Search Results for: Edward Mead Earle

Edward Mead Earle’s Critique of Spykman

April 09, 2015

Earle wrote a surprisingly negative review in the Political Science Quarterly (March 1943) of Nicholas Spykman's America's Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (1942), which is generally considered to have been highly influential among the set of individuals who composed Makers of Modern Strategy. Earle "found Spykman's focus on a narrow concept of power as the sole basis of international affairs unpersuasive and out of line with American traditions.

Alfred Thayer Mahan: “The Influence of Sea Power Upon History” as Strategy, Grand Strategy, and Polemic

Thomas Jamison

February 09, 2022

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.” 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.

Giulio Douhet, The Command of The Air (1921/1927)

Nicholas Morrow

September 01, 2015

Giulio Douhet, an Italian army officer who never learnt to fly, first published one of military theory’s most recognized and controversial works on airpower, The Command of The Air, in 1921. Just three years after the end of the First World War and the first widespread use of airplanes in warfare, this new technology had yet to be fully integrated into military strategy. Douhet advocated a new strategic application for what he identified as the airplane’s superior capabilities in order to avoid the destructive stalemate of the First World War in future wars. Promising a quick and decisive end to war, The Command of The Air synthesized concepts, namely strategic bombing, an independent air force, the dominance of an offensive strategy, and breaking the will of the civilian population, among others, which contributed to the development of the modern air force.

In Defense of Classical Geopolitics

Mackubin Owens

February 18, 2015

CSD Editorial Note: This essay was originally published in the Naval War College Review, Autumn 199, pp. 59-76. The formulation of national strategy is influenced by a wide variety of factors, including the past history of the nation; the nature of the regime; the ideology, religion, and culture; economic factors, to include technology;

Book: Makers of Modern Strategy

Edward Mead Earle

January 10, 2021

Edward Meade Earle's Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler (Princeton University Press, 1943) brought together many of the leading historians of the period, including Craig and Gilbert, R.R. Palmer, Hajo Halborn, Stefan T. Possony, and Margaret Sprout. The contributors considered those writers, statesmen,

A Contemporary Hat Tip to Makers of Modern Strategy

Patrick J. Garrity +

April 14, 2015

In "Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China," Robert Blackwill and Ashley J. Tellis argue that because the American effort to “integrate” China into the liberal international order has now generated new threats to U.S. primacy in Asia—and could result in a consequential challenge to American power globally—Washington needs a new grand strategy toward China that centers on balancing the rise of Chinese power rather than continuing to assist its ascendancy.