By Capt Joseph R. John, March 24, 2023
For 102 years, the Occupants of the Oval Office, members of the United States Congress, the leaders of the Department of Defense, and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff once fully understood and learned the lessons on strategy, geography, and history that Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, USN presented in his article entitled “The United States Looking Outward.” Published in The Atlantic in 1890. He argued that, with the closing of the frontier, the United States had become an island nation looking eastward and westward across oceans and stated that the nation’s energies should therefore be focused externally: on the seas, on maritime trade, and on a larger role in the world.
The US Government understood in the age of Alfred Thayer Mahan, that the US Navy must be strong to ensure Freedom of the Seas (the concept of a mare liberum—a “free sea”—which was first enunciated by the Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius in 1609). At the end of World War II, the US Navy fleet consisted of 6700 ships, and for the next 20…
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