Indisputably, however, the early twentieth century and the RAN at its birth were the inheritors of the early modern strategic legacy—especially that of the Royal Navy—both as tradition and as concepts mediated by Mahan and to a lesser extent Corbett. Australia was itself a major product of the British maritime diaspora. Essentially this was a compendium of early modern Royal Naval practice which Corbett was in the process of codifying , popular Mahanian ideas, and Nelsonian heroworship. It is an Anglo-Australian strategic profile, arguably not shared in the round by any other early twentieth-century navy save that of the United States.
It set the scene for the Australian naval strategic tradition. The colonial apples do not fall far from the imperial tree. Surely today we live in a different world, and surely technology has changed the strategic game out of recognition? To the question about a different world, the answer must be yes. Our world also evidences a different global balance of power, with greater wealth and influence rooted in the Asia—Pacific region. Our world is dependent upon oil as a vital industrial—strategic commodity. Our world is politically transformed, with powerful public opinion wanting quick, cheap victories, and impatient of the time involved in a naval strategy such as blockade.
New zones of maritime territoriality are now impinging on the traditional high seas. Today there is internationalised flagging of vessels involved in maritime transport. None of these phenomena, however, necessarily negates the strategic value of navies and some indeed enhance it. How far has the picture changed in terms of technology? To take one example and probably the major one , we can consider air power.
It has certainly changed the context in which naval strategy is formulated by introducing a new dimension, and in so doing helping to solve the problem of locating an enemy at sea although other methods also now exist. It has greatly enhanced sea control and power projection capabilities, and radically altered the context of amphibious warfare. Such technology can alter the nature of strategic geography. The task of guarding the English Channel and employing it as an anti-invasion moat was complicated by air power.
Monocausality is suspect as much in strategy as history. All wars are different, but many are similar. History is a school of loosely evolving strategic patterns, of change and continuity, both of which we neglect at our peril both intellectually and strategically. What then are the continuing legacies and what is the continuing relevance of early modern strategy? The ability of naval power to gain time, help structure a conflict and enable a counter-offensive was still evident in the Persian Gulf in — Two-thirds of the globe is still connected water, and that water is still the primary means of heavy transport.
National interests are still regional and global. War is still governed by friction; strategy is still about choices conditioned by unpredictable contexts; and naval power still affords an impressive variety of strategic options. And while Corbett is the theoretical ancestor of new doctrine for power projection from the sea, there has also been recent speculation that we may be entering a new Mahanian age—predicated on a globalising economy dependent upon sea transport and perhaps upon maritime resources.
Throughout modern times, for five centuries, it has never been on the losing side of a major conflict, and this is surely food for thought. The way in which navies have acted as force multiplying factors for demographically small powers—Portugal, Holland, England—is also a lesson for Australia.
On the other hand history, and early modern history, are of course irrelevant if one enjoys reinventing the wheel. First, how important has sea power been in the strategic history of the twentieth century? Second, does that strategic history carry powerfully plausible implications for the probable importance of sea power in the twenty-first century? To such people, history is a matter of antiquarian interest. I shall abandon custom and, instead, expose immediately the more key among the elements in my argument and also my conclusions.
Notwithstanding some qualifications necessary for fit with time, place, and specific belligerent, this chapter suggests the following: This claim is perhaps remarkable, given the pace and extensive domain of technological innovation in the twentieth century. Of course, this is not to deny that the relative significance of sea power is always specific to the actual historical case at issue.
Sea power will count for more in some conflicts than in others. I will argue that both sea power and land power, though especially sea power, have adapted to changing circumstances very largely by co-opting new capabilities. Sea power has not merely survived technical—tactical and operational challenge, rather it has embraced that challenge to make more of itself. But a strategic lesson of this century now all but passed is that sea power deriving from a continental scale of resources enjoys a systemic advantage over continental land power.
If continental-scale powers triumphed in the twentieth century, they triumphed quite substantially through the agency of sea power resting upon a continental fund of assets. Indeed, so imperial has first-class military sea power become that it can be difficult to see the seams between sea power, air power, land power, and so forth.
Sensibly viewed, there is no trend extant today that suggests a decline in the strategic importance of sea power. My argument, at core, is that strategic history shows a growing complexity, as additional geographical environments are exploited. In the twentieth century the strategist has had to adjust to exploit no fewer than three new environments for war: As if all this were not complicated enough even as simply posed, there is the fact that the new environments for war—air, space, and the EMS—have strategic effect not only in their own right, but also by their implication for the potency or otherwise of land power and sea power.
The other, no less essential, thread to my argument is that the many linear, and even non-linear, changes in strategic affairs in the twentieth century have produced what amounts to a progressive layering of factors. Properly viewed, I suggest that the strategic history of this past century has registered a succession of revolutions in military affairs RMA —certainly a succession of MTRs—that have not superseded each other. Instead, what we have at the beginning of a new century is a military environment that from the high end to the low end of capability contains virtually all of the additions of the previous century, but which has retired scarcely anything.
But we are not about to concede that strategic affairs can be transformed or revolutionised by new equipment. Fortunately, Boer strategy and Serb strategy were only slightly superior to, respectively, British and NATO strategy; a fact which meant that the much bigger battalions had to win. In the Second Boer War of —, sea power was the great enabler of British military power projection into Southern Africa. That was not because trends in relative military effectiveness have been disadvantageous to sea power.
Rather, sea power played only modestly in because of the unique geopolitics of that particular conflict, and because of some poor strategic choices made by NATO. That is unarguable; it is also a matter of only secondary moment. Far more important is the fact that to date sea power, even naval power narrowly, has resisted successfully every implicit and explicit challenge to its relevance. Just possibly, there may be some political, economic, social, or more likely technological development lurking in ambush for sea power, or naval power, in the twenty-first century.
We can prove, and disprove, nothing about a future which, by definition, has yet to happen. Nonetheless, today I am willing to venture the prediction that strategic analysts in the year will regard commercial and military sea power very much as I do now. Of course, this is a personally safe prediction! Bearing in mind that this is a volume on naval history, I devote the main body of this chapter to our strategic experience with sea power in the twentieth century. I shall return to the future prospects for sea power towards the end of my remarks.
Indeed, Mahan is a serious candidate for nomination as the most underrated theorist of modern strategy. No less a historian than Paul M. Mahan was right to emphasise the strength of the influence of sea power upon history. Unfortunately, like most prophets they are both more often quoted than read. But, except from 20 June until 22 June , Britain was not obliged to stand alone in a stark confrontation between dominant land power and dominant sea power. Nonetheless, even though the growing complexity of the grammar of strategy requires modern sea power to compete for attention with weapons of mass destruction, with very smart weapons deliverable by air power, and with information warfare, it has proved more than equal to the challenge.
It is of the essence of sea power to function as a great enabling instrument of strategy, to be adaptable to evolving technological and tactical conditions, and to function at all levels of conflict with enormous flexibility. Nonetheless, the significance of sea power for modern strategy is well captured in parallel claims made by Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond and by the historian Correlli Barnett.
In the two World Wars and the Cold War the Western Allies functioned as a maritime alliance, which is to say that the principal lines of communication among allies were maritime rather than continental. Sea power in all its forms, military and civilian, played critical strategic enabling roles in the years —18, —45, and for NATO and the defence of Japan and other East Asian friends and allies of the West from until The years and witnessed the exercise of an amphibious maritime strategy with a vengeance indeed.
In both —18 and —89, Western—Allied sea power sustained, enabled perhaps, respectively an extant or a potential fighting front on land. Neither in World War I, nor in the Cold War, was amphibious strategy ever a major enterprise, let alone the main event. Australian warships usually operated as an integral part of the Royal Navy, sustaining the maritime strategic links between the Allied nations which allowed the war on land to continue. RAN operational practicability of amphibious action in the face of nuclear threat. In addition, deep uncertainties pervaded maritime operations in the context of a possible World War III.
The adaptability characteristic at least of a well-funded navy helps explain why sea power broadly, and navies narrowly, have not been eclipsed in tactical, operational, strategic, or political relevance by the grammar of modern strategy. Navies responded to each of the more significant military developments of the twentieth century with a strategy of co-option. In modern strategy thus far, at least, the ever changing grammar of war has yet to sound the death knell either for navies writ large, or even for surface naval vessels as major combatants.
That condition of operational disadvantage, however, in principle is long familiar. For the precise and rapid bombardment of an enemy there is no plausible alternative to air, or air-breathing missile, strikes. A navy can provide the presence that expresses national concern, without necessarily threatening a potential adversary provocatively.
The reason why naval power is so preferred is because it offers prudent policymakers optimum flexibility. Some of the advantages of sea power also can be viewed as limitations, or indeed are strictly chimerical for many second-class navies. Notwithstanding the occasional feasibility of cunning stratagems and devilish devices that can offset brute superiority, the sea, in common with the air and earth orbit, is unforgiving of weakness. The substantially uniform aspects to those geographical environments deny the second-class navy, air force, or space force, anywhere in which to hide with confidence.
There can be no fortifiable refuges at sea though the undersea realm is something of a sanctuary , in the air, or in space at all analogous to the defensibility of city rubble, triple cover jungle, or mountains. The tactical value of humanly altered and natural terrain varies with technology and political context, but overall it continues to offer assistance to those who are at a disadvantage in open and regular land warfare.
If sea power characteristically continues to be a—though no longer the—great strategic enabler, that quality is a limitation as well as a source of advantage. Except for those rare strategic contexts wherein war at sea, relatively small-scale power projection across the shore, or coercive diplomacy by naval means alone, can generate adequate strategic effect for war termination, sea power can be only an enabler. Furthermore, that Royal Navy could not even compel the navies of France and Germany to put to sea so that they could be sunk.
In addition to the limitation that sea power, even at its most competent, usually can only enable other military instruments to win wars, it is important to recognise just how slowly sea power generates its strategic effect. It is paradoxical that although naval battles in modern history have lasted only for hours, the benefits or the disadvantages of victory or defeat can require years to yield their full crop of strategic consequences. So, although maritime geography is merciless on numerically disadvantaged navies, it also is the case that naval superiority for control of the sea is ever likely to be fragile.
It is not a sensible criticism of sea power to note that it functions strategically only slowly; such is its strategic nature. Understanding of the grammar of strategy has to include recognition that for all its advantages in flexibility, adaptability, global mobility, and as a great enabler, sea power is constrained systemically by its dominant need to operate successfully in the maritime environment. In other words, sea power first has to earn the right through combat at sea, before it can work as a strategic instrument to help decide whether a war will be won.
But, is the grammar of strategy for sea power the same for maritime, as for continental, powers? Do second- and third-class navies sail in the same waters of theory and military practice as do the navies of the first rank in combat prowess? Few are the Anglo—American theorists who have recognised this question as referring to a potentially serious strategic challenge. Two exceptions, writing 90 years apart, are Charles E. In , Callwell observed that We [British] with our vast naval resources and noble traditions of the sea, are inclined to regard the noble art of maritime war solely from the point of view of the stronger side.
We are prone to forget that when in any set of operations the conditions dictate the adoption of an aggressive attitude to one belligerent, those conditions may dictate the adoption of a Fabian policy [i. It is often forgotten that the destruction of a hostile navy cannot easily be accomplished, even when that navy represents only a relatively speaking feeble fighting force, unless it accepts battle in the open sea. It is, after all, in the nature of sea power—let alone naval power, more narrowly—that explanation of its working and strategic effect can constitute only a partial theory of strategy and war.
Russia and Germany had no strategic need to use the seas as did their essentially maritime opponents, but that is not the point. The point is that Russia and Germany repeatedly had the most pressing need to deny their foes the ability to use the seas at will. The quest for a theory of naval power that, following Rodger, accommodates the different circumstances among navies of varying purpose, scale, and competence, still probably should look no further than to Mahan, Corbett, and the Anglo—American tradition of theory of dominant sea power. Three theoretical points are central.
Third, war at, and from, the sea, is a unity; navies of different levels of military effectiveness are not at liberty to pick the rules of engagement that suit them best while remaining competitive in the maritime sphere. A second-class navy can choose not to risk surface battle, but it cannot so choose and expect to be able to use the seas for positive purposes.
Small, perhaps smaller, navies are of course not only at liberty, they are maximally motivated to discover and exploit operational, tactical and technical terms of engagement for the advantageous conduct of asymmetrical war at sea. That logic emphasised the role of the battlefleet to fight for command. If sea power is a great strategically enabling agent for maritime-oriented coalitions, then it has to follow that the rivals of those coalitions, be they similarly maritime or be they continental in primary focus, have to find ways to disable that otherwise enabling hostile sea power.
The efforts at disablement do not have to take maritime form. In addition, Hitler calculated that the defeat of the USSR would so liberate Japan to expand in the Asia—Pacific region that the United States would be distracted from Europe for years to come by that challenge. Napoleon had entertained the same thought, had let theory be his guide, and made the same mistake with his crossing of the Niemen and drive on Moscow.
In the expansive and overambitious words of the Emperor: Unlike Corbett, Mahan did not exaggerate the strategic merit in an amphibiously British way in warfare; also unlike Corbett, wisely he saw continuing value in the practice of convoy. Because sea power is only an enabling instrument of strategy, prominent among the conditions for success in its exercise is a conflict of sufficient duration for its working to be strategically effective.
There is nothing magically effective about superior sea power for war as a whole, even for a war of long duration. The American war effort on land in Vietnam proved to be beyond help from the sea, no matter how magnificently the sea was commanded. An enemy such as North Vietnam, with a long coastline in a long war, should be notably vulnerable to the strategic effect that sea power can generate. In practice, though, the vital qualification ceteris paribus intrudes to upset the apparent logic of maritime-friendly geostrategy.
Countries with long coastlines are not always vulnerable to power projection from the sea, because the details of particular conflicts yield exceptions to general rules. For another example, Mahan was right, in general, with his claim that the guerre de course does not work as an alternative to a quest after sea control via decisive battle.
The technical and tactical conditions for war at sea have changed in modern times, but it is less obvious that revolution has attended the course of modern sea power operationally or strategically. That judgement may appear unduly conservative. After all, a century ago navies anticipated the conduct of war at sea with terms of engagement, or the declining of such by the weaker fleet, not radically dissimilar from those of the great war against France.
If there is little surprise that the Battle of Jutland on 31 May was primarily a brief passage of arms between the great guns of two lines of battleships, with hindsight it is perhaps strange to recollect that as late as 4 June Admiral Yamamoto intended to use the gun power of his nine battleships to conclude business with the US Pacific Fleet at Midway.
The grammar of strategy for sea warfare matters critically, because tactical, technical, or operational misunderstanding of the true terms of contemporary military engagement can be strategically fatal. No matter what the theoretical benefits of superior sea power may be, if that sea power is expended witlessly in tactically hopeless operations of war, its strategic leverage will be strictly moot. Having granted the vital importance of military competence in the tactical conditions that obtain, still it must be said that the evolution in those conditions has not translated into a strategic revolution.
With the sole exception of nuclear peril, the myriad and synergistic changes in the grammar of strategy as it bears upon sea power have left navies today strategically very much where they were 50 or even years ago. A powerful navy at the beginning of the twentyfirst century functions as an enabling instrument of national or coalition strategy.
It can project military power against and across the shore; and it provides these services flexibly and adaptably. The grammar of strategy for modern sea power, however, for all its often frenetic pace of technical and tactical change, continues to be broadly compatible with ideas on its leverage that require scant amendments for changing eras. Sea power and war in the twenty-first century: In fact, today, at the start of a new century, both American and British military postures and policies are acquiring an ever more classically maritime cast to them.
Currently, the leading British military policy issues pertain to the undue heaviness of their land forces, to the shortage of numbers of light infantry battalions, and to the prospect of their forces actually being equipped as they should be.
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The relative importance of maritime power is not an issue in Britain today. The issue, to repeat, is whether the current, and future, government will actually buy enough of it. Rather do the more hotly debated issues relate to the wisdom of planning a reduction in major surface combatant numbers down to , eventually perhaps sinking into the high 90s,45 and—the driving reason behind that reduction—the wisdom of investing strictly in high-tech, most expensive equipment.
With reference to policy, strategy, and ultimately force structure, questions persist about the character of war at and from the sea in the twenty-first century. The two large 40 — 50 ton, aircraft carriers that the British Royal Navy has been promised could, if ever constructed, launched and commissioned, still be in active service in the s and even s. I began this chapter by posing two extremely broad questions: First, how important has sea power been in the strategic history of the twentieth century; second, does that strategic history carry powerfully plausible implications for the probable importance of sea power in the twenty-first century?
I believe that I have answered the first question directly by showing how sea power has adapted successfully to a changing context, and has co-opted technical—tactical rivals.
World war i
There is much debate today about how much navy we need, and what it should be required to be able to do. But to the best of my knowledge there is no—repeat no—debate of interest anywhere on the proposition that naval power narrowly, let alone sea power writ large, is being sidelined by the course of history. My second question, concerning sea power and naval power in the future, I believe I have answered indirectly, though largely by plain inference. Let me be more direct and offer some predictions. Of course, we can bombard from altitude, but bombardment is not synonymous with war.
This is not to deny that sea-based forces have some, though only some, advantage over land, air, and space-based forces, for the conduct of aerial assault. In fact, because of the nature of ships and the basic elements of geography, there is always the risk that navies are regarded too much as instruments of power projection as mobile fire bases alone. I must advise that the social institution of war is, as Clausewitz noted, a true chameleon,49 if anything even more adaptable than is naval power to changing times.
Major war is neither obsolete nor obsolescent. Yes, in principle ships, especially surface ships, will be vulnerable in the future. But ships have always been vulnerable, just as aircraft and armoured fighting vehicles, and indeed human beings, are vulnerable. It was always so. The details of political, strategic, operational, tactical, and technical choices really count. There is a constant tactical dialogue between offence and defence, and hiding and finding, just as it is in the nature of conflict to be paradoxical as two or more adversaries seek to impose their will.
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But strategic history to date has seen off every one such. I have no hesitation in concluding this chapter with the dual conservative and radical prediction that navies will remain in the new century much as they have done in the previous one, only with some different equipment. No revolution in political affairs, strategic affairs, or technology, is going to leave sea power or naval power irrelevantly on the beach. There seems indeed to be something essentially antagonistic between the habit of mind that seeks theoretical guidance and that which makes for the successful conduct of war.
The conduct of war is so much a question of personality, of character, of common-sense, of rapid decision upon complex and ever-shifting factors, and those factors themselves are so varied, so intangible, so dependent upon unstable moral and physical conditions, that it seems incapable of being reduced to anything like true scientific analysis. RAN But Corbett then proceeded to describe roles for theory that in effect called for the creation of a system of rules and carefully defined language.
His disclaimers notwithstanding, he was a builder of systems, however qualified and sophisticated. That depends on the combination of intangible human qualities which we call executive ability. The German author had written in On War about military theory that dealt with planning as opposed to command: Very little—so little that they have made theory, from its beginnings, the very opposite of practice, and not infrequently the laughing stock of men whose military competence is beyond dispute.
Identifying exactly what Clausewitz thought non-prescriptive war theory was is another. The author is not a specialist on Clausewitz, German military history, or strategic theory, and his knowledge of On War is based upon reading it in translation. Charges of impudence, therefore, would not lack foundation. In the first place, use of armed force should have well-defined and attainable ends—that is, the resort to and direction of war should be rational. In the second place, the regime of rationality could dictate that an act that was advantageous from a purely military standpoint might justifiably be rejected on political grounds.
Viewed in these terms, Clausewitz serves as a patron of reason and restraint, attractive qualities in a century that has experienced two catastrophic world wars and faced the possibility of nuclear destruction. HISTORY AND THEORY 43 Clausewitz used the concept of war as an instrument of policy to explain how the capacity of states to wage war was affected by changes in the political consciousness of their societies, to explore the relationship between political aims and military operations, and to justify his view of the primacy of the state over its military organs.
The first chapter culminated in a discussion of the famous dictum, which was characterised as a critical element of the foundation of theory. His study, however, is much more than an essay on a single major theme. In addition to dealing with the linkage between politics and armed conflict, Clausewitz put forward a number of propositions that he believed were easily demonstrable and significant.
These were that defence was a stronger form of war than offence, major successes brought forth minor ones, victory required the destruction of the enemy both physically and morally, military effect was always greatest at the point of victory, and every attack lost force as it progressed. Moreover, their connections to the issues raised by the famous dictum are not always strong or clear.
Recent scholarship has demonstrated that the note thought to have been written in was produced at a much earlier date, and that On War is a more finished work than has been supposed. This being the case, the text as it stands cannot be dismissed as an artefact of early drafting and provisional thinking whose content would have changed fundamentally had the author lived to revise the manuscript. Clausewitz in fact worked out most of his new ideas on the relationship of war and politics in the last section of On War. In book two, Clausewitz explained the operation of this synthetic mechanism in his exploration of the nature and proper relationship of history with respect to the understanding of decision-making by senior commanders.
Previous major treatments of the history and theory question have been compromised by incomplete analysis of book two. The main argument is that Clausewitz did not use ideas alone to explain the phenomenon of armed conflict, but called for the use of ideas in conjunction with historical knowledge to develop a sense of the nature of high command, which he regarded as the prerequisite to the comprehension of war.
Clausewitz was convinced that reliable and complete evidence concerning the influence of politics and other factors on the mindsets of the leaders of armies was likely to be nonexistent or unobtainable. Their effects had, therefore, to be constructed theoretically and then mated to known facts about past events in order to achieve a sound understanding of the motives that lay behind the conduct of major military operations.
Such engagement with a more complete picture than was achievable by conventional history alone, Clausewitz believed, was essential for anyone who lacked actual experience but wished to understand war. In addition, it was good preparation for officers who might some day have to direct the deployment of armies in real hostilities.
In the first chapter, Clausewitz divided the phenomenon of war into two parts, fighting and preparation for fighting. The latter, he argued, was essentially a matter of administrative technique, and thus he excluded it from further serious consideration. The former was divided into two subjects: Clausewitz insisted that in such matters a workable positive doctrine—that is, a prescriptive code—was unattainable. Clausewitz believed that the will of the commander to make decisions in the face of incomplete and misleading information, fear of failure, and the unpredictable major and minor difficulties that could arise in any military operation were no less important than troop strength and movement.
This facilitated the development of theory that codified war command through rules, principles, and even systems. They aim at fixed values; but in war everything is uncertain, and calculations have to be made with variable quantities. They direct the inquiry exclusively toward physical quantities, whereas all military action is intertwined with psychological forces and effects. They consider only unilateral action, whereas war consists of a continuous interaction of opposites. The first was the critical role of moral force—that is, emotion, of which the most important was courage; this was a quality that not only varied from person to person, but could be different in the same person at one time as opposed to another, and in any case was something difficult to measure.
The second was that war consisted of a series of actions and reactions by two or more adversaries, whose course was inherently unpredictable. And the third was the fact that the information upon which actions on both sides were based was bound to be uncertain, and the degree of uncertainty yet another value that was difficult to quantify. Theory, in other words, did not contain its whole meaning within itself, but only through conjunction—and indeed only after being transmuted through combination—with something else later explained to be history.
It was this process of connection and transformation that ensured that the gap between theory and practice that other theoreticians regarded as unavoidable, but which Clausewitz deplored, was never, for him, allowed to come into being. The ultimate goal of the kind of self-education proposed was the development of a capability. The acquisition of a highly subjective kind of knowledge was an important part of this process: He did not exclude persons who were not commanders-in-chief in waiting from his audience,37 but asked them to understand that any proper theory of war had to make the consciousness of the human executor of high command and human relations its focal points.
Clausewitz believed that war was not just an activity performed by humans, but a purely human activity, which meant that it was essential to understand the nature of the agents of action as well as dealing with the actions themselves. But Clausewitz believed that for those who lacked first-hand experience of war, the main stimulus to the development of understanding about human behaviour and the effects of environmental forces such as time of day, terrain, and weather in a real conflict was the study of the past.
These were establishing a truthful basic narrative, explaining causation, and evaluating the soundness of actions, or as Clausewitz put it, historical research, critical analysis proper, and criticism proper. But Clausewitz was acutely aware that crucial information about military operations often did not exist. In the first place, actions had unintended as well as intended effects. In the second place, Clausewitz recognised that circumstances could multiply the force of trivial initial happenings.
Clausewitz knew that the difficulty of command was in large part a problem of choosing the right course at the right time. Sound evaluation of particular decisions, therefore, required the consideration of a range of alternative options and the reasons for their rejection as well as the rationale for the action actually taken. He thus insisted that a strong claim to intellectual legitimacy be established by the rigour of the theory that governed the process of reasoning.
Without such a theory it is generally impossible for criticism to reach that point at which it becomes truly instructive—when its arguments are convincing and cannot be refuted. Clausewitz noted that the critic, then, having analysed everything within the range of human calculation and belief, will let the outcome speak for that part whose deep, mysterious operation is never visible. The critic must protect this unspoken result of the workings of higher laws against the stream of uninformed opinion on the one hand, and against the gross abuses to which it may be subjected on the other.
Success enables us to understand much that the workings of human intelligence alone would not be able to discover. That means that it will be useful mainly in revealing intellectual and psychological forces and effects, because these are least subject to reliable evaluation, and also because they are so closely involved with the will that they may easily control it. On the one hand, there was the use of precise language to establish clearly the relationship of many things in proper proportion.
The second mode was no less important than the first, and the deployment of both together—which precluded the creation of formal bodies of law and attendant technical jargon—was probably what Clausewitz meant when he spoke of natural as opposed to elaborate scientific observation. But the kind of simple narratives or anecdotes that were the usual form of historical evidence were almost always incapable of providing a complete proof of a major theoretical conclusion. He was less sanguine about the immediate attainability of the second. It would take time to create the literature required, and without it his pedagogical ideal would remain no more than its name—a distant beacon rather than a practical source of illumination.
In , Clausewitz suspended labour on On War and turned his attention to writing the kind of analytical historical studies called for in book two. These were on the Italian campaigns of and , and the campaign of In , Clausewitz was recalled to active service in the field when Prussia mobilised in response to the French Revolution of that year. In , shortly after resuming light administrative duty that would have allowed him to carry on his literary endeavours, Clausewitz died from the effects of cholera.
This has yet to be translated into English. In book two of On War, Clausewitz presented a different approach. His own extensive experience as an officer during the French Revolution and Empire60 equipped him with knowledge about the difficulty and complexity of war command and, no less importantly, about the incompleteness of the historical record with respect to its actual operation in the past. He thus formulated a body of important ideas for which there was nor could there be any hard evidence, and insisted that these factors had to be imagined and related to known historical facts in order to comprehend the process of war command in particular.
In other words, a critically important component of the larger theoretical edifice presented in On War defined the terms of synthesis of that for which there was no record, and thus neither summarised nor distilled history, but complemented it. This aspect of Clausewitzian theory consisted of instructions for dealing with the following issues. First, there were the fundamental psychological factors affecting the state of mind of the commander, which were emotion, contingency, and uncertainty.
Third, there was the multitude of operational facts and motives for action of many individuals that were either never known or if known never recorded or even intentionally obscured. Fourth, there was the peculiar nature of the relationship between cause and effect in war, whose character was affected by the play of unintended consequences and complexity. Fifth, there was the fact that in war commanders were confronted by a range of options, and that assessment of the quality of the decision actually made required consideration of the possible alternatives.
And sixth, the success or failure of the operation had to be given a measure of significance when considering the rightness or wrongness of decision-making by way of acknowledging the effects of unknown and perhaps even unknowable factors. The first was that the execution of the theoretical instructions be intellectually rigorous, and the second that the historical cases investigated be ones about which a very great deal was known in order to keep the play of surmise about matters of objective and subjective fact to a minimum. This truth, moreover, was a thing which was felt as much as thought—a form of consciousness rather than a body of knowledge.
The goal of intensive engagement through study and reflection with a combination of fact and surmise, in other words, was not erudition, but the replication of the effects of actual experience. This was done in order to induce the formation of a sensibility that could facilitate effective decision-making in war. Manoeuvres, hypothetical cases or wargaming provided verisimilitude with regard to specific military circumstances, but not the conditions of danger and the human response to it, especially critically debilitating fear. It was the special function of history, in other words, to evoke the moral dimension of war.
The objective of such involvement was to induce understanding that command at the strategic level was not so much asserted or exercised as expressed. For Clausewitz, engagement with a single properly presented historical case was preferable to the study of multiple conventional accounts of past campaigns. By the same token, Clausewitz probably believed that his pedagogical objectives could be achieved through the study of only a few events.
He did not require, in other words, a comprehensive survey of major recent military happenings; a selection would do. And because ordinary life also involved engagement with complexity, uncertainty, and the risk of negative consequences in the event of error—risk which was sufficient to prompt debilitating apprehension—Clausewitz observed that it too could serve similarly as a source of insight into the nature of command in war.
Of course, the critical difference between decision-making in war and ordinary life lay in the far greater magnitude of responsibility in the case of the former, which meant that military crisis was bound to generate commensurately higher levels of fear. War, Clausewitz thus might have said, was like ordinary life, only much more so.
In book one of On War, Clausewitz defined major terms and introduced important concepts, including the famous aphorism, but it was essentially a taxonomic prelude to book two. Having presented his method of study, Clausewitz then devoted the remainder of his treatise to the investigation of important issues which needed to be taken into account when employing the method provided in book two: It does not make sense, therefore, to criticise On War as an incomplete analysis of the total phenomenon of armed conflict. Clausewitz rejected the notion that war could be understood through comprehension of a description or an explanation.
To come to terms with war demanded a strenuous mental reenactment of decision-making at the strategic level. Such a re-enactment of the past was intended to keep the focus of self-education on the process of human action—that is, command—rather than on military planning as known through the outcomes of human action—that is, strategy. Clausewitz was interested in the induction of experience of high command, not the teaching of strategic lessons. This characteristic of On War thus anticipates certain important ideas of the English philosopher and historian R.
Collingwood rejected in principle the notion that history could be used to construct general laws and, like Clausewitz, specifically excluded the legitimacy of doing so with regard to the conduct of warfare. Suffice to say that Clausewitz engaged with questions subsequently central to serious inquiry into the philosophy of history. The concept served as the most important of the subjective factors—the second category of his theoretical instructions—which shaped the judgement of military leaders but it was a concept too often overlooked for want of evidence or understanding of its significance in accounts of past wars.
It was less an axiom for statesmen and generals, for whom it could hardly come as news,71 than one of a number of tips for laymen and officers lacking experience and studying history, or for would-be analysts writing it. The famous phrase may legitimately provoke thought about important questions without regard to its intended meaning, but it cannot stand as the epitome of Clausewitz, the philosopher of war—if indeed he can be characterised as such—without betraying Clausewitz, the philosopher of history.
Three major conclusions therefore seem inescapable. Finally, implementing Clausewitzian ideas about history and theory would introduce radical change in and, arguably, greatly improve the writing of military history and the educating of military officers. Which is to say that, nearly years after it was written, On War is not just a classic text, but insofar as the study of military decision-making is concerned, is still in advance of the state of the art.
The road followed was one of technical unity, and a community of interest, without a machinery for more than consultation on matters of foreign policy. It is easy to point to the limitations of the structure, but impossible to deny that it resisted the centrifugal political forces of nationalism enough to survive the horrors of the Second World War. Given the limitations of the United Nations, transnationalism is the best that is available for the defence of civilised values, and has been tried in the furnaces of twentieth-century history.
At the turn of the century, the prevailing strategic idea dominating thinking about naval defence was that unity of control and freedom of movement were essential to ensure that overwhelming force could be brought to bear at the decisive battle which would determine the outcome of a war. Centralisation was also valued because it was feared that small fleets could not be efficient.
The Royal Navy satisfied the strategic ideas, but it was not really an imperial force, because it was the instrument of the British Government.
In the winter of —07, Rear Admiral Charles Ottley, Director of Naval Intelligence, wrote several assessments of the problem of developing an effective system of collective naval defence of the Empire in which he was scathing about the influence on Australian policy of local naval officers who stood most to gain by the creation of an Australian navy. On the other hand, he admitted that the Admiralty did not like the Australian naval agreement by which the Australian Image rights unavailable At the Imperial Conference the Admiralty countered colonial criticism of its refusal to strengthen fleets on distant stations by arguing that the concentrated battlefleet was the ultimate deterrent.
Colonial leaders front row, from left: Bond Newfoundland , R. Hume Natal and T. Fuller representing Cape Colony. The creation of local navies was a necessary attribute to the ability of colonies to leave the association should they so wish. In the first place I do not believe it would endure. In the second place it would [be] a source of friction.
It would conduce, if anything could conduce, to severing the present connection between Canada and the Empire. Discussion as to the best form of co-operation is, in fact, somewhat academic because the statements of Dominion statesmen make it clear that future co-operation from Canada and New Zealand will eventually follow the Australian model.
Quite irrespectively, then, of the advantages of this system, the Admiralty will be required to assist in the development of these navies, and to find a place for them in a comprehensive system of Imperial defence. The success or failure of any measure of defence rests ultimately on the sanction of the people. It is for this reason that public interest is placed first in the list of requirements to be fulfilled. This difficulty especially affected Canadian interests. Shortly after the turn of the century, it was recognised in London that the Royal Navy could no longer guarantee Canadian defence against the United States, and it followed that Royal Navy intervention in Canadian—American maritime disputes might well not be in the interest of Canada, let alone Great Britain.
In the s disputed fisheries jurisdiction on the east coast, and the need of the Empire to walk softly in the relations with the post—Civil War United States, had brought the Canadian Government to acquire ships with some degree of naval status. In the first decades of the century, whatever their wishes might be, the Dominions could only opt out of the common foreign policy of the Empire if foreign countries chose to overlook the juridical unity of the Empire under the Crown. For the same reason, there were great difficulties in the way of according the Dominions a right to carry out independent military action outside their own territorial seas.
It must be recognized that international difficulties of a very grave nature may arise, owing to the fact that a mobile armed force has been established, over whose action the Central Government would have no control, though the ultimate responsibility would rest with them. During the first 40 years of the century a great deal of effort was put into the attempt, but the actors in the drama were distracted by a multiplicity of motives, and fell short of reaching a satisfactory solution to the problem.
The compromise solution reached before the First World War to the problem presented by the need to reconcile constitutional autonomy with centralised strategic control and the juridical unity of the Empire was for the Dominions to accept the operational authority of the British Admiralty and its commanders-in-chief when operating outside their own areas of national responsibility.
The same principle applied when Royal Navy ships were attached to the Canadian Atlantic and Pacific stations or to the Australian station, within which areas the Dominion governments were held to represent the interests of the entire Empire. For very practical reasons, the Dominion navies purchased British naval equipment.
It did not, however, arrange for automatic transfer upon the outbreak of hostilities. Canadian ultra-nationalists objected that the Liberals were in fact creating a rod for their own backs, whatever their intentions. The Dominion governments were invited to attend meetings of the CID, but the Canadian Government refused on the grounds that it was a committee controlled by the British Prime Minister.
Participation in the formation of strategic policy, but without much prospect of being able to change it, would make it impossible for Canada to stand aside from policies with which it disagreed. Suspicious nationalism was limited by a willingness to participate in Commonwealth Conferences, and by an underlying belief that the cultural and family ties of the Commonwealth were so strong that they could overcome political suspicions.
Commitments were made that the dockyards at Halifax and Esquimalt would be available for the Royal Navy in the event of Britain going to war, regardless of Canadian policies at the time, and Canada undertook to store the equipment in Canada for the conversion into armed merchant cruisers of liners running out of Vancouver.
These pragmatic compromises provided the political formula which ensured that the British Commonwealth, with the military and naval forces which they had developed, responded collectively in and on the outbreak of war. It also enabled the Dominions to meet local problems, such as that in the Canadian fisheries, without turning such episodes into major issues between the Empire and other great powers. Where it was inadequate was in the management of crises leading up to war. As the Imperial Chiefs of Staff put it in October Even in —39, the Admiralty did not know how much it could count on from Canada.
The political limitations of the system of imperial defence were reflections of the strategic stress which was placed on it by the growing power of the United States and Japan. Before the Great War, the greatest conflict between the strategic requirements of the Empire as a whole, and those of its component parts, was that affecting relations with the United States.
The Empire was not able to provide Canada with local security, employing the same operational means as served for the other Dominions and for the mother country. Following the Great War, it was to be the Antipodean Dominions and colonies which found that measures of general security were inadequate for their local needs.
In Australia he had felt obliged to raise the spectre of a Japanese war because, as he explained in a letter to the First Lord, Lord Long, otherwise he could not have advised any standard for Australian fleet strength. In doing so, of course, he was echoing opinion already held in the Antipodes.
Equally clearly, the only hope lay in collective action, and for very real financial and technical reasons, the Royal Navy could not keep up anything like a war fleet in the Pacific.
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The plan eventually adopted, of course, was that in the event of anticipated hostilities naval forces in the Eastern theatre should be concentrated at Singapore, there to await the arrival of the main fleet dispatched from Europe. The next day the leaders met at the Admiralty and the fundamentals of interwar strategy were discussed and agreed to. If any money became available, India would prefer to use it to develop a Royal Indian Navy.
The Prime Minister of Canada, Sir Arthur Meighen, rejected the appeal for a common perspective on imperial defence in the Pacific, on the grounds that the Canadian public could never be brought to agree. He even suggested that the Chief of Naval Staff should himself be prepared to relocate.
British policy, however, was inconsistent, tormented by considerations of economy and the hope that the League of Nations would obviate the need for substantial defence initiatives. The Australian government was also strongly against the decision. British Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald made good use of these later in presenting his decision to the House.
The Munich crisis made it all too apparent that the Singapore strategy was built on sand. Internationalist values Great as were the consequences of the failure to perfect the Singapore strategy, the imperfections of the structure of imperial defence had compensatory advantages. English Similar books to The State of the Navy in Kindle Edition File Size: Customer reviews There are no customer reviews yet. Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a product review. Most helpful customer reviews on Amazon. I used this as one of my sources when writing'How I Saved The British Empire' as I needed detail on the ongoing, early s, debate on the size and makeup of the post-Victorian Royal Navy.
I was hoping for information about British pre-dreadnought battleships. This is a postion paper opposing Jacky Fisher's naval reforms. Not what I was looking for. Feedback If you need help or have a question for Customer Service, contact us. Would you like to report poor quality or formatting in this book? Click here Would you like to report this content as inappropriate? Click here Do you believe that this item violates a copyright?
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