Naval Coalition Warfare: From the Napoleonic War to Operation Iraqi Freedom (review)

This is an intensely frustrating book. On the one hand, it is an excellent collection of consistently high quality essays, by a superb group of eminent and well respected students of naval warfare. But on the other, it fundamentally fails to achieve the goals it sets out, and left this reviewer questioning if 'Naval Coalition Warfare' is a useful or even valid term. Moreover, the complete lack of any maps, charts, diagrams or illustrations of any sort, and the adequate but uninspired production, is unacceptable in a book with a retail price of US$160. Institutional libraries with a strong history or military client base should buy the book, but individuals should think long and hard before spending their money.

The conceptual problems with this book are deep-seated. Most importantly, nowhere in the book is the term 'naval coalition warfare' actually defined; something that should have been a first step if it was to live up to its claim as 'the first scholarly book examining naval coalition warfare over the past two centuries from a multi-national perspective' (facing page). The book actually seems to discuss the employment of naval forces by coalitions. Lest this be thought of as pedantry, it needs to be remembered that states form coalitions, not navies; and that naval forces, either independently or in some form of combined operation, are one way of threatening or using force to achieve the states' (and coalition's) aims. The lack of clarity over what 'naval coalition warfare' actually is, if it can be said to exist at all, regrettably detracts from what are, in almost every other way, 18 excellent essays, as the reader is left to search for a unifying theme or focus.

Paul Halpern's essay on World War I was the standout for this reviewer. The tight focus on naval combined operations in the Mediterranean illuminates a lesser known part of the war at sea. It also enabled discussion of the operational and tactical level difficulties, and the utility of the naval contributions to overall coalition aims. James Goldrick's essay on the First Gulf War was also noteworthy, placing the 1990-91 combined operations in the context of the preceding 45 years of activities, that built such a high level of interoperability between so many navies.

Halpern's and Goldrick's essays demonstrate there is ample space for a scholarly exposition of coalition warfare, and naval combined operations and exercises: why states are willing to contribute naval forces to a coalition; the relative utility and implications of commitments of maritime, ground and air forces to coalitions; whether issues of interoperability or the congruence of political aims are the limiting factors in both combined operations and coalition warfare; and whether there have been changes in these themes over time, in different conflicts and with changes in technology. The possibilities are beyond the space available to this review.

In sum, this book fails to be more than the sum of its high quality parts.