Mahan and East Asia, Theories of War

so I'm gonna talk to you guys about Mahon I'm a person I like something tactile and historical I don't like to just talk about theory in the abstract so when I was talking to Bill about doing this I thought I'd try to show about Mohandas legacies and influence in Asia if you will not just talking about Mahon in a vacuum I paired Mahon up there with my favorite Asian maritime theorist km Panikkar it was a Indian diplomat and academic who was very much inspired by Mahone's work and I kind of we've both of their ideas to the thing as you guys have noticed I don't have a white uniform right so I'm not an easy person but I like to study maritime issues my interest in this is a kind of a personal thing comes from - kind of funny little vignettes when I was studying Indian foreign policy whenever I started going to India and I started talking to people about strategy or security issues one of the things that often happen is I would have Indian military officers kind of point their finger in my chest and say you you United States why did you send the USS Enterprise since the Bay of Bengal in 1971 and I was like well I wasn't born then so I didn't do that but it was something that for most Americans we don't remember sending the carrier battle group into the Bay of Bengal during 71 war but almost everybody in the Indian political-military establishes remembers this incidence they call American gunboat diplomacy attempting to sort of fulfill sort of our treaty obligations to Pakistan when India was defeating in a war the other incident happened a couple years ago when I was doing a project on the Andaman and Nicobar command so India the Indian military has one joint theater command over the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and if you look at this as an armed chair geo strategist it's a very strategic location right it's at the entrance on the Indian Ocean side of the Straits of Malacca and if you look to the history the Andaman and Nicobar Islands everybody's interested in this so the Japanese when they go into the Indian Ocean World War two they seize these islands when India was getting independent the British toyed with the idea of keeping these kind of like how they kept other strategic Island points like Ascension and other places the Pakistanis wanted it the in dunya Asians wanted it there's actually only one power jokingly that has never been interested in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and ostensibly that's India so one of the ironies is is that the Indian government the Indian defense establishment only very belatedly saw the strategic value of these islands that everybody else was interested in I'm quoting Indian Admiral who told me that everybody has been interest in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands except India so that's kind of my interest and so how the sea power is viewed in Asia so this is roughly what I'd like to talk about introduced sort of mahon thinking some of his important Trident you know lucidity z-- and class fits have Trinities Mahon has a trident I'd also like to problematize Mahana bit and talk about different ways you can interpret Mahon because I think Mahon often gets stereotyped to very specific things that are not necessarily the only way you can read Mahon and I'd like to talk about why it is that Mahon and seapower seem to have such a strong legacy in the Asia Pacific region and I'll talk about three different countries encounters with sea power Mahon Japan during sort of the Imperial days and then China and India today if you will and again for bahan the importance of a government deciding to invest in CPR we're not that sort of my game plan so if we look at Mahon a little bit on his biography some of you guys have probably looked at this in your makers of modern strategy book Mahon himself he comes from a kind of military lineage right his father was a professor at West Point who was widely known as being a scholar of the Romanian approach to warfare to his heart Mahon you guys were talking about today with jhemini and but for various reasons Mahon decides to go to him to the navy not into the army and he serves in the Civil War and has naval patrols after the war but one of the funny ironies with Mahon is Mahon was not really a great sailor and he wasn't very comfortable in command he's got a lot of you can read passages of mahon writing to people saying after he got back from a sea duty on a ship in the 1870s he said boy I forget what a ghastly place being on a ship is and only an idiot would want to be on one basically which is really astray notion for a naval officer but Mahon sort of found his home kind of in the library or in the classroom so doing research this is where he felt more comfortable rather than being on naval ships so he's a very political the most famous of which is his influence of sea power upon history which was followed by several different editions looking at sea power in history and he wrote some 130 140 various articles and book chapters he was in many ways kind of like a public intellectual the same way like today you guys might see these talking heads on CNN or BBC or Fox News people who write about terrorism or geopolitics you know like Robert Kaplan or one of these guys he was a very sought-after public intellectual about geopolitics about international relations the u.s. role in the world economics and other things so a very prolific author not somebody a little bit more perhaps like how you talked about jiminy today rather than say Klaus Fitz sort of writing alone and a sort of monkish Younker existence right a couple of things that are important here for from ahan timing is critical for when Mahon is writing so Mahon is writing at sort of the height of the Imperial age where many countries are looking to sort of extend their reach to get colonies and of course from Mahon sort of great powers and maritime powers and he's writing when the United States and other countries are looking at the world so the US has this debate with the closing of the frontier so the United States reach out into the Pacific and of course we have the spanish-american war and so on but other countries Imperial Germany was interested in building a high seas fleet interested in having colonies Imperial Japan and so on so Mahon was well sought after the picture here is the USS Iroquois which is actually a ship that muhammad' on that went to Asia so Mahon himself spent time in Japan he really had a positive impression of what he saw of Japan modernizing in the late 19th century as he was a young officer so one thing that you guys won't kick around a lot tomorrow in terms of mahon thinking are these six elements of sea power so the geographical position physical conformity and so on and so forth Mahon was really reflecting this is an often quoted piece of mahon writing Mahon was really quoting or engaging with a sort of literature about sea power in geography that was very ala mode at the time period and so it's talking about what makes a country have strong sea pounder right so obviously for Mahon writing you can see the characteristics of Great Britain here is the island maritime nation but I'm going to kind of problematize that in a second so he's got the critical elements one of the things I kind of put up here are these different tridents so Mahon has sort of three arguments about sea power a political argument the basically maritime Affairs have affected history so you guys saw that in the Peloponnesian War right eventually Sparta had to have naval capacity in order to defeat Athens right we're linking with the Spartans really key to Mahon and this is key I think to sea power for a lot of your discussions tomorrow sea power is more than just navies right there's a political economic aspect to see power it's more than just great hold ships with numbers on the sides it's also about production it's about shipping colonies and then it's self naval supremacy is based upon geographic position bases in battle fleets so he's got these sort of cascading tridents if you will of what makes sea power three parts are trident for economy three parts for naval supremacy six parts for the element of sea power this is the interesting part as well here he's also very interested in the role of the state or the government in deciding to invest in Sipan or not and I would actually argue that's a more important argument for Mahone than most people realize and then he also talks about other Trident is well geographic nodes maritime axis he likes to put things in threes if you also kind of tried ins and you can see the development of this and sort of u.s. foreign policy naval policy in the early 20th century is the u.s. is looking for coaling stations for projecting power and getting access to Asia and also to be able to supply and ostensibly protect our exposed possessions with the Philippines as many of you know is the lead-up to World War two is this huge debate between the Army and the Navy about how to defend the Philippines in Hawaii and where to defend the Philippines in Hawaii and so on however I want to talk a little bit about different ways you can interpret Mahon so the conventional way that we kind of think about Mahon is Mohandas very influenced by Joe Meany his dad was a jomini scholar and there's a lot of gemiini in' language in Mahon about principles about lines of communication all these sorts of things and again one of the shortcuts for understanding Mahon often is decisive battle in battleships the navies must invest in battleships have a decisive naval engagement big guns and that's what's going to get you commanded of the sea many people have also written how scathing Mahon was about Garrett of course right commerce warfare about you know that the British were wanting to seek battle the French for doing Garret of course attacking Commerce and other trading vessels and that that was not effective and of course there's also the sort of marshal imperialist Mahon that you can read in that kind of hardwiring sort of the the rise of naval power to great power competition and warfare and again you think about that time period in which Mohan was writing Imperial Age rising Germany rising Japan rising other countries clashing against each other each for their place in the Sun and some more critical writers of mahon have talked about he was a very street had very strong evangelical faith he's living in an imperial age so many people sort of read read into the Hans personality about maybe why he was so jus mean Ian or inflexible or something like that that's sort of a very conventional reading of mahon I think you can actually kind of disagree with most of that when you actually looking behind while Mahon ostensibly read Klaus fits very late in life later on not early there's certain cloth suits Ian aspects I would say to maja is thinking Mahon is very interested in uncertainty in warfare the same way that Clausewitz was he was very interested in lot non-linearity with it and part of this was his reaction against how he felt the Navy was teaching officers and you have to contextualize this the 19th century this transition from sail to steam right the technique the technological revolution and navies he felt particularly in the US Navy there was too much emphasis and teaching officers and science and engineering in these things and not enough on command and so he really was interested in developing sort of an art command to deal with the uncertainties of warfare in a similar fashion I would argue to Klaus Festus talk about military genius and the need for military genius to deal with the fog and friction of war the other thing that's interesting with GERD of course if you read my Hans writing the primary purpose of the battle fleet right it's destroy the other person's battle fleet but how do you influence events on the ground and you influence events in the ground by protecting your commerce and threatening your adversaries Commerce now Mahon conceptualize this normally as a close blockade of the enemy's Shores so it's not like he was against commerce warfare at the end of the day for Mahon maritime Commerce in the Navy are intrinsically linked what he was against was a u.s. conception of gear to course right we have this tradition in the u.s. natan u.s. maritime thinking in the nineteenth century we don't really need like a large Navy we can use the John Paul Jones model of a few privateers to do some individual surface raiding mahant says that's not going to work that's not going to work in modern warfare to have sort of hastily converted merchant ships to do surface rating and you can think of how quickly in World War two for example the British were able to wrap up most of the individual German surface Raiders you know they only last for about the first six to eight months of the war Mahon said this is not going to work so it's a Pacific type of geared of course that he was against the other thing that's interesting if you're reading Mahon you can read uh more merchant oriented Mahon a Mahon who actually says this is a quote from Mahon force is an alien element and maritime commercial intercourse so Mohammed sinter ested in trade interested in the maritime community sort of even beyond the Navy if you will so you can kind of think about different ways to engage with Mahon this has several sort of implications right the conventional way that we look at Mahon is that he's writing about Great Britain and so I get my groove on for you guys um let's see oh yeah not train of thought there so one of the conventional ways we look at Mahon is he's writing about Britain and how Britain the whole thing if the influence of sea power upon history is this great long contest between Britain France and Holland for mastery of the Seas and so the conventional we look at well Britain was an island it didn't have these continental distractions so it won out over Holland in France because they had to defend territory and were conflicted however I mean if that's the case if that's really the argument mo Hans book you don't need a book to say that right hey what do you need for sea power just be an island right I mean that's not very helpful for most people right because you can't create yourself as an island or maybe the Chinese are in the South China Sea but anyways the thing for Mahon is not really the six elements of sea power this thing for Mahon is government choice governments have a choice between investing and only being a land power or also investing in sea power so I would flip the influence of sea power in history the key actor that Mahon is interested in is France because France has a lot of material elements that can make it a maritime power but it also has continental interest and Soma hans critical role was how france at some times invested in sea power but often miss the boat so to speak bad pun about investing in sea power in critical ways and so Mahon in writing his book he's really worried that the u.s. is an analogous position to france and it will be too focused on our own region on the americas and being a continental power and we might turn away from the sea so it's really about government choice for Mahon rather than necessary Geographic elements and many people have written on Mahon have actually said that the whole thing with the six elements of sea power that we often talk about was essentially something forced upon him by his editor because that's the way people talked about sea power so puts it in more as a foil if you will for his larger arguments about government role um now we're gonna can switch to where maybe perhaps Asia fits into this because I haven't talked about that yet remember Mahon is writing in a time period in the Imperium empires so empires start off in the early modern age right we've got these empires about 1700 and of course by the time Mahone's writing it's the high tide of European empires within the world and also Japan as well one of the things that we see here is the high tide of sort of European imperialism coincides with sort of the rise of the West and sort of the decline of the non West nations and so some of you guys who were interested in military history if I read about the military revolution argument I think that essentially there's a revolution in military affairs that allows the West to rise and conquer a large parts of the rest of the world right the thing that's interesting with this is how this relates then to Asia so if we think about the decline in Asia during the Imperial age I've got a lot of graphics for you one of the things is before the modern era China India tended to be much more wealthy countries than the European countries but with the sort of European expansion 1700s 1800s you see this huge decline and the share of global GDP by India and China as essentially you see the rise of the West and almost any way that you can measure this is a very very drastic decline in Asian wealth and power during this Imperial age right so you can put it I've got different slides here that you can look at for decline of China and India and again different ways you could look at that what I'd like to then do now is kind of think about the the specific sort of encounters these countries add so here's the Portuguese entering into the Indian Ocean in the early 1500s with Vasco da Gama and Albuquerque we also have here the British with the opium wars in the 1840s imposing the will upon China and of course most famously in sort of our context in the u.s. the u.s. opening of Japan in 1853 with Commodore Perry is there do you notice like a similarity between the visual representations of these three events anybody any commonality between all three I like asking obvious questions chips and this is this is kind of like an obvious point but I think we tend to forget this European domination of Asia was made possible through sea power right that at the end of the day at sea power and that left a mark and historical memory in many places in Asia so my good friend campaña Carr who introduced you guys earlier the great Indian historian he calls this era the Vasco de Gama epic of Asian history which is essentially the domination of maritime power over land power traditionally most of these Asian states tend to be very land power based and they're security threats tended to be land power base so you see this domination of Europe through the Seas and again he wrote several books about this and that this is the key to sort of make Western imperialism over Asia work that I think is often kind of missed out when we in the West look at the history of imperialism I give you a quote by the to naval us over at the Naval War College Jim Holmes and toshio shahara control of maritime communications in Asia enabled European conquerors to deprive India of independence and the only time its history and to have their way with a China and decline and to establish bases and colonies throughout coastal Asia and again you can see this the spread of European colonization and trading posts first in South Asia in the 1500s to the 18th century also interesting yeah this is a map from my good friend office mate Mike Phillips who's into geography if you're looking from the sea toward China right it's interesting to see how much of China is exposed if you control the maritime domain and how close a lot of the key points in China are to the ocean so if you look at the far right here this part here where I'm kind of putting my that's Peking right that's Beijing if you're thinking about projecting power from the ocean work China is pretty well defended in a sense of coming in from barbarians coming in from the hinterlands if you will it's fairly open to exploitation from the sea some of you guys later on in TSC I think we'll do the Boxer Rebellion as a case study for combined-arms what's interesting if you look at Western Wes turn expeditions to get to Beijing Second Opium War the era war forcing the tae Kuk forts going up the river getting to Beijing 50 years later coalition against the boxers force the ty ku forts go of the Ruhr I mean virtually the same path for the campaign again maritime based if we look at a lot of the the century of shame for China the period of time period between the opium wars and the the end of the Civil War most again the loss of sovereignty for China from the sea if you look at we for always this is a war we don't remember in the West the sino-french war between Japan I'm sorry between China and Vietnam on the one hand and France and the other the French military and the ground couldn't defeat the Chinese in the north of Vietnam but the French Navy could operate with impunity and that's how they won the war there was just no way for the Chinese to match the French at sea if you look at the spheres of influence that has these unequal treaties these violations of Chinese sovereignty again tends to be mostly maritime based as countries the Western countries and Japan sort of forced themselves in upon China I love Korea is a nice one this is a great one for thinking about how important geopolitically Korea is to both China and Japan this is a map probably most of you guys know right this is a map to the Korean War right so North Koreans push everybody down to the south MacArthur lands at Incheon to cut them up and move them up Chinese intervene and so on but what's interesting if you think about the military history of Korea how these paths look a lot very similar so here let's go back to the 16th century when Hideo she tries to invade China very similar paths using Korea going up there with the Chinese coming down even more interesting is forget the rush of Japanese war we see the Japanese coming in landing in Korea going up to fight the Russians right the Japanese landed Incheon right same thumbpick Arthur does to get into Seoul and go up so if you thinking about how important geography controls the sea is to the sort of military history of the area that consciousness the area is something that we tend to overlook we don't tend to think about this critical role that maritime power and control Korea could have if you want to be Japan invade I know if you want to be China you want to be Japan so kind of the lesson that people were drawing and the sort of the late 19th early 20th century that see powers in curtain is intrinsic to both maintaining your sovereignty and also to becoming a rising power so there's a peel of mahon here right if you want to be a rising power you want to control your neighborhood you want to develop sea power seems intrinsic to this which leads to this question of the inevitability of clash I talked to you guys about sort of the martial Mahon right the Mahon that sees like hardwire conflict and of course you guys have mentioned this acidity strap that you guys talked about with acidities is there a view with Mahon of the inevitability of clash of great maritime powers and long run or not I mean I think that's a debatable point that's something you can think about so Asia's response right Western powers they came from the sea Western imperialism violated sovereignty so you need to have some sort of maritime capability to regain sovereignty to maintain sovereignty and then to become a great power again in the first country that does this is Japan Imperial Japan go through that real quick again first Asian state to modernized and become a great power it's amazing the transformation in Japan if you think about the eighty year period from the late 19th century to World War two so the top image I have for you guys is the British bombardment at Kagoshima in 1863 right so in response to an event on land the British sail the Royal Navy and they can shell Japanese positions with impunity right gunboat diplomacy fast-forward to 1942 the Japanese do the Indian Ocean raid into the Indian Ocean right this is after the fall Singapore so the after the fall Singapore the British moves our naval fleet to Sri Lanka and around India the Japanese raid into the Indian Ocean inflict losses and basically chase the Royal Navy to the east coast of Africa so the the end the British domination of the Indian Ocean region which was sort of taken as a given for 200 years I mean that's an amazing amount of naval development within such a short period of time for Japan you think about it and of course Mahon follows into this as well right so Mahon is globally popular during this time period in late 19th early 20th century so Japan is trying to learn from the West to modernize they have people to go and study and they have their own sort of a given you two figures here sort of mahon ian is sort of sea power thinkers in japan that are actively reading Mahon engaging with Mahone's ideas and of course you can think about the rise of japan in these various wars leading up to carving out its own Empire in East Asia leading up to World War two however this kind of a debate about what type of influence Mahon has had in Japan again there's a kind of conventional reading about Mahon being very influential in Japan he as I mentioned he visited Japan he taught Japanese Midshipmen in the United States and there was a period of time where the Japanese Naval Staff College debated inviting Mahon as a visiting lecturer they ultimately didn't do it and so for example in Ron Spector in his book about about World War Two in the Pacific he makes a comment that Japanese officers had inhaled deeply the heavy fumes of mahon right the Mahon is sort of a huge influence on the Japanese Navy and you can see that with some of the perhaps the focuses of the Japanese Navy in world war ii the emphasis on the decisive fleet engagement the emphasis on large surface vessels with big guns and so on and so forth if you will but there's kind of a question of how much influence Mahon actually had because if if you're an aspiring novelist if you want more money for the Navy does that mean you're influenced by Mahon or are you more influenced by your own sort of rice bowl bureaucratic interests and does Mahon instead of maybe influencing you merely become a convenient higher authority when you're making the case for a budget the same way if you're writing doctrine it's probably useful to put a couple parts of class fits in there right you might not be thinking Clausewitz Ian but mentioning fog and friction of the Trinity probably gives you a little bit of intellectual cachet when you're writing your doctrine not necessarily that you're influenced by them I would also argue the Japanese vision for sea power was influenced by Mahon I think but it also significantly varied from sort of Mahone's vision of sea power I think one of the things to keep in mind here Mahon is kind of writing for an aspiring global power Japan was really a regional power and didn't really think about a lot of the larger aspects of mahon and one of the interesting blind spots and Japanese naval thinking is thinking about the non naval aspects of sea power so very little time was given in Japan to things like Commerce protection protecting Commerce or thinking about Commerce interdiction in war there seems to be too much fraps of a focus and decisive battle you can even see this in the rush of Japanese war the Japanese Navy had a really hard time with the Vladivostok squadron that was introducting Japanese lines of communications to Korea and there's very limited thinking and in Japan about overseas commerce and the value you can think about the role of Japanese submarines in world war ii it was really to @rit u.s. surface vessels which they ultimately were very unsuccessful in doing compared to other countries thinking about submarine campaigns to strike at commerce and lines of communication which the United States did quite well against Japan in World War two so perhaps one could argue there was maybe not enough attention given to the sort of non naval aspects of mahon and Japanese naval thought a couple of other things I can talk about with that so moving them to contemporary with China and India so traditionally these are land powers so perhaps they fit this question that Mahon had when he looked at France when he's looking at the United States land powers that had the option to look out to the sea or not there is also both the history of Western imperialism that sort of changes their historical narrative and again for China and India for most of their history the invaders came from some other place in Central Asia coming in through the land Europeans were the first groups that came in from the sea moreover during the post-colonial period both China and India decide upon mostly having internal development and cutting themselves off from trade which again if you think about it from a Lahani in perspective right a Navy's purpose comes out of your commercial shipping in your trade you don't have commercial tripping and trade you're probably not gonna have a Navy which in case you can see with China and India not much emphasis on maritime affairs when they were trying to have alt ARCIC internal development contemporary those things have changed right both of these countries are end up to international trade they're both heavily dependent upon external energy imports and they have a rising interest in maritime security and of course kind of a desire for influence or perhaps control over their sea approaches and so oftentimes you have these writings that you'll see about Chinese or Indian thinking are they thinking about say the South China Sea is the South China Sea China's Caribbean right that word should have a Monroe Doctrine like control over or is the in or is the Indian naval officers always like to joke you know it's called the Indian Ocean for a reason right it's the Indian Ocean and we should have some degree of control over it the same way the Americans had an idea with the Monroe Doctrine so what must be done in the boast of these countries one thing one thing that could be done again it's developing of the civilian maritime industry you see heavy emphasis and investment on China China's part since the 1980s to become a large shipbuilding country and investment in ports and other things and you have an article and discussions about that tomorrow in your class contrasting for India there's been much less debate and investment in the shipbuilding maritime industry in India the shipbuilding industry in India the public one mostly supplies the naval vessels it's not really an investment into large-scale shipbuilding but there's been a debate about that with Modi in the make and India campaign the past couple of years increase in naval power particularly in China's case after the 1995-96 Taiwan Straits crisis a lot of interest because there was nothing they could do when the u.s. sent to carrier battle groups so again strong investment there India you see halting investment since the 1990s and the military capabilities of the Navy one of the other things is also interesting is how to increase elite mass support for naval and maritime investment so increasing maritime awareness as Muhammad right so one thing that's been interesting in both countries is they've been trying to fashion a useful maritime past so if you want to get people to be enthusiastic about the Navy invest in the Navy you have to find periods of time in your country's history where the Navy was strong so was as we talk about the rise of the Chinese naval power rise of Chinese Navy no surprise that everybody's talking about these Chinese treasure fleets the past 10 or so years right the fact that China sent the Admiral into the Indian Ocean in you know to explore Africa and so on that there was a moment in time where China was a naval power it was a maritime power so that's emphasized now as a useful aspect of maritime past you also see a flirting with this in India about the chola empire in the south of India which was a maritime which was a maritime Empire as well a little less emphasis than what China has done the past couple of years a couple of things about Indian thinking just to give you kind of a taste I mentioned Panikkar back in the 1940s his rural emphasis was that India needed to control the Indian Ocean region otherwise it would always be vulnerable to being cut off from trade or to have its sovereignty violated by some other country that had maritime power or maritime control within the Indian Ocean one of one of my favorite modern-day Indian naval thinkers Admiral Prakash he really felt that India needs to end what the Indians call maritime blindness that there's a kind of unwillingness of the political elite in Delhi to consider maritime and naval security seriously and to try and move India to being a more normal power that's more familiar more adept more comfortable with the maritime element and investing in the Navy you can see sort of where India's thinking about in terms of its area of interest this is from their last naval doctrine thinking about the dark blue here is India's primary area of interest within within Asia and then having secondary interest as well naturally it's very India Ocean Indian Ocean focused you get another map Indian security concerns and particularly concerns with the entry of China and the Indian Ocean region many of you guys have had presentations about strings of pearls and other things and o'Barr and other things like that the Indians are concerned with this grow that Chinese dual use facilities within the region in terms of China the focus has been a little bit different and it's been arguably longer and for much longer than has been in India so one of the focuses for China has been on this aspect of the two island chains and the need to protect trade and protect sort of the maritime approaches to China because if you look at China the the the ocean from China's perspective these island chains seem to box China in seem to box China's ability for trick power-out and particularly that the Taiwan situation has not been resolved that's also something that they're concerned with but again having Japan with the alliance with the United States going up to the islands then to the Philippines with their alliance again it seems that China sort of boxed in if you will so there's kind of an idea of how to contest sort of American control of these areas so that China can project power and again just another geographic representation of the island chains and thinking about how the China can actively contest US control and this is all the sort of focus we've heard the past couple of years you know the anti access area denial capabilities of the Chinese are working on if you will you can also link this to China and India right we've had this past summer this border standoff that was ended a couple weeks a week or so ago between India and China so China's not just concerned about the US and its allies but China and India are also concerned in terms of the maritime realm this is important because while we tend to put China and India in the same basket China's a much more powerful actor than India is economically militarily bombs any measure so for the Indians the maritime domain ostensibly gives them sort of an asymmetric advantage over China compared to say the land domain and so you see arguably a sort of competition between India and China over developing all this maritime infrastructure in the Indian Ocean region China's far ahead of India on this I would argue all right in closing what I'd just like to kind of wrap up with what I was kind of giving you guys for your taste is trying to introduce you guys to the theories of mahon getting you guys to think about different ways of reading Mahon and then perhaps also the influence Mahon has had in these countries whether it's whether it's Japan India or China and again this issue of the role of the government's policy you know will India and China will they stay the course will they invest in sea power in a way that perhaps France did not during the time period that Mahon was looking or will they do actually do invest in its way the United States has men and sort of what's the the future so I'll have some time for questions I'm a little bit under a cold right now so I'm not as coherent as I normally am but I'll do my best to pretend to answer questions I know don't all jump out at me at once there's no questions you guys could leave but we'll give you a minute or two questions Mahon anything yes you know they were not dependent upon maritime trade and I mean I would just echo Mahon if you don't if you're not dependent upon maritime trade it's more difficult to make an argument for a navy so China went out with those treasure fleets looking for trade looking for engagement but ultimately it didn't amount to I think where the investment the investment wouldn't balance the with the payments of you all for the trade moreover I think you also have Mahone's argument you have a government that was more concerned with both internal security threats and then terrestrial security threats rather than the maritime domain so chose in a sense this is not worth it the investment in the in the treasure fleet is not worth it for the particular dynasty and so they they turned away from the seized government policy and that's I think really for me that's where my han's main concern is is that governments can become distracted from the sea because of terrestrial demands and how do you balance against

Channel: USArmyWarCollege

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Keywords: Mahan, theories of war, Bratton, usawc, army war college, East Asia, Patrick Bratton

Id: y-tshVIAeIM

Length: 36min 51sec (2211 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 15 2017