Strategy on land, at sea and in the air

Terminology for land warfare and sea warfare is partly different. Where we talk of Strategy, Tactics, sometimes of operational art, with relation to the sea, it has been within the wider context of ‘command of the sea’ or ‘seapower’, a term traced to Thucydides’ ‘rule of the sea’ (Starr 1978). Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond, who upon retiring from the Royal Navy became a Cambridge don, defined it thus just after the Second World War:

The term ‘strategy’ appeared even later in a naval context than in Western writing on war in general. An entirely unsurprising definition in the Clausewitzian and Jominian tradition (see chapter 1) is that of Giovanni Sechi in his Elementi di arte militare marittima of 1906:

Here, as in general definitions of Strategy, much value was added by bringing in the political dimension. Sir Julian Corbett very helpfully introduced ‘maritime strategy’ as a generic term which subsumes the narrower concept of ‘naval strategy’ for the use of force at sea. Taking a wider, holistic perspective on Strategy, Corbett understood that ‘maritime strategy’ necessarily had to involve land warfare, but might – and in the case of island states like Great Britain usually did – involve the use of navies. If both land and naval warfare were involved, Corbett recommended the use of the term ‘maritime strategy’, with the purely sea-bound element of this Strategy being naval warfare:

On their own, navies could but exhaust the enemy, and would simultaneously exhaust themselves. For a ‘firm decision’, co-operation of land and naval forces was required.