Modern Military Strategy

An Introduction

Elinor C. Sloan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317578772
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to post-Cold War military theory for students of strategic studies.

This second edition has been fully revised and updated, including a new chapter on peacekeeping, and examines contemporary strategic thought on the conduct of war in the sea, land, air, nuclear, space and cyber domains, as well as irregular warfare. Each chapter identifies contemporary strategic thinkers in a particular area, examines strategic thought through the lens of identifiable themes, and discusses the ideas of classical strategists to provide historical context. Examples of the link between the use of military force and the pursuit of political objectives are presented, such as airpower against ISIS and in Libya, counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq, counter-piracy operations off the coast of Africa, and the Stuxnet virus in Iran. The chapters identify trends, statements and principles that indicate how military power can best be employed to effect political ends, while the conclusion paints an overall picture of the relationship between classic and contemporary strategic thinking within each warfare domain.

This book will be essential reading for students of strategic studies, war studies and military history, and is highly recommended for students of security studies and international relations in general.

Part I

Traditional dimensions of strategy

1 Seapower

Quiet and ubiquitous, seapower is the military force that is perhaps most fundamental to the enduring security and prosperity of the vast majority of nations. This is because naval forces, unlike land and air forces, are inextricably linked to the predominant phenomenon of our age: globalization. ‘Seapower’, notes the pre-eminent contemporary maritime strategist, Britain’s Geoffrey Till, ‘is at the heart of the globalization process in a way that land and air power are not’.¹

Globalization means the growing interconnectedness of the world and the fact that activities in distant locations increasingly impact circumstances at home and vice versa. The phenomenon is not new: the first great era of globalization lasted from about 1870 to 1914 and spawned the father of the concept of seapower, Alfred Thayer Mahan. His was essentially a blue-water vision of naval forces – that is, one that saw forces operating well offshore and countering one another to secure maritime trade routes. Yet even in these early years there was an alternate vision, one expressed by Sir Julian Stafford Corbett, of the use of naval forces to assist the army in its operations on shore. The ideas of Mahan and Corbett, history’s best-known seapower strategists, provide a useful framework in which to view modern ideas about the role of naval forces in a nation’s security policy.

Alfred Thayer Mahan²

A US naval officer who served during the American Civil War, Alfred Thayer Mahan remained in the US Navy for more than two decades after the war’s end. In 1886 he was given as his final posting the position of lecturer in naval history and strategy at, and president of, the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He subsequently went on to a prodigious writing career, but is best known for the lectures he turned into a two-part volume on seapower: The Influence of Sea Power Upon History (1890) and The Influence of Sea Power Upon the French Revolution and Empire (1892). The goal of these two works, which cover the periods 1660–1783 and 1793–1812 respectively, was to examine the ‘effect of sea power upon the course of history and the prosperity of nations’.³ Mahan presents his findings early, stating in the preface to the first volume that ‘mastery of the sea rested with the victor’.⁴ Most of the remaining pages are devoted to naval histories of various battles, Mahan’s own ‘collection of special instances in which the precise effect [of superior naval power] has been made clear’.⁵ Unfortunately the combined works lack a chapter that draws together conclusions, and only sporadically does Mahan relate the narrative back to his original thesis. It is therefore left to others to concisely state the Influence volumes’ overall argument: ‘Their central theme is simple’, writes Philip A. Crowl in the pages of the 1986 Makers of Modern Strategy. ‘In every phase of the prolonged contest between France and England, from 1688 to the fall of Napoleon, command of the sea by naval domination, or lack of it, determined the outcome.’⁶

For Mahan the idea of seapower had two essential meanings, one relatively narrow and a second comparatively broad, both of which pertain to the sea as a great highway of important trade routes. The first meaning centres on straightforward naval capability – that is, ‘military strength afloat … that rules the sea or any part of it by force’.⁷ A second, broader, meaning of seapower includes ‘peaceful and extensive commerce’, elaborated to involve (1) production; (2) shipping; and (3) colonies and markets.⁸ A seapower must produce and exchange goods, carry out this exchange through shipping and, significantly, have access to secure ‘stations along the road’ – in Mahan’s age, colonial possessions – from which ‘armed shipping’ could facilitate trade by protecting the ‘peaceful vessels of commerce’.⁹ Contemporary definitions similarly encompass a narrow and broad understanding of the term. Seapower, argues Sam Tangredi, entails not only the operations of navies in war, but also the control of international trade and commerce, the use and control of ocean resources and the use of navies as instruments of diplomacy, deterrence and political influence in peacetime.¹⁰

Mahan argued the aim of naval strategy was to support and increase seapower, and the purpose of seapower was, in turn, to enable sea control. The latter meant ensuring the great sea commons through which trade flows was open to a nation’s own use and interests at all times, and deprived to its enemies in wartime. Along these lines, contemporary British Maritime Doctrine has defined sea control as ‘the condition in which one has freedom of action to use the sea for one’s own purpose in specified areas and for specified periods of time and, where necessary, to deny or limit its use to the enemy’.¹¹ But, as will be seen below, the notion of sea control underwent a subtle change in the post-Cold War era. ‘In a globalized world [sea control] is less a question of “securing” the sea in the sense of appropriating it for one’s own use’, argued Geoffrey Till in the mid-2000s, ‘and more of “making it secure” for everyone but the enemies of the system to use’.¹²

Although Mahan acknowledged that sea traffic was at times threatened by piracy, his view of the history of seapower was largely one of a contest between nations – and this contest took place on the open oceans. The requirement was for overbearing power on the sea to drive the enemy’s fleet from the sea; such power would have to come from capital ships, meaning armoured battleships, but Mahan left open whether this was better obtained through a few very big ships or more numerous medium ships. It follows that he discounted the use of naval forces in coastal operations in support of land forces, something he had witnessed and observed to be generally ineffectual during the Civil War. ‘On no point is Mahan more emphatic’, states Crowl. ‘The primary mission of a battle fleet is to engage the enemy’s fleet.’¹³

Sir Julian Stafford Corbett

Scholars have pointed to Mahan’s failure to incorporate power projection from the sea onto land and the interdependence of armies and navies in wartime as key shortfalls in his thinking. Joint warfare, incorporating sea, land and air forces, was important during the Cold War but has become all but mantra in the Western world in the twenty-first century. For early thinking about joint warfare we can turn to a second naval strategist of the early twentieth century, Sir Julian Stafford Corbett.

A contemporary of Mahan’s, Corbett was a British scholar, a civilian naval historian who lectured at the British Naval War College and is best known for his 1911 book Some Principles of Maritime Strategy. The book itself examines a broad set of concepts including, among others, the concentration of forces at sea and the notion of a decisive battle (both of which he refuted), maritime communications, command of the sea, blockades and an extensive discussion of limited war. But of most interest here, because of its applicability to the present era, is his discussion of the integration of seapower and landpower in the context of expeditionary warfare.

The first indication of the importance Corbett attributed to what he refers to as ‘combined warfare’, but is today called joint warfare, lies in the book’s title and the use of the term ‘maritime strategy’. A maritime strategy encompasses naval strategy, but is broader in nature. For Corbett, a maritime strategy is necessary whenever there is a war in which the sea is a substantial factor. But that strategy must necessarily include other elements because, as he pointed out, ‘it is almost impossible that a war can be decided by naval action alone … [s]ince men live upon the land and not upon the sea’.¹⁴ In his view, ‘the paramount concern … of maritime strategy is to determine the mutual relations of your army and navy in a plan of war’.¹⁵ ‘Naval strategy’, in turn, is that part of maritime strategy that the fleet plays in relation to the action of the land forces.¹⁶

Just as naval power cannot determine the outcome of a war, nor can landpower effectively operate without the assistance of the navy. Unless by happenchance troops are being transported to friendly territory, the role of the navy must go beyond the simple transport of troops. ‘[A]n army acting overseas against hostile territory is an incomplete organism incapable of striking its blow in the most effective manner without the assistance of the men of the fleet’, Corbett argues. ‘Alone and unaided the army cannot depend on getting ashore, it cannot supply itself, it cannot secure its retreat, nor can it avail itself of the highest advantages of amphibious force.’¹⁷ For Corbett, one scholarly expert has concluded: ‘In order for war to be decisive … military force must be projected ashore, and this is most effectively done from the sea.’¹⁸

Although Corbett discussed joint and combined operations, his analysis was comparatively brief. Indeed, most of Some Principles is devoted to other concepts; the US Naval War College has described Corbett’s contribution on joint and combined military operations as being one of ‘partial insights’.¹⁹ Nonetheless, his views provide an important set of contrasting ideas to those of Mahan, and therefore help establish a useful framework in which to view the evolution of strategic thought in the area of seapower since the end of the Cold War.

The first post-Cold War decade

Navy strategy

With the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union, the predominant sea power of the day, the United States, prevailed over the predominant land-based power, Russia and its satellites – just as Mahan would have predicted. Yet throughout the Cold War the Soviet Union was also a significant sea power. US naval doctrines and strategies centred on capabilities, scenarios and operations both for sea control and power projection. Western naval forces maintained open the sea lines of communications between North America and Europe; patrolled the chokepoints between Soviet naval outlets and the wider ocean; assisted in opening up relations with China (since the existence of the Pacific Fleet convinced China the West could back it in any confrontation against the Soviet Union); and helped in arming forces battling the Soviets in Afghanistan (because supplies were first shipped to Pakistan by sea and then overland to Afghanistan). When it entered power, the Carter administration questioned the value of power projection forces, producing Seaplan 2000, which focused on sea control and downgraded the power projection mission. But the Reagan administration reversed the trend, focusing first on sea control through strikes and decisive battles in the Norwegian Sea, and then on naval power projection against Soviet ground targets. By including the land dimension, the new strategy, which was ambitious and expensive and credited with assisting in bringing about the Soviet implosion, was not just a naval strategy but also a maritime strategy.²⁰

Rendered moot by the dramatically new security environment, US naval strategy underwent a substantial change in the 1990s. The overall context was one of unpredictable risks to security brought on by failed states, ethnic conflict, the resurgence of old hatreds, humanitarian crises and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Western navies were called on to assist crisis management efforts on land by bringing power to bear in support of ground forces. The attendant shift in strategic focus, notes Till, was away from what navies do at sea, and toward what they can do from the sea.²¹

The new strategic focus was reflected in early strategy documents produced by the US Navy as it adjusted to the nature of the post-Cold War security environment. Jointly drafted by the US Navy and the US Marine Corps, … From the Sea (1992) and Forward…From the Sea (1994) defined a vision for the Navy and Marine Corps that was largely Corbettian in nature. The 1992 document makes explicit that the direction it provides ‘represents a fundamental shift away from open-ocean warfighting on the sea toward joint operations from the sea’,²² while the 1994 elaboration confirms ‘[t]he new direction for the Naval Service remains focused on our ability to project power from the sea in critical littoral regions of the world’ (emphasis added).²³ Rather than seeking to achieve command of the seas in a Mahanian sense, the idea was to use the command of the seas enjoyed by the United States as a result of its competitor’s demise to achieve other goals.

The implicit and underlying premise of the two US Navy documents was that while events happen at sea, people ultimately live on land and thus to have strategic impact the navy must be able to exert at least a measure of influence on activities ashore. Moreover, the vast majority of humanity, it was noted in several places, lives within close proximity of the sea or waters that reach the sea. The combination of these factors meant that navies would have to operate in the ‘littoral’ regions, defined by …From the Sea as areas of the open ocean that are close to shore and have to be controlled if one is to support operations ashore, and areas of land close to shore that can be defended directly from the sea. As usefully elaborated by Norman Friedman, ‘the littoral is distinguished from a much narrower coastal strip … The landward part of the littoral includes most of the world’s population and most of the major cities’ while the seaward portion may be considered the 200-mile exclusion zone established under the United Nations Treaty on the Law of the Sea.²⁴ At the ...