Big Serge has an excellent post on the history of naval warfare that happens to touch lightly on the strategic crisis facing the USA today with regards to the production of steel and the post-WWII lack of industrial capacity that has weakened the US military.
At the core of the great naval developments occurring around the turn of the 20th Century was a systematic erosion of Great Britain’s strategic position. This strategic decay was of course a multivariate process which included the emergence of new great powers like Germany, Japan, and the United States, and the evolving industrial dynamics of the world. At its heart, however, the problem was very simple: in the latter half of the 19th Century, industrial technologies began to diffuse from Great Britain to the rest of the great powers, to the effect that British supremacy in industry and critical military technologies became an open question.
A brief perusal of the relevant economic statistics betrays a clear and sustained erosion of British supremacy. In 1880, Britain still accounted for nearly a quarter of global manufacturing output and was by far the leading industrial nation of the world. By 1913, it had fallen in absolute terms well behind Germany and especially the United States, which now boasted nearly 2.5 times Britain’s output. Already by 1910, Britain (formerly the world’s premiere steelmaking nation) produced only half as much steel as Germany and barely a quarter of American steel output.
The immense economic advantages enjoyed by the United States need little enumeration. America occupies a uniquely providential economic geography, being blessed with a pair of accommodating seaboards saturated with natural harbors, an internal Mississippi waterway that is both dense and far reaching to accommodate internal trade, superb growing regions, peaceful borders, and ample deposits of virtually every mineral resource thinkable. In short, it is a country with bountiful mineral and agricultural resources, internal waterways for moving them about, harbors for exporting them abroad, and no meaningful security threats.
The German case, however, bears closer scrutiny. Whereas the United States was characterized by boundless space, free of meaningful external security threats, Germany was intensely bounded in the middle of Europe, birthed into a firestorm of potential enemies all around it. German economic might was little like the American story, characterized by the uninterrupted exploitation of a vast geographic bounty, and more the product of powerful and aggressive German institutions – both of corporations and the state.
The German population grew rapidly into the 20th Century (German birthrates were forever a point of hand wringing for the French). The German population grew from some 49 million in 1890 to 65 million by 1910 – an increase of 32%, compared to an increase of just 3% in France (from 38.3 to 39.5 million) and 20% in Britain (37.3 to 44.9 million). Simultaneously, the consolidation of an impressive educational apparatus ensured that this growing population was highly literate and productive. Around the turn of the century, many European armies still reported high levels of illiteracy among recruits. In Italy, some 33% of recruits were deemed illiterate: the corresponding figure was 22% in Austria-Hungary and 6.8% in France, but a mere 0.1% in Germany. The rapid growth of such a young and educated population benefited not just the German army, but also the burgeoning roster of German industrial enterprises like Krupp, Siemens, AEG, Bayer, and Hoechst. Such firms dominated the emerging 20th Century industries like chemicals, optics, and electrics, and the intensive adoption of agricultural modernization and chemical fertilizers made German agriculture the most productive in Europe on a per-hectare basis.
The explosion of two industrial powers who could not only compete but even outstrip Britain (and one of them right in the heart of Europe) could have no effect other than directly undermining Britain’s strategic position. Matters were made worse, however, but the proliferation of advanced naval technology around the world – in many cases directly abetted by British firms.
In 1864, British military leadership had made the fateful decision to keep artillery production in the hands of the state-owned Woolwich arsenal, despite the emergence of private industrial firms, like the Armstrong company, who were capable of making state of the art naval artillery. Cut out of British government contracts, this let manufacturers like Armstrong with no choice but to seek foreign buyers. When Armstrong built an armored cruiser – the O’Higgins – for the Chilean government, it set off serious alarm bells about the basis of British naval supremacy. The O’Higgins was fast enough to easily outrun any capital ship of the day, but her powerful 8 inch guns made her more than capable of sinking targets in the lower weight class. This suggested a distinctive use case as a commercial raider, able to evade enemy battleships while preying on merchants. Chile, of course, was hardly a rival to Great Britain, but Armstrong’s exploits did not end there. All told, Armstrong would build 84 warships for twelve different foreign governments between 1884 and 1914, and frequently supplied technical systems more advanced than those in use by the Royal Navy at the time – for example, the powerful main battery of the Russian cruiser Rurik, launched in 1890.
The prospect of fast cruisers – optimized for speed and striking power at the expense of armor – was particularly alarming to Britain owing to emerging patterns of agricultural production. The advent of efficient steamships had drastically lowered seaborne transportation costs – a fact that was of the first importance for Britain, as it allowed for the mass import of cheap grain from places like North America, Australia, and Argentina, at costs far below the levels at which British farms could compete. As a result, between 1872 and the end of the century wheat acreage in Great Britain dropped by about 50 percent, and already by the 1880’s some 65 percent of Britain’s grain was imported from overseas. The prospect of swift enemy cruisers capable of intercepting grain shipments while evading the British battle fleets now assumed a potentially existential importance, as for the first time in history London contemplated the possibility that the interdiction of its trade could bring the island to the brink of starvation.
This raised the possibility of a dangerous asymmetry: might it be possible to nullify Britain’s centuries-old naval supremacy without building competing battleships at all? French naval theorists certainly thought so, and it was proposed that France could out-lever Britain on the seas with a fleet comprised entirely of fast cruisers and torpedo boats. Such a program had the additional advantage of being very cheap, with dozens of torpedo boats available at the cost of a single armored battleship. This financial calculus was particularly important to France: after the disastrous defeat at the hands of the Prusso-Germans in 1870-71, it was natural that building out the army should be Paris’s primary concern. Therefore, a naval program that promised to outmaneuver the British without eating into funds for the army had irresistible allure. In 1881, the French allocated funds for 70 torpedo boats (halting the construction of armored battleships), and in 1886 the new Minister of Marine, Admiral Aube, launched a new building program for 100 additional torpedo boats and 14 swift cruisers designed to raid enemy shipping.
Taken together, the decay of Britain’s naval supremacy is easy to sketch out. Great Britain had become uniquely vulnerable to asymmetrical warfare at sea, owing to its growing dependence on imported grain, at the same time that technical changes in the form of the torpedo and the fast cruiser gave her enemies the potential to exploit this vulnerability. To make matters worse, the diffusion of the industrial revolution to continental Europe and the United States raised the prospect that Great Britain might no longer be able to simply out-build her enemies. In a sense, the comforting and familiar dynamic of the blockade was now reversed: instead of a powerful British battlefleet insulating the home islands from invasion and blockading enemy ports, the home islands now faced starvation at the hands of fast and cheap enemy raiding vessels armed with torpedoes and modern naval artillery.
The parallels of British decline and the subsequent US decline should be fairly obvious. As Admiral Mahan wrote in The Influence of Sea Power Upon the French Revolution, “we may profitably note that like conditions lead to like results.”