Maritime Power in a Politically and Technologically Changing World

As I write, seapower is much to the fore. The Houthis challenge to the security of the Red Sea, one of the major sea routes in the world, has forced a change to shipping patterns and greatly affected insurance rates, and the security of the sea is further threatened by the risk that Sudan’s civil war will lead to the establishment of a Russian naval base. Chinese naval strength challenges the maritime position in the East and South China Seas and, increasingly, the western Pacific, while Russian expansionism is a feature in the Baltic and Black Seas, and a host of factors, including civil war in Libya, in the Mediterranean. And so on. Moreover, once waters are considered in terms of the control of migration (as in the Channel and Mediterranean) or economic interests and resource extraction, then the range of issues at stake increases greatly. And alongside issues there are the rapidly changing aspects of contexts, notably in weapons technology and environmental possibilities, particularly Arctic melting.

This new book on seapower is therefore highly important. Basil Germond, Professor of International Security and Co-Director of the Security Research Institute at Lancaster University, is a major figure in the field and provides a deft guide to changing ideas about seapower from Antiquity to the present. As with Clausewitz, who had little to say about seapower, there is a combination of transcendent elements with more contingent and conjunctural facets. Germond has the advantage in writing more clearly, and in engaging with recent developments in a practical fashion.

As I tried to show in my books on naval power, the notion of seapower has to take note of the changing meaning of the sea. In particular, for much of history the sea was what we might describe as the inshore and much of the use of naval power was in coastal, deltaic, estuarine, riverine, and lacustrine waters. These continue important, as with the significance of boats on the Dnieper in the Ukraine War, but tend to be underplayed.

In contrast, there is an emphasis on oceanic waters and related warships, methods and doctrine. That is a reasonable proposition if you are America and Britain, but less so if you are the majority of the world’s states for whom seapower is more small-scale. As with military history in general, this raises interesting questions about the perspective that should be adopted. Should it be the main power in the system and its principal challenger, which would be America and China today, or should we consider the range of states that seek to have some naval power and/or fear the use of that power by others, a range that now includes ‘non-state actors,’ from Somali pirates to the Houthis. Germond’s discussion of ‘solidaristic’ maritime nations providing collective seapower is valid or possible in some cases, as against both those ‘actors,’ but is challenged by the degree to which the ‘world order’ is currently under acute strain.

As Germond points out, changing political contexts are tremendously important in the shaping of discussion about seapower. More so in many respects than the technological approach with its fascination with ‘platforms’. The contrast between seapower and land power in terms of the greater number of units that have to be considered is being challenged by the extension of land- and sea-based missile technology at sea, but there is still a fundamental difference in not having to fight among civilians and in differing meanings of control. Germond’s book richly deserves attention.

Our Reviewer: Jeremy Black, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Exeter, is also a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the author of an impressive number of works in history and international affairs, frequently demonstrating unique interactions and trends among events, including The Great War and the Making of the Modern World, Combined Operations: A Global History of Amphibious and Airborne Warfare, and The War of 1812 in the Age of Napoleon. He has previously reviewed The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century, Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939, War: How Conflict Shaped Us, King of the World, Stalin’s War, Underground Asia, The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps, The Atlas of Boston History, Time in Maps, Bitter Peleliu, The Boundless Sea, On a Knife Edge. How Germany Lost the First World War, Meat Grinder: The Battles for the Rzhev Salient, Military History for the Modern Strategist, Tempest: The Royal Navy and the Age of Revolutions, Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare, Sing As We Go: Britain Between the Wars, Maritime Power and the Power of Money in Louis XIV’s France, Empireworld: How British Imperialism Shaped the Globe, and Why War?

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Note: Seapower in the Post-Modern World is also available in hard cover & e-editions.

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