Theorists of naval warfare have been around for a long time. Thucydides, in Book One of his History of the Peloponnesian War, stresses the importance of sea power. The Chinese have an old (and little known in the West) series of treatises that include Chiang Chi's The Myriad Stratagems (including both naval and military ones), written in about a.d. 225; Li Chüan's Manual of the Martial Planet (that is, Venus) of 759; and the encyclopedist Tsêng Kung-Liang's Collection of Military Techniques of 1044.
The most famous early English work is probably the anonymous Libelle of Englyshe Polycye (1436?), which, in the context of the
Hundred Years' War, spoke of the need to control the Strait of Dover, a feat the king of England at that time probably could not achieve. The Elizabethan Sir Walter Raleigh (1552?-1618) stressed sea power and colonization as the best means of sapping Spanish strength by cutting off wealth from the New World. Spain's Alonso de Chaves (fl. 1530), Italy's Pantero Pantera (1568-1625), and France's Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642) also produced treatises on naval warfare. One of Richelieu's celebrated maxims was "He who is master of the sea is master of the land." Most eighteenth-century works on naval subjects concern tactics, and most are now of no more than antiquarian interest. The golden age of naval theorists would come later, in the nineteenth century.
The name
Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) is generally the first that comes to mind when discussing theories of naval warfare. An exasperated American secretary of war,
Henry L. Stimson, once even remarked during
World War II that the Navy Department "frequently seemed to retire from the realm of logic into a dim religious world in which Neptune was God, Mahan his prophet, and the United States Navy the only true Church." Mahan had a relatively unspectacular career until 1890, when the publication of The Influence of Sea Power on History, 1660-1783 made him famous. This was followed by several other influential works.
Mahan caught the imagination largely because of his grand scheme of certain principles of warfare at sea. He was one of the late-nineteenth-century theorists who liberated naval history from the realm of mere stirring tales of heroic adventures. Mahan believed that, first and foremost, the true objective in a naval war was always the enemy fleet. The traditional weapon of the weaker naval power, commerce raiding (guerre de course), would not be decisive without support of squadron warfare. Battle was to be carried through to a decisive finish, naval force was to be used offensively, and the fleet had to be concentrated and never divided. He considered capital ships (in Mahan's time, battleships) the most important vessels in the navy and found
blockade valuable, a central position and interior liners advantageous, and proper overseas bases important for naval operations. According to Mahan, one obtained "command of the sea" by concentrating one's naval forces at the decisive point to destroy or master the enemy's battle fleet; blockade of enemy ports and disruption of the enemy's maritime communications would follow.
Mahan's work appeared at just the right moment, providing ammunition for navalists in Great Britain and Germany. In Germany the state secretary of the Imperial Naval Office,
Alfred von Tirpitz (1849-1930), made sure that translations of Mahan were widely distributed as support for his naval bill. Tirpitz echoed Mahan in his emphasis on the decisive battle and primacy of battleships. Tirpitz's Risikogedanke (doctrine of risk) claimed that once the German fleet reached a certain size, the British would be deterred from attack lest they incur losses that would weaken their worldwide position. However, Tirpitz tended to consider a large navy and sea power to be primarily an expression of national greatness and a factor in diplomacy. Critics would later charge that Tirpitz never evolved a true strategy as to how the fleet would actually be used.
Mahan was certainly not alone in writing on naval affairs. In the 1880s the so-called Jeune École in France, associated with Minister of Marine Admiral Hyacinthe Aube (1826-1890) and publicist Gabriel Charmes (1850-1886) attracted much attention with its theories: the age of squadron warfare was over, and small, cheap torpedo boats and the guerre de course carried out by fast, light cruisers could bring the British to heel in a war with France, partially by raising insurance rates to prohibitive heights and thereby paralyzing trade. Mahan to a certain extent had written to refute these claims.
In Britain, Captain John H. Colomb (1838-1909) in a series of articles and lectures argued that the navy was the most important component of imperial defense; his brother, Admiral Phillip Colomb (1831-1899), sought to establish from history general rules applicable to modern naval warfare in his Naval Warfare (1891). But it was Mahan who captured the public imagination.
Mahan's most serious rival for professional status was probably Sir
Julian Corbett (1854-1922), a civilian from a comfortable family who turned to naval history in his midforties. His lectures at the Royal Naval War College, Greenwich, eventually evolved into Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, published in 1911. Corbett's strategic thought was in some ways more subtle than that of Mahan; he emphasized the interdependence of naval and land warfare and tended to concentrate on the importance of
communications rather than the battle. Communications governed both the movement of commerce and overseas expeditions; therefore securing one's own communications and disrupting those of the enemy formed important objectives. Combat at sea was not an end in itself; the primary objective of the fleet was to secure communications, not necessarily to seek out and destroy the enemy's fleet. Corbett's work as a historian also convinced him that an island nation like Britain with command of the sea would be able to isolate distant objectives and at the same time prevent the invasion of its home territory. Furthermore, raiding activity would be valuable against an enemy whose army was too strong to be attacked on the battlefield, and such raids should therefore be part of any strategic plan.
Mahan's and Corbett's theories faced a severe test in
World War I, which did not conform to prewar scenarios. The guerre de course in the form of the submarine campaign almost defeated the British—the blockaders in a sense were subjected to a blockade themselves. Corbett's ideas, which deemphasized the Mahanian concept of the great battle at sea, were viewed as heresy by many officers in the Royal Navy. Corbett was even blamed for
John Rushworth Jellicoe's apparent caution at the
Battle of Jutland.
Yet Corbett received support from another well-known writer, Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond (1871-1946). Richmond had been highly critical of the Admiralty's conduct of the war; among other things, his historical study of eighteenth-century warfare had convinced him of the importance of trade defense and the
convoy as a means to achieve this. Richmond had a high regard for the study of history and felt that all wars, both old and modern, were worthy of analysis—one should not be preoccupied merely with the most recent war. Richmond also downgraded the importance of the great battle and strongly believed in the importance of the general blockade. During the war he had advocated reducing the Grand Fleet's strength in destroyers in order to use them for the defense of trade. This might diminish the possibility of a tactical victory but would enhance the ability to win the war through the defeat of the German attack on trade. Richmond argued that it was important to determine what a navy would be used for, and in the early 1920s he opposed the construction of large battleships. They were expensive, too much effort would be concentrated on defending them, and British interests really required large numbers of cruisers and destroyers for the defense of trade. Richmond never wrote his planned volume on naval strategy, but his ideas appeared in his Statesmen and Sea Power (1943).
Mahanian concepts fitted well in a British or American setting. Continental theorists put a different spin on them. The German vice admiral Wolfgang Wegener (1875-1956) criticized the Tirpitz doctrine, with its emphasis on an eventual decisive battle. Wegener argued that even a German naval victory would not really shake British sea control. To achieve the latter, the Germans needed a flanking position to menace the British lines of approach. This meant that in the north the Germans should seize Denmark, southern Norway, and the Faeroe Islands, and in the south Brest or Cherbourg and eventually the Portuguese Atlantic islands. Wegener's critique earned him the enmity of the German naval establishment and premature retirement. When his The Naval Strategy of the World War was published in 1929, it was also purged to omit the aggressive references to Denmark and Norway, although they certainly foreshadowed German actions in 1940.
Vice Admiral Raoul Castex (1878-1968) sought to apply Mahanian doctrines to a navy such as France's, which was doomed to second-rate status by geography and France's obligation to maintain a large continental army. In his magisterial five-volume Théories stratégiques (1929-1935)—a sixth volume was published posthumously in 1976—Castex did not discount the importance of the battleship or the battle, but regarded naval strategy as only part of general strategy. He also wrote much of the concept of manoeuvre (a term including plan of action or scheme, as well as movement), a complex of actions that the weaker fleet might use to alter the naval balance in its favor. Strategic manoeuvre was "a key element in the conduct of operations."
Many have judged that the experience of
World War II was not flattering to naval theorists such as Mahan. The climactic battle between rival fleets never took place, and the submarine and airplane would significantly complicate Mahan's concept of command of the sea. The more nuanced approach of Corbett as well as the latter's emphasis on the importance of combined operations seemed closer to the mark. On the other hand, Mahan's rejection of the guerre de course was vindicated by the Allied defeat of the German U-boat offensive in both world wars, although in World War II the U.S. Navy conducted a devastating guerre de course with submarines against Japan. This did not necessarily contradict Mahan—he had made a distinction about guerre de course when backed by a regular fleet, in this case the powerful U.S. naval offensive.
It is not really profitable, however, to apply the doctrines of theorists from the classic age of naval theory to World War II. Technology had advanced beyond their wildest dreams, and, particularly in the case of air power, in an age of total war the distinctive position war at sea had formerly enjoyed was eroded. Even Castex, much younger than Mahan and Corbett, depreciated the potential of the aircraft carrier at the same time that he emphasized the importance of command of the air as well as the sea, and he accurately forecast a surprise attack on a naval base from the air. Nevertheless, in the broadest sense, the now often-maligned Mahan was right—sea power against an island empire like Japan would prove decisive.
Bernard Brodie is a transitional figure. His Sea Power in the Machine Age (1941) appeared in the prenuclear era; his later work, notably Strategy in the Missile Age (1959), grapples with the new problems. Other nuclear strategists include Henry Kissinger and Robert E. Osgood. But in the scope and depth of their work, they are all a far cry from Mahan or Corbett. For similarities to Mahan, one might look to Soviet Russia and Admiral Sergei Gorschkov (1910-1988), commander in chief of the Soviet navy (1956-1985) and author of The Sea Power of the State (1976). Gorschkov's book lacks the brilliance and originality of the great naval theorists, but he led an unprecedented—and ultimately unsustainable—Russian buildup in both surface and undersea craft.
Theory of naval warfare is certainly not a dead subject. As the world's navies move toward the uncertainties of the twenty-first century, the interested reader can follow debates concerning naval strategy and tactics in publications such as the British Naval Review and the American Naval Institute Proceedings.
The classic age of theories of naval strategy probably ended with World War II. Post-1945 writers on strategy are abundant, but increasingly naval strategy has been merged with general strategy involving land and air warfare, and technology plays a dominant role in revolutionary means of propulsion, the development of guided missiles, and, of course, the dilemmas involved with the existence and possible use of
nuclear weapons.
Paul G. Halpern
Philip A. Crowl, "Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Naval Historian," in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (1986); Theodore Ropp, "Continental Doctrines of Sea Power," in Edward Meade Earle, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler (1941); D. M. Schurman, The Education of a Navy: The Development of British Naval Strategic Thought, 1867-1914, reprint (1995).
