War is a condition which arises when the appeal to reason, justice, or fear has failed and a nation wishes, or in self-defence is compelled, to bring another to its will by force.

Force is exerted by armies on land and naval fleets at sea. It is the primary business of the armed force in each element to defeat that of the enemy in battle, and so disintegrate and destroy it. The beaten nation’s power to fight is thus brought to naught. Its resolution to renew the attack or to continue resistance is broken down. If defeat throws it open to invasion without power of stopping the invader, its national life, internal and external, is paralyzed and it is compelled to bow to the will of the conqueror. In its simplest conception, then, war is a struggle between nations in which the opposing sides pit their armed forces against each other and have to abide by the issue of that combat.

It is rarely, however, that a single battle between armies has decided the issue of a war. The campaigns of Jena and Sadowa are indeed instances in point. But they are in their way as exceptional as is the Boer War—decided without a pitched battle being fought at all. These may be regarded as the extremes. Normally, war may end victoriously for one side without the other having been deprived of the means of continuing even effective resistance. In such cases it is some moderation in the victor’s terms, some change in the ambition of the partially defeated side, or, at least, a sense that no adequate results can be expected from further fighting, that has brought about the cessation of hostilities.

But, again, there are wars in which the issues can admit of no compromise at all. The invasions of Tamerlane, Attila, and the Mohammedan conquerors were not wars but campaigns of extermination. It is in such a war that we are engaged to-day. The stake for every country is of a vital character, so that compromise is indistinguishable from defeat, and defeat must carry with it the negation of everything which makes national life tolerable. The Germans have convinced themselves that there is no alternative to world dominion but downfall, and the civilized world is determined that there shall be no German world dominion. Such a struggle by its nature permits of no end by arrangement or negotiation. It must go forward until either one side or the other is either militarily defeated or until the economic strain disintegrates the state. In such conditions a secondary form of military pressure may be of paramount importance.

Now if we go back to our first definition of war, as a struggle in which the opposing sides pit their armed forces against each other and abide by the issue of the combat, we must remember that, just as it is rare for a war to be decided by a single combat, so is it rare for a single combat to dissipate and destroy an army. Ordinary prudence dictates that there shall be protected lines or some strong place into which it can retreat in the event of defeat. And when it is thus compelled to abandon open fighting and seek a position of natural or artificial strength, it becomes the business of the stronger to complete the business by destroying and penetrating the defences. But if this is too costly a proceeding, the stronger tries to contain the force so protected and passes on, if possible, to investment and siege. The simplest case of this is the complete encirclement and siege of the great city or camp, of which the war of 1870 gave two such striking examples in Metz and Paris.

When war calls out the whole manhood of many nations and turns them into fighting forces, it is obvious that there cannot be equality of force in all the theatres. Where either side is weaker, it is compelled locally to adopt the same tactics that a defeated force adopts. It must, that is to say, go upon the defensive. It entrenches and fortifies itself. Thus, as military operations, the attack and defence of fortifications may become general, and this without either side being necessarily able to inflict the pressure of siege upon its opponent, siege being understood to mean severing of communications with the outside world. But, clearly, where siege is possible, as was the case with Metz and Paris, the attacking force becomes also the investing force. It can rely upon the straits to which it can reduce the besieged to bring about that surrender which, ex hypothesi, would have been the result of the battle had the weaker not declined it.

Battle and siege are thus in essence complementary modes of war and all military action may roughly be defined as fighting, or some method of postponing fighting, or steps or preparations towards fighting.

SEA WAR

War at sea is carried on, as we have seen, by naval fleets. The immediate object of a fleet is to find, defeat, and destroy the enemy’s fleet. The ultimate or further objective which is gained by such destruction is to monopolize the use of the sea, as the master highway, by retaining freedom for the passage of the victor’s ships while denying such passage to those of the defeated. The power to insist on this exclusive control of sea communications is called “command of the sea.”

If the war is a purely naval war, that is, limited to the use of naval forces and hence directed solely to naval ends—as was the war between England and France, in the course of which the United States gained their independence—the command of the sea can theoretically be won by a single victorious battle. For if the main force of one side is destroyed, that belligerent becomes incapable of questioning the supremacy of the enemy, and hence must limit his sea action to sporadic attempts on communications. These can never be maintained to a degree that can be decisive, simply because a power greater than can be brought to the attack can be employed for their defence. Success in such a war, then, can simply be measured in terms of trade or of sea supply; defeat by the economic loss that its cessation must cause. There have been purely naval wars in the past and, could a combination be formed of countries whose aggregate sea-power was greater than that of Great Britain, a purely naval war might occur again. But it could only be brought about by such a conjuncture for the reason that Great Britain is the only country to which a purely naval defeat would mean such utter and immediate ruin, that her surrender to her sea conqueror would follow inevitably and promptly. This is so because, whereas almost every country is to some extent dependent upon sea supplies, Great Britain exists only in virtue of them.

To us, therefore, the advantages that derive from possession of command of the sea are overwhelming; and our possession of it adversely to any other country must be disadvantageous, exactly in proportion as that country is dependent upon sea supplies.

In a war which is both naval and continental, as in the present war, command of the sea means much more than the power to deny the gain and comfort of sea supplies. The side that is defeated at sea, or avoids fighting for fear of defeat, may lose not only everything which can come to it directly or indirectly from the use of ships, but will suffer from the added disadvantage that a military use can be made of sea communications in the enemy’s possession. The side that commands the sea can carry on its ocean traffic, and supply not only its civil population but its armies and its fleets from abroad. It can ally itself with continental nations and send its military forces away in ships and land them in friendly ports. It can prevent the sea invasion of its own, of its allies’ territory, and of its colonial possessions. It can stop not only the enemy’s own sea trade, but all neutral sea trade that directly or indirectly can benefit him, so that he is cut off from all supplies, whether raw material, food, or manufacture, not produced in his own territories or in those with which he has land communications. If the sea force of the side possessing command includes means of engaging stationary defences with success, and removing passive sea defences from the approaches to the enemy’s coast and harbours, then it can even beat down the enemy’s coast protection and invade him directly. The nation with sea command, then, threatens its opponents with attack by land at every point and, pending its development, can to the extent to which the enemy is dependent on overseas traffic for the necessaries of life, or for the maintenance of his armies at full fighting strength, subject him to all the rigour of siege.

The command of the sea which makes the exercise of these menaces possible, is, as we have seen, the fruit of victory over the enemy’s armed forces. But if that enemy is weaker and follows at sea the course which, as we have seen, an army inferior on land must adopt, viz., declines battle and withdraws his fleet behind defences to postpone it, he thereby to a great extent surrenders the sea command to the stronger. And if the stronger knows his business, he at once uses this command to subject his opponent to the economic disadvantages set out above. Siege by sea, then, like siege on land, may be the consequence of, but is always the alternative to, victorious battle in bringing about a decision. For while victorious battle robs the defeated nation of any possibility of warding off further attack by force, siege undermines the will and resolution of the civil population to endure, and thus calls forces into existence which will compel the enemy’s government to surrender.

The command of the ocean ways are, then, of tremendous consequences in war—so great, indeed, that the control of sea communications has often been put forth as the primary object to be aimed at by sea-power. That it is the object of sea-power victoriously used we have already seen. But so long as the enemy possesses forces that actually disturb the tranquil enjoyment of sea communications, command is certainly qualified, and if he have in reserve unused and unimpaired forces for attacking and defeating the fleet which secures command, the command of the sea cannot be said to be unconditionally possessed. Consequently, if destruction of the enemy’s armed forces is a necessary condition to real—because indisputable—sea command, it is for victorious battle and for nothing else that fleets exist.

These propositions are not only obviously true; they seem to be truly obvious. But in recent history we have witnessed the curious spectacle that an inversion of the order of these two statements did actually create two different and opposed schools of naval thought. The first school saw in victory the first and constant preoccupation of the fleet. It concerned itself, therefore, chiefly with the essentials to victory, and as victory can only come from fighting, it was at the elements of fighting that it worked. It sought to find the most perfect methods of using weapons, because it realized that it was only from the evolution of these that right tactics could be deduced. It studied the campaigns of the past to discover the two great groups of doctrine that our fighting ancestors have bequeathed to us, the first dealing with the science of strategy, the second with the principles of command. They realized that weapons and the ships that carry them do not fight themselves, but must be fought by men; and they wished those men rightly educated and trained in the subtle and complex science of their high calling. To them, in short, sea war was an affair of knowledge applied by men trained both in the wisdom and in the lofty spirit of those that had excelled in naval war before. And, faithful to the traditions of the past, no less than eager for research into all the undeveloped potentialities of the products of modern progress, they pinned their faith on ability to force the enemy to battle, and to beat him there when battle came.

The other school went for a short cut to naval triumph. If only they could get a fleet of ships so big, so fabulously armed, so numerous as to make it seem to the enemy that his fleet was too feeble to attack, why then battle would be made altogether superfluous, and no further worry over so unlikely a contingency was necessary. They did not, therefore, trouble to inquire either into the processes needed for bringing battle about, or into what was necessary for success when battle came. They passed on to the contemplation of what can only be the fruit of victory—as if victory were not a condition precedent!

It was, unfortunately, this group, hypnotized by a theory it did not understand, which controlled naval policy in Great Britain for the ten years preceding the war, and for the first three and a half years of it. Their error lay, of course, in supposing that a fleet, so materially strong and numerous that its defeat was unimaginable because no attack on it could be conceived, must—so long as any serious lowering of its force by attrition was avoided—be the military equivalent to one which had already defeated the enemy; that “invincible” and “victorious” were, in short, interchangeable terms. So masterful was this obsession that their apologists—shutting their eyes to the obvious and appalling consequences of this creed in action—two years after the event, still regarded the only encounter between the main fleets in this war as a great victory, because the larger, by avoiding the risk of close contact with the lesser, came out of the conflict with forces as substantially superior to the enemy’s as they were before the opportunity of a decisive battle had been offered.

The group in question had, indeed, become possessed of one truth. It was simply that preponderant force is a vital element. But by holding it to the exclusion of all other truths they were blinded not only to the crucial business of studying the intellectual and technical essentials to fighting, but even to the orthodox meaning of the communication theory of sea war, on which they had so eagerly, but ignorantly, seized. For the true doctrine is, as we have already seen, just this, that when an enemy refuses battle, the stronger navy’s sole remaining offensive is to cut him off from communication with the sea. It must do this, as we have seen, to restrict his supplies, to weaken his armed forces, to strike at his prosperity and the comfort of his civil population, and thus obtain that partial paralysis of his national life, the completion of which can only be got by a victory that disarms him. And these things, which are the results of blockade, are also the intended results. But they are not intended for their own sake only, nor, primarily, to make the enemy surrender to avoid them. They are inflicted to force the enemy to the battle which he has refused, because it is only by battle that he can relieve himself from them. A stringent blockade, then, is the primary means of inducing a fleet action, and hence we see that siege, while truly the only alternative to battle, is something much more.

Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that, viewed in its right relation to the true theory of war—a state of things in which a conflict of wills between nations is settled by a conflict of their armed forces—it is almost the primary object of siege to bring this conflict about and so to hasten the issue. From the definition the aim of war is the enemy’s defeat and not merely his surrender. And battle is necessary to defeat.

The failure to realize this elementary truth was the cause of much more than an omission to fathom the technique of fighting, the fruits of which we shall find, when we come to the consideration of the naval actions of the last three years and note the curious result of the Jutland deployment and the inconclusive character of so many of the artillery encounters which have occurred, and the extraordinary prolongation of those which were not inconclusive. It brought about what is, at first sight, something even more astonishing, viz., an actual indisposition by those in control of the British Navy, to adopt, when the enemy refused battle, the only course that could compel him to it, though it was actually the first article of their creed to gain the power to do this very thing.

Great Britain went to war at midnight August 4, 1914. The Grand Fleet went to its war stations. The High Seas Fleet withdrew to the security of the Kiel Canal. Within a day no enemy trading ships dared put to sea. Within a week, transports were carrying a British army to France. Our merchantmen continued their sea trading almost as if nothing had happened. But, though the German flag vanished from the seas, neutral vessels were free to use the German ports until the following March, and for another six months the enemy was free to import, in almost any quantities that he liked, certain forms of food, cotton, fats, and many of the ores and chemicals which were the indispensable raw material of the propellants and explosives vitally necessary to him in a prolonged war.

By permitting this, we showed that our policy, in other words, was not to attack but to wait attack, and then not to do anything to compel the enemy to attack. Our sea statesmen had not indoctrinated the civil government with a clearly defined policy that it was prepared to enforce at the opening of hostilities. Yet in a matter of this kind it was exactly at the opening of hostilities that a stringent blockade, accompanied by a generous rationing of sea supplies to the neutrals bordering on Germany, could have been proclaimed and enforced with the least friction. For, in the first place, Germany’s declaration of war was so entirely unprovoked and sudden, and her first measure of war, the invasion of Belgium—when her soldiery became at once outrageous—combined the world over to create a neutral opinion strongly in favour of the Allies. Next, the fact that Great Britain’s participation in the war was both professedly and actually in loyalty to the identical obligation to Belgium which Germany had violated, predisposed America, for the first time since the colonies proclaimed their independence, to an active sympathy with the British ideal, perhaps because for the first time that ideal appeared to them to be one that was purely chivalrous. It was then everything that the psychological moment should have been seized. Nor could it have been difficult to see that, if the opportunity was allowed to slip by, the mere fact that a half measure—to wit, the suspense of German shipping—had been enforced, must lead to a new condition, namely, a hugely magnified trade through the neutral ports. This trade, it is true, was nominally confined to goods that were not contraband of war. But contraband is an elastic term, and, to make things worse, the British Government proclaimed its intention—so little had war-trained thought prepared its policy—of accepting the provisions of the unexecuted Declaration of London as defining what contraband was to be. This gave the enemy the liberty to import materials indispensable to his manufacture of munitions and of armament, was one of which full advantage was taken. It was bad enough that cotton, indispensable ores, the raw materials of glycerine as well as the finished product, were poured into the laboratories, the factories, and the arsenals of Germany without stint or limit. It was, if possible, worse that this traffic created gigantic exporting interests in America which, once vested, made the restriction of them wear the appearance of an intolerable hardship when, many months too late, more stringent measures were taken. So powerful indeed had these interests become, that the real and rigid blockade which, under the doctrines of the “continuous voyage” and the “ultimate destination” would from the first have been fully consonant with international law, was actually never attempted at all until the United States themselves became belligerents.

For fourteen months, then, we witnessed a state of things so paradoxical as to be without parallel in history. It was our professed creed that the fleet existed to seize and control sea communications. The enemy conceded us this control and, so far from using it to straiten him so relentlessly that he would have no choice but to fight for relief from it, we actually permitted him to draw, through sources absolutely under our control, for essentials in the form of overseas supplies that he needed in a war which all the world realized must now be a prolonged one. The traditional naval policy of the country was thus not reflected in the action of the country’s government, because that policy had no representation in the Navy’s counsels. There is, perhaps, no single heresy for which so high and disastrous a price has been paid.

It would appear, then, that our pre-war naval policy did not contemplate that immediate and stringent sea pressure that would compel the enemy to action, nor yet the closest and most vigilant kind of watch that would have brought him to action in the promptest and most fatal manner when circumstances compelled him to come out. Nor is it difficult to see why this was so. To profess the communication theory of sea war without realizing that the control of communications is the result of victory, that is, setting up a consequence as an aim while ignoring its cause, inevitably led to the inverted error, an unwillingness so to employ the control of communications, when the enemy ceded them without victory, as to force the enemy into battle as the only hope of escaping an intolerable condition. Not having contemplated and prepared for battle as the first aim of naval policy, they left an instinctive disinclination to force on an affair which they suddenly realized would be as critical as it was certainly unanticipated. It is this which explains possibly the greatest paradox in history, viz., that Germany proclaimed a strict blockade of Great Britain before Great Britain proclaimed such a blockade of Germany.