![]() ![]() As great as this book is, there are a two things that hold it back from a five-star rating. He spends the last 200 pages going over the whole naval operations surrounding the American Revolution, looking at and extending beyond North America. Mahan deftly shows through example how Louis XIV's designs for continental Europe were completely frustrated by England's control of the seas, which brought to England sources of revenue far in excess of her island-bound resources. Although some of these wars were mostly confined to the continent of Europe, Mahan makes a potent case that in all of them the control of the seas played a critical role in the outcome of those wars. ![]() Mahan takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the wars between the years 16, focusing on the role that sea power played in all of them. In fact, I've been finding that many of these "ancient" historical texts are far more enjoyable than some of their contemporary counterparts (see my review of Henry Adams' History of the United States, Vols. I could generally follow along, but it takes a fair amount of effort it shouldn't, and the details are lost.ĭespite being over a hundred years old, Mahan's classic text on the importance of sea power in wartime is both accessible to the modern reader and applicable to modern naval thinking. On the other hand, the tactical description of battles is reliant on a number of maps that are directly referenced in the text, but are not included in this copy. ![]() I started noticing errors about a third of the way through, and they slowly become more common as the book went on, but never got to the levels I've seen in other books. My copy of the book is an OCR Pyrrhus Press ebook, which is in decent shape. This is decidedly Nineteenth Century writing, and technical in nature to boot, with overly long-winded sentences and paragraphs by today's standards (thankfully, the page-long paragraph is a thing of the past), but it still retains a high degree of readability. As his descriptions get more detailed, so too do the conclusions that he draws from them. His narrative gets steadily more detailed as it goes on, with the last couple chapters looking at actions in India and the Caribbean from 1781-1783 in great detail. This is definitely a preferred era for him, but he considers that while tactics must change over time, with new technology, it is still possible to find strategic truths that always apply, and I think he did so very well. Mahan covers the most of height of the Age of Sail in his book, from the Restoration of Charles II to the end of the Revolutionary War, after an extended chapter that looks at naval power throughout history. (The Battle of the Atlantic might be seen as a condemnation of this rule, but I imagine Mahan might argue that the failure to actually hamper the British-and American-navies gave them the ability to find a way to destroy U-Boats and end "The Happy Time".) ![]() Lastly, he considers the pursuit of interrupting merchant shipping to be a mistaken strategy, as British trade increased even during wars where the French captured large numbers of British merchants. The later parts of the book particularly talk about this, showing that the French government and navy held to theory that saw the taking of objectives while preserving force, and that it time and again failed to gain results, while the British habit of forcing battles inevitably put their opponents into a worse position over time. The secondary one is not so clearly stated, but quite evident in the later parts of the book, that the proper goal of military operations is the reduction of organized enemy forces in the field. The primary one is the assertion that naval power is a deciding factor for everyone but the most land-locked of countries. There's actually a few interrelated theses here. In the list of influential works on strategy it is probably number four, behind The Art of War, The Prince, and On War. Mahan wanted to show that navies decided wars, even between land powers, and many powerful and influential people listened. You could easily write a recursive book about the influence of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History upon history. ![]()
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