90 percent by sea - Defence Academy of the United Kingdom

‘We’re a maritime nation—we’ve grown by the sea and live by it; if we lose command of it we
starve…We’ve been safe so long, and grown so rich, that we’ve forgotten what we owe it to.’ 1
The notion that a component of a nation’s power in its seapower, and that a component of a
nation’s seapower is its merchant navy, is a long held one. Certainly, the great American
naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan recognised the indivisibility of trade from a nation’s
seapower: ‘If navies, as all agree, exist for the protection of commerce, it inevitably means
that in war they must aim at depriving their enemy of that great resource’ 2 whilst in Britain, Sir
Julian Corbett has similar sentiments: ‘Command of the sea, therefore, means nothing but
the control of maritime communications, whether for commercial or military purposes’. 3 More
recently, the ‘virtuous maritime circle’, 4 describing the circular relationship between maritime
trade, maritime resources, naval strength and maritime supremacy, has been used to
describe the historical development of British mercantile and naval strength, with successive
monarchs encouraging the construction and use of a sovereign merchant fleet to carry British
goods, and naval strength to prevent or punish interference with it.
Today, however, few would see Britain’s maritime trade as having quite so central a place in
naval thinking. British Maritime Doctrine considers it specifically in paragraph 238, under
‘Role 2 – Maritime Security’; 5 a demotion indeed from the opening paragraph of Mahan’s
work, which tells us that ‘the profound influence of sea commerce upon the wealth and
strength of countries was clearly seen long before the true principles which governed its
growth and prosperity were detected’. 6 Indeed, the retreat of commerce protection from its
position as a core naval role at the heart of the Royal Navy’s raison d’être has been a slow
but seemingly inexorable process. The aim of this essay is to examine why, and will argue
that the doctrinal divergence of the RN from the protection of commerce has had a significant
second order consequence: it has subordinated the ability to provide power at sea to the
requirement to deliver power from the sea. This is likely to be detrimental to both. Moreover,
since the critical requirement for the nation to sustain its way of life is uninterrupted access to
a global maritime trading system, it should instinctively follow that the protection and
assurance of that system, across the spectrum of conflict, is a primary, core function of the
RN. Consequently, the ability to deliver power at sea is the RN’s most fundamental utility;
and in an international community which has proliferated increasingly Mahanian views as
well as an array of advanced naval technology, the delivery of power at sea is likely to
supersede the requirement to deliver power from the sea in future.
1 Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands (Ria Press edition: 2008), 34
2 John B. Hattendorf, ed., Mahan on Naval Strategy: Selections from the Writings of Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer
Mahan (Annapolis: United States Naval Institute, 1991), xxvii
3 Sir Julian Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1972), 90
4 Geoffrey Till, Seapower: A guide for the Twenty First Century (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2004), 20
5 Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre, JDP 0-10 British Maritime Doctrine (DCDC, 2011), 2-18
6 Hattendorf, ed., Mahan on Naval Strategy, 1
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