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 [pg 92] 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 [pg 93] 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.
[pg 94]
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 [pg 95] 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 [pg 96] 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. [pg 97] 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 [pg 98] 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 [pg 99] 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 [pg 100] 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.
to elucidate the point, it must be repeated that maritime communications, which are the root of the idea of command of the sea, are not analogous to military communications in the ordinary use of the term. military communications refer solely to the army's lines of supply and retreat. maritime communications have a wider meaning. though in effect embracing the lines of fleet supply, they correspond in strategical values not to military lines of supply, but to those internal lines of communication by which the flow of national life is maintained ashore. consequently maritime communications are on a wholly different footing from land communications. at sea the communications are, for the most part, common to both belligerents, whereas ashore each possesses his own in his own territory. the strategical effect is of far-reaching importance, for it means that at sea strategical offence and defence tend to merge in a way that is unknown ashore. since maritime communications are common, we as a rule cannot attack those of the enemy without defending our own. in military operations the converse is the rule. normally, an attack on our enemy's communications tends to expose their own.
[pg 101]
the theory of common communications will become clear by taking an example. in our wars with france our communications with the mediterranean, india, and america ran down from the channel mouth past finisterre and st. vincent; and those of france, at least from her atlantic ports, were identical for almost their entire distance. in our wars with the dutch the identity was even closer. even in the case of spain, her great trade routes followed the same lines as our own for the greater part of their extent. consequently the opening moves which we generally made to defend our trade by the occupation of those lines placed us in a position to attack our enemy's trade. the same situation arose even when our opening dispositions were designed as defence against home invasion or against attacks upon our colonies, for the positions our fleet had to take up to those ends always lay on or about the terminal and focal points of trade routes. whether our immediate object were to bring the enemy's main fleets to action or to exercise economic pressure, it made but little difference. if the enemy were equally anxious to engage, it was at one of the terminal or focal areas we were almost certain to get contact. if he wished to avoid a decision, the best way to force him to action was to occupy his trade routes at the same vital points.
thus it comes about that, whereas on land the process of economic pressure, at least in the modern conception of war, should only begin after decisive victory, at sea it starts automatically from the first. indeed such pressure may be the only means of forcing the decision we seek, as will appear more clearly when we come to deal with the other fundamental difference between land and sea warfare.
meanwhile we may note that at sea the use of economic [pg 102] pressure from the commencement is justified for two reasons. the first is, as we have seen, that it is an economy of means to use our defensive positions for attack when attack does not vitiate those positions, and it will not vitiate them if fleet cruisers operate with restraint. the second is, that interference with the enemy's trade has two aspects. it is not only a means of exerting the secondary economic pressure, it is also a primary means towards overthrowing the enemy's power of resistance. wars are not decided exclusively by military and naval force. finance is scarcely less important. when other things are equal, it is the longer purse that wins. it has even many times redressed an unfavourable balance of armed force and given victory to the physically weaker power. anything, therefore, which we are able to achieve towards crippling our enemy's finance is a direct step to his overthrow, and the most effective means we can employ to this end against a maritime state is to deny him the resources of seaborne trade.
it will be seen, therefore, that in naval warfare, however closely we may concentrate our efforts on the destruction of our enemy's armed forces as the direct means to his overthrow, it would be folly to stay our hands when opportunities occur, as they will automatically, for undermining his financial position on which the continued vigour of those armed forces so largely depends. thus the occupation of our enemy's sea communications and the confiscatory operations it connotes are in a sense primary operations, and not, as on land, secondary.
such, then, are the abstract conclusions at which we arrive in our attempt to analyse the idea of command of the sea and to give it precision as the control of common communications. their concrete value will appear when we come to deal with the various forms which naval operations may take, such as, "seeking out the enemy's fleet," blockade, attack and defence of trade, and the safeguarding of combined expeditions. [pg 103] for the present it remains to deal with the various kinds of sea command which flow from the communication idea.
if the object of the command of the sea is to control communications, it is obvious it may exist in various degrees. we may be able to control the whole of the common communications as the result either of great initial preponderance or of decisive victory. if we are not sufficiently strong to do this, we may still be able to control some of the communications; that is, our control may be general or local. obvious as the point is, it needs emphasising, because of a maxim that has become current that "the sea is all one." like other maxims of the kind, it conveys a truth with a trail of error in its wake. the truth it contains seems to be simply this, that as a rule local control can only avail us temporarily, for so long as the enemy has a sufficient fleet anywhere, it is theoretically in his power to overthrow our control of any special sea area.
it amounts indeed to little more than a rhetorical expression, used to emphasise the high mobility of fleets as contrasted with that of armies and the absence of physical obstacles to restrict that mobility. that this vital feature of naval warfare should be consecrated in a maxim is well, but when it is caricatured into a doctrine, as it sometimes is, that you cannot move a battalion oversea till you have entirely overthrown your enemy's fleet, it deserves gibbeting. it would be as wise to hold that in war you must never risk anything.
it would seem to have been the evil influence of this travestied maxim which had much to do with the cramped and timorous strategy of the americans in their late war with spain. they had ample naval force to secure such a local and temporary command of the gulf of mexico as to have justified them at once in throwing all the troops they had ready into cuba to support the insurgents, in accordance with their war plan. they had also sufficient strength to ensure that the communications with the expeditionary force could not be [pg 104] interrupted permanently. and yet, because the spaniards had an undefeated fleet at sea somewhere, they hesitated, and were nearly lost. the japanese had no such illusions. without having struck a naval blow of any kind, and with a hostile fleet actually within the theatre of operations, they started their essential military movement oversea, content that though they might not be able to secure the control of the line of passage, they were in a position to deny effective control to the enemy. our own history is full of such operations. there are cases in plenty where the results promised by a successful military blow oversea, before permanent command had been obtained, were great enough to justify a risk which, like the japanese, we knew how to minimise by judicious use of our favourable geographical position, and of a certain system of protection, which must be dealt with later.
for the purpose, then, of framing a plan of war or campaign, it must be taken that command may exist in various states or degrees, each of which has its special possibilities and limitations. it may be general or local, and it may be permanent or temporary. general command may be permanent or temporary, but mere local command, except in very favourable geographical conditions, should scarcely ever be regarded as more than temporary, since normally it is always liable to interruption from other theatres so long as the enemy possesses an effective naval force.
finally, it has to be noted that even permanent general command can never in practice be absolute. no degree of naval superiority can ensure our communications against sporadic attack from detached cruisers, or even raiding squadrons if they be boldly led and are prepared to risk destruction. even after hawke's decisive victory at [pg 105] quiberon had completed the overthrow of the enemy's sea forces, a british transport was captured between cork and portsmouth, and an indiaman in sight of the lizard, while wellington's complaints in the peninsula of the insecurity of his communications are well known.9 by general and permanent control we do not mean that the enemy can do nothing, but that he cannot interfere with our maritime trade and oversea operations so seriously as to affect the issue of the war, and that he cannot carry on his own trade and operations except at such risk and hazard as to remove them from the field of practical strategy. in other words, it means that the enemy can no longer attack our lines of passage and communication effectively, and that he cannot use or defend his own.
to complete our equipment for appreciating any situation for which operations have to be designed, it is necessary to remember that when the command is in dispute the general conditions may give a stable or an unstable equilibrium. it may be that the power of neither side preponderates to any appreciable extent. it may also be that the preponderance is with ourselves, or it may be that it lies with the enemy. such preponderance of course will not depend entirely on actual relative strength, either physical or moral, but will be influenced by the inter-relation of naval positions and the comparative convenience of their situation in regard to the object of the war or campaign. by naval positions we mean, firstly, [pg 106] naval bases and, secondly, the terminals of the greater lines of communication or trade-routes and the focal areas where they tend to converge, as at finisterre, gibraltar, suez, the cape, singapore, and many others.
upon the degree and distribution of this preponderance will depend in a general way the extent to which our plans will be governed by the idea of defence or offence. generally speaking, it will be to the advantage of the preponderating side to seek a decision as quickly as possible in order to terminate the state of dispute. conversely, the weaker side will as a rule seek to avoid or postpone a decision in hope of being able by minor operations, the chances of war, or the development of fresh strength, to turn the balance in its favour. such was the line which france adopted frequently in her wars with us, sometimes legitimately, but sometimes to such an excess as seriously to demoralise her fleet. her experience has led to a hasty deduction that the defensive at sea for even a weaker power is an unmixed evil. such a conclusion is foreign to the fundamental principles of war. it is idle to exclude the use of an expectant attitude because in itself it cannot lead to final success, and because if used to excess it ends in demoralisation and the loss of will to attack. the misconception appears to have arisen from insistence on the drawbacks of defence by writers seeking to persuade their country to prepare in time of peace sufficient naval strength to justify offence from the outset.
having now determined the fundamental principles which underlie the idea of command of the sea, we are in a position to consider the manner in which fleets are constituted in order to fit them for their task.
