The Making Of A Maritime Power

This book is a valuable work of reference for the study of sea power, especially in China. It analyzes the challenges and problems facing China’s sea power and offers a complete set of solutions known as ‘sea exploitation.’ In this context, it discusses five aspects of China’s sea power: 1) It revises the notion of sea power and proposes a cost-benefit analysis framework for it. It holds that sea power is undergoing major changes, that multivariate completion and peaceful competition have become mainstream, that negative and zero-sum games have become positive sum games, and that the pursuit of control over the sea has gradually developed into efforts to establish dominance in a partnership. 2) By analyzing the increase in the benefits of China’s sea power, the rise in the nation’s ability-to-pay principle and the growth in the public expectation of China’s capability of providing global public goods, it points out that the rise of China’s sea power is an unavoidable trend. 3) It explores the challenges and problems facing China’s sea power, arguing that China is currently in a situation where it is daunted by large countries, troubled by small countries and its neighbors are expanding their armaments, which have combined to increase the cost of improving China’s sea power. Meanwhile, factors such as strategy vacuum, poor oceanic management and polices tending to restrict ocean development have substantially undermined the benefits of China’s sea power. 4) It summarizes features of China’s sea power and stresses that dilemmas of non-sovereign sea power expansion and sovereign sea power expansion, traumatic pressure and transcendental ideals, escalated conflict and peaceful appeal, etc. require China to articulate its stance on sea power on the one hand and possess the wisdom to resolve sea power problems peacefully on the other. 5) It proposes that China should draw on the experience of the Western Han Dynasty of ancient China, which adopted a land exploitation strategy and introduced a sea exploitation strategy, offering a unique way to implement sea exploitation strategies in China based on domestic and foreign practices.

In Maritime Power and the Law of the Sea: Expeditionary Operations in World Politics, Commander James Kraska analyzes the evolving rules governing freedom of the seas and their impact on expeditionary operations in the littoral, near-shore coastal zone. Coastal state practice and international law are developing in ways that restrict naval access to the littorals and associated coastal communities and inshore regions that have become the fulcrum of world geopolitics. Consequently, the ability of naval forces to project expeditionary power throughout semi-enclosed seas, exclusive economic zones (EEZs) and along the important sea-shore interface is diminishing and, as a result, limiting strategic access and freedom of action where it is most needed. Commander Kraska describes how control of the global commons, coupled with new approaches to sea power and expeditionary force projection, has given the United States and its allies the ability to assert overwhelming sea power to nearly any area of the globe. But as the law of the sea gravitates away from a classic liberal order of the oceans, naval forces are finding it more challenging to accomplish the spectrum of maritime missions in the coastal littorals, including forward presence, power projection, deterrence, humanitarian assistance and sea control. The developing legal order of the oceans fuses diplomacy, strategy and international law to directly challenge unimpeded access to coastal areas, with profound implications for American grand strategy and world politics.

A collection of essays on British and American maritime relationships in the 20th century together with details on the British organization of warfare, Anglo-American maritime theory, their rivalries and coalitions and their plans for dealing with a future war in the nuclear age.

This book adopts an innovative new approach to examine the role of maritime power and the utility of navies. It uses a number of case studies based upon key Royal Navy operations in the twentieth century to draw out enduring principles about maritime power and to examine the strengths and limitations of maritime forces as instruments of national policy. Individual chapters focus on campaigns and operations from both World Wars and a series of post-1945 crises and conflicts from the Palestine Patrol in the 1940s to Royal Navy operations in support of British policy in the 1990s. Each case study demonstrates critical features of maritime power including: operations during the transition to war; fleet operations in narrow seas; logistics; submarine operations; the impact of air power on maritime operations; blockade; maritime power projection; amphibious warfare; jurisdictional disputes and the law of the sea; and, peace support operations. The contributors to this book all have considerable experience lecturing on these issues at the United Kingdom Joint Services Command and Staff College, where maritime campaign analysis is used to teach the principles of maritime power to officers of the Royal Navy. The book combines an authoritative examination of critical Royal Navy operations during the twentieth century with a sophisticated analysis of the nature of maritime power. As such it is of both historical interest and contemporary relevance and will prove equally valuable to academic historians, military professionals and the general reader.

This book examines US naval strategy and the role of American seapower over three decades, from the late 20th century to the early 21st century. This study uses the concept of seapower as a framework to explain the military and political application of sea power and naval force for the United States of America. It addresses the context in which strategy, and in particular US naval strategy and naval power, evolves and how US naval strategy was developed and framed in the international and national security contexts. It explains what drove and what constrained US naval strategy and examines selected instances where American sea power was directed in support of US defense and security policy ends – and whether that could be tied to what a given strategy proposed. The work utilizes naval capstone documents in the framework of broader maritime conceptual and geopolitical thinking, and discusses whether these documents had lasting influences in the strategic mind-set, the force structure, and other areas of American sea power. Overall, this work provides a deeper understanding of the crafting of US naval strategy since the final decade of the Cold War, its contextual and structural framework setting, and its application. To that end, the work bridges the gap between the thinking of American naval officers and planners on the one hand and academic analyses of Navy strategy on the other hand. It also presents the trends in the use of naval force for foreign policy objectives and into strategy-making in the American policy context. This book will be of much interest to students of naval power, maritime strategy, US national security and international relations in general.

Maritime power has been a key defining parameter of economic vitality and geostrategic power of nations. This book explores how the first decade of the 21st century has witnessed the rise of China and India as confident economic powers pivoting on high growth rates, exponential expansion of science, technology and industrial growth.

"This concise but exhaustive treatment of sea powers examines the strengths and weaknesses of maritime power, including chapters on mutiny, blockades, coalitions, expeditionary warfare, piracy, commerce raiding, and soft power operations. Throughout, Elleman analyzes the competition between land power and sea power strategies"--

EconomicWarfare and the Sea examines the relationship between trade, maritimewarfare, and strategic thought between the early modern period and thelate-twentieth century. Using a variety of geographic and chronologicalexamples, it presents a longue duree approach to a crucial theme in maritimestrategic thought.