ABSTRACT
Conflicts are decided on land. Few would dispute Corbett’s dictum that great issues are decided by armies and what navies can do in their support.1 Nonetheless, even if maritime forces decide events only rarely, they can influence them, in some cases profoundly-a quality captured most memorably by Mahan when he wrote about the “far distant, storm-beaten ships” of the British Navy standing between Napoleon and domination of the world.2 Similarly, students of insurgency and counterinsurgency have concentrated on what happens in jungles and cities but have done so at the expense of the maritime aspect of insurgency, which has often been poorly appreciated, and naval support for counterinsurgency, which has tended to be underplayed or ignored.
