A survey of every war with a significant naval campaign since 1200 validates the theory of nineteenth-century naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan that a decisive naval battle dramatically increases the prospects of winning a war. Mahan emphasized that a nation’s success is achieved by focusing on sea control and spurning distractions, such as the loss of insecure island bases. Naval historian Admiral Herbert Richmond agreed with Mahan that once sea control is attained, islands can be easily recaptured. 

For the United States, this means that it must resist the temptation to use its blue-water fleet to intercept a sudden Chinese amphibious assault on Taiwan proper and instead concentrate on luring China’s fleet into a decisive battle under more favorable circumstances. Although the amassing of a Chinese escort fleet in the Taiwan Strait, made vulnerable by its need to optimize the protection of an amphibious force, is a tempting target for a concentrated attack of carrier air wings and sea and sub-based stand-off weapons, it will be a battle at a time and place of China’s choosing, and therefore a likely trap. Furthermore, the United States should not risk its blue water fleet, which needed to enforce a blockade, against a regional brown water fleet, the possible outcome of which could be a Chinese victory and the United States’ loss of naval supremacy in the Pacific.

The conventional wisdom, which is almost certainly in alignment with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN)’s wishful thinking, is naval historian Julian Corbett’s proposition that local and temporary sea control is sufficient for producing a strategic effect. Therefore, there is no need for a decisive strategic naval battle. The widely accepted proposition is conceptually flawed and falsified by the historical data. 

Put simply, any amphibious invasion needs continuous logistical support from the moment of the landing. 100,000 PLAN marines and PLA brigades cannot be supplied for high-intensity combat by only 275 transport aircraft and 1,000 transport helicopters, even with total air dominance. An intermittent disruption of supplies is survivable, such as by the U.S. Marines on Guadalcanal in 1942. Still, a repeat of the Anzio debacle, or the isolation of the 3rd Egyptian Army in 1973, could challenge regime stability in Beijing.

Furthermore, British Admiral Philip Howard Colomb challenges Mahan’s assertion that Admiral Torrington’s “Fleets-in-Being” is not the equivalent to contesting sea control. Colomb argues that a disengaged but surviving flotilla can paralyze an enemy fleet into hesitant inaction and is particularly effective at deterring amphibious operations. Based on the historical record of the collected dataset, a U.S. brown water flotilla patrolling the Philippines Sea and configured to intervene against a Chinese amphibious operation, or even just the Taiwanese navy itself, is a sufficient deterrent in 76 percent of historical cases. 

For this study, we created three datasets. The first comprises seventy-five wars involving a major maritime theatre, coded with thirty-one variables, ranging from the 1213-14 Anglo-French War to the 1982 Falklands War. We exclude non-peer wars where power is so asymmetrical that a variation in naval strategy would be irrelevant to the outcome. The second dataset is drawn from Colomb’s 1891 Naval Warfare: Its Ruling Principles and Practices. Its units of analysis are the seventy-one planned amphibious landings, executed or not, between the Spanish Armada of 1588 to the 1879–1883 War of the Pacific, and mostly focused on the English Channel and the Caribbean. The third dataset consists of ninety-three planned modern amphibious operations from the Japanese landings at Wuhan in 1938 to the 2012 Kismayo Battle between Kenya and Somalia and primarily focused on the U.S. Pacific Theatre of the Second World War. 

Despite dramatic changes in naval technology since 1213, the low cost of movement across oceans, which eases the concentration of fleets, leads to a winner-take-all outcome of naval battles regardless of the period technology, preserving the generalizability of our findings. Furthermore, the case of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is a cross-channel attack, which is the naval situation for twenty-two of the seventy-five war cases (29 percent). All of these datasets are freely available by email on the condition that improvements are shared with the authors.

The Mahanian imperative of luring China’s fleet beyond the protection of its littoral air bases will be difficult. China could mimic the United States with a secure fleet-in-being in its ports and, thereby, deter a U.S. reinforcing counter-landing in Taiwan. Fleet actions are as much the result of creating irresistible conditions to lure out an enemy fleet as they are inadvertent or secondary outcomes of other operations. In the war dataset, there were only twenty-one deliberate luring operations, 28 percent of the total of seventy-five cases, of which fourteen were sweeping patrols, four were threatening attacks on ports, and two were interceptions of an escorted amphibious convoy. 

The intuitive response to the Mahanian proposition of deprioritizing Taipei is that Beijing will conduct a fait accompli invasion of Taiwan by securing a Corbett-prescribed local and temporary sea control in the strait. Beijing would thereby avoid exposing its fleet and could secure bases for land-based naval aviation to push its interdiction zone farther out. However, in only thirteen of seventy-five cases (17 percent), a victorious land battle resulted in the strengthening of the attacker’s naval force. Furthermore, fait accompli conquests, such as the German descent on Norway in 1940, presume some method of achieving war termination in which the attacker retains their territorial acquisitions.

How will Beijing achieve war termination, especially if the United States refuses to cease hostilities? This was the same problem Japan faced in 1942 after its conquest of Asia. Japan lacked a naval doctrine of attrition, such as the use of submarines, to wear down the United States and was unable to exploit a domestic crisis, which had enabled it to defeat Russia in 1905. Only eighteen cases (25 percent) were victorious war termination achieved because of a naval win in conjunction with a triumph on land. Another method by which China may seek war termination to consolidate its capture of Taiwan is to inflict economic losses on the United States through the guerre de course or an attack on sea lanes. This could be achieved through surface commerce raiders operating from neutral ports, submarine attacks from Myanmar, and deploying long-range aviation in Pakistan against congested commercial routes. In fifteen of the seventy-five cases of naval campaigning, or 20 percent of the total, the weaker state pursued an explicit commerce raiding strategy.

The prevailing dataset evidence suggests six reasons that support the counter-intuitive Mahanian concept of withholding naval forces from an attritional fight over Taiwan in lieu of preparing for a concentration of the fleet, followed by luring the Chinese fleet into a decisive naval engagement.

First, forty-seven of the seventy-five war cases, fully 63 percent of the total, consist of a strategically decisive Mahanian naval battle that had a critical impact on shaping the course of the war, contributing indirectly to ultimate victory, typically by supporting ground operations. Most often, this was done by foreclosing further amphibious assaults by the adversary and permitting the conduct of similar operations by friendly forces. Second, presuming that the United States can secure the balance of forces necessary to achieve a naval victory, 28 percent of decisive Mahanian battles resulted in the adversary suing for peace terms within a year. 

Mahan, without the longer perspective of historical events, did not see that militarily decisive battles could also be politically decisive, although the relationship could have been deductively anticipated. Naval defeats often compel peace negotiations when they create opportunities for third-party fleets. Naval theorist Herbert Rosinski believed this was also because naval victories were often irrevocable for defeated land powers, which needed a considerable period of peace to rebuild their fleets. The earliest case was the 1284 Battle of Meloria that concluded the Genoese-Pisan Wars, and the latest case was the 1866 Battle of Lissa between Austria and Italy.

Third, in twenty-five of the seventy-five cases of amphibious operations, or one-third of all instances, a decisive naval battle foreclosed the option of a landing for the duration of the war. Fourth, according to Colomb’s amphibious dataset, a fleet-in-being challenging an attacker’s sea control led to the immediate cancellation of 9 percent of amphibious attacks, and only four cases of amphibious landings (5 percent) were subsequently ever attempted. Fifth, only six of the ninety-four amphibious operations coded from the 1930s (6 percent) were ever conducted in the presence of even a weak enemy air and maritime threat. 

The prevailing nightmare of a Chinese strategic surprise attack on Taiwan, combining a large and hurriedly concentrated amphibious force protected by a Chinese surface fleet, simultaneously distracting the United States with diversionary actions by its fleet carriers, is extremely unlikely. The rationale for this conjecture is that China must move quickly to seize Taiwan in a fait accompli, or at least to secure a major port. Otherwise, even a tiny U.S. reinforcement on Taiwan by an alert Washington would make any subsequent crossing of the strait prohibitively costly. However, there are only five instances of a surprise attack (5 percent of the total) exploited for the purpose of achieving a strategically or politically decisive naval outcome.