on paper, since the boats are also “very expensive to maintain.” When it comes to fleet-on-fleet engagements, the patrol boat is ineffective due to the range and firepower of modern warships.

However, the United States’ peer opponents disagree with this assessment. The Iranian Navy infamously uses its smaller vessels to harass ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz, threatening shipping if war suddenly breaks out like how Japanese torpedo boats threatened the Russians. Although the Iranians understand these smaller boats are no match in a one-on-one fight against a U.S. Navy destroyer, their battle plan is to swarm outnumbered ships. The Chinese Navy has similar ships with their Type 22s, each armed with eight “carrier-killer” missiles analogous to Lieutenant Agar’s strategy with the CMB. Similar to how CMB-4 evaded destroyer fire, smaller vessels can more readily dodge missiles from enemy combatants. These speedy ships lack effective anti-air abilities and have limited range, but en masse may pose a threat to an overextended United States fleet. With the Chinese military’s recent advances in drone warfare, unmanned patrol boats capable of rapidly approaching and launching missiles at a surprised ship may soon be a reality and became a viable naval strategy. This modernization of the patrol boat makes them a dangerous and under-appreciated threat.

In addition, patrol boats thrive in chaotic environments when an enemy least expects an attack. In the first days of a peer conflict, many of the technologies that the United States Navy relies upon may be rendered non-operatable through cyber warfare, such as GPS, communications, and software-based missiles. Low tech options, like speedy patrol boat assaults, will be extra effective at waging war upon an underprepared enemy. If combined with air or missile strikes, patrol boats remain an effective tool to destroy enemy vessels in their harbors and maintain forward intelligence in a GPS-denied environment while their small size minimizes anti-access/areas-denial (A2AD) missile effectiveness. Raiding enemy ports immediately after the beginning of conflict will panic confused enemy leadership and may severely damage public morale when the average person sees his or her national fleet burning on television. In addition, patrol boats will delay enemy fleets from massing at sea and undermine the opponent’s ability to assault high-cost U.S. assets like aircraft carriers. While patrol boats are unable to win a peer-to-peer conflict by themselves, they have the potential to tip the scales in the U.S. Navy’s favor.

Looking to the Future

The Dogger Bank Incident and CMB-4’s sinking of the Oleg proves that smaller boats with light armaments can significantly impact the outcome of naval conflicts. The threat posed by a squadron of six Japanese torpedo boats during the Russo-Japanese war placed pressure on the fifty-ship Russian Baltic fleet and caused Admiral Rozhestvensky to open fire on neutral fishing ships. Fourteen years later, British Navy Lieutenant August Agar commanded a 5-ton vessel which defeated the 6,975-ton Bolshevik cruiser Oleg. Considering these historical conflicts with the Chinese and Iranian incorporations of similar naval strategies, the United States should not discard the Mark VI and Cyclone class patrol boats without an appropriate replacement. The United States Navy’s potential adversaries have fleets with numerous patrol boats capable of using their speed and numbers to destroy much larger United States assets. While designing a new patrol boat may be prohibitive expensive, Lieutenants Barnard’s and Colin’s proposal for the United States to purchase German Navy models is a cost-effective method to maintain an edge in small craft warfare. If the U.S. Navy removes patrol boats from their arsenal, it abandons this potentially low cost and high reward strategy to its opponents.

1. Constantine Pleshakov, The Tsar’s Last Armada: The Epic Voyage to the Battle of Tsushima (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 96.
2. Constantine Pleshakov, The Tsar’s Last Armada: The Epic Voyage to the Battle of Tsushima, 80.
3. Pleshakov, The Tsar’s Last Armada, 30.
4. Pleshakov, 27
5. Pleshakov, 96.
6. Pleshakov, 97.
7. Steve R. Dunn, Battle in the Baltic: The Royal Navy and the Fight to Save Estonia and Latvia 1918–20 (Annapolis, Maryland: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2000), 90.
8. Steve R. Dunn, Battle in the Baltic: The Royal Navy and the Fight to Save Estonia and Latvia 1918–20, 29, 92.
9. Dunn, Battle in the Baltic, 85
10. Dunn, 85.
11. Dunn, 89.