| dc.description.abstract | In the winter of 1889-90, Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Franklin Tracy altered the basic naval strategy of the United States, a change unique in American history. Since the Revolutionary War the Navy had been devoted to protecting the coasts and raiding enemy commerce, although the emphasis of this policy had varied. In the 1880s a group of young naval officers, who advocated a fleet in the style of the European powers, advanced to command ranks. Two of their leaders, Admiral Stephen B. Luce and Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, convinced Tracy to begin the construction of a squadron of American capital ships, a course last seriously contemplated during the War of 1812. Since that winter, the capital ship has evolved fro.rn battleships and armored cruisers to nuclear aircraft carriers and ballistic .missile submarines, but American naval policy has remained firmly centered on the battlefleet. The complete victory of Tracy's battleships at the Battle of Santiago apparently vindicated this new policy, but only seven years later, the Navy's unwavering adherence to the capital ship strategy caused it to become increasingly impotent as a consideration in international strategy. In October 1905 Great Britain began the construction of HMS Qreadnought, a battleship of unprecedented power and expense, which substantially raised the prerequisites of a warship of capital ship status. The United States Navy had fumbled an opportunity to gain a similar technological breakthrough and then opted to build dreadnoughts only after prolonged debate. In a critical error, the General Board, the closest equivalent to a naval general staff, decided merely to upgrade the Navy's strategic goals and policies to the new standard.2 Continuing advances in naval technology and increasing international competition would raise this criterion every year until 1922. The spiraling expenses of building and maintaining a fleet of these leviathans forced every major power to sacrifice other naval necessities, but none more so than the United States. In April 1917, the Navy could muster only a dozen dreadnoughts and twenty-seven destroyers ready for service.3 This was a force capable of daunting Japan, however, if either of the European alliances won a decisive victory it would be unable to defend the national interests. The battlefleet was quite extravagant for its usual task of maintaining the informal empire in the Caribbean, and it had proved ineffective at asserting other foreign policy objectives after the return of the Great White Fleet. Previous commentators only superficially have examined the appropriateness of Mahan's Capital Ship Strategy to the strategic position of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Most naval historians have viewed the period as a necessary phase in the progressive evolution of American seapower to global command of the oceans.4 Naval strategists when turning to history have concentrated on the baleful effects on Imperial Germany of her naval leader's excessive devotion to and limited understanding of Mahan's principles.5 Alfred Vagts has proposed the construction of a great monument to Mahan with the inscription "He taught the Germans the wrong lessons."6 David Trask and Herwig Helger have noted in passing that American naval policy essentially followed the same Risk Strategy as the High Seas Fleet.7 Clark G. Reynolds conspicuously did not include a capital ship strategy as a viable option for an ambitious naval power of middle rank.a The one clear lesson in Mahan's historical writings was that England paid any price for the destruction of her naval rivals. The United States avoided this fate because of the fortuitously simultaneous emergence of German naval power, and the fortuitous pyrrhic victory of Great Britain in the First World War. I contend that the United States' pursuit of a Capital Ship was flawed from the outset, despite its auspicious beginnings, and that it became potentially disastrous through the Navy's inability to mount a creditable response to the Dreadnought Revolution. As noted above, other writers have alluded to this conclusion, but this research in its support is original. | |
