Alfred Thayer Mahan (September 27, 1840 December 1, 1914) was a United States

Navy admiral, geostrategist, and historian, who has been called "the most important American
strategist of the nineteenth century." His concept of "sea power" was based on the idea that
countries with greater naval power will have greater worldwide impact; it was most famously
presented in The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 16601783 (1890). The concept had an
enormous influence in shaping the strategic thought of navies across the world, especially those
of the United States, Germany, Japan and Britain, ultimately causing a European naval arms
race in the 1890s. His ideas still permeate the US Navy doctrine. Several ships have been
named as the USS Mahan, including the lead vessel of a class of destroyers.
Strategic views
Mahan's views were shaped by the 17th-century conflicts between the Dutch Republic, England,
France and Spain, and by the nineteenth-century naval wars between France and Great Britain,
and British naval superiority eventually defeated France, consistently preventing invasion and
blockade. To a modern reader, the emphasis on controlling seaborne commerce is
commonplace, but in the 19th century, the notion was radical, especially in a nation entirely
obsessed with expansion on to the continent's western land. On the other hand, Mahan's
emphasis of sea power as the crucial fact behind Britain's ascension neglected the welldocumented roles of diplomacy and armies. Mahan's theories could not explain the success of
terrestrial empires, such as Bismarckian Germany.
In the context of his time, Mahan backed a revival of Manifest Destiny through overseas
imperialism. He held that sea power would require the United States to acquire defensive bases
in the Caribbean and Pacific as well as take possession of Hawaii. That came while the United
States was launching a major shipbuilding program to move it to the third place among
worldwide naval powers by 1900.
Sea Power
Mahan believed that national greatness was inextricably associated with the sea, with its
commercial usage in peace and its control in war. His goal was to discover the laws of history
that determined who controlled the seas. His theoretical framework came from Antoine-Henri
Jomini.
The primary mission of a navy was to secure the command of the sea. Mahan contended that
with a command of the sea, even if local and temporary, naval operations in support of land
forces can be of decisive importance and that naval supremacy can be exercised by a
transnational consortium acting in defense of a multinational system of free trade. Mahan
argued that radical technological change does not eliminate uncertainty from the conduct of war
and so a rigorous study of history should be the basis of naval officer education. Mahan was a
frequent commentator on world naval, strategic, and diplomatic affairs.
Impact
Mahan's name became a household word in the German navy, as Kaiser Wilhelm II ordered his
officers to read Mahan, and Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz (18491930) used Mahan's reputation to
finance a powerful surface fleet. Tirpitz, an intense navalist who believed ardently in Mahan's
dictum that whatever power rules the sea also ruled the world, had The Influence of Sea Power
Upon History translated into German in 1898 and had 8000 copies handed out for free as a way
of pressuring the Reichstag to vote for the First Navy Bill.

Tirpitz used Mahan not only as a way of winning German public opinion over to navalism but
also as his guide to his strategic thinking. Before 1914, Tirpitz completely rejected guerre-decourse as a strategy as Mahan was against guerre-de-course, and he instead embraced
Mahan's ideal of a decisive battle of annihilation between two fleets as the way to win Germany
command of the seas. Tirpitz always planned for the High Sea Fleet to win the Reich "world
power status," a strategy that he based upon his reading of The Influence of Sea Power Upon
History.
Mahan argued that only a fleet of armored battleships might be decisive in a modern war.
According to the decisive-battle doctrine, a fleet must not be divided. He encouraged
technological improvement in convincing opponents that naval knowledge and strategy
remained necessary, but domination of the seas dictated the necessity of the speed and the
predictability of the steam engine.
His books were both greatly acclaimed and closely studied in Britain and Imperial Germany,
influencing the buildup of their forces prior to the First World War. Mahan influenced the naval
portion of the SpanishAmerican War. His work influenced the doctrines of every major navy in
the interwar period.
Mahan's concept of sea power extended beyond naval superiority: in peacetime, states should
increase production and shipping capacities, acquire overseas possessions, either colonies or
privileged access to foreign markets. He stressed that the number of coal fuel stations and
strategic bases should be few to avoid draining too many resources from the mother country.
Although Mahan's influence on foreign powers has been generally recognized, it is only rather
recently that scholars have called attention to his role as significant in the growth of American
overseas possessions, the rise of the new American navy, and the adoption of the strategic
principles upon which it operated.
The Influence of Seapower Upon History, 16601783 was translated to Japanese and used as a
textbook in the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN). That strongly affected the IJN's doctrine on
stopping Russian naval expansion in the Far East, which culminated in the Russo-Japanese
War from 1904 to 1905.