The Future of Sea Power

Eric Grove

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367711160
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000371130
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book, first published in 1990, presents a fundamental reassessment of maritime strategy. It analyses the lessons of twentieth-century naval warfare and examines in detail the changing face of naval warfare, both in terms of the weapons used and the platforms from which they are launched and controlled. It looks at the evolving uses of the seas, both economic and military, and sets sea power against the developing world environment, political, legal and economic, discussing those factors that stimulate nations to exert power at sea and those that limit their naval capabilities. It also develops a theoretical framework for future thinking about maritime strategy and forces, revises and updates Mahan's classical analysis of the foundations of sea power, and discusses thinking about naval tasks.

Part I

The state of the art

Chapter 1

Sea power in the modern world

‘Sea Power’ means different things to different people. It can be an almost mystical concept, a magic formula to be mouthed in awestruck tones to scare away evil spirits such as defence ministers with non-naval priorities or air force officers with alternative means on offer of providing a state’s military power on or across the oceans. To others, following in the well-trodden footsteps of Alfred Thayer Mahan, ‘sea power’ represents a more coherent but equally universal concept, an interlocking system of forms of sea use, military and civil, which has a unique contribution to making powers great or greater still. This book will take a narrower and more measured approach. In series with its two earlier companions on ‘air power’ and ‘land warfare’ it will treat ‘sea power’ as a military concept, that form of military power that is deployed at or from the sea. As Mahan himself put it, ‘the history of sea power, while embracing in its broad sweep all that tends to make a people great upon the sea or by the sea, is largely a military history’;¹ equally, the future emphasized here will be the military future of sea power, although the relationship of naval power with the various forms of sea use must also be considered.

The whole subject has become rather more complex than it once seemed in the age of Mahan. For a number of economic reasons, which are dealt with more fully in Chapter 3, the states that possess the world’s most powerful navies do not possess the world’s largest merchant fleets. Despite many state sponsored attempts to prove Mahan correct in his famous assertion that, ‘The necessity of a navy in the restricted sense of the word, springs, therefore, from the existence of a peaceful shipping and disappears with it’,² the world’s most powerful naval power was outranked at the end of 1986 in merchant shipping by Liberia, Panama, Japan, and Greece.³ Liberia, with 97.8 million deadweight tons of ships and 15.6 per cent of the world’s total tonnage, deployed a military fleet of six patrol craft, none bigger than 50 tons, and a land-based helicopter. The largest weapon available was an 81 mm mortar. Panama, with 69 million tons of merchantmen, 11 per cent of the world’s tonnage, has eight small patrol boats and eight transports; one of the latter is a former shrimp boat.⁴ The two major mercantile marines of the world seem to prosper with nothing more than a coastguard back home. Only when we come to the world’s number three, Japan, with almost 56 million deadweight tons of merchant ships and almost 9 per cent of world tonnage, do we find the possessor of a significant military navy, one that ‘has tended to look more and more like an ocean going navy’.⁵ Nevertheless, its operations are still severely circumscribed and it is still significantly smaller and less capable than the navies of Britain and France, countries which no longer make it into the merchant shipping top ten (unless Britain’s dependencies are included). Something has clearly gone wrong with the Mahanian paradigm.

One factor has been the growing internationalization of marine activities. Mahan drew his lessons from the great days of classical mercantilism and the clashes of autarkic empires competing for slices of a finite ‘cake’ of maritime trade. He thought this might well recur in the twentieth century. In a way it did, but the defeat of the German and Japanese attempts to carve out continental and maritime variations on this theme led to a new world of economic neo-liberalism that still, despite numerous vicissitudes, survives. In this environment the flag a ship carries is very often not a reflection of the identity of the owner. If US-owned ‘flag of convenience’ vessels are taken into account, the tonnage of the American mercantile marine more than doubles to over 65 million tons; but that of Japan increases by an almost similar margin, to over 90 million. Even taking beneficial ownership into account, therefore, the United States remains only third in merchant ship ownership, behind Japan and Greece.⁶

Why then is she the number one naval power, closely followed by the USSR, with a mere 23.4 million tons of merchant ships. The fundamental fact of twentieth-century sea power is that a country’s naval capability is a direct reflection of its sheer economic power in all senses and that that power inevitably reflects its control and exploitation of large land masses. Professor Paul Kennedy has ably demonstrated that Halford Mackinder not Alfred Mahan proved the surer prophet of the new century.⁷ In 1902, in his Britain and the British Seas, Mackinder argued that Britain’s sea power rested on fragile foundations in an era of ‘vast Powers, broad based upon the resources of half continents . . . mere insularity gives no indefeasible title to marine sovereignty.’⁸ In 1904, before the Royal Geographical Society, he went further by suggesting that ‘When historians of the remote future come to look back . . ., it may well be that they will describe the last 400 years as the Columbian epoch, and will say that it ended soon after the year 1900.’ Mackinder argued that with the world now virtually fully explored and divided up, ‘we are for the first time in a position to attempt, with some degree of completeness, a correlation between the larger geographical and the larger historical generalisations.’⁹ In other words, as Kennedy has rather more clearly put it, ‘efficiency and internal development would replace expansionism as the main aim of modern states and . . . size and numbers would be more accurately reflected in the sphere of international developments.’¹⁰ The railway already meant that for the first time in human history, transport by land was as (if not more) effective. And in some ways it was as economical as transport by water. The beginnings of air (and road motor) transport promised to confirm this secular change. In one of the most perceptive comments by a member of Mac-kinder’s audience, Leo Amery, while insisting that a great power must possess sea power as well as land power, accepted that ‘sea power alone, if it is not based on great industry and has a great population behind it, is too weak for offence to really maintain itself in the world struggle’. In future, once the transport revolution had taken place ‘the successful powers will be those who have the greatest industrial base. It will not matter whether they are in the centre of a continent or on an island; those people who have the industrial power and the power of invention and of science will be able to defeat all others.’¹¹

And so they have. The world’s superpowers, the USA and the USSR, stand supreme upon the world’s oceans, their navies confronting each other around the globe as global expressions of the fundamental politico-strategic split that divides the planet. Both sides’ navies are more expressions of a power that has its roots elsewhere than, as the Royal Navy was at the height of its power, the guardians of the foundations of national economic power itself, i.e. seaborne trade. Nothing better symbolizes the foundations of sea power in the modern world than the nature of much of both sides’ current naval investment. The superpowers’ ballistic missile firing submarines prowl their patrol areas ready at a moment’s notice to destroy the political and economic heartland of the other side. They use the hiding place provided by the sea to make themselves the least vulnerable and most stabilizing form of long-range nuclear striking power: they might even be regarded as a form of air power. For the USSR, perhaps the one form of sea use that is fundamental to its national security is the ability to use the seas to deploy this form of strategic reserve as a final sanction against all-out Western nuclear attack. Certainly the USA seems to think so in its recent articulations of how to exert potentially decisive maritime pressure on the USSR in a conventional war.

Modern technology, as explained more fully in Chapter 5, has revolutionized the ability of sea-based forces to ‘thrust power ashore’, especially in the form of bombardment. ‘Sea power’ can thus directly affect the land battle in immediate and short-term ways that it could not do, except on the coastline itself, until the middle decades of this century. Before that ‘sea power’ tended to be an indirect factor in the campaign ashore, maintaining sea-dependent states in the war so that they could exert direct military pressure on the enemy in various ways, be it subsidies to allies, giving battle on land or, in later years, bombing from the air. Even at the height of the Columbian era in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the last and greatest maritime empire, the British, had to maintain armies in the field against France if she was to ensure success: the one war where she did not do this was the one she lost – the War of American Independence.¹² Sea power prevented the wars against Napoleon being lost but Mahan’s famous ‘storm tossed ships upon which the Grand Army never looked’¹³ could do little in themselves to win them.

When that greatest of all maritime strategists, Sir Julian Corbett, wrote up in 1911 the lectures of history and strategy with which he had been intriguing (and annoying) the officers of the Naval War College for the previous five years, he stated the situation plainly: ‘Since men live upon the land and not upon the sea, great issues between nations at war have always been decided – except in the rarest cases – by what your army can do against your territory and national life or else by the fear of what the fleet makes it possible for your army to do.’¹⁴

The events of 1914-18 bore Corbett out. Lord Esher set out the strategic situation only ten days into the war. ‘No one,’ he wrote, ‘. . . believes that the naval forces of the allies can force a decision, or do more than render the lives of the Allied peoples secure and that of the enemy impossible. We shall remain immune from attack. The French will be free to receive supplies from oversea. The Germans will become a beleaguered garrison. These achievements are those of modern sea command.’¹⁵ Esher doubted if a major battle would take place and when it did, off Jutland in 1916, the British fleet commander wisely did not risk losing the fruits of Britain’s current strategic situation for the somewhat limited extra gains that would have been obtained from destroying the German battlefleet. Britain was thus able to continue to draw on the resources of the world to deploy the Imperial Army that, in its finest hour, defeated the full might of the German Army in the summer and autumn of 1918. When, following these land defeats, the Germans gave up most of their battlefleet to the British without a fight the Admiralty was moved to send a congratulatory signal to the Grand Fl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: The state of the art
• Part II: The uses of the sea
• Part III: The changing shape of naval war
• Part IV: The evolving environment
• Part V: Navies in peace and war
• Part VI: Conclusion
• Notes and references
• Acronyms and abbreviations
• Index