Study a Forgotten War to Glimpse the Pacific Future
The U.S. Navy can learn much from the Russo-Japanese War—and from dueling interpretations of that conflict by naval theorists Alfred Thayer Mahan and Julian S. Corbett.
Foreign observers are poring over the daily reports from an ongoing war of attrition. They marvel at a string of humiliating losses inflicted on the Russian Navy with the help of new military technologies. They gape at the Russian Army’s inability to perform well on land against a much smaller and supposedly outmatched foe. And they seek to glimpse the future of warfare, deriving lessons that will help prepare their own armies for the next great-power conflict.
This, at any rate, is the situation in 1904—as the rest of the world watches upstart Japan soundly defeat the Russian Empire in the Russo-Japanese War.
The battlefield of the day is Korea, along with territories north of the Yalu River in China and Manchuria. Practitioners and scholars of martial affairs invariably regard this latest war as a laboratory for what does and does not work in contemporary warfare. The character of war is constantly changing, making it hard to gauge how the next conflict will play out. Accordingly, the big brains of maritime strategy promptly went to work appraising the combatants’ performance. The Russo-Japanese War is nearly forgotten today, 120 years after it was fought—but it should not be, as some of its insights resonate to the present. Let’s review two.
Fortune Favors the Bold? Not Always
Alfred Thayer Mahan, history’s most influential maritime strategic theorist, penned an influential analysis of the war in 1906, one year after its resolution in the Treaty of Portsmouth. Among his other conclusions, Mahan upbraided Russian naval commanders for reducing their oceangoing navy to a “fortress fleet” that sheltered under the guns of Port Arthur, a Russian base on China’s Liaotung Peninsula.
In theory the Russian armada was mounting a forward defense of Port Arthur. In reality, it was outclassed on a fleet-to-fleet basis. Consequently, Russian naval commanders relied on coastal artillery to offset the firepower of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s (IJN) Combined Fleet prowling offshore. Mahan condemned the fortress fleet as a “radically erroneous” mode of naval warfare. It constricted the fleet’s operating radius, limiting mobility to within the range of the fort’s guns at a time when rudimentary cannon could fire effectively only a few miles offshore. It rendered fleet and ship commanders timid, whereas overseers of a blue-water navy need to be venturesome. It was a fatal choice.
For Mahan, in short, the Russian Navy showed what not to do in sea combat.
Mahan’s critique is worth exhuming because it proved perishable as military technology advanced. As the twentieth century wore on, then turned over to the twenty-first, advances in weaponry, sensors, and fire control progressively extended the reach of shore-based firepower. Guns were accurate at longer ranges. Military aviation matured, empowering land-based warplanes to strike at ships cruising the high seas hundreds of miles distant. The advent of precision-guided arms further broadened the fortress’s sway. China’s military now fields families of anti-ship ballistic missiles, some boasting an effective firing range estimated at over two thousand miles.
If descendants of the guns of Port Arthur can rain down accurate fire throughout an entire theater, tethering the fleet to land-based fire support is no longer radically erroneous. In fact, the fortress fleet is an obvious choice for a sea power like China, whose marine ambitions lie chiefly in the Western Pacific and China seas. In the modern world, this particular Mahanian critique has lost credence.
What Do You Do As the Weaker Combatant?
Mahan’s contemporary and sometime rival Julian S. Corbett saw the Russo-Japanese War as vindicating his concept of “active defense.” The relationship between offense and defense marked the sharpest disagreement between Corbett and Mahan. Both commentators agreed that sinking an enemy’s battle fleet, or blockading it in port, charted a navy’s surest route to victory. It foreclosed an antagonist’s commercial, diplomatic, and military prospects in the nautical realm. It was the ultimate goal of naval strategy. The question was timing. Mahan wanted to go on offense in enemy home waters on the first day of a naval war, ideally settling things in an afternoon. He didn’t seem to entertain the notion that the friendly fleet could be the weaker contestant at a particular time and place—making it hazardous in the extreme to join battle.
Mahan yearned to wrest “command of the sea” from rivals, barring their access to the high seas. His doctrine was simple: all offense, all the time.
Corbett knew better. In his masterwork Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, he affirmed Mahan’s view that “nine times out of ten the maxim of seeking out the enemy’s fleet” and assaulting it close to home is “sound and applicable.”
A ringing endorsement of Mahanian strategy? Not quite. Corbett devoted an outsized share of his commentary to the one time out of ten when such offensive actions courted disaster. As he observed, no navy—not even the Royal Navy, then the world’s foremost armada—could be stronger than every possible antagonist at every place on the nautical chart at all times. No fighting force can.
Naval commanders, then, needed to learn to play “active defense” until such a time as they could amass superior firepower at the scene of action. And then they could go on strategic offense, asserting the “overbearing power upon the sea” that was the lodestone of Mahanian command. Crucially, this command might have to be eventual, not instant. For Corbett, this was simple reality. Inveighing against the “seeking out” principle so beloved of Mahanians constitutes a recurring theme in his writings. His commentary on the Russo-Japanese War was no exception.
The Japanese Navy Won By Increments
The common claim that maritime command had proved decisive in the war, Corbett noted tartly, was “certainly not” the view “of the Japanese themselves.” He depicted this as a “facile” reading of events, firing a shot across Mahan’s bow. For Corbett, command was an enabler, not an end in itself. Nor was it always even necessary. For an ally, the English theorist conjured no less an authority than Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō, commander-in-chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Combined Fleet, to help him debunk the “seeking out” orthodoxy.
Like any good strategist, Corbett started building his case by reviewing the nature of the war. He ascertained that the Russo-Japanese War had been a limited war whose “most conspicuous feature is admittedly that it was a war in a maritime theater, where . . . naval and military operations were so intimately connected as to be inseparable.” He went on to contend that “a war of this nature does not necessarily involve the complete overthrow of the enemy.” Instead it was “a combined or amphibious war where the question [was] which side could occupy and hold a certain piece of seagirt territory,” namely the Korean Peninsula, “to which for troops acting alone there would be no unrestricted access.”
In other words, the paramount purpose for both navies, properly understood, was to “control the relative amount of [ground forces] that could be brought to bear on the territorial object.” Decisive sea battle might not even be necessary! Guaranteeing the Imperial Japanese Army unfettered access to battlefields in Korea, north China, and Manchuria—and, as a corollary, keeping the Russian Navy from obstructing their access—was Tōgō’s prime goal. This was how the army would prevail on land, the decisive theater in the war. Winning command of vital waters was a desirable objective, but ultimately a secondary one.
In the war, Corbett concluded, the Combined Fleet’s posture was strategically defensive.
Of course, strategic defense does not mean passive defense. Tōgō remained constantly on the lookout for opportunities to mete out painful tactical blows. He simply declined to send the IJN fleet foraying all over the nautical chart in search of a decisive battle. He arrayed the fleet to support the army, and accepted battle when the Russian fleet offered it. Moreover, he was content to conserve his precious ships of war while letting others shoulder the burden against the Russian Navy. His fleet defeated the Russians at sea in the Yellow Sea during the summer of 1904. Yet it was the Imperial Japanese Army, not the IJN Combined Fleet, that administered the killing blow. The fleet merely confined the Russian Pacific Squadron to Port Arthur, allowing the army to pound it to smithereens with artillery fire from the heights overlooking the harbor.
Tsar Nicholas II refused to accept the loss of his Pacific Squadron. In the fall of 1904, the tsar dispatched the Russian Baltic Fleet on an epic 18,000-mile voyage through the Indian Ocean into the Far East. Once the Baltic Fleet had debarked in hopes of salvaging Russia’s fortunes, Admiral Tōgō, a consummate active defender, resolved to assume a strategically defensive position. As the Russian force neared, he positioned his force off the island of Tsushima, in the narrow sea separating Korea from Japan, to block the Baltic Fleet’s access to the Russian seaport of Vladivostok while remaining close enough to cover the Yellow Sea coast and facilitate army operations.
Tōgō knew full well that his own fleet would have been freshly refitted by the time of battle, and facing a foe that had undertaken an wearisome journey with scant logistical support. Both the material and human dimensions of sea combat would side with Japan. So he let the Russians come to him, rather than hunting for them in the South China Sea or some other Asian battleground. “From the beginning,” Tōgō declared, “the plan was to concentrate our whole Fleet in the Korean Strait, and so ‘in comfort and well-being to take advantage of the enemy’s fatigue. . . .’”
And indeed, Japan won a crushing victory at Tsushima Strait in May 1905, demolishing the Baltic Fleet in close action.
The Imperial Japanese Navy wrested Mahanian command from its enemy, then, but it did so by increments. And the gradual approach sufficed. Only after the Japanese triumph at Tsushima—among the most decisive fleet engagements in the annals of naval warfare—did Tōgō believe Japan at last held command of the sea. Corbett applauded Japanese prudence, and touted Tokyo’s maritime strategy as active defense in action. He claimed that the war had ratified his strategic vision.
The U.S. Navy can learn much from the Russo-Japanese War, from Mahan, and from Corbett—which is why we study that long-ago war and the two theorists with our students in Newport. Our navy and joint force will have to grapple with a fortress fleet whose battle potential would boggle the mind of Mahan should war come in the Western Pacific. And U.S. naval commanders should get used to Corbettian active defense, a strategy of the weaker pugilist. The odds range from slim to none that America will be the stronger contender at the outset of a Pacific war. Maritime command will elude the U.S. Navy on day one. It will need to be eventual, not instant.
But this does not mean victory is impossible. Just ask Tōgō Heihachirō.
James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Faculty Fellow at the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. The views voiced here are his alone.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
