Some Principles of Maritime Strategy

by Julian Stafford Corbett

But it was not the only reason. The idea of privateering was a survival of a primitive and unscientific conception of war, which was governed mainly by a general notion of doing your enemy as much damage as possible and making reprisal for wrongs he had done you. To the same class of ideas belonged the practice of plunder and ravaging ashore. But neither of these methods of war was abolished for humanitarian reasons. They disappeared indeed as a general practice before the world had begun to talk of humanity. They were abolished because war became more scientific. The right to plunder and ravage was not denied. But plunder was found to demoralise your troops and unfit them for fighting, and ravaging proved to be a less powerful means of coercing your enemy than exploiting the occupied country by means of regular requisitions for the supply of your own army and the increase of its offensive range. In short, the reform arose from a desire to husband your enemy's resources for your own use instead of wantonly wasting them.

In a similar way privateering always had a debilitating effect upon our own regular force. It greatly increased the difficulty of manning the navy, and the occasional large profits had a demoralising influence on detached cruiser commanders. It tended to keep alive the mediaeval corsair spirit at the expense of the modern military spirit which made for direct operations against the enemy's armed forces. It was inevitable that as the new movement of opinion gathered force it should carry with it a conviction that for operating against sea-borne trade sporadic attack could never be so efficient as an organised system of operations to secure a real strategical control of the enemy's maritime communications.

A riper and sounder view of war revealed that what may be called tactical commercial blockade—that is, the blockade of ports—could be extended to and supplemented by a strategical blockade of the great trade routes. In moral principle there is no difference between the two. Admit the principle of tactical or close blockade, and as between belligerents you cannot condemn the principle of strategical or distant blockade. Except in their effect upon neutrals, there is no juridical difference between the two.

Why indeed should this humane yet drastic process of war be rejected at sea if the same thing is permitted on land? If on land you allow contributions and requisitions, if you permit the occupation of towns, ports, and inland communications, without which no conquest is complete and no effective war possible, why should you refuse similar procedure at sea where it causes far less individual suffering? If you refuse the right of controlling communications at sea, you must also refuse the right on land. If you admit the right of contributions on land, you must admit the right of capture at sea. Otherwise you will permit to military Powers the extreme rights of war and leave to the maritime Powers no effective rights at all. Their ultimate argument would be gone.

In so far as the idea of abolishing private capture at sea is humanitarian, and in so far as it rests on a belief that it would strengthen our position as a commercial maritime State, let it be honourably dealt with. But so far as its advocates have as yet expressed themselves, the proposal appears to be based on two fallacies. One is, that you can avoid attack by depriving yourself of the power of offence and resting on defence alone, and the other, the idea that war consists entirely of battles between armies or fleets. It ignores the fundamental fact that battles are only the means of enabling you to do that which really brings wars to an end-that is, to exert pressure on the citizens and their collective life. "After shattering the hostile main army," says Von der Goltz, "we still have the

forcing of a peace as a separate and, in certain circumstances, a more difficult task ... to make the enemy's country feel the burdens of war with such weight that the desire for peace will prevail. This is the point in which Napoleon failed.... It may be necessary to seize the harbours, commercial centres, important lines of traffic, fortifications and arsenals, in other words, all important property necessary to the existence of the people and army."

If, then, we are deprived of the right to use analogous means at sea, the object for which we fight battles almost ceases to exist. Defeat the enemy's fleets as we may, he will be but little the worse. We shall have opened the way for invasion, but any of the great continental Powers can laugh at our attempts to invade single-handed. If we cannot reap the harvest of our success by deadening his national activities at sea, the only legitimate means of pressure within our strength will be denied us. Our fleet, if it would proceed with such secondary operations as are essential for forcing a peace, will be driven to such barbarous expedients as the bombardment of seaport towns and destructive raids upon the hostile coasts.

If the means of pressure which follow successful fighting were abolished both on land and sea there would be this argument in favour of the change, that it would mean perhaps for civilised States the entire cessation of war; for war would become so impotent, that no one would care to engage in it. It would be an affair between regular armies and fleets, with which the people had little concern. International quarrels would tend to take the form of the mediaeval private disputes which were settled by champions in trial by battle, an absurdity which led rapidly to the domination of purely legal procedure. If international quarrels could go the same way, humanity would have advanced a long stride. But the world is scarcely ripe for such a revolution. Meanwhile to

abolish the right of interference with the flow of private property at sea without abolishing the corresponding right ashore would only defeat the ends of humanitarians. The great deterrent, the most powerful check on war, would be gone. It is commerce and finance which now more than ever control or check the foreign policy of nations. If commerce and finance stand to lose by war, their influence for a peaceful solution will be great; and so long as the right of private capture at sea exists, they stand to lose in every maritime war immediately and inevitably whatever the ultimate result may be. Abolish the right, and this deterrent disappears; nay, they will even stand to win immediate gains owing to the sudden expansion of Government expenditure which the hostilities will entail, and the expansion of sea commerce which the needs of the armed forces will create. Any such losses as maritime warfare under existing conditions must immediately inflict will be remote if interference with property is confined to the land. They will never indeed be serious except in the case of complete defeat, and no one enters upon war expecting defeat. It is in the hope of victory and gain that aggressive wars are born. The fear of quick and certain loss is their surest preventive. Humanity, then, will surely beware how in a too hasty pursuit of peaceful ideals it lets drop the best weapon it has for scotching the evil it has as yet no power to kill.

In what follows, therefore, it is intended to regard the right of private capture at sea as still subsisting. Without it, indeed, naval warfare is almost inconceivable, and in any case no one has any experience of such a truncated method of war on which profitable study can be founded.