Word: mahan
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Pearl Harbor ended an epoch in naval history-an end to which the sinking of H.M.S. Prince of Wales and Repulse were only extra footnotes. The Navy now has put its full wartime emphasis on airplane carriers and on airborne attack. Blue-Water Men. The works of Alfred Thayer Mahan, for half a century, were the Navy's Bible...
Tactician Mahan had taught that a nation with a good navy was a nation able to protect its trade routes. A nation with protected trade routes was a prosperous nation, able to support a good navy. The one thesis upheld the other in a solid arch. But now the flat-topped, hound-fast carrier had suddenly become sea power's capital ship. Unregenerate airmen, in the hearing of brooding seadogs, said the carrier outmoded the battleship. Air-power partisans supported them...
...example of the Gallipoli at which Colonel Kernan rails so effectively. Unless he has information on the present control of the Mediterranean which is unknown to the layman he would appear to speak unwisely. He may continue to dismiss the value of sea power with the pat chapter title "Mahan Was Wrongl," but until he brings facts rather than sarcasm to bear on the Admiral's theory, control of the sea lanes will still have a certain appeal to warring powers and the Mediterranean will still be a difficult "mare nostrum" in which to maintain lines of communication...
...Hitler can be beaten only by going after him, smashing him, routing his armies. His thesis is simple: the U.S., Britain and France relied too long on defense outposts (Singapore, Hong Kong), defense lines (the Maginot for France, the oceans for the U.S.), the classic seapower doctrines of Admiral Mahan. (One chapter title: "Mahan Was Wrong!") France fell because the French and British generals were gripped by the "defense myth." So fell Singapore, Hong Kong and the Philippines. Kernan pointed the lesson: by trying to defend everywhere, the Allies had held nowhere...
...Mahan's Influence of Sea Power upon History...