Identity – that imagined community of shared ideas which unite a group – is an important aspect of sea power and the strategies used to maintain or achieve it. This should not be a novel proposition. Clausewitz in his analysis of war as a trinity that encompassed the people, the government and the military clearly includes both the political process and the society that supports it in his theoretical model. With regard to sea power, Mahan alluded to this when he noted that one of the six determinants of sea power was ‘the character of the people’, or ‘national character’ as he also refers to it, a concept that has proven most long lasting in Britain where the idea that the British (or at least the English) were an island race, a race of natural sailors, or had a special relationship with the sea as a result of their island home was a common place one up to quite recently. On the other hand, Julian Corbett showed very little interest in the links between society, the political process and sea power in the theoretical model he constructed to underpin his Principles of Maritime Strategy, preferring to focus on how sea power can meet political goals. Corbett is not alone in avoiding any deep engagement with the swirling and perhaps immutable forces that shift and mould public opinion, the political interest in sea power, or the will to use armed force in war or in peace to achieve national ends. Professor Colin Gray has noted that several significant contributors to the field of strategic studies acknowledge the importance of societal and political issues, but that these same writers also recognise that mastery of sociology, anthropology and local or regional knowledge are not generally strengths of strategists; the inference being that all too often the strategist draws back from them in favour of the more mutable and quantifiable aspects of their discipline. Even Clausewitz and Mahan, having identified societal and political factors as being of considerable importance, concentrate on the perhaps more comfortable and more readily analysed pure military aspects of strategy and sea power.