The Harvard professor Alfred North Whitehead once described modern philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato. When it comes to naval or maritime theory, something similar might be said about Alfred Thayer Mahan’s 1890 classic, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. A captain in the U.S. Navy, Mahan argued through multiple historical examples for the importance of ‘command of the sea’ as essential to a nation’s strength and economic prowess. Strategically, Mahan emphasised the importance of a large battleship fleet and the decisive battle as determinant of victory in conflict. His work served as a vindication of the Royal Navy’s ascendancy in the eighteenth century and laid out a program for the dominance of the U.S. Navy in the twentieth.
Since Mahan’s time, theoretical reflection on sea power has ramified in multiple ways. Even in his own day, he faced rivals in the French Jeune École, or ‘Young School’, who emphasised the importance of small craft and the technological advantage provided by torpedos and other means of stealth against the large battleship. The Englishman Julian Corbett would revise Mahan’s views in significant ways, providing a kind of synthesis of Mahanian and Jeune École thinking and, perhaps more important, relating maritime strength to land as the primary theatre for military conflict through his engagement with the great Prussian theorist of war Carl von Clausewitz.
In recent decades, theoretical reflection on maritime matters has broadened beyond the strategic or military context. (Ken) Booth’s triangle describes the strategic, diplomatic, and constabulary or policing role of navies as equally important elements. Geoffrey Till has written a standard textbook on Seapower – note how two words have become one – that combines all aspects of maritime theory in a broad synthesis that stresses the difference between modern and post-modern approaches to naval matters. In Till’s account, ‘modern’ denotes the traditional function of fleets in naval conflicts and ‘post-modern’ describes a world in which naval functions are continuously multiplying and changing according to the political and economic context.
Naval theory remains a rich field for exploration and development. As the title of a key work from the 1990s has it, Mahan is Not Enough.
Learn more:
Framing Australia’s Maritime Domain
The Future of Sea Power: Proceedings of the RAN Sea Power Conference 2015