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. 

The earliest case is Kublai Khan’s 1283 surprise attack to bypass Vietnam’s fleet and achieve a land victory at Thin Nai Bay. The most famous case is Pearl Harbor, even though it was a limited raid whose principal goal was to inflict political costs on a U.S. government that had already faced German U-boat warfare. The other cases are the 1894 Yalu River attack, the 1718 British attack at Cape Passaro during the War of the Quadruple Alliance, and the Dutch Raid on the Medway in 1667. These cases demonstrate the rarity of surprise naval attacks, primarily because naval operations are intended to support land operations, whose logistical and diplomatic preparations for war are more easily detected. A planned Third World War with the Soviet Union would have forced Moscow to choose between sending its sub-fleet into the Atlantic versus preparing its mechanized forces in Germany, not both.

Strategically decisive naval battles are those that significantly shape the outcome of a war, most often by foreclosing the option of a maritime invasion by one of the sides, by the destruction of its fleet, but are not sufficiently calamitous as to compel either side to seek war termination. Of the forty-seven cases of successful Mahanian naval battles (or 63 percent of the total of seventy-five cases), seventeen of these strategically significant Mahanian naval battles, or 36 percent of the sub-total, were also politically strategic, resulting in immediate peace negotiations. There were another eleven failed attempts to bring about a decisive Mahanian naval battle. Thus, of the fifty-eight attempts at a decisive Mahanian battle, eleven, or 19 percent of the sub-total, failed. The earliest case of a strategically decisive naval battle was the Battle of the Damme in 1213 over the English, and the most recent case was the 1916 Battle of Jutland. The most famous case is the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar.

There are eight exceptions, or 11 percent of the total of seventy-five cases, in which a navy achieved victory through local and temporary Command of the Sea. These instances are Kublai Khan’s 1283 defeat of Vietnam at the battle of Thi Nai Bay, the Dutch supplanting of the Portuguese at the Strait of Malacca in 1641, the Spanish defeat of the British in the 1739-1748 War of Jenkins’ Ear, the naval operations facilitating the continued Siege of Yorktown in 1781, the Russian defeat of Turkey in the 1787–1792 Russo-Turkish War, the Battle of the Atlantic during the Second World War, the Indian amphibious operations against Cox’s Bazaar in 1971, and the British defeat of the Argentines in the Falkland Islands. 

These cases are critical because they constitute the conditions under which China can achieve its fait accompli strategy to capture Taiwan and obtain a peace settlement. Three of the eight cases were won by land-bound defenders against naval incursions, leaving five relevant instances, of which another two were very long-drawn campaigns that ended because of mutual exhaustion. This leaves the coastal advances by Kublai Khan on Vietnam and the Indian carrier flotilla at Cox’s Bazaar, and thus only the Falkland Islands that are relevant. While Julian Thompson’s 1985 No Picnic and the companion Michael Clapp’s 1996 Amphibious Assault Falklands are instructive for a multi-battalion level landing, China is expected to land a minimum of ten brigades in the first wave in Taiwan. Thus, it may not be a relevant analog of the unprecedented challenges faced by the PLAN. 

Colomb argued that amphibious assaults are highly averse to operating in the absence of naval supremacy, especially as the landed troops are often in slower and less well-protected transports and because of the catastrophic outcome of an interception. The low frequency of exemplarily disastrous interceptions of amphibious forces is the result of the selection effect of most admirals diligently avoiding such catastrophes. The double capture of French troop transports by the Royal Navy at the 1747 First and Second Battles of Cape Finisterre netted 7,000 prisoners and immediately provoked peace negotiations in Paris. A Chinese amphibious operation conducted within the stand-off reach of the U.S. Navy may be stopped before disembarkation.

Colomb’s amphibious dataset shows the rarity of amphibious operations against any naval presence at all, with just four exceptions (6 percent of seventy-one cases): the bold 1704 Dutch-British seizure of Gibraltar while being confronted by a larger Franco-Spanish fleet; the Royal Navy came quite close to intercepting Napoleon’s 1798 convoy to Egypt; the Anglo-French confidence that the Russian fleet would not make a sortie to stop the 1854 landings at Balaklava; and the 1778 French attack on St-Lucia because they were unaware of the presence of the Royal Navy. 

Of the ninety-four cases of major amphibious operations from 1938, there are another six exceptional cases of opposed landings, all but one of which have extenuating circumstances. Overwhelming air superiority during the 1941 German troop ferries to Crete, the 1941 Japanese landings in Malaya, and the 1944 U.S. landings at Leyte mean that any maritime patrol would have been severely punished. The Tokyo Express during the Guadalcanal operation was feasible only because of its intermittent and clandestine use. Operation Sutton, the landings on the Falkland Islands, and the 1940 German seizure of Norway demonstrate the high cost and risk of conducting an amphibious operation against even a sporadic enemy air and maritime presence.

However, Colomb’s certainty that a naval power would not even attempt an amphibious landing until after it has secured sea control and dealt with any fleet-in-being farther afield must be tempered with the discrepancy evident in the older timeline of the war dataset. This shows that there are eighteen cases, or 24 percent of the total, in which naval battles took place to stop an amphibious attack in progress. Of these cases, in which the attacker was clearly not deterred by the risk of interception, ten were associated with Anglo-French-Spanish-Dutch attempts to force the British Channel, two implicated Sweden, and another two involved the Ottoman, with the remainder being the War of 1812, the Second World War in the Mediterranean, Japan’s moves against U.S. landings in the Philippines, and Genova versus Venice. With modern long-range weaponry, China is far more vulnerable than is suggested by these cases.

Examining the probabilities in a worst-outcome sequence, China has a cumulative 5 percent chance of achieving surprise and a 24 percent likelihood of being undeterred and taking the risk of conducting an amphibious attack against Taiwan. There is a further 24 percent likelihood that the United States would unadvisedly intercept, in which case China would have only an 11 percent chance of capturing Taiwan using only local sea control. If the conquest of Taiwan is successful, then China has a 17 percent chance of being able to leverage its new bases against any approach by the U.S. Navy. 

There is a subsequent 20 percent chance that China will pursue some interdiction of U.S. commerce to incentivize peace negotiations. There is a further 20 percent chance that China can achieve war termination if it wins both a land victory in Taiwan and a naval battle against the United States and its allies. Still, this likelihood is low if the U.S. Navy avoids seeking a decisive battle in the Taiwan Strait. Thus, even if China could dominate the immediate waters around Taiwan, the historical behavior of amphibious attackers suggests that even a risk-acceptant Beijing would either hesitate or falter at one of the later steps.

The United States, on the other hand, has only a 28 percent likelihood of being able to lure the PLAN to fight a decisive battle according to a preconceived plan and a 19 percent chance of failing to lure out the PLAN at all. Conversely, the United States is still 81 percent likely to improvise a clash with the Chinese eventually. If it achieves victory, it then has a 33 percent chance of blocking any further amphibious operations, including the resupply of Taiwan. Furthermore, it would have a 28 percent likelihood of immediately compelling Beijing to sue for peace. Otherwise, it has a 65 percent probability of having a decisively favorable impact on the conduct of an ultimately victorious war in the defense of Taiwan. The next phase of research is intended to identify the factors that enable a successful luring and destruction of an enemy amphibious force.

Dr. Julian Spencer-Churchill is an associate professor of international relations at Concordia University and the author of Militarization and War (2007) and Strategic Nuclear Sharing (2014). He has published extensively on Pakistan security issues and arms control and completed research contracts at the Office of Treaty Verification at the Office of the Secretary of the Navy and the then Ballistic Missile Defense Office (BMDO). He has also conducted fieldwork in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Egypt and is a consultant. He is a former Operations Officer of the 3rd Field Engineer Regiment from the latter end of the Cold War to shortly after 9/11. He tweets at @Ju_Sp_Churchill.

Alexandru Filip is an International Relations student at Concordia University, Montreal, and an analyst and editor at the Canadian Center for Strategic Studies research institute. His research focus is strategic and security studies, with a particular interest in naval, air, and nuclear capabilities. He has published pieces on capability analysis and policy recommendations in venues such as Real Clear Defense, The Centre for International Maritime Security, and Merion West.

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