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THE INFLUENCE OF SEAPOWER ON HISTORIANS

Younghusband at Coming Anarchy has an excellent post up now contrasting the ideas of Naval power theorists Alfred T. Mahan and Julian S. Corbett. An excerpt:

“Mahan was writing for the American public, advocating a better funded Navy (which he was a part of), appealing for the US naval power to mirror that of Britain. Corbett was a professional historian writing for a British audience, writing ont he role of navies in geopolitics. In my opinion Mahan represents a class of “military theorist” that I think should be properly labelled “military advocacy” in that he has an agenda wrapped in an analysis. Another example of this is Napoleonic strategist Antione-Henri Jomini.

Julian Corbett was never in the navy, so he loses points for firsthand experience. Mahan wasn’t a model captain though, crashing most of his ships, and in fact dreaded going to sea. Corbett was a trained lawyer, and unlike Mahan, was an experienced historian who has a much more professional and robust theoretical approach in Some Principles of Maritime Strategy. Mahan’s theory rested on inductive reasoning, using carefully selected historical analogues to “prove” his theory, similar to Jomini’s approach in the Art of War. This type of argumentation is prevalent throughout the beginning of the Scientific Age.”

Well done.

Mahan was part of an intellectual circle around Theodore Roosevelt, all of whom were historians ( as was, it must be said, Roosevelt himself) including Frederick Jackson Turner, Brooks Adams, Henry Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge *and John Hay. Influenced by Frederick Jackson Turner, all of these men saw America as the great rising power of the twentieth century and were committed, in varying degrees and with somewhat different conceptions, to guiding the country down the path of national greatness and world power. Mahan’s thesis was helped frame and was in turn influenced and interpreted according to that common vision. Roosevelt, partly due to Mahan, became a hard-core Naval enthusiast both as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, where he helped provoke war with Spain and as President where he built ” The Great White Fleet” and the Panama Canal.

Ideas matter.

*Lodge actually held a PhD. in Political Science but mentored and assisted Roosevelt as the latter wrote his well-regarded histories of the American West.

BARNETT EN FUEGO

Not quite as thermonuclear as the post he once lobbed at Robert Kaplan but a rather feisty Dr. Barnett nonetheless.

Also, first newsletter in a while ( Steff Hedenkamp is now filling the large shoes of Critt in the webmastering capacity).

THE SHORT CENTURY OF THE LONG WAR AND OUR NETWORKED FUTURE

The twentieth century was nasty and brutish. Mercifully, it was also short.

It is popular among historians to say that the nineteenth century ended only with the Guns of August but that trendiness should not obscure the truth of that statement. The Great War was not only a physical catastrophe for European civilization but a profoundly moral one because the universal conception of war at the time owed more to romantic myths of the charge of the Light Brigade than to brigadiers of the artillery. Had the Europeans learned from the American experience at Petersburg, they might have pulled back from the brink. Or pursued their war aims with less zeal and greater thought.

Instead of a pageant of gallantry, or a quick victory as at Sedan, Europe experienced slaughter on an industrial scale. As the eminent military historian John Keegan wrote of the Germans:

” Year groups 1892-1895, men who were between nineteen and twenty-two when the war broke out, were reduced by 35-37 per cent. Overall, of the sixteen milion born betwen 1870 and 1899, 13 percent were killed, at the rate of 465,600 for each year the war lasted. The heaviest casualties, as in most armies, fell among the officers, of whom 23 per cent – 25 per cent of regular officers – as against 14 percent of enlisted men “

The aristocratic class structure of Great Britain broke at the Somme, lingering on only in form but not in substance. The First World War ended cultural illusions about the nature of Western society as Europe followed democratic America and socialist Russia and openly entered Ortega y Gasset’s new age of the Mass-man. The power of thoroughly “massified” modern societies enlisted for war dwarfed even the Great War and was carried out to its logical conclusion at Hiroshima. The twentieth century was, a root, an era of zero-sum conflict on the grand strategic scale. Philip Bobbitt terms it ” The Long War” which balances the ” Long Peace” that had followed Waterloo.

It is arguable- though not yet proven – that the global paradigm of the Mass-man, nation-state died in 1991 along with the Soviet empire, the Cold War rule-set and the information monopoly of the media elite. I certainly believe this to be so as we not only have a void where great centripetal forces once stood but globalization and the internet have rushed in to ” de-massify” modern society, creating a grand economic integration even as political disintegration permits individuals and groups the autonomy to create new kinds of networks with new rule-sets to govern not a society of states but a system of systems.

Something new is coming and many of the old tools for political and strategic analysis are not going to be enough. We cannot throw them out entirely – Realpolitik, Liberalism, Game Theory – all retain their uses but it is becoming evident that these traditional paradigms do not suffice to explain al Qaida ‘s behavior much less its next move. We need to look at the world systemically as interrelationships of dynamic networks and include concepts like “emergence“, ” resilience” and “consilience” on our intellectual palette. The deep methodological compartmentalization that prevails in the social sciences and between science and the humanities must be abandoned if we are to see the world more clearly. Power laws govern more widely than at just the nano level.

A new world requires, if not new eyes, at least some new vision.

RECOMMENDED READING

Good things Right and Left.

From Marc at The American Future ” Die Zeit Interview with Michael Scheuer:Parts I and II” and “Part III, Part IV and Part V“.

Scheuer headed the CIA’s Bin Laden Task Force prior to writing several books on al Qaida and the Bush administration. Scheuer’s highly critical remarks about American policy get much play in the MSM but his equally critical evaluation of the performance of senior career management at the CIA ( who generally oppose Bush) and our European allies (ditto) seldom receive much exposure from the NYT or the major networks. Scheuer contributes frequently to On Point.

From J. at The Armchair Generalist ” Changing the Defense Lineup“

Good commentary on an important but subtle shift at the Pentagon.

From Dr. Daniel Nexon at The Duck of Minerva ” Empire, Schmempire“

Despite the blase title, the post represents some very cogent thinking about empires and IR theory. ” Informal empire” tends to become, in my view, a magic cloud for many academics to cover a range of policies they simply do not like, such as capitalist market behavior, as if that were the same thing as coercion. Dan however draws many careful distinctions and offers interesting links to pursue.

Two posts that go well together:

John Robb ‘s “ Dangerous Ideas” and

John Hagel at Edge Perspectives ” Globalization and Diversity“

Cultural evolution occurs at the margin.

That’s it.

And now that my computer seems to be working, I’ll attend to the comments from yesterday.

BLOGGING NOTE

Having a few computer problems today…..