ABSTRACT
A glance back on the historical record reveals that the idea of sea, land and, more recently, air forces operating ‘jointly’ on the battlefield is not a new one. Europeans began thinking about cooperation between sea and land forces as early as the seventeenth century, although this was generally limited to landing ground forces some distance from the homeland and then resupplying them by sea. The American Civil War saw the first joint operations, with seaborne attacks on ground targets and the landing of naval troops. The value and importance of joint warfare became most apparent in World War One when the Dardanelles campaign failed largely because of a lack of cooperation between the British army and navy. By the latter part of the war both sides were operating jointly, using aircraft to support ground forces. Two decades later Germany’s lightning war, or Blitzkrieg, tactics in the opening days of World War Two fully revealed the power and potential of integrating air and land power. The United States subsequently conducted joint operations in the Pacific, while the Normandy invasion represented the most complex joint operation of the war. Yet military services have historically been far more likely to resist cooperation, and
this reality has been reflected in the content of strategic thought. Although Jomini discussed amphibious warfare and Corbett spent some time detailing the linkages between naval power and landpower, Clausewitz famously ignored naval warfare, Mahan gave only passing attention to the employment of naval forces against the land (and when he did so advised it should be avoided) while Douhet argued strenuously that airpower should operate independently of other dimensions of war (although Mitchell did see the value of air forces operating in conjunction with armies). Even the tactical brilliance of Blitzkrieg was not followed by any appreciable body of thought on joint warfare. For Williamson Murray inter-service cooperation in the late stages of World War Two represented the peak of jointness, with such cooperation not to be seen again until the 1991 Gulf War.1
