Sea Control - Sea Control 239 - Things Done by Halves with Dr. BJ Armstrong

Episode Date: April 11, 2021

Links1. 21st Century Mahan: Sound Conclusions for the Modern Era, by BJ Armstrong, Naval Institute Press, 2013.2. 21st Century Sims: Innovation, Education and Leadership for the Modern Era, by BJ Armstrong, Naval Institute Press, 2015.3. Small Boats and Daring Men: Maritime Raiding, Irregular Warfare, and the Early American Navy, by BJ Armstrong, Oklahoma University Press, 2019.4. “Things Done By Halves: Observations from America’s First Great Power Competition,” by BJ Armstrong, Naval War College Review, Vol. 73, No. 4, 2020.5. “Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy,” Department of Defense, 2018.6. Six Frigates: The Epic Story of the Founding of the U.S. Navy, by Ian Toll, W.W. Norton & Company, 2008.7. Stoddert’s War: Naval Operations During the  Quasi-War with France, 1798-1801, by Michael Palmer, Naval Institute Press, 2000.8. On the Wide Seas: The US Navy in the Jacksonian Era, by Claude Berube, University of Alabama Press, 2021 (forthcoming).9. Shaping a Maritime Empire: The Commercial and Diplomatic Role of the American Navy, 1829-1861, by John Schroeder, Praeger, 1985.10. “A Hero,”by BJ Armstrong, Naval History Magazine, February 2021.

Hey folks, Jared here. I have talked about our feed. I'm going to keep talking about our feed. There are two existing C-Control feeds out there. The legacy feed is labeled C-Control-SimSec. It's run through something called FeedBurner, and we have no control over what's populated in that feed. If you look at it, the last several episodes are missing. The current feed is labeled simply C-Control, and it includes the phrase SimSec's Flagship Podcast in its description. So C-Control, SimSec's Flagship Podcast, that's where you want to be. Please rate and review the new feed as well. This week we have Walker Mills, and I don't think I need to say a lot more about his guest than it's historian B.J. Armstrong.

So B.J. was literally one of the first six names that I wrote down when we were restarting the podcast and framing out who exactly we wanted to bring in to talk to, to kick things off. I'm very excited to finally get him aboard. We've mentioned the knockout, most of the names on that list, but Cher, if you're listening, please come on. I want to discuss the Turn Back Time video. serious note though this episode was the very first edited and produced by a new member of our editing staff marie williams so welcome to the team marie i'd also encourage you to check out everything that's going on over at the main website simsec.org just complete a retrospective series on the 1980s maritime strategy as well as naval intelligence week and our next call for

submissions for project trident is out so that topic maritime infrastructure and trade is having a bit of a moment with all the discussion surrounding Ever Given and the Suez Canal. As I record this, it's actually T-minus eight hours and counting to recording a podcast with our old friend, Dr. Salmer Cagliano, on that fiasco. Biodigress. If you're interested in contributing to the discussion on maritime infrastructure and trade, submissions are due April 19th. For more information, check out our website, simsec.org. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcast.

On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Welcome back aboard the Sea Control podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security. This week, we're talking with Dr. B.J. Armstrong, who is a professor of naval history at the United States Naval Academy. Today we're going to talk about his new article in the Naval War College Review, Things Done by Habs, Observations from America's First Great Power Competition. BJ, happy to have you here. Can you go ahead and introduce yourself to our audience?

Walker, thank you so much for having me aboard. It's great to be with you. As you said, I'm a permanent military professor at the U.S. Naval Academy. I guess I'll start by caveating that my opinions here are my academic and personal opinions and not the Naval Academy's opinions. But I'm a helicopter pilot by trade, flew search and rescue and special warfare missions when I was in the fleet. But I went off and got my Ph.D. at King's College, London, where I studied American naval history in the age of sail for my for my thesis or my dissertation. And I'm now a permanent military professor here in the history department. So I teach classes on American naval history, as well as the history of air power, as well as research seminars and kind of the developmental courses that we have here at the Naval Academy. I've edited a couple books on Alfred Thayer Mahan and William Sims.

And I'm the author of the recent book, Small Boats and Daring Men, about maritime raiding and irregular warfare in the American age of sail experience. Awesome. Well, we're happy to have you, and we're hoping that we get to talk both about your recent article in Naval War College Review and also about your book. So now that you've introduced yourself, can you introduce us to your recent article about the quasi-war? Absolutely. You know, the article itself came about as I was recently, you know, the past, I don't know, I guess, let's say two years, reading articles about our contemporary security environment. And a lot of these articles have started to talk about great power competition. And then we had the National Defense Strategy came out and explicitly told us, right, that we are in a new era of great power competition. And as I read our articles in different journals, whether Proceedings or the Marine Corps Gazette or online at War on the Rocks or places like that, you know, oftentimes someone would say great power competition and then immediately pivot their article or their discussion to great power war, right? They would talk about the wartime conflict between peer or near-peer competitors. And as I read these articles, they were always good articles.

They always talked about important things to think about when thinking about wars. But they used that label, great power competition, and I kept thinking, wow, competition means so much more than just wars. And as I was thinking about this, you know, my own historical studies, of course, are in my background. And I thought to myself, is there a good case study that can take us out of our contemporary environment? Because sometimes I think moving further back into the past offers us the chance to think in new and different ways when looking at a case study. if we look at a case study that's contemporary, then there's way too many parallels that are close, right? Too many things that are just like they are now that might skew our ability to take

real insights from it. And that's part of why I like studying the age of sale, because I feel like, you know, 200, 250 years apart, it's long enough ago that you can end up with different kinds of insights. And so I started asking myself, is there a case? And of course, the United States its very first war, its very first conflict, is an example of maritime hybrid conflict or gray zone operations as sparked by great power competition, a conflict that was short of declared war. And that's the quasi-war with France. And so I kind of took that thought process of, you know, what could another kind of historical case study offer us in terms of insights when thinking about our modern and our contemporary security environment. And then I used the quasi-war

as that case study to kind of study that history and think about what were the things that planners, what were the things that the folks conducting those operations for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps in the quasi-war, what influenced their decision-making and what were the challenges that they faced? And so that's kind of the background of the article. Do you think you could give us a little bit of a background or a quick summary of what the quasi war was, because I'm, you know, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say not all of our listeners are familiar with it, especially because we pride ourselves on having a diverse and international audience. It's not just a diverse and international audience question, right? I would

say that the vast majority of Americans and including the vast majority of military officers in the US services, have no idea what I'm talking about when I say the quasi war. So the quasi war was a conflict between the United States and France during the French Revolutionary Era. So it was in 1798 to 1800. And it occurred really as an outgrowth of the war between Great Britain and France that was the French Revolutionary War. So we're talking about before Napoleon's rise, really. And so the Quasi-War is sparked as Great Britain and France go to war after the French Revolution. Now, the Americans had been allies of the French. Famously, Louis XVI allied with the American cause during the American Revolution. The French played, frankly, a critical

and decisive role in American independence. You know, the Virginia Capes between the French fleet and the British fleet is the event that is required for Yorktown to happen successfully for the Americans, right? So if the French had not defeated the British or turned them away at the Battle of Virginia Capes, Cornwallis would have been reinforced and the war would have gone on. Yorktown would not have been an American victory. So the French are vital to American independence. And so when the French launched their own revolution, they turned to the Americans and they say, hey, we helped you with your revolution. We are allies by treaty. We want your support against the British now that we're at war with them in our own revolution.

And George Washington, who was president at the time, really found this problematic for a number of reasons. First, both the French and the British had political constituencies here in the United States and supporters here in the United States. You know, it's kind of a stereotype, but, you know, the way most of us early Americanists look at it, for the most part, the Federalist Party, the Federalists in government tended to support the British and British views of the world, while the Democratic Republican Party, Thomas Jefferson and his compatriots tended to like the French and tended to support the French. And so there was this political divide that already existed in the United States of America that could get very quickly and very easily wrapped up in a conflict between France and Britain. And Washington was afraid of this politically, domestically. He also knew that the United States economically did not have the ability to get involved in a war right now. And so as at the end of Washington's second term, right as right as John Adams is about to take over the presidency, Washington denies the French American support in their war with Britain in their own revolution. It's kind of a circuitous argument that he makes diplomatically as to why he denies that. He says, basically, he says, we made that treaty with Louis the 16th and you just cut his head off. And so that treaty doesn't exist anymore. Now, diplomatic historians and diplomats at the time will tell you that's a really problematic argument for continuity of government and international relations, which is true. But Washington did it nonetheless, because he did not want the United States to get sucked into this war.

The problem is Washington can want all he wants, but the French and the British are going to do what they're going to do on the world's oceans. And what ends up happening is the French directory, which is how the government was known in Paris during the beginning of the revolution there, the directory authorizes the French to begin attacking Americans because they say, look, if you're not with us, you're against us. And so French privateers and French naval forces begin attacking American merchants, accusing those American merchants of carrying cargo to their enemies, carrying cargo to the British, supporting the British and the British enemy, and therefore making them legitimate prizes, you know, under the laws of war at that time. And so, you know, the French begin attacking American merchants in the West Indies and in the Atlantic. So whether Washington wanted to or not, the Americans begin to get drawn into the conflict. So as John Adams is president, these attacks begin happening, and eventually Adams and the Congress have to respond. There's nearly 400 attacks on British merchants in the year before the war begins from an American perspective in terms of involvement. So the Americans have to create a navy. They didn't have a navy. They have to create a navy and they have to fight this maritime defensive war against French attacks, which lasts until 1800 when a treaty is finally signed between the French and the Americans ceasing hostilities. so you mentioned that we we didn't have a navy at that time can you talk a little bit more to that and kind of what was the state of the navy or the or the proto-navy as it were politically domestically americans and we know this from our studies of the american revolution

americans are suspicious of militaries right the quartering of of troops is is one of the reasons You know, quartering of British troops in American homes, the oppression of the British army is one of the reasons for the revolution. It's in the Constitution that you can't quarter troops. And so, you know, in early America, there's very much a strong suspicion of standing forces, whether that's ground forces or maritime forces. And there's a suspicion that particularly when it comes to navies, that having a navy is putting ships on the world's oceans that are going to draw you into conflict, that it will actually spark conflict to have a navy. And a lot of these political arguments that are made, you know, the historian Craig Simons has labeled them the navalist versus anti-navalist debate of early America. And it stretches all the way through the War of 1812, these political dynamics, these debates over whether there should be a United States Navy and how big it should be and what it should do. It lasts for decades. And prior to the Quasi-War, kind of the anti-navalist sentiment was dominant.

So there was no Navy. The United States Navy did not exist. In the earlier part of the 1790s, the United States had been begun building six frigates because of the threat of Corsairing in the Mediterranean from the Barbary powers. But when Congress authorized the money to be spent to build those frigates, there was a caveat in the bill. And the caveat was, if a peace treaty is signed with the Barbary powers, we will stop construction. which is exactly what happens so they begin construction on these frigates the first three keels are laid down construction begins and then there's a treaty signed with algiers which is followed by a treaty with tripoli and with with tunis and construction stops and so there was a an idea of having a navy but it kind of never went it didn't really go anywhere and these ships were

constructed under actually under the control under the auspices of the department of war There was no naval bureaucracy. It was under the Department of War. So at the start of the Quasi-War, as tensions begin to ramp up between France and the United States at the start of the Quasi-War, there's realization that this has to be a maritime conflict. And John Adams himself was a navalist. In many ways, John Adams was the father of the American Navy. I know that I'm sitting not far away from the crypt where John Paul Jones is buried and where we hold him up as the father of the American Navy. And he does have a legitimate claim to that title. But I think John Adams also has a legitimate claim to that title. During the revolution, John Adams was one of the leading naval supporters. John Adams actually wrote the naval regulations, the first naval regulations that the Continental Navy had and then that was adopted by the U.S. Navy. And he's the president that that founds the Department of the Navy. So, you know, John Adams is a navalist. He believes that naval power is an important part to defending a nation. and so Adams and Congress begin to figure out what is it going to take to have this war with

France and creating a navy is what they need to do and so Congress founds the department of the navy separates naval responsibilities from the department of war creates the office of the secretary of the navy Adams appoints a gentleman named Benjamin Stoddart to the job who was a a former army officer. He'd been a quartermaster in the revolution, but was a merchant, was a Georgetown merchant and had some familiarity with the maritime world. And he gets appointed as secretary of the Navy. And they begin construction on these frigates again. At the same time, the frigates are not near completion and they need to be finished. And the Navy needs ships relatively quickly. And so Congress authorizes the purchase of merchant vessels that can be

converted into warships, and also authorizes the re-flagging of the revenue cutters, the predecessor to the Coast Guard. Alexander Hamilton, as Treasury Secretary, had established the revenue service several years before. And so the revenue service pre-exists the United States Navy, the Coast Guard's predecessor pre-exists the United States Navy. So those revenue cutters, those Coast Guard cutters, are re-flagged as warships, as naval vessels, and placed under the command of the Department of the Navy. We see this throughout American history, right? So the Coast Guard cutters patrolled the coasts of South Vietnam, participated in the gun line on South Vietnam, patrolled the waters alongside the Navy. We've seen it in our recent conflicts in Iraq. The

Coast Guard has been right alongside us for the last 20 years. So Congress has to cobble together this naval force, some converted merchantmen, the revenue cutters, and then some purpose-built warships and begins putting more money towards purpose-built warships. And all of this Benjamin Stoddart takes over as the new Secretary of the Navy to try and figure out how to lead and fight this conflict against France. If I'm remembering my history correctly, and I think I am, there was a lot of action from the Kwasi War in the Caribbean. And you talk about this some in your essay, both why the Caribbean was so complex and the number of different actors and potential adversaries there. Could you explain a little bit? Yeah, the end of the 18th century and the

beginning of the 19th century is a very complex time in the Caribbean world. It's the height of empire, right? So you've got the Spanish empire there, the British empire there, the French empire there. You've got these upstart Americans who are inspiring everyone to ideals of freedom and separation from the, from the empires that rule over them. And it, it is a, it is a, like I said, it's a complex time. And I think one thing I want to point out about the Caribbean in the age of sail era is the issue of distance. Because, you know, today we look at a map and we think, oh, the Caribbean, it's where our, it's where cruise ships goes. Okay. So it's where cruise ships went pre-covid um but it's where cruise ships go it's close it's right there it's easy

it's where americans go on vacation um but in the age of sail it was a it was a long way away and i say that because of sailing uh and how sails work in order to get the winds necessary to go from say the chesapeake bay to the caribbean to say let's say the coast of haiti you can't sail straight south the prevailing winds come up with the gulf stream the prevailing currents they come up the american coast from south towards north so you can't sail south without tacking continuously and it takes forever to get south so really the only way to get to the caribbean is to sail all the way out towards the middle of the atlantic ocean and then once you catch the trade winds there to tack back and turn southwest towards the Caribbean. The result of

these prevailing winds and currents is that it actually takes about three weeks for a ship to get from the Chesapeake Bay to the Caribbean, sometimes four weeks, depending on the winds, depending on the currents. It takes about four weeks to get to Europe from the East Coast if you're sailing. So if you think about it in terms of sailing distance, as opposed to as the crow flies. The Caribbean is a distant station for the U.S. Navy. It is far away from home. While it seems close, and yes, the political dynamics of the United States are wrapped in what happens in the Caribbean world, it's also far away from a naval standpoint. And I think that's an important thing for us to remember as we think about the operations of the quasi-war.

But what's going on in the Caribbean? So you've got this conflict, this war is going on between France and Great Britain, right? So you've got these two empires at war with each other and their navies at war with each other. That's conflict number one. Conflict number two is a civil war that has been happening on the island of Saint-Domingue or what we today call Haiti in the Dominican Republic. So there's been a revolution. It started as a black slave revolt against the French empire and the French colonists who lived in what we call Haiti today. And it became something of a civil war that stretched on for years. And this is happening in this era that the quasi-war happens. So there's a raging civil war in what we know today

is Haiti. There's also the Spanish empire, which is dwindling. It's losing power. It's no longer the the dominant force in the americas that it was a generation earlier but it still wants its influence it still wants its interests defended and so the spanish are there too and they've got coast guard forces and they've got their own privateers and they've got the ability to swing the balance of power by joining one side or the other in the war between france and britain and they're maneuvering. You also have a number of other European powers that have colonies in the Caribbean. Like I said, there's several others that are not part of these kind of major empires, but that kind of belong in an imperial sense, in a colonial sense to European powers.

And so there's tons of different interests in the Caribbean. And those are the political ones. The Caribbean is also rampant with smugglers and maritime crime. In many ways, we look at the drug smuggling and the human trafficking of the Caribbean in the late 20th and 21st centuries, and we say, oh, things are challenging there. Yeah, this is nothing new to the Caribbean world, right? Smuggling has been endemic. Largely because of these empires and the rules that they placed on things that encouraged smuggling. So there's smugglers. There's also pirates. There's also maritime criminals who are out simply to steal. Many of these smugglers are Americans. They're Americans who are looking to make a profit. So you take this whole stew and

you add to it legitimate merchant trade that is continuously sailing through the Caribbean, and what you find is an enormously challenging environment for American naval officers to operate in. One of the things I think is really fascinating about naval warfare in this time, in the age of sail, is that when ships seize other ships, that the ship's captain and the ship's crew then get to kind of divvy up and split the spoils, if you were, of the prize that they've taken after it's been adjudicated in court. Can you say a little bit about how that works? Because I just, I think that's a fascinating thing that obviously we don't have anymore. Yeah. Prize taking is, is a fundamental part of naval warfare in the age of sail. It doesn't really end

technically for the American Navy until about the turn of the 20th century, the end of the 19th century. In order to legitimately capture a prize, three things have to happen. And this is true both of a commissioned warship, but also true of privateers. And so the first thing that has to happen is the ship that's doing the capturing has to be commissioned. It has to have a commission. So in a warship sense, you know, being a commissioned vessel of the United States Navy, commanded by commissioned officers. In a privateering sense, it's to have what's called a letter of mark or a privateering commission, which is given to you by the government and allows the privateering captain to make captures. So item number one, you have

to be commissioned. You have to have a license, if you will. Item number two to be a legitimate prize is you can only capture the enemy, right? So you have to be able to differentiate the enemy and only capture enemy flagged vessels with enemy cargo. Now, the Americans have a problem here because how the Americans interpret cargo versus flagging of a vessel is different from much of Europe. And much of Europe, it's the flag of the vessel itself as well as the cargo that matters.

So if, let's say, you know, Britain and France are at war with each other, if a ship is carrying French cargo and the British stop it, the British say, as long as the cargo is French, as long as it's going to France, that's a legitimate price. The Americans say that the flag of the vessel matters. So if you capture that vessel and it's, say, Danish who are neutral, even though the cargo is going to the French, you're not allowed to capture that ship according to the American rules. Nobody in Europe agrees with the American rules. So the Americans keep demanding this recognition of

freedom of the seas, that the Europeans look at them and say, you're nuts. That's not how this works. So that, as an aside, you have to capture an enemy vessel, however your country defines that. And then after capturing an enemy vessel, not a friendly, not a neutral, you then have to bring that vessel back to a court, an admiralty court, where it's adjudicated by a judge who assesses all of the information present and decides whether you followed the rules or not. And that judge will then condemn the vessel and say, yes, it's a legitimate prize, or we'll free it and allow it to go home. And so this is true, like I said, both for commissioned warships and for privateers. And usually in the American courts, and this is

relatively standard in Europe as well, usually what happens is the Admiralty Court sells the vessel itself at auction once it's condemned. And then the profits of that sale is divided up. A portion of it actually goes to the government to help pay for the admiralty courts and as a revenue source. And then the majority of it goes to the owners of the vessel that did the capturing. The owners of that privateer or that warship then divide it up as they see fit based on whatever their contracts are. If it's a warship, the owners are the American government and the money is distributed via the standard naval regulations. The captain of the vessel that made the capture gets the most money and it goes kind of down the ranks from there. But everyone gets a little bit

of a bonus in their paycheck when a prize has been adjudicated. In a privateering sense, the owner, usually it's based on a contract that they have with the ship's captain and then contracts with the sailors, what percentage of the cut that they get. But this is a standard part of naval warfare, and it's a common motivator in the age of sail for navies across the world. Sailors' pay is not particularly good in navies, the salary kind of side of things, but there's this promise of a real windfall if you happen to be on a good ship with a good skipper that makes a lot of great captures. And a number of American naval officers in the age of sail

become relatively wealthy based on the prizes that they capture. Can you give us a sense of how many vessels are engaging in prize-taking as privateers? I mean, is this also a way for the government to just put more combatants out there because they're sharing the economics of doing it is so good with these captains? That's exactly right. from a government's perspective, privateers are an enormously inexpensive way to augment your maritime forces, right? So yeah, you spend a lot of money building a Navy, and Navies are enormously expensive. We know this today, right, in the 21st century, just look at the cost of a Ford-class

aircraft carrier, but they're enormously expensive across time. In many ways, the British government that we know today, the massive bureaucracy that was able to run an empire throughout centuries, that bureaucracy is initially built in order to build a Navy because Navies are so expensive, not just to build the ships, but to hire the sailors, to keep the supplies going, to build the shipyards that you need. It's an enormous administrative and financial undertaking for a nation to have a navy so anything that you as a as a nation can do to cost effectively augment that force you jump on in the age of sale and privateers are really the the primary way that that nations do this for the americans there's also this uh this parallel element of privateering

that it kind of looks an awful lot like the militia of ground forces, right? It's kind of the citizen sailor, as opposed to the citizen soldier element of naval warfare. And so Americans look at privateering in a relatively positive light. Many European powers conduct privateering and give letters of mark or commissions for privateers kind of as a, hey, we have to, They don't really like it, but it's what they do in war. The Americans see this as part of American military culture. Privateering is an enormous part of the American Revolution and an enormous part of the naval efforts in the War of 1812. So American privateering in this early American era, we're talking about hundreds of American vessels in the American Revolution and in the War of 1812 that are privateers. When we look at the actual numbers of commissions, they're kind of tricky to count, especially in the revolution where it's not only the Continental Congress that it's giving commissions, but state governments give commissions, commissions all over the place. In some measures, there's like 6,000 commissions given or something, if you count local governments that are giving them, and they're kind of questionable legality.

But at the very least, potentially up to 2,000 really legitimate commissions are given during the American Revolution. That's a lot of ships sailing, right? And so it's a big part of early American naval small land, maybe, maritime power. I just find that absolutely fascinating. And I'm reminded of both the article and also your comments talking about the revenue service cutters that were converted because the government was just trying to put more ships out at sea. And that then makes me think of some conversations that are going on, I'm sure, in the Pentagon and DHS, but also in the USNI proceedings. And there's been good commentary about using Coast Guard vessels for whether you want to call it hybrid warfare or gray zone competition or simply presence. I thought your article had some really good comments about force structure and also kind of the composition of the Navy and arguments for small vessels and the kind of privateering and using the revenue service cutters. And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about a little bit more about your conclusions on force design and force competition, maybe link those to some of the things that we're talking about in the contemporary Navy.

The size and shape of the U.S. Navy, of the American fleet in the age of sail is a really interesting thing to look at. For the most part, we tend to remember the frigates when we think about the early American Navy, right? Ian Toll's fantastic book, Six Frigates, right, which is all about the early American Navy. It focuses on those first six big warships, and particularly Joshua Humphrey's Super Frigates, which are 44-gun massive vessels built of live oak. You know, Old Ironsides earns her nickname in the War of 1812 because British cannonballs bounce off the live oak sides. And our naval architects tell us, well, the live oak is a denser wood. It's a denser oak than the woods that are used in most European warships in that era. The super frigates, the Humphreys frigates, they're engineering marvels. They are technology. Yes, they're canvas and they're wood, but they are modern technology in that era. We tend to focus on those vessels. In the War of 1812, we focus on the frigate duels. Like I said, Old Ironside's getting her nickname, the capture of Macedonia and the capture of Java. These are the battles of the U.S. Navy in the War of 1812.

And so we tend to allow our attention to be focused on these big ships that conduct big battles. But in a lot of my studying of the early American Navy, the conclusion I've come to is that while those battles are certainly important and those super frigates are absolutely marvels and fascinating to study, the vast majority of naval work is done by other vessels and particularly smaller vessels. And this is absolutely the case in the quasi-war with France. So when the American squadrons begin deploying into the West Indies, into the Caribbean, in order to protect American merchants from these French privateers and the French Navy, big ships don't help with that. well, that's probably the wrong way to put it, because they do help in a way. They serve as good sea bases, right? They can carry a lot of cargo. They can carry a lot of people. They've got food. They've got water. But they can't go inshore quite as far, because they have deep keels. They can't get into the literals quite as much as smaller vessels can. And so if you start chasing a privateer that's rigged like a Baltimore clipper, like we call them,

a schooner that maybe has a draft of nine feet and you're carrying a draft of 20 plus feet in a frigate, they're going to get away from you as long as they get inshore. And so these frigates are great warships. But in the quasi-war, there aren't that many big naval battles. There are some frigate duels between the French frigates and the American frigates. Constellation wins two of them famously. But for the most part, the operations are not those big battles. And what the American Commodores discover is, yes, they have these great big and dominant frigates. But that means what they don't have, all the money's been spent on these big frigates. What they don't have is a lot of smaller vessels that can do the patrolling, the convoy escort, and chasing down of these

privateers in the literals of the Caribbean. And they struggle because of it. You know, it's really easy to spot a 44-fun gun frigate on the world's oceans. You see it coming towards you, you know it's coming towards you. And you're a privateer, you spot it and you turn around and you run away. Whereas another smaller vessel that blends in with other merchant traffic that is harder for the privateer to identify, they don't necessarily run away from quite as quickly. And therefore the patrolling works better. And so what the American Commodores discover as they take their squadrons into the Caribbean is that it's their smaller ships that are the most effective operationally. The two great examples of this are the two schooners that are purpose-built for the

quasi-war, the Experiment, which comes off the Waze first, and then Enterprise. And these vessels, they're about, you know, 85 feet long, 100 feet if you count the bowsprit. They're not big ships. He got a crew maybe of 30, 12 guns, six pounders, six on each side. They're not big guns, but they're big enough that with a well-trained crew, you're going to overcome any privateer that you run up on, even though you're in this small vessel. But they're schooner rigged, Baltimore Clipper style, which means they sail very close to the wind. They maneuver well. They're fast. Arguably, the Baltimore Clippers, especially in this era, are the fastest ships on the world's oceans, even though they're small.

And so you can chase down a fellow Baltimore Clipper that's a privateer much more easily in one of these vessels or surprise them because they don't realize that you're a warship. And so what ends up happening is Experiment, when she sails, in the first year of her service, she captures more ships, more privateers and recapturing American merchants who had been captured than almost the rest of the fleet combined. And then Enterprise sails, I think it's about six months after experiment, and has a very similar experience, right? And these two ships end up accounting for a statistically significant amount of the operational effectiveness of the rest of the Navy. And the Commodores see this, they know this. The other benefit of these ships is, guess what, they're commanded by young, aggressive officers, young lieutenants, right? Because you don't put a captain on one of these small ships, they're too small. And so you've got captains like Charles Stewart, who's going to go on to great fame in the US Navy and be one of the most important commanders in the War of 1812. His first command is Enterprise in the Quasi-War when he's a lieutenant, and he begins learning his craft as a commander in command of one of these small vessels.

So these ships end up being enormously important to the operational effectiveness of the U.S. Navy in the quasi-war. And they really caused the Commodores in their discussions with Benjamin Stoddard about what the size and shape of the fleet to look like. They caused them to call for more small ships. They don't need more big ships. They need more small ships. so i feel like you've been baiting me at a couple times uh to talk about your book which i love and i i wrote a review of um and so we absolutely are going to talk about it and you have a chapter in your book uh small boats and daring men and we'll make sure that we put a link to that beneath the podcast so our listeners can find it and you have a chapter on the quasi war and if i'm not mistaken it also is titled things done by halves and so i wanted to ask both from a content perspective um what's kind of the relationship there um and and from a writing perspective did one beget the other because i i reread the book chapter after i read your article and and i was

kind of expecting it to be the same thing and it it was actually very different um i felt like the book it was a lot of action and combat i kept thinking of that movie master and commander and then your article was much more lessons for the you know contemporary strategist for the contemporary um sailor so just hoping you could talk a little bit about maybe your writing process and then the relationship between those two great works that you've put out yeah as you can tell as you pointed out when it comes to titles i just love that thomas truxton quote right so there's there's a moment i think it's after the victory over insurgent constellation defeats the frigate the french frigate insurgent and thomas truxton who's the captain of constellation writes his

report. He writes his letter back to Benjamin Stoddart saying, hey, I've captured this French ship. And he says, I'm not going to try and quote it directly, but he basically says in the letter, hey, the French captain has told me I started a war with France. He's pretending like we're not in conflict with each other. And God, I wish that was true because I hate things done by halves. Getting to his frustration about the nature of this conflict. It's not an all out war. It's not a declared war between France and the United States. Instead, he has to he has to navigate these complicated waters of the Caribbean. He has to, you know, keep the keep the the British informed. He kind of he kind of works with the British, but the British are also, frankly,

kind of jerks and they're still impressing American sailors. And the British aren't necessarily that friendly, even though they're partnering with the Americans in some ways. He has to deal with the civil war going on in Haiti that Truxton hates this. He just wants to go out and fight another ship and have these clean battles. And that doesn't surprise us at all. Right. Like in that every naval officer. I just want it simple. Let me go shoot at stuff. But the reality of being a naval officer is that you have to deal with these complicated environments in which we operate. And so, yeah, I love that quote from Truxton because I think it just gets to the heart of that challenge of the reality of naval professionalism. Now, to your question about the difference between the two pieces, yeah, they're fundamentally different. The chapter in the book is, it's operational history, and it's operational history that I studied and wrote kind of in the service of the arguments of that book. So it contributes to the discussions of maritime raiding and irregular operations and kind of the theoretical construct I come up with in the in the conclusion of the book about how to think about irregular naval warfare as opposed to kind of conventional or regular naval warfare. And so that's that was the purpose of that chapter in the book. And so it it's it's different. It's very different than this article.

This article is much more analytical, right? The book chapter is strongly narrative. It tells the history of what was happening in the Caribbean during the Quasi-War. And the article, because of the space limitations of an article, doesn't really get into those tactical and operational level details quite as much. It's more at the upper operational to strategic level discussions of why did the leadership of the Department of the Navy, Benjamin Stoddart and John Adams, President Adams, why did they make the decisions that they made? How did they think about the conflict and what were the complications that kind of everyone was facing in the Caribbean in that era? And then based on that strategic level view, what can we take away from that today as we talk about great power competition, as we talk about something that is short of warfare? that is short of open combat. Now, I don't want to make it sound like there wasn't open combat in the quasi-war. There clearly was open combat. But it wasn't a declared war, and there were many operations that fell short of that open combat. Yeah, so the article is an attempt to kind of think more strategically and in a more contemporary way than the book is. The book is a work of

history. And as a historian, I wrote it, you know, in the norms of academic history. The article is, is, it's history as well, but it's history informed by kind of a strategic studies view of things that wants to speak to our contemporary world. BJ, I'm going to have to ask you to just explain briefly kind of the thesis and the argument that you do lay out in your book, because I'm realizing that I don't, I haven't asked you to do that yet. And I'm familiar with your book, but obviously not all of our listeners are. So can you just lay out the general premise and the argument for us, please? So Small Boats and Daring Men is it's an examination of what I have labeled maritime

raiding and irregular warfare, naval irregular warfare in the age of sail U.S. naval experience. The eight chapters in the book are there are eight different episodes. I hesitate to call them case studies because it's not really how it's constructed in a kind of an academic or intellectual way, but there are eight different episodes or examples from American age of sail naval history of operations that fall short of kind of our idealized Mahanian, and I mean that in kind of a caricatured sense, but Mahanian ideal of ships fighting ships, fleet battles. we tend to think of naval history we tend to think of those big naval battles right trafalgar midway manila bay um i could keep going but that's such a it's an important part of american naval history it's important important part of world naval history but it's it's it's not the only part there's so much more to naval history even wartime even operational wartime naval history. There's so much more to what navies have done in conflict than just those big battles.

And our history tends to focus on those big battles. And so my effort in Small Boats and Daring Men was to look across the span of America's age of sail history and look for these examples, these episodes of irregular operations, things that weren't kind of the big battle ship on ship type combat, and to examine them and to see if there was any continuity or connections or any ideas that we could draw out, analytical ideas we could draw out of those. And so the examples start with John Paul Jones raiding Whitehaven, his cruise on board Ranger prior to getting command of Bonhomme Richard, which is kind of his famous, most famous command for his most famous ship on ship battle. But I examined the cruise before that aboard Ranger,

a sloop of war, a smaller ship. I start there and then I go all the way up through an operation on the coast of Sumatra in 1838 and 1839, where the East India Squadron, under the command of Commodore George Reed, and I say squadron, it's really just the USS Columbia and the USS John Adams, where they respond to a piracy event on the coast of Sumatra and conduct maritime operations in investigation and punishment of the pirates in Sumatra in 1838. And I stop there because it's in 1840 that the first steam-powered American warships enter American service. And so I wanted to stay, I wanted, in looking for boundaries for the book, I wanted to stay in the age of sail. And so I kind of stopped there in 1838. And I guess I should caveat for a minute, I just called

them USS. In that era, they did not call them USS. It was just the frigate Columbia. It wasn't USS Columbia. The moniker, the addition of USS in the names of American vessels doesn't happen to the very end of the 19th century. Are there any specific examples or other case studies either in your book or outside your book that you'd also recommend besides the quasi-war to look at strategy through the lens of the history of the age of sale? So even the quasi-war, I mentioned it in the article, Michael Palmer's book Stoddart's War is fantastic. It's really the only kind of relatively modern academic examination of the Quasi-War, it's really good. And I encourage anyone who's interested in the Quasi-War to go read that book. You know, there are a lot of

examples. There are a lot of elements that are being studied. One of my colleagues here at the Naval Academy, Dr. Claude Barabé, recently finished an examination of Andrew Jackson's naval policy. Uh, and the, the era between the war of 1812 and the American civil war, um, is full of fascinating naval history that is, that is not very, uh, deeply studied, I guess is the way to put it. There's a lot of really interesting work that current scholars are putting into it. I think Claude's book, which is going to come out, I believe this summer, um, on, on the Jacksonian era of the U S Navy is, is going to be an important contribution to that. Uh, we also have a, uh, an adjunct professor here at the Naval Academy named Roger Bailey, who's finishing up his work

at the University of Maryland for his PhD, who studies the American officer corps in the antebellum period and kind of, you know, their views on slavery and sociocultural elements. And Roger's done some really fascinating work as well. So it's starting to get studied. But I think that era is ripe. John Schroeder, the historian John Schroeder, wrote a book called Shaping a Maritime Empire, which is about a broad brush look at the U.S. Navy in that era. And it really is, it's the birth of American aspiration to great power status, right? Aspiration to economic empire, if not political empire. And so there's a lot of examples in there. I have an honors student right now, a midshipman named Justin Rosas, who's studying the Second Seminole War and the American,

the navy and marine corps operations in the second seminal war and his work is absolutely fascinating right viewing what is in essence a counterinsurgency war through the lens of modern counterinsurgency doctrine you know the officers in that era did not think of things in the same terms that we do today but it's amazing the parallels and the things that we can learn from these kinds of operations those are awesome recommendations and again for our listeners will make sure that we rack and stack those and put some links down beneath the podcast so they can track those down. Also have to do a shout out to Claude. He was on the podcast just a couple of weeks ago. We haven't released his episode yet. And he was talking to us about the Sea Shepherd

Organization and contemporary maritime security. So obviously he's got pretty diverse research interests. I rewatched the movie. I think I already mentioned it, Master and Commander recently. fantastic movie, in my opinion, about the Age of Sail. Are there any movies that you could recommend that either have scenes or are about this period or close to this period? I think it just gets, it can get you really jazzed up about the Age of Sail to see these guys going at it. You nailed it, right? Master Commander is the gold standard. I mean, it is, it is, it's not just a great story right any of the patrick o'brien novels um the aubrey maratin novels are fantastic but it's just a great movie but it's also historically accurate i mean i show

clips from it in my class in my american naval history class when we're doing the age of sail to try and give my students here at the naval academy a sense of what combat was really like in the age of sail. It's brutal. We have this sense of naval combat, especially in the modern world as being kind of antiseptic. It looks like machines against machines. And it's not. It's horrifying. You know, the possibility that you're going to drown, never mind get shot, never mind explode, never mind all of these other risks that come along with combat. Naval combat is a brutal and horrifying thing and and frankly i think master and commander in some of those battle scenes does a really good job of showing that especially in the age of sail my midshipmen are

often shocked to come away from watching one of those battle scenes and realize that as much as anything else what's going to kill you is a giant splinter of wood sailing through the air that's going to you know go right through the center of your chest or take your arm off and so uh yeah Master and Commander, I've just made it sound kind of brutal and horrific, but Master and Commander is a great movie. I wish there were more good age of sale movies, frankly. I think there's an opportunity there. I'd love to see a good movie about John Paul Jones, right? There really aren't that many.

I've got a lot of other favorites when it comes to naval movies, but they're mostly about 20th century history. Bridges at Toko-ri is probably the best naval aviation movie ever made. Highly recommend to anybody about naval aviation in the Korean War. Not just historically a good movie, but the story is fantastic. It's a tragedy in a true sense. BJ, I want to end with a question. And I think it's kind of cyclical, because this is one of the things I think it's in the first sentence of your of your article, you use the phrase great power friction instead of great power competition. And I just wanted to know why you use that and where, where that came from. because I thought that was interesting and a slightly different way to frame it than what we usually see, which is great power competition, GPC, great power competition. So when we say competition, right? In competition, there's always a winner and a loser, right? In a competition at the end, there's a clear winner and a clear loser. and in great power competition that's not always the case there's not always a clear winner and a

clear loser at the end of a particular episode but part of the problem with the label great power competition is connected to the other label that we see in our contemporary security writing often these days and that is the phrase cold war we tend to we tend to equate those two things because the most recent great power competition the United States was in was the Cold War with the Soviet Union, right? But if we just look at that competition as the quintessential example of how great powers interact, I think it's going to lead us astray. It's not nearly nuanced or complicated enough for us to understand that competition with other rising powers today may take a different shape or a different form than the competition with the Soviets did.

and so when i go way further back into history when i think of the great power era right we're talking about after the treaty of westphalia we're talking about the 17th 18th centuries here when we look at the wars of those of the 17th and 18th century we see a lot of conflicts that that really end with negotiated settlements right they end with a little bit of trade of territory maybe hey i'm going to take this colony from you but i'm going to promise these economic benefits back in return. There's a lot of maneuvering between great powers. There's a lot of, yes, it's competition, but there are no winners and losers, right? So coming out of the Treaty of Westphalia, part of the great power system as it's first constructed is designed so that they don't

eliminate each other. These aren't existential conflicts between these nations. It's just nations in constant friction with each other. Yes, they're pursuing their own interests and those interests bring them up against each other and cause friction. But it's not existential. They're not looking to outright destroy each other in every interaction that they have. And I think I was trying to illustrate that, that, you know, France and the United States in the quasi-war, neither one was trying to eliminate the other from the board. Each one just had particular political objectives they were trying to achieve. And the friction between those political objectives caused them to come in conflict with each other. um but so i think i adopted that phrase great power friction as much as great power competition

just to try and get at that little bit more nuanced view of what great powers do when they come in contact with each other if we only see great power competition as a binary existential thing that shapes our decision making that shapes how we approach our 21st century competitions in a way that might not actually be to our best interests. Well, thank you. I think that's really astute. And that's part of the reason that I enjoyed your article so much.

And again, I'd encourage all our listeners to go out and read your book and read your article. Unfortunately, that's about all the time we have today. So I want to thank you again for coming on and ask you if you had any final comments you wanted to leave us with, and also where, if anywhere, our listeners can find you online and if you're working on anything currently that we can expect to come out in the near future.

Thank you for having me, Walker. I really appreciate it. I'm a longtime SIMSEC member and contributor, and it's just great to be on the podcast with you guys. So I've got an article that's out in the new issue of Naval History Magazine about Robert Smalls, who's a slave in the American Civil War, who, along with his crew, steals a Confederate gunboat and sails to freedom out of Charleston. It's a it's a fascinating story of naval heroism that we don't hear a lot about when we teach our naval history because because Smalls was not a naval officer. and I get into that a little bit in the article as to why he wasn't although he did serve with

the U.S. Navy as a pilot for the remainder of the war and was in 17 combat engagements after he escaped his bondage so you can find that in Naval History Magazine the article is currently behind the paywall right now so you need to be a subscriber if you're not a subscriber think about subscribing to Naval History Magazine so that's kind of where you'll find some of my current work I have a book that I've written with a colleague that is in production right now so we're in the production editing portion of that book. We hope it will come out sometime this coming fall. My colleague, Captain John Fryman, and I wrote it. It's called Developing the Naval Mind. And it's all about self-education and an education in the fleet, group education in

war rooms and ready rooms and work centers in units in the fleet, and how officers, sailors, chiefs, NCOs might lead educational efforts in their own units to try and develop our naval minds and our understanding of the world and our understanding of naval professionalism without having to go to a schoolhouse. The War College here at the Naval Academy, the schoolhouses we have, the institutions we have in the Navy are amazing and they are fantastic places to study, but they're insufficient. You shouldn't be studying your profession only when you happen to get orders to be in a school. You should be studying your profession all of the time. And that's kind of what the book is about and how to do that. It's

a practical guide, how to lead group learning and discussions, as well as having some recommended readings and discussion questions and stuff like that. It's kind of a seminar class in a box, if you will. And so we're looking forward to finishing the production editing on that and having that come out with the Naval Institute Press later on this year. Awesome. Well, we're looking forward to that, too. I think that kind of work is sorely needed. And I think all of the sea services have emphasized, you know, education and putting people first. So that's good. And again, B.J. Armstrong is a professor at the United States Naval Academy. Thanks again for coming on the podcast. All opinions presented in this podcast are solely

our own and should not be taken as representative of any of the institutions that we're associated with. Thanks for tuning in and see you next week. We'll be right back.