introduc ti on

THE SEA IS ONE

S hakespeare, in his immortal sea drama The Tempest, said, We

are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is
rounded with a sleep, referring to the small and confined di-
mensions of our individual lives. It is a haunting passage, and one I have
thought about a great deal. The play opens with a massive storm at sea,
and the line has always had profoundly nautical implications for me. In
my nearly four decades as a Navy sailor, when all the days I spent on the
deep ocean, out of sight of land, are totaled, they add up to nearly eleven
years. The endless vistas of the open ocean, upon which I gazed for more
than a decade of my life, provide quite a setting for such dreaming. And
in those days, when I looked at the ocean, I always felt a sense of seeing
the same view that millions upon millions of other deep-sea mariners,
coastal sailors, and even land dwellers close to the ocean saw. Like the
fishermen, traders, pirates, harbor pilots, and indeed sailors of every ilk
who went down to the sea in ships of all kinds, we have all seen the same
ocean views. In a way, it is like looking at eternity; to gaze upon it for an
 SEA POWER

hour, a day, a month, or a lifetime reminds us gently that our time is

limited, and we are but a tiny part of the floating world.
In addition to simply warning us not to overimagine the importance
of our own small voyages on this earth, Shakespeares line also makes us
consider quite literally what we are indeed made of. It is worth remem-
bering that each of us is, essentially, largely made of water. When a hu-
man baby is born, it is composed of roughly 70 percent water. It has
always fascinated me that roughly the same proportion of the globe is
covered by w
aterjust over 70 percent. Both our planet and our bodies
are dominated by the liquid world, and anyone who has sailed extensively
at sea will understand instinctively the primordial tug of the oceans upon
each of us when we look upon the sea.
I still dream about being on a ship, and part of why I wanted to write
a book about the oceans is in response to those dreams. It often happens
as I nod off on my now landlocked bed that I dream of the faint rumble
of a ships engines and feel the rolling of the waves pushing and rocking
the hull of my ship. When I rise and head up to the bridge, it is always
on a bright day, with the clouds hanging in front of the bow and the ship
pushing through the sea. I never know exactly where the dream will take
me but I always end up approaching the shore, and when I do, I feel a
pang of regret to leave the ocean. The approaches to land are always dif-
ficult in my dreams, and the ship often finds herself running out of deep
water and becomes rapidly in danger of foundering on a beach or up a
river or upon a reef. I always wake up before the ship finally impales
herself ashore, and I always wish I had stayed farther out to sea.
The British navy, which dominated the worlds oceans for so many
years, truly and deeply understood the interconnected character of the
global waterways. The sea is one is an expression you will hear from a
Brit. I heard it first when I was eighteen years old and a second-year
student, called a midshipman, at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis,

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Maryland. My navigation instructor was a crusty British lieutenant com-

mander, who seemed incredibly old and saltyhe was probably in his
mid-thirties, and who could imagine being so ancient? This Old Man
of the Sea was a crack hand with a sextant, a nautical almanac, and
atidetable to be sure, but what he really taught me was the way in which
all the worlds oceans are at once c onnectedobvious enough given the
continuous flow of water around the c ontinentsbut also separate. He
would painstakingly discuss each of the great global bodies of w
aterthe
Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian, and the Arctic oceansas well as thema-
jor tributary bodies: the Mediterranean Sea, the South China Sea,the
Caribbean. The lieutenant commander could talk for an hour about a
particular strait between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, and
how the water looked in the winter, and why it was a crucial passage. I
learned a great deal from him, not only about the science and art of navi-
gating a destroyer, but also about oceanography, maritime history, global
strategy, and how the tools of empire so often were dusted with dried
salt, like the taffrails of a sailing cutter. You could drop a plumb line from
my days as a teenager at Annapolis through the arc of nearly four decades
as a Navy officer and finally end up on the pages of this book.
The oceans were the place I spent much of the early years of my ca-
reer. I sailed through them all, validating the lessons he taught me, im-
proving my own ship handling and navigational skills, and learning to
lead men and women at sea. As my understanding and appreciation of
the international system i ncreasedaccelerated by a PhD at the Fletcher
School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, where I am now a
very deskbound a dmiralI came to understand the influence of the sea
on geopolitics. It is no coincidence that so many of the great national
enterprises of the past two thousand years were influenced by sea power,
and that continues to be true today. The sea is one indeed, particularly as
a geopolitical entity, and will continue to exert an enormous influence on

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how global events u

nfoldfrom the high tension of the South China
Sea, to the cocaine smuggling of the Caribbean, to the piracy off the
coasts of Africa, to the unfortunate reemergence of a new cold war in the
Greenland-IcelandUnited Kingdom gap in the North Atlantic. Some
observers may not be interested in the geopolitics of the oceans, but they
will haunt our policy and our choices in this turbulent t wenty-first cen-
tury. The oceans will matter deeply to every aspect of human endeavor.
When we go to seawhether in a warship for a nine-month combat
cruise, or a week on a Carnival cruise liner, or just a day sail out of sight
of landwe are launching ourselves into another dimension altogether.
The world shudders and shakes beneath us, the wind cuts more sharply
with nothing to slow its pace, the weather skims by our unprotected hull,
the dolphins sometimes swim alongside for h
oursit is a very different
world. In a primal sense, we are an ocean away every time we go to sea
and can no longer see the land. When you are on a hull, however large or
small, and come up on the deck and slowly pivot around to see nothing
but the ocean stretching away from you, stop and measure the moment
in the passage of your life: you are seeing the same view, the same endless
ocean that Alexander the Great saw as he sailed the eastern Mediterra-
nean, that Napoleon gazed upon on his long, sad voyage to exile in the
South Atlantic, and that Halsey saw as he lashed his Fast Carrier Task
Force into combat in the western Pacific. In that sense, as a sailor, you
are at once an ocean away from the world of the land, but also connected
to a long, unbroken chain of men and women who have set their course
for the open ocean.
It is those two important aspects of the oceans that I have tried to
capture in this volume: the personal experience of a mariner at sea, and
the geopolitics of the oceans and how they constantly influence events
ashore. Only by understanding both the individual and personal experi-
ences of sailors and trying to pour that distinct nautical culture into the

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larger questions of how the oceans drive the international system can we
fully appreciate the value and the challenge of the sea. In that sense, this
is a book that could have been written by many different sailors at any
point in the long, long history of our collective human voyages both over
the ocean and through time. Writing it now, in this century, is simply
an attempt to take a vivid snapshot of those two tendrils of human
experiencea sailors life at sea and the strategic impact of the oceans
upon the vast water world we call earth.
Lets get under way.