The Jeune Ecole Offers Lessons for a New Contested Maritime Environment

The people on one side of a maritime strait look north and west toward their menacing neighbor on the other side: a naval power that has long held historical irredentist claims on their territory, and whom they take to be one of their greatest threats. Contemplating this far more powerful naval adversary—and the relatively narrow channel that separates them—defense officials and military officers on the southeastern side of the strait seek to formulate an offset strategy that will compensate for their own weakness relative to this naval hegemon, and the marked superiority it enjoys in terms of numbers, tonnage, and firepower. 

This was the situation faced in the late 19th-century by French naval officers as they looked across the English Channel to Great Britain—a country that had been an erstwhile ally in the Crimean War against Russia (1853–56), but had another role dating back centuries as France’s most persistent nemesis. Great Britain was by far the strongest force on the world’s oceans during this period, enjoying a preponderance of strength codified in the Naval Defence Act 1889, which called for the Royal Navy to maintain a fleet of battleships equal to the combined forces of the next two naval powers combined. In the face of the Royal Navy’s decisive advantages in big-gun firepower, and facing limited shipbuilding resources, French defense officials and naval theorists looked for a way to fill the gap.

The solution they developed was a framework that ultimately became known as the Jeune Ecole (“Young School”). Having its genesis in the writings of Captain Richild Grivel and others in the 1860s, the school arguably saw its apogee under the tenure of Admiral Théophile Aube as Minister of Marine in 1886–1887. The Jeune Ecole was a series of generally agreed-on ideas, rather than a clear plan codified in any single theoretical work. However, in its broad outlines, this school of thought deemphasized constructing big-deck battleships in favor of shifting resources toward constructing smaller and more numerous surface combatants—particularly torpedo boats—and creating a submarine arm. It further deemphasized armor in favor of mobility and firepower, seeking to put as much punch as possible onto as many small platforms as possible. It was, in essence, the idea that many Davids, armed with powerful slings could successfully down a smaller number of Goliaths. The Jeune Ecole concepts—the embodiment of asymmetry before asymmetry became a buzzword—seemed to promise the navy of France’s Third Republic a viable means of countering a British navy with which it could not hope to catch up in traditional terms.¹ 

The Jeune Ecole also envisioned a twofold posture for naval warfare, depending on the relative strength of the enemy power. Against a weaker naval opponent—perhaps Prussia, which had not yet embarked on the naval buildup that made Germany a sea power in the early 20th century, or China, against whom the French fought successful naval actions in the Tonkin War (1884–85)—French naval and expeditionary forces could conduct a more conventional grand guerre maritime. However, when facing a more powerful opponent, the more decentralized French fleet could adopt a sort of Fabian strategy at sea by waging hit-and-run strikes with its smaller combatants, as well as conducting a guerre de course against the enemy’s maritime commerce. 

The overall record of the Jeune Ecole in the context of its time was mixed. Its calls for an asymmetric, offensive posture against a stronger naval opponent never had a proof-of-concept trial by fire among the major navies of the late 19th century. Furthermore, as is inevitably the case, changes in technology and tactics invited a countervailing response. Under the innovative leadership of Admiral Jackie Fisher (who served as Britain’s First Sea Lord from 1904–10, and briefly again in 1914–15), the Royal Navy adopted countermeasures to the threat of torpedo boats and other smaller craft—such as introducing the “torpedo boat destroyer,” whose title became shortened to “destroyer” for surface operations in the subsequent two world wars. In addition, borrowing a modified page from the French playbook, the considerations of greater mobility and firepower, tied to lighter armor, were key concepts behind the development of the battle cruisers that became a backbone of the Royal Navy during World War I and the interwar years. 

Within two decades of its emergence, the Jeune Ecole’s strategic posture was geopolitically eclipsed by France’s friendlier Entente Cordiale alignment with Great Britain, amid the shared perception of threat from the greater Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II. In essence, France wound up entering an alliance with the very naval power at which the Jeune Ecole originally had been directed, and the Royal Navy became a protector of France’s maritime security. Ironically, the Jeune Ecole arguably saw its most impactful legacy in the development of German submarine commerce raiding during World War I—a conflict in which France’s enemy adopted a ruthless form of guerre de course that threatened Britain’s maritime trade with strangulation, just as the Jeune Ecole’s theorists had imagined.

The ideas of the Jeune Ecole also echoed in the earlier and middle decades of the 20th century, finding greatest purchase in the Soviet Union and China. For Stalinist naval planners in the 1920s and 1930s, the asymmetric posture offered by a fleet of smaller gunboats, torpedo boats, and coastal submarines accorded with Joseph Stalin’s advocacy of “revolution in one country,” and appeared to offer a resource-frugal means of defending the country’s shoreline against stronger “imperialist” navies. China sought in the 1950s (with significant Soviet technical assistance) to offset its weakness at sea with a smaller-ship naval force animated by the adaptation of “People’s War” to a maritime environment. The real commonality here, however, was not Communist ideology, but rather weakness: The combination of a defensive strategic posture and an asymmetric offensive tactical posture, as envisioned by the Jeune Ecole, are naturally attractive to weaker naval powers attempting to level the playing field against a superior enemy. 

The Newfound Relevance of the Jeune Ecole 

Except for a period during the later Cold War, when the expansion of the Soviet Navy challenged U.S. naval superiority, the United States has enjoyed nearly eight decades of naval hegemony on the world’s oceans. This period is coming to an end—for, as noted in the official unclassified assessments of the Chinese military issued by the U.S. Department of Defense, China has now eclipsed the United States in fielding the world’s largest navy.² While there remain many questions regarding the operational proficiencies of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN)—just as there were valid questions regarding material readiness and crew training in the massive fleet constructed by the Soviets during the Cold War—both the number and the modern nature of the PLAN’s ships are not in doubt.³ 

This is particularly true in terms of the operating areas of the western Pacific where the PLAN would enjoy home field advantage in any conflict over Taiwan or the South China Sea—as contrasted with the U.S. Navy, which would be operating on much longer exterior lines, as well as balancing other global commitments. This means that the Navy is gradually sliding into a second-place posture in the western Pacific, absent the unlikely emergence of a breakneck building program to make up the gap. 

In addition, this position of relative inferiority could be greatly magnified by the emerging land-based naval strike architecture fielded by China. As once again acknowledged in the Pentagon’s public assessment of Chinese military capabilities, the PLA Rocket Force (PLARF) possesses long-range, land-based strike systems theoretically capable of targeting U.S. vessels from as far away as 3,000 kilometers.⁴ Recognition of the PLA’s advancing reconnaissance-strike complex is also at the heart of the Marine Corps’ controversial (and fundamentally correct) Force Design 2030, which observes that future “Marine formations must operate within the adversary’s weapons engagement zone and under technical surveillance that is ubiquitous in nature.”

Furthermore, the sinking of the Russian cruiser Moskva in April 2022, reportedly the result of strikes from land-based Ukrainian Neptune antiship missiles, demonstrates the hazards now posed to naval surface vessels operating in near-proximity to a hostile coastline. In an aphorism traditionally ascribed to Lord Admiral Nelson, “A ship’s a fool to fight a fort.” Despite this assertion, the Navy has been successfully “fighting forts” from the sea for more than a century and a half—ranging from the reduction of Confederate fortifications during the Civil War, to naval gunfire bombardment of enemy positions during the 1991 Gulf War, to carrier-based strike operations in every conflict from World War II to the present—and this has been a key element of U.S. military power projection. However, we have likely entered a new era in which Nelson’s assessment is reaffirmed: Ships are once more fools not just to tangle with forts, but also to operate near any shoreline controlled by a technologically advanced opponent.

U.S. naval force structure is poorly suited for this more dangerous environment against a top-tier opponent possessing an advanced naval reconnaissance and strike architecture. U.S. force structure was built up over decades of U.S. naval preeminence and was intended to assert U.S. presence for reasons often more relevant to geopolitics than to tactical military concerns. Big-ticket, big-deck U.S. ships may face a western Pacific future in which they could be outnumbered, potentially outgunned, and vulnerable to attack from both sea and shore. So, what to do?

Draw Some Lessons from the Jeune Ecole

Although the Jeune Ecole enjoyed a relatively brief lifespan as a guiding naval strategic concept, there are elements of it that bear consideration in light of the maritime challenges faced by the United States and its allies in the early 21st century, especially in the Indo-Pacific region. The first is its focus on decentralizing naval power: having smaller and more numerous platforms and loading them up for strike capability. The Navy certainly carries a big stick of offensive firepower, but it is concentrated in a relatively limited number of large capital ships—particularly aircraft carriers—that it can ill afford to lose. Effective damage control (a skill that the Navy has been right to prioritize, as the crew of the Moskva clearly did not) goes some way to obviate this, but it does not remove the dramatically increased risks of sinking or mission kills. The Navy has too many eggs in too few baskets, and a larger number of smaller and more dispersible surface combatants would make more sense for this more contested environment.

Amid the growing tensions in the western Pacific, the de facto state of Taiwan—the focal point of China’s expansionist ambitions and the most dangerous potential flashpoint for armed conflict between China and the United States—has begun, in ways that have gone unnoticed by most foreign observers, to implement policies in its own naval procurement that bear fundamental hallmarks of the Jeune Ecole. Although the Republic of China (ROC) Navy continues to operate larger legacy platforms such as the Kidd-class destroyers purchased from the United States almost two decades ago, its current indigenous shipbuilding is focused on smaller, more mobile platforms. These include the Tuo Chiang class of guided-missile patrol craft (PGG) (of which Taiwan has built seven, with five more slated for production over the next three years). These are small missile corvettes with a catamaran hull design, approximately 200 feet long and reportedly displacing roughly 685 tons, intended to leverage mobility and a smaller radar cross-section as they stalk and target larger enemy surface ships with their complement of antiship missiles. These vessels are heavily armed for their size, reportedly carrying eight each of Taiwan’s indigenously built Hsiung Feng II and Hsiung Feng III antiship cruise missiles (ASCMs), as well antiaircraft missiles and two torpedo tubes. 

Such vessels are the modern-day successors to the torpedo boats that occupied so much of the attention of French naval planners in the 1880s. Whether its defense policies are consciously conceived as such or not, the state most threatened by Chinese naval aggression is reorienting its maritime posture in a decidedly Jeune Ecole-ish direction—and it is right to be doing so. While Taiwan’s defense planners are frequently hectored by foreign observers to redirect their efforts in a more “asymmetric” direction (however one chooses to define asymmetry), this is an area in which the Navy might do well to emulate Taiwan’s shipbuilding in terms of its own future asymmetric efforts.

…But Make Sure to Draw the Right Ones

This is not to say, however, that the Navy and its major Pacific allies should uncritically embrace all the aspects of this 19th-century naval strategy. Many aspects of the Jeune Ecole are clearly inappropriate for the present-day circumstances of the U.S. maritime posture in the Pacific. For starters, the Jeune Ecole approach is almost entirely a sea-denial strategy—which the United States, as the chief global defender of maritime rights of navigation and of the free flow of maritime commerce, cannot adopt. Furthermore, the United States is not a solo actor, but rather the leading state in multiple security alliances. To fulfill these roles, continued proactive presence—and with it, power-projection capability—are required. 

This said, there is a balance to be struck in the composition of U.S. naval forces, which currently lean too heavily toward large platforms. Rebalancing, in the direction of more numerous and smaller combatants that sacrifice tonnage and protection while emphasizing mobility and firepower, would provide greater mission flexibility in today’s higher-threat strike environment. This, combined with a continued prioritization of the Navy’s superior submarine branch, and the laudable efforts of the Marine Corps to adapt to the new Indo-Pacific Command environment with the littoral regiments emphasized in Force Design 2030, would represent important steps toward the more decentralized, but still hard-hitting, maritime force that the United States needs.

No abstract naval theory from any time or place can adequately reflect the complexities of the real world. This is true for the Jeune Ecole, which was flawed even in its time. However, this late 19th-century theory offers valuable concepts to consider for a naval force that risks sliding into second position relative to a competitor in possession not only of superior ship numbers, but also an unprecedented land-based, long-range naval strike architecture. In terms of confronting the more complex maritime threat environment in the western Pacific, while continuing to balance these concerns against the capabilities required to conduct a traditional great power grand guerre maritime, today’s U.S. Navy planners could glean some inspiration from the Jeune Ecole.