21st Century Mahan: Sound Military Conclusions for the Modern Era

By Benjamin F. Armstrong

Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History is well known to students of naval history and strategy, but his other writings are often overlooked when considering today’s challenges.  This collection of eight of Mahan’s essays, along with Benjamin Armstrong’s informative introductions and analysis, illustrates why Mahan’s work remains relevant in the 21st century and how that work can help develop our strategic understanding. 
 
People misunderstand Mahan, Armstrong reveals, because they have only read what others have to say about him, rather than what Mahan actually wrote.  From the challenges of bureaucracy and staff duty, the development of global strategy and fleet composition, and effective leadership included in the first edition, this second edition adds discussions of the United States’ place in the world, the difficulties of naval readiness, and the organization needed for construction of an effective national and naval strategy.  With these added essays from Mahan, and a new preface and conclusion analyzing his work from Armstrong, this book demonstrates that Mahan’s ideas about the importance of sea power continue to provide today’s readers with a necessary foundation to address the military and international challenges of the 21st century. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781682470916

Book preview

PREFACE

Mahan the Man in Width, Depth, and Context

Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan is arguably the best-known naval strategist and naval educator in history. His publications and theories are taught at war colleges and staff colleges around the world, and they lie at the foundation of most naval strategic writing and teaching even one hundred years after his death. Yet, despite the thousands of words that he wrote and the easy access to his works in today’s digital world, modern-day strategists and naval writers tend to discount his work and its relevance to contemporary affairs. Despite this, a deeper engagement with his works offers valuable waypoints in considering naval affairs and national strategy in the twenty-first century, just as it did in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹

One reason Mahan’s work is dismissed as a source of wisdom today is that it is a product of his time. He did not write about the challenges of computers, cyber, space power, or networked operations.² At least, he did not write about them explicitly. Mahan was born in 1840, a child of antebellum America, and died of a heart attack in 1914 at the dawn of World War I. While he had seen a great deal of technological change in his lifetime, he passed away before submarines, aircraft, and wireless telegraphy were widely tested in the cauldron of war. Sometimes these new technologies achieved spectacular effects, and sometimes they created their own new challenges. Mahan saw changes in technology leading to changes in tactics and recognized the potential of these new weapons and communication systems.³ But he was still a man of his age.

Most people connect Mahan with battleships and grand battles, but his interests were much broader and deeper than that. By examining the width of his published work, in depth through his unique position as both a naval officer and a historian, and in context—the time in which he lived and the audiences he wrote for—we can better understand how and why Mahan still has much to offer in the present day. Much of the writing on both Mahan and his contemporary Sir Julian Corbett focuses on examining their theories as doctrine to teach to students, often in isolation. However, looking at Mahan and his writings through the historical lenses of width, depth, and context offers a different perspective. This more historically informed approach, suggested by the British military historian Sir Michael Howard, allows readers to appreciate Mahan and his writing by understanding the historical details of his own life and the time in which he lived.⁴

While almost all modern staff colleges and war colleges teach about Mahan’s theories and ideas, few appear to spend much time teaching about the man himself. For historians engaged in strategic studies this presents a problem. Looking only at selected excerpts of his writings on sea power and strategy, but ignoring who he was and where his ideas came from, gives us no understanding of how he saw his own ideas being applied.⁵ Theory alone is useless. As Mahan’s correspondent and fellow historian and strategist Julian Corbett wrote, theory is useful to naval professionals only if they understand how to adapt that theory, modify it, and think about it within their contemporary context.⁶ The same rule of thumb applies for strategic scholars and historians. Theory is valuable as an element of study that informs analysis, but it cannot be the only element. We must also recognize the unique nature of every historical event. Thus, using a wider historical lens to study Mahan takes us beyond theory to application.

Mahan in Width

Mahan was an enormously prolific author, yet the vast majority of those who discuss his work focus almost entirely on his single most famous book. Some scholars insist that this is the proper way to assess his contributions, telling us that despite the fact that he published numerous other works displaying nuanced views on seapower and world affairs, for better or worse, great strategic thinkers are judged by their masterworks.⁷ At the very least, however, a brief look at those other works may be in order. This book offers the opportunity to start that examination.

Most of those who say that they have read Alfred Thayer Mahan seem to have focused on a very few pages of The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783: the preface, the introduction, and the portion of the first chapter where Mahan lays out his definitions and conceptual ideas and his six elements of sea power. Mahan, however, wrote or contributed to 20 books and more than 160 articles. Including his letters to the editor and interviews with New York newspapers and others gets us closer to 300 pieces.⁸ Almost all of this, save for one book and one article, was published after he published the Influence of Sea Power upon History; thus Influence was written at the start of Mahan’s career as a naval thinker and strategist. In contrast, that other oft-quoted great strategist, Carl von Clausewitz, wrote On War close to the end of his life as the sum total of his knowledge about war and warfare. He did not even finish the book, and his wife, Marie, had to complete the editing and publication.⁹

Scholars of strategy should be nervous when we are told to limit our sources to a single book—or worse, an eighty-page excerpt from that book—as all that is needed for understanding. As Geoffrey Till noted in Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-First Century, who wrote what does matter if we are going to understand the subject.¹⁰ The eight essays that are included in this book, covering topics from command to staff work, from wartime to peacetime, and from strategy to policy, offer a starting point for thinking about Mahan in width. Yet even they are only a start.

Mahan in Depth

In examining Mahan in depth, we should consider his background and how it affected his approach to naval subjects and his writing. Mahan was a career naval officer, but even beyond that he had a lifelong connection to the U.S. military and to military thinking and strategy. He was born in 1840 and grew up on the banks of the Hudson River at the U.S. Military Academy. As a child on post at West Point, surrounded by military scholars, he learned about military life even as he was reading the seagoing novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Frederick Marryat. His father, Dennis Hart Mahan, a renowned military professor and future academic dean of West Point, taught the Civil War generation of U.S. Army generals.¹¹ Alfred Mahan went on to spend forty years in uniform, from his induction at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1856 to his retirement in 1896. He rose through the ranks, fought in the Civil War, commanded ships, had his share of incidents at sea and in landing forces ashore, and retired at the rank of captain. His introduction to intellectual pursuits was thus almost entirely naval.

Mahan’s first published article, an essay on naval education and the curriculum in Annapolis written during his second tour of duty as an instructor at the Naval Academy, was published by the Naval Institute in 1879.¹² Mahan had immediately gravitated toward the institute when he returned to Annapolis in 1878, and he soon became the institute’s president. He was yet to become the prophet of sea power, but he was surrounded by naval officers studying and writing about naval affairs in pursuit of their profession.¹³ And then Stephen Luce asked him to come to Newport and help found the Naval War College. In preparing for his lectures there, he turned to history to understand and elucidate the principles of strategy and geopolitics to teach his fellow naval officers—and eventually to help educate the American people.

Mahan in Context

Understanding the context surrounding the events of history is a key element of how historians study their subjects and practice their craft. Mahan taught at the upper level of professional naval education and focused his scholarship on strategic projects and topics. But as is true for all historians, he did these things in a particular time and place, for a particular audience. When thinking about Mahan’s context, it is important to start with the state of the U.S. Navy in 1885 when he began working on the lectures that would become The Influence of Sea Power upon History. Through the last decades of the nineteenth century the U.S. Navy was a fourth-or fifth-rate power. It lacked modern warships and advanced weapons and trailed the major powers of the world technologically, operationally, and tactically, despite the experiences of the American Civil War. Even Oscar Wilde made fun of the U.S. Navy. When an American character in The Canterville Ghost points out that the United States has no ancient ruins to visit, the ghost replies, You have your navy and your manners.¹⁴ Some historians label this period the doldrums of American naval history.¹⁵

In 1890, Mahan was writing for and about a navy that would likely lose any major naval battle it tried to fight. The United States began to be more assertive on the global stage following the end of Reconstruction and westward expansion, but it lacked a navy that could back up its threats or diplomatic rhetoric.¹⁶ Even as the U.S. Navy rose in power at the dawn of the twentieth century, driven by Mahan’s friend and frequent correspondent Theodore Roosevelt, doubts remained both at home and abroad about the role America and an American navy should play in the world.

Mahan was writing for an American audience that needed to be taught that navies are for more than just coastal defense and showing the flag—they have to prepare for and be able to win battles. That ability creates sea power. To use a poker analogy, a strong oceangoing navy was the table stakes to being a great power. Coastal defense and peacetime operations mattered, of course, and commerce raiding was valuable to an overall wartime strategy, but those elements alone were insufficient for true sea power. That is why Mahan focused on the importance of a large, organized battle fleet and how to operate it in The Influence of Sea Power upon History, and that is why his apparent focus on decisive battles remained a hallmark across his writings. It was central because that was the message his audience most needed to hear. Above and beyond that, however, Mahan wrote about the political and economic challenges of developing naval readiness, the importance of administrative work in keeping a navy relevant and prepared for the future, and the interpersonal challenges of command.

Mahan and the 21st Century

Mahan’s works will not provide strategists or naval professionals with easy answers or set checklists that give them a clear next step. They do explain the principles of naval warfare and national strategy illuminated through historical examples. History, however, is not always directly relevant. Mahan himself wrote that studying history requires judgment and conjecture rather than imparting certainty.… The instruction derived from the past must be supplemented by a particularized study of the indications of the future.¹⁷ The essays included in this second edition are meant to be read and considered in light of what Mahan called contemporary conditions. It is up to readers to use their own judgment and conjecture to see how they might apply and offer wisdom for the future.

INTRODUCTION

Sound Military Conclusions

The world was experiencing rapid globalization, rising powers in Asia threatened to change the balance of power, and across the globe there was a steady increase in naval spending. In the United States, parts of the political class insisted on focusing on the problems at home, and others feared that defense spending during those tough times would result in cookie-cutter reductions across the services without the thought of strategic considerations. The decades at the turn of the twentieth century were a challenging time for the United States, just as they are in the twenty-first century.

More than a hundred years ago an American historian and former naval officer recognized and wrote on these problems. He developed the strategic approaches to America’s challenges that laid the foundation of the American Century. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s work is often ignored in current discussions of national strategy and modern-day challenges, but it is a relevant source of strategic thought that should be considered by those studying solutions for the modern era.

Policymakers, naval leaders, and analysts insist that Mahan wrote for a different time and a different United States. They point to The Influence of Seapower upon History, with its focus on the Age of Sail, and say that it has nothing to offer the high-technology military forces of today. We are encouraged to dismiss him because of his focus on battleships, because of his interest in territorial expansion, and because his approaches are outdated.¹

These writers and scholars are mistaken. They focus solely on his most famous work and unthinkingly repeat the analysis preferred and taught by some academics. Few of these writers appear to have actually read the works of Alfred Thayer Mahan, perhaps because, as historian Geoffrey Till noted, he sometimes suffers from having written more than most people are prepared to read.² Mahan wrote more than a dozen books and several dozen articles on topics ranging from combat leadership to global strategy. The world the U.S. Navy faced at the end of the nineteenth century is in many ways similar to the one it faces in the twenty-first century. Much of his strategic thinking is applicable today, and it deserves consideration as the United States and the U.S. Navy face the challenges of the new century.³

Turn of the Century

Mahan wrote in a time of change and international development. Increasing consumption at the end of the nineteenth century led to a general rise in standard of living for Americans and other Westerners compared with the rest of the world. Economic interests took a primary place in the interactions between nations. The development of rapid transportation and communication systems, driven by steam power and undersea telegraph cables, began to link the globe. Today’s writers would say that the world was experiencing globalization. Mahan wrote that the vast increase in the rapidity of communication, has multiplied and strengthened the bonds knitting the interests of nations to one another, till the whole now forms an articulated system.⁴ It was apparent to him that in the new century’s international relations, the maintenance of the status quo, for purely utilitarian reasons of an economical character, has gradually become the ideal.⁵

In this increasingly interconnected world, Mahan perceived that while there were motives to maintain the status quo, there were also other motivations at play. He believed that the increased speed of communication and views of national greatness based purely on economics tended to make the new global order excessively sensitive and open to instability. Commerce, on the one hand deters from war, he wrote, but on the other hand it engenders conflict, fostering ambitions and strifes which tend toward armed conflict.⁶ In a statement reminiscent of another great strategist, Carl von Clausewitz, Mahan wrote that war is simply a political movement, though violent and exceptional in its character.⁷ Yet Mahan took a step beyond Clausewitz and tied the political, military, and economic together, writing that although logically separable, in practice the political, commercial, and military needs are so intertwined that their mutual interaction constitutes one problem.⁸ Economic or commercial motivations could drive a nation to military conflicts just as easily as they could encourage stability in the global commons.

Looking East

With these conclusions as background, Mahan looked for the next area of great conflict and settled on Asia. A century before Thomas Friedman wrote that the rise of Asia demonstrated the flattening of the global political landscape, Mahan suggested that Japan, India, and China would become central players in a great economic and political conflict with the West. Because the economic and political could not be separated from the military, he foresaw trouble. He predicted a stirring, a rousting from sleep, in the non-Western world and a craving for the two advantages the West held at the turn of the last nineteenth: power and material prosperity.⁹

Japan’s adoption of some elements of Western culture and economics was his first indicator. He also saw India, rising both economically and in population, as having great potential. Both countries might adopt important portions of Western culture, resulting in what he called a conversion.

China, however, was a different story. Mahan admitted that Westerners knew less about China in general, but experience had already shown a forceful and determined character in the Chinese people. Based on the general conservatism in Chinese culture he predicted comparative slowness of evolution … but that which for so long has kept China one, amid many diversities, may be counted upon in the future to insure a substantial unity of impulse. He feared that China would lead a rejection of Western values and pull the other future powers of Asia toward a conflict with the West.¹⁰

As other parts of the world sought the power and material prosperity of the West, Mahan saw the coming conflict beginning in the realm of economic competition. Access to markets and to the raw materials needed for production lay at the heart of economic competition between nations. As the interaction of commerce and finance shows a unity in the modern civilized world, he wrote, so does the struggle for new markets and for predominance in old, reveal the unsubdued diversity.¹¹ The large populations of Asia struggling to gain economic strength and to achieve the power and prosperity of the West were likely to do so based on their own cultural norms rather than those of the West. China and the West, Mahan said, are running as yet on wholly different lines, springing from conceptions radically different.¹² These differences would result in competition and conflict.

Mahan believed that the world was at the beginning of this marked movement toward economic competition that would bring nations into political and military conflict.¹³ He reminded his readers that those who want will take, if they can, not merely from motives of high policy and as legal opportunity offers, but for the simple reasons that they have not, that they desire, and that they are able.¹⁴ Because of this, and because we are not living in a perfect world, and we may not expect to deal with imperfect conditions by methods ideally perfect, Mahan turned his attention to military policy.¹⁵

Preparing for Conflict

As the twentieth century approached, Mahan looked at his nation’s military policy and saw disaster on the horizon. If his analysis of international affairs was correct—if the United States faced rapid globalization, rising powers in the East, and particularly the awakening of China and Japan—then the military policy of the United States was in desperate need of an overhaul.

The American people at that time considered the Army more important to national security than the Navy, even though, as Mahan noted, America was not at risk of invasion. And if an invasion were to occur, the risk must be at sea … yet the force of men in the navy is smaller, by more than half, than that in the army.¹⁶ Overseas commerce, overseas political relationships, and commercial maritime routes would clearly dominate as the primary objects of external policy of nations. It was only logical that the instrument for the maintenance of policy directed upon these objects is the Navy.¹⁷ The powerful nations of Europe were on the same page as Mahan. He noticed that European newspapers and political journals were showing an appreciation for the importance of naval forces in the new century, and it was reflected in the growth of naval spending and sizes of fleets.¹⁸

Approaching the question of military organization, Mahan wrote that America should not try to calculate how big a military force would be necessary to ensure superiority over the other armies and navies of the world. Far better to determine what there is in the political status of the world, including not only the material interests but the temper of nations, which involves a reasonable, even though remote, prospect of difficulties which may prove insoluble except by war. Those prospective difficulties provided the guidance for the strategic vision of the nation. It is not the most probable of danger, he said, but the most formidable that must be selected as measuring the degree of military precautions to be embodied in the military preparations thenceforth to be maintained.¹⁹ A military organization that favored naval power was the most strategically viable course in his view, because every danger of a military character to which the United States is exposed can be met best outside her own territory—at sea. Preparedness for naval war—preparedness against naval attack and for naval offence—is preparedness for anything that is likely to occur.²⁰

The Modern Mahanian World

While the technology of today’s Navy has developed far beyond anything Mahan could have conceived, it is unlikely that it would surprise him if he were here. He recognized the importance of rapid mechanization, or what we call the development of high technology. Nor would the political state of the world that the United States faces today have surprised him. Globalization, rising powers, Asian development, and the impact of technology were just as important a century ago as they are today.

As the defense budgets of the United States and the European community have shrunk in the early twenty-first century, it is important that policymakers understand the world that they face and consider the strategic questions that should guide their decisions. Mahan laid out the questions that should be asked when facing similar challenges. Answering them can help create a sound foundation for any new approach to defense spending as the twenty-first century progresses.

First, what in the temper of nations around the world could lead to a reasonable expectation of armed conflict? Considerations should include growing movements in the non-Western world for freedom and representative government, and the potential conflict of that temperament with the spread of radical and religious ideologies. Thought must also be given to the role played by smaller nations such as Iran and North Korea when they attempt to exploit the divisions and uncertainty introduced by the most recent round of globalization. The growing potential for economic competition between the rising powers of China, India, and Brazil and the established powers like the United States and European Union likewise raises a reasonable expectation of conflict in the future.

Second, what is the most formidable of these potential conflicts? While the clash between authoritarian governments and freedom movements is likely to create conflict, it produces little direct strategic threat to the United States as a nation. Likewise, attempts to exploit international instability by regional powers will probably impact American policy and interests, but not the security of the country’s borders. The prospect of an armed conflict between the United States and China sparked by economic competition is a very formidable challenge and a more direct threat to the United States. Mahan would not suggest ignoring the first two reasonable expectations; however, according to his strategic approach, the focus should be on the final and most formidable threat to American security.

Policymakers today face similar challenges to develop sound, strategically shaped defense policy as in Mahan’s day. The tendency of those in the halls of power to avoid making hard decisions has not changed. As the United States approaches the possibility of a plateau in defense spending, some call for the budget to be evenly divided between the services, ignoring Mahan’s warning about the great risks of such a policy. The rise of counterinsurgency strategy and doctrine, and a growing desire by some policymakers to apply that operational and tactical template to all defense problems also demonstrate a potential risk of the pendulum swing that Mahan warned about.

Reading the Forgotten Strategist

There are two particular reasons why Mahan’s work has slowly fallen out of favor. First, his writing style isn’t particularly easy for twenty-first-century readers. This is especially true of his books and longer works of history, including his seminal work, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1815. Even Mahan’s son admitted that reading his work can be a laborious process. Mahan realized the problem, writing in his autobiography, From Sail to Steam, that his attempt to clarify every assertion and qualify every statement tended to make his work thorough, but difficult reading.

Second, students of military history and international affairs, as well as naval officers, are being taught that Mahan’s work focused on two things that lack relevance in the modern world: the importance of battleships and the main battle fleet, and America’s entry into colonialism at the start of the twentieth century with the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands, the possession of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War of 1898, and the construction of the Panama Canal. Because many naval analysts and officers suffer from a measure of technological determinism, Mahan’s alleged focus on a vessel that has long been replaced in the fleets of the world causes many to dismiss his writing as irrelevant. They are wrong.

21st Century Mahan: Sound Military Conclusions for the Modern Era takes its title from a quote in Mahan’s 1912 book Armaments and Arbitration. He wrote that the study of military history lies at the foundation of all sound military conclusions and practices.²¹ Looking in retrospect at the history Mahan wrote and the strategic legacy he left through his works will help illuminate the global challenges we face at the start of this century just as his work did originally at the start of the last century.

The purpose of this book is to return the discussion of Mahan as a strategist and naval thinker to our time, and to point out the importance of his writings and principles when approaching modern-day challenges. The eight essays that make up the bulk of this book were selected to show readers that Mahan’s work is neither unreadable nor irrelevant.

Many of the articles that he wrote for magazines such as Harper’s and Britain’s National Review are more concise and approachable than the long historical treatments of conflicts like the War of 1812 and the American Revolution that he published in book form. The language in the essays is clearer because he knowingly approached a nonspecialist readership and did not feel the