A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy

A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy. James R. Holmes. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2019.

This cultural aversion to strategic studies and thought has deep roots. While speaking to the incoming Naval War College class of 1911, war college founder Stephen B. Luce lamented how operational demands and a preoccupation with technology had drawn the U.S. Navy’s attention away from strategic education. “Very few [U.S. Navy line officers] are studying their profession—the art of war,” Luce observed.[1] Indeed, one restless student in Luce’s audience, Captain William S. Sims, nurtured a longing for “some duty I would like better—something in closer touch with practice and less theoretical.”[2] To the action-oriented Sims, the war college program of strategic studies seemed a distraction, robbing precious time from practical pursuits such as leading sailors, managing technology, and orchestrating fleet operations. No doubt many of Sims’s contemporaries felt the same.

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Today’s naval culture also treats the study of strategy as a lesser priority. In his latest work, A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy, James R. Holmes describes how the “tyranny of time” dominates the lives of twenty-first century naval professionals. Daily duties and the need to master complex technology allow precious little time for modern seagoing warrior-engineers to study strategy and other aspects of Luce’s art of war. Holmes, a Naval War College professor and former naval officer, thus designed the book as a strategy primer for the time-constrained junior officer.

This volume—168 pages, including endnotes—admirably succeeds in achieving the author’s purpose. Holmes’s insightful treatment of maritime strategy and policy offers a concise review for not only junior officers, but also senior navy leaders, civilian policy-makers, and other readers interested in topics about strategy and national security.

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Throughout his survey, Holmes highlights the ideas of the renowned strategic theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan, reframing them as guideposts for navigating today’s national security environment. In this regard, Holmes joins other scholars in rehabilitating and applying Mahan’s thinking to contemporary situations. Most notably, John Sumida’s seminal study, Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching Command: The Classic Works of Alfred Thayer Mahan Reconsidered revealed Mahan as a deep thinker and innovator—the first person to integrate military affairs with broader political, economic, and government themes. Sumida’s analysis refuted earlier scholarship depicting Mahan as a mere synthesizer and publicist. More recently, in 21st Century Mahan: Sound Military Conclusions for the Modern Era, Benjamin F. Armstrong challenged Mahan’s reputation as a stodgy, inscrutable theorist by making his writings accessible to modern readers and demonstrating their current-day relevance.

Holmes contributes to this corpus by interpreting Mahan’s theories for a modern audience and interweaving them with ideas from other strategic thinkers, past and present: Julian Corbett, Nicholas Spykman, Edward Luttwak, Geoffrey Till, and James Stavridis, to name a few. Altogether, more than four dozen strategic theorists and experts appear in the book. The resulting synthesis offers the reader a set of valuable tools for analyzing, understanding, and addressing contemporary geopolitical, technological, and cultural challenges.

Holmes explains Mahan’s conception of sea power as a multiplication of three variables: industrial and agricultural production; shipping, both merchant and naval; and markets or colonies. Within this formulation, a virtuous cycle operates: the merchant marine carries goods and commodities produced at home to markets abroad, generating wealth and fostering national prosperity.[3] As commerce flourishes, it generates tax revenues to fund the naval establishment, which in turn protects and promotes the commercial project.

Holmes both clarifies and updates Mahan’s classical model, distilling sea power to its essentials: “commerce, ships, and bases.”[4] Drawing from twenty-first century supply chain economics, Holmes reformulates Mahan’s calculus as a continuum of production, distribution, and consumption. Two interlinked cycles function within the continuum: commercial and naval. Within the commercial cycle, merchant shipping moves cargoes from home ports to overseas markets and back again. The naval cycle parallels the commercial, as nations build and train warship fleets at home ports (production), deploy the fleets overseas to sustain and protect the liberal commercial order (distribution). While deployed, forward bases provide sites for warships and crews to replenish, refit, and recharge (consumption). In sum: “Mahanian sea power is nothing more than a global supply chain equipped with its own guardian in the form of a navy.”[5]

Yet sea power is not an end in itself—rather it is an instrument that nations may apply to achieve goals determined by their political leaders. Thus maritime strategy is the process of harnessing sea power, or “the art and science of using power to fulfill purposes relating to the sea,” as defined by Holmes.[6] And what are these purposes to fulfill? Holmes postulates that access to rimlands––the continental peripheries bordering the sea––is the fundamental focus of maritime strategy. “Maritime strategy is about access” Holmes  observes—access to the rimlands for transacting commerce and for exercising military muscle, if such need arises.[7]

Holmes contrasts Mahan’s commerce-oriented approach to sea power and maritime strategy with the wider perspective of Julian Corbett. “Commerce is king in the Mahan order of things,” and the Mahanian perspective views strategy as essentially a maritime pursuit.[8] Corbett’s view of strategy is instead holistic, integrating sea campaigns with those on the ground to achieve geopolitical objectives ashore. For Corbett, “the aim of naval operations is to shape events on land.”[9]

Historians and scholars of strategy have long compared and debated the merits of Mahanian and Corbettian approaches to maritime strategy.[10] For his part, Holmes counsels readers to study and reflect upon the works of both masters, along with ideas from the deep bench of strategic theorists proffered by the book. He encourages practitioners “to mix and match concepts from the strategic canon to reach a kind of synthesis,” a process aimed at fostering deeper understanding and sound strategic decision-making.[11]

Throughout the book, Holmes develops culture as a fundamental influence permeating maritime strategy. Warships are cultural artifacts, for example, because their construction and characteristics express ideas, beliefs, norms, and practices held by their designers and builders.[12] More broadly, national culture—channeled by national leadership—shapes and is shaped by a people’s will to the sea. Cultural lenses form biases and assumptions that condition the attitudes of maritime professionals, the general public, and national leaders.

In the book’s closing, Holmes offers a cautionary note on culture. Drawing from Machiavelli’s observations on human nature, Holmes calls the reader’s attention to assumptions and proclivities within navies that can hinder policies and practices designed to sustain the vibrancy of sea power: institutional orthodoxy, strategic complacency, hubris, and a tendency to substitute maxims for judgment. The solution to such cultural calcification, Holmes advises, is lifelong education for naval professionals and, this writer might add, civilian leaders: studies in history and strategy that cultivate good judgement and adaptive culture to keep the fighting edge sharp.

Were he alive today, William Sims would endorse Holmes’s prescription. Overcoming his initial reluctance, Sims quickly discovered value in the Naval War College curriculum, recognizing it as a worthwhile, even critical, pastime. After graduation, Sims used his newfound strategic acumen, first while leading a destroyer flotilla and ultimately as the four-star Commander of U.S. Naval Forces Operating in European Waters during the First World War. In the process, Sims became a relentless advocate for developing naval leaders as critical and strategic thinkers. He pushed back against the Navy’s aversion to strategic studies, declaring “the importance of doing everything possible to convince our officers of the absolute necessity not only of training in the art of war, but of training in systematic and logical thinking.”[13]

For today’s naval professionals and scholars aspiring to follow Sim’s advice on strategic studies, A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy offers an ideal starting point. Concise and well-researched, this highly readable volume will no doubt persuade many readers, most especially young naval professionals, to dig more deeply into studies of history and strategy.

Scott Mobley is a retired U.S. Navy surface warfare officer, with command experience afloat and ashore.  He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and enjoys teaching, researching, and writing about strategy, national security, and maritime history.  Mobley currently teaches at UW–Madison, where he serves as Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy, and he is the author of Progressives in Navy Blue: Maritime Strategy, American Empire, and the Transformation of U.S. Naval Identity, 1873-1898. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the reviewer.

This article appeared origianlly at Strategy Bridge.

[1] Stephen B. Luce, “On the Relations between the U.S. Naval War College and the Line Officers of the U.S. Navy,” United States Naval Institute Proceedings 37, no. 3 (September, 1911): 787.

[2] Elting E. Morison, Admiral Sims and the Modern American Navy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942), 289.

[3] Holmes, James R. A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy. (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2019): 22

[4] Holmes, 23.

[5] Holmes, 51.

[6] Holmes, 1.

[7] Holmes, 2.

[8] Holmes, 2.

[9] Holmes, 119.

[10] For two recent examples comparing how Mahan and Corbett approached strategy, see: Smith, James W.E. “Corbett's Relevance to the Modern Strategic Thinker,” The Strategy Bridge, August 21, 2018, https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2018/8/21/corbetts-relevance-to-the-modern-strategic-thinker and Lacey, James. “A Revolution at Sea: Old Is New Again,” War on the Rocks, October 16, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/10/a-revolution-at-sea-old-is-new-again/.

[11] Holmes, 120.

[12] Holmes, 82

[13] William S. Sims, “The Practical Naval Officer,” United States Naval Institute Proceedings 47, no. 4 (April, 1921): 525.