Transformation a Century Ago
By Norman Friedman
Naval History, April 2005
Navalists at the turn of the 20th century were beginning to see the oceans as highways for both commerce and war. Two of the principal transformational visionaries were Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan and Admiral William S. Sims
In 1900, the U.S. Navy was in an obvious state of flux. The most visible change was the sudden growth of the fleet; Jane's Fighting Ships was listing it as the second most powerful navy in the world, a status inconceivable a decade earlier. A suddenly enlarged fleet required a vast growth in the officer corps and creation of the General Board, a permanent war-planning agency with the explicit role of devising policies based on what would be needed should war break out. William Snowden Sims was on the verge of transforming U.S. naval gunnery; his work helped change a fleet with potential combat power into one with real combat potential. Within a few years the naval personnel system also was transformed, again in the direction of greater capability. Much the same might be said of the drastic change in the way in which ship characteristics were determined, in accord with the needs revealed by war planning. The torpedo was beginning to transform the world's navies, and the U.S. Navy was buying its first modern submarine.
Yet, one kind of transformation seems to overshadow all the others. In 1900, the Navy was at the center of a deep shift in U.S. national strategy. The shift is obvious if, instead of focusing on 1900 itself, one looks at dates 15 years to either side. In 1885, U.S. national interest was concentrated on inward development, on the fate of the frontier. The U.S. Navy was beginning its revival, with construction of new steel cruisers and with measures taken to limit the further life of the obsolescent wooden fleet. This revival was clearly a limited effort; the Navy was anything but the focus of national policy.
By 1915, the U.S. Navy was the premier U.S. service, and anyone interested in national defense took that pre-eminence for granted. As a measure of that attitude, we know Congress annually debated not whether to build further capital ships, but how many. The Wilson administration was about to propose the 1916 Act, which would have made the U.S. Navy the most powerful in the world, at least in terms of modern capital ships. National policy was outward-looking, in the sense that the connection between the fleet and U.S. national independence was shared widely. Something enormous had happened in 30 years.
From a technological point of view, the creation of a steel navy was essentially inevitable; no one in the 1880s could deny that the collection of wooden steam sloops was obsolescent and perhaps even risible. A glance at any contemporary reference book will show that every navy in the world went through roughly the same process of modernization. That usually meant building a few modern warships. It absolutely did not usually mean aspiring to the first rank of sea powers. Indeed, the technological revolution of the late 19th century raised the cost of competing with the major sea powers, particularly with the Royal Navy. It took some special national impetus to cross that barrier. That is why, for example, the British were shocked into action when the Germans, until then almost exclusively a land power, chose to build a fleet to rival theirs. That the German effort was not seen as routine suggests that the U.S. effort, which was certainly comparable in its magnitude, was not routine, either.
The key, it seems, was a new perception of what naval power could mean to the United States. The single most important fact of naval power is that the sea is the greatest of all highways: it is far easier to move anything, particularly anything massive, by sea than it is over land. The classic quoted example is that it is less expensive to move cars from Yokohama to New York than from Detroit to New York, but one might equally point out that it is remarkable that a fully equipped air base can be moved about the sea at more than 30 knots. One could hardly do the same over the best overland highway. Much the same might be said of a squadron of intercontinental ballistic missiles. This fact of seaborne mobility runs counter to most people's experience; to them the sea seems a rather dangerous place, more barrier than anything else.
If the sea is dangerous, it is a moat. If it is a highway, it is a potential invasion route. Another formulation might be that if the sea is a barrier, then the United States can and perhaps should isolate itself, because it is so conveniently far from most potential sources of trouble (except, of course, the land borders with Canada and with Mexico). On the other hand, if the sea is a highway, then in some special way distances over the sea count for far less than distances overland, and the United States is quite close to Europe and Asia and quite incapable of isolating itself from whatever problems arise there. For that matter, in this vision, the future of the United States is bound up with the futures of countries connected to us by that sea route.
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