The Collaborative International Dictionary
Naval \Na"val\ (n[=a]"val), a. [L. navalis, fr. navis ship: cf. F. naval. See Nave of a church.] Having to do with shipping; of or pertaining to ships or a navy; consisting of ships; as, naval forces, successes, stores, etc. Naval brigade, a body of seamen or marines organized for military service on land. Naval officer.
An officer in the navy.
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A high officer in some United States customhouses.
Naval tactics, the science of managing or maneuvering vessels sailing in squadrons or fleets.
Syn: Nautical; marine; maritime.
Usage: Naval, Nautical. Naval is applied to vessels, or a navy, or the things which pertain to them or in which they participate; nautical, to seamen and the art of navigation. Hence we speak of a naval, as opposed to a military, engagement; naval equipments or stores, a naval triumph, a naval officer, etc., and of nautical pursuits or instruction, nautical calculations, a nautical almanac, etc.
Wikipedia
Naval tactics is the collective name for methods of engaging and defeating an enemy ship or fleet in battle at sea during naval warfare, the naval equivalent of military tactics on land.
Naval tactics are distinct from naval strategy. Naval tactics are concerned with the movements a commander makes in battle, typically in the presence of the enemy. Naval strategy concerns the overall strategy for achieving victory and the large movements by which a Commandant and commander secures the advantage of fighting at a place convenient to himself.
Modern naval tactics are based on tactical doctrines developed after World War II, following the obsolescence of the battleship and the development of long-range missiles. Since there has been no major naval conflict since World War II, apart from the Indo-Pakistani Naval War of 1971 and the Falklands War, many of these doctrines reflect scenarios developed for planning purposes. Critics argue that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent reduction in the size and capabilities of the Russian navy renders most such fleet-on-fleet scenarios obsolete.
Usage examples of "naval tactics".
He'd climbed aboard the Committee's political bandwagon not because of any belief in what Rob Pierre and Oscar Saint-Just had promised the Mob but because it had offered him the opportunity for personal power, and he'd played the political game with a skillfulness which somehow managed to elude him in the field of naval tactics.
Since modern naval tactics called for boarding as well as ramming, the rowers/soldiers on the upper banks were protected by nothing more substantial than a light frame rigged along the gangways to which they attached their shields.
Unlike Helen, however, I was never good enough at naval tactics to have much hope of climbing to a command position in the fleet.
Russian naval tactics, like their tactics for land warfare, depended on saturating the enemy's defenses, piling on so much raw power in such huge numbers that sooner or later those defenses began to leak.
Eliza, though she knew little of Naval tactics, could see the logic of it as plainly as if it had been writ out on a page by Leibniz: The English could bring their ships no nearer shore than a certain point because of the shore-batteries.
I assigned myself the first watch, and after a half hour on the learning program, spent the time reading a long article in one of dad's library cubes, about naval tactics on primitive field worlds.
Each day presented its difficulties like a fleet of hostile ships, and each difficulty could only be overcome by classic naval tactics.