Volume 7, Issue 4, Winter 2022 19 Context - Navies and Nations in the World Context continues, throughout centuries, to be one of the elements of understanding which historians insist on. It is central to how history majors at universities across the world are taught to examine and understand the times, places, and people that they study. Each man this article has been discussing was a naval educator, and both taught at the upper level of professional military education. They were both historians. But they taught and studied in far different places, with different students, and for different navies and marine corps. When thinking about context it is important to startwith the state of the U.S. Navy in 1885when Mahan began working on the lectures that would become The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. Through the last decades of the 19th century the U.S. Navy was a fourth or fifth rate power. It lacked modern warships, it lacked the most advanced weapons, and it didn’t have a Congress or a country that seemed to care about it. 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.”[xxii] When his book was published in 1890, Alfred Thayer Mahan was writing for a navy that would likely lose any major naval battle that they tried to fight. Even as the United States began to be more assertive on the global stage following the end of Reconstruction and westward expansion, it did not have a navy that could do much to back up threats or diplomatic rhetoric.[xxiii] As the U.S. Navy rose at the dawn of the twentieth century, driven by Mahan’s friend and frequent correspondent Theodore Roosevelt, doubts remained about the role America and an American navy should play in the world. This was the audience that Mahan was writing for, an American audience that needed to be taught that navies are more than just coastal defense and showing the flag, that they have to prepare for and be able to win battles, and that ability then helps to create sea power. To use a poker analogy, it was the table stakes to being a great power, and the U.S. needed to figure out how to do it. It was not that coastal defense or peacetime operations did not matter, or that commerce raiding was not valuable to an overall strategy, but that these elements alone were insufficient. So it should make sense to us that the large, organized, battle fleet and how it operated was the focus of Mahan’s message in The Influence of Sea Power Upon History and that his apparent focus on “decisive” battles remained a hallmark across his writings. It was central because that was the message he thought his audience most needed to hear. Corbett had a fundamentally different audience. His audience was already the global naval hegemon with the largest and most powerful navy in the world. It was assumed that British naval officers knew that they had to win battles. And they had been building large, organized battle fleets, and operating them for generations. Nobody needed to be reminded of the importance of it.[xxiv] In fact, the Royal Navy’s focus on battles and their centuries-long embrace of the need for “decisive” sea power became a major concern for Corbett. If Mahan needed to convince Americans that they needed to be able to win big battles, Corbett realized that he needed to teach Britons that just winning them was insufficient. Trafalgar was a glorious moment, and certainly important to the victory over Napoleon. But it clearly did not win the war on its own. Instead, it set the conditions that allowed the British to win. As a result, Corbettwas focused onwhat to dowith your navy besides just winning the big battles. It was insufficient to beat the enemy and then just float around and wonder what happened next. So Corbett’s focus was on what to do with a large powerful Navy, rather than simply the importance of having one for battle. The Grudge Match that NeverWas The sea power scholars and teachers who focus on theory, and who ascribe to a doctrinal approach to Mahan and Corbett, will often suggest that the two men and their ideas are in competition with one another. This interpretation is based on a focused reading of the most famous books of each man. But this approach also loses sight of these strategic writings in width, depth, and context. As a result it offers a skewed view of naval strategy as something that creates competing schools of thought, or that forces naval professionals to make exclusive or procedural choices about a theory to adopt. Instead, a broad examination of these two men and their work, the books and the articles, and considering them closely, the common interpretation and that narrative of competition falls apart. As the Naval War College’s Kevin McCraine has written in his recent book Mahan, Corbett, and the Foundations of Naval Strategic Thought, the two men are in far more alignment and agreement than would be necessary to consider their ideas as competing with each other.[xxv] The truth is, the theories are not very far apart at all. In fact, if today’s strategists and historians study them while considering the width of the author's expansive bibliographies, the depth of their differing personal biographies and approaches to the subject, and the dramatically different context of their audiences and the nations they were writing for, we quickly realize that there are logical explanations for the areas where they appear to disagree. And these disagreements begin to appear quite minor. At the same time, this closer reading and broader analysis results in the realization that even at their most theoretical they reach the same strategic principles. As Mahanhimselfwrote to Corbett in 1907, theirwork “reaching the same conclusion by different paths have reinforced and complemented one another.”[xxvi] The disagreements demonstrate the fluid nature of sea power and strategy, and give students of that strategy a reminder that there are no Mahan Versus Corbett in Width, Depth, and Context Benjamin ‘BJ’ Armstrong
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