Indian maritime strategy, the author reviews two contending models of India’s
strategic worldview. C. Raja Mohan, a well-known Indian commentator,
maintains that Indians think in terms of concentric geographic circles, with
New Delhi asserting certain prerogatives in each circle. Primacy and the capacity
to veto external intervention are top priorities within the inmost circle,
while achieving great-power status is Indians’ foremost goal in the outermost,
globe-spanning circle.
An American scholar, Stephen P. Cohen, portrays the Indian worldview more
in philosophical than geographical terms. Rather than concentric circles, Indian
strategic thought is shaped by three contending visions, namely Nehruvian,
realist, and revivalist. Applied to the nautical realm, each of these schools of
thought would see things somewhat differently, with, say, followers of Nehru
striking a more cooperative pose in world affairs and revivalists focusing on
military preeminence in the Indian Ocean region. Winner evaluates each of the
missions laid out in New Delhi’s 2004Indian Maritime Doctrinestatement—
sea-based deterrence, economic and energy security, forward presence, and naval
diplomacy—in light of the strategic worldviews posited by Mohan and Cohen.
While the author deprecates Indian maritime power as it currently stands,
he confidently predicts that the nation will fulfill its potential at sea in the
not-too-distant future, regardless of which model best explains Indians’ strategic
perspectives.
JamesR.Holmesappraisesthecondition of maritime strategic thought in
Japan today, contending that Tokyo is ‘‘allowing strategic thought to atrophy.’’
In prewar Japan, notes Holmes, the IJN revered Alfred Thayer Mahan’s works.
Japanese naval strategy nonetheless bore at best a partial resemblance to Maha-
nian doctrine, interwoven as it was with Japan’s peculiar geography, the nation’s
ambitions on the Asian continent, the lessons Japanese strategists learned from
the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, the IJN’s bureaucratic needs, and
countless other factors. In the end, tactics and hardware shaped Japanese strategic
thought as much as the ideal relationship among theory, strategy, and force struc-
ture did.
Postwar Japan speedily took on maritime duties, largely at the behest of its
enemy-cum-ally, the United States. Washington prodded Tokyo to build war-
fighting capabilities augmenting those of the U.S. Navy, notably in the areas of
mine warfare and ASW (antisubmarine warfare). Territorial defense, protection
of the SLOCs, and ASW were among the primary missions entrusted to the
Maritime Self-Defense Force, and Japanese mariners executed these missions
with aplomb. But there was little evidence that Japanese officials thought about
these missions in rigorous theoretical terms. Wartime defeat discredited Mahan
in Japanese eyes, but no thinker, Western or Asian, has yet taken his place.
Today, says Holmes, the nation’s political leadership is thrusting nontradi-
tional missions on the Japanese armed forces under the rubric of ‘‘international
Introduction 13