Excerpt
Maritime commerce warfare” has a distinctly dated whiff. The great Anglo- American naval theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the Colomb brothers, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and Julian Corbett—all dismissed it as an indecisive strategy of the weak. Imperial Germany’s turn to unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917 failed to achieve its political purpose, instead bringing the United States into the war just as war weariness and revolution threatened to undermine the Entente’s military effectiveness. In the Second World War, both Germany and the United States used the submarine with deadly effectiveness against the maritime supply lines of their enemies, but even the more effective of their campaigns—that of the U.S. Navy in the Pacific—seemed outdated and unnecessary once the atomic bomb made Giulio Douhet’s vision of directly attacking the enemy’s industry and civilian population a reality. The accelerating pace of technological change after the Second World War suggested that any war between superpowers might swiftly escalate beyond the conventional stage; the U.S. and Soviet navies accordingly paid a great deal of attention to the nuclear balance of terror, to deterrence, and to finding, fixing, and destroying military assets.
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