Progressives in Navy Blue: maritime strategy, American empire, and the transformation of U.S. naval identity, 1873-1898

摘要

Sailors and historians have long criticised the U.S. Navy's apparent cultural arch-conservatism. The enduring allure of a scathing slogan testifies to the popularity of this critique of the Navy: "two hundred years of tradition unhampered by progress." In Progressives in Navy Blue, Scott Mobley, a retired Navy captain who holds a Ph.D. in history, persuasively challenges this perspective. Mobley establishes that the U.S. Navy and its officer corps engaged far more creatively and systematically in innovative endeavours than is often considered to be the case. Surveying the twenty-five-year period that preceded America's war with Spain (1898), Mobley demonstrates that the Navy awakened to the geos-trategic vulnerabilities caused by America mismatching its ambitions for greatness with a woefully understrength naval arm.