Thus, in the case of a war with Germany, the object of which lay in the Eastern Mediterranean, or in America, or South Africa, our respective lines of communication would be identical.
This was also the case in all our imperial wars with France.
This peculiarity is the controlling influence of maritime warfare. Nearly all our current maxims of Naval Strategy can be traced to the pressure it exerts on naval thought.
It is at the root of the fundamental difference between Military
and Naval Strategy, and affords the explanation of much strategical error and confusion which have arisen from applying the principles of land warfare to the sea without allowing for the antagonistic conditions of the communications and the operations against them in each case.
On land, the chief reason for not always striking the enemy's communications at once is that, as a rule, we cannot do so without exposing our own. At sea, on the contrary, when the great lines are common to both, we cannot defend our own without striking at the enemy's.
Therefore, at sea, the obvious opening is to get our fleet into such a position that it controls the common lines, unless defeated or evaded. This was usually done in our old wars with France, by our attempting to get a fleet off Brest before the French could sail.
Hence the maxims "That the proper place for our fleets is off the enemy's coast," "The enemy's coast is our true frontier," and the like.
But these maxims are not universally true; witness Togo's strategy against Rojesvensky, when he remained correctly upon his own coast.
Take, again, the maxim that the primary object of the fleet is to seek out the enemy's fleet and destroy it. Here, again, Togo's practice was the reverse of the maxim.