Wars, like the men who fight them, had their origin on land. As mankind took to the sea, he long carried with him the habits of his original environment. For centuries “naval” warfare was fought by land soldiers, battling from floating platforms maneuvered by non- combatant slave or mercenary sailors. Between battles, in fact on every possible occasion, “ships’ companies” sought the nearby shore to cook their meals and sleep. More centuries passed before the origin of fighting fleets, manned by professionals, and capable of sustaining themselves at sea for long periods. By then a handful of marines furnished the only reminder of one-time sea soldiers.
The advent of aerial warfare inaugurated a similar, if swifter, transition from soldiers of the air to airmen. The United States Air Force, born Aviation Section of the Signal Corps in 1915, grew in a few years to the Army Air Corps. With the advent of World War II came “separate command” status and the new appellation “Army Air Force.” Under the 1947 Unification Act, the United States Air Force attained its majority and independence. Whether this meant parity of prestige with the older (sometimes termed “senior”) Services or a bid for priority remains clouded.
Precocious, compared to sea power, air power’s coming of age has been, and still is, attended by many growing pains. In today’s challenging world situation, there is no time for the slow development seapower followed. Technological progress has far outpaced principles and procedures. We swiftly perfect new tools accompanied by theoretical instructions for their immediate use, little thinking what edifice they are best fitted to build.
There is no precedent in the ageless expansion of seapower to guide the young giant of air power, conscious of his strength, confident in his ability to achieve—yet uncertain what path to follow. Should that astound a world that needed centuries fully to comprehend the principles and potential of sea power? Admitting the hastened tempo of “progress” since the Industrial Revolution, we need only consider the automobile. Nearly fifty years of adjustment went into developing that present American necessity into its niche in our way of life, a niche still incomprehensible and unattainable in the rest of the world.
The ascendency men have won over the alien element of oceans dims our memory of the comparatively recent date of that victory. Not until the sixteenth century did England and the Low Countries form the world’s first navies, which proved their worth by driving soldier-manned Spanish fleets from the seas before they fought each other for supremacy. Another two hundred years passed until England was simultaneously blessed with a Pitt and a Nelson to seize the prize of sea power she had often neglected. Even then England merely sensed rather than understood what she had won.
Only if necessity is the mother of invention, can England’s naval preeminence be explained. It fell to an American naval officer, undistinguished in combat through no fault of his own, to enunciate as an era approached its end the fundamental principles that necessity had called forth. Alfred Thayer Mahan, Civil War lieutenant, retired as captain without having experienced a single fleet action, devoted his mature years to keen analytical study of his profession.
When he published The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, in 1890, its significance was recognized almost immediately by the British. They found in his work a clarification of their three centuries’ struggle to sustain a policy more instinctive than reasoned; one that was, in that very decade, fumbling clumsily to adapt itself to radically new weapons, strange techniques. That soon Germany, then France, Russia, and finally his own country acclaimed Mahan’s prescience demonstrates the close connection between his message’s import and the degree of preoccupation with sea power among the then major nations of the world.
It is presumptuous to attempt briefly to evaluate Mahan’s influence upon world affairs—other than to acknowledge its magnitude. But the mere acceptance of Mahan’s place in history causes us to seek his modern counterpart in the realm of air power. The advent of atomic weapons (whether uranium or hydrogen based) places this country in a quandary over air power similar to that sea power muddle Mahan resolved for Britain. In no field of endeavor could an American do more for the United States today than by the clear, logical resolution of the fundamental principles of air power, explaining their true influence upon history.
Seventy years ago Mahan expressed the need: “Easy to say the use and control of the sea is, and has been, a great factor in history; it is more troublesome to seek out and show its exact bearing at a particular juncture. Yet unless this is done, the acknowledgment of general importance remains unsubstantial, not resting as it should upon a collection of specific instances in which the precise effect has been made clear, by an analysis of the conditions at the given moments.”
Substitute the word “air” for “sea” and we state a modern problem whose solution is vital to the United States.
In the decade before 1890 Britain sorely needed Mahan’s analysis of a navy’s value, purpose, and function. The rapid change, for those times, from wooden sailing ships of the line to armored, steam-propelled battleships, the expanded variety in types of naval vessels (ram, torpedo, monitor) demanded a decision on constituting the new-age navy. It likewise obscured the basic strategy of sea power, never clearly announced to peoples and governments, however assiduously the more astute British leaders had practiced it since the Elizabethan era. Building programs in all nations of Europe were an unreasoned mixture of battle fleet supremacy, coast defense, and commerce raider constituents.
The United States of 1880 had almost no navy or naval program. Mahan then decried this failing in a personal letter: “Our Navy could not meet that of Chile. Spain, a near and troublesome neighbor, is our superior.” Within twenty years we fought a predominantly naval war against Spain. Enough heed had by that time been given Mahan’s warning so that Spain at least was no longer “our superior,” but our margin was principally in American seamanship.
The United States today does possess an Air Force, an air force building program, but it again has a threatening contemporary, converted by the atomic age into a “troublesome neighbor.” Moreover, disputes on the floors of Congress and in the public press attest our likeness to Britain’s Victorian Age befuddlement, though now the scene has shifted from sea to air.
Our national inability to comprehend the limitations no less than the real potentials of air power is not surprising. If any other nation now fully comprehends these factors, the secret is still locked in darkest intelligence archives. Prophets of air power are hailed, misunderstood, misquoted. Even Italy’s Douhet, alleged founder of the mass destruction cult, extolled more vociferously after death than in life, cried out exasperately against his earlier and less radical apostles: “I would like at last to be understood—I concern myself essentially with my country’s particular conditions when I assert that the aerial field will be decisive. Italy is essentially involved. Other nations have other problems.”
The fundamentals of sea power went undiscovered for centuries. Is it reasonable to expect that sound strategic doctrines for air power will be speedily and correctly enunciated? Certainly not while the doctrinaires have financial or political axes to grind. Air power needs not only the sagacity but the disinterested research of a Mahan!
“Never Divide the Fleet”
Alfred Thayer Mahan invented nothing, for all that he discovered much. This country’s need for, and use of, sea power is older than the Declaration of Independence.
Appealing to France in January, 1781, George Washington gave it high, though not top, priority. “Next to a loan of money, a constant naval superiority upon these coasts is the object most interesting.” Yet money or no, American strategy in the closing years of the Revolution was tied to sea power as Washington’s correspondence with Jefferson, in the Continental Congress, and General Greene, his commander in the South, clearly indicates.
The Monroe Doctrine, probably the sole perennial in our hodgepodge growth of foreign policy, rested squarely upon sea power, although up to the closing years of the 19th Century Great Britain, not the United States, maintained the navies that supported it. Britain’s traditional balance of power obsession saved our national neck for nearly a century, until Mahan’s precepts found a powerful disciple in Theodore Roosevelt.
The faint threat of Cervera’s squadron in the Spanish War, vastly exaggerated by every coastal town and city, aided that aggressive President’s post war determination to strengthen the Navy and to operate our naval forces with strategic common sense at last. “Never Divide The Fleet” logically resulted in the Panama Canal. The remote but dangerous menace inherent in the Anglo- Japanese Naval Alliance was officially, if not publicly, discerned before 1914. It contributed to our World War I building program which would have provided us with the world’s most powerful fleet. But Woodrow Wilson’s failure to recognize one of sea power’s essential requirements—-bases to make that fleet master of the oceans— caused him to throw away, at Versailles, German islets in the Pacific. Our jealous rival, later our foe—Japan—gobbled them up—under a League of Nation’s mandate which forbade their fortifications.
The Harding-Coolidge era of “normalcy at any price” and optimistic “outlawing of war” heralded a wave of isolationism more potent than Mahan had assailed. The “influence of sea power” was ignored. We voluntarily surrendered our capital ship preeminence as well, until a later Roosevelt took over his predecessor’s unfinished task. The jolt administered by the Hepburn Board’s report—- “ours is a one-shot Navy”—reminded thinking Americans in 1939 how dangerously we had drifted from the path blazed by Mahan. A new post of Naval Under Secretary was created for James V. Forrestal to “provide business leadership for a tremendous industrial task.” The disaster at Pearl Harbor wiped out every trace of our smug disregard of sea power.
Since that day prodigious efforts have made us supreme on the high seas. Now for the first time we even have the potential bases to support that role. Mahan’s other essential elements are also met: industrial capacity unparalleled; vast world commerce, (though much of it free aid to our Allies); and the world’s largest merchant marine (in the main extravagantly dependent upon government subsidies or in “moth balls”).
Not only the instinctive desire to keep war from our own hearths has made the United States finally appreciate the vital nature of sea power to our security. Enough of Mahan’s dry, precise, irrefutable logic has seeped into our national consciousness to convince us, perhaps quite without realization, that any nation or alliance strong enough to confine this country to the Western Hemisphere will, in the long run, defeat us. We have donned Britain’s fallen mantle of “Mistress of the Seas,” but where is the “Pax Americana” to succeed the “Pax Britannica?”
Two epochal, technological developments have destroyed it. First, the tremendous improvement, both in speed and capacity, of land transport, and second, man’s conquest of the air. Sea power is not by any means impotent. It has, however, lost the absolute preeminence it could formerly bestow upon “an insular power like Britain.” Land mobility, slowly welding together the vast Eurasian land mass and capable eventually of adding Africa to its attainable entity, suggests that sea power is our essential weapon to prevent such a union. And prevent it we must, for once that union is established, no sea power based upon the remaining free world could shatter it. The “balance of power” is with us as surely as ever Britain faced it—now a world balance not just a European balance. As England intuitively realized that a hostile united Europe would eventually destroy her, sea supremacy notwithstanding, so the United States is gradually comprehending the menace of a Eurasian dictatorship dedicated to the future destruction of the Democratic American way of life.
In this newer world balance, we must accept the influence of that second technological miracle as well as the first. Sea power must henceforth work hand in hand with air power. Either sea or air power alone might, for some years yet, protect the American continent from invasion. Neither, operating alone, can prevent the consolidation of the world’s land mass into a super state sworn to our destruction.
Whether or not the Truman Doctrine of containment is the successor to the Monroe Doctrine, we must find in our own strength the power to support it. There is no existing equivalent of the 19th century British Navy to turn our righteous blasts into unassailable ramparts. North Atlantic Pact nations are invaluable Allies, but American strength— industrial, land, sea, and air—is the foundation upon which all their efforts are built. Apparently we have the sea power in all its elements; we seem to be expanding soundly, if slowly, our land armies. But what of our air power?
Sea Power Formula Developed
Do we need more and super carriers to transport our combat aviation to every sea? Are mammoth, ocean-girdling bombers with atomic missiles the absolute weapon? What of our fighter defences, modern substitutes for the coastal batteries that once prevented damaging raids by foes who eluded our dominant fleet? Diffidently, ignored ground soldiers might interpose, “What of our army to hold strategic, far-flung bases; to seize more from an enemy as we advance?”
The public press is filled with speeches glorifying the “balanced forces” of unification’s new day. But explanation of the intricate three-way balance—land, sea, air—is conspicuously missing. We can read of “survival through air power” or of “disaster through air power” as we choose. We realize that the historic roles of armies and navies are drastically altered by war in the air, though certainly not obliterated, as Jan Smuts told England in 1917, after the Gotha raids on London. What we must learn, and quickly, is to what degree, and in what ways, are those roles altered. And, before this new strategic doctrine can be correctly assessed, we must reach an understanding of the influence of air power upon history, past and future, and of the strengths and weaknesses of that newest strategic element of total war.
The whole concept of sea power was not instantly clear even in Mahan’s perceptive mind. In his earlier writings, while he assumed our national interests were confined to the North American Continent, Mahan preached the doctrine of a “position of menace,” secure defense of our sea frontier coupled with fast, powerful commerce destroyers able to fight since “running away is demoralizing.” We have that argument in modern guise supported by sincere people who would indignantly reject the title of “isolationist.” Let America be secure from attack, they tell us, while we maintain fleets of heavy bombers capable of destroying an enemy’s commerce and industry at its source, “strategic bombing” multiplied in potency by atomic weapons.
Mahan’s deeper studies and analytical mind rejected his earlier philosophy as, far ahead of his time, he discovered that the United States’ security begins beyond its continental limits. His preoccupation was with an isthmian canal just as today our eyes are upon Western Europe’s Ruhr and the British Isles as well as uncertain but growing forebodings over the Near East and the Far Pacific.
As early as 1897 Mahan described this country as “to all intents an insular power like Britain,” warning that “every danger of a military character 'to which the United States is exposed can best be met outside her territory.” In Mahan’s eyes that meeting place was inevitably upon the high seas. How much, now, should we rely upon his teachings, how much adapt them to a new medium, the air?
The master of sea power was no longer content with “positions of menace” and impregnable defensives. He boldly called for striking power which he defined and tabulated. So, too, he outlined the auxiliary defenses to secure our bases and coasts, leaving the attacking fleet free to concentrate on the offensive.
Where is the mind which can point out today’s balance of offense and defense, tabulating the requirements of each? The formula for command of the sea has proved difficult and costly to solve. What is its worth today?
Development of aerial warfare in all its forms seriously complicated the old formula with new unknowns. Atomic missiles have thrown it into chaos. What is the true posture of our air power in offense and defense? How do we proceed to ensure the command of the air which certainly goes hand in hand with, though it cannot for our purposes do without, command of the sea?
Mahan taught the principles Nelson, and a select few before him, intuitively practiced. The stronger fleet could drive the weaker from the sea, or destroy it. There is no equally clear concept for command of the air.
Has Air Power a Formula?
Goering’s Luftwaffe adapted Douhet’s real theory, not the popular misconception. German air crushed the enemy’s airdromes in the first onslaught and undisturbedly covered the Army’s march of conquest. Poland, France, Scandinavia, and the Balkans fell before that formula’s practice, but difficulties crept in at the Battle of Britain, difficulties earlier foretold at Dunkirk. Sea power had come to the aid of a weaker air strength. The following year’s invasion of Russia demonstrated new errors. The Luftwaffe had only partially solved the formula. Is it not pertinent to question, in spite of the “we won, didn’t we?” argument, whether any nation grasped the fundamentals of air power?
American and British sea power fell temporarily before air offensives at Pearl Harbor and off the Malayan coast. The Luftwaffe dive bombed to victory ahead of blitzing armies, yet collapsed before the might of British and American air armadas. Our air power eclipsed the “rising sun” in the Pacific skies. And now United Nations’ air power has contributed to stopping the march of overwhelming hostile forces in Korea. How did those historic epics transpire? Upon what principles were they founded?
Nazi air power was demolished—we were told at the time—by bombing fleets, protected by hordes of fighters, swarming over Germany’s vital areas, forcing the Luftwaffe to do battle—and die. Yet the postwar Strategic Bombing Survey reported a powerful Nazi air force existing impotently on the ground—-unable to fly for lack of fuel. It reported dangerous new jets constructed but helpless for the same cause. Was the Luftwaffe destroyed in air battle or strangled for lack of petroleum products?
We now understand how Germany might have won the Battle of Britain; how on the contrary England could have made her air defense less precarious. We can perceive the flaws in Japan’s strategy that overreached itself before it secured its gains. But that wisdom is the dubious gift of retrospect. What of foresight? How to plan wisely for the next dire emergency?
The offense’s enhanced potency stemming from atomic weapons has given rise to gloomy forebodings of “two mighty antagonists pounding each other’s cities to pieces from the air.” That would have been as sterile a solution to Mahan as World War I’s “battle of attrition” that left France prostrate and bled England white.
There has arisen no Mahan of the air to assess those controversial imponderables. We desperately need such an analyst. Among the most radical enthusiasts of air power themselves, there exists today more divergent opinion on the composition of that power and of its optimum use in war than ever arose, between general and admiral, over the relative importance of land and sea combat. Mahan, in his day, clarified not only the unification of the various functions of sea power into a cohesive force but also combined the strategy of sea and land combat into a practical, working entity. Introducing a third dimension, and a third major combatant, into warfare enormously complicates the problem. Are Mahan’s original findings still a sound basis for expansion? Must they be cast aside for a completely fresh start? Air power, American air power in particular, needs its Mahan.