School of War - Ep. 15: Andrew Lambert on Julian Corbett

Episode Date: February 1, 2022

Andrew Lambert, Laughton Professor of Naval History in the Department of War Studies at King's College, London, joins the show to discuss British strategist Julian Corbett and his vision of seapower at the turn of the 20th century. Times 01:37 - Introduction  02:02 - The British Empire during the 19th and 20th centuries 04:43 - Corbett as a lawyer, novelist, and strategist 09:05 - The Boer War and the future of the British Empire  13:26 - Corbett’s education on the principals of British power 16:12 - Britain’s power on land versus at sea  19:04 - British power in the Mediterranean  22:30 - How Corbett differentiates himself from Alfred Mahan 28:14 - The principles at the core of Corbett’s strategy  35: 56 - Maritime strategy throughout history 37:29 - An argument for a continental strategy   41:28 - What Corbett envisioned during World War I  51:43 - How Corbett’s ideas apply to British and American military strategy today

When Britain first at Heaven's Command arose from out the Azuramane, this was the charter of the land, and guardian angels sang the strain, rule Britannia, rule the waves. Britons never will be slaves. So goes the start of the famous song that most of us have heard at some point or another. And the story of the British Empire for sure is the story of a maritime power, for which ruling the waves became something that very nearly approached ruling the world, or at least setting its rules.

In so doing, Britain joined a tradition of sea power states that stretches back as far as ancient Carthage and ancient Athens, states with fundamentally different strategic worldviews than the great continental powers like Germany, Russia, or China. Today, we'll take a look at the logic of sea power states, focusing on Britain at the turn of the 20th century, and on Sir Julian Stafford Corbett, one of the great applied historians and strategic analysts of the British Empire, the man who, among other things, literally wrote the book on British Maritime Strategy and who went toe to toe with a young First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous.

The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. The people are not seen buildings. fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm very happy to be joined today by Andrew Lambert.

Andrew's the Lawton Professor of Naval History at King's College London. He's a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He wrote a book called Sea Power States, which won the 2018 Gilder-Larman Book Prize in military history. And he is most recently the author of The British Way of War, Julian Corbett. in the battle for a national strategy. Andrew, thanks for joining us. That's my pleasure. So our task today is to talk about Julian Corbett,

and I suspect introduced him to a good chunk of our listeners. But before we get to the man himself, your book does such a wonderful job of painting a portrait of the world from which he sprang, the sort of vision of empire, the liberal vision of empire at the end of the 19th century in Britain. Maybe we could start there. What was Julian Corbett's world like?

And how did that condition the career that he went on? Corbett is born into a rising middle-class family. His father is a very successful property developer, architect, and in the space of his very young childhood, they go from moderately well-off to remarkably wealthy. So he grows up in a privileged upper-middle-class society. He goes to a public school. Essentially, it's a training academy to get him into university.

He goes to Trinity College, Cambridge, which is one of the great colleges. he reads a law degree. He's a first-class student, quite literally. He also at the same time qualifies in law in what we would call a barrister or an advocate in the United States, a courtroom lawyer. And he practices the law as part of his heritage. His father has shaped the education of his two elder sons so they can take over the family

business, so they can advance the causes that he's connected with. But he's also infused them with a profound commitment to liberal political views. It's a family heritage issue. And Corbett will remain a convinced liberal, a politically active liberal, who takes a liberal political view of the British Empire. It's often thought the empire is a fairly conservative organization, but within it are many people who see the empire as a progressive organization. The future of the British Empire is not to endure forever, but to transform into a collection of self-governing commonwealths.

The modern British Commonwealth is not entirely different to Corbett's vision. The British don't want to rule the world. They want the world to rule itself along progressive liberal principles. And the sooner parts of the empire can do that, the better. In his own lifetime, he travels to Canada at a time when Canada is essentially a self-goveraliener. governing member of the Commonwealth. So he's watching the empire transition and he's watching how Britain is able to facilitate that happening without those countries, then becoming at risk of being attacked by aggressive imperialist countries with different agendas. And before he becomes,

you know, one of the more important strategic analysts of the last couple hundred years, He's practicing the law for a while, gets a bit dissatisfied with that, and then he becomes a novelist, something that I did not know. Maybe you could talk to us for a minute about that. Yeah, Corbett quite clearly was born to write. His early letters home from his travels, he traveled quite extensively right through his life. He was in India with his elder brother in his early 20s. His letters home are literary masterpieces, small, elegant, beautifully composed, and acutely aware of, the context in which he's writing. So he never writes as if he's just discovered this and it's

wonderful. He writes as if he's rediscovered something that other people have talked about. These are letters that his family clearly read and reread. The actual physical letters are folded and along the fold. They're falling to pieces. They've been read so many times. As a younger man, I think he worked out his dissatisfactions as a lawyer by writing advanced fiction. He wrote about the sea a lot. His first book is about the conversion of the Vikings from paganism to Christianity. And he doesn't take the obvious Victorian stance that, well, Christianity is just better. He balances the arguments. Ultimately, the Christians win out, but this isn't Corbett dictating that we should all follow

a particular view. He writes about England in the age of Elizabeth and Francis Drake, again, a sea story. The Corbett's third book is about a fabulous English kingdom set in the middle of southern Morocco. It's a wonderful story about rebellion and treachery, and it's all based on a picture by one of the leading pre-Raphaelite artists of the year, Edward Byrne Jones. So Corbett is closely involved in the world of art, literature, music, and his final novel is about the French Revolutionary War,

but again, it's a sea story. So he's a writer of the sea from early on. He's engaged with the sea. He's traveled extensively, necessarily by sea. So the ocean is in his mental world before he becomes a historian or a writer on maritime strategy. It's sort of difficult to imagine a man or a career like this happening today with its generalism, you know, from the law to fiction to not just writing about strategy and geopolitics, but be taking being taken. seriously about it because he is serious. And I suppose, you know, on some level, the opportunity to live a life like this is sort of a function of his, of his family's wealth. He had the leisure

to sort of become good at all these things. Yeah, I think that's true. I think Corbett is very much a product of his opportunity. His contemporaries, the American strategist, Alfred Thayer Mahon, had to write for a living. And his writing career is different. You know, Mahan complains in one famous letter that the reason he's republishing his essay so frequently is because he has a son to put through law school. Corbett was put through law school and didn't have to pay. His children were still quite young when he died, so he never faced any of those bills. He had family wealth, and he used that to serve the causes that he believed in. Britain, the future of a progressive empire future, the Royal Navy, which he clearly greatly admired.

He takes it as his duty to use that opportunity, that wealth, that potential leisure to serve the interests of the country. And he does that. His diaries make quite clear. He doesn't work five days a week. He works six, six and a half, sometimes seven days a week. During the First World War, it's a very, very rare day when he's not working. And that's well over four years. To my hand's point, I'm reminded of an amusing anecdote from the great British wine journalist,

Janice Robinson, who describes being a young reporter in the early 80s and interviewing the famous food writer, Elizabeth David. And she asks David, you know, why do you do it? Why have you chosen this life? And David stares at her bitterly and says, for the money. So as Corbett is turning to an interest in strategy, you described in your book, and I don't know exactly how to characterize. that I'll leave it to you, but I'll take a stab at it with a darkening mood or a sense of impending crisis of some sort around the time of the Boer War in Britain. This is a moment at which Britain is at the peak of its power, probably by most any measure relative to its peers. Why the sense of something dark on the horizon?

For Britain, the very end of the 19th century is inevitably going to see some change. Queen Victoria isn't going to be raining for much longer, as we know, she dies in 1901 before the Boer War even finishes. And the end of an epoch in which people like Corbett were born. So Corbett will have known no other monarch than Elizabeth. The head of state has been a constant from his birth right through to 1901. There's a growing challenge to the British system coming out of Ireland, the campaign for home rule in Ireland. And not independence, but home rule, an Irish parliament to run Irish affairs. Much along the lines of a Canadian parliament to run Canadian affairs, it really isn't a big ask that the Irish are putting in here.

But that raises very serious questions about the future of the empire. The challenge coming from rival powers by 1900 is clear that Germany is also building a major navy. The United States in the last decade has built a big navy. Germany is building one. Russia and France already have them. Britain is no longer absolutely dominant on the world ocean. It's now outnumbered by the combined fleets of possibly three or even two of its rivals. So there are challenges coming, the challenge of independence. We can already see challenges to British rule in India. So the new century is going to be different. Britain is going to face challenges. And it's about how Britain meets those challenges. and how it manages the changes that will happen. Is it going to resist all change and crash in ruins, or is it going to find an elegant solution in which it can preserve its vital interests

without having to fight this great existential conflict? And for Corbett and for men of his generation, they necessarily look back to the last great age of crisis, which is the French Revolutionary Napoleonic Wars. And it's no accident that Corbett's career as a historian ends in this climactic study of the Battle of Trafalgar and the great campaign that led to it. It's about understanding what is essential for Britain and what is not. And where Corbett, I think, differs from so many of his contemporaries and he's heavily influenced by many of the commentators of this period, is that he sees the maritime, the sea, the naval as critical to establishing why Britain is different.

and why British choices will not be the same as the choices being made in any of the other major powers at this point. Britain is sort of like other great powers, but it definitely isn't going to be following the same pattern. It isn't going to be looking to internal resources. It has to be engaged in the world. It can't stand alone. It is a unique and different kind of state. And his recognition of this drives his strategic thinking, his policy arguments, and it integrates with his liberalism and his career-long engagement with the law.

The legal basis of maritime warfare is absolutely critical. And Corbett has the skill to see this historically and legally and to put it into the political debates of his age. And he's doing this right to the end of his life. He fights a great battle, a great paper battle with Woodrow Wilson, who wants absolute freedom of the seas, which would end the British Airs. empire's ability to function and would challenge the basis of British power. And it's Corbett who provides all of the intellectual firepower that's used to defeat that argument. And when

Wilson concedes that freedom of the seas is not going to happen, he quotes Corbett. He doesn't say it's Corbett he's quoting, but there's a quote in his speech and it's Corbett. And so he comes to these principles of British power. As you point out through a sustained program of historical research and writing. And if I'm not mistaken, he may end in the Napoleonic Wars, but he begins with the Tudors and with Sir Francis Drake. Talk to us about that, if you don't mind. Corbett's relationship with Drake is critical.

While he ends with Nelson, Drake is his ultimate hero figure. In his novel about the Tudor period, Drake appears as a real individual in a work of fiction. And the reviewers pointed out that Corbett's treatment of Drake was actually more engaging than his fictional writing around it. So Drake, for him, is a paradoxical character. He's a pirate.

He's a privateer. He's an admiral. Where does he fit? And for Corbett, it's that intangible, fluid nature of Drake's identity that I think keeps to be engaged right the way to the end. Just before the First World War breaks out, he's leading a campaign to put up a statue of Drake in London. He never ceases to be engaged with this.

The Tudor era is when Britain steps aside from Europe and begins that drive that makes it a global maritime power. When the Tudors come to the throne, England is just off the coast of Europe. It's really part of Europe. And British English interests are European. By the time that Tudors finish 1604, England is clearly different. It's already got an agenda which is global and oceanic.

It's trading around and outside Europe, not just in Europe. And it's that transitional period that Corbett is looking to because the period he's living in is a period when those questions are being asked again, what is Britain? Where does it fit? How does it line up with the great powers of the world, which are mostly. European powers. Well, it's not European. It's not in Europe. It's alongside Europe. But it needs Europe to be balanced and peaceful and open for business. It doesn't want to move into Europe and take over control of Europe or even drive European politics. British intervention with Europe has always

been about preventing threat from Europe, not about getting engaged in Europe. And the post-second World War phase of British policy when the British were in Europe and stabilizing and defending Europe is entirely exceptional. Corbett would have been hugely surprised by the sustained deployment of a British army in Germany in peacetime. We'll come back to the to the chronology in a minute, but because we keep speaking to it, you've talked a bit about what it means for Britain to be a maritime power and how that's different. But let's talk about the difference for a second. We could pick any extent. We could pick the Austro-Hungarian Empire. How are the, how are the concerns of a continentally bounded power fundamentally different from British concerns?

This is a really important consideration. And I think in the 20th century, it's been somewhat confused because Britain has been engaged in these great coalitions, which have been primarily continental. And it's led many in Britain, particularly soldiers, to think that Britain is a continental power. Being an insular power, British security depends on the sea, right down to the advent of serious strategic warfare by air. And from the Middle Ages, the security of Britain depends on stopping one of the great powers controlling the Scheldt estuary, the piece of water between Antwerp and the North Sea, in which you can assemble a great invasion fleet. When the Hundred Years War

began in the Middle Ages, the French had an invasion fleet in that area, and the English sailed into the harbour and burnt it, and that's why the Hundred Years wars fought in France, not in England. And all the way down to the Second World War, keeping the dominant European power out of what we now call Belgium is fundamental to British interests. The British are not interested in what happens in the rest of Europe as long as they can keep that piece of territory free. That's why the French Revolutionary Wars never end for the British, because getting the French out of Belgium is the absolute requirement. And it's not until that happens that Britain is starting to think about peace, and it uses the peace process of 18, 14, 15 to establish a European state system

which guarantees the French will not get back into Belgium. And it spends a whole of the next century balancing that system out to make sure that doesn't happen. That's Britain's strategic concern, but its economic opportunity is not in Europe. The whole point of leaving Europe in the early Tudor period was that the Europeans were closing markets against the British. Henry VIII left Europe because the Habsburg Empire was using its market dominance to close down trade access to the British and to penalise British trade. And so the British set off to find trade with other players, the Ottomans, the Russians, and increasingly began to think about opening up Atlantic trade routes, which ultimately, of course, led to the foundation of English

colonies in North America. So the English realized that they couldn't control Europe and they weren't going to let Europe control them. And that meant they had to open up new worlds in which to do business and new places to generate the resources which they needed to balance out the European system. One of Corbett's early and important books is a history of British power in the Mediterranean. How does the Mediterranean fit into this global puzzle? Because it's still European, obviously, in its context. The Mediterranean book is Corbett's response to a big debate about the future of British power, should Britain be a Mediterranean power?

That was a live debate in the 1890s, which started in the serious press. Corbett's argument is this. It was not until the British took control of the Mediterranean, just around the time it became Britain in the end of the 17th century, that it became a great power in the European system. When a British fleet dominates the Mediterranean, the French, the Spanish, all the Italian kingdoms, and the Pope and the Ottoman Sultan have to pay attention to what the British want. Suddenly, naval power makes Britain a great power in a way that no British army was ever going to do.

It also enables them to control the North African corsair states, Algiers and Tunis and even to an extent Morocco, and to protect British trade. So it's able to penetrate economically. It's able to use its strategic leverage to change the balance of power in the region. And this means that in every war from the 1690s onwards, the British have serious alliance value, even for landlocked states like the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Austrians can see that if the British command the Mediterranean, that gives them huge advantages in a war against France. So by playing to their strengths, naval power, economic development, the British were able to maximize their advantage.

And Corbett uses the long history of Britain in the Mediterranean to establish how that functions. And he basically underlines the point that commanding the Mediterranean is still really important to Britain's role in balancing the European system. And even in the time he's writing that, when the book is published in 1904, the British science. in the Entente with France because they're balancing out an increasingly aggressive Germany. And where is Germany applying pressure against France in Morocco on the Mediterranean coast at Tangier? So the synergy is there. And that book really opens with the discussion of the British, the English, having a base at Tangier in the age of Charles II. So Corbett is using those parallels and those synergies.

So the same map explains what Charles II is doing. and you can use it to explain what the Anglo-French Entente is doing in 1904-5. So geography is constant and strategic interests are fairly constant, and that is a case study which explains why Britain is in the Mediterranean, it needs to remain. So Corbett is a writer of history for today, and while he is using the past, he is constantly aware of who he's talking to

and what the debates of the age are. So he doesn't make those choices on an academic basis in the way that perhaps a modern scholar might do. He makes them on the basis of policy because he never has that university post where he has to write that scholarly monograph. He's writing for sailors and politicians and generals, he hopes, not for an academic audience. And as he's continuing this program of research, and as you point out, he's starting to teach professionals. You know, there are other authors that are already dominant at the time. You've made reference to Mahan in terms of war more generally. Claudez is still an influential figure.

Let's talk about Mahan for an instant because this is, I think, a dominant trend, right? When Corbett's ideas are forming, what is Mahan's view of sea power? And that can lead us into how Corbett sort of differentiates himself. Yeah, I think this is one of the great points of debate. What is Mahan saying that Corbett isn't and vice versa? Alfred T. Mahan is operating in a country which is very large, very continental, has just finished wrapping up the whole internal settlement of the continent as an enormous industrial base, a very small army and not much of a navy.

And Mahan is making a big play for the United States in the 20th century being a maritime, dynamic, expansive, economic player with quasi-imperial interests, America needs a big fleet to defend itself against the only possible threat, which comes from one of the European powers. And the United States Navy, in which Mahan serves, would very much like to be the dominant military service of the United States. So he's pushing a particular set of arguments that work very well in the American context and end up translating quite well into German. He's certainly, He certainly persuades his ideas are used to persuade the Germans to build a great battle fleet. But they're not relevant to Britain at all.

Britain has a big Navy. It's had a big Navy for a long time. It absolutely needs one. It has no choice to be self-sufficient. It has no possibility of being isolated. It depends on massive amounts of imported food. So Britain has to be out at sea controlling the seas. So Mahan's vision that you can secure the United States by winning a great naval battle somewhere in the Atlantic.

It's not relevant. And this is what Corbett subtly and elegantly points out that Mahan's strategy works very well for the United States. It works fairly well for quite a lot of other major powers, but it's not British strategy. And what he elegantly does is use Klauswitz's philosophical approach to war to explain that what the British are doing is different, but it's still. follows the philosophical concepts that Klauswitz is advancing. Corbett is the best of all the early 20th century Klauswitzians because he understands Klauswitz in the context of his own national experience. German writers at this time in the main are converting Klauswitz into an apostle

of total war to suit the agendas of the contemporary German army. Corbett says this is just wrong. You know, that isn't what Klauswitz is saying at all. He's saying there are different kinds of war. We have choices. We don't have to do this kind of war or that kind of war. And that Klauswitz almost ignores the sea because Germany or the Prussia that he lived in hardly has a coast, doesn't have a navy, and really isn't very interested. Klauswitz does mention you need to guard the coast if you have one. That's about he's more interested in defending mounting passes and river crossings than the sea. But his philosophical approach, is the basis of Corbett's system.

And Mahan recognizes this. He said, look, Corbett is very much following Klauswitz's system. And it's Corbett's ability to read Klauswitz in English, to turn him into somebody who can advise on how to think about war from an English perspective that makes him so important. And that, I think, is one of the great strengths of his principles of maritime strategy that they are so securely founded in Klauswetian principles. And Mahan is very much more a student of Antoine Henri Germini,

the Swiss-French writer who his father taught several generations of American generals at West Point. And if you want to know why all the generals in the Civil War had the same battle plan, it's because they all sat in the same class and read the same textbook. And it was Mahan's father who taught them. Mahan uses Jomani a lot. He never mentions his father, I think, because his father committed suicide, and I think he was very, very anxious not to raise that. But it's quite clear that his strategic thinking has been shaped by his heritage and his exposure to French strategic theory, and particularly the work of Jomene. So that, I think, differentiates them.

Corbett is a progressive liberal civilian. Mahan is a socially conservative, uniformed officer. Again, they're coming from different worlds. Mahan is used to hierarchical society. Corbett is used to one where if you have the skill and the brains and in his case, the money, you can change things fairly quickly. So I think Corbett is a more fluid, flexible thinker. Mahan, I think, is more securely founded in his professional identity

in the heritage of his strategic thinking. and both of them are writing for their own country and their own the service that they that they educate. And that again will change the way that they operate. So the more you know about each strategic writer, the more obvious it becomes that they're doing something unique and distinct. One of the I think the most important points I've taken away from your book is that strategy, maybe not uniquely, but certainly importantly. is something that by definition has to be applied at a particular time and place by a particular nation or state or group of people. And that ought to condition how one one thinks of the problems in front of one. And you know, you prosecute this case very ably throughout.

We've been we've been sort of teasing around its edges and pushing towards it. But I think we've arrived. Should we talk a bit about what Corbett's actual system is? What are his maritime principles? Right. Yeah. I think that's, you know, I think getting that, that core. For Corbett, control of sea communications is the key to everything.

If you have the ability to control what moves by sea, then from the British point of view, you can continue to provide your country with food. You have choices. You can prevent an invasion. The enemy can't move his army by sea. You're secure. if you can continue to import food and raw materials, Britain is secure. You then turn to the offensive.

You can shut down other people's economies. The primary strategic element of Corbett's system is economic warfare. And the key tool of that is not ships and squadrons moving around the ocean. It's the legal basis on which you can stop and prosecute neutral merchant shipping in wartime to prevent it supplying your enemy. This was a huge issue in the Napoleonic era. Napoleon's continental system basically said if you trade with the British, I'll destroy you. And the British said if you trade with the French, we'll arrest you.

And that led to a serious disagreement with the United States from 1805 onwards. Because the United States, as a neutral, just wanted to trade with everybody and make as much money as possible. and neither the British nor the French allowed them to do this. The American government at that time, the Democratic Republicans, were somewhat francophile, and they tended to take what the French said on at face value rather than the British. And that led to a war. The war of 1812 is about ultimately a combination of ambition to secure territory and ambition to secure economic opportunity. So for Corbett, you have to have a very secure.

legal basis for command of the sea, because otherwise neutral powers will complain. And we know in the First World War, neutral powers complain, including the United States. And there's a constant balancing act between having an economic warfare system that will be really effective against the enemy and having an economic war legal system, which is sustainable against the complaints of major neutral powers. So the British are constantly aware that if they do anything that upsets any of the neutrals in the First World War, the Dutch, the Danes and the Norwegians and the Swedes are obvious candidates here. There's the possibility that the United States will take action and that will be detrimental to Britain's interests. So Corbett recognizes both the

strength of economic warfare and its vulnerability. It's going to put you in a place where neutrals will ask big questions about you. And fortunately for the British, both in the olionic era and in the two world wars ultimately everybody has to take sides all the major powers end up enmeshed in the war on one side or another by the middle of 1917 the united states is a belligerent it's not an ally but it's certainly belligerent from 1939 onwards the united states is a is a positive neutral and it becomes a belligerent um and so we have less problem with those neutral rights issues in World War II than World War I because World War I was demonstrated that every time the United States is blocking Britain's attempt to defeat Germany, ultimately in the long term,

it's exposing itself to greater risk. And it needs to make a decision. It's got to be on one side or the other. I think Woodrow Wilson would rather like to have seen the end of the German Empire and the British Empire all in one war, but that wasn't going to happen. And they had to prioritize one of them. So that's the basis of it. Command of the Sea gives you security and it gives you a massively strong weapon, which you can use to break the enemy's economy. And in a succession of wars, the British were able to do this to the French, the Russians and the Germans. So the system does work. But these are not going to be short wars. They're not going to be filled with massive military victories. And there is no need to fight any great battles at sea. So Corbett is not talking about great battles. Where Mahal Hahn says you win command of the sea in a battle. Corbett says, we've already got it. You know, unless the other guys come out and challenges, we don't need to fight about this. We don't need to fight the Battle of Jutland. Anyway, it's fought just off the German coast.

It's not just off the British coast. The Germans are not coming to try and land an army in Britain. It's the British are in German waters. And the great battles at sea are not something you can guarantee. You can't force the enemy to come out and fight. so you've got to take the opportunity when you get it. And that's what Trafalgar is all about. It's a fleeting moment in time when the enemy is at sea

and Nelson understands that just this one's there at sea and we can't afford to do anything other than wipe them out. So we take massive tactical risks to secure a big strategic victory. And Corbett like Nelson understands that tactics should be determined by strategy and policy. You shouldn't start by thinking about winning the battle. You should start by thinking about what you need to achieve to secure political and strategic advantage and adjust the tactics accordingly. So at Trafalgar, Nelson's tactics are, as Corbett says, they're truly absurd.

You know, that is not how to win the battle, but it is how to win the battle quickly before the storm breaks to ensure that you secure the strategic result you need. So you take risks at one level to secure success at the higher level. And ultimately it's about the integration of all elements of national power, army, navy, economics, politics, economy, into a system which is dominated by the maritime perspective. And that gives Britain its unique strength because every other power on earth is dominated by more terrestrial concerns. Even the United States, which is effectively isolated by oceans, ultimately masses up and becomes a massive terrestrial military power in both world wars.

Britain doesn't do that because it can't. It's not big enough. And because that wouldn't serve its interests. So it's establishing that having a maritime strategy is different to having any other kind of strategy. So when Corbett says some principles of maritime strategy, what he's saying is this is British strategic doctrine. That's what we do. That's what we've always done. And going forward, we're going to have to think about how we do this under modern conditions.

And that means updating the way we look at international law, updating the way we use and deploy our fleets. But the principles are all there. The principles are sound. They're established. And they are based on experience and Klauswitz's system. Even though it's obviously of its moment and influenced by Klaus Fitz, hearing you lay it out like that makes me think that there's a real echo in all of that of Paracly's first speech in the Peloponnesian War.

It's not a radically different vision, updated perhaps. And I suppose that speaks to the historical continuities for maritime powers. Yeah, absolutely. And I think men of Corbett's generation and earlier were acutely aware of those parallels. In my last book, Cpao states, I looked at Athens. and Carthage and Venice and the Dutch Republic as precursor sea powers. They, too, had used maritime economic warfare as the basis of their strategy. Have they'd accepted that this was a long strategy, not a short strategy?

You can't march on the enemy's capital city with a fleet of war galleys or dreadnoughts. You know, that's a different kind of strategic problem. And those continuities, everybody knows them. Walter Raleigh talks about them. He uses the Punic Wars as an example. of what's the war between Spain and England. You know, it's quite clear who the Carthaginians are. Napoleon calls the English the Carthaginians.

And JMW. Turner paints a great picture of the rise of the Carthaginian Empire to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon. It's in the National Gallery here in London, and it is one of the truly great pictures. You know, it's absolutely of the moment. We are the new Carthaginians, only this time we've won. The Romans have been defeated. So speak for a moment about the other side of the argument, because the way you lay it out, it all sounds so reasonable and sort of self-evident that it sort of calls into question,

who in their right mind could possibly disagree. But of course, there are voices at the time for a continental strategy. I guess they tend to come from the Army and sort of politically more associated with conservatism. Who could possibly disagree? The curious thing about Corbett's career is that many in the Royal Navy disagreed and even more in the army. You're right. There is a connection between continentalism and conservatism. And the army obviously is licking its wounds after the Boer War where it didn't perform very well. It got to be very big and it rather liked being a big army, but it hadn't covered itself in glory.

And it rushed into professionalism as an antidote. The Victorian army was never hugely professional. Large parts of it were remarkably amateur. So professionalism became the new mantra, and professionalism meant copying the Germans, reading lots of German books in English translation, of course, because the English are not very good at languages. And these books were being produced in London. So there's two publishers in London who translate all of the leading German military literature into English, and then put it out in red-jacketed books, because the British Army is a red-jacketed organization. And so you can read in English the deluded and nihilistic fantasies of Colmar von de Gaulle,

who's already talking about total war in the 1880s and is getting ready for a war in which he doesn't really care with, the Germans win or not, long as he's big. We have a really serious amount of fighting. So the army is reading some very dangerous literature. It's the wrong thing to be reading if you're the small army of a maritime imperial power, a German who's thinking about marching from Germany across the Rhine and into Paris, that's not a useful text for the British to read. The smart people in the British Army understood this.

And so we actually need to look at the American Civil War because that's about mobilizing large citizen armies. And that's much more likely to be what we're doing than using mass professional armies. So the British Army becomes professional by essentially copying the world's leading army, which is the Germans. And many in the Royal Navy don't want to think about. about Corbett's wider economic and legal arguments, because they very much prefer Mahan's idea that you fight a big battle,

and that gives you all that you want. So Corbett's opponents on the naval side are very much using Mahan as their argument. And Corbett's argument against Mahan isn't with Mahan. It's with the very simplistic way in which British quasi-Maharnian writers are using his argument. Or you win a battle and that gives you everything, doesn't it? Corbett says that gives you nothing. You know, you have to then exploit that battle. You have to use it to achieve economic, political or strategic advantage.

So the people who disagree with Corbett are either fundamentally illiterate or they're fundamentally unaware of how Britain actually operates. And there is a British military history in which fighting on the continent has been significant for a very long time. It's seriously misguided. If the British have a very large army fighting somewhere in Europe, something has gone very badly wrong. It's not in Britain's interest to do that.

At the end of the First World War, when the British had this enormous army fighting in France, what positive benefit did the British get for all of that fighting in France? You could write the answer on a piece of paper without making any marks at all, absolutely zero. You know, you don't even get gratitude. The French have never said thank you. It's not...

Let's talk about the First World War then. What would have been... As you point out, it involves tremendous continental involvement by the British, in particular in France. What would have been the Corbettian vision of that conflict? From 1900 onwards, Corbett had worked very closely with Admiral Sir John later, Lord Fisher, who was major reforming figure in the Royal Navy, a progressive liberal in a Navy dominated by social conservatives,

man who wanted to improve the recruitment and training of officers, conditions of life for men serving on the lower deck, to improve the efficiency of the fleet, to upgrade and improve designs, to introduce new warship types, including submarines. Generally, the man who modernized the Royal Navy before the First World War, and he and Corbett were very much on the same intellectual plane.

They both think about development and progress rather than stasis. So when Corbett is working with Fisher, he's writing the great propaganda pieces that support Fisher's key programs, educational reform, the dreadnought, strategic redistribution. So he knows how Fisher thinks, and much of Corbett's thinking is shaped by that relationship. When the war breaks out in August 1914, Corbett is engaged by the government writing an official history of the recent Russo-Japanese War, but is also heavily involved with the naval staff and on the development of naval education. So he's already inside the warmaking machine. He's inside the Admiralty Building. He's inside the Committee of Imperial Defense, which directs British strategy. But he's not in a position to drive strategy until Fisher returns

to office in late October 1914 after the failure of the Admiralty administration to secure the results they'd expected. At that point, Fisher immediately clears up the war outside Europe. Remember, the First World War ended on December the 6th, 1914, with the destruction of Admiral von Spays Squadron off the Falkland Islands. From that point on, the Germans are just fighting a very big European war, and they're fighting against the Entente powers who have access to the world's resources in men, food, raw materials, industrial products, and they're never going to win. Commanding the world gives the Entente an amazing amount of power, which they do their very best to waste in futile offensives. Fisher then develops a very clear strategy for the war,

working very closely with Corbett. He argues that the British need to remove the Germans from the north coast of Belgium, where the Germans are using Ostendency. Bruger as major bases for destroyer and submarine raids on British merchant shipping, which is a major strategic problem throughout the war. And that to do this, the British Army needs to be linked up with the Royal Navy and to advance along the Belgian coast to the Dutch frontier. Really straightforward, serves British interests and is entirely in line with British strategy throughout the previous 300 years.

There's nothing radical about this. It's just amazing that the British army doesn't see it. After all, their last great battle was fought to defend that very area against Napoleon in 1815. Waterloo is about maritime access and about the river shell estuary. So Corbett is engaged in developing that plan, but the culmination is not clearing the Belgian coast. It's sending the Royal Navy's forces into the Baltic Sea to complete the blockade of Germany, to isolate Germany from its major supplies of iron ore, finished iron and steel goods, copper, and even food coming from Sweden.

Scandinavian food supply is a massive element of the German war effort, and Fisher has known this for a long time. So the plan is to open up the Baltic with a special fleet of newly built vessels, mostly of shallow draft, and preserve the existing grand fleet, which gives the British command of the world ocean, not to risk it in breaking into the Baltic, but to use a second fleet to link up with the Russians

who have a fleet in the Baltic, and to complete the blockade of Germany. And to do this, the risk is that the Germans will invade Denmark and try and close the entrance of the Baltic. At that point, the British Army will be deployed to the big islands of the Danish archipelago, the islands of Funen and Zeeland, and they will hold open the Baltic and enable the blockade to be completed. It's entirely consistent with Corbett's writing on the core of grand strategy

being economic warfare. And it's entirely consistent with Fisher's abhorrence of major battle. Fisher doesn't see any need for a major battle unless the Germans want one, because the British are in a position to strangle the German economy without fighting those battles. And a combination of a British army and the Royal Navy can hold the Danish islands, hold the Baltic open, and secure a fairly rapid end to the war in 1916. Instead of this, Mr. Churchill, who's in charge of the Navy, decides on a futile attack on the Dardanelles,

which turns into a double debacle when the army sends some troops, and the whole thing just doesn't work. So the Dardanelles-Gillipoli fiasco is the case that ruined the chances of conducting a proper British operation to attack Germany. You don't defeat Germany by attacking Turkey. You defeat Germany by taking out the German economy. The weak point of Germany's war effort is not its army or its navy. It's the economy. What crumbles in Germany? The economy in the railway system.

And it would have crumbled a lot sooner without access to Sweden. In 1916, the Germans can't even feed their soldiers without Sweden, let alone find a hardware to build a war machine. So that is the real target. The soldiers won't hear of it. and the conservative sailors don't want to think about it. And when Fisher then resigns to try and secure this strategy in the late spring of 1915, but his bluff is called and the soldiers are able to fight their war

right down to the end at enormous cost. I'm only sitting here talking to you because both my grandfathers came back from the Western Front. One of them quite badly damaged, but they both came back. otherwise that doesn't work. So at enormous cost, the British fought the wrong war in the wrong place

for the wrong reasons because it suited the soldiers to fight that war and the Navy didn't produce other than Fisher the officers with the intellectual skill and the commitment to make that argument. And when the politicians were asked to choose, they always chose the easy option. The army was in France and reinforcing it just seemed easier.

there seemed to be some kind of bizarre logic to that. So ultimately, Fisher's project failed because the quality of political leadership in Britain was very low. The one political figure who understood what Fisher was doing and continued to think this was the right answer was Lloyd George, who was the successful war completing Prime Minister of 1917, 18. all the other politicians just couldn't see far enough to understand what the options were. Corbett and Churchill end up in a dispute about the analysis of all this after the fact, yes? Yeah. Churchill is one of the great negative characters of this study. On the first day of the war, it's Churchill who says the army should be sent to France.

He's the first Lord of the Admiralty. His job is to represent the Navy's interests. And yet here is Winston Churchill. former lieutenant of Hozah's cheerleading the army, which means the Navy doesn't have an amphibious strike force to use and severely compromises British strategy. Instead of having a maritime strategy, Britain ends up with a military strategy and a naval strategy. And the synergy between the two, which is the core of British success, is ripped out and thrown away by Churchill. The failures of the early months of the war, the disaster at Coronel, the loss of cruises off the Dutch

and a sequence of other failures, they're quite clearly down to inadequate leadership at the Admiralty. And in the official history, Corbett writes them up very delicately, but it's quite clear that things were not well done and somebody was responsible. And Churchill is so frightened of the damage this will do to his career that he fights a year-long battle to try and prevent Corbett's official history commissioned by the government and written using all of the official materials from being published. What he doesn't know is that Corbett is a brilliant lawyer, and he wrote the contract under which one of the major London publishing houses has the contractual right to publish this

text, and there's nothing the government can do about it. If they'd blocked the publication of the book, the publishers would have been able to take them to court and sue them. Corbett wrote the contract. He arranged that all of the official histories of the First World War were published commercially to ensure the government couldn't block them. It's classic Corbett, attention to detail. One of those things that really good lawyers have in spades. Never miss the points of detail, because on the points of detail, turn the big picture. So brilliant. He then fought the same battle

with David Beatty over the blunders at the Battle of Jutland committed by Beatty and his squadron, and he won that argument as well. Both men, after his death, took the opportunity to be unbelievably unpleasant about him and his reputation suffered seriously from the writing of both Beatty and particularly Churchill. Churchill was still banging on about Corbett after the Second World War, very undignified and very misguided. You're being very generous with your time and I want to ask one more question that probably deserves another hour of discussion, but we can dispatch it with less than that. The very title of your book, The British Way of War, suggests that you think that what Corbett has to say about war 100 years ago is applicable to Britain's situation today, at least in some fashion.

And so I'm interested in that. But I'm also, if only out of personal interest, concerned with the question of what you think we Americans should take from Corbett. I wouldn't be the first to suggest that there are some strategic echoes between the position of America today and the position of Britain at the time Corbett is writing. Yeah, I think there's two very good points there. And I'll start with a second, really, because it sort of rolls along nicely. The United States is not a power like Britain. It has, it has enormous resources in human and economic and industrial terms. It is also far further away from potential adversaries than Britain. You know, if you stand on the cliffs at Dover, you can see the enemy. obviously they're not not the enemy at the moment but for hundreds of years the enemy would literally within within eye shop and the enemy for britain has always been larger more powerful countries with bigger populations who would overwhelm england britain militarily so the sea has been absolutely essential it would be a very ill-advised contemporary superpower that invaded the united states and they would lose that war um

whatever they tried because the United States is simply so big and so powerful. And it strikes me that it would have the ability to mobilize the resources it would need to deal with any possible threat of that nature. So the threat will necessarily be different. But that question of having to rely on the ocean is similar and yet different. The United States Navy, like the Royal Navy, is a very effective, powerful, professional Navy. But it sees the world differently. The United States Navy is a Navy that thinks about fighting other navies.

The Royal Navy is a Navy that thinks about controlling the sea. And it has a much larger engagement with peacetime missions. It thinks about dealing with people trafficking, drug smuggling, gun running, things like that. You know, I say his Navy is really much more interested in who the enemy is. And it tends to think in a more military way, where's the enemy army? Let's go and find them and fight them. And the Royal Navy has always said, if we have to do that, we'll do that. But it's really about keeping control of the sea.

The modern United States, the Navy is not the dominant service. It is not the lead service. It's probably the third service and has been for a very long time. In modern Britain, the Navy is still the dominant service. And going back to that point about British way of war, the major British military deployment of 2021 was a carrier task force going all the way to Japan and back. and doing cross-deck operations in the Philippine Sea with American and Japanese ships, linking up with old friends and allies, a place like India and Singapore,

signing a new defence agreement with the US and Australia about nuclear submarines. The past and future of British defence is maritime, not naval, but maritime. Britain has to think maritime because it's not big enough to be able to have, the luxury of thinking about having an army, a Navy, and an Air Force doing their own thing. We need to get all of our defense, diplomatic, economic, cultural power engaged in a common messaging exercise. We need to think about these things in the way that men of Corbett's generation thought about them. They saw the sea as central to the project. The British Empire is a huge oceanic connection system.

John Robert Seeley, the great Cambridge professor of the 1870s and 18, said that there were three great powers in 1870, 75, 18, Russia, the United States, and Britain. Two of them were huge continental states, and the other one was an ocean, an oceanic version of Venice. That's what it means. If you're that small, you have to be very agile and you have to get all of your policy issues linked together, you have to make sure that all of your policy has a constant central theme and that you don't diffuse your efforts because you don't have the resources to waste any effort

on side projects. And going to the continent with a very large army is a side project if you live on an island. In both world wars, the United States was able to fund those side projects with these because of its size and its scale and its ability to mobilize resources and human resources, particularly. For the British, they could only do that at the expense of sacrificing other things in the maritime domain. And remember, the Second World War brings the British Empire to an end, not because they lost the war, but because they blew the economy to pieces, waging it.

At the end of the Second World War, Britain wasn't just economically disadvantaged. It was literally flat broke. they didn't have a penny or any credit. And that's what happens when you make difficult strategic choices. Two world wars meant that the project that Corbett had studied and whose security he'd examined was no longer viable. When the money had gone, those choices disappeared. So going forward, it's about understanding what Britain can do,

what Britain can't do, and how to make the best use of the resources you have. it's a point having a wish list for things you can't have. What have we got? What can we do? And by concentrating on a maritime posture, Britain will gain more value as a partner, an ally, a contributor, than it will by having some three-cut, diffused combination of air, land and sea forces, none of which will add up to a strategic impact. So we need to concentrate on where we can really make a difference. And there's only one place we can do that. And Corbett wrote the book about it. Andrew Lambert, author of The British Way of War. It's been a completely fascinating discussion.

Thank you so much for joining. It's my pleasure. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.