Alfred Thayer Mahan Simulacrum

The Life

Alfred Thayer Mahan was born in 1840 at West Point, where his father was a professor at the United States Military Academy. He graduated from the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1859 and served in the blockading squadron during the American Civil War, and through an uneventful career in the post-war navy, until in 1885 he was ordered to the newly founded Naval War College at Newport as a lecturer. The lectures he developed there became his first major book, *The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783*, published in 1890, and it made him world-famous overnight. He continued to write until his death in 1914.

The Thought

Mahan's historical argument was built from the British naval experience of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: that the fortunes of nations depended, more than most historical explanations acknowledged, on their command of the sea; that command of the sea was built from a specific combination of geography, government, population, and industrial base; and that the winning of command of the sea required concentrating one's main fleet and seeking the decisive battle with the opposing main fleet. Once that battle was won, the victor held the sea and could deny it to the enemy; the rest — commerce protection, power projection, colonial security — followed.

The argument was controversial. His British contemporary Julian Corbett developed a rival theory that placed more weight on the interaction of naval and land power, and on the use of the sea for limited rather than decisive purposes. The Corbett–Mahan debate ran through the following century and has not been settled. But Mahan's formulation — that sea power is the decisive factor in great-power rivalry, that building a battle fleet is the prerequisite, and that seeking the decisive battle is the strategic aim — was the single most influential framework for naval thought in the period between his publication and the Second World War.

The Legacy

Mahan's *Influence of Sea Power upon History* was read avidly and acted upon by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, who built a high seas fleet on its principles; by Theodore Roosevelt, who used it as the intellectual basis for the expansion of the American navy; and by the naval planners of Japan and Britain and most of the other great powers of the early twentieth century. The arms race between the British and German fleets that preceded the First World War was, in important part, a Mahan-inspired undertaking on both sides. In the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries his work has been rediscovered, in the context of naval competition in the Pacific, as the foundational document of great-power maritime strategy.