Ft. Leavenworth: Alfred Mahan and Naval Theory

okay good afternoon everybody and welcome to the dole institute of politics my name is sarah stacy development specialist and soon to be director of events in student affairs so we're very excited to see you all here today for our first in-person program since march 2020. so thank you for joining us for dr john coon's presentation given the popularity of our long-running fort leavenworth series it seems appropriate for it to lead the way on our return to in-person programs we are also hosting a live stream of today's discussion on our youtube channel please remember that ku currently has a mask mandate in place so please keep your mask on at all times due to the pandemic we regret that we can't offer our normal refreshments but that will return once things go back to normal after the program we will allow time for the audience to ask questions if you have a question please raise your hand and we will make a mic available for you as you prepare your question please keep in mind the mission of the dole institute to foster civil and respectful discussion around important and often difficult topics before we begin please turn off your cell phones so please silence them now so thank you so much and now to introduce dr kuhn please join me in welcoming dave cutter thank you dave thanks sarah i really appreciate it it is really great to be back in a face-to-face environment uh it has been a very very long time and and i i concur with uh with sarah having john kick off here is is uh is a great way to get restarted in the face-to-face mode uh you've all for those of you have been here before and and i see a lot of familiar faces uh john is a regular uh dr kuhn's uh been here and made a number of presentations uh his his list of scholarly achievements you already know um what i would tell you uh today in introducing john is that uh the field of historians recognizes his excellence as scholarly excellence as evidenced by his his past uh occupation of the major general staff chair for historical research at the commander general staff college and he has only recently been paroled by the navy where he spent a year as the uh as the fleet admiral ernest j king chair uh at the naval war college so that is the kind of esteem with which the historical community holds john and the department of military history does as well and i'm sure his presentation on on mahan today will be very informative so thank you for coming out and i'm i'm very glad that we can continue in a face-to-face mode thank you [Applause] can you hear me okay great thank you thank you very much dave i appreciate that that kind and generous introduction thank you to the the staff and and folks here at the dole center for uh for uh being so courageous and trying to open this up again to a more human sort of approach to this it's not all this virtual cybernetic stuff that we've been doing well i'll get right to it i think uh somebody said it was a uh a difficult topic and that is true it is a difficult topic um and it is contentious sometimes uh naval theory the the slide is a little misleading because the uh it's not just naval theory but actually it's it's theory writ large it's theory writ large so so i i've been on my hobby horse for years and years about alfred thayer mahan as sort of being a guy whose most important contributions to the world of of political theory and military theory is more geopolitical and grand strategic and that essentially his his theory at the operational level at the military level at the naval level is pretty simple uh and comes down to to uh principles that that that he already knew and and that he was quite well aware of primarily from land warfare so uh from uh from by way of his father so we'll talk a little bit about that uh in terms of that uh the other guy up here is is his great contemporary let me go back and show you a picture of him again we'll get in a little bit more is sir julian corbin so it's fascinating it's kind of like the calculus right in uh the calculus was invented in two separate places at the same time by two completely different guys who spoke completely different languages and weren't talking to each other okay leibniz and newton right and so so uh klaus uh mahan and corbett are kind of doing the same thing they're kind of each kind of doing their own thing they do become aware of each other my hand precedes corbett a little bit and i always tell my students that's great because that's what you should look at first is my hands ideas and then drill into corbett's ideas which are which is what my hand recommended anyway well i always like this slide because it emphasizes the importance of power projection that the sea is a medium to project power all right and not just troops but economic power uh it's it's a way to project economic power it's a way to take advantage of economic power mahan famously once said even if we don't ever have ever have another us vessel merchant ship that has an american flag on it we'll still need a navy to protect commerce because we because we rely so heavily on maritime commerce and he said that back in about 1905. whether that's true or not anymore we'll we might talk about in the questions all right so that's the agenda we'll get right to it we're not going to waste too much time on it there's the young ur mahan uh probably on the wachusetts one of the ships many ships he commanded there's the older mahan sort of in his prime probably his most famous picture is that one that's on on the left all right but let's kind of go back to the beginning for this guy i think it's always important to kind of understand who a person is uh and in my hands case you got to understand who his family was and his family was the family of dennis hart mahan dennis hart mahan was sylvanus thayer's most promising student at west point and in honor of his mentor surveillance thayer one of the fathers of west point dennis hart mahan named his son alfred thayer mahan okay so and i think dr refuse gave a lecture on dennis hart mahan and his influence literally the fathers of professional military education for the united states at least in the 19th century and to some degree in the in the 20th century although some may argue that their their their influences is still very very important even in the 21st century was from one family this father and son the father at west point and the son at an at the naval war college okay he grew up in west point so he spent his time there around the cadets uh he his uncle was a uh was a church man in the episcopal church milo mahan and and alfred initially wanted to follow his uncle in in uh as as a as a pastor as an episcopalian high church pastor and so he's after he finished secondary education there weren't really high schools back then but after he finished his secondary education he went to columbia university i think he was 16. when he started to matriculate at columbia university and then he something went wrong with him i guess and he decided to transfer to the naval academy the brand the relatively new united states naval academy in annapolis maryland um jerry brown who uh a former colleague of mine he's he's now passed away a wonderful guy he was my history teacher at leavenworth he always used to he had this theory about great men in history that they were always these sort of guys who had these interesting domineering complex fathers and that they were rebelling against them you know frederick the great with frederick williams with fred with king frederick williams first and and uh and so he uh so he thought this was kind of the case with mahan that he was rebelling against his father who was this icon at west point uh when he went to the naval academy um a fascinating thing about mahan is when he got to the naval academy uh after a year at colombia he he asked he had he had read the regulations surrounding matriculation at the annapolis and annapolis was an emerging institution it didn't have all the traditions and rules and everything that we have today when we think about service academies and but he had read what did exist and there was a there was a loophole in in annapolis uh in the in applying for annapolis once you got an appointment and mahan's appointment actually came through the secretary for war jefferson c davis and so so mahan mahan had read all the stuff and he said well i i see here i can take a test and i can test out on my plea beer and they went well you know you're right you can so go ahead you know test out your plea beer he did he tested out of his plea beer and they eliminated that loophole after he did that he's the only guy to have ever uh to have ever tested out of the plebe year at annapolis so he only attended annapolis for three years not the not the standard four years commissioned in 1859 well why is that important what's going on in 1859 yeah the country is falling apart there's already a civil war here in kansas missouri bleeding kansas bleeding missouri too to some degree but more blood in kansas and missouri you know uh potawatomi john brown the osteoartery massacre all that kind of stuff so it's a bloody time and so he joined a nation that was uh falling apart and we get the war of the rebellion some people call it the civil war and and he served in the civil war in a blockading squatter in the gulf of mexico initially there was only one blockading squadron in the north atlantic but eventually this the secretary of war gideon wells and his advisor gus fox came up with this idea we'll have three as we get more and more navy ships we'll have a north atlantic blockading squad and a south atlantic blockading squadron and a gulf blockading squadron and mahan served in the gulf blockading squadron and he would later write a monograph on that published by uh scribners and that would be his first history book that he ever wrote he prided himself as being sort of an asian feo he cruised to japan in uh 1867 on a steam sloop and uh spent some time in kieto he he found kyoto one of the most lovely places that he'd ever seen in the world he waxed poetic about it so he always sort of considered himself an expert on japan because he'd actually been in japan and visited japan although he never really learned the language uh at all uh he did not found the naval institute but i think he was member number 17 of the united states naval institute which was founded in annapolis he was teaching there in the weapons department he was a gunnery officer at annapolis and the naval institute would meet there on the grounds of the naval academy to develop this this this professional society uh to develop the profession one of the things that sam huntington talks about professionalism is that professions have have a body of work and they publish and they share ideas they're self-policing supposedly and and so mahan was part of that naval reform movement after the civil war civil war was no different than a lot of american wars after the war was over the navy almost went away okay and the navy went from approximately 600 ships uh at the height of the civil war and again we're talking about uh ships is you know size of gun boats all the way to the big steam sloops and and that down to about 35 ships at its lowest point in the gilded age after after the civil war so my hand managed to keep his job and that shrunken navy that's that's worth remembering uh a lot of other people were not okay uh and so my hand was kept on uh and then because of this book that he had written because he was known as a naval reformer and because frankly he had let his friend henry loose or not henry loose but uh admiral loose no or flag officer lou snow that he was ready to for some short time after being at sea for quite a number of years the admiral luce who became the president of the naval war college in the 1880s decided to bring my hand to this brand new institution the naval war college in newport rhode island and and have my hand be his lecturer in history mahan was actually his third choice for that okay he was not first choice i think first choice was the guy who won the naval institute prize essay that year i think it was goodrich it might have been james t sully was lev later assistant secretary of the navy but my hand was not first choice but when all the others dropped out my hand came and he showed up at newport and loose was already gone and so you know the janitor or somebody said well he's gone so i guess you're the president of the war college too so he was the second president of the naval war college hopefully i'm shattering all of these myths that exist in your minds about this guy he had a family he was married had a couple daughters he loved his daughters his letters are published in three volumes by the naval institute and they're really they really make good reading they're they're they actually read better than than the influence of sea power upon history okay so he writes this book when he gets there he when he gets to the naval war college at first his his overriding concern is to keep the college afloat because there are these they're not really anti-reformists uh somebody has called them uh the the mechanists the guys that are the technology guys who think technology is gonna solve all the navy's problems the nation's problems and so we don't need strategists like they want to develop at the naval war college we just need science technology engineering and math guys and so they're trying to get the naval war college abolished and so much of my hands first couple years there are fighting those guys and trying to keep the college open it actually closes for a couple years and one of the last thing my hands does is reopen the college before he has his last sea going command all right but while he's there he prepares these lectures and and loose says i think you should publish your lectures so he goes to scribner's and scribner's looks at them and goes this is like dry as toast you're making you're taking a dry topic and you're making it drier all right we're not going to publish it okay yeah we know we published your book on the civil war we are not going to publish it so my hand had friends in boston and they said well why don't you try little brown and so he went to little brown and they they actually saw the value in these lectures they were actually kind of progressive thinking yeah this is kind of interesting we've got this newport place that's you know down there in rhode island on the water and everything where we all like to vacation and and and this guy is writing this stuff he's kind of an interesting guy we could probably market this thing and and get some money for it um so they went back to him and they said you know we just want one change to this thing you've got you've got like 12 chapters and you've got a preface and an introduction uh but we want you to write another chapter you normally don't get that from publishers they normally don't say we want one more chapter in your book normally they like no we want like fewer chapters at least that's the way it is these days with publishers at least for the stuff that i write and and and they said what we want you to do is explain your overall ideas about sea power and my hand said you know that's a good idea so he wrote the first chapter of the book last and i would commend that process to just about every scholar i a really good way you know always tell my students don't put too much work in the first chapter because you're just going to rewrite it anyway okay so so that's what my hand did in his preface he posed a couple questions you know one of them is why did hannibal cross the alps you know and the answer is simple because he had elephants no that's not the answer right i mean that's the whole thing a hannibal with the elephants through the alps you know wow you know because he wanted to be the in the book you know he wanted to be in the guinness book world record right he wanted to be in the guinness book of rule no he crossed it because he didn't have a navy in the first punic war the romans had been getting their butts kicked by the carthaginians in their ships and at least according to the stuff that mohan had read which was the work of theodore monson a great german historian he uh the the romans went out built a fleet and they finally were able to beat the carthaginians at sea so much that the carthaginians agreed to apiece okay so when hannibal initiated the second punic war he didn't have a navy to speak of all right so he had to march his armies from spain over the alps in order to invade italy and try to compel rome to do his will all right and so he didn't have it actium the last battle of the roman civil war is a sea battle because everybody knew we were going to keep having problems with you know mark antony as long as he's got a navy he can land an army somewhere in the empire and cause trouble raise new legions and the civil war will just go on forever so we have to obliterate his navy and that will bring peace to the empire and so the pax romana has some of its basis in sea power okay nc so he talks about that in his thing mahan really had three arguments and they're in they're in his his preface his introduction and his chapter one all right of the influence of sea power upon history the other chapters are pretty much just straight history all right straight c power history you know broadsides and all that kind of stuff so so the first argument was you know mahan argues that sea power is influential upon history or put another way mahan was arguing that people hadn't paid enough attention to the influence of sea power upon history or put another way historians had not identified the significance of the influence of sea pass it was a historical argument he was essentially putting the historical community on reports saying you guys particularly military historians don't understand that sea power is important and influences in history okay a pretty easy argument to make actually as long as you don't overplay the argument which some people argue mahan did the other the other argument that he had it concerns sea power and the conditions of sea power and the idea of how the sea and economic factors shape grant's strategy and then there was a third sort of argument that was implicit in the way he wrote the book and the way he presented his arguments which was given all of these things the united states navy needs a navy that is commensurate with its economic and its its its geographic extent all right for lack of a better term and in chapter one he goes through these things called the the the principal conditions influencing sea power he never really defines sea power not explicitly anywhere he never really comes about and says see power is he sort of wants you to figure out what it is by looking at the conditions that shape it the first three are entirely geo determined it's geodeterminism okay and you'll understand what i mean by that this is actually geopolitical theory all right i don't see navy up there anywhere i don't see the word navy up there i don't see the word fleet up there anywhere the final three are the human factors or the human determinism okay so the first three are physical geographically determined it's kind of where you are as the real estate people say location location location okay and then the last three so let's talk about them a little bit okay because this is the heart of his geopolitical theory which i argue is the heart of what we need to understand about mahan all right some of his naval theories and everything have value but this stuff is far more important because it's at the grand strategic level all right the first thing he said is position matters geographical position where you're located with respect to other major powers and the sea lanes is important now if you're these cold dreary damp islands located up here on the edge of the abyss while all of the major trade routes are going through the nice warm sunny mediterranean to the east you got a pretty poor position in terms of economics but then somebody invents maritime navigation or some bodies portuguese spanish french british british british and the whole dynamic changes and the abyss actually turns into raw materials and resources in the new world all right it turns into this great trade route off this way and then all of a sudden this position becomes very important all right so there are no contiguous land borders all right there are no contiguous land borders okay those borders count i mean just let's do a little exercise how many nations have contiguous land borders with china yeah you start to lose count after a while okay all right okay how many nations have contiguous land borders with the continental united states last time i checked it was two all right unless you want to count texas right but uh so last time i checked it was two all right and one of them is like the 51st state all right you know canada the people that speak american and and uh and then the and the other one you know is is problematic but there's a lot of labor that comes up from there so neither one of them is necessarily bad for the united states from the viewpoint of like pakistan and india right okay so so it's not like france yeah she's got sea coasts she's got maritime real estate but her position is difficult because she's got these contiguous borders with other powers so position matters position matters all right that's the first thing all right extent of territory and this is not simply just how much sea coast do you have because if that was if that was totally influential in the development of sea power then then russia would have been just hard to beat but it's navigable sea power see a sea coast an extent of maritime geography with deep water ports navigable bays rivers estuaries that can determine too if a nation is going to develop sea power because those are going to aid in commerce both import export both internationally as well as internally okay internally so extent of territory it seems like he's kind of building an argument to fit another argument in some sense he's kind of cutting the foot to fit the shoe here isn't he as he uses geography to make his arguments uh let's go back here the other thing is is uh is is not just the type but but you know is it navigable so those last two geographic things that i talked about they're actually very very closely related you could almost make those last two into one geo physical confirmation and extent of territory into one confirmation is navigability for sea going assets or assets that use water for communications and trade and extent of territory is how much so where you know uh what and how much all right that's what those are okay and one of his arguments is that hey that would mean that the confederate states of america were in a pretty good position right except for one thing they didn't have a navy so all of these advantages in peace time for commerce and trade and everything getting the cotton over to england to manchester and everything uh become drawbacks if you don't have a fleet that can defend them all right uh and and the and the idea that fortresses can defend them there's some utility in that and we'll see it at places like charleston right but for the most part it turns out to be a disaster for the confederate states of america that the bulk of the fleet goes north and fights for the union in the war of the rebellion okay the other piece of course is the geo-determined or the human piece so here's where it really looks like mohan is cherry-picking his argument to support the idea that all of these these these principal conditions affecting sea power are are like ideal for the united states to leverage sea power as as a major power at least a major power in the western hemisphere maybe not a global power but certainly you know to give the monroe doctrine some teeth right so so the first thing he says is well you need a you need a nation that's got got people that go to sea you know it doesn't it's not going to help if you don't have anybody that's that wants to you know go out on a boat and go anywhere right and so who who's making their living are you a fisherman do you have the other thing that he that he says is what's the character of the people do the people like to trade or are these are they these narrow aristocrats who just simply extract wealth until they devalue all their currency right like that's what spanish did and mahan actually talks about that in chapter one a little bit he alludes to it um or do they create wealth with commerce all right in other words is the character the people inclined towards you know market capitalism all right for lack of a better term all right so is the character the people the kind of character that wants to trade i always talk to people about this with the chinese the chinese for years and years and decades and centuries and millennia have always been a trading people right they've always been a trading people they've always dominated the trade of east asia they've always been almost a super regional trading power ever since what the 12th century bce right the shang dynasty so so the same thing is true the final thing is well if you're going to have policies to develop sea power both both the economic assets and favorable policies with respect to trade and foreign trade and free trade and maybe to develop a navy to protect that trade then uh it would be nice if that's the character of the people to have a government that's run by the people so that's the sixth element which is representative government i'm not going to say democracy per se i'm going to say representative government and now it makes a lot more sense that the next 12 chapters in the book are all about a nation with representative democracy great britain okay or representative government not democracy who who the merchant class basically tells the political class this is why we want a navy and and and after the elizabethan era for sure they get that navy and then they spend immense sums to maintain that navy but the payoff is the creation of wealth via sea power okay so it's it's as much an economic theory as it is a political theory it's not even really military theory when you think about it it does justify building a navy if you have the interests in the trade that need protection now for the united states at the time of mahan we were just coming out of a period where we didn't need that we didn't need a big navy because the british were doing that they were protecting the seas for us we didn't need a big navy because and after the war of 1812 the british really did they kind of protected our interests and when the americans went abroad in their ships and on their navy ships they generally cooperated with the biggest guy on the block whether it was in japan or china or southeast asia or in europe or africa or wherever and other than the monroe doctrine we would you know which we didn't kind of pay attention to anyway i mean if the british wanted to do something they'd do it and uh and that was the british it was the royal navy okay so that's kind of my hand in a nutshell uh i might come back to sort of his operational level strategy but it's real simple the great german naval theorist and historian herbert rozinski who taught at the naval war college because he had to flee germany because he was jewish [Music] he said it all boils down to this mahan's concept of command of the sea uh is to take your navy and either blockade your enemy and keep him from getting out to sea or sweep his fleet from the seas that's it that's his operational naval theory it's as simple as that okay that that's what you need to do you know if he's got a fleet out there hunt it down kill it and then make sure all the rest of it's blockaded that's sort of my hand in a nutshell now my hand was not so sure about some of this with the emergence of new technology but he alliterated that in 1895 in a really wonderful article for the royal united services institute which is uh in great britain all right mahan was much greater appreciated in great britain i think than he was in the united states he really was he was misunderstood even more in other nations that appreciated him like japan and like uh and like germany particularly germany i i think germany just just didn't understand what he was talking about particularly kaiser wilhelm all right his counterpart sir julian corbett uh was what we would call from the upper classes he wasn't really an aristocrat but he was from money uh he didn't need to work for a living he trained as a barrister that is as a trial lawyer but he didn't like that he didn't want to do that he basically had an income already guaranteed probably from money that he inherited from his family um and he liked the right he wanted to be a writer and so he wrote pirate novels you know about at first he was writing fiction but then he thought well no i'd rather write history you know so he switched over from like pirate novels to writing about sir francis drake and hawkins and all these guys and and the sea wars of the elizabethan era and he kind of got wrapped up in that uh probably more scholarly in terms of his prose and his approach again i think a lot of this has to do with his barrister's training as a lawyer um but he uh but he started to write naval history and again mahan wrote naval history okay and corbett so naval history history was sort of the doorway to theory for both these guys okay it was the doorway to theory history theory and then out of the theory comes the doctrine right okay and then if people pay attention to the doctrine they might use it in practice right so so he switches to history he gains the attention of the royal naval officer corps particularly a guy named radical jack radical jack sir john arbuthnot fisher known as radical jack later known as sir jackie fisher who becomes first sea lord of the royal navy in 1904 okay and and because of that the first sea lord fisher makes sir julian corbett part of his fish pond that's what they call it all the guys that sort of aligned with jackie fisher you know and one of jackie fisher's big things was we're going to educate royal naval officers we're actually going to teach them naval history and try to make better strategists out of them because as corelli barnett once wrote of the royal naval officer corps of this period by some divine act of divine grace these guys would become a flag officer and suddenly they understood everything there was to understand about strategy without any education whatsoever okay so fisher didn't believe in that and certainly corbett didn't so at the college of dartmouth they brought fisher there to be the light or not fisher but corbett to be the lecturer there uh on on maritime principles strategy and history all right corbett's first thing was to kind of produce a gouge sheet as we say in the navy or a cheat sheet for the naval officers called the green pamphlet so he actually sort of wrote his main ideas in this little green pamphlet that he would give his students and then somebody said well you ought to maybe turn that into a book and so he did and that became some principles of maritime strategy and that is more of a of a of a theoretical work uh and there's history in it but unlike mahan it's it's more theory than it is history my hand sort of had all this kind of little theoretical piece up front and then he just had sort of pure history corbett didn't take that approach in fact my hand said of corbett uh in in something that he wrote so far as they stand the test my own lectures perform desirable preparation for works such as those of corbet such as those of corbyn he mahan really thought highly of corbett and actually corresponded with him that comes from uh 1911 naval strategy by the way i'm not lecturing on naval strategy what he said in naval strategy because he was not very happy with the book and and i think he had good reasons not to be happy with it he he never really kind of codified an operational strategy whereas i think corbett did so i think he's right i think you know once you move past geopolitics and policy which is where my hand was most comfortable and then you get to this level you'll uh you get to corbett uh one of the the problems that corbett had was that uh that he did piss off his students the royal naval officers because he had the temerity to criticize uh mahan's hero who was sir horatio nelson or lord horatio nelson uh saying he was too rash he was too quick to go to battle he could never kind of keep the objective in mind which was the objective was to win the war on land right and so so he actually kind of rubbed people the wrong way and i think if it hadn't been for jackie fisher corbett wouldn't have lasted very long or not even been invited at all to teach the royal naval officers but he did he did get pushback from his students his actual influence on practice and strategy or contested i personally think he didn't really influence british strategy uh directly so you know some people have argued well this is this is you know this is the mentor to jackie fisher who molded jackie fisher's strategic ideas both prior to world war one and during world war one i don't i don't ascribe to that i think i think jackie fisher saw corbett as a good guy to have in the classroom right you know just like just like the cno sees me that way he's a good guy in the classroom i'm not going to put him in charge of anything jackie fisher already had a really really really good idea about what he thought about strategy he did like to interact and test his ideas on guys like corbett and on my hand right but uh but corbett's influence on actual strategy uh is is probably minimal in the times he lived his influence later though because of people who have been studying some principles of maritime strategy now you can start to make an argument that he's been very very influential on the development of maritime strategy he also writes an official history of the royal naval in world war one it actually gets gets has to go through another chop because he criticizes some of the officers and so he some of it gets sort of redacted right because they he was too critical of some of the officers so here's the essentials of his stuff first there's major or grand strategy what mahan was talking about right um and land and sea forces relations is what results in the maritime strategic component so maritime strategy is not an independent strategy it has to be a component of an overall strategy and it's got to be related to whatever your land power strategy is and today we cycle in all those other things like air power strategy and space strategy cyber strategy whatever okay and he and corbett again did not make any friends in the royal navy because said of the two this is the more important because people live on land all right people you're not it is very rare for a major conventional war to be decided on land in fact it's it's hard to find historical examples where something that happened on sea was absolutely decisive on land independently of whatever was going on on land that there's just not a lot of examples of that in limited wars maybe it's a different story all right and and corbett's theory is really a great theory for limited wars he he's really sort of the guy who he's sort of the first joint theorist who says hey you know if you're going to be a big hegemon global spanning hegemon and you're going to sort of police the empire here's some good ideas for how to use maritime principles for limited war okay all right but that limits you in the kind of wars you could fight too right okay um and naval strategy is not independent it has to be subordinate to this so he's got a hierarchy of strategy all right the navy doesn't say to you well go away don't talk to us we know what we're supposed to do you go away corbett is the joint theorist guy he's like no the navy needs to make sure its naval strategy is nested as we say at cgsc under a overall maritime strategy that's also synchronized and coordinated with the military or the national military strategy so that's and again this stuff sounds like duh right but he actually was teaching it to people and they were going it's good to see that in writing okay the essential of command of the sea and corbett really does define command of the sea he says the sea is just the medium for communications it's you send stuff this way you receive stuff this way it's up for grabs it's temporal it's not permanent all right and and according to corbett command of the sea is not a concept that has much meaning in peace time command of the sea requires conflict and war in order to be a meaty concept all right now maybe in the 21st century we've modified that a little bit and if i come back and do naval theory too i can talk to you about barry posen and and and herbert rozinski and jc wiley but we don't have time for that so we won't talk about that all right so and he says that's the object of naval warfare in other words naval strategy is built around the idea of gaining command of the sea and denying command of the sea to your enemy all right it can be general that's kind of like the air force concept of air superiority right i've got enough superiority in the air to kind of do whatever i want in the air i might take a couple losses here or there but i'm okay i don't need to be worried about what's going on out at sea i don't need to be worried that there's six japanese carriers running around the pacific because i have command of the sea right at least general command in the pacific all right and then there's local command and that's local command you know i've got control of the kaw river out here and nobody's going up or down that river without my permission in that one spot off lawrence right so and it's temporary or permanent temp temporary is the normal situation for command of the sea all right unless you have a huge fleet that can be everywhere but that's so expensive it's not really worth the cost right so yeah china keep building all those boats keep going keep going and they'll break the bank and that'll be great that'd be great i i don't have any problems with the growth of the chinese navy okay because eventually it'll break the bank and permanent is sort of a it's it's an elusive term you know can you ever really get permanent command of the sea and if you're a naval historian you go you know you never really can all right yeah that little guy can load up in air craft and launch kamikaze attacks even when his navy is gone he can build fortresses he can do like the samurai did in the 13th century and build walls along the beach to repel the mongols okay so permanent command of the sea is sort of an elusive thing all right the nature of naval warfare in some sense corbett is saying it's really defensive yet at the operational level maybe offensive get command of the sea but you're really defending a medium of communication and supply and a medium that you use to sustain things but it's not really an offensive thing offensive means marching on berlin marching on moscow marching on paris armies of occupation okay that's that's what that is he does say limited war is an option available to naval powers as a strategy naval powers is and by naval powers he means powers that have navies powers that have fleets powers that require maritime commerce for economic prosperity so that's what he means by that oops we're getting there almost ready for questions so these are the three verbs and i think these are really important they sort of overlap he spends a lot of time talking about these corbett sir julian corbett does the first is disputing command disputing command is when you're not sure if you have command of the c or the other guy does or maybe the other guy has command of the sea but you want to dispute it right it's like disputing that traffic ticket right you're not going to surrender you're going to dispute it okay so yeah there might be a fleet off your port off of bologna or there might be a fleet that's you know off charleston but you're going to go try to dispute that by building a submarine or you're going to go try to dispute that by breaking out and disputing command of the sea all right garrett of course which is commerce rating so the german submarines in world war ii the american submarines in world war ii the german submarines in world war one that's commerce rating geared of course that's disputing command of the sea okay so that's what dispute is this term fleet and being comes up and it's a it's kind of a squishy term there's all kinds of definitions on it i just wrote a chapter for a book on fleets and beings and essentially what a fleeting being is is a fleet that can dispute command of the sea any kind of command of the sea so do the iranians have a fleet and being you bet they do they can dispute local command of the sea in in the straits of hormuz right can the hooties dispute command of the sea yeah you know they sort of have a fleet and being ashore you know with anti-ship cruise missiles so that's what the fleet and being concept is for me if you have a fleet that's parked in port and not doing anything it's not really a fleet and being it's got to be an active fleet that goes and does stuff at sea sailors have to be on ships and the ships have to be at sea for it to be a fleet and being okay securing command that's where you achieve local general permanent command of the sea somewhere right that can be done and corbett agrees with mahan on this decisive action blockade they're absolutely in agreement on how to secure command of the sea where corbett differs from a hand is he says but do you need to secure it do you need to secure it this way is is is do you really need to fight a battle will blockade only do it for you and i wrote a i wrote an article where i say it's actually the blockade that stymies napoleon in 1805 not trafalgar okay napoleon marches towards olman austerlitz before trafalgar even takes place he gives up his invasion of britain and why because the blockade has stymied him okay it's kind of loose it's kind of wobbly but it holds and it essentially defeats his strategy to invade great britain all right trafalgar does something else all right exercising command you don't have to have command to exercise it i always use the example of of the germans u-boats you know they might not have command of the sea in the classical sense but they can still use the sea to do something or you used to see to go somewhere like napoleon he's trapped in egypt right he doesn't have command of the sea but he still exercises command by getting on a frigate and sailing to france under the noses of the royal navy it won't be the first time he does something under the noses of the royal navy either elba comes to mind all right and so power projection geared of course but you can also exercise it when you're a big heavyweight the united states has been exercising command of the sea ever since the end of the end of world war ii mostly by power projection we show up with a bunch of ships usually an aircraft carrier and we essentially participate in an air campaign or a blockade like we did in vietnam with market time that's power projection that's also a exercising command of the sea exercise and command defend against invasion sir francis drake and all those guys okay so exercising command is is is is where you actually use your ships at sea so there's overlap and there's a lot of confusion here and people can get really wrapped around but i think it's worth looking at them because those are the words that corbett uses and i think it's worth being familiar with them you can substitute in other theories disputing command of the electromagnetic spectrum securing command of the electromagnetic spectrum exercising command of the electromagnetic spectrum securing command of the air securing the command of space you know disputing command of space to see how you so that's why i think corbin is so immensely useful he provides a nice template for other theories of war all right an example from history okay and this is to sort of highlight both guys but more mahan than corbett 1895 the united states navy is still pretty much a third-rate navy okay there there are south american governments with navies that are more capable and modern than the united states navy all right okay that now that's about to change right but in 1895 great britain threatens venezuela over a border dispute with british guiana okay the united states stands up you know where this is back when we were a very isolationist you know george washington avoid entanglements but the monroe doctrine is sacrosanct we actually decide to enforce the monroe doctrine against the british and say hey you can't tell those guys what to do they're in they're in our hemisphere and uh so we actually send a dispatch to the british to say hey butt out you know you need to settle this via arbitration and we'll arbitrate it for you now at the time the royal navy is the world's largest navy it's built to the so-called two power standard in other words the royal navy is bigger than the next two biggest navies combined and oh by the way one of those two biggest navies is not the united states navy okay all right so the royal navy is bigger than the next two navies it dwarfs the united states navy and the only way the united states can do anything vis-a-vis venezuela really is with the with its little tiny navy you know uh that's only just starting to get steel warships so we intervene on the basis of the monroe doctrine secretary of state only who is i think president cleveland's secretary of state at the time sends a message to the british foreign minister and this is what he says the united states is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition why it's not because of the pure friendship or goodwill felt for it nor is it simply by reason of our high character as a civilized state nor because of the wisdom and equity there are invariable characteristics of dealing with the united states so not because of all this good stuff which is already true as we all know right now this is why great britain needs to listen to secretary of state only because in addition to all these other grounds it's infinite resources north american continent combined with its isolated position separated by geography render it the master of the situation and it's invulnerable against any and all other powers now you would think the british would go hahaha we'll just invade from canada right it's not what they do for six months the british wait to respond to the only dispatch for six months there's no action against venezuela by the british either militarily or even even with the banks because they're threatening to freeze all venezuela's funds and then they come back to the united states and they go okay we'll submit to your arbitration that's the power of geopolitics of the geostrategic position because those guys in the british government went back to their to their board room and they looked at it and they go well who's our biggest trading partner you know outside of europe you know okay um who's got the government most is most like ours who is you know yeah they're obnoxious but you know are they really that bad they speak the same language you know and they're right the coal mines of pennsylvania the steel mills of pittsburgh and cleveland the oil fields you know all of these resources and oh by the way when was the last time we ever took defense of canada seriously against the americans you know the war of 1812 when the finnians invaded i don't know sometime back to so i mean they they really they they went to they went and they looked and and and this is a case of where geography and economy not a big fleet really were the factors and that was really what my hand was talking about in chapter one is that those factors play all right now it would help to have a bigger navy and later on the united states has a similar experience with germany and in that case the united states actually has a pretty big navy of about 60 ships that it sends down to venezuela to cal the germans okay all right we don't need to go to that yet we'll go to this okay all right i don't have any final thoughts i've probably created all kinds of questions so i'm gonna defer to sarah and entertain your questions [Applause] so please raise your hand if you have a question there we go i did uh offered uh i enjoy i enjoyed your presentation very much what i wanted to ask is uh whether uh alfred thayer mahan had any position on uh on the relationship between uh naval power and uh colonial empires yeah the uh my hands views on these things changed over time they they really did um he was an american and i think if you scratch every american you'll get something of an anti-colonialist except for our own colonies right but but you'll you'll get that you'll sort of get that and and more and more mahan was was guided by that especially in these letters uh he becomes more and more humanistic as time goes on that said he has real problems in london when he goes to the meeting with with the uh i'm trying to remember the the norman angel and all those guys and they were having the meetings on creating a world court and arbitration and even though you know he likes the idea of arbitration he was a great power guy he believed in sort of great power things so that would tend to confirm that he was okay with colonies and to that we've got to go back to this no blessed lies and the white man's burden and all that kind of thing he kind of believed in that of kind of helping raise other peoples up to the level of you know americans right so you know that we had sort of we were sort of the tip of the spear for progress and and so anything that we could do to help others be like us was was worthwhile now some people would call that colonization or imperialism cultural imperialism or whatever and of course my hand didn't think about it that way the philippines is an interesting case because [Music] he liked the idea of having overseas basis but again he realized there were going to be problems and he wrote a great book called retrospect and prospect not one that we read enough where he sort of looks at the emerging problems of the 20th century one of which is going to be what's going to happen to all these colonial empires uh are they going he writes about the problem of china he writes about the problem of the middle east in retrospect and prospect so you can see the beginnings of an attitude that will coalesce particularly in the 1930s with guys like franklin roosevelt into into militant anti-colonialism all right but we're not there yet he dies in 1914 and the great catharsis of the great war doesn't reshape his thinking about things like it will do so many other people all right that's probably the best i can do with you all right yes yes sir she's going to have the thing for you in a second you spoke about uh sea power breaking the bank now my first intuition would be that sea power would uh you know gain control of the bank and that it wouldn't uh limit well it has to do with political yeah so it has to do with economic theory too right um and um trade balance all that kind of thing so at what point you know it from what i've seen based on the british experience with the royal navy is it starts the juice starts to not be worth the squeeze i mean the whole reason that jackie fisher does his reforms is to save money because they're sort of in what what some economists have called a high-end economic trap which is the balance of trade is shifting because of emerging powers and in in jackie fisher's day those emerging powers were germany russia russia hasn't left the stage even though she's defeating the russia japanese war japan and of course the united states i mean the united states is is a behemoth when it comes to financial and industrial power by 1905 the united the united states is going to outpace everybody in steel production uh for example uh with within five years um and and then financially they're gonna after world war one the entire balance of the control of the financial world will shift to the united states after world war ii there's no industrial basis left except one the one in the united states so so uh the problem is these things tend to be cyclical paul kennedy has written about this and and at what point it does the bang is the bang worth the buck at what point is it worth protecting other nations ability to create unfavorable trade balances for your nation which is a situation which is what we're in right now okay is it worth us paying that and the british decided uh after world war ii let the americans have it we can't afford it anymore uh we need to take care of our own people uh and we're broken our you know our industrial base is ravaged and and and we were a creditor nation now creditor nation we owe money you know everybody owes money to one nation the united states so or the banks that are in the united states so uh so why i say that i mean i'm a big believer right now that the united states navy is probably gonna have to get smaller before it gets bigger okay because right now the united states navy is broken all right but how much sea power do you need i am on the record of saying you know do we really need aircraft carriers as many as we have and my answer is no we can do what we need to do with far fewer aircraft carriers because we have about 20 of them right okay all right we do you can put f-35s on gator freighters and they become aircraft carriers we've done that with the japanese aviation destroyers they're aircraft carriers and we've got an f-35 outfit on board the queen elizabeth with the british so so and those are foreign ships if we throw those in we've got what 30 aircraft carriers that's a lot of aircraft carriers but what's the bang for the buck with that you know we're not getting a lot of bang for the buck with that for what we need to do because frankly corbett is right there's only so much you can do with sea power all right so i'm i i think we need to take a look at what we really need to do and do we do we really need to have a global navy or do we need to do burden sharing with our allies and i think we're kind of on the right path we're sort of being forced into it by circumstances but it's not necessarily a bad thing now do i think we need to have a that we need to just completely give up the ghost and say well we're just going to be a regional naval power i'm not there quite yet i'm not i'm not to barry posen's position yet on that that command of the seas and command of the commons in our hemisphere should be job that should be job one but i i still buy into that but but navies are very very expensive they take a lot of money to maintain and building the right platforms is a huge risk it's not a gamble it's a risk because you can always repurpose platforms right okay you can always repurpose things you know because you always have to do in war anyway right as wayne hughes famously said the only thing that did what it was designed to do in world war ii in terms of naval shipping was was was was mine minecraft everything else did something different than was planned for what it was going to do in world war ii including aircraft carriers aircraft carriers were supposed to fight air defense against fleets of bombers coming from land bases all right that that was their job to protect battleships from b-17s and and that was disproven at midway so so uh so my position is that that you know we really need to look at what we build because when you build a 16 billion dollar platform you're going to have to maintain the life cycle on that thing is 40 or 50 years okay you're making a you're making some you're you're reading the future in some sense with those kind of expenditures and you have to really look at it well so what does that really give us well it gives cocom's flexibility not to have land basing in country and they don't have to worry about bed down and sofa really 16 billion dollars so that somebody can go well now i don't have to no i don't have to talk to the air force okay so that's my position and and i'm that way you know i was king the navy well see you know ask for my my thoughts on this a couple years ago and i i said that to him right and and i emphasized that the platform that i thought we got the most bang for the buck out of in this nation is uh the smaller service combatants i think we're gonna go places with uh with uh with unmanned i think unmanned uh is an imperative it's not the only thing but is a thing for the future and undersea warfare uh the undersea warfare is is still pretty much our domain so submarines so if you're going to build anything build submarines okay so i i you can't build too many submarines that's my position you can build too many aircraft carriers all right yes sir she's going to get the thing thank you yeah i'm a heretic on that same topic either today or at any time the next 10 years do you believe the united states can successfully engage the chinese in the south china sea well that's a case of we always have to ask what the political context for that is the chinese are going out of their way to get what they want without violence occurring okay with us with the filipinos different story right with the vietnamese different story i mean they fought a war with the vietnamese over the paracels how many of you knew that you didn't nobody reported on it when they seized the paracels okay and that was back in the 1980s 1987 1988 where they did that um and uh and they're still pushing the filipinos around today they haven't lately done anything high profile you know and the filipinos can say well look you know the world court ruled in favor of us of course our president is going to ignore that ruling um until he doesn't right duterte but uh so so that so so it's not in our interest and it's not in the chinese interest so who's interested is it in and so you know there's a little bit of me that thinks that the military-industrial congressional complex is interested in at least having a threat to keep the money flowing for these high inexpensive weapon systems and i don't think they're i don't think you're getting your tax dollars worth on that uh for a for an unlikely event what are the political circumstances it doesn't mean that that xi jinping might not make a miscalculation and decide well i'm going to go for it the key here is taiwan what is going to happen that's the question for the i don't think it's going to be south china sea it'll be taiwan if it's anything because that's something the chinese are willing to spill blood over all right uh but they'll salami slice in the south china sea as long as they can and i think we should just if we need to sail ships through the south china sea we should you know personally i'm not a big fan of of deployments to the middle east myself um that way you don't have to go through the south china sea at least from the pacific you can you can send all your middle east deplores to the suez canal or around the horn of africa or not at all you know as far as i'm concerned yet i think dr babb can can add to this there's 20 some armed islands in the south china sea they don't move i got an artillery gun in here how how easy a target is it when it doesn't move so and you can't put the islands under emission controls so we know where they are we know what's on them and and we can target them you know down to 25 digits 24 digits so what good are they so as an army guy you're going to go to patent fixed installations are an anachronism so then you have to ask yourself why are the chinese doing this well it's for the filipinos it is for the vietnamese it's for the others and one can argue it keeps us in the south china sea doing the job for them so we're doing sea control for the chinese so they can ship stuff all over the world and especially to arkansas for walmart that's what i meant to say [Laughter] did my hand have any opinions or positions on teddy roosevelt's great white fleet did he think that was a worthwhile exercise oh yeah no he was supportive i mean mahan certainly believed that the united states needed a fleet that was commensurate in size to the aspirations of the united states but also its global economic interests he the his biggest concern you know we always think of the great white fleet as being designed to cow the japanese that's not who it was designed to cow the the great white fleet the the big problem for mahan uh mahan was an anglophile he loved the british um and so was teddy roosevelt to some degree was germany germany and so he understood so he supported that fleet because it would free up royal navy assets to deal with the real problem which man thought of as germany okay and so he he supported that now the the great white fleet was used to to let the japanese know that we were a pacific power and but but the the animosity and the relationship between the united states and japan develops over time i mean it it begins with when we went into hawaii and beat the japanese to an exiting hawaii uh but it really doesn't gather steam until world war one when the giant when the japanese really start to kind of throw their way around in china okay so it's all about china so the japanese american animosity is really about china's but but in my hands time germany was the problem war plan black was the plan that we were worried about we were our plans were that we were worried the germans were interprets was going to send a fleet over the united states over to the caribbean and invade venezuela and seize a base uh on margarita island or seize uh puerto rico or seize some other caribbean base and fight and that was the war plan was warplane black the germans actually did have such a crazy stupid war plan interprets terpits had a war plan to do that nobody else in the german political strategic structure you know would have supported him if he advised the kaiser to go do that and again the whole period of 1900 and 1914 is a period where the germans you know kind of misplay their hand time after time after time in these various crises the moroccan crisis agadir all these different crises the algerian christ you know the wind and the lion all those crises and in every single case that the germans misplay their hand but my hand my hand regarded them as the problem and so the great white fleet was a fleet that was really designed to to to fight the germans and and ns admiral george dewey admiral of the fleet george dewey the only admiral fleet we've ever had uh in the navy he was a the president of the general board of the navy uh sonic here that was offered to him to keep him running for president and uh and he agreed totally with teddy roosevelt and with mahan that that the germans were the problem and he was also an anglophile so the united states relations with great britain prior to world war one and prior to the wilson administration were actually quite good you know they declined under wilson and josephus daniel and it took a little time to kind of repair things like a war with germany so yeah short answer yes he liked the great white fleet he thought it was a good idea and he supported the building of the great white fleet yeah the cruise of the great white fleet is a fascinating case because in a sense the united states was telling everybody we can be anywhere with our fleet and this is a coal-fired fleet right but the united states was saying we're not the russians we're not going to show up with a dilapidated fleet when we send it halfway around the world to protect our interests so don't count on another tsushima okay because that's so so so the great white fleet was that was sort of a secondary but the purpose of the fleet was was more about defending the united states against germany and about defending the sea lanes against germany yeah given all the talk today about space and space development and all that you think discussions like this might become less relevant uh in terms of a practical sense in fact a practical political sense what capabilities from space are going to obviate this kind of discussion well i i really don't have an answer to that but just well space is another so space is a common so barry posen you know i said i'd give a lecture on him later but your question opens the door for this which is there are the comments now the word the commons the global commons comes from my hand from influence to see power upon history it's right in there you know that the the oceans of the world are a global commons right because of technology the global commons are at sea they're in cyberspace they're in space and they're in the air those are sort of the recognized various global comments where everybody can operate but nobody dominates right okay um and and so it's just another comment so yes it does add another layer of complexity in terms of using what we term comments but space is a lot like to see i mean it's it's temporal i mean it takes energy and money to keep objects in outer space functioning all right it takes maintenance so maintaining a fleet of right now satellites space stations to a certain degree in outer space it's like maintaining a fleet it costs money it's not it's yeah we don't send those satellites they don't last forever look at the russians they had they had nuclear powered satellites and the nuclear eventually their orbits degrade and they they strew nuclear material across canada okay so so it takes money to keep those things up there yeah you can quit spending money on them and then they just become satellites they just become like you know rings around saturn in fact people are saying that's what will eventually happen is you know the aliens will be looking at us from seven light years away and they'll see these rings around the united states it'll be all this space junk that nobody's maintaining anymore okay so uh so that's my position on space it's a commons it's a part of the solution i don't think it's going to obviate what goes on in the other comments i think the biggest common that space affects is the cyber commons because so much of the cyber world is dependent on space right this is this thing it works because of satellites that's why this works so well yeah there's microwaves around here but it's also all that other stuff that's in the ether that's bouncing off satellites that's there okay yep connolly john based on your last year's experience at the war college what are your students when they arrive what's their view their attitude their knowledge of mohan and corbett and what is it after you're finished with them short answer not very much okay not very much some of them have what i call sort of myths in their head um and i think one of the great things about the naval war college is the naval war college review they have something called the hattondorf lecture and a couple of years ago n.a.m roger nick roger wrote the first hattendorf lecture and he said the problem is we don't know enough history the problem is we know too much history and most of it is wrong and that's the problem with the students coming to naval war college they have all these myths in their head that come from the internet or tv or they read a they read a they read a book that's 50 years old it's completely been replaced in terms of the scholarship and so you know or they you know for example they've read the crowl essay on my hand in makers of modern strategy which is based on what has now been proven to be a a in an academically and scholarly malicious pernicious misrepresentation of the guy's life okay uh because the guy who wrote it there are perfectly good biographies that were written of mahan before but this guy who sort of became the most recent scholar he's also the guy who organized his letters so i've always wondered what letters did my hand write that he threw out that he didn't like he said well i'm not going to put that into published letters that's how historians shape things they get to choose right and so a lot of these guys come in and they think oh you're my hands about you gotta have a big battleship plea well they they're shocked in my class at alpha 659 theory in history of of of naval strategy and and uh when i tell him well my hand was actually against the battle cruiser or or not the battle cruiser but the battleship he argued against dreadnoughts he said he thought dreadnoughts were too expensive and he famously said americans are trusting in bigness and the only thing they're trusting in bigness and that's going to lead them to make huge errors and so he was he was real worried he said you've got this fleet that you've designed to go at a certain speed with a certain logistical support and now you're going to obsolesce that fleet overnight for this all right and he was he so he was actually a contrarian on the issue or never divide the fleet well when we look at one of mahan's war plans for great britain uh in the 1890s around the time of the only dispatch in fact mahan is has adopted a defensive strategy involving using geared a course in a divided fleet well that's not the han i read about in in corral's essay okay so you know when history theory doctrine practice kind of meet reality you'll find that he's a far more complicated and wants guy and again i've already said his views change you know uh famously i think it was a one of the nobel laureate economists somebody somebody said said well you didn't say that 20 years ago and he says he or you said that 20 years ago you know and why don't you think it's true anymore he goes well when i get new evidence i change my mind okay so so and i think that was happening with mahan he was changing his views his views were evolving he died in 1914 so he never got to see what happened in world war everybody always says the mahan was against technology which is i i don't think that was that's a fair critique and i think some of the more recent works 21st century man or john cemeter's work on my hand kind of pull out the fact that that's just another myth but these students that are showing up they they they most of the stuff they have in their brain housing groups if they have anything is flawed okay i would prefer the guys that have nothing in their heads you know to the guys that that have the wrong stuff okay so anyway sorry about that i got a little excited yes sir uh the chinese seem to be establishing uh presences in port seaports around the world uh what's their uh plan there are they trying to become a c power well the thing with china is so the so the the biggest economic power in the world is still the united states but but china at the rate she's going will become and again we've got a very unfavorable balance of trade with china right now which is a really it's one of those indicators that's very very worrisome because our manufacturing so you know you know if the united states really had a grand strategy we we would kind of take a look at that how could how can we come become you know we do have service industries we still provide a lot of intellectual products for the market but a lot of that gets stolen because of our open system that we have so to go back directly to your your thing about about china china you know with the belt with the road belton road initiative with some of the stuff they're doing in the south american countries and african countries um it it all has to do with chinese interests and what's good for china china's got an economy and for china to kind of keep going she's got to keep her economy healthy um i think that's the politburo's biggest concern right now the uh and xi jinping of course is the chairman of communist parties also the chief of the of the of the of the central military commission of the polyp bureau and then it's got the third portfolio he's also what the president the prime minister i forget what the third portfolio he's got all of those so he dominates all of the polities and elites inside china right now but it is still very much there's still a lot of other factors at play in china but their concern is growth we don't want to stagnate they're not looking at us when they look at stagnation they look at japan and the stagnation that took place in japan i mean 20 20 30 years ago what was the conversation we were having japan japan this you know the giant singapore of the pacific right so i mean and they stagnated and they don't want that to happen well how do you prevent that from happening you develop new markets you extract materials you develop enough infrastructure you create enough of a market you guarantee your access to markets and and markets access to your products um and that all requires fleet right well yeah we they've they have one to take care of that globally and that's called the united states navy regionally they have their navy right so uh i think jeff's absolutely right the chinese have been free we always criticize nato for free writing right the chinese have been free riding you know ever since the cultural revolution you know i mean so you know we never criticized the chinese for free writing right so the other thing is you know well they're building a big navy and a huge coast guard and they are and these naval militias and everything like that um and do they dual purpose their fishing fleet yeah just like the russians they do like the soviets used to do and like the russians still do but but uh but never you know people go what do you think about them building aircraft carriers i go boy i hope they build more i hope they i hope they try to build magnetic catapults don't interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake a little provocative here it's okay get you thinking anything else i just this i'm gonna close here because i think we're gonna we're ready to close i'm concerned about china right i'm concerned about china but i am much more concerned about the united states economically culturally socially there's so many things that we need to fix here at home i think george cannon got that right when he came up initially with the containment strategy that he came up with so there's a lot of work that we need to do back home you know i mean segregation we need to get rid of that we need to you know do land conservation we need to do all these things china the thing that does concern me about china is a collapse inside china that would be catastrophic for the world for china to collapse i would not celebrate a collapse of china's economy at all that i think is a huge concern we they're our biggest trading partner we can we have a vested interest in them not collapsing so now some of this argument existed in world war prior to world war one that we're too invested economically with each other and we're not going to blow everything to heck and ruin what's a pretty good deal with with business and economies and and norman angel and all those guys were making that argument that no there's too much in economic interconnectedness for everything to fall apart i think later tom friedman made the same argument right but um so there are miscalculations history's contingent somebody could make a mistake she could decide that he needs to unify the country and that the best way to do that is to seize the falkland islands right taiwan that's what argentina did when they had so many problems we'll seize the falklands we'll start a war with somebody that doesn't have a navy anymore right and then it turned out they still did have a navy so so there's always that miscalculation piece you know i'm for talking i mean my position is we need to invite everybody to washington uh on the 100th anniversary of the washington naval treaty and have an arms limitation conference that lasts about a year and where we all agree okay how can we keep the system that we have in place from falling apart like it did a hundred years ago and that's what i'm interested in so i think engagement is the better strategy but cautious engagement realistic engagement not starry-eyed panda hugger engagement all right that's all i have to say thank you [Applause] yeah i turned into a piece nick i've turned into a piece you

Channel: The Dole Institute of Politics

Views: 1,135

Rating: 4.8518519 out of 5

Keywords: Dole Institute, Dole Institute of Politics, Politics, University of Kansas

Id: pMZ8E8a5JQc

Length: 92min 10sec (5530 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 03 2021