Naval power is the projection of force by navies. Although it has been a feature of warfare since the earliest days, the difference it makes to the waging of wars and to the rise and fall of nations has only been seriously addressed over the past century or so. The US Adm Alfred Thayer Mahan was one of the first in the field really to analyse the nature, extent, and requirements of naval power in a variety of books that became very popular and influential at the turn of the century.
He believed that strong navies conferred power in a form that had many advantages over land power. It was fast-moving, flexible, and cost-effective. In peacetime, strong navies could provide the conditions for the merchant marine to carry on the levels of international trade upon which national prosperity and security depended. Naval power afforded the means of acquiring foreign markets, supplies, and colonies. In wartime naval power conferred the ability to protect your trade against the attacks of your adversary and to attack his. It meant that expeditions against the most vulnerable parts of the enemy's land mass could be mounted in the form of amphibious operations. He concluded: ‘Control of the sea by maritime commerce and naval supremacy means predominant influence in the world … [and] is the chief among the merely material elements in the power and prosperity of nations.’
Mahan's views on the nature and the prospects of naval power were somewhat moderated by the other main naval theorist of the time, Sir Julian Corbett. A lawyer by training, Corbett was a prominent thinker on the nature of naval power in Britain before WW I. He had a much more judicious sense of the limitations of naval power than Mahan, so much so in fact that he tended to avoid the word. Instead he talked about ‘maritime power’, a phrase he adopted in order to give some emphasis to the need for navies to work with armies. Corbett was the author of Some Principles of Maritime Strategy and a friend of the main naval decision-makers of the time, especially Fisher.
Corbett's conclusions about naval, or maritime, power were twofold. First, he believed that a maritime policy in which Britain's sea concerns were given some prominence would suit the country's interests and national policy best. Naval power was not an end in itself, but more a means to a political end. The type of strategy chosen by the navy should reflect the national objectives for which the war was fought. He explored the idea of limited maritime wars (for narrowly defined economic or geographic objectives) where the investment costs were few, the price paid small, but the gains disproportionately large. With this approach, military power could be made particularly cost-effective. Britain's historic success was founded on such principles. It was Britain's naval power and the consequent ability to command the sea that explained how it was that a small country with a weak army should have been able to defeat Napoleon and gather to herself the most desirable regions of the earth as overseas possessions.
Secondly he believed that Britain needed a balanced, amphibious type of strategy, with the kind of army and enfolding military doctrine that could exploit the strategic opportunities yielded by naval supremacy. Corbett was deeply sceptical of the growing tendency of his time to develop an army whose structure and habits of thought were becoming increasingly optimized for large-scale war on the continent of Europe. Britain should, on the contrary, leave that to its allies who did not, in most cases, have Britain's luxury of choice. In this he echoed the views of Thomas More Molyneux who wrote as long ago as 1759 that ‘The Fleet and army, acting in conjunction seem to be the natural bulwark of this kingdom.’
On the basis of his study of the success of the British in the 18th century, Corbett concluded that naval power offered the prospect of avoiding the huge drains of resources associated with large-scale continental campaigns. Where necessary, these costs would be met by Britain's allies whose geographic circumstances would deprive them of maritime alternative. The British had contented themselves with limited engagements on the continent of Europe and had shown themselves able to use the flexibility and mobility afforded by their naval supremacy to launch spoiling attacks on the weakest points of the enemy's land mass. The enemy had been exhausted by virtue of the fact that he could not know where such an attack was coming and had therefore to guard the whole of a coastline rendered potentially vulnerable everywhere by the strength of Britain's navy. Britain's naval power had also enabled British maritime trade to proceed unhindered, while the enemy's was strangled; it allowed the British to seize their enemies' colonies and bases, devastating their war economies while protecting their own. All this seemed to show quite conclusively that naval supremacy, properly exploited, was the means to economic prosperity, possessions, and influence around the world and the ability to manage the international balance of power.
After WW I, Corbett's views were developed by Liddell Hart into a philosophy of war that came to be known as ‘The British Way in Warfare’. In this, both built on earlier ideas espoused by another military dissident Charles Callwell. For all of them, naval power was the basis for a distinctively cost-effective and inherently limited approach to the business of war.
Mahan and Corbett were both clear about how nations should aim to increase their relative naval power. Obviously, it would be easier for nations that had the requisite characteristics to become naval powers. These characteristics included a national geography that provided access to the sea, sufficient ports, and a lively sense of the importance of the sea to their prosperity and their security amongst the ordinary population. Governments with the good sense, the administrative competence, and the financial and industrial resources to translate all this into an effective maritime policy, with strong and appropriately designed navies, stood the best chance of developing significant naval power. In the light of the technological challenges articulated by the likes of Halford Mackinder, Corbett, in particular, was well aware of the fact that sea dependence could be at least as much a source of weakness and vulnerability as of strength if the country in question did not recognize this fact and act accordingly.
With a strong navy, a term which navalists understood to encompass ships (with all their weapons), trained personnel, sufficient bases, and the harbour and industrial facilities to support them, the nation could then seek to increase its power at sea. The physical destruction of the adversary's fleet in some grand-fleet encounter (such as Jutland) was the quickest and most convenient way of achieving this happy result. More normally naval supremacy was achieved through the effect of a number of less than totally decisive battles added together over a period of time (such as the battle of the Atlantic). In their era this was largely a matter of heavy-gun warships battling each other on the open ocean. Later mines, submarines, aircraft and aircraft carriers, and small torpedo boats came in to complicate the calculations of admirals.
But, for the weaker side, it would be foolish to agree to a battle on such terms, and the vastness of the oceans made it possible for the second-best fleet (measured in terms either of size or quality or maybe both) to indulge in a naval defensive, usually called a fleet-in-being strategy. This was designed to extract as much strategic benefit from the circumstances as possible by keeping the fleet safe from major encounters with a stronger adversary but nonetheless able to challenge the adversary's capacity to use the sea as he might wish. In WW I, the German High Sea Fleet sought to avoid full-scale battle with the Grand Fleet but to attack Britain's weaker points. Thus the British were forced to keep their fleet on constant alert should the Germans sally forth, isolated squadrons were constantly menaced, the exposed coastline constantly threatened, and individual warships and merchantmen sailing about the sea always liable to unpredictable destruction.
Confronted by a weaker adversary resorting to such an operational philosophy, the stronger party would need to fall back on the strategy of blockade. Naval forces would seek effectively to seal the adversary's main naval forces from the sea by deploying forces off his harbour entrances or positioning them in his region in such a way as to maximize the chances of an unwanted and deadly encounter should he seek to reach the open ocean. This strategy could be implemented in two ways, close and distant, which differed only in the amount of sea room they allowed the weaker side. Although it could be a way of seeking to force a battle on a reluctant adversary, blockade was more normally the best way of neutralizing an enemy fleet by sealing it off from the open ocean.
All three approaches (the pursuit of decisive battle, the fleet-in-being strategy, and blockade) could be the means by which adversaries sought to control or command the sea. A fleet which had command of the sea could exploit it as a source of transportation of both warlike and economic goods, and at the same time deny the adversary equivalent possibilities. The more command of the sea was enjoyed, the more able would its possessor be to mount or defeat amphibious operations, to send economic and war supplies and military personnel across the oceans while preventing the adversary from doing likewise, and to be able to use the sea for general strategic purposes.
For a naval power, command of the sea was in other words a means to an end, but as far as navalists like Mahan and Corbett were concerned, these ends were strategically crucial to the outcome of wars and to world power. By following these suggestions nations could build up their naval power and become able to enjoy a level of prosperity and strategic influence, possibly quite disproportionate to their own, home-grown resources. Although both Mahan and Corbett wrote with their own nations, the USA and Britain, very much in mind, they were in fact universalists too. Although they both took Britain's maritime experience as the material from which their theories were developed, they both believed that what they had to say was relevant to other countries in other times as well. Other countries would need to adapt and amend according to their circumstances, but most of them would be able, at least to some degree, to take advantage of navalist ideas—provided they had the sense to see the advantages of doing so.
But, of course, naval power faced its challenges and its sceptics too. One of the most celebrated of these was Halford Mackinder. His view on naval power was quite clear. The Columbian age, in which for the past several hundred years European naval powers had been able to dominate the world's affairs, was over. Now better able, with the help of modern technology in the form of railways and so on, to exploit their huge latent economic resources, land powers like Germany and Russia were apparently becoming steadily less susceptible to maritime pressure in the shape of economic blockade. Increasingly they would be able to find ways of getting round it.
Much the same applied to the threats of amphibious assault and coastal bombardment. Even Charles Callwell was concerned that technology in the shape of railways and the internal combustion engine would increase the land defender's capacity to move around behind threatened coastlines and to bring powerful defences (increased by the advent of long-range artillery, machine guns, and so on) against threats from the sea wherever they eventually materialized. Thus Corbett's stress on amphibious assaults around the edge of the adversary's land mass seemed likely to lead to costly disasters with little real impact on the war's outcome, such as Gallipoli in WW I and the Norwegian campaign in WW II.
Worse still, for their part, the naval powers seemed to be increasingly vulnerable to the hostile attention of continental powers, especially when the latter chose to put to sea with navies that were essentially in the negative business of sea denial. Being maritime could in fact be a source of dangerous vulnerability. Britain's PM Ramsay MacDonald put it like this in 1929: ‘In our case, our navy is the very life of the nation. We are a small island. For good or for ill, the lines of empire have been thrown all over the face of the earth. We have to import our food. A month's blockade, effectively carried out, would starve us all in the event of any conflict. Britain's navy is Britain itself and the sea is our security and our safety.’
New technology in the shape of the modern submarine able to mount savage assaults on merchant-shipping at sea, and long-range air power capable of devastating ports and harbours, hugely increased the threats that continental land powers could mount against the naval powers. Many naval powers were vulnerable to overland attack. Soviet naval power was, for example, quite undermined by the eastward advance of the Wehrmacht in 1941. And even the island kingdoms of Britain and Japan were open to aerial attack.
Despite all this, the experience of the 20th century shows that naval power continues to be effective as a means of increasing the security and prosperity of the nations that possess it. The degree of its effectiveness of course depended on circumstances. In both world wars against continental Germany, the naval power of Britain had an enabling function. It ensured that Britain was not defeated and it provided the conditions in which the other services, and the other services of other countries, could win the war. This meant that Britain and its allies won the battle to keep the shipping going that was necessary both for immediate survival and for eventual counter-attack. During WW I, the British naval blockade was sufficiently effective to create serious food shortages in the Central Powers, an important and some would say the decisive factor in their collapse in 1918.
In WW II, the battle of Britain was fought so that German air power could counter British naval power, a precondition for a cross-Channel invasion. When this could not be achieved, naval power preserved the integrity of the UK as the base from which Allied air forces and invading armies could project military power against the German-held continent. In the war against Japanese expansionism, while land campaigns in China, Burma, and latterly in Manchuria were significant, it was US maritime operations in the Pacific campaign that put the dagger to the heart of the island empire, sinking its entire merchant fleet and enabling the coup de grâce to be delivered at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
In the same way, the battle for sea transportation was both offensive and defensive. Sea dependence brings its own vulnerabilities, especially when it is exploited by a technologically advanced and resourceful adversary. In both world wars the naval power of Britain faced one of its greatest challenges when seeking to counter the savage attacks of the German U-boats. In both cases, this defensive campaign was won but it took huge resources to do so. This defensive victory, however, conferred enormous offensive possibilities. Indeed it could almost be regarded as a war-winning campaign in its own right. At the grand strategic level the Axis powers totalled only some 193 million people and 17 per cent of the world's manufacturing capacity. The Allies on the other hand amassed 359 million people and some 60 per cent of the world's manufacturing capacity. Other things being equal, by ensuring that a vast international coalition could act as such and eventually bring the whole of its potential to bear against a weaker adversary, naval power could be said to have had a war-winning function at the level of grand strategy.
The same could, in some theatres, be said at the operational level too. In the Mediterranean campaign, for example, control of the central sea area between Italy and the North African coastline helped determine the outcome of the North African campaign, since the armies in contention there depended in large measure on the supplies brought by sea. Here the effects were clear and followed events at sea directly. But the effect of the battles for the Arctic convoys was much more hard to trace for the outcome of the Nazi-Soviet struggle on the eastern front, where so many other factors had a bearing too. Operations against the shore were both defensive and offensive too. Against a maritime power like Japan, amphibious operations were clearly decisive in that they were the means by which superior land, sea, and air power could be projected eventually against the Japanese homeland itself. The issue in regard to continental powers like Germany was less simple. On D-Day there were 154 divisions on the eastern front, the quintessential continental campaign, but 128 elsewhere defending Germany from attack from the sea, or engaged in theatres such as Italy which were supported from the sea. When it came, Normandy changed the course of the war and hastened its end considerably, but clearly naval power had made a major contribution towards that end.
By 1945, then, the strategic effectiveness of naval power had been subjected to a number of conceptual, theoretical, and technological challenges. The geographic context and the leading characteristics of the main adversary meant that naval power was probably more strategically decisive in its own right in the Pacific war, but even in the European war, the expectations of orthodox navalists such as Mahan and Corbett were largely confirmed. Nonetheless, by the end of WW II new challenges to traditional concepts of naval power were already making themselves manifest. Particularly in the Pacific war the aircraft carrier had replaced the battleship as the navy's ‘capital ship’ and had thereby drawn a line under the experience of several centuries in which the long-range gun had dominated naval warfare. Submarines, in the shape of the U-boat arm of the German navy, had shown they could inflict severe damage on the strongest naval power by avoiding battle altogether and attacking commerce directly.
Perhaps the gravest challenge of all was the advent of nuclear weapons. Strategists around the world concluded that major wars in the nuclear age would be short either because such weapons were used or because of the fear that they would be used unless military operations were ended quickly. Either way, it was far from clear what the function of naval power would then be, since it was by tradition slow-acting. What, for example, was the point of preparing for a major onslaught on the adversary's sea lines of communications, or to defend them against such an assault, if the war was only likely to last a few days? Adm Gorshkov, of whom more later, called this the ‘atomic shock’ and realized, as did many other professional sailors, that the whole function and value of naval power was now in question.
Allied to this was a recurrence of a view that had first appeared between the two world wars in the shape of the ‘bomb v. the battleship’ debate. At that time the RAF believed itself to be at the cutting edge of new technology and able to offer cheaper and more effective ways of performing such strategic functions as the defence of territory against invasions, the defence or attack of coastwise convoys, and so on. Surface warships appeared to be much more vulnerable to attack than they were before the advent of aircraft, and the vital functions they performed seemed also threatened. These views reappeared strongly in the late 1940s in the form of a ferocious conflict between the US navy and air force over the former's proposed carrier construction programme, but found echoes in many other countries as well. In brief, some advocates of air power claimed that aircraft could perform the tasks of naval power much more easily and cheaply.
There were other technological puzzles and concerns as well. For example, over the years, harsh experience had shown that the traditional convoy strategy was the best way of defending shipping. But in the post-war era there were many naval professionals who seriously doubted whether that was still true, given the advent of nuclear-powered submarines guided by surveillance satellites and potentially armed with area attack weapons. Perhaps the experience of naval power in the past was irrelevant, even misleading?
To this set of technological challenges were soon added others of a political and legal nature. One of the hallmarks of traditional naval power was its political utility in peacetime. As Nelson once remarked, ‘a fleet of British ships of war are the best negotiators in Europe’. But the increased political sensitivities of the international community in the nuclear age seemed to make gunboat diplomacy quite unacceptable. By the traditional standards of naval power, for example, Britain should have won the Icelandic Cod ‘wars’ (1958, 1972, 1975) since her naval forces far outweighed the Icelandic opposition. But she did not.
Moreover, the leading characteristics of naval power which had made them so useful in war, peace, and the twilight situations between the two included their controllability, mobility, flexibility, and relative invulnerability, given the size and opacity of the oceans. Now there were many who concluded that new developments in the law of the sea could seriously threaten these attributes. For example, the extension of the territorial sea from 3 to 12 miles (4.8 to 19.3 km) and the prospect of jurisdiction gradually being extended over the 200 mile (322 km) Exclusive Economic Zone could make it much more difficult for navies to move about as freely as they used to, and so could reduce the value of naval power.
To this varied set of challenges, there was a multitude of responses, most particularly from strategic thinkers associated with the Soviet and US navies. Despite the somewhat spotted history of the Russian/Soviet navy, perhaps the most thoroughgoing response came from Adm Sergei Gorshkov who was C-in-C of the Soviet navy from 1956 to 1985. In 1979 his The Sea Power of the State first appeared in the West. In this weighty (if difficult) volume, Gorshkov argued two key points. First, he believed that many of the traditional functions of naval power were still valid, even though the advent of new technology meant they might be performed in different ways. For example, he believed that there had been a shift in naval firepower away from surface ships and towards submarines and aircraft, although this did not stop him building notably effective ships such as the Sovremenny class destroyers or the Kirov class nuclear battlecruisers. ‘Operations against the Shore’ could still be conducted in a nuclear environment; indeed, since the threat of nuclear weapons could be said to force the dispersion of defending forces, they might actually make the conduct of landing operations easier.
Secondly, Gorshkov argued that naval power had become more influential in that some of its older functions were now relatively much more important and that, on top of this, naval power could perform new and vital functions too. Gorshkov, and his American equivalents, put much more stress on the peacetime functions of naval power in winning friends and influencing people around the world. Navies had reach, mobility, and flexibility and could go to places that their sister services could not. In the sensitive Cold War era, peacetime naval diplomacy had a special value. Whereas in the past this had been regarded as something of a bonus, something to do with navies when there were no wars for them to fight, it was now a core function that justified their existence and helped determine their design and composition.
More dramatically, and as had been realized by the British and US navies before the end of WW II, the advent of missiles and nuclear weapons provided them with a strategic nuclear function that made them more important than ever they had been before. Strategic nuclear weapons could be deployed at sea in missile-firing submarines which would need to be protected by open fleet and hunted by another. With such weapons, navies could deter or determine the outcome of wars much more immediately than ever.
Similar views were espoused in the US navy by a variety of strategic thinkers which included Adms Elmo Zuwalt and Stansfield Turner and the largely anonymous authors of the US navy's The Maritime Strategy of 1986. They vigorously argued that naval power was at least as effective strategically as it had always been, and that during the Cold War, it provided the ‘forces of choice’ for many peacetime situations of threat in the Third World. Moreover, navies had adapted to the new technological circumstances sufficiently to be able to make their particular strategic contribution to the outcome of wars.
Such claims can be investigated by considering the three types of conflict in which naval forces have been involved since 1945. The first was the potential full-scale world war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. This would have been a war encompassing the whole world, but its naval aspects are best understood by looking at its application to the waters surrounding north-west Europe. Naval power in the shape of NATO's Strike Fleet had first of all a key role in dissuading the USSR from regarding the Norwegian Sea as a Soviet lake in which it could do what it liked and of persuading allies in advanced positions (most obviously Norway) that significant help would be available were the Soviets not to be deterred.
In the event of a conflict in that area, NATO's Strike Fleet and the supporting naval forces of north-west Europe would have mounted a determined sea-control campaign featuring the local inshore defence of Norway's fiords and the Baltic approaches, the imposition of a modern blockade in the shape of so-called ‘barrier operations’ across the Greenland-Iceland-UK (or GIUK) gap, and offensive operations by carrier and submarine forces looping around the top of Norway to attack the Soviet navy in its own waters, and its infrastructure ashore. Securing sea control by this means would have greatly facilitated the extension of naval support (including landing operations and the provision of close air support ashore) to the conduct of the land campaign in Scandinavia and northern Germany. At the same time, NATO's nuclear posture (whether to use or merely to threaten the use of such weapons) would have been sustained by offensive and defensive strategic nuclear operations at sea. Finally, the land and air campaigns in the NATO area as a whole would have been sustained by another battle of the Atlantic in which war supplies and reinforcements would have been fought across the Atlantic against Soviet submarine and air attack. The outcome of such a Homeric contest is, of course, pure speculation, but its putative importance was demonstrated by the huge efforts that both sides devoted to their naval power during the Cold War era.
There is much more certainty about the contribution made by naval power to the conduct of the second more common because more limited type of conflict that has unfortunately characterized the last 50 years. The Falklands war of 1982 was a very maritime war in the sense that the objective and the main theatre was maritime. Accordingly, it would not have surprised the likes of Corbett that the key contest was for the capacity to control the seas around the disputed islands. Sea control was assured for the Royal Navy by its demonstrated capacity to use its submarines and its aircraft against the Argentine fleet and by its capacity to reduce the Argentine submarine and air threat, if not completely, then at least to manageable proportions. The consequent degree of sea control meant that Argentine forces on the islands were largely cut off from all but inadequate air supply and that the British could accumulate, land, and support the land and air forces that eventually retook the islands.
In some ways, the Gulf war of 1990-1 was more significant in that this was clearly not a maritime theatre. The main disputants (and their allies) were territorial neighbours. The maritime area of operations was not the open ocean so familiar to the likes of Mahan and Corbett but a narrow and constrained sea area almost entirely surrounded by land and air bases. Nonetheless, the contribution made by naval power was unique and indispensable. First and foremost, the war could only be conducted once international and domestic opinion had been reconciled to its necessity. Even though it failed to persuade Iraq to leave Kuwait, the extensive sea-based UN sanctions campaign had a vital function in rallying world opinion and in constructing the international coalition that would eventually go on to conduct the war. Equally essential, huge military supplies and forces needed to be transported into the area. This depended on the Coalition's being able to locate the necessary ships. Many observers have since commented on the impact that the declining fortunes of the West's merchant-shipping fleets might have on the capacity to conduct such a vast operation in the future. Less obviously, success depended absolutely on the degree of sea control exerted by the Coalition. As it turned out, there was no significant challenge to this outside the Gulf (although even a minor threat might have made a tremendous difference) and the potential danger posed by Iraq's missile armed fast-attack craft inside it was quickly disposed of by American and British helicopters and warships.
Once sea control was assured and the forces assembled, military operations could be mounted. As it turned out, amphibious operations were not found to be necessary although the Coalition's very obvious preparations for them undoubtedly persuaded the Iraqis to devote significant forces to the defence of the Kuwait coastline, well away from the main axis of the Allied advance. Naval power was projected ashore in the form of cruise missile and aircraft attack, supplementing the more extensive efforts made by Coalition air forces operating from shore bases. And once the conflict was over, naval forces were needed to take many of the forces home, to clean the detritus of war from the sea and the beaches, to engage in an extensive mine-clearance operation, and of course to maintain sufficient forces in the area to guard against further aggression.
Finally, throughout the Cold War era and increasingly since then, naval power has been deployed in support of humanitarian and peace-support operations that range from hurricane relief in the West Indies to the support of peace-support operations in Bosnia. It would appear from this review that one of the most notable characteristics of naval power is its capacity over the years to adapt to changing circumstances.
Bibliography
- Corbett, Julian S., Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (London, 1911).
- Friedman, Norman, The US Maritime Strategy (London, 1988).
- Gray, Colin, The Leverage of Sea Power (London, 1992).
- Grove, Eric, The Future of Sea Power (London, 1990).
- Mahan, Alfred Thayer, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 (Boston, 1890).
- Till, Geoffrey, Maritime Strategy and the Nuclear Age (London, 1984)
— Geoffrey Till
