No book has had greater effect on the composition of and justification for industrial navies than Alfred Thayer Mahan’s 1890 The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783.[1] Indeed, it is likely true that no other piece of “applied history” has been as successful (for better or for worse) in the making and shaping of U.S. national security policy; George F. Kennan’s 1947 “X Article” comes to mind as a comparable example. Written during a period of U.S. naval reform and expansion, Mahan’s research is at once a parochial argument about the need to revitalize U.S. “sea power,” and a broader account of the relationships between the ocean, trade, and national strength. Many critics have read Influence as transparent propaganda for a domestic audience or a set of dated prescriptions about naval strategy. True, the book is both of those things, but Mahan’s account of Atlantic imperial rivalries is also more valuably an “estimate of the effect of sea power upon the course of history and the prosperity of nations.”[2] That form of comparative and nomological history makes Influence a strategic classic of enduring relevance.
This essay leverages Mahan’s personal correspondence, archival sources, and an extensive body of commentary to explore the content, creation, and reception of Influence. In doing so it encourages readers to consider the text through three lenses: polemic, naval strategy, and grand strategy. Like a piece of stained glass held up to the light, the Mahanian concept of “sea power” is many things at once, depending on one’s perspective. In a narrow sense, Influence is a specific argument—a polemic—aimed at fin de siècle “navalists” about the necessity of expanding the United States Navy (USN). As an analysis of purely naval strategy, it is also a thesis emphasizing concentrated battle fleet engagements as a means of achieving command of the sea. Most importantly, however, it is an outline of a grand strategy bound up in a national turn toward the maritime world.
Mahan’s Argument and Its Moment
Like all historical texts, Mahan’s work tells us as much about the moment in which it was created as it does the objective past. Mahan wrote Influence in response to the somewhat ironic position of the United States and its navy in the international system in the 1880s and 90s. The irony was chiefly with respect to the gap between growing U.S. economic power and the comparative weakness of the USN. Consider the context: By the 1880s, railway lines knit together the United States continental empire from the Atlantic to the Pacific. New and expanding corporations had built industrial productivity to rival that of the North Atlantic “Great Powers.” Commercial interests increasingly looked overseas, eyeing opportunities in Latin American and East Asia, as well as the territorial infrastructure (the Panama Canal and coaling stations) necessary to exploit them.
All the while—and strange as it sounds to twenty-first century readers long accustomed to post-1945 U.S. maritime preponderance—U.S. naval power lagged far behind that of its European peers, not to mention a handful of Latin America nations.[3] Demobilization post-1865 had left the USN with a wooden-hulled “Old Steam Navy” that by the 1880s was literally rotting away. Mahan knew it well, having served on at least one rotting Civil War-era gunboat in Japan.[4] All the while, the U.S. Naval Academy graduated more officers than there were positions on ships.[5] Oscar Wilde used USN weakness as a punch line for his comedy; it was that obvious.[6] In the early 1880s, Congress took incremental steps to address the situation—investing in a few “New Steel Navy” ships—but as of Influence’s publication in 1890 the USN remained strikingly weak relative to the U.S. industrial base and national identity. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s mediocre and often frustrated career as a USN officer spanned exactly this nadir of U.S. naval capabilities.
Largely in response to these circumstances, Mahan took matters into his own hands, making a historical argument (or polemic) for naval expansion. While serving as a professor at the newly founded (1884) U.S. Naval War College, in 1890 he selectively compiled lecture notes into the body-text of Influence. Extrapolating from the history of Northern Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, Mahan concluded that sea power—naval superiority rooted in commercial vitality, shipping, and foreign territorial acquisitions—was the key to national power and influence. Foreseeing a not-so-distant day when an Isthmian Canal would transform the Caribbean Basin (like the Mediterranean) into a hub of trade routes and a site of great power conflict, he advocated for the construction of a sea-going U.S. fleet of battleships designed to compete with the dominant powers in the North Atlantic (Britain above all). A growing “navalist” movement in the United States capitalized on Influence’s publication to argue for investments in a blue-water, battleship navy.[7] In doing so these navalists spurred on what one historian has called the “American Naval Revolution”: the radical re-making of the U.S. Navy and with it the entry of the United States into the ranks of the North Atlantic maritime powers as an empire among empires, in 1898.[8]
As a matter of naval strategy, Mahan’s argument is relatively straightforward. The purpose of a navy, Mahan notes, is to protect trade routes and seaborne communications between points. Naval forces, as the American naval strategist Wayne P. Hughes later agreed, are fundamentally “in the links business,” assuring: “1) our own goods and services are safe and 2) that an enemy’s are not.”[9] Mahan believed (and used history to demonstrate) that navies are best able to provide this protection through a decisive, concentrated engagement with an adversary fleet.[10] Mahan disagreed with many of his compatriots—and a competing set of French thinkers—who argued for comparably cheaper investments in coastal defense technologies and commerce raiding ships.[11] These ideas, Mahan insisted, were dangerously misguided. Fragmented groups of ships dispersed across the sea were vulnerable to attack and destruction by a larger, unified fleet. His reading of history also demonstrated, time and again, that attacks on adversary merchant vessels by raiders—a guerre de course—were never as effective as a decisive battle with the enemy that drove his force from the sea or at least allowed it “to appear only as a fugitive.”[12] Toward that end, the construction of a fleet of armored battleships was an essential condition of national power.
Mahan claimed that these lessons on force composition and employment transmitted across the ages and were effectively immutable.[13] In fact, technological advances in the 20th century rendered many of his conclusions suspect or at least out of step with weapons like submarines and aircraft. If the test of theory is experience, then Mahan as a purely naval strategist has suffered many indignities. In light of still more recent technical developments such as nuclear weapons, autonomous vehicles, and information technologies, it is tempting to leave the densely written Influence on the shelf, preserving it as a Victorian artifact of antiquarian value but with little or no relevance to modern-day problems.
Mahan, however, as a historian and a grand-strategic proponent of geopolitics (to say nothing of his role as a polemicist for institutional prerogatives) remains both insightful and significant. Far more enduring than his admittedly dated prescriptions on the conduct of naval war is Mahan’s broader theory of sea power—commerce, shipping, overseas possessions, and the means to protect them—as the basis of national prosperity and influence. Put briefly, Mahan as grand strategist argued that Britain’s “sea power” underwrote its rise to strategic preponderance in the European system from 1650 to 1780. In a virtuous cycle, physical access to the sea, commercial trade, and colonial possessions created national wealth. That wealth, reciprocally, financed and justified a powerful navy capable of protecting the trade routes that linked colonies, markets, and the national base. Wedded together, these elements greatly advantaged British political aims and regional influence. As Mahan concludes: “The overwhelming sea power of England was the determining factor in European history during the period mentioned.”[14] When reading Influence today it is useful, even imperative, to differentiate sea power as a narrow military strategy from this latter, more capacious, and (I argue) Mahanian understanding of the term as a form of “grand strategy” for the organization of national resources and objectives. Sea power—a slippery term from its inception—has diverse meanings with different applications. I consider some of these below.
Mahan’s Theories of s/Sea p/Power as Naval Strategy and Grand Strategy
It reflects the appeal of Mahan’s argument that “sea power” as a slogan or bumper sticker has traveled so widely in the 130 years since Influence’s publication. The term itself entered the English language in the 1840s via the British classicist George Grote’s History of Greece, which described the Minoans as a seapower or, alternately, “thalassocracy.”[15] Mahan split that word into its component parts for effect (“maritime power” was apparently “too smooth” for his liking) and then spread the concept with nearly religious zeal.[16] As what Margaret Sprout called an “Evangelist of Sea Power,” he was remarkably successful: The Mahanian phrase has been appropriated by all the other branches of the armed services with varying degrees of fidelity (land power, air power, and surely space power is not too far off in the future).[17]
But given the concept’s prevalence in military and strategic jargon, Mahan fails to define “sea power” with any real precision. Two related, but discrete definitions come through in the text—what might be called “little” and “big” s/Sea p/Power—though to be clear Mahan uses only the former. In an immediate sense, Mahan’s concept or strategy of “sea power” (lower case “s”; lower case “p”) refers to naval preponderance or military command of the sea. Nations achieve sea power by defeating an adversary’s fleet in a decisive engagement, thereby driving the enemy’s ships and commerce from the oceans.[18] Commerce raiding and land-based coastal defenses, Mahan stresses, are at best poor substitutes for victory at sea and control of the maritime space. The ghost of Nelson at Trafalgar hangs over the concept, as it does over much of Mahan’s work—see his hagiographical The Life of Nelson: The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain.[19]
This form of “little” sea power—and its rules for naval strategy—is widely read, but ultimately peripheral to Mahan’s core purpose. Stipulating his consistent skepticism of “commerce raiding” as a viable policy, Mahan’s text actually has relatively little to say about tactics (though he sometimes digresses) or even strategy qua naval strategy.[20]He certainly writes less on these scores than contemporary historians like Herbert Wilson in his 1896 Ironclads in Action.[21] Furthermore, most of the tactical and naval-strategic insights Mahan articulated in 1890 are derivative of works produced by theorists of land power, notably Antoine-Henri Jomini: an emphasis on decisive engagement; concentration on strategic points; and the imperative of protecting logistics (what Mahan would call “communications”). These are not fatal deficiencies. Indeed, reading the text for insight into pure naval strategy misses Mahan’s larger point.
Real Mahanian Sea Power (capital “S”; capital “P”), is not exclusively or even primarily a function of military force. Sea Power as an organizing principle or even a grand strategy stems from a more holistic calculation of economic and geographic factors as well as contingent political choices. For Mahan, ephemeral superiority in ship tonnage, technology, or proficiency is only a chimerical form of security. With a broader understanding of Sea Power in mind, Influence’s aim is to identify the mutually reinforcing relationships between geography, commerce, and military or commercial shipping—as well as to explain why individual states do or do not mobilize Sea Power to pursue national goals.
In Influence, Mahan offers two possible formulas for grand strategic Sea Power. The first is the confluence of “(1) Production; (2) Shipping; (3) Colonies and Markets,—in a word, sea power.”[22] A strong national economy is the foundation of Sea Power, and that foundation grows (Mahan believes) in large part through the movement of trade over the sea. Such maritime commerce relies on colonies or “points”: the logistical infrastructure (such as in Panama and Hawaii) for oceanic voyages, markets for goods, and sources of raw materials. With trade routes established, overt military power follows almost as an afterthought. An armed force at sea, Mahan writes with serene confidence, “naturally and healthfully springs” from the need to defend seaborne commerce.[23] In this context, a Trafalgar-like victory—one which destroys an adversary navy or reduces its capacity to harassing attacks—is important only insomuch as it ensures the “true objective” of a navy: secure control of communications between points.[24]
Beyond this tripartite definition, Mahan also sketches out a related, but more systematic means of predicting Sea Power in Influence’s first chapter, “Six Elements of Sea Power.” This list is unusually explicit and does not necessarily track across the text’s empirical core. Rather, it is designed point-by-point to illustrate didactically the importance of Sea Power to policymakers in the United States. This effort to encourage U.S. policy was, after all, Mahan’s main political project—as Joshua Boucher’s 2015 Classics of Strategy and Diplomacy essay on The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future demonstrates. Even having acknowledged Mahan’s political bias, nonetheless the six elements identified in Influence are useful signposts marking out the relationships between geography, trade, public policy, and power. The elements in question are: 1) geographical position; 2) physical conformation; 3) extent of territory; 4) population; 5) national character; and finally, 6) the character and policy of governments.[25] These divide naturally into two subfields: territory and people.
Territory. While it is crude to see Mahan as a geographic determinist, he does stress the geostrategic features of the North Atlantic as key determinants of sea power. That stress is the reason Influence is so often paired with later work by geopolitical thinkers such as Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman.[26] Note that element one of Mahan’s scheme—in pride of place—is the “geographical position” of the “home base,” that is, the territorial nation-state.[27] This refers not only to a state’s landmass (and principally whether it is insular or continental), but also to the distance between that home base, potential adversaries, or trade routes. Great Britain—an island nation with free access to the high seas—had strong geographic incentives and advantages in the race for Sea Power vis-à-vis its continental rivals France and later Germany.[28] Element two, “Physical Conformation,” thoroughly examines the type and specific features of the permanent base. Naturally, states with numerous and deep harbors enjoy advantages over those without them. Less intuitively, poor soil and climate often encourage Sea Power because domestic inadequacies force commercial interests abroad in search of resources and profits.[29] Element three is the extent of territory. Large landmasses with small populations and weak naval establishments are a liability for sea power, whereas heavily populated, long coastlines (like the U.S. East Coast) are a source of strength. For Sea Power to work, the “garrison must be proportioned” to the territory.[30] Drawing from his experience in the Civil War, Mahan noted that the sparsely populated inlets and harbors of the Confederacy were not a source of strength, but rather highways for riverine penetration by Union gunboats.[31] (Semi-)Colonial peoples the world over could no doubt empathize.
People. These geographical features, while foundational to Mahan’s theory, are not destiny. Mahanian Sea Power varies in accordance with decidedly human elements and contingent political decisions. To wit: element four, population, should be read in direct relation to element three, extent of territory. The number of people in a country obviously influences the “garrisoning” of a given space.[32] But the relationship of population to Sea Power is not a matter of raw numbers. What might be called the “human resources” of Sea Power are generally employed in peacetime by the merchant marine and related industries, making for a ready reserve that can be drawn on by the navy.[33] Without the former, the latter rests on weak foundations. Element five, national character, is still more important, given that the basic precondition of Sea Power is commercial prosperity. Mahan—a product of his times—takes for granted that nations have innate and often racialized characteristics. Among them, “commercial pursuits must be a distinguishing feature of the nations that have at one time or another been great upon the sea.”[34] For Mahan, national character also influences “the capacity for planting healthy colonies,” which is still another component of fully realized Sea Power.[35] Lastly comes national policy. Mahan is suspicious of democratic societies because they may struggle to maintain naval funding during peacetime (witness U.S. demobilization after the Civil War). Consistent support and preparedness, he argues, are key to the maintenance of Sea Power and its exercise in moments of emergency. Incredibly enough, Mahan argued the position so often that in 1897 the New York Times erroneously attributed to him the etymology of the word “preparedness.”[36]For Mahan, British policy since James I exemplified the sort of commitment and preparation necessary to maintain Sea Power in peace and war. As he generalizes, “amid all the fluctuations of continental politics in a most unsettled period … the eye of England was steadily fixed on the maintenance of her sea power:” military command of the ocean as a result of economic productivity, commercial shipping, and foreign territorial infrastructure.[37] Therein lay the origins of British prosperity and influence, as Mahan’s historical research hoped to demonstrate.
Mahan’s Historical Argument
The elements and definitions discussed above account for what is almost certainly the most widely read portion of Influence: the introduction and first chapter. Mahan, as a historian, (and roughly three-quarters of Influence’s actual text) is concerned chiefly with applying these basic principles and definitions to the 18th century and the rise of Great Britain to a position of what the historian Paul Kennedy called “naval mastery.”[38] Conversely, but of equal importance, Mahan is interested in why France failed to build enough Sea Power to upset Britain’s position in the North Atlantic. Influence in this respect is as much a warning to the United States of what happens when continental states neglect to build Sea Power.
As a narrative history, Influence’s temporal and geographic scope—as well as Mahan’s penchant for Victorian flair—makes the book difficult to read. Stylistically, Mahan rarely uses one word when ten will do. Exacerbating matters, he originally wrote the text as a series of lectures at the War College. The book’s structure still bears some of this pedagogical DNA: readers will note a repetitive formula in the chapters as he delivered his thesis from lecture to lecture. Anyone curious about the period in question should save time and energy by turning to N.A.M. Rodger’s magisterial The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815.[39] What distinguishes Influence as grand strategy, strategy, and polemic—and why it is worth reading today—is the neat thread throughout weaving evidence around Mahan’s central thesis: that Britain rose to preeminence in the European system as a result of Sea Power.
Mahan’s evidentiary base consists of several case studies, beginning with the Anglo-Dutch Wars in the 17thcentury. In many ways, the Dutch Provinces make for an awkward departure point for Mahan’s comparative project. After all, he notes that the Anglo-Dutch peoples were not only “radically of the same race,” but also shared a common interest in commerce.[40] Why did one succeed at sea and not the other? Despite these similarities, Mahan affirms that the Dutch lost out in the competition for Sea Power because of a lack of political consensus and the need to divert resources against continental threats from France and Spain. Most critically, William (of Orange) and Mary’s ascent to the British throne in 1688 reconfigured Dutch strategic concerns toward France at the expense of the navy.[41]
Influence then shifts focus to a century-long Anglo-French competition, punctuated by war. Sea Power explains victory throughout. Britain was successful in the War of the League of Augsburg (1688-1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), chiefly as a result of its ability to maintain overseas trade and finance armed conflict on the Continent. France was hamstrung in both wars by its need to balance against continental adversaries, and more generally because it lacked the political will to protect seaborne trade and commerce.[42] Even Louis XIV’s “great French fleets” could be maintained only briefly “owing to the expense of that continental policy which [Louis XIV] had chosen for himself.”[43] In the rare moments where British policy fell short—as in the American War of Independence—it did so because it failed to follow the principles of Sea Power.[44] American independence, as it turned out, was a function of the one instance in which continental France effectively deployed sea power (if not Sea Power) against the British Empire, winning a determinative victory at the Battle of the Chesapeake (1781).
Mahan’s subsequent work, The Influence of Sea Power Upon the French Revolution and Empire (1892), carried this argument forward in an almost wholly derivative encore.[45] The final triumph of British Sea Power was (predictably) the defeat of the Napoleonic Empire through command of the sea after Trafalgar—the Salamis or Armada of its age.
Origins and Reception
Influence’s origins date to the 1880s, though its exact genesis is obscured by retrospective sentimentality. Mahan had no formal training as a historian, and he claimed to have been moved by a sort of divine intervention. He recalled that the book’s basic thesis “dawned first on my inner consciousness. I owed it to no other man.”[46] Mahan was deeply religious, and so perhaps it should come as no surprise that his conversion to Sea Power has a Road-to-Damascus feel to it.[47] It would be more accurate to say that he was inspired by classical example. Mahan conducted his basic research for Influence in the library of the English Club of Lima, Peru while he was stationed (sullenly) patrolling the Pacific coast of South America. While there, Mahan took to Theodor Mommsen’s account of the “Hannibalic episode” in The History of Rome.[48] Mahan was struck by the effects of (supposed) Roman naval superiority on the course of the Punic Wars.[49]In asking what lessons might flow from the “influence” of Roman sea power on the fall of the Carthaginian Empire, Mahan arrived at the germ of his project.
It makes for a compelling origin story—of principles transmitted from Rome, to Britain, to the United States—but Mahan need not have searched so far back for inspiration. Discussions of Sea Power were common in the late-19thcentury—often motivated by the naked institutional self-interest of naval officers and their political backers.[50] South America proves the point. Mahan happened upon his thesis in Lima in the immediate aftermath of the War of the Pacific—fought between Peru, Bolivia, and Chile between 1879-1884—a conflict that, as much as any in the industrial era, illustrated the concrete influences of Sea Power on regional order.[51] After defeating Peru in a decisive naval battle in 1879, Chile leveraged its maritime preponderance to cut off Peruvian trade, finance war spending, and move amphibious armies along the Peruvian coast. In 1885 (five years before Influence) the Chilean Revista de Marina caught the spirit, crowing: “‘The trident of Neptune is the scepter of the world’ and the history in the support of this truth shows to us that the peoples who have taken hold of the empire of the sea surpass all the others in their riches, power and civilization.”[52] Mahan’s failure to grapple seriously with this contemporaneous example of Sea Power in practice reflected either his racially motivated condescension toward Latin America or else his shocking lack of investigative talent. Either is possible. Mahan was a middling sailor and a still worse intelligence collector. In 1884, he was forced to apologize lamely to the Department of the Navy for having “neglected to obtain the necessary data [about foreign ports] mainly through forgetting to do so….”[53]
In 1886, Mahan was recalled from his Pacific posting—likely the best case for all involved—to assume a position at the freshly christened Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island by his mentor and patron Stephen B. Luce. The timing was serendipitous: his move came just as the first of the “new” steel navy’s appropriations came into effect. Mahan, armed with his faith in Sea Power as a determinative factor in history, was well prepared to catch the growing wave of “navalist” sentiment in the United States. Four years after arriving in Newport, he published Influence, ensuring his lasting contribution to history and navies alike.
The book was an immediate hit—at least overseas. Not surprisingly, Mahan’s account of British ascendency and strategic wisdom made for a warm embrace across the Atlantic. In London, he was fêted as a hero—even if some of his biggest supporters confessed confusion over how exactly to pronounce his last name. Was it, Ma-HAN, the naval historian Sir John Knox Laughton wondered, “like the bleating of an anxious ewe”?[54] Methodological critiques aside (“taken rather too exclusively from French sources” *sniff*), the text earned him honorary degrees from Cambridge and Oxford, among other laurels.[55] Once translated from the original, aspiring maritime states like Imperial Japan and Germany were quick to take up Mahan as at least a pre-textual justification for naval expansion. Kaiser Wilhelm II ostensibly absorbed from Mahan the need to construct an ocean-going High Seas Fleet to compete with the Royal Navy.[56] In the Pacific, Mahan claimed (self-consciously) that more of his works were translated into Japanese than any other language (though his precise impact on Imperial Japanese Navy policy is a contested one; note work by Sadao Asada, who is careful to acknowledge that Mahan’s theory was often more justification for ongoing Japanese naval expansion than genuine inspiration).[57]
Influence’s effect on the U.S. Navy took longer to register, much to Mahan’s disappointment. Harrison Administration (1889-1893) Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Franklin Tracy read it approvingly, seeing the book as evidence in favor of naval investment. His 1889 Report of the Secretary of the Navy toyed with many of the arguments made implicitly and explicitly by Mahan. Once published in 1890, Tracy was quick to appeal to Influence as a source of intellectual authority (see the Classics of Strategy and Diplomacy essay on Tracy’s report for more detail).[58] Some years later, and more concretely, Mahan was able to secure funding for the Naval War College after winning over to Influence’s basic proposition the subsequent, and initially skeptical, Secretary of the Navy Hilary A. Herbert. As the decade wore on, Mahan found an increasingly receptive U.S. audience for his polemic—especially in positions of power. Most famously, Theodore Roosevelt—a naval historian in his own right—took from Mahan a vocabulary and rationale for naval power and U.S. foreign policy.[59] Whatever the exact influence the book had on Roosevelt, it is hard to argue with the results: Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet (1907-1909) and the Panama Canal (1914) neatly reflected Mahan’s ambitions for U.S. Sea Power made good.
Criticisms and Alternative Geopolitical Models
For all of its success, critics—and there have been many—have found ample fault with Mahan’s method and conclusions. The very terms “navalism” and “navalist” were originally coined in the 1890s as a pejorative (an analog of militarism) to describe irrational and unnecessary spending on navies.[60] More systematically, subsequent geopolitical thinkers were quick to raise alternate foundations of national and international “power,” even as they borrowed Mahan’s fundamental interest in the nexus of geography, economics, and policy.
The best known competing geopolitical model to Mahan’s is Halford Mackinder’s 1904 “Heartland” or “World Island” theory: a theoretical and historical argument that control of the landmass of Eurasia underwrote a continental (or land power) that no maritime state could effectively challenge.[61] Mackinder believed that the momentary dominance of European warships and seaborne commerce (from roughly 1500-1900) was largely an accident of technology and not an immutable fact. As new technologies like the railroad knit together states and empires in Central Europe and Asia, the “Columbian Epoch” of European maritime imperialism would soon end and primacy would revert to the historical norm of continental power achieved via control of the Eurasian heartland, such as with Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, and the like.[62] As Mackinder conceived it, the Eurasian heartland is surrounded by an “Inner Crescent” of Western Europe, the Middle East, and South and North East Asia. Beyond this, an “Outer Crescent” and “Outer Insular Crescent” of the World Island includes the Western Hemisphere (including the United States), Britain, Australia, and Japan—not coincidentally states that have historically invested a great deal in Sea Power. Nations in these outer rings were, by Mackinder’s definition, peripheral to the “pivot” of history in central Eurasia.
Between Mackinder and Mahan, the Dutch-American thinker Nicholas Spykman struck something of Solomonic balance. Writing during the interwar period and World War II, he argued that the real contest for power in the 20th century would take place in the “rimland” around Eurasia (what Mackinder called the “Inner Crescent”) where Sea Power and Land Power meet in a sort of geopolitical estuary.[63] Rather than controlling the sea or retreating behind it, Spykman argued for consistent engagement with the “rimlands” of Western Europe, the Middle East, and the Asian “Monsoon lands” as a means of balancing power and controlling potential hegemons. As he stressed, “the safety and independence of [the United States] can be preserved only by a foreign policy that will make it impossible for the Eurasian landmass to harbor an overwhelmingly dominant power in Europe and the Far East.”[64] Though critical of what he called the “extraordinary Anglo-Saxon predilection for thinking that only naval warfare is important,” Spykman agreed that a pillar of this balancing act was sufficient maritime power to sustain relations on either end of Eurasia.[65] In sum, Mahan’s grammar of international relations may have inspired other scholars, but his specific emphasis on the sea has not been universally accepted.
Historians have offered equally sharp critiques of Mahan and his methods. During the interwar period, Charles Beard famously saw the Mahanian navy as more portent of war than authentic defense.[66] By the 1960s and 70s, still more historians, led by Walter LaFeber, portrayed Mahan as an arch-imperialist, consciously designing maritime empire across the Pacific and the Caribbean.[67] While this school of criticism was right to stress Mahan’s pervasive racism and interest in overseas possessions, LaFeber and the “revisionists” overestimated Mahan’s pre-1895 influence as well as the scope of his explicit imperial ambitions—which were always more pointillist than territorial.[68] In fact, the network of overseas ports and depots Mahan advocated is mostly akin to the sort of “hidden” empire detected by Daniel Immerwahr in How to Hide an Empire (2019).[69]
Fast on the heels of these authors, the best comprehensive revision of Mahan’s argument came from the British naval historian Paul Kennedy in the 1970s. Compared to Mahan, Kennedy placed a great deal more emphasis on the “central economic factor” of industrial productivity in the making of naval power.[70] Mahan mentions “production,” Kennedy acknowledges, but he is more interested in seaborne commerce as the driving source of wealth; a significant distinction even if the concepts of “trade” and “production” routinely overlap in practice. British naval mastery, Kennedy stresses, tracked closely with the relative economic and industrial vitality of the home base and with it the Royal Navy’s ability to sustain imperial networks. It was a basic thesis that Kennedy expanded in 1987 to “the Rise and Fall of Great Powers,” a landmark text in which he identified a similar pattern of economic prosperity, imperial overstretch, and decline.[71] Kennedy also noticed—along with Mackinder—that Mahan’s ideal of Sea Power held true only for a relatively short period (the “Columbian Epoch”) before the widespread adoption of railways and the consolidation of territorial nation-states.[72] Factors like size and population might matter to sea power, but are far more relevant to calculations of raw geopolitical or “landpower” strength—as anyone contemporaneously counting Soviet infantry divisions in Eastern Europe could attest. In this sense Kennedy largely reflected Mackinder’s argument: Railways and the consolidation of nation states like Germany, Russia, and the United States in the late-19th century once again made land-powers the dominant actors in the international system. Sea Power could contend only if used peripherally and strategically.
More recent critics—interested in culture and ideology—have highlighted the function of Influence as less historical project than deliberately crafted advocacy for a battleship-dominated U.S. Navy.[73] Andrew Lambert’s ambitious and engaging Seapower States (2018) is the most critical and provocative of this vein (though Lambert’s larger project is much more than a refutation of Mahanian sea power). Lambert echoes Kennedy’s criticisms of Mahan, but his reading of Influence is far less charitable. Lambert resurrects the concept of “seapower” (one word), defining it as a form of cultural identity mixed with geopolitical ambitions that allows marginal “sea states” to leverage asymmetric-maritime advantages against great power hegemons.[74] Major continental powers can build naval force (or sea power, two words) but are unlikely to become “seapowers” because they lack an identity anchored in maritime traditions. Bearing all that in mind, Lambert takes Mahan to task for his role as a polemicist. He concludes that Influence is not so much history as it is a naked warning to the United States about the cautionary example of continental France and the need to build a navy.[75]
That last charge is true up to a point, and Mahan the historian—president of the American Historical Association (AHA) in 1902, no less—would have likely acknowledged it. Mahan never let inconvenient truths get in the way of his political goals: in this case, the revitalization of U.S. Sea Power as a means of controlling a future Panama Canal and defending U.S. coastlines. As he noted in his 1902 Presidential Address to the AHA, the “artistic unity” of a historical project often necessitated the subordination of contradictory evidence around a central theme, lest a more subtle argument mislead lay readers. Critics of the “use and misuse of history in American foreign policy,” as the Harvard historian Ernest May put it, could find a great deal to fault in Mahan’s method.[76]
Nonetheless, Mahan as a historian could actually be quite sensitive, particularly in his use of analogy and comparison. Mahan is skeptical, for example, of the galley as an analogy to steam-powered vessels. Though steamships, like galleys, could travel against the wind, oared galleys in early-modern Europe lacked cruising range and guns, making them poor comparative examples.[77] As such, rather than a vulgar set of transferable analogies about tactics, Mahan saw history as a font for principles. “From time to time,” he wrote, “the superstructure of tactics has to be altered or wholly torn down; but the old foundations of strategy so far remain, as though laid upon a rock.”[78] The strategic principles of concentration, decisive engagement, control of communications, and offensive action all translated from the Age of Sail, while specific tactics required revision as a result of technical advances.
Even this seemingly intuitive distinction between evergreen strategies and shifting tactics, however, has been questioned. Mahan’s most effective inquisitor in this regard has been American naval officer and educator Wayne P. Hughes.[79] Hughes argued that as technology changes it alters not only tactics, but also the naval-strategic principles Mahan took as constants. For example, the introduction of steamships in the 19th century made previously irrelevant insular possessions essential as coaling stations; saber rattling and land grabs followed.[80] Hughes also tracked tactics that endured across waves of technological innovation from ships-of-the-line to battleships to the missile age. The upshot, he asserted, was that tactical principles like maneuver, firepower, the value of surprise and “anti-scouting” all translated across the centuries.[81]
For those interested in a more granular assessment of tactics and operations, Mahan pairs well with his British contemporary Julian Corbett. The two thinkers are often read in contrast, but in fact they are basically complimentary. At base, Mahan is a historian of Sea Power in a broad political and grand strategic sense. Corbett is far more interested in naval tactics, operations, and their various applications to limited war. He wrote his treatise in 1911 specifically toward that end, balancing (like Clausewitz) the ways, means, and ends of naval war.[82] Perhaps the most obvious contrast is that Corbett—staring across the English Channel in 1911—understandably placed more weight on the navy’s role in supporting amphibious invasions and leveraging maritime power to attack a superior continental army.[83] To put it bluntly, Mahan saw naval war as a game of checkers, matching equal pieces (in this case battleships) in one attritional battle for sea control. Corbett, by contrast, played chess: Though using the same board, he was quick to recognize the importance of specialized assets, maneuvering in concert, often toward limited ends. In this sense, Corbett is less a repudiation of Mahan than a refinement of Mahanian logics.[84]
Influence’s Enduring Influence
When Mahan died in 1914, Influence was the literal headline of his New York Times obituary: “Admiral Mahan, Naval Critic, Dies: Gained Fame from Book.”[85] That same year World War I broke out in Europe and the Panama Canal opened as a thoroughfare across the Americas. In his last months, Mahan took an understandable interest in both events; friends declared that “over study” of the war contributed to his death.[86] Perhaps it was for the best. Festivities for the canal were delayed in deference to the crisis in Europe. Jutland (1916)—what should have been a new Trafalgar—failed to produce a decisive impact on the war. Admiral John Jellicoe’s “turn away” from the retreating German High Seas Fleet would have been an acute disappointment for the offensively minded Mahan.[87]
Nonetheless, even without a climactic battle, it is clear that the Mahanian historical method could have accommodated WWI and its outcome. The German Navy’s adoption of U-boat operations in 1917 reflected the eighteenth-century French reliance on cruisers, as did the failure of both efforts to cripple British shipping. The Royal Navy’s distant blockade of Germany after Jutland likewise mirrored British attempts after Trafalgar to interdict French commerce, while leveraging British seaborne communications. Most importantly, Anglo-U.S. Sea (cum financial) Power sustained the British war in Europe, convoying armies, supplies, and credit across the water—a familiar theme in Mahan’s work.
Tactical questions aside, in the 100 years since its publication, Influence’s basic contentions have held up remarkably well. Some have argued that twentieth-century inventions like the submarine and the aircraft carrier make Mahan and his overwhelming emphasis on surface-capital ships irrelevant, but this is far too narrow a reading of the text. While the aircraft carrier replaced the battleship as the “Queen of the Seas” in the 1940s, the centralized battle fleet remains—for now at least.[88] Likewise, though World War II was not settled in a single fleet encounter, decisive naval engagements were key to winning whole theaters of the war. Allied command of the South and Central Pacific after Coral Sea and Midway (respectively), as well as the attritional Battle of the Atlantic, were critical to victory. German commerce raiding without sea control in WWI and WWII—as with eighteenth-century France—was not strategically determinative. By contrast, with sea control in hand, the U.S. Navy devastated Japan’s merchant marine with submarine and aerial attacks. Since 1945, the maintenance of “Freedom of the Seas” through a preponderant navy and a vast archipelago of overseas bases has remained a consistent feature of the U.S.-led post-war order. Those commitments are not-so-distant descendants of Mahan’s insistence on overseas trade and logistical stations as a means of securing Sea Power, and with it, national strength.
In the 21st century, even as technologies advance, the core insights of Mahan and his method remain fundamental. Methodologically, his interest in “applied history” has imitators across the academy.[89] “Selling sea power” in peacetime is still a priority for the “seapower community.”[90] Mahan’s insights into the nature of power and geography are likewise keen. As the People’s Liberation Army Navy—to name one obvious example—builds an increasingly capable force, the tension between China’s identity as a continental and maritime power is an issue of global importance. Mahan’s argument for how and why the nineteenth-century continental United States should build a great-power navy mirrors a long running “great policy debate” in China.[91] Control of “points,” too, remains a vital consideration, justifying Freedom of Navigation Operations from the South China Sea to the Persian Gulf. In 1890, Mahan called the sea a “wide common.”[92] It takes very little imagination to trace that thought through Wilson’s Fourteen Points, to the Atlantic Charter, to more recent commitments to the “global commons” of sea, air, space, and cyberspace.
It is worth repeating, in closing, that Sea Power is not naval power or the capacity to wage war. In any case, as a history of naval war Influence makes for dull reading. Rather, Mahan is interested in the more fundamental relationship between national primacy and the sea. Without commerce, territorial infrastructure, and political will, naval preponderance is unsustainable. Momentary superiority in tonnage or deployable warships often masks a deeper brittleness. As Mahan puts it when discussing the War of the Spanish Succession: “The sea power of England therefore was not merely in the great navy, with which we too commonly and exclusively associate it; France had had such a navy in 1688, and it shriveled away like a leaf in the fire.”[93] In this respect, Mahan actually shares a great deal with later critics who highlight the importance of a dynamic economy as the ultimate source of national or imperial power. Today, U.S. strategists concerned with the vulnerability of sea lines of communication, a retreat from global commitments, or the hollowing out of the domestic industrial base, could find common cause with Mahan’s logic. Without those elements of Sea Power, pure military or naval strength is a colossus with feet of clay.
Thomas “Tommy” Jamison is a military historian and assistant professor of strategic studies in the Defense Analysis Department at the Naval Postgraduate School. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University (2020) and has served as a USN Intelligence Officer (2009-2014).
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Further Reading:
Primary:
A.T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783 (Boston, Little Brown and Company, 1898). Though originally published in 1890, this essay has cited the 1898 version throughout—the edition most readily available via Google.
A.T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon the French Revolution and Empire, Vol I-II (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1892).
- A.T. Mahan, The Interest of America in Sea Power (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1897).
A.T. Mahan, The Life of Nelson: The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1897).
A.T. Mahan, From Sail to Steam: Recollections of a Naval Life (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907).
Mahan on Naval Warfare: Selections from the Writings of Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, ed. Allan Westcott (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1918).
Letters and Papers of Alfred Thayer Mahan, Vol I-III, ed. Robert Seager II and Doris Maguire (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1975).
Secondary:
B.J. Armstrong, 21st Century Mahan: Sound Military Conclusions for the Modern Era (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2013).
Charles Beard, The Navy: Defense or Portent? (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1932).
Dirk Bonker, Militarism in a Global Age: Naval Ambitions in Germany and the United States Before World War One (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).
Julian S. Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (London: Longmans, Green and Co. 1918).
Philip Crowl, “Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Naval Historian,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
Suzanne Geissler, God and Sea Power: The Influence of Religion on Alfred Thayer Mahan (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2015).
Wayne P. Hughes, Fleet Tactics (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986/2000/2018).
The Influence of History on Mahan: The Proceedings of a Conference Marking the Centenary of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, ed. John Hattendorf (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1991).
Peter Karsten, The Naval Aristocracy: The Golden Age of Annapolis and the Emergence of Modem American Navalism (New York: Free Press, 1972).
John Keegan, The Price of Admiralty: The Evolution of Naval Warfare (New York: Viking, 1988).
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (New York: Penguin, 2017), originally, (New York: Scribner, 1976).
Andrew Lambert, Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires, and the Conflict that Made the Modern World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).
Halford J. Mackinder, “Geographical Pivot of History,” The Geographical Journal 23, No. 4 (1904): 421-437.
Kevin D. McCranie, Mahan, Corbett, and the Foundations of Naval Strategic Thought (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2021).
Scott Mobley, Progressives in Navy Blue (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2018).
N.A.M. Rodger, Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1659-1815 (New York: Norton, 2005).
Robert Seager, Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Man and his Letters (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1977).
Robert Seager, “Ten Years Before Mahan: The Unofficial Case for the New Navy, 1880-1890,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review (December 1953), 491-512.
Mark Russell Shulman, Navalism and the Emergence of American Sea Power (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1995).
Ronald Spector, Professors at War: The Naval War College and the Development of the Naval Profession (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1977).
Margaret Tuttle Sprout, “Mahan: Evangelist of Sea Power,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler, ed. Edward Mead Earle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943).
Nicholas J. Spykman, The Geography of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1944).
Nicholas J. Spykman, “Geography and Foreign Policy,” I-II, The American Political Science Review, 1938.
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NOTES
[1] A.T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783 [hereafter Influence] (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1898). NB: Influence was published in 1890, but I have cited throughout the 1898 version because it is the one most widely available on Google Books c. 2022.
[3] Kenneth Hagan, American Gunboat Diplomacy and the Old Navy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 140; George Davis, A Navy Second to None: The Development of Modern American Naval Policy (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1940), 32.
[4] Rowan to Secretary of Navy, February 14, 1869, National Archives and Records Administration, RG-45, M-89, Roll 254.
[5] Lee McGiffin, Yankee of the Yalu: Philo Norton McGiffin, American Captain in the Chinese Navy (1885-1895) (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1968), 35. Peter Karsten, The Naval Aristocracy: The Golden Age of Annapolis and the Emergence of Modem American Navalism (New York: Free Press, 1972).
[6] Oscar Wilde, “The Canterville Ghost,” The Court and Society Review (1887).
[7] Mark R. Shulman, Navalism and the Emergence of American Sea Power (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1995); Scott Mobley, Progressives in Navy Blue (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2018).
[8] Walter Herrick, The American Naval Revolution (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967). Borrowing a phrase from: Charles Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
[9] Wayne Hughes, Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2000), 9.
[11] Hugues Canuel, “From a Prestige Fleet to the Jeune Ecole,” (2018) Naval War College Review: Vol. 71: No. 1, Article 7; Arne Roksund, The Jeune Ecole: The Strategy of the Weak (Boston: Brill, 2007); Theodore Ropp, The Development of a Modern Navy: French Naval Policy 1871-1904, ed. Stephen Roberts (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1987).
[15] See also: George Grote, A History of Greece, Vol II, 2nd Edition (London: John Murray, 1849), 152; Andrew Lambert, Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires, and the Conflict that Made the Modern World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 2. Though Grote apparently applies it to Minoan civilization, see: Lambert, Seapower States, 334, n. 2.
[16] A.T. Mahan, Letters and Papers of Alfred Thayer Mahan [hereafter LPATM] Vol I-III, ed. Robert Seager II and Doris Maguire (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1975), Vol II, 494.
[17] Margaret Sprout, “Mahan: Evangelist of Sea Power,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler, ed. Edward Mead Earle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943). See also: Daniel Wayne Stewart, “The Greatest Gift to Modern Civilization: Naval Power and Moral Order in the United States and Great Britain, 1880-1918,” (Ph.D. Diss., Temple University, 1999).
[19] A.T. Mahan, The Life of Nelson: The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1897).
[20] Mahan’s only book dedicated to strategy and tactics as such was, by his own admission, the worst writing he ever produced. A.T. Mahan, Naval Strategy Compared and Contrasted with the Principles and Practice of Military Operations on Land, (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1911). For suspicion of Commerce Raiding, see: Mahan, Influence, 288. Consider the strategic indecisiveness of Confederate cruiser warfare during the U.S. Civil War.
[21] Herbert Wilson, Ironclads in Action: A Sketch of Naval Warfare from 1855 to 1895 (London: Low, Martson and Company, 1896).
[22] Mahan, Influence, 71. See also: 28, 510.
[26] Halford J. Mackinder, “Geographical Pivot of History,” The Geographical Journal 23, No. 4 (1904): 421-437; Nicholas Spykman’s “Geography and Foreign Policy,” I-II, The American Political Science Review, Vol XXXII, Issue I, Vol XXXII, Issue II, (1938).
[27] Though the metropole of an imperial network applies as well.
[36] “On Preparedness,” New York Times, March 18, 1897.
[38] Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (New York: Penguin, 2017), originally, (New York: Scribner, 1976). 9.
[39] N.A.M. Rodger, Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1659-1815 (New York: Norton, 2005).
[45] A.T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793-1812 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1892).
[46] Mahan, From Sail to Steam, 276.
[47] Suzanne Geissler, God and Sea Power: The Influence of Religion on Alfred Thayer Mahan (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2015).
[48] Mahan, From Sail to Steam, 277; Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome, tr. William P. Dickson (London: R. Bentley, 1862-1866).
[50] Robert Seager, “Ten Years Before Mahan: The Unofficial Case for the New Navy, 1880-1890,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review40, No. 3 (1953): 491-512.
[51] William Sater, Andean Tragedy: Fighting the War of the Pacific, 1879-1884 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007).
[52] Revista de Marina, No. 1, July. 1885.
[53] A.T. Mahan, LPATM, Vol I, 563-564.
[54] “Obituary,” Letters and Papers of Professor Sir John Knox Laughton, 1830-1915, ed. Andrew Lambert, Navy Records Society, 259-260; King’s College (London) to A.T. Mahan, March 11, 1893, Mahan Papers, Library of Congress, Box 2, Reel 2.
[55] John Laughton to S.B. Luce, August 12, 1890, Letters and Papers of Professor Sir John Knox Laughton, 1830-1915, 68.
[56] For an account of the parallels and interplay see: Dirk Bonker, Militarism in a Global Age: Naval Ambitions in Germany and the United States Before World War One (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).
[57] Sadao Asada, From Mahan to Peral Harbor: The Imperial Japanese Navy and the United States (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2006), 26-27. See also: Dingman, “Japan and Mahan” in The Influence of History on Mahan: The Proceedings of a Conference Marking the Centenary of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, ed. John Hattendorf (Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1991).
[58] Benjamin Cooling, Benjamin Franklin Tracy: Father of the Modern American Fighting Navy (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1973).
[59] Richard W. Turk, The Ambiguous Relationship: Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan, 1987; Forging the Trident: Theodore Roosevelt and the United states Navy, ed. William Leeman and John B. Hattendorf, (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2020).
[60] E.L. Godkin, “Navalism,” Nation, Vol. 54.
[61] Mackinder, “Geographical Pivot of History,” 421-437.
[62] John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000 (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008).
[63] Nicholas Spykman, The Geography of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1944), 40-41.
[66] Charles Beard, The Navy: Defense or Portent? (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1932).
[67] Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), 91. See also: David Healy, US Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 67.
[68] Mahan, LPATM, Vol II, 590.
[69] Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).
[70] Kennedy, Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, 8.
[71] Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987).
[72] Kennedy, Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, 7-8.
[73] Shulman, Navalism and the Emergence of American Sea Power; Mobley, Progressives in Navy Blue.
[74] Lambert, Seapower States, 333.
[76] Ernest May, Ernest May, “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
[79] Wayne P. Hughes, Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986/2000/2018).
[80] Peter A. Shulman, Coal & Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015); David Allan Snyder, “Petroleum and Power: Naval Fuel Technology and the Anglo-American Struggle for Core Hegemony, 1889-1922,” Ph.D. Diss., Texas A&M University, 2001.
[81] Hughes, Fleet Tactics 226-227.
[82] Julian Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1918). NB originally published in 1911, pre-WWI.
[83] Corbett, Principles, 51-56.
[84] Kevin D. McCranie, Mahan, Corbett, and the Foundations of Naval Strategic Thought (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2021).
[85] “Admiral Mahan,” New York Times, December 2, 1914.
[88] See: Wayne Hughes, Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat, 1986/2000/2018.
[89] See examples like the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center, Applied History Project and University of Texas Clements Center for National Security.
[90] Ryan Waddle, Selling Sea Power Public Relations and the U.S. Navy, 1917-1941 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019).
[91] Immanuel C.Y. Hsu, “The Great Policy Debate in China, 1874: Maritime Defense Vs. Frontier Defense,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 1964-1965, Vol 25, pp. 212-228.