MILITARY GEOGRAPHY
FOR PROFESSIONALS AND THE PUBLIC
PART THREE: POLITICAL-MILITARY GEOGRAPHY
14. MILITARY SERVICE PREDILECTIONS
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion. No one is entitled to his own facts.
James R. Schlesinger
Testimony before Congress, 1973
EVERYONE HAS OPINIONS THAT INTENTIONALLY OR INADVERTENTLY DISTORT FACTS TO SUIT PREDILECTIONS, whether they are entitled to or not. Spokesmen for each Armed Service, who advise chiefs of state, foreign ministers, and senior defense officials, commonly possess dissimilar views concerning political-military problems and corrective actions, because they operate in distinctive geographic mediums and genuflect before different geopolitical gurus who variously advocate land, sea, air, or space power. Many (not all) members of each service are firmly convinced that their convictions are correct and believe competing opinions are flawed. The dominant school of thought in any country or long-standing coalition (such as NATO and the now defunct Warsaw Pact) consequently exerts profound effects on military roles, missions, strategies, tactics, plans, programs, and force postures.
DIVERSIFIED VIEWPOINTS
Warfare was confined largely to conflicts on land, the natural habitat of all human beings, until about 700 B.C., when Phoenician strategists introduced ships designed explicitly for combat at sea. Persian armed forces initiated major amphibious operations at Marathon in 490 B.C. and a decade later engaged a Greek fleet at Salamis in the first large-scale naval battle.1 Land and sea thereafter remained the only military arenas until the 20th century, when air forces, then military operations in space, added third and fourth dimensions that generate ceaseless interservice jockeying to consolidate or expand geographical jurisdictions. The four thumbnail sketches that follow illustrate fundamental philosophical differences.
TERRACENTRIC VIEWS
Army generals, who revere the Clausewitzian treatise On War,2 subdivide continents into theaters, areas of operation, and zones of action within which terrain features limit deployments, schemes of maneuver, weapon effectiveness, and logistical support. Ground forces engaged in conventional combat are loath to lose contact with adversaries until they emerge victorious and, if necessary, impose political-military control by occupying hostile territory. Armies once were self-sufficient, but dependence on aerial firepower currently is pronounced and, unless circumstances allow them to move overland, they can neither reach distant objective areas nor sustain themselves after arrival without adequate airlift and sealift. Senior army officials consequently tend to favor command structures and relationships that assure essential interservice support whenever and wherever required.3
Terracentric advocates of land power trace their roots to Friedrich Ratzel who, in 1897, for the first time formally correlated continental land masses with political-military power. James Fairgrieve, Karl Haushofer (who made Lebensraum a household word in Nazi Germany), and Nicholas J. Spykman were subsequently prominent,4 but none attracted greater international attention than Sir Halford J. MacKinder, whose 1904 study entitled, "The Geographical Pivot of History," assigned prime importance to central Eurasia which, because it coupled splendid isolation with vast space and resources, seemed to comprise a defensible base from which to project decisive power. MacKinder in 1919 added a good deal of Eastern Europe to the Pivot Area, designated it as the Heartland, recognized the rest of Eurasia as an Inner or Marginal Crescent (sometimes called the Rimland), and conceived an Outer or Insular Crescent that included Africa south of the Sahara, Australia, Britain, Japan, large archipelagos like Indonesia, and the Americas (map 41). Europe, Asia, and Africa became the World-Island, at which point he postulated:
Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland.
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island.
Who rules the World-Island commands the world.5
MARECENTRIC VIEWS
Free-wheeling marecentric forces, unlike armies, rely little on joint service
cooperation, enjoy a global reach channelized only by geographic choke points,
and generally determine unilaterally whether, where, and when to fight, because
they most often are able to make or break contact with enemy formations as they
see fit. Admirals as a rule accordingly resent bureaucratic restrictions on
naval freedom of action and defy anybody to draw recognizable boundaries across
their watery domain, which is a featureless plane except along littorals where
land and sea meet 6 (go-it-alone
policies during World War II made Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson lament the
"dim religious world where Neptune is God, Mahan is his prophet, and the
U.S. Navy the only true church"7).
Topographic obstacles other than shallows, islands, and ice are foreign to surface
sailors--submariners have different perspectives--but one prominent geographic
limitation is inescapable: even navies with superlative underway replenishment
capabilities ultimately are tied to vulnerable bases ashore.6
Map 41. The
World According to Mackinder
(1904 and 1919)
The basic naval wartime objective, articulated in the early 1900s by British strategist Sir Julian Corbett, "must always be directly or indirectly either to assure command of the sea or to prevent the enemy from securing it."8 U.S. Navy Captain (later Rear Admiral) Alfred Thayer Mahan, in his political-military exposition entitled The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, preached that sea control indeed can determine decisions ashore.9 Blockades were the principal instrument when he penned that document in 1904, but carrier-based aircraft, specialized amphibious assault forces, and guided missiles enable modern navies to project power far inland. Admiral Mahan additionally predicted that armed forces positioned around Eurasia could contain land power emanating from MacKinder's Heartland, a postulation that the United States and its allies put to good use first during World War II, then during their prolonged Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union and its associates (map 42).10
AEROCENTRIC VIEWS
Land-based air forces operate in a medium that surface navies might envy, where there are three dimensions rather than two, no choke points, no topographic impediments, and visibility to far distant horizons, being less limited by Earth's curvature, is restricted only by clouds except in mountainous terrain. Global reach is truly obtainable, given secure airfields, secure launch pads for long-range missiles, and essential logistical support from other services. Small wonder, therefore, that aerocentric generals (like admirals) prefer the greatest possible autonomy and are leery of boundaries that limit flexibility because, in the main, they believe that unfettered air power could be the decisive military instrument and make protracted wars obsolete. All services attach top priority to air superiority, without which most combat missions ashore or afloat become excessively costly, even infeasible. 11
Italian Brigadier General Guilio Douhet began prophesying about the future of air power five scant years after the Wright Brothers first took flight. His Command of the Air (1921), which visualized air strikes to destroy enemy population centers, industrial bases, and war-making potential, laid the foundation for strategic bombing concepts. Douhet, whose disciples are legion, vastly overrated the destructive potential of munitions then available and underrated rival air defenses, but nuclear weapons seemed to vindicate his theories during the Age of Assured Destruction.12 Alexander de Seversky, whose book Air Power: Key to Survival (1950) updated and supported Douhet, unequivocally subordinated armies and navies to air forces.13 His postulations not only put a north-south rather than east-west spin on superpower confrontations during the Cold War but identified an "Area of Decision" around the North Pole, where U.S. and Soviet dominance appeared to overlap (map 43). Nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with north-south trajectories strengthened his arguments in the 1960s, whereas submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) had the opposite effect, because they could attack from diverse directions.
No comparable philosophies with persistent and widespread approval underpin theater air power doctrines. Brigadier General William "Billy" Mitchell, who conceived division-sized parachute assaults in 1918 and twice demonstrated the potency of air power against naval surface combatants (1921, 1923), may have come closest to "sainthood" but, like Douhet before him, was persecuted for his prescience.14
Map 42. U.S. and Allied Encirclement of the Soviet Union
Map 43. De Seversky's View of the Globe
ASTROCENTRIC VIEWS
An astrocentric school of thought devoted to military space, in early formative stages at
this moment, concentrates on the Earth-Moon System (chapter 7), because interplanetary
conflicts seem far in the future. The central theme is still indistinct, but may well
revolve around lunar libration points L-4 and L-5, then adapt MacKinder's Heartland Theory
with words something like these:
Who rules circumterrestrial space commands Planet Earth;
Who rules the moon commands circumterrestrial space;
Who rules L-4 and L-5 commands the Earth-Moon System.
INTEGRATED AND UPDATED VIEWS
Conflicting advice from land, sea, air, and space power advocates is valuable, because it provides senior officials with service-oriented opinions on any given political-military topic before they reach decisions. Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara even so was right when he wrote, "We can imagine many different kinds of wars the United States must be prepared to fight, but a war in which the Army fights independently of the Navy, or the Navy independently of the Air Force is not one of them."15
Each service as it stands is superior in some environments and inferior in others. Armies generally function more efficiently than air forces in heavily forested regions and rugged terrain, whereas air power is especially advantageous over sparsely covered plains. Ballistic missile submarines at sea, being mobile as well as invisible to enemy targeteers, are less vulnerable to prelaunch attacks than "sitting duck" intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in concrete silos ashore. Reasonable degrees of centralized control coupled with joint doctrines, joint education, and joint training programs that effectively integrate multiservice capabilities thus seem desirable.
Some opinions that Mackinder, Mahan, de Seversky, and other geopolitical savants expressed many years ago may still be sound, but all require periodic reexaminations followed if necessary by fresh interpretations or replacements, because political, economic, social, scientific, and technological developments continually alter relationships between geographic circumstances and political-military power.16 Mackinder, well aware of change, not only tacked Mongolia and the Tibetan Plateau onto his Heartland in 1943 but, in light of events during World War II, repudiated his 1919 pronouncement, "Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island."17 Not everyone concurred with his judgments, but his openminded attitude remains worth emulating in this turbulent world.
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