The Neptune Factor: Alfred Thayer Mahan and the Concept of $ea Power

448 pages

Prof Geoffrey Till

Nicholas Lambert is famed amongst other toilers in the vineyards of naval history for constantly finding hitherto undiscovered material which, he claims, upend established ideas and interpretations of whatever it is that he is investigating. His first book, Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution, for example sought to show that Jacky Fisher was by no means wedded to the idea of the all-big-gun battleship and battlecruiser as the essential element in Britain’s naval defence in the run-up to the First World War. Instead, he proposed, Fisher was working for ‘flotilla defence’ by a host of smaller, faster combatants as a far more effective and far more affordable means of defending the homeland against the German fleet. Not everyone was convinced, to put it mildly, but it was a refreshing and stimulating form of history that made you think.

The same qualities are evident to a large but not complete extent in The Neptune Factor. Here Lambert’s target is what he considers to be the popular image of Mahan and his thought. The great American master of maritime strategy, he says, has been grossly simplified, wildly misinterpreted and belittled in a sequence of popular but indifferent biographies.

Another distinctive element in the Lambert approach has been a strong emphasis on the economics of naval defence. It was present in his first book because Lambert argued that what drove Fisher’s re-appraisal of big ships was their unaffordability. The same awareness of the importance of the economic dimension underpinned his Planning Armageddon in which he proposed that the Admiralty before the First World War thought that Germany would be brought down less by defeat at sea and the perambulations of a superior British battlefleet and more by the expected economic consequences of a decisive commercial blockade.

The same preoccupation is at play in The Neptune Factor. What was distinctive, valuable and perceptive about Mahan wasn’t the crude fixation on big ships and decisive battle that he is so well known for; instead, it was for something much richer and more complex. This was his advocacy of the destruction of the enemy’s commerce as the main weapon of sea power. Mahan arrived at this conclusion by means of a meticulous and truly scholarly investigation of the economic sources of Britain’s strength and its adversaries’ weaknesses and vulnerabilities in his most illuminating trio of studies. The first of these was the most famous but least impressive, The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660-1783; thesecond was the two-volume The Influence of Sea Power Upon the French Revolution and Empire 1793-1812; the third was the least popular (at least in the US!) but the most impressive, Sea Power in its Relation to the War of 1812.

In the latter, Mahan argued that the British won the war of 1812 by its overwhelming destruction of American commerce. The tactical victories of the US Navy’s super-frigates were no more than a distracting irrelevance, good for American morale perhaps but of no strategic significance. Lambert argues that Mahan came to this conclusion by virtue of a thorough acquaintance with the teachings of the so-called ‘Wisconsin School’, which did so much to raise the raise the profile of economics just at the time when Mahan was at his most productive.

So what are we to make of this? My first impression, frankly, was a degree of puzzlement because to my mind at least we are long past the period when critics used to dismiss Mahan as a crude navalist only interested in big ships and decisive battles. The recent review of Mahan’s work by Kevin McCraney, is just one indication of current thinking and illustrates that quite well I would have thought. Even odder, much of this rehabilitation of Mahan’s thinking was due to Lambert’s mentor in many ways, Jon Sumida, whose Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching Command: The Classic Works of Alfred Thayer Mahan Reconsidered in 1997 made us all look at Mahan in fresh ways. Lambert’s interpretation of the economic context of Mahan’s work is surely quite right and well argued, but to mix analogies his particular target seems something of a ‘straw man’.

Secondly, I missed the so what, the next stage of the enquiry- and investigation of what Mahan thought should be the consequence of his insight. In particular, Lambert covers but doesn’t really investigate the link that Mahan saw between decisive battle and commerce destruction. Battlefleet supremacy made for decisive commerce destruction, rather than the episodic, random and ultimately inadequate commerce raiding practices of the guerre de course. The interesting questions here are what happens when there are tensions between the two –  winning command and exercising it, when for example the escorts of the Grand Fleet are needed for the protection of commerce; or when campaigns to attack or defend trade, cannot wait until the command of the sea is decided ? Or the extent to which new technology in the shape of the submarine might elevate the priority of the defence and attack of trade above that of the struggle for sea control – and so on.

But, thirdly, there’s a reason for that lacuna I think, it’s that, despite appearances, Lambert is not really writing about Mahan and naval strategy at all.  Nor, and much more to the point does he seem to think Mahan is either, much of the time!  In the last extremely interesting chapter of the book, Lambert argues that Mahan is really a historian explaining the way things were at a particular time with as much attention to detail as he could; Mahan is not a strategist making grand and sweeping generalisations about the principles of maritime strategy, as did Julian Corbett. This of course explains why, as his critics so frequently lament, Mahan’s general observations about the conduct of war at sea are not conveniently concentrated but scattered about in his narrative account of various wars. I am not sure I entirely buy this argument, for, after all, Mahan was as Lambert shows very well, a passionate believer in ‘belligerent rights’ as a general principle of economic statecraft. All the same it’s an intriguing and stimulating suggestion.

And that is the real strength of this book. If you read it as a biography of Mahan, the man in his times, The Neptune Factor surely fills the gap in good biographies that Lambert laments. The book is very well written, a pleasure to read and hangs together very nicely. It fills in the relevant context to Mahan’s work. It tells us a lot about the slow evolution of the US Navy at a critical time. It provides a host of insights into many of the key issues of maritime policy and, happily, provides an excellent bridge into today’s concerns about the sanctions campaigns against Russia, the effect of the Houthi attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea and above all on the need to integrate the naval dimension within broader national policy and strategy. The Naval Institute Press have done an excellent job in producing a book that lives up to the importance of its subject; its comfortable print size, and tactile paper makes for pleasurable handling. So altogether and although this reviewer isn’t necessarily wholly convinced by everything in The Neptune Factor, it is nevertheless highly commended.