ABSTRACT

If we are to believe Napoleon that armies march on their stomachs or Walt Whitman that war was “about nine hundred and ninety-nine parts diarrhea to one part glory,” then military historians must seriously consider the place of the natural world in their scholarship (Smidgall, 2001, 187). And if armies march on their stomachs, they also march over mountains and through valleys, forests, and plains, rivers, swamps, and jungles, riding horses and swatting mosquitos. Navies operate in so-called blue water, brown water, and even green water. Implicit in such terms is the recognition that the marine environment fundamentally shapes warfare at sea and the naval forces that wage it. Militaries and the historians who study them have long understood that there is a connection between war and the environment. The “most marked if … not the most important … specialty of military activity,” the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote in On War, is the “connexion which exists between War and country or ground,” and one finds similar environmental and geographical awareness from Sun Tzu to Alfred Thayer Mahan (Clausewitz, 1873, 32).