The constant warring with Spain and France meant the Royal Navy went through many structural and strategic changes as their power grew and waned - but mainly grew. In the 1700s Britain was using the restrictive trade technology of Mercantalism which meant many political decisions and confrontations were based on trade. Pitt turned trade on its head stating that it was the oceans, and the Royal Navy's dominance of them that tied Britain's Empire together.

Arthur Herman writes;

[t]The "blue water" strategists did grasp an essential point about British naval power: without it, Britain's overseas trade could not grow. And it was "the vastness and extensiveness of our [Britain's] trade", said a writer as early as 1718, that made Britain "the most considerable of any nation in the world."

Even today 95% of trade is still done by sea. In the 1700s there was no aviation and for a nation like Britain, isolated by the sea and channel, there were no overland routes.

The Spanish Empire, which was the dominant empire before Britain ousted them were also dependent on ocean trade to sustain their empire. Namely the gold and silver coming across the Atlantic from South America. One of the earliest strategies of Britain in their numerous wars with the Spanish was to use piracy and privateering to capture and disrupt those trade routes, essentially acting as a blockade to Spanish trade.

The Royal Navy formalised it far more in their wars with the French where they used supply convoys to keep a blockade on stations. The Germans also tried it in WWI and WWII with the disruptive technology of the submarine. In maritime strategies strangling an opponents trade through a blockade is common.

As member of Parliament in the 1730s William Pitt understood the importance of trade to Britain's future and to Britain's emerging identity as a commercial, as well as religious, Elect Nation. "When trade is at stake," he argued, "it is your last entrenchment; you must defend it or perish."

But as a statesman in the 1750s, Pitt would turn the standard formula of sea-power and trade inside out. Instead of seeing the navy as a weapon for getting and defending overseas empire, he saw overseas empire as a tool for the navy, giving it the bases it needed to defend British mercantile interests and to increase its own global reach.

Prior to the French wars the Royal Navy did not maintain separate fleets, preferring to keep their fleet concentrated and overseas warring or piracy being done by privateers, often with state backing. The constant wars with the French meant that the Royal Navy was big enough, and strategically justified, to start splitting its forces.

The first of these was the Western Squadron which later became the Channel Fleet. Eventually Gibraltar became a base for the Mediterranean fleet which was used to bottle up the French and stop their fleet from exiting into the Atlantic to disrupt trade or participate in an invasion.

I am not sure what to make of Pitt's change in doctrine. Maybe it is when Britain went from trading nation to empire. Australia certainly came about from Pitt's doctrine, apart from being a convenient place to dump convicts, it was intended as a colony to satisfy the Royal Navy's needs in the Pacific. One of the reason for the choice of Norfolk Island was the tall pines which it was thought could be used for ship-building and repair.

The early self-governing colonists in the late 1800s and Billy Hughes saw Australia in Pitt's manner too. Both thought that Australia was the British Empire in the Pacific. WWII proved that illusionary as British power waned, it is doubtful Britian could have done it in the late 1880s anyway. When Queensland raised militia to invade German New Guinea the Colonial Office had a fit, concerned that it would precipitate war in Europe. Australia eventually invade German New Guinea in 1914 after WWI had been declared.

Edwards' continues;

John Oldmixon may have been the first to point out, back in 1708, that what really made Britain great was not trade but its fleets. Trade was merely a way to pay for them. But Pitt saw even deeper and clearer. The old view of seaborne empire, going back to Hawkins [British Admiral] and Phillip II [of Spain], was of a mother country connected to its various colonies by trade routes, a network of long delicate filaments stretching out over vast empty oceans.

Pitt showed that instead of the oceans dividing Britain's empire, they united them. The fact that the seas were all one could enable a powerful navy to consolidate Britain's imperial possessions and divide and distract those of its enemies.

Pitt turned Britain's supposed weakness, its far-flung global trading networks into strategic strength. Viewed in this way, the Royal Navy gave Britain's maritime empire a vibrancy and dynamicism none of its predecessors, ... ever had.

The comparisons between the Pitt Doctrine and American blue water dominance in the late 20th and early 21st century are inevitable. The US is the undisputed master of blue water projection, able to bring massive resources to bear, at high tempo and for indefinite periods. American power is heavily dependent on its blue water Navy and the deployment of its forces around the world. It could be argued that the doctrine of American empire follows Pitt's.

Chalmer's Johnson records the words of Joseph Nye with, "Our [US] forward presence provides for the stability - the oxygen - that has helped provide for East Asian growth." Nye is arguing the US military is the engine which under-pins the freedom of globalisation and ties the world into the US trade economy.

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The War of Jenkin's Ear between Britain and Spain has a bizarre origin. Robert Jenkin's ship was boarded by the Spanish to determine if he was complying with the Treaty of Seville. Jenkin's claimed the Spanish cut his ear off; he pickled it in a jar, and presented it to Parliament. War was declared.

That is the glib history to the start of the war, but by 1739 Spain was a waning, if still rich, power. The two rising powers were Britain and France, who would be locked in a militaristic competition over the next century and a half to determine which nation would be the sole power in Europe. The war against Spain was probably opportunistic.

It appears to have backfired, as Spanish naval power was not broken. Then again, European history is pretty miserable, in that the states were constantly warring with one another. Extended peace was rare. Fortunately for Britain most of the fighting occurred in continental Europe, the colonies or the Atlantic Ocean.

These paragraphs caught my eye from Arthur Hermann's To Rule The Waves:

The British public had expected an easy victory over the Spanish [in the War of Jenkin's Ear], "mere poltroons" who "durst not look our squadrons in the face at sea."

The [Spanish] colonies in [Central and Southern] America would rise up to meet their British liberators. "Millions of miserable People wou'd bless their Deliverers: their Heart and Minds wou'd be open to us."

But instead of giving up at first sight of British warships, the Spanish reverted to a French-style guerre de course while concentrating all their resources to defend their most important bases, Cartegena [Columbia] and Havana [Cuba].

Privateers from Spanish ports scored success after success against British shipping, which the navy seemed unable to prevent, even as the Spanish flota evaded their attempts to stop it.

I am surprised how the language from 1739 mimicks some of the language of the last few years.

x-posted

William H. McNeill in Pursuit of Power discusses the phenomonen of command technology. He uses the term in a similar manner to command economy and describes it as state based and state funded technological innovation through the military. Rather than the industrial-military complex as described by Eisenhower, to McNeill it would be the technology-military complex. McNeill traces the origins of command technology to the late-19thC British Navy.

Prior to the mid-19thC innovations in armaments came from private industry and followed the restrictions of the free market such as private equity and finding customers. As an example one of the biggest armament companies in the 1800s was Krupps. They had several innovations in the areas of artillery and naval guns. A lot of their success was the innovation in the production process of these guns which improved their capability and length of use. The interesting thing though is that only 25% of Krupps' business was with Germany. Three quarters of their armament sales were to international customers.

McNeill isn't calling the industrial process the 'command' part. It is the technological innovations that are command technology and prior to the 1850s this was handled by private capital rather than state capital. There were state-based factories for armaments; for instance Britain's Woolwich Arsenal. But the state based factories would buy the innovations from inventors and technology companies of the day so they could manufacture these arms.

A good modern day example of the command technology process is the Joint Strike Fighter [JSF] program. The United States government funded two prototypes, one by Lockheed Martin and one by Boeing. They then chose a winner and funded the development process for Lockheed Martin's JSF prototype to become a mass manufactured weapon system. State based investment has bank rolled the whole technological innovation process; not private equity.

In the mid-1800s organisational technology was improving, the industrial revolution was maturing and Britain had adopted a two ocean naval policy. However they were finding that the industrial revolution had brought an escalating pace of technological change. As a result the capital investment required to come up with naval weapon systems and ships was increasing as the systems increased in complexity.

France was mainly concerned with a continental army but wanted to see British seapower upset by new technologies. As a result French scientists came up with the torpedo boat and the submarine. Both disruptive industrial technologies that were very cheap in comparison to the capital intensive battleship. The British response was to fund metallurgical and engineering innovation for quick firing naval guns and a new platform that was faster than the small and cheap torpedo boats which could protect the battleships. We know this today as a Destroyer.

This process of command technology continued in the capital intensive and technologically complex area area of naval systems at a quickening pace of state investment. It produced the Dreadnought which obsoleted every battleship in every navy, including Britains.

HMS Dreadnought.

By this stage all countries were nationalising their technology development of armaments and free-market manufacturers like Krupps and Armstrong were unable to sell into foreign markets like they had in the past. Soon Krupps was selling to the German government nearly exclusively.

With WWI and the industrial demands of a war economy all nations adopted both a command technology and command economy platform. This never really left government policy. The Soviets took it to extremes, and despite their successful industrialisation of their economy in peacetime, born out by their success against Germany in WWII, the brutal cost in lives, tyranny and oppression was repugnant.

Differing versions of command technology organisation have existed through history, but since the 1880s and 1890s it has become the dominant form of creating new armaments for organised violence.

It is a common question, and different nations all have different opinions on their contribution and importance to winning the war. However the war was more like a continental siege on an industrial scale rather than the blitzkrieg and heroics we see in movies. This makes the role of the Royal Navy and French Armies important in the containment and blockading of Germany to the point where it was unable to compete on the battlefield; economically, socially or politically.

Prior to World War I there was a level of globalisation and trade that wasn't seen again until the 1990s. World War I, the depression and consequent protectionist and nationalist policies stopped that globalisation but in 1914 national wealth was highly dependent on the inter-connectedness of trade and communications. Crippling Germany's ability to make war would require cutting them off from the rest of the world's trade, technology and resources. This was the role for the British Royal Navy. Niall Ferguson writes;

Significantly, the first Royal Navy action of the war - on August 5th, the day after Britain's entry - was the severing of all Germany's international telegraph cables, which ran along the ocean floor to France, Spain, North Africa and the United States.

Britain did not lose global blue water supremacy to the United States until World War II, consequently in WWI it was in the ideal geographical location and force structure to conduct a naval blockade of Germany.

The second important component of a continental blockade was sufficient forces to lay siege to Germany and the territory it occupied. This was made easier by industrial warfare which proved advantageous to defence. Technology, weaponry and

tactics had to advance before industrial warfare could be used offensively with any success. Byng and Monash by war's end were coordinating ground, armoured and aerial forces in a very modern manner. Arguably, offensive industrial warfare did not come of age until the German blitzkrieg's of WWII where air-power was used as mobile forward artillery.

The majority of forces on the western front were supplied by the French Army. British forces, including Australian, only operated on a small part of the front in Belgium and northern France whereas French forces held a majority of the line from northern France to the Swiss border.

Source: Wikipedia

Russia and France suffered the greatest number of military deaths, though industrial warfare brought massive casualty rates for every nation involved, but Russia collapsed militarily and socially under the pressure of such dehumanising warfare. France suffered similar problems with whole Division falling into mutiny, but managed to hold it the army and front line together without suffering revolution as Russia did.

Russia's exit from the war did not help Germany much either as Russia fell into revolutionary chaos which limited access to trade and resources, but it would not have mattered. The globalised trading world that existed before the war was shattered by 1917 and would take seventy years to resurrect itself again.

In World War I the high-tech industries of the day were aviation and submarines. These required cutting edge science, engineering, design and materials. Germany still produced amazing designs, but in the area of materials and production it had fallen behind by late 1916. A good example is the deployment of 180hp and 200hp SE5as and Spads to the front with the Hispano Suiza engine. This was the last time that Germany would be able to match the Allies for horsepower in deployed squadrons.

In the last days of the war the United States was spitting out 400hp engines while the best Germany could come up with was the 110hp rotary. Some of the the Fokker DVIIs had the high-performance 185hp BMW engine, but they were in small numbers at war's end. In comparison the British were rolling out the 230hp Sopwith Snipe which was the least powerful of the next-gen 1918 aircraft.

It is probably a fair statement that the blockade affected Germany's ability to deploy high-technology production in numbers by 1916. It would take another two years, and defeat in the Battle of the Marne in early 1918 for Germany to be unable to continue in a state of warfare socially, economically or politically.