Maritime Dominance Quotes
Germany had a very small and insignificant navy. It was Tirpitz who persuaded the nation to develop sea power.
Military men tend to rely so much on military history that they are almost always fighting the last war. Soon air power would supplant sea power as the critical factor. Then nuclear power, and then nuclear weapons became too severe for actual use and yet wars still continued with no consensus as to that will be in the future.
This quotation illustrates several historical differences of the past with today. To be a world superpower, one had to have a dominant navy. Yet that navy was, in Churchill’s concept, a defensive system. It could protect the nation from invasion, and its merchant ships on the seas, but a navy provided no threat to invade towns and villages in Europe or elsewhere. Germany and France in contrast, with their large armies could invade other nations and menace Europe and Asia. It also illustrates why the navy and the army were considered completely separate departments of government in that they had different functions. The early American government had a Navy Department and Secretary but no Secretary of the Army or standing army.
In the first year of WWI, the British Fleet kept the German Fleet bottled up in port. As a result, the British had a very successful sea embargo against the Germans who rarely challenged the British fleet even though they had some major, powerful, capital ships. See {642234}. Meanwhile, the German ships were in no position to harass much less destroy Allied (French, Russian or English) shipping.
Teddy Roosevelt dispatched 16 battleships (The Great White Fleet) around the world to impress the Japanese and others with American naval strength:
