The Impact of Mahan on Naval History - Decisively more than just battles

[Music] for a man who would have such an impact on both naval history and as a result world history alfred thayer mahan would initially not appear to be destined for such a role born in 1840 he did at least determine that he wanted his life to be a military one in general and a naval one in particular entering the u.s naval academy and coming in a creditable second in his class his first posting in the then small u.s navy was to the frigate uss congress a more modern and slightly larger successor to the frigate that had taken part in the war of 1812. this would change quite rapidly though since he entered active service in 1859 his early career was overshadowed by the american civil war where he served on a number of smaller ships taking part in the blockade both perps built warships and converted merchantmen between active sea service and once the war was over some time instructing at the academy he managed to survive the massive cuts to u.s navy strength in the late 1860s seeing active service in command of ships in the 1870s and early 1880s although it must be said he did prefer shore duty his skills in command at sea were not particularly remarkable the only real thing that stood his commands apart from his fellow captains was an unusual propensity to run into things and so it seemed that his career arc would be summed up as a long-serving but relatively unremarkable officer of the late 19th century u.s navy this would however change radically in 1885 when mahan moved to lecture at the naval war college and shortly thereafter became president of the same institution by default as the existing president was sent out on active sea duty here he formulated his thinking and lectures melding them with military theories that were in circulation at the time from a number of important military theoreticians and began to publish a series of books the two most important of which would be the influence of sea power upon history 1660-1780 published in 1890 and the influence of sea power upon the french revolution and empire 1793-1812 in 1892. there would be two other works the life of nelson the embodiment of sea power at the sea power of great britain which was published in 1897 and sea power in relation to the war of 1812 which was published in 1905 but whilst these latter two reinforces reputation and position it would be the first two works that really got traction going on his theories whilst the main part of his work focused on the conflicts encapsulated by the classic age of sale he did also look back into ancient history in brief all the way back to alexander the great and the various major naval conflicts between nations that flowed on from that time period but whilst many may have summarized mohan as that guy who argued for decisive battles and others have tried to dismiss his theories on exactly that account mainly citing things like the desire of the japanese navy for a mahanian decisive battle coupled with the fact that they lost as apparent evidence for their claims and a few more advanced arguments are made that point out that decisive battles didn't impact end wars jutland for example mohan's thinking was actually far more complex than that and so we'll briefly try and go over that in this video very broadly it's possible to place mohan's theories into three approximate categories which is already two more than the uh haha decisive battlego boom position but nevertheless there's a preparation element which is what the navy does in peace time and at the start of water position itself for best advantage for action then there's the idea of the decisive battle and then there's what you do after you presumably win that decisive battle there's also a bit of a sideline about what to do if you know you can't winner decides to battle but still want to try and win the war at some point but all of this falls under the much wider umbrella of the overall objective mahan was espousing control of the sea it would be this control of the sea which allowed the victorious navy to act effectively against its opponent and thus guarantee success the decisive battle was not the end the enemy wouldn't surrender just because they'd lost a good chunk of their navy although they might seek terms it was no certainty what the decisive battle was supposed to do was to allow further activities to take place without interference and it would be these that would then lead to victory but let's look at the elements under discussion preparation for the decisive battle was in mohan's view probably the single greatest aspect of his body of work and comprised a number of aspects some taking place in peacetime and others at the start of hostilities they were as follows the establishment of a network of coal and supply depots this was seen as vital due to the fact that modern steam-powered vessels did not have their endurance limited largely by the supplies of food and water the way that sail powered craft did so for a navy to be able to operate anywhere in the world or even relocate to a more favorable position within a given fixed theatre stocks of fuel and naval stores would be needed positioned in such a manner that the fleet's radius of action from one base overlapped to another although mahan also cautioned against being excessive in the location and number of these since each base would need funding defensive installations and all sorts of other expenses that would drain the home country and the fleet itself of resources and money if an unnecessary number of bases were established the balance of course was difficult since of course you didn't want to have one weak link whose loss would shatter the chain of operation for the fleet but at the same time having four or five alternate bases for every main base was a step too far the answer lying somewhere in the middle next you had securing supply lines to and from those depots you'd think that goes without saying but the number of times in history that an overseas port or base was isolated and overwhelmed by the enemy thus denying its facilities to the original owners and granting the use of those facilities to the opponent is quite disturbing especially since these kind of distant actions were often accomplished by blockades and or sieges which would often end in surrender rather than outright conquest and part of the terms of that surrender would often include leaving the important infrastructure largely intact at least by the time of muhammad's writing then there was the training of officers in this mahan drew distinction between practical and theoretical training and much valued the practical over any other form but in this mahan sought to push back the idea that practical training could only take place at sea and aboard a ship instead he defined the two terms approximately thus a practical lesson is one that would eventually lead to useful action thus studying ballistics in a classroom would be practical if the officer who learned this then went on to apply his new knowledge in working a ship's guns and thus achieving better results whereas an officer who studied in depth why exactly it wasn't a good idea to use high explosives like tnt as a propellant was engaging in theoretical work the knowledge had no actionable application in the real world where the lesson had already been learned and could be explained in a few sentences or even boiled down to high explosive propellant leads to overpressure overpressure makes guns explode however this theoretical line could also take the form of what on the surface might be classed as practical work such as going out and actually firing a gun to see what happens if say the shell was made of rubber and not metal additionally some practical matters could be moved into the realm of the purely theoretical simply depending on their application for example sending an engineering officer on the same ballistics training course as you just sent your gunnery officers on then you have to establish the purpose of the navy and mahan drew a distinction between nations that possessed a navy primarily to ensure the security of trade and shipping which tended to be island nations and all those with significant trade fleets and those nations who owned a navy for purely martial purposes these being countries with some combination of relatively small merchant fleets an economy that simply wouldn't support a fleet large enough to meaningfully ensure trade security or those largely self-sufficient internally the makeup of the navy would then be dictated by its purpose as a very different combination of ships were needed depending on which particular ambition you were following then he listed destruction or at least attacks on enemy commerce this obviously was a wartime measure mahar did not believe that pursuing a solely anti-commerce offensive would bring about victory in and of itself and bearing in mind he was writing in an era before ocean going submarines he maintained that firstly to raid enemy commerce you had to decide which was the most efficient way to do so and this would vary depending on the opponent in some cases it might be best to send a cruiser fleet marauding across the globe in other cases it might be best to concentrate a force at some global trade hub or hubs and catch enemy shipping as it passed through in still other cases such as where the nation in question already had the predominance of force a blockade might well serve this purpose whilst damaging the enemy the main focus of this activity would be to lure the enemy fleet into coming out to try and stop you thus leading to the decisive battle there were also in mahan's view a number of influencing factors which would guide the balance of the above issues on a nation-by-nation basis firstly strategic geography this related to where on the map a nation might find itself in relation to others mahan cited britain as an example of a nation that enjoyed significant advantages in this regard as opposed to france or holland by being a unified island nation there was no need to maintain a large standing army for home defense as the other two nations had to and britain sat in the middle of or in close proximity to every major trade route between northern europe and the rest of the world conversely the other two countries had to maintain larger standing armies and face separate additional challenges the netherlands had a britain-shaped problem potentially menacing its trade whilst france did possess an atlantic coast it also had a mediterranean coast which meant that its naval forces would be forever split and having to pass through the gibraltar straits in order to unify which would always mean being partially subject to the whims of whoever controlled those waters which by that point had for over a century been britain writing in a time before the panama canal of which idea he was a great advocate mohan noticed that this split coastline for home territory would cause either great weakness or great expense for the united states should it seek to assert significant presence in both the atlantic and pacific oceans he also noted that spain and the united kingdom had both enjoyed an overseas empire and a continuous coastline at points in history but that different strategies in within their navies had resulted by the late 19th century in one empire becoming dominant and the other falling prey to many depredations including naval ones not in the least helped by the uk taking gibralta which in later years would put spain in the same position as france in a naval conflict with the uk mahan also noted that italy largely protected from land invasion by the alps would be in a similar position of advantage as the uk if not for the fact that immediately outlying islands such as malta and corsica which he described as naturally italian were in the hands of foreign powers which had something of an effect of boxing it in applying these lessons to the united states mahan pointed out that a good number of ports and access to major rivers meant that the usa would have a strong maritime geographic advantage providing that a canal was built through panama to allow the unification of east and west coast fleets then secondly physical geography as distinct from strategic geography what mahan called physical confirmation related to the nature of the seaboard of any given nation a coastline that possessed no natural harbors was useless to a maritime nation except potentially as a means of defense against landings providing that this coastline was also especially inaccessible ideally you wanted to have plenty of large deep and navigable harbours providing of course you could defend them the raid on the medway being a good example of failing at the latter other examples that he gave were the mississippi its mouth being of great commercial advantage to the united states generally but proving to be a thorn in the side of the confederate states of america due to the lack of defenses when war came likewise earlier in his nation's history the lack of meaningful defenses in the chesapeake area had resulted in the burning of washington dc the dutch were noted as having a bit of a two-edged sword they had many large harbours with good defenses but they were shallow this limited their own fleet when it came to trying to build the big ocean-going warships that would later be called first rates but at the same time it did provide a degree of passive defense against the assault of other navies who were predominantly made up of these larger vessels he also hypothesized that the climate might have something to do with a nation's drive to go to sea after all the dutch were a single dyke breach away from living in the sea itself anyway and the prospect of a sky that wasn't mostly grey would surely lure the british beyond their borders but if you happen to have a relatively secure life on the mediterranean coast of france why would you ever want to go anywhere else there was also a matter of rivers good internal waterways would encourage the products of a nation's inland industries to flow outwards but a relative lack of them would mean transport was harder and thus a country would be more prone to developing elements of itself with a degree of isolation between them and so only a small amount of national effort would ever flow to the coast and hence to the sea in this regard he did advocate railways as a potential replacement for large-scale inland waterway transport if you happen to be a nation that was not blessed with large amounts of rivers thirdly the type and size of your territory this subset of the above two geographical issues was mahan maintained incredibly important this didn't relate to the size of any empire that a country might have but rather to the nature of the home territory and how that might relate into driving that nation to value the sea in the first place the measure that he used was the ratio of coastline as compared to overall territory thus absolute land size was actually less relevant than the extent of that nation's coast in proportion the more of a country that was either coastline or had coastline nearby the more likely a seafaring tradition was to develop although that he noted that population proportional to that coastline was also needed attributing the naval failure of the confederate states navy in part to the fact that whilst the csa had possessed a lot more coastline by ratio than the union had the overall population meant that it couldn't be fully guarded and nor could a navy proportionate to the number of harbors and ports that it possessed be maintained and this factor related in part his next category the fourth the number of people whilst absolute population had some say as per the previous point he also pointed out that the proportion of people in a given nation associated with seafaring was a major factor by illustration he cited that in late 18th century france france had a much larger population than the uk did so in absolute terms france should have been able to man far more ships than the british assuming the similar ratio of people on the coast as compared to inland but because a much larger portion of the british population was associated with the sea the reality was that the royal navy was able to field significantly more vessels than the marine national a matter for which again in the context of the late 18th century he upgrades the existing u.s administration for since for all its size he pointed out that the us navy of the time was not even an adequate defense behind which to hide whilst building up further strength let alone take an offensive and that brings us on to the next point number five the type of people dubbed national character by mohan he uses this somewhat 19th century concept to explain the relationship of various nations with their overseas colonies and thus why some nations have been successful in building and maintaining empires in his time and others have not for example he credits the dutch with a long-term enduring empire on the basis of their strong entrepreneurial spirit but maintains that since all they seem to want out of overseas colonies is commerce they have no further drive to expand once they've got trade ports going and hence their overall holdings remain relatively small the french he claims would always rather prefer to be in france and so have little will to remain overseas or else they plow all their efforts into making their holdings into clones of france itself the spanish on the other hand are said to have a limited range of ambitions that mostly center around gold and other valuable material wealth that prevents them from treating their colonies as anything more than resource extraction centers the british the elephant in the room for the late 19th century he maintains would always love their home country but not feel any particular need to return just yet and in so doing they'll always seek to expand the area that they're in and make such alterations as they feel are needed for safety and order but not the extent of the french trying to remodel the entire country this he maintains is the self-evident best balance of factors to ensure a swift but stable growth of empire and with it both the need for and the resources for maritime supremacy since at this point america's major colonial adventures beyond the borders of what's now the continental united states had yet to start he leaves the character of the american people to some brief speculation although he is somewhat optimistic sixth and finally the type of government this last part points out that this element is the hardest to predict mohan favors free government by the people but he also acknowledges that such governments have at times fallen well short of advancing what he terms national greatness whilst at the same time a much more despotic style of government has occasionally advanced the nation's maritime cause very successfully overall he concludes that the primary qualification in this case is that whatever government type there is it must maintain a constant view that control of the sea is necessary and providing this is always kept in mind the nation's good fortune upon the waves should be ensured to a reasonable degree of certainty having used the above to determine approximately where your particular navy and nation would stand in world rankings mahan then speaks of matters more specific to the strategy of warfare these take the form of the central position interior lines and communications briefly thus the central position is the most advantageous as it divides enemies or parts of a single enemy from each other and affords the one occupying this position the ability to deploy most of their force rapidly against one or the other assuming they have sufficient force available at the time of writing he points out that the triple alliance had an advantage over the triple on taunt as germany austria-hungary and italy divided off russia from its allies in the event of any conflict conversely in the anglo-dutch war the uk had this advantage as it stood between the netherlands and the wider world of maritime commerce interior lines are simply areas which allow the owner to move their forces around faster and more directly than their opponents can this can allow overwhelming force to be brought to bear at a given location even if the attacker doesn't have quite as much overwhelming force overall or it can allow defense in many places to be made even if the defending force is overall outnumbered by the various forces it has to fight in separate locations for maritime purposes examples cited are the keel canal as this allows germany to switch between the north and baltic seas much faster than anyone else the panama canal if and when it's built would allow the us navy to do the same for the pacific and atlantic oceans and the british hold in on gibraltar and the sewers canal meant that anyone that they didn't like would have to go all the way around africa to get between the indian and atlantic oceans whilst the british and any allies they had could use the mediterranean as a shortcut and finally communications this is twofold in the late 19th century first the simple physical distance involved in a world where ships at sea could not be reached 24 7 in this respect messenger vessels and the like benefit from the above two circumstances and of course the telegraph cable system which allows for worldwide communication at least between ports and the one who controls these will have a major advantage as will be shown in world war one when a small shed at the end of cornwall suddenly became one of the most vital strategic assets of the war and cable cutting vessels were likewise suddenly in high demand and so after having considered all of this we finally get to approach the thing that mohan has been distilled down to by so many the run-up to the decisive battle for this mahan advocates concentration of force to bring overwhelming power to bear in the aid of this he cites nelson giving orders to a pair of frigates that he'd sent off on a mission if you meet two enemies do not each attack one combine both on one of the enemy and you'll make sure of that one and you might get the other one afterwards but whether the second escapes or not your country will have won a victory and gained a ship he applies this not just to battle tactics but also to the ships that you bring to that battle noting that you cannot have the fastest most heavily armed best protected and longest-range battleship on the planet assuming displacements are approximately equal as anyone who concentrates on one or two of these factors will always do better there i.e you will end up with a jack of all trades master of none and you'll probably only be able to afford two of them rather concentrate on what you do best or what will hurt the enemy the worst and build ships with that focus he points out that trafalgar combined both of these ideas of concentration as the majority of nelson's fleet was made up of third rates with the leveling of first and seconds and further despite arguably having better ships and crews he fought the battle so as to isolate and eliminate a portion of the enemy's larger fleet by making it locally smaller than his own and then dealing with the rest later this produced a decisive result as opposed to more generalized match-up in which ships on both sides might have been lost or forced to retire due to damage and the overall impact on the enemy fleet even if an overall victory was achieved would have been significantly less on a larger scale concentration was designed to bring the bulk of your forces to bear in a theater of your choosing whilst preventing the enemy from doing the same again bearing in mind the layout of things in the late 19th century mohan points out that an enemy fleet operating near florida would have concentration in the central position it would not need to be stronger than the us navy just stronger than the largest portion that it had divided off from the other and this explains in his view why the u.s at the time viewed cuba with such worry as it would make an excellent pace for a hostile fleet to do exactly this from ideally this concentration of force should be achieved in a strategically strong position which should allow the interdiction of something important to the enemy thus forcing them to meet you and causing them harm if they refuse to do so ideally this should also be narrow or have easily guarded entrances so as to impede the enemy's freedom of movement should they attempt to circumvent or flank your fleet this should also be a position such that it affords your navy both defensive and offensive strength this defensive strength could be the proximity of fortified harbours minefields or the availability of short-range crafts such as torpedo boats whilst also denying as much of these factors to the enemy as was possible which left them with only their offensive strength in terms of deep water fleet to face your combined defensive and offensive powers however whilst focusing on having defensive assets available your campaign should be centered around an offensive use of your overall assets as holding a purely defensive pattern and waiting for the enemy to come to you would end up sapping the morale of your sailors and render you in a position of weakness as it gives the initiative to the enemy critical to this is the type of ports that you base from mahan points out that whilst places like gibraltar are excellent for dominating an area and controlling the flow of shipping the fact that a port like that needs constant supply from overseas renders it an inferior position to concentrate an entire fleet from for a long-term campaign as compared to a port that can supply most all of its needs from friendly territory that happens to surround it especially basics like food and water so assuming you're following mahanian doctrine you've concentrated your fleet in the right location now you can go on the offensive here at last is the decisive battle but the heart doesn't say all that much about how to win the decisive battle in terms of the actual tactics of the fight he gives plenty of examples of decisive battles that were fought in the past and why they were important but he leaves the finer details of exactly how to blow your enemy out of the water to the admiral who may be on the scene at the time but presuming that you do find the enemy fleet and beat them mahan goes further he says you must pursue them to finish off any that were left anything that wasn't utterly destroyed in the decisive battle itself he points out that there were a number of conflicts where a great battle that might appear to be decisive was fought but thanks to a lack of successful pursuit the overall effect on the two sides numbers was relatively minimal compared to what it could have been and this allowed the losing side to fall back regroup and at times eventually prevail in the war as a whole ideally this pursuit should be done by also wiping out the enemy's ability to fall back to safety i.e cut off his access to bases whether by just getting your fleet ahead of theirs laying out minefields or having another unit of ships where your strength allows to backstop your own main efforts of course this applies for when your concentration of force is such that you're actually pretty confident of victory if you do not have this confidence you may need to fight defensively until you think you can carry the decisive battle although this does require you to know roughly where the enemy might be headed as you will not have enough force to cover multiple possible areas of enemy approach part of this defensive action may be commerce warfare by cruisers or other similar means since this will force a dilution of the enemy fleet or force them to move on you at a time that's more under your control than theirs conversely a power on the offensive may blockade the weaker power with the objective of forcing them to come out to fight again on terms of the attacker in this respect mahan actually theorizes an entire war plan for what the us navy should do should it in its late 19th early 20th century format find itself at war with the royal navy but that's probably a subject for another video as it does go into quite a bit of detail however all of this is a means to an end namely as said earlier control of the sea where a lot of supposed mahanian thinking in various navies went wrong was to assume that by following all of these steps you would fight the decisive battle and the enemy would immediately seek terms mohan doesn't actually maintain this rather he points out that command of the sea is what should win you the war the decisive battle is simply in his opinion the surest way to gain command of the sea and hold it because if you've eliminated the enemy fleet they can't come out to challenge you for it again once achieved the enemy's maritime commerce can be destroyed entirely his communications and supply lines disrupted whilst your industry is fed from trade with the rest of the world his fortifications can be reduced troops may be landed on his coast and your own troops if you happen to have them in the field can be kept supplied and fed whilst his wither under your blockade then either by sheer economic pressure or possibly by your troops marching into their capital your enemy should be forced to give in thus saith the mahan of course this brief summary of four books and a number of extensive lectures only scratches the surface but hopefully it gives some insight into actual mahanian thinking and shows that it goes much further than simply have a big fight winner takes all that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry dock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 134,825

Keywords: wows, world of warships, USN, Mahan, Spanish-American war, naval tactics, American Civil War, WW1, Mahanian doctrine, decisive battle

Id: LSE7piJcFvo

Length: 31min 14sec (1874 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021