In 1900, the U.S. Navy was in an obvious state of flux. The most visible change was the sudden growth of the fleet; Jane’s Fighting Ships was listing it as the second most powerful navy in the world, a status inconceivable a decade earlier. A suddenly enlarged fleet required a vast growth in the officer corps and creation of the General Board, a permanent war-planning agency with the explicit role of devising policies based on what would be needed should war break out. William Snowden Sims was on the verge of transforming U.S. naval gunnery; his work helped change a fleet with potential combat power into one with real combat potential. Within a few years the naval personnel system also was transformed, again in the direction of greater capability. Much the same might be said of the drastic change in the way in which ship characteristics were determined, in accord with the needs revealed by war planning. The torpedo was beginning to transform the world’s navies, and the U.S. Navy was buying its first modern submarine.
Yet, one kind of transformation seems to overshadow all the others. In 1900, the Navy was at the center of a deep shift in U.S. national strategy. The shift is obvious if, instead of focusing on 1900 itself, one looks at dates 15 years to either side. In 1885, U.S. national interest was concentrated on inward development, on the fate of the frontier. The U.S. Navy was beginning its revival, with construction of new steel cruisers and with measures taken to limit the further life of the obsolescent wooden fleet. This revival was clearly a limited effort; the Navy was anything but the focus of national policy.
By 1915, the U.S. Navy was the premier U.S. service, and anyone interested in national defense took that pre-eminence for granted. As a measure of that attitude, we know Congress annually debated not whether to build further capital ships, but how many. The Wilson administration was about to propose the 1916 Act, which would have made the U.S. Navy the most powerful in the world, at least in terms of modern capital ships. National policy was outward-looking, in the sense that the connection between the fleet and U.S. national independence was shared widely. Something enormous had happened in 30 years.
From a technological point of view, the creation of a steel navy was essentially inevitable; no one in the 1880s could deny that the collection of wooden steam sloops was obsolescent and perhaps even risible. A glance at any contemporary reference book will show that every navy in the world went through roughly the same process of modernization. That usually meant building a few modern warships. It absolutely did not usually mean aspiring to the first rank of sea powers. Indeed, the technological revolution of the late 19th century raised the cost of competing with the major sea powers, particularly with the Royal Navy. It took some special national impetus to cross that barrier. That is why, for example, the British were shocked into action when the Germans, until then almost exclusively a land power, chose to build a fleet to rival theirs. That the German effort was not seen as routine suggests that the U.S. effort, which was certainly comparable in its magnitude, was not routine, either.
The key, it seems, was a new perception of what naval power could mean to the United States. The single most important fact of naval power is that the sea is the greatest of all highways: it is far easier to move anything, particularly anything massive, by sea than it is over land. The classic quoted example is that it is less expensive to move cars from Yokohama to New York than from Detroit to New York, but one might equally point out that it is remarkable that a fully equipped air base can be moved about the sea at more than 30 knots. One could hardly do the same over the best overland highway. Much the same might be said of a squadron of intercontinental ballistic missiles. This fact of seaborne mobility runs counter to most people’s experience; to them the sea seems a rather dangerous place, more barrier than anything else.
If the sea is dangerous, it is a moat. If it is a highway, it is a potential invasion route. Another formulation might be that if the sea is a barrier, then the United States can and perhaps should isolate itself, because it is so conveniently far from most potential sources of trouble (except, of course, the land borders with Canada and with Mexico). On the other hand, if the sea is a highway, then in some special way distances over the sea count for far less than distances overland, and the United States is quite close to Europe and Asia and quite incapable of isolating itself from whatever problems arise there. For that matter, in this vision, the future of the United States is bound up with the futures of countries connected to us by that sea route.
Historically, Americans who lived far from the sea had little or no experience in foreign trade, so the highway aspect made little impression. The view from coastal ports was, of course, different. Inhabitants saw the fruits of overseas trade in their shops. Most of them could see the piers and the ships. For that matter, most of them came into daily contact with those arriving from overseas.
In 1885, the barrier view predominated. It might be conceded that an enemy could, if he wanted to make a supreme effort, approach the United States by sea, but most Americans in 1885 would have doubted that such an assault would be anything but desperate and relatively easy to defeat. Moreover, the most appropriate means of defense against any such attack would be a combination of mobile and fixed fortifications. The former might include small capital ships.
When the revival of the U.S. Navy began in 1883, to the extent that any maritime threat was conceded, the agreed one was a descent by one or more European powers on the U.S. coast. Much of the wealth of the country was concentrated in a few coastal cities, such as Boston, New York, Baltimore, and New Orleans. The last great foreign war the country had fought, the War of 1812, had seen the British burn Washington and assault Baltimore and New Orleans. The strategic question was how such a threat could be met at minimum cost. The accepted answer, which was not particularly explicit, was that the enemy would be held off by coastal fortifications while a small U.S. cruiser force preyed on his commerce, raising the cost of the war. The hope was that after a time the foreign attacker would realize that the game was not worth its cost, and he would make peace. Americans of historical bent could remember a strategy of this type pursued during the War of 1812. They tended to avoid remembering just how ineffective it had been. There was little or no hope or expectation of deterrence, merely a theory of war termination, should war come. It seems unlikely that many Americans took the threat of naval attack very seriously.
Naval reconstruction was predicated mainly on the feeling that unless the U.S. Navy was rebuilt, it would be ridiculed as far weaker than major South American navies, and hence inadequate to a self-respecting country. Periodically, writers produced books describing future wars in which European fleets threatened U.S. ports with destruction unless ransom was paid, but again such speculations had little or no effect.
The barrier view had a deeper consequence. It seemed far easier to move forces over land. If Britain was the most likely future enemy, then surely the long border with Canada was a much more likely invasion route. After all, the War of 1812 had seen attacks by both land and sea. Probably it was also very significant, in the 1880s, that most Americans with military experience remembered the Civil War essentially as a land war. Naval officers remembered the blockade as the crippling blow against the South, but the land campaigns were far more prominent in the popular imagination. It seemed that in 1861-65, as in 1812-15, naval power had been auxiliary to land combat. There was little or no interest in the sort of strategic analysis that would have demonstrated the key enabling role of sea power.
In about 1886 Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan began to discuss his theory that sea power had been central, rather than peripheral, to the world history of the past two and a half centuries. In particular, he emphasized the highway aspect of the sea as the key to understanding that history. His largely tacit point was that, given very easy transportation by sea, seaborne commerce would soon become the dominant factor in the world economy. That would be true even for largely self-sufficient countries such as the United States, because some vital commodities would always be far less expensive abroad than at home. Given very cheap transportation, they would dominate the U.S. market. All countries ultimately would specialize, hence ultimately would be dependent on sea transportation for at least some vital commodities. This was much the message we see now as globalization. Mahan’s argument was that any country dependent on the world economy must be able to secure access to the world. It could not do so if an enemy fleet dominated the seas. Mahan’s greatest historical example was the Netherlands, probably the first modern state largely dependent on overseas trade for its survival. When the Dutch fleet was defeated by the British, the Dutch economy collapsed; in Mahan’s phrase, “grass grew in the streets of Amsterdam.”
Mahan had served as a naval officer in the Civil War, and presumably his faith in the economic consequences of sea power can be traced to a belief that the blockade of the Confederacy had been decisive. Indeed, his first book, published in 1883, had been an account of naval operations in the Gulf and in inland waters during the Civil War. The particular operations that Mahan recounted were involved mainly with exploiting seaborne (and river-borne) mobility rather than with blockade; but we would see such exploitation and blockade as two sides of the same coin. It does not, incidentally, seem that Mahan drew such conclusions at the time; he needed time to realize that the sea-as-highway was the key insight.
Mahan’s view was radical in that few before him seem to have made the sea-as-highway argument explicitly. Most military writing of Mahan’s time—indeed, most of the writing of any time—is devoted to particular battles. Sea power differs from land power in that much of its influence is indirect; ships in a blocking position can determine history, but armies tend to have to fight to make their presence count. One might imagine that the 1889 publication of Mahan’s first great book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, led directly to the transformation of the U.S. Navy. That was hardly the case. Mahan’s insights did raise some consciousness of the significance of sea power, but he did not articulate any program, and he was not placed to have any direct influence on events.
What counted was a political decision, in the sense that the word “political” comes from the same root as policy. In the U.S. system, shifts in basic governmental policy must ultimately have public support. Mahan was well aware of the problem. In his first book, he contrasted two kinds of sea power. He understood British sea power to be organic, in the sense that the British political public (those responsible for electing Parliament, for example) were well aware that Britain’s fate as an island power rested on its navy. No special argument about the virtues of sea power was needed. With no theoretical underpinning, the British might use their sea power more or less wisely, but they would not consider it optional.
France represented an alternative. It was not at all obvious to Frenchmen in influential positions that sea power was vital. It was expensive, and it detracted from what could be spent on the army, which fought on most of the French frontiers. Periodically a particularly insightful French minister managed to convince the king to spend much more on the fleet, generally to counter British sea power. Enormous dividends were gained. Because the policy argument for sea power was never well enough or widely enough articulated, however, it generally did not outlast the individual involved. Mahan concluded that only a natural sea power, the economic life of which rested on the sea, could support a major fleet. His problem was that this was not quite the case with the United States, with its anemic merchant marine. In fact, however, some of those who heard Mahan’s arguments realized that they did apply very much to the United States.
Benjamin F. Tracy served as Secretary of the Navy in the Harrison administration (6 March 1889-4 March 1893). Influenced by Mahan, he appreciated the potential of sea power, which made his position extremely important. Tracy formed a Policy Board, advised by but not dominated by Mahan. It submitted its report at the end of 1889, and the result was duly published the following year in the Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute. In typical 19th-century style, it laid out not only a broad policy but also details of the ships to be built, including drawings.
The Board argued for a new kind of strategy—a forward strategy rather than the earlier defensive concept. It proposed building an oceanic navy built around battleships rather than cruisers, one that could deal with an enemy by exploiting the same ocean highway an invader might use. This was deterrence. A few U.S. cruisers might create limited havoc, but as the Union Navy had shown decades earlier, they ultimately would be hunted down by a superior sea power. One consequence of the ongoing technological revolution was that it was becoming more expensive to produce cruisers capable of hunting down fast merchant ships. A commerce-raiding strategy would have to make do with fewer raiders, and they would be far more difficult to replace in wartime. On the other hand, a modern U.S. battle fleet could smash an enemy’s sea power and thus lay both his commerce and his coast open to attack.
The Board called for creation of two fleets, one for long-range offensive action and a second to shield the U.S. coast. The concept of the coast defense fleet explains why the first three modern U.S. battleships were described as coast defense battleships; only the fourth, the USS Iowa, was described as oceangoing. In the past, it had taken a massive ship to carry guns sufficiently powerful to deal with enemy capital ships. Now, however, a torpedo carried by a small boat could sink an ironclad. If the cost of close-in defense could be constrained, two oceanic fleets—one for distant operations and one for mid-ocean operations—might become more affordable.
Overall, however, the board’s prescription called for a fleet nearly the size of that operated at the time by the dominant sea power, Great Britain. Newspaper editorials denounced such extravagance. But the Board’s paper was intended as the beginning of a process, not the end. It does not seem to have provoked a national debate, but it did make Mahanian ideas respectable in the United States.
The Policy Board’s strategy clearly made sense, so it survived. Successive secretaries of the Navy took the new strategy seriously enough to shift the balance of U.S. naval construction, in the decade following the board’s report, toward battleships. Even so, on the eve of war with Spain, the United States was far from achieving the status of a major sea power. Moreover, given the slow pace of U.S. construction and the rapid pace of naval technology, it was unlikely the United States would or could even maintain its position.
Then in 1898 the United States fought Spain. Suddenly, the oceans seemed far smaller. Histories of the war emphasize its offensive aspects: U.S. warships seized the Philippines, and the U.S. Navy destroyed the Spanish fleet off Cuba. Then, as now, China was seen as the great opportunity of the future, and the Philippines were, in effect, a U.S. foothold in the East. Those who favored global engagement clearly won. The unstated implication was that the world could easily engage the United States via the sea: the Policy Board’s argument.
The war had another side as well. When war broke out, the Spanish fleet was in home waters. It might steam to Cuba to protect against a U.S. assault. Then again, it might be employed more indirectly. Residents of the U.S. East Coast suddenly realized there was no good reason why the Spanish battleships and cruisers would not bombard them. That sort of operation certainly would have attracted attention. The Navy Department did commission the fastest U.S. liners to take up patrol stations in the mid-Atlantic, but it is not at all clear that, without radio, they could have got word back in time for any sort of effective reaction. The most visible Navy counter to the threat was to recommission surviving Civil War monitors as harbor-defense craft. Everything more modern was needed in the active theater of war, Cuba. The United States could afford a modern forward fleet or a modern coast defense force, but not both.
This story could, of course, be told in a very different way. The Spanish clearly valued Cuba and the Philippines. Offensive operations by the United States may well have focused their attention on both. They, too, did not know where the small but quite modern U.S. fleet would strike. They felt compelled, for example, to keep their one usable battleship in home waters (at the end of the war she was being sent East, to relieve the Philippines, but it was far too late for that). The Spanish cruisers went to Cuba, because without them the island would have been overrun instantly. In effect, Spanish action in response to a U.S. threat validated the strategy espoused by the Policy Board almost a decade earlier. The destruction of the Spanish cruisers in Cuban waters ended the threat to the U.S. mainland in a way familiar to students of decisive naval battle, though not to those citizens who wanted direct protection.
The quandary over defending U.S. cities highlighted the strategic problem the United States faced then (and, for that matter, now). Given finite resources, is it better to attempt to protect the country itself, or to deal with an enemy as far forward as possible? The Policy Board report can be read as a statement of what it would have cost to do both (omitting the obvious implication that such a strategy would be unaffordable). It also had to be admitted, however, that coast defense was not really practicable. The U.S. coast is just too long. The local defenses built up so expensively around U.S. cities—some of which survive as deserted fortifications—were insufficient, because an enemy could land farther up the coast and take the cities from the rear. Exactly such descents figured in the future-war fiction of the time. That sort of threat was a consequence of basic naval mobility.
In the aftermath of the war, Congress bought the battle fleet that had been proposed a decade earlier. That the United States would build and maintain a capital ship fleet, however, was hardly foreordained. As President, Theodore Roosevelt managed to buy numerous battleships, but at the time he might have been seen as a lone visionary whose legacy would vanish after his departure. Moreover, just before he left office, a convulsion in battleship design—the Dreadnought revolution—made his new ships obsolete. Every major navy built some dreadnoughts, but most could not afford to replace their earlier ships on anything like a one-for-one basis. Before about 1906, battleship evolution had been slow enough that navies could take decades to build battle fleets. That situation did not last. Thus, for many navies, the advent of the new type of battleship ended any pretension to first-class status. Not only did the U.S. Navy continue to build battleships, but it built larger and larger ones as the technology developed. This trend was so pronounced that skeptics in Congress began to ask the Navy to indicate the natural limits on such growth. Moreover, U.S. designers led the world in some important areas, such as protection (“all or nothing” armor and underwater protection) and machinery (turbo-electric drive, which was partly a matter of protection). It is true that the rate at which the U.S. Navy built dreadnoughts did not match that of the pre-dreadnoughts, but these were much larger and more expensive ships.
The Navy did retain a coast-defense mission after 1900, but it sought to accomplish that mission at minimum cost so the overseas offensive force could be built into an effective instrument of national power. That is why the post-1900 U.S. Navy became so interested in submarines, which offered a mobile form of defense almost impossible to counter. Yet, even including their tenders, they were far less expensive than dedicated coast-defense ships, which the United States ceased to build.
The policy shift begun in 1890 extended far beyond the Navy. Before 1890 the U.S. vision of the world was largely dismissive. A foreign descent on U.S. shores might be conceivable, but it was far down the list of possibilities. The Policy Board report helped awaken Americans to the real possibility that foreign powers might use their fleets to cross the Atlantic, that the United States was far too underarmed to protect itself. It may be argued that this was actually a fairly new threat based on newly efficient steam engines, which by the mid-1880s finally made it possible to build truly oceanic capital ships. For years, historians tended to dismiss fears of seaborne invasion as inventions devised to support expensive naval construction. To some extent the 1898 scare on the Eastern seaboard suggests that the fear was not entirely fantasy.
This brief account of the U.S. strategic problems in the early part of the 20th century shows that the United States faced a two-ocean problem. There was no question of building a two-ocean fleet to match, however; the resources simply were not there. A one-ocean fleet had to be able to swing between the two oceans to meet emergencies. The problem had been highlighted in 1898 by the heroic dash of the battleship Oregon from the Pacific to the Atlantic, but examination of war plans showed just how serious it was. It was not accidental that President Roosevelt, long a student of naval history, successfully pressed the construction of the Panama Canal. The canal was clearly part of the same story that began with the Policy Board.
We are still living with the sort of national strategy the Policy Board first expressed. We still try to keep strategic problems at arms’ length; it is better to fight abroad than to fight at home. That view has never been unanimous, but it has been very important. The old contest between coast defense and a forward policy is visible right now, in debates over the proper course of the ongoing war against terrorism.
The events of 1898, read in the light of the Policy Board paper, showed that the United States faced real threats. It was not enough merely to buy more ships. Something had to be done to make the Navy an effective weapon. Before 1898 very little real war planning had been done, although there had been some exercises at the Naval War College. The Secretary of the Navy convened a Strategy Board to recommend policy during the Spanish-American War. Advised by Mahan, it reflected the thinking first widely spread by the Policy Board. After the war, a permanent war-planning entity, the General Board, was convened on the theory that war plans should form the basis for naval policy. In 1904, the General Board was called on to recommend that year’s building program, probably partly as a way of pushing the technical Bureaus of the Navy to develop an all-big-gun battleship.
On a deeper level, the combination of the continuing influence of the Policy Board and 1898 was to convince many younger officers that reform of the Navy was urgent; what would happen if instead of Spain the United States faced something more serious, like Germany? In effect, the reformers deepened the process of transformation, which had begun in 1890. Prominent among them was William S. Sims, who made his name as a gunnery expert, when guns were clearly the preeminent naval weapons. He and other young officers also managed to make the General Board, which represented the wartime operational thinking of the Navy, the main authority determining the overall characteristics of U.S. warships. Anyone reading the transcripts of General Board hearings conducted between the two World Wars will be struck by the repeated question: How does this ship contribute to the expected war with Japan? Nothing equivalent seems to have been asked before about 1900.
So something very impressive happened between 1890 and, say, 1910. The Navy was transformed. In this particular case, one key transformation in U.S. overall policy inspired many to press forward the technical transformations that were far more visible. For example, the new battleships in some vital ways were far in advance of their foreign counterparts. There were, to be sure, some major gaps. A fleet was more than battleships. Each year the Secretary of the Navy asked for cruisers and auxiliaries, but Congress only rarely provided them, and in insufficient numbers. The feeling on the key committee may have been that it was miraculous to convince an inward-looking Congress to buy the most expensive warships, and that anything smaller could be built relatively quickly as needed.
Why did transformation work? It had two key aspects. It was cooperative, in that the basic transformational concept was widely understood within the Navy. Not all understood correctly, but enough did to carry through the transformation from the inside. It may be argued that ambition drove men such as Sims, but they could have pushed in any of a number of directions. The effect of a simple basic concept was to give Sims and many others a common direction, enormously strengthening what they did and also providing a measure against which to evaluate their efforts.
The other key aspect was that the transformation enlisted support from outside the Navy. The Policy Board study came not from a group of internal reformers, but from a politically appointed Secretary. That meant he had, at least potentially, the President’s ear; he would not have entered office unless the President had wanted him. He could transmit his thinking to Congress, and only Congress could agree to a major shift in priorities.
This sort of education is the role of major statements of naval strategy. There was really nothing like the product of the Policy Board until the statements of the Maritime Strategy in the 1980s.