In the past several months, the U.S. Navy has continued to protect global shipping in combat in the Red Sea, the Port of Baltimore struggled through the Francis Scott Key Bridge disaster, and the Chinese Coast Guard and maritime militia conducted attacks on Philippine ships. With these events and more, concerns about shipping rates and routes and responses to global maritime insecurity have led commentators and strategists to turn their attention toward the U.S. role in the maritime world. These reflections have not all been positive. We are assured that “America is a maritime mess” and that the “list of America’s maritime vulnerabilities is long.” Our collective sea-blindness is being peeled away. Challenges on the world’s oceans are being covered by major news outlets. Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro has called for a “New Maritime Statecraft,” and the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space conference in the spring of 2024 touted “Integrated Maritime Power.”
In May 2024, a bipartisan group of congressional leaders offered a report that identified issues with both naval and civil elements of U.S. maritime strategy and provided a vision for future maritime spending. This report explains key reasons why a new focus on maritime strategy and policy are important and makes significant suggestions the executive branch should pursue moving forward. All of these engagements with the maritime world, from political leaders, industry, and national security thinkers offer important reflections on “why” the United States should be taking maritime strategy more seriously. But, as Philip Zelikow reminds us, just as important for achieving strategy and policy aims is the “how.” Lists of places where the U.S. might invest and areas for potential focus are an excellent starting point. But in the American system, where naval and maritime ideas and actions require coordination and political collaboration, it is time to consider how maritime strategy and statecraft are executed.
More than a century ago, the world experienced another era of rising great powers and tension on the world’s oceans. In the early years of the 20th century, the American strategist and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan examined the role of navies in international affairs. Even today, his insights have much to offer and have a remarkable applicability to the present. It is in that spirit that today’s leaders might consider one of his ideas for the creation of national policy: a coordinated approach to maritime statecraft and strategy that integrates executive and legislative efforts in the form of a committee of American maritime power. Such a body could help the United States create the necessary framework for a unified maritime strategy, combining economic, diplomatic, and military interests.
Mahan’s World
In the first decade of the 20th century, rising powers across the globe were dramatically changing the realities of the world order. In the Pacific, the Japanese had defeated Imperial Russia and created an alliance with Britain that raised their stature and helped them develop their naval power. In the Atlantic, the rise of Imperial Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II drove the British and French into an alliance and shook the imperial holdings of European powers. Lodged between the Atlantic and Pacific worlds, the United States was growing its navy at a rapid rate and was on the cusp of opening the Panama Canal, which would change the flow of trade and have global economic and political impact. This was the world in which Alfred Thayer Mahan was thinking and writing about strategy, naval policy, and international affairs.
Mahan, who had graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1859 and served nearly 40 years in uniform including through the Civil War, became a leading voice in American discussions of international affairs. His book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History: 1660–1783, published in 1890 while he was still on active duty, was only the beginning of a career as a strategist, historian, and educator. He published over a dozen books and hundreds of articles before his death in 1914. The New York World newspaper described him as “intellectually, influentially, a man without peer in the United States,” and a leading voice in national strategy. In 1911, he published an article with the North American Review reflecting on global naval affairs and international relations in his contemporary world entitled “Navies as International Factors.”
The essay, rather than an operational study of navies, is a reflection on how governments create naval and maritime policy and develop national strategy. It is about coordination, integration, and implementation of maritime statecraft. Mahan examined a number of examples but primarily focused on the rise of Imperial Germany as a system based in authoritarianism and the British model as a system involving representative democracy. After examining each, and how the two had been competing with one another across the first decade of the 20th century, he turned to how the U.S. government was organized and ways that it might better approach the creation of naval policy and national strategy. As Nicholas Lambert has shown, Mahan was more than just a naval officer who wrote about battles; he was also one of the early scholars of what today we call international relations and globalized economics. His essay is one of the works that has driven the noted military historian Jon Sumida to conclude that he was the inventor of the concept of grand strategy in the American context.
Executive and Legislative Naval Power
Mahan’s comparison of the German and British models for the development of seapower fundamentally comes down to a question of executive versus legislative political power, and how each is involved in different systems of government. According to his analysis, the German model was an executive-heavy model. While the German state did have a legislature, it largely followed the wishes of the kaiser. Having a system where the executive predominated allowed for efficiency and for planning that could be executed over years or decades. Mahan pointed out that this, from the standpoint of the rapid and consistent development of seapower, was a most effective system.
In contrast, Mahan’s examination of the British model concluded that in the parliamentary system, legislative power predominated as the members of the government were all members of the majority party but also members of the legislature. This created a risk to the creation of a consistent naval policy and national strategy since there is an “unsteadiness of naval policy dependent upon party government.” By his analysis, in democratic systems like the British one and the American one, the executive tends to be responsible for “estimates” and budgets, but legislatures often do not trust them or will “tend to naturally contest” them. Having outlined the risks of legislative power, Mahan makes his commitment to democracy clear and tells readers that even with the challenges of the system, “it is in accord with the genius of their institutions” and of democratic values in the United States and the United Kingdom.
According to Mahan, the United States was in a peculiar situation that differed from both the German and the British models. The American system had a strong and independent executive, like the Germans. But it also had a strong legislature that, through the two-party system, protects its own prerogatives like the British. In some ways, this combines the best of both systems, particularly effective in protecting the “foundation of their edifice of liberty.” However, it also introduces the possibility of conflict between the branches of government and the unsteadiness of strategy and policy that might result. Mahan insisted that good strategy-making requires “a process of reasoning,” but the overt politicization that can result from party politics or the interaction between the executive and legislative can result in simple ideas, such as simple ship-counting or sloganeering, driving policy. This replaces formulation based on strategic principles with a strategy constructed on simplicity and politics.
Strategic Collaboration: The Best of Both Worlds
Approaching the challenge of developing and wielding seapower in the 21st century requires policymakers and strategists to look both backward to the precedents of the past and forward to the possibilities of the future. Mahan was doing exactly this when he wrote in 1911, a kind of applied history of an earlier era. After explaining his analysis of the German and the British paths toward building their navies and developing seapower, he turned to how the Americans might approach the process of strategy and policymaking based on their own unique political system and process. In doing so, he developed an organizational scheme that offers interesting possibilities for today’s American seapower challenge.
Mahan was looking for a way to organizationally bring the executive and legislative power bases into a formal conversation with one another. He believed this would engender collaboration instead of the tendency to “naturally contest” one another. Recognizing that the Americans could not, and should not, adopt the more authoritarian model of Germany, he turned to the structures used in the British system. At the dawn of the 20th century, the U.K. government had created the Committee of Imperial Defense in order to develop a collaborative process across the government. The committee was chaired by the prime minister and included the foreign secretary, first lord of the admiralty, secretary of state for war, chancellor of the exchequer, and uniformed heads of the army and navy. But it was also “elastic” and could include other members of the government that the prime minister felt were appropriate for the deliberations. This largely ad hoc committee brought the stakeholders together, and was supported by a secretariat to staff the process.
Mahan suggested that an American committee to oversee strategy and naval policy could begin with a similar baseline. The secretary of the Navy would be joined by the secretary of state and the secretary of war, the uniformed heads of the Navy and the Army, and the secretary of the treasury. But Mahan pointed out that in the American system of government, the legislative branch needed to be included. He suggested adding the chairs of the naval affairs committees in the Senate and the House of Representatives, as well as the chairs of the foreign affairs committees from each chamber. With a small staff to manage their meetings and administer the products and communications, the stakeholders could all be brought together to make collaborative policy and strategy.
While a council on national defense was formed in 1916, and had pieces of what Mahan and others suggested, it focused on the coordination of industry for the war effort and involved less work on national strategy. In some ways, what Mahan suggested in 1911 has a lot of similarities to the way that we think about the National Security Council today. With “the principals committee” gathering all of the executive branch leadership to make strategic decisions, it might be suggested that his vision has largely been achieved. And in our 21st-century government, the executive departments represented by Mahan’s suggestion are far larger, and the secretaries and principals have much more to oversee and administer in their current establishments.
Yet, returning to the purpose of Mahan’s essay: Considering the role of navies as international factors and the creation of naval policy and strategy, today we might reimagine his suggestion in a purely maritime sense. To determine the “how” of the recent congressional guidance and the secretary of the Navy’s speeches, a committee made up of representatives to collaborate and coordinate American maritime strategy and naval policy could be useful. This might help in overcoming the tendency to “naturally contest” one another, which remains not only between the executive and legislative branches but also between the executive departments themselves.
Whether the members of this committee of American maritime power were principals or deputies, or other leaders specifically appointed by departments or stakeholders, the point would be collaboration rather than seniority and posturing. Bringing leaders from the Department of the Navy, both civilian and uniformed Navy and Marine Corps, together with the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and the U.S. Coast Guard, the Department of Transportation and the Maritime Administration, the State Department, and the Commerce Department, as well as the House and Senate Seapower Committees and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, would include relevant participants. This representation would allow for a body to develop maritime strategy and naval policy that would forward the economic, diplomatic, and military goals of the United States. Taking a suggestion from the century-old British model, the committee membership could also be elastic depending on issues discussed. For example, the U.S. Agency for International Development could be at the table for discussions of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief policy, or the Department of Labor might be at the table in conversations about rebuilding the maritime industrial base. As Mahan wrote in another essay on the “Considerations Governing the Dispositions of Navies,” in the planning for and exercise of seapower, “the political, commercial, and military needs are so intertwined that their mutual interaction constitutes one problem.”
American Maritime Strategy at the Water’s Edge
It may be that a committee aiming to bring together competing executive departments and the legislative branch would be too difficult. Between departments competing for budget, partisan divisions, and the in-built tensions between Congress and the executive it funds and oversees, there are surely many challenges.
The inability to simply appoint members to the naval review commission created in the fiscal year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act suggests we should be wary. In that case, while Congress created the committee in the National Defense Authorization Act, members of Congress never appointed enough members to the committee for it to begin work. However, as Mahan wrote, “The question for the United States, as regards to the size of its navy, is not so much what it desires to accomplish as what it is willing, or unwilling, to concede.”
This question would be best addressed with an integrated and whole-of-government approach that a committee of American maritime power could provide. Efforts like the bipartisan “Congressional Guidance for a National Maritime Strategy” and Secretary Del Toro’s maritime statecraft initiative are positive steps. But U.S. maritime policy needs something more than the legislative branch and the executive branch each making demands of the other, no matter how intelligent those suggestions might be. At the very least, an effort to bring together leaders from the multiple sources of American maritime power would offer an opportunity to raise the key questions of the new era of great power competition and clarify what it might be that we are conceding with our policy decisions.
Today, American naval forces are responsible for not only operations and success in war, but also advancing American interests during peacetime. With the mission of the U.S. Navy including both economic prosperity and peacetime interests, the U.S. government must find a way to develop collaboration between the interests represented in the new mission, bringing together those that contribute to both security and prosperity. Using the insights of the past to help us ask the right questions about the development of naval policy and maritime strategy for the present, Mahan offers us an old idea to think about in a new context.
BJ Armstrong is the author of several books on naval history and strategy including Naval Presence and the Interwar U.S. Navy and Marine Corps: Forward Deployment, Crisis Response, and the Tyranny of History, and 21st-Century Mahan, Revised and Expanded: Sound Military Conclusions for the Modern Era. He holds a PhD from King’s College, London. Opinions expressed in his article are offered in his personal and academic capacity and do not reflect the positions or policies of the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense, or any other agency.
Image: Petty Officer 2nd Class Jared Mancuso
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