Abstract
At the beginning of the Second World War, American naval strategists still based their fundamental concepts on the ideas that Alfred Thayer Mahan had expressed fifty years earlier. With Mahan, they shared the belief that the essential problem in naval warfare was to obtain ‘command of the sea’. In other words, the way to protect oneself from the dangers which threaten across the vast, neutral expanse of the ocean is to deprive an opponent of his ability to move at sea. Mahan believed that there were two effective ways to do this. One could destroy an enemy fleet in a battle at sea, or one could blockade it in port in order to prevent its use. Fundamentally the Mahanian concept of sea power was based on the idea that the best defence is an offence. ‘Command of the sea’, which opens and assures the free use of the ocean to the victor, provides security by denying the use of the sea to the opponent.1 The Navy that the United States built up so dramatically after 1940 was designed to perform this function.
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Notes
B. Mitchell Simpson III (ed.), The Development of Naval Thought: Essays by Herbert Rosinski (Newport, RI, 1977) p. 24.
See, for example, Bernard Brodie, Layman’s Guide to Naval Strategy (Princeton, NJ, 1942, and four other editions to 1965)
and A. E. Sokol, Sea Power in the Nuclear Age (Washington, 1961).
The pre-eminent work in the iconoclastic school is Robert Seager II, Alfred Thayer Mahan (Annapolis, 1977).
See, for example, Geoffrey Symcox, The Crisis of French Sea Power, 1688–1697: From guerre d’escadre to the guerre de course (The Hague, 1974)
J. F. Guilmartin, Jr, Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1974)
and J. B. Hattendorf, England in the War of the Spanish Succession (New York, 1987).
See also, Michael Howard, The British Way in Warfare: A Reappraisal, Neale Lecture in English History, 1974 (London, 1975) which summarises the general trend of recent work.
Clark G. Reynolds, Command of the Sea: The History and Strategy of Maritime Empires (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1974), pp. 12–16.
See especially, Rear Admiral J. R. Hill, Maritime Strategy for Medium Powers (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986) which develops the concept of a medium Power, that is to say those who have sufficient naval power to protect their own interests, but can not by themselves be a match for a superpower.
Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London, 1976).
Carlo M. Cipolla, Guns, Sails, and Empire: Technological Innovation and the Early Phase of European Expansion, 1400–1700 (New York, 1965).
John D. Hayes, ‘Peripheral Strategy — Mahan’s Doctrine Today,’ US Naval Institute Proceedings (Nov. 1953), p. 1193.
Largely through the efforts of Donald M. Schurman, most notably in his book, Education of a Navy: The Development of British Naval Strategic Thought, 1867–1914 (Chicago, 1965).
Carl von Clausewitz, On War, translated and edited by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, 1976), p. 81.
For geopolitics, see Hervé Coutau-Begarie, La Puissance Maritime: Castex et la strategie navale (Paris: Fayard, 1985)
Geostrategie de l’Atlantique sud (Paris, 1985) and
Colin S. Gray, Maritime Strategy, Geopolitics, and the Defense of the West, New York, 1986)
Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, Mass., 1960): Arms and Influence (New Haven, 1966).
James C. Cable, Gunboat Diplomacy: Political Applications of Limited Naval Force (New York, 1971)
Edward N. Luttwak, The Political Uses of Sea Power (Baltimore, 1974)
Kenneth Booth, Navies and Foreign Policy (New York, 1977).
A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 (London, 1965) p. 7.
L. W. Martin, The Sea in Modern Strategy (New York, 1967) pp. 9–10.
Oskar Morgenstern, The Question of National Defense (New York, 1959) p. 90.
A. C. Enthoven and K. W. Smith, ‘What Forces for NATO? And from Whom?’, in Foreign Affairs (October 1969) p. 82.
Linton Brooks, ‘Tactical Nuclear Weapons: The Forgotten Facet of Naval Warfare’, US Naval Institute Proceedings, January 1980
Donald C. F. Daniel, ‘The Soviet Navy and the Tactical Nuclear War at Sea’, Survival, vol. 29, no. 4, July/August 1987, pp. 318–35.
The most famous of these studies is Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston, 1971).
Matthew Arnold, ‘Sweetness and Light’ (1867), printed in E. K. Brown, Four Essays on Life and Letters (New York, 1947) pp. 44, 50, 52; and
Elting Morison, Men, Machines and Modern Times (Cambridge, Mass, 1966) pp. 206–7.
See Morison, Men, Machines, Ch. 2, and Stansfield Turner, ‘Navies for Yesterday or Tomorrow?’, a special university lecture in War Studies, King’s College, London, 4 May, 1976.
C. R. Brown, ‘The Role of the Navy in Future Warfare’, US Naval War College: Information Service for Officers (Naval War College Review) (April 1949) p. 16.
Herbert Rosinski, ‘New Thoughts on Strategy’, in B. M. Simpson III (ed.), War, Strategy and Maritime Power (New Brunswick, NJ, 1977) p. 64. This was written in 1955.
H. E. Eccles, Military Concepts and Philosophy (New Brunswick, NJ, 1965) p. 262.
Henry E. Eccles, ‘Strategy — The Theory and Application’, Naval War College Review (May-June 1979) pp. 11–21.
K. Booth, Navies and Foreign Policy (New York, 1977) pp. 15–17.
James Cable, ‘Coercion, Compromise and Compliance’, in Diplomacy at Sea (London, 1986) p. 18.
Julian S. Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (Classics of Sea Power edition. Eric J. Grove, editor. Annapolis, 1988) pp. 32–3, 34–40.
Frank Uhlig, Naval Warfare since 1775’; Captain Wayne P. Hughes Jr, USN (Ret.), Fleet Tactics: Theory and Practice (Annapolis, 1986) pp. 227–32.
Hubert Moineville, Naval Warfare Today and Tomorrow (Oxford, 1983) pp. 26–7, 45–6.
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© 1989 John B. Hattendorf and Robert S. Jordan
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Hattendorf, J.B. (1989). Recent Thinking on the Theory of Naval Strategy. In: Hattendorf, J.B., Jordan, R.S. (eds) Maritime Strategy and the Balance of Power. St Antony's. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09392-2_8
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