ABSTRACT
The United States Civil War offered an interesting insight into the relative merits of blockade and commerce raiding. The stronger Union navy imposed a blockade on the Confederate states. Ultimately the Jeune Ecole failed in their attempt to bring radical change to French naval policy. By the 1890s the focus of the major navies was firmly back on battleships, notwithstanding residual interest in the concept of commerce raiding. The First World War provided an opportunity to test the principles of maritime strategy in practice. Histories of that war tend to focus on the land campaigns and on the appalling conditions and horrific casualties associated with trench warfare. This is inevitable given the scale of the conflict and, as Corbett had emphasised, it is on land where wars are usually decided. A more radical approach was offered by the Soviet New School that emerged in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s.
