I am a big Norman Friedman fan, but this book was a particularly difficult read for me. The subject is a detailed review of big gun surface fire control from its beginnings in the 19th century through World War II. Understanding this topic is key to understanding the Age of the Dreadnought, that very brief era from 1906 to 1941 when a nation's battleships dictated military/naval strategy and foreign policy.

Published by Friedman's usual publishing house, the U.S. Naval Institute Press, in 2008, "Naval Firepower" spans 319 pages covered in 14 numbered chapters with an appendix on propellants, guns, shells, and armor. The author includes endnotes, a glossary, a bibliography, and an index. Unlike most authors, Friedman uses endnotes to supplement his text and are meant to be read; I surmise he uses this ploy to give his reader more information without adding significantly to the length of his book. Without endnotes the book's text would be probably another 50 pages longer. However, this strategy leaves the reader with a tough choice--to go back and forth between text pages and the endnotes or to complete the text and look at the endnotes altogether?

The first chapters of the book (Chapters 1-3) dive into what is known in naval circles as the fire control problem--the mathematical relationships that allow a gun-armed ship to place shells on a moving target. As Great Britain's Royal Navy took the lead at examining this problem in depth, Friedman focuses these chapters on the Royal Navy's developments in this field. Chapters 4 through 7 continue the Royal Navy story to the end of World War II by looking at pre-World War I tactics, the surprises brought on by that war, developments between the world wars, and the events of the Second World War. The remaining 7 chapters then look at fire control developments in the other world naval powers of the early 20th century. The helpful appendix gets into the details of the other components of the fire control problem aboard big gun ships.

"Naval Firepower" is loaded with illustrations both of ships and equipment, with the photographs of ships highlighting the ship's fire control fittings. Fire control equipment is illustrated both by photograph and drawings. As is usual in a Friedman work, most captions for the illustrations are quite detailed. Helpful as they are, the detailed illustrations/captions are not enough to help the reader decipher the complexities of gun fire control. Gunnery specialist in all of the navies mentioned in this book absorbed years of education, training, and practice to develop the proficiency to master the fire control problem. Modern day readers, especially historians who may not be mathematically inclined (such as your humble reviewer) may stumble in grasping the vast amount of information Friedman offers. The array of rangefinders. Dumaresqs, plotting boards, Dreyer tables, Argo clocks, Ford range keepers, inclinometers, and other equipment is confusing to someone unpracticed in this specialized art. These devices are some of the most intricate and precise ever made in the Industrial Age; a simple textual description of how they work is not enough for me to understand what Friedman was driving at. I did find some helpful YouTube videos of USN training films out there that helped me to understand how analog devices can perform mathematical operations using gears, shafts, cams, slots and differentials--knowledge that is no longer useful in the Digital Age.

If I had one suggestion to make to help the reader, it would be to add more illustrations like those used in US Navy training manuals to help with the mechanics of how these analog devices operated. Despite this criticism, I am grateful that Dr. Friedman put this book together, as I am pretty sure no one else is going to try a similar effort anytime soon. Maybe a third reading will make it through my thick skull.... ( )

This book is kind of a disjointed mess, at least in terms of being a cross between some of the survey books Friedman produced early in his career and a coffee table production. That said there are many useful points here and the tome is well-illustrated.

Probably the single most striking observation in the book is in relation to the battle of Jutland, where Friedman goes revisionist and challenges the notion that Jellicoe should have adopted division as opposed to line-ahead tactics. On the basis of the C3I technology of the time Friedman doesn't believe that Jellicoe would have been able to maintain the situational awareness to safely avoid nasty friendly-fire incidents.

However, it seems that more could have been said about the experience of fire control in the Second World War, and I'm a little surprised that the day-time experiences in and about Africa, such as Dakar, Casablanca, and Mers-el-Kebir didn't receive more attention. This is particularly true of Casablanca, the only day-time naval action of World War II involving a U.S. battleship using her main battery for the intended purpose. ( )

A book of promising scope which hints that the author lacks a true understanding of what he is writing about. Friedman is a well-known and well-respected author, but he has never before focused on fire control (well, honestly... who has?), and this first mass-market book to attempt to cover it shows a failed effort.

The book is crowded with errors, some so fundamental as to introduce serious wonder whether the areas of the subject I am not as well informed about are poorly connected to fact. Here are a few I have noticed as I read only those portions of the book I already felt well informed about:

page 19. He asserts that "pointer" is a synonym for "trainer". It is not: it is a synonym for "layer". To confuse the two in a book of fire control is akin to writing about air line flight operations and being unclear on the role of pilot and flight engineer.

page 43, a diagram is mislabeled so that a target ship's relative heading is called the "inclination", which is the name for the angle formed between a target's heading and its line of bearing.

pages 178 and 179 have two photos whose captions are reversed.

These are, perhaps, sloppy editorial mistakes that can be remedied in a second edition. Less easily addressed is his immediate resort to mumbo-jumbo in favor of clear discussion of the capabilities and frailties of the systems and procedures being discussed. The most glaring one is that he thinks it helpful to arrange fire control systems under headings of "analytic" versus "synthetic". These are words with perilously near no meaning, and his prose remains there when a more illuminating and inspiring examination of how the machines worked is sadly foregone.

The book contains extensive photographs, though the captions on them are very finely printed. Some show equipment seldom seen outside (say) Japanese nerd-historian magazines of the 70s and 80s -- I am making a guess there -- but they are like peeking into another world of lost mysteries. Friedman has done well to bring these to the eyes of the mass market, even if in some cases he has merely promoted their visibility in the West.

I hope to see Mr Friedman touch this up, and perhaps excise much of it to be saved for a follow-on volume. He has to demonstrate that he has read John Brooks's "Dreadnought Gunnery at the Battle of Jutland: the Question of Fire Control" and mimic some of that author's shafts-and-cams descriptions rather than simply comparing vague categories of machinery he feels each system he examines kinda sorta fits into. ( )