Big Serge Thoughts

1. The North Sea Chessboard: Germany against Britain

If you ask someone to name the worst military or geostrategic blunders in history, the standard answers will tend to center on doomed invasions of the Russian interior, either in the form of Napoleon's 1812 campaign or the Third Reich's invasion of the USSR. Someone with a deeper well of knowledge might point to a more esoteric and specific blunder: perhaps Erwin Rommel's failure to neutralize Malta, the Byzantine division of forces at Manzikert, or Britain's Gallipoli campaign. Perhaps we could return to the age of heroes and cite the Trojans bringing that wretched wooden horse into their city without inspecting its interior.

What most of these mistakes (perhaps with the exception of the Trojan Horse) have in common is that, although they all misfired spectacularly, they at least possessed a certain strategic logic which made them defensible on theoretical grounds. Mistakes, the actions of the enemy, and bad luck can all compound to create a disaster, but usually there is no sense that decisions were made for no reason at all. Usually.

Between 1897 and 1914 Imperial Germany conducted its own geostrategic blunder of the highest order, when it unilaterally launched a naval arms race against the greatest sea power of the age in the Royal Navy. What is remarkable about the German naval buildup is that it was justified on tenuous strategic speculations about the British response; despite the fact that it was apparent in real time that these speculations were untrue, the buildup continued for its own sake, and Germany repeatedly eschewed opportunities to turn aside from a dead end path.

Prewar Germany stands out among the annals of the great powers for all the wrong reasons. It was, to be sure, an impressively powerful state with remarkable industrial and military power. Institutionally, however, it was a train wreck which allowed its strength to be commandeered in the name of an armaments policy that was conducted separately from its war planning and diplomacy. In the space of two decades, the Germans did succeed in building the second largest battlefleet in the world, but it did so with no sense of how such a fleet might figure into its broader geostrategy, or how to deploy it in wartime.

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The result was an expensive military boondoggle which backfired on virtually all of its theoretical justifications, significantly worsened Germany's strategic position, and demonstrated virtually no military utility when war came to Europe in 1914. This grand debacle was embarked upon as a willful and unilateral experiment driven by a few key personalities in Germany. Neither widespread organic domestic support, nor international pressure, nor critical strategic vulnerabilities compelled Germany to launch an arms race with Great Britain. She did so willingly, in an act of profligacy so profound that it astonished observers at home and abroad, with Winston Churchill naming it the German "Luxury Fleet." Adrift from a coherent geostrategy and lacking institutional mechanisms for course correction, the Germans plunged ahead into a strategic trap of their own making.

Upstart: The Rise of the Germany Navy

One of the great peculiarities of the First World War, and in particular its nautical dimension, is that Germany and Great Britain, as late as the 1890's, had no real sense that they were preparing to fight a war with each other. Well towards the end of the century, both German and British naval policy continued to view France (and to a lesser extent Russia) as the chief objects of anxiety. Yet in the span of barely a decade, their strategic animus became redirected and the two forces - the Royal Navy on the one hand, and the Kaiserliche Marine, or Imperial Navy on the other - were thinking almost exclusively of war against the other.

This mutual strategic pivot was predicated on changes in both Britain's alliance policy and strategic outlook and on a wholesale revolution of the German Imperial Navy. In the early 1890's, Germany's navy was viewed fundamentally as a limited coastal defense force, designed and tasked with keeping the French and Russians away from Germany's North Sea and Baltic coastlines, respectively. In 1900, the German fleet included just 36 effective fighting ships and ranked a distant fourth in Europe, behind not only the Royal Navy (by laughable margins) but also the French and Russians. By 1914, the Germans had the second largest navy in the world, with more dreadnought equivalent battleships than all the other non-British navies of Europe combined.

The rapid expansion of the German surface fleet, and its strategic shift against Britain, was a complex process, and certainly too complex to wave away by simply saying: "The Germans decided to build lots of battleships." The process was intimately tied to the Imperial Navy's unique position in the German state, and the personal predilections of two individuals: Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz.

To begin, it is important to understand that the German Imperial Navy had a unique relationship to the rest of the state which made it strategically erratic. It was, to be sure, very unlike either the German Army or the Royal Navy. As an institution, it was practically unique. While perhaps less interesting than battleship design and deployment plans, a brief overview of the institutional peculiarities of the German Navy provides an important starting point for the broader topic of the prewar naval buildup.

The German Kaiser was both the head of state and the head of the armed forces, and he wielded power through his cabinets and the senior appointees within them. In practice, however, the Kaiser had limited authority over the land forces. The General Staff maintained absolute authority over war planning, and was free to appoint Chiefs of Staff to the field commanders (who were appointed by the Kaiser). The army thus had strong institutional control over both personnel and operations planning which were largely immune to the Kaiser's direct interference.

The navy was much different, and far more subject to the Kaiser's direct control. As a result, he tended to view it as something of a personal plaything. In wartime, the Kaiser had to personally approve naval operations, and he generally did so with great trepidation over losing "his ships." Unlike the army, the navy had no institutional insulation from the Kaiser, and it lacked a strong central planning body akin to the army's general staff.

Instead, the navy had a variety of different leadership bodies which frequently shuffled in relation to each other, under the overall command authority of the Kaiser. Initially, there was a conventional admiralty, generally called simply the OK (for Oberkommando, or Naval High Command), which was nominally responsible for planning and combat operations. The OK was parallel to a separate office known as the RMA (for Reichsmarineamt, or Imperial Naval Office), which was responsible for the navy's building program. Finally, there was a a Naval Cabinet which was responsible for personnel and appointments, and was directly subordinate to the Kaiser. In a sense, we can think of the Germany Navy as having its three critical functions (operations planning and command, material and shipbuilding, and personnel) split into three separate bodies which did not have direct institutional connections, and instead were separately suborned to the Kaiser.

This suggests, from the beginning, a fragmented command structure with the Kaiser at its nexus, and in the absence of a unified naval command it was inevitable that the Kaiser - mercurial, easily influenced, and largely ignorant of naval operations - should have dominated the navy as a service. Furthermore, the lack of unified command and clear lines of communication largely froze the navy out of war planning and made it a strategically autonomous service, which did not coordinate with the General Staff of the army and generally lacked a sense of how it could fit into Germany's larger war plans.

In short, the trajectory of Germany's naval policy was always strongly influenced by several important institutional idiosyncrasies, which differentiated the service from both the German Army and from competing navies. These could be aptly summarized as follows:

1. The German Navy suffered from a dissipated command structure, with different bodies of authority including the OK and the RMA. This meant that war planning and fleet building were conducted by separate bodies which did not coordinate well with each other, with only the Kaiser in a position to adjudicate and give orders to all the different parties.

2. Ultimate authority over the navy was vested in the Kaiser, with no independent command (like the Army's General Staff) able to plan operations independently of the monarch. The Imperial German Navy utterly lacked a single senior admiral, akin to the British First Sea Lord or the American Chief of Naval Operations, who could issue commands directly to operational commanders or engage with the Chief of the Army General staff on equal terms.

3. The head of the RMA (responsible for the design and construction of the fleet) was an Admiral, rather than a civilian. This stands in stark contrast to, for example, the American Secretary of the Navy or the British First Lord of the Admiralty, who were almost always civilians with little experience in naval operations. Rather than appointing a civilian with advising admirals, the German system vested this power directly in an Admiral.

Finally, we can add that because the German navy began as a strongly subsidiary service (relative to the army, which was always the main pillar of German strength), the navy was forced to actively promote itself to ensure its own survival and growth as a service. This made the German Navy intensely political, locked as it was in a perennial fight to get the Reichstag to appropriate money for shipbuilding. We can say, with little exaggeration, that the primary activity of the German Navy was shipbuilding, rather than war planning or tactical innovation.

This was particularly the case because the dominant figure in the prewar Imperial Navy was Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. Undoubtedly a titanic figure, Tirpitz more than any other man was responsible for transforming the German Navy from a modest coastal defense force into a world class service capable of threatening (at least on paper) the Royal Navy. However, the methods that he used to do so had the ancillary effect of further warping the institutional peculiarities of the service, such that in wartime the High Seas Fleet proved to be much less than the sum of its parts.

Tirpitz was a Prussian, but in contrast to the usual Prussian pedigree he had joined the Navy as a young man, at a time when - by his own admission - it was not a particularly popular institution. He began his first serious leap towards high power in the 1880's as the head of Germany's torpedo program - notwithstanding his background in torpedo boats, however, he would become a staunch advocate of battleship construction and became the driving figure in the naval arms race which Germany would launch, almost unilaterally, against Great Britain.

Two broader aspects of Tirpitz's career and character stand out which bear commentary before the particular process of the naval arms race can be evaluated. First and foremost, Tirpitz was a skilled political operator who demonstrated a perfect willingness to take a hatchet to institutional niceties in order to advance his program. This can be seen clearly in the way his views pivoted as he moved from post to post.

For example, from 1892 to 1895 Tirpitz was Chief of Staff for the OK (naval high command), and during that time he argued incessantly and aggressively that it was madness to allow the RMA (the Marine Office) to have control over fleet development. During this period, Tirpitz and the OK were chomping at the bit to build battleships, but the RMA and the Reichstag were still nervous about the price tag and continued to build armored cruisers instead. Frustrated by the failure of the State Naval Secretary, Friedrich von Hollmann, to heed his advice, Tirpitz argued that fleet construction ought to be the remit of the admirals who would command the fleet in wartime: in essence, this was a call to neuter the RMA and give its responsibilities to the OK.

In 1897, however, when Tirpitz took control of the RMA and succeeded Hollmann as State Naval Secretary, he launched a coup the other direction, that is against the OK. In a near total reverse of his old arguments, he now lobbied the Kaiser to transfer command authority from the OK to the RMA. The culmination of this effort, in 1899, was the dissolution of the OK altogether with many command authorities distributed between the RMA and a new admiralty staff organized under the Kaiser's supreme authority.

All of this can seem like esoteric bureaucratic infighting (and in many ways it was) with far too many acronyms and obscure titles. The point, however is relatively straightforward: Tirpitz was aggressive about aggrandizing power in whatever office he happened to hold at the time. During his years as chief of staff in the OK (Naval High Command), he argued that shipbuilding responsibilities should be taken away from the State Naval Secretary. Once Tirpitz was himself the State Naval Secretary, he lobbied to strip command authority from, and the ultimately dissolve, the OK. At both stops, he was skilled at manipulating the Kaiser - with whom he had an exceptional relationship - to get what he wanted, even threatening to resign on multiple occasions. For Tirpitz, the point was that he had a clear and singular vision for how to develop the Navy's power, and he resented the dissipated authority - therefore, he was ruthlessly and pragmatically willing to attack the institutional structure in order to accumulate the power he craved to push his vision forward.

And what was that vision? In its simplest form, it was a surface fleet structured around battleships that would be capable of, if not directly fighting and defeating the Royal Navy, at least posing a credible threat. The evolution of the German fleet from a budget force designed for coastal defense into a world class force with only one real rival (the Royal Navy) was not an inevitable process. It was a choice, spawned in Germany largely through the auspices of Tirpitz and his staff, who adroitly maneuvered the Reichstag into embarking on an unprecedented shipbuilding spree in a nexus of evolving strategic thought, personal ambition, economic concerns, and national anxiety.

The pre-Tirpitz conception of the German Navy was aptly summarized in an 1873 memorandum from the first chief of the Admiralty, Albrecht von Stosch:

The mission of the battlefleet is the defense of the coasts of the nation… Against larger seapowers the fleet has only the significance of a "sortie fleet." Any other objective is ruled out by the limited naval strength that the law provides.

The memorandum had a clean dual effect of not only stipulating the navy's coastal defense mission but also noting that the limited German fleet would have no wartime role seeking battle on the high seas. The general sensibility is that the navy would have a purely defensive role preventing the enemy from landing troops on the German coastline and keeping the country's ports and coastal installations open. This remained the general strategic animus of the navy until Tirpitz began to revise it in the 1890's.

The embryo of Tirpitz's evolving theory of naval power was his growing concern that, in some future war, the enemy might attempt to blockade German ports at long distance - that is to say, rather than conducting a close-in blockade of German harbors, the enemy fleet might loiter at strategic standoff and intercept German trade as it flowed through traffic chokepoints. It seems that at the beginning, the specific anxiety that preoccupied Tirpitz was the possibility that France might interdict German trade in the English Channel and the North Sea, at a distance beyond the fighting range of Germany's coastal fleets.

If this were the case, then the entire German naval strategy might be obsolete. A blockade at range would compel the German fleet to come out from its own coastal areas to defeat the enemy on the open sea. This marked a conceptual shift from coastal defense to "sea control", which necessitated in turn an entirely different sort of battlefleet prepared to fight a decisive battle far from German bases. In 1891, Tirpitz lamented that the naval officer corps did not grasp "the necessity to strike the enemy's seapower in open battle."

Tirpitz was thus already thinking along new lines early in the 1890's, but the critical strategic pivot came specifically in 1894. In that year (while still Chief of Staff of the OK), Tirpitz drafted a series of memoranda for general distribution. Among these documents, the most important was memorandum (Dientschrift) number 9. Dientschrift IX would become perhaps the most important and influential doctrine in the history of the German Navy, announcing Tirpitz's new strategic animus in unequivocal terms. The most important section of the memorandum was titled in a way that left no room for misunderstanding: "The Natural Purpose of a Fleet is the Strategic Offensive." It read, in part:

In recent times, when the sea became the best highway for commerce between individual nations, ships and fleets themselves became instruments of war, and the sea itself became a theater of war. Thereby the acquisition of sea supremacy [Seeherrschaft] became the first mission of a fleet; for only when sea supremacy is achieved can the enemy be forced to conclude peace.

It is at this point that Tirpitz's growing preoccupation with the thinking of Alfred Thayer Mahan first becomes readily apparent. Mahan, of course, was the American theorist whose famous book The Influence of Sea Power upon History argued in unequivocal terms that control of the sea was the central pivot in world affairs and an absolute prerequisite for victory in modern war. Mahan's books remain recommended reading today, and it is difficult to do them justice in a short space, but he implied two conclusions above all that were highly actionable for Tirpitz: first, that control of the sea was the greatest coefficient for victory on a strategic scale, as it would allow the dominant sea power to conduct global commerce unmolested while choking off the enemy's trade, and second that supremacy at sea was attained primarily through decisive battle between rival main battle fleets.

Mahan's book (published 1890) was a sensation, and while its influence has been occasionally overstated, it did capture the imagination of many world drivers, including US President Theodore Roosevelt, the Kaiser, and of course Tirpitz himself. It seems most likely that Tirpitz (who was fluent and comfortable in English) first read the book in the spring of 1894, before a German translation became available, and thereafter Mahanian language began to saturate his own writings, including the famous Dientschrift IX. It was notable, for example, that Tirpitz frequently referenced the decline of the Dutch Republic as a warning of what could happen to a power once defeated at sea: the preoccupation is telling, as the Anglo-Dutch Wars are a major topic in Mahan's writing.

From 1894 onward, then Tirpitz was preoccupied with what he saw as a pressing need for Germany to acquire a battlefleet that could fight a decisive battle on the open ocean and wrest "sea supremacy" away from the enemy. This marked a radical shift from the conventional German sensibility, which was predicated on a defensive war fought in proximity to the German coast. Tirpitz argued:

Advocates of a defensive fleet proceed from the assumption that the enemy fleet will come to them and that the decision must take place where they wish it. But this is the case only very infrequently. Enemy ships need not stay close to our coasts… but they can stand out to sea far from one's own works. Then our own fleet would have only the choice between inactivity, i.e., moral self annihilation, and fighting a battle on the open sea.

At this time, German planning was still centered around scenarios involving a war against France and/or Russia. Dientschrift IX, therefore, called for a battlefleet designed to grant 1/3 superiority over either France's Northern Fleet or the Russian Baltic Fleet, depending in which was expected to be bigger. The nucleus of this fleet was to be a striking force of 17 battleships (two squadrons of eight ships each, plus a fleet flagship) augmented by cruisers and torpedo boats.

Nothing about the German operational sensibility at this time was remotely realistic. A draft operations plan in 1895 envisioned a blockade of French channel ports designed to draw the French fleet out for battle. This was an elementary sort of formulation which ignored the fact that the French Northern Fleet would simply wait for reinforcements from the Mediterranean, and to make the plan work (even on paper) the OK assumed that repair and resupply could be done in English ports. This latter point is important, as it emphasizes that in 1895, rather than thinking of a war with the Royal Navy, the Germans were not only still preoccupied with France but even assuming that England would be a friendly neutral.

The movement in the German strategic concept occurred in two shift. The first shift, embodied in 1894's Dientschrift IX, argued that the German fleet had to be prepared to proactively seek decisive battle and therefore needed a powerful nucleus of battleships, but it still envisioned France as the most likely enemy. The second shift, which began almost immediately after Tirpitz took office as the State Naval Secretary in 1897, moved the crosshairs onto the Royal Navy. In a top secret memorandum presented to the Kaiser on June 15, 1897, Tirpitz argued that the essential task of the German Fleet had to be seizing supremacy in the North Sea in wartime. This task implied that the measuring stick against which the German fleet had to size up was not the French Northern Fleet, but the most powerful force in the theater: the Royal Navy:

"For Germany the most dangerous naval enemy at present is England."

The point, for Tirpitz, was not some particular hatred of the English, but simply the fact that the Royal Navy was the most powerful in the world. Therefore, building a fleet designed specifically to defeat the French was a half measure, since victory would still leave the Germans with only the second most powerful fleet in the theater. "Sea Supremacy" implied just that: supremacy did not mean second place.

The issue, however, went even deeper than this. Tirpitz was determined to build a viable and powerful fleet comprised of battleships, but to do so he needed a strategic vision that could justify such a program. Neither Russia nor France was a good fit for the Mahanian understanding of war, with its emphasis on "Sea Supremacy." In any war against the Franco-Russian alliance, whatever the particular configuration, it was inevitable that the German Army would be the arm on which the country lived or died. A Navy designed for decisive fleet battle and sea supremacy implied, almost by definition, that the Royal Navy was an adversary. Russia and France could never be defeated by sea, therefore Tirpitz needed an adversarial standard which would require, unequivocally, a fleet of battleships.

Tirpitz had, in effect, locked himself into a strategic feedback loop akin to the famous chicken-egg question. He believed that Germany's global power could only be guaranteed through sea supremacy, which would be won through decisive battle by powerful battlefleet. Thus the battleship was, in his mind, the indispensable platform for power projection. Building battleships, in turn, required measuring the fleet against the Royal Navy; conversely, however, it was only by identifying the Royal Navy as a rival that costly battleship construction could be truly justified. The choice of the Royal Navy as the enemy justified the expense of the battleships, and it was the building of the battleships that made the Royal Navy an enemy.

Of course, the 1897 memorandum to the Kaiser was top secret for a reason. Tirpitz could not come out and simply say explicitly that he wanted to prepare for a decisive showdown with the Royal Navy - and given the state of the paltry German surface fleet at the time, such an announcement might have been mistaken for comedy. There was also the matter of the Reichstag, which Tirpitz - now ensconced as State Naval Secretary - would have to cajole for every mark and every ship. As he would put it in 1899:

For political reasons the government cannot be as specific as the Reichstag would like it to be; one cannot directly say that the naval expansion is aimed primarily against England.

Nevertheless, it is clear from Tirpitz's writings that by the end of the century, he (and the Kaiser) had the Royal Navy clearly in mind as a potential adversary, and the standard against which the German Fleet would have to measure itself. Given the fact that relations between Britain and Germany were generally good at this time, it is essentially indisputable that Tirpitz (and his brain worm, Alfred Thayer Mahan) began the Anglo-German naval race almost unilaterally, with the English serving as the necessary adversary to justify costly battleship construction.

One thing remained: Tirpitz would have to convince the Reichstag to pay for it all. Although Tirpitz did not conceive of himself as a particular political person, he proved quite adept at ramming his construction schedules through the legislature. His signature accomplishments were a pair of naval bills, known in the German parlance as the Naval Laws, which were passed by the Reichstag in 1898 and 1900 respectively, with a series of amendments coming at later dates.

The genius of the Naval Laws, and Tirpitz's great political innovation, was that they laid out a long-term commitment to build a fixed number of ships over several years. This marked a radical departure from the established practice. Tirpitz's predecessor as State Naval Secretary, Admiral Hollman, made it a practice to annually present the Reichstag with requests for a small number of ships. Hollman had considered it politically impractical to move at a larger scale: "The Reichstag", he argued, "will never agree to be bound to a formal program for years in advance."

As Tirpitz saw it, however, the protocol of annual shipbuilding appropriations prevented the navy from building out the fleet in a properly systematic way, and allowed the Reichstag to meddle needlessly in the particulars. He wrote:

"When I became State Secretary, the German Navy was a collection of experiments in shipbuilding surpassed in exoticism only by the Russian Navy of Nicholas II."

The British, he noted, had a similar practice, but:

"There, money is of no importance; if they built a class of ships wrongly, they just threw the whole lot into the corner and built another. We could not permit ourselves that… I needed a bill which would protect the continuity of construction of the fleet."

Convincing the Reichstag to approve a multi-year building program was no easy feat, which required Tirpitz to show both a deft political touch and justify the fleet on strategic grounds. Despite his previous disdain for the political process, the Admiral engaged in a flurry of activity plying German notables to support the Naval Law: he paid visits to the recently retired Bismarck, to the King of Saxony, the Prince Regent of Bavaria, and various and sundry Grand Dukes and municipal authorities, occasionally pledging to name ships after his hosts to cajole their support.

Strategically, Tirpitz validated his proposed battlefleet on the grounds of a supposed "Risk Theory." Since he could not simply come out and openly say that he wished to be able to challenge the Royal Navy for control of the North Sea (in essence asking the government to sign on for an arms race with the strongest sea power in the world), he argued that a suitable battle fleet would act as a deterrent, forcing "even a sea power of the first rank to think twice before attacking our coasts." He also stressed that, politically speaking, agreeing to a long term building plan would create predictability and free the Reichstag from worrying over endlessly expanding building plans being proposed year after year.

Tirpitz found an enthusiastic ally in his search for ever larger naval appropriations, in the form of German industrial interests - particularly the metallurgical behemoth, Krupp. The reason, once again, was a complex interplay of geopolitical concerns and economics - in this case, the emerging alliance between France and Russia and a subsequent explosion of French arms exports. What mattered for Germany in this instance, however, was not only the strategic implications of a French-Russian linkup (which intensified the German sense of encirclement and siege) but also export competition for Krupp.

Krupp's enormous complex of machine shops and arms factories had a colossal output potential which was far beyond the demands of any one government - even Germany's. Thus, Krupp relied extensively on foreign orders to keep its enterprises busy: in 1890-91, more than 85 percent of Krupp's armaments sales were exports to foreign countries, and the Russians were one of their best customers. In 1885, however, the French government had lifted the ban on foreign weapons sales which had previously prevented French producers, like Schneider-Creusot, from competing with Krupp. Although Krupp was more price-competitive than the French, they were quickly squeezed out of the Russian market, thanks first to the consolidation of the Franco-Russian alliance, and secondly due to the eagerness of French banks to give the Russians loans to finance the purchase of French guns.

With the French government, banks, and manufacturers collaborating to outflank Krupp in foreign markets, the firm naturally needed to find alternative revenue streams, and it found a big one in the German naval construction program: if the German Army did not order enough artillery pieces to keep Krupp's factories busy, they could make up the difference with naval guns.

Krupp would become an indispensable partner for Tirpitz in advancing ever larger naval construction bills (Naval Laws, in the German parlance) - not only through direct lobbying, but also by mobilizing broad public support. In 1898, the German "Navy League" was founded with Krupp money, for the purpose of organizing public support for the Navy. Within a year, it had over 250,000 fee paying members and some 770,000 affiliates. Mobilizing support from newspapers, industrialists, university professors, politicians, and patriotic citizens of every stripe, it provided a powerful apparatus of political pressure to drive Tirpitz's construction schedule through the Reichstag.

Tirpitz's full press on the Reichstag was too much to resist, despite continuing trepidation from many of the deputies - particularly those who anticipated, correctly, that the battle fleet program was putting them on a collision course with England. But Tirpitz had mobilized a great swathe of public opinion behind him, and on March 26, 1898, the First Navy Law passed with a vote of 212-139. The Kaiser was overjoyed and showered Tirpitz with praise:

There is the Admiral himself…. Cheerfully and alone, he took up the awesome task of orienting an entire people, fifty million truculent, short-sighted, and foul-tempered Germans, and of bringing them around to an opposite view. He accomplished this seemingly impossible feat in eight months. Truly a powerful man!

The 1989 Naval Law provided appropriations for the construction of 19 battleships, organized into two squadrons of eight ships each, along with a fleet flagship and two reserve ships, along with a bevy of cruisers. Of equal importance, the law provided for automatic replacement of vessels on a regulated timetable - it thus provided a sort of self-regulating strength for the fleet. It was, of course, not nearly enough. The Second Naval Law, passed in June 1900, ballooned the construction schedule with an additional pair of battleship squadrons: once all ships were completed, the German battlefleet would have a total of 38 battleships along with 52 cruisers.

Tirpitz's master plan seemed to be coming along nicely. Although it was doubtful that the Germans could ever match the total strength of the Royal Navy, Tirpitz counted on the fact that British strength would be dissipated around the world protecting her far flung empire. In January, 1905, for example the British had three fleets in proximity to the North Sea: a Channel fleet, based at Dover, an Atlantic fleet at Gibraltar, and the reserve Home Fleet. If these three fleets joined for action, they could muster some 31 battleships. Tirpitz's Naval Laws, then, could be deemed to give the Germans a fighting chance in the North Sea.

Then, the master plan came untracked. On February 10, 1906, Jacky Fisher's monstrous creation came off the slipway at Portsmouth. The Dreadnought was here.

The Dreadnought Race

In his memoirs, Tirpitz attempted lamely to argue that the British had made a fatal mistake in launching the Dreadnought. She was an immensely powerful weapons system, to be sure, but her commissioning more or less rendered all the pre-dreadnought battleships obsolete overnight. In Tirpitz's argument, this created an opportunity to overtake the Royal Navy: because all the older ships were now obsolete, the only thing that mattered was the number of Dreadnought equivalent ships in the fleet: therefore, the Dreadnought reset the naval clock to zero. Instead of needing to match Britain's enormous lead in pre-dreadnought ships, the Germans only needed to match them in dreadnoughts. In essence, Britain's naval advantage was now 1:0, and their dozens of pre-dreadnoughts no longer mattered.

A tidy argument, but untrue. In real time, the launching of the Dreadnought sent Tirpitz into a minor panic, as his entire master plan for the battlefleet was now subject to revision. The decision to build German dreadnoughts was not as simple as it seemed: it entailed not only a significant increase in unit costs (each dreadnought equivalent would cost nearly 20 million marks more than a pre-dreadnought battleship) but also costly infrastructure improvements to accommodate the larger vessels, including widening the Kiel Canal and dredging harbor channels. Furthermore, if Germany immediately scrapped its extant ship designs and began building dreadnoughts, this would be a clear and unmistakable challenge to the Royal Navy. If Tirpitz took the plunge and began a Dreadnought construction program, he would be committing to a costly and resource-intensive naval construction race with Britain. If he did not, then the entire fleet program was dead in the water and Germany would be abandoning her vision of sea supremacy in the North Sea. Tirpitz decided he had to have dreadnoughts.

The first German dreadnought was laid down in July 1906. She was the Nassau, the lead ship of her class, followed shortly by the Westfalen, Posen, and Rheinland. Although some particulars of her design were different than Fisher's Dreadnought, she fulfilled the basic design parameters of an all-big-gun capital ship, armed with twelve 11-inch main guns. In 1908, Tirpitz would authorize four additional dreadnoughts, along with armored battle cruisers. On the whole, the German pivot to dreadnoughts was largely seamless - but if Tirpitz hoped to catch the British asleep at the helm, he was in for a rude awakening.

On December 8, 1908, the British cabinet settled in for its regular Monday morning meeting. For most of the assembled ministers, the morning seemed unremarkable, but one among them - the newly appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, Reginald McKenna - had come to lob a bomb into the proceedings. Based on alarming intelligence that was now trickling in concerning the German shipbuilding program, McKenna planned to ask Parliament to pay for six new Dreadnoughts in 1909, followed by another six in 1910, and a third six in 1911. As if the enormity of this request was not enough, McKenna also brought forward the unsettling revelation that unless this accelerated program was approved, both he the Sea Lords (including First Sea Lord Jacky Fischer) intended to resign. McKenna's disturbing information about the German Navy, his demand for accelerated battleship construction, and the ultimatum from the Sea Lords marked the beginning of an episode known forebodingly as "The Navy Scare."

McKenna's sudden and unexpected request to expand construction marked a stark shift from the prevailing sensibility, which had been for slim naval bills. The Liberals, who had swept the Conservatives out of power in 1905, generally resented the Dreadnoughts as staggeringly expensive and unnecessary, and had barely even formed their cabinet before they began slashing ships off the construction schedule: one battleship each was trimmed off the 1906 and 1907 programs (so that three instead of four ships were laid each year), and in 1908 the schedule was trimmed further to just two. As a result, by late 1908 the British had twelve Dreadnoughts either built, under construction, or approved, rather than the sixteen that had been anticipated by the old Conservative cabinet.

In this context, McKenna's ask came as a genuine shock. Parliament had anticipated approving another two dreadnoughts in 1909, but here was the First Lord of the Admiralty not only requesting that this be tripled to six, but also that this accelerated pace be maintained for three years, and even threatening to resign his post if his demands were not met - taking the entire senior officer cadre of the Royal Navy with him. What could have provoked such a politically toxic maneuver?

The answer, obviously, lay in the acceleration of German shipbuilding. In 1907, precisely as the new Liberal government in London was trimming down the British battleship program, the German Naval Law (parlance for the annual shipbuilding appropriations) provided for four dreadnought equivalents, followed by an additional four in 1908. At the time McKenna was formulating his proposal for an expanded battleship schedule, the Admiralty had calculated that by 1912 (at which point all the approved ships would be completed), Britain's lead in battleships would stand at just sixteen dreadnoughts against thirteen for the Germans. For McKenna, Fisher, and the other Sea Lords, this was clearly too slim a margin for comfort.

The publicly acknowledged German construction schedule, as approved by the Reichstag, was bad enough, and clearly indicated that the British lead in battleships would erode steadily unless corrective measures were taken. For the British Admiralty, however, the more ominous concern was the intelligence suggesting that German naval construction was been accelerated in secret.

The crucial question here was the peculiar timetable of dreadnought construction. The main constraint on battleship construction was not, in fact, the building of the hull, but rather the manufacture of the guns, turret systems, and armor, as these were both more expensive and laborious than the hull itself. What this meant, in practical terms, was that the construction of dreadnoughts could be accelerated if these intricate and expensive fittings were completed and staged ahead of time. The generally presumed timetable of three years for the completion of a German battleship could theoretically be compressed to just two, provided appropriate preemptive orders were placed for weaponry and armor.

What this meant, in practical terms, was that the Germans could theoretically have far more ships in the pipeline than advertised, if they were placing advance orders for guns, turrets, armor, and powerplants, or if the German Admiralty was placing preemptive orders before receiving authorization from the Reichstag. Rumors abounded - Krupp, it was said, was stockpiling vast warehouses of 12 inch gun barrels and buying up hoards of nickel - but ascertaining what was actually happening in the German dockyards and machining plants proved difficult. It did not help that London's ear was bent by British industrialists (anxious to secure contracts of their own), like Herbert Hall Mulliner, managing director of Coventry Ordnance Works, who pestered McKenna with scare stories about a secret German acceleration.

One crucial nexus for information was the German ambassador to London, Paul Wolff-Metternich. Unfortunately, Metternich was frequently left in the dark by his superiors in Berlin, including Admiral Tirpitz, which put him in a compromised position and soured his relationship with Lord Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary.

The problem was fairly straightforward: the Germans were, in fact, ordering materials, laying keels, and stockpiling equipment in advance of the formal appropriations of the Reichstag. Their reason for doing so, however, was not to secretly build more ships than they were letting on, but for mundane reasons related to costs and contracts. Tirpitz, for example, had several battleship keels laid in advance (that is, before he was authorized by the Reichstag) because he wanted to get a lower price and prevent the yards from having to lay off workers (which might itself lead to a labor dispute and higher prices). In the aggregate, the Germans never did build more ships than the Reichstag's naval laws allowed, but a cost conscious German Admiralty did stretch the timetables. Unfortunately, Metternich - posted in London and largely cut out of the loop on such matters - did not know any of this, and when pressed by Lord Grey he continually insisted that the German Navy did not place advance orders or lay keels before Reichstag approval.

Metternich was not exactly lying - he genuinely did not know that Tirpitz had been running ahead. But the British did know, and Grey confronted Metternich with the evidence. When Metternich urgently wired Berlin asking for clarification, Tirpitz belated explained the situation and allowed the ambassador to inform Grey that contracts were being placed preemptively only to secure better prices. Unfortunately, Metternich had by this time been humiliated and discredited, through no real fault of his own, by denying things that were actually true. Grey had concluded that Metternich - and Tirpitz by extension - were dissimulating. Berlin's categorical refusal to allow naval attaches to visit dockyards to simply "count the ships" further poisoned the discussion. In the end, the British felt that they had no other option than to prudently assume that the Germans were secretly accelerating their building program, with Grey announcing that "We have got to have a margin against lying."

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2. Ukraine: Fighting to the Conclusion

The Russo-Ukrainian War is now three years old, and the third Z-Day, on February 24, 2025, was marked by a substantively different tone than prior iterations. On the battlefield, Russian forces stand significantly closer to victory than they have at any point since the opening weeks of the war. After reversals early in the war as Ukraine took advantage of Russian miscalculations and insufficient force generation, the Russian army surged in 2024, collapsing Ukraine's front in southern Donetsk and pushing the front forward towards the remaining citadels of the Donbas.

At the same time, 2025's Z-Day was the first under the new American administration, and hopes were high in some quarters that President Trump could bring about a negotiated settlement and end the war prematurely. The new tenor seemed to be made abundantly clear in an explosive February 28 Oval Office meeting between Trump, Vice President Vance, and Zelensky, which ended in the Ukrainian president being ignominiously shouted down and evicted from the White House. This followed an abrupt announcement that Ukraine was to be cut off from American ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) until Zelensky apologized for his conduct.

In an information sphere rife with rumors, inscrutable diplomatic maneuvering, and heavy handed posturing (clouded further by the distinctive style and personality of Trump himself), it is very hard to figure out what might actually matter. We're left with a bizarre juxtaposition: based on the explosive vignettes of Trump and Zelensky, many might hope for an abrupt course change on the war, or at least a revision of the American position. On the ground, however, things continue much as they have, with the Russians grinding forward along a sprawling front. The infantryman entrenched near Pokrovsk, listening for the whirring of drones overhead, could be forgiven for not feeling that much has changed at all.

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I have never made any bones about my belief that the war in Ukraine will be resolved militarily: that is, it will be fought to its conclusion and end in the defeat of Ukraine in the east, Russian control of vast swathes of the country, and the subordination of a rump Ukraine to Russian interests. Trump's self conception is greatly tied up in his image as a "dealmaker", and his view of foreign affairs as fundamentally transactional in nature. As the American president, he has the power to force this framing on Ukraine, but not on Russia. There remain intractable gulfs between Russia's war aims and what Kiev is willing to discuss, and it is doubtful that Trump will be able to reconcile these differences. Russia, however, does not need to accept a partial victory simply in the name of goodwill and negotiation. Moscow has recourse to a more primal form of power. The sword predates and transcends the pen. Negotiation, as such, must bow to the reality of the battlefield, and no amount of sharp deal making can transcend the more ancient law of blood.

The Great Misadventure: Front Collapse in Kursk

When the history of this war is laid out retrospectively, no shortage of ink will be lavished on Ukraine's eight month operation in Kursk. From the broader perspective of the wartime narrative, Ukraine's initial incursion into Russia filled a variety of needs, with the AFU "taking the fight" to Russia and seizing the initiative, albeit on a limited front, after months of continuous Russian advances in the Donbas.

Notwithstanding the immense hyperbole that followed the launch of Ukraine's Kursk Operation (which I facetiously nicknamed "Krepost", in an homage to the 1943 German plan for its own Battle of Kursk), in the months that followed this was undoubtedly a sector of great significance, and not only because it brought the distinctive of Ukraine holding territory within the prewar Russian Federation. Based on a perusal of the Order of Battle, Kursk was clearly one of the two axes of primary effort for the AFU, along with the defense of Pokrovsk. Dozens of brigades were involved in the operation, including a significant portion of Ukraine's premier assets (mechanized, air assault, and marine infantry brigades). Perhaps more importantly, Kursk is the only axis where Ukraine has made a serious effort to gain initiative and go on the offensive in the last year, and the first Ukrainian operational level offensive (as opposed to local counterattacks) since their assault on the Russian Zaporizhia line in 2023.

With all that being said, March brought about the culmination of a serious Ukrainian defeat, with Russian forces recapturing the town of Sudzha (which formed the central anchor of Ukraine's position in Kursk) on March 13. Although Ukrainian forces still have a presence on the border, Russian forces have crossed the Kursk-Sumy border into Ukraine in other places. The AFU has been functionally ejected from Kursk, and all dreams of some breakout into Russia have faded. At this point, the Russians now hold more territory in Sumy than the Ukrainians do in Kursk.

This would seem, then, to be a good time to conduct an autopsy on the Kursk Operation. Ukrainian forces achieved the basic prerequisite for success in August: they managed to stage a suitable mechanized package - notably, the forest canopy around Sumy allowed them to assemble assets in relative secrecy, in contrast to the open steppe in the south - and achieve tactical surprise, overrunning Russian border guards at the outset. Despite their tactical surprise and the early capture of Sudzha, the AFU was never able to parlay this into a meaningful penetration or exploitation in Kursk. Why?

The answer seems to be a nexus of operational and technical problems which became mutually reinforcing - in some respects these problems are general to this war and well understood, while in some ways they are unique to Kursk, or at least, Kursk provided a potent demonstration of them. More specifically, we can enumerate three problems that doomed the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk:

1. The failure of the AFU to widen their penetration adequately.

2. The road-poor connectivity of the Ukrainian hub in Sudzha to their bases of support around Sumy.

3. Persistent Russian ISR-strike overwatch on Ukrainian lines of communication and supply.

We can see, almost naturally, how these elements can feed into each other - the Ukrainians were unable to create a wide penetration into Russia (for the most part, the "opening" of their salient was less than 30 miles wide), which greatly reduced the number of roads available to them for supply and reinforcement. The narrow penetration and poor road access in turn allowed the Russians to concentrate strike systems on the few available lines of communication, to the effect that the Ukrainians struggled to either supply or reinforce the grouping based around Sudzha - this low logistical and reinforcement connectivity in turn made it impossible for the Ukrainians to stage additional forces to try and expand the salient. This created a positive feedback loop of confinement and isolation for the Ukrainian grouping which made their defeat more or less inevitable.

We can, however, go a little deeper in our postmortem and see how this happened. In the opening weeks of the operation, Ukraine's prospects became severely untracked by two critical tactical failures which threatened from the outset to spiral into an operational catastrophe.

The first critical moment came in the days from August 10-13; after initial successes and tactical surprise, Ukrainian progress stalled as they attempted to advance up the highway from Sudzha to Korenevo. Several clashes took place throughout this period, but solid Russian blocking positions were held as reinforcements scrambled into the theater. Korenevo always promised to be a critical position, as the Russian breakwater on the main road leading northwest out of Sudzha: so long as the Russians held it, the Ukrainians would be unable to widen their penetration in this direction.

With the Russian defenses jamming up the Ukrainian columns at Korenevo, the Ukrainian position was already pregnant with a basic operational crisis: the penetration was narrow, and thus threatened to become a severe and untenable salient. At the risk of making a perilous historical analogy, the operational form was very similar to the famous 1944 Battle of the Bulge: taken by surprise by a German counteroffensive, Dwight Eisenhower prioritized limiting the width, rather than the depth of the German penetration, moving reinforcements to defend the "shoulders" of the salient.

Blocked at Korenevo, the Ukrainians shifted their approach and made a renewed effort to solidify the western shoulder of their position (their left flank). This attempt aimed to leverage the Seym River, which runs a winding course about twelve miles behind the state border. By striking bridges over the Seym and launching a ground attack towards the river, the Ukrainians hoped to isolate Russian forces on the south bank and either destroy them or force a withdrawal over the river. If they had succeeded, the Seym would have become an anchoring defensive feature protecting the western flank of the Ukrainian position.

The Ukrainian attempt to leverage the Seym and create a defensive anchor on their flank was well conceived in the abstract, but ultimately it failed. By this time, the effects of Ukraine's tactical surprise had dissipated and there were strong Russian units present in the field. In particular, the Russian 155th Naval Infantry Brigade held its position on the south bank of the Seym, maintained its links to neighboring units, and led a series of counterattacks: by September 13, Russian forces had recaptured the critical town of Snagost, which lies in the inner bend of the Seym.

The recapture of Snagost (and the linkup with Russian forces advancing out Korenevo) not only ended the threat to the Russian positions on the south bank of the Seym, but more or less sterilized the entire Ukrainian operation by confining them to a narrow salient around Sudzha and constricting their ability to supply the grouping at the front.

It's rather natural that road connectivity is poorer across the state boundary than it is within Ukraine itself, and this is especially true for Sudzha. Once Snagost was recaptured by Russian forces, the Ukrainian grouping around Sudzha had just two roads connecting it to the base of support around Sumy: the main supply route (MSR in the technical parlance) ran along the R200 highway, and was supplemented by a single road some 3 miles to the southeast. The loss of Snagost condemned the AFU to resupply and reinforce a large multi-brigade grouping with just two roads, both of which were well within reach of Russian strike systems.

This poor road connectivity allowed the Russians to persistently surveil and strike Ukrainian supplies and reinforcements making the run into Sudzha, particularly after Russian forces began the widespread use of fiber optic FPV drones, which are immune to jamming. One other advantage of the fiber optic drones, which is not as widely discussed, is that they maintain their signal during final approach to the target (as opposed to wirelessly controlled models, which lose signal strength as they drop to low altitude on attack). The stable signal strength of fiber optic units is a great boon to accuracy, as it allows controllers to control the drone until impact. They also provide a higher resolution video feed which makes it easier to spot and target concealed enemy vehicles and positions.

Operationally, the main distinctive of the fighting in Kursk is the orthogonal orientation of effort by the combatants. By this, we mean that Russian counteroffensives were directed at the flanks of the salient, steadily compressing the Ukrainians into a more narrow position (by the end of 2024, the Ukrainians had lost half of the territory they once held), while Ukrainian efforts to restart their progress were aimed at moving deeper into Russia.

In January, the Ukrainians launched a fresh attack out of Sudzha, but rather than attempting to widen and solidify their flanks, this attack once again aimed to punch down the highway towards Bolshoye Soldatskoye. The attack was repulsed on its own terms, with Ukrainian columns advancing a few miles down the road before collapsing with heavy losses, but even if it had succeeded it would not have fixed the fundamental problem, which was the narrowness of the salient and the limited road connectivity for supply and reinforcement.

By February, the Ukrainian grouping in Kursk was clearly exhausted and their supply linkages were under permanent surveillance and attack by Russian drones. It was perhaps predictable, then, that the Russians would close up the salient quickly once they made a determined push. The actual endgame took, at most, a week of good fighting. On March 6, Russian forces broke through Ukrainian defenses around Kurilovka, to the south of Sudzha, and threatened to overrun the secondary supply road. By the 10th, the Ukrainians were withdrawing from Sudzha proper, with the town falling back under full Russian control by the 13th.

It was during this brief period of climactic action that the sensational story of the Russian assault through the pipeline emerged. This become a totem anecdote, with Ukrainian sources claiming that the emerging Russian troops were ambushed and massacred, and Russian sources acclaiming it as a tremendous success. I think this rather misses the point. The pipeline assault was innovative and high risk, and it certainly involved tremendous grit on the part of the Russian troops who had to crawl through miles of cramped pipeline, but ultimately I do not think it mattered much in the operational sense.

On a schematic level, the Ukrainian position in Kursk was doomed by mid-September when Russian troops recaptured Snagost. If the Ukrainians had successfully isolated the south bank of the Seym, they would have had the river as a valuable defensive barrier protecting their left flank as well as access to valuable space and additional supply roads. As it happened, the Ukrainian flank was crumpled early in the operation by the Russian victories at Korenevo and Snagost, which left Ukraine trying to fight its way out of a very compressed and road-poor salient. The (correct) Russian decision to concentrate its counterattacks on the flanks further compressed the space and left the Ukrainians with inadequate supply linkages subject to persistent Russian drone strikes. One recent Ukrainian publication claims that by the end of the year, Ukrainian reinforcements had to move to the frontline on foot, carrying all their equipment and supplies, due to the persistent threat to vehicles.

Fighting in a severe salient is almost always a bad proposition, and is something of a geometrical motif of warfare going back millennia. In the current operating environment, however, it is particularly dangerous, given the potential of FPV drones to saturate supply lines with high explosive. In this case, the effect was particularly synergistic: the cramped salient amplified the effect of Russian strike systems, and this in turn prevented the Ukrainians from assembling and sustaining the force needed to expand the salient and create more space. Confinement bred strangulation, and strangulation bred confinement. Fighting with a caved in flank for months, the Ukrainian grouping was doomed to operational sterility and eventual defeat almost at the outset.

The world is still adjusting to the new kinetic logic of the powerful ISR-Strike nexus which now rules the battlefield. What Kursk demonstrates, however, is that conventional sensibilities about operations are hardly obsolete: if anything, they have become even more important in the age of the FPV drone. Ukraine's defeat in Kursk ultimately reduces to well-established rules about lines of communication and flank security. Their early defeats in Korenevo and Snagost left their western flank permanently crumpled and thrust them back on a thin logistical chain which was easy for Russian forces to surveil and strike. In a sense, drones have made it possible to vertically envelop enemy forces, isolating frontline groupings with persistent overwatch on supply roads. This was a feature that was largely missing in Bakhmut, where Russian forces were still preferentially using tube artillery rather, but it seems to be a permanent feature of the battlefield going forward, making seemingly antiquated concerns like "lines of communication" more important than ever. Drones matter, but the spatial position of forces matter too.

So where does this leave Ukraine? They've now blown a pair of carefully husbanded mechanized packages: one in Zaporizhia in 2023, and now a second in Kursk. In both cases, they were unable to cope with the capability of Russian strike systems to isolate their groupings on the frontline, and with Russian surveillance and strikes on rear assembly areas and bases of support. Their position in Kursk is gone, and they have nothing to show for their efforts.

All theories as to why Ukraine went into Kursk are now a quaint point of speculation. Whether or not they intended to hold some token slice of Russian territory as a bargaining chip is irrelevant, as the slice is gone. More importantly, the theory that Kursk could force a major redeployment of Russian forces has gone awry and now threatens to boomerang on the Ukrainians. Most of the Russian forces in Kursk were redeployed from their grouping in Belgorod, rather than the critical theater in the Donbas (as we noted earlier, while the AFU was running its "diversion" in Kursk, the Russians completely collapsed the southern Donetsk front and pushed up the Dnipro Oblast border).

What's important to note, however, is that the Kursk front is not going to be scratched off simply because the Russians have ejected Ukraine across the border. In his surprise appearance at the Kursk theater headquarters, Putin noted to need to create a "security zone" around Kursk. This is the Russian parlance for continuing the offensive across the Ukrainian border (and in fact, Russian forces have crossed into Sumy Oblast in several places) to create a buffer zone. This will have the dual purpose of both keeping the front active, preventing Ukraine from redeploying forces back to the Donbas, and preempting any attempt by the AFU to stage forces for a second crack at Kursk. Most likely the Russians will attempt to capture the heights along the border line and position themselves uphill from the Ukrainians, replicating the situation around Kharkov.

In short, having opened a new front in Kursk, the Ukrainians cannot now easily close it. For a force facing severe personnel shortages (read my previous analysis on the parlous state of Ukrainian mobilization if you'd like a refresher), Ukraine's inability to shorten their frontline creates unwelcome additional stresses. With Russian pressure continuing unabated in the Donbas, we are left wondering whether a doomed 9 month battle for Sudzha was really the best use of Ukraine's dwindling resources.

A Brief Tour of the Front

The Kursk salient is the second front to be fully collapsed by the Russian Army in the past three months. The first was the southern Donetsk front, which was completely caved in over the course of December and then rolled up in the opening weeks of the year, which had the effect of not only knocking the AFU out of longstanding strongholds like Ugledar and Kurakhove, but also safeguarding the flank of the Russian advance towards Pokrovsk.

At the moment, there are several axes of Russian progress which we'll examine in more detail momentarily. More broadly, as Russia scratches off secondary axes like South Donetsk and Kursk, the general trajectory of the front is becoming more focused, as the arrows converge on the Slovyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration. Eyes on the prize. Russia currently controls roughly 99% of Lugansk Oblast and 70% of Donetsk.

We'll take a brief tour of these axes of combat. One of the motifs which will immediately stand out is that in multiple critical sectors, Russian forces currently occupy operationally potent positions that give them powerful launchpads for further advances in 2025. In particular, the Russians currently hold multiple bridgeheads across river lines, putting them in position to outflank Ukrainian defensive lines, and they have consolidated control of dominating heights in places like Chasiv Yar.

We can begin at the northernmost end of the line, at Kupyansk. Kupyansk is a modestly sized town (prewar population of perhaps 26,000 people) located at a strategic crossroads on the Oskil River, which is the largest tributary of the Donets. More specifically, Kupyansk is at the intersection of the main east-west highway out of Kharkov and the Oskil highway corridor which runs south to Izym, and it is also the most important transit hub for crossing the Oskil in its northern course. The city was captured early in the war by Russian forces and served as an important plug to prevent the movement of Ukrainian reserves into northern Lugansk Oblast, and was later recaptured during Ukraine's late-2022 counteroffensive, which saw them push the front away from Kharkov and across the Oskil.

Today, Kupyansk serves as the vital transit hub, base of support, and crossing point that supports a Ukrainian grouping fighting on the east bank of the Oskil. As the battlefield is currently shaped here, however, Russian forces have a tantalizing opportunity to collapse the Ukrainian position altogether. The critical feature here is the consolidation of a sizeable Russian bridgehead north of Kupyansk on the west bank of the Oskil (that is, the Ukrainian side), with Russian forces already positioned on the north-south highway. Although this northern front has been a decidedly de-prioritized theater in recent months, as the Russians scratched off the Kursk and South Donetsk fronts, the placement of Russian forces west of the Oskil creates serious problems for the AFU in Kupyansk.

An advance to the south and west out of the Oskil bridgehead would flank Kupyansk and, in combination with advances from the southeast, threaten to collapse Ukraine's salient across the Oskil altogether. Depending on how much combat power Russia commits to this axis, we could see a similar situation to the one we saw in Kursk, with multiple brigades (currently fighting east of the Oskil) forced to attempt an ad-hoc evacuation across the river as the salient collapses, with their ability to extract heavy equipment potentially compromised by the complication of the river crossing.

Further south on this front, we see a similar situation on the Donets axis. The operational geography here is a bit complicated, so we will indulge in a bit of an elaboration.

The northern Donetsk theater (with its ultimate prize in the Kramatorsk-Slovyansk agglomeration) is dominated by two important terrain features. The first is the fact that the urban corridor (which runs from Kostyantynivka northward to Slovyansk) lies at low elevation along the course of the Kryvyi Torets River - while the river itself is not an important feature, the low elevation of its basin is. This means that the cities themselves are dominated by heights to the east, with Chasiv Yar forming an important hub and stronghold at a commanding elevation.

The second important terrain feature is the Donets River - unlike the diminutive Kryvyi Torets, this is an imposing barrier which bisects the Donbas and forms the northern shield for Slovyansk and Kramatorsk. Russian control of the Donets from the north bank (either at Lyman or, ideally, Izyum further to the west) unlocks the potential to outflank Slovyansk and Kramatorsk from the west and interdict road traffic.

In short, although Kramatorsk and Slovyansk together form an imposing urban agglomeration, their defense is intimately connected with the battle for both the heights to the east and the struggle for control of the Donets. At the current moment, however, Russian forces hold valuable positions which provide a launching pad to unlock this front.

When we zoom in more closely, we see that the Ukrainian defenses around the Donets have benefited from the terrain. On the north bank of the Donets, Russian forces must also contend with an ancillary waterway in the Zherebets River, which flows south towards the Donets and feeds several reservoirs which form formidable defense barriers. The gap between the Zherebets and the Donets is roughly five miles, forming a natural defensive bottleneck, and most of that gap is covered by the town of Tors'ke (now heavily fortified) and a dense plantation forest. For most of the past eighteen months, this section of front has been largely static, with Russian forces failing to make significant headway fighting into this bottleneck.

One way for Russia to undermine this strong defensive position might have been to advance along the south bank of the Donets, reaching the crossing near Yampil and outflanking the Tors'ke line from the southeast. This would have isolated the Ukrainian forces fighting in the forestry plantation and allowed the Russians to advance through the bottleneck. Ultimately, this did not materialize due to the low material priority placed on this front in addition to a very well-managed defense of the Siversk salient by Ukrainian forces. Siversk has been strongly held, and serves as the shield for the Ukrainian right flank.

What is different now, however, is that Russian forces have consolidated a bridgehead over the Zherebets River, which will allow them to outflank Tors'ke and reach Lyman - not from the south, but from the north. Recent weeks have seen the Russians moving into the small villages around the periphery of their bridgehead (names like Kolodyazi and Myrne), creating the space to move additional units over the Zherebets. Much like at Kupyansk, the bridgehead offers the launching point for a sweeping hook into the rear of the Ukrainian defenses.

What stands out about the Russian bridgehead here is that it is not only over the Zherebets (that is, Russian forces are firmly on the western bank of the river while the Ukrainians further south are still defending far to the east of it), but that it is also past most of the Ukrainian field fortifications in the area. Borrowing from the Military Summary Map, which conveniently includes fortifications and earthworks, we can see that there is very little built up in the space between the Zherebets and Lyman. Russian forces breaking out of this bridgehead are entering mostly open space, with only a few roadblocks in place.

If Russia can parlay the Zherebets bridgehead into an advance to Lyman, they can collapse much of the Ukrainian defense on both sides of the river. Not only would they outflank the defensive line at Tors'ke and roll up the northern bank of the Donets, but doing so would also precipitate the fall of the Siversk salient. Siversk has been well defended by the AFU to this point, but it is already firmly in a salient, and the capture of Yampil would put Russian forces firmly in Siversk's rear and physically sever the main line of communication.

Further south still, the front is similarly well shaped for Russian advances in the coming months. The signature developments here have been the capture of Chasiv Yar and Toretsk, and Russia's victory on the South Donetsk front. The latter is particularly important as it safeguards Russia's flank to the south of Pokrovsk - rather than a Russian pincer flaring out into space to encircle Pokrovsk to the west, the entire frontline is now to the west of Pokrovsk.

Toretsk has been something of a sticky wicket. Russia made great progress throughout the winter advancing through this heavily fortified urban buildup, and in early February the Russian MoD announced the capture of the city. In the weeks since then, however, fighting has continued in the outer limits - at first, this was styled as Ukrainian infiltration back into the city, but it spiraled into rumors of a full fledged Ukrainian counteroffensive, with sensational claims that Russian forces were encircled or destroyed in Toretsk. The situation was strongly reminiscent of the late stages of Bakhmut, when Ukrainian phantom counterattacks were reported frequently.

It appears that what actually happened was rather that the Russian MoD announced the capture of the city while its extremities were still contested. Russian forces remain in control of the bulk of the city, but Ukrainian units remain dug at the periphery and fighting has continued in the "grey zone." DeepState (a Ukrainian mapping project) confirmed that there was no general Ukrainian counterattack - rather, the fighting was simply part of a continuous struggle for the western periphery of the city.

Fighting a delaying action in Toretsk is inarguably the correct choice of action for the AFU. The reason that Toretsk and Chasiv Yar were so hotly contested is fairly simple: both occupy the high ground and will allow Russian forces to attack downhill, wrapping up large salients sitting on the floor of the battlespace. Pincers from Chasiv Yar and Toretsk will work concentrically towards Kostyantynivka, collapsing the strongly held Ukrainian line along the canal west of Bakhmut. Similarly, forces blooming west out of Toretsk and Niu York will link up with the Pokrovsk front and push the frontline well to the north of the city.

That is quite a bit to chew on, and I sometimes question the value of such analysis. For those who have been dutifully following this war from the beginning, this is all fairly elementary. For others with less investment in the front, it's possible that the status of these settlements is not very interesting and devolves into esoteric minutia.

Broadly, however, the arrows are pointing up for Russia in the Donbas for the following reasons:

1. The collapse of the Southern Donetsk front for Ukraine secures the flank of Russia's advances towards Pokrovsk and allows the front to be pushed far to the west of the city.

2. Russian bridgeheads over the Zherebets and Oskil rivers create opportunities to outflank and collapse Ukrainian positions around Kupyansk, Lyman, and Siversk.

3. The capture of Chasiv Yar and Toretsk, both of which lie on elevated ridges, provides the launching point for strong thrusts towards Kostyantynivka, collapsing multiple Ukrainian salients in the process.

All in all, this portends continued Russian advances in the next stage of the offensive. Pokrovsk is already a frontline city, and Kostyantynivka will become one very soon. The Russians have scratched off two important fronts in the last three months - collapsing first the South Donetsk axis, and then eradicating the Ukrainian position in Kursk. The next phase will see breakthroughs in the Central Donbas, as the Russians move through the next belt of cities and approach the final objectives in Kramatorsk and Slovyansk.

None of this is predetermined, of course. Both armies face continual force allocation problems, and at the moment large groupings are fighting around both Pokrovsk and Toretsk. But the simple fact is that the Russians have claimed victory on two strategic axes and have defeated a large and determined AFU grouping in Kursk. The captures of Toresk and Chasiv Yar are of great strategic importance, and the front is well shaped for further Russian gains. Russian forces are significantly closer to victory in the Donbas than they were a year ago, when the front was still mired in places like Ugledar and Avdiivka. The Ukrainian forces are still upright, fighting bravely, but the front is bleeding from an ever increasing number of wounds.

The Art of the Deal

Any discussion of the diplomatic sphere and the prospects for a negotiation peace must begin by noting the guiding animus of the American stance: namely, that President Trump is a practitioner of personal politics, with a fundamentally transactional view of the world. By "personal politics", we mean that he places great emphasis on his own interpersonal dynamics and his self-conception as a dealmaker who can maneuver people into agreement, provided he can just get them to the table.

Trump is hardly alone in this; to take one example, we could look at his long-dead predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt. FDR, much like Trump, took great pride in the idea that he was exceptionally skilled at managing, soothing, and charming people. A guiding principle of American policy during the Second World War was FDR's sense that he could "manage" Stalin in face to face interactions. In one infamous letter to Churchill, FDR told the British Prime Minister:

I know you will not mind my being brutally frank when I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.

Trump shares a similar sensibility, which postulates personality and transactional acumen as a driving force of world affairs. To be perfectly fair to President Trump, this has largely worked for him both in business and domestic politics, but it may not port over so well to foreign affairs. Nevertheless, this is how he thinks. He expressed it succinctly in his explosive February 28th meeting with Zelensky:

Biden, they didn't respect him. They didn't respect Obama. They respect me… He might have broken deals with Obama and Bush, and he might have broken them with Biden. He did, maybe. Maybe he did. I don't know what happened, but he didn't break them with me. He wants to make a deal.

Whether or not this is true, it is an important bedrock in the framing of the situation to remember that this is how Trump sees himself and the world: politics is a transactional domain mediated by personalities. With that in mind, there are two different issues to consider, namely the mineral deal between Ukraine and the United States, and the prospects for a negotiated ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia.

The mineral deal is somewhat easier to parse, and the central motif that emerges is just how badly Zelensky bungled his meetings with Trump. It's helpful first to examine the actual contents of the mineral deal - notwithstanding the enormous $500 billion price tag, it is actually a very scant agreement. The agreement, as it currently stands, seems to essentially give American companies the right of first refusal on the exploitation of Ukrainian mineral resources, with 50% of the proceeds from state owned resources going to an "investment fund" for the reconstruction of Ukraine under joint US-Ukrainian management.

The mineral deal ought to be understood as a manifestation of Trump's immense aversion to acting at economic disadvantage. He is a fundamentally transactional man who complained at great length about the costs of American support for Kiev, and mineral rights are the easiest way for him to extract promises of "repayment" from a Ukrainian government that cannot actually afford to repay anything in the near term.

For Ukraine, entangling America in Ukrainian mineral wealth might seem like an opportunity to ensure ongoing American support, as it would potentially create direct stakes for American companies. It's important to note, however, that the mineral deal does not contain any security guarantees for Ukraine, and is in fact explicitly tied to *past* support, rather than future aid. In other words, Trump wants to present the mineral deal as a way for Ukraine to repay the last three years of American assistance, and not as a deal guaranteeing American support in the future.

Given this, it ought to be obvious that Zelensky badly fumbled his encounter with Trump. The optimal strategy for Ukraine was to draw as close to the Trump administration as possible - sign the mineral deal, say thank you, wear a suit, and commend Trump's efforts to negotiate an end to the war. Trump's negotiations were guaranteed to run into a wall once the Russians themselves were brought into the discussion, but in this scenario (one where Zelensky came across as supportive and compliant towards Trump), Trump's personal ire would be directed at Moscow, rather than Kiev. This might have enabled Zelensky to play Trump and Putin off of each other, parlaying the situation into more American support once Trump became frustrated at Russia's unwillingness to quickly negotiate a ceasefire.

The operating principle is that Trump is a mercurial, personal politician who places primacy on the deal. Inability to solidify the deal breeds irritation, and Zelensky's best play was to do everything possible to ensure that it was Russia that became the irritant in Trump's attempted deal making. Unfortunately for Ukraine, a valuable opportunity was wasted by Zelensky's inability to read the room. Instead, Ukraine was put in an ISR timeout and Zelensky had to come crawling back with an apology to sign the mineral deal.

This parlayed directly into tenuous diplomatic feelers, including a long phone conversation between Trump and Putin and a diplomatic roundtable in Riyadh attended by American, Russian, and Ukrainian delegations.

Thus far, the only outcome from these discussions has been the sketch for a climbdown in the Black Sea, which in its essence would end attacks on commercial shipping (presumably including Russian attacks on Ukrainian port infrastructure in Odessa) in exchange for American moves to rehabilitate Russian agricultural exports by reconnecting Russia to shipping insurance, foreign ports, and payment systems.

For those that have been following along, this is more or less a revival of the defunct Turkish-negotiated grain deal, which collapsed in 2023. There are still sticking points here: Ukraine is bristling at the promise to loosen sanctions on Russian agricultural exports, and Russia will want a robust inspection regime to ensure that the Black Sea ceasefire does not provide cover for weapons to be shipped into Odessa, but things appear on the whole to be returning roughly to the lines of the 2022 grain deal. Whether the rerun will last remains to be seen.

All of this is preliminary and perhaps even irrelevant to the main question, which is whether it is possible to negotiate a meaningful peace in Ukraine at this time, or even a temporary ceasefire. This, however, is a much larger hurdle to climb. As I see it, there are four structural obstacles to a negotiated peace which Trump has little or leverage to overcome:

1. Russian disillusionment with negotiation and the credibility of western promises

2. Climbing Russian confidence that they are on track to win a decisive victory on the battlefield

3. Mutual unwillingness between Moscow and the extant Kiev regime to engage in direct negotiations with each other

4. The status of Russian-claimed territories in the Donbas which are still under Ukrainian control

Many of these issues dovetail, and are ultimately linked to the trajectory of the battlefield where the Russian Army continues to advance. So long as Russian leadership believes they are on pace to capture the entirety of the Donbas (and beyond), Putin's team is highly unlikely to accept a truncated victory at the negotiating table - the only way out would be for Kiev to cede objectives like Kramatorsk and Slovyansk. In many ways, Ukraine's current possession of these cities are its best cards in any negotiation, but for cards to be useful they must be played, and it's difficult to imagine Zelensky's regime simply giving up cities that it has fought for years to defend.

Furthermore, Putin has made it extremely clear that he does not consider Zelensky to be either a legitimate or credible figure at all, arguing that because Zelensky has suspended elections under the pretext of martial law, there is in fact no legitimate government in Kiev. This is obfuscation by the Kremlin, of course: Zelensky is the President of Ukraine, and within the parameters of Ukraine's laws, conditions of martial law do allow him to stay in office. But this is rather beside the point: what matters is that the Kremlin has more or less categorically ruled out negotiating with the current government in Kiev, and has even suggested an internationally supervised provisional government as a replacement.

A generous assessment is that, for there to be reasonable prospects for a negotiated settlement from the Russian perspective, at least four conditions have to be satisfied:

1. Regime change in Kiev to bring in a government more acquiescent to Russian interests.

2. Russian control of all annexed territories (either through the actions of the Russian Army on the ground or by Kiev withdrawing from them)

3. Broad sanctions relief for Russia

4. Credible pledges that western troops will not be stationed in Ukraine as "peacekeepers" - since, after all, one critical strategic objective for Russia was to prevent the consolidation of NATO on its flank, they will hardly accept a peace that features the deployment of NATO troops into Ukraine.

So long as Russia continues to advance on the battlefield, they have no incentive to (as they would see it) rob themselves of a full victory by accepting a truncated and premature settlement. Putin expressed this view very cogently and explicitly on March 27:

We are gradually, not as quickly as some would like, but nevertheless persistently and confidently moving towards achieving all the goals declared at the beginning of this operation. Along the entire line of combat contact, our troops have the strategic initiative. I said just recently: We will finish them off. There is reason to believe that we will finish them off.

Fair enough. Ultimately, Trumps' transactional view of politics runs into the more grounded reality of what negotiations actually mean, in wartime. The battlefield has a reality of its own that is existentially prior to negotiations. Diplomacy in this context does not serve to transact a "fair" or "balanced" peace, but rather to codify the reality of the military calculus. If Russia believes it is on a trajectory to achieve the total defeat of Ukraine, than the only acceptable sort of peace would be one that expresses such a defeat through the fall of the Ukrainian government and a Ukrainian withdrawal from the east. Russia's blood is up, and Putin seems to be in no mood to accept a partial victory when the full measure is within reach.

The problem for Ukraine, if history is any guide, is that it is not actually very easy to surrender. In the First World War, Germany surrendered while its army was still in the field, fighting in good order far from the German heartland. This was an anticipatory surrender, born of a realistic assessment of the battlefield which indicated that German defeat was an inevitability. Berlin therefore opted to bow out prematurely, saving the lives of its young men once the struggle had become hopeless. This decision, of course, was poorly received, and was widely denounced as betrayal and cowardice. It became a politically scarring watershed moment that shaped German sensibilities and revanchist drives for decades to come.

So long as Zelensky's government continues to receive western support and the AFU remains in the field - even if it is being steadily rolled back and chewed up all along the front - it is difficult to imagine Kiev acceding to an anticipatory surrender. Ukraine must choose between doing this the easy way and the hard way, as the parlance goes, but this is not really a choice at all, particularly given the Kremlin's insistence that a change of government in Kiev is a prerequisite to peace as such. Any successful path to a negotiated piece runs through the ruins of Zelensky's government, and is therefore largely precluded at the moment.

Russian forces today stand significantly closer to victory in the Donbas than they did one year ago, and the AFU has been decisively defeated in Kursk. They are poised to make further progress towards the limits of the Donbas in 2025, with an increasingly threadbare AFU straining to stay in the field. This is what Ukraine asked for, when they willingly eschewed the opportunity to negotiate in 2022. So for all the diplomatic cinema, the brute reality of the battlefield remains the same. The battlefield is the first principle, and the ultimate repository of political power. The diplomat is a servant of the warrior, and Russia takes recourse to the fist and the boot and the bullet.

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3. The Rise of the Dreadnought

The most famous warships in history tend to be known either for their wartime exploits or for their longevity and place of pride in their fleets. A few names that might come to mind would include the German Bismarck, which was pursued and sunk in a dramatic chase on the high seas by the Royal Navy; the HMS Victory, which served as Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar; the USS Constitution, in service today with the US Navy as the oldest commissioned warship still afloat; or perhaps the carriers that fought at Midway, like the Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown, or Japan's Kaga and Akagi.

It is ironic, then, that perhaps the most famous warship of all time, the HMS Dreadnought, had a service career that was both short and entirely light on kinetic action. Launched in 1906, the Dreadnought had an active lifespan of just thirteen years - barely that of a small dog - and by 1921, after two years in reserve, she was ingloriously sold for scrap. Today, virtually no artifacts of the ship survive, apart from a few small items like a decorated gun tampion (essentially a plug for the barrel of a gun) at Britain's National Maritime Museum. In the brief years that she was on active duty, the Dreadnought fought no real battles and never fired at an enemy ship: her lone kill was the German submarine U-29, which was sunk off the coast of the Orkney Islands in 1915 when the Dreadnought ran her over.

The Dreadnought had, by any measure, a short and quiet service career. But this has little bearing on the enormity of her significance in the history of naval warfare. When she was launched in 1906, the Dreadnought marked a watershed development in ship design. Her form was the culmination of a dramatic evolution in warship design, which had been moving steadily forward throughout the latter half of the 19th Century with the adoption of steam propulsion, armored hulls, and exploding shells. From the moment the Dreadnought came off the slipway and settled her hulking girth into Portsmouth Harbor, every other capital ship in the world was obsolete, and she left her mark on the world's navies by conferring her name to a new era of ship design: every ship built before her was now designated a "pre-dreadnought".

It is easy, in the historiography, to find any number of appellations and praises for the Dreadnought. The "most powerful warship in the world", ushering in a "revolution" in naval design - on and on it goes. This can lead easily to the conclusion that the Dreadnought's design was implicitly accepted, or that her innovations were readily apparent to all - in other words, that it was obvious to everyone that this new class of warship, the modern battleship, was the future.

It was not. Although the Dreadnought was indeed the most powerful ship in the world when she launched, and a central component of British plans to maintain naval supremacy, the new battleships were hardly an icon of British triumph. In fact, the design of the Dreadnought came about against a backdrop of British strategic crisis, in which Great Britain's strategic position began to decay in significant ways - and although the Dreadnought was undoubtedly an impressively powerful weapons system, she did not ameliorate the British strategic conundrum.

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The Dreadnought, then, marked a departure point not merely in ship design, but in an emerging century characterized by geopolitical pressures and military-industrial processes that were virtually unrecognizable. The Industrial Revolution in Britain had uncorked a bottle and let out a genie wielding technological processes, financial considerations, and geopolitical pressures. The genie could give gifts and grant wishes, of course, in the form of bigger profits, bigger guns, bigger armies, and ever more powerful weapons systems, but the diffusion of this technology around the world looked ever more like a curse as time went on - and the genie could not be put back into the bottle.

Britain's Strategic Crisis

At the core of the great naval developments occurring around the turn of the 20th Century was a systematic erosion of Great Britain's strategic position. This strategic decay was of course a multivariate process which included the emergence of new great powers like Germany, Japan, and the United States, and the evolving industrial dynamics of the world. At its heart, however, the problem was very simple: in the latter half of the 19th Century, industrial technologies began to diffuse from Great Britain to the rest of the great powers, to the effect that British supremacy in industry and critical military technologies became an open question.

A brief perusal of the relevant economic statistics betrays a clear and sustained erosion of British supremacy. In 1880, Britain still accounted for nearly a quarter of global manufacturing output and was by far the leading industrial nation of the world. By 1913, it had fallen in absolute terms well behind Germany and especially the United States, which now boasted nearly 2.5 times Britain's output. Already by 1910, Britain (formerly the world's premiere steelmaking nation) produced only half as much steel as Germany and barely a quarter of American steel output.

The immense economic advantages enjoyed by the United States need little enumeration. America occupies a uniquely providential economic geography, being blessed with a pair of accommodating seaboards saturated with natural harbors, an internal Mississippi waterway that is both dense and far reaching to accommodate internal trade, superb growing regions, peaceful borders, and ample deposits of virtually every mineral resource thinkable. In short, it is a country with bountiful mineral and agricultural resources, internal waterways for moving them about, harbors for exporting them abroad, and no meaningful security threats.

The German case, however, bears closer scrutiny. Whereas the United States was characterized by boundless space, free of meaningful external security threats, Germany was intensely bounded in the middle of Europe, birthed into a firestorm of potential enemies all around it. German economic might was little like the American story, characterized by the uninterrupted exploitation of a vast geographic bounty, and more the product of powerful and aggressive German institutions - both of corporations and the state.

The German population grew rapidly into the 20th Century (German birthrates were forever a point of hand wringing for the French). The German population grew from some 49 million in 1890 to 65 million by 1910 - an increase of 32%, compared to an increase of just 3% in France (from 38.3 to 39.5 million) and 20% in Britain (37.3 to 44.9 million). Simultaneously, the consolidation of an impressive educational apparatus ensured that this growing population was highly literate and productive. Around the turn of the century, many European armies still reported high levels of illiteracy among recruits. In Italy, some 33% of recruits were deemed illiterate: the corresponding figure was 22% in Austria-Hungary and 6.8% in France, but a mere 0.1% in Germany. The rapid growth of such a young and educated population benefited not just the German army, but also the burgeoning roster of German industrial enterprises like Krupp, Siemens, AEG, Bayer, and Hoechst. Such firms dominated the emerging 20th Century industries like chemicals, optics, and electrics, and the intensive adoption of agricultural modernization and chemical fertilizers made German agriculture the most productive in Europe on a per-hectare basis.

The explosion of two industrial powers who could not only compete but even outstrip Britain (and one of them right in the heart of Europe) could have no effect other than directly undermining Britain's strategic position. Matters were made worse, however, but the proliferation of advanced naval technology around the world - in many cases directly abetted by British firms.

In 1864, British military leadership had made the fateful decision to keep artillery production in the hands of the state-owned Woolwich arsenal, despite the emergence of private industrial firms, like the Armstrong company, who were capable of making state of the art naval artillery. Cut out of British government contracts, this let manufacturers like Armstrong with no choice but to seek foreign buyers. When Armstrong built an armored cruiser - the O'Higgins - for the Chilean government, it set off serious alarm bells about the basis of British naval supremacy. The O'Higgins was fast enough to easily outrun any capital ship of the day, but her powerful 8 inch guns made her more than capable of sinking targets in the lower weight class. This suggested a distinctive use case as a commercial raider, able to evade enemy battleships while preying on merchants. Chile, of course, was hardly a rival to Great Britain, but Armstrong's exploits did not end there. All told, Armstrong would build 84 warships for twelve different foreign governments between 1884 and 1914, and frequently supplied technical systems more advanced than those in use by the Royal Navy at the time - for example, the powerful main battery of the Russian cruiser Rurik, launched in 1890.

The prospect of fast cruisers - optimized for speed and striking power at the expense of armor - was particularly alarming to Britain owing to emerging patterns of agricultural production. The advent of efficient steamships had drastically lowered seaborne transportation costs - a fact that was of the first importance for Britain, as it allowed for the mass import of cheap grain from places like North America, Australia, and Argentina, at costs far below the levels at which British farms could compete. As a result, between 1872 and the end of the century wheat acreage in Great Britain dropped by about 50 percent, and already by the 1880's some 65 percent of Britain's grain was imported from overseas. The prospect of swift enemy cruisers capable of intercepting grain shipments while evading the British battle fleets now assumed a potentially existential importance, as for the first time in history London contemplated the possibility that the interdiction of its trade could bring the island to the brink of starvation.

This raised the possibility of a dangerous asymmetry: might it be possible to nullify Britain's centuries-old naval supremacy without building competing battleships at all? French naval theorists certainly thought so, and it was proposed that France could out-lever Britain on the seas with a fleet comprised entirely of fast cruisers and torpedo boats. Such a program had the additional advantage of being very cheap, with dozens of torpedo boats available at the cost of a single armored battleship. This financial calculus was particularly important to France: after the disastrous defeat at the hands of the Prusso-Germans in 1870-71, it was natural that building out the army should be Paris's primary concern. Therefore, a naval program that promised to outmaneuver the British without eating into funds for the army had irresistible allure. In 1881, the French allocated funds for 70 torpedo boats (halting the construction of armored battleships), and in 1886 the new Minister of Marine, Admiral Aube, launched a new building program for 100 additional torpedo boats and 14 swift cruisers designed to raid enemy shipping.

Taken together, the decay of Britain's naval supremacy is easy to sketch out. Great Britain had become uniquely vulnerable to asymmetrical warfare at sea, owing to its growing dependence on imported grain, at the same time that technical changes in the form of the torpedo and the fast cruiser gave her enemies the potential to exploit this vulnerability. To make matters worse, the diffusion of the industrial revolution to continental Europe and the United States raised the prospect that Great Britain might no longer be able to simply out-build her enemies. In a sense, the comforting and familiar dynamic of the blockade was now reversed: instead of a powerful British battlefleet insulating the home islands from invasion and blockading enemy ports, the home islands now faced starvation at the hands of fast and cheap enemy raiding vessels armed with torpedoes and modern naval artillery.

All of this was bad enough, but technical developments further conspired to make the mass of the British battlefleet obsolete. As late as the 1880's, British battleships continued to use enormous muzzle loading cannon. These could do immense damage when fired at close ranges against accommodating targets (in essence, continuing the tactical methodology of Nelson's day), but their slow rate of fire and inaccuracy threatened disaster in a fight against swift enemy torpedo boats and cruisers. It was not unthinkable now that a ponderous and expensive British battleship could be sunk by an enemy torpedo boat, darting in close to discharge its tubes and then zipping away again before the massive muzzle-loaders could be brought on target.

But it got even worse. In the late 1850's, an American naval officer named Thomas Rodman discovered that propellant powder could be packed into grains with a hollow space on the inside, allowing the powder to burn on both the inside and outside of the grains simultaneously. This had the effect of stabilizing and equalizing the burn rate of the powder - instead of a massive initial burn that rapidly trailed off, the propellant would burn at a stable rate from ignition right down to the end of the burn. When combined with the introduction of nitrocellulose explosives (so-called "guncotton"), Rodman's graining system promised a much more powerful, more stable, and essentially smokeless propellant system.

It was this leap which finally made the muzzle loading cannon obsolete. The more stable burn provided by Rodman's system greatly increased muzzle velocity, because the burn rate of the charge remained constant after ignition (as opposed to older powder forms where the power of the charge rapidly decreased after firing). This required, in turn, lengthening the barrel to leverage this stable charge, providing both greater accuracy and range. Longer barrels, in turn, made muzzle loading obsolete at last - a series of powerful demonstrations by Krupp in 1878 and 1879 proved once and for all that breech loading steel cannon were the future.

The discomfiting reality was that the entirety of the British naval ordnance was on the verge of total obsolesce, both tactically and technically. Tactically, the muzzle loading batteries were too inaccurate and fired too slowly to engage fast enemy torpedo boats, and technically they could not compete with the new generation of breach loading artillery. In 1879, the British naval authorities decided that it was time to make the switch to steel breech loaders.

This, as it turned out, was much easier said than done. The sole provider of naval ordnance continued to be the state-owned Woolwich arsenal, which now faced not only the challenge of adopting entirely new gun designs, but also a total overhaul of its plant, which would have to be converted from wrought iron to steel. To make matters worse, the Board of Ordnance was under army control. Feeling intense pressure to renovate the navy's artillery park, naval authorities now had to face both the physical limitations of the Woolwich arsenal and an army-led Board of Ordnance which was viewed as lethargic and unresponsive to the needs of the navy.

Frustrated by the intransigence of both the Board of Ordnance and the Arsenal officials, who seemed to be unapprehending of the severity of the situation, one enterprising officer decided to take matters into his own hands. This was Captain John Fisher - known to the British public and to history as Jackie Fisher. Recovering at home from a bout of malaria and dysentery developed on deployment, Fisher reached out to a journalist named W. T. Snead in 1884, and together they hatched a plan to force the government's hand with a series of explosive articles under the heading "The Truth about the Navy", published under the ominous pseudonym: "One Who Knows the Facts."

These articles, which had a fantastic effect in Britain, argued in no uncertain terms that the Royal Navy's supremacy was on the verge of extinction, and perhaps had already ceased to exist. It did achieve some measure of immediate results, with Parliament increasing the naval appropriations by some 50%. On a more historic scale, however, Jackie Fisher became a singular figure in both modernizing the Royal Navy and in breaking down the traditional barriers that had existed between the service, private industry, and politics, creating a nexus between them that is very familiar to us. Fisher, in effect, ushered in the military industrial complex.

Fisher's rise was meteoric, born of his own ambition, his political acumen and willingness to flaunt convention, and his intense preoccupation with what he saw as a technological crisis. While older and more conservative officers felt that it was their duty to simply make the most of whatever funds the political authorites chose to allocate, Fisher was willing to go the mat - first anonymously and then publicly - to argue for the Navy. His ascension furthermore tracked very closely with the conversion of the naval artillery: in 1883 he had been made commandant of the naval gunnery school, and in 1886 he made the leap to Director of Naval Ordnance, and in 1892 he was an Admiral, Third Sea Lord and Controller of the Navy - in control of all naval procurement. By 1904 he was First Sea Lord: the highest ranking officer in the navy.

Throughout this ascent, Fisher served as the icebreaker plowing a new path of relations between the navy, private industrial firms, and politics. This was partially the result of a changing British political substrate. In 1884, the British franchise widened dramatically without a commensurate expansion of the income tax. This meant that there were now millions of new voters with a keen interest in economic conditions - particularly reducing unemployment - who were little concerned with how this might be paid for.

As a result, after 1884 there was a clear turn in British politics towards what we would now recognize as fiscal stimulus - particularly because there was a depression in 1884 precisely as the franchise widened. Economic depression suddenly made it seem more pressing to pass large naval appropriations to generate work and employment in private industry. In October 1884, the First Lord of the Admiralty suggested to Parliament that "if we are to spend money on the increase of the navy, it is desirable in consequence of the stagnation in the great shipbuilding yards of this country, that the extra expenditure should go… to increase the work by contract in the private yards." The idea of a senior officer stumping for a larger naval bill on the basis of job creation, unthinkable just a few decades ago, now had a sudden sublime logic to it that was irresistible to politicians.

At the same time, Fisher pioneered a growing nexus between the military and private industry. The most important change in this regard came in 1886, after Fisher's promotion to director of naval ordnance. Frustrated with the lethargic Woolwich arsenal and fixated on what he viewed as a critical technological gap, Fisher demanded (and was given) permission to purchase anything from private manufacturers that Woolwich could not supply more quickly or cheaply. On paper, Fisher hoped to stimulate competition between the arsenal and private producers, but the reality was that Woolwich would never be able to match the capital investment needed to match private lines. Armstrong, for example, had reacted to the emergence of Krupp as a competitor in foreign markets by investing in both a new steel mill and a shipyard, and was thus willing and able to immediately begin delivering guns to the Navy while the Woolwich arsenal was only beginning its foray into breech loading guns.

In essence, Fisher's tenure as Director of Naval Ordnance allowed private manufacturers, of whom Armstrong was the most famous but not the only, to systematically undercut the more expensive and cumbersome arsenal system, granting a de-facto monopoly to private industry. This was the birth of the British military-industrial complex, with the feedback loops and personnel sharing that still characterize this system today, albeit much stigmatized.

Today, it is common to read outraged complaints about the incestuous relationship between armaments manufacturers, politicians, and military officers. At the risk of making an apologetic for this system, it is critical to understand that in the late 19th Century this system emerged more or less as an imperative of state security, without the negative connotations of corruption that exist today. In other words we could say that while there are many distasteful aspects of the modern military-industrial complex, no great power could survive the 20th Century without one.

Indeed, from very early on it became necessary to inculcate a close cooperation between Naval leadership and military industrialists, largely because of the sheer complexity and cost of naval engineering. Fundamentally, the Navy was buying very large, complex, and expensive products, which necessitated a close working relationship between procurement officers and private industrialists. Most famously, William White, who served as the Admiralty's Director of Naval Construction, came directly from Armstrong, where he had worked as the company's chief ship designer. But White was hardly the only such example, as personnel moved back and forth between state and private employment in an estuary of armaments design and fabrication.

The effect was not only to align private designs more closely with the needs of the navy, but also to accelerate the pace of change. Prior to the 1880's, engineering and innovation had been largely driven by private inventors performing autonomous experimentation. This was a highly speculative enterprise with no guarantee of financial return - Armstrong discovered this firsthand in the 1860's, when his breechloading guns (although definitively the superior system) were passed up by conservative officers in favor of muzzle loaders from the Woolwich arsenal.

In such an environment, technological change was bound to be relatively incremental, simply because private industrialists were unwilling to spend heavily on R&D with no assurance of return. By the mid to late 1880's - the start of the "Fisher Era", if you will - the growth of naval budgets and the close cooperation between Navy and industry provided an escape route. Now, the Admiralty could provide financial assurances to reduce the risk of expensive research and development, and even guide the process of innovation. Technological progress thus became a top-down, guided affair, rather than a process driven by private experimentation. In effect, the Admiralty set parameters for new systems - performance metrics for a gun, or an engine, or a torpedo, or an optical sight, and so on - and the engineers at private firms worked to meet them. It was now possible for invention and technological changes to respond to the needs of the service, rather than the service adopting its tactics around available technology.

The most famous example of this - and a truly revolutionary one - was a weapons system designed to counter the rising threat of fast torpedo boats: the quick firing artillery gun. The Admiralty asked for a very specific weapons system: a gun capable of firing at least twelve rounds per minute, with the range, accuracy, and power to destroy an enemy torpedo boat beyond the 600 yard range limit of the day's torpedoes. By 1887, Armstrong had a gun that met all the design criteria, utilizing a hydraulic recoil system to automatically return the gun to its firing position after each shot. When combined with improvements to the breech system, this became the recognizable prototype of most modern artillery systems, which can fire in quick succession while remaining trained on target.

The quick firing gun was not only an effective tactical solution to enemy torpedo boats, but a powerful example of command technology, with innovation progressing towards concrete objectives laid out by naval authorities, rather than moving haphazardly at the auspices of private experimentation. Another such example was a new class of ship - the torpedo boat destroyer, which morphed into the vessel that we simply call the destroyer. Essentially a marriage of the quick firing gun with innovative new tube boilers, the concept was a fast and agile vessel that could screen battlefleets to intercept enemy torpedo boats before they could close to threaten capital ships. By 1897, the Royal Navy was fielding destroyers capable of making 36 knots - more than doubling the speed of warships just a decade earlier.

Taken together, it is clear that the mid-19th Century created a strategic crisis for the British which they answered by unleashing a military-industrial revolution, with the encouragement of Jackie Fisher. The diffusion of industrial capacity abroad, the development of new asymmetric warship types like torpedo boats and fast cruisers, and Britain's growing dependence on imported grain all threatened to upend a centuries old calculus of British naval supremacy. Matters further came to a breaking point when developments in gunnery made the Royal Navy's muzzle loading naval artillery (and the Woolwich arsenal that manufactured it) obsolete.

Facing both a technical and a strategic crisis, the British opened up a new nexus between political bodies, naval authorities, and private industrialists which promised to propel the Royal Navy to future glories. Close working relationships with major manufacturers like Armstrong allowed the Navy to drive innovation and procure ordnance in quantities that the old Woolwich arsenal, venerable though it was, could never hope to match. Meanwhile, the political apparatus discovered that naval appropriations were popular both on patriotic grounds and as a mechanism for job creation. Taken together, the entire apparatus of industry, technology, and finance were reaching the escape velocity needed to propel warfare at sea to a higher form.

The Rising Sun at Sea: Tsushima

While Britain busied herself responding to a systematic decay of her strategic position, unleashing an embryonic naval revolution in the process, equally dramatic changes were happening on the far side of the world in another island nation. The emergence of Japan as a modern and assertive power was among the most important geopolitical developments of the 19th Century, rivaled only by the American Civil War and the unification of Germany. The Japanese story, however, was endlessly surprising. Germany and the United States were well understood and intimately familiar nodes in the European mental map, with obvious potential as future powers - the question was only one of what sort of political arrangement would emerge to harness that power. Not so with Japan.

The Japanese revolution generally features in history books under the innocuous name of the "Meiji Restoration", which belies the enormity of the changes in Japanese society which occurred in relatively short order. When the future Meiji Emperor, Mutsuhito, was born in 1852, Japan was still a pre-modern and fundamentally feudal country characterized by an extreme level of feudal decentralization, with over 270 minor polities ruled by petty warlords (Daimyos). Nominally ruled by a military head (the famous Shogun) who exercised power in the name of a politically neutralized emperor, the reality of Japanese political life was decentralization, warlordism, and strict isolation from foreigners.

The lifespan of a single man, then - in this case, Mutsuhito the Meiji Emperor - contained the wholesale transformation of Japan into a virtually unrecognizable modern state. The Boshin War (1868-1869) successfully overthrew the Shogunate and returned power to Emperor, and in the following decades the Meiji court would unleash a flood of reforms on Japan which reversed, practically in their entirety, the previous trajectory of the country. Japanese isolation, formerly a strict policy, was abolished and replaced with an intentional program to solicit foreign advisors and engineers, as Japan sought to remake itself into a modern state. Heavy land taxes on the peasantry and burgeoning silk exports financed the construction of modern industrial plants, railroads, and shipyards. Simultaneously, old feudal power structures were dismantled and the Imperial government pressured the privileged Samurai class (which numbed in the millions) into becoming productive civil servants and army personnel.

In short (and we can never do such a monumental event justice in such a short space), Japan transformed itself from prototypical colonial prey into an embryonic imperial power. Pre-Meiji Japan was precisely the sort of state which had traditionally been devoured by European powers: insular, fractured, and listless. Under the Meiji government, this Japan was transformed into a centralized Imperial state which consciously and aggressively sought modernity by adopting the best technological and bureaucratic practices of the day, even at the cost of transgressing ancient Japanese social taboos and coming into direct conflict with conservative Samurai.

Conveniently, the navy was one of the few areas where Japan had already opened itself to foreign influence even before the Meiji restoration got underway. A series of mid-century dustups with European fleets had highlighted the need for naval modernization, such that even the conservative Shogunate could not ignore it. In 1862, a British merchant was killed by the retinue of a local Daimyo, and when a small British armada appeared offshore the following year to demand restitution, it was able to bombard the city of Kagoshima with impunity. Almost simultaneously (in 1863), a joint western armada was able to force control of the Shimonoseki Strait, which separates the Japanese home islands of Honshu and Kyushu.

Basic prudence dictated that Japan, as an archipelago, would have to become a naval power to have any prospects in the world, and so the Shogunate had already begun soliciting foreign engineers (primarily British and French) to assist with the construction of modern naval arsenals, with a handful of warships purchased from Dutch, British, and American shipyards. We could say, then, that the Navy was one of the few arms of the Japanese state that was already open to foreign influence and modernization even before the Imperial restoration made this the norm.

Naturally, however, the development of the Imperial Japanese Navy (formally established in 1869) accelerated amid the more widespread reforms of the Meiji Period. Although the Royal Navy was widely seen as the gold standard to be emulated, it was in fact the French that provided the most powerful influence in the early Meiji period. This was precisely the time that the French were espousing their ideas for a budget fleet comprised of fast torpedo boats and cruisers which, in theory, could sink expensive capital ships at a fraction of the cost. This had obvious appeal to the Japanese, who were modernizing the entire state on a shoestring budget, and Japan's 1882 naval appropriations bill laid the foundations for a fleet predicated on torpedoes, naval mines, and fast cruisers.

Both Japan's foreign policy and the design of her fleet would take a sharp turn in the last decade of the 19th Century, with China serving as a crucial fulcrum. The Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) featured a series of largely unbroken Japanese victories, but there were still important lessons to be learned.

In particular, the Battle of the Yalu River (September 17, 1894) revealed the limitations of the French-style fleet design predicated on cruisers and torpedo boats. The Japanese did win the battle rather handily - shattering a Chinese fleet in the bay at the mouth of the Yalu, off the coast of Korea. However, the Chinese armada did possess a pair of German-built ironclad battleships which proved largely impervious to Japanese gunnery: they were only defeated after the remainder of the Chinese fleet had been swatted away, permitting torpedo boats to come in at close range.

This is not to remotely imply that the Yalu River was anything but a decisive Japanese victory, but for Japanese senior officers observing the battle, the resilience of the two Chinese battleships was slightly discomfiting, and seemed to indicate that a fleet comprised entirely of torpedo boats and cruisers was inadequate. It followed logically, then, that future phases of fleet expansion would incorporate capital ships, and the Japanese turned towards a more conventional, Mahanian battle fleet along British lines.

Secondly, the outcome of this first Sino-Japanese War did much to embitter Japan against the European powers and intensify their proclivities for a kinetic foreign policy. The chief cause of this was the so-called "Triple Intervention". What happened was this: in the wake of Chinese defeat, a treaty was signed renouncing Chinese influence over Korea and ceding both Taiwan and the Liaodong Peninsula to Japan. Almost immediately after these terms were ratified, however, a joint diplomatic intervention by Russia, Germany, and France urged Japan to renounce its claim on the Liaodong Peninsula in exchange for a larger financial indemnity from China. Japan acquiesced under this European pressure, only to watch the Russians swoop in afterwards and obtain a 25 year lease on the peninsula, where they established a naval base at Port Arthur in 1898.

The Japanese, rather fairly, felt that they had been bullied and swindled, with the Russians taking a critical position that had been rightfully won with Japanese blood. To make matters worse, the new Russian position at Port Arthur, along with the new Trans Siberian Railway (which opened in 1904), put Russia in a position to move into Korea, which was now the main theater of empire for Japan.

In short, the Sino-Japanese War marked an important first chapter in Japan's imperial story. Her victories against the Chinese fleet gave the modernizing Japanese navy an important base of experience and demonstrated that the growing fleet could not rely completely on torpedo boats but would require proper battleships, and the subsequent diplomatic wrangling embittered Japanese opinion against the European powers, particularly Russia. In the wake of this war, Japanese foreign policy would become increasingly muscular. Tokyo would sign an alliance with Great Britain in 1902, intended to deter further meddling by the French and Germans, and the Japanese battlefleet would be built out even further with capital ships. The stage was set for Japan to try her strength against a European power, and avenge herself on Russia.

The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, then, constituted an attempt by Japan to sterilize the encroachment of Russia towards Korea and Manchuria. The war began with a surprise attack on the Russian base at Port Arthur, with the Japanese beginning their assault several hours before a formal declaration of war. While Americans would later be scandalized and outraged at the undeclared attack on Pearl Harbor, this was in fact a well established trick in the Japanese playbook: at Port Arthur and at Pearl Harbor, Japan began its two largest wars against outside powers with a surprise attack on the enemy's main naval base.

The full scope of the Russo-Japanese War is beyond our remit here, but we will make a few brief comments on its overall character. Japan's surprise attack failed to capture Port Arthur, but they were able to successfully bring it under siege and largely sterilize Russia's Pacific Fleet in the process. The Russians made a variety of attempts to break out and concentrate their fleet for action, but were unable to do so. Naval mines - a relatively new technology - played an important role for both sides, serving to both keep the Russian fleet in Port Arthur and the Japanese out.

On land, this war was a muddled affair. The Russians and the Japanese each had a difficult problem to solve. For the Russians, the main issue was that their operational possibilities were narrow and left little room for creativity: the Russian armies railed into the region had a singular objective (break the siege on Port Arthur), which left them no other course of action than to try and fight their way down the rail line from Harbin (see the map above). Thus, the largest land battle of the war, Mukden, was fought precisely on this rail line. Fighting literally thousands of miles from home in Russia's remote far east, it was impossible to supply these armies without rail, and this fact meant that the Russians simply could not maneuver or try anything clever. In a word, their operational planning was extremely predictable, with their line of advance and supply chained to the rail line.

For the Japanese, the problem was that their tactical aggression and initiative were giving them a preview of the First World War, and Russian rifle fire and artillery frequently inflicted terrible losses. At the Battle of Nanshan, for example (which cut off the land approach to Port Arthur), the Japanese suffered more than 6,000 casualties in the process of overrunning a relatively small Russian defending force of perhaps 3,800 men. Although the Japanese were victorious at Nanshan, in that they did capture the Russian positions, their losses were thrice that of the Russians. At the Battle of Mukden, Japanese casualties were likewise very heavy, with more than 75,000 killed or wounded.

In essence then, the overland campaigns of the Russo-Japanese War had a unique and frustrating logic, in that the Russian Army was tactically proficient (it could inflict significant casualties on the Japanese), but operationally sterile, trying as it was to advance in a linear and predictable fashion down the railway line to rescue the besieged garrison at Port Arthur. Mukden was a paradoxical battle which was superficially indecisive; but to win the war, the Russians had to break through to rescue Port Arthur, therefore even a stalemate at Mukden constituted defeat for the Russians.

It was in this context that we come to our topic of interest here: the Battle of Tsushima. The strategic framework for the Russians was very simple: Port Arthur was besieged and therefore needed to be rescued. The overland rescue had come untracked at Mukden, with the army unable to proceed any farther. Therefore, all hopes for the salvation of the Port Arthur garrison came to rest on the Russian Baltic Fleet, which was dispatched at ultra-long range from Petersburg to Port Arthur. There is a persistent myth that the Russians were denied the use of the Suez canal by the British after a jumpy Russian captain opened fire on British fishermen in the North Sea, thus needlessly extending the voyage by forcing them to circumnavigate Africa. While the incident with the British fishing ships did occur as reputed, it had no relation to the ability of the Russian fleet to traverse Suez: the journey around Africa was necessary from the start, as the draught of the newer Russian ships was too deep for the canal.

With Suez closed to them, albeit by engineering particulars rather than British remit, the Russian Fleet was compelled to steam out into the North Sea, around Iberia, and thence down the entire length of Africa, across the Indian Ocean, around Indochina, and then north towards Korea. In total, this was a voyage of about 18,000 nautical miles which took seven months. Without any exaggeration, we can therefore call the Baltic Fleet's attempted rescue of Port Arthur the longest range combat operation of all time. The logistics of the voyage were complicated even farther by the idiosyncrasies of the Russian Navy. First and foremost, Russia - unlike, say, the British - did not possess a network of far flung coaling stations to support the fleet - which meant the Russians had to manage a tending force of colliers and supply ships. Secondly, because the Baltic Fleet had been designed as a coastal defense force intended to fight in the littoral of the Baltic, many of its ships were simply not designed for a global voyage nor crewed by sailors with robust experience on the high seas.

This cumbersome fleet, now asked to operate at the absolute limits of thinkable range, was put under the command of fifty-three year old Vice-Admiral Zinovi Petrovich Rozhdestvensky. He certainly cut a striking figure - tall, dignified, and energetic, known for being a high strung workaholic (he regularly went sleepless for days at a time). A British rhyme described him thusly:

And after all this, an Admiral came,

A terrible man with a terrible name,

A name which we all of us know very well

But no one can speak and no one can spell

Russia is by convention a land power, and given its geography it is natural that the army should always have place of pride and importance in the country's defense and power projection. In 1905, however, the Russian Navy - and the Baltic Fleet in particular - had elements that were essentially modern and capable. The core of the fleet sailing to far east consisted of four Borodino Class Battleships, which had been completed in 1901-02, and were thus slightly newer than their Japanese equivalents. The Borodino class was equipped with what was, at the time, state of the art weaponry, armor, and powerplants, much of it designed in collaboration with French and German engineers. On the whole, although the Japanese had significantly more ships on aggregate, much of this came from armored cruisers and torpedo boats, while the Russians had more battleships.

Functionally, the Russian fleet was at a disadvantage in almost every area: it had fewer ships, fewer mid-caliber guns (like the 6 and 8 inch batteries on Japan's cruisers), and it was operating very far from home. Furthermore, the Borodino class had been designed with an eye towards protection from torpedoes, which meant that its heaviest armor was below the waterline. Much of the superstructures above the water, including the coning towers and gun turrets, had little armor to speak of. This indicates, in general, that around the turn of the century the design of modern battleships was still in flux, and there was no consensus as to whether armor ought to be optimized to defend against torpedoes or against the enemy's big guns. The Russians did, however, have one distinctive advantage: they had more big guns (of the 10 and 12 inch varieties). Therefore, if the ensuing battle was fought at longer ranges, to take the Japanese cruisers out of the action, the Russians would have a boxer's chance.

What the ensuing Battle of Tsushima would demonstrate (beyond the obvious fact that the Japanese were to be treated with deadly seriousness), was the critical importance of two specific capabilities: speed and fire control. We will make a brief digression to examine fire control in particular before treating with the battle itself.

Fire control, as such, simply refers to the ability to coordinate accurate fire at range, and entails a spectrum of technical capabilities including range finding, optics, and correction. At Tsushima, the Japanese fleet utilized a new system of fire control which decisively demonstrated its superiority over older methods. There were certain technological advantages in play, of course - electric firing mechanisms, superior telescoping sights, and state of the art rangefinders - but beyond this, the Japanese had pioneered a new methodology which proved to be decidedly superior.

Traditionally, the fire control system was dissipated: an artillery officer and his assistants would estimate the range to the target and transmit the data to the gun crew commanders. After firing the first shot, these gun crew commanders would make adjustments to the range by observing the splash of their shells in the water - splashes behind the target meant the range had to be reduced, and vice versa for splashes in front of the target. The problem with this system of fire control is that, by giving responsibility for adjusting range to individual gun crew commanders, the turrets became desynchronized, with each turret commander independently tinkering with the range. Furthermore, with all the gun crews adjusting their fire independently, it quickly became difficult to tell which splashes came from your shells and which came from the other turrets on the ship.

At the Battle of the Yellow Sea in 1904, the Japanese began to implement centralized fire control, which gave responsibility for calculating new ranges to the ship's artillery officer and his team. Under this system, all the gun turrets used the same range for each subsequent salvo - the result was that there was now a single set of splashes (with all guns firing in unison). Instead of each gun crew commander straining to watch the splashes and then make his own adjustments on the fly, the ship would fire a synchronized salvo and then wait for the adjusted firing parameters to be calculated by the artillery officer and his technical specialists. When combined with state of the art rangefinders and optics purchased from the British, this would give the Japanese a considerable advantage in accuracy. The rate of fire might be slightly reduced, since the gun crews had to wait for the new firing parameters to come down from the artillery officer, but the Japanese had learned that the increase in accuracy was well worth the slight delays that came from centralizing the range calculations.

A memorandum from Fleet Admiral Togo expressed the new system thusly:

Based on the experience of past battles and exercises, the ship's fire control should be carried out from the bridge whenever possible. The firing distance must be indicated from the bridge and must not be adjusted in gun groups. If an incorrect distance is indicated from the bridge, all the projectiles will fly by, but if the distance is correct, all the projectiles will hit the target and the accuracy will increase.

The Japanese fleet was also faster. In this case, the matter was not merely a difference in the technical capabilities of the ships, but the fact that the Russian fleet (having sailed tens of thousands of kilometers) had worn its boilers down to the bone, and the powerplants of the vessels were badly fouled by smoke and particulate pollution. This advantage in speed would prove crucial, particularly given the more numerous Russian big guns. If the battle was fought at extreme ranges, the Russians would have the advantage in firepower, but because the Japanese were faster, they were able to dictate the range of the engagement and fight at distances that kept their cruisers (with 6 and 8 inch guns) in play.

In short then, the Russians came to Tsushima with plenty of firepower and a powerful nucleus of modern battleships, but they were slower than the Japanese and at a significant disadvantage in fire control, owing to better Japanese rangefinders and the methodological advantages of centralized fire control. These two basic capabilities - speed and accuracy - would make all the difference.

Before the battle could be joined, Admirals Togo and Rozhdestvensky had to make difficult deployment decisions. The Russian fleet had departed its Baltic ports in October of 1904, under orders to relieve the besieged garrison at Port Arthur by sea. These orders had become obsolete on January 2, 1905, when Port Arthur surrendered to the Japanese Army. This did not, however, prompt a recall of the Baltic Fleet, and Rozhdestvensky proceeded under revised orders to reach Vladivostok, link up with the surviving squadron of Russia's Pacific Fleet, and bring battle to the Japanese navy.

From this accrued an obvious geographic problem. Vladivostok lies on the continental coastline of the Sea of Japan - so named because it is an almost entirely enclosed sea, walled off in all directions by the Japanese home islands. Only three deepwater channels offer access to the Sea of Japan: these are the Soya, or La Pérouse Strait (between the islands of Hokkaido and Sakhalin), the Tsugaru Strait (between Honshu and Hokkaido), and the Tsushima Strait which separates the Japanese home islands from the Korean Peninsula.

To reach Vladivostok, Rozhdestvensky had to choose between taking the straight route through Tsushima and circumnavigating Japan to slip through the Soya strait in the north. The Soya route was significantly longer, adding more than 1,000 miles to a Russian voyage that had already strained the limits of long range operations. Despite the distance, there were factors recommending it, as the Tsushima straits would bring the Russians right past several major Japanese naval bases. If the Russians chose the longer route and were able to sweep around the Japanese home islands mostly undetected, there was a good chance that they could catch the Japanese fleet out of position and reach Vladivostok unmolested. In the end, however, Rozhdestvensky opted against the Soya route due to a combination of distance and fears that the Soya Strait (only 25 miles wide) might be heavily mined.

So, Rozhdestvensky chose to steam straight into the strait of Tsushima and head directly for Vladivostok. Unfortunately for the Russians, Admiral Togo had correctly guessed his intentions and based virtually the entirety of the Japanese surface fleet at Masan Bay, on the coast of Korea, where - like a spider waiting in the corner of a web - it could quickly sortie for action when the Russians entered the strait.

Togo's decision to bet the farm on Tsushima spoke to extreme confidence and calm. Although the Japanese had virtually all the momentum in the war, there were larger strategic reasons to be nervous. The Japanese victory at Mukden had required committing virtually all of Japan's trained reserves, and the country was generally running low on both manpower and cash (in fact, Japan's looming exhaustion was the primary reason why the terms of the eventual peace were much less decisive than expected, given the scope of their victories). The Russian Army in Manchuria, although defeated, had been able to withdraw in good order to the north and was awaiting reinforcement. More generally, although the Japanese had won significant victories, they had no ability to defeat Russia strategically, given the scope of Russian manpower and their strategic depth. If Togo gambled wrong - if the Russians went east, around Japan, and evaded him - the war threatened to extend for another year, and the longer this war went on the better it was for Russia.

But Togo had not gambled wrongly. As the Japanese waited for weeks at Masan, waiting for some clue as to Rozhdestvensky's whereabouts, there was increasing chatter that the Japanese fleet ought to redeploy northward and hedge its bets. Togo decided to wait. On the 27th, he received a vital bit of information that confirmed he had been correct. Intelligence arrived informing Togo that much of the Russian support fleet, including the colliers, had broken off from the battle fleet and arrived in Shanghai. This confirmed Togo's bet on Tsushima: if the Russians were planning to take the longer route and sail to the east of Japan, they would have kept the supporting ships with them. At 2:45 AM on May 27th, the Japanese reconnaissance cruiser Shinano Maru managed to spot the Russian fleet, despite the foggy night. A radio message came crackling into Togo's anchorage at Masan:

The enemy sighted in number 203 section. He seems to be sterring for the eastern channel.

By 6:30 AM, the Japanese fleet had spilled out of Masan Bay and was steaming into Tsushima to intercept the enemy. Togo's flagship, the battleship Mikasa, hoisted a signal strongly evocative of Nelson's famous exhortations:

The fate of the Empire depends on today's result, let every man do his utmost.

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4. Ironclad: Modernity at Sea

The Ship of Theseus is a very old thought experiment, relayed to us by Plutarch in his "Life of Theseus." In its original formulation, Plutarch relates that the ship used by the Greek hero Theseus (slayer of the Minotaur), was lovingly maintained by the Athenians, who honored the legendary hero by taking the vessel on an annual pilgrimage to make sacrifices to Apollo. Wooden Greek ships, of course, are predisposed to rot, which compelled the men of Athens over the years to replace the various timbers of the ship - removing rotted planks and beams and replacing them with new pieces, to preserve the ship in its original splendor. This, according to Plutarch, sparked a philosophical debate among the Athenian thinkers: if, after enough time had passed, literally every element of the ship - the mast, the sail, the ropes, and every timber of its hull - had been replaced, was it really Theseus's ship, or was it an entirely different vessel?

This question is mildly interesting, of course, and relates to all manner of philosophical questions about forms and matter and various platonic minutia. For our purposes, however, it forms a useful place to begin an exploration of the remarkable ways that naval combat changed in the 19th century. In this case, the Ship of Theseus is useful because we are similarly talking about literal ships, and like the hero's vessel, warships in the 19th century went through radical changes. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, warships looked essentially like they had two hundred years prior - wooden sailing vessels armed with banks of broadside cannon. By the turn of the century, however, they had been transformed into the essentially recognizable modern battleships that we know today: steel, propeller driven vessels armed with massive naval artillery batteries mounted in rotating turrets.

Both of these forms are very familiar to us - both the wooden ship of the line and the colossal steel battleship are iconic, instantly recognizable weapons systems. There are many places where you can tour one or the other. However familiar we may be with these vessels, at least in their general visible impressions, they are starkly alien from one another. The transition from the sailing broadside warships of Rodney and Nelson to recognizably 20th century battleships was the result of ruthless technological pressures driven in many cases by private inventors, innovators, and industrialists.

Like the ship of Theseus, the transformation of the warship entailed the obsolescence and replacement of literally every component of the ship. Wooden hulls were replaced first with iron and then with steel; muzzle loading cannon firing inert ordinance were replaced with breech loading and fantastically powerful naval artillery with exploding shells; sails were replaced with steam propulsion (powered at first by coal and later by fuel oil). These technological leaps seem logical and straightforward to us, but at the time they were frequently controversial (and often outright rejected at first by conservative naval authorities), incremental, and often connected in a vicious feedback loop. Unlike in previous centuries, this revolution in naval armament was frequently driven by private citizens - entrepreneurs and inventors eager to make their fortunes, who increasingly intruded on the prerogatives of conservative government arsenals and ancient cultures of artisanal weapons manufacture.

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Warships, in essence, made a variety of incremental changes that amalgamated old and new technologies - passing through hybrid forms which blended metal and wood, steam and sail - until they became something entirely new. But it was not only the structure of the warship that changed in this way - the economic and bureaucratic systems that built and supported them changed as well. Traditional admiralties and state operated shipyards and arsenals were challenged by the proliferation of private inventors, industrialists, and manufacturers, as society - particularly in Western Europe and the United States - made the leap to modernity and acquired all its signature attributes: mass production, mass politics, and mass mobilization.

The transformation of the warship became a visible symbol of the emerging age of modernity: gleaming with steel, belching smoke into the air, teeming with thousands of personnel, and knitting the imperial world more tightly together than ever with faster transportation and communications - and exponentially more powerful weaponry. With navies across the globe straining to float ever more and ever larger and more powerful vessels, the battleship became the totem weapons system of a world increasingly trapped in its own strategic logic, captive to the insatiable demands of bureaucratized and industrialized war at sea.

The Battleship of Theseus: Modernity at Escape Velocity

In 1807 - two years after the great battle at Trafalgar - Robert Fulton's little steamship, the Claremont, made the first commercial demonstration of steam powered water transportation by ferrying passengers up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany and back again. The Claremont made the voyage (a round trip distance of about 350 miles) in 62 hours, which was considered a remarkable feat for the time, and developments in steam propulsion would come rapidly. Thirty years later the Atlantic would be crossed in just 18 days by the paddle wheeler Sirius. Although the Sirius also utilized sails (such hybrid propulsion was a standard of early steam vessels), this was the first demonstration of an oceanic crossing with continuous and sustained steam power. By the 1840's, the clumsy and inefficient paddle wheels of the Sirius and the Claremont had given way to propellers and recognizably modern screw systems, and the power of engines began to increase exponentially. While Fulton's little Claremont boasted a mere 24 horsepower (about as much as a modern riding lawnmower), the Sirius disposed of 320. By the 1850's, the British had launched what was at the time the largest ship ever built by far - the 680 foot Great Eastern, which was driven by screw propellers and a massive 1,600 horsepower boiler complex.

In a few decades, then, steam powered ships had had already made the leap from small demonstration projects - essentially the province of hobbyist inventors and entrepreneurs - to fully scaled, if unrefined industrial products. The Great Eastern, for example, was an early but functional ocean liner, capable of carrying passengers from England to Australia under steam power without refueling. Despite these impressive achievements, the advent of steam initially made little impression on the navies of the world, particularly the vaunted British admiralty. The broader transformation of naval warfare would entail not only the radical redesign of the warship, but indeed a total revolution in the relationship between the institutional navy and society's industrial and economic base.

The naval establishment in Britain had an extremely conservative temperament. This was not merely an ideological disposition, but was also derived from the structural and material apparatus of the navy. The Royal Navy had won global naval supremacy after many decades of war, with its crown jewel at Trafalgar. The British basis for global power rested, at its heart, on a system of naval combat that had not fundamentally changed since the Anglo-Dutch Wars in the mid-1600's. A vast bureaucratic and manufacturing apparatus existed to support this system - a supply system to provide timber for hulls and hemp for ropes and sails, shipyards and docks for constructing and repairing ships, arsenals for casting iron cannon, and personnel arm finely tuned to produce the particular sailing and fighting skills that were the backbone of British dominance.

Given the scale of the British naval administration, and the fact that its material and human systems were finely calibrated for war in the age of sail, the British admiralty in fact had good reasons to resist the urge to plunge headlong into technological experiments. It (correctly) felt that it had no immediate peers at sea, and given the lack of urgency there was little reason to begin tearing up its powerful naval structures by the floorboards. On the contrary, there was a sense that rocking the boat (pardon the pun) could only serve to narrow the gap between Britain and her would-be rivals. An 1828 memorandum from the Admiralty argued:

"Their Lordships feel it is their bounden duty to discourage to the utmost of their ability the employment of steam vessels, as they consider that the introduction of steam is calculated to strike a fatal blow at the naval supremacy of the Empire.

This may seem like a classic case of "famous last words", but the plainer truth is that an experienced naval administration, with no real rivals, was always unlikely to embrace speculative changes and abandon a proven and deeply entrenched methodology, in which they were heavily invested. The coming naval revolution would instead be spurred primarily by private actors and and by Britain's rivals, with the Royal Navy (as the leading force of the day) responding to changes, rather than driving them. As it would turn out, Britain's vastly superior industrial and financial capacity meant that it did not always need to be the prime mover of technological changes. British economic resources and her vast shipbuilding capacity meant that, even when a potential rival like France made an early breakthrough in ship design, the Royal Navy was never left behind for very long and found it relatively easy to imitate and adopt foreign innovations at scale.

In many ways, the 19th century revolution in naval warfare can be traced through a series of individual names, signifying men who - if not wholly responsible for major technological breakthroughs - are very nearly synonymous with these great leaps. Robert Fulton has gone to the history books as the father of the steam ship. After Fulton comes another singularly significant figure: the French artillery officer Henri Paixhans, father of the exploding naval shell.

Paixhans solved a thorny problem in military engineering. Explosive shells had been used previously, going back to the 18th Century, with Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel's hollow casing which splintered and ejected shards of metal, but these weapons were used primarily in a siege setting, with mortars firing them at a high trajectory to injure personnel behind fortifications. Before Paixhans, no one had been able to work out how to safely fire explosive ordnance at the high velocities and flat trajectories used in naval combat. His first solution, which became the first functional exploding naval shell, was to rig an explosive shell with a fuse which would be lit by the blast of the gun firing - turning the cannonball into a sort of self-lighting bomb. In 1822, as he was preparing to showcase his newly finished design, he published a book entitled Nouvelle force maritime, which argued that in the near future wooden warships would be rendered obsolete by metal-plated warships armed with explosive shells.

In 1824, a French test confirmed the lethality of the Paixhans gun. The hulk of the decommissioned Pacificator was shot up with Paixhans's shells, which lodged in the wooden hull before exploding, setting the entire ship alight in short order. The extreme vulnerability of wooden hulls to exploding shells - and in particular the fires that they would spark - was obvious to everyone, and by the late 1830's both the French and British navies had begun the mass adoption of explosive shells, with other interested parties - like Russia - also placing orders.

On November 30, 1853, a small Russian naval squadron sailed into the harbor at Sinop, on the northern coast of Turkey. Russia and the Ottomans were again at war, and the Russian naval force had been instructed to interdict Turkish naval traffic bringing supplies to the Ottoman ground force in the Caucasus. Armed with a small complement of Paixhans guns with exploding shells, the Russian armada set almost the entirety of an equivalently sized Turkish fleet on fire with just a few volleys. Within two hours of the Russian entry into the Sinop harbor, 11 Ottoman ships had either been destroyed or intentionally grounded by their panicking crews. The Russian fleet then set its guns on the Turkish shore batteries and destroyed them as well.

At the cost of just 37 Russian dead, the little fleet (under admiral Pavel Nakhimov) killed nearly 3,000 Turkish soldiers and sailors and won virtually unimpeded operational control of the Black Sea. The Battle of Sinop - if we can call such a one-sided affair a battle - was the first operational use of the emerging explosive ordinance, and it made a deep impression on both a strategic and a technological level. Strategically, Sinop emphasized that the Ottomans were nearly powerless to oppose Russia and raised the thought that Constantinople was now realistically within Moscow's reach. The battle became a major inducement to the entry of Britain and France into the conflict which would become the Crimean War. On a more technical level, however, Sinop emphasized the near total lethality of exploding shells brought to bear against wooden warships.

The 1850's and the Crimean War, then would become a watershed decade for armaments manufacturing and warship design. Before commenting on this war and its ramifications, however, it is worth contemplating the domino chain which revolutionized ship design, and specifically the direction that it flowed.

We can roughly think of the transformation of the warship as consisting of three great changeovers: from inert cannonballs to exploding shells, from wooden hulls to steel with iron plating as an intermediary step, and from sails to steam. Although steam engines were demonstrated early, they were not the first system to be adopted en-masse by the great navies. Rather, it was exploding shells that set off the chain reaction of changes - particularly in that the French, who were far weaker at sea than Britain, were highly motivated to experiment with new technologies.

Exploding shells had made wooden hulls acutely vulnerable, and it was this fact which spurred experiments with metal plating on hulls - particularly in the aim of preventing primitive shells from embedding themselves in the wood and igniting fires. Metal, however, is very heavy, as were the enormous guns required to fire Paixhans's shells. It is very easy to understand how an escalating race between protection and firepower, with larger guns provoking thicker plating and vice versa in a feedback loop, could very quickly make ships prohibitively heavy and immobile under sail power. It was the sheer weight of these ships which increasingly made steam power a necessity. In effect, then, the modern battleship emerged from a triparte arms race between firepower, protection, and mobility - manifested tangibly as the exploding shell, the steel hull, and the steam engine.

An excellent example of this process in action was the French warship Gloire - a hybrid ironclad warship par excellence. La Gloire had a wooden hull and sails, but also so much more. Outfitted with breech loading artillery and armored with nearly five inches of iron plating (backed by more than a foot of timber), La Gloire proved nearly impervious to any naval artillery then extant. She was also remarkably heavy, with a displacement of some 5,600 tons. This was no obstacle, as a screw propeller powered by steam engine allowed her to attain 13 knots. Most importantly, she was fully ocean-worthy. Her hybrid form - sails and steam, wood and iron alongside each other - spoke to the fact that this was a weapons system in transition, and though she would not remain so for long, at the time she was launched La Gloire was the most powerful naval weapons platform in the world. Protection, firepower, and mobility, all advancing, competing against each other and yet synergizing as the warship evolved.

The Spark: War in Crimea

The Crimean War (1853-1856) would spark the exponential acceleration of change in naval warfare - a fact that at first may seem odd, as it was largely a conflict fought on land. A full recounting of this conflict is beyond our remit here, but we will make do with a brief sketch of its strategic and tactical concepts, before examining in detail the ways that it accelerated technical change in the world's navies.

The Crimean War was fundamentally a containment war. Russia had emerged from the Napoleonic Wars as the dominant land power in the world, with the largest army in Europe by far and a proven capacity to project its forces from Paris to the Caucasus to Central Asia. Although the aggregate power of the Russian Army concealed many weaknesses (like the need to defend a vast and sprawling border and an eroding economic basis), the general consensus was that Russia was the dominant power of continental Europe, and the events of the early 1850's raised serious fears that Moscow would dismember the decaying Ottoman Empire, attain Constantinople, and turn the Black Sea into a Russian lake. The Crimean War, in its essence, was a war fought by France and Britain to prevent a strategic Ottoman defeat at the hands of the Russians, and it was fought in Crimea because this was the only place where the French and British could feasibly project armed power against Russia.

Discussions of the Crimean War tend to emphasize the fighting as a primitive preview of the Western Front of World War I. After a series of initial battles at Alma and Balaclava which forced the Russians back on the fortress of Sevastopol, the war transformed into a colossal siege, characterized by extensive field fortifications, trenches, and heavy artillery barrages. Accounts also frequently emphasize the emerging technological gap between Russian forces, who still utilized muskets, and the French and British troops with their newly issued rifled guns.

All of this is fair and of course interesting in its own right, but what matters most to us now is the naval dimension and the industrial base that would support its evolution. Therefore, two topics in particular are very important and ought to be teased out in full: namely, the enormous advantage in supply derived from Anglo-French naval lift, and the fact that the Crimean War served as a spark that ignited a revolution in arms manufacturing. Rather than focusing on the technical gap that existed between Russian and allied forces during the war, it is important to understand that the war set off an explosion of technological change in the field of armaments. These changes came too late to impact the war in Crimea, but would dramatically change the form of future wars.

Although naval combat was of secondary importance in Crimea, seaborne logistics were not. Anglo-French forces had a decisive and overpowering logistical advantage despite the fact that the war was fought on Russian soil. With fighting centered around Sevastopol, on the southern periphery of the empire, Russian forces had extreme difficulties ensuring an adequate delivery of munitions and other supplies, while the allies - supplied by sea - had access to an enormous logistical lift. French steamships were able to make the trip from Marseilles to the Black Sea in twelve to sixteen days (depending on the weather), while Russian reinforcements and supplies - traveling overland with thousands of animal drawn carts - could take months to reach the front from the Russian interior. Although allied supply was hardly unlimited, French and British forces were much more tightly connected to home, both logistically and in communications, than the Russians, who nominally *were* fighting at home.

In addition to the growing use of steam ships for logistical functions, the Crimean War was also the first major war to make use of the telegraph for communications. When combined with the presence of journalists embedded with the troops (again a first), this connected civilians in France and Britain with the fighting in an entirely new and intimate way, and provoked intense public interest in the war. This fact would have profound implications for weapons manufacturing, as we will see shortly. In contrast, the Russians - who had built up neither telegraph nor railroad connectivity to Crimea - were largely out of the loop. Tsar Nicholas I was said to regularly complain that he got better and more timely information from French newspapers than he did from his own commanders.

In short, the Crimean War prefigured the emerging totalization of war which would be made possible by the twin technologies of steam power (whether in locomotives or ships) and the telegraph. Steam ships and railroads would soon be able to move men and material in previously unthinkable qualities, while the telegraph would make possible the prospect of command and control of ever larger armies. These were the essential tools of mass mobilization and mass politics that would soon allow the states of Europe to fling armies of millions at each other.

In enumerating the consequences of the Crimean War, however, we at last come to (in my view) the single most important outcome: a total revolution in armaments manufacturing. The Crimean War, without exaggeration, led directly to the formation of what we might recognizably call the "military industrial complex", though here I use the phrase without the negative connotation usually implied. The Crimean War sparked a revolution in arms production for two reasons: first, it exposed the utter obsolescence of existing models, and secondly it inculcated an immense interest among private citizens and inventors to offer something better. To demonstrate these changes, we will focus primarily on the British case.

Weapons manufacturing in Britain had long been the domain of a decentralized web of artisan craftsmen, located primarily in London and Birmingham. Making guns, in other words, was a craft, with artisans essentially working as subcontractors for the state-owned Woolwich Arsenal. Craftsmen specialized in making specific components of the finished weapon and delivered batches of these parts to trickle up the chain towards final assembly. This artisanal, dissipated system of manufacture dovetailed with the conservativism of the military establishment to freeze weapons technology. The British officer corps taught the same basic drill (that is, the process for synchronized marching, reloading, and firing), and British artisan gunsmiths made the same basic musket, and nothing changed. The mainstay British musket - "Brown Bess" as she was affectionately called - remained virtually unchanged from the time of Marlborough (the early 1700's) all the way through the Napoleonic wars and into the middle of the 19th Century.

In the Crimean War, however, this artisanal system of gunsmithing showed its obsolescence, in that it proved unable to either expand its output or adapt to emerging new designs in firearms. When war broke out in Crimea, the British Army attempted to place large new orders for small arms - but to the artisans of London and Birmingham, this appeared to be the perfect opportunity to go on strike for higher wages. As a result, the Crimean War exposed the artisanal manufacturing system to be inelastic and unresponsive to the army's needs. Precisely when the army was demanding a surge in production, work stoppages and strikes led to a stark drop in output. Simultaneously, these same workmen - accustomed to practicing a very old and unchanged manufacturing process to make Brown Bess muskets - proved resistant and inflexible when the government tried to make the transition to new rifled models.

Clearly, something had to change. Fortunately, there was already an alternative model of firearms manufacture being practiced in America. The American arsenal in Springfield, Massachusetts - and a bevy of private American gunmakers - had already proven the viability of mass production using milling machines to cut interchangeable components. The British had seen a demonstration of this up close: in 1851, at the Great Exhibition in London's Hyde Park, Samuel Colt showed off his revolvers and demonstrated their interchangeability by dismantling a whole slew of pistols, mixing up the parts in a great pile, and then reassembling them into working guns.

The difficulties with the artisans, combined with the proven viability of American mass production, compelled the British to finance a new manufacturing plant at Enfield based on the "American system of manufacture", as it was called. Expensive milling machines were ordered from the Americans, and although they arrived too late to impact the war in Crimea, by 1859 the Enfield plant was operative. Meanwhile, newly designed machines at the government Woolwich Arsenal were capable of manufacturing hundreds of thousands of bullets per day. The new breakthroughs in manufacturing were hardly limited to government enterprises, however - two major private manufacturers emerged in Britain in the 1860's, located in the old artisanal manufacturing hubs in London and Birmingham.

The advantage of the emerging system of mass production was not only in the scale of the output, but also in the speed with which armies could produce and deploy new weapons. Before the Crimean War, the glacial speed of production discouraged innovation in design, because rolling out the new weapon required cajoling thousands of artisans in a decentralized production system to adjust their processes. Now, a new weapon could be produced en-masse simply by designing new jigs and forms for the automatic machine tools. Brown Bess changed very little over hundreds of years, but now a new rifle could be deployed en-masse in short order. Both France and Prussia, similarly, were able to totally reequip their armies with new rifles in about four years using American-style machining lines.

At the same time, the Crimean War had exposed conservative military officers to the fearful prospect that future wars would be fought with new weapons with which they had little or no direct experience. The power of the new breech loading rifles and exploding artillery shells jolted much of the European military caste out of its slumber, and in general made them much more open to innovation and change.

The Crimean War sparked a similar revolution in artillery manufacture and metallurgy, which was to have profound implications for our particular subject of naval warfare. The link to Crimea was first the powerful demonstration of exploding shells and armored warships (the French in particular made effective use of iron-plated floating artillery batteries to shell Russian fortifications), and secondly the intense interest of the public in a war which for the first time was being comprehensively covered in real time by embedded journalists connected to the home front via telegraph.

At least two of Britain's great industrialists at this time - Henry Bessemer and William Armstrong - were provoked directly by their interest in the Crimean War. Bessemer spent the early part of the 1850's experimenting with methods to cheaply produce steel at scale specifically for manufacturing artillery barrels, and finally broke through when he discovered a novel method of refining by blowing air through molten iron ore. Thus, the mass production of steel, which is both stronger and more easily worked than iron, was gifted to the world. This remains one of the most important technological breakthroughs of the modern world.

The "Bessemer Process" broke the world through to an entirely new age of metallurgy, which quickly made old methods of casting artillery utterly obsolete. This is not, of course, to imply that steel would never have come to predominate without the Crimean War, but it is worth emphasizing that Bessemer was specifically grappling with an application in armaments. In his autobiography, he wrote that the artillery problem: "was the spark which kindled one of the greatest revolutions that the present century had to record… I made up my mind to try what I could to improve the quality of iron in the manufacture of guns."

Meanwhile, the industrialist William Armstrong remembered reading an account of British artillery in action at the Battle of Inkerman, in Crimea, and promptly sketched out a design for a breech loading artillery piece. His remark, similarly to Bessemer's, was that it was "time military engineering was brought up to the level of current engineering practice." Armstrong would soon become Britain's most prolific private artillery designer, and although the Navy eschewed his guns and chose to continue procuring artillery from the state Woolwich Arsenal, Armstrong's guns created a commercial pressure that drove engineers at the arsenal to develop new designs of their own.

Although government operated artillery arsenals fought to maintain their monopoly on the manufacture of heavy guns, it was impossible to ignore the developments being driven by private inventors and industrialists. Henry Bessemer had blown the game wide open by gifting the world cheap steel at scale, which made it possible to produce not only munitions and artillery barrels but eventually the hulls of ships to exacting standards without the brittleness characteristic of iron. Meanwhile, private manufacturers like Armstrong, his rival Joseph Whitworth, and the Prussian industrialist Alfred Krupp, pushed the envelope with new designs and were eager to point out the superiority of their guns.

Everything was now in place for warships to undergo their next phase of evolution - transitioning from the hybrid midcentury forms, which combined wood and iron, sail and steam - to recognizably modern battleships. The chain of innovations is, in fact, relatively straightforward to trace.

A race had already begun between protection and firepower, particularly between the French and British who, although allies in Crimea, continued to eye each other's ship designs warily. When the French launched La Gloire in the late 1850's and boasted that its iron plating was invulnerable to any extant naval gun, it naturally pushed the British to simply design a bigger and more powerful artillery piece. As armor got thicker and thicker (eventually giving way to hulls made entirely of thick steel), guns got bigger and bigger.

The increasing size of the guns forced a total reevaluation of the layout of the warship. Designing ships with rows of cannons laid out along the sides was now abortive, as the guns were so heavy and ponderous that placement on the outer hull threatened the stability of the ship. Guns therefore had to be placed midships along the deck of the vessel for purposes of stability, and that in turn meant that masts and sails had to be removed to give the guns a free field of fire. Thus, by 1871 the Royal Navy had launched the HMS Devastation - the first capital ship to be both powered entirely by steam (she carried no sails at all) and to have her guns mounted on the top deck, rather than below in the hull. When the Devastation shed her sails and the gunports in her hulls, the last vestiges of Nelson's broadside sailing ships were finally gone.

Further developments were soon made. Mounting the guns on the top deck of the ship exposed the gun crews to enemy fire. The solution, obviously, was to encase the gun in an armored turrets, and these turrets needed to be able to turn in order to bring the gun to target. Therefore, the turret needed hydraulic power, and this by extension meant more steam, which required bigger and more boilers. Thus, we get the battleship.

In summary, technologies were emerging in the early 19th Century that would radically change naval warfare, transforming the venerable ship of the line into recognizably modern battleships, but Admiralties - particularly in Britain - were initially slow to adopt these changes given their long established systems of shipbuilding, training, and maintenance. The primary inducement to break this system open was the exploding shell - French tests indicated that wooden warships were highly vulnerable to these emerging weapons, and the Crimean War proved this beyond a shadow of a doubt, first in the Russian defeat of the Ottoman fleet at Sinop, and again with the Anglo-French use of exploding shells to reduce Russian fortifications in Crimea.

The advent of the exploding shell began an incremental race between armor and firepower which would take off fully after the Crimean War, as the conflict spurred private innovations in metallurgy and artillery design by men like Bessemer and Armstrong. Simultaneously, the war exposed the inflexibility and inadequacy of the old artisanal system of manufacturing and spurred state arsenals to pursue mass production along the American model, while making military establishments more open to innovation and input from private industrial enterprises.

The result was a fantastic acceleration of what we might refer to as weapon cycling times, or generation times: in other words, the rate at which weapons became obsolete and were replaced by newer models. Cycling times used to be measured in centuries: iconic weapons systems like the Brown Bess musket or the broadside sailing ship changed very little over very long periods of time. From the Anglo-Dutch Wars to Nelson, the broadside line ship remained generally the same and changed mostly by becoming larger. In the mid-19th Century, however, ships became obsolete faster and faster. In 1861, the Royal Navy launched the HMS Warrior - an iron hulled warship with mixed steam and sail propulsion. The most powerful ship in the world when she launched, the Warrior was made utterly obsolete just a decade later with the 1871 launch of the Devastation. The idea of a ten year old ship being essentially useless in combat would have been insanity to a 17th or 18th Century admiralty, but now it was unremarkable.

In regards to warships design more specifically, the interplay between protection, firepower, and mobility created a feedback loop that drove ships towards configurations that seem very nearly predestined by the nature of the underlying technology. Exploding shells necessitated armor plating which became thicker and thicker, driving the design of ever larger guns to defeat the thickening armor. The size of these guns eventually ensured that they would be moved from gun decks inside the hull to armored turrets on the deck, which made it impossible to maintain masts and sails. This implied steam both for propulsion and to power the hydraulic turrets, and the powerplants of ships grew correspondingly larger to accommodate the growing bulk of the heavily armored vessels. From Robert Fulton's 24 horsepower engine in 1807, boiler complexes grew by leaps and bounds - the powerplant on the Devastation, for example, provided more than 6,600 horsepower.

In short, what I have endeavored to demonstrate here is that the design of warships followed an extremely logical course, and the transition from broadside sailing ships to early modern battleships - although astonishing in its totality - in fact consisted of a series of fairly predictable incremental changes, beginning with the introduction of exploding shells. To return to the Ship of Theseus, we can say that at midcentury warships still generally resembled the old line ships from the golden age of sail, albeit with larger guns, iron plating attached to the hull, and the odd smokestack poking out here and there. Shortly after the Crimean War, however, these ships became something entirely new, recognizable to us as early modern battleships: shedding the last vestiges of their masts, adding more boilers, housing their guns in turrets, and eventually boasting hulls made entirely of steel.

One could almost go so far as to say that the battleship was practically inevitable from the moment Henri Paixhans demonstrated his fuse shell. The Crimean War, which demonstrated in unequivocal terms the enormous combat power of shell artillery, sparked a revolution in weapons manufacturing, with mass production, steel (compliments of Mr. Bessemer), and private manufacturers driving the warship into a new era - the era of steel and steam and mass armies and terrible destruction. Or, as Victory Hugo (of all people) put it:

"Earth! The shell is God. Paixhans is his Prophet."

Earth and Water: Conjuring the Great Snake

While the British and the French led Europe into a total revolution in naval warfare, the old continent was mercifully spared a general continental war of the sort that had ravaged it in the Napoleonic era. Accordingly, after Trafalgar in 1805, there would be no general fleet actions by the great powers for the remainder of the Century. In fact, the broader irony is that despite the enormous advances made in ship design and armaments and the swelling industrialization of war, the 19th Century was remarkably light on naval combat of any kind - for Europe at least. The Battle of Sinop was a notable exception, but tactically it was hardly very instructive or elaborate: a Russian fleet more or less set fire to an Ottoman armada. If anything, Sinop was more like arson than a proper fleet battle.

Thus, although it was obvious that warships were changing in a very fundamental way and would provide astonishing combat power in future wars, European navies did not experience this firsthand and did not fully understand what naval battle would be like. However, there were hints and demonstrations to be seen, if one could cast a wider eye and look beyond the great powers of Europe. There were other navies, new emerging states, and looming powers.

Between the fall of Napoleon and the beginning of World War I (essentially a round 100 years), three particular geopolitical developments eclipsed all others in their importance. Two of these were the Meiji Restoration in Japan, which produced an assertive, consolidating, and rapidly modernizing power in East Asia, and the unification of Germany under Prussian headship, which created an extraordinarily powerful state in Central Europe, with consequences that are well known to us. The emergence of powerful Japanese and German states was of immense interest and importance to the traditional great powers of Europe, and in particular Russia, which now faced rapidly industrializing powers on both its western and eastern flanks.

The third great happening of the long 19th Century, however, was by far the most important. This was the American Civil War. The Civil War today is shrouded in trite political debates and heavy handed displays of historical erasure. Most people, if asked, would undoubtedly say that the most important outcome of the Civil War was the abolition of southern slavery, with perhaps some vague addendum about preserving the Union without a clear notion of what it meant. Between Confederate lost cause romanticism and the turbocharged civil rights regime, there is little common ground and a lack of interest in something as vague and tired as geopolitics.

The US Civil War was, as I would argue, the single most consequential act of empire building in modern history. The simple fact was that the Confederate South was a nation, or at least was in the process of becoming one, with a wealthy agrarian economy, peculiar social forms, and a patrician leadership caste that was largely alien to the industrial, urban north. Southerners affirmed their membership in this emergent nation with exceptionally high levels of military participation, the willingness to endure extreme privation, and a new schema of southern symbols and hagiography. This emerging southern nation was strangled in its cradle by the powerful north and then re-integrated into the Union in a complex political settlement - the cost of which was abandoning southern blacks to a postwar racial caste system.

The essential function of the Civil War was to preserve a growing American empire with continent-spanning dimensions and consolidate control of the vast American space under the increasingly penetrating power of Washington. The future would belong to powers with the ability to wield resources on a continental scale: super states able to exploit far flung resources and lands through the emerging power of the railroad and the increasingly sophisticated bureaucratic apparatus of state. On many killing fields across the Confederate heartland, the Union affirmed its control of a continent and preserved the embryo of America's coming global supremacy.

Fought as it was in the interior heartland of America, the Civil War was generally characterized by set piece battles on land, and cursory accounts tend to emphasize, as the main cause of Union victory, the north's overwhelming superiority in population, industrial capacity, and logistics - particular given superior northern railroad density. This is all fair enough, and the war was ultimately a clash between a populous, industrial north and a relatively thinly settled agrarian south. The Union had 70% of the prewar population, 70% of the rail network, and 90% of the manufacturing output, leaving razor thin odds for the South. A simple open and shut case, if there ever was one.

The Union struggled mightily in the early years of war, however, with the question of just how to bring this preponderance of force to bear against the Confederacy, and displayed no small measure of strategic indecision and even paralysis. Nowhere was this more evident than in the naval dimension of the war.

The naval theater offered immense opportunity for the Union. When secession began and signaled the outbreak of war in 1861, only two significant naval installations fell into Confederate hands - namely, naval bases at Norfolk Virginia and Pensacola Florida. The base at Norfolk (the Gosport Shipyard) was of particular importance, with the Confederates taking custody of the dry dock, considerable warehouses full of munitions, and the wreck of the Merrimack. The latter was a brand new steam powered screw frigate of the US Navy, which had been scuttled by evacuating Union forces, though not well enough: southern engineers were able to raise the wreck in salvageable condition and return it to combat.

Notwithstanding Norfolk and a determined effort by the Confederacy to build out its naval capabilities, the shipbuilding capacity of the North was vastly greater, almost to a laughable extent. The South began the war with roughly 14 seaworthy ships, and a herculean effort would manage to raise the force to 101 vessels throughout the war. In contrast, the North had some 42 combat ready vessels at the outbreak of war, and would raise this number to more than 670 ships by the time of Confederate surrender - in effect, the force ratios on the sea increased from a 3:1 northern ship advantage at the start of war to nearly 7:1 by the end.

The United States had a considerable amount of firsthand experience which demonstrated how potent sea power could be when leveraged properly to support overland forces, in what would we would now call joint operations. The British had made great use of sea power in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, in particular with the Royal Navy wrecking the American defense of New York in 1776, and British control of the Chesapeake leading to the climactic burning of Washington in 1812. Furthermore, the Union's senior officer, Commanding General of the Army Winfield Scott, had gained intimate experience with joint operations in the Mexican-American War, when he conducted an amphibious invasion of Mexico. Scott became a particularly powerful advocate of joint operations and a naval grand strategy, and it was unfortunate that the venerable old General did not remain in command after the first year of the war.

The operational possibilities were myriad. In addition to a broader strategic campaign to blockade Confederate ports and isolate the under-industrialized southern economy, seaborne forces could ensure secure lines of communication for Union armies fighting in the Confederate littoral. They could be used to enhance Union operational mobility and turn enemy defenses by landing in the rear.

General Scott advocated a broad campaign predicated on joint operations which put naval combat power in a position of priority. In a formulation that Union newspapers would label the "Anaconda Plan", Scott proposed a two-fold approach that would simultaneously blockade Confederate ports while launching a riverine campaign down the Mississippi, which served as the great arterial waterway and provided penetration deep into the Confederate heartland. As Scott put it, a campaign in the interior along the Mississippi would:

Clear out and keep open this great line of communications in connection with the strict blockade of the seaboard, so as to envelop the insurgent States and bring them to terms with less bloodshed than by any other plan.

Although Scott would leave his post late in 1861, to be replaced by the much-maligned George McClellan, his tenure in the opening months of the war was sufficient to set in motion strategic developments along these lines. Although the war did not proceed precisely as Scott envisioned it, two critical elements of his thinking - a riverine campaign along the Mississippi and a blockade of Confederate ports - would become pillars of the coming Union victory. Indeed, while the campaigns of Robert E Lee and the ferocious battles in the Virginia theater are generally among the most famous moments of the war, it is inarguable that the coming Union blockade and the conquest of the Mississippi were the most critical strategic developments of the conflict, and both were intimately dependent on naval combat power.

Although the Union boasted both a larger fleet at the outset of the war and a significantly greater shipbuilding capacity, blockading the Confederacy was much more difficult than it sounded. While Europeans continued to look on American military proficiency with a strong tint of smugness, the reality was that the Civil War was a military-logistical challenge far greater than any European army or state had ever attempted. This was because the United States was, in a word, huge. The eleven states which comprised the Confederate States of America cover some 780,000 square miles of greatly varied terrain - greater in size than Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain combined. The length of the Mississippi theater alone (running from the Union base of support around Cairo, Illinois all the way to the sea) is nearly equal to the north-south dimensions of France.

In short, the Confederacy was a vast state with 3,500 miles of coastline and many hundreds of miles of navigable rivers. Blockading such an enemy was an imposing task - by far the largest such blockading operation ever undertaken, and even more daunting given the miniscule naval force (42 combat-worthy ships) available at the outset of war. In addition to building up the forces needed to undertake the blockade, the intended campaign along the Mississippi would require building out a riverine force of both gunboats for combat operations and transports for troops and material.

Fortunately for the Union, the vast geography of the Confederacy also had implications that worked in their favor. The size of the Confederacy, and the growing paramount importance of rail transportation, meant that the Union did not have to blockade the entire coastline - only those ports with the infrastructure and rail connectivity to serve as viable transit hubs for the enemy. By far the most important Confederate port was New Orleans, at the mouth of the Mississippi. To New Orleans could be added Galveston (Texas), Mobile (Alabama), Savannah (Georgia), Charleston (South Carolina), and Wilmington (North Carolina). If the Union Navy could blockade these ports, which sat at vital southern railheads, it would be enough to largely choke off the southern states, and imports at smaller ancillary ports would never be able to meaningfully offset the loss of these major hubs. Meanwhile, Virginia's sea access was cut off with relative ease thanks to built-in Union dominance of the Chesapeake.

Late in the summer of 1861, the Army-Navy Blockade Board convened to sketch out how all of this could be accomplished. They clearly understood that a blockade could be achieved by isolating the Confederacy's major ports, but even this task required identifying a series of coastal installations which would have to be captured. Above all, the navy would require coaling stations - a new wrinkle in war planning. By this time, the US Navy - like its European counterparts - had transitioned to steam power, but the steamships of the day were woefully inefficient coal-guzzling monstrosities which required regular restocking. Maintaining a blockade around major Confederate ports would require not only an adequate force of warships, but also nearby coaling bases under Union control.

The blockade board eventually identified a series of locations that were to be captured and used as coaling stations and bases of support for blockading fleets - these included Fernandina, Florida, Bull's Bay and Port Royal, South Carolina, and Ship Island, Mississippi. The latter was to prove particularly important - located between Mobile and New Orleans, Ship Island would serve as a base for blockading forces in the Gulf and allowed Union Ships to patrol both the mouth of the Mississippi and the entrance to Mobile Bay.

The naval theater offered the Union a chance to win a decisive victory relatively early in the war, but this opportunity was wasted due to a variety of institutional neuroses. These began with the retirement of Scott and his replacement by McLellan, who had less appreciation for joint operations and viewed the pivotal axis of the war to be the land front along the Virginia border, with naval operations playing a subordinate, supportive role. Furthermore, there was no systematic or institutional mechanism for coordinating Army and Navy operations (particularly when the blockade board disbanded after issuing its recommendations in 1861), and Lincoln - still shaky as commander in chief - generally failed to adjudicate disputes between the services, of which there were many.

The Union's 1861 capture of Port Royal, South Carolina offers an instructive example. The Union foothold at Port Royal had essentially driven a wedge in the lower Confederate seaboard, giving Union forces a powerful position between Savannah and Charleston. The threat was severe enough that Confederate high command dispatched Robert E Lee to sort out defenses along the southern coast. Many Union officers saw Port Royal not merely as a naval base to support the blockade, but as a place where they could land and supply an army deep in the enemy's rear. Such a vision, however, would require close coordination and strategic synchronization between army and navy - but the army's commander, McLellan, was preoccupied with his campaign into Virginia, and the Navy was much more concerned with the blockade and hardly wanted to subordinate itself to a support arm of the army. Admiral Gustavus Fox, who commanded the naval detachment at Port Royal, encapsulated the views of many naval officers when he said "my duties are twofold; first, to beat our southern friends; second, to beat the Army."

In the end, then, the Union simply lacked the institutional mechanisms to systematically coordinate joint operations and establish what we would call unity of command. Tactically, Union forces proved capable of assaulting and capturing sometimes formidable Confederate coastal forts, but a lack of strategic perspective prevented the North from fully capitalizing on these footholds. Rather than landing forces for operations in the Confederate rear, the Union's chain of coastal positions were largely used as bases of support for blockading ships.

There was, however, one theater where commanders managed to develop a working practice of joint operations. Fortuitously for the Union, this was the single most strategic theater of the war, and it was here that Ulysses Grant found himself in the driver's seat.

Grant and the Turtles

Today, Cairo, Illinois is a dilapidated and depopulated little ghost town, full of boarded up buildings and poverty and social rot. In the early 1860's, however, it occupied the single most strategic position of the American Civil War. Cairo lies at the place where the four great rivers of the American Midwest - the Missouri, the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the Cumberland - converge and meet both each other and the almighty Mississippi. It is thus the place where vast flows of riverine traffic converge, and the place where Union forces had the opportunity to use those rivers to penetrate deep into the Confederate space.

The potential for penetration via the Mississippi and its tributaries was astonishing. The state of Tennessee can be almost entirely subjugated through the access provided by the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers - these waterways offer direct access to Nashville and Chattanooga, and would provide Union forces both efficient logistical connectivity via boat and the ability to easily move men and artillery. The importance of the Mississippi, of course, needs no real elaboration - it was the artery of the South, both dividing the Confederacy in two and providing unimpeded access to Louisiana and Mississippi. A Union army operating from Cairo, lying directly on the confluence of the region's five great rivers, was like a blood clot threatening to descend into the Aorta of the Confederacy. And since this Civil War was the conflict which guaranteed America's immanent status as the world's most powerful nation, we can say with only a little exaggeration that, for a moment at least, Cairo was the pivot of world affairs.

While 1861 and 1862 saw few decisive developments in the eastern theater of the war (the theater of Lee, which draws most of the attention in historiography), Ulysses Grant would blow the western theater wide open with series of riverine campaigns which made ruthlessly effective use of combined operations. Grant's life prior to the Civil War was one of hardship and instability, but when he was given command of Union forces in the Cairo district, luck was finally and firmly on his side: his operational possibilities were second to none, and he had powerful new technological means to exploit them.

Grant's riverine campaigns in the western theater would make use of one of the Civil War's novel weapons systems: the Eads Gunboat, formally the City Class Gunboat and otherwise affectionately known simply as the turtle. Designed by wealthy and renowned inventor and industrialist James Buchanan Eads of St. Louis, the steam powered turtles were remarkable and quirky little vessels that packed a tremendous punch and represented the cutting edge of naval combat systems in the day. Some 175 feet long and 50 feet at the beam, the steam powered turtles boasted thick armored plating arrayed at a sharp angle to deflect shot, and were armed with a whopping 13 cannon of various calibers. Most importantly, they had a draught of only six feet despite their tremendous weight - providing, in essence, a highly mobile and well armored ship capable of traversing the rivers with ease. Their combination of mobility, protection, and firepower made them an essentially novel weapons system and a harbinger of the industrial era of war. While the Eads boats were perhaps the most powerful and innovative vessels at Grant's disposal, they were not alone - Union forces also constructed a flotilla of flat-bottomed boats which carried siege mortars for reducing Confederate fortifications, and a host of barges for transport.

The Eads Gunboats were not only the perfect weapons system for a campaign which would be centered on the great rivers, but also a potent demonstration of Union superiority in manufacturing and engineering. Eads and his men were able to deliver a fleet of eight working gunboats just four months after receiving the contract, with more vessels in the works. In contrast, the Confederacy - which lacked an equivalent base of engineering and innovating industrialists - had nothing even remotely comparable to contest the rivers. Although the south would scramble mightily throughout the war to deploy ironclad warships, they were always too late and too few to match Union assets. Furthermore, although the North was not nearly as urban as the South liked to believe (Confederates frequently derided northerners as soft city boys who had never held a rifle), the more industrialized quality of northern society now proved to be an asset. Grant's forces contained no shortage of railroad workers and mechanics who were more than capable of operating and repairing the steam engines on the gunboats - thus, although custody of the ships nominally belonged to the Navy, much of the crew and in particular the mechanics were soldiers from Grant's army formations. In the modern parlance, we would say that Northern industrialization gave Grant organic engineering capabilities.

The ensuing campaign would provide an iconic demonstration of riverine operations, and more generally revealed the immense value of rivers are arteries for movement, supply, and the delivery of combat power.

The Confederates made the opening move late in 1861 and got the jump on Grant, with General Leonidas Polk seizing the city of Columbus, Kentucky, allowing him to block the Mississippi just a few miles downstream of Grant's base in Cairo. The move made some sense, as far as Confederate operational presumptions went: commanders on both sides continued to view the Mississippi as the vital waterway of the war, and not without some justification. What Polk failed to grasp, however, was that the uniquely dense waterways of the region would give Grant ample opportunities to bypass Columbus. The real operational prize in the region was not the course of the Mississippi itself, but the area farther upstream where all the great rivers - the Ohio, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee - converged on the Mississippi. Polk could block the Mississippi, but Grant's position around Cairo allowed him to access any of the region's rivers at his pleasure.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the single most important position for the Confederacy to defend at the outset of the war (perhaps with the exception of New Orleans and the mouth of the Mississippi) was the narrow corridor where both the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers cross from Kentucky into Tennessee. A Union army at liberty to use the rivers here would be able to freely penetrate into Central Tennessee, threatening to not only overrun the heartland of the state (and advance directly to Nashville) but also outflank defensive positions to the east along the Mississippi - positions like Polk's base of operations at Columbus. While Polk was setting up shop in Columbus, Grant moved east from Cairo to the little town of Paducah - a seemingly trivial little settlement, except that it sat at the confluence of the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee rivers, and thus gave Grant the ability to run his gunboats in any direction he pleased.

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5. Total Kievan Debellation

On March 5, 2022, the wreck of the sailing ship Endurance was found in the depths of the Weddell Sea off the coast of Antarctica. This, of course, was the vessel lost in Ernest Shackelton's third expedition to Antarctica, which became trapped in the ice and sank in 1915. The story of that expedition is an extraordinary tale of human fortitude - with the Endurance lost to the ice, Shackleton's crew evacuated to a loose ice flow where they camped for nearly 500 days, drifting about the Antarctic seas, before making a desperate dash across the open ocean in an open 20 foot lifeboat, finally reaching the southern shore of inhospitable and mountainous South Georgia Island, which they then had to cross on foot to reach the safety of a whaling station.

The story itself has an essentially mythic quality to it, with Shackleton's crew surviving for years on free floating ice floes in the most inhospitable seas on earth. For our purposes, however, it is the story's coda that is particularly interesting. In Shackleton's memoirs, he remembered that, upon finally reaching the safety of the Stromness whaling station, one of his first questions was about the war in Europe. When Shackleton first set out on his ill-fated expedition on August 8, 1914, the First World War was less than a week old, and the German Army had just begun its invasion of Belgium. There was little expectation then that the war would proceed as it did, unleashing four years of slaughterous positional warfare that engulfed the continent.

Shackleton, having been adrift at sea for years, clearly did not imagine that the war could still be raging, and asked the commandant of the whaling station "tell me, when was the war over?"

The answer came back: "The war is not over. Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad."

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The timing is serendipitous, since the discovery of the Endurance's wreck, after more than a hundred years, happened to occur only a few weeks after the world again went mad, with the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War in February 2022. As time continues its inexorable march and the calendar turns yet again, the war is passing through its third full winter. In February, Z-World will be three years old.

Of course, modern communications make it extremely unlikely that anybody could be cut fully out of the loop for years at a time, like Shackleton and his men. Instead of being ignorant as to whether or not the war is over, many of us are exposed on a daily basis to footage of men being killed, buildings being blown up, and vehicles being shredded. Twitter has made it essentially impossible to live under a rock, or on an ice floe, as it were.

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If anything, we have the very opposite problem of Shackleton - at least as far as our wartime information infrastructure goes. We are saturated in information, with daily updates tracking advances of a few dozen meters and never ending bombast about new game changing weapons (which seem to change very little), and bluster about "red lines". This war seems to have an unyielding dynamic on the ground, and no matter how many grand pronouncements we hear that one side or the other is on the verge of collapse, the sprawling front continues to grind up bodies and congeal with bloody positional fighting.

It would seem difficult to believe that a high intensity ground war in Europe with hundreds of miles worth of front could be boring, yet the static and repetitive nature of the conflict is struggling to hold the attention of foreign observers who have little immediately at stake.

My intention here is a radical zoom-out from these demoralizing and fatiguing small scale updates (as valuable as the work of the war mappers is), and consider the aggregate of 2024 - arguing that this year was, in fact, very consequential. Taken as a whole, three very important things happened in 2024 which create a very dismal outlook for Ukraine and the AFU in the new year. More specifically, 2024 brought three important strategic developments:

1. Russian victory in southern Donetsk which destroyed the AFU's position on one of the war's key strategic axes.

2. The expenditure of carefully husbanded Ukrainian resources on a failed offensive towards Kursk, which accelerated the attrition of critical Ukrainian maneuver assets and substantially dampened their prospects in the Donbas.

3. The exhaustion of Ukraine's ability to escalate vis a vis new strike systems from NATO - more broadly, the west has largely run out of options to upgrade Ukrainian capabilities, and the much vaunted delivery of longer range strike systems failed to alter the trajectory of the war on the ground.

Taken together, 2024 revealed a Ukrainian military that is increasingly stretched to the limits, to the point where the Russians were able to largely scratch off an entire sector of front. People continue to wonder where and when the Ukrainian front might begin to break down - I would argue that it *did* break down in the south over the last few months, and 2025 begins with strong Russian momentum that the AFU will be hard pressed to arrest.

Front Collapse in South Donetsk

What stands out immediately about the operational developments in 2024 is the marked shift of energies away from the axes of combat that had seen the most intense fighting in the first two years of the war. In a sense, this war has seen each of its fronts activate in a sequence, one after the other.

After the opening Russian offensive, which boasted as its signature success the capture of the Azov coastline and the linkup of Donetsk and Crimea, the action shifted to the northern front (the Lugansk-Kharkov axis), with Russia fighting a summer offensive which captured Severodonetsk and Lysychansk. This was followed by a pair of Ukrainian counteroffensives in the fall, with a thrust out of Kharkov which pushed the front back over the Oskil, and an operation directed at Kherson which failed to breach Russian defenses but ultimately resulted in a Russian withdrawal in good order over the Dnieper due to concerns over logistical connectivity and an over-extended front. Energies then pivoted yet again to the Central Donbas axis, with the enormous battle around Bakhmut raging through the spring of 2023. This was followed by the failed Ukrainian offensive on Russia's defenses in Zaporozhia, in the south.

Just to briefly recapitulate this, we can enumerate several operational phases in the first two years of the war, occuring in sequence and each with a center of gravity in different parts of the front:

• A Russian offensive across the land bridge, culminating in the capture of Mariupol. (Winter-Spring 2022, Southern Front)

• A Russian offensive in Lugansk, capturing Severodonetsk and Lysychansk. (Summer 2022, Donets-Oskil front)

• Ukrainian Counteroffensives towards the Oskil and Kherson (Autumn 2022, Oskil and Dnieper fronts)

• The Russian assault on Bakhmut (Winter-Spring 2023, Central Front)

• Ukrainian counteroffensive on the land bridge (Summer 2023)

Amid all of this, the front that saw the least movement was the southeastern corner of the front, around Donetsk. This was somewhat peculiar. Donetsk is the urban heart of the Donbas - a vast and populous industrial city at the center of a sprawling conurbation, once home to some 2 million people. Even if Russia succeeds in capturing the city of Zaporizhia, Donetsk will be by far the most populous of Ukraine's former cities to come under Moscow's control.

In 2014, with the outbreak of the proto-Donbas war, Donetsk was the locus of much of the fighting, with the airport on the city's northern approach the scene of particularly intense combat. This made it rather strange, then, that at the start of 2024 the Ukrainian Army continued to occupy many of the same positions that they built a decade prior. As intense fighting ebbed and flowed along other sectors of front, Donetsk remained besieged by a web of powerfully held Ukrainian defenses, anchored by heavily fortified urban areas stretching from Toretsk to Ugledar. Early Russian attempts to crack this iron ring open, including an assault on Ugledar in the winter of 2023, met with failure.

The signature operational development of 2024, then, was the re-activation of the Donetsk front, after years of static combat. It is not an exaggeration to say that after years of coagulation, the Russian Army cracked this front wide open in 2024 and Ukraine's long and strongly held network of urban strongpoints collapsed.

The year began with the AFU fighting for its fortress in Avdiivka, where it continued to block the northern approach to Donetsk. At the time, the typical argument that one heard from the Ukrainian side was that the Russian assault on Avdiivka was pyrrhic - that the Russians were capturing the city with exorbitantly costly "meat assaults" that would inevitably sap Russian combat power and exhaust their ability to continue the offensive.

With the full measure of the year behind us, we can definitively say that this is not the case. After the fall of Avdiivka, Russian momentum never seriously slackened, and in fact it was the AFU that appeared to be increasingly exhausted. The Ukrainian breakwater position at Ocheretyne (which had previously been their staging point for counterattacks around Avdiivka) was overrun in a matter of days, and by the early summer the frontline had been pushed out towards the approach to Pokrovsk.

The Russian thrust towards Pokrovsk led many to believe that this city was itself the object of Russian energies, but this was a misread of the operational design. Russia did not need to capture Pokrovsk in 2024 to render it sterile as a logistical hub. Simply by advancing towards the E50 highway, Russian forces were able to cut off Pokrovsk from Ukrainian positions to the south on the Donetsk front, and Pokvrovsk is now a frontline city subject to the full spectrum of overwatch from Russian drones and tube artillery.

By autumn, the Russian advance had put the Ukrainians in a severe salient, creating an unstable chain of positions in Selydove, Kurakhove, Ugledar, and Krasnogorivka. Russia's advance from Ocheretyne onto the southern approach to Pokrovsk acted like an enormous scythe, isolating the entire southeastern sector of the front and allowing Russian forces to carve through it in the closing months of the year.

This war has turned the word "collapse" into a devalued buzzword. We are told repeatedly that one side or the other is on the verge of collapse: sanctions will "collapse" the Russian economy, the Wagner uprising of 2023 proved that the Russian political system was "collapsing", and of course we hear that exorbitant losses have one army or the other on the verge of total failure - which army that may be depends on who you ask.

I would argue, however, that what we saw from October 2024 onward represents a real occurrence of this oft-repeated and discarded word. The AFU suffered a genuine collapse of the southeastern front, with the forces positioned in their strongpoints too attrited and isolated to make a determined defense, Russian fires becoming too heavily concentrated in ever more compressed areas to endure, and no mechanized reserve in the theater available to counterattack or relieve the incessant Russian pressure.

Ukraine does maintain enough drones and concentrated fires to limit a full Russian exploitation - that is, Russia is still not able to maneuver at depth. This gave the Russian advance a particular stop-start quality, leapfrogging from one settlement and fortress to the other. More generally, Russia's preference to use dispersed small-unit assaults limits the potential for exploitation. We have to emphasize, however, that Russian momentum on this axis has never seriously slackened since October, and many of the key Ukrainian positions were overrun or abandoned very quickly.

Ugledar is a good example: the Russians began their final push toward the town on September 24. By September 29, the 72nd Mechanized Brigade began evacuating. By October 1, Ugledar was fully under Russian control. This was a keystone Ukrainian position put in a completely untenable position and it went down in a week. One could argue, of course, that Ugledar held out for years (how then can we say with a straight face that it was captured in a week), but this is precisely the point. In early 2023 Ugledar (with the help of artillery stationed around Kurakhove) successfully repelled a multi-brigade Russian attack in months of heavy fighting. By October 2024, the position was completely untenable and was abandoned almost immediately when attacked.

The Ukrainians did no better trying to hold Kurakhove - previously a critical rear area that served as both a logistical hub and a base of fire for supporting (former) frontline strongpoints like Ugledar and Krasnogorivka. Kurakhove, now under full Russian control, will in turn serve as a base of support for the ongoing Russian push to the west towards Andriivka.

Taking the state of the front holistically, the AFU is currently holding two severe salients at the southernmost end of the line - one around Velyka Novosilka, and another around Andriivka. The former is likely to fall first, as the town has been fully isolated by Russian advances on the flanks. This is not a Bakhmut-like situation, where roads are described as "cut" because they are under Russian fire - in this case, all of the highways into Velyka Novosilka are cut by physical Russian blocking positions, making the loss of the position only a matter of waiting for the Russians to assault it. Further north, a more gentle and less strongly held salient exists between Grodivka and Toretsk. With Toretsk now in the final stages of capture (Ukrainian forces now hold only a small residential neighborhood on the city's outskirts), the front should level here as well in the coming months.

This leaves the Russians more or less in full control of the approaches to Kostyantinivka and Pokrovsk, which are in many ways the penultimate Ukrainian held positions in Donetsk. Pokrovsk has already been bypassed several miles to the west, and the map portends a re-run of the typical Russian tactical methodology for assaulting urban areas - a methodical advance along the wings of the city to isolate it from arterial highways, followed by an attack on the city itself via several axes.

The coming months promise continued Russian advances across this front, in a continuation of what can only be regarded as the collapse of a critical front on the part of the AFU. The Russian Army is advancing to the western border of Donetsk oblast and will ferret the Ukrainians out of their remaining strongpoints at Velyka Novosilka and Andriivka, while pushing into the belly of Pokrovsk. At no point since the fall of Avdiivka have the Ukrainians demonstrated the ability to seriously stymie Russian momentum along this 75 mile front, and the ongoing dissipation of Ukrainian combat resources indicates that little will change in this regard in 2025.

Toehold: The Incredible Shrinking Kursk Salient

Throughout the autumn of 2024 and these early months of winter, as Ukrainian forces were dug out of their dense web of fortified positions in the southern Donbas, their comrades continued to stubbornly hold on to their position in Russia's Kursk Oblast. The basic shape of Ukraine's offensive into Kursk is by now well known - billed by Kiev as a gambit to change the psychological trajectory of the war and strike a prestige blow to Russia, the Ukrainian attack had early momentum after achieving initial strategic surprise, but quickly faltered after Ukrainian columns ran into effective Russian blocking positions on the highways out of Sudzha. Efforts to force the roads through Korenovo and Bolshoe Soldatskoe were defeated, and the Ukrainian grouping was left holding on to a modest salient around Sudzha, jutting out into Russia.

Throughout the autumn, Russian counterattacks have focused on chiseling away at the base of the Ukrainian salient - forcing the Ukrainians out of Snagost and pushing them away from Korenovo. The progress here has been incremental, but significant, and by the start of January the "neck" of the Ukrainian salient had been compressed down to a little over nine miles wide, after their initial penetration in the summer had forced a breach of over twenty miles. All told, Ukraine has lost about 50% of the territory that they grabbed in August.

The Russian pressure on the flanks of the salient have amplified many of the qualities that make this position wasteful and dangerous for the AFU. There is limited road connectivity for Ukrainian forces - a problem amplified by the rollback from Snagost, which cost them access to the highway running from Korenovo to Sumy. Apart from a few circuitous side roads, Ukrainian forces only have a single highway - the R200 route - to run material and reinforcements into the pocket, which allows Russian forces to surveil their lines of communication and conduct effective interdiction strikes. The compression of the pocket also greatly narrows the targeting area for Russian drones, tube artillery, and rocketry, and creates more condensed and saturating bombardment.

Despite the fact that this position has been profoundly unproductive for Ukraine - being steadily rolled back and having no synergy with other, more critical theaters - the same grouping of Ukrainian units remain here, fighting in a steadily more compressed space. Even more baffling, the Ukrainian grouping consists largely of premiere assets - Mechanized and Air Assault brigades - that could have contributed meaningfully as a reserve in the Donbas over the last three months.

On January 5, there was a surprise in the form of a renewed Ukrainian attack out of the salient. The internet of course jumped to the conclusion that the AFU was going back over to some sort of general offensive posture in Kursk, but the reality was very underwhelming - something like a battalion sized assault up the axis towards Bolshoe Soldaskoe, which got a few kilometers up the road before it ran out of steam. Ukrainian efforts to jam Russian drones were stymied by the increasing ubiquity of fiber-optic systems, and the Ukrainian attack collapsed within a day.

The tactical particulars of the Ukrainian attack are interesting, and there's ongoing speculation as to its purpose - perhaps it was intended to cover a rotation or withdrawal, to improve tactical positions on the northern edge of the salient, or for inscrutable propaganda purposes. However, these specifics are rather unimportant: attacking out the end of the salient (that is, trying to deepen the penetration into Russia) does nothing to reverse Ukraine's problems in Kursk. These problems are first, on the tactical level, that the salient has been greatly compressed on the flanks and continues to narrow, and on the strategic level the willful expenditure of valuable mechanized assets on a front that does not impact the critical theaters of the war. More simply, Kursk is a sideshow, and it is a sideshow that has gone wrong even within its own operational logic.

One thing that has been of endless interest, of course, have been the continued rumors of North Korean troops fighting in Kursk. Western intelligence agencies have been adamant about the presence of North Koreans in Kursk. Some people are predisposed to instinctively disbelieve everything that western officialdom says - while I think some skepticism is warranted, I do not automatically assume that they are lying. One recent report lays out what would seem to be a plausible version of this story: that the idea actually originated in Pyongyang, not Moscow, and that a modest number of Korean troops (perhaps 10,000) are embedded with Russian units. The presumption here is that the Koreans hatched the idea as a way to gain combat experience, with the Russians in turn getting auxiliary forces, though of questionable combat effectiveness.

However, it is worth noting that this is not nearly as important as it has been made out to be. Much has been made of the idea that the North Korean presence proves some sort of Russian state of desperation, but this is fairly silly on its face - with more than 1.5 million active personnel in the Russian military, 10,000 Korean troops in Kursk represents a paltry appendage. More importantly, there has been an attempt to portray the North Korean contingent as a major departure point in the war. In particular, the formulation "North Korean troops in Europe" has been used to conjure cold war imagery of communist despotism clawing at the free world.

The point, however, is that North Korean troops are presumed specifically to be in Kursk, which is in Russia. This is linked, of course, to the recently concluded mutual defense agreement signed between Moscow and Pyongyang. By attacking into Kursk - widening the front into prewar Russian territory - Ukraine created a defensive combat task for Russia which triggers the possibility of military assistance from North Korea. However much one may wish to link the Korean contingent to Russia's dreaded "war of aggression", the force in Kursk is very objectively engaged in the defense of Russian territory, and that makes it possible for Russia to use auxiliary forces - including conscripts and the troops of its allies - to fight there.

Ultimately, then, the presence of North Koreans in Kursk is interesting, but perhaps not very important after all. These troops are not in Ukraine (even under the most maximal definition of the Ukrainian territorial unit), they are not carrying the primary combat load, and they are unequivocally not the problem that the AFU is facing in Kursk. The "big problem" for Ukraine, very simply, is not the presence of some amorphous Korean horde dedicated to spreading Glorious Juche to Europe - it is the loitering of large grouping of their own precious mechanized brigades in a compressed salient, far far away from the Donbas, where they are greatly needed.

Scraping the Barrel: AFU Force Generation

I think it is well understood, of course, that Ukraine faces severe manpower constraints relative to Russia, both in terms of the raw totals of male biomass available - with roughly 35 million fighting aged males in Russia against perhaps 9 million in prewar Ukraine - but also in terms of its capacity to mobilize them.

Ukraine's mobilization scheme is hampered by both widespread draft evasion (with willingness to serve decreasing as the war has stretched on) and a stubborn unwillingness to draft younger men, aged 18-25. Ukraine is structurally burdened with a deeply imbalanced population structure: there are roughly 60% more Ukrainian men in their 30's than in their 20's. Given the relative scarcity of young men, particularly in their early 20's, the Ukrainian government rightly views this 18-25 year old cohort as a premium demographic cohort that it is loathe to burn away in combat. Given the ubiquity of draft evasion, the refusal to mobilize younger males, and the corruption and inefficiency characteristic of the Ukrainian government, it should come as no surprise when Ukrainian mobilization falters.

Russia, in contrast, has both a much larger pool of potential recruits and a more efficient apparatus for mobilization. In contrast to Ukraine's scheme of compulsory conscription, Russia has relied on generous sign-on bonuses to solicit volunteers. Russia's incentive system, to this point, has provided a steady stream of enlistments that has been more than enough to offset Russian losses. Without going too far into the various speculative estimates of Russian casualties, it is widely acknowledged by western military leadership that Russia has significantly more personnel now than it did at the start of the war.

All of that is to say: Ukraine faces a severe structural disadvantage in military manpower in the aggregate, which is exacerbated by the idiosyncrasies of the Ukrainian mobilization law, ameliorated slightly by the relatively low troop densities and the preponderant power of strike systems in this war.

The argument that I want to make here, however, is that Ukraine's systemic problems matching Russian manpower have been exacerbated by several developments which specifically became prominent in 2024. In other words, 2024 can and should be marked as the year where Ukrainian manpower constraints became markedly and perhaps irretrievably worse due to specific decisions made in Kiev, and particular developments on the ground.

These are as follows:

1. The decision to expand the AFU's force structure through the creation of the "15 series" brigades

2. The decision to deliberately widen the front and create additional demands for manpower by launching the incursion into Kursk

3. The stall out of Ukraine's new mobilization program in the autumn

4. Accelerating problems with desertion in the AFU

We'll run through these in order.

An army that is intaking new personnel has to decide between two possible allocations for them. New personnel can be used as replacements to replenish existing frontline units, or they can be used to expand the force structure by creating new units. That much seems fairly obvious, and ideally mobilization will exceed losses and make it possible to do both. Where armies face hard manpower constraints, however - that is, where losses are equal to or greater than intake of men, the decision to expand the force structure can have monumental consequences. The stereotypical example, of course, would be the late-war Wehrmacht, which created premiere new assets in the form of Waffen SS divisions, which received privileged access to recruits and equipment while regular army divisions in the line suffered from a trickle of replacements which could not keep up with losses.

Ukraine, with its garbled force structure, has created a mess through its own attempts to expand its force structure in the face of dwindling strength on the line. Late in 2023, the AFU announced intentions to form an entirely new grouping of brigades - the so-called "15 series", given their designations as the 150th, 151st, 152nd, 153rd, and 154th Mechanized Brigades. This was followed in 2024 with the appending of the 155th Mechanized Brigade, which was to be trained and equipped in France.

Forming a new grouping of mechanized brigades is essential to the way that Ukraine is presenting its war. Because Ukraine still aims (at least on paper) to recapture all of its Russian held territory, there must always be the illusory possibility of a future offensive, and in order for that illusory possibility to remain, Ukraine must present itself as actively preparing for future offensive operations. Ukraine's presentation of its own strategic animus - the idea that it is holding the front while it prepares to go back on the offensive - essentially locks it into a program of expanding its force structure.

The problem for Ukraine is that the immense pressure on the front makes it essentially impossible for them to properly husband resources the way they would like. Properly training and equipping half a dozen fresh mechanized brigades and holding them in reserve would be very helpful, but they cannot really do this in light of the demands for personnel at the front. These brigades instead become "paper formations" that have a bureaucratic existence, while their organic assets are pulled apart and sucked into the front - stripped down into battalion or company sized elements that can be plugged into sectors of need on the frontline. At the moment, none of the 15 series brigades have seen action as organic units - that is, fighting as themselves.

The French-trained 155th brigade forms a useful example. Originally designed as an overweight formation of some 5800 men, equipped with premiere European equipment, the brigade was hemorrhaging personnel from the start, with Ukrainian sources reporting that some 1700 men - many of them forcibly conscripted off the streets of Ukraine - deserted the unit during training and formation. A collapse in the brigade's leadership - with its commander resigning - made matters even more complicated, and the formation's first action around Pokrovsk went badly. Now, the brigade is being dismembered, if not formally disbanded, with personnel and vehicles being stripped down and parceled out to bolster neighbor units.

The decision to allocate personnel to new mechanized brigades (though given stocks of armored vehicles it is questionable whether those designations mean anything) does not necessarily change Ukraine's manpower balance in the aggregate, but it is certainly an inefficient way to use personnel. To return again to the 155th brigade, one problem noted by Ukrainian analysts was the fact that much of the brigade was formed whole cloth from forcibly mobilized personnel, without a proper cadre of veterans and experienced NCOs - some 75% of the brigade, it turns out, had been mobilized less than two months before arriving in France for training. This fact was certainly instrumental in the mass desertions and the brigade's poor combat effectiveness.

Given Ukraine's constraints, the best course of action would undoubtedly be to allocate new personnel and equipment as replacements to build out the depleted veteran brigades on the front lines, plugging in replacements around existing veterans and officers. Kiev, however, prizes the prestige that comes from force expansion and the "shiny new toy" factor of new formations equipped with scarce and valuable equipment like Leopard tanks. These new brigades, though billed as premiere assets, clearly have lower combat effectiveness than existing formations, given their lack of experience, shortage of veteran officers, and low unit cohesion.

The simple reality, however, is that replacements for existing brigades are nowhere close to keeping up with burn rates. Frontline units have complained of increasingly dire infantry shortages for months, with some brigades on the Pokrovsk axis reporting that they are down to less than 40% of their allocated infantry complements.

In short, Ukraine's decision to embark on force expansion in the face of significant manpower shortages has exacerbated the problem - both starving veteran units of replacements and concentrating newly mobilized personnel into combat ineffective formations that lack a veteran core, experienced officers, and vital equipment. They have tried, belatedly, to square this circle by parceling out new formations to backstop line brigades, but this is less than ideal - it leads to a patchwork order of battle with lower unit cohesion and a fragmented defense.

Unfortunately, this comes precisely as Ukraine has created additional self-imposed strains on its resources, in particular through its incursion into Kursk. At the moment, elements of at least seven mechanized brigades, two marine infantry brigades, and three air assault brigades are stationed on the Kursk axis. Without going too far into the weeds rehashing Ukraine's operation here, it's important to remember that Ukraine - facing extreme pressures on its force generation - voluntarily chose to widen the front into a secondary theater, diverting scarce assets and reducing its own ability to economize forces.

In summary, Ukraine has made deliberate decisions to widen the front and expand its force structure, both of which have been decidedly detrimental to its efforts to economize personnel. This comes precisely as a 2024 effort to ramp up mobilization has come off the rails.

Ukraine's mobilization program suffered from a variety of defects, including gaps and errors in its databases and endemic corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency. Laws passed in 2024 aimed to rectify many of these problems, including through the rollout of an app that would allow draft-eligible men to register and check their status without having to visit recruitment offices. It appeared that matters had come to a head when Zelensky fired several recruitment chiefs in 2023, and there was a real sense of urgency. After some signs of initial promise, it is clear that this intensified mobilization drive has faltered over the autumn and early winter.

There were initially signs of optimism for Ukraine - in the first month after the new mobilization law was passed, there was a surge and the army enlisted 30,000 new personnel. However, by the end of the summer this initial burst of enlistments had faded, and mobilization was again running behind the AFU's losses. An October briefing from the Ukrainian General Staff confirmed that enlistments had already declined by 40% after the brief surge brought on by the new mobilization law. Around the same time, officials in Odessa (Ukraine's third largest city) admitted that they were running at only 20% of their mobilization quota.

The problems are myriad. The new mobilization law led to some initial improvements but has ultimately failed to resolve problems with draft evasion, bureaucratic miscues remain endemic, and employers desperate to retain workers filed an avalanche of employment related draft deferments. Unable to sustain the initial surge of enlistments, Ukraine faces a looming manpower crisis.

Furthermore, Ukraine's continued inability to provide either demobilization or timely rotations means that mobilized personnel face the prospect of indefinite service on the frontlines. This is obviously bad for morale, with soldiers contemplating the possibility of years of uninterrupted service, and this in turn drives the desertions that are becoming a mounting problem for the AFU. Some reports indicate that as many as 100,000 Ukrainian troops have deserted by this point, many no doubt driven by the psychological and physical strains of endless combat with no prospect of rotation.

A deadly feedback loop is now at work, with the lack of rotations and the shortage of replacements synergizing to accelerate the burn of Ukrainian personnel. The AFU is unable to regularly rotate units out of combat, and the inadequate flow of replacements causes frontline infantry complements to wear thin. Unable to rotate or reinforce, line brigades resort to cannibalization - scraping support personnel like mortar teams, drivers, and drone operators to fill out frontline positions. This further accelerates losses as brigades fight with thinned out support and fires elements, and makes Ukrainian men more unwilling to enlist - because there is now no guarantee that becoming a drone operator, for example, will save one from being sent to a frontline trench eventually.

Where does this leave us? Ukraine continues to dispose of a very large force, with more than a hundred brigades and hundreds of thousands of men under arms. This force, however, is both substantially outnumbered by the Russian army and in a clear trend of decay. Despite a highly touted attempt to reinvigorate the mobilization apparatus in 2024, the intake of new personnel is clearly too low to offset losses, and the heavy lifting formations in critical sectors of front have seen their strength - particularly in the infantry complements - decline, in some cases to critical levels.

The failure of Ukraine's 2024 mobilization program has coincided with several strategic choices which have exacerbated manpower concerns - specifically the decision to embark on a program of force expansion even as the AFU voluntarily extended its commitments by opening a new secondary front in Kursk. In other words, Ukraine's mobilization falls short of its force requirements, and the AFU has also made choices that sabotaged its ability to economize. Units are ground up, replacements come in a paltry trickle, rotations are late or absent, units cannibalize themselves, and angry and weary men desert.

It's not at all clear that this will lead to a "breaking point", in the sense that people are anticipating. Ukrainian strike capabilities and the Russian preference for dispersed, leapfrogging assaults limit the potential for grand breakthroughs and exploitation. However, what we saw over the past three months on the southern Donetsk axis offers a preview of what awaits: an exhausted force being steadily rolled back, dug out of its strongpoints, and mauled - covering its retreat with drones but losing position after position. The line holds, until it doesn't.

End of the Line: ATACMs, JASSMs, and Hazelnuts

Ukraine's ability to remain in the field depends on a titration of two indispensable resources: first, Ukrainian male biomass, and secondly the critical western weaponry that gives them combat effectiveness. We have evaluated the first: Ukraine is not exactly out of men, but the trends of its mobilization program are poor and personnel shortages are mounting. The trends regarding the second are, if anything, even more foreboding for Kiev.

There are two general dynamics that have emerged, neither of which create an optimistic picture for Ukraine, which we'll examine in turn. These are as follows:

1. The delivery of heavy weaponry to Ukraine (tanks, IFVs, and artillery tubes) has largely dried up in recent months.

2. The west has essentially run out of escalatory weaponry (strike systems) to give, and those systems already given have failed to meaningfully altar the trajectory of the war.

In 2023, building out new mechanized units was the name of the game, with the Pentagon leading a multinational effort to stand up an entire army corps worth of units equipped with Leopards, Challengers, and a whole slew of western IFVs and APCs. When that lovingly assembled grouping bashed its head on a rock in the botched assault on the Zaporizhia line, the United States belatedly and begrudgingly dispatched its own Abrams to backstop the Ukrainian tank force. In 2024, however, deliveries of heavy weapons slowed to a trickle.

The role of the tank in Ukraine has been greatly misunderstood. The vulnerability of tanks to the myriad strike systems of the modern battlefield led some observers to declare that the tank as a weapons system was now obsolete, but this did not really square with the fact that both combatants in this war were eager to deploy as many as possible. Tanks need more critical enablers - more combat engineering, air defense, and electronic warfare support - but they continue to fill an indispensable role and remain an essential item in this war. The failure of Ukraine's 2023 counteroffensive showed, if anything, that tanks simply are not "game changing" systems, but mass consumption items - but this has always been the case. The signature quality of iconic tanks like the Sherman and the T34 was that they were numerous.

Unfortunately for Ukraine, deliveries of tanks have dropped off dramatically after the failures of 2023. America's drawdowns for Ukraine in 2024 were almost entirely devoid of armored vehicles of any kind. Data from the Kiel Institute, which has been meticulous tracking weaponry commitments and deliveries, confirms a sharp dropoff in heavy weapons in 2024. In 2023, Ukraine's backers pledged 384 tanks. This dropped to just 98 in 2024 - which explains why the new Ukrainian mechanized brigades are perilously light on the equipment indicative of their designations.

While 2023 was all about building out Ukraine's mechanized package with tanks, IFVs, and engineering, 2024 has been largely about enhancing Ukraine's strike capabilities. There have been two separate elements at play - first, the delivery of both air and ground launched systems (most notably the British Storm Shadows and American ATACMs respectively), and secondly the loosening of the rules of engagement to allow Ukraine to strike targets inside pre-war Russia.

This dovetailed, as it turned out, with Ukraine's operation in Kursk, and in many ways the most direct impact of the Kursk incursion has been to force the west's hand on the rules of engagement. While Ukraine has long been striking inside Russia with indigenous systems, most notably drones, the White House continued to drag its feet on formal approval for strikes with American systems. By launching a ground assault on Kursk, Ukraine made the decision for them: the United States gave clearance to use ATACMs to support the ground forces in Kursk, and this metastasized into general license to strike Russia with the full range of available systems. This was a poignant reminder that, however we conceive of the proxy-sponsor relationship, Ukraine has some ability to force America's hand: a classic example of the tail wagging the dog.

In any case, 2024 saw Ukraine and its western backers slowly but surely bash through all the supposed red-lines in this domain: the British breached first with the delivery of Storm Shadows late in 2023, and this was followed by the delivery of ATACMs (with a handful of F16's to boot), and finally the loosening of the rules of engagement to clear strikes on Russia.

Where does this leave us? There would seem to be three important things to consider.

1. The west has essentially reached the end of its escalation chain. The only remaining step that they can take would be to supply Ukraine with JASSMs (Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile), which would mark a quantitative but not a meaningful qualitative upgrade to Ukraine's strike capabilities.

2. Ukraine's use of western-supplied strike assets has been dissipated and has not materially improved their situation on the ground.

3. Russia maintains a dominant strike advantage, both qualitative and quantitative.

Ukraine faces a stark disadvantage in strike capability relative to Russia, in a variety of ways. Russian strike assets are far more numerous and have significant range advantages, but it is also important to take into consideration both Russia's significantly greater strategic depth and its more dense and relatively unscathed air defense. Unlike Ukraine, which has seen its air defense stretch to the limit with destroyed launchers and a mounting interceptor shortage, Russia's air defenses have been essentially untouched, as Ukraine has lacked the large numbers of assets required to conduct a proper SEAD/DEAD (Suppression/Destruction of Enemy Air Defense) campaign.

Given this basic calculus, using western strike systems to wage a blow for blow strategic air campaign is bad math for Ukraine. It is generally unwise to engage in a bat fight when your opponent is a bigger man with a much longer bat. Instead, Ukraine's strike systems should have been leveraged to support ground operations - concentrating strikes spatially and in time to synergize with efforts on the ground. Just as a simple thought experiment, it is not difficult to imagine ATACMs making a difference if they had been available in 2023 and used to saturate Russian rear areas during the assault on the Zaporizhia line - striking in tempo with the mechanized assault to disrupt Russian command and control and prevent reinforcement of critical areas.

Instead, Ukraine's strike capacity has been largely dissipated in attacks that sometimes achieve success hitting Russian installations but fail to directly support successful operations on the ground. The result is a diffusion of Ukrainian striking power that is less than the sum of its parts. Now, Ukraine has essentially run dry on missiles - of the 500 ATACMs sent by the United States, perhaps 50 are left in Kiev's stockpiles. Stocks of air launched Storm Shadow missiles are similarly low, and Britain's commitment to resupply is limited to "a few dozen".

The last option for the west to backstop Ukrainian strike capability are American JASSMs. While there is a longer-range variant in production (the JASSM-ER, or Extended Range), these are relatively new and expensive and are earmarked for American stocks - it is therefore presumed that the Ukrainians would receive the standard variant. The standard JASSM has slight range advantages over Storm Shadows and ATACMs, at roughly 230 miles. In the event that JASSMs are not given, there is a shorter range system called the SLAM (Standoff Land Attack Missile) with a range of some 170 miles. Both JASSMs and SLAMs would be compatible with Ukrainian F-16s.

Two things need to be noted about the JASSM. First, the JASSM - while offering slightly longer ranges - would essentially serve as a backstop/replacement for the rapidly dwindling ATACMs and particularly the air launched Storm Shadows - instead of Ukraine's native SU-24s launching Storm Shadows, they would utilize F-16s launching JASSMs. This would not represent a dramatic upgrade in Ukrainian capabilities, but would instead simply serve to maintain a bare minimum Ukrainian strike capability. JASSMs are a replacement for dwindling capabilities, not an augmentation to them.

Secondly, it must be understood that JASSMs are the last stop. We're now entering the territory, not of artificially constructed red lines, but physical and real limits. Russia has essentially eaten the gifted stocks of ATACMs and Storm Shadows, with little discernable effect on their ability to fight, and JASSMs are the last extant item in the inventories to keep Ukrainian strike capabilities operative. We are at the last rung of the aid ladder.

In the case of JASSMs, however, there are notable downsides for the United States. This is an important case of putting all of one's eggs in the same technological basket. In 2020, the United States scrapped the development of its conventionally armed Long Range Standoff Missile, making the JASSM - particularly the new extended range variants - the system for the United States, earmarked to play a critical role in future conflicts, particularly in the Pacific. This makes the JASSM an extremely sensitive system, as a centerpiece of American strike capabilities, particularly with the modernization of the Tomahawk system crawling along at a few dozen units per year.

Given the fact that JASSMs are GPS guided, there are real reasons to be reticent about giving Ukraine such a technologically sensitive system. Russian electronic warfare has enjoyed considerable success jamming GPS and disrupting similarly guided American systems. Allowing the Russians to gain familiarity with a keystone American system could wreak havoc on Pentagon war planning - most, if not all of the strike eggs are in this basket, so why let an adversary peek inside?

It's probable, given what we have seen to this point, that these concerns will ultimately be dismissed and Ukraine will receive a line of JASSMs which will backstop their strike capabilities - but given the size of Ukraine's F-16 fleet, the scale will be constrained. Furthermore, air launched systems are less optimal for Ukraine, given their dependence on large and easily targeted airfields, in contrast to ground launched systems which are mobile and more easily concealed.

Certainly, JASSMs will never give Ukraine the ability to match Russia's own strike capacity. After hearing endlessly about how Russia is running out of missiles, it has at last been concluded that this is simply not true, and indeed never was. Recently, Ukrainian defense intelligence admitted that per their own estimates Russia retains about 1,400 long range missiles in its reserves, with a monthly production of roughly 150 units. Russian production of inexpensive Geran drones has also skyrocketed, with Ukrainian intelligence estimating a ceiling as high as 2,000 drones per month.

There is also the matter of the new Russian missile system - the now famous Oreshnik, or Hazel Tree. Russia tested the Oreshnik system on a large machining plant in Dnipro on November 21, 2024, which allowed the basic capabilities of the system to be gauged. The Oreshnik is an Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile, characterized by its hypersonic capabilities (exceeding Mach-10) and its Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicle equipped with six separate warheads, with the potential for submunitions in each. Although the attack on Dnipro was essentially a demonstration which used inert training warheads (that is, without explosive payloads), the missile can be configured with nuclear or conventional warheads.

As in the case of the North Korean troops in Kursk, I rather think that the Oreshnik launch was not nearly as important as it was made out to be. The system is expensive and likely impractical for conventional use. I understand the desire to conceive of Oreshnik as a massively powerful conventional weapon - showering its target with half a dozen warheads with the power of an entire flight of Kalibr missiles - but there are several problems with this. The accuracy of the system (the CEP, or "Circular Error Probable" in the technical parlance) is much more consistent with a nuclear delivery system than a conventional one. Furthermore, the problem with using an IRBM for conventional strikes is the danger of miscalculation - foreign adversaries may misinterpret the launch as a nuclear attack and respond appropriately. This is precisely why the Russian government actually alerted the United States to the launch ahead of time - a fine arrangement for a demonstration, but impractical for a weapon that is intended to be used regularly.

We may see another use of the Oreshnik against Ukraine, but ultimately this is unlikely to be a system of consequence in this war. The demonstration in Dnipro was instead likely intended to send a message to Europe - reminding NATO that Russia has the capacity to deliver strikes against European targets that cannot be intercepted. It also serves as a poignant reminder that Europe lacks the equivalent capability, and in essence provides a demonstration of Russia's ability to launch missiles from far beyond the range of either Ukrainian or European response. The Hazelnut is a tangible reminder of Russia's strategic depth and strike dominance in Ukraine.

Ultimately, Ukraine will lose the strike game. It's strike capacity has dwindled, with missiles frittered away in a dissipated air campaign, and though the exhaustion of Storm Shadow and ATACMs stocks can be offset somewhat by JASSMs, Ukraine simply lacks the range or quantities necessary to match Russian capabilities. Needing to do more with less, Ukraine instead diffused its assets and failed to synergize its strikes with ground operations. We are now at the end of the line - after JASSMs, there's nothing left in western warehouses to upgrade Ukrainian capabilities. Hazelnuts or no, the math on this bat fight is bad for Kiev.

Conclusion: Debellation

Trapped in an endless news cycle, with daily footage of FPV strikes and exploding vehicles, and a dutiful cottage industry of war mappers alerting us to every 100 meter advance, it can easily feel like the Russo-Ukrainian War is trapped in an interminable doom loop which will never end - Mad Max meets Groundhog Day.

What I have endeavored to do here, however, is argue that 2024 actually saw several very important developments which make the coming shape of the war relatively clear. To briefly recapitulate:

1. Russian forces caved in Ukrainian defenses at depth across an entire critical axis of front. After remaining static for years, Ukraine's position in Southern Donetsk has been obliterated, with Russian forces advancing through an entire belt of fortified positions, pushing the front into Pokrovsk and Kostayantinivka.

2. The main Ukrainian gambit on the ground (the incursion into Kursk) failed spectacularly, with the salient being progressively caved in. An entire grouping of critical mechanized formations wasted much of the year fighting on this unproductive and secondary front, leaving Ukrainian positions in the Donbas increasingly threadbare and bereft of reserves.

3. An attempt by the Ukrainian government to reinvigorate its mobilization program failed, with enlistments quickly trailing off. Decisions to expand the force structure exacerbated the shortage of manpower, and as a result the decay of Ukraine's frontline brigades has accelerated.

4. Long awaited western upgrades to Ukraine's strike capabilities failed to defeat Russian momentum, and stocks of ATACMs and Storm Shadows are nearly exhausted. There are now few options remaining to prop up Ukrainian strike capacity, and no prospect of Ukraine gaining dominance in this dimension of the war.

In short, Ukraine is on the path to debellation - defeat through the total exhaustion of its capacity to resist. They are not exactly out of men and vehicles and missiles, but these lines are all pointing downward. A strategic Ukrainian defeat - once unthinkable to the western foreign policy apparatus and commentariat - is now on the table. Quite interestingly, now that Donald Trump is about to return to the White House, it is suddenly acceptable to speak of Ukrainian defeat. Robert Kagan - a stalwart champion of Ukraine if there ever was one - now says the quiet part out loud:

Ukraine will likely lose the war within the next 12 to 18 months. Ukraine will not lose in a nice, negotiated way, with vital territories sacrificed but an independent Ukraine kept alive, sovereign, and protected by Western security guarantees. It faces instead a complete defeat, a loss of sovereignty, and full Russian control.

Indeed.

None of this should be particularly surprising. If anything, it is shocking that my position - that Russia is essentially a very powerful country that was very unlikely to lose a war (which it perceives as existential) right in its own belly - somehow became controversial or fringe. But here we are.

Carthago delenda est

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6. The Big Happening

There is an oft-quoted remark from Vladimir Lenin, which in its English formulation usually reads something like: "There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen."

This is one of those aphorisms which has been exercised practically to death, but there are rare occasions where it perfectly fits the chaotic tempo of world events, and few cases fit the bill better than the fall of the Syrian Arab Republic and its embattled (former) President, Bashir Al-Assad. Syria was first plunged into Civil War by an escalating insurgency in 2012, and more than a decade of grueling positional fighting and sieges, including a maddening four-year siege of Aleppo, saw the frontlines in the country coagulate into an uneasy quasi-stasis.

The Assad regime's endurance (with timely and crucial assistance from Russia and Iran), which saw government forces claw back from the brink beginning in 2015, became something of a running joke, spawning the infamous "Assad Curse", in reference to Assad's proclivity to politically outlast western leaders calling for his removal. Having survived more than a decade of Civil War and successfully recapturing Syria's crucial urban corridor from Damascus to Aleppo, few people saw what was coming next.

In this case, Lenin's comment about "weeks where decades happen" is almost literally true. On November 27, insurgent forces led by the Tahrir al-Sham paramilitary group launched a shock offensive towards Aleppo which captured the city in only a few days. Regime forces melted away as they swept down the urban corridor, capturing Hama and then Homs. On December 8, the Syrian Arab Republic functionally ceased to exist and Assad evacuated to seek asylum in Russia amid rumors that his plane had been shot down. From November 27 to December 8: 12 days from uneasy stasis to the total collapse of Assad's government and army. In this case, two weeks sufficed to achieve a decisive outcome which had been bloodily and indecisively contested for more than a decade.

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As a brief editorial aside - I have been intending to produce both some thoughts on the remarkable collapse in Syria as well as a situation report on the Russo-Ukrainian War, where there have been important developments both in the frontlines and in the meta-strategic sphere. I had contemplated amalgamating them into a single article, but chose not to because I do not wish to contrive a unifying narrative structure. I know that it is popular to depict Syria and Ukraine as different fronts in a coherent "third world war", but I think this is rather overwrought and needlessly induces panic. Events in Damascus and the Donbas are not as cleanly connected as people would like them to be - if there is a connection, as such, it is simply that these are frontier zones of Russian power. However, Ukraine will always matter much more to Moscow than Syria will, and for the Russians it is their western frontier that forms their most pressing strategic concern. Thus, this entry will focus on the implosion of Syria, and an update on the front in Ukraine will come shortly in a separate offering.

The Fall of Assad: Long Awaited, Unexpected

With only the space of a few weeks to consider developments in Syria, a fair bit of reservation and restraint is warranted. We have the general shape of the rebel offensive, which rolled out of Idlib into Aleppo in the opening 48 hours before beginning a sweep south down Syria's urban corridor along the M5 arterial highway, but the broader political situation in Damascus is still in flux and extremely murky.

What deserves emphasis, however, is the totality and speed of the collapse of the Syrian Arab Army and the Assad government. There was perhaps a 24 hour window, around November 30, where it looked like the SAA was going to fight - there were reports of reserves being scrambled into Hama with local counterattacks, and the Russian Air Force began heavily bombarding Tahrir al-Sham's stronghold around Idlib. The near instantaneous loss of Aleppo was clearly the nucleus of an emerging military catastrophe, but few could have anticipated that regime resistance would simply evaporate.

The SAA's broader performance throughout the civil war deserves a whole host of asterisks. It is a simple matter of fact that Assad would have likely lost his grip on power many years ago in the absence of Russian and Iranian assistance, but the basic premise was never challenged that the regime and the army were willing to fight - until now. SAA defenses were systemically melting down by the first of December, never reconstituted, and that - as they say - was that.

What we witnessed in Syria was, at its heart, systemic state rot that had been concealed by a tenuous ceasefire in the north, and it is clear that during this ceasefire Assad's government was both unwilling and unable to address the problems that plagued the SAA during the earlier phases of hot fighting. We can enumerate the basic problem as follows.

The crisis of the SAA was first and foremost a crisis of revenue, with the country decaying to bare economic subsistence. Syria is a tenuous economic entity in the best of times. It can be thought of broadly as a patchwork of four different geospatial regions: the Alawite stronghold in the coastal mountain range (with urban centers like Tartus and Latakia), the corridor of the ancient oasis cities (Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Damascus), the Euphrates valley in the east, and the Turkish hinterlands along Syria's northern border.

The problem, not just for the Assad regime but for any would-be ruler of Syria, is that knitting these geographic regions together is a very difficult military-political task, but one that is essential to the economic and fiscal coherence of the country. Syria's primary grain growing regions are in the east, particularly in the Euphrates basin. The Northeast in particular is Syria's predominant source of both cereal staples like wheat and export crops like cotton. For more than a decade now, these growing regions have been lost to Damascus and are under pseudo-autonomous Kurdish control.

Furthermore, the loss of the northeast to the Kurds (along with a de-facto American occupation around Al-Tanf) cut off the Syrian regime from its most productive oil and gas fields - although Syria has never been a major oil exporter by global standards, this dried up yet another revenue stream for the regime. When one factors in the physical damage caused by a decade of war and continual strangulation from western sanctions, the total economic hollowing of the Syrian regime was largely predestined.

With Syrian GDP at a paltry $18 billion in 2022 (a meager ~$800 per capita), it's no surprise that the SAA had become a hollowed out, corrupt, and unmotivated force. Salaries for soldiers were abysmal, and officers become accustomed to supplementing their income by taking bribes and shaking down travelers at roadside checkpoints. It's the classical corruption motif of armies in bankrupt states, and it bends the army towards a "paper" existence, with an ORBAT that seems adequate on paper but in reality consists largely of virtual or skeletal units led by officers who are more interested in supplementing their salaries with bribes than maintaining baseline combat effectiveness.

Thus, in almost every account of the rebel offensive from the SAA's perspective, the same signature emerges: underpaid and unmotivated conscripts, receiving no meaningful direction from their superiors, chose to simply shed their uniforms and flee. One can hardly blame them - this was in the end an exhausted regime with few remaining who were willing to fight for it, and amid the centrifugal chaos of regime collapse men tend to begin thinking about themselves and their own fates. Hence, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Commander Hossein Salami commenting: "Some expect us to fight in place of the Syrian army. Is it logical… to take on full responsibility while Syria's army merely observes?"

The grand story of the Assad regime is going to be one of an over-reliance on foreign backers and an unwillingness (or inability) to grapple with the bureaucratic rot and systemic corruption in the Syrian Army. Assad proved far too willing to solicit foreign powers to fight his battles for him, and with his regime choked of revenue he allowed the SAA to languish as a skeletal, third class fighting force in its own country, and in the end it collapsed into a heap of bones as skeletons are wont to do.

To the extent that there are still staunch backers of Assad, they will point fingers in all manner of directions - blaming the crippling sanctions and the loss of Syria's east for the economic strangulation of the regime, crying about treachery among the army's officer corps for failing to fight, bemoaning the failure of Iran and the "axis of resistance" to come to Assad's aid. The reality is that the Syrian regime had clearly reached the point of exhaustion: unable to adequately pay its soldiers, uproot corruption in the army, or motivate men to fight for it. This was a checkmated regime with a fictional army, and it is not surprising that Iran and Russia decided to wash their hands of it before it became an unbearable geostrategic albatross around their necks.

Syria: Shattered and Battered

It is very popular these days to accuse one's adversaries of being a "fake", or "illegitimate" country. One hears this very commonly in reference to Israel - the idea being that Israel is not really a country, but an illegitimate occupation of Palestinian land. Many Russian patriots similarly argue that Ukraine is a "fake" country, and an artifact of internal Soviet politics and Galician revanchism. China decries the illegitimacy of Taiwan and affirms the unity of the Chinese state as they see it.

I confess that I find this line of argumentation rather odd, largely because I have always seen states as constructs that have an objective reality based on their ability to mobilize resources for the purpose of exercising political power - that is, maintaining a political monopoly in their territory (against external and internal rivals), and projecting commensurate power outwards. Israel is very obviously a real state. It dispenses of a discrete territory, it checks rivals within that territory, and it projects force and influence outward. One does not have to like it, but it's obviously real.

Complaining that a state is illegitimate or fake is a bit like arguing that an animal is not real, when in fact the life of an animal is an objective property derived from its ability to continuously mobilize calories from its environment and defend itself against predation. States and animals can die - they can waste away through the failure of mobilization (starved of revenue or calories as the case may be), they can be devastated by the internal parasitism of rebellion and disease, or they can be eaten up by larger, more potent predatory forms. Parasitism, mobilization of resources, predation, and death - all unceasing pressures for both the animal and the political organism. States don't possess an abstract quality of legitimacy, but rather live or die on their own terms.

Syria is not quite a "fake" country, but it is certainly a diseased one. In particular, the question now arises of the relationship between the state and the discrete territory formerly known as the Syrian Arab Republic. The Assad regime is gone, but the immense pressures that distort and pull across the breadth of its former territories remain, and the basic question becomes whether any stable political arrangement can prevail on the territory of Syria.

We need to remember that Syria, as such, is an unwieldy union of discrete geo-economic regions - the coastal range, the corridor of ancient oasis cities (Aleppo, Hama, Homs, Damascus), and the Euphrates basin. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, a brief boom of oil exports, combined with expansive irrigation works along the Euphrates, allowed a Syrian population explosion, with the total population growing nearly threefold from some 7 million in the early 1970's to more than 22 million by 2010. After a brief decline in the early years of the civil war, the population began to recover and once again crested 22 million by 2022.

It is not a coincidence, then, that a collapse in the Euphrates irrigation system brought on by drought in 2011 (drought conditions that still persist) was a major harbinger of civil war, nor is it a wonder that this became the key fiscal-economic problem that the Assad regime could not solve. It is not simply that Assad lacked a solution - it is doubtful whether a solution exists.

The crux of the problem is simple (and I apologize for taking so long to get to the point): Syria cannot exist as a stable entity without the unification of virtually all of the territory of the old Syrian Arab Republic, but maintaining control over that territory requires welding together an explosive amalgamation of ethnic and sectarian blocs.

The vast and bloated population of the oasis city corridor cannot survive without access to both the more productive agricultural lands in the east (and even then, remediation of the irrigation system and more favorable rainfall will be essential) and the ability to export Syria's gas and oil resources. If the interior urban corridor remains cut off from the economic resources of Syria's east, it will be doomed to remain an overpopulated and impoverished breeding ground for dissent and violence. It likewise requires access to the coastal range to facilitate economic access to the Mediterranean. Syria's astonishing population increase in the latter half of the 20th Century was only possible because the Syrian Arab Republic linked the corridor of oasis cities with the the coastal range and the Euphrates basin in the east. In other words, for the population of Syria to have any viable economic future, the country must have essentially the same discrete territory that it had prewar - and even then, the deteriorating irrigation system in the east makes a stable recovery doubtful.

Yet, knitting this territory back together requires mediating a host of sectarian, ethnic, and geostrategic impasses. Some of the more pie in the sky proposals for Syria involve a partitioning of the country, with an Alawite state in the coastal range, one or several Sunni states in the interior, and an independent Kurdistan in the east - these proposals perhaps make sense on ethnic and sectarian grounds, but they would ensure the economic unviability of the entire project, and would have the effect of creating overpopulated and landlocked Sunni states, cut off from both sea access and natural resources, and doomed to impoverishment. This is not a recipe for any sort of lasting peace.

This is to say nothing, of course, of the interests of outside powers. The Russians seem to have largely washed their hands of Syria and are aiming mainly to reach an arrangement with whatever powers prevail to keep their basing rights on the Mediterranean Coast - this is probably another case of Moscow being too trusting of the latest "deal" to come down the line, but so it goes. Iran's position in Syria is essentially shattered (more on that in a moment), and regional initiative has firmly passed to Turkey and Israel. However, Iran on the backfoot still has the potential to resort geopolitical arson.

In short, it is difficult to be optimistic about Syria's future. The structural reality of the country is the same: an overpopulated and impoverished Sunni interior that requires connectivity to the coastal range and the straining Euphrates in order to feed itself and economically recover. The shattering of Syria's economic coherence is precisely what bankrupted and hollowed out the Assad regime to the point where it could not pay its soldiers, feed its people, or defend itself from a final sharp blow. It was the impoverishment of the bloated Syrian population, and the failure of irrigation in the east, which set off the civil war and the heaving flows of refugees to Turkey and Europe. None of this has gone away, and knitting a coherent economic unit back together in the face of Syria's stark sectarian and ethnic divisions will require a political touch that is either unimaginably deft or violent and forceful.

Syria may or may not be a "fake country", in the sense that its economic coherence runs contrary to the patterns of its peopling. It is, however, a country that has steadily disintegrated - subject to both internal parasitism and external predation - and the Assad regime clearly lacked the powers of mobilization to hold the thing together, cut off as they were from the Euphrates. The new Sunni rulers of Damascus may fare better, in the sense that they (unlike Assad) are astride a demographic majority and enjoy the backing of a powerful and ascendant Turkey, but there is little doubt that more violence lies ahead before a coherent state is once again hammered out of these disparate and impoverished components.

Winners and Losers

With the chapter now closed on the Assad regime, we can consider Syria as a plaything of external powers. Syria has been a place of intense interest for at least four powerful outside states, which I am assigning winner and loser status as follows:

• Big Winner: Israel

• Small Winner: Turkey

• Small Loser: Russia

• Big Loser: Iran

We'll consider these in order, beginning with Israel and Iran - as their situations are nearly perfect inverses.

It is difficult to over-emphasize just how completely Iran's geopolitical position has collapsed in the Levant and the Eastern Mediterranean. Iran invested significant resources in propping up the Assad regime, contributing military aid and logistical support on the order of tens of billions of dollars. Most significantly, however, Iran was central to providing manpower to prop up the flagging Syrian Arab Army over the years, with the elite Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps training militias to support Assad's army and leading the mobilization and coordination of foreign fighters, including from Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

For Iran, Syria and Lebanon formed a nexus of power projection that were mutually reinforcing. Syria provided a crucial land corridor that allowed Iran to funnel personnel and supplies to Lebanon, creating an essential link in the geographic connectivity of Iran's force projection. Hezbollah served a valuable role in Iran's coordination of militias in Syria, and Syria secured ground link between Iran and Hezbollah. For Iran, then, 2024 has been a disaster, with Hezbollah severely battered by the IDF and Syria now in a state of collapse.

Israel has, in effect, created a kinetic feedback loop which is eating away at Iran's position in the region. Hezbollah is weakened by the 14 month war with the IDF, and its leadership and infrastructure are in disarray after a series of devastating Israeli strikes, including both the infamous exploding pager operation and an airstrike which killed Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah's weakened state left them utterly unable to intervene to prevent the collapse of Assad's regime, and now that same collapse means that Iran must contrive a way to rebuild Hezbollah's operational capabilities without the vital ground-logistical link that it has long utilized.

For Israel, then, 2024 brought at least a temporary neutralization of much of Hezbollah's command apparatus, the rupture of Iran's ground link to Lebanon, and an enlarged IDF-controlled security zone around the Golan Heights. There is a growing sense that Israel can act with near-impunity, after conducting an impressive shooting spree against high value enemy personnel, fighting a grueling and devastating ground campaign in Gaza, and exchanging air strikes against Iran itself.

The suggestion that Israel has come off very well from all this tends to incense people and solicit the usual accusations of Zionism, but the reality is fairly straight forward. Israel has killed large numbers of high ranking enemy personnel, including the highest leaders of both Hamas and Hezbollah. The IDF maintained a ground presence in the Gaza Strip for months and reduced much of its urban buildup to rubble. Israel killed the chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau in Tehran itself. It has seized an expanded buffer zone in the Golan, and it has seen Iran's ground link to Lebanon collapse. These are objective manifestations of kinetic force - exploding pagers, IDF tanks, and air strikes simply are. Any suggestion that Israel is not on a heater would be an act of willful ignorance and pointless cognitive intransigence.

Iran, of course, does have some strategic depth and options to rebuild its position. It still maintains militias in Iraq, it has the option of engaging with the SDF (the Kurdish led militias in eastern Syria), it maintains productive proxies in Yemen, and it demonstrated strike capabilities against Israel. However, it is clearly very much on the back foot and facing the prospect of painstakingly rebuilding a position in Lebanon and Syria after investing heavily in the region over the decades.

Meanwhile, Turkey has clearly supplanted Iran and Russia as the dominant external powers in Syria. A host of Turkish interests are at play in Syria, including the refoulment of Syrian refugees (nearly four million of whom are currently in Turkey and whose presence remains unwelcome to many), the rollback of Kurdish (SDF) control in eastern Syria, and the expansion of Turkish influence into the South-Caucasus, where Turkey and its Azerbaijani ally continue their press.

The unsettling ease with which Turkey managed to roll over the Assad government, as Tahrir al-Sham's foremost foreign backer, has put Ankara in a dominant position in which it will play a central role in shaping Syria's political future. The problem for Turkey, however, is that its interests run against the current here. Ankara would like to see a return of Syrian refugees, a stabilization of Turkey's southern border, enduring Turkish influence in Syrian politics - and above all they want to prevent the emergence of a stable and enduring Kurdish polity in Syria's east. All of Turkey's interests, in other words, imply the return of Syria's old territorial integrity under Sunni leadership.

In short, Turkey won this phase of the war, but it now must "win the peace", as the expression goes. If Syria relapses into another phase of bloody civil war, Turkey will go back to square one on its strategic goals. Ankara is much like Sisyphus with his bloody rock - he's rolled it nearly to the top of the hill, and now he has to try to keep it there.

For Russia, the main issues at play are naval basing rights on Syria's Mediterranean coast and the loss of leverage over Ankara that was formerly derived from the Assad regime. We can consider these in turn.

Russia maintains bases in Syria's coastal range, including airbases and naval bases near Tartus and Latakia. These bases are a valuable link in Russian power projection into the Mediterranean, and for the time being it seems clear that Moscow has decided to wash its hands of Assad and try to salvage the bases through agreements with whatever government emerges in Syria.

The bigger issue for Moscow is a loss of leverage vis a vis Turkey. While the Assad regime remained in power, Russia was functionally the arbiter of relations between Turkey and Damascus. Syria was a pressure point for Turkey that Moscow was able to utilize to influence Ankara's decisions on other issues like Ukraine and the Black Sea. With the fall of Assad, however, the relationship is now reversed. It is now Turkish proxy that controls Damascus, rather than a Russian one, and Moscow will need to succor Ankara if it wants to keep its bases on the coast.

Summary: Syria at a Crossroads and in the Crosshairs

Ultimately, the fall of the Assad regime is owed to inherent instabilities in Syria's construction, particularly in the absence of consolidated control over the entire former territory of the state. Without oil exports and the growing regions around the Euphrates, Syria cannot sustain itself, and the belt of oasis cities becomes doomed to an impoverished half-life. Assad's biggest problem is also Turkey's problem: the millions of refugees languishing in Turkey are closely connected with Assad's underpaid and unmotivated soldiers, in that both are a manifestation of a starving and exhausted country.

The Problem of Syria, as such, is that the fiscal-economic viability of the state is tenuous at best and relies on consolidated control of the state's former territory, but this in turn requires welding together an amalgamation of ethnic and sectarian groups, combustible in the best circumstances, at the same time that foreign powers are trying to set them alight. The ethnic logic and the economic logic of Syria border on total incompatibility, and have historically been held together by repression and violence.

Furthermore, Syria lies almost literally at a geostrategic crossroads, as an estuary of greater outside powers. In particular, Syria forms a collision zone of Iranian and Turkish power. Whichever of these powers finds itself on the back foot in the region has recourse to strategic arson - the intentional inflammation of a trashcanistan to create a noxious hazard to the rival. While the Assad Regime held power, thanks to the generous support of Moscow and Tehran, it was Ankara who provided powerful - and eventually successful backing. For Turkey to consolidate its victory, it must successfully establish stable governance in Syria, mitigate Kurdish autonomy, and reverse the flow of refugees. But with Iran now in retreat, turnabout is fair play, and Syria - with its wobbly economic basis and host of sectarian divisions - is a land full of kindling for a geostrategic arsonist.

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7. The Apotheosis of Lord Nelson

There are a handful of cataclysmic breaks in the historical timeline: upheavals so severe that they signal a wholesale course shift in the trajectory of human political development. Oftentimes these are the result of exogenous forces - human migrations and invasions external to the political subject, as in the case of the Bronze Age Collapse, the barbarian migrations which destroyed the Roman Empire, or the Mongol expansion across Eurasia. Sometimes, however, existing political structures which can superficially appear stable will collapse organically into chaos. These latter, internally generated breakages are usually called "revolutions."

The French Revolution (1789 - 1799) ranks among the most dramatic and cataclysmic of these political breakages. The collapse of French absolutism had seismic effects which reached far beyond the borders of France itself, with the abolition of serfdom and the privileges of the nobility, a fumbling reach for participatory politics and the emancipation of the individual, the emergence of new strands of patriotic nationalism, and the first recognizable advent of secular millenarian ambitions. Many of the motifs that universally characterize modern political life, like mass political participation, the nation, and the end of arbitrary absolutist rule were clearly present in Revolutionary France, to the point where the revolution - for good or ill - is identified closely with the origin of modernity as such.

Yet for all its high minded idealism, and the frequently rosy nostalgia which reduces the French Revolution to a simplistic revolt of starving commoners against a profligate and unfeeling monarchy, the Revolution in France was also extremely bloody and terrible - it ushered in a period of extraordinary political violence and famine, and it failed utterly to provide stable governance - at least until the emergence of the singular man of the age in Napoleon.

From a geopolitical point of view, the French Revolution is fascinating for rather unexpected reasons. While the Revolution did mark a wholesale break with past political and social norms, in truth it changed the geopolitical dynamics of Europe very little. For a century, European affairs had been driven by the French Problem - that is to say, France's preponderance of power and its outward drive, which repeatedly brought it into conflict with vast enemy coalitions; in the inverse, France itself had long struggled with how to manage the dual strains of both its extensive land commitments and the difficulty of waging naval-colonial war against its offshore rival in Britain.

The Revolution, rather than bringing an end to the French Problem, in fact only served to intensify it. Revolution brought extensive new powers of mobilization to France, with mass political participation in turn spawning expansive conscription of fighting men (the Levee en Masse) while the churning of the French officer corps brought young and dynamic talents into command - Napoleon chief among them. While the peculiar social form of the Revolution was unprecedented (and terrifying to Europe's remaining absolutist monarchies), there was nothing particularly new about France going to war with the continent - except this time, the size of her armies and the intensity of the warfare had been greatly increased. After the stabilization of France under Napoleon's guardianship, the geopolitical dynamic of Europe returned to something approximating its pre-revolutionary norm, with governments in Austria, Prussia, Russia, and elsewhere forced to mediate between the immediate threat posed by French land power and the looming, global power of Britain. As late as 1812, there were fierce debates in many European capitals as to just which of the western powers - Napoleon and his grand armee, or the British and their spectacular navy - posed the greater threat.

One of the more peculiar aspects of this warfare, and a subject of our interest here, is that the Revolution had markedly different effects in France's army and navy. French fighting power on land was magnified greatly by the effects of the Revolution, and the power of the French Army - in combination with his own singular genius - would bring Napoleon tantalizingly close to the ultimate dream of continental hegemony. On the oceans, however, the Revolution created a drastic setback for the French Navy, for reasons we will elucidate momentarily. The French Navy, which had made a remarkable comeback under the latter Bourbons, was greatly weakened by the Revolution and entered the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in a shaky and parlous state.

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This would have disastrous effects for France, because France's revolutionary wars coincided with the life of one of history's rarified military geniuses: not Napoleon (though he was, to be sure, a genius), but Admiral Horatio Nelson. The name Nelson is undoubtedly very famous - practically synonymous with Britain's era of global naval supremacy. The British naval apparatus was, by the time of the French Revolution, already a well oiled machine, and when general war again began on the European continent, it was inevitable that the Royal Navy would be London's primary lever of kinetic power against the resurgent French. In Nelson, it found its ultimate practitioner - a commander with a rare mixture of instinctive tactical aggression, operational dexterity and imagination, and intangible human qualities of leadership.

The land wars that ravaged Europe at the dawn of the 19th Century will always be known by the name of France's own military dynamo. They were, in almost every sense, Napoleon's wars. The war at sea, however, played its own crucial role in the outcome, and it was here that Napoleon's military genius found its limits. Napoleon was the land general par excellence, but the sea belonged to Nelson.

The Revolution at Sea

Enumerating all the social, economic, and political upheavals originating in the French Revolution would be a monumental task. To be sure, there is no shortage of historical literature on the watershed event of modernity and the great uncorking of social forces that could not be rebottled even by decades of war. Here we will confine ourselves to a brief meditation on the ways that the French Revolution affected France's state power, both in a general sense and more particularly as it relates to the navy.

Revolution had the general effect of massively increasing France's capacity for armed power projection, by eradicating longstanding constraints on the size and conduct of her armies. The fall of the Bourbon regime opened the way for the first time to an ethos of mass politics and national participation, which made it possible to conduct a mass mobilization of fighting men. Segregating the armed forces and the civilian populace was a longstanding concern of Europe's monarchies, since the army was always intended to be a bulwark against popular rebellion. Revolution made such concerns obsolete and empowered the popular government to raise armies that dwarfed enemy monarchist forces.

France's ability to mobilize enormous forces was augmented by the onset of war with Central Europe's monarchies, which created a permanent sense of siege and emergency. The arrival of the levee en masse, gave France sprawling forces which exponentially increased her potential for power projection. A 1773 proclamation, which is popularly reprinted in practically every history of the era, stated:

From this moment until such time as its enemies shall have been driven from the soil of the Republic all Frenchmen are in permanent requisition for the services of the armies. The young men shall fight; the married men shall forge arms and transport provisions; the women shall make tents and clothes and shall serve in the hospitals; the children shall turn linen into lint; the old men shall betake themselves to the public squares in order to arouse the courage of the warriors and preach hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic

There is, of course, an aura of melodrama and exaggeration to all this, with the exhilarating notion of the entire nation mobilizing in a fight for survival, but the numbers are difficult to argue with. By 1794 the French had some 1.5 million men under arms, most of them well motivated by the newfound sense of patriotic mass politics. In early Revolutionary battles like Fleurus and Wattignies, it was not uncommon for the French to bring a nearly 2 to 1 advantage to the field.

The other crucial aspect of the Revolution from the perspective of the army was the astonishing churn of the officer corps. Most of France's senior officers were of aristocratic extraction and were therefore swept quickly out of their posts, to be replaced by rapidly promoted field-grade officers. The result was that French military leadership tended to be much younger than their adversaries - great generals of the Revolutionary Armies, like Napoleon, Étienne Macdonald, and Jean-Baptiste Jourdan were still in their 20's when the Bourbon government fell.

On the whole, then the Revolution had the effect of rapidly expanding France's force generation and promoting a new caste of younger, more dynamic officers into command to replace the stale aristocratic officer corps. The early years of Revolutionary warfare therefore saw a wave of stunning French victories, with the French overrunning the low countries and achieving military objectives that had stymied the Bourbons for generations.

In the navy, however, an entirely different dynamic emerged. The particularities of naval combat make it immune to the factors that made Revolutionary France's land forces so powerful. In the first place, the navy cannot be exponentially expanded overnight simply by declaring a levee of manpower. Naval power projection relies - quite obviously - on capital intensive and immensely complicated engineering projects which we call "ships."

Furthermore, Revolutionary efforts to remove Aristocratic officers and instill an egalitarian, revolutionary spirit in the armed forces were disastrous for the French navy. A October 1793 decree ordered the Minister of Marine to provide a list of all officers whose loyalty to the Revolutionary Regime was considered suspect, and the subsequent purging of officers created an institutional cancer in the service. Navies rely on strict, untrammeled discipline - an absolute necessity given the complex coordination that it takes to operate a sailing warship and the stresses imposed on hundreds of men confined in close quarters with one another. Mutinies became frequent, and a marked deterioration in discipline was observed. This had further knock-on effects, with many experienced sailors and petty officers growing disgusted with the indiscipline and leaving the navy to work on merchant ships. Meanwhile, attempts to promote new officers frequently went badly, with the Revolutionary apparatchiks in charge of these decisions lacking the technical knowledge of sailing to judge candidates correctly. As Admiral Villaret Joyeuse put it: "Patriotism alone cannot handle a ship."

By far the worst injury imposed on the navy, however, was the 1792 decision to abolish the Fleet Gunners Corps. This was a corps of some 10,000 men, specially trained in naval gunnery, which provided the backbone of French fighting power at sea. In their place, the Revolutionary Regime opted to staff naval batteries with an amalgamation of general artillerists, trained to roughly the same specification as the artillery crews of the army, and commanded by artillery officers, rather than naval officers. The motivation for this change, rather bizarrely, seems to have been indignation at the fact that naval gunnery crews comprised their own elite corps, segregated from the land artillery. The President of the National Convention, Jeanbon Saint-André, complained:

In the navy there exists an abuse, the destruction of which is demanded by the Committee of Public Safety by my mouth. There are in the navy troops which bear the name of "marine regiments." Is this because these troops have the exclusive privilege of defending the republic upon the sea? Are we not all called upon to fight for liberty?

In essence, the special training and elite status accorded to Fleet Gunners Corps made them an anathema to the egalitarian ideals of the Revolution, and they were summarily abolished to be merged with the artillerists of the land forces. This, obviously, would have terrible effects on French combat effectiveness at sea, with the new gunners unaccustomed to shooting at moving targets from a moving and pitching firing platform. The loss of accuracy and proficiency was particularly problematic given the French combat methodology, which favored firing on the uproll of the ship to smash the enemy's fragile rigging - in contrast to the British, who aimed at the larger and more accommodating target of the enemy hull and gun banks. Thus, French naval gunnery - which had previously been world class and a major source of their fighting strength at sea - was severely crippled by political choices at the onset of war.

Much of the surviving French naval establishment was well aware of this self-imposed crippling, but the political climate of the day left them with nothing to do but issue unheeded warnings. Admiral Morard de Galles wrote in 1793 that "The tone of the seamen is wholly ruined. If it does not change we can expect nothing but reverses in action, even though we be superior in force." The latter clause is particularly important. The Bourbons left an unenviable legacy in France, with the country's economy and finances in tatters, her political body inflamed by resentments, and her borders surrounded by enemies. The navy, however, was in remarkably good shape. The latter Bourbon navies had lavished great attention on the shipyards and naval bases, after much neglect, and had won important victories over the Royal Navy in the American War. With the British fleet dispersed over much of the earth to safeguard her far flung colonial lifelines, the French had every reason to expect fair or even favorable fights in the near waters of the Channel, the North Atlantic, and the Mediterranean. The Revolution upended this calculus, even as it upended the world.

When war broke out in full force in 1793, the naval theater lay largely dormant for the first year, largely due to the sorry state of the French fleet, the more pressing emergencies on France's land borders, and the surprise capture of Toulon by a British task force, which put France's main naval base in the Mediterranean under occupation. The loss of Toulon in December 1793 to Napoleon Bonaparte (which left fifteen French ships of the line intact) was a major disappointment to the British, who hoped to keep the French navy bottled up for the duration of the coming war, but the fact remained that there was initially little reason for the French, pressed about on all their land borders, to seek a fight at sea.

French energies were directed inwardly, towards a major land war which was initially defensive in nature. With France feeling itself to be in a state of siege, there was little interest in dispatching the fleet for strategic offensive actions - much different, for example, from the previous Anglo-French War, where the Bourbon fleet was used proactively to separate Britain from her colonies and chip away at their global positions. Naval battle in the Wars of the Revolution would have to wait until the French fleet had a compelling reason to come out of their ports.

This compelling reason, as it would turn out, was famine. The sprawling and intense land war across the entire eastern French periphery, combined with British control of the seas, had left the French once again thrown back on their internal resources all through 1793. Meanwhile, the mobilization of millions of young men had dovetailed with a poor harvest to create an increasingly dire food insecurity, which threatened to become an all out famine in 1794.

To rectify the growing food emergency, the government looked across the sea towards another young republic, and its envoys in the United States arranged for a large convoy of grain to be shipped to France - a voyage which would force it to run a gauntlet of British patrols, in a reversal of the more famous modern story of German submarines prowling for convoys bound for Britain. The grain convoy of 1794 would at last set the stage for a major naval engagement - the first of France's revolutionary era.

In May, 1794, no less than four major naval bodies were sailing into the same vicinity of the Mid-Atlantic. The first of these was the massive French grain convoy, numbering some 130 merchant vessels loaded with foodstuffs, guarded by a handful of French warships. The second body was the French Brest fleet, comprising 25 powerful ships of the line, which was dispatched on May 16th under Admiral Villaret Joyeuse, with instructions to find and link up with the grain convoy in the mid-Atlantic and shepherd it home. Simultaneously, 26 ships of the British Channel Fleet under Admiral Richard Howe were prowling a wide patrol arc in the Bay of Biscay, searching for the same French convoy. To this already cluttered roster, we add a Dutch merchant convoy cruising through the channel en-route for Lisbon. All of these bodies would collide in the Mid-Atlantic by the end of the month.

Howe and his fleet suffered, as is often the case in war, by arriving at their destination too early. He had set sail on May 2nd, giving him a two week jump on the French fleet. He arrived at Brest in the 2nd week of May and reconnoitered the harbor - seeing that the French fleet was still anchored, he set out on a wide sweep of the Bay of Biscay in search of the French grain fleet, and returned to Brest on the 19th to check once again on the status of the French battle fleet. This time, however, he found the harbor empty: Villaret had slipped out on the 16th, leaving Howe in the lurch and forcing him to chase after the French, with dense fog masking their escape.

The ensuing chase had an element of excitement to it so extreme that it borders on farce. On May 19 - the exact day that Howe returned for a second peek at Brest and found that the French fleet was gone - that same French fleet was over a hundred miles west, sailing into the Atlantic, when it bumped directly into the Dutch merchant convoy heading for Lisbon. Villaret managed to snare and capture several Dutch vessels, which he crewed and dispatched back to France as prizes - but only two days later, as these captured Dutch ships were sailing back towards France, they ran into Howe's fleet, which was in hot pursuit of the French armada. Howe therefore not only captured back the Dutch ships, freeing their crews, but also learned from them the heading of the French fleet.

The difficulty of navigating precisely in the open sea thus brought the two fleets into a circuitous sort of dance, with Villaret's fleet weaving about in search of the French grain fleet, and Howe weaving in search of Villaret. It was not until the afternoon of May 29 that the fleets encountered each other far out at sea, at which point they spent two days maneuvering and fighting partial actions, with Howe seeking a decisive engagement and Villaret reacting defensively. The onset of pitched battle was delayed by intermittent fog, which roiled the area for nearly 36 hours.

On June 1, however, the fog cleared and clear sun shone down on two fleets of virtually identical strength (26 ships of the line each) tracking parallel to each other, with the French downwind. The ensuing battle is known simply as "The Glorious First of June" - named for its date because, rather uniquely, it was fought far out in the open sea, more than 400 miles from the closest land, and thus has no landmark to associate with it.

Villaret realized that, although he was running slightly ahead of the British fleet, he had not gained enough of a lead to avoid the battle (as he would have preferred to do), and accordingly shortened his canvas, meaning he reduced his sail to slow the speed of his line and free up crews for combat. Howe, observing that the French were slowing and preparing to fight, chose the opposite course of action and approached at full sail. His tactical intention was to launch an attack on the side of the French line - but rather than simply coming alongside the French and exchanging fire at close range, he intended for each of his ships to pass through the gaps in the French line, crossing to the downwind side and breaking the French formation apart.

Tactically, this was very clever - passing through the line, each British ship would be able to fire on two French ships, and having passed through they would now be downwind and able to cut off any French retreat. Howe evidently thought that this would be a clean wrap up of the battle in one blow, and he is said to have slammed his signal book shut with an "air of satisfaction." Unfortunately, the order to slice through the French line individually was considered so unusual that much of the British line either misunderstood or ignored the order.

The lead British ship, the Ceasar, began the action by launching an attack on the lead French vessel, but rather than dashing down and cutting through the French line, the Ceasar simply formed up 500 yards from the French and began firing ineffective, long ranged broadsides. This greatly irritated Howe, particularly because he had previously contemplated replacing the Caesar's captain (whom he considered incompetent), but had refrained at the request of the captain of his flagship, the Queen Charlotte. Upon seeing the Caesar botch the attack, Howe tapped the captain on the shoulder and said: "Look, Curtis, there goes your friend. Who is mistaken now?"

The Caesar, however, was not alone in misunderstanding and fumbling Howe's order to drive into the French line. Of the 26 ships in the British fleet, only six - including Howe's flagship, the Queen Charlotte - would drive through the line in the opening attack - the other five being the Marlborough, the Defence, the Brunswick, the Royal George, and the Glory. The remainder of the British fleet - with the exception of the poorly handled Ceasar - managed to draw at close range, though not passing through the French line, and the battle turned into a close quarters melee.

By mid-morning, the battle was already beginning to slacken. Seven French ships had been disabled, but Villaret managed to extract his flagship - the Montagne - and form a rallying point to the north, where he was joined by other captains breaking off from the engagement. By noon, Villaret had formed an improvised secondary battle line, with at least 11 ships in good condition to fight. As both fleets had suffered badly, Howe opted not to renew the battle and instead stood off to conduct repairs and secure the disabled French ships, which were taken as prizes.

Adjudicating the Glorious First of June is rather difficult. From the purest view of loss ratios, the battle was a British victory, with seven French ships lost against none of Howe's. Despite all of his vessels still being afloat, however, Howe's ships and crews had been badly battered, with several demasted vessels which required tows - as a result, he was unable to pursue or further press action with Villaret. Furthermore, despite defeating the French Battle Fleet, Howe was unable to intercept the French grain convoy, which made it safely home and prevented the French home front from succumbing to famine. Both Britain and France therefore celebrated the engagement as a victory, with London celebrating the captured French ships and Paris rejoicing in the safe arrival of the grain fleet. As Mahan would later put it, the French cruise had been "marked, indeed, by a great naval disaster, but had insured the principal object for which it was undertaken."

On a tactical level, however, the First of June exposed a lassitude and indiscipline among the British captains, who largely failed to implement Howe's orders correctly. The struggles of the French ships, with their uprooted gun crews and overpromoted officers, was to be expected, but the British - and Howe most of all - felt that they could have gotten more from the engagement. Still, France's Brest Fleet was badly smashed, and would exert no influence in the war for some time. Instead, the center of gravity in the naval war would shift south, with the entry of Spain into the war as a French ally.

Enter, Nelson: The Battle of Cape Saint Vincent

The strategic reversal suffered by the British in the Mediterranean theater in the early years of the Revolutionary Wars was nearly totalizing in its scale. War began with the Spanish as a member of the anti-French coalition and a joint British-Spanish force capturing the French naval base at Toulon in lightning stroke with the aid of French royalists. Although Toulon was quickly besieged by the Revolutionary Army, under the command of one Napoleon Bonaparte, its occupation put the French Mediterranean fleet out of commission. With Spain in the allied camp, the Royal Navy now had the ability to operate virtually unimpeded in the Mediterranean.

Things began to go sour in December, 1793, when Napoleon recaptured Toulon after a bold operation to storm the fortifications overlooking the harbor. The British took pains to destroy as much of the French fleet and its stores as possible during their evacuation (most importantly, they managed to burn much of the timber in the dockyards), but fifteen French ships of the line survived the occupation of Toulon to form the nucleus of a Mediterranean battlefleet. Matters got further out of hand for the British in 1796, when Spain defected from the anti-French coalition. Spain's war against France had gone badly, with French armies occupying Biblao in 1794. The Spanish court decided that, given Spain's relative weakness, an alliance with her powerful French neighbor was the correct policy, regardless of the new revolutionary regime in Paris. Thus, in 1796 the Treaty of San Ildefonso was signed which brought Spain back into alliance with France, as it had been before the Revolution.

The sudden defection of Spain put the British in a precarious position. Spain had by this time sunk solidly into the second rank of the great powers, but her vast coastline made her an imposing presence on the prow of Europe, and the Spanish Fleet, in combination with the reconstituting French fleet at Toulon, was potentially much more powerful than the British Mediterranean Fleet, which was soon forced to abandon its bases in Corsica and Elba and withdraw to the safety of Gibraltar.

The overall balance of naval power then, was as follows. The British maintained undoubted naval supremacy on a global scale, particularly after battering the Brest Fleet on the Glorious First of June. In a strategic sense, the British maintained their ability to blockade much of the European coast and cut off Spain from her colonies. The Franco-Spanish coalition, however, maintained the ability to amass local supremacy in the Bay of Biscay and in the Western Mediterranean. The British Mediterranean Fleet disposed of just 15 ships of the line, while the Spanish Fleet and the French Toulon Fleet could amass up to 38 if they congregated together for action.

It is a point of particular interest, then, that the British fleet would be outnumbered and outgunned in the two decisive battles of the Mediterranean theater - these being the Battles of Cape St. Vincent and the Nile. In both instances, the British would defeat larger enemy fleets through a deadly nexus of superior seamanship and discipline, excellent gunnery, and brilliant tactical aggression on the part of one particular officer, who now bursts on the scene in full force. Nelson's time had come.

The first opportunity for decisive action in the theater came in February of 1797. The Spanish intended to shuttle a large fleet - comprised of some 25 ships of the line - from the port at Cartagena, which lies in Spain's inner Mediterranean coast, to Cadiz, which is on the Atlantic. Necessarily, then, the Spanish had to cross through Gibraltar in full view of the British fleet under Admiral John Jervis, which set out in pursuit with its 15 ships. The British chase was aided by a powerful easterly wind, which pushed the Spanish much further out to sea than intended, and created the space necessary to allow Jervis to close with them.

The Battle of Cape St. Vincent began in the most cinematic and suspensful manner possible, with the two fleets drawing near in dense fog. Jervis knew that the Spanish fleet had been driven out to sea in a loop and would be working their way back towards the coast, but did not have an exact pin on their location or disposition. On February 11, a British frigate managed to sail right past the Spanish in a thick early morning fog bank and delivered a report to Jervis, allowing him to dial in his search. By the morning of the 14th, the fleets were within some 30 miles of each other, and the British could hear Spanish signal guns firing in the distant fog.

As the mist cleared in the sunlight on the 14th, Jervis at last could see the Spanish at a distance. The British fleet - comprised of just 15 ships of the line - was decisively outnumbered by the Spanish, who counted 25 line ships, but Jervis could immediately see a tactical opportunity. The Spanish admiral, Jose de Cordoba, had neglected to order his fleet and keep them on station - rather than sailing in an orderly battle line, the Spanish ships were clustered in a pair of masses, with 16 ships in the forward cloud, 9 in the rear, and a distance of several miles between the two bodies. With the Spanish fleet both divided into two masses and unprepared for battle, Jervis saw that he had an opportunity to engage a larger enemy fleet on favorable terms - and even more importantly, defeat the Spanish before they could link up with the French fleet. Jervis immediately ran up signals to prepare for battle, commenting stoically to the officers on his flagship, the Victory, that "A victory to England is very essential at this moment."

The signals from Jervis's flagship offer an insightful look at the brevity and decisiveness that characterized good command and control in this era. The essence of Jervis's entire battle plan was communicated to the fleet with just three signals, delivered at the following times:

• 11:00 AM: "Form in a line of battle ahead and astern of Victory as most convenient."

• 11:12 AM: "Engage the enemy."

• 11:30 AM: "Admiral intends to pass through enemy lines."

With just these three signals, the British fleet wheeled into action with deadly purpose. They had originally been approaching the Spanish in two parallel columns, but at the first signal the two columns began to merge into a single consolidated battle line, which plowed straight into the gap between the two Spanish masses. Jervis's intention was to split the gap and deliver scathing fire on the rear Spanish division, repelling it and forcing it to turn away, so that he could wheel his own line in pursuit of the lead Spanish ships.

The opening pass of the battle went well for the British line. Sailing in a tight column, they passed directly between the separated clouds of Spanish ships. The rearmost Spanish division, seeing that the British were going to cut them off from their comrades, attempted to drive through the British line, but the withering fire of the passing British ships tore up the lead Spanish vessels and forced them to turn aside. The first Spanish ship to approach, the Principe de Asturias, received two broadsides, including one from Jervis's Victory, and was forced to break away from the battle.

Jervis now had his line squarely between the two Spanish groupings. The rear Spanish squadron had been smacked in the nose and was turning away from the fight, giving the British an opportunity to wheel and engage the Spanish vanguard. Unfortunately, the lead Spanish division had wasted no time peeling into the wind - not to fight, but to sail away from the battle and make for Cadiz. Jervis had already begun to wheel his line about in pursuit, but with the wind blowing to the northeast the Spanish had already begun to pull away. This threatened a disaster for the British. The entire point of this engagement was the unique opportunity for an outnumbered British fleet to engage the enemy while they were divided and in disarray - if the Spanish managed to simply haul off into the wind and escape, the day would be wasted in its entirety.

Jervis had his line turning into the wake of the Spanish to pursue, but they seemed to be too late. The prey was escaping. The lead British ship, the Culloden, was within range of the rearmost Spanish vessels, but most of the Spanish fleet was on track to slip away.

At this juncture, however, a lone British warship suddenly hauled out of the line. This was the HMS Captain, under the command of Commodore Horatio Nelson. Nelson - situated third from the rear of the British line - could see what was happening in its entirety. The Spanish were now passing him on the opposite course, and he could see that the Culloden and the front of the British line were coming about too slowly to catch them. Seeing that the enemy was escaping, he chose the course of maximum aggression and wheeled out of the line alone, executing a sharp turn and driving between the two friendly ships behind him, heading at top speed straight for the Spanish mass all alone.

Nelson's independent decision to break formation and attack the Spanish mass instantly changed the trajectory of the battle. Nelson's Captain was a modest 74 gun ship, charging straight into a cloud of sixteen Spanish vessels, several of which counted over 100 guns. His attack had an aura of suicidal recklessness to it, but it achieved a fantastic shock value. The Spanish, evidently thinking that they were going to sail clear of the battle, were taken aback by the spectacle of a lone British warship bearing down on them, and several Spanish ships collided as they tried to steer away from Nelson. The shock of Nelson's attack recalls the words of American novelist Charles Portis in his western classic True Grit:

You go for a man hard and fast enough and he don't have time to think about how many is with him, he thinks about himself and how he may get clear out of the wrath that is about to set down on him.

This was precisely what occurred in the Spanish fleet. The Captain, as it crashed into the Spanish mass, came under fire by no less than six enemy ships, but the shock value of Nelson's charge completely disordered the Spanish fleet and allowed the rest of the British line to spill into the action. Jervis, seeing and understanding what Nelson was doing, immediately signaled for the rear of his line to support the Captain - and not a moment too soon.

Nelson's ship suffered tremendously battling in the center of the Spanish fleet alone. By mid-afternoon the Captain had been de-masted and had her wheel shot away, making her entirely unmanageable. Remarkably, this did not diminish Nelson's aggression at all - he grappled his drifting ship with the Spanish San Nicolás, which had collided with the San José in their efforts to avoid his charge. He ordered his men to board and capture the San Nicolas, then cross over to the San Jose and board her too, with Nelson receiving the swords of both their captains in surrender.

The Battle of Cape St. Vincent was a deadly display of British tactical prowess which cast the relative proficiency of the fleets into sharp relief. The Spanish fleet was undoubtedly stronger in ships (25 against 15), total cannon (with well over 2,000 combined guns against some 1200 British guns), and manpower. The Spanish, however, never ordered themselves for a fight and were caught flat-footed in an attempt to escape action, while Jervis's smaller force sorted itself out efficiently for action and proved highly aggressive in the attack. In contrast to Jervis's single-minded drive for action, the Spanish admiral, Jose de Cordoba, never exerted meaningful command over the battle.

If the British advantages were primarily discipline, decisiveness, and tactical aggression, Commodore Nelson was the veritable avatar of all these things. He changed the battle in an instant at around 1 PM, observing that the Spanish were beginning to slip away and instantly choosing to wheel his own ship out of the line to attack. This unexpected rupture in the British line, with Nelson charging into the Spanish flank, was the singular moment that prevented the battle from ending indecisively: the subsequent disordering of the Spanish led to the capture of four Ships of the Line and inflicted some 4,000 Spanish casualties, against a mere 300 dead and severely wounded among the British.

Nelson's turn at Cape St. Vincent served as an iconic moment of foreshadowing for the great exploits that he would soon become known for. He was an officer with an instinctive aptitude for aggression and initiative, willing to take risks that bordered on suicidal recklessness. It is difficult to exaggerate just how reckless this maneuver was. His charge at the Spanish flank obviously entailed tremendous physical danger to both Nelson and his crew, with the Captain sailing into a maelstrom of fire with at least six Spanish ships - and indeed, the Captain was horrifically damaged by the end of the day. But Nelson's charge also entailed a professional risk, in that he disregarded Jervis's orders that the fleet hold a battle line - later, Nelson's actions were justified as an interpretation of a vague instruction from Jervis to "take suitable actions to engage the enemy."

In short, Nelson faced the imminent possibility of mutilation, professional disgrace, court martial, and death when he broke out of the line, but all of these concerns were overridden by his instinctive desire to grab the enemy and bash him. This attitude can be compared very favorably to the culture of the classical Prussian officer corps, which had a strong tolerance for the independence of field commanders in the attack. Prussian officers understood that they were extremely unlikely to be punished for disregarding or playing fast and loose with orders when they had the opportunity to attack. Nelson embodied a similar ethos at sea - one that skillful superiors like Jervis welcomed and empowered. After the battle, with his uniform torn and blacked from action, Nelson was received on Jervis's flagship to profuse praise. Nelson remembered: "The Admiral embraced me, said he could not sufficiently thank me, and used every kind expression which could not fail to make me happy."

When the news of the victory at Cape St. Vincent reached Britain, it caused a surge of energy and patriotism, with the public latching on to Jervis and Nelson in particular as heroic figures who had reinvigorated confidence in the British fighting man. For most in Britain, this was the first they had heard of Nelson's name - but it would by no means be the last. The career of this emerging British hero was on the verge of dovetailing with the military supernova rising on the continent. Napoleon was going to sea.

Nelson's Masterpiece: The Battle of the Nile

After the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, naval action in the Mediterranean languished for a year. The battered Spanish fleet took refuge in its base at Cadiz, and the victorious British began a watchful blockade, keeping the Spanish ships bottled up where they could not threaten Portugal (a key British ally). For the remainder of 1797, Nelson's lone meaningful action would be a botched amphibious assault on the Spanish Canary Islands, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of British marines. Nelson himself took a musket ball to the right elbow which shattered the bone. The limb was hastily amputated at the elbow, and Nelson was forced to recuperate in England for several months. Now 39 years old, his missing limb and partial blindness were a testament to his extreme tactical aggression and personal bravery.

The Mediterranean swung back into full force as a theater of action in 1798, under the auspices and initiative of Napoleon, who like Nelson had become the rising military superstar of his country thanks to his performance in the opening rounds of the war. The Directory in Paris had declared war (again) on Britain, and were seeking the opportunity to wage a proactive campaign against global British power. With the prospect of a cross channel invasion bleak given the superiority of the Royal Navy, it was Napoleon who suggested an expedition to Egypt in a speculative attempt to strike at the British underbelly. The Egyptian enterprise carried a variety of tenuous and loosely connected objectives, ranging from a poorly defined scheme to improve French trade linkages in the middle east, all the way to Napoleon's more ambitious proposal to threaten British India.

Whatever its ultimate guiding animus, in the spring of 1798 the French naval base at Toulon became a beehive of activity as Napoleon assembled his invasion force - 40,000 men, requiring nearly 300 transports to carry them with their horses, cannon, and supplies. The ground force was to be escorted by the Toulon battle fleet, consisting of 13 ships of the line, including the massive 124 gun l'Orient, under the command of Admiral François-Paul Brueys d'Aigalliers. In order to conceal their intentions from the British, absolute secrecy was maintained, such that only Napoleon and his immediate subordinates even knew what the objective of the expedition was.

Despite French OPSEC, it was impossible to conceal the buildup at Toulon entirely, and by late May the Royal Navy was well aware that a large force was preparing to depart - though for what destination, they did not know. Admiral Jervis, commanding the watchful blockade of the Spanish fleet at Cadiz, was ordered to dispatch a squadron to reconnoiter Toulon and keep tabs on the massing French fleet. He had the perfect man for the job in Nelson. Thus, the stage was set for a dramatic chase across thousands of miles, worthy of any Hollywood blockbuster.

On May 8, Nelson passed through the strait of Gibraltar in his flagship, the 74 gun HMS Vanguard, along with the Orion and the Alexander (also 74s) and three frigates. The date is rather serendipitous, because it was the next day (the 9th) that Napoleon arrived in Toulon from Paris and began the process of embarking his army for departure. On May 19, the French fleet began to spill out of Toulon with its massive cloud of transport craft. The following day, Nelson's little squadron ran afoul of a terrific storm, which was to have profound implications. The storm not only completely demasted the Vanguard, forcing Nelson to anchor at Sardinia for repairs, but it also scattered his three frigates.

The captains of Nelson's frigates presumed that, with the little fleet scattered by the storm, Nelson would return to the British base at Gibraltar to regroup - naturally, therefore, that is where they headed. Nelson, however, had his blood up to hunt the French fleet and was in no mood to return to base - especially because a little brig arrived off the coast of Sardinia and informed him that Jervis was sending him 11 additional ships of the line. Jervis, however, naturally had no clue that Nelson had lost his frigates in the storm, and accordingly did not send him any.

Nelson's loss of the frigates on May 20 was to have a profound effect on the ensuing chase. Frigates were smaller, lither, and more lightly armed vessels (usually with something on the order of 34 to 40 guns). Much too small to tangle in close quarters with the huge line ships, frigates instead filled extremely important roles as scouts, messengers, and recovery vessels, sailing ahead of the main fleet, peeking into harbors, and carrying dispatches. A fleet comprised entirely of heavy line ships was, without putting too fine a point on it, blind, and the storm of May 20th had firmly blinded Nelson precisely as the French were departing from Toulon.

Bereft of his frigates, Nelson stayed true to form and took the maximally aggressive and decisive course of action. His orders were to find the French fleet and sink it, so that is what he did - frigates or no frigates. On June 7, a row of masts crested the horizon from Nelson's vantage point off Sardinia. These were the 11 ships dispatched by Jervis to be his reinforcements, bringing Nelson's total strength up to 14 line ships - all of them 74 guns, with the lone exception of the 50 gun Leander. It was time to hunt.

Nelson set out again on June 10, working his way around Corsica and down the coast of Italy in search of the French. By this point, however, he was already well behind. Napoleon and Admiral Brueys had arrived at Malta (then under the control of the Knights Hospitaller) on June 9 and had captured the island, spending over a week there establishing a French occupation and deprovisioning their ships.

Napoleon's relatively long stayover in Malta gave Nelson an opportunity to close the gap, and it created a close call which ably demonstrates the role of chance and uncertainty in warfare. Napoleon did not leave Malta until June 18, at which point Nelson was already close by, off the coast of Sicily. However, on June 22 Nelson stopped a small merchant vessel, whose captain told him that the French had departed Malta on the 16th. Operating with this incorrect information, Nelson believed that the French had a head start of nearly a week, and guessed (correctly) that Napoleon's objective was Egypt.

Believing that the French had a much longer head start than they actually did, Nelson decided to set off for Egypt at top speed - a choice which caused him to miss an opportunity to catch the French on the open sea. On June 22, the Leander actually faintly spotted several of Napoleon's ships on the horizon, but Nelson (thinking the French were already hundreds of miles ahead) decided to ignore the sighting and go straight to Egypt. Again, the lack of frigates severely impeded his ability to search thoroughly.

Racing at top speed for Egypt, Nelson's fleet rapidly outpaced the French (who were slowed by the lethargic troop transports), and by midday on June 23, the British had passed Napoleon's fleet. Still operating under false intelligence, Nelson believed the French were ahead, when in fact it was now he that was leading. On June 28, Nelson's fleet sailed into the harbor at Alexandria and found it empty of French warships. This appears to have shocked Nelson, as he had calculated that the French fleet ought to have arrived there the day before. Finding the port empty, Nelson immediately hauled his fleet off to the east and began a sweeping search of the Eastern Mediterranean, combing the Levantine coast, the inlets of southern Turkey, and the coasts of Crete and Greece, before sweeping all the way back to Sicily.

Nelson was a man of action and decision. When he found the giant harbor at Alexandria devoid of French ships on June 28, he immediately supposed that he had incorrectly guessed Napoleon's destination and departed to resume the search. In fact, if he had loitered at Alexandria for just a day, he would have been waiting when the French fleet pulled into view. By the 1st of July, Napoleon's army was ashore in Egypt, and the French ships of the line had anchored in Abu Qir Bay, some 12 miles northeast of the city - but by this point, Nelson was already moving at high speed up the coastline towards the Levant.

Nelson came tantalizingly close to intercepting the French on the open water on multiple occasions, in scrapes so close that it is difficult to believe they really happened - particularly given the vastness of the Mediterranean. The distance from Gibraltar to Alexandria is some 2,000 miles as the crow flies, but Nelson's route was much longer, with its circuitous path along the coast of France and Italy, searching every inlet and harbor for the enemy fleet. In all, Nelson's fleet traveled well in excess of 5,000 miles in its search, and yet on multiple occasions they came frighteningly close to finding the enemy. Nelson was within 70 miles when the storm of May 20 scattered his frigates, and on June 22 he came as close as 30 miles - later that night, as he passed the French in the dark, they were so close that French sailors could hear the sound of British cannon signaling each other. Later, he arrived at Alexandria only a day ahead of Napoleon. Near miss after near miss, much to Nelson's frustration.

Nelson could apprehend on multiple occasions that he was on the right trail, and that his own instincts had caught Napoleon's scent. This is why the lack of frigates weighed so heavily on him, and in hindsight (knowing, as we do, how close the fleets came to each other) we can rightly say that Nelson probably would have caught the French between Malta and Alexandria if he had only had a few frigates to widen his search radius. He would write in his diary during the chase: "Were I to die at this moment, 'want of frigates!' would be stamped on my heart."

Equally important, however, was the incorrect intelligence that he received off the coast of Sicily, when he was told that the French had left Malta on June 16 (when in fact Napoleon had not departed until the 18th). Nelson seems to have grabbed on to this report as his one solid piece of intelligence and based his calculation of the French position off of it, but of course it was wrong, and so he misjudged his arrival at Alexandria.

The upshot of all this chasing was that, rather than catching the French in the open water in early June (when the French warships would have had the difficult task of trying to defend the vast cloud of transport ships), Nelson spent not only the remainder of June but also almost the entirety of July searching the Mediterranean in vain. On July 25 - the day that Napoleon smashed the Egyptian Mamluks at the Battle of the Pyramids - Nelson's fleet was a thousand miles away off the coast of Sicily. It was not until the HMS Culloden, in a stroke of random fortune, encountered and captured a French merchantman carrying wine that Nelson learned the truth, that Napoleon had arrived in Alexandria only a day after his own visit to the port. This news, which confirmed Nelson's suspicion that Egypt had been the French objective all along, seems to have energized the admiral, and he hauled off for Alexandria at top speed.

Nelson's fleet arrived at Alexandria on August 1 to find the French tricolor waving over the city and the port clogged with French transports and merchant vessels. Curiously, however, none of the French ships of the line were to be seen. After their June arrival, Admiral Brueys had considered a variety of options as to where and how to station his warships, and had chosen to deploy them in Abu Qir Bay - a gently curved, semi protected stretch of coast just to the east of Alexandria. That is precisely where Nelson found them on the evening of June 1.

Brueys' chief concern, from the beginning, had been the possibility that Nelson might come upon his fleet in anchorage, and the French deployment was chosen specifically to give them the best odds (as Brueys saw it) in the event of a battle. The French warships, comprising 13 ships of the line, were anchored in a gently curving battle line across the width of Abu Qir Bay, protected (or so they hoped) by the shoals. Brueys believed that by forming his line snugly against the curvature of the coast, he would leave the British unable to maneuver around him and compel them to take the fight straight up against the seaward flank of his line. To ensure the integrity of the line, Brueys had taken the additional step of lashing many of his ships together end to end with heavy cables, to prevent British ships from breaking through.

The overall tactical schema from the French, then was very simply to transform their line into an immobile, anchored fortress, protected by the coastline. It is clear that they considered it an impossibility that the British would be able to squeeze between their line and the coast, as evidenced by the fact that the port French batteries (that is, the cannon facing the shore) were not prepared for action. If the battle had proceeded as Brueys envisioned - that is, as a straightforward exchange of fire between lines - the French had reasonable prospects of success. Both fleets had 13 first rate ships of the line, but whereas all of Nelson's ships were 74s, Brueys had a pair of heavier 80s as well as the mammoth l'Orient, with her 120 guns.

Several factors, however, would ruin the French vision for the battle. In the first place, the entire positioning of the French fleet had been botched. Brueys was counting on the shoreline to keep the British from getting behind his line, but the French ship at the front of the line - the Guerrier - was anchored nearly 1,000 yards from the edge of the shoals, leaving a gap that was small (in naval terms) but still adequate for British warships to slip in. Secondly, the French had neglected to anchor the sterns of their vessels (that is, they were anchored only at the bow) which allowed them to swing somewhat freely in the wind, creating further gaps in the line where British ships could penetrate. Finally, Brueys severely underestimated the tactical aggression of Nelson and his captains, who arrived on August 1 ready to give battle immediately.

The great battle in Abu Qir Bay, which comes down to us in history as the Battle of the Nile, was a singular demonstration of Nelson's aggression, tactical flexibility, and penchant for decisive action. The French had been in their anchorage for over a month, while Nelson's fleet had only just arrived after weeks at sea. Nevertheless, Nelson was determined to take the fight immediately and drew up to attack. The critical action would be fought overnight from August 1-2, with the first shots fired in the early evening, just a few hours after the British arrived at Alexandria.

Nelson's plan of action centered on the crucial fact that the French battle line was anchored, and thus immobile. The initial schema aimed to take advantage of French immobility to attack the vanguard and center of the line, attacking each French ship with two British vessels, and creating a local superiority at the front while the French rear sat idly at anchor. As the lead British vessels rounded into the bay, however, they noticed an unexpected gap between the Guerrier and the shore. Captain Thomas Foley, on board the Goliath at front of the British attack, decided independently to veer into the gap between the French and the shore.

It is difficult to understand how disorienting the beginning of the battle was for the French. The British fleet first came into sight at about 4 PM on August 1 - Brueys recalled those of his men that were on shore and weighed his options, but judged that it was late in the day and the British were unlikely to seek a night battle so soon after arriving. Simultaneously, however, Nelson was dining with his officers and expressing his determination to give battle immediately, famously saying: "Before this time tomorrow I shall have gained a peerage or Westminster Abbey." At 5:30 PM, Nelson signaled for his lead ships - the Goliath and the Zealous - to lead the attack into the harbor. By 6:20 PM, the the fleets were exchanging fire and the battle had begun. Finally, at 6:30 PM the Goliath crossed over the head of the Guerrier and slipped between the French line and the shore.

This was an incredible and sudden turn of affairs. Less than three hours after the British first arrived in the area, the battle had not only begun, but British ships had penetrated between the French line and the shore - a disaster that Brueys had thought an impossibility due to the shoals. The speed and urgency with which Nelson sorted himself out for battle and the ferocious tactical aggression of the British put the French permanently on the back foot, and they spent the subsequent hours in a state of total reactivity.

The British fleet attacked in three subsequent columns, comprised of five, four, and four ships respectively. The first column, led by the Goliath, dashed into the gap between the Gurrier and the shore and began to work its way up the French line on the shoreward side. The British attacked in a leapfrogging style, firing broadsides as they went before each British ship dropped its anchor to settle directly alongside a French counterpart. What this meant was that, within the first hour of the battle, each of four French ships at the front of the line now faced a British ship anchored directly alongside it on the shoreward flank. This was a disaster for the French, as they had not prepared their shoreward batteries for action, and the lead French vessels suffered terribly in the opening salvos.

One British ship, the Orion, was surprised as it worked its way along the shore to come under fire by the French frigate Serieuse. It was considered a standard nicety of battle at the time that lightly armed frigates did not exchange fire with line ships. Frigates were too small to exert a meaningful influence in a pitched battle - their main role was recovering overboard sailors and towing away damaged ships - and it was considered a gentlemanly protocol to leave them alone in battle. The 36 gun Serieuse's ill-advised decision to shoot at the 74 gun Orion evidently greatly irritated Captain James Saumarez, and he paused to unleash a point blank broadside which reduced the little French ship to a wreck. The Orion then continued its attack run along the shoreward flank of the main French battle line.

After the first British attack run, then, the French were already in disarray - caught completely off guard by the British run into their shoreward side, scrambling to open their left hand batteries to return fire. It was at this moment, as the French were in a state of extreme disorientation, that Nelson led the attack of the second British column, which now ran up along the seaward side of the French just before 7:00 PM, taking several most of the French vanguard in a deadly crossfire.

As night fell on the Egyptian coastline, Abu Qir Bay remained lit by the blazing signal lamps of the British fleet and the fires that now raged on the decks of the French. The burning fires, shrouded by smoke beneath a darkening sky, gave the battle a stygian and cinematic quality, but a peek through the smoke would have revealed the French fleet steadily wasting away under the deadly British crossfire. By 10:00, most of the French vanguard was disabled to various extents, and surviving French captains began to surrender.

The battle was not without blemishes for the British fleet. One of Nelson's rearmost ships, the Culloden, was grounded while attempting to round the shoals and spent most of the battle attempting to free itself unsuccessfully with the aid of the little cutter Mutine. The grounding of the Culloden was a poignant reminder of just how small the margin of error was for the British attack as it skirted the shoals. Meanwhile, HMS Bellerophon, attacking the French center, misdjudged its approach and accidentally found itself tangling with Brueys' powerful flagship - the 120 gun l'Orient. By 8 PM, the massive firepower of l'Orient had collapsed all three of the Bellerophon's masts, and her captain was forced to cut his anchors and allow the shift to drift away from the battle.

l'Orient, however, had suffered badly as well, and by 9:00 the British observed a fire raging on the lower decks of the French flagship. French fire control was now failing, owing to the destruction of the deck pumps by British shot, and Captain Benjamin Hallowell of the Swiftsure ordered his gun crews to begin firing directly at the burning decks of l'Orient, which spread the flames and prevented the French from fighting the fire. Finally, at 10 PM, the fire reached the powder magazine, and l'Orient exploded in a colossal fireball, which temporarily stopped all the fighting as ships British and French alike scrambled to get clear of the blast. Admiral Brueys had already been killed by this point (nearly cut in half by a direct hit from a cannonball), and now the burning hulk of his flagship carried him down in an improvised burial at sea.

The detonation of l'Orient marked the climax of the battle which put the finishing touch on the French discombobulation, with their exploded flagship blowing a literal hole in the center of their line. Several ships in the French rear (which had not been engaged up to this point) cut their anchors to get away from the fires, and inadvertently drifted backwards into the shoals. Two French ships, the Heureux and Mercure, were captured almost completely intact when the morning light revealed them stranded on the shoals at the southern end of the bay, while another -the Timoleon - was destroyed when it ran aground in a botched attempt to escape, and was then set alight by her crew to prevent her capture. And that, as they say, was that.

The Battle of the Nile was a quintessentially decisive battle. In a single night, Nelson smashed the entire French Mediterranean battle fleet in a victory so comprehensive that it bordered on annihilation. Of the 13 French ships of the line that participated, 11 were lost, along with two of the four French frigates on scene. The price for destroying virtually the entire enemy fleet was just three disabled ships, all of which were recoverable: the grounded Culloden, and the Bellerophon and Majestic, both of which were demasted in duels with larger enemy ships. It is not an exaggeration to call the Nile the single most decisive victory in the age of sail: the entire enemy battle fleet annihilated in a few hours, winning near total control over the Mediterranean in one moment.

What stands out most about the Nile was the extreme tactical aggression displayed by Nelson, and the high tempo of his attack. The battle reached its crescendo with the explosion of l'Orient at roughly 10 PM: just six hours after Nelson's fleet arrived near Abu Qir Bay. In a single night, Nelson strategically checkmated the entire French expedition to Egypt: bereft of the fleet, Napoleon's army was now stranded far from home, and he was soon forced to abandon his army and evacuate back to France.

The Nile bore all the hallmarks of Nelson's personality and genius, particularly his aggression and personal bravery. Abu Qir Bay was not a well charted zone for the British, and in fact they lacked depth charts or a clear view of where the shoals were. Brueys was confident that a night attack skirting the shoal would have been suicidal - and indeed, the grounding of the Culloden shows that the British were taking a serious risk by making an attack run so close to the shallows. Nelson, however, judged that tempo and aggression were more important than exhaustive prudence. Brueys believed that he had all night to prepare for battle, but in reality he had approximately 45 minutes.

It may be worth considering, for a moment, the particular role that Nelson played in winning the battle. It is true that he did not micromanage the actions of his ships of course, and that such finely tuned command and control was not possible. Nor was he the architect of British gunnery or the designer of her ships. Nevertheless, a great deal of credit belongs personally to him, in that his command instilled a spirit of aggression and risk taking in his captains, and his sketch of the battle plan created the rapid attacking tempo that unhinged the French.

In the many weeks that they were at sea, combing the Mediterranean for the French fleet, Nelson held frequent conferences with his officers, at which they sketched out various plans of action and contingencies, depending on the disposition of the French fleet. Nelson had his captains prepared for action well in advance and preached an aggressive ethos in battle, and this fact explains why the British were able to offer battle with a coherent maneuver scheme almost immediately after arriving. Furthermore, Nelson encouraged risk taking by his readiness to shower effusive praise on subordinates when they acted decisively, and set a personal example by exposing himself without reservation to danger. At the Nile, he was wounded by a piece of shrapnel which shredded his forehead. The bleeding was so severe that he told the surgeon: "I am killed. Remember me to my wife." But of course he was not killed, and returned to the deck for action as soon as he had been stitched up, later refusing to enter his name in the casualty list.

Both by his personal example and through his calls for an aggressive attacking tempo, Nelson created a schema of tactical aggression that was understood by all of his captains. He bears a close resemblance to land generals par excellence like Napoleon and Von Moltke, who not only showed deft operational touch but also produced a culture of aggression, tempo, and an instinctive desire to get at the enemy and attack him immediately. At the Nile, Brueys and his fleet ended up disordered, disoriented, and cognitively overwhelmed by Nelson's initiative, and the British achieved the ultimate dream of naval combat: seizing command of an entire sea in a single night through the annihilation of the enemy fleet.

Nelson Unblocks the Baltic

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8. The Forest and the Trees: Ukraine's Strategic Dissipation

In virtually all eras of human history, protracted high intensity wars have been the most intricate and overwhelming challenges that a state can face. Warfare presents a multi-faceted strain on state powers of coordination and mobilization, requiring a synchronized, full-spectrum mobilization of national resources. It is no coincidence that periods of intense warfare have frequently spurred the rapid evolution of state structures and powers, with the state forced to spawn new methods of control over industry, populations, and finance in order to sustain its war-making. Even in a country like the United States, which likes to think of itself as relatively untouched by war, the eras of rapid state expansion and metastatic administrative growth have correlated with the country's great wars: the federal bureaucracy grew in massive spurts during the Civil War and the World Wars, and the state security apparatus exploded to accommodate the Global War on Terror. War is destructive, but it is also an inducement to rapid technological change and state expansion.

The myriad decisions and tasks facing a state at war can easily boggle the mind, and they span the technical, tactical, operational, industrial, and financial realms. Choosing where this or that infantry battalion ought to be deployed, how much money to invest in this or that weapons system, how to acquire and allocate scarce resources like energy and fuel - all decisions made in a vast concatenation of uncertainty and chance. The scope of this coordination problem is astonishing, and readily becomes apparent in the context of hundreds of thousands, or even millions of men fighting on thousands of kilometers of front, disposing of incomprehensible quantities of ammunition and food and fuel.

The sheer scope of this coordination game brings the inherent threat of decision making paralysis and distraction, with a vast array of operational minutia and competing political concerns causing the focus of the army and state to dissipate. The war begins to absorb its own energies and become unmoored from strategic direction. The prototypical example of this, of course, is Nazi Germany, which by 1943 continued to wage war with extreme energy and intensity, but without a unified strategic animus or theory of victory. German effort and capacity never seriously slackened; the German army continued to fight and hold positions, German commanders continued to deliberate and argue about holding this salient and that river line, German industry continued to produce ammunition and advanced weaponry, and the German logistical apparatus continued to shuttle vast quantities of coal and fuel and supplies and human biomass back and forth across the continent. This enormous energy and intensity, however, was unmoored from a theory of victory, and Germany's war became detached from any political or strategic sense about how the conflict could be ended in anything other than the destruction of the German homeland.

In other words, war as an enormous challenge of coordination and mobilization always brings about the dangerous possibility of losing the forest for the trees, as the expression goes. The dissipation of energy into tactical, technical, and industrial minutia threatens to separate the state from a coherent theory of victory. This threat becomes more pressing the more protracted a war becomes, as initial theories of how the conflict will unfold are upended by events, and become muddled and buried by subsequently unfolding plans, chance, and exhaustion.

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As the war in Ukraine approaches its third full winter, the Ukrainian war effort now appears to be similarly directionless and listless. Previous efforts to seize the initiative on the ground have failed, the AFU's carefully husbanded resources have been steadily exhausted, and Russia continues to methodically plow its way through Ukraine's chain of fortresses in the Donbas. Ukraine's war continues unabated, but its energies and focus increasingly seem dissipated and unmoored from a particular vision or theory of victory.

Blueprint of Desperation: The Victory Plan

For Ukraine, the central political development of October has been the dramatic unveiling of President Zelensky's so-called "Victory Plan", which laid out a tenuous roadmap for Ukraine to win the war without ceding territory to Russia. In many ways, the presentation of a "victory plan" more than two and a half years into the war is very odd. It may then be worthwhile to contemplate the war holistically and consider that this is not Ukraine's first theoretical framework for victory; in fact, Kiev has now pursued no less than four different strategic axes, all of which have failed.

To begin, we must remember what "victory" means for Ukraine, within the confines of their own expressed strategic goals. Ukraine has defined its own victory to mean the successful re-attainment of its 1991 borders, meaning not only the ejection of Russian forces from the Donbas but also the recapture of Crimea. Furthermore, having succeeded in achieving these goals on the ground, Kiev expects NATO membership and the associated American-backed security guarantees as a prize for winning.

Understanding the lofty extent of Ukraine's framework for victory, we can articulate several different "theories of victory" that Ukraine has pursued. I am labelling them as follows:

• The Short War Theory: This was the overarching strategic animus in the opening year of the war (2022), which presupposed that Russia was anticipating a short war against an isolated Ukraine. This theory of victory relied on the assumption that Russia would be unwilling or unable to commit the resources necessary in the face of unexpected Ukrainian resistance and a blitz of military support and sanctions from the west. There was a kernel of truth underpinning this theory, in the sense that the resources mobilized on the Russian side were inadequate in the first year of the war (leading to significant Ukrainian successes on the ground in Kharkov, for example), however, this phase of the war ended in the winter of 2022 with Russian mobilization and the shift of the Russian economy to a war footing.

• The Crimean Isolation Plan: This theory of victory took primacy in 2023, and identified Crimea as the strategic center of gravity for Russia. Kiev therefore supposed that Russia could be crippled or knocked out of the war by severing its connection to Crimea - a plan which required capturing a corridor in the land bridge on the Azov coast through a mechanized counteroffensive, bringing Crimea and its linkeages within easy range of Ukrainian strike systems. This plan collapsed with the decisive defeat of the Ukrainian ground operation on the Orokhiv-Robotyne axis.

• The Attritional Theory: Presupposed that Ukraine's defensive posture in the Donbas could impose disproportionate and catastrophic casualties on the Russian Army and utterly degrade Russia's combat capability, while Ukraine's own combat power was regenerated through western arms deliveries and training assistance.

• The Counter-Pressure Theory: Finally, Ukraine has postulated that a multi-domain pressure campaign on Russia, including the seizure of Russian home territory in Kursk oblast, a campaign of strikes on Russian strategic assets, and the continued strain of western sanctions, would promote the collapse of Russia's willingness to fight.

Such "theories of victory" are critical to keep in back of mind, and should not be forgotten among all the discussions of the operational and technical particulars of the war on the ground (as interesting as they are). It is only when actions on the ground correlate to a particular animating strategic vision that they gain meaning. Excitement over the exchange of lands and lives in Kursk or in the urban settlements around Pokrovsk become meaningful when they are chained to a particular strategic concept of victory.

The problem for Ukraine is that, thus far at least, all of their overarching strategic visions have failed - not only in their own particular terms on the ground, but also in their connection to "victory" as such. A concrete example might be useful. Ukraine's offensive in the Kursk region has failed on the ground (more details on this later) with the advance jammed up by Russian defenses early and now steadily rolled back with heavy losses. But the offensive also fails conceptually: attacking and holding Russian territory in Kursk has made Moscow more intransigent and unwilling to negotiate, and it has failed to meaningfully move the needle on NATO backing for Ukraine.

And this is Ukraine's problem. It seeks the return of all its 1991 territories, including those that Russia now controls and administers, many of which are far beyond Ukraine's realistic military reach. It is utterly inconceivable, for example, to contemplate Ukraine recapturing Donetsk with a ground operation. Donetsk is a vast industrial city of nearly a million residents, ensconced far behind Russian frontlines and fully integrated into Russia's logistical chains. Yet the recapture of Donetsk is an explicit Ukrainian war aim.

Ukraine's ongoing refusal to "negotiate" the surrender of any territory within the 1991 borders brings Kiev to a strategic impasse. It is one thing to say that Ukraine will not give up territories that it currently possesses, but Kiev has extended its war aims to be inclusive of lands that are firmly in Russian control, far beyond Ukraine's military reach. This leaves Ukraine with no possibility of ending the war without losing on its own terms, because their own war aims fundamentally require the total collapse of Russia's ability to fight.

And thus, we come to Zelensky's tenuous "victory plan." Perhaps unsurprisingly, the plan is little more than a plea for the west to go all-in on Ukraine. The planks of the victory plan, as such, are:

• An official promise of NATO membership for Ukraine

• Intensified western assistance to shore up Ukraine's air defense and equip additional mechanized brigades

• More western strike systems and the green light to attack targets deep inside prewar Russia (something Ukraine has been doing anyway)

• A nebulous pledge to build a "non-nuclear deterrent" against Russia, which ought to be interpreted as an extension of the request for western assistance launching deep strikes on Russian territory

• Western investments to exploit Ukrainian mineral resources to economically rehabilitate the country

When you put it all together, the "victory plan" is essentially a plea for more help, asking NATO to rebuild Ukraine's ground forces and air defenses, while providing enhanced strike capabilities, with long-term integration with the west via NATO membership and western exploitation of Ukrainian natural resources. When you add in a few ancillary requests (like integrating Ukraine into NATO's real-time ISR), it's clear that Kiev is pinning all of its hopes on some eventual trigger for direct NATO intervention.

And this, ultimately, is what has created Ukraine's unsolvable strategic dead end. Kiev clearly wants NATO to intervene directly in the conflict, and this has put Ukraine on an escalatory path. Ukraine's foray into the Kursk region, and their continued strikes on Russian strategic assets like airfields, oil refineries, and ISR installations, are clearly designed to draw NATO into the war by intentionally violating supposed Russian "red lines" and creating an escalatory spiral. At the same time, Zelensky has argued that Russian de-escalation would be a prerequisite for any negotiations - though, given his refusal to discuss ceding Ukrainian territories and his insistence on NATO membership, it's not clear what there is to discuss anyway. Specifically, he said quite recently that negotiations are impossible unless Russia ceases its strikes on Ukrainian energy and shipping infrastructure.

We end up with a picture where Ukraine's overarching strategic concept would appear to be pulling in two directions. Verbally, Zelensky has tied the prospects for negotiations to a de-escalation of the war on Russia's part (while excluding categorically any negotiations relevant to Russia's own war aims), but Ukraine's own actions - attempting to double down on both long range strikes and a ground incursion into Russia - are escalatory, as are the various demands made of NATO in the peace plan. There's a certain measure of strategic schizophrenia here, which all stems from the fact that Ukraine's own concept of victory is far beyond its military means. Western observers have suggested that a prerequisite for negotiations ought to be the stabilization of Ukraine's defenses in the Donbas - which in substance means containing and freezing the conflict - but the Ukrainian effort to expand and unlock the front with the Kursk incursion runs directly contrary to this.

The result is that Ukraine is now waging war as if - as if NATO intervention can eventually be provoked, as if Russia will crack and walk away from vast territories that it already controls, and as if western assistance can provide a panacea for Ukraine's deteriorating state on the ground. It all adds up to a blind plunge forward in the abyss, hoping that by escalating and radicalizing the conflict either Russia will break or NATO will step in. In either scenario, however, Ukraine is counting on powers external to it, trusting that NATO will provide a sort of deus ex machina that rescues Ukraine from ruination.

Ukraine stands today as a stark example of strategic dissipation. Having opted to eschew anything less than the most maximalist sort of victory - full re-attainment of the 1991 borders, NATO membership, and the total defeat of Russia - it now proceeds full speed ahead, with a material base and a gloomy picture on the ground that is utterly unmoored from its own conception of victory. The "victory plan", such as it exists, is little more than a plea for rescue. It is a country trapped by the two myths that animate its being - on the one hand, the notion of total western military supremacy, and on the other the theory of Russia as a giant with feet of clay, primed to collapse internally from the strain of a war that it is winning.

Strangling the Southern Donbas

On the ground, 2024 has been a year of largely unmitigated Russian victories. In the spring, the front transitioned to a new operational phase following Russia's capture of Avdiivka, which - as I argued at the time - left Ukrainian forces with no obvious places where they could anchor their next line of defense. Russian forces have continued to advance in the southern Donbas largely unabated, and the entire southeastern corner of the front is now buckling under an ongoing Russian offensive.

A brief look at the state of the front reveals the dire state of the AFU's defenses. Ukrainian lines in the southeast were based on a series of well-defended urban fortresses in a change, running from Ugledar on the southernmost end, to Krasnogorivka (which defended the approach to the Vovcha Reservoir, to Avdiivka (blocking the main line out of Donetsk to the northwest), all the way up to the Toretsk-Niu York agglomeration. The AFU lost the former three at various points in 2024 and are currently holding on to perhaps 50% of Toretsk. The loss of these fortress has unhinged the Ukrainian defense across nearly 100 kilometers of front, and subsequent efforts to stabilize the line have been stymied by a lack of adequate rear defenses, inadequate reserves, and Ukraine's own decision to funnel many of its best mechanized formations into Kursk. As a consequence, Russia has advanced steadily towards Pokrovsk, carving out a salient some 80 kilometers in circumference.

The picture that has emerged is one of highly attrited Ukrainian units being steadily driven out of poorly prepared defensive positions. Ukrainian reporting in September revealed that some Ukrainian brigades on the Pokrovsk axis are down to less than 40% of their full infantry complement, as replacements fall far short of burn rates, and ammunition has dwindled with the Kursk operation being given supply priority.

During the summer, much of the reporting on this front implied that Pokrovsk was the main operational target for the offensive, but this never really passed muster. The real advantage of the bursting advance towards Pokrovsk, rather, was that it gave the Russians access to the ridgeline to the north of the Vovcha River. At the same time, the capture of Ugledar and the subsequent breakthrough on the very southern end of the line puts the Russians on a downhill drive. The Ukrainian positions along the Vovcha - centered around Kurakhove, which has been a centerpiece of the Ukrainian position here for years - are all on the floor of a gentle river basin, with Russian forces coming downhill both from the south (the Ugledar axis) and the north (the Pokrovsk axis).

The Ukrainians are now defending a series of partially enveloped downhill positions, with the Vovcha River and reservoir acting as the hinge between them. On the northern bank, Ukrainian forces are quickly being compressed against the reservoir in a severe salient (particularly after the loss of Girnyk in the final week of October). Meanwhile, the Russians have forced multiple breaches on the southern line, reaching the towns of Shakhtarske and Bogoyavlenka. This advance is particularly important due to the orientation of Ukrainian defensive emplacements in this area. Most of the Ukrainian trench lines and strongpoints are arranged to defend against an advance from the south (that is, they run on an east-west orientation), particularly on the axis north of Velya Novosilka. What this means, in essence, is that the capture of Ugledar and the advance to Shakhtarske have outflanked the best Ukrainian positions in the southeast.

It is likely that the coming weeks will see Russian momentum continue, parsing through the thin Ukrainian defenses on the southern line while simultaniously advancing down the ridgeline from the Selydove-Novodmytrivka axis towards Andriivka, which forms the center of gravity pulling in both Russian pincers. Ukraine is facing the loss of the entire southeastern corner of the front, including Kurakhove, in the coming months.

The current trajectory of the Russian advance suggests that by the end of 2024, they will be on the verge of completely wrapping up the southeastern sector of the front, pushing the frontline out in a wide arc running from Andriivka to Toretsk. This would put Russia in control of some 70% of Donetsk Oblast, and set the stage for the next phase of operations which will push for Pokrovsk and begin a Russian advance eastward along the H15 highway, which connects Donetsk and Zaporozhia.

The methodology of the Russian advance has furthermore upset Ukraine's calculations around attrition, and there is little evidence that the Russian offensive is unsustainable. Russia has increasingly turned to smaller units to probe Ukrainian positions, followed by heavy bombardment with guided glide bombs and artillery before assaulting. The use of small probing units (often 5 to 7 men) followed by the physical destruction of Ukrainian positions limits Russian casualties. Meanwhile, the constant presence of Orlan drones (now flying unmolested due to the severe shortage of Ukrainian air defense) gives the Russians unimpeded ISR, and increasing availability of ever larger and longer-range glide bombs has made the reduction of Ukrainian hard points much easier.

The shifting tactical-technical nexus of the Russian offensive has scuttled Ukrainian hopes of a winning attrition calculus. Western officials estimate that the Russian Army continues to intake some 30,000 new recruits per month, which is far more than they need to replenish losses. With Mediazona counting some 23,000 Russian KIA thus far in 2024, Russian margins on manpower are highly sustainable. Meanwhile, Ukraine's pipeline for manpower is becoming ever thinner: even after passing a new mobilization law in May, their pool of replacements in training has fallen by more than 40%, and they currently have just 20,000 new personnel in training. The lack of replacements and rotations has left frontline units exhausted in both material terms and in their psychological state, with desertions and insubordination increasing. Ukrainian attempts to redouble their mobilization program have had mixed results, and have inadvertently increased casualties by prompting Ukrainian men to risk drowning to escape Ukraine.

In short, Russia's 2024 South Donetsk offensive has thus far succeeded in driving the AFU out of its frontline strongpoints which it had defended doggedly since the beginning of the war: Ugledar, Krasnogorivka, and Avdiivka have fallen, and Toretsk (the northernmost of these fortresses) is contested with Russian control over half of the city. The two cities that formerly acted as vital rear area hubs for the AFU (Pokrovsk and Kurakhove) are in the rear no longer, and have become frontline cities. Kurakhove in particular is likely to fall in the coming weeks. The Russians are, in a word, poised to complete their victory in Southern Donetsk.

It is important not to understate the operational and strategic significance of this. In the simplest terms, this will be a significant advancement towards Russia's explicit war aims of capturing the Donbas oblasts (putting Russia in control of some 70% of Donetsk and 90%+ of Lugansk).

Wrapping the southeastern corner of the front will also greatly simplify Russian defensive tasks, both by pushing the frontline away from its vital rail linkages and shortening the southern front. Ugledar, while the AFU held it, was the Ukrainian position closest to the rail lines that link Donetsk City with the southern front and Crimea; pushing the front all the way out to the Vovcha eliminates this potential threat to the rail. Additionally, the shortening of the southern front reduces the potential for future Ukrainian offensive operations on this axis. If Russia can roll up the line to Velyka Novosilka, the total exposed frontage in the south will shrink by nearly 20% to some 140 kilometers, compressing the battlespace and making Russian defensive tasks much simpler.

We do not want to give the impression that the ground war in Ukraine is anywhere near over. After consolidating in southern Donetsk, the Russian Army will be move off its springboards at Pokrovsk and Chasiv Yar to advance on Kostyantinivka, all as a prelude to a major operation aimed at the massive Kramatorsk-Slovyansk agglomeration. As a prerequisite, they will not only need to capture Kostyantinivka but also regain previously lost positions on the Lyman-Izyum axis, on the northern bank of the Donets River. These are all complicated combat tasks that will drag the war on until at least 2026.

Nevertheless, we do clearly see the Russian army making significant progress towards its goals. It will be able to write off much of the southeastern sector of front, with the AFU evicted from their powerful chain of prewar fortresses around the city of Donetsk. These losses raise an uncomfortable question for Ukraine: if they could not successfully defend in Avdiivka, Ugledar, and Krasnogorivka, with their long built-up defenses and powerful backfields, where exactly is their defense supposed to stabilize? We must also ask another salient question then: on the precipice of losing South Donetsk, with a full 100 kilometers of front unraveling, why are many of Ukraine's best brigades loitering 350 kilometers away in Kursk Oblast?

Operation Krepost: Status Check

When Ukraine first launched its offensive into Kursk in August, the reaction from the western commentariat ranged from cautiously optimistic to enthusiastic. The operation was variously hailed as a humiliation for Russia, a bold gambit to unlock the front, and an opportunity to force Russia to negotiate an end to the war. Even the more measured analysis, which acknowledged the precarious military logic of the operation, praised the political calculus of the operation and the psychological benefits of bringing the war into Russia.

Three months later, the enthusiasm has faded and it has become clear that the Kursk Operation (which I nicknamed Operation Krepost as an homage to the 1943 Battle of Kursk) has failed not only in the operational particulars, but also conceptually (that is, in its own terms) as an attempt to alter the trajectory of the war by changing Russia's political calculus and diverting forces from the Donbas. Krepost has not "turned the tide", but has in fact caused the tide to come in faster for Ukraine.

A brief refresher on the progression of the operation on the ground will help us understand the situation. Ukraine attacked on August 6th with an assortment of maneuver elements stripped from their dwindling roster of mechanized brigades, and managed to achieve something approximating strategic surprise, taking advantage of the forest canopy around Sumy to stage their forces. The forested terrain around Sumy affords one of the few places where it is possible to conceal forces from overhead Russian ISR, and stands in stark contrast to the flat and mostly treeless south, where Ukrainian preparations for the 2023 counteroffensive were well surveilled by the Russians.

Taking advantage of this concealment, the Ukrainians took the Russian border guards by surprise and overran the border in the opening day of the assault. However, by Friday, August 9, the Ukrainian offensive had already been irreparably bogged down. Three important factors intervened:

1. The unexpectedly stiff resistance of the Russian motor rifle forces in Sudzha, which forced the Ukrainians to waste much of the 7th and 8th enveloping the town before assaulting it.

2. The successful defense of Russian blocking positions at Korenevo and Bol'shoe Soldatskoe, which jammed up the Ukrainian advance on the main highways to the northwest and northeast of Sudzha respectively.

3. The rapid scrambling of Russian reinforcements and strike assets into the area, which began to smother AFU maneuver elements and strike their staging and support bases around Sumy.

It is, unequivocally, not an exaggeration to say that the Kursk operation had been sterilized by August 9, after only three days. By this point, the Ukrainians had suffered an unmistakable delay at Sudzha and had failed completely to break out further along the main highways. The AFU made a series of assaults on Korenevo in particular, but failed to break the Russian blocking position and remained jammed up in their salient around Sudzha. Their brief window of opportunity, gained via their concealed staging and strategic surprise, was now wasted, and the front calcified into yet another tight positional fight where the Ukrainians could not maneuver and saw their forces steadily attrited away by Russian fires.

It initially appeared that the Ukrainian intention was to reach the Seim river between Korenevo and Snagost, while striking bridges over the Seim with HIMARS. In theory, there was the possibility of isolating and defeating Russian forces on the southern bank of the Seim. This would have given Ukraine control over the southern bank, including the towns of Glushkovo and Tektino, creating a solid foothold and anchoring the left flank of their position in Russia. In my previous analysis, I speculated that this was probably the best possible outcome for Ukraine after their lanes of advance were jammed up in the opening week.

Instead, the entire operation went sour for the AFU. A Russian counterattack, led by the 155th Marine Infantry Brigade, managed to completely crumple the left shoulder of the Ukrainian salient, driving the AFU out of Snagost and rolling back their penetration towards Korenevo. As of this writing, nearly 50% of the Ukraine's gains have been retaken, and the AFU is still trapped in a confined salient around the towns of Sudzha and Sverdlikovo, with a perimeter of perhaps 75 kilometers.

Historical analogies are frequently overwrought and forced, but in this case there are clear parallels to Germany's 1944 Ardennes offensive, and particularly the way that the American Army managed to render the German advance sterile by blocking up the major arteries of advance. In particular, the famous defense of the Airborne at Bastogne and the less well known and largely uncelebrated defense of the Eisenborn ridge managed to throw off German timetables and throttle their advance by denying them access to critical highways. The Russian blocking positions at Korenevo and Bol'shoe Soldatskoe did something very similar in Kursk, preventing the Ukrainians from breaking out along the highways and bottling them up around Sudzha while Russian reinforcements scrambled into the area.

The Russian counterattack on the left shoulder of the penetration put the final nail in the coffin here, and the Ukrainian operation has been firmly defeated. They still hold a modest chunk of Russian territory, but the strategic surprise that empowered their initial breach is long gone, and a series of attempts to unblock the roads have failed. Ukraine is now allowing a large bag of premiere assets, including elements of at least five mechanized brigades, two tank brigades, and three air assault brigades to loiter in the grinder around Sudzha. Ukrainian vehicle losses are severe, with LostArmour tracking nearly 500 Russian strikes using lancets, glide bombs, and other systems. The compact space, located on enemy territory outside of the dwindling Ukrainian air defense umbrella, has left Ukrainian forces extremely vulnerable, with vehicle loss rates far outstripping other sectors of front.

It ought to be abundantly clear by now that the Ukrainian offensive in Kursk has failed in operational terms, with the left shoulder of their salient collapsed, mounting losses, and a large grouping of brigades wasting away hundreds of kilometers from the Donbas. All Ukraine has to show for this operation is the town of Sudzha - hardly a fair trade for Russia's impending capture of the entire Southern Donetsk front. Unfortunately, the AFU cannot simply walk away from Kursk due to its own distorted strategic logic and the necessity of maintaining a narrative structure for western backers. Withdrawing from the firebag at Kursk would be a conspicuous admission of failure, and Kiev's preference is to instead let the operation by extinguished organically - that is to say, by Russian kinetic action.

In more abstract strategic terms, however, Kursk has been a disaster for Kiev. One of the strategic rationale for the operation was to seize Russian territory that could be used as a bargaining chip in negotiations, but the incursion has only hardened Moscow's stance and made a settlement less likely. Similarly, attempts to force a diversion of Russian forces from the Donbas have failed, and Ukrainian forces in the southeast are on the ropes. A large grouping of forces that might have made a difference at Selydove, or Ugledar, or Krasnogorivka, or any number of places along the sprawling and crumbling Donbas front, are instead loitering aimlessly in Kursk, waging war as if.

Strategic Dissipation and Focus

One of the clear narrative strands that has emerged in this war is the vast gulf in the relative strategic discipline of the combatants. Ukraine's war is being pulled apart by strategic dissipation - that is, the lack of a coherent theory of victory, both in the way victory is defined and how it can be achieved. Ukraine has flitted from one idea to the next - flinging a large mechanized package at Russia's fortifications in the south, attempting to attrit the Russians with powerful fortresses like Bakhmut and Avdiivka, launching a surprise attack at Kursk, and endlessly sending western backers new shopping lists full of wonder weapons and game changers.

Within the expansive reach of Kiev's self-declared war aims, including the phantasmagorical return of Crimea and Donetsk, it has never been quite clear how these operations are correlated. Russia, in contrast, has pursued its war aims with consistent clarity and a great reluctance to take risks and allow its energies to dissipate. Moscow wants, at an absolute minimum, to consolidate control over the Donbas and the land bridge to Crimea, while trashing the Ukrainian state and neutering its military potential.

Strategic patience on Russia's part - its reluctance to commit to a full de-energization of Ukraine, or to strike the Dneiper bridges - frequently exasperates its supporters, but it speaks to Russian confidence that it can achieve its aims on the ground without unnecessarily radicalizing the war. Moscow is loathe to either risk provoking western intervention or create undue disruption to daily life in Russia. This is why, despite possessing significantly greater capabilities thank Ukraine, it has consistently been the reactive entity - ramping up strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure as a response to Ukrainian strikes, embarking on the Kharkov operation in response to Ukrainian attacks on Belgorod, and adopting a wait-and-see attitude towards western weapons.

Russia has remained maniacally focused on the eastern front as the center of gravity for all its military operations, as the Donbas is the raison d'etre of the entire war. The war in the Donbas, for all its frustrating positional-attritional quality, with Russian forces methodically working through Ukrainian fortresses, has an intimate and well-defined relationship to Moscow's theory of victory in Ukraine, and Russian forces in the southeast are on the verge of checking off an enormous box on this to-do list. Moscow's theory of victory is clearly defined; Kiev's is not, no matter the publication of the nebulous and speculative victory plan.

Ukraine, in contrast, is increasingly waging war "as if". It is dissipating its scarce combat resources on remote fronts which have no operational or strategic nexus with the war for the Donbas. It has awakened to the fact that the war in the Donbas is simply a losing proposition, but its attempts to change the nature of the war by activating other fronts and provoking an expansion of the conflict have failed, because Russia is not interested in unnecessarily matching Kiev's strategic dissipation. Its attempts to radicalize the conflict have failed, as neither the west nor Russia has seriously reacted to Ukraine's attempts to breach red lines. The idea of a settlement to the conflict now seems incredibly remote: if Ukraine is unwilling to discuss the status of the Donbas, and if Russia believes that it can capture the entire region by simply plowing ahead on the ground, then it would seem that there is very little to discuss.

Taken as a whole, the events of 2024 are immensely positive for Russia and frightening for Ukraine. The AFU began the year trying to weather the storm in Avdiivka. In the intervening time, the front has moved from the doorstep of Donetsk, where the AFU still held its chain of prewar fortresses, all the way to the doorstep of Pokrovsk. Cities like Pokrovsk and Kurakhove, which previously functioned as rear area operational hubs, are now frontline positions, with the latter likely to be captured by years end. Ukraine's great gambit to unlock the front by attacking Kursk was defeated in the opening days of the operation, with AFU mechanized elements jammed up at Korenevo.

It has now been more than two years since Ukraine last managed to mount a successful offensive, and a recapitulation of events reveals a sequence of defeats: failed defenses at Bakhmut and Avdiivka, the collapse of their line in the southern Donbas, a much anticipated counteroffensive shattered at Robotyne in the summer of 2023, and now a surprise attack on Kursk scuttled at Korenevo. Unmoored from a coherent theory of victory, and with events on the ground souring at every turn, Kiev might take comfort in waging war as if, but a reckless thrust at Kursk and blind trust in the Deus Ex Machina of NATO will not save it from the war as it truly is.

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9. France and the Tyrant of the Sea

The 17th Century was a time of great suffering on a global scale. In the depths of a period of pronounced global cooling - the so-called "Little Ice Age" - poor harvests sparked various forms of social unrest ranging from peasant rebellions to all out civil war in places as far flung as China, Japan, Russia, Turkey, France, and England. In 1644, the last Ming Emperor of China - the Chongzhen Emperor - committed suicide, and his dynasty collapsed amid famine and the invasion of the Manchus. Four years later, the Ottoman Sultan was murdered during a revolt of the elite Janissary Corps. The following year (1649), King Charles I of England was executed against the backdrop of England's bloody civil wars. The whole time, Central Europe was ravaged by the Thirty Years War, which left much of Germany and Bohemia in ruins. Poland found itself reduced to wreckage after its Ukrainian provinces flared into a cossack-led uprising, sparking years of war with neighboring Russia. Little wonder, then, that the Welsh historian James Howell lamented that "God almighty has a quarrel lately with all mankind."

Within this broader calamitous context, the disastrous 17th Century gave rise to the embryonic form of the European great power system that would come to dominate the world for two centuries, until it destroyed itself in the great act of self-immolation that we call World War One. The social and geopolitical upheavals brought a close to the era of European politics in which the hegemony of the Habsburgs had been the dominant geopolitical pivot, and saw the arrival of new powers on the European periphery. Russia's defeat of Poland in the midcentury wars set the stage for the country's eventual eruption under Tsar Peter I: Peter the Great (born 1672). Meanwhile, the consolidation of the English state after years of Civil War, and the emergence of the powerful Royal Navy as a result of the Anglo-Dutch Wars, announced the arrival of the offshore power of Britain.

Thus, by the beginning of the 18th Century the signature condition of modern European geopolitics had begun to present itself, even if it was not fully formed. The basic "problem" of European power politics, as such, is the challenge of amassing hegemony on the European continent while contending with the latent power of Europe's two "flanking powers" - Russia, with its tremendous land-logistical power on the eastern flank, and Britain, with its naval and economic strength loitering offshore in the west. The challenge facing any would-be European emperor was the triple-lift of not only subjugating his neighbors in the European core, but also being prepared to contend with the flanking powers.

The first would-be continental hegemon to attempt and fail this challenge was 18th century Europe's most powerful state: France. Bourbon France emerged as a rival to the Habsburgs in the 17th Century and soon came to surpass them, with the French benefitting from their compact and defensible geographic position, its vast and growing population (which rapidly outstripped that of Spain and England), and a powerful centralized state. Between 1701 and 1815, the French would fight a long sequence of wars that promoted their push for continental hegemony - wars that can largely be contained in the lives of just two men: Louis XIV (the Sun King), and Napoleon Bonaparte.

France was undoubtedly the most powerful state in the world during this time, but it ultimately fell short of its leap for enduring hegemony - undone by its inability to cope with the flanking powers. Our purpose in this space is, mercifully, not to give an exhaustive accounting of the great rise and fall of the French superpower, but to focus on one particular aspect of its struggle on the flanks: the long naval struggle with the Royal Navy, whom the French pejoratively called "The Tyrant of the Sea."

Throughout the French century, virtually all of France's wars on the continent contained an important off-continent dimension of colonial and naval conflict with the British. A list of the great wars fought in this period - the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years War, the War of American Independence, and the Napoleonic Wars - reveals in every instance a litany of crucial battles fought between the French and the British, either in the overseas colonial theaters or on the sea itself. It is this latter item that serves as an object of great interest for us.

This long sequence of frequently climactic sea battles between the French and British navies saw the maturation of the naval combat system which had emerged in the Anglo-Dutch Wars. That methodology of combat, which emphasized the firepower of heavily gunned capital ships arrayed in battle lines, had proven decisively superior to older forms of combat and swept away archaic concepts like converted merchant vessels, boarding actions, and free swirling melees. Henceforth, naval combat would center on the battle line, and tactical innovations were predicated on maximizing the effectiveness of one's own battle lines while breaking the integrity of the enemy's line.

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The long saga of the Anglo-French wars at sea were the apogee of this system of battle: cinematic, deadly, and decisive to global affairs. From India, to the Americas, to the English Channel, the pivot of world power would increasingly be these titanic clashes between long, threadlike lines of broadside vessels, dealing out death and shot and smoke to each other amid the merciless waves.

The Apogee of De Ruyter

In his day, Louis XIV was the most powerful monarch in the world. He had all the various trappings and achievements to prove it, from his sprawling and opulent palace at Versailles, to the territorial expansion of France which occurred under his reign, to his pithy and implicitly confident commentary on his own power: "I am the state." The longest reigning monarch in human history, his rule saw France advance to the apex of the European power structure. Nevertheless, it was under the Sun King that the perils of France's strategic posture began to show. He was overly eager to make war against vast enemy coalitions, disdainful of conducting a prudent alliance policy, and frequently unable to fully embrace the expense and logic of war at sea, all to France's detriment.

France's age of expansion intersects cleanly with the European story as we left it in our last piece, with the Third Anglo-Dutch War. The second war between the Dutch and the English had ended in 1667 after the Dutch Navy's shocking raid on the English shipyards in the Thames Estuary. Although the terms by which this conflict was ended were not particularly injurious to England, King Charles II felt a pair of acute humiliations, both in the embarrassment of the Dutch raid and his own financial dependence on Parliament. England's subsequently revanchist stance was thus motivated both by the desire to repair the prestige of the navy and Charles's own financial woes.

Charles found an opportunity to ameliorate both of his great discontents in the ambitions of Louis XIV, who had begun a steady and inexorable policy of French expansionism. Louis coveted the Spanish Netherlands - that peculiar stretch of the low countries centered on Flanders which we now call Belgium and Luxembourg. Then under the dominion of the fading Spanish Habsburgs, Louis made the attainment of the Spanish Netherlands the guiding animus of much of his foreign policy, and this inevitably brought him into conflict with the Dutch, who naturally preferred having the weakening and distant Spanish monarch for a southern neighbor, rather than the powerful and assertive Louis. It was this approaching collision between France and the Dutch that gave Charles his opportunity for English revenge. In 1670, Louis and Charles agreed to a secret treaty under which Charles agreed to provide military support to the French in exchange for a hefty financial subsidy from Louis; this gave France the support of the potentially decisive English Navy, while providing Charles with both a source of revenue independent of Parliament and the opportunity for revenge against the Dutch.

Thus, France's first major naval war of the modern era began, oddly enough, with England as an ally against the Dutch. Unlike the previous Anglo-Dutch Wars, this war was to have a decisive theater on land, with French forces pressing the Dutch to the limits. An ambitious French offensive in 1672 outflanked the primary Dutch defensive lines, and brought the Dutch to such a level of desperation that they were forced to open levees and use strategic flooding to maintain their defense.

French success on the ground made the naval theater all the more critical, in that it brought the Dutch government to a condition of financial desperation, which made oceanic merchant traffic absolutely essential for continuing the war. It was particularly important to ensure that the Dutch spice fleet could safely return home; the interdiction, destruction, or capture of the spice fleet (either on the open seas or via an Anglo-French blockade) threatened to financially cripple the Dutch and lead to total defeat. There was also the consideration of preventing the allied navy from supporting the French Army by landing forces on the Dutch coast.

The Dutch therefore originally had intentions of engaging and defeating the English fleet before it could join up with the French, but the awkward design of Dutch institutions (which gave each of the five major Dutch provinces its own Admiralty with responsibility for raising ships) prevented the Dutch from constituting a fleet in time, and the English and French navies were able to rendezvous in the mouth of the Thames, placing the Dutch at a decided numerical disadvantage.

Facing a superior Anglo-French fleet, but pressed by the absolute necessity of preventing the enemy from blockading the Dutch coast, the Dutch commanding Admiral, Michiel de Ruyter, put on a virtuoso performance. He put to sea and came within sight of the allied fleet, but - although he had every intention of seeking battle - made a great show of retreating before their superior numbers and withdrew to the safety of the Dutch coast, where the shoals and islets made it dangerous for the enemy to pursue. The English and French (under the overall command of the English Prince Rupert), believing that their superior numbers had scared de Ruyter off, decided to retire back to the English coast to rest, refit, and take on additional provisions.

De Ruyter, however, was not scared. The run back to the Dutch coast had been only a feint, and he was in fact following the enemy back towards England in hot pursuit. His ships came over the horizon as the Anglo-French were anchored against the coast near Soleby. From the outset, the allies were in an extremely precarious position. The wind was blowing towards the coast, which was at their back, and they had made their anchorage with the English and French divisions of the fleet at a distance from each other. They were thus unable to maneuver freely with their forces already divided; a situation that was exacerbated by de Ruyter's handling of the battle.

De Ruyter tasked an undersized division under Adriaen Banckert with engaging the French (under Count Jean d'Estrées) at the southernmost end of the allied line; its task was not so much to engage and destroy the French fleet as to ensure that it could not participate in the battle, either by pinning it or driving it away. The French, as it turned out, would help with this by choosing to get underway towards the south, which carried them further away from the English and ensured that they exerted no influence on the rest of the battle. Meanwhile, de Ruyter led the bulk of the Dutch fleet in an aggressive run on the English, who were (like the French) cutting anchor and getting underway, in this case by tacking northward.

De Ruyter's tactical schema allowed him to entirely neutralize the enemy's overall advantage in ships. Exploiting the gap in the enemy fleet and taking them by surprise, he managed to chase the French fleet to the south using only a small squadron; thus, although the enemy had more ships in total, De Ruyter achieved a local superiority against the English, and kept the French from participating in the battle at all. Four English ships were destroyed, and the casualties in the English fleet were sufficient to render it incapable of any immediate further combat.

The Battle of Solebay traditionally draws extremely high marks for de Ruyter, who demonstrated a deadly nexus of seamanship, tactical guile, and aggression. The entire engagement was, to be sure, brilliantly conducted on the Dutch part: de Ruyter's feigned retreat to the Dutch coast convinced the enemy coalition that he had been scared off by their superior numbers, allowing him to ambush their fleet in a compromised downwind position against the English coast. Once the battle was joined, de Ruyter cleverly wedged the enemy fleet apart and ensured that he could engage the English center with local superiority, with the French more or less removed from the battle entirely through maneuver, without any serious fighting by the French fleet.

Like many of history's great commanders, de Ruyter faced a seemingly insuperable strategic problem: he could outwit and maul the enemy, but the Dutch resource base was dwarfed by the force generation potential of a powerful Anglo-French coalition. For the rest of the year, then, the Dutch navy had to adopt a defensive posture, aiming to preserve its strength for the defense of the Dutch coast, seeking battle only when favorable conditions presented themselves, or when absolutely necessary, but otherwise keeping their fleet intact to ward off enemy attempts to either blockade or land troops on the coast.

The naval war reached a climax in the summer of 1673 with a renewed Anglo-French effort to force de Ruyter to battle. The ensuing action would, instead, be the crowning jewel of de Ruyter's distinguished career. A previous series of indecisive engagements had whittled down Dutch strength, leaving de Ruyter with just 54 ships of the line against some 81 in the coalition fleet (54 English and 27 French). Although substantially outnumbered, de Ruyter could not afford to remain passive and hide in the shelter of the Dutch coast. The Dutch spice fleet was returning home, and ceding the seas to the enemy risked the capture of the spice fleet, and by extension the bankruptcy and defeat of the Dutch Republic. The navy would have to fight to keep the sea lanes open.

The fleets met each other off the Dutch coast on August 12, near the island of Texel. What stands out immediately is the reversal from the situation at Solebay, where de Ruyter had attacked the allied fleet when its back was to the coast. In this case, the Dutch had the coastal position, with the wind blowing steadily out towards the sea.

De Ruyter's plan would hinge, once again, on separating the enemy coalition and removing the French from the battle through an artful maneuver. At Texel, the French contingent was in the vanguard, sailing at the front of the allied line on a southerly course. The forward Dutch squadron, under Banckert, paced the French as they sailed down the coast, steadily pulling further and further away from the center and rear divisions of the fleets. The emergence of this gap in the line was owed to a lack of communication between Prince Rupert and the French admiral, dEstrees. Rupert was aiming to pull the Dutch away from the shelter of the coastline by steadily falling out to sea. The French, however, missed this memo and continued to sail straight down the coast.

Seeing the gap emerge between the centers and the vanguard divisions, Banckert made his move. He suddenly wheeled his division to the right, sailing his 12 ships straight through the French division and out the other side; having passed through, he wheeled back to join the developing battle in the center. Remarkably, dEstrees opted not to follow him: the result was that the French simply dropped out of the battle, sailing idly towards the south, while Banckert raced back to join de Ruyter in his battle against Rupert in the center.

Meanwhile, the rearmost divisions also separated from the center, but in this case they were motivated not by lethargy but by personal hatreds. The commanders in the rear were Edward Spragge for the English and Cornelius Tromp for the Dutch. These two had tangled numerous times in previous battles, and Spragge had vowed to King Charles that he would not return until he had either taken Tromp dead or alive, or else given his own life in battle. The two rival admirals locked together, aiming to adjudicate the oath. The battle here was exceptionally fierce, with Spragge obliged on multiple occasions to transfer his flag to a new ship amid horrific damage. On one such occasion, the admiral boarded a boat to change ships, but en-route to his new flagship a cannon struck his little boat and tore it to splinters. Spragge drowned, and so fulfilled his oath to the king - not for lack of trying, but certainly not in the manner he had hoped. Tromp would survive the war and die in 1691 after a long bout with alcoholism.

The Battle of Texel thus took on a unique shape. The two fleets first made contact in conventional tripart battle lines, but the integrity of the lines was soon broken, with the rear divisions drifting away as Tromp and Spragge sought desperately to kill each other, and the leading French squadron being carried out of the battle and left behind by Banckert's maneuver. As a result, Rupert found himself fighting de Ruyter in the center, but while the Dutch vanguard (Banckert) was wheeling back to join this central battle, Rupert's own vanguard (the French) was simply sailing away. For obvious reasons, then, the battle of the centers went in favor of the Dutch, and raged intensely for the rest of the day, until the French at long last wandered back in. Seeing the French fleet returning for action (after many hours of absence), de Ruyter broke off the battle.

The Battle of the Texel interests for many reasons. In terms of material, it was indecisive. Both fleets suffered serious damage and casualties; Dutch losses were lighter on the whole, but their fleet was also smaller, so in relative terms the two sides both left the day with serious damage. It probably represented a draw, but in this case a draw was (paradoxically) a victory for the Dutch. The Dutch goal was to drive the enemy fleet off so that the Dutch coast could remain open for the spice fleet to return home: therefore, since both the Dutch and Anglo-French fleets were so badly damaged that they had to return home for refitting, a mutual mauling served to fulfill de Ruyter's strategic goals. The enemy coalition did, in fact, pull back to the English coast for refit, leaving the path clear for Dutch shipping to get home safely.

On a tactical level, Texel again represents a remarkable performance by de Ruyter. Although badly outnumbered (the enemy having 50% more ships), he managed to create favorable conditions for himself, drawing the French out of position and removing them from the battle, much as he had done at Solebay. In both cases, the French showed poor seamanship and a low willingness to fight, and allowed themselves to be pulled away from the battle by relatively small Dutch squadrons. At both Solebay and Texel, the Anglo-French fleets came to battle with the numbers, but de Ruyter managed to gain superiority in the center by pulling the enemy lines apart. In both cases, the French made this chore easier by voluntarily sailing themselves away from the English.

After Texel, the English war effort began to dissipate, and they would drop out of the war in February, 1674 after signing the Treaty of Westminster with the Dutch. This left the French alone in the fight; for this reason, the "Third Anglo-Dutch War" and the "Franco-Dutch War" are often regarded as separate conflicts.

The emerging dynamics of the conflict were predictive of France's larger strategic problems which explain why Louis XIV's France was simultaneously the most powerful nation in the world and yet doomed to fail in its leap for hegemony. France began the war with a remarkably successful land offensive that put the Dutch on the ropes, and they had reasons to be optimistic about the naval campaign thanks to their English ally. They were, however, unable to convert this into a decisive strategic victory. After the English dropped out, the naval dimension of the war became dramatically less important; meanwhile, the Dutch were amenable to making peace, but Louis' demands were so severe that the Dutch opted to fight on. Furthermore, France's gains had startled the rest of Europe, so that the Spanish and the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I, entered the war on behalf of the Dutch. Alarmed by the emergence of this new enemy coalition, Louis softened his demands, but the Dutch were now in no mood to negotiate. The war dragged on for several years and became very costly for the French, and in the end Louis made only modest territorial gains.

This was France's problem. It was an extremely powerful state, with a vast population and highly defensible borders, but its overtly expansionistic stance and poorly conducted alliance policy frequently left it fighting protracted and costly land wars against formidable enemy coalitions. Meanwhile, the French navy failed to impress, and Louis let the two preeminent sea powers (England and the Dutch Republic) slip out of his orbit and into the hostile camp: after the brief moment of Anglo-French alliance, the English would move firmly into the anti-French coalition and remain there for over a century.

In the latter years of the Franco-Dutch War, the naval dimension naturally became substantially less important, as the French navy lacked the strength to contest the Dutch coast without its erstwhile English allies. In the Mediterranean theater (activated in the conflict by the entry of Spain into the war as a Dutch ally), naval operations did remain important late into the war. Despite their remoteness from the Mediterranean, the Dutch remained the heavy lifters, as the declining Spanish crown found it more convenient to simply pay the Dutch to provide a fleet rather than try to raise one of their own.

After decades of venerable service defending Dutch access to the North Sea, it would be the Mediterranean that provided the locale for de Ruyter's swan song. By 1675, the Dutch Republic was increasingly exhausted, and even with the Spanish footing the bill it proved impossible to outfit a large fleet of comparable size to the war's earlier actions. De Ruyter, now well into his 60s, was dispatched to the Mediterranean with a mere 18 ships of the line. As a testament to the old man's stoicism and steadiness, he remarked to the Dutch admiralty that the fleet was far too small to contest the growing French Mediterranean fleet, and then set sail anyway.

The Dutch intention was to rendezvous with a Spanish squadron for joint operations, but the French were able to force de Ruyter to fight before he could link up with his Spanish allies. De Ruyter's fleet encountered the French in January near the volcanic island of Stromboli, off the northern coast of Sicily. Although the count of ships was roughly even, with 20 French line ships against de Ruyter's 18 Dutch ships, plus a single Spanish vessel that had joined his fleet, the fighting power of the French was much greater. The French fleet consisted of larger and better armed vessels, such that they had some 1,500 guns against 1,200 in the Dutch batteries. Though old, tired, and outgunned, de Ruyter still had one more good fight in him.

In contrast to his previous maneuvers as Solebay and Texel, he began the Battle of Stromboli rather passively, forming a battle line in the downwind position and apparently ceding all the important advantages to the French, who could now count on both more gunnery and the weather gauge. De Ruyter's exact motives and thought processes are not well documented, but we can make some guesses. It is likely that, having inferior firepower, he prioritized keeping his line well formed to maximize his broadside potential, and left it to the French to disorder themselves by attacking.

The French obliged. Their admiral, Abraham Duquesne, sensing that he held all the cards, began an immediate attack, hauling his fleet in at an oblique angle to come alongside the Dutch. In doing so, however, he temporarily gave the Dutch an advantage in effective firepower. A ship approaching obliquely - that is, at an angle to the enemy - is unable to fire all of its cannon during the approach, while being fully exposed to the enemy broadside. The Dutch, who were holding steady in a well formed line, used the opportunity to unleash heavy fire on the approaching French, and successfully disabled two ships in the French vanguard.

The oblique approach proved to be a difficult maneuver to control, with the French ships making contact one at a time, rather than altogether (that is, the French vanguard engaged first, with the rear ships lagging behind on the approach). The result was that the French fleet became disordered and had a difficult time reforming a coherent line under Dutch fire.

Thus, despite the significant advantage in French gunnery, de Ruyter was able to exchange fire on favorable terms, and the battle broke off at the end of the day with the French nursing significant wounds. Stromboli stands apart from de Ruyter's other notable battles, in that he opted to forgo the opportunity to maneuver in favor of keeping his line on station, awaiting a French attack. It speaks to the old admiral's versatility that he was able, time and time again, to battle larger and more powerful fleets than his own, in a variety of different tactical circumstances. De Ruyter would die soon after the Battle of Stromboli. Now a venerable 69 years of age, he would take a cannonball to the leg off the coast of Sicily in April, 1676, and died a week later of his festering wound.

Michiel de Ruyter was one of the greatest admirals in history, and undoubtedly the best of his era. He almost always fought with a numerical disadvantage, but proved able time and time again to force the enemy fleet into unfavorable positions, allowing him to batter and maul larger enemy armadas. His career is full of fascinating tactical maneuvers, such as we have elucidated here, but on a strategic level his life is testament to the crucial role of sea power and the way that it functions.

Sea power saved the Dutch Republic from an overwhelming French ground assault in the earlier courses of the war, allowing it to survive in a state of pseudo-siege with the French army on its territory. The sea lanes provided the crucial flow of commerce that brought supplies and wealth into Dutch ports, forming a literal lifeline for the battered and overmatched republic.

De Ruyter was repeatedly able to keep this lifeline open by battering, but not destroying enemy fleets. Most of his great battles in the latter years of his life, like Texel and Solebay, ended with indecisive material exchanges - that is to say, both the Dutch and Anglo-French fleets took significant and mostly proportional damage. These indecisive exchanges were, however, strategic victories for the Dutch. The Dutch were fighting a defensive naval campaign aimed at preventing the enemy from blockading their coast and severing their access to the ocean. To succeed in this campaign, de Ruyter did not need to destroy the enemy fleet entirely, but only cause enough damage to force it to return home to refit. In other words, the Dutch needed only to deny the enemy total control over the sea lanes to keep the path clear for their merchant marine. The Anglo-French, on the other hand, needed to win overwhelming victories so that they could begin a blockade of the Dutch coast. Despite routinely possessing a preponderance of force, they were unable to do so in the face of Dutch tenacity, seamanship, and de Ruyter's own magisterial command.

As a result, the Dutch Republic emerged from the Franco-Dutch War both battered and exhausted, but they were not forced to give up any territory. All of Louis' gains came at the expense of the Spanish, who ceded lands in the Spanish Netherlands which extended France's borders to the northeast. The Dutch Republic survived the French onslaught because their strength and life came from the sea, and de Ruyter kept the sea open to them, eventually losing his life amid the rocking caress of the waves.

For the French, the war had been a disappointment at sea. Despite the benefit of the English alliance in the first years of the war, victory over the Dutch navy had escaped Louis, and the French fleet performed poorly in critical engagements. France, however, always had latent naval power potential, which many of her statesmen were eager to exploit. France is blessed with three major seaboards, having access to the English Channel, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea. Her trivially easy access to the ocean always inferred the potential for robust oceangoing trade, while her vast population and robust domestic economy (much larger than England's) provided an adequate resource base. Most importantly, France's large and proficient army (at this time the best in Europe) and her project of fortress building on her borders had created a powerful indigenous industry in cannon manufacture and considerable expertise in gunnery.

France's Chance

The first French statesman to work systematically to develop French naval power was Jean-Baptiste Colbert. The scion of a merchant family in Reims, Colbert worked his way up the French administration and rapidly gained the confidence of the king, and by the 1760's he held portfolios in a variety of ministries, being simultaneously the Secretary of State of the Navy and the Controller-General of Finances, Minister of Commerce and Minister of Colonies, all while holding a palace appointment. He thus became the de-facto second most powerful man in France beneath Louis XIV, empowered to enact a broad economic policy. His system, known colloquially as "Colbertism", was a fairly standard spin on the mercantilist policies of the day, which emphasized protectionism and tariffs to incubate French manufacturing, an efficient and tightly regulated fiscal regime, and the development of a robust merchant marine and navy to ensure the linkages to France's growing colonial holdings.

Under Colbert, France's naval strength rapidly accumulated strength precisely as English and Dutch naval power was waning due to mounting financial strains. Therefore, when France once again found itself at war with Europe in 1688 due to Louis' inexorable drive to expand French borders to the east, the French Navy was in significantly better condition than it had been at the outbreak of the last war in 1672.

Unlike in the first Franco-Dutch War, the so-called Nine Years War saw France go to war without a single ally, and in fact the two preeminent naval powers - the Dutch and the English - were now tightly bound in alliance thanks to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which overthrew yet another Catholic English Monarch (James II) in favor of William of Orange and his wife Mary. William thus became, after Louis XIV, the second most powerful and prominent man in European politics, being both the King of England, the hereditary prince of Orange, and the Stadholder of the Dutch Republic. France therefore faced the prospect of naval operations against joint Anglo-Dutch fleets, with the two naval powers now tightly bound together in personal union under William.

The weak point in the anti-French alliance was the shaky position of William on the English throne. The deposed James II fled to Ireland and led it into a state of rebellion against William's kingship, while in England proper there were increasingly disruptive demonstrations against William in favor of restoring the the Catholic monarchy (the so-called Jacobite movement). While Louis was certainly focused, as ever, on expanding his frontiers in the east through campaigns on land, the naval dimension of the war was potentially decisive, with the French fleet in a position to strongly influence the growing conflict between William and James in Ireland.

It was against this broader strategic backdrop that the French would clash with a combined Anglo-Dutch fleet in the channel in 1690. The stakes were extremely high: if the French could shatter the allied fleet, it would be possible to sever English communications with Ireland and render direct assistance to James. Conversely, if the French were defeated at sea, William would have secure access to Ireland and slowly but surely choke out the Catholic cause there.

The fight that ensued is known as the Battle of Beachy Head, named for the nearest spit of land on the southern coast of England. The French fleet, under Anne-Hilarion de Costentin, Comte de Tourville (usually called simply Tourville) had 70 ships in the line, against perhaps 60 in the Anglo-Dutch contingent. The allies had the wind at their backs, and perhaps thought to use the weather gauge to compensate for their inferior numbers.

The battle was shaped by two important factors: first, the fact that the French had more ships and were thus able to form a longer battle line, and secondly the attempt of the allied fleet to seize the initiative and attack while attempting to match the length of the French line. As the French fleet sailed in line towards the northwest, the allies approached obliquely and began to wheel in alongside them. Allied command, under the overall leadership of the Earl of Torrington, was fearful that the longer French line would overlap them in the front and envelop them, and made the fateful decision to stretch out their line to match the French. Having fewer ships, of course, the act of stretching the line out compelled the allies to create gaps between their divisions.

The battle began to go wrong for the allies almost immediately after the lines engaged. Their central division, comprised of English vessels under Torrington, intended to engage and fight the French center, but found the French ships to be strangely out of range. This was because Tourville had cleverly bowed his line, sagging into the wind to carry his line in a curved shape away from the English, so that they kept out of range. Furthermore, the allied attempt to stretch their line out had created a dangerous gap between their center and forward divisions. It was into this gap that Tourville's central division, which had remained unengaged by bowing into the wind, now shot at top speed, slipping through the allied line and running up on the right of the forward allied division (under the Dutch admiral Cornelis Evertsen).

From here, it was all a disaster for the Anglo-Dutch fleet. Tourville had evaded the English center by cleverly sagging into the wind, then shot perfectly through the gap in the enemy line to take the Dutch division in between two fires. As the Dutch were already hotly engaged with the forward French division, under the Marquis de Château Renault, they had little power to maneuver or escape the trap that was now springing shut on them. The Dutch got much the worst of the fight from that point on, and the French gunnery was deadly.

The allied fleet was only saved by a sudden shift in the wind, which allowed them to break off the engagement and haul out. Tourville ought to have unleashed his fleet in pursuit, but he incorrectly chose to maintain his battle line during the chase, which greatly reduced his speed and allowed the English and the Dutch to escape. It is probable that Tourville did not understand just how badly he had battered the enemy, and thus did not realize that he was chasing a thoroughly beaten foe. In this situation, it would have been correct to allow the formation to break so that the pursuit could be conducted at top speed. Instead, Tourville maintained his line and so failed to catch the enemy.

Though the pursuit came to nothing, Beachy Head was a decisive and clear French victory. Losing no ships of his own, Tourville had managed to destroy 8 enemy ships of the line (including those that the Dutch chose to scuttle due to catastrophic damage), with almost 20% of the enemy's personnel becoming casualties.

Unfortunately for France, their victory at Beachy Head could not be converted into a strategic success. James was defeated by William in Ireland and was forced to flee to Paris, so that instead of being a useful asset against Louis' enemies, he simply became an obnoxious guest, endlessly begging the King of the French to give him another army and send him back across the channel. It was too late for James, however - William was now firmly ensconced as the King of England, and this time the settlement of England's endless religious vacillations was permanent. There has not been another Catholic monarch in England since James, and Louis had lost his chance to bring England back into his orbit.

With the Williamite War in Ireland settled, the importance of the naval theater again receded for the French, and resources were funneled ever more intensively into the exhausting and costly land campaign on France's eastern border. The great expense of the land war, and a lack of vision by the French government as to how the naval theater could be leveraged for victory, led the French navy to languish and decay as it was starved of funds and attention. French naval action was reduced to small scale privateering and interdiction of English and Dutch trade, which failed to make a strong dent in the economies of those nations.

The great curse of France in this era was that she was far too assured of her own strength. This strength was, to be sure, prodigious, but under the Sun King she went to war repeatedly against more or less the whole of Europe, and her aggressions cost her the opportunity to bring either of the great sea powers - the Dutch or the English - into a stable alliance. Meanwhile, the great expense and burden of France's sprawling land wars gnawed away at her navy, which suffered increasing neglect. The Battle of Beachy Head demonstrated that French seamanship was up the task of fighting and winning on the water. Unfortunately, the government of Louis XIV never fully adopted the logic of naval power projection and the merchant marine, despite the best efforts of men like Colbert. France was thus left bereft of allies, forced to make war on her own resources, increasingly cut off from commerce by the navies of the Dutch and English sea powers and by the ring of enemies around her.

Histories will often somewhat reductively say that France was doomed to lose the long naval conflict with England because she was burdened with the cost of maintaining expensive land armies and defenses. There is an element of truth in this, but it does not tell the full story. France had every opportunity to be the great maritime nation of Europe, with three accommodating seaboards and a vast population to provide sailors and gunners. France was burdened with the expense of long and costly land wars, but these were not imposed on her from the outside - rather, they sprang from the antagonistic and expansive ambitions of her monarch, the Sun King, who was far too eager to make war against vast coalitions, and eschewed effective alliance policies.

The Nine Years War ended in French defeat. Fiscally exhausted, Louis was forced to cede many of his hard won border territories back to the Hapsburgs. Undeterred, he would wage yet another war on Europe in the great War of the Spanish Succession, which again saw the French attempting push their eastern and northern borders outward. Although that war was almost exclusively a land conflict, fought primarily in Germany and the Spanish Netherlands, it had critical knock-on effects in the naval dimension.

The peace terms which ended the War of the Spanish Succession are the convoluted sort of swaps that are difficult for modern readers to wrap their heads around, filled as they are with mutual concessions that make it hard to declare a "winner." France, for example, achieved one of its primary war aims by putting a French prince on the Spanish throne, but was forced to give up a variety of fortresses and holdings on its eastern border. The Principality of Orange - the ancestral seat of King William - was given to France, but the Dutch did gain possession of a chain of barrier fortresses defending their southwestern border. On and on the list goes.

If there was one nation that unequivocally emerged victorious, however, it was England. The English gained trading rights in Spanish America and secured possession of critical naval bases like Gibraltar and Minorca in the Mediterranean. Even more importantly, England emerged from the war as the undisputed naval superpower of the world, with the French and Dutch navies wasting away as their owners struggled under the strain of a long and costly land war.

It is easy to attribute England's power simply to the battle fleet of the Royal Navy. The fighting navy was obviously essential, but it does not tell the whole story. After all, in 1688 France had a powerful navy as well, and they smashed the English at Beachy Head. The navy was the fighting instrument which defended the sinews and linkages of English power: namely, a vast and growing merchant marine which increasingly dominated global shipping, a web of colonies that fed valuable materials and goods into England, and a sprawling network of naval bases and outposts which allowed the navy to operate at vast distances. These things all fed into each other: for example, the Dutch had a similarly prodigious shipping industry, but the decay of the Dutch fighting navy relative to the English made English shipping much safer, which in turn allowed the English to swallow up more and more of the market.

The sea made England rich, and that wealth allowed the English to maintain a large and powerful navy. This was a self-supporting feedback loop of fighting power and wealth that France's chosen vector of expansion overland could never hope to match. France was instead thrown back into herself, increasingly cut off from the world. This is why France, with a population of some 20 million, ended the wars of Louis bankrupted, while England, with its 8 million souls, was not only rich enough to wage war under her own financial powers, but even able to raise and finance the anti-French coalition with subsidies. France was vast and fertile, but nowhere near so vast as the sea - and the sea belonged to England.

The First World War

The reign of the Sun King set a sharp contrast between the imperial strategies of England and France. Both nations possessed natural access to the sea and at various times possessed preponderant naval power, but whereas England fully committed to the logic of the feedback loop between naval combat power and shipping, which in turn brought financial power which enabled it to raise powerful alliances, France fell back on its own indigenous resource base and allowed its navy to rot in favor of expensive land wars which brought minimal gain. Louis XIV was an immensely powerful and feared king, but his reign was in many ways a waste. Louis died in 1715, but as the sun set on the Sun King, the British increasingly lorded over North America and India: the bones of the empire on which the sun never set.

The great irony of the French imperial arc is that, while the reign of Louis XIV is generally thought of as the apogee of French power in this era, it was in fact his successors that tried to forge a better path forward by rebuilding France's naval strength and adopting a more sensible colonial-maritime strategy targeted at Britain (as we may start calling it after the 1707 Acts of Union). Ultimately, however, they would fail due to France's increasingly dismal fiscal situation and the burden of more futile ground wars.

When Louis XIV died, it is a testament to his long life and reign that he was succeeded not by his son, or even his grandson, as these had predeceased the old king, but by his great-grandson, who became Louis XV. The younger Louis would face many of the same strategic problems which had plagued his great grandfather, but they were in many ways much worse given the fact that the Sun King had badly drained the French treasury even as the British had become wealthier and more powerful. France was in the same strategic trap, but with less money, fewer ships, and less flexibility than a century prior.

The seminal war of the 18th Century is the famous Seven Years War (1756-1763) - the coming out party of the powerful Prussian Army and the Prussian King, Frederick the Great. The most popular imagery of the Seven Years War is that of Frederick leading his army on a high speed walking tour of Central Europe, beating back French, Austrian, and Russian armies in a rapid sequence of battles. This was all true and all too real, but the war also had a global-maritime dimension, with Frederick's British backers not only bankrolling Prussia's war effort but also chipping away at French colonial footholds in North America and India.

The Seven Years War also brought forth a powerful demonstration of the Royal Navy's latest trick: the hermetic blockade. Blockading enemy ports had always been an element of naval operations, but in the 18th Century the British demonstrated an evolved form, which differed from previous practices in two important ways. Firstly, the British showed off a new capability in imposing a continuous blockade of major French ports. Previously, blockades had been intermittent, seasonal affairs, with blockading ships compelled to return to port for refitting and resupply in the winter. By 1756, however, the British had built up a powerful logistical structure of naval bases and supply ships which allowed them to maintain their blockade on a permanent basis, as well as a much larger battle fleet which allowed for rotations of the blockading force. Secondly, blockades had traditionally followed after winning control of the sea by defeating the enemy fleet - the blockade was in other words the prize for winning. In 1756, however, the Royal Navy reacted to the outbreak of war by preemptively beginning a blockade of France's Atlantic and Channel ports, declaring "all vessels bound to those ports liable to seizure as lawful prize."

The implementation of a blockade at the outset of war, without first defeating the enemy navy, was a significant development which spoke to Britain's mounting naval advantage. In 1756, France had 63 ships of the line, of which perhaps 45 were in ready condition. France's only ally of nautical consequence, Spain, had 46 ships of the line, which were widely considered to be of grossly inferior quality. England, on the other hand, boasted of 130 ships of the line, and thus outmuscled both her adversaries by a wide margin. By implementing a preemptive blockade, particularly of critical French ports like Brest (where much of their battle fleet was stationed), the British threatened to win the naval war without even fighting it, by preventing the French fleet from ever leaving harbor.

The British blockade had a profound effect on both the French economy and morale, with France cut off from its trade and colonies, and the French navy languishing in port. By 1758, the French were becoming increasingly weary of both the effects of the blockade and their repeated setbacks in the ground war against Fredrick (who mauled the French Army at the Battle of Rossbach), and decided to solve both of their problems by striking directly at Britain. A plan was hatched to ferry a landing army across the English Channel to force Britain out of the war, causing them to both stand down their blockade and withdraw their financial support for Prussia with one blow.

The problem, however, was how to invade England with the French battle fleet bottled up in port by the Royal Navy's blockade. Remarkably, the French Foreign Minister, the Duke of Choiseul, insisted that the invasion could and should be conducted without the support of the navy. The army could be ferried across the channel in flat bottomed boats, he argued, using speed and surprise to dash across the channel before the Royal Navy could intercept it. Thankfully, Choiseul's skeletal plan was never put into action - instead, plans were made to slip the French fleet out of the blockade and concentrate it to support the invasion of England.

The French fleet was concentrated primarily in two ports: Brest, on the Atlantic coast, and Toulon, in the Mediterranean. The French planned to run these two fleets past the British blockade, evade the British pursuit through maneuvers on the open sea, and rendezvous them near the city of Vannes, in the Quiberon Bay, where they would link up with the ground force and its transports. A cozy, if difficult plan.

Unfortunately, the wheels (or sails, if you will) came off almost immediately after they sprang into action. The Toulon Fleet, under Commodore De La Clue, was to move out first, and it did successfully slip out of harbor and make for the open sea. It seemed that his path was clear, and the British blockaders were nowhere in sight. Unfortunately for De La Clue, the British blockade had left Toulon because it had withdrawn temporarily to Gibraltar to refit. As any casual student of geography knows, there is but one natural way from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and that is through Gibraltar. Rather than evading the British blockade, as he had initially hoped, De La Clue bumped into a frigate of the royal navy on patrol in the strait, which quickly began firing its guns in alarm, and the entire British Mediterranean Fleet was soon hot on his heels. The Toulon Fleet was soon overtaken by the British, roughly halfway between Gibraltar and Lagos, Portugal, and swiftly taken apart by the superior British fleet.

This left only France's Atlantic Fleet, stationed at Brest, available to support the planned invasion. The Brest fleet had the potential for a breakout, owing to a peculiar idiosyncrasy with the British blockade there. This was perhaps the one place where the British blockade was not continuous. The Atlantic Coast near Brest is episodically buffeted by a very strong westerly wind (that is, blowing west to east), which made it dangerous for the British to remain anchored at the mouth of the harbor. When these winds began to pick up, the British blockading fleet made it a practice to temporarily withdraw back to the English coast. Because the strength of the wind, blowing into Brest, made it nearly impossible for ships to come out of the harbor, this temporary gap in the blockade usually did not allow the French to leave: in effect, the British would temporarily pull back and allow the wind to do the blockading for them.

It was possible, however, for the French to slip out if they were prepared to leave at a moment's notice once the wind shifted. This is what they attempted in November, 1759, under the command of Hubert de Brienne, Comte de Conflans. Having waited out the westerly wind, they slipped out of Brest on November 14, which was precisely the same day that the British fleet, under Sir Edward Hawk, was departing the English coast to resume the blockade.

Events now took the form of a strange chase on the high seas. Conflans made a series of maneuvers out to sea and congratulated himself, imagining that he had successfully evaded British eyes and escaped cleanly. He then hauled back to the southeast towards Quiberon Bay, where he intended to rendezvous with the invasion fleet near Vannes. Hawke, however, had passed Brest by this point and learned that the French had flown the coop. He guessed almost immediately where Conflans was headed, and set off at maximum speed, like the French, for Quiberon Bay. As a result of Hawke's decisiveness and speed (and Conflans wasteful maneuvers aiming to shake off imagined pursuers), the two fleets arrived at the entrance to the bay almost simultaneously on November 20.

The appearance of the British fleet right on his tail seems to have deeply shaken Conflans, who wrote in his official report that he had considered it impossible for the enemy to intercept him with such force. He then attempted to lead his fleet into the shelter of the bay itself, believing that the English would not dare follow him into such a tight space, notorious for its shoals, in French home waters. He was wrong - Hawke thought about it for a moment, and decided that he could simply follow the French tightly and trust that the French ships would show him the safe path into the bay. Hawke's fleet dashed directly into the mouth of the bay alongside the French, and the battle devolved into a violent melee. In this circumstance, with so many ships arriving in a tight space all at once (in a choppy winter sea, no less), orderly management of the battle proved nearly impossible. One French ship sank when it tried to open its lowest gunports and was flooded by the heavy waves; others were lost to British gunnery, and the remainder scattered in multiple directions. Conflans grounded his own flagship to prevent its capture, and with that the Brest fleet was annihilated: hunted and killed by the aptly named Hawke.

With the defeat and scattering of the Brest fleet at Quiberon Bay, all French ambitions of invading England faded permanently. Both of France's battle fleets which might have been of consequence in a channel fight had been caught during their breakout attempts and run down, with the Toulon fleet being cornered and smashed at Lagos in August, and Conflans and the Brest Fleet intercepted by Hawke at Quiberon Bay in November.

After the neutralization of France's battle fleets in the European theater, the remainder of the Seven Years War transformed into an awesome demonstration of Britain's naval power projection. The ability of the British, now essentially unchallenged on the waves, to act decisively at great distance was truly astonishing, and enabled London to fight what was, in truth, the first truly global war.

A brief recounting of British operations in these latter years of the war reveals the global scale of their reach. In the summer of 1762, they captured Havana from the Spanish after besieging it from the sea and landing an army unopposed in Cuba. A few months later, in October, a similar amphibious operation captured Manila in the Philippines. A French-Spanish invasion of Portugal (a British ally) was defeated when the British landed a force in Portugal and proceeded to supply it entirely by sea. Meanwhile, the French suffered defeats in New France (Canada) and India, while the Royal Navy chipped away at their holdings in the Caribbean - all of which were made possible by the British ability to operate essentially unimpeded at sea relative to the French, who were almost always at a numerical disadvantage in the colonial theaters.

The heavy lift performed by the Royal Navy in this war was astonishing and unprecedented. Fighting and winning against the French on two remote continents, sniping at the key bases and linkages in the enemy's shipping, and safeguarding Britain's own lines of shipping and communication, all the while keeping a watchful eye on France's own blockaded coastline: never before had a European power demonstrated the systematic ability to operate across the globe at this scale. What is most remarkable, however, is that this tremendous war effort did not bankrupt or even strain Britain's finances. On the contrary, Britain continued to grow richer, not only through its own growing trade (with a merchant marine that now numbered in excess of 8,000 ships) but also by bringing in substantial loot, taken primarily from the Spanish. The contemporary Scottish historian John Campbell (writing in the 1780's) put it this way:

The trade of England increased gradually every year, and such a scene of national prosperity while waging a long, costly, and bloody war, was never before shown by any people in the world.

The 1763 Treaty of Paris ratified Britain's global victory. While much of the historiography focuses on Prussia, which doggedly fought and survived the land war against an overwhelming enemy coalition, the true victor was London, which added vast new territories to its sprawling overseas dominions. France ceded all of its North American territories, with the exception of the Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi river - Britain thus took possession of Canada and all French lands west of the Mississippi, in addition to taking Florida from Spain. Adding to these enormous territories, the British kept a bevy of formerly French islands in the Caribbean, including Dominica, Grenada, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Tobago.

The British did return many of their captures to their original owners, including the restoration of Havana and Manila to Spain. France was allowed to keep their trading posts and outposts on the coast of India, but they acknowledged the British right to select client rules for the Indian states and pledged not to send French troops to Bengal - in effect, conceding that France's position in India existed at London's discretion, and confirming Britain's sea power, and the financial wealth that it accured, as the emerging arbiter of global affairs.

Bourbon Twilight

Louis XVI is perhaps the second most famous member of France's Bourbon Dynasty, surpassed only by his great-great-grandfather, Louis XIV. But while the Sun King is most famous for his long and mighty reign, ruling for 72 years and fighting a series of wars practically against the whole of Europe, Louis XVI is most famous for being deposed and executed in the violent social cataclysm of the French Revolution.

The tragic irony of Louis XVI is that, while the most famous vignette of his unfortunate reign is his own death at the guillotine, the early years of his rule teased the potential for a great French naval revival which might have put France back on its path to global power and, in time, European hegemony. Under his auspices, the French Navy was restored to its most powerful condition in a century, and it proved again to be a powerful instrument in global affairs. The revival of French sea power was decisive in prying Britain away from her rebellious colonies on the Atlantic seaboard of North America, and came tantalizingly close to capturing the single most profitable British colony of all: Jamaica, with its money-printing sugar plantations. The Bourbons, in their final act, came very close to reversing much of their previous decline at sea, but they came up just short when they were smashed in decisive battle in the Caribbean.

The revival of the French Navy was seeded in the disastrous year, 1759, when the Toulon and Brest fleets were hunted down and shattered at Lagos and Quiberon Bay, respectively. The loss of the fleets caused a patriotic outcry in France which clamored for the restoration of the navy's strength and pride. The reconstruction of the battle fleet was thus facilitated by a decentralized and popularly motivated fundraising campaign, with various French cities, merchant agglomerations, and wealthy private citizens organizing funds and donations to restart shipbuilding. France's natural opportunities for sea power, with its accommodating seaboards and vast population, proved their value again, and the French Navy reconstituted itself rapidly - a development watched with trepidation by Britain.

By 1761, the French had rebuilt the nucleus of their fleet, with 40 ships of the line in fighting condition. These came too late to alter the course of the Seven Years War, which ended in a British victory of global dimensions, but the shipbuilding project put the French on the path to reverse their losses at later opportunities. By 1770, the French counted 64 premiere line ships and 50 frigates. In total, this was not an adequate fleet to challenge the Royal Navy, but British strength was denuded simply by virtue of their vast empire, which compelled them to distribute squadrons across the world. With British naval commitments in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean, it was perhaps possible for the French to attain equitable fights in a single theater.

Under Louis XVI, France - at long last, and perhaps too late - had come to realize that the sea power of Britain was the most dangerous enemy, after centuries of fruitless and expensive continental wars. A directive from the new king (who ascended the throne in 1774), showed an intelligent evolution in French grand strategy. The document states, in part, that France must:

Meddle adroitly in the affairs of the British colonies; to give the insurgent colonists the means of obtaining supplies of war, while maintaining the strictest neutrality; to develop actively, but noiseless, the navy; to repair our ships of war; to fill our storehouses and to keep on hand the means for rapidly equipping a fleet at Brest and Toulon; finally, at the first serious fear of rupture, to assemble numerous troops upon the shores of Brittany and Normandy, to get everything ready for an invasion of England, so as to force her to concentrate her forces, and thus restrict her means of resistance at the extremities of empire."

All in all, this presents a cogent and sensible strategic direction, which emphasized the continuing expansion of the French Navy and the opportunity to separate Britain from her colonies. France had entertained notions of a cross-channel invasion of Britain for centuries, but here for the first time it is presented explicitly in connection to the broader maritime strategy. Merely the threat of an invasion, it was hoped, would compel the British to recall fleets to defend British home waters, creating the opportunity for decisive action in the colonial sphere. Previous schemes to invade Britain smacked of desperation - a sort of last ditch effort to reverse failing war efforts. Here, however, the cross channel threat is presented as a ploy to divert British naval assets to their home waters to facilitate French actions against their colonies.

The opportunity to put such a strategy in motion was accelerated by the deterioration of British relations with her American colonies, which had begun in the 1760's with the Stamp Act and continued apace right up to famous 1776. The full context of the rebellion in the American colonies is far beyond our scope here, as is the military progression of the campaigns on the American continent. The War of American Independence is, however, a crucial dimension of our larger topic here, in that France again found herself at war with Britain beginning in 1778, when Paris informed London that she would recognize the independence of the American colonies.

The ensuing Anglo-French War, which ran from 1778 to 1783, differed greatly from France's previous wars in a variety of important ways, which we enumerate as follows:

1. Hostility between Britain and her North American colonies

2. Far greater readiness for war in the French Navy

3. Spain's entry into the war as a French ally early in the conflict (Spain had entered far too late to make a difference in the Seven Years War)

4. Neutrality by the other continental powers in Europe, which left France free of meaningful land commitments and expenses

In other words, everything about this war was far more favorable for the French than in previous conflicts. In this case, England was on the strategic defensive and without allies, aiming to preserve what she had, while the French could leverage both the rebellious American colonies and their own Spanish ally.

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10. The Rise of Shot and Sail

Endless ink has been spilled pontificating on precisely how and why Europeans came to rule the world in the modern era. There are a variety of what we might call grand, unified theories of European domination, ranging from the geographic determinism of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" to more mystical notions of "western civilization" and the ability of philosophical concepts to convert readily to hard power. In the modern political climate, with its trite anathematization of all things colonial and imperial , the topic has increasingly become toxic in its entirety - European hegemony is taken to be synonymous with western civilization, and vice versa.

If one can move past the ideologically charged caricatures of rapacious Europeans prowling the earth in search of loot and slaves, a moment of brief reflection might reveal how counterintuitive Europe's age of global empire was. In the late middle ages, Europe was both more politically fragmented, less populous, and significantly less wealthy than the imperial states of the east. Although the trope of the middle ages as a barbarous dark period have increasingly been left behind, there is little question that regions like China, Central Asia, India, and the Middle East enjoyed a higher level of political consolidation and state capacity, and were both more populous and richer than Europe in this period. Militarily, Europe was frequently on the back foot amid deep geopolitical penetration by the Ottomans and the Islamic statelets of North Africa.

Even more strange, however, is the fact that the key progenitors of European empire were poorer and more politically marginal states even within Europe itself. It was not the economic and technological powerhouses in Italy and Germany that spread European power to the ends of the earth, but relatively poor, unpopulous, and ancillary players like Portugal, the Netherlands, and England.

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Our purpose here is not to dwell at length about the European spirit, for good or ill, but instead to examine the evolution of the weapons system that won the earth for Europe: the full-rigged sailing ship armed with broadside cannon. The spiritual and intellectual content of European civilization is another matter entirely from the technical methods that gave it supremacy thousands of miles from its home shores. Europe was certainly not the only part of the world to possess gunpowder in the 16th and 17th centuries, but it was Europe that successfully married cannon to ship and produced the phenomenally powerful navies that ruled the waves in the age of shot and sail. It was these ships that gave Europe the means to rule the world, creating the economic basis which made possible the construction of ever larger fleets, empowering the entrenchment of greater state capacity, and prompting the systemization and professionalization of naval warfare.

The Advent of Empire: Portugal and the Battle of Diu

At a cursory glance, the first arrival of Portuguese ships in India must not have appeared to be a particularly fateful development. Vasco da Gama's 1497 expedition to India, which circumnavigated Africa and arrived on the Malabar Coast near Calicut consisted of a mere four ships and 170 men - hardly the sort of force that could obviously threaten to upset the balance of power among the vast and populous states rimming the Indian ocean. The rapid proliferation of Portuguese power in India must have therefore been all the more shocking for the region's denizens.

The collision of the Iberian and Indian worlds, which possessed diplomatic and religious norms that were mutually unintelligible, was therefore bound to devolve quickly into frustration and eventually violence. The Portuguese, who harbored hopes that India might be home to Christian populations with whom they could link up, were greatly disappointed to discover only Muslims and Hindu "idolaters". The broader problem, however, was that the market in the Malabar coast was already heavily saturated with Arab merchants who plied the trade routes from India to Egypt - indeed, these were precisely the middle men whom the Portuguese were hoping to outflank.

The particular flashpoint which led to conflict, therefore, were the mutual efforts of the Portuguese and the Arabs to exclude each other from the market, and the devolution to violence was rapid. A second Portuguese expedition, which arrived in 1500 with 13 ships, got the action started by seizing and looting an Arab cargo ship off Calicut; Arab merchants in the city responded by whipping up a mob which massacred some 70 Portuguese in the onshore trading post in full sight of the fleet. The Portuguese, incensed and out for revenge, retaliated in turn by bombarding Calicut from the sea; their powerful cannon killed hundreds and left much of the town (which was not fortified) in ruins. They then seized the cargo of some 10 Arab vessels along the coast and hauled out for home.

The 1500 expedition unveiled an emerging pattern and basis for Portugal's emerging India project. The voyage was marked by significant frustration: in addition to the massacre of the shore party in Calicut, there were significant losses to shipwreck and scurvy, and the expedition had failed to achieve its goal of establishing a trading post and stable relations in Calicut. Even so, the returns - mainly spices looted from Arab merchant vessels - were more than sufficient to justify the expense of more ships, more men, and more voyages. On the shore, the Portuguese felt the acute vulnerability of their tiny numbers, having been overwhelmed and massacred by a mob of civilians, but the power of their cannon fire and the superiority of their seamanship gave them a powerful kinetic tool.

When the Portuguese returned yet again in 1502, this time once again under Vasco da Gama, they were still thinking about the massacre at Calicut and looking for revenge. They started by burning an unarmed ship full of Muslim pilgrims returning from Mecca, before engaging in a sequence of fruitless negotiations with the Zamorin (king) of Calicut, and beginning a blockade of the city. An attempt to lift the blockade and drive the Portuguese out predictably turned into a disaster. Despite mustering a significantly larger fleet (over 70 vessels against the 16 in De Gama's armada) Calicut blundered into a disaster; the Portuguese took advantage of both their superior gunnery and favorable winds to remain at range and pummel the Malabar fleet, shattering it while taking only minor losses of their own.

The strategic situation in the Indian Ocean thus took the following shape. The Portuguese had originally aimed to establish a permanent trading post in Calicut, but relations had gone permanently sour (for obvious reasons), and they instead formed an alliance with Calicut's enemy to the south, the Sultan of Cochin (a kingdom centered on the modern day Indian state of Kerala). Holding permanent, fortified positions in India was of supreme importance to the Portuguese, not only for purposes of basing and protecting their trade, but also to anchor them amid the seasonal winds of the Indian ocean. The Indian monsoon has a charming and useful reliability, with strong winds blowing from Africa to India during the summer, before reversing in the winter. This pattern gave the Portuguese a reliable current to make the circuit to India in a year, but it also meant that once they had ridden the summer Monsoon in, they could not leave until the winds reversed late in the year. The seasonality of the winds meant, in essence, that Europeans could not simply come and go any time they wished, and made it paramount for the Portuguese to have safe harbors and solid bases. Eager to leverage Portuguese gunnery against his rivals in Calicut, the Sultan of Cochin was happy to provide just such a base of support.

The alliance with Cochin gave the Portuguese a permanent base in India which allowed them to devastate shipping around Malabar, and in December of 1504 they sunk almost the entirety of Calicut's annual merchant fleet as it was en-route to Egypt. The disaster at last prompted the Zamorin to seek outside help, and envoys were sent to Cairo to request assistance from the powerful Mamluk Sultanate, which was already growing very tired of Portuguese aggression towards the Arab merchants operating in India. In 1507, a Mamluk armada arrived on the coast of Gujarat, basing themselves in the port city of Diu.

The war for the west Indian coast would therefore be fought primarily between the Portuguese, operating out of their base in Cochin, and the Mamluks, who were supported by (and had come to the aid of) the Zamorin of Calicut, the Gujarati Sultanate, and the prosperous communities of Muslim traders operating all along the coastline. In March of 1508, the Mamluks managed to ambush and defeat a small Portuguese flotilla at the port town of Chaul, killing the son of the Portuguese viceroy, Dom Francisco de Almeida, and alerting the Portuguese to the fact that they now faced a serious adversary who would attempt to dislodge them from India altogether. Almeida called in all available ships to rendezvous at Cochin, and in December they set out for Diu, to crush the Mamluk fleet. After a cautious voyage up the coastline, they arrived near Diu in March, 1509.

The Muslim strategy in the ensuing battle was shaped first and foremost by the human considerations that often intrude on the rational calculus of war. Although nominally a consolidated allied fleet, the Muslim armada was in fact a tenuous joint force comprised of Mamluk vessels under the command of Amir Hussain Al-Kurdi and the local Gujarati forces of Diu, under the command of the local governor, Malik Ayyaz. The relationship between the two was, in a word, less than amiable, and hobbled by mutual suspicion - conditions which are rarely conducive to sensible military planning.

Hussain argued from the jump that they ought to sail out and meet the Portuguese in the open sea, while they were still tired from their long voyage and had not had time to formulate a battle plan of their own. Ayyaz, however, saw this as a ploy - fighting in the open sea would allow the Mamluks to break away and flee back to Egypt if the fight went poorly, leaving Ayyaz and the people of Diu to face the wrath of the Portuguese and shoulder all the consequences. Ayyaz therefore insisted that they ought to instead wait in the shelter of the harbor and let the Portuguese come to them. Nominal tactical arguments were made for this plan, but the real purpose - from Ayyaz's perspective - was to prevent Hussain from abandoning him. Hussain then tried to override Ayyaz by simply ordering the entire armada to sail out, at which point Ayyaz had to scramble to override the order and call his own ships back. Thus, before the battle even began, the two Muslim commanders were fighting each other to a command stalemate.

These dynamics of mistrust pushed the Muslim fleet into the default strategy, which was to simply wait in the shelter of the city in a defensive position. There were certain tactical points to be made here, of course - the Gujarati artillery on land might be able to intervene in the battle, and the Muslim fleet might be safe from Portuguese maneuvering if it remained snug against the shore, but the larger problem was that Ayyaz and Hussain had ceded the initiative to a Portuguese enemy that was very eager to fight, and to fight aggressively.

In the end, the Muslim fleet deployed with its heavy ships - including the six carracks and six galleons of Hussain's fleet and four Gujarati carracks - anchored in a snug line close to the shore, under the ostensible protection of shore mounted cannon, while a cloud of lighter vessels, mainly comprised of small oared vessels and light galleys, loitered farther up in the harbor. The plan, as such, seems to have been to draw the Portuguese into a fight against the shoreline so that the light vessels could sail out and swarm them in the rear. It was not a commendable design, but given the paralyzing distrust between the Muslim commanders it would have to do.

The mood in the Portuguese fleet could hardly have been more different. Almeida was emphatic that the coming battle would be decisive, not just in the local, tactical sense but in a more grand and historic way. He told his captains that "in conquering this fleet we will conquer all of India", and made lavish promises of knighthoods, promotions, and rewards to every man in the event of victory.

The Portuguese battle plan hinged on tactical aggression, initiative, and superior gunnery. Almeida's flagship, the Frol de la Mar (Flower of the Sea) transferred most of its fighting men to other vessels and prepared to fight as a mobile artillery platform, to loiter in the rear of the battle where it could offer fire support and allow Almeida to coordinate the fight. The remainder of the Portuguese fleet was prepared to sail laterally across the face of the Muslim fleet and soften the enemy with cannon fire before wheeling in for boarding action.

As the sun rose on February 3, 1509, a small Portuguese frigate sailed down the line of the fleet as it loitered and waited to commence the battle. As it passed each ship, it briefly stopped and a herald came aboard to read a proclamation from the Viceroy. This gesture underscored that Almeida was not only fully prepared and eager to fight, but also convinced that he was about to win a world-historic victory. The proclamation read, in part:

Dom Francisco d'Almeida, viceroy of India by the most high and excellent king Dom Manuel, my lord. I announce to all who see my letter, that on this day and at this hour I am at the bar of Diu, with all the forces that I have to give battle to a fleet of the Great Turk that he has ordered, which has come from Mecca to fight and damage the faith of Christ and against the kingdom of the king my lord.

After reading the proclamation, the herald reiterated the previously promised rewards of titles and knighthoods, and gave universal permission to loot the enemy in the event of victory. Having dispersed this message to the whole fleet, Almeida's flagship fired a signal shot and the Portuguese began to spill into the harbor, sailing right past the shore batteries of the defender. To the great dismay of the Muslim fleet, the defensive fire from the shore guns had no great effect on the onrushing Portuguese armada. The lead Portuguese ship, the Santo Espirito, had its deck swept by fire which killed nearly a dozen men, but the line of Portuguese warships continued uninhibited and set on the static Muslim fleet.

The ensuing battle was shaped by a threefold Portuguese advantage in gunnery, armor, and tactical aggression, all of which were magnified by the disastrous decision by the Muslim commanders to moor their ships in a line with their sterns towards the shore - this rendered the Muslim fleet largely immobile and ensured that they could only fire their bow cannons, while the Portuguese vessels fired broadside volleys as they spilled into the mouth of the Diu harbor. The opening salvos of the Portuguese managed to sink a Mamluk carrack at the outset, and they continued to disgorge fire as they wheeled inward and slammed into the stationary Muslim warships, which remained largely immobile and fought like floating forts.

Portuguese fighting spirit was evidently extremely high, and their heavily equipped marines led ferocious boarding actions which, supported by the gunnery of the ships, slowly but surely overwhelmed the Muslim defenders. Hussain had some hope that his flotilla of light boats, which was loitering further up in the harbor, might swing the fight in his favor by swarming into the rear of the Europeans and boarding them from the stern, but this gambit was shattered by Almedia's flagship. The Frol del Mar had remained aloof from the close quarters fighting and was prowling in the rear, offering fire support as it went; when the cloud of little boats came charging into the battle at full row, they ran straight into the Frol, which unloaded its cannon on them. The lead boats were smashed, leading to a congested and fouled mess which blocked the other vessels from entering the battle. The utter failure of this attempted swarming on the flank left the larger Muslim vessels trapped helplessly against the shore, where they were slowly but surely overwhelmed.

By the end of the day, Diu had turned into the most overwhelming Portuguese victory imaginable. Every one of Hussain's 12 warships had been destroyed or captured, and of the 450 Mamluk personnel who had fought in the battle, a mere 23 had escaped - Hussain himself and some 22 men who had fled with him in a small boat. As for Hussain's erstwhile ally, Ayyaz, he played his cards brilliantly in the end - after watching the battle from the shore, he brought Almedia an offer of surrender, pledged vassalage to Portugal, and sent the victorious Portuguese fleet a sumptuous gift of food and gold.

In the grand scheme of things, Diu was not a particularly large or complex battle. The victorious Portuguese fleet had a mere 18 ships, of which only 9 were heavy carracks, and there were at most 800 Portuguese fighting men and sailors present. For our purposes, however, the battle presents two highly notable elements.

Diu was a significant and early demonstration of the emerging European naval system as a tool for potent long range power projection. The ability of a European power - even a poor one like Portugal - to project military force thousands of miles from home, fighting and winning in the littoral of wealthy and vast foreign states, was an entirely new and shocking state capacity, and one which would obviously have earth shattering implications. The combination of massed cannon fire and heavy European infantry created a powerful tactical nexus, which could now be deployed and sustained with truly global reach. By the end of the 16th Century, the Portuguese would control a chain of forts and outposts stretching all the way from Lisbon to Nagasaki, and Portuguese sailors and soldiers would withstand decades of bloody warfare, repelling all attempts to dislodge them.

On a tactical level, however, Diu resembles a bridge between eras of naval combat. Although the workhorse vessel in the Portuguese fleet was the carrack, which was recognizable as a precursor iteration of the broadside warship, the fighting at Diu still centered on boarding actions. The Portuguese used their gunnery to great effect and sank large Mamluk vessels with cannon fire, but the cannonry was still largely utilized for softening up the enemy and supporting boarding parties. Most of the Muslim fleet was overwhelmed by the boarding actions of heavily armored Portuguese marines which, although tactically powerful, exposed the Portuguese to deadly bowfire - as a result, more than a third of the Portuguese who fought at Diu were wounded in a battle that they won decisively.

In this sense, although the Portuguese fought at Diu with recognizably advanced sailing ships capable of traversing oceans and operating thousands of miles from home, the combat itself was still a close order affair with gunnery operating in a supportive role. Notwithstanding the different design of the ships, the physics of this combat was not altogether different from that which was seen on the galleys at Lepanto.

Diu and Lepanto were fought on opposite ends of the 16th Century. For naval warfare, therefore, this century forms what we might call a historical estuary, where distinct eras blurred together. Lepanto was the swan song of a very old system of naval warfare involving close order combat between rowed galleys; Diu was fought with the prototype of broadside sailing ships, but they fought rather similarly to galleys. Lepanto was the last showing of an old form of warfare which had reached the point of obsolescence; Diu was the prologue to an emerging system of naval warfare that had not yet been fully developed. Cannonry, with the ship as a floating artillery battery, was clearly an extremely powerful weapons system, but the secret of its proper application had not yet been fully uncovered.

The Spanish Armada and the Birth of the Royal Navy

More than 4,000 miles from Diu, there sat a relatively poor and unimportant kingdom called England. In the mid-16th Century, England was a marginal and unimportant state in the grand turnings of European affairs. She had not yet consolidated control over Scottland, had no overseas possession apart from the port of Calais on the French coast, and her ability to project power or exert influence beyond her shores was minimal. Her role in the European system at this time was primarily that of a junior partner to the powerful Spanish and an antagonist to the French; during the reign of the notorious Henry VIII, England would fight three wars with France as an ally of Spain.

Relations between Spain and England reached a turning point with the onset of the English Reformation and the death of Henry VIII. Henry's successor, the young Edward VI, became the first English king to have been brought up as a Protestant, but he reigned for only six years before dying at age of just 15. The throne then passed to his aunt, the Catholic Mary I, who reversed many of the church reforms and attempted to reassert Catholic prerogatives in England. In 1556, Mary was wed to King Philip II of Spain, providing a powerful foreign backer of the Catholic cause in England, and under his auspices Mary joined yet another war against France, which ended in victory for Spain, at the cost of England's last possession on the continent when the French captured Calais in 1558. Mary died a few months after the loss of Calais and was in turn succeeded by Elizabeth I, who once more reversed the religious trajectory and favored the Protestants.

The whipsawing of the English religious balance of power, with the throne passing back and forth between Catholic and Protestant monarchs, of course has great importance in the story of England's political development. What is interesting for our purposes, however, is the way this was perceived in Habsburg Spain, which was the most powerful Catholic state in Europe and a preeminent advocate of the Catholic cause. From the Spanish perspective, the English reformation threatened to tear England out of Spain's orbit, robbing Spain of its influence over an ally that was usefully positioned on France's northern flank. The death of Mary I was particularly devastating, in that it cost King Philip his direct influence over the English crown and replaced Mary with the Protestant Elizabeth.

It was within this context that Spain began to contemplate plans for what modern readers will instantly recognize as regime change. The Spanish initially supported plots to have Elizabeth overthrown and replaced with her cousin, the Catholic Queen Mary of Scotland - in response, Elizabeth had Mary imprisoned, forced her abdication, and eventually ordered her execution in 1587. Elizabeth further responded to these Spanish intrigues by backing the rebellion of Philip's provinces in the Netherlands and commissioning privateers to attack Spanish shipping. From the Spanish perspective, England was on the verge of permanently slipping out of Spain's orbit, and the time had come for more direct measures. Thus, the scheme for the Spanish Armada (colloquially called the "English Enterprise" in Spain) was born.

The Spanish Armada represented a remarkably ambitious attempt to settle the question of the English reformation once and for all. The plan, as such, was to muster an enormous fleet in Spain, sail through the English Channel, link up with a Habsburg ground army in the Spanish Netherlands, and then amphibiously land the army across the Channel to march on London, depose Elizabeth, and replace her with a compliant Catholic monarch. On the whole, this was an unprecedented scheme for the early modern era, combining as it did a massive fleet operation, amphibious assault, overt plans for regime change, and operations at great distance from the Spanish fleet's home ports.

The Spanish initially had pretensions of maintaining the element of surprise, but given the sheer scale of the preparations involved (including not only assembling an enormous fleet in Spain but also staging the invasion army in the Netherlands) this proved impossible. By the summer of 1588, the famous Spanish Armada of 141 ships had been assembled in Lisbon (at this time, Portugal and Spain were in a state of personal union under Habsburg rule), and they set out for the Channel.

As the Armada entered the English Channel, it rounded a peninsula in Cornwall and was spotted on July 29 - the news of the Spanish arrival was then conveyed to London via a chain of beacons constructed for that purpose, and the English fleet readied itself at Plymouth to contest the channel. The following weeks of action would constitute, in many ways, the birthing operation of the Royal Navy, which had been formally founded by Henry VIII some 42 years prior.

The Spanish advantages were formidable. On paper, the English had more ships - around 220 against 117 in the main body of the Spanish fleet - however, of this large number a mere 34 English ships were purpose built warships in the royal fleet. The remainder largely consisted of armed merchantmen, few of which participated in combat. Thus, although the Spanish nominally had fewer hulls, they had a significant advantage in firepower, with up to 50% more guns. Furthermore, the complements of heavily armed Spanish marines on deck would give the Armada an insuperable advantage in close range fighting and boarding actions. All told, the Spanish had good reason to feel confident in a pitched fleet action, to say nothing of the danger that the English would face if the Armada succeeded in convoying the Hapsburg land forces over the Channel.

As the Armada worked its way eastward through the Channel in the final days of July, the English attempted in vain to engage them. The Spanish had adopted a crescent-shaped formation which protected their transport ships and barges by wrapping them in a tight perimeter of heavy galleons; given the danger inherent in grappling with these massive Spanish warships at close range, the English fleet under Sir Francis Drake was forced to snipe at them from range with cannon fire; this initial action failed to result in the loss of even a single ship on either side. English fortunes improved slightly on August 1 when several Spanish ships collided, setting one galleon adrift and allowing it to be captured by the English fleet. A second Spanish galleon was captured, albeit heavily damaged, when its gunpowder magazine exploded. On the whole, however, the Armada managed to reach Calais on August 7 entirely intact, where it anchored itself in the same defensive crescent formation to await a linkup with the Spanish ground forces.

In the dead of night on August 7, the Spanish fleet anchored off Calais was awakened by the alarms and bells of their lookouts. Eight burning hulks were drifting slowly towards the Spanish formation. These were eight large fireships - stripped down English hulls packed with gunpowder, pitch, pig fat, and any other flammable material on hand, then set ablaze and cut adrift at a distance from the Spanish anchorage. As the wind and current naturally drove them in at the Spanish, the Armada fell into a panic. Much of the Spanish fleet cut their anchors and scattered in a mad scramble to evade the path of the drifting fireships. While none of the Spanish vessels was burned, the fireship attack at Calais served the critical function of scattering the Armada and compelling it to break its tight crescent formation, which it had worked so hard to maintain ever since it entered the Channel.

The broader problem for the Spanish was that, by cutting anchor and scattering in a mad panic, the Armada had been driven eastward by the prevailing winds - it was now not only disorganized, but it would have to fight powerful currents if it wished to either return to anchor at Calais or regain its crescent formation. It was in this state of disorder, as the Spanish were scattered by the fireships and carried out by the wind, that the English fleet chose to attack. They closed in on the morning of August 8 as the Spanish attempted to sort themselves out near the town of Gravelines, some 20 kilometers up the coast from Calais.

The Battle of the Gravelines is one of those historical oddities where it appears at first blush that very little happened. The Spanish had left their home port in July with 141 vessels in their armada, and at Gravelines the British managed to sink just five. This would appear to be a fairly inconsequential battle then, judging by the loss calculus. In fact, Gravelines marked a crucial turning point in naval warfare, and created a tactical pivot around which the English began their rise to rule the waves.

As the Spanish Armada attempted to reconstitute its formation following the disorientation of the fireship attack, the English fleet sailed in to have a fight. Drake had discovered, upon studying the captured galleons in the channel, that Spanish ships were not laid out for efficient reloading of their guns, with the Spanish cannon tightly spaced together and the gun decks clogged with supplies. This was because the Spanish, like the Portuguese at Diu, still favored a tactical methodology inherited from their long experience with galley warfare. Spanish cannons were intended for softening up enemy vessels as a prelude to boarding action, and the vessel itself was thought of fundamentally as an infantry assault craft.

The Spanish therefore had a damnably difficult day at Gravelines, as Drake's ships constantly stayed at the edge of grappling range, firing volley after volley at the Spanish fleet and constantly evading the enemy's attempts to board them. While little of the tactical detail of Gravelines is documented, a few things are known for certain. First, we know that five Spanish ships were sunk and another six suffered significant damage. No English ships were lost. Furthermore, the battle ended at approximately 4 PM because the English fleet had expended most of its powder and shot; in contrast, recovered Spanish wrecks revealed large supplies of unused munitions. This supports the general sketch of the battle as one where the English were prepared to fight at range the entire time, while the Spanish struggled in vain to execute boarding actions.

Although the fighting at Gravelines sank only a small fraction of the Armada, the entire operation had been successfully scuttled. The Armada was scattered and disordered, had missed its rendezvous with the ground forces, and was now driven much farther to the east than it had intended. Returning to Calais would mean battling not only the English fleet, but also the winds. The Armada could not sail west back into the channel, it could not facilitate an amphibious invasion of England, and it could not defeat the English Navy. That left only one course of action, which was to return to Spain by sailing north and circumnavigating the British Isles. The Spanish rounded northern Scotland on August 20 and soon ran into yet another disaster, when the gulf stream carried them much closer to the Irish shore than they had anticipated. A series of strong winds drove many of their ships into the shore - particularly those that had been damaged in battle or by the long voyage - and claimed another 28 ships.

The Spanish Armada had set out with lofty strategic goals, preparing itself for the triple lift of fighting a major fleet action, facilitating an amphibious landing, and affecting regime change in England. Expectations were high, and the Spanish crown had mobilized impressive resources. Because the strategic intention was fundamentally to eradicate Protestant rule in England and resuscitate the Catholic monarchy, Philip II had even been granted the right to raise crusading taxes and grant indulgences to his men. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Armada represented the second front in a broader Spanish war for Catholicism. They had been victorious in the Mediterranean front against the Turks at Lepanto, but faltered in the English channel, and the costs were high. Of the 141 ships that were mobilized in July, a third were lost to combat and storms. The proportional loss of men was even higher, with many perishing from disease and accident along the way: 25,696 men set out, and 13,399 returned.

In the larger picture, the battle at Gravelines proved to be a tactical turning point in naval combat. The Spanish, influenced by their long experience fighting galley battles with the Turks in the Mediterranean, had continued to view their ships as infantry assault craft, with cannon batteries serving as supplemental weapons designed to support and facilitate boarding actions. Tactically, the Spanish attempted to fight Gravelines in a manner very similar to the way the Portuguese fought at Diu - firing limited salvos with their heavy cannon before boarding with their heavy infantry. In contrast, the English fleet used its ships as floating and highly mobile artillery batteries. The results vindicated the English model.

Going forward, the English would aggressively pursue ship designs which facilitated gunnery-centric combat. Most importantly, the English fleet would pioneer so-called "race built" ships. The word "race" is here a deformation of "raze", and implied "razing" the fore and aft castles, creating a much sleeker vessel. The fighting castles, which continued to feature prominently on Spanish galleons, were useful in boarding actions, but they made ships top heavy and reduced maneuverability. By scrapping the fighting platforms altogether, English race built ships attained the familiar sleek shape and streamlined deck that gave them an insuperable advantage in ranged combat.

The English capital ships, which by the end of the 16th Century constituted the most powerful warships in the world, were essentially an admixture of four important technological changes:

1. Wheeled cannon carriages which rolled back into the ship upon firing, allowing for faster reloading.

2. Water tight porthole covers which could allow cannon banks to be placed on lower decks closer to the waterline.

3. Race built ship designs to make ships more maneuverable and less top heavy.

4. Full rigging, with three or more masts bearing square rigging.

While the English did not invent all of these important innovations, they were the first European Navy to pursue the systematic adoption of all four, and in doing so they cemented the superior combat power of ships deployed as mobile artillery batteries, rather than infantry assault craft. It was a warship built in 1514 for Henry VIII that first demonstrated the possibility of cutting gunports in the hull and placing banks of cannon close to the waterline, and it was Sir John Hawkins - Queen Elizabeth's Treasurer of the Navy - who began cutting the fighting castles off of English ships to create the maneuverable race-built design.

The naval revolution which found its pivot at Gravelines is a profound example of the way that weapons systems can intervene in history, and even outweigh the larger structural factors of state power. Spain was a much more powerful, wealthier, and more populous state than England, with an exceptional military pedigree. It did not matter - the English had fully accepted the logic of the agile floating artillery battery in a way that the Spanish, who were accustomed to boarding fights in the Mediterranean, had not.

And so, the 16th Century presented three landmark naval battles which proved the passing of the age and the future of war at sea. At Lepanto (1571) the Holy League and the Turks fought a classical galley battle centered on boarding actions. At Diu, the Portuguese used solidly built sailing ships, but their cannons were utilized to support a galley-like boarding assault. Finally, at Gravelines (1588) the Spanish attempted to fight somewhat similarly to the Portuguese at Diu, but were utterly unable to either grapple with or return the fire of the more agile and relentlessly cannonading English fleet. The embrace of heavily armed ships optimized for broadside firing - the so-called "Great Ships" - gave the English the first recognizable Capital Ships on the seas and became the embryo of their eventual naval supremacy.

The Line Arrives: The Dutch and English Wars

The Dutch Republic and England fought three major wars at sea between 1652 and 1674. Curiously, these wars failed to make a lasting impression in either the English popular memory or the broader historiography of Europe and warfare. They are a point of interest in the Netherlands, but beyond Dutch shores they are little known and little regarded.

This fact is rather strange, because it was in these Anglo-Dutch Wars that naval warfare in the age of sail reached its mature and recognizable form, particularly through a series of radical and important innovations made by the Royal Navy - innovations which were frantically and aggressively copied by the Dutch. The Royal Navy's eventual ascension to total global naval supremacy - the backbone of Britain's century of global empire - was forged in decades of intense and close quarters naval combat with the Dutch. Perhaps it is little wonder, then, that one particular historian of the field, named Alfred Thayer Mahan, found these wars to be uniquely important and dwelt on them at great length.

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