Big Serge Thoughts

1. 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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2. 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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3. 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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4. 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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5. 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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6. 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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7. Back to the Bloodlands: Operation Krepost

On Tuesday, August 6, the Russo-Ukrainian War took an unexpected twist with the beginning of a brigade-level Ukrainian assault on Kursk Oblast, across the border from Ukrainian Sumy. The decision by Ukrainian command to willingly open up a new front, at a time when their defenses on critical axes of the Donbas are failing, is both aggressive and fraught with peril. The sensational spectacle of a Ukrainian offensive into prewar Russia in a region that is operationally remote from the critical theater of the war has whipped the peanut gallery into a frenzy, and most commentators and observers seem to have fled straightaway to their base narrative instincts. Russian "doomers" have been quick to denounce the affair as a catastrophic failure of preparedness by the Russian Ministry of Defense, accelerationists have trumpeted the immateriality of Russian red lines, while the more disillusioned pro-Ukrainian commenters have despaired of the operation as a wasteful sideshow which dooms the Donbas line to defeat.

People form opinions very rapidly in the current information ecosystem, and the prospect of excitement often leads them to throw caution to the wind despite the orgy of misinformation and deception that surrounds such events. It is worth noting, however, that only two weeks have passed since the beginning of an operation that apparently nobody was expecting, and we should therefore be cautious of certainty and carefully distinguish between what we think and what we know. With that in mind, let's take a careful survey of the Ukrainian operation as it stands and attempt to parse out both the strategic concept of the assault and its possible trajectories.

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The sudden and unexpected eruption of combat in Kursk oblast has, of course, raised comparisons to the 1943 Battle of Kursk, which is often incorrectly called the "biggest tank battle of all time." For a variety of reasons, that famous battle is a poor comparison. Germany's Operation Citadel was a constrained and unambitious operation against a fully alert defense, characterized by a lack of both strategic imagination and strategic surprise. The current Ukrainian endeavor may lay on the opposite end of the spectrum - highly imaginative, and perhaps dangerously so. Nevertheless, the return of German military equipment to the environs of Kursk must raise eyebrows. The current battlefield around the town of Sudzha is precisely the spot where, in 1943, the Soviet 38th and 40th armies coiled for a counteroffensive against the German 4th Army. Russia's southwestern steppe tastes blood again, and the fertile earth opens wide to accept the dead.

Krepost: Strategic Intentions

Before we talk about the strategic concept behind Ukraine's operation in Kursk, let us briefly ponder what to call it. Repeating the phrase "Ukraine's Kursk Operation" will rapidly become tiresome and dry, and calling it "Kursk", or "The Battle of Kursk" is not a good option - both because it raises some confusion as to whether we mean the city of Kursk or the larger oblast around it, and because there has already been a Battle of Kursk. Therefore, I am suggesting that for now we simply refer to the Ukrainian assault as Operation Krepost. Germany's 1943 offensive towards Kursk was codenamed Operation Citadel, and Krepost (крепость) is a Slavic word for a fortress or citadel.

Ukraine has made repeated forays across the Russian border throughout this war - generally suicidal thunder runs into Belgorod Oblast which met with disaster. Krepost, however, stands apart from previous episodes in several ways, chief among them being the use of regular AFU brigades rather than the paramilitary fronts stood up by the GRU (that is, the Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate, not Steve Carell's character in the Despicable Me franchise).

For previous expeditions towards Belgorod, the Ukrainians opted to use thinly veiled irregular formations like the "Freedom of Russia Legion" and the "Russian Volunteer Corps". These are the sort of sheep dipped units that can be useful in certain contexts by allowing states to maintain a token façade of plausible deniability - a good corollary might be Russia's own use of unmarked special forces in the 2014 annexation of Crimea. In a time of active war, however, these paramilitaries came across as exceptionally lame. Whatever the "Freedom of Russia Legion" called themselves, they were obviously forces stood up by the Ukrainian government, using Ukrainian weaponry, fighting Ukraine's war. The paint job fooled nobody, and absurdities like the "Belgorod People's Republic" did not exist beyond a few bad memes on twitter.

It is notable, however, that the Kursk incursion has been undertaken not by forces disguising themselves (however poorly) as independent Russian paramilitaries but by Ukrainian forces operating as themselves - that is, as regular Ukrainian army brigades. Committing core AFU assets to a ground incursion in Russia, especially during a time of general operational crisis in the Donbas, is something entirely different than flinging a disposable paramilitary battalion at Belgorod.

But why? The obvious thing that stands out about Kursk is how operationally remote it is from the critical theater of the war. The center of gravity in this conflict is the Donbas, and Ukraine's line of defenses around the cities of Pokrovsk, Kostyantinivka, Kramatorsk, and Slovyansk, with crucial flanking axes in the land bridge and on the Oskil River line. The frontier of Kursk Oblast, where the Ukrainians are now attacking, is more than 130 kilometers away from the subsidiary battles around Kharkov, and more than 200 kilometers away from the main theater of the war. Given the scope of this war and the pace of advances, Kursk may as well be on the moon.

In short, the Ukrainian operation in Kursk bears no possibility of being supportive of the other, critical fronts of the war, and even in the most generous range of outcomes it has no potential to exert a direct operational influence on those fronts. Parsing through the strategic intention behind Krepost, therefore, in that it has no immediate operational bearing on extant fronts. A variety of opportunities have been proposed, which we will review and contemplate in turn.

1) The Atomic Hostage

Sixty kilometers from the Ukrainian border lies the small city of Kurchatov (named after Igor Kurchatov, the father of Soviet nuclear weaponry) and the Kursk Nuclear Powerplant. The proximity of such an obviously significant - and potentially dangerous - installation so close to the scene of the fighting led many to immediately presume that the nuclear plant is the objective of Krepost.

These theories are highly reductive and unsupported, and act as if the powerplant is the object in a game of tag - as if Ukraine can "win" by reaching the plant. It's not immediately obvious that this is the case. There's plenty of hand-wringing about Ukraine "capturing" the plant, but the question then remains: to do what with?

The implication would seem to be that Ukraine might use the plant as a hostage, threatening to sabotage it and initiate some sort of radiological disaster. This, however, would seem to be both impractical and unlikely. The Kursk plant is currently in a state of transition, with its four older RBMK reactors (similar to those used at Chernobyl) being phased out and replaced with new VVER reactors. The plant features modern biologic shields, a robust containment building, and other protective mechanisms. Furthermore, nuclear power plants do not explode in the sense that is often feared. Chernobyl, for example, experienced a steam explosion due to particular design flaws which do not exist in currently operable plants. The idea that Ukrainian soldiers could simply flip a bunch of switches and detonate the plant like a nuclear bomb are not realistic.

It is theoretically possible, one supposes, that the Ukrainians could try to bring in colossal amounts of explosives and send the entire plant sky high, spreading radioactive material into the atmosphere. While I am certainly no great admirer of the Kiev regime, I cannot help but doubt the willingness of the Ukrainian government to intentionally create a radiological disaster which would irradiate much of their own country along with swathes of central Europe, particularly because the Kursk region is part of the Dnieper watershed.

The powerplant story sounds scary but is ultimately too phantasmagorical to take seriously. Ukraine is not going to intentionally create a radiological disaster in close proximity to their own border, which would likely poison their own primary river basin and turn them into the most intensely hated international pariah ever seen. Even for a country at the end of its strategic rope, it's hard to give credence to a harebrained scheme that uses critical maneuver assets of the regular army to capture an enemy nuclear plant and rig it to blow.

2) Diversionary Front

In another formulation, Krepost is construed as an attempt to draw Russian resources away from other, more critical sectors of front. The idea of a "diversion" as such is always appealing, to the point where it becomes something of a trope, but it's worth considering what this might actually mean in the context of the relative force generation in this war.

We can begin with the more abstract problem here - Ukraine is operating at a serious disadvantage in total force generation, which means that any widening of the front will disproportionately burden the AFU. Extending the frontline with an entirely new - and strategically isolated - axis of combat would be a development that works against the outnumbered force. This is why, in 2022, we saw the Russians contract the frontline by hundreds of kilometers as a prelude to their mobilization. The idea of extending the front becomes a shell game for the Ukrainians - with fewer brigades than the Russians to cover more than 1000 kilometers of frontline, it becomes questionable as to just which army is being "diverted" in Kursk. For example, the spokesman for the 110th Mechanized Brigade (currently defending near Pokrovsk) told Politico that "things have become worse in our part of the front" since Ukraine launched Krepost, with less ammunition coming in as the Russians continue to attack.

The more concrete problem for Ukraine, however, is that the Russians formed an entirely new Northern Army Group covering Belgorod, Kursk, and Bryansk and is in the process of raising two additional army equivalents. To the extent that Krepost forces the deployment of Russian reserves, it will draw from forces organic to this northern grouping, and not the Russian formations currently attacking in the Donbas. Ukrainian sources are already taking a dour mood, noting that there has been no drawdown of Russia's grouping in the Donbas. Thus far, the identified Russian units fighting in Kursk have essentially all been drawn from this northern grouping

More to the point, Krepost seems to have meaningfully denuded Ukrainian strength in the Donbas while affecting the Russians very little. A recent piece in the Economist featured interviews with several Ukrainian troops fighting in Kursk, all of whom said that their units had been "pulled, unrested, from under-pressure frontlines in the east with barely a day's notice." The article goes on to quote a source in the AFU's general staff who notes that the Russian units scrambling into Kursk are coming from the northern army group, not the Donbas. A recent New York Times piece, which triumphantly announced the redeployment of Russian forces, admitted that none of Russia's troop movements are affecting the Donbas - instead, it is deploying resting units from the Dnipro axis.

And this is Ukraine's problem. Fighting an enemy with superior force generation, attempts to divert or redirect the fighting ultimately threaten to become a shell game. Russia has approximately 50 division equivalents on the line against perhaps 33 for Ukraine - an advantage that will stubbornly persist no matter how they are arranged on the line. Adding 100 extra kilometers of front in Kursk is fundamentally contradictory to the AFU's fundamental interests at this juncture, which hinge on economizing forces and avoiding overextension.

3) Bargaining Chip

Another strand of thought suggests that Krepost may be an effort to strengthen Ukraine's position for negotiations with Russia. An anonymous Zelensky advisor allegedly told the Washington Post that the point of the operation was to seize Russian territory to hold as a bargaining chip which could be swapped in negotiations. This view was then corroborated by senior advisor Mykhailo Podolyak.

If we take these claims at face value, we perhaps have arrived at the strategic intention of Krepost. If Ukraine indeed intends to occupy a swathe of Kursk Oblast and use it to bargain for the return of prewar Ukrainian territory in the Donbas, then we must ask the obvious question: have they lost their minds?

Such a plan would instantly founder on two insurmountable problems. The first of these would be an obvious misread of the relative value of the chips on the table. The Donbas - the heart of Russia's war aims - is a highly urbanized region of nearly seven million inhabitants, which - along with Russian annexed Zaporozhia and Kherson - forms a critical strategic link to Crimea and grants Russia control over the Sea of Azov and much of the Black Sea littoral. The idea that the Kremlin would consider walking away from its aims here simply to bloodlessly recover a few small towns in southwestern Kursk is, in a word, lunacy. It would, in the luminary words of President Trump, be "the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals."

If Ukraine thought that seizing Russian territory would make Moscow more amenible to peace talks, they badly miscalculated. The Kremlin responded by declaring an Anti-Terror Operation in Kursk, Byransk, and Belgorod Oblasts, and Putin - far from appearing humiliated or cowed - projected anger and defiance, while Foreign Ministry officials have suggested that the Kursk operation now precludes negotiations.

The other problem with trying to hold Kursk as a bargaining chip is, well, that you have to hold it. As we will discuss shortly, this will be very difficult for the AFU. They managed to achieve strategic surprise and make a modest penetration into Kursk, but there are a variety of kinetic factors that make them unlikely to hold it. For something to be useful as a bargaining chip, it must be in your possession - this would therefore compel Ukraine to commit forces to the Kursk front indefinitely, and hold it to the bitter end.

4) Pure Spectacle

Finally, we come to the more nebulous option - that Krepost was conceived purely to scandalize and embarrass the Kremlin. This is certainly the sensationalized solution that much of the commentariat has converged on, with plenty of vicious delight in the reversal of fortunes and the spectacular reverse uno of Ukraine invading Russia.

This all plays well with foreign audiences, of course, but it ultimately does not matter much. There's no evidence that the Kremlin's grip on the conflict or the commitment of Russian society to support the war are wavering. This war has seen a long sequence of nominal Russian "embarrassment", from the 2022 withdrawals from Kharkov and Kherson, to the Ukrainian air strikes on Sevastopol, to drone and terror attacks deep inside Russia, all the way to the bizarre mutiny of the Wagner PMC. None of these things have detracted from the central objectives of the Kremlin's war, which remain the capture of the Donbas and the steady exhaustion of Ukraine's military resources. Did the AFU throw a grouping of its dwindling strategic reserves into Kursk Oblast purely to scandalize and embarrass Putin? Possibly. Would it matter? Highly unlikely.

It's very common, particularly on social media, to see a sort of reveling in the great reversal of Ukraine liberating Russia, and battlefield updates frequently make reference to the AFU "liberating" Kursk oblast. This is, of course, very childish and meaningless. Once one extracts oneself from the spectacle, the entire enterprise seems obviously disconnected from the larger logic of Ukraine's war. It's not at all clear how occupying a narrow slice of the Russian frontier correlates to Ukraine's self-professed war aims of regaining its 1991 borders, or how widening the front is supposed to promote a negotiated end to the settlement, or - for that matter - how the little town of Sudzha could be a fair trade for the Donbas transit hub of Pokrovsk.

Ultimately, we have to acknowledge that Krepost is a very odd military development - an overmatched force, already heaving from the strain of a grinding, 700 kilometer front, voluntarily opened a new, independent axis of combat which has no possibility of operationally synergizing with the war's critical theaters. There is some satisfaction to be derived from bringing the war into Russia and scandalizing the Kremlin. Perhaps Kiev hopes that simply unsettling the situation will cajole the Russian military into making a mistake or redeploying out of position, but so far the Kursk axis has not denuded Russian strength in other theaters. Perhaps they really do think that they can seize enough ground to bargain with, but to do that they will need to hold it. Or perhaps they are simply losing the war, and desperation breeds strange ideas.

History will probably conclude that Krepost was an inventive, but ultimately far-fetched gambit. The crude calculus on the ground shows that the existing trajectory of the war simply doesn't work for Ukraine. Russian progress across the contact line in the east has been steady and relentless throughout the spring and summer, and the devastating Ukrainian failure in 2023's counteroffensive showed that banging away against alert and entrenched Russian defenses is not a good answer. Faced with the prospect between slow strangulation in the east, Ukraine has attempted to unlock the front and introduce a more kinetic and open pace.

On the Ground

The biggest problem with the more fanciful and explosive theories of Operation Krepost are fairly simple: the results on the ground are not very good. The attack has been both limited in scale and constrained in its advance, but the shock and surprise of the operation has allowed the narrative to spin out of control, both on the part of exuberant Ukrainian supporters and the usual doomposters in the Kremlin orbit, who have been bemoaning and expecting imminent Russian defeat for years at this point.

Let's begin with a brief sketch of Krepost, the units involved, and the state of the advance. We should begin with a note about the composition of the Ukrainian assault grouping, and what this tells us about the state of the AFU.

Very soon after Krepost began, the Ukrainian ORBAT began to materialize in a jumbled mess. The basic problem, to put it in the most elementary terms, is that there are far too many brigades represented in the operation. There are currently no less than five mechanized brigades (22nd, 54th, 61st, 88th, 116th), a territorial defense brigade (103rd), two Air Assault Brigades (80th and 82nd) and a variety of attached battalions - something like a dozen total brigade equivalents. To put it bluntly, there are very clearly not twelve brigades (30,000 personnel) in this section of front - we have a puzzle on our hands.

The mysterious ORBAT grows ever moreso when one considers the astonishing variety of vehicles that have been spotted (and destroyed) in Kursk. The list includes at minimum the following assets:

• KrAZ Cougar

• Senator

• Oshkosh M-ATV

• Kozak-2

• Bushmaster

• Maxxpro MRAP

• Stryker

• BTR-60M

• BTR 70/80

• VAB

• Marder 1A3

• T-64

• BAT-2

• BREM-1

• Ural 4320

• AHS Krab

• Buk

• M777

• Grad

• 2S1 Gvodzika

• 2k22 Tunguska

• 2S7 Pion

• M88AS2 Hercules

• BMP1

• PT-91

• BTR-4E

• MTLB

That is a long list. But what does it mean?

There is a disconnect between the number of brigades and different vehicle types identified in Kursk and the actual size of the AFU grouping. What this suggests is that the Ukrainians stripped down the motor pools from a variety of different brigades and concentrated them in a strike package to attack Kursk, rather than deploying these brigades as such.

The situation would appear to be highly similar to the Second World War German practice of forming Kampfgruppen, or Battle Groups. As the Wehrmacht became more and more overstretched, German commanders became accustomed to forming improvised formations comprised of sub-units stripped from the line as necessary: take an infantry battalion from this division, steal a dozen panzers from that division, commandeer a battery from that regiment, and voila: you have a Kampfgruppe.

In the voluminous masses of World War Two literature, Kamfgruppen were often taken as evidence of Germany's wonderful improvisational powers, and the ability of their cool-headed commanders to scrape together fighting power from threadbare resources. There's nothing specifically incorrect about that, but this tends to miss the larger point - Kampfgruppe did not become a phenomenon until late in the war, when Germany was losing, and their regular order of battle (ORBAT) was becoming shredded. Cobbling together mutant formations can help you stave off disaster, but it is not a superior option to deploying organic brigades as such.

We appear to have a Ukrainian Kampfgruppe in Kursk, with elements of a variety of different brigades - bringing with them a whole hodgepodge of different vehicles - forming a grouping that is likely not more than 7-8,000 men. Above and beyond the progress that they are making in Kursk, this does not suggest anything good about the state of the AFU. To launch this offensive, they had to strip down units that were actively fighting in the Donbas and rapidly shuttle them to Sumy to accumulate in an improvised strike group. It is a threadbare grouping for a threadbare army.

In any case, the basic shape of the Ukrainian offensive is fairly clear. The mechanized elements (including the mech and air assault brigades) formed the critical maneuver assets, while territorial defense troops from the 103rd provided flank security on the grouping's northwestern flank.

The Ukrainian grouping was able to achieve something approximating total surprise - a fact that was surprising to many, given the ubiquity of Russian reconnaissance drones in theaters like the Donbas. In fact, the terrain here was highly conducive for Ukraine. The Ukrainian side of the border on the Sumy-Kursk axis is covered with a thick forest canopy which gives the Ukrainians the rare opportunity to conceal the staging of its forces, while the presence of the city of Sumy only 30 kilometers from the border provides a base of support. The situation is highly similar to Ukraine's Kharkov operation in 2022 (the AFU's most impressive achievement of the war), in which the city of Kharkov and the forest belt around it provided the opportunity to stage forces largely undetected. These opportunities do not exist in the flat, mostly treeless Ukrainian south, where Ukraine's 2023 offensive was heavily surveilled and bombarded on approach.

In any case, with strategic surprise achieved, the Ukrainian force managed to get the jump on the thin Russian defense and penetrate the border in the opening hours. Russian defenses in these regions consist mainly of obstacles like ditches and minefields, and do not feature well prepared fighting positions. The nature of these barriers suggests that the Russians were primarily focused on impeding and interdicting raids, rather than defending against an earnest assault. At the outset, elements of the 88th managed to pin the Russian rifle company stationed at the border crossing and take a substantial number of prisoners. The now famous pictures circulating which show many dozens of surrendered Russians comes from this border checkpoint, located literally on the state border.

The dual effect of strategic surprise, along with images of a large batch of captured Russian personnel, let the narrative on the attack break all containment. In the following days, a host of misinformation began to circulate implying that the Ukrainians had captured the town of Sudzha, some 8 kilometers from the border.

In fact, it quickly became clear that the Ukrainian advance on Sudzha had already begun to bog down with the rapid scrambling of Russian reinforcements into the area. Ukrainian forces spent most of August 7th and 8th consolidating positions to the north of Sudzha and working to envelope the town, which sits at the bottom of a valley. They eventually captured the town, but the delay cost them precious days and allowed the Russians to move reinforcements into the theater.

The opening days of the operation were very difficult to get a handle on, largely because the Ukrainians flung motorized columns up the road as far as they could, leading to inflated claims as to the depth of the Ukrainian advance.

It has now become clear that the initial Ukrainian advance hinged on both their mobility and strategic surprise, but both of these factors had been exhausted roughly by day five of the operation. By Friday, August 9, Ukrainian advances had largely stopped as the Russians established effective blocking positions, including in the towns of Korenevo and Bol'shoe Soldatskoe. Many of the furthest Ukrainian penetrations, furthermore, turned out to be isolated mechanized columns which had punched as far up the road as possible before either turning back or running into ambushes (the results of one such encounter are seen in the video below), such that the Ukrainians reached several positions that they never actually controlled.

Put it all together, and what you get is a fairly confined and modest Ukrainian breach into Russian territory, running from the approach to Korenevo (still firmly under Russian control) in the west to Plekhovo in the east - a span of just over 40 kilometers (25 miles). Sudzha is under Ukrainian occupation, but their positions have not extended far beyond it - the total depth of the penetration is some 35 kilometers at the farthest point.

Having captured Sudzha, but failing to break out on either of the main axes out of the area, Ukraine now faces a very unpleasant tactical reality. Their brief glimpse of an open and mobile operation has dissipated, and Kursk is calcifying into another front, with all the attendant difficulties. They now occupy a modest salient within Russia, with the town of Sudzha (population 6,000) at its center.

With progress stalled, the AFU is currently working to solidify and extend the flanks of the salient. The focal point at the present moment appears to be the inner bend of the Seim river, which winds across the border and runs along a course some 12 kilometers inside Russia. The Ukrainians recently struck several bridges across the Seim with the intention of isolating the southern bank. If their ground advance can push to the Seim south of Korenevo (through a front currently defended by the Russian 155th Marine Infantry brigade) they stand a reasonable chance of cutting off and capturing the Seim's southern bank, including the villages of Tektino and Glushkovo.

All of this is reasonably interesting, in terms of the tactical minutia, but it does not have much bearing on the two important strategic questions for Ukraine: namely, whether their operational successes in Kursk are worth the tradeoff in the Donbas, and whether their gains are worth the losses they are suffering. We'll take up the latter question first.

The basic problem for the Ukrainians, tactically speaking, is that the fighting in Kursk leaves them highly exposed to Russian strike systems, for a variety of reasons. The Ukrainian position around Sudzha is a road-poor region, connected to the rear area on the Ukrainian side of the border by only a handful of exposed roads which offer no concealment. This leaves the Ukrainian logistical tail highly vulnerable to strikes by Lancets and FPV drones. Furthermore, attempts to properly support the advance require the AFU to bring precious assets close to the border, exposing them to attack.

Ukrainian's strikes on the Siem bridges are a good example of this. In theory, dropping the bridges and securing the south bank of the Siem makes good sense as a way to secure the western flank of their position around Sudzha, but the strikes on the bridges involved bringing forward precious HIMARS launchers, which were detected by Russian ISR and destroyed.

Trying to provide air defense for the Ukrainian salient is likely to be similarly cost prohibitive, as it entails parking the AFU's dwindling air defense assets in close proximity to the Russian border. We have already seen the Russians capitalize on this, with a successful hit on a European-provisioned IRIS-T system.

By creating a front within Russia itself, the Ukrainians have voluntarily accepted a long and exposed logistical tail, while fighting within the shadow of Russia's own base of material support. The results have been largely disastrous thus far. A running total of 96 strikes on Ukrainian vehicles and positions have been recorded and geolocated in Kursk thus far, and Ukrainian vehicles losses are on par with the opening weeks of the Ukrainian offensive at Robotyne last summer.

Unlike Robotyne, however, there is not even a strong theoretical case to be made for incurring heavy losses on this axis of advance. Even a generous sketch of the coming weeks leaves Ukraine at an impasse in Kursk. Suppose they push through to the Seim and force the Russians to abandon the southern bank, capture Korenevo, and carve out a 120 kilometer front in Kursk - what then? Is this a fair trade for the Toretsk-New York agglomeration, or Pokrovsk, where the Russians continue to steadily advance?

Krepost thus threatens to turn into another Volchansk, or Krinky - an isolated attrition pit disconnected from the crucial axes of the war. Control over Sudzha does not exert any leverage over Russia's ability to sustain the fight in the Donbas or around Kharkov, but it does create another vacuum that will suck in precious Ukrainian resources, banging away on a road to nowhere. If you had suggested a month ago that the Russians could contrive a way to draw off and pin the maneuver elements of no less than five Ukrainian mechanized brigades, along with a variety of disparate support elements, this would have been viewed as a beneficial move for them - yet this is precisely what the AFU has voluntarily done with Krepost.

Krepost ultimately reflects a growing Ukrainian frustration with the trajectory of the war in the east, where the AFU has grown weary of the industrial slugfest with its bigger and more powerful neighbor. By flinging a secretly assembled mechanized package at a lightly defended and previously ancillary sector of front, they briefly managed to reopen mobile operations, but the window of mobility was far too small and the gains far too meager. It has now become clear that the decision to divert forces to Kursk has undermined the already precarious defense of the Donbas. Ukraine hold Sudzha and may very well clear the south bank of the Seim, but if it comes at the expense of Pokrovsk and Toretsk, that is a trade that the Russian Army will be happy to make.

The AFU is expending carefully husbanded and scarce resources in the pursuit of operationally inconsequential objectives. The exhilaration of taking the fight to Russia and being on the attack again can certainly work wonders for morale and create a spectacle for western backers, but the effect is short lived - like a broke man gambling away his last dollar, all for the momentary thrill of chance.

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8. The Passing of the Age: The Battle of Lepanto

White founts falling in the courts of the sun,

And the Sultan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;

There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,

It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,

It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,

For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.

They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,

They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea

So begins GK Chesterton's poem Lepanto - an ode to the colossal battle fought between the Ottoman Navy and a coalition Christian armada off the coast of Greece in 1571.

Lepanto is a very famous battle, and one which means different things to different people. To a devout Roman Catholic like Chesterton, Lepanto takes on the romanticized and chivalrous form of a crusade - a war by the Holy League against the marauding Turk. At the time it was fought, to be sure, this was the way many in the Christian faction thought of their fight. Chesterton, for his part, writes that "the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss, and called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross."

For historians, Lepanto is something like a requiem for the Mediterranean. Placed firmly in the early-modern period, fought between the Catholic powers of the inland sea and the Ottomans, then on the crest of their imperial rise, Lepanto marked a climactic ending to the long period of human history where the Mediterranean was the pivot of the western world. The coasts of Italy, Greece, the Levant, and Egypt - which for millennia had been the aquatic stomping grounds of empire - were treated to one more great battle before the Mediterranean world was permanently eclipsed by the rise of the Atlantic powers like the French and English. For those particular devotees of military history, Lepanto is very famous indeed as the last major European battle in which galleys - warships powered primarily by rowers - played the pivotal role.

There is some truth in all of this. The warring navies at Lepanto fought a sort of battle that the Mediterranean had seen many times before - battle lines of rowed warships clashing at close quarters in close proximity to the coast. A Roman, Greek, or Persian admiral may not have understood the swivel guns, arquebusiers, or religious symbols of the fleets, but from a distance they would have found the long lines of vessels frothing the waters with their oars to be intimately familiar. This was the last time that such a grand scene would unfold on the blue waters of the inner sea; afterwards the waters would more and more belong to sailing ships with broadside cannon.

Lepanto was all of these things: a symbolic religious clash, a final reprise of archaic galley combat, and the denouement of the ancient Mediterranean world. Rarely, however, is it fully understood or appreciated in its most innate terms, which is to say as a military engagement which was well planned and well fought by both sides. When Lepanto is discussed for its military qualities, stripped of its religious and historiographic significance, it is often dismissed as a bloody, unimaginative, and primitive affair - a mindless slugfest (the stereotypical "land battle at sea") using an archaic sort of ship which had been relegated to obsolescence by the rise of sail and cannon.

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Here we wish to give Lepanto, and the men who fought it, their proper due. The continued use of galleys well into the 16th century did not reflect some sort of primitiveness among the Mediterranean powers, but was instead an intelligent and sensible response to the particular conditions of war on that sea. While galleys would, of course, be abandoned eventually in favor of sailing ships, at Lepanto they remained potent weapons systems which fit the needs of the combatants. Far from being a mindless orgy of violence, Lepanto was a battle characterized by intelligent battleplans in which both the Turkish and Christian command sought to maximize their own advantages, and it was a close run and well fought affair. Lepanto was indeed a swan song for a very old form of Mediterranean naval combat, but it was a well conceived and well fought one, and Turkish and Christian fleets alike did justice to this venerable and ancient form of battle.

Medieval Languishing

The Battle of Lepanto was fought in 1571, while the last entry in this essay series ended with a consideration of the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. The astute observer may notice that a significant period of time lapsed between these two events, and wonder whether it is possible that something interesting occurred in that intervening period. In fact, many things did happen between the 1st and 16th Centuries of the common era, but relatively few of those things were what we might recognize as naval battles.

After Octavian's victory in the Roman Civil Wars, the Mediterranean again became a pacified internal zone of the Roman Empire, which left little possibility of major naval operations being necessary for several centuries. It was not until the disintegration of pan-Mediterranean Roman power in the 5th Century that Southern Europe and the inner sea again became a contested theater, but the intense geopolitical contest of the medieval period did not lead to a significant resurgence of naval combat. Still, it is worthwhile for us to consider medieval naval warfare, such as it was, as a prelude to early modern war and Lepanto. Although phrases like "the medieval period" and "the Middle Ages" can take on a somewhat nebulous meaning, I have always preferred to date the Medieval era from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 to the defeat of Byzantium in 1453, bookending the period with the two deaths of Rome.

For a variety of reasons, naval warfare was of relatively scant importance during the medieval era. Naval battles were relatively rare and generally smaller in scale than in the archaic world - in those many centuries, there were few naval operations that even remotely compared in scope to the great ancient battles at Salamis, Cape Ecnomus, or Actium. Medieval Europe had ships, of course - the most numerous being the modestly sized flat bottomed cogs which formed a mainstay of merchant fleets. In wartime, however, such vessels were primarily used to transport armies and their supplies, and they usually did so uncontested. Where naval battles did occur, they tended to be ancillary affairs and were not decisive of larger wars - in sharp contrast to the classical era, in which there were many major conflicts that were decided by the naval theater.

The de-prioritization of naval warfare during this period resulted from a dovetailing of strategic factors and preferences. First and foremost, there was a dearth of state capacity, with medieval states lacking the extractive powers and far reaching bureaucracies that characterized powerful archaic states like Rome or Persia. The weak and unconsolidated state had ramifications for many aspects of political life and geopolitical competition, this was acutely felt in the naval arena, to an extent that was disproportionate to the impact on land power.

The key difference between generating fighting power on land and sea in the medieval period lay in the decentralization of military preparedness and the latent power of the peacetime society. What we mean by this is that while medieval societies had the power to quickly raise armies from their peacetime resources, this capacity did not extend to warships. A class of landholding military servitors (which we popularly call knights) provided ready combat power, while peasants could be levied to fight in a pinch. Furthermore, the longstanding threat posed by raiding threats from the periphery - Vikings, Magyars, and so forth - led to the devolution of defensive responsibility. Centralized royal authority was utterly unable to react in a timely manner to such threats, and so defense became essentially a localized affair, delegated de facto to local lords and the fighting resources of the immediate region.

With most medieval societies therefore organized to generate defensive land power from their extant resources, states were, as a rule, simply not organized bureaucratically to maintain capable standing navies, as these were resource intensive forces which required specialized knowledge (both to build and operate) and significant expenditure even during peacetime. Where naval support was required for a war, it took a significant amount of time to amass and usually made use of merchant ships, as contracting or requisitioning existing civilian vessels was cheaper and much easier than raising a purpose built war fleet. Thus, the ships used in medieval naval battles - when they did occur - tended to be merchant cogs and barges, modified for combat.

As a result, medieval societies were geared for warfare on land, even when facing threats from the sea. The preeminent example of this, of course, was the Vikings. Popular portrayals of the Vikings tend to emphasize their extraordinary ferocity in battle, but the true "strategic asset" of the Scandinavians who ran wild in Europe in the 9th and 10th Centuries was their extraordinary seamanship. The Viking longship was an astonishing cultural artifact, capable of navigating rough open ocean while still being maneuverable and shallow enough on the draft to sail up rivers and beach itself for amphibious assault. The ability of the Vikings to cross the tumultuous North Sea and even venture out into the North Atlantic as far as Greenland and the North American coast in open hulled, single decked galleys was truly exceptional.

One thing the Viking longship was not, however, was a good platform for fighting on the water. Lacking any armament whatsoever, it sat too low in the water to board enemy vessels with ease, and there are scant references to what we might call pitched battle involving Viking fleets. Where such battles did occur, as at the Battle of Svolder in 999, combat seems to have involved lashing ships together to form an immobile floating fortress, rather than maneuvering in a recognizable fleet action. So while seamanship and shipbuilding were an essential element of the Vikings' spread and power, the sea played the role of incurring tremendous mobility and striking range to Viking forces, rather than being an arena of combat. All of the most critical engagements between the Vikings and their adversaries, such as the Battles of Brunanburh, Rochester, Edington, Maldon, and Stamford Bridge, occurred on land. The example of the Vikings is greatly instructive, demonstrating that even in scenarios where the sea was the sole vector of attack for the enemy, scaled fleet operations were simply not a favored strategic recourse.

The simple fact that medieval Europe lacked dedicated institutions for naval warfare meant that there was a corresponding lack of specialized engineering, training, and expertise. As a result, medieval navies lacked a ship-killing weapons system. There is no record of the medieval use of rams, such as were used in archaic navies. There are incidents where the use of fire weapons is recorded - most famously by the Byzantines, who used a proprietary chemical mixture of quicklime, naphtha, and sulfur to create the equivalent of a medieval flamethrower - in almost all circumstances medieval naval combat centered on boarding action and the exchange of bowfire.

Because medieval warships were generally armed only with the personal weapons of the fighting men on deck, tactical methodologies favored efforts to fortify the ship, rather than to execute sophisticated maneuvers at sea. A few of these tactical trends bear enumeration.

In a battle between medieval warships, the most pressing and immediate danger came from the missile weapons of the men on the enemy deck, including crossbows, traditional bowfire, javelins, and occasionally jars full of caustic lime. Because battles were at the outset an exchange of personal missile weapons, one of the easiest and most cost effective ways to increase combat effectiveness was to simply increase the height of the ship, so that one's own men were aiming downward at the enemy deck while being protected from enemy missiles by the railing of the ship. There was a concerted trend throughout the medieval period, therefore, to fortify vessels by constructing higher and higher fighting platforms with a protective wooden railing, particularly in the prow and the stern of the ship. Such fighting platforms became the origin of the terms forecastle and aftercastle as names for the front and aft decks, which remained in use long after the utility of such "castles" in combat disappeared.

Given the narrow parameters of a medieval sea fight as an exchange of missile weapons and boarding actions, the relative height and protective quality of these fighting platforms were frequently decisive in battle. Perhaps most notable example of this was the Battle of Malta in 1283, which took place in the "War of the Sicilian Vespers". This was one of those esoteric medieval wars which is almost impossible to make sense of without a great deal of specialized reading - fought between states that no longer exist (chiefly the Crown of Aragon, based on Southeastern Spain, and the Angevin Kingdom of Naples in Southern Italy) for purposes that are essentially incomprehensible to us.

A full and dutiful exposition of this opaque conflict would be beyond our remit in this essay. What is interesting for our purposes was that this was one of the few medieval wars where there was a meaningful naval theater, given the fact that this was essentially a war between Spanish and Italian states over Sicily and to a lesser extent Malta, some 50 miles to the south. In 1283, an Aragonese fleet arrived off the coast of Malta and managed to trap a similarly sized Angevin fleet inside Malta's Great Harbor. The Aragonese fleet had two distinguishing factors in its favor: first, it was led by a highly capable Admiral named Roger de Lauria, and secondly that its ships had been built up with exceptionally tall fighting platforms ("castles").

When de Lauria's fleet arrived at the mouth of the Great Harbor, he formed them up in a line across its mouth and then proceeded to lash his ships together with heavy chains, forming a unified barrier across the exit. Wary of being trapped in the Great Harbor, the Angevin fleet immediately disembarked from its protected anchorage at Fort Saint Angelo and rowed out to give battle. De Lauria, however, counted on the superior height of his decks to shelter his men from enemy projectiles, and ordered his men to return only a small amount of token crossbow fire. The heat of the day was spent with the Angevin fleet futilely futilely flinging crossbow bolts, jars of lime, and javelins at the high Aragonese fighting platforms, doing very little damage and causing few casualties. Once the Angevins had expended all their ammunition, de Lauria ordered his fleet to attack, and his men were able to fire down on the lower decks of their now helpless adversaries.

The Battle of Malta is a very useful illustration of medieval naval combat, containing in miniature many of the more universal principles. First and foremost, the battle was decided tactically by the use of small arms like javelins and crossbows, as the ships involved were unarmed save for the personal weapons of their fighting crews. In this case, the single determinant factor of victory was that the Aragonese ships were taller. The battle also demonstrated that, although rare and usually small in scale, medieval naval combat was extremely bloody, as the victorious side tended to massacre enemy crews. At Malta, the Aragonese killed some 3,500 Angevin personnel, taking only a small fraction of that number captive.

This was a standard practice of the times. At the Battle of Sluys in 1340, for example, a French fleet tried unsuccessfully to replicate de Lauria's blocking technique, chaining their vessels together to prevent the English from entering the Scheldt River. Unfortunately for the French, a strong wind began to disorder their formation, and the English fleet attacked them as they were struggling to hold their line. The English more or less massacred the French to the man, killing some 16,000 in a single day.

The Battle of Malta also, however, illustrates the limits to the scale and operational import of naval combat in this era. The two fleets that clashed in the Great Harbor were very small - something like 20 vessels on each side. Yet even such a small engagement - a skirmish by the earlier standards of the First Punic War - was sufficient to put the Angevins in retreat and cement de Lauria's reputation as the best admiral in the Mediterranean. Today, he is still generally regarded as the greatest admiral of the medieval era, on the basis of a career in which his fleets rarely exceeded 30 ships.

It has become increasingly common to push back on the previously popular motif of the medieval period as a "dark age" of stunted human development in Europe. Despite the fragmentation of state authority after the fall of Rome, the middle ages saw the emergence of new strands in European high culture, the consolidation of embryonic modern states, and major advancements in agricultural practices and military technologies. Many European states, like 13th Century England, enjoyed prolonged periods of remarkable stability and prosperity.

This period was, however, a dark age for the science of war at sea. With Europe's military apparatus devolved to prioritize local defense readiness, states lacked the centralized fiscal-military apparatus, technical expertise, and logistical infrastructure to maintain sophisticated standing navies. This rendered naval battle a matter of expediency, using modified variants of civilian cogs. Battles could be extremely bloody, and had a propensity to turn into the wholesale slaughter of defeated parties, but these engagements remained mercifully small with fleets numbering in the dozens, rather than the hundreds which were frequently seen in archaic battles.

Naval warfare as a science and an art languished for centuries in Europe, waiting for the perfect admixture of ingredients to reinvigorate it. The needs of the navy were threefold: fiscal-military systems capable of financing fleet construction, an economic rationale to make such fleets a sensible use of funds, and a weapons system capable of destroying enemy ships outright, without resorting to a gruesome close order fight. They would get all three: the state, spice, and cannon.

The Advent of Sail and Shot

The development of the highly effective weapons systems that we know as the line ships of the classic age of sail were the result of synchronous developments in the technology of sailing and cannonry, along with the economic systems needed to make these complex and expensive vessels feasible. Taken together, these innovations produced the single most powerful system of power projection ever seen, with vessels that had the range and seaworthiness to attain global reach, and the firepower and capacity needed to bring flexible and formidable combat power to bear wherever they went.

The signal development which set off the rapid development in European seamanship was the reconquest of Iberia in the 13th and 14th centuries. This long period of protracted war against Muslim occupation spurred the consolidation of highly militarized and assertive monarchies in Portugal, Aragon, and Castile, serving as an ideal example of the principle that, although the state makes war, war also makes the state. The reconquesta produced states with a very particular nexus of traits: they were mobilized and had unusually high state capacity for the era, possessed of an expansive and assertive orientation motivated by the sense of an ongoing cosmic war with Islam, and - most importantly - they lay on Europe's Atlantic bow, making the sea their natural vector for expansion.

It was not surprising, therefore, that Iberia (Portugal in particular) became the site of particularly dynamic innovation in ship design and navigation. By the early 15th Century, the Portuguese were probing further and further down the African coastline under the sponsorship of Prince Henrique, Duke of Viseu - known to history simply as "Henry the Navigator." The vessel favored for these annual expeditions was the caravel - an indigenous Portuguese design which featured a shallow draft and lateen (triangular) sails. The caravel was ideal for exploration along the coast - it could run safely in shallow waters and sail very close to the wind, and it proved an ideal workhorse for working down Africa's western coast, with Portuguese navigators steadily working out the shape of the continent and taking constant depth measurements as they went.

The caravel was, however, a limited vessel. It was precarious (to put it generously) in the open ocean, both due to its triangular rigging (which was inferior on the open seas to the square rigging characteristic of larger vessels), and its relatively small size, which made it both cramped and dangerous in rough seas. Most importantly, however, this was fundamentally a scouting and exploration vessel, which lacked the cargo space to actually function as a long range trading vessel. The caravel could hug the coast and plot routes to foreign markets, but it could not haul back large quantities of precious cargo once it had reached them.

It is a well understood fact of history that Spanish and Portuguese exploration in this era were motivated by a desire to procure direct access to the rich markets of the east, tinted with a religious fervor to project Christendom across the globe. Situated on Europe's western edge, the Iberian states were cut off from the profits of the silk roads by both the Islamic powers, which controlled the Levantine coast, and the merchant empires of Genoa and Venice, which dominated trade on the Mediterranean. Most everyone understands that the Spanish and Portuguese wanted to outflank these middle men and procure direct market access for themselves.

What is less understood, or at least less appreciated, is that it was access to these markets that made the European naval revolution financially feasible. The construction of larger and more seaworthy sailing ships, like the hefty, square rigged carrack, was astronomically expensive. These were among the most complex engineering products then in existence, and required a tremendous pool of highly specialized (and expensive) manpower to design, build, maintain, and operate. When the Portuguese crown financed the construction of two large carracks and a 200 ton supply ship for Vasco de Gama's first voyage to India, the navigator Duarte Pacheco Pereira wrote simply: "The money spent on the few ships of this expedition was so great that I will not go into detail for fear of not being believed."

The tremendous expense of these vessels was only made bearable to the state due to the extraordinarily high profits to be made in spices, exotic goods, and specie like gold and silver which could be found in Africa (and soon, the Americas). When Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe and returned safely to England in 1580, the value of his cargo (much of it looted from Spanish vessels) was more than twice the English crown's revenue for the year. Little wonder, then, that the English went all-in on the project of maritime empire.

Perhaps this seems obvious and elementary, but this underscores a crucial strategic aspect of sea power in history. Naval power projection, rather uniquely, has the potential to be economically self-perpetuating. The range and carrying capacity afforded by shipping makes the ocean a unique pathway for exploiting far flung economic resources and penetrating foreign markets. A land-based imperium historically did not offer a similarly cost effective system of scalable economic exploitation. It was not until the invention of the railroad - a late development in the human story - that continental powers like the United States and Russia had a cost effective way to exploit the vast resources of their interior spaces. Maritime empires, in contrast, never struggled with this problem, and so naval power projection and wealth created a singular feedback loop for the states of Western Europe, with each making the other possible.

The Age of Exploration, spearheaded by the Spanish and the Portuguese, therefore had the effect of breaking the ocean wide open for Europeans - not only in the sense that they demonstrated the possibility of global navigation, but also in establishing the economic feedback loop which could empower an early modern state to assume the massive fiscal and logistical burden of maintaining a navy. A possible modern allegory would be the development of phantasmagorical methods to economically exploit outer space - like generating space based solar power, or mining the mineral resources of asteroids - which could suddenly make expensive space exploration financially self-perpetuating.

The arrival of larger and more stable sailing ships also happened to dovetail historically with the emergence of gunpowder artillery, providing the ultimate platform for this powerful new weapons systems. Gunpowder weaponry began to spread in Europe in the late 1300's, initially in the form of irregularly sized cannons which fired arrows, bolts, and stone shot. By the end of the century they had acquired a clear role in battle as defensive weaponry which could be mounted atop fortifications; the Byzantines used primitive cannon to great effect and defeated an attempt by the Turks to capture Constantinople in 1396; the Turks would then famously use dozens of their own large artillery during their ultimate capture of the city in 1453. This was still, however, an embryonic weapons system at the dawn of the early modern era - deadly, but cumbersome, difficult to move, and dreadfully expensive to manufacture.

It was no small matter that gunpowder weapons were emerging as a powerful battlefield expedient precisely as the Iberian age of exploration triggered a colossal expansion in shipbuilding. Large sailing vessels and cannon were, from technical perspective, a perfect match, in that they provided solutions to each other's problems. Early modern cannon were tremendously heavy and laborious to move, and required large magazines of gunpowder and shot to operate. This could be a logistical headache for forces marching overland, which could require dozens of horses to haul a single gun. For a ship with tonnage in the hundreds however, even a sizeable battery of cannon was hardly an undue burden. Cannon, in turn, solved the main problem of medieval naval combat, by finally providing a ship killing weapon.

It therefore ought to be no surprise that the adoption of massed cannon at sea was an inevitability which happened very rapidly. Vasco de Gama's flagship the São Gabriel carried twenty cannon on its 1497 voyage despite being only a modestly sized 100 ton carrack, while the English Mary Rose, which was launched in 1511, had roughly 80 guns of various calibers. When combined with the prowess of the fighting men on board - honed by centuries of intense intra-European warfare and crusading - this was a recognizable prototype of the weapons system that would extend European power to virtually every corner of the earth. Sail and shot had come.

These developments, we reiterate, were wholly dependent on their economic context. These increasingly large and ever more heavily armed vessels were among the most complex feats of engineering and the most expensive investments that an early modern state could make, and they justified themselves by creating the very economic expansion that made this expense possible. This, however, was not universally true. China, for example, achieved tremendous feats in navigation and shipbuilding, but it possessed its own vast inner world and colossal markets, leaving it ultimately disinterested (in both the economic and spiritual sense) in going abroad in search of foreign lands and wealth. Meanwhile, in the Mediterranean, there was no real possibility of a rapid economic expansion. This was a closed sea with a fully explored and intimately known perimeter, with established risks and rewards. In such familiar confines, a more familiar form of war would prevail for a while longer.

Old Reliable: The Galley in the Early Modern Period

The first thing that immediately stands out about the Battle of Lepanto as a major galley battle was how late it was fought. Lepanto was contested in 1571 - nearly eighty years after the Spanish had reached the Americas under Columbus and the Portuguese had arrived in India by circumnavigating Africa. Lepanto took place exactly 60 years after the launch of the famous English warship Mary Rose - a recognizably advanced sailing vessel armed with some 80 cannon.

Lepanto is thus temporally located firmly within the early age of sail. By this time, sailing vessels were crossing entire oceans; Ferdinand Magellan's expedition had circumnavigated the globe, and sailing ships with broadside cannon were becoming a fixture in many European navies. And yet, when the Ottomans and their Catholic adversaries clashed off Greece, they did so with rowed vessels and a combat methodology that was largely similar to that utilized by the Romans, the Carthaginians, the Greeks, and the Persians. This is evidently very odd - in chronological terms, it would be as if the American navy launched sorties in Vietnam with First World War vintage biplanes.

This can give rise to the impression of primitiveness or a lack of imagination by the practitioners of 16th Century galley warfare. While a well armed carrack like the Mary Rose was bristling with many dozens of heavy cannon, a Mediterranean galley of the day would have been armed with, at most, three heavy guns, aimed forward from the prow of the ship - since the broadside of a galley was occupied by hundreds of oarsmen, it was obviously impossible to mount cannon there. Surely such a weakly armed ship represented an obsolete and archaic throwback - a nautical dinosaur awaiting extinction?

In fact, the galley retained its usefulness late into the 16th century due to a variety of economic, strategic, and geographic factors at play in the Mediterranean. The men who fought at Lepanto were not stupid, but were simply plying a well established form of warfare that had proven itself in the unique arena of the inner sea, and the galley as a weapons system can only be appreciated in the context of a broader system of warfare which prevailed in that time and place. In 1526, for example, the Venetian war office made an explicit decision to further experiment with galley designs, rather than pursuing the sailing carracks that were in use in Western Europe. It would require substantial hubris to presume that Venice, then one of the most educated, wealthy, and sophisticated states in Europe, would make such a decision out of ignorance, rather than well grounded tactical and strategic concerns.

To begin to understand this, we must view the Mediterranean Sea the way that strategists of the day saw it: as a single and vast littoral, or coastal zone. The Mediterranean is essentially tideless, splattered with islands, and ringed with accommodating sandy beaches, natural harbors, and shallow approaches. This created a tactical orientation which was fundamentally amphibious, and within this framework the galley remained the favored weapons system for centuries after the advent of cannon artillery. The crucial point is that weapons systems do not exist in a vacuum - it was not simply a matter of galleys being replaced by sailing warships, but rather that these vessels were used to prosecute entirely different systems of warfare.

The sailing, cannon broadside vessels which would eventually come to predominate the world offered a potent new strategic opportunity: they made it possible to control the sea. This was not only due to their powerful armament (with each ship possessing the firepower of a massed artillery battery, they offered the potential to shatter enemy fleets and sink cargo vessels with ease), but also due to their carrying capacity. A deep-draft sailing ship can carry hundreds of tons in cargo, allowing it to stay at sea for months at a time - this provides a permanent and extremely powerful force projection at sea. The ultimate manifestation of such sea control is the blockade: having driven the enemy surface fleet away, an armada of sailing warships can exert a suffocating control over access to the ocean.

A galley cannot do this. With most of the galley's hull space dedicated to the rowing crews, they have a cargo-to-crew ratio that is very poor compared to a sailing vessel, and they are thus unable to stay at sea for extended periods of time. The galley was therefore not a tool for controlling the sea, but a weapon for projecting fighting power from the sea to the land, and vice versa. In the Mediterranean, the ability of the shallow-draft galley to operate right up against the shore, penetrate into riverways, and to ground itself on the beach was extremely valuable.

The galley thus continued to fill a critical role in a Mediterranean system of naval warfare that was very different from that which prevailed in the age of sail. This was a system of combat which focused not on major fleet actions and blockades, but on projecting power towards the land, with the main object of these operations being the networks of bases that supported long range galley operations. This was a schema that was intimately familiar to the Romans, who saw most of their naval conflicts resolved through the control of such bases. Carthage was defeated in the First Punic War through the capture or isolation of its harbors and depots, and in the later Roman Civil Wars it was Caesar Augustus and his admiral, Marcus Agrippa, who defeated Antony and Cleopatra by striking at their chain of supply bases and fortresses. This basic operational formulation had not changed much by the early modern period, and networks of island bases still remained the main object of naval combat.

There was one other important consideration which kept the galley relevant, however, and this was the cost and availability of cannon. In the 16th century, cannons were not yet subject to easy mass production. Methods for casting cannon (which produced the barrel in a single cast piece out of a mold) were beginning to appear by mid-century, but much of the European world's artillery continued to be produced with variations of the hoop and stave method, which laboriously welded the barrel together out of multiple strips of metal, similar to the way a wooden barrel would be produced with planks. While the details of the metallurgical processes are perhaps interesting to some, the upshot was that cannon were still very expensive and limited in quantity. Given that the Mediterranean powers needed to provide cannon for both ships and their fortresses, while retaining enough pieces to serve their land forces in sieges (both the Spanish and the Ottomans in particular maintained large forces on land which competed with their navies for cannon), it is not surprising that more modestly armed galleys with a handful of bow guns remained in common use, while the heavily armed broadside ships took much longer to come into play.

And so, when the fleets clashed at Lepanto, the vessels were a refined but intimately familiar variation of the archaic galleys that had plied Mediterranean waters for thousands of years. Allowing for some variations among the combatant nations (more on this in a moment) a "standard" 16th century galley was approximately 136 feet long and some 18 feet wide, powered by roughly 200 oarsmen manning about 24 banks of oars. Vastly improved shipbuilding techniques made these early-modern galleys much more seaworthy than their ancient predecessors (unlike Athenian galleys, they did not take on water and so did not need to be hauled onto the beach to dry out), and of course they were distinguished by the presence of gunpowder weaponry. Lepanto galleys possessed a small battery of heavy cannon which aimed directly out of the bow, which when fired would recoil on their wheeled mounts back into the gap between the rowing benches. For flank protection against boarding, a variety of small swivel guns were mounted on the flanks of the ship, and of course a company of marine infantry prowled the deck.

The important point to emphasize, however, is that the maneuvering aspects of these ships was essentially unchanged since ancient times. This was both because they continued to be powered by oarsmen (and thus they moved essentially the same way as archaic ships), but also because the cannon battery aimed forward out of the bow of the ship - it could therefore only be aimed by turning the ship in combat. Because the cannon aimed statically forward - just like the rams on ancient Greek and Persian vessels - the ship maneuvered much the same in combat, aiming to achieve a shock attack on the vulnerable flanks and stern of the enemy vessel. And so, while cannons are obviously significantly more powerful than a ram, these remained vessels engineered to attack head first. The smell of gunpowder and the crack of the cannon were new, but an ancient admiral watching from a distance would have found the frothing oars and the maneuvering of the fleet to be comfortingly familiar.

Out With a Bang: The Battle of Lepanto

The backdrop for the great clash of Lepanto was the slow and inexorable expansion of Ottoman power around the Eastern Mediterranean rim, which brought it into conflict with the maritime empire of Venice. Venice's strategic position and orientation were highly analogous to that of ancient Carthage: their "empire" consisted of a network of colonies and bases strung along the coasts and islands of the Adriatic and Mediterranean. The critical function of these positions was primarily to provide control over the sea route between Venice and the Levantine coast, with a chain of bases and fortified harbors protecting the shipping which was the lifeblood of the wealthy Venetian economy.

The keystone position which became the basis of the Ottoman-Venetian War was the island of Cyprus. From a geostrategic perspective, the importance of Cyprus is refreshingly easy to understand. As the easternmost island in Venice's control, it was the critical node ensuring Venetian access to the Levantine coast. Cyprus also, however, sat directly on the sea lines of communication between the Ottoman heartland in Anatolia and their provinces in Egypt. In essence, Cyprus sat at the intersection of two critical sea lanes - a north-south line between Anatolia and Egypt, and an east-west line between Venice and the Levant. It is not particularly hard, then, to understand why the Ottomans coveted it.

When an Ottoman armada arrived at Cyprus in 1570, Venice faced a disturbing strategic outlook. Venice was a wealthy but thinly populated mercantile power, ill constructed for a protracted slugfest with the much more powerful Ottomans. The naval prowess of the Turks was by this point a well established fact - in 1538, the Ottoman Navy had smashed a coalition Christian fleet at the Battle of Preveza (fought, incidentally, exactly where the Battle of Actium had taken place some 1600 years prior). Another decisive Ottoman victory at the Battle of Djerba in 1560 had the Turks sitting 2-0 in major fleet actions. A third round would be no laughing matter, and Venice needed allies.

It was thanks to the intense and energetic intervention of Pope Pius V that Venice secured the assistance of Hapsburg Spain and her satellites, with the 1571 formation of the "Holy League". The terms of the alliance called for the fleets of the allies to rendezvous in late summer at Messina, on the Sicilian coast, for a joint campaign into the Eastern Mediterranean. Command of the joint fleet would fall to Don Juan of Austria - the illegitimate half-brother of the Spanish King, Philip II.

And so we come to Lepanto - the swan song of the galley; violent codicil to a three thousand year old form of Mediterranean warfare. The battle was shaped and made possible by a serendipity which is often rare in war: both sides were highly motivated to seek a decisive battle, which meant that both sides had a carefully devised operational scheme that was thought out in advance. Lepanto was a battle that both sides wanted and planned for, and both the Turks and the Holy League managed to implement their battle plans and achieve their desired deployment.

The Turkish motivation to fight is easy to understand - they were under express orders from the Sultan, Selim II, to bring the Catholic fleet to battle and destroy it. As for the Holy League, their dynamic was more nuanced and subtle, and had much to do with Don Juan's attempts to mediate an uneasy alliance.

The various constituent allies had different motivations for joining the war, and correspondingly different senses of urgency. For the Spanish, the war with the Turk was primarily a religious matter - another chapter in their long, cosmic struggle with Islam. Venice, on the other hand, was fighting for concrete geostrategic interests - particularly to save their colony in Cyprus. The Venetians also fought with an important handicap. Because Venice had such a relatively sparse population, mobilizing their fleet required them to raise levies of fishermen, merchant sailors, and other civilian laborers. Coming to a war footing therefore brought Venice's economy to a full halt, and was extremely expensive to maintain. The Venetians were therefore strongly motivated to bring the war to a swift conclusion. Don Juan also had to worry about the various ancillary allies, particularly Genoa, which had joined the Holy League while continuing to trade with the Ottomans.

Don Juan therefore had to plan a campaign around strategic disagreements in his coalition, with the very real possibility that some of his fleet might withdraw from the alliance or even defect. The longer the campaign dragged on, the worse these aggravations were likely to become; therefore, he, like the Turkish Admiral, Müezzinzade Ali Pasha, was also determined to bring about a decisive battle as soon as possible.

After rendezvousing in Sicily late in the summer, the Holy League fleet - some 212 ships in all, crossed the Adriatic and arrived at the island of Kefalonia off the western coast of Greece on October 6th. The mass of the Turkish fleet, 254 vessels in all, was stationed just 65 miles to the east in their naval base at Nafpaktos, in the Gulf of Corinth. The Venetian name for Nafpaktos is Lepanto. The following day, both armadas came out to meet at the entrance of the gulf. It was October 7, 1571.

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9. NATO at the Crossroads

"The 80's called, they want their foreign policy back."

At the time, it was a stone cold zinger - a nice line that was typical of the celebrated personal political skills and folksy ease of President Barack Obama, and a slick little soundbite on the road to his clinical defeat of Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. With the passage of time, however, it has entered into the dubious ranks of history's famous last words.

When Romney argued in that debate that Russia was the chief geopolitical rival to the United States, it was easy for Obama to dismiss him, and for the country to laugh it off. At the time, America was riding the high of its great victory over the Soviet Union, Russia was crouched in a passive stance, and it seemed that the only security challenges that now remained were bush wars in the Middle East. But in 2024, who in the American political and foreign policy establishment would doubt Senator Romney's total validation?

Since 2012, NATO has experienced a revival and a return to relevance that would make any washed up 80's movie star turn green with envy. After languishing for years, where the only real mention of NATO in American politics were the token admonitions for European members to increase their defense spending, NATO is once again at the center of global (and domestic American) politics. NATO has been identified as one of the critical driving anima of the war in Ukraine, with debates raging over supposed American promises given to the Russians that NATO would not expand eastward, arguments over Ukrainian membership in the alliance, and a growing narrative that one of the key threats from a second Trump presidency is the possibility that The Donald would withdraw the United States from NATO or otherwise neutralize the bloc. Americans, strained by inflation and endemic institutional rot, are asked to please think of the poor, frightened North Atlantic Council when they go to vote in November.

The United States certainly does have a NATO problem on its hands. That problem, however, is not some Trumpian affinity for despotism which threatens to unhinge the alliance and hand Europe over to the Russians, nor is it a Russian plot to attack Poland. The problem, rather, is that NATO's place in broader American strategy has come untracked, even as that broader strategy becomes ever more frayed and rudderless. The tail is wagging the dog, and it is steering the dog into a bear trap.

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NATO, in its original conception, was designed to resolve a very particular security dilemma in Western Europe. In the immediate wake of World War Two, Western Europe - specifically Britain and France - had to consider how it might be possible to mount a defense against the colossal Soviet forces that were now conveniently forward deployed in Central Germany. The 1948 "Western Union Defense Organization" (WUDO), which included the aforementioned Anglo-French allies along with the Netherlands and Belgium, was created with an eye to this problem. With the rapid demobilization of American armies in Europe, however, it was obvious that this threadbare European alliance had dismal prospects in the unthinkable event of war with the Soviet Union. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the supreme commander of WUDO forces, was asked what the Soviets would it would take for the Red Army to attack and push through all the way to the Atlantic, and famously replied: "Shoes."

NATO, therefore, was an attempt to resolve the total strategic overmatch on the European continent through two expedients. The first of these, obviously was America's membership, which brought both formal American security commitments as well as permanent American military deployments in Europe. The second strategic boost provided by NATO concerned Germany. Even after being ravaged by war and dismembered by the allied occupation, Western Germany remained the most populous and potentially powerful state in Western Europe. From the beginning, it was clear (particularly to the Americans and the British) that any sustainable strategy for deterring or fighting the Red Army would have to make use of German manpower - but this implied, axiomatically, that West Germany would have to be economically rehabilitated and rearmed. The prospect of *intentionally* rearming Germany was immensely upsetting to the French, for obvious reasons given the events of 1940-44.

NATO thus solved two major obstacles to a sustainable and viable defense of Western Europe, in that it formally and permanently tied the United States into the European defense architecture, and it provided a mechanism to rearm West Germany without allowing for the possibility of a truly autonomous and revanchist German foreign policy.

In many ways, NATO can be seen as a total reversal of the Versailles system which had doomed Europe after the First World War by guaranteeing the Second. The interwar period saw the Anglo-French alliance pitted against an adversarial Germany without American assistance; NATO ensured American commitment to European defense and rehabilitated Germany into a valuable partner - providing the command architecture to rearm Germany and mobilize German resources without allowing Germany to conduct an independent foreign policy.

Thus, the popular formulation, coined by the first General Secretary of NATO, Lord Hastings Ismay, that NATO existed to "keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down." This statement, however, has frequently been misinterpreted. The idea of "keeping the Americans in" was not a plot by Washington to dominate the continent, but a contrivance by the Europeans to keep America engaged in their defense. As for "keeping the Germans down", this is pithily stated but not entirely accurate - the entire point of adding West Germany to NATO was to allow it to rebuild and rearm in the interests of collective western defense. For the United States, NATO made sense as a way to mobilize European resources and calcify the "front" in Europe, in the context of a broader geopolitical struggle with the USSR.

This is what NATO was for. It was a mechanism for formalizing an American security commitment in Europe and mobilizing German resources to deter the USSR, and it worked - the frontline of the Cold War in Europe remained static up until the collapse of the Soviet Union due to the naïve and self-destructive political visions of one Mikhail Gorbachev.

But what is NATO for now? What purpose does it serve in the context of a broader American grand strategy? More to the point, does such a grand strategy exist, and is it coherent? These are questions worth asking.

The Grand Strategy of Area Denial

Grand Strategy, as such, has become a nearly tiresome word, like geopolitics itself. In the abstract, grand strategy refers to the unifying framework for how a state leverages the full array of its powers - military, financial, economic, cultural, and diplomatic - to pursue its interests. This all sounds well and good, but of course the idea of a unified grand strategy is much harder to achieve than it sounds. States are not always easily able to define their interests clearly; in democracies, of course, there may be wide disagreements on state interest, but even within more totalizing regimes there will always be institutional interests and modes of behavior that are orthogonal to each other. We may consider, for example, the sharp vitriol between the Japanese Imperial Navy and Army, or the divide between interventionist and isolationist camps in the United States. With both the domestic framing of interests *and* the international arena in a state of flux, can a coherent grand strategy really be said to exist? Despite growing conceptual disagreement as to what exactly grand strategy is, or even whether it exists at all, there are innumerable books to be found on the grand strategies of all manner of historic or contemporary states - the Roman Empire, the Byzantines, the Hapsburgs, Singapore, South Korea, Russia, Japan, and of course China and the United States.

I rather feel that "Grand Strategy" is one of those things that we struggle to define, but we know it when we see it. Patterns and motifs of state behavior clearly emerge through history, and there are obvious interests towards which states work and coordinate their levers of power. Where these patterns and coordinated behaviors emerge, we call them grand strategy. The state becomes like a wild predator, which exhibits many different tactics and strategies for catching prey. The human observer may endlessly wring his hands, wondering about the interior life of the animal, its capacity to draft a strategy, and its ability to communicate with its pack, but the existence of coordinated and goal-oriented patterns of behavior is enough to deduce that strategy exists.

American grand strategy centers on the policy of area denial, or what we might call hegemonic denial. This is an old strategy, favored by great powers blessed with strategic standoff, and inherited from America's British geostrategic predecessor. The "grand strategy" of the British, for many centuries, was predicated on simply denying any continental European power the opportunity to dominate the continent. The rationale was simple and sublime: Britain's status as an island power afforded it strategic insulation via standoff from continental wars. The channel freed Britain from the burden of having to maintain a large standing army, like the powers on the continent, and invest heavily in its naval power projection. Relieved of the great expense that dangerous land borders bring, British naval power made them the grand winners of the colonial arms race. However, Britain always lived in the fearful shadow of European consolidation. If any one continental power managed to consolidate power over the European core, that power would have the resources to mount a naval challenge to the Royal Navy.

This is why, for centuries, Britain simply backed the rivals of whoever the most powerful continental state happened to be at the time. They backed the Hapsburgs and then the Prussians in wars against France, played an active and central role in the wars to prevent Napoleon from establishing hegemony in Europe, then pivoted to an alliance with France to contain Russia in the Crimean War. Finally, when Germany consolidated and became the most powerful state in Europe, Britain fought in two catastrophic World Wars to prevent German domination of the continent. The presence of Britain loitering offshore and a powerful Russian state in the east served as a natural hedge on continental hegemony, because both Russia and Britain were always guaranteed to be adversarial against any would-be European imperium. France and Germany both gave a mighty effort in their turn, but the challenge of mobilizing sufficient naval-expeditionary power to defeat Britain and the requisite land-logistical power to defeat Russia was enough to undo Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler alike.

The guiding animus of British "grand strategy" was therefore very simple: maintain a cost-effective colonial footprint, and do not let anybody consolidate hegemony on the continent - the latter to be achieved through prudent intervention and the backing of anti-hegemonic coalitions. American grand strategy is much the same, except that it has a more globe-spanning scope. While Britain played hegemonic area denial in Europe, America pursues a similar containment and balancing act in Eastern Europe, the Persian Gulf, and East Asia simultaneously. This means, more practically, strategic area denial and a prevention of regional consolidation by China, Russia, and Iran - each the most powerful states within their prospective regions.

It has become a standard line, of course, to condemn this American defense strategy as fundamentally cynical and sinister, replete with language about American imperialism, its meddling in foreign governments, and complaints about the spread of a vapid American consumeristic culture which atomizes societies. America is frequently abhorred as an eternally expanding blob which is gray and featureless, yet simultaneously emblazoned with the gaudy colors of the rainbow.

Such opposition is understandable and highly sympathetic, but we must acknowledge that the core of America's global defense strategy is not irrational, but aligned with critical American interests, at least in its highest order objectives. East Asia, in particular, is home to nearly 40% of global GDP and is by far the most populous and industrialized region in the world. While America is fundamentally secure from direct physical attack, safely sequestered behind its twin oceans, consolidated Chinese hegemony in East Asia could force American-aligned states to disaffiliate from the United States and either exclude or disfavor America in their enormous markets. While certain aspects of American foreign policy are certainly hyperbolic, disjointed, and damaging to the stability of the world, there can be little doubt that preventing hegemonic consolidation in these critical regions - East Asia, Europe, and the Persian Gulf - does serve a fundamental American interest and safeguards the possibility of a prosperous life for Americans and their allies, free of hostile coercion.

The core animus of American grand strategy, as a policy of anti-hegemonic area denial, is sound. My argument, however, is that it has become diluted by a fraying sense of strategic direction in Washington, and NATO in particular has become untracked as an element of America's strategic architecture.

The Incredible Shrinking NATO

The fall of the Soviet Union created a unique moment in world history, as the first instance of globe-spanning unipolarity, leaving the United States as the last and unrivaled hegemon. The possibility that the USSR could disintegrate bloodlessly was hardly to be taken for granted, and the fact that the Soviet government - although armed to the teeth astride the world's largest security apparatus - simply allowed the core Union Republics to break away remains one of the most fortunate bounces in history. Great bloodshed was averted, though much to the detriment of Soviet citizens, who were cannibalized by a decade of economic turmoil and social upheaval.

With the Red Army suddenly removed from the board, it was not clear what the strategic rationale for NATO now was. It was not immediately obvious that a strong central state would be reconstituted in Russia, and the temporary collapse of authority in Moscow left the European rim of the former Soviet empire up for grabs. But what to do with it?

In hindsight, it is clear that there were two potential paths forward for NATO, which I will call the Expand and Entrench path and the Hold and Engage model, respectively. The choice between these two models ultimately reduces to whether or not Russia was seen as an intrinsically hostile state, destined to animus with the American bloc, or whether the Russians were to be viewed as a prospective partner to be rehabilitated and engaged with on favorable terms.

If Russia was indeed a primordial adversary and a predestined hostis loitering on the perimeter of Europe, then the expansion of NATO to the east into the old Warsaw Pact countries at least made some sense, as a way to expand the west's defensive perimeter cheaply and grow America's footprint. Paradoxically, however, NATO expansion was facilitated by the perception that Russia did not actually pose a serious military threat. Offering defense guarantees to Russia's neighbors appeared to be a trivial matter of extending promises that would never need to be kept, and a nearly cost free way to fence the non-threatening Russians in. Russia could be pacified with a diplomatic campaign - Obama's famous "reset" - at the same time it was boxed in with NATO expansion.

And so, we come to the problem with NATO expansion. The alliance rapidly expanded, fully doubling its membership from 16 to 32 members since 1989, under the illusion that this was a cheap and easy way to secure Europe's eastern flank. In underestimating the revival of Russian power, however, NATO unwittingly created difficult new security challenges for itself at the same time that it was rapidly disarming.

This was the paradox: as NATO expanded its footprint geographically, both its existing and new members radically downsized their military readiness. In many of the keystone existing members, military spending as a share of GDP plummeted beginning in the 1990's. In Britain, it declined from 4.3% in 1991 to 2.3% by 2020; the corresponding drop in Germany was a decrease from 2.5% to only 1.4%. Meanwhile, the new members that it added on its eastern flank were both geographically indefensible and abject military noncontributors.

The prime example, of course, would be the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Perched precariously on the Russian border, the Baltics are both highly exposed in the event of an outbreak of war *and* utterly incapable of defending themselves for even a token amount of time. The armed forces of these three states have a combined strength of fewer than 50,000 personnel and virtually no heavy equipment - at present, the Baltics do not possess a single main battle tank. NATO wargames concluded that the Baltics could be rolled by the Russian Armed Forces in a matter of days. Although the war in Ukraine has certainly sparked Baltic interest in raising military preparedness, this process is being slow walked - Latvia admits that the construction of fixed defenses on the country's border could take up to a decade, with deliveries of new systems like HIMARs scheduled for 2027 or later.

This may sound like I am suggesting that Russia currently has some intention of invading the Baltics and starting a war with NATO. I do not believe this is the case. The problem, rather, is that the process of NATO's expansion has been highly discombobulated and reflects a strategy that has come untracked. NATO expansion was supposed to be a cheap way to push America's strategic footprint to the east - but now it threatens to become an enormous drain on resources.

The essence of the problem is that NATO chose to both expand and disarm at the same time, to the effect that the post-Cold War expansion has raised the probability of a conflict with Russia, increasing America's geopolitical exposure while simultaneously degrading the American bloc's preparedness for such a contingency. Washington saw NATO expansion as a cheap way to expand its strategic footprint deep into the old Soviet strategic space - penetrating into former Union Republics, even. Unfortunately, most of those new members viewed NATO membership as a substitute for their own military readiness - trusting in the differentiated deterrent credibility of American security guarantees as a panacea for their defense. The military readiness of the European bloc was allowed to substantially deteriorate in the face of an apparently dormant Russian adversary, with new members trusting that American security guarantees held a unique and uncontested deterrent value.

Ultimately, this reflects internal incoherence as to the nature and scope of the threat posed by Russia. If Russia is indeed deemed to be an existential threat to NATO's flank, expansion might have made sense in the context of a clearly defined plan to defend that flank. It does not make sense in the context of systemic disarmament across Europe at the same time that America faces the prospect of escalating military commitments in East Asia.

This is why, despite the alliance's confident and inexorable expansion to the east, it finds itself paradoxically grappling with a sense of crisis and vulnerability. There has emerged a clear and gripping sense that a Russian attack on the Baltics is on the table in the coming years, as the point where Russia may attempt to test NATO's commitment to collective defense. Baltic leadership, which tends to be the bloc's most hawkish, seems frustrated that NATO's more westerly members are not taking the prospect of a Russian attack seriously. Washington think tanks like the Institute for the Study of War now write earnestly of a looming war with Russia.

This is all very odd, for several reasons. First and foremost, the central idea of the entire modern NATO project is America's differentiated deterrent credibility: the notion that an American security guarantee (like the tripwire Article 5) precludes the possibility of war. Mounting fears among Baltic leadership that Russia intends to test the alliance indicate an implicit worry that this differentiated American credibility is waning, due to either a real or perceived decline in American willingness to fight in Eastern Europe. In part, this would seem to reflect a dilution of Article 5's strength as NATO expanded eastward. In the Cold War, America's willingness to fight (or even use nuclear weapons) to defend Bonn, Paris, Amsterdam, and London was never really in doubt. In 2024, there are real reasons to question America's appetite for a full scale continental war over Riga or Tallinn. Perhaps the Baltics sense that they really have never mattered to Americans.

The other strange aspect of the mounting Russia scare is the apparent lethargy and scattered stance of Europe's response. The military leadership of Europe's three most powerful nations - France, Germany, and the United Kingdom - are all open about their unreadiness to fight a high intensity continental war. Despite such warnings, efforts to jump start military readiness are lagging. Germany is not only drastically cutting its aid to Ukraine, but is also rejecting requests from its own military to scale up spending. The UK is dragging its feet when it comes to covering gaps in its procurement plan; French defense investments continue to prioritize domains like space, cybersecurity, and nuclear deterrents at the expense of conventional forces - indicating little interest in a land based slugfest like the one playing out in Ukraine. On the whole, there appears to be little urgency to ramp up force generation or systematically rejuvenate Europe's expensive and scale constrained armaments production.

So while many European states have made much of their success reaching NATO's spending target at 2% of GDP, this has become a totem number that does not directly correlate to military readiness. This is a natural consequence of Europe's degraded armaments industry, which has steadily deteriorated due to low spending, piecemeal orders, a lack of export markets, and competition from American systems. While Europe has shown at least some sense that it must nurture indigenous armaments production, the difficulty of inter-government coordination and lack of scale (with individual states placing small and sporadic orders) make this difficult.

As a result, despite lofty rhetoric about a rejuvenation of the European defense base, Europe lags far behind on its production targets for critical items like shells for Ukraine. When it comes to building out its own stockpiles, Europe still shows a preference for American systems - choosing, for example, to order Patriot air defense systems rather than the indigenous European SAMP-T. Poland, embarking on a buying spree of rocket artillery, is splitting its money between Korean and American systems. On the whole, European spending has simply contributed to a surge in American exports. Less than half of Europeans armaments purchases are actually manufactured within the EU.

This matters a great deal. It's not, particularly, that there is anything wrong with American systems. American armaments are world class, despite their hit or miss track record in Ukraine (which has a great deal to do with the unique use case of the AFU). The issue with reliance on American systems is availability and sustainment. The Ukraine War has already demonstrated that America cannot be a universal and bottomless arsenal for its satellites; already, we have seen orders deferred and shipments rerouted as the United States is forced to make difficult calls on the priority of various theaters, and Ukraine has served as a sort of perfect case study of the difficulties that Europe might face trying to sustain a ground war on its own. In any event of a general European war involving Russia - let alone kinetic action in the South China Sea - European industry would be called on for heavy lift, and the returns so far are not encouraging. Nor are munitions and weapons the only strategic shortcoming; Europe's "critical enablers", like ISR, logistics, airborne transit, and other support elements are far below satisfactory readiness.

All of this is to say, there are roiling contradictions at the heart of NATO. The alliance chose to expand rapidly at the same time that it systematically disarmed, striking a provocative and adversarial stance vis a vis Russia while it simultaneously downgraded its military readiness, making itself both hostile and unprepared. Now there is increasing alarm that a confrontation between NATO and Russia may be on the horizon, but the alliance's European members are dragging their feet on rearmament. Ultimately, NATO transformed itself into a bloc that is geopolitically stanced against Russia, but unwilling to materially prepare itself for the potential consequences - projecting its footprint directly up to Russia's border without considering what might come next.

The decision to expand the alliance while allowing its military readiness to deteriorate dovetails nicely with the ongoing crisis in Ukraine - indeed, Ukraine has become the locus and archetype of NATO's current state of strategic disorder.

Ukrainian Quagmire

The war in Ukraine is now nearly two and a half years old. That is more than enough time to mull over the broader strategic logic of the conflict. Nonetheless, western leadership continues to give contradictory responses to a very elementary question: is the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian War existential for NATO? Depending on who and when you ask, NATO's (or, more specifically America's) interests in Ukraine are presented in various ways, and generally run along three different tracks.

In the more tactical, cynical variant of the story, the west has backed Ukraine because it is an opportunity to attrit an adversary without putting western soldiers in harm's way. This is the mercenary version of the story, where the AFU can propped up in the field to destroy as many Russian vehicles and kill as many Russian personnel as possible. This has a certain opportunistic and cold strategic calculus to it, but it certainly does not frame Ukraine as an existential battleground for the west. Another version of the story reframes Ukraine as an extension of the old Cold War theory of containment. It is the duty of the west, evidently, to defend "democracies" against a perceived bloc of totalitarian states, in a show of deterrence.

The third answer is the most interesting, and the most phantasmagorical. This is the story that describes Ukraine as a forward bulwark and barrier state for NATO. Russia must be stopped in Ukraine, it is argued, because if Russia succeeds in conquering much (or all) of Ukraine, it will surely attack NATO next. That's bad news, because if NATO and Russia get into an open war it will probably go nuclear. Therefore, Ukrainian victory is existential not just for the Ukrainians themselves, or even just for NATO, but for all of humanity. Ukraine is the last line of defense preventing a likely nuclear war. This is an argument that has been repeated in earnest by many figures in both western leadership and the analytics sphere, including ISW and the internet's favorite talking head, Peter Zeihan. This is the argument which underlies all the rhetoric comparing Putin to Hitler - the notion is that "Putler" will continue his rampage if he is not stopped in Ukraine, but unlike Hitler he possesses a nuclear arsenal, so that when he goes down into the bunker, he can take the world with him. Or something.

It's all a bit blasé, of course. But the confusion when it comes down to actually characterizing NATO's interests in Ukraine (are they trying to save the world, or simply degrade an adversary's military?) speaks to a larger contradictory pattern when it comes to Ukraine's role vis a vis the alliance. Two elements in particular stand out - namely, the continued promises of a Ukrainian path to membership in NATO, and the unwillingness to negotiate a settlement which cedes territory to the Russians. Let's review them in turn.

At the recent NATO summit in Washington DC, most attention was directed to President Biden's characteristically incoherent babble, mispeaks, and inability to properly form recognizable English sentences - particularly his introduction of Ukrainian President Zelensky as "President Putin", to thunderous and befuddled applause. But amid the babble, the summit reconfirmed NATO's commitment to Ukraine's eventual and inevitable membership in the bloc.

At some level, this is understandable. Ukrainian membership in NATO has been a consistent element of Russia's war aims, and Moscow has consistently sought a guarantee against Ukrainian membership as a condition for peace. It is not hard to see how NATO would wish to emphasize its commitment to Ukraine, to avoid the impression that they can be easily deterred by Russia.

On a more pragmatic level, however, the logic of Ukrainian NATO membership is badly garbled. At this point in the war, the United States has crossed virtually all of the red lines that it had set for itself at prior points: it sent Abrams tanks after the Pentagon initially ruled it out, it has cleared the way for F-16s, and delivered ATACMS. The pattern is clearly one of slowly (slower than the Ukrainians would like) but surely checking off all the items on Ukraine's wish list, after an initial period of refusal and foot dragging.

The one red line that Washington has consistently hewed to, however, is direct and formal American involvement on the ground (various undeclared American trainers, advisers, and contractors notwithstanding). Biden has been particularly clearsighted about the fact that America cannot justify "fighting the Third World War" in Ukraine. The problem here is a contradictory and undefined sense of the stakes at play. NATO has communicated, in fairly unequivocal terms, that it is not willing to fight an open war with Russia and risk annihilatory nuclear exchange over Ukraine. But by pledging eventual NATO membership for Kiev, they are signaling that they would be willing to do so in the future.

It's not clear how to reconcile these positions. America has essentially pledged that it is willing to link nuclear escalation calculus to Kiev and commit to a hypothetical future war with Russia by bringing Ukraine under the umbrella of Article 5, while simultaneously insisting that it is not willing to fight such a war now, while there is an immediate kinetic threat to Ukraine. It's not obvious why Ukraine might be worth fighting a catastrophic war tomorrow, but not today. If defeating Russia in Ukraine and holding the line at Ukraine's 1991 borders are indeed an existential American interest, then why is America holding back now?

Furthermore, insisting on Ukraine's postwar path to NATO membership alters the calculus of the current war, in myriad ways. Insisting on Ukraine's future membership encourages Russian maximalism - if Moscow resigns itself to the idea that whatever is left of Ukraine after the war will eventually join NATO, it will likely conclude that it ought to leave the most wrecked and neutered Ukrainian rump state that it possibly can. Since NATO membership requires prospective candidates to resolve all their active territorial disputes before entry into the alliance, Russia has a direct lever to scuttle and delay Ukraine's path to membership by keeping the conflict burning.

In effect, the repeated pledges of postwar Ukrainian NATO membership create a host of strategic incentives that are bad for Ukraine and bad for NATO, since it is hard to see precisely why the western bloc would be so eager to admit a shattered Ukrainian trashcanistan with intractable anti-Russian revanchist tendencies. In addition, Moscow would be sure to see this rump Ukraine as the frontline weak spot in NATO, and an ideal place to probe and test America's commitment to Article 5.

NATO has put itself in this bind through its overly eager and careless expansionary mindset - having prematurely promised Ukraine NATO membership as early as 2008, the west cannot formally withdraw its pledges without undermining its own credibility, to say nothing of the backlash from a betrayed and ruined Ukraine, which would likely exit western orbit altogether.

And so, we arrive at the current Ukrainian crisis. NATO frivolously spread to the east, handing out cheap security assurances and pushing right up to the Russian border - intaking the Baltics and making promises to Ukraine at the same time that it systematically disarmed itself. Now, in the face of a counterstroke by the Russians, the west - but America more particularly - cannot seem to decide if these places are actually worth fighting for. NATO expansion as a low cost mechanism to push the American footprint deep into the old Soviet space made sense; NATO expansion as a burden which requires America and Western Europe to prepare for a land war in Ukraine and the Baltics makes no sense at all.

Washington is caught in a bind of its own making, created by decades of writing checks that it would prefer not to cash It has pledged to fight the "Third World War" for Tallinn and Riga, should the need arise, and has promised in no uncertain terms to extend that guarantee to Kiev as well at some point in the future. But faced with a high intensity continental war in the Donbas, there are increasing reasons to doubt American willingness to actually risk it all for these remote and strategically tenuous positions, particular as China's swelling power promises to suck in ever more of America's constrained military power to the East Asian theater, and the keystone European partners drag their feet on military preparedness.

In the end, Ukraine becomes the poster child and archetype for the mismatch between NATO's promises and its material basis of power. It has now been 16 years since Kiev was first enticed with the prospect of NATO membership. But what did they actually get? A wrecked power grid, the loss of 20% of their territory (so far), and hundreds of thousands dead, wounded, or missing. The 45 million strong Ukraine that received those lofty promises so long ago is now a shattered and battered husk with perhaps 25 million citizens left. From NATO, they receive too many words and far too few shells, vehicles, and air defense interceptors.

NATO is, after all, a military alliance. When it was originally created, the hard calculus of divisions, manpower, and operational minutia were a foundational element of its construction. West Germany was brought into the alliance not due to lofty rhetoric about democracy and friendship, but due to the need to mobilize West German manpower and industrial capacity, and the desire to defend forward of the Rhine - a far cry from the induction of the Baltics, which brought no strategic advantage whatsoever. What NATO needs now is not another member, another noncontributing security commitment deep in the Russian strategic space, but a hearty dose of realism.

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10. Mare Nostrum: Roman Naval Power

Most people, if they were asked to list the great seafaring peoples of history, or more specifically the great naval fighting traditions, would come up with a fairly uniform list. There are obviously the two great naval powers of modernity in the British Empire and the United States (though the latter is now not without challengers), and the navigators of the first transatlantic empires in Portugal and Spain. China had a brief period of prolific shipbuilding and navigation in the early modern period, but was disinterested in trying to leverage this into durable power projection. Modern China seeks to rectify this missed opportunity. A deeper dive into the mental archives might churn up the ancient Phoenicians, or perhaps the Genoese and Venetian city states that dominated the Mediterranean in the early modern period. There are those wonderful Vikings, who managed to reach the Americas in their open hulled longboats, and terrorized and colonized much of Europe with their nautical reach. Few, however, would immediately think of the Romans.

The Romans are by convention and by reputation a great land power. The iconic system of Roman power projection was the legion, famed for its discipline, its versatility, and its great prowess of combat engineering - throwing up roads, fortresses, and fortified camps with ease at it trampled enemies from Britain to Syria. In the popular imagination, the Roman Navy is a mere footnote.

The relegation of the Roman naval tradition to the footnotes is a rather interesting phenomenon. It stems, in fact, from a naval victory so totalizing and complete that Roman control of the Mediterranean became an established fact of life. Rome's domination of the sea became so total that for many centuries it was as implicit and unchallenged as the breathability of the atmosphere. Rome swept all challenger navies from the Mediterranean and never let them return, as long as the empire remained strong. Rome is viewed fundamentally as a land power because it obliterated all naval rivals, so that its only military challenges lay on its peripheral land borders.

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In short, the Roman navy is often forgotten simply because it did its job so well. The total victory of Rome at sea gave the Romans the wherewithal to say, without any real hubris or exaggeration, that the Mediterranean was Mare Nostrum: Our Sea. The transformation of the Mediterranean - a crossroads of civilizations that had once been prowled by many rival navies - into a pacified internal zone of the Roman Empire is at the same time a largely forgotten reality - so true that it is taken for granted - and a major source of Roman imperial strength, which let them transport foodstuffs, material, and men around the empire with great efficiency and the assurance of safety.

But the Mediterranean was not always the Roman Sea. Mare Nostrum was not given. It was taken, and the taking required an exorbitant expense and a great loss of life. The watershed event in this saga was the great contest with Carthage - a genuine great power with a strong naval pedigree and tradition of its own - in the Punic Wars. With great effort and difficulty, the Romans slowly but surely exterminated the Carthaginian Navy, and then Carthage itself, in one of the cornerstone acts of Roman empire building and the greatest naval war of the ancient world. In repeated violent clashes on the Mediterranean, the Romans won their sea by their willingness to fill it with the blood of their sons.

Winning the Sea: Rome and Carthage

The Carthaginians have gone down in history as a geopolitical nemesis and foil. Rome, for obvious reasons, is the pivot of many centuries of western history, and as the most hated and dangerous Roman rival, Carthage is usually discussed only in the context of its long, bloody, and ultimately unsuccessful struggle with the Romans. While the naval war with Rome is obviously our main interest here, a few words about the Carthaginians themselves are perhaps worth our time.

The ancient city of Carthage lay on the coast of modern day Tunisia very close to the contemporary capital of Tunis, near the strait that separates Sicily from Northern Africa. Although it lay on the continent of Africa and in the same maritime strategic space as Rome, it was neither European nor African in its nature, but rather Canaanite. The city was founded just before 800 BC as a colony of the seafaring Phoenician people, who from ancient times lived on the coast of the Levant. The particular founders of Carthage were colonists from the Phoenician city of Tyre, in modern day Lebanon.

The Phoenicians were a prodigious people, famed for their navigational skills, mercantile predilections, alphabet, and shipbuilding, but they had the misfortune of being a fundamentally maritime people living near the heartlands of the great archaic land empires. From the 8th Century onward, the Phoenicians were frequently dominated by first the Assyrians and later the Persians, and the fading of Phoenician autonomy (combined with the great distances of the sea) led to increasing Carthaginian independence. The result was a unique Carthaginian civilization, Canaanite in its ethnic origins, with its own systems of proto-Republican government and religion which were alien to the Romans and other peoples in the Western Mediterranean. The Carthaginians, like other Punic peoples (the favored term for the Phoenician transplant civilizations in the west) worshipped gods of the Canaanite religion, including the Baal of biblical infamy. In this sense they were cultural alien both to their Roman rivals and to the African tribes that inhabited the lands around them.

By the third century BC, as Rome consolidated its control of the Italian peninsula, Carthage had carved out powerful position for itself around the rim of the Western Mediterranean, with a web of client states, colonies, vassals, and allies along the North African Coast, in Iberia, Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia. The Carthaginian Empire, like many archaic empires, was not so much a discrete territory subject to direct control as an extension of diplomatic and mercantile influence, bringing in tribute and trade to Carthage, held together by Carthage's powerful navy and by a network of Carthaginian outposts, fortresses, naval bases, and colonies.

In looking at a map of the Western Mediterranean on the eve of the Punic Wars, it may seem that war was inevitable given how close Carthaginian influence had come to Italy. Perhaps the Romans coveted Sicily, or feared Carthaginian naval incursion into Italy? In fact, there was initially little Roman interest in either Sicily or a broader war with Carthage. Rather, the Punic Wars, which would engulf the Mediterranean for a century and lead to the complete destruction of Carthage and its civilization, began practically by accident, and offer an instructive example of how quickly a conflagration can burn out of control.

The great war between Carthage and Rome was started by neither power, but rather by an unemployed company of Italian mercenaries calling themselves the Mamertines, or Sons of Mars. Out of work and bored, they decided to pass the time by occupying the strategic city of Messina, which sits on the strait separating Italy and Sicily. The occupation of this valuable port by a band of rogue mercenaries raised the alarm of Syracuse - a kingdom of Greek transplants in southeastern Sicily which was the only notable independent state in the Western Mediterranean aside from Carthage and Rome.

Because Syracuse was a sort of distant third wheel to the Romans and Carthaginians, the Syracusan King, Heiro II, opted to appeal for aid in ousting the Mamertines from Messina. His call was answered in 265 by a Carthaginian fleet, which arrived and swiftly took custody of Messina and brought the mercenaries to heel. This was the spark that set off the great fire.

The Romans, who at this point were still largely contained within Italy, had never shown any great interest in expanding their dominions to Sicily or in fighting a war with Carthage, but the sudden appearance of a Carthaginian force in Messina was greatly alarming, and after some heated debate it was decided to intervene on behalf of the Mamertines (who had appealed to Rome for help, citing their status as Italians) and eject Carthage from Messina. No one seems to have seriously considered the possibility of a long war, but only a short and decisive action to prevent the Carthaginians from consolidating a base so close to Italy.

In 263, Roman forces crossed the narrow strait to Sicily, occupied Messina, and marched south, forcing Syracuse to capitulate and defect from its alliance with Carthage. King Heiro agreed to pay a symbolic war indemnity, become a Roman ally, and provide basing and supplies for the Roman army in Sicily. The Romans then got the jump on the Carthaginians by rapidly marching to the city of Agrigentum, in southern Sicily, where they laid siege to it and eventually sacked it - a satisfying victory, no doubt, but one which greatly hardened the Carthaginian stance and made a full scale war for Sicily all but inevitable.

The beginning of the war therefore clearly favored the Roman preference for high intensity and decisive warfare - largely as a result of strategic surprise and aggression which caught the Carthaginians on the back foot. Unfortunately for the Romans, Sicily was not a place where this type of war could be waged indefinitely. Sicily is (and was) mountainous and road poor, making supply and maneuver difficult. The terrain, combined with Carthage's preference for a defensive and patient strategy, denied the Romans the opportunity to fight decisive set piece battles and massive sieges. In the following 23 years of war in Sicily, the Romans and Carthaginians would fight only two conventional set piece battles. The remainder of the land campaign would be a frustrating grind characterized by ineffective sieges, raiding, interdiction, and small skirmishes in the mountainous terrain.

The Romans found the pace and nature of the fighting in Sicily immensely frustrating and indecisive, and were particularly flummoxed by their inability to successfully siege the key Carthaginian strongholds on the coast. Because these port cities were easily supplied and reinforced by the powerful Carthaginian navy, conventional Roman siege tactics were ineffective. It was inevitable, of course, that a war for an island would eventually revolve around the sea, however much the Romans may have wished to leaned on the strength of their legions.

It is difficult to emphasize just how little experience the Romans had with naval operations or shipbuilding. They had briefly maintained their own fleet at the turn of the century, but after a defeat on the water at the hands of the small city state of Taranto in 282, they had disbanded their navy and instead chose to conscript the vessels of allied cities as naval auxiliaries - indeed, the Roman army that went into Sicily in 263 was transported and supplied by these satellite navies. Facing the prospect of a wider naval struggle in the seas around Sicily, however, the Romans took the fateful leap. In 260, after three years of stalemate on land, the Romans built their first navy.

By the 3rd century, naval combat had changed from the era of the Athenian trireme in ways that were meaningful, but not radical. Triremes were still in service, but they no longer formed the mass of the battle line, as they had been supplanted by the much larger quinquereme - which, as the name suggests, now had a bank of five rowers rather than three. It was previously taken at face value that there were five separate banks of oars on each side of the ship, but modern scholarship has firmly established that this would have been deeply impractical - making the ship extremely top heavy and raising the likelihood of the mass of oars becoming tangled or fouled. It is now accepted that the quinquereme - sometimes simply called the "five" - instead had three banks of oars like the trireme, but with five associated rowers. The bottom oar would have been manned by a single rower, with the upper two rowed by two rowers each. Thus, a Roman five would have been propelled by a crew of some 280 rowers, as opposed to the 170 men who rowed an archaic trireme.

The addition of more rowers was not an innovation to produce a faster ship. On the contrary, the additional propulsion was desirable because it powered a ship that was much taller, heavier, more seaworthy, and more sturdily built. Triremes continued to be much the faster and more maneuverable vessels, but they were dwarfed by the quinquereme and found it impossible to grapple with the larger vessels in combat. The height and deck space of the quinquereme were particularly important in boarding actions, in that they allowed the ship to carry a much larger complement of infantry on the deck. Whereas an ancient trireme would frequently have as few as 20 marines on deck, the Romans would pack a quinquereme with as many as 120 legionaries. The smaller but faster trireme, now badly outmuscled in pitched battle, took on reconnaissance duty.

Therefore, when the Romans set out in earnest to build a navy, the quinquereme was to be the mainstay of the fleet. The Senate resolved in 260 to fund the construction of a 120 vessel armada, of which 100 were quinqueremes and the remainder triremes. Polybius records that a shipwrecked Carthaginian quinquereme was recovered and reverse engineered as the model for the Roman fleet - consequentially, there is little reason to doubt that the vessels used by the warring navies were of very similar construction. The decisive factor would be training, tactical innovation, and the caprice of battle.

The Roman historian Pliny made a particular point to note that this first Roman fleet was completed in only 60 days. This has at times been taken as an exaggeration meant to emphasize the usual Roman point of pride in their engineering prowess, but modern archeological finds have deduced that the Romans managed to assemble a fleet very efficiently, whether 60 days is the appropriate figure or not. The ribs and beams of sunken Roman vessels from this era are inscribed with notched marks that indicate part numbers and a design template, indicating an assembly line process of mass production.

In any case, the Romans managed to rapidly assemble and crew a fleet, and put a detachment to sea to take the newly recruited and inexperienced rowers through their paces.

The early naval engagements of the First Punic War were a demonstration of a timeless axiom in naval combat - namely, the importance of staying apprised of the enemy's position and striving to keep one's fleet on station together in a mass. Both the Carthaginians and Romans suffered early defeats when a small detachment of their fleets were surprised by larger enemy forces. The Romans lost a small force of 17 vessels (and had a consul go into captivity) when they were ambushed and trapped in a harbor, and several weeks later the Carthaginians lost several dozen ships when a raiding detachment unexpectedly bumped into the main Roman fleet off the northern coast of Sicily.

These were small and relatively chaotic engagements, but they neatly impressed upon the Romans that, although they had successfully copied the Carthaginian quinquereme design, their rowing crews and captains were too inexperienced to hold up against the enemy in maneuvering fights. They had great difficulty ramming and grappling with the more agilely handled Carthaginian ships, and this deficiency led to a critical early war innovation that would prove absolutely essential for allowing the novice Roman navy to compete in early battles.

This new Roman weapon has gone down in history as the Corvus, which means crow - although none of the ancient sources use this term. The identity of the inventor is unknown, which suggests that he was not Roman, as Romans liked to claim responsibility for their achievements. In any case, the corvus was a boarding plank, some four feet wide and 36 feet long, mounted on the bow of the vessel on a swiveling platform. Raised into attack position via a pulley, the swiveled mount allowed the corvus to swing about on either side of the ship, where it could be dropped on any enemy vessel which came too close. The signature feature of the corvus was a curved spike on the underside of the plank's outward end, which would bite into the deck of the enemy vessel as it dropped and prevent it from getting away. This curved hook, which resembled a bird's beak, is likely where the name originated.

The corvus gave the Romans an extremely powerful tactical expedient which allowed them to, in essence, snare any enemy vessel that came within reach of the bow. When an unfortunate Carthaginian vessel came too close, the corvus could rapidly swivel into position, drop with a heavy thud, and grip the enemy deck with its underside hooks. The enemy would have no time to react or dislodge the hook before Roman legionaries and marines came rushing down the ramp, giving the Romans the exact type of fight that they liked best - an infantry fight in close quarters.

This was a powerful tactical method, and it proved to be one that the Carthaginians never did develop a reliable counter to. Most importantly, the corvus greatly simplified the task of the Roman crew - rather than try to match the more experienced Carthaginians in maneuvers, they only had to try to keep the enemy ship away from their stern, since any attack on the bow of the ship would bring the corvus into play. It was much more difficult to ram the enemy in the aft flank than it was to simply get close and grab the enemy with the corvus. We should note, however, that the corvus was not without drawbacks, some of them quite severe. The weight of the corvus made Roman ships even more ponderous and less maneuverable, and in particular they made the ships very top heavy and vulnerable to rough weather. In the short term, however, they provided a powerful tool to balance the odds against the veteran Carthaginian fleet.

The first use of the Corvus was a rousing success. The Roman fleet intercepted a raiding Carthaginian armada near the port of Mylae in northern Sicily, joining the first pitched naval battle of the war. The fleets were of roughly equivalent size - perhaps 120 vessels each - but the Carthaginians were taken aback by their first encounter with the corvus, which time and time again crashed down and snared their unlucky ships, opening the path for a flood of Roman infantry to board. More than 30 Carthaginian ships were captured, and another dozen sunk, in Rome's first victory on the water. However, the faster Carthaginian fleet was able to disengage and escape with all its remaining vessels, while the heavier Roman ships - burdened with the corvus - were unable to pursue.

For the Romans, the Battle of Mylae late in 260 proved that they could fight the Carthaginians on the water and win, despite the superior nautical pedigree of the enemy. The Carthaginians, for their part, probably felt that the Romans had been lucky, surprising them with a novel tactic. The corvus was deadly, yes, but the battle had also proven that the Carthaginian ships were still faster, more agile, and better handled. In any case, the battle confirmed that the sea would now be fully and hotly contested, and would become the decisive theater of the war.

Beginning the following year, both sides would begin pouring vast resources into shipbuilding in the aims of achieving a decisive advantage on the water. The Romans remained frustrated by a grinding stalemate in Sicily, but unexpectedly encouraged by their success in naval engagements. This led the Romans to renew a naval-oriented strategy, and in 256 they launched a campaign to mount an amphibious invasion of Carthaginian North Africa, in the hopes of threatening Carthage proper and forcing a surrender. It was this expedition that set the conditions for the largest naval battle of the war, and indeed of all time.

The Big Brawl at Ecnomius

Late in the spring of 256, an enormous Roman fleet mustered at the mouth of the Tiber and set out for North Africa. The force was a truly imposing armada: 330 warships, almost all of them quinqueremes, under the command of Rome's two consuls for the year - Marcus Atilius Regulus and Lucius Manlius Vulso - each of whom sailed in a colossal six-banked hexareme flagship. In addition to this imposing accumulation of naval combat power, they brought with them a large number of transport vessels which carried supplies, horses, and fodder for the landing army. Though the number of transports is not identified by Roman sources, it must have been substantial given the size of the force.

Intercepting and combatting such a fleet would require virtually all of Carthage's naval assets. It was therefore fortunate that they were alert to Roman intentions, and conducted a near simultaneous counter-muster of the fleet under the command of generals Hamilcar and Hanno off the coast of Sicily, including not only the ships already active there but also a fresh fleet raised in Carthage. In total, the Carthaginians were able to accumulate some 350 vessels.

The amount of fighting power now operating around Sicily was genuinely astonishing, not just for the archaic era but for any period of history. Each Roman quinquereme carried 80 legionaries in addition to the standard complement of 40 marines, meaning that the armada's infantry component alone was nearly 40,000 men. When the rowers and deck crews of the massive ships were added in, one calculates that the Roman fleet had a credible headcount of nearly 140,000 men. The historian Polybius recorded that the Carthaginian fleet contained 150,000 personnel - a number that is broadly accepted, given the similarity in the size of the fleets, though it is possibly too high as there is some reason to believe that the Carthaginians carried fewer infantry on board. But with nearly 300,000 men involved, the ensuing clash between these fleets was, most likely, the largest naval battle of all time when judged by the count of personnel.

The Carthaginians had several important advantages to lean on, most of them related to the mobility of the Roman fleet. Roman ships at this point continued to utilize the corvus in combat. Although this remained a deadly expedient in battle, it gave the Carthaginian ships a substantial edge in maneuverability and speed. More importantly however, the weight and imbalance of the corvus made Roman ships rather suspect in choppy seas - a fact which strongly encouraged Roman fleets to stay as close to land as possible. Furthermore, the Romans had a large number of transports in tow - quite literally, in fact, as the transport barges lacked propulsion and had to be pulled behind the warships.

Burdened by their transport barges and destabilized by the corvus, the Roman fleet was therefore unable to take a direct or rapid route to North Africa. Instead, they had to partially circumnavigate Sicily, sailing within eyeshot of the coast, in order to cross over to Tunisia at the narrowest point of the straits. The ponderous, plodding nature of the Roman fleet gave the Carthaginians strong prospects of intercepting it mid-voyage and bringing it to battle. This is precisely what they did.

As the mighty Roman armada worked its way across the southern coast of Sicily, making a westward course towards Africa, they saw rising on the horizon an equally imposing Carthaginian fleet awaiting their arrival. The greatest collision of nautical fighting power in the history of the Mediterranean was now imminent, off the coast of Cape Ecnomus.

The course of the battle was to be determined first and foremost by the unique arrangement of the fleets as they approached each other. As the Romans were winding along the coast, they kept a tight and compact formation. The 330 warships were divided roughly into four large divisions, commonly called squadrons in the historographic parlance, though this was not a Roman word. The Roman sailing column formed a sort of wedge, with two squadrons leading in oblique echelon. Behind them, the third squadron sailed in a line, towing the vast cloud of transport barges behind them. The final, fourth squadron sailed at the back as a rearguard and reserve.

In contrast, the Carthaginians were arrayed in a conventional battle line, with their left wing angled towards the coast. The battlespace thus had the coast of Sicily as a boundary to the north, and open sea to the south. The dynamics of combat between these fleets were by now well understood. Carthaginian ships could be badly mauled by the Roman corvus and boarding parties if they fought a congested, head on battle, but their superior maneuverability gave them a strong advantage if the battle could be widened into the open sea.

The Carthaginian battleplan, therefore, hinged on an attempt to break apart the compact Roman formation and create a more open, fluid battle where superior Carthaginian mobility could carry the day. The centerpiece of this effort was a feigned retreat by the Carthaginian center as the fleets approached each other. As the Roman wedge approached, the Carthaginian center immediately began to back water, opening up a yawning void in the middle of their line. The two leading Roman squadrons, each personally led by one of the consuls, immediately lunged forward in pursuit. Both sides had now agreed to a mutual gambit. By breaking their front open through the withdrawal of the center, the Carthaginians gave up the integrity of their battle line - but by surging forward to exploit this situation, the forward Roman squadrons abandoned the more vulnerable rear of the column, which was still encumbered by the towed transports.

The Carthaginian trap began to spring shut as the lead Roman squadrons eagerly came forward to attack the withdrawing Carthaginian center. While their center backed water, the Carthaginian wings shot forward, bypassing both their own center and the advancing Roman lead elements. The plan, evidently, was for the Carthaginian wings to rush forward to attack the rear half of the Roman column as it was still attempting to deploy into a battle line. On the Carthaginian left wing, their ships skirted past the coast and prepared to set on the Roman 3rd squadron, while the right wing - which lay on the open sea and contained the fastest and most experienced Carthaginian crews - made a dash for the rear of the Roman column.

Things very well may have gone very badly for the Romans at this juncture. Their 3rd Squadron, which had been towing the transport train, had to disengage their tows before they could even begin to maneuver, while the 4th squadron at the rear could not cleanly enter the battle because all of the transports were in their way. On paper, it certainly looked like the Carthaginian wings were going to slam into the Roman column while it was immobile and disorganized.

Disaster was averted for the Romans thanks to the timely and lithe reaction of their 3rd squadron. Seeing the Carthaginian left wing bearing down on them, they hastily cut their transports loose - then, rather than accept a fight with the Carthaginians in the open water (with the transports at their back, hampering their mobility) their captains made the ingenious decision to run for the coast. This apparently caught the Carthaginians by surprise, for despite the superior speed and maneuverability of their ships, they were unable to snare the Romans into a fight or intercept them before they could reach the coast.

The decision by 3rd squadron to run for the coast was, in a word, brilliant. Out in the open water, the Romans were vulnerable to the agile Carthaginian ships, which could dash in and out looking for opportunities to ram the Roman vessels in the stern. Upon running to the shore, however, 3rd squadron turned about and backed in, so that the sterns of their ships were pointing towards the coast and the bows out towards the sea. With their rear snuggled in against the coastline, it became impossible for the Carthaginians to flank or envelop them. Instead, they faced a wall of ships facing outward, with the deadly corvus waiting to grab any Carthaginian ship that came to close. This neutralized the entire maneuver of the Carthaginian left wing and turned it into an ugly close quarters scrum.

Still, the Romans were not in a particularly cozy spot. Their transports were now adrift, having been cut from their tows. The Roman 3rd squadron was defending itself capably, but it was still pinned against the shore and unable to actively intervene in the larger battle - more importantly, it had voluntarily backed into a corner and would be destroyed if the larger battle went poorly. Meanwhile, the rearmost Roman squadron had great difficulty forming up a battle line due to the drifting transports in the way, and found itself hard pressed and facing likely defeat in the open water at the hands of the Carthaginian right wing.

The battle was decided, then, by the collision of the centers. After backing water to draw the forward Roman squadrons in, the Carthaginian center joined battle and found, very simply, that they did not have an adequate counter to the corvus system. While several Roman ships were successfully rammed and sunk, the Romans time and time again managed to snare enemy ships with the corvus. The all-too familiar horror replayed itself dozens of times: the sudden swivel and drop of the boarding plank, the splintering crash as the bronze spike stabbed into the deck, and the ensuing rush of heavily armored and deadly Roman legionaries rushing to board. That the corvus was the predominant means of combat for the Romans is attested by the Carthaginian losses, a large majority of which were captured, rather than sunk.

By the mid-afternoon, the remaining crews and captains of the Carthaginian center had had enough, and began to break off and retreat. Rather than pursue further, the Roman center, consuls still firmly in command, broke off and immediately began to wheel back to assist their rear squadrons. While the Carthaginian wings had acquitted themselves well, there was now nothing to be done with the squadrons of the Roman center bearing down on them, save extract themselves from the fight as fast as possible and make a break for it. Most of the Carthaginian right wing, which had open ocean on its flank, was able to escape, but the left wing was trapped near the shore and largely destroyed.

Cape Ecnomius had been a resounding victory for the Roman Navy. Intercepted with their transports in tow by a colossal Carthaginian fleet equal in size to their own, Roman captains and crews alike handled themselves with great cool and professionalism, foiling a well conceived Carthaginian battle plan. Total Roman losses amounted to just 24 ships and some 10,000 men - less than a quarter of Carthage's losses, which ran to nearly 100 ships and more than 30,000 men.

On the whole, the Carthaginians seemed surprised at the greatly improved seamanship of the Romans. Earlier battles had seen the Romans handle their ships clumsily and unprofessionally, scraping out victories with the brute power of the corvus and the Roman infantry. In contrast, at Cape Ecnomius, the Roman fleet maneuvered well, as seen in the rapid run by the 3rd squadron to the shore where it could defend itself, though the weight and awkwardness of the corvus continued to give the Carthaginians an advantage in agility.

More broadly, Cape Ecnomius illustrates the tradeoff between scale and experience in warfare. Carthage began the war with a highly professional navy informed by a centuries old naval tradition, and in early engagements there was no question that their seamanship and maneuverability were vastly superior to the Romans. After the Battle of Mylae, however, both navies began to rapidly expand with aggressive shipbuilding programs, floating hundreds of new quinqueremes. This expansion forced Carthage to recruit tens of thousands of new rowers, just the same as the Romans. While the core of the Carthaginian navy still included many experienced crews and captains, this talent pool was diluted by the expansion of the navy, and by the time the great battle was fought at Cape Ecnomius, the Carthaginians were counting on a large number of essentially rookie crews who did not have the same edge that they had enjoyed in previous battles.

Ecnomius was a great Roman victory, and a sort of coming out party for the ascendant Roman Navy. It was also, incidentally, the swan song (or crow song, if you prefer) of the corvus. This had proven to be a formidable weapons system that was decisive in Rome's early victories at sea, but it soon became apparent that the tradeoff in the seaworthiness of the ships was not worth the tactical advantage in the long run.

Despite smashing the Carthaginian fleet, the larger Roman assault on North Africa turned into a debacle. After pausing to rest and refit in Sicily, the Roman armada proceeded to Africa and landed a force of some 16,000 men on the coast. A series of Roman victories in the hinterland around Carthage spooked the Carthaginians into suing for peace, but the Roman consul in command - Marcus Atilius Regulus - demanded such excessively punitive terms that they resolved to continue fighting instead. The Carthaginians then hired a mercenary Spartan general named Xanthippus, who defeated the Romans at the Battle of Tunis and wiped out most of their expeditionary army.

The battle at Tunis was a harbinger of things to come, for the Romans. All of the previous engagements on land had taken place on Sicily, which is - to put it mildly - very poor cavalry country. Having previously only fought the Carthaginians in the Sicilian hills, the Romans had never before gotten a good look at the excellent Carthaginian cavalry, which were a mainstay of their land forces and would later be a critical arm in the great Hannibal's many victories. Well, at Tunis the Romans got a look at the Carthaginian horse, and they didn't like it much at all. Of the 16,000 men who had landed in Africa, barely 2,000 survived to be evacuated by sea.

That is a lot of action, but what was the score? The Roman Navy had acquitted itself remarkably well, utilizing the corvus to even the odds with the more experienced Carthaginians and winning a massive pitched battle at Ecnomius, but the larger expedition had gone all wrong, undone first by Regulus's overly punitive peace conditions, secondly by the arrival of the Spartan general Xanthippus, and finally by the deadly Carthaginian cavalry. Limping home to lick its wounds, the Roman force suffered one final disaster. Off the coast of Sicily, a massive storm blew in which wrecked most of the fleet. After launching more than 300 ships in 256, only 80 survived to return to Italy the following year.

It seems, tragically, that the corvus was to blame. The weight of the apparatus is understood to have been destabilizing, making Roman ships less reliably seaworthy than their adversaries. They could still be handled well enough in favorable water, but evidently the corvus turned into a tremendous liability in a storm, overweighting the bow. Despite the great success of the corvus in battle, its use is never again mentioned after the great shipwrecking storm of 255. This is a powerful reminder of the pivotal role that the weather and the water play in naval operations. The corvus may have been deadly to Carthaginian ships that strayed within its reach, but it was powerless against Poseidon's wrath.

Naval Attrition and State Capacity

The great campaigns of 256 and 255 brought Carthage and Rome to an impasse. Both had lost enormous fleets - Carthage to the Romans, and the Romans to the storm - representing a tremendous financial investment and tens of thousands of personnel. These costs seem to have sobered both belligerents, and there was an interim period of years where pitched battles were rare, fleet strength was slowly rebuilt, and the conflict turned into a gridlocked series of sieges, blockades, and interdiction efforts.

By 249, however, Rome had steadily rebuilt its fleet, and one of the year's consuls, Publius Claudius Pulcher, hatched an ambitious plan. Frustrated by the long and protracted sieges and blockades of Carthage's coastal strongholds in Sicily, Claudius decided to launch a surprise attack on the main Carthaginian naval base at Drepana (modern day Trapani, on the western tip of Sicily).

The plan had a certain bold logic to it. The personnel of Claudius's fleet had been steadily attrited by their participation in a long and bloody siege at Libyaeum - a fact that the Carthaginians were certainly aware of. What the Carthaginians did not know, however, was that Claudius had just been reinforced by 10,000 fresh rowers, who had been dropped off in eastern Sicily and then marched overland to join his fleet. Claudius therefore deduced that the Carthaginians likely did not have an accurate estimate of his strength. His plan was to row by night from Libyaeum to Drepana, some 50 kilometers up the coast, to catch the Carthaginians by surprise, ambushing and trapping their fleet while it was still in the harbor.

In an ominous moment for pious Romans, however, Claudius began the operation with an act of impetuous blasphemy. The Romans were always meticulous about consulting omens before battle. In this case, however, the sacred chickens refused to eat - a strong sign that the battle was not sanctioned by the gods. Claudius allegedly became so angry that he grabbed the chickens and threw them overboard into the sea, shouting "if they will not eat, let them drink." He should have listened to the chickens.

If the plan had worked, it might have ended the war. Unfortunately for Claudius and his men, Drepana became a painful example of the difference that a few minutes can make. The Roman armada - some 120 ships in all - set out at night, but their voyage was slow due to the inexperience of Claudius's new rowers and the difficulty of keeping ships on station at night. It was not so much that they could get lost - after all, the route simply followed the coast northward - but the fleet straggled and became disorderly, with Claudius's own flagship falling into the rear of the column. Then, in the early morning, they were spotted by Carthaginian reconnaissance on land, and messengers raced to warn Adherbal, the Carthaginian admiral at Drepana.

Adherbal understood that if his fleet was caught still at harbor, it would be trapped and easily blockaded. He raced to mobilize his crews to their ships and loaded up as many marines as he could scrounge up, and immediately put to sea.

Drepana was decided by the narrowest of margins. Adherbal's flagship rowed out the mouth of the harbor exactly as the first Roman ships rounded the corner - an almost literal example of ships passing in the night (except it was mid-morning). Claudius had missed his chance by less than an hour. The Carthaginian fleet was now beginning to sweep out to see in a wide arc, turning back towards the Roman armada crawling along the shore. Claudius attempted to form his ships into a battle line to meet them, but was stymied first by the fact that his fleet had become disorderly and strung out during the night voyage, and secondly by the fact that his lead vessels were already rowing into the Drepana harbor. In their attempt to quickly turn back and form up for battle, many of the leading Roman ships in the harbor collided with each other and sheared their own oars.

The Romans did manage to form an improvised battle line, but it was tired from a night of rowing, disorganized, and - most importantly - arranged with its back to the coast. While in the past this had been a benefit, as it allowed the Roman ships to protect their sterns while facing outward with the corvus, by this time the corvus had been abandoned. The battle therefore took the form of conventional boarding and ramming actions, and the presence of the shore at the rear put the Romans at a distinct disadvantage. With their backs at the open sea, the Carthaginians were able to freely reverse away from danger, while the Romans were trapped against the shore and had little room to maneuver. If a Carthaginian ship found itself in trouble, it could simply back away; a Roman ship could not. The battle - originally envisioned as an ambush of the Carthaginians in port - turned into a disaster for the Romans, who lost 75% of the fleet. Claudius, who managed to break out and escape with a mere 30 ships, was so widely panned for the debacle that he was eventually charged by the senate with treason. The sacred chickens, who might have testified to his rashness, were unavailable for comment.

After Drepana, the Carthaginians regained naval supremacy for a time and had a strategic window of opportunity. The expense of having to continually build and rebuild massive fleets was extremely burdensome, even for a society as wealthy and extractive as Rome. The loss of yet another armada to a massive storm late in 249 practically eradicated what remained of the Roman fleet, and the Senate opted to temporarily suspend naval construction and reprioritize the land war in Sicily. Notably, however, Carthage opted not to push the envelope, and seems to have downsized their fleet, thinking perhaps that the Romans were exhausted and no doubt worried about their own mounting financial burdens.

It was not until 243, six years after the debacle at Drepana, that the Romans decided to build yet another fleet and push for a decisive outcome on the water. This time, they would get it. The state, however, was effectively bankrupt by this time, and the new fleet had to be financed with donations by the aristocracy, with wealthy Roman families "sponsoring" ships. On paper, this took the form of "loans" to the state, but the terms were interest free and were due to be repaid with the indemnity to be imposed on a defeated Carthage. They thus represented a genuine patriotic commitment by the Roman elite, and a sort of financial pledge of faith in Roman victory.

By 242, the Romans had once again floated a fleet of over 200 quinqueremes, and they immediately deployed them to the Sicilian coast to blockade the remaining Carthaginian strongholds there, including the naval base at Drepana. Unlike in prior campaigns, however, the purpose of these blockades seems to have been very explicitly to draw out the Carthaginian fleet for a decisive battle. The Roman admiral in command, one Caius Lutatius Catalus, made it a particular point to keep his rowers on a calibrated training routine and kept them well fed and rested, in anticipation of a showdown with the enemy fleet.

The Carthaginians were now in a very serious bind. The new Roman fleet (the sudden materialization of which must have come as a great shock) had successfully blockaded important ports, putting much of the Carthaginian land forces in danger of being starved out. The Carthaginian navy had to resupply them, but it also had to be prepared to fight an engagement with the Roman fleet. Resupplying the garrisons on land meant carrying grain and other supplies, which in turn reduced the space available for marines, which in turn gave the Carthaginians poor prospects in a naval battle. The solution, therefore, was a dangerous gambit, but the only one which offered to solve all of these problems. The mass of the Carthaginian fleet, some 250 ships in all, was to dash for the Sicilian coast laden with grain and supplies, avoiding the Roman fleet. The grain would then be offloaded, and infantry would be onboarded in its place, so that the fleet could seek a fight with the Roman navy and defeat it, hopefully for the last time.

The Carthaginians got a fair chance to execute their ambitious gambit. They crossed from Carthage to the westernmost of the Aegates Islands, some 35 kilometers off the western tip of Sicily. On March 10, 241, a strong easterly wind began to blow through the Aegates, offering the possibility that the Carthaginians could raise sails and make a swift dash to the Sicilian coast before the Romans could intercept them. Their admiral, Hanno, decided to make a run for it. Catalus, however, was alert to their presence. He now faced a difficult choice of their own. He had an opportunity to intercept Hanno's fleet while it was still burdened with supplies and low on marines, but to do so he would need to row into the wind. The war now hinged, in essence, on a race.

Hanno's ships were bearing down on Sicily at top speed, but it was not fast enough. Catalus's crews coped admirably with the unfavorable wind and formed up a battle line in the path of the oncoming Carthaginians, who now had no choice but to fight. The ensuing battle was something of a foregone conclusion. The numbers in the fleets were roughly equivalent - somewhere between 200 and 250 ships on both sides - but the Romans were far better configured for the fight. The Carthaginian ships were much heavier and less maneuverable, both because they were burdened with supplies and because they had their masts. Masts and sails granted extra speed when sailing in a straight line with the wind, but in battle they merely became dead weight that burdened the ships. Catalus, in contrast, had removed his ships' masts beforehand to maximize his agility in battle. Furthermore, the Carthaginian ships were loaded with supplies, not marines, while the Romans carried full complements of fighting men. Being thus undermanned and overweight, the Carthaginian fleet had poor prospects from the outset and was smashed. Nearly 120 Carthaginian ships were lost, against a mere 30 Roman vessels.

Catalus's interception and defeat of the Carthaginians off the Aegates Islands proved to be the final, deciding victory of the war. Rome had now regained naval supremacy, and Carthage was financially unable to construct yet another fleet. Furthermore, the defeat of Hanno's mission to Sicily meant that the Romans now had a firm blockade in place, which isolated and threatened to completely starve out the remaining Carthaginian forces on the island. Defeated at sea and cut off from their Sicilian bases, the Carthaginians resigned themselves to defeat and sued for peace.

With Carthaginian surrender in 241, the Romans became the de-facto masters of the western Mediterranean sea. Of the terms imposed on Carthage, by far the most important was the abandonment of their bases and possessions in Sicily. The short range of galley fleets made them heavily dependent on forward bases and ports to operate at distance - therefore, even if Carthage decided to build a new fleet in the future, its ability to contest the sea would have been sterilized by the loss of the Sicilian bases. In contrast, the Romans now had full control over Sicily, which allowed their navy to operate across the entire theater.

This is why, when Carthage and Rome renewed their multi-generational struggle in 218 with the beginning of the Second Punic War, Carthage conducted no meaningful naval operations at all. The operational centerpiece of this war was the great Hannibal's famous overland invasion of Italy, but this overland strategy (and the famous crossing of the alps) was made necessary by Rome's control of the waves. Unable to operate at any scale or distance in the western Mediterranean, Hannibal instead had to accumulate forces in Carthage's Iberian territories and laboriously march them to Italy.

How did Rome defeat Carthage, despite the latter's superior naval pedigree and early advantages in the naval theater? According to Polybius (who, although Greek himself, was an unequivocally pro-Roman author with no incentive to lie) the Romans lost a total of some 700 warships in the First Punic War, against roughly 500 Carthaginian losses. Many of these Roman losses were due to storms, to be sure, but the fact remained that the Roman navy did suffer roughly 40% more losses than its adversary. It does not much matter to a drowned sailor whether the enemy or the weather has killed him.

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