Is Mahan Dead?

A major debate is raging in the American policy and defense communities about what form the navy of the future should take to best serve the national interests of the United States. There are differing views about the security challenges the fleet of the future will face and how these should shape the composition, mission, and disposition of the fleet and the number and types of ships, aircraft, and other forces attached to it. This is no small matter. Billions of dollars are at stake as security experts and politicians look into an always cloudy crystal ball and guess—there is no other word for it—the general outlines of the future security environment. Guessing wrong can have expensive and even disastrous consequences.

There is nothing terribly new about debating force levels, appropriations, and even the navy's primary mission. But the current debate is different thanks in large part to the views of Barrett Tillman, a prolific writer of military and naval history. He announced the arrival of a new "Post-Naval Era" in the June 2009 issue of theU.S. Naval Institute Proceedings. The venue is significant. The Proceedings is the Navy Department's semi-official venue for institutional dialogue about all things naval. A "post-naval era" would suggest a radically altered maritime environment, one that would have enormous implications for the navy of the future. Tillman touched a nerve. And it did not take long for a firestorm of criticism and commentary to appear in the letters section of the Proceedings. Sea power types have always had an almost neurotic sensitivity to landlubbers' ignorance about the obvious importance and influence of sea power. After all, none other than Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan back at the end of the 19th century had written the gospel of sea power to set the historical record straight once and for all. And now Tillman, like Nietzsche's "mad man," has entered the public square to announce to a stunned audience that "Mahan is dead."¹ Or, to put this in naval terms, Tillman is suggesting that the age of the big blue-water fleet that began with Teddy Roosevelt is over. And naval and marine officers need to recognize this and adjust accordingly.

Is Tillman right? Are there historically informed ways to think about all this? Is a radical redesign of the United States Navy that Tillman and others are proposing really called for? He certainly has some powerful evidence on his side. First off, he argues that there have been no major fleet actions since the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. Others have made the same case and have come to a similar conclusion. Historian H.P. Willmott, for example, maintains that "the battle of Leyte Gulf represented fin de siècle in terms of naval warfare as it had come to be represented over thousands of years—fought in a single dimension on the surface of the sea and within line of sight."² Willmott's judgment, however, does not necessarily imply the end of the big blue-water fleet; rather, it signals that the style and dimensionality of naval warfare has changed in a very significant way. Both Tillman and Willmott use large-scale combat between fleets as their primary criterion. But Willmott is closer to the truth. Naval combat as it had been fought for millennia does appear to have changed after 1945. That said, the uses to which sea power has been put since 1945 are not fundamentally different: protection of the sea lines of communication, power projection, and sending diplomatic messages, to name the most important. These uses are all consistent with the writings of Mahan and his British contemporary, Sir Julian Corbett.

The launching of the USS Mariano G. Vallejo submarine, Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Vallejo, California, October 23, 1965. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Tillman says little about the very real tension, and sometimes conflict, between fleets over the course of the Cold War. This is somewhat curious given the approximately twenty-year anniversary of the end of the Cold...