Maritime Strategy

Sir Julian Stafford Corbett (1854-1922) was a prominent British naval historian and geostrategist whose works helped shape the Royal Navy's reforms of that era. Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (1918) is one of his most famous works. It covers the theory of war and the theory of naval war, and examines how England was able to prevent stronger navies from ever landing successfully or cutting supply routes between colonies in the empire. Corbett illustrates his insights with reference to the history of navies and naval battles.

A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy is a deliberately compact introductory work aimed at junior seafarers, those who make decisions affecting the sea services, and those who educate seafarers and decision-makers. It introduces listeners to the main theoretical ideas that shape how statesmen and commanders make and execute maritime strategy in times of peace and war.

For centuries, oceans were the chessboard on which empires battled for supremacy. But in the nuclear age, air power and missile systems dominated our worries about security, and for the United States, the economy was largely driven by domestic production, with trucking and railways that crisscrossed the continent serving as the primary modes of commercial transit.

A monumental retelling of world history through the lens of maritime enterprise, revealing in breathtaking depth how people first came into contact with one another by ocean and river, lake and stream, and how goods, languages, religions, and entire cultures spread across and along the world's waterways, bringing together civilizations and defining what makes us most human.

Set against the backdrop of the Age of Exploration, Black Flags, Blue Waters reveals the dramatic and surprising history of American piracy's "Golden Age" when lawless pirates plied the coastal waters of North America and beyond. Best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin illustrates how American colonists at first supported these outrageous pirates in an early display of solidarity against the Crown, and then violently opposed them. Upending popular misconceptions and cartoonish stereotypes, Dolin provides this wholly original account of these seafaring outlaws.

This radical new book concentrates on the way in which each side tried to use or deny the sea to the other, and in so doing describes rapid wartime changes not only in ship and weapons technology but also in the way naval warfare was envisaged and fought. Melding strategic, technical, and tactical aspects, Friedman approaches World War I from a fresh perspective and demonstrates how its perceived lessons dominated the way navies prepared for World War II.

The year is 2026. China has taken over as the world's largest economy, while the United States, mired in an oil shortage, struggles to adjust to its diminished role. Then, a surprise attack throws the US into a chaos unseen since Pearl Harbor. As the enemy takes control, the survival of the nation will depend upon the most unlikely forces: the Navy's antiquated Ghost Fleet and a cadre of homegrown terrorists.

In the great wars of modern history, maritime powers have always prevailed over land-based empires, whether Habsburg, Napoleonic, Nazi, or Soviet. In contrast to the rigid hierarchies and centralization of land-based empires, those nations attaining mastery at sea have been distinguished by liberty, flexibility, and enterprise. The 17th-century Dutch were the first to achieve naval and trading dominance.

In Maritime Power and the Struggle for Freedom, Peter Padfield presents a superb description and analysis of naval campaigns conducted between 1788 and 1851 that shaped the modern world. Winner of the Mountbatten Maritime Prize, this is the second of Padfield's masterful trilogy that traces the impact of naval power on modern history, and the means by which it has been enacted.

Even if we live within sight of the sea, it is easy to forget that our world is an ocean world. The open ocean, that vast expanse of international waters, begins just a few miles out and spreads across three-fourths of the globe. It is a place of storms and danger, both natural and manmade. And at a time when every last patch of land is claimed by one government or another, it is a place that remains radically free.

Command of the oceans was crucial to winning World War II. By the start of 1942 Nazi Germany had conquered mainland Europe, and Imperial Japan had overrun Southeast Asia and much of the Pacific. How could Britain and distant America prevail in what had become a "war of continents"? In this definitive account, Evan Mawdsley traces events at sea from the first U-boat operations in 1939 to the surrender of Japan. He argues that the Allied counterattack involved not just decisive sea battles, but a long struggle to control shipping arteries and move armies across the sea.

In the late 1990s, Patrick O’Brian’s multimillion-copy-selling historical novel series—the Aubrey-Maturin series, which was set during the Napoleonic Wars—seemed destined for film. With Russell Crowe as Jack Aubrey and Paul Bettany as Stephen Maturin, the production only needed a ship that could stand in for Lucky Jack’s HMS Surprise, with historical accuracy paramount. The filmmakers found the Rose, a replica of an 18th-century ship that would work perfectly. Only there was one problem: the Rose was in Newport, Rhode Island, not in Southern California.

Authors Simon Reich and Peter Dombrowski challenge the common view of grand strategy as unitary. They eschew prescription of any one specific approach, chosen from a spectrum that stretches from global primacy to restraint and isolationism, in favor of describing what America’s military actually does, day to day. They argue that a series of fundamental recent changes in the global system, the inevitable jostling of bureaucratic politics, and the practical limitations of field operations combine to ensure that each presidential administration inevitably resorts to a variety of strategies.