JANE’S LOVERS

A schoolfellow had a boat better than I; I mounted a gun in mine and committed an act of piracy on a duck pond. My chum was a sportsman, and after punching my head, proceeded to arm his ship also. We took to armour plates made from biscuit tins, and to squadrons instead of single ships. In the battle that ensued our fleets annihilated each other, and depleted finances forbade their renewal.

A boy like this may grow up into a builder of model planes, a collector of toy soldiers, or just a voracious reader about the military. But he will almost certainly have one book or another from Jane’s Information Group, which bills itself the “leading provider of defense, aerospace, aviation, transportation, geo-political, and law enforcement information to the world’s militaries, governments, universities, and businesses.”

Jane’s periodicals, including Jane’s Defence Weekly and Jane’s Navy International, have a combined circulation of almost sixty thousand. But 30 percent of its business stems from the commercial sector — which means hobbyists, enthusiasts, and many who have never even served in the armed forces. It can mean ex-insurance salesmen like Tom Clancy, tycoons like Malcolm Forbes, or even aging rock stars like John Cale.

Cale is probably best known for co-founding with Lou Reed The Velvet Underground. He also decapitated a chicken on stage (prompting his band to walk out on him). And he just wrote a book called What’s Welsh for Zen. At first glance, he doesn’t seem the type to read Jane’s Intelligence Review or Foreign Report. But it turns out he’s an avid reader of military publications. In a phone interview, he explained: “If a mother wanted to know about the effects of an aluminum works on a well, she couldn’t. It was considered confidential. But you can find out, and when I went to college, that’s what I did. I learned to research. And Jane’s is one of those publications that keeps you informed.”

But what really got him interested was the 1975 movie Three Days of the Condor, starring Robert Redford. Cale becomes quite animated about it: Redford “was this average guy who just read a lot, knew a lot, and got involved in a government conspiracy. And the guys after him wanted to know, who is this guy? Who does he work for? What does he do? But he was just an ordinary guy.”

Like Redford’s character, Cale began absorbing as much information as possible on subjects not generally well known outside of government circles. (Unlike Redford’s character, Cale’s co-workers were not in the CIA and were not gunned down in the office one day.) When I asked him what he thinks causes people’s fascination with military books like the ones published by Jane’s, he replies, “Boys’ toys! . . . Look at [Kiss guitarist] Ace Frehley. He would fly his little helicopters around the stadium while the crew was setting up for the concert. He knew everything there was to know about those little helicopters.”

Jane’s books, such as Jane’s Pocket Guide for Modern Military Helicopters and the Pocket Guide for Advanced Tactical Fighters, published by HarperCollins, have been a tremendous success. “It is a very healthy and successful business for us,” says Marion Maneker, executive editor at HarperCollins Resource, adding that they would continue selling these titles and even books that were a few years old but still extremely popular. “What’s important about Jane’s as a business is that it is quite healthy even in this day and age when the military is no longer as esteemed as it used to be in American life.” Why do people flock to Jane’s? “We have a reputation for reliability and credibility. Our readers know they’re getting a quality, thoughtful publication, and also recognize we have no biased agenda,” says Joe Dougherty, the company’s public relations manager.

Jane’s has been a valuable source for leaders throughout the world. When President Bush boarded a Coast Guard ship off of Kennebunkport for a debriefing during the Gulf crisis, the first thing the commander in chief asked for was a Jane’s book. (Coincidentally, Saddam Hussein was also a subscriber, though his subscription was terminated once the embargo against Iraq took effect.)

Greg Caires, a spokesman for Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor, gives a qualified nod: “I’m unconvinced that Jane’s is the primary information source within the U.S. military-industrial complex, but for those on the outside and not in the armed forces, their pocket guides can be indispensable reference tools.”

These guides offer little in the way of reading matter. But the stunning photos of state-of-the-art fighting machines are the real selling points. Next to pictures of the Russian Mi-24 “Hind” helicopter (recognizable from movies like Red Dawn and Rambo III) is a brief history, information on size, speed, and armaments: a 12.7 mm Gatling cannon, AT-2 Swatter wire-guided anti-tank missiles, AT-6 “Shturm” radio and laser guided missiles, air-to-air missiles, free-flight rocket pods, 23-mm gun pods, a 30-mm grenade launcher, and mine dispensers. Mine dispensers? It’s the kind of thing military buffs drool over.

The popular format of these guides dates back to 1898 and the first printing of Jane’s All the World’s Fighting Ships in Portsmouth, England. It could not have come out at a more significant time. At the turn of the century it was widely accepted that a superpower was a naval power. The seminal book was The Influence of Sea Power upon History by Alfred Thayer Mahan (the only recognized American naval theorist of the time; probably the only recognized American naval theorist of any time). Mahan believed only those nations that controlled the high seas could control their own destinies, and the effect of his book on the British admiralty and Kaiser Wilhelm was almost hypnotic.

This obsession with naval superiority worsened an already feverish arms race between Germany and England. It was in this atmosphere that Fred T. Jane, eccentric British naval enthusiast, journalist, novelist, and Scoutmaster, published his first Fighting Ships. The book took ten years to complete, discussed twenty-two different navies in two hundred pages, and included not a single photograph: Jane considered photos misleading, and, being a skilled artist, he opted to draw each ship by hand.

As Richard Brooks describes in his biography, Fred T Jane: An Eccentric Visionary, Jane’s “was the first book to successfully provide technical information about warships in a structured and integrated way giving its users a consistent and rational basis for comparison.” Jane popularized the use of silhouettes, arguing that the first sighting of any ship would be on the horizon. He understood the importance of expressing the ship “not only as she is but also the ship as she strikes the ordinary observer who is mentally comparing her with other vessels. This necessitates some slight accentuation of peculiarities,” placing special emphasis on funnels and masts. This silhouette system of identifying distant vessels was used in varying degrees well into the 1980s until radar characteristics became the dominant factor.

By the end of his life, Jane had produced roughly twenty more publications on military matters, including The Imperial Russian Navy and The British Battle Fleet, and devised the Jane Naval Wargame, described as “a sea kriegspiel simulating all the movements and evolutions of every individual type of modern warship, and the proportionate effect of every sort of gun and projectile.” He hoped the British Navy would use his game to better their naval maneuvers. (It was not well received; the Russians were the first to express interest in the game.)

There is not much evidence that Jane’s works influenced British policy early on. In fact, the Edwardian navy had a great distrust of civilian defense analysts. And within the ranks of the British Navy there were conflicts of class — between deck officers and the engineers, blue-collar petty officers (whom Jane favored) and the upwardly mobile captains and admirals. The admiralty slowly came around, however, after Jane published an article in Fighting Ships by Italian engineer Vittorio Cuniberti, entitled “An Ideal Warship for the British Navy.”

Although the first reaction in England was ridicule, two years later, a revolutionary warship similar to the one in Cuniberti’s article emerged from Ports-mouth — the HMS Dreadnought. Armed with ten twelve-inch guns each firing 850-pound shells and bearing eleven-inch armor, she immediately (in the words of Brooks) “rendered every other battleship in existence obsolete.”

A better explanation can be found in Dreadnought, Robert Massie’s highly acclaimed history of Britain and Germany before the First World War:

As theretofore no previous battleship, British or foreign, had carried more than four twelve-inch guns, two firing ahead, two astern, or four broadside, the Dreadnought was the equivalent to two or even three earlier ships. . . . If all eight guns of the Dreadnought’s broadside fired simultaneously, 6,800 pounds of steel and high explosive would plummet down on the enemy.

The acceptance of the Dreadnought and the move toward bigger guns on faster ships was a vindication of Jane’s long-held beliefs. The admiralty at long last recognized Jane by conceding that “never before had Jane so clearly attained his ambition of making Fighting Ships the mirror of naval progress.”

But Fred Jane didn’t stop there. Shortly after the Wright brothers’ first successful flight, he came out with All the World’s Airships 1909 — what the Daily Mail described as “The First Flying Directory.” While he deemed armed aerial combat to be far distant, Jane felt that the use of aircraft for reconaissance would pose a serious threat. Jane thought naval strategy was “something like a game of poker — aircraft have already made it poker with the cards face up.” He recommended armored decks and higher angled guns, and spoke of the possibility for carrier-like “depot ships” to be used “so there might be a fair prospect of the aeroplane being able to return.”

He also warned about the dangers of using battleships as weapons against coastal fortresses — his great fear was the threat of mines. And sure enough, the Allied attempt to destroy the Turkish batteries along the Dardanelles in 1915 proved a catastrophe. The HMS Irresistable and two French battleships were sunk by floating mines. As Jane put it, “the fort has immense advantages against the ship even without the aid of floating mines . . . which if at all efficiently protected from the shore can only be swept or counter-mined with the greatest difficulty.”

Jane died unexpectedly in 1916 at the age of fifty-one (many suspect suicide out of depression because of ill health and a disintegrating marriage). Not only did he miss the end of the Great War, he also missed the only battle between the British and German navies at Jutland. Jane would have been shocked to learn that the five ships of Britain’s Battle Cruiser Squadron decided to valiantly charge head on against the entire German High Seas Fleet (seventeen dreadnoughts) with catastrophic results — the Indefatigable, the Queen Mary, and, later, the Invincible were obliterated (the latter lost all but five sailors from its company of over a thousand).

His Fighting Ships did not die along with him. Rather, as stated in his will, the publication would carry on under his editorial colleagues and eventually flourish into the multi-million dollar operation we see today and what 60 Minutes describes as “the closest thing there is to a commercial intelligence agency.”

That books on military matters are still a draw at the local bookstore despite the absence of world war and even the end of the Cold War might come as a surprise. But war’s enduring interest, for boys of all ages, derives more from fascination with the mechanisms of war than with its deadly consequences. One need look no further than the media and the military’s fixation with videotaped sorties and bombing raids during the Gulf War. Who can forget those first black and white clips of bunkers and bridges obliterated via “surgical strikes” with a minimum of casualties?

“There’s a disconnect between the military and civilian sectors that now brings out the curiosity in people,” explains Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, an avid Jane’s reader and former guitarist for Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers. And when he’s not producing records, he’s reading in Jane’s and forwarding it to another Jane’s fan, Slim Jim Phantom, drummer for the Stray Cats. “When I started consulting for [music companies],” Baxter relates, “one of the chief sources of information happened to be Jane’s. It gave me the cutting edge in technology. In the meantime, I began stroing up knowledge on things like the turning radius of a MiG-29.”

Then one day, Baxter decided to write an article on the Aegis cruiser and the ater missile defense that caught the eye of congressman Dana Rohrabacher. “Next thing you know, I get invited by the Navy to go aboard one of their ships. I do more writing and thanks to Jane’s, I can get to the technical underside of it. And I met with [Representative] Curt Weldon who said I knew more about missile defense than some of his own people. And then I got into wargaming.” Wargaming?

Baxter can barely contain his excitement. He sounds, in fact, just like that boy whose love of toy sailboats never stopped growing. The boy’s name was Fred T. Jane.

Victorino Matus is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.