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This goes a long way towards explaining the immense difference in nature of how humans have conducted naval and land warfare.

In essence, ground warfare is far more individualistic by nature—even in the blocky, disciplined formations of sword-bearing armies, maintaining discipline, group cohesion, and commitment to action was a constant struggle for even experienced units. Commanding them on an operational and strategic level was extremely difficult. Naval warfare is fundamentally different—even when commanding many ships as an admiral, an admiral can reasonably expect each individual ship to act like a sufficiently cohesive, disciplined whole. Each ship acts as its own unit, as the physical reality of a crew all being on the same boat (in the middle of a vast ocean where survival can otherwise be measured in minutes or hours) enforces such a status quo. Given that such morale and cohesion effects are self-fueling cycles, having a constant, physical bias towards cohesion makes a tremendous difference for humans.

In ancient human warfare, successfully coordinating an army at operational and tactical levels was an extremely difficult task. Morale was not merely an abstract, indirect concern that manifests over time, but a major and immediate factor in any engagement. Whereas a lone soldier feels isolation, confusion, desperation, etc, when fighting alone (or feeling like one is fighting alone), a lone ship feels the opposite. After all, without the ship, no one is going to survive—so even those who break discipline or determination will usually contribute to the ship's wellbeing, though with severely reduced effectiveness.

To convey the gist: the most critical factor in a human army's effectiveness is its coordination and communication, not its weaponry, advanced training, or familiarity with the terrain. One doesn't even have to look far back to see when some of the biggest game-changers in a given battle were preparing effective and innovative means of communications and coordination. To quote one of the central tenets of the ancient, influential, and utterly fascinating human text 'The Art of War', "all warfare is based on deception." Humanity having a general consensus supporting this notion says a great deal about their psychology and military history: information, misinformation, and lack of information is, to them, what warfare revolves around. Armies are the agents of force to achieve objectives, but knowing and not knowing various information is a more important and influential aspect of the conflict than force of arms. While this sounds just like a basic salarian military ethos on the surface, the key difference here is that for salarians, the information warfare is constant and distinct from the physical warfare, where violent action is a tool that comes into play at the proper times to brute-force their way to otherwise unattainable objectives; for humanity, information warfare—or intelligence, as they call it—is a completely different concept in peace or war. In peace, openness about intentions, general goals, and relationships is paramount; in war, every tool of deceit is brought to bear as the first line of defense and offense in the physical sense: the deceit is not at all used to avoid conflict but rather to decisively conclude it. That kind of deceit is, to humans, a central tactic of warfare that almost completely doomed to disaster if employed outside of warfare (with a few notable exceptions, granted, but the general point still stands).

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/7278544/16/