Earlier this year, The Strategy Bridge asked civilian and military students around the world to participate in our seventh annual student writing contest on the subject of strategy.
Now, we are pleased to present an essay selected for Honorable Mention from Tyler Self, a student at the Naval Postgraduate School.
The conventional wisdom of naval analysts maintains that a country’s maritime strategy occupies a place of prime importance in determining the course of its naval shipbuilding. According to Sir Julian Corbett, “Classes of ships which constitute a fleet are, or ought to be, the expression in material of the strategical and tactical ideas that prevail at any given time.”[1] Alfred Thayer Mahan also writes, “Conditions and weapons change; but to cope with the one or successfully wield the others, respect must be had to…those wider operations of war which are comprised under the name of strategy.”[2] More recently, Andrew S. Erickson has written that “ships are the ultimate embodiment of maritime strategy,” while other analysts state that “ships are the essential element of the ‘means’ by which the ‘ends’ of maritime strategy are achieved.”[3] In a study of late-nineteenth century U.S. naval expansion, Benjamin Apt observed, “A powerful nation did not make do with accumulated older craft simply because they were at hand but rather constructed its navy according to explicit strategic requirements.”[4] These authors bare this premise explicitly, but the idea behind much of their analysis is never overtly stated.
Alfred Thayer Mahan and Sir Julian Corbett (Wikimedia and Project Gutenberg)
How does a country’s maritime strategy determine fleet design? An ideal, rational model involves a flow of requirements. This may be conceptually understood by the following formulation: maritime strategy exists as a component of grand strategy and establishes mission requirements, which in turn generate capabilities requirements, before final decision on shipbuilding’s technical requirements. By linking ends and means, strategy should ensure acquisitions and innovation remain directed toward a clearly defined goal.
Such a framework resembles the structure of the U.S. military’s first unified maritime strategy document.[5] Procedurally, the process outlined above resembles how former US Secretary of the Navy Andrew Lehman described the 1986 US maritime strategy’s role in shipbuilding. “First strategy, then requirements, then the [Program Objective Memorandum], then budget,” he said.[6] In order to ensure “strategic guidance and priorities…strongly influence the plans across the shipbuilding plan horizon,” the U.S. Navy’s resource allocation process involves planning, programming, budgeting, and execution in consecutive steps.[7]
In contrast to the ideal, rational model, the influence of non-strategic factors, defined as ideas or desires not derived from maritime strategy, often impose themselves on naval shipbuilding. While always present in the compound thinking of decision-makers, when their influence supersedes that of maritime strategy, it may be expected that incongruence between strategy and ship capability results. Maritime strategies often change as a country grows in power, and therefore historical case studies of countries that grew from fledgling navies to powerful fleets may shed light on where, when, and how non-strategic factors supersede maritime strategy in naval shipbuilding.
A case study of Imperial Germany presents an opportunity to test the influence of maritime strategy in naval expansion from what Holger H. Herwig calls “modest beginnings.”[8] Germany embarked on intentional naval expansions that elevated the navy from its early modesty. While the constituent kingdoms and duchies that combined to form it possessed few ships, by pursuing naval expansion effectively from embryonic beginnings, Imperial Germany inhabited an ideal context in which the formulation and execution of maritime strategy can be observed due to its lack of naval tradition. Study of its naval expansion allows for control of the variable of inheritance, as well as any inertia associated with the old ways of doing things.
The analysis below proceeds first by establishing where Germany’s navy stood in certain eras and what maritime strategy it embraced, then outlines how its naval shipbuilding reflected strategy. After that, discrepancies are examined to determine the role of non-strategic factors. By a disaggregation of strategic and non-strategic factors, the case study will parse apart the diverse motives driving decision-making in shipbuilding programs.
The Stosch Era, 1872-1883
When Germany unified in 1871, the Imperial German Navy (IGN) inherited the Prussian shipbuilding program and a small navy of iron-clads and armored frigates from the North German Confederation.[9] The Prussian program, passed in 1867, called for the construction of “sixteen armored warships, twenty unarmored corvettes, eight dispatch boats,” and twenty-two gunboats over ten years.[10] This modest navy reflected its relative unimportance to German strategic thinking.
Rolf Hobson traces the beginnings of the German school of naval thought to Alfred Stenzel, “the first teacher of naval strategy and history at the Marine-Akademie” from 1875-1881.[11] Hobson characterizes Stenzel as “the most pronounced representative of tendencies within early German naval thought which can also be substantiated by other references,” and describes his naval thought as “one long attempt to baptize Clausewitz with salt water.”[12] The substance of Stenzel’s thought may be summarized in the following passage:
Whether directly or indirectly: The destruction of the enemy forces is the foundation of all military activity; in order to bring it about, we have only one means, combat. The end for which the crew is recruited, clothed, trained and fed, for which the ships are built, equipped, and armed—is simply to fight at the right time at the right place.[13]
Stenzel held naval warfare to be “essentially very similar” to land warfare, and Hobson writes that he “seem[ed] to regard secondary operations such as commerce interdiction and blockade as akin to Clausewitz’s pursuit after battle: the object is to complete the destruction of the enemy’s organized resistance.”[14] Nevertheless, as Hobson argues, Stenzel’s teaching “provided the theoretical framework within which the Imperial Navy developed” until Alfred von Tirpitz.[15]
Albrecht von Stosch, appointed as Germany’s first chief of the Imperial Admiralty in January 1872, sought to shape the navy as an adjunct to the army. As an army general himself, he called the navy a “living coastal defence,” and Holger Herwig characterizes the role of Stosch’s navy as “prevent[ing] an enemy landing on German soil and, if possible, safeguard[ing] German coastal cities from enemy shelling.”[16] He viewed the navy as an extension of land power, even formulating naval tactics based on that of infantry, and swore to circumscribe naval growth when he told the Reichstag, “I do not believe that we are called…to compete with states that have already developed large fleets.”[17] In a new country that owed its unification to its powerful army, such a position by the head of the navy would not register controversy. As David Olivier would observe of Stosch’s navy, it “was an unofficial subsection of the army, and any efforts expended on behalf of the navy were in no way to interfere with the needs of the army.”[18] The appointments of Stosch and his successor Leo von Caprivi to head the navy, while serving as army generals, virtually ensured the priority of the army in military spending, as the navy would lack a forceful advocate in spending matters.
In part due to his influence with the Reichstag, Stosch secured its near unanimous rejection of large ships in April 1873.[19] The account provided by Olivier depicts Stosch admitting the army must come first and that the navy’s role must remain confined to coastal defense, blockade prevention, and “overseas duties,” the last of which was understood to mean showing the flag, merchant escort, and guerre de course in wartime.[20] In rejecting larger warships, Stosch and the Reichstag rejected guerre d'escadre against Britain or France.
In 1873, upon concluding that the 1867 shipbuilding plan could not be met in time, Stosch commenced a new expansion plan to add to the armored fleet five corvettes, and two floating batteries, as well as an additional eight corvettes, four dispatch boats, and twenty-two torpedo boats to the unarmored fleet.[21] (Stosch would later cancel the floating batteries and dispatch boats in favor of thirteen armored gunboats.[22]) Torpedo boats and gunboats would suffice to protect the North Sea coast because “in it the vulnerable area was limited to the Elbe, Weser, and Jade estuaries.”[23] The eight new unarmored corvettes procured under this plan, already obsolete by the time of completion, would become the overseas workhorses of the German navy for two decades in showing the flag, gunboat diplomacy, and colonial matters.[24] The armored corvettes, meanwhile, suffered from “limited range, seaworthiness, and fighting value.”[25] Stosch’s 1873 expansion program set the agenda conceptually until the end of his tenure, and as the only systematic program until 1898, its influence percolated into decision-making until Tirpitz. With few exceptions, Germany would adhere to Stosch’s 1873 naval expansion program even beyond its expiration.
As Sondhaus points out, however, Stosch’s 1873 program had few direct connections to the strategic needs of the state.[26] Olivier writes that it possessed a “contradiction…between the demands of defence in home waters and an emphasis on lighter cruising vessels.”[27] The Leipzig- and Bismarck-class unarmored corvettes, built for commerce raiding, posed an intractable strategic problem in the fact that they could not attack enemy commerce without overseas support—which the government refused to provide by refraining from colonialism—while it was also widely understood they would be useless in fleet action against a first-rate maritime power in European waters.[28] Toward the end of his tenure, Stosch would argue his shipbuilding program increased Germany’s value as an ally, and Caprivi would later echo this argument in 1884, even as other European countries’ naval expansions surged past Germany’s.[29]
The primary benefits of Stosch’s 1873 plan lay in Stosch’s intentions outside the realm of maritime strategy. His close friend Gustav Freytag recalled that “he expressed his determination to have everything that the German navy required procured in Germany.”[30] As a newcomer to the maritime realm, Germany lacked the manufacturers and facilities to build or maintain modern ships. Stosch, however, awarded all gun contracts to the German company Krupp, and commissioned companies like A.G. Weser in Bremen, A.G. Vulcan in Stettin, Norddeutsche Schiffbeau A.G. of Kiel, and the imperial shipyard in Danzig to build his ships.[31] German shipyards evolved and modernized as a result. Sometimes, however, Stosch’s patronage of German industry came at a price. Even as “compound iron-and-steel” armor rendered the navy’s planned armored corvettes obsolete, Stosch persisted in their construction, utilizing “‘sandwich’ armor of alternating wrought iron and teak” from a Dillengen foundry.[32] Nevertheless, Stosch’s fleet plan “freed the navy from its dependence on foreign builders and supplies” and therefore “laid the foundation of the naval-industrial complex that helped make Germany a first-class sea power after the turn of the century.”[33]
By stimulating German domestic industry, Stosch’s naval expansion also assisted Germany’s recovery from the depression of the 1870s and helped stamp out socialist agitation. Besides rising employment within the private and imperial shipyards, Sondhaus writes that Stosch, “to retain experienced workers…did not hesitate to authorize the imperial shipyards to pay higher wages than their private counterparts.”[34] Sondhaus also documents how the imperial shipyard in Kiel, already a “hotbed of Social Democratic sentiment,” retained skilled workers by “habitually hir[ing] workers idled by strikes at private shipyards and machine shops.”[35] By providing employment to the burgeoning working-class on the coast, Stosch’s shipbuilding program kept laborers too busy to protest.
From Caprivi to Tirpitz, 1883-1897
Leo von Caprivi, Chief of the Admiralty (Wikimedia)
With the appointment of Stosch’s successor, Leo von Caprivi, in early 1883, the navy entered an improvisational era lacking any systematic shipbuilding programs. Caprivi informed the Reichstag that he would “focus on short-term goals rather than propose another long-term plan.”[36] Also an army general, he described his own intention to keep the navy “within narrow limits, as narrow as our conditions permit.”[37]
According to Sondhaus, in the period of 1883-1888 the Imperial German Navy suffered from “tactical and strategic confusion that reigned under Caprivi.”[38] That Caprivi was an army general, like Stosch, almost certainly made him susceptible to maritime strategic confusion in an era filled with innovation in technology that seemed to threaten old ways of thinking. Caprivi’s tenure coincided with the popularity of the French Jeune École school. At the theoretical level, the debate between these two schools of thought created uncertainties that derailed any hope for a second systematic naval shipbuilding program.
The Jeune École was perhaps most of all responsible for confusion in maritime strategy and shipbuilding in the 1880s. It achieved popularity thanks to the writings of French maritime theorists Richild Grivel, Théophile Aube, and Gabriel Charmes.[39] Grivel wrote that the French navy could not “permit itself any illusions regarding an inequality so clearly revealed by geography, history, and statistics.”[40] After conceding British superiority at sea, the Jeune École aimed to articulate “what [a navy] could achieve in a position of inferiority, with the limited resources at hand,” and emphasized coastal defense using torpedo boats and gunboats to prevent decisive defeat of one’s army, as well as cruisers for waging war on a superior enemy’s shipping to whittle down its economy.[41] In Charmes’s words, the Jeune École “seek[s] by a series of individual catastrophes to destroy general prosperity.”[42]
As for Caprivi, he appears to have endorsed a view closer to Stenzel’s school of thought than that of the Jeune École. Upon taking office, he convened an Admiralty Council that affirmed major principles of the Jeune École, especially commerce raiding, but Caprivi chose to reject the Council’s conclusions regarding cruiser warfare two months later before the Reichstag.[43] As an army man, Caprivi embraced the navy’s roles in coastal defense and in challenging blockades, despite acknowledging that the Imperial German Navy could not hope to destroy those of the great naval powers. He wrote, “Rules for a melee are few and simple. For every ship sunk a hostile ship must be incapacitated. No ship should leave the melee as long as it can use any of its weapons. Torpedo-boats are not to leave the melee when they have used up their torpedoes, but are to hinder hostile torpedo boats.”[44]
To best prepare for the envisioned melees off the German coast, Caprivi hoped to boost the navy’s battle fleet. He wrote that “wherever there is struggle for control of a part of a sea, one cannot dispense with armored ships…A navy which concentrates on the land or on the coast no longer deserves its name.”[45] However, rapid innovation in nickel-steel armor, smokeless powders, and armor-piercing shells threatened any battle fleet construction with immediate obsolescence.[46] Caprivi, mindful of the possibility of wasting money on the navy, wrote that “a navy like ours cannot afford the luxury of failed experiments…We will rather proceed cautiously in the area of development of armoured ships.”[47] Construction of the Siegfried-class armored ships would wait until 1887, while Caprivi chose instead to build seventy torpedo boats for coastal defense and ten unarmored cruisers.[48]
A lithograph of the Siegfried-class coastal defense ship SMS Heimdall (Wikimedia)
By delaying construction of the Siegfried-class, Caprivi’s tenure resulted in employment at private shipyards and the imperial shipyard at Kiel falling almost 50% because, as Sondhaus observes, Caprivi’s ad hoc constructions did not provide the “the numbers of jobs nor the stimulus for domestic industry that larger armored projects had in the past.”[49] In torpedo boat construction, the navy awarded nearly all contracts to Schichau of Elbing, but divided the considerably fewer cruiser projects between all other shipyards.[50]
Kaiser Wilhelm II replaced Caprivi in July 1888 with Vice Admiral Count von Monts, the first navy man to lead the Imperial German Navy. His seven-month tenure, and those of Vice Admiral Baron von der Goltz from January 1889 to May 1895 and Admiral Eduard von Knorr from May 1895 to February 1897, remained bedeviled by the Jeune École with uncertainties in the effectiveness of fleet actions and commerce raiding.[51] The accession of Wilhelm II to the throne in mid-1888 caused further development confusion. His naval thinking reflected the broader debate in miniature, and he constantly wavered between the philosophies of the Jeune École and a Mahanian battle fleet.[52] Building programs under Monts and Goltz featured torpedo boats, cruisers, dispatch vessels, and even the Brandenburg- and Kaiser Friedrich III-class battleships, such that one liberal politician lamented the “limitless fleet plans.”[53]
The twenty-five-year period beginning with the appointment of Stosch and ending with the appointment of Tirpitz is one of immature developments in German maritime strategy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it shares with Stenzel’s body of thought a profound lack of “an ideology of sea power.”[54] What is more, the influence of the Jeune École, whose popularity coincided with Caprivi’s tenure in the 1880s, exhibited an influence that further confused German naval thought, as Caprivi himself oscillated between opinions of commerce raiding as either “an anachronism” or “decisive.”[55] The only axiom that remained constant was the need for the navy to provide coastal defense.
During this era, a period marked by rapid technological change and skyrocketing costs of naval shipbuilding, German leaders chose not to compete with the great naval powers at naval expansion. Instead, naval shipbuilding occurred in furtherance of maritime strategy based heavily on land warfare and the consequent primacy of the army. Nevertheless, the construction of more robust ships, such as Stosch’s Sachsen-class armored corvettes, reflected a need to supply German industry with projects that filled capacity and spurred employment, even at the expense of heightened costs and immediate obsolescence.
The Tirpitz Era, 1897-1916
With the ascension of Alfred von Tirpitz to state secretary of the Imperial Navy Office, the Imperial German Navy gained an advocate with a vision for true, systematic naval expansion endorsed by the Kaiser. Already, in 1894, he had advocated for a modern battlefleet in Service Memorandum IX, where he argued:
A state that has sea interests or—what is equivalent—world interests must be able to represent them and to make its power felt beyond territorial waters. National world trade, world industry, and to a certain extent high-seas fisheries, world transportation, and colonies are impossible without a fleet capable of taking the offensive.[56]
Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz (Wikimedia)
By pursuing Tirpitz’s vision, the Imperial German Navy would free itself from the domination of army priorities, as well as alienate Great Britain by its challenge in the maritime domain.
German maritime strategy underwent fundamental change under Tirpitz. The navy’s mission before his tenure emphasized coastal defense, showing the flag overseas, and sometimes commerce raiding, but Tirpitz sought to strengthen the fleet past such strategies that implied naval weakness. While sometimes inconsistent in his precise mission for the navy, he sought to reorient the fleet toward an offensive posture. At his most optimistic, Tirpitz calculated that by achieving a 2:3 ratio of battleships with Britain, Germany could dominate the North Sea due to a combination of its greater concentration of warships in theater and greater number of warships kept in active service.[57] Germany could wield this threat like “a sharp knife, held gleaming and ready only a few inches away from the jugular vein” of Britain.[58] At his most pessimistic, Tirpitz’s Risk Theory, outlined in his preamble to the second Navy Law, argued that victory at sea did not necessarily need to occur, because “the destruction of the German fleet would so much damage the enemy that his own position as a world power would be brought into question.”[59] In other words, a pyrrhic victory by the Royal Navy would neutralize the British fleet from the war and permanently weaken Britain on the international stage.
Tirpitz’s Mahanian bent in maritime strategy came to dominate German naval thinking due to the promotional and repressive efforts of Tirpitz himself. In 1898, Tirpitz ordered the distribution of a German translation of Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History, whose popularity worldwide strengthened Tirpitz’s strategic theories, already formulated in 1894.[60] He paired these promotional efforts with repression when a book written by Vice Admiral Curt von Maltzahn, planned for publication in 1899, “stressed the advantage of avoiding sea battle against overwhelming forces and suggested that the battle fleet should not dominate the fleet's resources, so as to retain the flexible use of cruiser warfare.”[61] By utilizing his proximity to the Kaiser, Tirpitz succeeded in preventing the book’s publication and suppressing its discussion by officers in public.[62] Even the Kaiser’s idea of a cruiser-battleship hybrid never made headway, and Tirpitz subjected other detractors to personal attacks.[63] In short, as Herwig writes, “young officers who associated too closely with cruiser or submarine tactics could be assured of short careers.”[64]
As part of directing the Imperial German Navy toward a Mahanian offensive strategy, Tirpitz spearheaded a naval expansion program that emphasized the battle fleet. Wilhelm II signaled this significant reversal of course in an order that “greater expenditure on coastal defenses be avoided and that those defense measures made necessary by the increase of the fleet be assigned higher priority than others.”[65] With the goal of sixty capital ships and forty light cruisers, his Naval Laws of 1898 and 1900, as well as various supplementary bills, mandated that the navy acquire modern battleships, armored cruisers, and light cruisers from German shipyards and automatically replace commissioned ships after set service lives.[66] Even after Britain’s HMS Dreadnought transformed the naval arms race in 1906, Tirpitz and his inner circle decided to continue their building program in the face of dire financial straits and without consultation with other financial and strategic stakeholders.[67]
While Tirpitz represented a sea change in maritime strategy and naval shipbuilding, his expansion program was also informed and motivated by domestic factors. Perhaps most contentious in the historiography is how much to understand Tirpitz’s naval expansion as “social imperialism.”[68] According to this explanation, German imperialism served to hinder the forces of liberalization and socialism, and thereby maintain the privileged status of conservatives and industrialists. This social-historical explanation relies on Tirpitz’s private letters, such as when he wrote, “In this new and important national task of imperialism and in the economic gain that will result from it, we have a powerful palliative against both educated and uneducated social democrats.”[69] Because Tirpitz and Kaiser Wilhelm II viewed the fleet as the growing instrument of Germany’s imperial power, historians like Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Eckert Kehr conclude that the Imperial German Navy under Tirpitz expanded for this reason.[70] Strongest of all, Kehr argues that all German armament policy may be understood through this lens when he writes, “The actors were under the impression that they were acting independently, and yet…they merely executed what was predetermined by social power relations.”[71]
While contentious in the historiography over how much they explain German leaders’ decision-making, social-historical factors shed considerable light on how Tirpitz consolidated domestic political support for the passage of his Navy Laws through the Reichstag. Appeals to special interests in Hanseatic cities like Hamburg and heavy industry became vital to dispelling resistance aroused by Berlin banks and university professors.[72] The Reichstag coalition that passed the 1900 Navy Law consisted of middle-class industrialists and conservative agrarians.[73] While the industrialists stood to profit from building the ships, the agrarians received tariffs on imported cereal grains that privileged domestic agriculture and helped offset the budget deficits exacerbated by Tirpitz’s shipbuilding program.[74]
The interests of industrialists shaped the modernization of the fleet, sometimes to its detriment. From 1894, Krupp, in conjunction with Dillinger, held a monopoly on nickel-steel armor and guns that “constantly drove ship prices up” between 1894 and 1909, before the American Midvale Company began to compete with Krupp armor in Germany.[75] The soaring price of capital ships, especially after the launch of HMS Dreadnought, became the recurring objection of Reichstag deputies. Even in 1897, backlash from the pro-navy Center party against a navy budget that included construction of a single Kaiser Friedrich III-class battleship forced the budget commission to reduce its estimates by 19%.[76] By 1908, with resistance building, Tirpitz resorted in some cases to awarding contracts for battleships and cruisers without prior approval by the Reichstag.[77]
Lithograph of the battleship SMS Kaiser Friedrich III (Wikimedia)
Tirpitz’s policies within the navy also led to the slow adoption of turbine propulsion in German battleships. Turbine engines represented a significant improvement in surface ship propulsion. HMS Dreadnought was the first battleship constructed around a turbine engine plant, although British naval experimentation with the Parsons turbine had occurred since 1901.[78] Tirpitz, however, restricted navy procurement to German firms and left all innovation to the private sector.[79] These policies enabled the British to maintain superiority in speed and firepower for some time. The reciprocating engines of the Imperial German Navy forced its battleships to use two guns with hexagonal mountings on each side, instead of Dreadnought’s centerline turrets that brought more guns to bear during a single broadside.[80] Eventually, the navy contracted with Parsons, but because Tirpitz refused so long to either rely on a foreign firm such as Parsons or to steer turbine development, the Imperial German Navy did not construct its first turbine-powered battleship until 1911.[81]
Perhaps the most glaring departure from Tirpitz’s fleet plan was the German submarine program. Tirpitz was outspoken about the submarine’s incongruency with German maritime strategy. “The U-boat is, at present, of no great value in war at sea,” he said.[82] Nevertheless, “under pressure from close aides,” Tirpitz contracted with Krupp to build the Imperial German Navy’s first submarine in 1904, and authorized 1.5 million German Marks for experimentation.[83] The popularity of the Jeune École and commerce raiding had not faded in France, and as a result French improvements in submarine technology caught the eye of some in the Imperial German Navy.[84] Tirpitz never succeeded in completely stamping out other maritime theorists like Karl Gakter, Kurt von Maltzahn, and Lothar Persius from advocating commerce raiding.[85] According to Tirpitz’s memoirs, the Imperial German Navy’s experimentation with submarines sought to improve their propulsion, so as to increase their blue water capabilities.[86] Six years of testing proved the superiority of diesel engines over petrol engines, and from 1910 to 1914 the Imperial German Navy ordered twenty-six submarines.[87] It should be noted that, unlike Tirpitz’s battleships, submarine acquisition was greatly assisted by the fact that they “tended to come in extremely close to contract cost,” which aided their continued funding by the Reichstag.[88]
Conclusion
Germany did not have a strong maritime tradition, and its navy began as an extension of army power, whose force had united their nation. As such, it functioned as a coastal defense force with little to no independence from land-based power. In its earliest days, articulated maritime strategies remained conspicuously absent, although maritime strategizing certainly occurred. Not until it reached a mature stage did Germany begin to articulate explicit maritime strategy.
Beyond strategy, domestic factors in Imperial Germany impacted naval shipbuilding. Domestic factors could strengthen naval expansion or constrain it. In Germany, naval shipbuilding became an important source for the Kaiser and navy leaders to pay to the blue-collar classes in places like Kiel, Bremen, Danzig, and Wilhelmshaven. As centers of social-democratic organization, reliable employment in these cities minimized the opportunity for shipyard workers to organize. The navy’s patronage of shipyard-related industries also subsidized technological innovation in sectors such as armor and steel.
It may be inferred, therefore, that the conventional wisdom of the primacy of maritime strategy in naval shipbuilding may also hold true for mature navies. At all times, but especially for rising navies, non-strategic factors such as economic subsidies and technological innovation may exhibit influences that precede or override maritime strategy in naval shipbuilding. Put another way, leaders often exhibit composite thinking in naval shipbuilding decisions, but maritime strategy’s primacy does not always hold.
Tyler Self is an officer in the U.S. Navy. His first assignment was Auxiliaries Officer onboard USS INDEPENDENCE (LCS 2) from 2017 to 2020. His second assignment was Anti-Submarine Warfare Officer on USS MUSTIN (DDG 89) from 2020 to 2022. He is currently at the Naval Postgraduate School, where he is completing a thesis on Chinese maritime strategy and naval shipbuilding.
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Notes:
[1] Julian S. Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1918), 93.
[2] Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1898), 7, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044013659107&view=1up&seq=9.
[3] Andrew S. Erickson and Manfred Meyer, in Modern Chinese Maritime Forces, ed. Larry Bond and Chris Carlson (Admiralty Trilogy Group, 2022), 3; Christopher P. Carlson and Jack Bianchi, “Warfare Drivers: Mission Needs and the Impact on Ship Design,” in Chinese Naval Shipbuilding: An Ambitious and Uncertain Course, ed. Andrew S. Erickson (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2016), 19.
[4] Benjamin L. Apt, “Mahan’s Forebears: The Debate Over Maritime Strategy, 1868-1883,” Naval War College Review 50, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 105, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44638752.
[5] A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower (Washington, DC: United States Marine Corps, United States Dept. of the Navy, United States Coast Guard, 2007).
[6] Dmitry Filipoff, “Secretary John Lehman on Strategic Credibility and Leveraging Command of the Seas,” Center for International Maritime Security, March 22, 2021, https://cimsec.org/secretary-john-lehman-on-strategic-credibility-and-leveraging-command-of-the-seas/.
[7] Irv Blickstein et al., Navy Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution: A Reference Guide for Senior Leaders, Managers, and Action Officers (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2016), 8, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/tools/TL200/TL224/RAND_TL224.pdf; Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Report to Congress on the Annual Long-Range Plan for Construction of Naval Vessels for Fiscal Year 2023 (Washington, DC: Pentagon, 2022), 10, https://media.defense.gov/2022/Apr/20/2002980535/-1/-1/0/PB23%20SHIPBUILDING%20PLAN%2018%20APR%202022%20FINAL.PDF.
[8] Holger H. Herwig, “Luxury” Fleet: The Imperial German Navy 1888-1918 (London: The Ashfield Press, 1987), 9.
[9] Lawrence Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik: German Sea Power Before the Tirpitz Era (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1997), 108–9.
[10] Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik, 86.
[11] Rolf Hobson, The German School of Naval Thought and the Origins of the Tirpitz Plan 1875 ~ 1900 (Oslo: Institutt for Forsvarsstudier, 1996), 18, https://fhs.brage.unit.no/fhs-xmlui/handle/11250/99521.
[12] Hobson, The German School, 18–19.
[13] As quoted in Hobson, The German School, 21.
[14] Hobson, The German School, 21.
[15] Hobson, The German School, 22.
[16] As quoted in Herwig, Luxury Fleet, 13.
[17] Herwig, Luxury Fleet, 13; Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik, 108.
[18] David H. Olivier, German Naval Strategy, 1856-1888: Forerunners to Tirpitz (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2004), 91.
[19] Olivier, German Naval Strategy, 89, 96.
[20] Olivier, German Naval Strategy, 89, 91.
[21] Ivo Nikolai Lambi, The Navy and German Power Politics, 1862-1914 (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1984), 5.
[22] Lambi, The Navy, 6.
[23] Lambi, The Navy, 5.
[24] Lambi, The Navy, 6; Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik, 114.
[25] Lambi, The Navy, 6.
[26] Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik, 143.
[27] Olivier, German Naval Strategy, 99.
[28] Olivier, 106.
[29] Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik, 143, 168.
[30] Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik, 111.
[31] Olivier, German Naval Strategy, 105; Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik, 111, 114.
[32] Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik, 136.
[33] Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik, 111, 140.
[34] Lawrence Sondhaus, “The Imperial German Navy and Social Democracy, 1878-1897,” German Studies Review 18, no. 1 (February 1995): 52, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1431518.
[35] Sondhaus, 53, 55.
[36] Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik, 153.
[37] As quoted in Lambi, The Navy, 6.
[38] Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik, 172.
[39] Arne Røksund, The Jeune École: The Strategy of the Weak (Boston: Brill, 2007), 1, 6, https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004157231.i-242.
[40] As quoted in Røksund, 3.
[41] Røksund, x–xi, 7; Lawrence Sondhaus, Naval Warfare, 1815-1914 (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2012), 142, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203132234.
[42] As quoted in Røksund, 8.
[43] Olivier, German Naval Strategy, 145, 147.
[44] As quoted in Lambi, The Navy, 10.
[45] Lambi, The Navy, 7.
[46] Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik, 180; Herwig, Luxury Fleet, 26.
[47] As quoted in Olivier, German Naval Strategy, 147.
[48] Lambi, The Navy, 9; Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik, 166.
[49] Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik, 165, 168.
[50] Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik, 164, 166.
[51] Lambi, The Navy, 9.
[52] Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik, 176.
[53] As quoted in Herwig, Luxury Fleet, 25.
[54] Hobson, The German School, 21.
[55] Lambi, The Navy, 6, 9.
[56] As quoted in Dirk Bönker, “Global Politics and Germany’s Destiny ‘from an East Asian Perspective’: Alfred von Tirpitz and the Making of Wilhelmine Navalism,” Central European History 46, no. 1 (March 2013): 73, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43280550.
[57] Herwig, Luxury Fleet, 36.
[58] Paul Kennedy, “Tirpitz, England and the Second Navy Law of 1900: A Strategical Critique,” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, no. 2 (1970): 38, ProQuest.
[59] As quoted in Hobson, The German School, 47.
[60] Holger H. Herwig, “The Failure of German Sea Power, 1914-1945: Mahan, Tirpitz, and Raeder Reconsidered,” The International History Review 10, no. 1 (February 1988): 69, https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.1988.9640469.
[61] John B. Hattendorf, “The Caird Lecture, 2000: The Anglo‐French Naval Wars (1689–1815) in Twentieth‐Century Naval Thought,” Journal for Maritime Research 3, no. 1 (2001): 55, https://doi.org/10.1080/21533369.2001.9668312.
[62] Lambi, The Navy, 166.
[63] Herwig, Luxury Fleet, 38; Carl-Axel Gemzell, Organization, Conflict, and Innovation: A Study of German Naval Strategic Planning, 1888-1940 (Stockholm: Esselte Studium, 1973), 60–61.
[64] Herwig, Luxury Fleet, 39.
[65] Lambi, The Navy, 168.
[66] Herwig, Luxury Fleet, 36.
[67] Holger H. Herwig, “The German Reaction to the Dreadnought Revolution,” The International History Review 13, no. 2 (May 1991): 278, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40106367.
[68] Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Bismarck’s Imperialism 1862-1890,” trans. Norman Porter, J. Sheehan, and T. W. Mason, Past & Present, no. 48 (August 1970): 151, https://www.jstor.org/stable/650484.
[69] As quoted in Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Bismarck’s Imperialism 1862-1890,” trans. Norman Porter, J. Sheehan, and T. W. Mason, Past & Present, no. 48 (August 1970): 152, https://www.jstor.org/stable/650484.
[70] Wehler, 153; Eckart Kehr, “Anglophobia and Weltpolitik,” in Economic Interest, Militarism, and Foreign Policy (Berkeley,CA: University of California Press, 1977), 39, 82.
[71] Eckart Kehr, “Class Struggle and Armament Policy in Imperial Germany,” in Economic Interest, Militarism, and Foreign Policy, ed. Gordon A. Craig, trans. Grete Heinz (Berkeley,CA: University of California Press, 1977), 75.
[72] Eckart Kehr, “The Social and Financial Foundations of Tirpitz’s Naval Propaganda,” in Economic Interest, Militarism, and Foreign Policy (Berkeley,CA: University of California Press, 1977), 83–84, 87, 89.
[73] Gary E. Weir, Building the Kaiser’s Navy: The Imperial Navy Office and German Industry in the von Tirpitz Era (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1992), 53.
[74] Weir, 53; Steinberg, “Review: The Tirpitz Plan,” The Historical Journal 16, no. 1 (March 1973): 199, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2637924.
[75] Weir, Building the Kaiser’s Navy, 31, 109.
[76] Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik, 216, 218.
[77] Herwig, Luxury Fleet, 69.
[78] Herwig, Luxury Fleet, 46.
[79] Weir, Building the Kaiser’s Navy, 29, 95.
[80] Herwig, Luxury Fleet, 59.
[81] Weir, Building the Kaiser’s Navy, 96, 199; Herwig, Luxury Fleet, 46.
[82] As quoted in Weir, Building the Kaiser’s Navy, 52.
[83] Herwig, Luxury Fleet, 86–87.
[84] Gary E. Weir, “Tirpitz, Technology, and Building U-Boats, 1897-1916,” The International History Review 6, no. 2 (May 1984): 178, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40105369.
[85] Weir, “Tirpitz,” 175.
[86] Alfred von Tirpitz, My Memoirs, by Grand-Admiral von Tirpitz, Volume II (England: Hurst & Blackett, 1919), 571, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31210006877748.
[87] Tirpitz, 572; Herwig, Luxury Fleet, 87.
[88] Weir, “Tirpitz,” 184.