The challenge posed to authors submitting essays to the Naval Institute’s 2020 General Prize Essay Contest is to answer the following question:
Renewed competition will require us to rethink our culture, to come to grips with how we organize to face the national, strategic, and operational challenges facing the Sea Services, and thereby the way they will have to fight.” The National Defense Strategy says we have to pursue “urgent change at significant scale.” Do we have the right culture to embrace it?
According to Roger W. Barnett, “Strategic culture consists of shared beliefs, values, and habits among persons in a military or paramilitary organization with regard to the use of military force.”[1] Alfred Thayer Mahan, through his writings, laid the foundation of strategic culture for generations of naval officers. In so doing, he won for himself the mantle of foremost strategic thinker of the U.S. Navy throughout most of the 20th century.
But is he still relevant? Ask yourself, “What does a late-Victorian, High-Church Episcopalian, sail-to-steam naval officer who lived in a strategic environment vastly different from our own have to offer to strategic thinkers today? How will officers studying at the Naval War College as part of their Joint Professional Military Education benefit from learning Mahan’s strategic theories?” We need to answer these questions because the answers will go far in defining the Navy’s strategic culture in the 21st century and will give us insight into whether a culture founded on Mahan’s strategic theories is still relevant.
The Battle Force Sea Control Paradigm
Alfred Thayer Mahan can rightly be called the theoretical founder of the 20th-century U.S. Navy. Because of his theory of sea power, the Navy has been and continues to be a battleforce Navy.[2] Regardless of the potential enemy or the nature of the enemy’s power, the United States has consistently created and nurtured a battle force founded on the combat power of the capital ship which “denotes that the vessel is the largest, most powerful warship a country can build. The (capital) ship, by its formidable appearance, power, and armament, embodies the fighting capabilities of the country that built it, and is the leading class of vessel in that country’s battle line.”[3] From 1880 to 1940, most seafaring states regarded the armored, heavily gunned battleship as the capital ship. During and after World War II, it was the large, multipurpose aircraft carrier although some have argued that the nuclear-powered fleet ballistic missile submarine should hold the title.
Regardless of which ship type retains the title, Mahan’s sea power theory holds that the mission of the capital ship battle force was and is to control the seas (sea control) and project combat power to any place on Earth.[4] That this mission and force structure have remained articles of faith to this day is demonstrated every time the United States lays the keel for a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier or nuclear-powered missile submarine. The origin of what can be called the “Battle Force Sea Control Paradigm” can be traced directly back to its founding father, Alfred Thayer Mahan.
Who was Mahan?
Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan was the son of Professor Denis Hart Mahan of the U. S. Military Academy and nephew of the Reverend Doctor Milo Mahan, D. D, a High-Church Episcopal pastor and scholar. Both men had an influence on Mahan. From his father he learned the military art and science that every Civil War general who had graduated from West Point learned. From his uncle, he received guidance on the formulation of his Christian faith.
Mahan began his naval service in 1859 following graduation from the U. S. Naval Academy and retired in 1896. The bulk of his career was spent in one dreary assignment after another in the antiquated post–Civil War navy. He held a number of commands but was an indifferent commanding officer, having little interest in the practical aspects of his profession.
His perspective changed with selection by Commodore Stephen B. Luce as lecturer at the newly established Naval War College. Mahan prepared to take up his duties by reading and researching his syllabus at the New York Public Library during the summer of 1885. The lectures he prepared became the classroom curriculum of the Naval War College and formed the basis of his first book on sea power, published in 1890.[5]
The book brought Mahan international fame. During his next tour as commanding officer of the modern steel cruiser USS Chicago in 1893–94, he made a cruise to European waters during which he was celebrated and feted by European monarchs and statesmen who had universally embraced his sea power thesis. His fame followed him back to the United States where he soon retired from active duty to continue to write books and articles, cultivating his image as the prophet of sea power, until his death in 1914.
This biographical summary is fairly well-known, but it obscures some characteristics that are key to understanding Mahan and his influence. As the foremost polemicist of sea power in his day, Mahan’s writings supported the work of men such as Theodore Roosevelt, George Dewey, Henry Cabot Lodge, Bradley Fiske, and William S. Sims who built first truly great U.S. maritime battle force. In addition, his ideas served as the foundation upon which their successors justified that battle force’s continued growth and evolution as the premier arm of American national defense during the 20th century.
Mahan’s primary appeal among professional naval officers was that his content and his conclusions appealed to their own inclinations and interests. As later historians have noted, Mahan’s great contribution was not originality but synthesis.[6] He brought together preexisting, disconnected ideas about the importance of navies and oceanic commerce to national power, substantiated them with historical examples, and then presented them in a logical, coherent fashion. Mahan’s writings had amazing resiliency, occupying a central place in American strategic thought until historians such as Paul Kennedy challenged their universality beginning in the 1970s.[7] Despite the revisionist interpretations advanced by Kennedy and others, Mahan still occupied a central place in the Navy’s strategic thinking as evidenced by his books’ continued presence in the Naval War College’s curriculum and in the pages of professional journals such as the Naval Institute Proceedings.
Mahan’s appeal also arose from his historical philosophy. Unlike other historians of the 19th century such as Marx, Hegel, and Turner; Mahan was never labeled with a formal philosophy of history.[8] His practice, however, reflected his upbringing, education, professional experience, and inclination. Mahan was not a professional historian. Instead, he was an educated, professional, Episcopal Christian gentleman of the late-Victorian era who believed the universe was governed by immutable principles established by God and exemplified by the life of Jesus Christ. To live a life modeled on that of Jesus, one could do no better than seek to understand how those principles governed human existence and then live one’s life by them. Mahan believed that he had arrived at his principles of sea power with God’s help and that they comprised a small subset of those divine principles that governed the universe.[9] Just as it was the Episcopal churchman’s duty to educate others in those principles relating to the spiritual life of a Christian, Mahan believed it was his duty to educate his fellow Americans in those principles that related to the importance of sea power to their national destiny. Selective historical case studies, drawn from a limited period of world history were the instruments whereby he provided this education. The Battle Force Sea Control Paradigm owes as much to Mahan’s religious philosophy as it does to his historical analysis.
The Resiliency of Mahan’s Appeal.
Perhaps the most pernicious characteristic of the Battle Force Sea Control Paradigm is that it has kept American naval officers from considering “out of the box” alternatives. One of the earliest and most long-standing examples is dismissal of French Admiral Theophile Aube’s guerre de course, a sea-denial strategy involving small, fast warships designed to render large, slow capital ships impotent while the former wrought havoc on the enemy’s commerce. Aube and his followers were called the Jeune Ecole or new school because they challenged the paradigm that the French could compete with Britain on the latter’s terms by building a battle force to challenge that of the Royal Navy. The Jeune Ecole believed that Great Britain could always out-build any rival’s attempt to challenge the supremacy of the British battle force. The British would always win this arms race and, with greater combat power, always win in battle.[10] Members of the Jeune Ecole argued, therefore, that the correct strategic choice for a weaker naval power such as France was to conduct guerre de course, or war on the commercial shipping of the stronger power in order to create economic upheaval of such severity as to cause the stronger power to sue for peace.[11]
For guerre de course to be an effective strategy, however, the commerce raiders of the employing power needed to be impervious to attack from the enemy’s battle force. When guerre de course was first proposed in the 19th century, there existed no commerce raider which possessed this immunity so the strategy was largely ignored in the United States. By the early 20th century, however, a practical and effective submarine boat had been developed by all major naval powers to be used to harass and weaken an enemy battle force during an engagement. As German prospects for victory at sea in World War I looked increasingly grim, it dawned on their naval staff that the submarine might make guerre de course feasible. Possessing, because of their ability to operate submerged, the required immunity from the capital ship, the German Navy’s submarines nearly defeated Great Britain in two World Wars while the U.S. submarine campaign against Japan during World War II was a major factor in Japan’s defeat. The German campaign in World War II was defeated only by a large fleet of corvettes and frigates built and employed primarily by the Royal Canadian Navy.[12]
Given that the primary naval threat from the Soviet Union during the Cold War was its submarine fleet, the United States, drawing on lessons learned from World War II, could have built a large fleet of submarines for offense and a large fleet of anti-submarine warfare ships for defense. A battle force may not have been required. This alternative guerre de course strategy was not even considered, however, because it was inconsistent with Mahan, the Battle Force Sea Control Paradigm, and their centrality to the Navy’s strategic culture.
Conclusions
The Battle Force Sea Control Paradigm has been at the heart of the Navy’s strategic culture since Mahan started writing on naval strategy nearly 130 years ago. The paradigm emerged from Mahan’s prolific writings which he completed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This highlights the problem with the paradigm and the continued relevance of Mahan’s writings.
The strategic environment of Mahan’s time was vastly different than todays. China was in the middle of a century-long period of painful transition from the 2000-year-long imperial era to the communist revolution. Russia’s imperial government was on the verge of collapse and also was soon to experience a communist revolution. Great Britain and Germany were engaged in a naval arms race. The nondeveloped world was divided up into colonial empires ruled by a handful of European states. Humanity had yet to experience a modern world war but would, beginning in the year of Mahan’s death—1914. This is the strategic environment that informed Mahan’s thinking.
Mahan’s thinking was also informed by his upbringing and experience. Although he was a career naval officer, his service experience was nothing like that of a modern naval officer. He lived in a homogenous society and embraced religious and moral values that differ greatly from the modern, diverse society that exists in the Navy today.
It was with this background and in this environment that Mahan developed his sea power theory that formed the basis of the Battle Force Sea Control Paradigm. This paradigm is clearly outdated and long overdue for reevaluation with a view toward replacing it. As a result, it may be time to stop reading Mahan, give him an honored place in American history, and create a new paradigm that reflects the reality and challenges of naval warfare today.
Endnotes
[1] Roger W. Barnett, Navy Strategic Culture: Why the Navy Thinks Differently (Annapolis, MD, Naval Institute Press, 2009), 9.
[2] A battle force is a squadron, group, or fleet of warships the center of which is one or more capital ships. For the purposes of this discussion, the World War I British Grand Fleet was a battle force as is a modern carrier or amphibious strike group.
[3] Walter W. Jaffee, “Capital Ship,” in Spencer C. Tucker, ed., Naval Warfare: An International Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA, ABC-CLIO, 2002), 190.
[4] Sea control involves protecting one’s own country’s commercial and naval access to the sea while denying such access to one’s enemy.
[5] Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 (Boston, MA, Little, Brown and Company, 1890).
[6] Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London, England, Allen Lane, 1976), 5.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Robert Segar, II, Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Man and His Letters (Annapolis, MD, Naval Institute Press, 1977), 438.
[9] Ibid., 430-431.
[10] Arne Roskund, The Jeune Ecole: The Strategy of the Weak (Leiden, NL and Boston, MA, Brill, 2007), 6.
[11] Ibid., 15.
[12] W. A. B. Douglas, et al, A Blue Water Navy: The Official Operational History of the Royal Canadian Navy in the Second World War, 1943-1945, vol. II part 2 (St. Catherine’s, Ontario, Vanwell Publishing Ltd., 2007), 23.
