Australian Maritime Issues 2005 - Royal Australian Navy

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SEAPOWER IN THE 21ST CENTURY new area and then had to protect their investments there. Their soldiers were never sufficiently numerous to engage in major continental campaigns, so their 160 year empire in the Indian Ocean rested on a few garrisons in strategic places and on superior naval forces. When others, especially the Dutch and the English, began to accumulate greater levels of naval force, the Portuguese Empire went into decline. The British Empire, which succeeded it in this area, was likewise based on seapower. Its strategists conceived of the Empire as a huge landmass divided by eight chunks of water (the Dardanelles and Bosphorous, the Caspian Sea, the Tigris-Euphrates rivers, the Nile, the Red Sea, the Aral Sea and River Oxus, the Gulf and the Indus/Sutlej). Controlling these water areas assured control of the land. Losing them would result in imperial decline. The security of the Empire then rested on a series of defensive and offensive strategies centred on controlling the sea. For better or worse, the Europeans created new empires and changed the world. And they did it by sea. To make it all possible, they developed navies and a strategy, a set of concepts of how to use them, from which all of the classic functions of seapower derived: assuring sea control, projecting power ashore in peace and war, attacking and defending trade, directly and indirectly, and maintaining good order at sea. Motivations for such maritime endeavour were mixed but certainly included a strong economic dimension, in that there was a widespread view that in order to sustain growth, modern states needed access to other areas, preferably controlled in some way, for further resources and markets. Strength at sea was such a clear path to dominion and power that countries sought to control it for what that control could apparently give them. All of these ideas were drawn together by Alfred Thayer Mahan, a late 19th century American admiral, who famously concluded: Control of the sea by maritime commerce and naval supremacy means predominant influence in the world...and is the chief among the merely material elements in the power and prosperity of nations. Accordingly, to the extent that they could profit from the sea as a medium of commercial transportation and trade, the economies of the sea powers would boom; to the extent that they could exploit the strategic advantages of deploying decisive military power at sea and then projecting it ashore against the land-bound, their strategies would succeed. Because, therefore, the sea powers would generally prosper in peace and prevail in war, they would inevitably become great. Seapower, properly understood, thus encompasses the geo-economic dimensions of human activity and can best be represented as a tight and inseparable system in which naval power protects the maritime assets that are the ultimate source of its effectiveness. Of course, navies that have tended to prevail were generally those with great warships and effective weaponry, with better tactics and more advanced technology, and above all perhaps with first-rate commanders able to wield their fleets with ruthless efficiency. The Portuguese broke into the Indian Ocean because they had all these advantages and so prevailed against the much larger navies they encountered there. Fighting advantages were not, however, the exclusive property or the invention of the Portuguese or of
AUSTRALIAN MARITIME ISSUES 2005: SPC-A ANNUAL anyone else. After all, many of the navigational advances made towards the end of the European Middle Ages derived from contact with the Islamic world, even down to the use of the word ‘Admiral’, which in Arabic once meant the ‘Prince at Sea’. Across the other side of the world, the Koreans deployed the first armoured warship, and, of course, China of the Song dynasty (from 1000-1500 CE) boasted ‘the world’s most powerful and technologically sophisticated navy’. What was distinctive about the European approach to seapower at this time was that, like the Chinese and others before them, they had discovered the huge advantage to be derived from the close association between the military and the mercantile aspects of seapower. In the hands of the Venetians, the Dutch, the British and to a lesser extent the Portuguese, Spanish and French, a virtuous circle was at work. From maritime trade, the Europeans were able to derive maritime resources that could be diverted to naval purposes when the need arose. Partly it was through having ports, merchant hulls and seamen that could be used to support the navy directly. Partly it was through having access to the indirect benefits deriving from the kind of sophisticated financial structures that maritime trade encouraged. All this underpinned naval strength and meant it was much easier for the maritime powers (that is, naval powers with a strong mercantile element) to build a navy than it was for the merely naval powers. At the end of the 17th century, the French showed that with a real effort they could out-build the British and produce a bigger and indeed very fine fleet - but they could not maintain it. The British simply outlasted them. Maritime powers could devote huge resources to building and maintaining a fleet but at less real cost, and they often had enough left over to support the war effort generally, and, in Britain’s case, to subsidise allies as well. Mercantile finance from the profits of trade also funded access to a mass of industrial and technological developments, which could be translated into specific military advantage. The British industrial lead in coke-smelting techniques and steam machinery for example, meant it was much easier for the Royal Navy than the French to copper-bottom its ships - making them more nimble and faster than old ships would otherwise have been. All this made for an approach to war that was uniquely cost-effective and does much to explain why the maritime powers predominated over the merely naval, and in most cases in the last few centuries over the continental ones too. But of course this virtuous circle was not a closed system - it could be influenced decisively from outside. A good example of this was Oman. There is no wood in Oman to speak of, so Omani sailors needed to get teak for their dhows from the Malabar Coast of India. They were able to do this because trade produced the money that allowed them to go out and obtain the teak, and in turn produce warships to protect and maintain their maritime supremacy; however Oman was subject to overland attack by neighbouring enemies, and when that happened the circle could be broken up. So this is a useful corrective to Mahan, who tended to stress only the benefits of sea power, to bear in mind that being a maritime power can also be a source of vulnerability as well, especially if you don’t have the naval strength to defend your weaknesses.
Page 1 and 2: Papers in Australian Maritime Affai
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Page 8 and 9: About the Authors Midshipman Steve
Page 10 and 11: ABOUT THE AUTHORS ix Commander Glen
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Australian Maritime Issues 2005 - Royal Australian Navy

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