U.S. Navy's ...'From the Sea' Strategy: Sir Julian Corbett Revisited.

摘要

This essay begins with a confession. Although I have been a naval officer for more than 20 years, I had never encountered the work of Sir Julian Corbett before arriving at the National War College. This might be more easily understood if Corbett was considered an obscure proponent of some limited aspect of naval strategy, but he is not. In fact, a cursory search of references on naval strategic thinking clearly identifies Corbett as one of but a handful of important writers on the use and effectiveness of sea power. In my own defense and as a partial possible explanation of my ignorance, the research also indicates that Corbett was often overlooked by historians of the U.S. Navy, perhaps overshadowed by his American near-contemporary, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan. Recent histories of the U.S. Navy by such well-known naval writers as former Naval Academy professor Kenneth Hagan, and retired Navy Captain Edward Beach, whose works of both fiction and nonfiction on naval matters have been widely read by naval officers, have dozens of references to the works of Mahan, but neither even so much as mentions Julian Corbett.