Seapower

A Guide for the Twenty-First Century

Geoffrey Till

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317219279
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

This is the fourth, revised and updated, edition of Geoffrey Till's Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-first Century.

The rise of the Chinese and other Asian navies, worsening quarrels over maritime jurisdiction and the United States' maritime pivot towards the Asia-Pacific region reminds us that the sea has always been central to human development as a source of resources, and as a means of transportation, information-exchange and strategic dominion. It has provided the basis for mankind's prosperity and security, and this is even more true in the early twenty-first century, with the emergence of an increasingly globalised world trading system. Navies have always provided a way of policing, and sometimes exploiting, the system. In contemporary conditions, navies, and other forms of maritime power, are having to adapt, in order to exert the maximum power ashore in the company of others and to expand the range of their interests, activities and responsibilities. While these new tasks are developing fast, traditional ones still predominate. Deterrence remains the first duty of today's navies, backed up by the need to 'fight and win' if necessary. How navies and their states balance these two imperatives will tell us a great deal about our future in this increasingly maritime century. This book investigates the consequences of all this for the developing nature, composition and functions of all the world's significant navies, and provides a guide for anyone interested in the changing and crucial role of seapower in the twenty-first century.

Seapower is essential reading for all students of naval power, maritime security and naval history, and highly recommended for students of strategic studies, international security and international relations.

1
In search of seapower

There is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.

(Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows)

1.1 Introduction: the maritime case

From the very beginning of recorded history, peoples and nations have sought to be powerful at sea. Those who did so recognised that there was something uniquely cost-effective about seapower, as compared to landpower, and that those nations best able to exploit its attributes profited hugely over those who did not. Alfred Thayer Mahan, of whom more shortly, went much further than this and claimed that ‘[c]ontrol 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’.¹ Such observations have been incorporated into a kind of maritime narrative that seeks to justify and explain the proposition that nations large and small that ‘mess around in boats’ have had, and continue to have, a commanding economic and strategic advantage over those that do not. Being American, Mahan, and his British counterpart Sir Julian Corbett, emphasised European experience to prove their point.

From the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, the Europeans discovered, and were able to exploit, the huge advantage to be derived from the close association between the military and mercantile aspects of seapower. The British of the era of the Napoleonic wars understood this point very well. For them ‘maritime power’ meant a potent mix of a small, relatively agile army and extensive naval and economic power, which in turn made possible a wide-ranging grand strategy based on economic pressure exercised through seapower. As Liddell Hart put it, there were two aspects to this maritime strategy,

one financial, which embraced the subsidising and military provisioning of allies; the other military, which embraced seaborne expeditions against the enemy’s vulnerable extremities. In the Napoleonic wars, whatever was said and hoped by Englishmen who day-dreamed of quick victories, the method pursued in the end was financial attrition.

Even with the cost of the war spiralling from £29,000,000 per annum in 1804 to over £70,000,000 in 1813, ‘Britain was able to sustain a level of expenditure that far outstripped that of every other country in Europe’.²

What made this possible was the simple fact that the British Empire was founded on seapower, and that seapower was founded on trade. The Royal Navy maintained the international stability in which trade could flourish; it protected the trade routes and the merchant ships that plied them; its command of the sea made possible the movement and supply of land-forces, which protected the colonies and Britain’s commercial interests from overland attack and internal disorder. The Royal Navy was disposed and deployed accordingly around the world to protect the Imperial system – a system that depended on safe and rapid communications of all sorts.³ Trade and the Royal Navy, in short, held the Empire together and made Britain the wealthiest and most powerful of all nations.⁴

And all this provided what Niall Ferguson has called ‘world dominion on the cheap’. The British devoted rather less than 2.5 per cent of their gross national product (GNP) to defence, maintained only 215,000 soldiers but a navy of 100,000. Before the First World War, they built 27 Dreadnoughts, the Death Stars of their time, for £49 million, less than the annual interest charge on the national debt.⁵ The cost-effectiveness of sea-based enterprise was even more clearly displayed in Britain’s trading relationships with its informal empire in South America, where many of the benefits of imperialism were enjoyed but without the expensive entanglements that usually came with them.

Arguably, the United States took the same maritime baton from the British during the course of the Second World War. As Walter Russell Mead has remarked:

The world system today as managed by the United States preserves most of the chief features of the British system that existed before World War II: a liberal, maritime, international order that promotes the free flow of capital and goods and the development of liberal economic and political institutions and values.⁶

Two points need to be made about this. The first is the emphasis on the word ‘liberal’, the notion that certain characteristics of government facilitate economic growth and development and so should be actively encouraged. These include such things as secure property and contract rights, personal liberty, stable responsive incorrupt government and so on.⁷ As we shall see in Chapter 4, these might indeed be taken as some of the more important constituents of sustainable seapower.

Second, Mead’s emphasis on the word ‘maritime’ is significant because the British Empire was plainly not based on demographic advantage, nor on the size of its commercial activity, which at its peak in the 1870s amounted to no more than 9 per cent of the world’s GNP.⁸ It was the consequence of entrepreneurial skill, industrial and technological prowess, a general capacity to win wars (though often losing the first round) and perhaps, above all, of maritime strength, both commercial and naval. Mahan wrote of the ‘[o]verwhelming power, destined to be used as selfishly, as aggressively, though not as cruelly, and much more successfully than any that had preceded it. This was the power of the sea.’⁹ This was and continues to be a ‘maritime order’, based on seapower, and one that has indeed shaped the world. On the basis of this kind of maritime narrative, Walter McDougall has concluded: ‘all truly grand and successful strategies have been essentially (if not exclusively) maritime’.¹⁰

Caveats, exceptions and challenges

Of course, this simple and apparently persuasive maritime narrative has had its challengers. Caveats and cautions have to be entered and the historic victory of the maritime powers, if that is what happened, was far from effortless, or assured. While British naval supremacy in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars shielded the country from invasion, provided the means for expeditionary operations on the continent of Europe, and with the aid of a sophisticated sea-based financial system allowed them to subsidise one anti-Napoleonic coalition after another, this was at considerable human, social and financial cost and was fraught with continuing difficulty.¹¹

Geo-politicians such as Halford Mackinder have pointed out that many long-lasting empires were based on landpower not seapower. Mahan and others had made too much of the Columbian era. This, in fact, was the exception to the rule. The Mongols, for example, created a massive empire lasting some 500 years that was about as far from the sea as it is geographically possible to get. The great Eurasian empire of Genghis Khan and his successors stretched from Europe to the Pacific and took in South Asia and much of the Middle East as well. But this was an empire based on horsepower not seapower, although in places the Mongols did approach the sea. Moreover, the Mongol Empire turned into a great force of ‘global connectedness’ if not of true globalisation. Genghis (1206–27) with speed, surprise and the ability to operate across incredible distances conquered more peoples and territory in 25 years than Rome had managed in 400, and it was at the time the most densely populated area of the world’s surface. Genghis galvanised the Silk Route and established what was in effect a free-trade zone stretching from Korea to the Balkans, introduced a universal alphabet, the first international postal system and a body of law and regulation that encouraged trade to flourish, German miners to work in China, and Chinese doctors to practice in Persia.¹² Tamerlane carried this still further, dominating the great overland trunk road of Eurasian commerce.¹³ The rise of Muscovy over Gogol’s ‘golden green ocean of the steppes’ echoed all this in some respects. But this was no Athens; it was a Eurasian Sparta that exploited the trade routes of the interior of Mackinder’s ‘world island’ but that rested in practice on social and political oppression.¹⁴

Moreover, being maritime brings vulnerabilities as well as opportunities. Sophisticated maritime powers depend on a complex network of shipping that imports raw materials, food and uncompleted goods and exports finished and manufactured products. This can be a delicate system, and a dangerous source of vulnerability especially when the distracting effect of continental threats, or governmental neglect, or the appearance of a stronger maritime adversary produces a navy of insufficient strength to protect the wider maritime system on which it ultimately depends. Concerns about these centrifugal tendencies were widely felt even by the British at the apparent height of their imperial power. Thus Rudyard Kipling’s elegy to Empire at the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee of 1897:

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dunes and headlands sinks the fire;
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!¹⁵

As the fates of the Netherlands in the late seventeenth century and Japan, more dramatically, in the mid-twentieth century show, not just the interests but also the very survival of the maritime power may be at stake if their inescapable vulnerabilities are successfully exploited by others.

Again, turning away from the sea did not necessarily doom a state to depression and decay. China’s reversion to a much more ‘continental’ approach under the later Ming and through the early Qing dynasties did not lead to national decline. The Qing empire founded on its continental strength and an artful combination of hard and soft power¹⁶ was arguably at its apogee in the second half of the eighteenth century.¹⁷ China retained most of its links with the outside world, but the sheer size of its internal market (bigger than the whole of Europe’s) meant that in relative terms China’s international trade could remain quite small without strategic penalty.¹⁸ China’s view of the fundamental unimportance of maritime trade was expressed by the Qianlong Emperor to King George III through Lord Macartney in 1793:

Our dynasty’s majestic virtue has penetrated into every country under heaven, and kings of nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea. As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures …¹⁹

Finally, the geo-politicians argued that the ‘world political potential of sea power had been in full retreat long before the first submarine had plunged below the surface and the first plane had taken to the air’.²⁰ This was because land communications were improving. Transcontinental railways were facilitating the concentration of industrial capacity as a route to power rather than the acquisition of colonies. Clearly, the German economic rise of the late nineteenth century and Russia’s a little later on did not depend on seapower.²¹

To this, the ‘Maritimists’ might very well respond that by neglecting the sea – by getting the balance between land and sea power ‘wrong’ – Qing China, and for that matter Japan and India too, opened themselves up to the depredations of those countries that hadn’t and doomed themselves to a period of strategic vulnerability and decline from which China and India are only now recovering. Japan, however, provides a more complex case. When it was re-introduced by Commodore Perry and his ‘black ships’ to the potential of seapower, it responded much more enthusiastically but still the continental imperative remained (too?) strong.

In some ways, though, scepticism about the ‘terrible simplicities’ of the maritime narrative came to a head during the Cold War and in the aftermath of the Second World War in Europe, a contest effectively decided by the Homeric struggle between two massive continental powers. First, as far as sceptics were concerned, the seapower of a continental state in the form of a growing merchant marine and an increasingly powerful navy seemed likely to be able to exploit the inevitable vulnerabilities of a maritime alliance, espec...