Mahan, Dreadnought, and National Identity.

Scholars have established that sociological considerations drive defense procurement as much as hard security concerns. Decision-makers worry about prestige, national identity, and appropriateness when determining how to spend scarce defense dollars. In the early part of the twentieth century, national prestige in both great and minor powers depended on the acquisition of dreadnought battleships. In the wake of Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, national power, modernity, and independence were understood to be factors of naval power, and dreadnoughts became the most visible indicators of such power. Virtually abandoning considerations of military necessity and operational sustainability, small states contracted for the construction of dreadnoughts that they were unlikely to use and unable to maintain. This paper argues that sociological concerns dominated naval procurement in the early twentieth century, but that the steady rationalization of defense procurement procedures throughout the twentieth century has transformed the logic of vessel acquisition such that different justifications and different concepts of national power prevail. In the last fifteen years, the spread of the LHD, or amphibious support ship, has come to resemble the dreadnought spree of the early twentieth century, but with different effects and radically different implications for inter-state relations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]