Peripheral Strategy - Mahan's Doctrine Today

Henry L. Stimson, after his retirement as Secretary of War, expressed his views about the naval creed of sea power in strong language. In his autobiography he derided what he termed, “the peculiar psychology of the Navy Department, which frequently seemed to retire from the realms of logic into a dim religious world in which Neptune was God, Mahan his prophet and the United States Navy the only true church.”¹ While resenting the implications, few naval officers would deny these charges entirely. The teachings of Mahan have been accepted by them as dogma, for, like the teachings of Saint Paul to Christians, his lessons refuse to grow old. The United States Navy still believes today with all its collective heart that it achieved greatness and brought the United States to a leading position in the world by following, sometimes blindly, the teachings of Mahan.

The admirals did have historical justification for this firm attitude which irritated the Secretary of War. Francis Bacon, the English philosopher, wrote in 1597 at the beginning of the geographic age, “He that commands the sea is at great liberty, and may take as much or as little of the war as he will. Whereas those that be strongest by land are many times nevertheless in great straits.” Four centuries later, just before the beginning of another age, a scholarly American naval officer, Alfred Thayer Mahan, proved Bacon’s assertion and demonstrated by the subsequent history of England the connection for an island power between the control of the sea and national well-being. In two books, the Influence of Sea Power on History, 1660-1783, (1890) and the Influence of Sea Power on the French Revolution and Empire, (1892), Mahan proved with a wealth of historical detail that an insular nation could impose its will upon an enemy without too great a drain on its resources, even in fact concurrent with an increase in its own prosperity. Mahan saw the lesson for the United States in British history and he spent the rest of his life promulgating a doctrine that guided American naval policy for the next fifty years. This doctrine is in essence that: (1) the United States should be a world power; (2) control of the seas is necessary for world power status; and (3) the way to maintain such control is by a fleet of powerful warships.

Contemporary American historians now agree that Mahan’s earlier historical works have had greater practical importance than any other historical writing in our literature. His books have been translated into many languages and have influenced the national policies of several larger powers. They have been given a most critical review such as few historical writings get. Mahan had many disciples and as many opponents; he had imitators and detractors, and his phrase “sea power” has become part of our language. Since his death in 1914, the United States has fought in two great wars. The United States Navy and his doctrines both received their supreme test in the second of these wars.

World War II, the test of arms which proved Mahan’s thesis, also produced conditions which ostensibly indicated that such a thesis had become obsolete. The effect of this has been that now, in the middle of the twentieth century when wars and theories of wars are leading topics of discussion, the works of this man who stressed the impact of war on man’s progress are neglected and his name has become no more than a legend, despite the fact that he wrote of Europe in an age politically and militarily very much like our own. The causes which produced this trend away from Mahan were the airplane and the atomic bomb; plus the emergence of a belligerent Communist Russia as a great world power and the feeling that the Communist threat could only be answered in kind.

The dimming of Mahan’s fame under the impact of scientific warfare can be attributed in part to the U. S. Navy, for despite lasting faith in his doctrines, it no longer looks to him as it once did. Before World War II the Navy was still untried and Mahan furnished it with a beacon, but today, rich in its own tradition and experience, it can establish doctrines in its own right. The incentive to keep interest in Mahan alive in a rapidly changing world is now missing. Mahan’s works are no longer required reading to aspiring naval officers and his volumes are left untouched on the shelves of libraries in the new joint institutions of military learning. The U. S. Navy does not have the leisure today necessary for the type of scholarship displayed by Mahan and his sponsor, Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce, first President of the Naval War College. No contemporary naval scholars, comparable to Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond or Captain Russell Grenfell in the British Navy, have come out of this war. None of those who were nurtured on Mahan’s doctrines have grasped the splendid opportunity to transform this penetrating theory into a working hypothesis for today’s situation.

Mahan himself contributed in a large measure to the overshadowing of his own reputation, and he did it with the phrase, “Sea Power.” He selected this consciously and with purpose, as a label for his brilliant conception of maritime strategy. In choosing this term which improperly describes his thesis, he helped to channel future military thinking and almost consigned his own work to oblivion. Most writers on naval subjects have accepted this catchy term without examining it. It has been dulled by sloppy over-use and loosely copied by such terms as “air-power” and “land power.” It would be interesting to know how he came to select this term. In a letter to Mr. R. B. Marston, his London publisher in 1897, Mahan said:

I may say that the term “sea power” which now has such vogue, was deliberately adopted by me to compel attention, and, I hoped, to receive currency. I deliberately discarded the adjective “maritime,” being too smooth to arrest men’s attention or stick in their minds.

“Sea power,” in English at least, seems to have come to stay in the sense I used it. “The sea Powers” were often spoken of before, but in an entirely different manner—not to express as I meant, at once an abstract conception and a concrete fact.²

Thus for the sake of emphasis and appeal, Mahan admits dropping what would have been a more appropriate term. He has been accused of being an epigrammatic thinker and there may be some truth in this charge. By giving the narrow label of “Sea-Power” to a thesis that was broad and enveloping, he unknowingly excluded its application to the new medium of the air, which in the generation that followed him created a revolution in all methods of warfare.

Since Mahan’s time, the use of the air in war has become a factor of transcending importance. It has placed in the hands of man a weapon that had radically changed land warfare and the use of the sea in war. But the impact of the airplane which has revolutionized the methods of warfare has tended to confuse military thinking about the principles of warfare. It has focused attention on the power of weapons, overshadowing thereby the importance of sound principles. Principles are now expected to conform to methods instead of methods being applied in accordance with principles.

After each of the twentieth century wars there was the tendency to see the airplane as the ultimate vehicle of warfare, a vehicle so terrifying that wars would necessarily be short and could perhaps be avoided, a sort of military reductio ad absurdum. In 1921 Guilio Douhet brought out his aerial bombardment theory on which the strategic bombing of World War II was based. After World War II there was, of course, the absolute weapon theory. Sober judgment and the moral and economic revulsion after the trial in World War II has caused these theories to be gradually relegated from a primary to a retaliatory role.

But the tendency to think of the air as an independent medium of warfare still persists. Official military doctrine now divides warfare into the three neat packages labeled “air power,” “sea power,” and, a new one, “land power.” The availability of Mahan’s phrase “sea power” for purposes of analogy has had a great deal to do with fostering this type of loose military thinking. Walter Millis, long time military writer for the New York Herald Tribune, editor of the Forrestal Diaries, and the one critic of Mahan whose criticisms seem to have stood the test of time, has pointed out the inexactness of the analogy between “sea power” and “air power” and between command of the air and Mahan’s “command of the sea.” Millis says:

Unfortunately, the analogy, while close, was inexact, and the extension tended to exaggerate all the flaws or weaknesses of the original model. It was inexact, to begin with, in one very important respect. At the very core of the Mahan concept there lay the physical fact that war vessels could not (beyond the very limited range of bombardment artillery) participate in land warfare nor armies fight at sea. Without this physical separation there could be no “sea power” theory. The military airplane, on the other hand, is of course indissolubly linked with every form of military action. Not only is it indispensable in all kinds of surface operations; the Second World War repeatedly demonstrated that surface operations were indispensable to the advance and success of “independent” air power.³

Man is a land animal and ultimate objectives of all warfare can only be obtained upon the land. Military power is unitary. It is a compound, not a combination. The contribution of sea forces with their inherent mobility, range, and carrying power are strategic in nature. Air forces with their speed and striking power are basically tactical in nature and therefore relate directly to both land and sea forces. The pattern of a sound military system for the United States lies in integration, not separation, of the striking power of air forces, the mobility of sea forces, and the holding power of land forces. Millis remarks, “In actual warfare, missions are dictated, not by service politics but by combat conditions.” At the risk of interjecting service politics, I suggest that the United States Navy task force system offers a model for such integration and unity of military purpose.

Actually there still remain today the same two concepts or philosophies of warfare first identified by Francis Bacon. These have been named in our time the continental and the maritime or insular. The continental was typified by Napoleon and codified by Clausewitz. The insular was typified by Great Britain and codified by Mahan. Some day a genius may discover and a philosopher define a conception of warfare for the new medium that man has probed in the last generation. No one has done it yet.⁴ Perhaps the best documentation for the two concept theory, is the well known “World Island” and “Heartland” thesis of the British geographer, Halford J. Mackinder.⁵

Most nations subscribe to one of these two philosophies of warfare. France, Germany, and Russia are compelled to employ a continental strategy and for this reason their navies have always played secondary roles. For Great Britain the opposite has been the case. With the exception of the Peninsular War, which is perhaps history’s outstanding example of the use of land forces in a maritime strategy, and the short Waterloo campaign, no British army of any consequence fought on the continent of Europe during a period of two hundred years, from Marlborough’s time until 1914. In World War II Churchill tried to return to this policy with less than limited success. The connection between the present plight of Britain and the decisions which caused her to use continental strategy in her twentieth century war awaits historical analysis that will have meaning for the United States. Great Britain as a prostrate victor of two exhausting wars should be an object lesson for us.

There have been countries which have subscribed to or have had powerful advocates for both concepts of warfare. Japan once was one. The United States is another and this is understandable. The U. S. Army has fought three major continental wars within a century, and the efforts of-the U. S. Air Force have been devoted in good part to strategic bombing. It is natural for these services to advocate a continental concept of warfare. On the other hand, theU. S. Navy defeated Japan with a maritime strategy. The existence of two concepts of warfare within the U. S. military profession has not been lost on discerning civilian observers. Robert E. Sherwood, in discussing the attitudes of Army and Navy officers toward Roosevelt’s efforts to help Great Britain in 1940, says:

In the Army, there was a tendency among officers of both ground and air forces to admire Germany for her achievements in building up these arms. This led in some extreme cases to the hope that Germany would conquer England thereby providing historic demonstration of the superiority of land and air power over sea power. Obviously, these sentiments were not shared by Navy officers but, for many of them, the main interest was in the Far East, rather than Europe, and it was their hope that if the United States must go to war the main battleground would be the Pacific.⁶

Mahan felt that no nation could afford to support both philosophies of warfare. In one -of the first of his many essays, entitled “Preparedness for Naval War,” published in December, 1896, he writes in his heavy style but most prophetically:

Preparation for war involves many conditions, often contradictory one to another, at times almost irreconcilable. To satisfy all of these passes the ingenuity of the national Treasury, powerless to give the whole of what is demanded by the representatives of the different elements, which, in duly ordered proportion; constitute a complete scheme of national military policy, whether for offense or defense. Unable to satisfy all, and too often equally unable to say, frankly, “This one is chief; to it you others must yield, except so far as you contribute to its greatest efficiency,” either the pendulum of the government’s will swings from one extreme to the other, or, in the attempt to be fair all round, all alike receive less than they ask, and for their theoretical completeness require. In other words, the contents of the national purse are distributed, instead of being concentrated upon a leading conception, adopted after due deliberation, and maintained with conviction.⁷

Today when the size of our military budget and the drain on our resources is a matter of pressing concern, a revival of interest in a man who could exhibit such analytical foresight might be timely. Reexamination of Mahan’s teachings is overdue and should not be limited to the naval profession. Until recently, military people have restricted their studies to the narrow field of their own service and have been notably ignorant of the potentialities or problems of the other services. Only since World War II in this country have they addressed themselves to the broad aspects of the military profession as a whole or to its relations with economics and foreign relations. Dynamic conceptions of warfare in the past have been creations mainly of non-military leaders in government; Colbert in France, the Pitts in Great Britain, and Lenin, Hitler, Roosevelt, and Churchill. Foch as a Frenchman could be excused for thinking the British Navy not worth one bayonet, but Kitchener and Tirpitz are examples of powerfully minded military men leading their countries down false paths. Mahan, the scholar in military uniform, illustrated his principles on a broad political and economic canvas. For this reason the lessons that he taught are worth while today, both for the military man and the civilian in or out of government.

Limited Warfare, Peripheral Strategy, and Freedom of Action

The hope here is to find application for Mahan’s lessons in today’s world situation. To do this it will be necessary to set up some sort of a framework of terms into which his doctrines can be transferred. First, it would assist our thinking if the colorless but more correct term “peripheral” were substituted for “maritime” or for the phrase “sea power.” Peripheral is more inclusive than maritime and is more suitable for describing the situation today. The word “War” will be used here in the Clausewitz sense of an extension of national policy. “Total War” is to be employed in the sense of all-out effort, offering to the enemy either subjugation or annihilation; “Limited War,” in the sense of restricted aims and effort with the goal being military and economic exhaustion of the enemy. The term “strategy” will be used in a national sense and the two concepts or philosophies of warfare already discussed will be identified, in the rest of this study, as continental strategy and peripheral strategy.

When Americans talk about war they are thinking generally of total war, for that is the type of warfare they have experienced and understand. The idea of limited warfare or war for limited aims is strange to American thinking. The United States has fought several successful limited wars, but attention has been focused on our three great continental wars which were total in that the aims of each was complete defeat of the enemy. Two reasons can be advanced to explain this American acceptance of total war as the only choice. First, war to Americans is considered as something to go all out for and to be gotten over with. Secondly, mass production warfare comes natural to us and we have or have had the resources with which to wage total war. The unconditional surrender attitude, the conviction that war can only be total, is a product of the odd combination of our hatred of war and of our ability for it. Limited warfare, on the other hand, has a continuousness about it which to us is repellent. Our own Revolution, a war of limited aims on the part of both contestants, lasted eight years, our longest war. It took the British twenty years to stop the dynamics of the French Revolution and Napoleon. This is just too long for us.

After World War II this type of thinking was given added impetus by the emergence of a strong Russia and by the military concept of “air power” as the single vehicle for settling world power issues. Air power seemed to provide a method of total war that would be direct and simple and at the same time offer Americans, twice disillusioned by European Wars, a sort of safe isolationism in military form. But there was an inconsistency in this ostensibly plausible system of national security because the march of Russian imperialism continued and there seemed to be no means to check this march except the awful alternative of another total war. George Kennan proposed a policy of containment but was this militarily feasible? Then the challenge of Korea was forced on us and accepted. A limited war resulted, a limited war which neither the Russians nor ourselves choose to extend. The use of our army in Korea, the operations of our navy around the Korean peninsula, and the ease with which our supply was maintained across the Pacific set our military thinking on a new tack.

A break in our political thinking of formalizing international affairs into total war and total peace had come before Korea. Russian insistence on open rivalry between the Communist and non-Communist worlds forced on Americans the conception of “cold war,” a term for a condition of continued and recognized antagonism. There was, nevertheless, something unreal and unstable about this cold war idea, for how could such a war be waged without risking a “hot” one? It was Korea that produced the real reorientation in our thinking about war and peace in this age. Then it became realized that there is the same multi-casual relationship in international affairs as in all other human business.

Attitudes between nations can be divided roughly into categories of peace, “cold war” (an attitude of readiness to risk war), war of limited aims, general war, and total war. More important than these delineations is the continuity between them. A nation cannot be sure of peace, if it is unwilling to be ready for war. A cold war posture cannot be effective, unless it is backed by a willingness to use armed might to insure it. A nation cannot limit the extent of a war, unless it has the capacity to fight a general war, and a general war can only be won when the enemy is convinced, as were the Japanese, that total war, the war of annihilation, will be the alternative. The national thinking of the United States seems to have gradually come around to this realization and the nation is closer now to not having a general war than it has been for several years.

The next step in this thinking process is to determine whether a continental or peripheral strategy would fit better into this continuity of national attitudes. Our challenger for world power is not in a position to choose between strategies, and so the Lenin version of Clausewitz is as much the inspired word in the Soviet Union as the Lenin version of Marx. The United States does have the choice. In World War II we used both strategies to hurry victory but at an alarming expenditure of our resources. It is now generally agreed that we cannot do this again if we intend to leave a heritage as well as a nation for our children. We have to make a choice now of a national strategy, “adopted after due deliberation, and maintained with conviction,” as Mahan advised.

Contemporary history has indicated clearly that modern continental strategy and warfare of limited aims are not compatible. Continental strategy can only be used with total war and deciding on a continental strategy means choosing total war. With the starting promise of limited military assistance to France on the continent, Great Britain lost a generation in World War I and almost was invaded in World War II. A limited objective for a future land campaign in western Europe would be to drive the enemy back beyond the old borders of Russia. What then? The Chinese and North Koreans were driven back beyond the thirty- eighth parallel in Korea and this limited objective has produced a stalemate. The continental Roman Empire could use limited warfare to preserve the Pax Romana for three centuries. But modern weapons and communications allow us no such choice. With its extended lines, modern continental strategy cannot be kept limited. The same is true for strategic bombing, which is in essence a continental strategy.

Peripheral strategy was called “sea power” by Mahan. Before the air age it could validly be called maritime. But whatever its name, limited aims in warfare can be gained by such a strategy provided that these ends do not include liberating large geographical areas, complete subjugation, or unconditional surrender. An enemy can be contained, squeezed, and exhausted, provided we are patient—not a characteristic American trait. From a national strategy viewpoint, Europe is a peninsula and, until land transportation in the Eurasian land mass becomes a network such as ours, that area remains an island and not a heartland. As long as the waters around and the air above the periphery of Europe and Eurasia are ours, our strength can be moved and positioned as we please. The depth of that periphery is also our choice, dependent on our strength and our national desires. In their blessed insular position the United States and Canada can control the periphery of that island and so cannot be forced into a general or total war. For them the thesis of Mahan is the valid one.

The security of our insular position is inherent in this peripheral strategy. In 1806, which was England’s darkest year until 1940, the First Sea Lord, St. Vincent, said confidently, “I do not say the French cannot come, I only say they cannot come by sea.” In this air age, it is the duty of the military profession of the United States to put the country in a position where they too can assume the same confident attitude.

We Should Start Reading Mahan Again

It is not the intention here to add one more commentary to the many on Mahan but rather to stimulate interest in reading his works. The fact that Mahan reached only the threshold of the new age and that his “sea power” thesis did not include the airplane should not be a deterrent. If Napoleon found profit in reading the campaigns of Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar, to whom gunpowder was unknown, it can hardly be argued that Mahan’s history of what has been sometimes called the Second Hundred Years War can hold no lessons for us. It is Mahan’s books themselves that should be read, not the commentaries or collections of excerpts, the sort of second hand study that was popular before World War II. The background of events since 1939 should make reading these histories today interesting as well as profitable. One can speculate on how much Mahan himself would have enjoyed comparing the two periods, the one of which he wrote and the one in which we live.

Mahan published some twenty books, but his earlier outright historical works are the only ones which have significance for us today. His most famous histories are The Influence of Sea Power on History, 1660-1783 (1890); The Influence of Sea Power on the French Revolution and Empire, two volumes (1892); and Sea Power in its Relation to the War of 1812, two volumes (1905). Mahan says that this last would have been written earlier except for the fact that he was ordered to command the cruiser Chicago in 1893. The biographies are: The Life of Nelson, The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain, (1897); Types of Naval Officers, Drawn from British History, (1901); and a short Life of Farragut. His only work as an essayist before his retirement is his best and most prophetic, The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future, published in 1897 and already referred to. In it he outlines a policy for the United States which includes acquisition of the Hawaiian Islands, construction of an isthmian canal, and the building of a navy capable of defending both. Mahan’s reputation as a historian, in fact his whole reputation, ought to rest on these earlier works. Some of his friends have contended that he would have been a less controversial figure if he had written only these. He himself intimated that he felt the same.

A planned sequence of reading Mahan’s important works will help to understand his thesis better and will ease the chore. The first eighty-nine pages of The Influence of Sea Power on History should come first. These pages comprise its introduction and first chapter and in these Mahan outlined his whole theory of “Sea Power.” My own opinion is that Mahan’s best work in his second, The Influence of Sea Power on the French Revolution and Empire. At any rate it has more significance today, and so it is recommended that this book be read after the first eighty- nine pages of his first work. Then one can go on to the rest of The Influence of Sea Power on History, 1660-1783. Only the first volume of his Sea Power in its Relation to the War of 1812 need be added to this essential list, as it is devoted almost entirely to an analysis of the growth of British sea trade and to commerce warfare. Finally one should include his first essays, published in magazine articles from 1891 to 1897 and republished in book form as The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future. After these books have been read one can truthfully say that he is familiar with Mahan. The second volume about the War of 1812 and the biographies are supplementary and the choice of a sequence in reading can be left to the reader’s interests. His Life of Nelson, except for the first two chapters, deals with the period after 1793 and could be called “Nelson and Napoleon.” His Types of Naval Officers describes the men upon whom the statesmen of England depended and from whom the people of England demanded much. The Life of Farragut and the second volume of the War of 1812 tell us something of our own poorly explored naval history.

Earlier herein the doctrines of Mahan were condensed into three short statements. Mahan was undoubtedly right in the first two. The United States has become a world power almost in spite of itself. With undisputed control of the sea it functions as the major world power today. But there is still room for controversy about his third premise that a fleet of large and powerful warships is the proper instrument for maintaining such control. Within the basic conception of maritime strategy the aircraft carrier and the submarine are today’s successors to his ships-of-the-line and privateers. Mahan himself did not live to see the advent of the carrier and he failed to predict the possibilities of the submarine. Today the aircraft carrier is the primary tactical unit in controlling the seas and its maritime communications. The submarine and land based air have the capability of challenging that control or at least of making it onerous.

It took Germany two wars to learn the proper use of the submarine. Japan never did. The paradox is that the submarine service of the United States destroyed Japan’s communications in the Far East and brought that country to its knees with a method of warfare that Mahan disapproved. The success of the U. S. submariners was not the result of any doctrine or plan developed in peacetime. It evolved from the basic American characteristics of technical skill, offensive spirit, and the ability to see and exploit an opportunity.

The functions of land based air in a peripheral strategy have never been completely or satisfactorily determined, probably because of the U. S. Navy concentration on carrier aviation and the U. S. Air Force stress on strategic bombing. The challenge to naval forces by enemy air based on a large land mass is great and cannot be discounted. It is true that Japanese land based air never seriously challenged our carriers in the Pacific. But land based air did drive the British carriers out of the Mediterranean, and today it protects the exposed flanks of Russia, the Baltic and Black Seas. The integration of carrier aircraft and land based air has not yet been accomplished to the satisfaction of the maritime strategist. Friendly land based aircraft must assist carriers to perform their function in controlling and using narrow seas. Mackinder did prophesy that “air power” would be chiefly an arm of “land power,” a new amphibious cavalry that could reach out and contest “sea power,” but by the same token our air forces based on the enemy’s periphery and our carrier aircraft can reach in and cut the logistic arteries of a continental enemy.⁸

Mahan’s stress on the importance of Britain’s strong battle fleet in the wars with France caused the uncritical U. S. Navy after World War I to become obsessed with Nelson and with the Battle of Jutland to the neglect of other lessons of that war and of the American Civil War. As a result it was inadequately prepared for the anti-submarine and the amphibious tasks imposed on it in World War II. Before 1945 the Navy stressed only one part of maritime strategy, that of securing control of the seas, especially the vast Pacific Ocean; since then its role has been that of maintaining and using such control. Securing and exercising control of the seas are two entirely different operations. They are radically different in conception and purpose, and strategically they are on different planes. The U. S. Navy now realizes this. Korea helped.

With respect to amphibious warfare the United States was fortunate in that the Marine Corps developed amphibious doctrines and techniques and had the link between the ground and sea forces forged and ready when needed. The Marines filled the gap created by: (1) the Army’s concentration on Clausewitz and the Virginia campaigns of the Civil War; and (2) the Navy’s concentration on British naval history to the neglect of its own history between 1861 and 1865.

Despite some misinterpretation of Mahan’s writings, the U. S. Navy in adhering closely to his doctrines was on sound strategic ground. In doing so against opposition and pressure it carried itself and the nation to triumphant success. In gratitude the Navy should keep Mahan’s reputation as a military historian and philosopher alive and under continual observation in this rapidly changing world. Mahan lived in one era and before the beginning of another. It was not given to him, as it has been to many of us, to span two ages, for he died in 1914. As a historian he may be considered to have been fortunate in that he was able to view history in the light of the age he recorded. As a prophet (and what historian does not try to be?) he was less fortunate since he could not know the influence of the internal combustion engine, the vacuum tube, and nuclear fission on the generations following him. An even greater misfortune both for Mahan’s memory and for us may be that his work was discovered too early by a generation that did not need it and having been worked over so much it now lacks a freshness of appeal for this generation which is so frantically searching for guidance.

Be that as it may, Mahan taught principles which many believe to be unchanging. His works can now be read against a background of two world wars and a violent revolution and with the assurance of a kaleidoscopic future. The solution of today’s problems are not Mahan’s but ours. It makes no difference what Mahan would have said about them, what really is important is whether his principles are still applicable and how and where we can use them today. Until there comes another like him to dissect, analyze, and codify the experiences and lessons of our day, none of us can go wrong if we study Mahan’s great historical works.