How did the US gain naval dominance over long standing naval powers?

Commustar · 3 months

At the outset of the Spanish American war, European naval commentators were of the opinion that the conflict would be drawn out, and Spain had an excellent chance of winning. In fact, in 1898 the United States public had only recently become interested in naval power because of Alfred Thayer Mahan's "influence of sea power on history".

As it turned out, the US navy won convincing victories against Spanish squadrons at the battles of Manila and Santiago. The effect of the quick victories in the Spanish-american war was for congress to authorize the construction of at least 1 new battleship each year from 1898 until 1918.

However, a huge factor in shifting the United States from the 4th or 5th naval power in the world to the top spot has to be the first World War. While the British, German and French navies were glaring at each other from their ports, and German U boats were sinking British shipping, the United States had a free hand to build up their navy while at peace.

Ironically, with the Armistice, the US navy was in the most peril of competition or conflict with the pre-eminent naval power of the day, Great Britain. However, the lesson of the peril of a naval arms race had been learned by this time, and the Washington Naval Treaty was arranged to ensure naval balance. In these treaty talks, the United States essentially cheated, reading the diplomatic telegrams instructing the other delegates. That intelligence was largely responsible for the US being able to negotiate itself to naval parity with Great Britain, and relegating Japan to 3/5ths the gross tonnage of US and British navies, and France and Italy to 2/5ths tonnage of US and Britain.

Crucially, the Washinton Naval Treaty included language allowing the conversion of battleship/battlecruiser hulls into the newfangled Aircraft Carrier. By adopting the technology of Aircraft carriers, the United States navy was in a position to succeed in the new type of naval warfare that was the Pacific theater in WW2.

As for WW2, Britain again was preoccupied with the German U boat threat. The US was again able to build up her naval and industrial might, because Roosevelt perceived the threat the Japanese navy posed. By good fortune, the United States had the industrial capacity to replace losses while systematically destroying the Japanese navy and stopping the German U-boat threat.

Post war, Great Britain was focused on rebuilding the cities destroyed during the Blitz, and like NATO placed her defense under the US aegis. Germany and Japan took the lesson of pacifism from the war, and would not engage in rearmament. As for the Soviet Union, it is helpful to remember that Soviet involvement in World War 2 was primarily a land war. In the early cold war era, the Army generals would be able to point to the experience of Operation Barbarossa as to why defense spending must go to the army to defend the Rodina. Additionally, Nikita Kruschev was a believer in the theory that building up a nuclear arsenal would be a better and cheaper way to ensure national security than investing in conventional forces. Which could have been among the reasons why the Generals decided to depose Kruschev, but I am not sure.

For further reading, I recommend "the naval academy Illustrated History of the United States Navy" by E.B. Potter as a good general history of the navy up to 1970.

Anthony Preston's "Aircraft Carriers" is a good resource for the development of the technology of the aircraft carrier, and its fighting history for the Royal, US and Japanese navies in WW2. It also has a chapter explaining the Washinton Naval Treaty fairly well.

Summary: Spanish American War put the US on the path to naval power. Sitting out WW1 until 1917 and the Washington Naval Treaties placed the US as one of top 2 naval powers. WW2 smashes Japanese navy and British piggy bank. Soviet navy after WW2 was defense establishment redheaded step-child.

eternalkerri · 3 months

Cash, and being the last man standing.

By the 1920's and 1930's England couldn't afford to rule the waves any more. The cost of maintaining a huge fleet took up a significant proportion of their military budget during a huge economic downturn. Of course England always viewed their power through this phrase, "The English army is a projectile fired by navy." They sunk tons of money into the fleet as it was their source of domestic security and ability to tie the empire together, but it wasn't cheap.

After WWII only two navies stood tall, the English and the American. Why? The French fleet had all been interned by the English, sank by the English, or scuttled by defiant French officers. The Soviet navy was either outdated, outclassed, or had been sunk, but it was never their strongest suit to begin with. Japan's navy was at the bottom of the Pacific of course. Of course Germany's navy was mostly old cruisers or submarines and ended up scrapped or sold off at the end of the war.

So that essentially leaves the U.S. and England. To give you an idea of how broke England was at the end of WWII, they were rationing food until 1954. That's right, they couldn't feed their nation successfully. Additionally, they were in the midst of loosing a lot of their taxable income by jettisoning the last of their empire worth significant income, India. England simply couldn't afford their fleet anymore.

That left the United States. Their facilities intact to build a fleet, the war industries booming and fat with cash, and a huge power vacuum and a nebulous enemy in Communism to fight. The U.S. had so many ships pouring out of its shipyards by 1945, that many ships that were newly commissioned went straight into mothballs.

As technology progressed and the U.S. economy boomed, the two met hand in hand. Bigger guns, rockets, and nuclear engines meant the need for fewer ships, but they packed so much more firepower. The ability for the U.S. to field almost a dozen Nuclear Aircraft carriers each of which carried more firepower than many nations air forces. The U.S. could field nuclear submarines that qualified as a global nuclear power in and of themselves carrying up to 192 individual nuclear warheads.

By the end of the cold war, no one could build as many ships, as advanced as we could in sufficient quantities to even challenge the U.S. Of course it ended costing the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars to get there, but no one else had the money or will to do it.

agentdcf · 3 months

They just built more ships. American industrial capacity by the Second World War was simply so much larger that they overwhelmed the Japanese Navy. Nazi Germany obviously concentrated on submarines, but that was because they did not want to try to fight the still-formidable surface forces of the Royal Navy. After WWII--and even before, arguable--Britain did not have the economic base to maintain the Royal Navy as it had in the 18th and 19th centuries. The only country with the industrial base to compete with the US was the Soviet Union.

socrates28 · 3 months

As much as others have addressed the Political and Economic factors that America utilised to build it's top naval forces, we must also consider the geographic factors. Yes Great Britain was the main naval power since the 19th c. until about the end of WWII (but since the end of WWI till the end of WWII America was rising and they were declining to the point where even in WWII the US had a stronger navy). But the main point is that to achieve naval dominance it is important to exert control over the seas, exerting control is massively expensive especially when you require multiple bases all over the world so that all the major ocean's are within range of your ships.

So let us look at Great Britain and the US in this example. GB, though a powerful force, had to rely on a massive and at times unstable colonial empire to be able to place ships in remote areas of the world like the Pacific and the Indian Ocean (I say remote because the distance from the British Isles to these places is rather large). So the maintenance of all these bases was a drain on financial resources, but add to that to maintain a base, the colony would have to be maintained as well. Meanwhile the US, after its expansions, was wedged in between the Atlantic and the Pacific. This meant that the maintenance of naval bases that could allow ships to operate in either theatre was not reliant upon the maintenance of a colonial empire (that is not to say the US did not have imperial like qualities about it). When the Panama canal opened, it was in the backyard of the US (see the Munroe Doctrine) giving them the ability to quickly transfer the bulk of their forces from ocean to the other, and still base them completely in home territory.

Simply put the US is in a unique position to control both the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean's by virtue of its geography and as a result the world's shipping. It was only a question of exploiting this advantage and eliminating naval rivals.

ElMoog · 3 months

I'm not an historian, but I pretty sure the short answer is WWII. Before that it was the British Royal Navy that ruled the seas.

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