This book examines the nature and character of naval expeditionary warfare, in particular in peripheral campaigns, and the contribution of such campaigns to the achievement of strategic victory. Naval powers, which can lack the massive ground forces to win in the main theatre, often choose a secondary theatre accessible to them by sea and difficult for their enemies to reach by land, giving the sea power and its expeditionary forces the advantage. The technical term for these theatres is ‘peripheral operations.’ The subject of peripheral campaigns in naval expeditionary warfare is central to the British, the US, and the Australian way of war in the past and in the future. All three are reluctant to engage large land forces because of the high human and economic costs. Instead, they rely as much as possible on sea and air power, and the latter is most often in the form of carrier-based aviation. In order to exert pressure on their enemies, they have often opened additional theaters in on-going, regional, and civil wars. This book contains thirteen case studies by some of the foremost naval historians from the United States, Great Britain, and Australia whose collected case studies examine the most important peripheral operations of the last two centuries. This book will be of much interest to students of naval warfare, military history, strategic studies and security studies.

This book examines the nature and character of naval expeditionary warfare, in particular in peripheral campaigns, and the contribution of such campaigns to the achievement of strategic victory. Naval powers, which can lack the massive ground forces to win in the main theatre, often choose a secondary theatre accessible to them by sea and difficult for their enemies to reach by land, giving the sea power and its expeditionary forces the advantage. The technical term for these theatres is 'peripheral operations.' The subject of peripheral campaigns in naval expeditionary warfare is central to the British, the US, and the Australian way of war in the past and in the future. All three are reluctant to engage large land forces because of the high human and economic costs. Instead, they rely as much as possible on sea and air power, and the latter is most often in the form of carrier-based aviation. In order to exert pressure on their enemies, they have often opened additional theaters in on-going, regional, and civil wars. This book contains thirteen case studies by some of the foremost naval historians from the United States, Great Britain, and Australia whose collected case studies examine the most important peripheral operations of the last two centuries. This book will be of much interest to students of naval warfare, military history, strategic studies and security studies.

Maritime powers dominate the planet, from the British empire of the 19th century, to the American post-World War II domination of global affairs. To a large degree their control of the globe is based on control of the seas. This book seeks to examine the strengths and weaknesses of maritime power, including specific chapters on mutiny, blockades, coalitions, piracy, expeditionary warfare, commerce raiding, and soft power operations, but with larger discussion of such sea power characteristics as sea control, sea denial, and the competition between land powers and sea powers. The conclusions will discuss how many other countries, including Russia during the Cold War and the PRC today, have or are seeking to use sea power to claim regional and then eventually global hegemony.

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.

As one can guess from the title, the following book is a non-fiction work that attempts to explain why having a strong naval force can be the deciding factor of whether a country will emerge victorious when engaging in open conflict. It is written by Bradley A. Fiske, an officer in the United States Navy who was noted as a technical innovator. During his long career, Fiske invented more than a hundred and thirty electrical and mechanical devices, with both naval and civilian uses, and wrote extensively on technical and professional issues. At one point, The New Yorker called him "one of the notable naval inventors of all time."

The end of the Cold War has ushered in a period in which Western military forces have engaged primarily in expeditionary operations. These have turned out to be much more complex politically than first thought and have required naval planners to focus on delivering effects from the sea rather than at sea. Accordingly, navies around the world are going through a time of transition and transformation in which questions are being asked about their priorities, the relative importance of their contributions to joint and combined campaigns, and how these best might be provided. Because of the understandably widespread fixation on the war-fighting phase of the expeditionary operation, current conceptions of the naval contribution, even in the United States, do not pay sufficient regard to the less obvious aspects of the naval contribution to campaigns which mostly are by their nature maritime. It is easy, for example, to neglect the importance of the diplomatic activity which acts as a kind of beforeand- after-sales service to the main war-fighting event. Naval diplomacy, of course, may reduce the necessity for high-intensity expeditionary operations in the first place. But even when it does not, a naval diplomatic campaign to win friends and influence people and to deter potential malefactors should be designed to create the optimum political context within which the expeditionary campaign may be fought. The same can be said for the naval effort to assure maritime security by maintaining good order at sea against those that threaten it (such as waterborne terrorists, pirates, smugglers, arms suppliers, and the like). Even navies with their institutional and budgetary priorities for the requirements of high-intensity capabilities have a tendency to neglect these less visible low intensity tasks that often are crucial to the winning and, as important, the sustaining of victory in the land campaign. While the U.S. Navy may be taking the lead in developing capabilities of direct value to the prosecution of expeditionary operations, many other navies are doing so as well, if on a smaller and less ambitious scale, although this widespread effort may be predicated on assumptions about "an expeditionary future" which, in the end, may not be obtained. There are three maritime requirements of expeditionary warfare. First is the capacity to maintain sea control on the open ocean and in the littorals to protect the force and enable it to engage in missions against the land. Second is the projection of power ashore, and third is the provision of sea-based logistical support for maritime forces at sea and land forces ashore. These are interrelated in complex ways and should not be considered as separate and discrete. The maintenance of sea control raises issues about the difference and relative priority between operations in the littoral and on the open ocean, and provides a set of significant technological challenges to today's naval planners and force developers. The effectiveness of the response of these planners to these sometimes novel challenges will have significant implications for those involved in the land campaign because of their military and political reliance on high degrees of sea control. Political constraints of the sort revealed in the Iraq war of 2003 also have emphasized the advantages of maritime power projection.

A sweeping, lavishly illustrated one-volume history of the rise of American naval power during World War II “A brilliant and gripping book by a master historian working at the top of his powers.”—Fredrik Logevall, Harvard University “Paul Kennedy has written a classic in this sweeping narrative account of the desperate struggle to command the seas and America’s rise as a superpower during the Second World War.”—John H. Maurer, U.S. Naval War College In this engaging narrative, brought to life by marine artist Ian Marshall’s beautiful full‑color paintings, historian Paul Kennedy grapples with the rise and fall of the Great Powers during World War II. Tracking the movements of the six major navies of the Second World War—the allied navies of Britain, France, and the United States and the Axis navies of Germany, Italy, and Japan—Kennedy tells a story of naval battles, maritime campaigns, convoys, amphibious landings, and strikes from the sea. From the elimination of the Italian, German, and Japanese fleets and almost all of the French fleet, to the end of the era of the big‑gunned surface vessel, the advent of the atomic bomb, and the rise of an American economic and military power larger than anything the world had ever seen, Kennedy shows how the strategic landscape for naval affairs was completely altered between 1936 and 1946.

Read by Kaiser Wilhelm, both Roosevelts, and other leaders, this classic text on the history and tactics of naval warfare had a profound effect on the imperial policies of all major powers. The author argues that despite great changes and scientific advances in weaponry, certain military principles remain constant. Includes 4 maps, 24 battle plans.

This volume contends that nations embroiled in Continental wars have historically had poor maritime strategies, developing the argument that navies involved in such wars have made poor contributions to politial objectives.