From the earliest days the security of the United States has been wrapped up with the problem of its defense at sea. First as nurslings of the sea power of Great Britain, then as a young nation fighting against that power to find its own continental destiny, and eventually as defenders of a free world order in which they could live at peace, Americans have always found themselves concerned with the great problem of maritime defense.
This problem has expanded and changed in form since the days when Washington first raised the standard to which the wise and honest could repair. The problem then was simply to wage a limited war against Great Britain to achieve our independence. With the aid of the French fleet and a valiant struggle fought against odds on land, this was achieved. Washington himself noted at the time that in this struggle, navies had the casting vote. As our greatest naval historian, Admiral Mahan, has observed, “To Arnold on Lake Champlain, to de Grasse at Yorktown, fell the privilege of exercising that prerogative at the two great decisive moments of the war.” Today the immediate problem of United States security is to check and contain aggression as far as we can throughout the world. As in Washington’s day, naval power holds the casting vote.
John Paul Jones set forth the basically offensive mission of naval forces in the national defense when he criticized de Grasse at Yorktown for not pursuing and destroying the inferior British fleet in those waters, rather than being content with the inevitable surrender ashore. To this idea of striking directly at the enemy power afloat leaders such as Truxton, Preble, Decatur, and Hull added in succeeding years a tradition of fighting excellence which has lasted to our day. During the Civil War Northern sea power played a vital role in cutting off the Southern states from all possibility of out side aid and enabled the nation to complete by itself the necessary task of affirming its own integrity. In the war with Spain the re-united nation looked outward entirely for its security, and in the two great wars of this century fought against aggression in foreign parts, the United States has learned how far that outward look must now extend. The problem of American security had come to call for a maritime effort involving the transport and supply of armies able to support our cause on foreign soil. Today we are faced with the need of continuing that same maritime extension of our power, to support friendly nations on the far shore of the seas we must at all costs control.
The great weapon of maritime power, capable of gathering the forces of the free world to project them at the citadel of enemy resistance from bases made invulnerable to him has proved its worth in the two great wars of our century. In 1878 the cynical Bismarck, wishing to pose as the “honest broker” of European peace, pointed out that the whale of the dominant British sea power could not fight the elephant of Russian land power then occupying Constantinople. Since that time, however, the whale has learned to carry an army in its belly, and no policymaker however cynical in mind and intention can afford to write off this new power in planning his aggression.
The immense strength of this form of war was realized indeed even in Bismarck’s day and helped to sustain a rudimentary balance and order, since altogether vanished from European politics. It was British maritime power, in the end, that had humbled the first Napoleon’s ambition, financing and supporting endless coalitions against him, forcing him to seek a way out with his disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812, and eventually building up its own army in Europe capable of defeating him at Waterloo in 1815. In the troubled years that followed the Peace of Vienna a reactionary hegemony of Europe was attempted under the guise of the “Holy Alliance,” led by a fanatic Russian czar and supported mainly by his brother despots in eastern Europe. The threat of this coalition to the progress and freedom of the western world was considerable. While it lasted it cast an evil shadow over Europe. As Sir Julian Corbett, a great student of the problem of maritime defense, has remarked, “it proved a curse to Europe, and, but for sea power, would have proved a curse to the world.”
Against the possibilities of aggression and despotic conquest raised by this situation, and especially against its threat to the new- won liberties of the South American nations, the Monroe Doctrine was erected, affirmed by the United States but admittedly based on British control of the Atlantic. And it is difficult to see what besides this British sea power, the pre-eminent reinforcement of British diplomacy in Europe, restrained Bismarck himself from a policy of unrestricted aggression after his victory over France in 1871. The example of Napoleon, and of the setback administered to Russian dreams of conquest in the Crimean War fifteen years before, was always before him. From 1815 on, in fact, until the general outbreak of world war a century later, the British maritime power, with its economic and political ramifications, and its potentiality of direct action in concert with other powers, would seem to have exerted an immense unseen influence in European politics, keeping the forces of unrestrained aggression under a firm if unobtrusive control.
And this control, be it marked and forever remembered, was pre-eminently for freedom. Never before had Europe or the world known such general advance in all the common fields of human endeavor and government as it knew in this century of the Pax Britannica. Most of the countries since submerged under the tide of a new totalitarianism were then free republics, constitutional monarchies, or empires whose tyranny could not begin to compare with that under which they have labored since. In this general progress the power of British seaborne commerce and sea-supported diplomacy can surely be said to have played a leading part. All this vanished, however, in the insane militarist gamble of 1914. The Bismarckian policy of cautious alliance and limited aggression was cast aside, and the world projected into a new era of bloodshed, turmoil, and unresolved conflict.
It was in this post-1914 period that American sea power, as the instrument of a mature American national policy, came of age. As early as 1911 Mahan, surveying the ominous growth of a great militarist power centering on the strategic unity of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, had noted, “That power to control Germany does not exist in Europe, except in the British navy,” which, with the development of an offensive German naval power, made the European situation “a matter of prime importance” to the United States.
Our entry into the first World War in 1917 was fundamentally in defense of a principle of maritime security enunciated by President Wilson as “Freedom of the seas.” Unfortunately the real lesson of that war, that freedom must be fought for and won not only on the sea itself, but on the far shore of our oceanic borders, was not fully appreciated nor made part of American post-war policy. In the Washington Naval Conference of 1922 the British and American navies themselves were radically reduced in a paper battle which turned out in the result to be the most disastrous naval action ever conducted by either nation. Any peace in the unstable post-war world depended at the least on a strong Anglo-American command of ocean trade routes and potential lines of operation, but the bare naval forces necessary were cut below this minimum, with crippling mutual restrictions on further building which left the door open to future threats of aggression, especially in the Pacific.
The truth is that neither of the two great maritime nations was ready or willing to arm up to its evident responsibilities in a troubled world. As Harold and Margaret Sprout have remarked in their Toward a New Order of Sea Power, “Thus in 1922 the problem of sea power was merging with the problem of armaments as a whole, which was but one aspect of a gigantic problem of world order and reconstruction.”
In this gigantic problem, or rather in its failure, the United States soon found itself very critically involved. The tragic unpreparedness of the democracies in the West led to the outbreak of the second World War in 1939, followed by the unloosing of unrestricted aggression in the Pacific, and in late 1941 the United States found itself involved in war with powerful empires in both oceans. Of our allies, an embattled Britain was clinging to its last lines of defense in Africa and the Middle East, while Russia and China were hard pressed, with much of their territory in enemy hands. A strong Japanese amphibious power was running rampant in the Pacific, while in the Atlantic German submarines were sinking our ships more rapidly than they could be replaced. By a supreme maritime effort which the dictators had never imagined possible, our allies were supported and the last lines held. Before the end of the first year of war our first difficult offensives in both hemispheres had begun, and within three years of these beginnings total victory on all fronts had been achieved, and all our enemies had surrendered.
The growing naval power which reversed the tide of U-boat sinkings in the Atlantic and broke the back of Japanese air-sea power at Midway marked the turning point of this effort, because, as always, successful maritime war depended on firm control of the sea; and on the success of our maritime effort in sending supplies and reinforcements to all corners of the world depended the outcome of the war.
The weapon which achieved this almost miraculous reversal of world conditions is one that the enemies of freedom have come to respect, but if it is to prevent wars rather than win them at the eleventh hour it must be handled with resolution. In the 1930’s, as captured documents show, Hitler time and again risked his still unmatured war machine against the unwillingness of the democracies to fight. In this manner Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the remilitarized Rhineland were gained without open warfare. Going from strength to strength, Hitler soon felt able to take the risk of unlimited war in his campaigns of opportunist aggression, and the first half of this unlimited war he won with the conquest of France in 1940. But the second phase, involving the necessary conquest or subduing of the British power which lay on his seaward flank, he never achieved and in this failure lay the seed of his downfall and the complete destruction of his empire in 1945.
England, being a maritime power, was able by heroic efforts to halt the westward march of what was by then the greatest military machine the world had ever seen, and to keep the Atlantic open and in friendly hands until the time came that the democracies were themselves able to mount an unlimited offensive on the European mainland. The strategic implications of this kind of war, in which force is drawn from all corners of the world to crush the aggressor in his lair, were simply beyond the vision of the Nazi planners, as they had been beyond the vision of Napoleon and all who sought to dominate the continent before them.
Some years before the first war a British strategic thinker, reflecting on the implications of Mahan’s exploration of the realm of sea power, and on Great Britain’s own strategic experience, had concluded that the continental strategists in general had never managed to explain the maritime policy which had kept the peace of Europe so long.
“Standing at the final point which Clausewitz and Jomini reached,” he wrote,
we are indeed only on the threshold of the subject. We have to begin where they left off and enquire what their ideas have to tell for the modern conditions of world-wide imperial States, where the sea becomes a direct and vital factor.
The gradual development of British overseas resources, and the awakening of American maritime power under a slowly-evolved national principle of the oceanic defense of freedom, together made this new condition the decisive strategic fact in the first part of this era of conflict. Our many lapses from the necessities of the situation in isolationism and severely limited ideas of hemisphere defense did not quite destroy the situation, because the dictators remained more blind to its possibilities than we were, and at the eleventh hour in 1917 and 1941 we were able under an awakened national policy to save it.
But the strategic realities which confront the United States today will allow of no such belated action as saved us then. Once more aggression is rampant in the world, striking down its victims where it can, cautious and confined for the moment to limited objectives, but evidently ready to pass to unlimited attack as soon as its planners feel their moment has come. The needs of American security today call for a broad maritime strategy where oceans are regarded not as last ditch barriers against possible assault, but as broad highways by which armies can be supplied and freedom defended as firmly as possible throughout the world. As Sir Julian Corbett concluded:
The paramount concern, then, of maritime strategy is to determine the mutual relations of your army and navy in a plan of war. When this is done, and not till then, naval strategy can begin to work out the manner in which the fleet can best discharge the function assigned it.
And we need the tools for such a broad strategy of defense today. The time when the Monroe Doctrine in the Americas and the Open Door in China could be maintained against aggression under the friendly aegis of British power in Europe is passed forever, and with it the illusive idea of a national defense restricted to our coasts, to our hemisphere, or even to the barrier oceans we looked to before Pearl Harbor. We now know that aggression must be met and stopped on the Far Shore that was Normandy in 1944, Okinawa in 1945. And as Mahan remarked before American sea power had even met its first great test in the war with Spain,
For national security the correlative of a national policy firmly held and distinctly avowed is, not only the will, but the power to enforce it.
Today we have the beginnings, the potentiality of this power, of which the armed force of the United States afloat is the root and base, with aircraft, guns, tanks, and fighting men as its striking arm. The peculiar strength of this form of war power against aggression has already been shown, and the task today is to build it up again to the point where it can meet with force the threat of aggression wherever it occurs. That aggression today is taking the form of limited attacks and threats of attack throughout the world and underlines the great necessity of recreating this power. We cannot afford to see the free world captured piecemeal, or great areas of it weakly surrendered when it is in our power to save them.
“The points of attack are many,” as General Eisenhower has remarked:
It is in recognition of this obvious truth that one may observe that no nation, however strong, can provide a cordon of defense throughout the world. Any such attempt would tie down irrevocably all available forces and would make the entire structure a brittle defense that could be broken easily.
But surely a mobile defense based on maritime power, carrying its own army, its own air force, and full supplies to any threatened point, can be made equal to the limited attacks the aggressors have attempted, with sufficient reserve to meet the main threat should war break out on unlimited lines.
It is for this end, at any rate, that we must plan our defense, if there is to be any recreation of security in the world. Command of the sea, in all vital areas, is the first requisite of this defense. This command will in itself assure the immediate security of the Americas, the British Isles, and the oceanic areas of the Pacific world, including Japan, the Philippines, the Indies, and Australia. Some sort of balance must be recreated on the Asiatic mainland if we are to retain control of vital areas such as Malaya, Burma, and French Indo-China. In the light of this necessity economic and strategic aid to the great free power of India assumes a peculiar importance.
On the other side of the world, command of the Mediterranean will assure the defense of Africa, since the lines of any land-bound invasion of that continent would be exceedingly vulnerable at the junction of Suez, but such command must be in decisive force and must undoubtedly be supported by a strong land-based air power if it is to be at all effective. The Middle East, moreover, lies open to direct attack.
And aside from these more or less peripheral areas, the centers of free world power in India and Western Europe have vital frontiers open to direct overland attack. It is evident that these areas must be built up with all possible aid and their frontiers reinforced as necessary to something approaching the strength of the powers that menace them. Granted this necessary basis of initial resistance to attack, our maritime power will presumably be able to continue its role of limiting the attacks of the aggressors against the free world.
But the problem of these limited attacks, likely to develop at any moment into unlimited world war, still remains. Some way must be found of meeting them without imperilling the main body of our power, if any degree of order and balance is to be recreated in world politics. We do not demand that all nations subscribe to our political doctrines, but we do demand that the integrity of the free world be respected. Without the recreation of some such pattern of security it is difficult to see how there will be safety for any of us.
It would seem worth considering, then, to forge a spearhead to- our maritime power capable of immediate action wherever free nations are threatened. Such a striking force could function in the early stages of any war of limited aggression, and grant to the defense some prospect of an immediately effective counterblow. Such a force could operate on the seaward flank of any invading force in most of the friendly territories in Europe and Asia, and rightly used might act as the decisive deterrent to invasion in these areas. The landings at Inchon in the Korean war turned the tide of the early conflict in South Korea, although they were made in exceedingly limited force. Had the United States possessed say ten divisions of highly trained amphibious troops to put ashore from a mobile sea base providing its own overwhelming coastal fire power and tactical aviation in the fourth and fifth weeks of the war, may it not be doubted whether the invasion of South Korea would have been undertaken at all?
The provision of such a force held in such instant readiness would involve a considerable drain on our resources, but it would seem to be one that would be justified by the strategic advantage gained. In a typical operation, the force could first choose its point of attack, planning always to hit the invaders where it would be most likely to unhinge their operation. Then unremitting air attack and coastal bombardment could seal off the chosen area from reinforcement while the first landings were made. For this part of the operation a striking force of cruisers and battleships should be detached from other duties and held aloof in instant readiness for service. A strong division of fleet carriers should be provided to assure aerial cover stronger than anything the enemy would be likely to be able to bring to bear against it, and beyond this a concentration of strategic air power should be achieved on a chain of land bases extending throughout the friendly world. As in Korea, this form of support could be obtained from the opening days of the attack, but in more decisive strength.
The striking force itself should undoubtedly be in a small powerful army of Marines, trained in amphibious work and supplied by a fleet of combat-loaded transports. The size of this force should be sufficient to intervene decisively or to hold a beach head for further landings should enemy operations take on an unlimited character. A mobile force of five Marine divisions for the initial operation, supported by other ground forces in the later phases, would give us an advantage that might well prove decisive. A typical plan might then envisage a land army of ten divisions in two weeks’ time from the initial landing, preparations for the landing of the second group being set up while the Marines proceeded with their already formed operation. Such swiftness of concentration, which it is surely not impossible to visualize, would ensure immediate superiority to anything a land-bound enemy hampered by continuous aerial attack could bring against us.
Tactical air support for the Marines in their initial landing should certainly be provided by their own intimately integrated air arm. And there seems no good reason why this aviation should not come into operation immediately from auxiliary carriers provided for the purpose. Ten such carriers should be able to keep a tactical air force of 200 planes in operation, releasing the aircraft of the fleet carriers for offensive sweeps designed to secure control of the air. Later, when footing was secured ashore these tactical-support planes could be landed with fuel and ammunition supplied by the carriers, transported by landing-craft and vehicles carried aboard.
Flexibility and strategic independence should be the keynotes of any operation of this sort, using to the full the natural offensive possibilities of the form. And surely the possibilities of such a force deserve to be well considered in our planning today. Whether or not the atomic bomb is used by either side, whether or not the main bodies of the armies come to grips somewhere on the Eurasian land-mass, we cannot afford to let lapse or throw away any chance of creating some such immediately effective spearhead to our maritime power, to restore to the defense some degree of the initiative it has so tragically lacked in the opening phases of aggression in our time.
The charge of offensive purposes could not be brought against the creation of such a force, for in itself it would be too small to be used unless in support of a nation already attacked, with an army in the field, and the sanction of the United Nations, with its great potentialities of united action, behind it. But seen in this way, as the immediately available arm of a vigilant free-world authority, it would act as a powerful and immediate deterrent to aggression; and such deterrents seem to be the only ones that will be respected in this age of world conflict.
Any such arm of limited intervention must of course be directly supported by the power of the free world, if it is not to be overwhelmed by an unlimited intervention on the part of the enemy. Of this free world power the maritime force of the United States remains the prime agent. As the strength of the free world grows, this power will be able to exercise a more and more decisive role in meeting and preventing aggression throughout the world.
And the basis of all planning for security must continue thus to rest on a firm United Nations command of the seas. United States naval power is today the prime guarantor of that command. As Mahan pointed out when the concept of American naval power as an international force was still in its infancy, “The sphere of the navy is international solely.” If America was to have any voice in the world at large, it would have to rely primarily on this instrument, and in a world where the hundred years’ Pax Britannica was obviously threatened and on trial, such a voice was needed. The Monroe Doctrine, with the policy of the Open Door in China, was at that time the cornerstone of American foreign policy, and Mahan pointed out that we could not assert it in a troubled world without standing ready and able to defend it, as “a point of view of the American people.”
“More and more it becomes clear,” he wrote, “that the function of navies is distinctly military and political, whatever their origin in particular cases.” And so he arrived at what might well stand as his last warning to America before the decisive stage of its entry into world politics:
The United States, with no aggressive purpose, but merely to sustain avowed policies, for which her people are ready to fight, though unwilling to prepare, needs a navy both numerous and efficient, even if no merchant vessel ever again flies the United States flag.
Today our avowed policy has vastly expanded, in a world from which order has vanished and in which a policy of opportunist aggression prevails. The borders of our own security have necessarily become those of the free world, and we are at last preparing to defend them. Whatever withdrawal and compromise may prove necessary in the confused issues confronting the United Nations today, the fundamental principle of united resistance to aggression must never be too far compromised, and will never be withdrawn. On the right of small nations to independence the United States was founded, and for this right we laid down in the policy of the Monroe Doctrine and the Open Door the basis of all our future intervention in world affairs. The maritime power of the United States, with its vast potentialities of support and reinforcement throughout the world, is today the great unifying agent which alone can give life and reality to that principle.