Sea Control - Sea Control 608: David Smith on Alfred Thayer Mahan

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

Mahan The Life of Maritime Strategy’s Greatest Revolutionary David A. Smith  

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Strategy. Ahoy, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today, author David Smith is joining me. His book, Mahan, The Life of Maritime Strategy's Greatest Revolutionary, was recently released by Naval Institute Press. Welcome, Dave. Could you tell us a little about yourself? Absolutely. I teach American history at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. I teach maritime history, military history, political history, a little bit of everything. I'm a fleet professor with the Naval War College in their strategy and war division.

And in the summertime, I teach a class at Maastricht University over here in the Netherlands called Global Power Dynamics. Dynamics. Basically, the history of how great powers deal with each other over the course of the previous 500 years or so. It's a good class. Yeah, that sounds really interesting. So before we begin, I'd like to remind our listeners that all reviews expressed are our own and not that of any organization with which we may be affiliated with. So David, I'm sure that listeners have heard of alfred mahan but i don't think a lot of us have a good knowledge of who he was so yeah if you could just give us a background yeah sure absolutely you know most people if they've heard of mahan they think of him as a theorist or a strategist in a kind of one

dimensional way you know they may know that he wrote a couple of books but alfred there mahan was the son of a West Point professor named Dennis Hart Mahan, and Alfred Thayer Mahan was born in 1840, and his father was a really prominent professor at West Point, taught a lot of the officers that would fight in the Mexican War and the Civil War, so Alfred Thayer had a lot of of military in his background and he decides to go to the naval academy uh he sort of drifts around a little bit goes to a private school in maryland for a while goes to columbia university in new york for a while and winds up at the naval academy and and is commissioned a lieutenant uh sees action in the civil war blockade duty he he went into the civil war and let me think a second he

was about he was about 20 20 and a half right when the civil war started so he's all gung-ho about fighting he's he's got he's read swashbuckling tales of what war at sea is like and and he's expecting battles at sea of the of the romantic sort and he winds up on blockade duty and he does blockade duty for most of the war and that's important because while it's not dramatic it isn't what he thought sea power would be it teaches him that sea power is a whole lot more than battles the whole lot more than you know the battleship falgar you know something it just ships wailing on each other um he he spends the next oh 20 years or so 15 years or so sort of drifting between uh positions ashore and positions afloat uh goes around the world

spends time in Japan on the Asia Squadron, spends some time in the South Pacific on the Pacific Squadron. And it's really not until a colleague of his named Stephen Luce starts the Naval War College that he begins to sort of sense a purpose for his life. And that purpose is to bring the illumination that history can provide into a current understanding of what the naval situation in the world is like. And he says, you can't discount the past. This is why I like him so much as a historian. You know, the ships are different, technology is different, all that stuff. But control of the sea is a fundamental element, whether you're in the days of the Roman Empire or in the early days of the American Empire. Control of the sea lets you do things

as a nation that other people can't do. And he really started to pick up on this for the first time during the Civil War when he was on blockade duty. And then he becomes a professor at the Naval War College. He becomes president of the Naval War College. He does a little tour as a captain of a ship in the asia squadron in 92 93 94 1892 93 94 and then comes back and becomes pretty much a public intellectual for the last few years of his life he dies in 1914 and he spends a lot of time writing big books and he spends a lot of time writing magazine articles which it's key to understand him that he wants to reach the public as much as he wants to reach his fellow officers you know he's an impatient guy he doesn't suffer fools very gladly and he really i mean i i got the

feeling as i got to know him he really wants to be an academic and if you can give him a a book to write or lectures to write or a class to teach about naval history and give him the sense that he is making a difference in the way that sailors and officers and the public understand the role of the navy he's going to be as content as anybody in the world but if you stick him on a ship especially someplace out in peru or japan or someplace where nothing's happening he feels like his talents are being wasted i he's a hard guy to like you know i wrote about george dewey before this and i came away from the dewey book really liking george dewey and thinking this is a guy i'd like to hang out with but i'm not sure about my hand he's a hard guy to get to know and

he doesn't he he wants to be social at some points in his life but he doesn't do it very well one of the things that i would hit upon is it's surprising that he ends up becoming such a influential figure because you look at him you know when he's kind of entering middle age and he's pretty undistinguished he's a okay officer but someone who clearly doesn't have all the skills necessary to really rise up and so then he kind of just ends up i mean he pretty quickly becomes um president of the naval war college he was a late bloomer you know he was a late bloomer and and he he loved the navy he was frustrated by a lot of it and he felt like he was just what did he say he was drifting on the lines of respectability he had he had a decent career like

he said he had a decent career he was a okay officer uh but but it wasn't until this this role for him was carved out i mean he largely carved it out as a propagandist and a teacher and someone who said here's how we should think about the navy and it's not like we've thought about it before but we're going to have to start thinking about it differently because we are now a great power and we're going to have colonies around the world. And if the world hadn't changed about the same time he found his calling, I think you're right. He would have just been an obscure naval officer of average ability. Yeah. So take the listeners through this. You know, he gets appointed as a lecturer in 1885 what is he doing right before that does he end up in that

it couldn't be a more revealing story he had been thinking about writing books but he gets he winds up in the pacific doing absolutely nothing as commanded this creaky old ship called the wachusett and he gets a letter out of nowhere from his friend and fellow officer a guy named Stephen Luce, who had about the same time started basically a graduate school for the Navy, the Naval War College, where Luce thought that officers should study things like history and strategy and tactics, sort of the higher level of naval thought. That wasn't really going on at the Naval Academy to Luce's satisfaction. They taught seamanship and stuff there. So Mahan had been with Luce during the Civil War when Mahan did a little short duty at the Naval Academy.

So they were together then, and Mahan had written an article about naval education, and he had written a book about the Navy during the Civil War. So Luce is sort of casting his net, looking around for any naval officer who knows about history, who could possibly express history in a good way, and who can sort of think like a historian would. And he sends this letter to Mahan while Mahan is on post on the Pacific. And Mahan gets it and thinks, this is exactly what I want. I don't want to be captain of a ship. I don't want to be banished to the far side of the world. I want to be someplace where I can write and teach. And it was just a dream for him come true. And he waits for the orders to bring him back from Peru and put him in the Naval War College

in Newport, Rhode Island. But then the revolution in Panama breaks out, a revolution in Panama, in 1885 breaks out and the the consul in panama sends a this harrowing telegram to to mahan because he's the closest naval officer and mahan basically says great i'm gonna have to stop it at panama and this is gonna delay me even further but the what he gets to see and this is as it turns out it's really important he goes to panama and he gets first-hand experience with how important the Strait of Panama is, and because all these ships from all these other nations have sort of convened on Panama, this is, this is, we don't have a canal yet, we've got a Trans-Isthmus Railroad, the French are trying to build the canal, it's beginning to look like it won't work,

and Mahan realizes that this right here, this little stretch of land, the tiny little stretch panama this is important to the united states and it's important to naval lines of communication and supply so while while he's frustrated and he's and he's angry about not being home and installed at newport he's seeing some stuff that's going to make him change the way he thinks about global sea power and then finally the the revolution dies out he gets back to new york City at first, and he spends a year, this is probably the happiest year of his life, he spends almost a year writing his lectures to talk about the influence of sea power upon history. And he goes back and forth. It's curious. Sometimes he refers to what he's doing as writing a book,

and sometimes he refers to it as preparing lectures. It seems to be a little bit dependent on is mood and uh he winds up giving these series of lectures which are basically sort of the chapters of his first his big book uh not his first book but they go over well for the academic year he teaches there and from that point on he begins to sort of get swept up into a whole new career of a sort that never really existed before for a naval officer that makes sense yeah yeah once he gets off to choose it and gets to naval college he really starts rising uh so fast basically made president of it and that really it seems starts his um kind of involvement with politics yeah um he meets theodore roosevelt and his his meeting with theodore roosevelt is

really important and theodore roosevelt when he meets mahan it's 1891 or something and mahan and roosevelt roosevelt is a civil service commissioner in the harrison administration but what roosevelt is is a emerging imperialist and he's really interested in the navy and he understands sort of vaguely the relationship between naval power and imperialism. And suddenly he meets Alfred Thayer Mahan, and this guy is writing these books of a sort that Theodore Roosevelt sort of wishes he could write, you know, that takes the big sweep of history and brings it with its implications to the present. And Mahan is saying, this is why we need a navy now. And Roosevelt becomes president in 1901 and and mahan becomes his primary advisor about naval power and and things like where to put

the navy and what to do with the navy in general and his yeah and in his book when his book is published in 1890 it's a it's an absolute sensation among a really small group of people in the united states but that group of people will be really really influential over the next 10 or 15 years um yeah so um he now he seems to start out as i said as a democrat but really shifts over to the republicans and at this time he for the first time is really getting involved in the political fights over the naval war college can you give our listeners uh overview you know there was, as with anything that's new and sort of experimental, there's always going to be political pushback. And Mahan becomes the preeminent defender of the Naval War College

to political appointees like the Secretary of the Navy, who really sort of don't understand it, and to officers who are associated with the Naval Academy in Annapolis, who think that the Naval War College as some sort of rival or something. And it's always the opponents of the Naval War College always try to get it basically demoted sort of or subsumed within something else. And Mahan has to fight for it much more than he wants to, because that draws him into politics. He goes to Washington and he has to talk to senators and representatives. And at one point, he's trying to gauge how the, oh what would you call it the the chair of the house naval affairs committee is going to vote and it's this guy from alabama that he doesn't like and he says okay i think we've got 12 votes

against us being independent and 10 votes for so i've got to try to find another couple of votes and he hates to do this stuff right he he's not he's not a people person dewey was a people person and Roosevelt's a people person and Mahan is a let me alone to write my book person and he gets swept up into this largely against his will because at one point he feels like he's the only person trying to defend the war college and he feels like he's the only one who really understands what it's up to and this notion that our officers in this new world have to understand the big sweep of history and the long lens that tells you how somebody like the dutch or the english have become these global powers they're small they're islands they have big

navies and that's the key so if we want to have colonies we need a big navy we're not going to be a maritime power but we can't ignore a navy and politically speaking if the republican party supports naval expansion he's going to be a republican and that that's a transformation that happens while he's while he while he's right at the beginning of his affiliation with the war college back when he was in the pacific and he was sour and it was 1884 and he was mad at life he was an anti-imperialist and he he was sort of anti-everything he was just a glump and and he was worried that if a republican got elected in what would it have been uh 84 that that we might stumble into imperialism and he doesn't want that at that point

but by 1890 1895 he's beginning to realize that what the united states is going to do as it moves forward is going to require colonies and bases and a big navy so his political alignment which is which is sort of where i ought to have started this question um his political alignment is going to be with whichever party supports naval expansion and using the navy as something other than a coastal defense force yeah so in that sense he really becomes um kind of the real single issue voter i guess i mean yeah that's kind of a good way of putting it and he's well he he's a single issue voter for sure um yeah and that seems to have some blowback i mean he publishes influence the sea power upon history and then its sequel on you know and then he's

kind of sent back to ship duty um right yeah he didn't want to yeah he that's not where he was he thought he was finished with it he thought he was going to ride out his career at the naval war college and suddenly and the problem is he he writes an article that goes directly against the policies stated by the cleveland administration basically cleveland says we're not going to annex hawaii we don't need hawaii we don't need colonies and then mahan writes this article i think it's in the atlantic maybe that basically says we need hawaii and the next thing you know he's being booted back out to sea because because the cleveland administration and the and the uh sec navy for the cleveland administration they don't want him saying this stuff

because it's going directly against what cleveland and his administration they don't want to be imperialist we're not imperialists and we've got this naval officer writing books about how we should be imperialist get him out of here send him back to sea take his pen out of his hand yeah and that's that period really shows allows him to really see how much how influential he's gotten yeah it shocks him doesn't it you know he goes to england and uh yeah he's he's all he's the captain of a ship that makes up the entirety of the european squadron And when he gets to England, he's just hailed as a hero, and everybody wants to meet him, and he meets the queen, and he meets the first lord of the admiralty, and all these naval officers basically are congratulating him for writing these books that sort of provide a historical justification of where England has reaped with its navy, with its colonies, with its maritime power. and he's shocked because he's he's hailed as a hero in england and of course knowing his

personality it makes him bitter because he hasn't been hailed as a hero back home and he says these english people get me and my own country doesn't get me but eventually his own country comes around yeah yeah so once he gets back he's pretty much retires from the nation where he's one of our public intellectual so can you tell about that transition for him um it's interesting because from the outset of his career as an author you know he publishes this big old book the influence of sea power in history 1660 to 1783 he publishes that in 1890 but he also writes an article for the atlantic in 1890 knowing that it's going to reach an entirely different audience and basically he thinks part of my job whether it's part of my job as a naval officer as a public's voice for the

navy i've got to teach the public about what a navy does for the united states and why even farmers in Nebraska should want a big Navy. And this, this I think is one of his really important and often overlooked characteristics. He's the one that makes a case for people who do not understand why we should have a Navy. He's the one who makes a case for a Navy. And he says, look, if you're a farmer and if you grow surplus and you want to open foreign markets, and that was a big, big catchphrase right in the 1890s if you want to open foreign markets to your corn or your wheat or whatever we've got to have a navy for you to do that we've got to have the navy that protects our lines of communication and supply and if you want your corn or wheat or whatever you know mr

nebraska farmer if you want that into foreign markets you better support us having a big navy because that's going to keep those trade routes open. And that's the point at which he becomes a public intellectual, because he realizes that writing these books, you know, the big book about sea power, and then the sequel about the French Revolution, and then a big old honking two-volume biography of Nelson, and then a book about the War of 1812, he realizes that the public isn't going to read all this,

But the public reads The Atlantic, the public reads Harper's, the public reads Century Illustrated, and every time, whether it's the Spanish-American War or the Russo-Japanese War or anything naval comes up, he's writing articles for the public in these public outlets, and that's how he becomes a public intellectual. it's really surprising just how much interest there is in naval issues i mean today the navy gets oftentimes the door for other aspects of the military but it's surprising i suppose that's because it really is the new and major aspect of american power right back in his day right A battleship in his day was the technological and financial equivalent of a B-2 bomber today or an Apollo rocket in the 1960s. There was a technological captivation with battleships and stuff like that in the 90s that he was able to sort of link himself to and say, yeah, the technology is very interesting, but here's why we need it. Here's why politicians should support it. And I was thinking about this just the other day.

Mahan today would be following the news about the Strait of Hormuz very closely. And Mahan would be saying, this is what I said. We need sea power to keep these lines of communication and supply open. And it's the responsibility of naval powers to make sure these places like Panama and Suez and Malacca and Hormuz stay open for the global powers that need to use them. So it's as timely today as it was when the Panama Canal opened. And he doesn't mean that. He says you can control the sea without a battle if you're so strong that nobody's going to come out and face you. You don't need a battle.

What you need is control of the sea however you can get it. And in World War I, the United States and the British got control of the sea, not by building battleships, but by building destroyers, right, and taking out the German subs. But he said, this is what I was talking about. You know, this is exactly what I was talking about. You protect your national interests by using your naval power in whatever way it's required. And something you mentioned earlier, it reminded me of something that I have in common with Mahan. You know, I'm a historian and I and both Mahan and I get really frustrated when people say, oh, history is just about the past. And why do you need to study history? Because what does it have to do with today?

And and Mahan says, you need to study history because that's how we got to today. And today is going to be history in the future. And I'm right there saying, bravo, Alf. that's that's the way to think about it yeah um you know as he's really coming into this role as a public intellectual you're really building up its uh navy and different ideas you kind of give the listeners kind of like what that debate is and what's my hand's opinion of yeah um let me think about that just a second there's sort of two parts in this debate and the pivot point is the Spanish-American War in 1898. And in the 1890s, the United States was building up its navy, and, you know, over the skepticism of some, and including one of the secretaries of the navy,

you know, he went up to Newport to cancel the Naval War College until somebody put into his hands Mahan's book on the French Revolution. And up until 1898, the United States built a navy, sustained a navy but really the public really wasn't sure exactly what it was going to do and then we go to war with spain right this great power that has colonies in the pacific and in the atlantic and it's got you know it's been around since the 1400s and it's regarded as a great power and we the united states and this is one of those patriotic jingoistic raw raw moments the united states cleans the you know mops the floor with spain not just in the caribbean around cuba but in the philippines of all places on the other side of the pacific

and people suddenly realized hey wait a minute we did that because we have a strong navy and from that point the the public sort of begins to swing around a little bit in a patriotic sense that wow this is what we can do with the navy we can be a great power and and mahan was right there saying okay now we're gonna we've got a great navy but we want to make sure we use it right for our national interests and and he began to write books and articles about at least implying that what we need to do is have a fleet strong enough to protect our lines of communication and supply and that can defeat enemies that want to shut us out of markets or use economic warfare against us so basically up until the spanish-american war he was saying we need a big

arm a big navy because we can do stuff with it and then after the spanish-american war it becomes okay we're getting a big navy here's how we should use it yeah and he's really pushing back as people who really seem to think that, like, coastal defense and, like, small gunboats are what you want. Exactly. You know, and that's been a fight back since the days of Jefferson. Jefferson and his party versus Adams and the Federalists. And Jefferson said, yeah, and Jefferson's someone who doesn't trust armies

and certainly doesn't trust navies. We don't need a big navy because if we build a big navy, it's going to just go out and get us in trouble someplace. All we need is a navy that can keep enemies away from our shores, right? And Mahan has two problems with that. One is that if we're dependent on economic relationships carried out overseas, an enemy doesn't even have to approach our shores to take us out. because they can put a blockade on us and crush our trade, and coastal defense will do nothing. You know, you build forts along the coast, great, but what are they going to do against a blockade against our trade?

And Mahan says, coastal defense is not what a Navy's for, and we've got to get rid of that, And we've got to get rid of the old, old, back-to-Jefferson assumption that the oceans are protective moats that seal us off from the world, that make us insulated, and that protect us. We don't need a Navy because we've got these huge oceans. And Mahan says, you've got to face this. The oceans are not moats anymore. The oceans are highways. and people other powers can use the oceans to destroy our economy and coastal defense is no longer what a navy should do a navy has to operate away from the coasts to keep the seas

open so coastal defense i guess you could say that coastal defense in my hands eyes is something that the united states has grown out of and that maybe that was accurate at some point in the past he's not entirely convinced but maybe it was accurate for the united states in some point in the past but if it was then it's certainly not now i mean that really goes back to the beginning of his career as blockade duty where i mean it's definitely not the most covered aspect of the civil war but that coastal operations were incredibly important yeah and he understood right he understood that armies marching around and fighting battles and taking fortresses were important but the the blockade of the south by the union of which he took part he understands

that that was a key element in working with other manifestations of national power right sherman's army in georgia uh and and he understands that the navy isn't supposed to do the same thing that the army does and the navy's job is to project power away from the coast and not not you know and to prevent a blockade if the if the south had had a navy worth anything right the the south could have swept the union blockade from the sea and that's what the u.s navy going forward into the 90s and the 20th century that's what the navy's got to do it's got to take the fight out to navies elsewhere and prevent them from using sea power to destroy our economy he's a lot more about economics than most people realize yeah yeah no he definitely is um

yeah so i mean at this point he's basically just become um kind of your elder intellectual like the just a like final years yeah um he's really disappointed that woodrow wilson wins the presidency in 1912 because he's worried sick that woodrow wilson is going to take us back sort of intellectually and attitude wise to pre-colonial days and when wilson says we're not going to get in world war one and world war one has nothing to do with us mahan says this guy couldn't be more wrong and mahan wants to write about this he wants to write you know he wants to return to magazines and he wants to write articles and letters to the editor about why the united states is now a global power and we can't stay out of stuff like this but will says

i don't want any active duty or retired naval officers saying anything against my policies so my hand gets his mouthpiece taken away and that's in uh that's in september or october of 1914 right after the war starts and wilson says hey this has got nothing to do with us and then my hand dies in december of 1914 just not just a few months after the war starts it he um he's never been in really good health he had got malaria uh right after the civil war and it came back a few times as malaria does and it it just sort of wore him out it wore out his heart and and he he just sort of gave out and it's it's it's too bad because he would have been a valuable advisor you know i mean i he would have been a valuable advisor to wilson if wilson

had had the understanding to to adopt you know to to bring him aboard but well you know wilson was this basically arch 19th century conservative who had no desire to admit the ways in which the world had changed and that the united states now had to do something else with its power and mahan's last few months were pretty miserable and he thought he wouldn't he thought he decided okay i'm not going to write about naval power anymore i'm going to turn my attention to something else from history and he said i'm going to write a history of the united states for young people and i wish he had lived longer because i really would like to have read that yeah he's really seems to be still going pretty well right up until the end i mean if you yeah he he hits the wall running

yeah you i mean he is a man who's uh the second half of his life really is where he hits everything yeah you know he's he's found his calling and that's kind of neat right you look at a person's story and you think this guy sort i don't want to say fritters around but he's pretty unhappy for the first what 40 years of his life 45 years of his life and then suddenly boom he finds his calling and and his life is transformed by him yeah yeah it's it's a really interesting life um it is and and i'm i'm glad i got to know him the way i did yeah um but yeah Unfortunately, that's about all the time we have. There'll be links to the book in the show notes. David, could you tell the listeners where they can find you and what you're working on now? Yeah, I teach at Baylor University and probably the best way to contact me would be from the Baylor University History Department website.

You know, I'm on there with all the other faculty. I'm sort of I'm going back and forth right now. I've got two ideas. One is another biography, and it's a it would be a biography of a naval officer named William S. Sims. and he's he's basically a little bit younger than Dewey a little bit younger than Mahan but if I wrote a biography of Sims it would take the story of the U.S. Navy from Dewey's birth in 1837 to Sims's death in 1936 and there's a symmetry there that I kind of like but Sims's career he you know we talk about finding your calling like my hand did sims hits his stride as a naval diplomat and he sort of he sort of uh foreshadows a globalized role for the u.s navy in working with partners and allies and then the other thing i'm thinking about is a book is like

a military history of the north sea which would look at just the north sea and how ideas of sea control and command of the sea have played out on the North Sea over the past thousand years or so. But yeah, I'd like to thank my guest David Smith, and to our listeners, we'll see you again next time. © BF-WATCH TV 2021

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