A \ B \ C \ D \ E \ F \ G \ H \ I \ J \ K \ L \ M \ N \ O \ P \ R \ S \ T \ U \ V \ W \Z

Some Principles of Maritime Strategy by Julian Stafford Corbett

J >> Julian Stafford Corbett >> Some Principles of Maritime Strategy




By the battle of Tsushima the territorial object was completely isolated by
sea, and the position of Japan in Korea was rendered as impregnable as that
of Wellington at Torres Vedras. All that remained was to proceed to the
third stage and demonstrate to Russia that the acceptance of the situation
that had been set up was more to her advantage than the further attempt to
break it down. This the final advance to Mukden accomplished, and Japan
obtained her end very far short of having overthrown her enemy. The
offensive power of Russia had never been so strong, while that of Japan was
almost if not quite exhausted.

Approached in this way, the Far Eastern struggle is seen to develop on the
same lines as all our great maritime wars of the past, which continental
strategists have so persistently excluded from their field of study. It
presents the normal three phases--the initial offensive movement to seize
the territorial object, the secondary phase, which forces an attenuated
offensive on the enemy, and the final stage of pressure, in which there is
a return to the offensive "according," as Jomini puts it, "to circumstances
and your relative force in order to obtain the cession desired."

It must not of course be asked that these phases shall be always clearly
defined. Strategical analysis can never give exact results. It aims only at
approximations, at groupings which will serve to guide but will always
leave much to the judgment. The three phases in the Russo-Japanese War,
though unusually well defined, continually overlapped. It must be so; for
in war the effect of an operation is never confined to the limits of its
immediate or primary intention. Thus the occupation of Korea had the
secondary defensive effect of covering the home country, while the initial
blow which Admiral Togo delivered at Port Arthur to cover the primary
offensive movement proved, by the demoralisation it caused in the Russian
fleet, to be a distinct step in the secondary phase of isolating the
conquest. In the later stages of the war the line between what was
essential to set up the second phase of perfecting the isolation and the
third phase of general pressure seems to have grown very nebulous.

It was at this stage that the Japanese strategy has been most severely
criticised, and it was just here they seem to have lost hold of the
conception of a limited war, if in fact they had ever securely grasped the
conception as the elder Pitt understood it. It has been argued that in
their eagerness to deal a blow at the enemy's main army they neglected to
devote sufficient force to reduce Port Arthur, an essential step to
complete the second phase. Whether or not the exigencies of the case
rendered such distribution of force inevitable or whether it was due to
miscalculation of difficulties, the result was a most costly set-back. For
not only did it entail a vast loss of time and life at Port Arthur itself,
but when the sortie of the Russian fleet in June brought home to them their
error, the offensive movement on Liao-yang had to be delayed, and the
opportunity passed for a decisive counter-stroke at the enemy's
concentration ashore.

This misfortune, which was to cost the Japanese so dear, may perhaps be
attributed at least in part to the continental influences under which their
army had been trained. We at least can trace the unlimited outlook in the
pages of the German Staff history. In dealing with the Japanese plan of
operations it is assumed that the occupation of Korea and the isolation of
Port Arthur were but preliminaries to a concentric advance on Liao-yang,
"which was kept in view as the first objective of the operations on land."
But surely on every theory of the war the first objective of the Japanese
on land was Seoul, where they expected to have to fight their first
important action against troops advancing from the Yalu; and surely their
second was Port Arthur, with its fleet and arsenal, which they expected to
reduce with little more difficulty than they had met with ten years before
against the Chinese. Such at least was the actual progression of events,
and a criticism which regards operations of such magnitude and ultimate
importance as mere incidents of strategic deployment is only to be
explained by the domination of the Napoleonic idea of war, against the
universal application of which Clausewitz so solemnly protested. It is the
work of men who have a natural difficulty in conceiving a war plan that
does not culminate in a Jena or a Sedan. It is a view surely which is the
child of theory, bearing no relation to the actuality of the war in
question and affording no explanation of its ultimate success. The truth
is, that so long as the Japanese acted on the principles of limited war, as
laid down by Clausewitz and Jomini and plainly deducible from our own rich
experience, they progressed beyond all their expectations, but so soon as
they departed from them and suffered themselves to be confused with
continental theories they were surprised by unaccountable failure.

The expression "Limited war" is no doubt not entirely happy. Yet no other
has been found to condense the ideas of limited object and limited
interest, which are its special characteristics. Still if the above example
be kept in mind as a typical case, the meaning of the term will not be
mistaken. It only remains to emphasise one important point. The fact that
the doctrine of limited war traverses the current belief that our primary
objective must always be the enemy's armed forces is liable to carry with
it a false inference that it also rejects the corollary that war means the
use of battles. Nothing is further from the conception. Whatever the form
of war, there is no likelihood of our ever going back to the old fallacy of
attempting to decide wars by manoeuvres. All forms alike demand the use of
battles. By our fundamental theory war is always "a continuation of
political intercourse, in which fighting is substituted for writing notes."
However great the controlling influence of the political object, it must
never obscure the fact that it is by fighting we have to gain our end.

It is the more necessary to insist on this point, for the idea of making a
piece of territory your object is liable to be confused with the older
method of conducting war, in which armies were content to manoeuvre for
strategical positions, and a battle came almost to be regarded as a mark of
bad generalship. With such parading limited war has nothing to do. Its
conduct differs only from that of unlimited war in that instead of having
to destroy our enemy's whole power of resistance, we need only overthrow so
much of his active force as he is able or willing to bring to bear in order
to prevent or terminate our occupation of the territorial object.

The first consideration, then, in entering on such a war is to endeavour to
determine what the force will amount to. It will depend, firstly, on the
importance the enemy attaches to the limited object, coupled with the
nature and extent of his preoccupations elsewhere, and, secondly, it will
depend upon the natural difficulties of his lines of communication and the
extent to which we can increase those difficulties by our conduct of the
initial operations. In favourable circumstances therefore (and here lies
the great value of the limited form) we are able to control the amount of
force we shall have to encounter. The most favourable circumstances and the
only circumstances by which we ourselves can profit are such as permit the
more or less complete isolation of the object by naval action, and such
isolation can never be established until we have entirely overthrown the
enemy's naval forces.

Here, then, we enter the field of naval strategy. We can now leave behind
us the theory of war in general and, in order to pave the way to our final
conclusions, devote our attention to the theory of naval warfare in
particular.

* * * * *

PART TWO

THEORY OF NAVAL WAR

* * * * *

CHAPTER ONE

THEORY OF THE OBJECT--
COMMAND OF THE SEA

* * * * *

The object of naval warfare must always be directly or indirectly either to
secure the command of the sea or to prevent the enemy from securing it.

The second part of the proposition should be noted with special care in
order to exclude a habit of thought, which is one of the commonest sources
of error in naval speculation. That error is the very general assumption
that if one belligerent loses the command of the sea it passes at once to
the other belligerent. The most cursory study of naval history is enough to
reveal the falseness of such an assumption. It tells us that the most
common situation in naval war is that neither side has the command; that
the normal position is not a commanded sea, but an uncommanded sea. The
mere assertion, which no one denies, that the object of naval warfare is to
get command of the sea actually connotes the proposition that the command
is normally in dispute. It is this state of dispute with which naval
strategy is most nearly concerned, for when the command is lost or won pure
naval strategy comes to an end.

This truth is so obvious that it would scarcely be worth mentioning were it
not for the constant recurrence of such phrases as: "If England were to
lose command of the sea, it would be all over with her." The fallacy of the
idea is that it ignores the power of the strategical defensive. It assumes
that if in the face of some extraordinary hostile coalition or through some
extraordinary mischance we found ourselves without sufficient strength to
keep the command, we should therefore be too weak to prevent the enemy
getting it--a negation of the whole theory of war, which at least requires
further support than it ever receives.

And not only is this assumption a negation of theory; it is a negation both
of practical experience and of the expressed opinion of our greatest
masters. We ourselves have used the defensive at sea with success, as under
William the Third and in the War of American Independence, while in our
long wars with France she habitually used it in such a way that sometimes
for years, though we had a substantial preponderance, we could not get
command, and for years were unable to carry out our war plan without
serious interruption from her fleet.

So far from the defensive being a negligible factor at sea, or even the
mere pestilent heresy it is generally represented, it is of course inherent
in all war, and, as we have seen, the paramount questions of strategy both
at sea and on land turn on the relative possibilities of offensive and
defensive, and upon the relative proportions in which each should enter
into our plan of war. At sea the most powerful and aggressively-minded
belligerent can no more avoid his alternating periods of defence, which
result from inevitable arrests of offensive action, than they can be
avoided on land. The defensive, then, has to be considered; but before we
are in a position to do so with profit, we have to proceed with our
analysis of the phrase, "Command of the Sea," and ascertain exactly what it
is we mean by it in war.

In the first place, "Command of the Sea" is not identical in its
strategical conditions with the conquest of territory. You cannot argue
from the one to the other, as has been too commonly done. Such phrases as
the "Conquest of water territory" and "Making the enemy's coast our
frontier" had their use and meaning in the mouths of those who framed them,
but they are really little but rhetorical expressions founded on false
analogy, and false analogy is not a secure basis for a theory of war.

The analogy is false for two reasons, both of which enter materially into
the conduct of naval war. You cannot conquer sea because it is not
susceptible of ownership, at least outside territorial waters. You cannot,
as lawyers say, "reduce it into possession," because you cannot exclude
neutrals from it as you can from territory you conquer. In the second
place, you cannot subsist your armed force upon it as you can upon enemy's
territory. Clearly, then, to make deductions from an assumption that
command of the sea is analogous to conquest of territory is unscientific,
and certain to lead to error.

The only safe method is to inquire what it is we can secure for ourselves,
and what it is we can deny the enemy by command of the sea. Now, if we
exclude fishery rights, which are irrelevant to the present matter, the
only right we or our enemy can have on the sea is the right of passage; in
other words, the only positive value which the high seas have for national
life is as a means of communication. For the active life of a nation such
means may stand for much or it may stand for little, but to every maritime
State it has some value. Consequently by denying an enemy this means of
passage we check the movement of his national life at sea in the same kind
of way that we check it on land by occupying his territory. So far the
analogy holds good, but no further.

So much for the positive value which the sea has in national life. It has
also a negative value. For not only is it a means of communication, but,
unlike the means of communication ashore, it is also a barrier. By winning
command of the sea we remove that barrier from our own path, thereby
placing ourselves in position to exert direct military pressure upon the
national life of our enemy ashore, while at the same time we solidify it
against him and prevent his exerting direct military pressure upon
ourselves.

Command of the sea, therefore, means nothing but the control of maritime
communications, whether for commercial or military purposes. The object of
naval warfare is the control of communications, and not, as in land
warfare, the conquest of territory. The difference is fundamental. True, it
is rightly said that strategy ashore is mainly a question of
communications, but they are communications in another sense. The phrase
refers to the communications of the army alone, and not to the wider
communications which are part of the life of the nation.

But on land also there are communications of a kind which are essential to
national life--the internal communications which connect the points of
distribution. Here again we touch an analogy between the two kinds of war.
Land warfare, as the most devoted adherents of the modern view admit,
cannot attain its end by military victories alone. The destruction of your
enemy's forces will not avail for certain unless you have in reserve
sufficient force to complete the occupation of his inland communications
and principal points of distribution. This power is the real fruit of
victory, the power to strangle the whole national life. It is not until
this is done that a high-spirited nation, whose whole heart is in the war,
will consent to make peace and do your will. It is precisely in the same
way that the command of the sea works towards peace, though of course in a
far less coercive manner, against a continental State. By occupying her
maritime communications and closing the points of distribution in which
they terminate we destroy the national life afloat, and thereby check the
vitality of that life ashore so far as the one is dependent on the other.
Thus we see that so long as we retain the power and right to stop maritime
communications, the analogy between command of the sea and the conquest of
territory is in this aspect very close. And the analogy is of the utmost
practical importance, for on it turns the most burning question of maritime
war, which it will be well to deal with in this place.

It is obvious that if the object and end of naval warfare is the control of
communications it must carry with it the right to forbid, if we can, the
passage of both public and private property upon the sea. Now the only
means we have of enforcing such control of commercial communications at sea
is in the last resort the capture or destruction of sea-borne property.
Such capture or destruction is the penalty which we impose upon our enemy
for attempting to use the communications of which he does not hold the
control. In the language of jurisprudence, it is the ultimate sanction of
the interdict which we are seeking to enforce. The current term "Commerce
destruction" is not in fact a logical expression of the strategical idea.
To make the position clear we should say "Commerce prevention."

The methods of this "Commerce prevention" have no more connection with the
old and barbarous idea of plunder and reprisal than orderly requisitions
ashore have with the old idea of plunder and ravaging. No form of war
indeed causes so little human suffering as the capture of property at sea.
It is more akin to process of law, such as distress for rent, or execution
of judgment, or arrest of a ship, than to a military operation. Once, it is
true, it was not so. In the days of privateers it was accompanied too
often, and particularly in the Mediterranean and the West Indies, with
lamentable cruelty and lawlessness, and the existence of such abuses was
the real reason for the general agreement to the Declaration of Paris by
which privateering was abolished.

But it was not the only reason. The idea of privateering was a survival of
a primitive and unscientific conception of war, which was governed mainly
by a general notion of doing your enemy as much damage as possible and
making reprisal for wrongs he had done you. To the same class of ideas
belonged the practice of plunder and ravaging ashore. But neither of these
methods of war was abolished for humanitarian reasons. They disappeared
indeed as a general practice before the world had begun to talk of
humanity. They were abolished because war became more scientific. The right
to plunder and ravage was not denied. But plunder was found to demoralise
your troops and unfit them for fighting, and ravaging proved to be a less
powerful means of coercing your enemy than exploiting the occupied country
by means of regular requisitions for the supply of your own army and the
increase of its offensive range. In short, the reform arose from a desire
to husband your enemy's resources for your own use instead of wantonly
wasting them.

In a similar way privateering always had a debilitating effect upon our own
regular force. It greatly increased the difficulty of manning the navy, and
the occasional large profits had a demoralising influence on detached
cruiser commanders. It tended to keep alive the mediaeval corsair spirit at
the expense of the modern military spirit which made for direct operations
against the enemy's armed forces. It was inevitable that as the new
movement of opinion gathered force it should carry with it a conviction
that for operating against sea-borne trade sporadic attack could never be
so efficient as an organised system of operations to secure a real
strategical control of the enemy's maritime communications. A riper and
sounder view of war revealed that what may be called tactical commercial
blockade--that is, the blockade of ports--could be extended to and
supplemented by a strategical blockade of the great trade routes. In moral
principle there is no difference between the two. Admit the principle of
tactical or close blockade, and as between belligerents you cannot condemn
the principle of strategical or distant blockade. Except in their effect
upon neutrals, there is no juridical difference between the two.

Why indeed should this humane yet drastic process of war be rejected at sea
if the same thing is permitted on land? If on land you allow contributions
and requisitions, if you permit the occupation of towns, ports, and inland
communications, without which no conquest is complete and no effective war
possible, why should you refuse similar procedure at sea where it causes
far less individual suffering? If you refuse the right of controlling
communications at sea, you must also refuse the right on land. If you admit
the right of contributions on land, you must admit the right of capture at
sea. Otherwise you will permit to military Powers the extreme rights of war
and leave to the maritime Powers no effective rights at all. Their ultimate
argument would be gone.

In so far as the idea of abolishing private capture at sea is humanitarian,
and in so far as it rests on a belief that it would strengthen our position
as a commercial maritime State, let it be honourably dealt with. But so far
as its advocates have as yet expressed themselves, the proposal appears to
be based on two fallacies. One is, that you can avoid attack by depriving
yourself of the power of offence and resting on defence alone, and the
other, the idea that war consists entirely of battles between armies or
fleets. It ignores the fundamental fact that battles are only the means of
enabling you to do that which really brings wars to an end-that is, to
exert pressure on the citizens and their collective life. "After shattering
the hostile main army," says Von der Goltz, "we still have the forcing of a
peace as a separate and, in certain circumstances, a more difficult task
... to make the enemy's country feel the burdens of war with such weight
that the desire for peace will prevail. This is the point in which Napoleon
failed.... It may be necessary to seize the harbours, commercial centres,
important lines of traffic, fortifications and arsenals, in other words,
all important property necessary to the existence of the people and army."

If, then, we are deprived of the right to use analogous means at sea, the
object for which we fight battles almost ceases to exist. Defeat the
enemy's fleets as we may, he will be but little the worse. We shall have
opened the way for invasion, but any of the great continental Powers can
laugh at our attempts to invade single-handed. If we cannot reap the
harvest of our success by deadening his national activities at sea, the
only legitimate means of pressure within our strength will be denied us.
Our fleet, if it would proceed with such secondary operations as are
essential for forcing a peace, will be driven to such barbarous expedients
as the bombardment of seaport towns and destructive raids upon the hostile
coasts.

If the means of pressure which follow successful fighting were abolished
both on land and sea there would be this argument in favour of the change,
that it would mean perhaps for civilised States the entire cessation of
war; for war would become so impotent, that no one would care to engage in
it. It would be an affair between regular armies and fleets, with which the
people had little concern. International quarrels would tend to take the
form of the mediaeval private disputes which were settled by champions in
trial by battle, an absurdity which led rapidly to the domination of purely
legal procedure. If international quarrels could go the same way, humanity
would have advanced a long stride. But the world is scarcely ripe for such
a revolution. Meanwhile to abolish the right of interference with the flow
of private property at sea without abolishing the corresponding right
ashore would only defeat the ends of humanitarians. The great deterrent,
the most powerful check on war, would be gone. It is commerce and finance
which now more than ever control or check the foreign policy of nations. If
commerce and finance stand to lose by war, their influence for a peaceful
solution will be great; and so long as the right of private capture at sea
exists, they stand to lose in every maritime war immediately and inevitably
whatever the ultimate result may be. Abolish the right, and this deterrent
disappears; nay, they will even stand to win immediate gains owing to the
sudden expansion of Government expenditure which the hostilities will
entail, and the expansion of sea commerce which the needs of the armed
forces will create. Any such losses as maritime warfare under existing
conditions must immediately inflict will be remote if interference with
property is confined to the land. They will never indeed be serious except
in the case of complete defeat, and no one enters upon war expecting
defeat. It is in the hope of victory and gain that aggressive wars are
born. The fear of quick and certain loss is their surest preventive.
Humanity, then, will surely beware how in a too hasty pursuit of peaceful
ideals it lets drop the best weapon it has for scotching the evil it has as
yet no power to kill.

In what follows, therefore, it is intended to regard the right of private
capture at sea as still subsisting. Without it, indeed, naval warfare is
almost inconceivable, and in any case no one has any experience of such a
truncated method of war on which profitable study can be founded.

The primary method, then, in which we use victory or preponderance at sea
and bring it to bear on the enemy's population to secure peace, is by the
capture or destruction of the enemy's property, whether public or private.
But in comparing the process with the analogous occupation of territory and
the levying of contributions and requisitions we have to observe a marked
difference. Both processes are what may be called economic pressure. But
ashore the economic pressure can only be exerted as the consequence of
victory or acquired domination by military success. At sea the process
begins at once. Indeed, more often than not, the first act of hostility in
maritime wars has been the capture of private property at sea. In a sense
this is also true ashore. The first step of an invader after crossing the
frontier will be to control to a less or greater extent such private
property as he is able to use for his purposes. But such interference with
private property is essentially a military act, and does not belong to the
secondary phase of economic pressure. At sea it does, and the reason why
this should be so lies in certain fundamental differences between land and
sea warfare which are implicit in the communication theory of naval war.

Copyright (c) 2007. bestextbooks.com. All rights reserved.

Jane Addams - "Democracy and Social Ethics"

Edward A. Rand - "The Knights of the White Shield"

G. B. N. Tower - "Instructions on Modern American Bridge Building"

Various - "Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15,"

President Obama teams up with one of Marvel's greatest heroes, reports Alison Flood
Articles published by guardian.co.uk Books

Murder One closing so did we commit this crime?

Barack Obama is teaming up with Spider-Man in a new comic from Marvel, which will see the future president exchanging a fist-bump with Peter Parker's alter ego.

The five-page story takes place in Washington DC on inauguration day, when one of Spidey's oldest enemies, the Chameleon, attempts to stop Obama's swearing-in ceremony. Fortunately, Peter Parker is covering the event as a photographer, and jumps in to save the day.

"Ya hear that, Chameleon? The president-elect here just appointed me ... secretary of shuttin' you up," Spider-Man says as he thwacks the Chameleon in the face. "I hope this doesn't ruin the inauguration for you," he tells Obama, as the Chameleon is led away by security officials. "Honestly, I'm more upset by the Chameleon's shockingly deficient understanding of the electoral process," Obama replies.

Spidey then cedes the limelight to Obama. "This is your day, after all, and I know it wouldn't look good to be seen palling around with me," he says, in a nod to Sarah Palin's comment that the then presidential candidate had been "palling around with terrorists".

The story, written by Zeb Wells and illustrated by Todd Nauck and Frank D'Armata, will appear as a bonus feature in Amazing Spider-Man 583, which goes on sale on 14 January.

"When we heard that president-elect Obama is a collector of Spider-Man comics, we knew that these two historic figures had to meet in our comics' Marvel Universe," said Marvel's editor-in-chief Joe Quesada. "A Spider-Man fan moving into the Oval Office is an event that must be commemorated in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man."

In October, graphic novel biographies of Obama and his then rival John McCain were published by IDW. April will see Michelle Obama appearing in the Female Force comic book series.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Poetry Workshop creature features

For many years my local corner shop displayed a large sign in its window telling local residents to "use us or lose us!" It always looked a rather toothless threat to me. After all, if I didn't use them, what difference would it make to me if they weren't there? And surely a corner shop, one that had been there for years, would have enough customers to survive without recourse to such apocalyptic warning? But it didn't and was soon converted into flats.

This community shop was destroyed not so much by the pressures of the supermarkets or people's commuting patterns, but simply by customer apathy. It's something to think about as crime writers and readers across the world mourn the imminent passing of Maxim Jakubowski's celebrated Charing Cross Road bookshop in London, Murder One.

Apathy is a strange word to connect to a bookstore that thrives on passion. It's noticeable when you walk through the door, when you speak to the friendly, knowledgeable staff, when you look at the shelves and see the vast range of titles on offer. This isn't your regular kind of bookstore: the first time I visited spent a whole lunch break looking up and down, from floor to ceiling from table to table; it was an hour that changed my perception of both crime writing and of bookselling.

Murder One was – and for a few weeks will remain – a shop that took crime seriously. Not in the sense that it intellectualised it, or made unsubstantiated claims for its importance, but in the way that it treated crime writing with the respect it was due. With a genre that has so many off-shoots, branches and sub-genres, it took a shop of Murder One's calibre to show just how diverse, interesting and mentally stimulating crime could be – far more than the guilty pleasure I had, until then, considered it.

Thanks to judicious recommendations, enticing table displays and hours of foraging among the stacks, I discovered writers that I would never have picked up, let alone read. You could always get the latest blockbuster, but delve a little deeper and you'd find books that were not stocked anywhere else, novels that, like the perfect crime, were hidden from public view. The Martin Beck novels by Sjöwall & Wahlöö – probably my favourite sequence of novels in any genre – were introduced to me via Murder One, as were Kem Nunn, Sue Grafton, and Henning Mankell. It's also the staff of Murder One who piqued my interest in the inimitable Fred Vargas, and I can't thank them enough for the introduction.

Inclusive and without snobbery, Murder One amply demonstrated that the best bookshops are places not just of commerce, but of community; places that make feel you belong. It's the kind of store that bibliophiles dream about: well-stocked, well-staffed and shabby enough to lose days browsing within. It's just unfortunate that such shops don't have enough paying customers to keep them afloat, or that these customers visit all too infrequently – something of which I'm certainly guilty.

These kinds of shops are facing a long, bloody battle – and one which, without significant reinforcements, they are likely to lose. As we hear of the travesty of another brilliant independent going down, we'll mourn the loss, wring our hands and damn Amazon and the supermarkets and Waterstone's. Yet perhaps the most important detail we'll probably keep under wraps: the last time we actually spent any money there.

Murder One closing its doors for the final time is undoubtedly a .38 shell for independent bookshops, but whether it's body blow or a warning shot all depends upon us, the consumers. No one, no matter how iconic or established, can exist on fond memories alone: just ask Woolworths. Use these shops now, because it doesn't take a master sleuth to deduce what will happen if we don't.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds