A History of Strategy (11 page)

In our survey so far, naval warfare has barely been mentioned. This is not because the role it played in war was unimportant. After all, from the Peloponnesian and the Punic Wars to the wars of the Napoleonic era, ships and navies had often figured prominently, sometimes even decisively. Not only had naval warfare always been a highly complex and technical subject, but the ancient Greeks clearly recognized the importance of
thessalocratia
(command of the sea). Nevertheless, navies were never made the subject of any major theoretical treatises.

To be sure, several authors either appended chapters on naval warfare to their works or had others do so, as Vegetius and Jomini e.g. did. With Vegetius the discussion of naval theory consists of a single page about the importance of having a navy always ready. To this were appended eight short chapters on the principles of building ships, navigating them, and fighting them. To Jomini ships were merely an aid to the movements of armies. What he has to say about them is completely unremarkable. As to Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, the greatest writers of all, judging by their published works one would think they did not even know that such a thing as the sea existed.

In the study of history, room must be allowed for accident. The first staff colleges were founded in Prussia and France from about 1770 on. Having discovered strategy as the most important subject they could teach, they began to flourish after 1815 and even more after 1871 when every important army in the world felt impelled to have one. Navies, however, remained backward. It was not until 1885 that an American, Commodore Stephen B. Luce, was able to persuade his country’s Navy Department to set up a Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island. Even then keeping it open and functioning was an uphill struggle. After two officers had turned down the job, Luce chose a forty-five-year-old naval captain of no great distinction, Alfred Mahan, to act as chief instructor. Mahan was the son of a well-known professor at West Point, Dennis Mahan. He had also written a volume called
The Navy in the Civil War, The Gulf and Inland Waters.
With that, though, his qualifications ended.

If a death sentence is said to “wonderfully concentrate the mind,” so—in the case of some people at any rate—does the requirement to stand in front of a class and teach. Mahan taught class from 1886 to 1889. In 1890 he published his lectures in the form of a two-volume work,
The Influence of Seapower upon History, 1660–1783.
It was an immense success, probably selling more copies than all its predecessors put together (e.g. the first edition of Clausewitz only comprised 500 copies) and earning its author fame not only in the U.S but in Britain and Germany. The Kaiser himself was said to have kept it at his bedside, and made sure every naval officer read it. This success in turn was due to the fact that, in an age dominated by several great and would-be great “World Powers,” Mahan had succeeded in putting together a remarkably coherent case as to why such Powers should have navies; what having such navies entailed; and how they should be used.

The book’s main message is contained in the first and last chapters. Most of what is in between simply serves to illustrate how naval power had been successfully applied by the most important naval country of all, i.e. Britain. Its main concern was strategy. Convinced that continuing technological progress must soon render the details of building ships, arming them, sailing them, and fighting them obsolete, Mahan chose not to elaborate on those subjects. Strategy, on the other hand, was concerned with such questions as “the proper function of the navy in war; its true objective; the point or points upon which it should be concentrated; the establishment of depots of coal and supplies; the maintenance of communications between those depots and the home base; the military value of commerce-destroying as a decisive or secondary operation of war; [and] the system upon which commerce-destroying can be most efficiently conducted.” In common with many other nineteenth century theorists Mahan believed that it could be reduced to a small number of principles. Concerning those principles, history had a great deal to say.

Describing his own intellectual development, Mahan says that he had first been led to reflect upon these questions while reading Mommsen’s account of the critical role played by sea power during the Punic Wars. Not having control of the sea, the Carthaginian Navy had been reduced to operating mainly in home waters. Beyond that it could do no more than mount occasional raids and forays. Specifically, Carthage had been unable either to reinforce Hannibal’s Italian campaign—which, in spite of its commander’s genius, was thereby doomed to fail—or help its principal ally in Sicily, Syracuse. Rome, on the other hand, was able to use its command of the sea to cut Hannibal off from his bases in Africa and Spain (the overland route from the latter to Italy through the Alps being perilous, and most of the time, blocked by the Romans). It could also ship its own legions to both Spain and Sicily unhindered, keep King Philip V of Macedonia out of the war, and finally invade Africa itself. Thus seapower had helped shape the conduct of the war from beginning to end. It had also played a crucial part in Rome’s victory.

In this as in so many subsequent wars, the importance of the sea consisted in that it served as a great highway by which men, armies, and goods could be transported more efficiently and more cheaply than by land. In both war and peace, the side able to do so enjoyed a critical advantage over the one who could not. Never more so than in the late nineteenth century when so much of every advanced nation’s wealth had come to depend on its ability to export its industrial products while importing food and raw materials to feed its population and keep its factories running. During wartime, ensuring passage for one’s own side while denying it to one’s opponent was the function of the navy. Otherwise put, the navy of a great power—like almost all nineteenth century military theorists except for du Picq, Mahan was interested in none but great powers—found itself confronted by a double task, a negative one and a positive one. The negative part consisted of halting and destroying the enemy’s commerce. The positive one, of making sure that one’s own ships got through to their destinations.

In carrying out this double mission, two strategies presented themselves. One was to protect one’s own shipping by providing them with escorts while simultaneously going after the enemy’s cargo-bearing vessels. That strategy was known as
guerre de course
and was often resorted to by past belligerents. The other was to build up as powerful a battle-fleet as possible and use it to seek out, and defeat, the other side’s navy. With “command of the sea” thus achieved, protecting one’s own commerce while sweeping the enemy’s remaining ships off the sea and blockading them in their ports would be relatively easy.

In other words, not for Mahan either war on commerce or its converse, escorted convoys. Both constituted half-hearted solutions and merely led to the dispersal of forces. Instead one should seek, and achieve, command of the sea, which Mahan treated almost as if it were some piece of country that could be conquered and ruled. At this point the similarity between Mahan and Clausewitz, at any rate the early Clausewitz before he started thinking of limited war, becomes obvious. Though he never mentions the Prussian general, our American born and bred prophet of seapower might have said that the best naval strategy was always to be very strong. First in general and then at the decisive point. Once created, the battle-fleet should be kept as concentrated as circumstances permitted and launched straight at the opposing fleet with the objective of annihilating it. Thus considered, Mahan’s work represents one long diatribe against commerce-raiding (as well as the minor vessels by which, on the whole, it is carried out) and in favor of navies made up of the most powerful available capital ships.

Needless to say, this also entailed massive investments in other components of naval infrastructure such as qualified manpower, ports, depots, dry-docks, shipyards, factories for manufacturing arms and armor, and transportation facilities like the Suez, Panama and Kiel Canals. All of this Mahan explains at some length, which in turn contributed to his popularity, not only in naval circles, but among certain segments of industry and the political world as well.

As already mentioned, in setting forth his views Mahan had drawn mainly on what he interpreted as the historical experience of the strongest modern naval Power of all, i.e. Britain. Always tending to be pragmatic, though, the British had never been among the great producers of military theory, naval theory included. It was only a decade and a half after Luce had opened the US Naval War College that a similar reform could be carried through the British Navy. Even then many officers continued to argue that, in view of the Navy’s past record, a theoretical education was not really needed. It is therefore not surprising that the introduction to the work of the next important naval author whom we must consider here, Julian Corbett, had much to say on the importance of military theory as such. To him, it was “a process by which we co-ordinate our ideas, define the meaning of the words we use, grasp the difference between essential and unessential factors, and fix and expose the fundamental data on which everyone is agreed. In this way we prepare the apparatus of practical discussion…. Without such an apparatus no two men can even think on the same line; much less can they ever hope to detach the real point of difference that divides them and isolate it for quiet solution.” Achieving common ground was all the more essential in the case of an Empire, such as a British one, whose strategy would be made not by a single person or group at a single place but in innumerable conferences held at different places all around the world.

To be taught their own trade by a civilian—Corbett was a lawyer, but being a man of independent means he did not practice his profession and wrote full time—was regarded by many naval officers as an affront. As one of them wrote, Mr. Corbett had “permitted himself the indulgence of offering his audience his own views on the correctness or otherwise of the strategy adopted by naval officers in the past. His audience had usually treated his amateur excursions into the subject good-naturedly. Nevertheless his presumption has been resented, and he has apparently been deaf to the polite hints thrown out to him.” Had they been able to foresee the contents of his most important theoretical work,
Some Principles of Maritime Strategy
, which came out in 1911, no doubt they would have been doubly offended.

If only because he had no true forerunners, Mahan’s heroes were figures such as Colbert, who working for Louis XIV had created the modern French Navy, and Nelson, who more than anybody else had implemented the strategy of the decisive battle. By contrast, Corbett followed good approved late-nineteenth century practice in that he harnessed Clausewitz and Jomini to his cause. From the former he took the idea that naval warfare, like war as a whole, was merely a continuation of politics by other means. Jomini, Clausewitz’s “great contemporary and rival,” was said to have “entirely endorsed this view.”

Having thus pulled down naval warfare down a peg—focusing on the fleet, Mahan had written almost as if policy did not exist—Corbett proceeded to explain that, on the whole, “men live upon land and not upon the sea.” As a result, warfare in the latter was less important, and less decisive, than that which took place on the former. History could count many wars which had been decided purely on land without any reference to operations at sea. But the reverse was not true. That even applied to the Second Punic War, which Mahan had used as his starting point and case-study
par excellence
.

In their more mature days, both Clausewitz and Jomini had concluded that offensive war
a outrance
was only one form of war and that policy might dictate the use of other, more circumscribed methods. The latter had also shown, in considerable detail, how maneuvers by widely
dispersed
forces could lead to interesting strategic combinations and result in victory. Add the fact that, at sea as on land, the defensive was the more powerful form of war, and Mahan’s prescription for using the concentrated fleet for seeking out the enemy and dealing a single offensive blow turned out to be completely wrong. Instead, and other things being equal, a compelling case could be made in favor of a careful, and necessarily prolonged, struggle of attrition—safeguarding one’s own commerce, disrupting that of the enemy by every means that came to hand, and using the Navy to land forces at selected points in the enemy’s rear so as to disrupt his plans and throw him out of gear. All this was particularly true if the political entity waging the war was not a country facing a neighbor but a far-flung empire dependent on its lines of communication.

A much better historian than Mahan, Corbett was able to support his argument by means of detailed case-studies. The most comprehensive of those was
England in the Seven Years War,
published in 1907 specifically to refute Mahan and quickly getting into the “limitations of naval action.” Acting on a grand design thought out by the Elder Pitt, most of the time the British had
not
attempted to seek out the main French fleet and bring it to battle. Instead they had striven to contain the enemy and limit his movements; all the while protecting their own commerce and using their superior sea-power to assist their allies and grab prizes, such as India and Quebec, as came their way. The result of this “combined strategy” might not be decisive in the sense aimed at by Mahan. Though many combats took place, no general action between the two fleets was ever fought. When the War ended, so far were the British from achieving complete command of the sea that French commerce raiding still continued. The main French fleet also remained in being. The Peace of Paris, though achieved by strangulation rather than by some smashing victory, was “the most triumphant we ever made.” It marked a critical step on Britain’s way to world Empire.

Compared to those who came before and after them, Mahan and Corbett were giants. Blunt and to the point, the former can justly claim to have been the first writer who spelled out a comprehensive theory of naval warfare, a subject which hitherto had either been treated as secondary or neglected altogether. Highly sophisticated and tending towards understatement, the latter served as a useful corrective by emphasizing the limitations of maritime strategy and pointing out that command of the sea might be extremely useful even if it was not brought about by a climactic battle between the concentrated fleets of both sides; and even if, as a result, it was not as absolute as Mahan would have wished. The unique stature enjoyed by both authors has much to do with the fact that, instead of contenting themselves with the technical aspects of ports, navigation, ships and weapons, they started from first principles. The former looked into the objectives of naval warfare
per se
. The latter linked it to policy which might be less limited or more.