Sailing True North

by Admiral James Stavridis, USN (Ret. )

  Over the next four years as a midshipman studying both engineering and English, I learned a lot more about Mahan and returned many times to Mahan Hall for lectures, performances, and debates. I started to develop my own belief that part of being a professional naval officer included an obligation to read, think, write, and—eventually—publish. Throughout my time at Annapolis, I would often sit down to write a column for the alumni magazine, Shipmate; an essay for the Academy’s monthly literary magazine, The Log; or a short piece for Proceedings, the magazine of record for the sea services published by the Naval Institute that Mahan helped to shape early on. My classmates thought it strange that I would want to write and publish, but I firmly believed then and continue to believe now that it is through being part of a larger conversation in a profession that we can best advance the interests of our community. Mahan was the beginning of all that for me.

  Today I have the honor of serving as the chairman of the board of the US Naval Institute. In my office in Beach Hall, the Institute’s headquarters on the grounds of the Naval Academy, I have a sweeping view of the Severn River and the small cemetery of the Academy. Mahan is not buried there, but his spirit sails on through those gravestones, so many of them marking the final resting place of such great admirals of US naval history as Ernest King, Arleigh Burke, and James Stockdale. All of them spent more time at sea than Mahan and were vastly more distinguished in the handling of ships and sailors, but none of them can surpass Mahan in contributions—both practical and theoretical—to the profession of naval service.

  One of the most prized items in my office at Annapolis is the logbook that was the original “proceedings” of the US Naval Institute, including the minutes of the founding meeting of eight officers in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1886. It is written in a spidery hand, but the names and signatures are clear—including that of Commander Alfred Thayer Mahan. He would be proud, I think, to know how the Institute has grown; today it counts more than fifty thousand members—officer, enlisted, and civilian—convenes conferences on the big defense issues of our day; publishes more than eighty titles annually; maintains a superb library with more than 400,000 images, hundreds of oral histories, and thousands of books; and features a staff of dedicated professionals who carry on Admiral Mahan’s legacy every day.

  My relationship with Mahan endures to this day. Over the course of four decades, I have written for the Proceedings magazine at every stage of my career and authored or coauthored five books with the Naval Institute Press. All of that began for me—and for many others—with Alfred Thayer Mahan. In an early fitness report, Mahan was infamously slammed with the admonition, “it is not the business of naval officers to write books.” Count me grateful that he was undeterred: we are all richer for his continued writing—as a Navy, as a profession, and as a nation.

  What do we know about him? Mahan was an unassuming man who sported either a mustache or a tidy goatee and a withering stare. He was a scholar, and perhaps above all a teacher, but he was certainly not an accomplished sailor. His nautical career progress was uneven, to put it charitably. A good example is when Mahan was assigned to the new Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1885. Mahan’s mentor, Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce, had founded the college almost by force of will at the old torpedo school in Newport in 1884. Luce was driven by the idea that the principles of naval warfare could and should be found out by study and elevated to the level of a science, as (land-based) military science had been over the preceding century. In October 1885, he secured Mahan’s appointment to the college as a lecturer in naval tactics and sea power. With the college’s first academic year already underway and Mahan needing some time to prepare his lecture materials, he successfully lobbied Luce to let him live in New York with his family for ten months until the next class began in the fall of 1886. “I wish,” Mahan had written to Luce, “to place myself where I can find the best material for my intended book” on sea power. Luce agreed, and let Mahan stay in New York, where he did nothing but read, think, and write over nearly a year—a great rarity in a supposedly seagoing officer’s life.

  Mahan’s time in New York violated all the normal routines and responsibilities of naval life. There were no uniforms, no time aboard ship, no squalls at sea, no unruly sailors to discipline, and certainly no battles to be fought: just the long months of reading and writing. It was an interlude that perfectly illuminated the unique liberties this scholar-masquerading-as-sailor was permitted. Far from wanting to sail ships to war, he wanted to reshape the way the United States viewed the world, and show how the relatively new nation could best secure its strategic future. He said, “How to view the lessons of the past so as to mold them into lessons for the future, is the nut I have to crack.” Mahan intended nothing less than “to raise the [naval] profession in the eyes of its members by a clearer comprehension of the great part it has played in the world.”

  He did all this, in large measure, by studying the past and then intensively and creatively applying the lessons of history to the unruly present. His 1890 masterpiece, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, reshaped global geopolitics. Mahan’s work deeply influenced future president Theodore Roosevelt; indeed, it laid the intellectual foundation upon which Roosevelt would build the modern US Navy and carve out a far larger role for the United States in the world. All of this evolved as a result of the tumultuous geopolitics of the late nineteenth century. The European powers were scrambling for colonies around the world, especially in Asia and Africa. The prevailing geopolitical theory of the time was that of mercantilism, which espoused the idea that a nation’s wealth could be expanded by dominating vast tracts of the undeveloped world and constructing complex trading patterns that generated highly profitable trade for the colonizing power. The United Kingdom was the dominant actor in the system, and at one time controlled enormous swaths of global territory, with the Raj—what is today India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—being the crown jewel. But all the European nations were colonial powers—notably France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal; even tiny Belgium controlled territories in Africa and other parts of the world that dwarfed its small European landmass. In Asia, Japan was modernizing and emerging as a colonizing power itself.

  The United States initially rejected the mad dash to divide up the world, partly from its own history of overthrowing a colonizing power and partly because it already held an enormous spread of land in its own continental-sized nation. Much of the energy of the US population was focused on simply consolidating control of the continental United States, the “manifest destiny” of the nineteenth century. It was conventional wisdom to avoid any kind of overseas engagement; the admonition of George Washington to “steer clear of . . . entangling alliances” continued to resonate. But Mahan carefully studied the history of Great Britain and its path to global dominance and concluded that the United States needed to pursue a similar path to wealth and security—through sea power. He wrote, “The history of sea power is largely, though by no means solely, a narrative of contests between nations, of mutual rivalries, of violence frequently culminating in war. 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.”

  His prescription was simple: approach the global system as a zero-sum game in which the United States must compete; exclude rivals wherever possible; create trading monopolies with colonial authority; establish a global network of bases (the coaling stations of the time) which allow the fleet to operate with impunity anywhere in the world; maintain a technologically advanced fleet (making the shift from sail to coal and eventually from coal to oil as rapidly as possible); and—above all—possess the ability to control the sea at will. None of this necessarily would require war. Indeed, he said, “force is never more operative than when it is known to exist but is not brandished,” which Roosevelt would recast as “speak softly and carry a
big stick.” Today the massive aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) still carries the nickname “the big stick.” Through the span of his life toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Mahan was able through sheer force of intellectual will to bring alive the ideas of naval power as the key determinant of national power—and convince his own nation of the vital importance of sea power.

  This was not merely an academic exercise, of course. On February 15, 1898, the battleship USS Maine exploded in the harbor of Havana, Cuba—at the time a colony of Spain. The war fever that swept the country was fueled in part by a sense that the United States had fallen behind the European powers in colonization around the globe, and a “splendid little war” would provide the opportunity to join the competition. After a short, sharp war with Spain, the United States—for the first time in its history—acquired significant territory abroad, following the theories of Mahan. Cuba, the Philippines, and other territories fell into our hands, allowing the United States to remedy the shortage of overseas bases, which Mahan felt was critical. He had earlier written, “Having no foreign establishments, either colonial or military, the ships of war of the United States, in war, will be like land birds, unable to fly far from their own shores. To provide resting places for them, where they can coal and repair, would be one of the first duties of a government proposing to itself the development of the power of the nation at sea.” Through the intellectual determination of Mahan, the United States began at last to project its power outward into the world. The effects—as well as the debate—continue today.

  Ironically, the reluctant sailor who would intellectually reinvent the naval profession in the United States and around the world was born and raised on the campus of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, surrounded by soldiers through the early years of his life. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s father was a professor at the academy, and by all accounts a figure of stentorian authority, certainly to his students if not always to his children.

  Though he grew up amidst the sight and sound of Army military officers in training, the younger Mahan ultimately obtained an appointment to the Naval Academy, where he promptly set about trying to bring Annapolis into line with what he felt were the higher standards of discipline and professionalism of West Point, an approach that did not endear him to his classmates. From the beginning, Mahan’s reform efforts were intellectually based, quite inconsistent, and not especially effective. He was neither socially inclined, organizationally gifted, nor politically astute, but he was quick to perceive problems and tackle them head-on. His methods were neither subtle nor well attuned to dealing with the likely political effects that resulted. All of this made for a somewhat solitary youth. In the early years of his career, his actions appear so wantonly reckless as to suggest that Mahan did not even make basic political calculations; rather, he seemed to identify a problem and righteously run straight at it with nary a pause to weigh the evidence or a thought as to what might happen to him personally. He never met a windmill at which he was unwilling to tilt.

  Though he would grow better political antennae in time, his nerve endings would remain stubby and relatively insensitive for most of Mahan’s life. Whereas most other admirals of modern, bureaucratic navies gave at least some discernible thought to career planning along the way, Mahan’s approach could (and today almost certainly would) have cost him his career at many turns. Luckily, he survived such early indiscretions as lodging unproven accusations of malfeasance against a sitting secretary of the Navy. Over time, he was able to acquire sufficient discretion and protection to survive the most delicate part of his career, during the early years of the Naval War College and before the publication of his masterwork, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, solidified his reputation in the United States.

  Throughout his life, Mahan had a strong religious streak. A “high church” Episcopalian (the unofficial but widely practiced religion of the naval hierarchy in his day), he was deeply influenced by an uncle who was an Episcopal priest, and proposed in an article on naval education that the sea service should aim to instill in young officers a solid knowledge of and reliance upon God. Whatever the wellsprings of Mahan’s character—his martinet father, martial milieu, and mystical bent—the bottom line was that his career never seemed to mesh entirely comfortably with the cloistered world of the nineteenth-century Navy.

  Though he made his home and his name in the Navy, Mahan showed little interest in actual seafaring, had a tenuous relationship broadly speaking with the Navy (as with his family and very few friends), and was never to be mistaken for a charismatic leader of men. No other admiral in this book was less naval or less a leader in the traditional sense, yet perhaps no other had such a profound or lasting effect on the practice of the naval profession.

  If he so little enjoyed or practiced the seagoing side of the profession himself, how did Mahan come to have such influence on the entire Navy? His story is not unlike that of the influence of Thomas Aquinas on the Catholic Church. Mahan was never a chief of naval operations, just as Aquinas was never a pope. Neither man fit neatly within his organization, neither really led anyone in the usual sense, and neither was fully recognized in his own time; yet in the end, both were canonized for the quality of their thinking. Agree or disagree with him, all church philosophers after Aquinas were writing in his shadow; and similarly, all theorists of sea power after Mahan were working in the broad wake of Mahan’s intellectual voyages.

  Mahan’s Summa Theologica (the cornerstone of Aquinas’s work) was The Influence of Sea Power upon History, a book scarcely less sweeping in scope or ambition than Aquinas’s. Fittingly, Mahan began the work while on his nine-month, essentially unsupervised sabbatical from the Navy, as noted above.

  His efforts led to an early pair of books: one, on tactics, was later disowned by its author, who never taught the subject at the War College and moved immediately along to his principal métier: strategy. The other, which wended a tortuous path to publication, was The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (eventually expanded in a second volume through 1812). This was the subject Mahan was born to teach, and the lectures upon which the book was based proved popular among War College classes. But the effect of publication was not instantly electric. In fact, the book was initially better received in Europe (particularly in Britain and Germany) than in the United States. What it lacked in breadth of influence it made up for in the impact it had upon those who truly understood it.

  It is not an overstatement to say that the book created a set of powerful acolytes around the globe, and deeply influenced the strategic trajectory of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Fellow naval historian and future president Theodore Roosevelt (himself the author of more than twenty books) read it in a weekend and pronounced it “a very good book.” Indeed, as undersecretary of the Navy and especially as president, he would cement Mahan’s influence in the United States by building the Great White Fleet—the first truly modern US fleet. If Mahan had laid the cornerstone, Teddy Roosevelt built upon it the foundation of US naval power that would go into World War I less than a decade after the Great White Fleet made its round-the-world cruise (and put the world on notice) from 1907 to 1909. Kaiser Wilhelm II purchased copies of Mahan’s book for every ship in the German fleet and spoke about it often. Similar leading thinkers and strategists in Great Britain used it in justifying naval expenditures in the run-up to the First World War.

  None of this should imply that Mahan’s vision was perfect. Despite his ultimate vindication as a strategic thinker, Mahan could certainly miss on occasion, and his writing itself is difficult to penetrate. The sheer volume and density of his writing is frankly intimidating; even the two volumes of Sea Power are but a fraction of the whole corpus, and for readers without the photographic memory and boundless energy of Theodore Roosevelt, they are at least as heavy in the reading as they are in the hand. Mahan’s writing is also
riddled with errors apparent in his time and almost insuperable in ours. Not only are his social mores staunchly nineteenth-century (he was a late but fervent convert to the religion of American imperialism), but Mahan partially missed the already known and quite predictable effects of the technological advances of his own time, to say nothing of ours. Coupled with his difficult personality and lack of practical seagoing experience, he came across to many of his peers as an enigmatic figure, even as his global reputation grew.

  The case for Mahan’s canonization never really rested on his grasp of details, however, and he remains in the pantheon today not because of how well he understood ships or gunnery but rather because he understood better than any before and many since what a navy was for. Even in the United States, Mahan’s influence has waned in recent decades due to a somewhat perverse focus on his obvious flaws, but to dismiss him based on his emphasis on big ships fighting big battles is like dismissing Clausewitz because armies no longer line up in brightly colored uniforms to exchange musket fire.

  Mahan still has much to teach naval analysts today (tellingly, the Chinese navy has been diligently translating and reading his works in recent years), but his complicated character also contains broadly applicable lessons for leaders in many fields. Of the admirals surveyed here, Mahan’s personality is one of the least worthy of emulating and his type of leadership was and is the hardest to replicate. Naturally, only a very few leaders are called to intellectually overhaul their professions, and fewer still have the opportunity to do so. Mahan’s life still speaks to the importance of following one’s muse with ruthless determination and perseverance—in many ways the sine qua non of character. All leaders have jobs, but those jobs exist within organizations, and organizations exist within even broader contexts. It behooves leaders to reflect on their work and the work of their organizations in their broad contexts, and to write and publish their reflections. In this way they can contribute to the ongoing conversations within their professions as well as the public conversations taking place in the wider society.