Strategy (23 page)

His efforts to accommodate the views of those he was challenging made his work at times unnecessarily convoluted. Whereas Mahan was in some respects a polemicist writing for a receptive audience, Corbett was in a trickier position, a civilian writing for a skeptical audience. While Mahan sought to apply Jomini, Corbett began with Clausewitz, but with greater subtlety than Tirpitz.
²⁶
Like Delbrück, Corbett picked up on those aspects of
On War
that allowed for the possibility of something other than decisive battle in
an absolute war. The wisdom of Britain's naval strategy, demonstrated by achieving so much with limited resources, was the result of a succession of limited engagements for limited purposes. It had managed to combine “naval and military action” to give the “contingent a weight and mobility that are beyond its intrinsic power.”
²⁷
The potential of limited war at sea was compared to the potential for absolute war in continental Europe. There compact, nationalistic, and organized states bordered each other. If war came, popular feeling was apt to be high and it was possible to commit extra resource into the campaign if battles went badly. The further away from borders, the lower the political stakes and the greater the logistical problems. This made limitation and restraint more likely. The destruction of the enemy's armed forces was a means to an end and not an end in itself. If the end could be achieved by different means, so much the better.

The vital question for strategy was not how to win a battle but how to exert pressure on the enemy's society and government. This argued for consideration of blockade and attacks on commerce (“guerre de course”) as much as seeking out the enemy fleet. Major or grand strategy was about the purposes of war, taking into account international relations and economic factors, to which the strategy for the actual conduct of war should be subordinate. As it was highly unlikely that a war would be decided solely by naval action, except possibly over time as a result of blockade, armies and navies should not be considered separately. “Since men live on the land and not upon the sea, great issues between nations at war have always been decided—except in the rarest cases—either by what your army can do against your enemy's territory and national life, or else by fear of what the fleet makes possible for your army to do.” The relationship between land and sea forces was the business of maritime strategy, from which the fleet's specific tasks would emerge. That would be the business of a purely naval strategy.

The key to success on land was control of territory; at sea it was control of communications. This was because the sea did not lend itself to possession. Offensive and defensive operations would tend to merge into one another. Because of this, the loss of command of the sea, which meant that passage might be opposed, did not necessarily imply that another power enjoyed command. “The command is normally in dispute. It is this state of dispute with which naval strategy is most nearly concerned.” Corbett could see why it would be desirable to seek out and destroy the enemy fleet to gain command of the sea—the equivalent of a Napoleonic decisive battle—but he also understood why it might not be possible. Trafalgar, he noted, was “ranked as one of the decisive battles of the world, and yet of all the great victories, there is not one which to all appearance was so barren of immediate result … It
gave England finally the dominion of the seas, but it left Napoleon dictator of the continent.”

By exalting the offensive “into a fetish,” the defensive was discredited. Yet at sea the defensive was stronger because of the ease with which battle could be avoided. A fleet that knew it was weaker would have every incentive to avoid the stronger. Unlike Mahan, Corbett saw great advantages in dispersal, such as avoiding a stronger fleet, luring a weaker fleet into danger under the illusion that it enjoyed local strength, and producing a winning combination of ships. In this respect, the “ideal concentration” was “an appearance of weakness that covers a reality of strength.” The worst concentration, by the same token, would limit the area of the sea that could be controlled, leaving other parts vulnerable for any use. “The more you concentrate your force and efforts to secure the desired decision, the more you will expose your trade to sporadic attack.”
²⁸
The Great War gave far more support to Corbett's views rather than Mahan's. The one great naval battle, at Jutland in 1915, was inconclusive and in Corbett's eyes unnecessary, because the Royal Navy was still able to sustain a blockade that would have weakened Germany over time. Meanwhile, submarine warfare against British merchant shipping found Britain unprepared and only belatedly able to cope after adopting a convoy system.

It may well be that other great powers would have followed Britain into building large navies if Mahan had never written a word, but he certainly gave these efforts legitimacy and credibility. They were bound up with what was essentially a mercantilist vision of economic strength, protected and enhanced through the exertion of military power. Presenting the oceans as containing their own sea lanes, pathways for commerce that could be guaranteed by a naval hegemon, Mahan introduced a concept that took hold among maritime enthusiasts. His thesis was vigorously championed by President Theodore Roosevelt, who was something of a naval historian himself in an earlier life, and led to a major expansion in the U.S. fleet after 1907.

Perhaps because the British were aware that their days of naval superiority were numbered, it was not only Corbett who provided an important qualification to Mahan's thesis. A quite different perspective was provided by the geographer, adventurer, and politician Sir Halford Mackinder. Mahan was addressing what he assumed to be a real choice for the United States: whether to be a continental or a maritime power. For that reason he bemoaned the
fascination with developing the country's interior to the detriment of its seaboards. Mackinder did not accept this dichotomy. In an essay delivered to the Royal Geographical Society in 1904, he explained why it was possible for a land power to acquire strength from the interior which could then be applied to create a navy.
²⁹
A maritime power, and certainly a small island such as Britain, lacked this option. New forms of transport, particularly rail, would make it possible to exploit interior resources in a way that would have been impossible when movement depended on horses. He looked at the great Eurasian landmass and saw how either Germany or Russia (or the two in combination) could come to control it all, from which they would gain such economic power that it would be a comparatively small matter to project it out to sea. Mackinder explained in 1905: “Half a continent may ultimately outbuild and outman an island.”
³⁰
On this basis he saw an increasing vulnerability, which Britain could only address by closer integration with her empire.

His theory was given a more mature expression in a book published just after the First World War in which he gave the Eurasian interior its name, the “heartland.” This was the “region to which under modern conditions, sea-power can be refused access.”
³¹
He divided the world into a core “World-Island”—which was potentially self-sufficient, comprising Eurasia and Africa—with the rest of the islands—including the Americas, Australia, Japan, the British Isles, and Oceania—around the “periphery.” These smaller islands required sea transport to function. Despite Germany's defeat in 1918, Mackinder saw the basic danger remaining of “ever-increasing strategical opportunities to land-power as against sea-power.” This resulted in the advice to keep “the German and the Slav” apart. Three maxims flowed from his analysis: “Who rules East Europe controls the heartland; Who rules the heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the World.”
³²
The importance of distance, which Mackinder saw being transformed by railways and motorized transport, was eventually affected even more by the ability of aircraft to fly over both land and sea. Surprisingly, Mackinder paid little attention to the possibilities of air power though it was only a few weeks before he gave his seminal paper in 1904 that the Wright brothers made their historic first flight.

There was much that Mackinder shared with Mahan. International relations were understood in terms of relentless competition among naturally expansive great powers. What Mackinder introduced was a way of thinking about the geographical dimension that showed how the land and sea could be understood as part of the same world system, and as a source of continuity even as political and technological change affected its relevance. He was not
a geographical determinist, accepting that power balances would also depend on “the relative number, virility, equipment, and organization of the competing peoples.”
³³
What Mackinder offered was a way of rooting the higher-level strategic discourse in the interaction between states and the enduring features of their environment.

Mackinder never used the term “geopolitics.” It was coined by the Swede Rudolf Kjellén, who was a student of Friedrich Ratzel, the first geographer to focus on political geography. Kjellén's works were translated into German and picked up by Karl Haushofer, a former General who founded the German geopolitical school.
³⁴
Although he was not a Nazi, Haushofer reflected a world view that thought naturally in terms of distinctive ethnic groups occupying sufficient space to exercise economic independence (autarky). The logic of “lebensraum” (the need to expand living space) became part of Nazi ideology. Such associations left geopolitics discredited.
³⁵
Mackinder's more nuanced approach provided a context for the parochial concerns of individual states but also reinforced anxieties that there might be a route for a hostile power (for this option was not available to Britain) to eventual world domination. This idea influenced the titanic struggles of the coming century. It encouraged the view that there were a number of timeless imperatives arising out of the structure of international politics that states ignored at their peril. These encouraged a focus on the more conservative notions of nationality and territory and played down considerations of ideology and values, though these might well have been the most important factors when it came to deciding what was worth fighting for and with whom it was desirable to forge and maintain alliances. So, while geopolitics appeared to move strategy to a higher plane than one which concentrated solely on the operational art, it suffered from the same defect of failing to attend to the wider political context.

Quiet people go out in the morning, and see air-fleets passing overhead—dripping death—dripping death!

—H. G. Wells,
The War in the Air, 1908

F
EW EPISODES REVEALED
the limitations of military planning more than the German offensive of August 1914. The general staff controlled what they could, but their plans had paid insufficient attention to what France might do to disrupt these plans—especially as logistics and communications lines became extended. The plan's schedule soon proved impossible to meet, especially as Belgium put up some resistance. This led to brutal dealings with civilians (a pattern which continued through the war), including forced labor, denial of food supplies, and wanton destruction.
¹
Within weeks, the offensive had been halted. Yet the failure to knock France out of the war and the need to then cope with the Russians and the British (because of the attack on Belgium) did not lead to a fundamental reappraisal of war aims or strategic principles. The search was still on for a decisive victory, relying on superiority in temperament, refusal to countenance a hint of timidity, and faith in some new technique that could turn the tide. The first of these was the use of gas warfare. The next drastic move was unrestricted submarine warfare, reflecting optimistic views about the inability of civil shipping to cope with the threat. This had the predictable effect of bringing the United
States into the war. The final gamble was the offensive of March 1918 that left the army extended and exposed.

Delbrück had applauded the initial offensive and thought it would succeed, but once it stalled he quickly revised his thinking. If Germany could not annihilate it would have to exhaust the enemy, although Delbrück struggled to assess the relative economic impacts on the belligerents. He argued for a deal with Britain and France in order to concentrate on Russia. The uncompromising political and military stance led him to despair. Germany had “in a sense the whole world leagued against us,” he wrote in 1917, adding that “fear of German despotism is one of the weightiest facts with which we have to reckon, one of the strongest factors in the enemy's power.”
²

In the middle of this great stalemate, when there seemed to be few obvious means of breaking the deadlock other than by persevering with the costly and futile combination of artillery bombardment and infantry charges, plans began to be drawn up for more daring strategies. In each case the intention was to realize the potential of a new technology—the tank on the ground or the airplane in the air—to break the will of the enemy. In both cases the presumed impact of the new weaponry was assumed to be psychological as much as physical. The aim was to cause what would in effect be a collective nervous breakdown on the enemy side. This directly challenged the assumption that a decisive victory had to involve the annihilation of the enemy army. In neither case were the plans realistic: the technologies were still in their infancy, the production capacity limited and the tactics underdeveloped. Nonetheless, in both cases these early plans set the terms for the intense postwar debates about future strategy.