As people go about their daily business, often there is little to no thought spared about the fundamental and vast connected systems that enable and underpin civilisation. Most of the population is content, as long as those systems do not fail, to remain unaware of the chain of processes in the world that enable daily life, like getting to work, fuelling homes, powering businesses and buying groceries. Most of these systems depend on what happens at sea and on the seabed. However, these places are far from the consciousness of the public and decision-makers, even if the oceans, ice caps, and riverways cover over 71% of the Earth's surface. As science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) once said:
“How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.”
Therefore, it’s of little surprise that, since the classic period of Rome and Greece, the seas have been a place to communicate, explore, trade, and engage in warfare between nations and cultures. The aim is from the sea to influence what happens on land, like deterring conflict and enabling victory in war by exerting power to control the lifeblood of nations, alliances and the direction of our civilisation. Yet, after 1945, the sea became even more distantly remote than it already was. Even for island nations like Britain, who, like continental countries but more so islands, their culture, identity, strategy and foreign policy, let alone politics, have been shaped and defined by interaction at sea through commerce and warfare between nations. To some degree, this was because allied navies had been entirely successful in the Second World War. Naval forces had swept the seas of threats, providing protection against invasion, keeping populations and military fuelled and fed, ultimately enabling the land-based campaigns that resulted in the enemy's defeat. Although the liberalisation of freedom at sea opened the door to new threats over the post-war decades where war-like peace has been maintained at sea, this has supported decades of international growth, increased living standards and, in conjunction with nuclear weapons, an uneasy peace from total war.
In the 21st century, the public only gets glimpses or feels the aftereffects of disruption at sea and logistic chains as it impacts great swatches of daily life and not just national economies. Today, at sea, the state-sponsored Houthi Red Sea attacks are occurring, piracy continues, and growing naval competition around the world where nations are jostling to try and assert influence and control at sea, such as in the Indo-Pacific, are actively taking place. The business, function, and role of navies and seapower are enduring tasks, one going on for centuries with zero rest days, and the efforts of sailors and seafarers are little acknowledged by the public or in the corridors of power. As nations gather to mark significant historical events or future programmes, it often seems there is an emphasis placed on land and air forces at the expense of understanding the maritime contribution. This is part of a broader picture where awareness and education of the sea has declined rapidly in the latter decades of the 20th and early 21st century with the absence of Admiralty.
Yet behind all of this, why what happens at sea is overlooked is not just a mere matter of education, but the simple fact that humanity dwells on land where we make our homes, places of safety and produce the bulk of food that maintain our existence. The sea is a place where humans work rather than live. It’s not a transitory only space like the air where aircraft operate; there is business to be done at sea, such as through the undersea cables enabling the internet and access to natural resources, while vast ships carrying essential resources through to products and goods which value amounts to vast proportions of Stock Exchanges must operate and operate securely. However, as a species, we are naturally blind and cautious to hostile environments where we cannot survive for long or function without machines and technology. In short, we must purposefully go out of our way to do our best to overcome these challenges presented by hostile environments, learn about them and continually educate about them to the public and those who make decisions in the highest offices. We don’t seek out environments hostile to us but to try to overcome them as a challenge for the human spirit or an objective like to further a cause such as exploration, science, diplomacy, resources, trade and economics, with war and conflict often downstream from many of them. Prussian Army Officer Carl Von Clausewitz's (1780-1831) words that “war is politics by other means” could also be complemented with, ‘competition over resources as the mother of war and conflict.’ There is no escape from what happens at sea, for it has a fundamental role in this, something British historian and strategist Sir Julian Corbett (1854-1922) studied when he had no option but to analyse what happened at sea in the past and from that, educate the military and government through teaching maritime strategy.
The sea has deep civilisational roots in the fate and development of continents, humanity and nations. There are centuries of experience to analyse of how the role of the sea and the actions of nations with their military forces at sea have shaped the world around us. Still, there is an environment with which, more so than air, it shares commonality: the final frontier.
With the growing ease of access to orbit, nations are advancing their space-based assets with satellites and more efficient missiles and rockets interconnected with advancements in communications, intelligence and cyber technologies. They are increasing resources for space and enhancing their capabilities to support their objectives and influences over the land, an essential function of space and sea-based national assets. Using cheaper and more advanced technologies has created a crowded space environment, even more so than increased naval activity at sea today, where with both the pressure of tension can build and maintain alliances as equally as spiral out of some form of control. Space was always a militarised frontier, just as the sea was promptly militarised in the distant past and with a similar function in mind, contrary to today's mainstream narrative. After the first Cold War (1946-1991) and the first Space Race (1945-1975), interest has waxed and waned with space, but as technology and machines have made its usefulness and our dependency on it grow, attention by commercial and defence use for nations has expanded with it. Navies have experienced the same for different reasons, where their once popularity gained them widespread funding and admiration, and other times, they have been left far behind in policy. The expansion in space by nations, civilian and military, has been further fuelled by competition between national powers and alliances who seek any strategic advantage over their competitors, in-turn nations are looking to proven and new ways to gain that advantage, which can also be seen in advancements in the reach and capabilities of naval forces.
The creation of the US Space Force in 2019 marked not only a watershed moment in defence organisation but also an urgent need for maturity with thought on space behind military, geostrategic and geopolitical movements where space’s importance has only grown, for better or worse. Just as events at sea take twists and turns, what happens in space is going through heightened national and international discussion. Although the debate on space has often come with silly rhetoric more suited to a narrative of warmongering or the extreme fantasies of science fiction, it remains somewhat in its intellectual infancy. Yet, in common with the sea and our understanding of maritime strategy, space is increasingly an interface where exploration, science, diplomacy, trade (of forms), commercial activity and military activity intersect. This remarkable likeness to the oceans or seeing a hostile environment as a place to secure strategic advantage is no fluke, one not just contained to coastal waters or the space equivalent––orbit––but moving to geopolitics and strategy out to the moon, an island in space, and potentially in our lifetime, beyond. Space is far more than a passing conversation of air power, which is inherently limited to the equivalent of regional border disputes which make up the upper atmosphere and low orbit, for that quickly terminates and becomes a global conversation, the equivalent of one vast ocean sea space.
Defence establishments and national governments have short-term memories, which often makes understanding a connection like the maritime and space domain challenging without having a culture set on understanding the complex world around us and, principally, the logistics of our civilisation––a more difficult policy to sell for funding when the results are less immediate than planes, tanks and soldiers. The sea-space connection is essential to understand, as research and debate on topics like ‘space warfare’ and ‘space strategy’ or how space can work more effectively in national strategic doctrine intensifies. However, wisdom to guide the debate must be harnessed from long-term experience, which only domains like maritime can provide to overcome short-termism, often found in national space doctrines. After periods where an institutional and national focus has been lost on a specific domain, or experience of it thrown away, reinvention of things known yesterday happens even when analysis and wisdom that can help inform the debate already exists. The past and maritime model is helpful for those interested in space as they navigate choppy intellectual waters because the discussion on defence in space bears marked resemblance to historic disagreements over the application of certain types of military power, where theory and guesswork frequently ride to prominence at the cost of thorough analysis and reflection including the need of all military service participation to achieve national goals.
We are going through a maritime renaissance, not solely because of the increased military tension and commercial competition at sea and space but because maritime strategy tells us to think deeply and carefully about the intersection of diplomacy, commercial interest, military and civilian activity and how it is fundamental to our daily lives as well as nations on so many levels. Being mindful of this is vital to combat the ever-present issue of strategic, policy and public blindness to the sea and space.
Dr James WE Smith is supported by the British Academy and facilitated by King’s College London with his research on the future of both maritime strategy and space strategy. He completed his PhD in the Department of War Studies in 2021 which examined how government and defence organisation impacts how nations think and execute strategy. He is also a fellow of the US Naval War College, Royal Astronomical Society, and Royal Historical Society.
Photo: USS Wayne E. Meyer (DDG-108) transits through the East China Sea on Nov. 15, 2019. US Navy Photo.