Sea power, land power, air power. Al though we have heard these words often, they are relatively new to history. Alfred Thayer Mahan in 1890 popularized the sea in his epochal The Influence of Sea Power upon History; Sir Halford J. Mackinder emphasized land power in 1904 in his famous "heartland" paper, which he elaborated upon in his 1919 work, Democratic Ideals and Reality. It remained for Billy Mitchell, Giulio Douhet, and especially Major Alexander de Seversky in Victory through Air Power in 1942 to set forth grandly the new air power theory that would supposedly make the older and mossbound traditional land and sea doctrines forever obsolete.
These strategic terms have one thing in common: they are derived from the unchanging geographical realities of our planet. Historically, they have served also as the most logical way of dividing the roles and missions of the armed forces.
Partisans of the various services and theoreticians are fond of taking an extreme position and reducing the strategic conflict to a personalized disagreement between seaman, landsman, and airman. Each protagonist claims that his opponent cannot really become an expert in the type of warfare waged in his unique environment because of the complex skills required and the lifetime necessary for their acquisition. Only when this line of argument moves from the theoretical to the concrete does it finally become meaningful to the average citizen, who, unfortunately, then merely sees the illogical spectacle of soldier, sailor, and airman engaged in interservice bickering and squabbling. Commentators take up the controversy, label the participants "Fancy Dan" admirals, bomber or cavalry generals, a great defense debate is triggered, and the public becomes even more confused by charges and counter-charges.
After 75 years of conflicting claims, two world wars, and countless limited wars, it is clear that the strategists and theoreticians overstated their cases. As in most formulations dealing with that elusive phenomenon, power, a balanced equation is probably the most desirable. Our nearly 200 years of self-government seem to have demonstrated that balanced military forces will tend best to create an international balance of power; that balanced defense is best guaranteed by three competing services; and that representative government is most likely to endure where power is fragmented by a separation of powers within that government and throughout the defense establishment. That is the main reason why the American Congress so jealously preserves the three services with legislation like the National Security Act of 1947 and steadfastly refuses to sign away its control of the purse strings over them.
If a balance of power is important to the maintenance of equilibrium within a nation, it is also vital to the keeping of peace among nations. History has shown that there is more security in balanced power than in declarations of good intentions. Statesmen of the 19th century believed that if all powers were held in check, no state could win a war; and if no state could win a war, then no nation would threaten or start a war. Balanced power, they reasoned, is neutralized power. How to arrive permanently at this elusive balance of power has perplexed statesmen for centuries. In the years before thermonuclear weapons, diplomatic manipulation offered the best hope for stabilization and peace.
Any grand strategy entails, essentially, taking advantage of a nation's geographical position by the best available technology and diplomacy. The political aspects of a nation's physical environment playa fundamental role in this strategy, not because they alone provide all the answers to the world's problems, but because in an era of rapidly changing technology, they have a relatively permanent nature. Technology has not transformed the world's economic and political pattern, for natural and human resources still remain unequally distributed and unevenly developed.
Two foreign wars fought on a global scale with modern technical equipment have made the United States conscious of its geographical position as an island lying between the European and Asiatic shores of the Eurasian continental land mass. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 and the Panama Canal in 1914, our shores were easily accessible to both sides of the Eurasian continent. The fact that our continent lies between the European and Asiatic power centers of the old world and is separated from them by vast oceans gives our nation its unique strategic advantage. The Western Hemisphere has three oceans: the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic. The real center of power in the Western Hemisphere lies on the Atlantic coast of North America, "not only because American culture originated as a transatlantic projection of Western European civilization," but because of industrial location and geographical terrain, and it is toward the Atlantic that most of the economic life of this country flows. Nicholas J. Spykman in The Geography of the Peace remarked:
It is clear that the oceans play a most significant role in the economic, cultural, and political relations of the states of the Old World, and that they also determine the relations between the Old and the New Worlds.
According to Captain W. D. Puleston, U. S. Navy (Retired), Mahan wrote The Influence of Sea Power upon History to "rekindle among his own countrymen their former interest in sea power. He believed Americans had been so engrossed in developing the interior of the continent that they had unnecessarily thrown away a greater heritage."
Why were Mahan's theories accepted so slowly by his service and his country? The answer is deceptively simple: America has never really understood the diplomatic diversity and military flexibility accruing to a nation that understands and utilizes the unique advantages afforded by the command of the sea. A true comprehension of oceanic power has been slow to dawn on us.
From 1783 to 1898, Army provincialism was the dominant trend of American political-military thinking, and it was reflected in our isolationist foreign policy. The 19th century was one of continental expansion with its attendant wars—War of 1812, Mexican War, and Civil War—stemming directly from the conquest and digestion of North America.
Our greatest heroes—indeed, we elected them presidents—were army generals: the fox-like Washington; the crafty Jackson; and the innovating and relentless Grant, to say nothing of Generals Harrison, Taylor, and Eisenhower. Yet even the thought of an admiral as president seems preposterous, although sea power, too, has not been without its heroes and victories. Indeed, one can argue that American history as we know it would have been impossible without sea power—British, French, and American.
From 1899 to 1941, naval provincialism was the dominant political-military philosophy in the United States. In fostering a powerful navy, isolationists and imperialists found a comfortable bipartisan home. Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Ohio expressed the prevalent American expansionist mood this way:
Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours. We will establish trading-posts ... for American products. We will cover the ocean with our merchant marine .... We will build a navy to the measure of our greatness.
By 1900, the United States had acquired an empire and was the third largest naval power in the world with a resurgent merchant marine carrying the flag to the ends of the earth. With Teddy Roosevelt in the White House, the Navy had a champion.
The momentum generated by Roosevelt's administrations carried the Navy through the less-enthusiastic Taft tenure and, in 1915, President Wilson requested Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels to come up with a navy building program "for a consistent and progressive development of this great defensive arm of the nation." Daniels wrote Admiral Dewey requesting him to recommend a navy worthy of this country; one able to cope with any probable enemy. Nine days later, Dewey forwarded the program and replied that "the Navy of the United States should ultimately be equal to the most powerful maintained by any other nation of the world." Wilson, in his third annual message to Congress on 7 December 1915, called for "a Navy fitted to our needs and worthy of our traditions." The Naval Appropriations Act of 1916 marked a significant turning point in the nation's history, for by that action the United States accepted the idea of a navy second to none and began to build such a fleet.
In World War I, Mahan's theories were put to the test and found wanting. True, the British blockaded the Central Powers, but, for the first time in her history, Britain suffered enormous losses in ground combat on the Western Front. The winning blows of World War I were launched by massed infantry; sea power was not the decisive force.
By 1921, the recently concluded war was blamed on navalism and Mahanism, and the great powers gathered at the solemn Washington Disarmament Conference to limit navies and thus, hopefully, to make a repetition of World War I impossible. Meanwhile, Billy Mitchell, Lord Trenchard, and Giulio Douhet were evolving a new theory of war by strategic bombing. Between the naval disarmers and the bomber generals, America was stripped of adequate usable oceanic power.
During the 1920s, prosperity bloomed and then withered as depression gripped the world. Dictatorships flourished as the democracies wobbled under unparalleled economic problems. In 1936, Japan abrogated the Washington Naval Limitations, Hitler moved into the Rhineland, and President Roosevelt, like Wilson before him, sought security in a new naval construction program aimed at building "incomparably the greatest Navy."
World War II brought the United States a four-billion-dollar, two-ocean navy. It also brought home some simple lessons of sea power. An oceanic coalition, with help from sea-aided land power, defeated an integrated continental power and a narrowly based island empire. Balanced teams of land, sea, and air forces, directed by the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, co-ordinated with the coalition's Combined Chiefs, fought and won the world's greatest conflict.
From 1945 to 1961, the prevailing strategic thinking in the United States and in the Western world was dominated by air force provincialism, which implied that our boys would never have to fight on foreign shores; American-based intercontinental bombers, loaded with atomic bombs, would guarantee a Pax Americana. The cure for malignant Communism would be a dose of militant Christian atomic bombs. No armies, no navies—only fleets of bombers would be necessary to guarantee our security. The independent air force had become America's and the West's "first line of defense."
Throughout this decade and a half, the long-range bomber, its nuclear weapon, and the largely unexpressed threat of an atomic first strike were the dominant military instruments of the Western democracies. Events like the Greek Civil War, Berlin Blockade, Korean War, Tachens evacuation, Indochinese confusion, and Lebanon landings were explained or alibied away as the results of technology, timidity, or traitors. As Dean Acheson wrote: "The truth is that, having sought for a mechanical, painless, and cheap method of deterring the use of all force against us, we have lost sight of the problem." Air power apologists asked the American people: "Do you want battleships in the third world war, or do you want rockets, bombers, and atomic bombs?" The answer was obvious. William Bradford Huie, in his notorious Case against the Admirals, noted:
... it is no coincidence that the organization which clings most stubbornly to its caste system is also the organization which clings most stubbornly to outmoded methods of warfare. Just as mechanical progress has outmoded the battleship so has social progress outmoded the severe military caste systems.
Huie flailed the Navy brass for compelling the sailor to wear a uniform that makes him feel like a "seventeen year-old yokel," for obstructing "the development of long-range war planes—strategic air power—until Pearl Harbor was in ashes," for obscuring and minimizing "the effectiveness of our strategic air power," and for "trying to dodge and minimize the implications of the atomic bomb."
When America held a monopoly of the atomic bomb and a vast superiority of bomber delivery vehicles, the targets of our atomic weapons were the people and industry of Russia. The Italian Strategist Giulio Douhet explained why:
Any distinction between belligerents and non-belligerents is no longer admissible today either in fact or theory. Not in theory because when nations are at war, everyone takes a part in it: the soldier carrying his gun, the woman loading shells in a factory, the farmer growing wheat, the scientist experimenting in his laboratory ... it begins to look now as though the safest place may be trenches.
Only air power could achieve these spectacular ends, Douhet maintained. Sea power? Why should the Russians fear an American navy? "Russia is independent of the sea; has no naval or merchant fleet worth mentioning, and none of her vital industry is within range of naval weapons." Land power? America could never match the Communist "hordes."
De Seversky summed up the air doctrine thus: "But in the next war ... air power will have achieved the same clarity of organization and purpose formerly enjoyed by sea power. Today the Air Force has supplanted the Navy as our primary force in-being."
Feeling its oats, the newly independent Air Force took on its formidable competitor, the Navy, in the B-36-super carrier controversy of 1949. The deciding difference between these two contesting weapons systems was that the B-36 could deliver the miracle-working atomic bombs on Soviet targets and carrier bombers could not. Moreover, our conventional forces had been severely cut back so that the only "equalizers" seemed to be atomic-armed intercontinental bombers. W. Stuart Symington, as Secretary of the Air Force, proclaimed:
The airplane robbed us of these oceans and pole barriers which for centuries were the principal safeguards of our security. The airplane has brought the battlefield into every man's front yard regardless of where he lives. The ramparts we must watch in this air-atomic age are aloft—and every literate person in these United States knows it.
During the B-36 hearings, Admiral Robert L, Carney correctly summed up America's strategic alternatives. "There must be a decision as to whether strategic bombers are to be favored at the expense of other military assets, or whether some semblance of balance and flexibility is to be maintained."
So sure were the air power provincialists of the efficacy of their doctrine that all contingencies could be handled by air-atomic power that they were led to rather extreme statements. Louis Johnson, Secretary of Defense under Truman, bragged:
We shall make sure that no four in the morning attack will leave us prostrate at five, because Joe Stalin will know that if he starts something at four a.m., the fighting power of the United States will be on the job at five a.m. ... We seek to have a military establishment sufficient to deter that aggression and to lick hell out of her if she doesn't stay deterred.
There was no doubt in Johnson's mind as he justified a 100,000-man cut in the armed forces and the 13-billion-dollar defense budget that he was doing the right thing in the right place at the right time. He rationalized: "Yet this will leave more men in the fighting units than we have at present. We will clear out some more WPA workers .... Bows and arrows and obsolete battleships each have supporters who wish to see them continue."
This idea that armies and battleships, prime weapons systems of traditional land and sea forces, were obsolete, useless weapons in the era of the "absolute weapon" was all encompassing—at least within the ranks of air-atomic supremists. Winston Churchill, "the former naval person," was constantly cited to prove this eternal truth. Hanging in General Curtis LeMay's Pentagon office are two framed pictures: one, the mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion and the other, a quote from Churchill: "For good or evil, air mastery is today the supreme expression of military power, and fleets and armies, however necessary, must accept a subordinate rank. This is a memorable milestone in the march of man."
And indeed it is—if true.
Americans in the years from 1945 to 1961 frequently acted as if this were an unchallengable thesis. Air supremists were also fond of another Churchillian observation, as significant in the field of strategic theory as his Fulton, Missouri, "Iron Curtain" remarks were in East-West relations: "I must not conceal from you the truth as I see it. It is certain that Europe would have been communized and London under bombardment some time ago but for the deterrent of the atomic bomb in the hands of the United States."
With such august backing for this single environmental answer to world Communism, is it any wonder that Churchill was quoted again and again? Moving from this sure theoretical foundation, the air isolationists then considered the existing technology and correctly made the most of the fact that only the land-based heavy bomber could deliver the "absolute weapon" on the Communist enemy deep in its Eurasian heartland. Secretary Symington made the classic overstatement in behalf of the B-36 bomber in February 1949 at the kick-off to the bruising battle between air and naval elements of the U. S. defense establishment when he boasted: "I would like to join Mr. Churchill in his view that it is not only the possession of the atomic bomb, but also the ability to deliver it ... that makes the bomber the force for peace it is…" He then added:
A B-36 with an A-bomb can take off from this continent and destroy distant objectives which might require ground armies years to take-and then only at the expense of heavy casualties. The B-36 can do the job within 16 hours after taking off from this continent. And then return nonstop to its home base, all this at a risk of 16 American lives.
Naval leaders tried to warn the American people that in pursuit of a quick and easy solution to complex defense problems the nation was courting disaster, but to no avail. Commander George H. Miller, U. S. Navy, observed that in the B-36 propaganda "we recognize the theory of blitzkrieg, the quick, easy victory idea, that has always seemed so attractive to the uninformed. It is the old land power concept of 'putsch' which depends so much on being able to obtain the quick surrender of the enemy." Undaunted by the lessons of World War II, Symington offered the American people the panacea of a bloodless victory in a future war.
If war comes, we believe that the atomic bomb, plus the air power to deliver it, represent the one means of unloosing prompt crippling destruction upon the enemy with absolute minimum combat-exposure of American lives. If it is preferable to engage in a war of attrition, one American life for one enemy life, then we are wrong. That is not our way. That is not the way in which the mass slaughter of American youth in an invasion of Japan was avoided. To whatever extent we can bring it about that weapons fashioned at Los Alamos and carried in aircraft fashioned at Fort Worth, can destroy or diminish the power of an enemy to kill American soldiers, sailors, and airmen, we are for pursuing that method. We can hope but no one can promise, that if war comes the impact of our bombing offensive with atomic weapons can bring it about—that no surface forces ever have to become engaged.
Naval partisans were drowned out by the mighty roar of the intercontinental bomber with its "city-killing" weapons. In late 1949 one naval writer suggested an alternative:
Thus if we build up power on our side, and prepare sensibly for a possible surprise blow against us, we should ... be able to convince the Russians that war would be too dangerous for them .... Above all by avoiding hysteria and provocative measures which could goad Russia into belligerent countermeasures and by keeping diplomatic situations fluid, with room for negotiations we can by careful leadership, arrive at a stable relationship.
But the B-36 was grandly triumphant, and the strategy of "instant retaliation" that it carried beneath its mighty wings became the controlling strategic assumption from 1949 to 1961. John Foster Dulles' "massive retaliation" pronouncement of 1954 merely ratified a Truman-Johnson decision of 1948-49 to stress air-atomic power. The newly independent Air Force was its greatest beneficiary, and from 1953 to 1961 it was the dominant service, continually threatening to absorb the two older and traditional armed forces. Ironically, at the very moment of their triumph during the B-36 hearings, the Russians broke our atomic monopoly.
Noting this, Admiral Ralph A. Oftsie, U.S. Navy, warned his countrymen that in "instant retaliation" they were fostering an
illusion of power and even a kind of bomb rattling jingoism. Although responsible officers of the government generally do not themselves subscribe to it, they must be influenced by the public acceptance of the proposal of instant retaliation. The idea that it is within our power to inflict maximum damage upon the enemy in a short time without serious risk to ourselves creates the illusion that we are stronger than we actually are. This, in turn, becomes a constant temptation for policy makers to overcommit themselves, to make commitments actually impossible to fulfill. In recent weeks we have been made aware of the fact that we are not alone in our possession of the atomic weapon which had been the basis of this illusory strength. Perhaps now more prudent and realistic policies will get the attention which they deserve.
Unfortunately, Admiral Oftsie was a decade ahead of his time. His remarks were made in the fall of 1949 at the "take-off" point of the air-atomic doctrine. The B-S2 followed the B-36, H-bomb succeeded A-bomb, and tactical nuclear weapons were planned to replace conventional land and sea forces. Massive retaliation was formulated to go beyond instant retaliation, thermonuclear brinkmanship was designed to prevent "any more Koreas." The doctrine of pre-emptive war, or "exercise of the initiative," was developed to justify getting in the "first or forestalling blow."
Admiral Gerald F. Bogan, U. S. Navy, predicted in 1949: "Whatever the role of any branch of our armed forces in a future war be tween two strong nations or coalitions of nations, it is my firm conviction that the ultimate result will be the end of civilization as we know it today."
But the high priests of air doctrine became convinced that thermonuclear war could be "won" and made livable if only the proper strategy were developed, the correct number of bombers and missiles built, the proper civil defenses constructed, and the necessary governmental and institutional changes made. It mattered not if this entailed the militarization of foreign policy and our society. What was important was that controlled thermonuclear war offered a prescription for total victory and one world dominated by "Christian-democratic capitalism."
These theories were legitimized by the great think factories like Rand, which generated large amounts of "scientific" studies to buttress air-atomic doctrine. These strategists believed that if we had a massive superiority in thermonuclear delivery systems, all possible contingencies from total war through "wars of liberation" could be handled-the first by vaporizing world Communism, the second by "burning the jungle."
Since the end of World War II, an alternative doctrine has been building and with the strategic decisions of 1961-64 it has been given a fighting chance. Although this new strategy may be called an oceanic doctrine, it does not imply that traditional land and air elements are lacking. Far from it. Basically it is a return to the balanced forces concept of World War II and Korea and a rejection of an extremist or monolithic air provincialism, designed to handle the least likely contingency—total nuclear war.
Army provincialism lasted 100 years until it was overtaken by the battleship; naval provincialism endured 45 years, only to be torpedoed by the intercontinental bomber and the atom bomb; air force provincialism flourished for 15 years, only to be shot down by the thermonuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile. We are currently witnessing the attempt to bootleg a form of space provincialism masquerading under the guise of "an aerospace gap." It is an open question whether the world's political institutions can be reshaped in time to prevent the militarization of space and, ultimately, the planet beneath. In reaching for the stars, it should never be forgotten that armed forces are not ends in themselves, but are maintained to effect the political processes here on earth.
Oceanic power has two broad earthly functions in this Age of Deterrence. The first is to stabilize, and keep stabilized, the military equilibrium on all three levels of military action by the creation of proper deterrent forces:
Level I-
Total War: Polaris missiles and related groups of non-continental mobile-based true deterrents.
Level II-
Limited War: Aircraft carriers for close air support; jet airlift, expanded conventional ground troops; improved infantry weapons; greater use of amphibious warfare.
Level II-
Unconventional War or "wars of liberation": Additional special forces; psycho-chemicals; special equipment as well as conventional forces from the limited war area to accomplish the traditional diplomatic functions of military forces.
An oceanic strategy, though not a panacea, will at least give the statesmen of the West another decade in which to develop new institutions, new philosophies, and new ideas to prevent 1984 from arriving a decade earlier.
In 1890, Mahan wrote concerning the utilization of time by democratic nations:
If time be, as is everywhere admitted, a supreme factor in war, it behooves countries whose genius is essentially not military, whose peoples, like all free people, object to pay for large military establishments, to see to it that they are at least strong enough to gain the time necessary to turn the spirit and capacity of their subjects into the new activities.
I propose that the United States and other like-minded nations take the lead in developing "new activities," leading eventually to the unification of the oceanic world. This function of oceanic power goes beyond military containment and is, in the long run, just as significant to the preservation of the open society's ideals as is tri-level military stabilization. Oceanic power, if imaginatively conceived and implemented, can use the time gained by military stabilization to forge an oceanic community of freedom.
The trade routes of the sea can be the federating catalyst of this community. They can be, providing they have the constitutional framework and economic agreements to accompany them, as important in the economic federation of the oceanic community as the railroads were in the integration of our own land. The sea lanes can become the blue bands joining all nations into an interdependent oceanic federation.
Through utilization of our oceanic power, the Free World's flags are carried to all corners of the globe, providing access to approximately85 per cent of the earth's surface, making up 90 per cent of the world's shipping, carrying 99 per cent of the world's trade, and underwriting the opportunity for economic growth and political freedom by all nations.
The entire Southern Hemisphere is demanding to participate in the good life. Latin Americans, Africans, and Asians are seeking to telescope decades of development into one. The industrial nations of the north are grasping for solutions to eliminate rapidly the distinctions between rich and poor nations. Two of these awakening continents—South America and Africa—are islands permitting circumnavigation, and Asia south of the Himalayas is easily accessible from the oceans. The industrial West is increasingly dependent for raw materials on underdeveloped lands. Except for food, the Communist worlds are nearly self-sufficient in natural resources. It is obvious, therefore, that the Communists merely have to deny us these resources in order to cripple our industrial base. The control of the imperial lifeline from Liverpool to Gibraltar to Suez to Calcutta was crucial to Great Britain during the 19th century. Likewise, the maritime countries of the West can never allow any of the vital strategic "choke points" essential to protect the lifelines of our technological society—Gibraltar, Cape of Good Hope, Panama Canal, Cape Horn, Singapore—to be denied us.
Our society is at the gateway to a Golden Age of oceanic power. There is no need to be afraid of continental-based power as long as we continue to exploit the inherent advantages flowing from command of the seas. In 1964, the United States of America has, because of her sea heritage, geographic location, technical skill, wealth of her people, and wisdom of her leaders, the keys to enlightened oceanic power. The great cultural flowering under Queen Elizabeth I and 19th century optimism under Queen Victoria were based on security afforded by the Royal Navy.
Under the aegis of modern oceanic power, the Western world seems to be on the threshold of just such another burst of creative experimentation and innovation. History can be altered even by a controlled thermonuclear war, which the aerospace partisans offer as an alternative to tri-level stabilization. But by using the time gained in deterring that war to foster those conditions that will make such a war both ridiculous and impossible, perhaps history can be jolted permanently out of its never-ending cycle of ever more disastrous wars. Oceanic power can set the stage for a political federation of the oceanic community; it can foster the "open door policy" to all nations of the earth to join a wider social community regardless of race, religion, or prior political affiliation. While our immediate goal must be to preserve the Western world as a springboard for our revolutionary ideals clustered around the innate worth of the individual, our ultimate aim must be to preserve the planet earth as a base for conquering the stars, a step toward understanding life's purpose here on earth.
One additional essential element is needed: a high-level awareness of the potentialities of oceanic power. Teddy Roosevelt and F.D.R. understood this power, but since World War II, the detractors of sea power have organized naval and oceanic expertise out of government. Although by law the Chief of Naval Operations is still the president's principal naval adviser, he is rarely used in this role. The House and Senate Naval Affairs Committee has been abolished; there is no naval adviser to the National Security Council. The Secretary of Navy has been banished from the Cabinet, leaving "only the Secretary of Defense in this rarefied atmosphere of top-level decision making."
Captain Robert P. Beebe, U. S. Navy (Retired), writing in the June 1962 U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings stated: "It is the Navy that must lead national statesmen in the proper application of sea power." And he added: " . . . one thing seems sure in the long run; the land-minded leaders of the Western World will eventually awaken to the fact that their ability to assert absolute command of the seas, whenever they care to do so, is the biggest ace in the hole they have."
During the Cuban crisis of 1962, President Kennedy, operating under the shield of the deterrent power, brought measured force to bear and trumped the Soviet nuclear finesse. President Kennedy, according to the New York Times, personally selected the naval quarantine to be the instrument of American foreign policy. Under Secretary of State George Ball explained why the President turned to the sea for his weapons:
He chose ... a more limited response [instead of a sudden air strike or an invasion]. ... Through that choice, we could avoid resort to an immediate use of force that might have led ... up an ascending scale of violence. That choice also enabled the President to gain time .... By establishing the quarantine he developed an effective weapon—a weapon with economic as well as military implications—that may usefully be included in the growing arsenal that provides for the free world the widest spectrum of response to military and political threats.
President Kennedy, like the two Roosevelts before him, had begun to tap the potentialities of oceanic power. Carrying on in the same fine tradition, President Johnson met his Cuban crisis of early 1964 with another application of the measured response, "not by a battalion of Marines bayoneting their way in to turn on the water, but," the President pointedly remarked, "we sent a single admiral over to cut it off."
If imaginatively and responsibly used, oceanic power can transform the latter decades of the twentieth century and help give reality to President Johnson's inspired vision: " ... our hope and our purpose is to employ reasoned agreement instead of ready aggression; to preserve our honor without a world in ruins, to substitute, if we can, understanding for retaliation."
The 1960s and 1970s will see, hopefully, the end of all military, political, and economic forms of isolationism and provincialism. We will need new maps, new emphasis on geography, new understandings, new resources, and, eventually, new institutions. Oceanic power, properly understood and applied, can deter total war, prevent the erosion of the Free World in limited wars, win "wars of liberation," and, most importantly, carry technological "know-how" and political enlightenment to the underdeveloped two-thirds of mankind, eventually supplying fresh water, food, power, and minerals to our shrinking globe. The resulting synthesis should guarantee that in the 21st century the free but responsible individual and his society will prevail and flourish on a still green and vibrant earth.
A graduate of Grove City College (Pennsylvania) with an M.A. in History from the University of Chicago, Lieutenant Lowe entered the Navy in 1953 via the OCS program. He attended air intelligence schools at Washington, D. C., and Alameda, California, and served in air intelligence billets until 1957. From 1957 to 1961, he was an instructor in history and political science at Southeast Junior College, Chicago, and at the University of Maryland. He is currently a Foreign Service officer with the Department of State.