Arctic Adventure: Sides with Science

Review by Bill Doughty

A good Navy read during hot summer months is the chilling true tale by Hampton Sides, "In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette" (2014, Doubleday).

Sides, author of "Ghost Soldiers," takes us to the late 19th century when science was still revealing the truth about earth's geography.

Explorers like Hudson, Barents and Barrington believed in an open polar sea. They sought to find warm currents and a temperate land beyond the ice. Navy charts at the time were incorrect.

Vain efforts to prove an open sea at the North Pole were fueled by assumptions of a deranged German mapmaker named August Petermann. He's just one of the interesting characters in the drama. 

Another is newspaper magnate James Gordon Bennett Jr., the obscenely wealthy owner of "The New York Herald." The eccentric newspaper publisher capitalized on strong feelings of nationalism and saw rich profits to be gained by backing a voyage to the Arctic. Bennett funded a U.S. Navy public-private venture to discover something that didn't exist.

This is a tale of life and death, courage and resilience.

The Navy's maps indicating a "supposed open polar sea" were developed by a naval officer respected for his oceanography, Silas Bent, who had previously served as flag lieutenant under Commodore Matthew C. Perry aboard USS Mississippi.

The Jeannette mission to the Arctic was launched in early July 1879, just 27 years after Perry sailed his "black ships" into Japan, 14 years after the Civil War (in which Silas Bent would resign his commission to side with the Confederacy) and 20 years before the Navy established a base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. 

Parts of the world were still being opened to trade, ships were just being converted from canvas to steam, and Thomas Edison was about to light up entire streets with his greatest invention.

One hero of the voyage is captain of the USS Jeannette, Lt. Cmdr. George Washington De Long of New York.

De Long became captivated by the Cold North on an earlier journey up "the ragged west coast of the world's largest island, Greenland."

"De Long's disdain for the polar landscape soon wore off ... something began to take hold of him. He became more and more intrigued by the Arctic, by its lonely grandeur, by its mirages and strange tricks of light, its mock moons and blood-red halos, its thick, misty atmospheres, which altered and magnified sounds, leaving the impression that one was living under a dome. He felt as though he were breathing rarefied air. He became intrigued by the phenomenon of the "ice blink," the spectral glow in the low sky that indicated the presence of a large frozen pack ahead. The scenery grew more impressive: ice-gouged fjords, towering bergs calved fresh from glaciers, the crisp sound of cold surf lapping against the pack ringed seals peeking through gaps in the ice, bowhead whales spouting in the deep gray channel. This was the purest wilderness De Long had ever seen, and he began to fall in love with it."

Sides describes De Long as frustrated by Navy bureaucracy and red tape yet fully embracing the stern, disciplinarian style of shipboard leadership, quoting a contemporary of his, Mark Twain. According to Sides:

"De Long blamed the Navy for some of his worst traits. He once wrote, 'Ship life is a hard thing on the temper. Mark Twain in his Innocents Abroad says that going to sea develops all of man's bad qualities and brings out new ones that he did not suppose himself mean enough for. I wonder if that accounts for all the rough edges of my character.' He admitted that he could be 'hard on men,' but such was the nature of a naval officer's life. 'I can only say I never allow any argument,' De Long once wrote. 'It is my office to command and theirs to obey.''"

Prior to heading north, De Long brought USS Jeannette to the Mare Island Shipyard where double trusses, new iron beam reinforcement and extra pitch were installed and applied. Mare represented the nation's original "rebalance" to the Pacific and was considered a "western outpost of America's burgeoning might."

The Navy's Chief Engineer at the turn of the 20th century, George W. Melville

Another hero of the voyage is innovative engineer George W. Melville. Years later, Melville would become chief engineer for the Navy, earning the rank of rear admiral. As the 20th century dawned, Melville "presided over an expansive redesign of the fleet, largely completing its conversion from wood to metal, and from wind to steam power.  When he retired, in 1903, the U.S. Navy boasted one of the most powerful modernized fleets in the world."

Sides, known for revealing the personalities of long-dead characters, excels here in describing more than a dozen men of De Long's ill-fated mission.  The author shows the hard choices the sailors and civilians faced so they could survive: ice or sea, boats or sleds – which dogs to cull – what to eat.

Arctic-bound USS Jeannette becomes icebound.

Books were an important part of the mission, as inspiration both before and during the months at sea: books by Twain, Stephen Crane, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, Mary Shelley and Frederick Marryat, of the British Royal Navy, whose swashbuckling tales ignited in De Long "a profound desire to enter the Naval Academy."

"Kingdom" is a fascinating book, recommended by retired Adm. James Stavridis and another favorite Navy Read author, Nathaniel Philbrick, who calls this book a "dazzling page turner ... full of unforgettable characters and vividly described scenes." For example:

"Much of their journey seemed like a dream, a long whiteout of undifferentiated days punctuated by a few moments of haunting clarity: A snowy owl staring at them. A pile of decrepit sleds they smashed up for firewood. The corpse of a native buried in a box on a hill. A crow, circling and circling and circling."

Hampton Sides used original documents and reports from the voyage, coupled with contemporaneous newspapers and letters, including some heartbreaking correspondence between De Long and his wife Emma – featured in each chapter. The author's notes and selected bibliography span 34 pages and more than 140 years.

Pick up "In the Kingdom of Ice" to read more about De Long and Melville's daring adventure, the entropy of their mission in search of the open polar sea, and the revelations found in the frozen and unforgiving Arctic. Some survived. Others perished. Those who did not return alive were called by the Secretary of the Navy, "martyrs in the cause of science."

Chilling with ‘Icebound’

Review by Bill Doughty––

As the summer heats up literally, here’s a way to cool off literarily: Andrea Pitzer’s goosebumps-inducing history-science-adventure true story, “Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World” (Scribner, Simon & Schuster, 2021).

It’s the otherworldly true story of Dutch sailors, led by navigator William Barents, as they attempt to find an open polar sea in the Arctic in the age of sail.

Barents, who pioneered map-making in the Mediterranean, made three voyages for the Dutch Republic in the 1590s. This book covers all three ventures, but zeroes in on the third and final fraught attempt. The Dutch, along with other nations, wanted to discover a northern trade route to China.

It was time of growing empires and growing sea trade in slaves and spices.

It was also a time of war between Spain (Catholic and monarchistic) and the Netherlands (Protestant and based in liberty). While war raged in western Europe, Barents and other Dutch sailors headed East and North, hoping to find a warm sea beyond the ice.

Barents was considered a “magician” for his ability at celestial navigation. “He could look into the sun and fix their ship’s position not he globe. He could watch the stars and tell them the day of the year.”

Though no navigable route was found, the young Dutch Republic would continue to expand over the next hundred years –– thanks to the slave trade, spice trade, exploration, and art –– to become the largest economy and naval power in the world at the time, according to Pitzer.

“William Barents would play a role in that drama, but as he readied himself for his first voyage into the Arctic, his country was a blank slate, its sins and achievements still unwritten,” she writes.

Navy readers will appreciate Pitzer’s recounting of history and science, naval lore, and the courage and commitment of sailors in the face of seemingly impossible odds.

For example, as regards history and science…

We are reminded that Vikings “discovered” Ukraine and that the science of navigation relied on the discovery of trigonometry in 1080 by Arab Astronomers, as well as inventions by Babylonians, Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, Greeks, and Scandinavians. What they knew in the late 16th century, though, was dwarfed by what Barents and the sailors didn’t know. Many great scientific discoveries were yet to be made.

“As they set forth, they knew some things. They knew how to set the sails on the ship to catch the wind. They knew how to steer. They knew how to work wood, and hunt, and trap. Barents could reckon latitude and knew the stars, and those he didn’t know, he had charts for. Sailors understood that icebergs haunted the northern regions and could stretch for miles. Sometimes rising more than two hundred feet above the waterline, they were capable of rewarding vessels and the tiny human presence guiding them.

“Barents and his fellow crew members knew some things, but it wasn’t enough. They possessed no scientific understanding of gravity, no telescopes, and no calculus. Though they could find their latitude, they couldn’t yet determine longitude from aboard a ship. They were centuries away from deciphering the germ theory of disease. More than a hundred years could pass before humanity would discover that lightning was electricity. Decades remained before doctors would realize that blood circulates in the body, and that a cell is the unit of life. As he sailed into the Arctic, Barents would, in time encounter wonders and terrors without understanding most of the forces at play in his universe.”

Nenets idols, Vaigach Island.

Naturally, in the absence of information and in the embrace of superstition, early sailors believed good –– and bad –– fortune was the will of God. They believed their religion condoned slavery, for example, and ordained “man” to overcome and rule over nature.

Pitzer describes interactions with indigenous people in the far north, including the Sami and Nenets, who worshipped wooden idols, which fascinated the sailors. One sailor stole an idol and took it aboard ship only to be forced to return it later.

As the Scientific Revolution was beginning to blossom in Europe with Copernicus, Descartes, Francis Bacon, Barents and his crew were collecting and measuring polar bear pelts and walrus tusks and studying flora and fauna –– three hundred years before Darwin. Barents explained mirages, experienced the gap between Earth’s magnetic pole and true polar north, and mapped the geography at the edge of the Arctic. He also resolved a centuries-old superstition about barnacle geese: that they did not spontaneously hatch from barnacles (because no one had previously seen their nests and eggs).

Pitzer hides her history and science within harrowing tales of survival aboard their ship, at Vaigach Island, on boats, and at then-ice-covered Nova Zembla.

We feel the cold chill the crew to the bone. We hear chunks of ice hit the hull of the ship, see the men fend off frequent attacks by polar bears, smell the stink of sickness, and taste the desperation as the men are trapped in the ice over the winter: “Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World.”

Arctic fox

Navy history readers will appreciate passages about sails, masts, knees, joint pegs, and planks; scurvy; mutiny; keelhauling; and generally what life was like for age-of-sail sailors at sea –– endless routines, fear of storms, and trying to thrive in a crowded space.

Ultimately, this is a story of perseverance, the strength of the human spirit, and the will to survive.

The sailors relied on trapping Arctic foxes and finding birds and eggs. They rationed what food they could salvage from their ship. And they built a cabin and collected drift wood to keep warm.

Hampton Sides, author of the great “In the Kingdom of Ice,” blurbs: “Engrossing … Andrea Pitzer brings Barents’s three harrowing expeditions to vivid life –– while giving us fascinating insight into one of history’s most intrepid navigators.”

Pitzer visits Nova Zembla in 2019.

Pitzer bases her research on journals, material in museums, and interviews with scholars. She relies on entries in the original diary of Gerrit de Veer, one of the sailors who returned to tell the story.

She also makes a remarkable visit in August 2019 to Nova Zembla, “a numbing, desolate place,” near the ruins of Barents’s cabin. The land is now a Russian Arctic preserve.

The book concludes with a sobering account of the effects of global warming in the Arctic and the loss of ice during summer and over recent decades. Pitzer gives a stunning conclusion about the intersection of Barents’s exploration, our understanding and acceptance of science, and a context for how humans impact the planet.

Survival of individuals, and perhaps the species, depends on the will to endure, adapt, and overcome.

“Icebound” can be a springboard to confront cold, inconvenient truths.

The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Ross (DDG 71) prepares to replenish stores and fuel with the Henry J. Kaiser-class replenishment oiler USNS Laramie (T-AO-203) in the Barents Sea, Oct. 29, 2020. Ross is currently on its 10th Forward Deployed Naval Forces-Europe (FDNF-E) patrol in the U.S. Sixth Fleet area of operations in support of U.S. national security interests in Europe and Africa. (MCSN Christine Montgomery)

Honor, Courage, Commitment In 1776

1776 by David McCullough

Review by Bill Doughty

One of the many benefits of the Navy’s Professional Reading list is finding books that bring history to life.

Such is the case with David McCullough’s 1776, a compelling, lively story of the fragile beginnings of our nation and how the United States nearly didn’t make it.

McCullough introduces us to George Washington, King George III, and Benedict Arnold, as well as lesser-known but equally colorful characters like Major General Charles Lee, Washington’s deputy.

About Lee: “He was a spare, odd-looking man with a long, hooked nose and dark, bony face. Rough in manner, rough of speech, he had nothing of Washington’s dignity. Even in uniform he looked perpetually unkempt . . . He had been married to an Indian woman, the daughter of a Seneca chief,” writes McCullough. “Lee was also self-assured, highly opinionated, moody, and ill-tempered (his Indian name was Boiling Water), and he was thought by many to have the best military mind of any of the generals, a view he openly shared.”

Using hundreds of quotes from archived letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts of the time, McCullough shows how the honor of individuals – Americans, “Loyalists,” and the British – was tested in battle. He describes the commitment of leaders and volunteers in fruit orchard battles, city sieges, and long marches through forests in the dead of night. He reveals the courage of the mostly volunteer militia against overwhelming odds, facing the British army and Hessian forces.

Honor, courage and commitment come together in the story of Henry Knox of Boston. Knox was a self-educated bookseller from Boston who enjoyed reading about the “military art” and who became a colonel in Washington’s army.

“Colonel Henry Knox was hard not to notice,” writes McCullough. “Six feet tall, he bulked large, weighing perhaps 250 pounds. He had a booming voice. He was gregarious, jovial, quick of mind, highly energetic – ‘very fat, but very active’ – and all of twenty-five.”

McCullough writes: “The army that had crossed in the night from Brooklyn was, in the light of day on August 30, a sorry sight to behold – filthy, bedraggled, numb with fatigue, still soaked to the skin, many of them sick and emaciated. The army that had gone off to Brooklyn cheering was no more.”

Knox had the idea of bringing 58 mortars and cannon from Fort Ticonderoga in New York to the outskirts of Boston.

Traveling over snow-blanketed hills and across ice-covered rivers, cutting down trees and using sleds, Knox and his team succeeded in bringing the heavy guns (believed to be 120,000 pounds in total) to Washington. Knox’s heroic act helped deal a powerful and demoralizing early blow to the British.

1776 shows the few victories, but it includes painful details of the losses and the almost hopelessness of the situation at times.

The capture of more than a thousand American prisoners in Brooklyn was part of a terrible campaign in New York, including a retreat into New Jersey.

Thomas Paine famously wrote in The American Crisis:

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value.”

Paine's writings unquestionably inspired the leaders, warriors and patriots of the time. Washington is said to have ordered Paine's words read throughout the Continental Army.

The tide for Washington turned, thanks to freak weather conditions, some political crises on both sides of the Atlantic, and a timely capture of British vessels carrying resources all helped turn the tide for the colonies.

Logistics played a key role in determining the outcome of the war, according to military leaders and historians worldwide, and the story of 1776 and logistics still resonates with allies of the United States today.

In 2007, Vice Adm. Yoshinari Kawano, Commander of the Maritime Materiel Command of the Japan Maritime Self Defense Force, spoke at the Supply Corps Birthday Ball at Yokosuka, Japan. He talked about the heroism of 1776 from a logistics perspective.

Kawano said he thinks Americans won the Revolutionary War for these reasons: Britain’s long supply lines, blockades against British supply vessels by America’s allies (France, Spain, and the Netherlands), and George Washington’s leadership in capturing British ships laden with provisions and ammunition.

“With this triumph in the campaign, Washington made the Congress acknowledge the importance of building the Navy, and eventually led to the birth of the Supply Corps,” Kawano said.

“What may be said in the summary of these historical events is that the United States won against the Kingdom of Great Britain because it won the war of supply.”

In the May 2009 issue of Seapower, Admiral Gary Roughead, U.S. Navy’s Chief of Naval Operations, discussed the importance of logistics now and in the years ahead.

“Our ability to move significant amounts of logistics at sea and throughput them at sea is going to be important in the future,” Roughead said.

Learning the lessons of history and putting history in context is one of the benefits of the CNO’s professional reading program.

Our beginnings were so remarkably tenuous...

In 1776, McCullough writes: “The war was a longer, far more arduous and more painful struggle than later generations would understand or fully appreciate.”

“The year 1776 . . . (was) a year of all-too-few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowardice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement, and fear, as they would never forget, but also of phenomenal courage and bedrock devotion to country, and that, too, they would never forget.”

The beginnings of U.S. military core values and ethos...

McCullough concludes, “Especially for those who had been with Washington and who knew what a close call it was at the beginning – how often circumstance, storms, contrary winds, the oddities or strengths of individual character had made the difference – the outcome seemed little short of a miracle.”

Reading 1776 made me want to pick up Power, Faith, and Fantasy – America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present by Michael B. Oren (2007).

Oren’s book shows that while the 13 colonies fought for their independence, American merchant vessels became a target of the mighty British fleet, North African pirates, and other countries’ navies. This set the stage for American naval hero John Paul Jones, Thomas Jefferson’s engagement of what would become the “Middle East,” and the legacy of the Barbary Wars: “. . . to the Shores of Tripoli.”

But that’s another read.

A version of this review was originally published in the Navy’s Supply Corps Newsletter. In researching links for this posting, I stumbled across an amazingly detailed and provocative blog about the history of this period, a Boston perspective: Boston 1775; worth checking out! Coming soon on Navy Reads, an interview with the chief creator of the Navy Professional Reading Program...

Blue Age II: China, Russia, Mahan & Law

Review by Bill Doughty––

In Part I of our review of Gregg Easterbrook’s “The Blue Age: How the US Navy Created Global Prosperity –– and Why We’re in Danger of Losing It” we explored his thesis that the United States Navy is a force for good, keeping peace and stability on the seas, promoting prosperity, and reducing worldwide poverty.

Easterbrook says, “The United States would do well to recognize how many of its advantages are gifts of the sea.” Keeping sea lanes open the global commons from other nations’ ill intent and also from piracy means “open highways without trolls or tolls.”

Then-CNO Adm. Gary Roughead visits PLAN hospital ship Daishandao in Qindao, China in 2009,

Former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead is quoted twice in “The Blue Age.” Roughead says, “Land and air forces can win disputes, but it is the Navy that keeps disputes far from our shores.” Easterbrook quips, “Keeping disputes far from our shores looks better all the time.

”In Part I of our review of “The Blue Age,” we also presented Easterbrook’s conclusion that thinker-strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan was fundamentally wrong in some of his beliefs that, in fact, may have led to two world wars –– and may be influencing China today in the PRC’s expansionist policies, which parrot some of Mahan’s own views.

We also touched on Easterbrook’s conclusion that a continued era of peace and prosperity requires nations' commitment to following international laws, which will lead to more international cooperation. That’s especially important for the world’s two biggest powers.

“The question of whether the blue age will continue comes down to this: whether the United States and China, the two most important nations of history, can get along,” Easterbrook writes. Can maritime cooperation be achieved on the “outlaw ocean” through empathy and mutual respect?

“Walking in another’s shoes is the essence of human understanding,” Easterbrook contends. 

So, what is it like in China’s shoes?

Lights of Beijing and Tianjin, captured by the International Space Station orbiting 264 miles above, May 1, 2021. (NASA)

Evidence of China's rapid rise within one generation can be seen from space. But the affluence comes with effluence. "China must control its greenhouse emissions, the worst in the world." Easterbrook says, “Life is stressful in China, corruption permeates government, elections are rigged, and there is no freedom of speech or religion. These said, China’s living-standards, improvements and poverty reduction from 1995 to 2020 rank high in any accounting of the human family’s great accomplishments.”

In a deceptively easy style but with academic rigor, Easterbrook explains some of China’s feelings of victimization, its previous isolation, and its lack of enlightenment about human rights. He looks at the history of East/West interaction over centuries in or affecting China. And he shows some of the hypocrisy in dealing with the Middle Kingdom, including in recent history.

For example, President Trump’s second Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, lectured Chinese leaders about their lack of democracy, then –– in an attack on our own democracy –– “told the world from the podium of the Department of State that the [U.S.] election outcome would be ignored and Trump would remain president.” Then there's the January 6, 2021 insurrection, seen by the world.

“Walking in China’s shoes does not mean excusing failings, including oppression of the Uighurs and Tibetans, betrayal of Hong Kong, stifling of free speech, ‘labor camps’ that are actually prisons, no constitutional rights, corruption top to bottom. In China there is plenty of disgrace to go around. 

“Above all these, 1.4 billion human beings are living close together in a place that’s polluted and depleting its aquifers at an alarming rate. Modern China may not remain stable. Unstable societies may lash out. If China lashes out, the sea is the most likely setting.”

Easterbrook reminds his readers, “Capital C Communism has not failed some of the time; it has failed all of the time.” In large part, because the individual has a need to live free, not as vassals of an authoritarian state.

“The Western view of the world –– unbraced by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and increasingly by Japan and South Korea –– is the Enlightenment conclusion that the individual is more important than the state. The view is morally correct, is self-evident under natural law, is true in a metaphysical sense that exists independent of the empirical. The individual is more important than the state. That’s five hundred years of Western thought in one sentence.”

And individuals, once recognized as such, have rights, including the right to own property.

“The right to property is deceptively important, as it has been contested by many social systems, including fascist, autocratic, and communist. If at root your property is yours, just as your thoughts are yours, you have an incentive to build, create, and trade, profiting while helping others. If at root your property belongs to the commissar, prince, or Gauleiters, why work hard? That far-left and far-right nations are economically sluggish compared with the for-profit nations is explained in this way.”

Easterbrook warns against “fear of outsiders and assumption that change is automatically bad. Whatever might be true in a perfect world, in the actual world, opposition to change is a formula for being left behind.”

Ukraine President V. Zelensky meets Cmrs. John D. John, CO of USS Ross (DDG 71) during Exercise Sea Breeze 2021, Odessa, Ukraine. (MC2 Grosvenor)

Enlightened change is needed in strengthening international codes and conventions governing the world’s oceans. For example, there is a need for enforcing laws, including “against naval assaults, such as the one Russia staged in 2014 at Crimea.”

And what about Russia?

Then-Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Adm. James Stavridis holds a press conference with Russia Chief of Defense, Nov. 1, 2010. (Sebastian Kelm)

“Blue Age” evaluates the threat posed by Putin’s Russia as it also tries to build a modernized fleet as it rattles its scimitar at its neighbors, especially now against Ukraine.

“Since Russia about a decade ago gave up its hope of European Union membership, turning cold to the West, the Kremlin has resumed longing for the kind of maritime power that great nations possess. Russia’s moves against Crimea and Ukraine were seen in the West as owing to Putin’s ego. To the Kremlin, they were an attempt to fulfill centuries of Slavic desire for year-round access to warm waters.”

But intrusions into another nation is just one issue.

“A true global governance system for the blue water would eliminate flag-of-convenience loopholes, protect workers in fishing and shipping, impose strict antipollution rules, and create clear agreements about the mining of minerals on the seafloor. Prototype vessels that vacuum up nodules from the seabed discharge effluent that can pollute the towering deepwater columns essential to marine life, including the marine plants that release oxygen. If sea mining is to become common, a much better system, with close supervision, is required.”

Hope for better oversight rests in a document that is already in front of the international community, the “Law of the Sea.”

“No matter what, we need America to ratify the Convention on the Law of the Sea,” Easterbrook pleads. “The US position on this treaty is irrational. Irrational has been doing quite well in Washington, D.C., lately. But there must be international consensus on how to govern the seas. The sooner the world acts on this, the better.” International agreement and enforcement would protect fishing grounds and habitats, energy resources, and internet communication cables.

Easterbrook notes, “Since 1994 nearly every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the leadership committee for the US military, has expressed support for the Law of the Sea.”

As for nuclear arms control:

“When he was president, Jimmy Carter, a former navy officer who had been the XO of a submarine, joined the Soviet Union in signing the treaty called SALT II, which aimed to reduce strategic nuclear weapons. SALT II begat an arms control regime now called NEW START. At the end of the Carter presidency, the United States and Soviet Union possessed about 54,000 nuclear bombs, according to the Federation of American Scientists; today the total is down to about 9,900. In 2009, Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for advocating elimination of nuclear explosives.”

After Trump took the United States out of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2018, the Russian Federation also withdrew. China was not a signatory.

Easterbrook says, “Full elimination of nuclear arms might backfire by allowing great-power fighting to resume –– but the smaller the inventory the better.”

Regarding submarines armed with such weapons, he writes, “Having them underwater and constantly changing position tells any leader that a nuclear first strike will fail. At least, any rational leader.”

“For now, nuclear deterrence clearly discourages war.”

Mahan (September 27, 1840 – December 1, 1914) died decades before nuclear weapons were developed. He was an extremely devout orthodox Christian who believed humans were preordained toward violence and war, as shown by Susanne Geissler, author of “God and Sea Power: The Influence of Religion on Alfred Thayer Mahan” (Naval Institute Press, 2015).

Geissler writes, “It is important to grasp that because of his theological views, Mahan did not view human nature as constantly improving … Therefore, he thought war never could or would be eliminated.” Geissler’s biography is indispensable in helping understand Mahan’s linear thinking and inability to consider a world at peace.

Alfred Thayer Mahan attended the First Hague Conference in 1899.

Mahan was against international “universal arbitration,” even after attending the First Hague Conference in the summer of 1899 as a member of President McKinley’s U.S. delegation. “The idea was that if international disputes could be arbitrated, war could be avoided,” Geissler writes. “In Mahan’s view, arbitration was even worse than war in that it coerces the conscience and binds it ahead of time to unforeseen situations.”

[Of note, the League of Nations created the not-so-permanent “Permanent Court of International Law,” known as the "World Court,” in 1920; the court held its first session exactly one hundred years ago today, January 30, 1922 at the Hague, Netherlands. The United States never joined the World Court, and the court disbanded one year after WWII ended.]

Mahan’s beliefs were anchored in his interpretation of the Bible, sticking with Genesis but also solidly in the New Testament. “Based on his belief in original sin and the innate depravity of humankind, he believed that war was intrinsic to the human condition.”

Captain Mahan, front row, fifth from left, was CO of USS Chicago, circa 1893-95. (NHHC)

Among other revelations from Geissler, Mahan was against women’s rights to vote or hold political office, based on his belief in scripture. He supported annexation of Hawaii near the turn of the century but “also expressed concern about the ‘great number of Chinese’ who lived in Hawaii and whether the islands would become ‘an outpost of European civilization or of the comparative barbarism of China,’” in his words.

Geissler’s “God and Sea Power” is a compelling read, especially helpful in further explaining Easterbrook’s critique of Mahan in “The Blue Age.”

Easterbrook has his own list of related and recommended books. And there are a number we’ve featured here on the Navy Reads blog, including Robert Kaplan’s “Monsoon,” James Stavridis’s “Seapower,” Eri Hotta’s “Japan 1941,” Evan Thomas’s “Sea of Thunder,” and Hampton Sides’s “In the Kingdom of Ice.”

Like Steven Pinker, author of "The Better Angels of Our Nature," Easterbrook is an optimist. After all, he is the author of "The Progress Paradox" and "It's Better Than It Looks." He notes how the United States has a vast array of strong allies, while Russia and China have only a handful of friends; in Russia's case: Iran, Syria, and Venezuela. Easterbrook lauds the fact that at least until 2016 China had been previously invited to the Rim of the Pacific exercise at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and PLA(N) ships were welcomed with a spirit of aloha.

U.S. and Chinese leaders watch as Keiki Hula dancers perform during an arrival ceremony for three People's Liberation Army-Navy ships, Luhu-class destroyer Qingdao (DDG 113), Jiangkai-class frigate Linyi (FFG 547) and a Fuqing-class fleet oiler as they arrive in Hawaii for a scheduled port visit, Sept. 6, 2013. Over the weekend, Chinese and U.S. leaders conducted dialogues to build confidence and mutual understanding between the two nations. The port visit was part of the U.S. Navy's ongoing effort to maximize opportunities for developing relationships with foreign navies to build trust, encourage multilateral cooperation, enhance transparency, and avoid miscalculation in the Pacific. (MC2 Nardel Gervacio)

Easterbrook is hopeful for a true win-win in the future, where cooperation can be achieved and conflict can be prevented, thanks to a strong U.S. Navy and "gifts of the sea."

The Stavridis Bounce

Navy Reads got a bounce this month when the Task & Purpose blog connected to a post we published in 2013: "Stavridis's Novel Approach to Summer," in which former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Adm. James Stavridis revealed top 20 works of fiction by authors ranging from Ian Fleming and Ian McEwan to Stephen King and Hilary Mantel, author of "Wolf Hall" (now a BBC/PBS series).

Luckily, Stavridis, as dean of The Fletcher School of Tufts University, is still recommending books, including several works of fiction, Ha Jin's "A Map of Betrayal," Emily St. John Mandel's "Station Eleven," and Phil Klay's "Redeployment," which Dean Stavridis calls "a very serious read" of "beautifully realized stories."



Two works of nonfiction he recommends from 2014 are "World Order" by Henry Kissinger and "In the Kingdom of Ice," by Hampton Sides.

On Task & Purpose U.S. Army Major Crispin Burke presents the six smart habits of the U.S. military's most successful commanders, and among those habits is reading.

"Not only does reading expose you to new ideas, but it improves concentration, helps your writing skills, and best of all, it’s a lot more productive than playing video games," Burke advises.

"Most importantly, reading will teach you that there’s very little you’ll live through that someone else hasn’t experienced already. That’s especially true in the profession of arms — after nearly 5,000 years of recorded military history, most armed conflicts differ little from the days of Sun Tzu, Thucydides, and Clausewitz," he adds.

Burke also examines the importance of sound mind and body, setting a battle rhythm, networking, getting ground truth (not relying on yes-people), and remembering humility – servant leadership. Burke offers great examples to back up his thesis. Learning through others' experiences is a task with a purpose, and reading, once embraced, becomes more joy than task.

See how then-Adm. Stavridis explained in 2012 on TED Talks how the U.S. military is delivering global security this century using more than the barrel of a gun.