When World War II ended, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations explains, the U.S. Navy shifted its focus from battle tactics to a wide array of fleet operations that included an unprecedented long-term presence in the European and East Asian theaters:
The new war-at-sea component might well have been called “operational logistics” because the huge geographical span typical of operations at sea entailed the movement of maritime forces over vast distances. A map of a maritime theater usually covers an area at least ten times as large as that of a typical ground campaign, and some 80 percent of the planning and effort in a modern naval campaign—or even a peacetime “presence” operation—involve supplying vessels and air fields with the supplies and ammunition that they need.
Over the centuries the foremost objective of sea power has been to influence events on land by delivering ground forces and supplies to the battlefield via the oceans and, more recently, by conducting air strikes against targets on land and destroying enemy resistance when necessary. Only secondarily have naval forces conducted operations exclusively for a narrowly maritime purpose, such as protecting fishing and offshore oil rigs.
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Uhlig emphasizes three ways that the Navy has contributed to U.S. success: (1) to ensure “that friendly shipping [in the broadest sense] can flow”; (2) “to ensure hostile shipping cannot”; and (3) having accomplished these two things, “navies can risk landing an army on a hostile shore, supporting it with fire and logistics.”
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The oceans are a vast two-dimensional highway, and historically the shipping that traverses them has required naval protection. Whichever country has controlled the seas has enjoyed a great advantage; invariably, losing that edge has led to dire consequences. There is uncontestable historical evidence that naval powers usually defeat land powers. That was the theme of Mahan’s work, beginning with The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783.
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Professor John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School has provided a recent, more quantitative book in his landmark treatise, Dubious Battles, in which he offers evidence of an even bolder assertion—that in conflicts since 1815, land powers not only have usually ended up being defeated by sea powers, but they almost always have started the wars they later lost.
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A navy is a means to the end of controlling an enemy land force. Although there have been some exceptions, rarely has the center of a military conflict been on the oceans or in the air. Sea power’s greatest payoff comes from the highly efficient movement of goods and services into either friendly or hostile territory.
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A battle fleet of capital ships and accompanying forces meets and destroys the enemy’s battle fleet.
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Cruisers attack enemy commerce or help defend it from attack.
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A third category for today’s fleet is a flotilla that operates in littoral waters that are too dangerous to expose a battle fleet of large capital ships. Since the beginning of the twentieth century maritime powers have used a distinctively different fleet of small combatants, usually armed with torpedoes, to fight the enemy in the coastal waters of the Baltic, North Sea, and Mediterranean Sea, and in the Dardanelles.
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First, sea power prevents the enemy from attacking from the sea. Second, it gives a maritime state the freedom to choose the scene of action anywhere on a land power’s coast. The reason, Bubke explained, was the operational movement advantage that ships have over almost any form of ground transportation. At sea an amphibious force will move around five hundred nautical miles a day. Fast containerships will move farther still, but in the twentieth century the norm for merchant ships was more like four hundred miles a day. By contrast, on land an army moving at operational speed against weak opposition will advance only about twenty-five miles a day. The famous German blitzkrieg in Poland and France in 1939 and 1940 moved no faster than that. In operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 the American army took three weeks to reach Baghdad, which was hailed as a swift advance against moderate opposition of fifteen miles a day.
Thus, in terms of speed, ships involved in an operational movement have at least an order-of-magnitude advantage over an army advancing against light resistance on land. In terms of the number of logistical personnel required to move a force to the scene of action and sustain it, the advantage of ships over land transport is one or two orders of magnitude. In the weight of combat potential carried to the scene of action per unit of energy expended, the ships’ advantage can be two or three orders of magnitude.
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Nevertheless, Bubke shows clearly that because a sea power cannot be invaded it does not have to maintain a large standing army in peacetime, and often it can find and fund allies for coalition operations against the dominant land power that threatens them.
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Any encyclopedia of war will show that there have been far fewer sea battles than land battles throughout history.
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Until the twentieth century surface raiders and pirates routinely evaded searchers for months at a time. The onset of aviation enabled army (and later navy) scouts to cover wide swaths of ocean and report the raiders’ positions by wireless radio. Within a decade, the raiders had all but disappeared.
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Historically, naval strategists have sought to equip more and more ships, including commercial vessels, with weapons. In the Anglo-Dutch wars, for example, both sides employed armed merchant ships, which could be built quickly in large numbers and armed with the best weapons of the day. Today missiles of various ranges and homing characteristics can be placed in manned and unmanned ships and aircraft at a relatively low cost. With the onset of information-warfare concepts, this looks like the beginning of a lasting change in naval warfare.
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In the seventeenth century the Dutch and English fought repeated campaigns that were almost completely restricted to the seas. This phenomenon was tied to technology. At the time, an entire fighting fleet could be built in a few years. A country’s whole navy could be lost in a crushing and decisive battle, yet it could be restored and ready for action within a few years. Hence a fleet was more often risked.
The eighteenth century marked a transition period in which ships became larger, more heavily armed, and more expensive. There were fewer battles, and naval commanders became more cautious, partly because it took much longer and cost more for a defeated state to replace its losses or build a new navy.
During the battleship era of the early twentieth century the number of battles continued to decline. Between 1890 and 1910 the world’s sea powers built seventy-four pre-dreadnought classes of battleships; yet, during the entire battleship era, from roughly 1885 to 1935, there were only seven fleet actions for command of the sea. 11 The statistics provided strong evidence to support the maxim that arms races do not lead to war, but rather that the prospect of war leads to arms races.
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Part of the reason for the decline in the incidents of major sea actions was the dominance of Great Britain, with its policy of enlightened self-interest, during the nineteenth-century era of Pax Britannica. Under British policy, the Royal Navy protected the trade of all friendly nations. As a result, the number of naval battles fought on the high seas (and those fought near land) remained low from 1815 to 1894.
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Our own review suggests that using quantitative operations analysis techniques has yielded greater benefits in achieving wartime success than employing tactical analysis, which relies on highly variable hit probabilities, damage estimates, casualty ratios, Lanchester and Salvo equations, and other measurements to evaluate combat performance.