SCRIPT - The Naval Strategy of Alfred Thayer Mahan (12/04/2019)

The Naval Strategy of Alfred Thayer Mahan

November, 1873. The Virginius, an American ship smuggling arms to Cubans rebelling against Spain, is captured by a Spanish warship in open waters. Ignoring American protests, Spain declares the crew pirates, and swiftly executes them.

The American public demands revenge. But Washington faces an inconvenient fact: the US no longer has a ship that can defeat an ironclad on the high seas – and Spain has four. War would only place US shipping and even the US coast in dire peril.

The Virginius Affair will not only expose the US’ naval impotence, but also raises an unsettling possibility: what if a future enemy targets not just smugglers, but every US ship at sea? What will happen to the US if it is boxed within its own shores?

 

The Naval Strategy of Alfred Thayer Mahan

Alfred Thayer Mahan

In 1885, a naval captain named Alfred Thayer Mahan began lecturing on Naval History and Strategy at the US Naval War College. Before this, his career had mostly been spent on blockade and patrol duty, and he had seen fighting exactly once – during the Bombardment of Port Royal during the Civil War.

But that would all change in 1890, when Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783. It – or more accurately, Chapter 1 – swiftly seized the imagination of strategymakers worldwide: famously the German Kaiser, but more importantly, US President Theodore Roosevelt and an entire generation of naval leaders. Mahanian theory would become a cornerstone of naval strategy, and every future thinker would have to respond to him in some way.

But actually, Sea Power was written with humbler goals in mind. The 1870s and 80s were not great decades for the US Navy, whose budget, organization and morale plummeted during as the country demobilized after the Civil War. Half the intention of Sea Power was to show what a properly sized, maintained, and professional navy could do for state goals.

The other half sought to lay out a new grand strategy for the US, one actually suited for the reality the country was in. For Mahan, America needed to change direction fast, because the assumptions that held up the previous strategy were quickly disappearing.

The Grand Strategy – Sea-Based Trade

According to Mahan, previous US grand strategy was fairly simple. Separated from Eurasia by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, any invasion of America would require a titanic effort from any non-hemispheric state, an effort which could not be made thanks to Old World rivalries and the balance of power. All the US needed to do was to set up a cheap coastal defense, freeing up the rest of its resources for internal development.

But times were changing. By the 1880s, the impending ‘Closing of the Frontier’ seemed to indicate that the world was both getting smaller, and getting filled in by formal empires with formal borders. For Mahan, this impacted American grand strategy in three ways:

- 1) technological progress was lowering the barriers of distance that once made invasion unthinkable;

- 2) the construction of the Panama Canal, begun in 1881, would inevitably draw European empires closer to American shores;

- and 3) American development could no longer rely on an informal frontier to fuel and absorb economic production. Instead, future growth would mean regulated trade with states and empires.

What this all meant could be summed up in the following formula: production converted by trade equals wealth.

For Mahan, production and wealth are not the same thing. Wealth is what a state can use to directly achieve its goals: militaries, arms, and most importantly, money and credit. Through wealth, a state damages enemies, subsidizes allies, and convinces neutrals to side with it in diplomacy. In other words, wealth is power.

Production, by contrast, is just what a territory makes and harvest, regardless of whether the state can make use of it or not. A state can produce a lot of wheat, but if it all just rots in a silo, that’s not wealth. Instead, it’s the ability of the wheat to be made into rations, or else sold or mortgaged for money, that makes it contribute to state power.

And it is this need to turn production into wealth that makes trade important, whether by bringing production to market, or else supplying the inputs that refine existing production into something useful. Trade comes in many forms, but for Mahan, it’s sea-based trade that provides the most efficient conversion process. Not only is shipping over water the most efficient form of transport, trading over the oceans also grants access to the global market, allowing states to choose buyers and sellers for maximum profit.

Without sea-based trade, a state will need far more resources and production just to generate the same amount of wealth, which means that even the largest or most fertile land empires would struggle to match a smaller sea-based opponent. Here Mahan tells an anecdote of the French Minister Colbert who, while trying to save the French state from yet another bankruptcy, gazes out at the acres of farmland spread out before him, and bitterly exclaims: ‘What a rich country is France!’

Of course, the sea could be used for military purposes as well, like threatening coastlines or isolating theaters of war. But the focus of Mahan’s grand strategy has always been on the profound strategic impact of an efficient sea-based trade. Thinking beyond Mahan, we may also note that there are other ways of making trade more efficient, such as developing infrastructure or taking down internal barriers.

The Strategic Level – Sea Control

So on a grand strategic level, Mahan emphasizes the importance of sea-based trade to state power. Now, we turn to the strategic level, where we think about how to promote our own sea-based trade and suppress that of the enemy’s.

Right of the bat a solution comes to mind: why not raid the enemy’s shipping directly? Not only will this stop his trade, but our shipping will also be in a position to take over their market, right?

Wrong. Mahan consistently rejects the usefulness of what he calls guerre de course or commerce-raiding as a viable strategy against enemy trade and power. In Sea Power, for example, he describes how French privateers took out a third of the British merchant fleet during the Seven Years’ War, but that didn’t stop the British continuing to seize French colonies or subsidize its ally Prussia.

So what are Mahan’s reasons? First, because commerce raiders have to be fast and light, they can’t hope to stand against an actual warship. So the raided side always has the option of using warships to guarantee the safety of his commerce, whether by patrolling key routes, organizing convoys, or hunting down hostiles. Which in turn means that raiders have to constantly shift targets in response, making their overall damage unsystematic and random.

And you can’t hope to affect enemy power significantly through unsystematic and random damage. If the raided side can still access the high seas, albeit with more risk than before, he can still reasonably promise creditors that he’ll pay back the money once the next shipment arrives, and neutrals can still be sure that he’ll come knocking if they work against his interests.

Instead, to cause real damage to enemy power, states have to systematically shut down his trade by denying him access to the high seas, which in turn means gaining control yourself. This is the idea of ‘sea control’.

So how can sea control come about? After all, Mahan sees the sea as a ‘wide common’: you can’t garrison or police it like a land territory, so anybody who gets onto the high seas can essentially go wherever or do whatever he wants.

The solution is to box the enemy into his coasts, and stop him getting his ships out in the first place. This, for Mahan, is the strategic goal of any navy: blockade ports, trade routes or strategic narrows, all for the purpose of stopping the enemy’s trade getting out onto the high seas, as well as defending your own against his attacks. Thus ‘thrown back onto himself’, the enemy would see his economy wrecked, his power diminished, his allies defect, his credit risk soar, and his chances for victory decisively reduced.

Which is why Mahan expects the enemy would take decisive action to stop this from happening.

The Operational Level – Decisive Battle

So suppose the enemy is coming to blockade your coast: what is the best way to stop him? Clearly, it is to gather all your forces into a concentrated mass and try to overwhelm incoming hostiles through numerical superiority. In the same way, the best way for the enemy to counter this would be to mass his own forces and attempt to do the same thing. And thus emerges Mahanian theory’s signature concept – the decisive battle.

Note how Mahan’s strategy does not start off with decisive battle, which instead is the logical operational-level action to Mahan’s grand strategic and strategic thinking. In a sense, decisive battle for Mahan is merely the quickest way to settle the issue of sea control. Note also that decisive battle doesn’t have to take the form of battleship duels, although Mahan was indeed skeptical of new technology.

Nevertheless, since sea control has such an impact on the fortunes of a state, more so than anything else a navy could achieve, strategymakers would be well-advised to focus their efforts on this one event, keeping their fleets concentrated and single-mindedly working towards this task. In particular, Mahan rejects the idea that navies should also contribute to coastal defense, arguing that land forts can do this job cheaper and better, while freeing up resources for decisive battle.

Despite this, we can take – and many have taken – Mahan too far when it comes to decisive battle, ignoring the nuances he raised in Sea Power. Mahan did himself no favors here by attempting to condense his strategy into a couple of bullet-point ‘rules of war’ for public consumption, and later in his career, being seduced by the allure of a big-gun fleet.

The first nuance is that decisive battle isn’t always necessary. For Mahan, battle is always a means to the end of sea control, not an end in itself. Usually, sea control flows inevitably from the outcome of decisive battle, so the two become practically one and the same.

But in cases where sea control has already been gained without battle, Mahan doesn’t ask for navies to continue spoiling for a fight. Instead, they should start exploiting their advantage as soon as possible – and by hurting the enemy, he will eventually be forced into battle.

As a negative example, during the War of the League of Augsburg, the English fleet had decided not to fight a superior French fleet in the English Channel, thereby surrendering sea control to the French. The French initially exploited their advantage by landing an army in Ireland, but then decided instead to go away and try to get the English fleet to fight. In the end, not only did the English again refuse the bait, they also took advantage of their strategic luck to slip an army into Ireland and repulse the invasion.

Mahan’s thinking here also informs his response towards the operational strategy of a ‘fleet-in-being’. A fleet-in-being aims to lock down enemy fleets simply by refusing – but always threatening – to come out and fight. In our previous example, the behavior of the English fleet can be characterized as such a ‘fleet-in-being’.

The example also shows why Mahan is not overly-concerned by such a strategy, since by surrendering sea control without a fight, a fleet-in-being allows the enemy to immediately begin exploiting his advantage without loss. The only foreseeable benefit might be if the enemy urgently needs his naval assets elsewhere, to which Mahan would suggest either re-examining priorities or else run the risks that are inherent to war.

The second nuance relates to fleet concentration for decisive battle. Mahan has sometime been characterized as demanding concentration whenever, wherever, even recommending leaving the US East Coast undefended during the Spanish-American War in order to have a better chance at destroying the Spanish fleet.

Clearly, Mahan understands that warships need to be detached for commerce protection, troop escort and so on. But more importantly, when Mahan talks about concentration, he is also talking about having a proper appreciation of the geographic dimensions of war. Concentration is not about gathering everything into one point, but is instead about covering as much territory as possible, from as few positions as possible.

Take British naval force distribution during the American Revolutionary War. Wishing to protect their Empire from the French and Spanish, the British divided their fleet between Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and India.

Clearly, by trying to divide your fleet everywhere, you make your forces inferior to a concentrated enemy and thus risk achieving nothing anywhere. But for Mahan, dividing a force for India is justified: not only is India distant, but the lines of communications running to it also pass through chokepoints that could be blocked in war. It’s therefore easy to isolate India from both ally and enemy alike, which means that a local force there allows us to deal with events in a timely manner, without a large risk of a massed enemy force going over to annihilate it.

This is not the case when we think about Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. Because the sailing distance is comparatively short and there are no chokepoints regulating access between these regions, splitting forces here merely lets the enemy choose which fleet he wants to concentrate against first, which is what the French and Spanish actually did. For Mahan, the British ought to have recognized that the entire North Atlantic forms an integrated geographic whole, and concentrated their assets in Europe so that the French and Spanish couldn’t have gotten onto the seas in the first place.

One thing to note is that the geographic dimensions of war can and will change. Technology and friendly bases decrease the effects of distance, and control of canals and chokepoints will open up previously-isolated theaters and allow for further concentration. In particular, Mahan argued that US ownership of the Panama Canal meant that a single fleet would be able to cover all of its coasts.

To sum up, we’ve placed Mahanian decisive battle in its proper context. Decisive battle is a means to an end, and there are limits to what a navy should do in pursuit of it. This is important when considering something like the Battle of Jutland in World War I, which has sometimes been considered a lost opportunity because the British didn’t annihilate the Germans. But even from a Mahanian standpoint, Britain by this time had already obtained sea control over most of the world’s oceans, so why take on additional risk to win something they already had?

The Policy Level – Elements of Sea Power

Now that we’ve gone through Mahanian thinking on a grand strategic, strategic and operational level, we now consider what can states do to support this strategy. On the surface Mahan asks for two things:

- One, a battle-fleet capable of defending the state’s sea-based interests;

- and Two, a global network of naval bases and depots to support said battle-fleet.

But Mahan is actually more concerned about the sustainability of a state’s naval power. His shopping list isn’t cheap, and good ships and crews take a long time to create. It’s always tempting to just abandon the effort, but once naval power has decayed it’s not something that can be immediately revived in time for a crisis, as the Virginius Affair demonstrated to the US only a decade after the Civil War. It’s not enough to have good naval policy – you need sustainable policy.

This is the subject of Chapter 1 of Sea Power, where Mahan lists six elements that sustain naval power. Note that these don’t determine naval power, which can be propped up by political will, but a navy that relies on political determination alone probably won’t survive very long.

The first three elements are geographic: a good position, a lengthy coastline, and favorable terrain including good, accessible harbors. Unsurprisingly, Mahan sees islands – of which the US is one, geostrategically speaking – as the most favorable geography for naval power.

Then there are the three elements that the state can adjust. We start off with 6), Character of the Government, where Mahan gives consensus politics an advantage over despotisms. Despots can easily create a navy against all opposition, but such a navy will just as easily be neglected no matter its achievements. Democracies might take longer to decide on a navy, but once the policy is made Mahan is confident that it is here to stay.

4) is Number of Population, and by this Mahan means the seagoing population, or in other words, naval manpower. The state can increase this via what is basically geoeconomics: encouraging, through policy or investment, the emergence of a large shipping industry. A good example are the English Navigation Acts of the mid-to-late 17^th Century, which required English trade be carried on English ships, and in doing so laid the foundations of British naval power.

Finally, 5) is National Character, which represents the desire of the population to engage in maritime affairs. In a sense, this is a question of whether the public sees overseas engagements as being in their interest, and was not a theoretical problem when it came to Mahan’s self-sufficient and isolated America.

Mahan’s solution was essentially, to tangle America in overseas affairs by obtaining colonies. This worked somewhat in Europe, where the pre-World War I German Navy coordinated with colonial groups to lobby for a larger fleet. But US leaders would later prefer to abandon their colonies rather than invest in their protection.

Instead, Mahan might have been better-off highlighting the importance of a friendly business-industrial complex. Fresh from building continental railroads, Big Steel in the 1880s recognized in the US Navy a large and reliable market for its product, and its influence may have been as important as foreign threats in this regard.

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So with the policy level covered, we’ve largely gone through the basics of Mahan’s naval strategy. But before we finish, it’s worth looking at the response to Mahan from his contemporary, the British naval strategist Sir Julian Corbett. Seeing what Corbett makes of Mahan’s theory gives us some insight as to how we should assess Mahan in the modern age, warts and all.

Corbett’s Response – Mahanian Theory and its Critics

The first thing to note is that Corbett, unlike Mahan, rejects the idea of coming up with a set of rules for war, instead arguing that it’s more useful to have a big-picture view of war and appreciate all of its processes and complexities. This is usually why Corbett is seen as a foil to Mahan, but in fact, it’s better to see Corbett as somebody who ‘fills in the blanks’ left by Mahan’s theoretical structure.

Take decisive battle, where Mahan’s enthusiasm is often contrasted with Corbett’s skepticism. Now we’ve already seen how we need to be more nuanced when thinking about Mahan and decisive battle. But the bigger point here is that for Mahan, the importance of decisive battle is a logical consequence of his definition of sea control.

For Mahan, either you or the enemy will end up with sea control. This binary definition of sea control – where either you have it or you lose it – naturally encourages an all-out effort to decide the issue.

But see what happens when we replace Mahan’s sea control with Corbett’s expanded definition. For Corbett, sea control is not simply about having it or losing it: it can be a general dominance or restricted to a local corner; it can be permanent or disappear the moment your ships leave the area. More importantly, the default outcome for sea control is that neither side has it, with both sides unable to deny the use of the sea to the enemy.

Corbett’s definition opens up far more options for navies than merely decisive battle. Under Corbett, a fleet-in-being strategy would actually make sense, because by locking down enemy assets you deny him the opportunity to shore up his temporary control elsewhere. But neither is the decisive battle invalidated: achieving it would get you general and permanent control, but the question would then be: is it worth the risk to only aim for that?

The broader point is that the Mahanian strategic framework can still accommodate the modifications of a Corbett without much trouble. Changing definitions and ending up with a conclusion disagreeing with Mahan doesn’t necessarily invalidate the concepts of sea control or the strategic impact it has on war. Claiming that Mahan is ‘dead’ because big-gun battles can no longer happen places too much emphasis on the ‘decisive battle’ or even naval aspect of Mahanian theory: it may be possible to extend the idea of sea control to joint operations.

If Corbett really has to be made into a foil to Mahan, it should be because Corbett doesn’t share Mahan’s view on the importance of sea-based trade. Sure, it’s better to have it than not, but since most economic activity is based on land and not on sea, even a complete naval blockade will only damage the enemy by slowly bleeding him out. Even here Mahanian theory can be stretched to accommodate Corbett, with his strategy of ‘Limited War’, the subject of a previous video, being a potential answer to the question: ‘so we’ve won the decisive battle and established the blockade: what else can the navy do to speed up our victory?’

One problem Mahanian theory will find harder to evade, however, is the potency of submarine commerce-raiding in both World Wars, which might indicate that it’s possible to deny sea-based trade without establishing sea control. Of course, we can point to the Allies eventually overcoming U-Boat warfare as validation of Mahan, but it nevertheless remains a serious blemish on the fairly straightforward tale of naval dominance leading to economic strangulation.

Conclusion

So at long last, we’ve not only gone through the broad outline of Mahan’s naval theory, but we’ve also addressed some of its critics and re-stressed the need to take Mahanian theory as more than just big-ship or even naval battles. Nevertheless, Mahan is apparently now more fashionable with regards to air power rather than naval power, which seems strange because gaining air control is unlikely to yield the same strategic benefits as sea control. In fact, space is probably the most Mahanian environment after water, which means that far from being a relic of the past, Mahan may actually be a strategist of the future.

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