Speaking to Congress, the Chief of Naval Operations recently argued that the purpose of the U.S. Navy hinged on the timeless missions of sea control and power projection.1 Perhaps so. But to most people, these phrases raise more questions than they answer. Control at what cost, and to what end? Power to do what, exactly? Projected where and how? Such declarations seem unlikely to induce taxpayers to fork over the enormous sums entailed, especially when so many think the money could be better spent fixing pressing domestic problems. But this is nothing new.
More than a century ago, the patron saint of the U.S. Navy grappled with similar difficulties. Alfred Thayer Mahan faced a U.S. public riven by deep internal disagreement and skeptical of the need to spend scarce public resources on the Navy. Looking back on his career, Mahan considered that one of his greatest achievements was providing “men in civil life” with a coherent answer to a simple but profound question: “Why do we need a Navy?” In his autobiography’s opening chapter, he observed:
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1. ADM Michael Gilday, USN, Statement to the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness and Management, 2 December 2020.
2. RADM Alfred Thayer Mahan, USN (Ret.), From Sail to Steam: Recollections of a Naval Life (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1907), 7–8.
3. Theodore Roosevelt, “Review of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History,” Political Science Quarterly 9, no. 1 (March 1894): 171–72.
4. CAPT Alfred Thayer Mahan, USN (Ret.), Lessons of the War with Spain and Other Articles (Boston, MA: Little Brown & Co., 1899), 10–11.
5. RADM Alfred Thayer Mahan, USN (Ret.), “The Submarine and Its Enemies,” Colliers Weekly (6 April 1907), 17–21.
6. Letter from A. T. Mahan, The Times (London), 4 November 1910, 15, col. a.
7. Nicholas Lambert, Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War (Camrbidge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
8. Katherine C. Epstein, “The Conundrum of American Power in the Age of World War I,” Modern American History, v.2 (2019) 345–65.
9. Jon Sumida, Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching Command (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
10. Harold Sprout, “Geopolitical Theories Compared,” Naval War College Review 7, no. 1 (January 1954): 1.26
