Some folks are entirely enthralled with 20th century warfare. I know I was when I was younger, though now I've branched out. I believe the allure of modern mechanized warfare is that it is quantifiable. We know how, fast the tank or ship can go. We know it's armor thickness at all points, and how large a shell that it can stop. We know the range and power and rate of fire of all of its guns. It encourages us to diminish or eliminate the human equation. Big mistake.

Once upon a time when I still lived up in New York, our local wargaming, group got a bunch of WW I style metal miniature ships, and began to play. It was easy playing line of battle ships against line of battle ships. They were powerful, but could take a lot of punishment. We sailed and fired, arid sailed some more.

Then one of us was lured by the point system to invest in the purchase of a few torpedo boats. They were tiny and insecure, but torpedoes were deadly to battleships. The thought was that the battleships had so many guns, that no matter how many torpedo boats attacked, they would all be blown out of the water before they could launch their torpedoes.

That was, the thinking before the first attack. Unfortunately, there were two factors that were taken into account on the gunnery chart: size and speed, It was easy to hit the enormous ponderous battleships. The tiny torpedo boats, zipping in at high speed were anther matter. And for the torpedoes to hit the line of whales waddling through the sea was relatively easy. The group was crushed. They could no longer play with their battleships.

I found the answer to the tiny, fast moving torpedo boats by reading, the list of ships. What everyone else was simply calling destroyers--a prejudice of WWII aficionados-were actually titled torpedo boat destroyers: The thinking wits that these faster, larger vessels were destroyers which carried torpedoes. I thought that, using, them in a squadron between the lines of battleships, they could be employed to destroy the enemy's torpedo boats.

The result was that our torpedo boat destroyers vanquished their torpedo boats, and then our torpedo boats vanquished their battleships. Aghast, they raised their own torpedo boat destroyer squadron.

(wait for it ... wait for it....). .

Cruisers were raised; whose. speed and firepower and defenses enabled them to hold off the torpedo boat' destroyers. And how does one vanquish cruisers in the vanguard of your force? You guessed it. Battlecruisers! The end result was a balanced, fleet, with all of its elements doing what they did best while the line of battleships did their thing as well protected--much like an onion--within layers of protection from those torpedo boats' torpedoes.