Building Corbett's Navy

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States Navy lost the single enemy that had justified its every ship, doctrine, and budget request for forty years. How should a navy decide what to build when there is no peer fleet to defeat? This incisive monograph answers by reaching back to an Edwardian British theorist, and in doing so anticipates debates that would dominate naval strategy for the next twenty years. Building Corbett's Navy: The Principles of Maritime Strategy was written by Lieutenant Commander Tim Rexrode and submitted to the Marine Corps Command and Staff College in 2004, at the moment the Navy had abandoned its old planning compass without yet forging a new one.

Rexrode's intellectual heart is a deliberate choice between the two great theorists of sea power. Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose 1890 classic shaped navies on three continents, taught that command of the sea was won through concentration of the battle fleet in decisive engagement, with everything else, commerce raiding above all, relegated to secondary importance. Sir Julian Corbett, the British civilian historian whose Some Principles of Maritime Strategy appeared in 1911, offered a more supple framework: command of the sea is not absolute but local, valuable chiefly for what it allows a fleet to do, defend against invasion, attack and defend commerce, and support military expeditions ashore. Rexrode argues that the Navy's modern lineage traces to Mahan, and that this inheritance is the deep source of its difficulty adapting to a world without a single great adversary.

From this contrast Rexrode builds his central claim: the Navy organizes its policy around the wrong concepts. Since the 1970s it has planned around five strategic concepts, power projection, sea control, forward presence, strategic sealift, and strategic deterrence, several of which are not functional categories at all but broad generalizations that obscure the relationship between ways and means and anchor the fleet to an obsolete planning environment. In their place he proposes the enduring functions of the Navy, synthesizing Corbett, Frank Uhlig, Roger Barnett, Clark Reynolds, John Chase, and Wayne Hughes into ten recurring functions of naval warfare. Drawing on Corbett's concepts of fleet constitution and rating, the historical drift of cruisers into the battle line, he warns that the Cold War's multi-mission combatants have blurred functional distinctions and left the surface fleet poorly differentiated. The payoff is a disciplined method for force planning in an austere budget, which he applies to live controversies of his day, the Littoral Combat Ship and the DD(X) and CG(X) programs.

This Nimble Books edition faithfully reproduces the full study and adds a complete editorial apparatus newly prepared for this volume. A Historical Context essay reconstructs the post-Cold-War strategy debate, the Corbett-versus-Mahan contrast, and the work's striking relevance to later arguments over anti-access threats and distributed operations. Two complementary plain-language abstracts open the material to every reader, an accessible explain-it-simply summary and an advanced analytical summary that probes whether functions are truly more stable than concepts. A Glossary, Indexes of persons, places, and concepts, and an original computational RKHS knowledge-graph analysis situating the work among related strategy texts complete the volume.

For naval officers, strategists, students of military theory, librarians, and general readers, this is a remarkably early statement of a Corbettian revival that has since moved from the margins toward the center of how the Navy thinks about itself, and a standing reminder that force planning must rest on strategic logic, not program advocacy.