Geography, Technology, and British Naval Strategy in the Dreadnought Era.

摘要

In 'The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783,' Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that the effective deployment of naval force had determined the outcomes of the great European wars of the 18th century. Many, if not most, readers believed that this historical survey was the basis of related major arguments that were applicable to the late 19th and 20th centuries. The first was that naval supremacy was the prerequisite to economic prosperity and international political preeminence. The second was that naval supremacy could be achieved only through the possession of large numbers of battleships, which were always to be kept together to be able to contain or destroy enemy battleship fleets. The notion of the naval supremacy of a single country based upon battleships united in accordance with the principle of concentration of force thus became identified as the essence of Mahanian strategic theory. In effect, geopolitical and naval operational strategic lines of argument were conflated into a recipe for policy that was supposed to be universally valid. Such an understanding of what were widely believed to be the two main components of Mahan's thinking, however, was seriously flawed. In the first place, Mahan actually believed that naval supremacy in his own time and in the future would be wielded by a transnational consortium of naval powers acting in defense of a global system of free trade to the mutual benefit of participating parties. Secondly, Mahan's treatment of the principle of concentration of force in his most popular book was heavily conditioned by the particular geographical circumstances of Great Britain and its empire. Thus, while the first proposition was addressed to the question of the nature of an international system, the second was to a very considerable degree concerned with the character of the naval security problem of a single state. The relationship between the two arguments was thus much weaker than has been supposed.