Child and grandchild of naval Strategy

We have seen that writing on naval warfare differed in many points from that on land warfare. Air Strategy emerged in most ways as the child of naval or maritime Strategy, and much less of thinking on land warfare. The main tenet inherited from the land Strategy thinkers was the Clausewitzian war aim of ‘imposing one’s will upon the enemy’.

The inheritance from naval thinking was both much larger and more detailed. The three crucial bequests from naval writing to air power theory were:

• the debate about whether the navy’s (or as it might be the air force’s) actions should be subordinated to the needs of land warfare, which was essentially the argument of Corbett;

• the claim that the navy (or then, the air force) could win a war more or less on its own, mainly in a central and decisive naval battle (or strategic air campaign);

• the perceived possibility of using the navy (or later, the air force) to circumvent the enemy’s strongest or hardest part, his military forces, and carry the war directly to the enemy’s vital but softest part, his civilian populations in his big cities. While the overall aim of advocates of this route – through blockade or city bombing – was to defeat the enemy state, not to annihilate his population in a genocidal fashion, a Social Darwinist element resonated in this thinking.

Some concepts – such as command of the sea/command of the air, sea power/air power – could be transposed one to one. Other translation of ideas from naval and maritime Strategy to air Strategy included cross-overs and mergers of the ideas of several ‘schools’ on maritime Strategy. At times, the genealogy of ideas can be explicitly traced, as was particularly true for the writers on general Strategy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their influence on naval/maritime Strategy thinkers. But with the growth of formal educational curricula and cheaply available specialist periodicals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ideas spread in ways that elude specific tracing. Some were ‘in the air’: when finding in somebody’s writing on air Strategy traces of a previous author’s or school’s ideas, we often cannot prove that these were consciously assimilated. In some cases a certain idea may well have been re­invented, rediscovered. In others, two individuals, dealing with similar questions, having read similar things, may independently have hit upon very similar answers.