Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell and Alfred Thayer Mahan: A Very Brief Comparison

Also: A note on “Geostrategy”

 William “Billy” Mitchell

            Brigadier General William “Billy” Mitchell started off as a young Lieutenant in the Signal Corps in France at the end of World War I. As air assets of the army were currently assigned to the Signal Corps, Mitchell had interactions with aviators and began to become excited by the concept of aviation as more than simply reconnaissance devices; he was interested in using them to fight. At age thirty-eight, Mitchell began private flight lessons.

            While in Europe in 1917, in the closing years of the First World War, Mitchell observed British and French leaders and their air operations, and began to take charge of and make preparations for an American air arm. Though he earned numerous medals for his aviation skill and was known as one of the greatest American air combatants of the war, Mitchell alienated his superiors in his eighteen months in France during the war. He returned to the US in 1919 and, retaining his one-star rank, was appointed Deputy Chief of the Air Service.

            The return to America brought no end to Mitchell’s squabbles with his superiors; after a pair of bombing tests in 1921 and 1923 that sank battleships off of the American coast, he claimed that surface fleet navies were obsolete, and this began a long struggle between Mitchell and the General Boards of the Army and Navy. Mitchell was eventually court-martialed and found guilty of insubordination, and left the service. He left a legacy of a keen desire for an independent air wing in the US military, and truly brought aviation to the forefront of the public’s, and the military’s minds. Mitchell’s abrasive tactics and loud preaching of the doctrine of air power were instrumental to the maintenance and improvement of American air power, which proved vital in America’s future conflicts.

Alfred Thayer Mahan

            Alfred Thayer Mahan, a naval strategist and geostrategist, was partially behind the great buildup of fleets before World War I by means of his influence over the world’s navies. After transferring to the Naval Academy in 1857, and being commissioned as a Lieutenant in 1861, Mahan became an instructor at the Naval Academy after showing a lack of skill in ship command. It was here that Mahan began his research and started to form his theories on sea power.

            Mahan’s theory was that control of the sea was critical to warfare; if one combatant could deny another combatant the use of the sea for commerce and resources, than the combatant with control of the sea would inevitably win the conflict. Mahan advocated a large fleet of battleships to destroy the enemy’s fleet in one quick, decisive battle; once this was accomplished, a blockade of the enemy’s ports would be easy. The weaker combatant’s goal was to keep a fleet in port, and not move out very far to avoid such a dramatic and decisive battle.

            Alfred Thayer Mahan’s book, The Influence of Seapower Upon History, was studied closely in the interwar years, especially by the Japanese navy. His work was also the keystone that led to the Battle of Jutland and various smaller battleship conflicts in World War I and the interwar years. In World War II, the search for Mahan’s dramatic, climactic battle lead to the Japanese forces’ defeat.

            Overall, the legacies of these two theorists are quite different, nearly as different as the lives they led; Alfred Mahan was a traditionalist, and was enthusiastically received by the world, yet now his theories are looked upon as out-of-date and obsolete—battleships are no longer used as combatants. Billy Mitchell’s air theories, on the other hand, are still looked upon today as intelligent and are still indoctrinated in our modern Air Force long after the man’s death; all this despite the criticism and persecution Mitchell faced in his own time.

 “Geostrategy” 

            “A science named ‘geo-strategy’ would be unimaginable in any other period of history than ours. It is a characteristic product of turbulent twentieth-century world politics,” says Andrew Gyorgy of the University of California. Though there is no general definition, Jacob J. Grygiel defines it as such:

“Geostrategy is the geographic direction of a state's foreign policy. More precisely, geostrategy describes where a state concentrates its efforts by projecting military power and directing diplomatic activity. The underlying assumption is that states have limited resources and are unable, even if they are willing, to conduct a tous asimuths foreign policy. Instead they must focus politically and militarily on specific areas of the world. Geostrategy describes this foreign-policy thrust of a state and does not deal with motivation or decision-making processes. The geostrategy of a state, therefore, is not necessarily motivated by geographic or geopolitical factors. A state may project power to a location because of ideological reasons, interest groups, or simply the whim of its leader.”

            Alfred Thayer Mahan was a very well-renowned Geostrategist, writing at length in his “Influence of Seapower Upon History” series about the effects of America’s and Britain’s locations and geography and how that effects their fighting power and prowess. He also wrote at length about “The Problem of Asia” and designated the area between the thirtieth and fortieth parallels “the debatable and debated” area. Mahan argued that there were no states in this zone able to resist a more dominant nation making war against them. He went on to describe strategies to be used in Asia.

            Thus concludes my brief note on geostrategy.