The United States Navy, like its sister services, is first and foremost a war-fighting organization. Its reason for being, boiled down beyond recent recruiting slogans touting it as “a global force for good” or highlighting the Navy’s important work in disaster relief and humanitarian assistance, is to locate, engage, and defeat the nation’s enemies. It is from this imperative that everything else the Navy does must follow.
Understandably, any account of America’s Navy will thus center around naval warfare and the epic battles that define its 240-year history. From the romantic frigate duels of the War of 1812, to the iconic encounter of the Monitor and the Merrimack in the Civil War, to legendary World War II engagements such as Midway, the Coral Sea, and Leyte Gulf, the Navy’s feats of derring-do fill volumes.
Craig L. Symonds, one of our most distinguished naval historians, has tried a somewhat different tack in this slim and aptly named “concise history.” While it does not neglect the Navy’s fighting feats, it is emphatically not a battle history. The Battle of Midway, one of the most significant naval encounters in history and the turning point of the Pacific war, merits less than one full page. The naval war in Vietnam, one of the most difficult and frustrating campaigns in the Navy’s history, is covered in just a few paragraphs.
Instead, Symonds concerns himself with naval policy and strategy, peering down from the highest level to tell the story of the Navy’s (and America’s) rise to “Great Power” status. If Symonds relegates the clashes of ships and airplanes to a few sentences, he is eloquent and incisive on the strategy, resources, and personnel decisions that allowed the Navy to achieve its many victories.
Beginning with the rebellious colonies’ slapdash efforts to counter Great Britain’s overwhelming predominance at sea during the revolution, Symonds shows how the early history of the Navy was characterized by a militia mentality whereby the Navy was expanded rapidly in wartime but allowed to hollow out as soon as peace arrived. From 1775 until the late 19th century, the Navy mostly mirrored American foreign policy: an inward-looking nation focused on economic expansion and internal divisions but capable of impressive martial prowess when roused to action.
Inevitably, this hedgehog’s approach had considerable drawbacks, leaving the Navy almost invariably unprepared at the outset of conflict. Thomas Jefferson’s antipathy toward standing armies and navies resulted in the mass construction of small, coastal defense gunboats—which proved useless against the British in 1812. Our chronic unpreparedness made Abraham Lincoln’s 1861 declaration of a blockade against the Confederacy a source of amusement in European capitals; only an unprecedented wartime buildup resulted in a Navy capable of assisting the ultimate Union victory. Even after Theodore Roosevelt—a believer in Alfred Thayer Mahan’s assertion that a powerful navy was required for national greatness—propelled the Navy into the 20th century, it frequently found itself languishing between wars.
While Symonds brushes past the details of specific battles, he is scrupulous in detailing the ups and downs of the Navy’s fortunes. In this tale, the president and Congress are as important as vessels and admirals. John Adams’s decision to create a formal Navy Department in 1798 marked the first step toward a professional, permanent force. Benjamin Harrison and his Navy secretary (a former Union Army general named Benjamin Tracy) persuaded Congress to bring the fleet out of its post-Civil War doldrums, and laid the foundation that Theodore Roosevelt would transform into his Great White Fleet. Working with congressman Carl Vinson of Georgia, Franklin D. Roosevelt began preparing the Navy for its rendezvous with destiny through a series of legislative expansions in the years before Pearl Harbor. While this story may lack the drama of ships at war, it was fundamental to the Navy’s success in wartime.
Today, the legacy of naval victories past is in the most parlous condition in decades. Symonds notes that the fleet, now around 270 ships, is at its smallest size since World War I. Yet he is quickly dismissive of these numbers, arguing that the service retains far greater capabilities than any potential rivals. And he mentions only in passing the challenge posed by China’s burgeoning interest in seapower, a development that is changing the Asia-Pacific region before our eyes.
This optimism is belied by Symonds’s own thesis: namely, that policymakers have a choice whether to maintain a Navy commensurate with the country’s needs or not. Since the Reagan era, both parties have often chosen the well-worn path of neglect, living off the naval successes of the past without investing for the future. Should the country fail to correct the relative lack of interest in seapower shown over the last generation, the familiar tale of unpreparedness in war that Symonds documents here is all too likely to repeat itself.
Alexander B. Gray is a writer in Washington.
