An article in the June Proceedings, “Mahan’s Illusory Command of the Seas,” misinterprets both Alfred Thayer Mahan and the wider issue of how sea power can or should affect events on land. Mahan was hardly a mere advocate of neo-mercantilism. His central point—as valid today as a century ago—is that the sea is the world’s great highway, and dominating that highway can provide enormous leverage. Another is that the sea provides a degree of mobility not otherwise available. A fleet operating on an enemy’s strategic or operational flanks can be enormously effective.
Command is a real concept, and it has been achieved in many past wars. If you were standing somewhere in the Pacific in, say, January 1945, you would recognize it. Command would not have been total, inasmuch as U.S. presence off some Japanese islands was opposed. But on the whole, the Pacific was dominated by the U.S. Navy.
The 1986 Maritime Strategy applied the idea of dominating the highway to a specifically Cold War–oriented circumstance: By the 1980s, the Soviet Union had a great stake in a maritime asset—its strategic nuclear-missile submarine force. Consequently, the Soviets had to reckon with U.S. and allied capacity to attack the submarines in “bastions” that could not be protected easily. Intolerable pressure on the bastions led the Soviets to pull their other naval forces back from the open oceans, ceding to the West command of the seas in a way unimagined before the 1980s. The result was, in Mahan’s formulation, that the West was free to use the seas openly while the Soviets were reduced to furtively sporadic use.
The author also ridicules the idea that there can be “decisive battles,” citing Trafalgar and Jutland (and, implicitly, various World War II battles) in particular. It is not clear what he means by this phrase. Typically, whether by land or sea, battles are seen as decisive mainly in retrospect. They do not end wars by themselves; they set off a train of events that end in the enemy’s defeat.
The 1805 battle off Cape Trafalgar is a case in point. Through the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon kept defeating his enemies’ armies, forcing them to accept his domination but not wiping them out. The British financed coalition after coalition, often convincing those Napoleon had defeated to return to arms. By 1805, the only way for Napoleon to end the problem was to put the British out of action. He considered invading England but realized that was impractical in the face of the Royal Navy—a defensive triumph for British sea power.
But Trafalgar was much more. It destroyed the only effective French (and Spanish) fleet and provided the British with the freedom of action on land that command of the sea offers. (See Philip K. Allan, “The Duke of Wellington’s Navy,” Naval History, April 2021.) That command made it possible for Wellington to fight in Portugal and Spain, but—by itself—this was hardly a decisive land campaign. It was what Napoleon called “the Spanish ulcer.”
To heal that debilitating sore, Napoleon needed to find a way to defeat Britain without an invasion. His solution was economic: If the British used their money to keep the coalitions alive, he would destroy the trade on which their finances relied. Since he could not blockade Britain, he sought by force of arms to stop Europe trading with Britain. But Russia refused to enforce Napoleon’s economic demands, so he marched to Moscow. That turned out to be fatal.
So, was Trafalgar decisive? It made Wellington’s land war possible, allowing Wellington to become much more than a troublesome ulcer as Napoleon’s army shrank dramatically, and Wellington ended up winning at Waterloo.
What about Jutland? It was hardly decisive in naval terms; in fact, the Germans sank more British ships than the British sank German. But it was decisive in the sense that it convinced the German fleet commander, Admiral Reinhard Scheer, that he absolutely never wanted to risk another such battle. After Jutland, Scheer pressed for the only remaining naval measure that he thought actually might bring about victory: unrestricted submarine warfare.
Scheer and other Germans were aware this step might bring the United States into the war. But as Germany’s situation became worse in late 1916, the German Army high command (which at this point ran Germany) decided to adopt the tactic. To reduce the risk of U.S. entry, the German Foreign Ministry proposed an alliance with Mexico, offering it the part of the United States lost in the 1845–48 Mexican-American War. Unfortunately for Germany, the British decoded and shared the “Zimmerman telegram” making this offer. Combined with the unrestricted submarine campaign, it brought the United States into the war. After World War I, it was widely accepted that the entry of the United States had been the ultimate disaster dooming Germany.
Incidentally, it was Allied command of the sea that enabled all those U.S. troops to get to Europe in convoys. Jutland might appear to have little to do with destroyers and smaller ships escorting troop and supply ships, but the British Grand Fleet was a shield behind which the convoys could operate. Escorts could not survive attack by major surface ships. In the fall of 1917, for example, two German cruisers wiped out a Scandinavian convoy.
Between the two world wars, strategists largely discounted submarine attacks on trade because it was widely accepted that the U-boat offensive had been the ultimate blunder, bringing the United States into the war. For example, U.S. submarine officers who pointed out in 1920 that Japan depended even more on shipping than Britain had been were told explicitly that the United States would not risk bringing a neutral Britain into a U.S.-Japanese war by endangering British shipping.
Jutland had another interesting aspect. It is not widely known that Admiral Hugo von Pohl, Scheer’s predecessor, wrote that he could lose the war if he were defeated (much as British Admiral John Jellicoe is said to have pointed out that he could lose the war in an afternoon). Pohl was referring to the possibility that a victorious British fleet could enter the Baltic and outflank the German Army in the East, opening East Prussia to Russian invasion. As it happened, on the eve of Jutland, the hard-pressed Russians were asking the British for a “naval demonstration” in the Danish Straits, which suggests that they had much the same understanding of what was happening.
Finally, there is the author’s claim that the end of the Pacific war can be attributed entirely to the “shocking and awing” of the two atomic bombs. Again, it is difficult to learn much from such an oversimplified view of history. Until June 1944, Japan apparently thought it could win the war. But once U.S. forces seized Saipan, Japan realized the war was lost. Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, who had been in power through the war, was forced to resign in July (along with his entire cabinet) in favor of a civilian premier chosen to find some way out. The way out proved elusive, because the Japanese imagined that they could secure terms entirely unacceptable to the United States. The Japanese government convinced itself that by fighting very bloody (even if unsuccessful) battles, Japan could convince the United States to accept terms more favorable to Japan. There is still some question as to exactly what tipped the balance in August 1945, but it was hardly the two atomic bombs by themselves. They seem instead to have been the horrific acts that enabled Emperor Hirohito to surrender without total loss of face.
History does not come with a single, automatically correct interpretation, but it does require application of careful reasoning. Mahan’s works of history remain interesting because he tried to understand how the wars of the previous few centuries had been fought, and though today’s world is different from Mahan’s, many things are similar enough that what he wrote still has value.
Dr. Ullman strongly criticized the Mahanian strategy reflected in the 1986 Maritime Strategy at the time it was adopted (see, for example, Future Imperative: National Security and the U.S. Navy in the Late 1980s published by CSIS in 1985), and his use of “shocking and awing” refers to his idea that in 2003 Iraq could have been defeated more-or-less instantly by a massive aerial bombardment. (Those who fought their way to Baghdad might be forgiven for thinking that bombardment did not quite solve their problem.) “Mahan’s Illusory Command of the Seas” uses shallow reasoning in an attempt to revive long-settled debates.
