Seapower Twofer

Two bits at 1945 on the future of seapower. First, on the continued military relevance of the maritime domain:

Over time this sense of the strategic decisiveness of seapower faded. Land-based aircraft and missiles reach increasingly deep into the world’s oceans, making ships vulnerable in the spaces they once considered safe. Nuclear weapons seemed to make it easy to destroy even the most powerful capital ships, and in their strategic role made naval combat seem quaint.

Even the dominance of maritime trade seemed precarious. By mid-century there were reasons to believe that land- and air- trade might supplant, or at least heavily chip into, maritime trade. The century-long expansion of railways, along with the development of heavy trucks and continent-spanning systems of highways, meant that freight and people could be transferred at margins that were previously only available to ships. The development of wide-bodied, long-range passenger jets effectively took ships out of the people-transport game, at least in the Global North.

Long story short, container ships, offshore drilling, and long-range ship-launched precision munitions restored the traditional balance between land and sea. Second part is about how US naval doctrine has evolved (or not) to deal with a situation the USN hasn’t faced since mid-1944:

The seminal works on the political and strategic importance of seapower were written more than a hundred years ago.While doctrine and strategic thinking have developed in important ways since World War I, the most important thinkers in the maritime domain canon remain Alfred Thayer Mahan and Julian Corbett. While Mahan and Corbett are sometimes taught as antagonists, their work is better regarded as complementary than contradictory. Corbett and Mahan remain relevant, but for seventy years structural factors made their prescriptions less obviously relevant to naval analysts.