Eric Grove - The Future of Sea Power

Volume 9

THE FUTURE OF SEA POWER

ERIC GROVE

First published in 1990 by Routledge

This edition first published in 2021

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

1990 Eric Grove

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Eric Grove

First published in 1990

by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

1990 Eric Grove

Printed in Great Britain by

Richard Clay Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Grove, Eric

The future of sea power.

1. Sea power

I. Title

ISBN 0-415-00482-9

Sea Power means different things to different people. It can be an almost mystical concept, a magic formula to be mouthed in awestruck tones to scare away evil spirits such as defence ministers with non-naval priorities or air force officers with alternative means on offer of providing a states military power on or across the oceans. To others, following in the well-trodden footsteps of Alfred Thayer Mahan, sea power represents a more coherent but equally universal concept, an interlocking system of forms of sea use, military and civil, which has a unique contribution to making powers great or greater still. This book will take a narrower and more measured approach. In series with its two earlier companions on air power and land warfare it will treat sea power as a military concept, that form of military power that is deployed at or from the sea. As Mahan himself put it, the history of sea power, while embracing in its broad sweep all that tends to make a people great upon the sea or by the sea, is largely a military history; equally, the future emphasized here will be the military future of sea power, although the relationship of naval power with the various forms of sea use must also be considered.

The whole subject has become rather more complex than it once seemed in the age of Mahan. For a number of economic reasons, which are dealt with more fully in merchant shipping top ten (unless Britains dependencies are included). Something has clearly gone wrong with the Mahanian paradigm.

One factor has been the growing internationalization of marine activities. Mahan drew his lessons from the great days of classical mercantilism and the clashes of autarkic empires competing for slices of a finite cake of maritime trade. He thought this might well recur in the twentieth century. In a way it did, but the defeat of the German and Japanese attempts to carve out continental and maritime variations on this theme led to a new world of economic neo-liberalism that still, despite numerous vicissitudes, survives. In this environment the flag a ship carries is very often not a reflection of the identity of the owner. If US-owned flag of convenience vessels are taken into account, the tonnage of the American mercantile marine more than doubles to over 65 million tons; but that of Japan increases by an almost similar margin, to over 90 million. Even taking beneficial ownership into account, therefore, the United States remains only third in merchant ship ownership, behind Japan and Greece.

Why then is she the number one

And so they have. The worlds superpowers, the USA and the USSR, stand supreme upon the worlds oceans, their navies confronting each other around the globe as global expressions of the fundamental politico-strategic split that divides the planet. Both sides navies are more expressions of a power that has its roots elsewhere than, as the Royal Navy was at the height of its power, the guardians of the foundations of national economic power itself, i.e. seaborne trade. Nothing better symbolizes the foundations of sea power in the modern world than the nature of much of both sides current naval investment. The superpowers ballistic missile firing submarines prowl their patrol areas ready at a moments notice to destroy the political and economic heartland of the other side. They use the hiding place provided by the sea to make themselves the least vulnerable and most stabilizing form of long-range nuclear striking power: they might even be regarded as a form of air power. For the USSR, perhaps the one form of sea use that is fundamental to its national security is the ability to use the seas to deploy this form of strategic reserve as a final sanction against all-out Western nuclear attack. Certainly the USA seems to think so in its recent articulations of how to exert potentially decisive maritime pressure on the USSR in a conventional war.

Modern technology, as explained more fully in could do little in themselves to win them.

When that greatest of all maritime strategists, Sir Julian

The events of 1914-18 bore Corbett out. Lord

The Admiralty in its November message spoke of the pressure exerted by the Grand Fleet itself on Germany, and much has been made of the supposed effects of the blockade on the German war economy and the morale of her people.

In the second great twentieth-century war of 1939-45 the same pattern was repeated. Britain was, with some considerable effort both in the air and at sea, able to survive and act as a forward base for the projection of US power into Europe, but it was the latter and even more so the great land battles on the Eastern Front that defeated the might of Hitlers Reich. What was survival to the British was an exercise in seaborne power projection to the Americans. In the Pacific the United States demonstrated even more clearly the new shape of sea power, as a three dimensional fleet of unparalleled power and reach covered a succession of amphibious landings that cut the Japanese Empire in two and gained the bases for an aerial assault that eventually, with nuclear firepower, proved decisive. In addition, and almost as an afterthought, given Japans extraordinary power of ignoring strategic realities and coming close to committing national suicide, in the most successful war against seaborne trade in history, Allied submarines sank over 1150 ships of almost 5 million tons. Aircraft sank almost 750 more of almost 2.5 million tons. By the end of the War intensive Allied mining had bottled up the remaining ships and a maritime empires arteries had ceased to function. Japan had been effectively strangled. How long she could have continued fighting without the