Many new strategic theories are accompanied by an attitude of evangelism. Those who create them are not just selling a method of warfare but a kind of totalizing philosophy that sees the destiny of peoples and nations in a certain style of combat. There is little way of explaining Alfred Thayer Mahan and his theories other than the frame of evangelism.
Mahan, a naval officer with an otherwise undistinguished career, was lucky enough to write at a time when the navalist movement was rising across America. As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in his famous Frontier Thesis, the wellspring of American identity is in the constant push across a new frontier--the continual cycle of invention and re-invention and breaking of social norms that comes with the expansion across the frontier. But America had reached the West Coast by the 1840s, and by the end of the 19th century had largely pacified the Indians and annihilated the Southern states' revolt. Where to go now?
The 19th century was also the high point of the age of imperialism, when many European states sought the grandeur of empire in overseas colonies in Africa and Asia. Social Darwinist theories of competition, a hankering for glory, a fear of powerful European navalist powers, the lure of overseas markets, an evangelizing impulse, and a burning desire to expand into a new frontier motivated a select group of American elites to demand power projection in the Americas and the Pacific.
Mahan's military ideas were neither central to their plans or particularly imperialist in themselves. But they provided a strategic narrative for this expansionary mission's primary drive--the sea. He thrived in such a milieu, although his ideas ironically were admired more by foreigners such as the Kaiser of Germany, the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the British navalists than he was in the United States.
Mahan's thesis, expounded in his articles, Naval War College lectures, and two books, is that sea power is the dominant factor in history. He who controls the sea, Mahan preached, rules the land. Naval superiority had given England, the reigning imperial power of the time, domination over trade, colonies, and industry. The operational aspects of Mahan's thesis draw from Jomini: the object of strategy at sea is the destruction of the opponent's fleet.
Mahan also took Jomini's concept of interior lines to sea---England was in a vital central strategic position because it quickly destroy one army and then hit the next without compromising the mass of its force. Attacking the enemy's commerce is a waste of time, dominance only comes from direct battle. Mahanism proscribed one kind of force structure: a fleet composed of battleships or ships-of-the-line.
Like Jomini, Mahan also derided the careful and limited "war of the maneuver" seen in warfare of the previous century on both land and sea, denouncing it as "effete." Like Jomini, Mahan's ideas were at best sparingly supported by uses of military history at worst backed by outright distortions. And like Jomini, he was rendered largely irrelevant when new technologies--such as long-range guns and submarines--invalidated his operational theories.
His British contemporary, the civilian naval enthusiast Julian Corbett smartly recognized that "command of the sea is only a means to an end. It never has been and never can be the end itself." Sea power alone cannot defeat an adversary, and is only one of many tools that a competent grand strategist uses to accomplish a goal in national security policy.
Unlike Mahan, Corbett realized that Trafalgar, Britain's greatest naval victory against France, may have safeguarded Britain's global empire but left Napoleon dominant in Europe. It was only when Napoleon was decisively defeated on land in Russia and later at Waterloo did his power finally dissolve.
Still, Mahan provided a vision and a mission for an United States Navy that was beginning to take on a truly global role. While others may have provided the impetus for the growth of the modern USN, none could have provided an eloquent guiding narrative like the one Mahan crafted. The careful and aloof Corbett may have been proven right by history but lacked a guiding, transcendental mission like the one Mahan supplied.
The contrast between the two is a lesson in the need for national security policy not only to be correct and sound but also dramatic. They must provide a persuasive and coherent view of the future that motivates soldiers, civilians, and policymakers alike. It would be preferable if that vision were not marred by reductionism of the kind that Mahan wholeheartedly embraced. But visionaries are seldom careful people---which is why the implementation of their visions is carried out by those who, by dint of the "hobgoblin of small minds"--value practical solutions and consistency.
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