Rear Admiral Chris Parry had an active and interesting career in the Royal Navy, including combat operations in the Falklands War, and culminating in the post of Director-General, Development, Concepts, and Doctrine from 2005 to 2008. It clearly gave him a taste for the broader reaches of the maritime world. His new book, Super Highway: Sea Power in the 21st Century, reaches for the broader context of sea power in this new, and already battered, century. Certainly there is a need for a new contextual framework to follow the great 19th and 20th century geopolitics of the likes of Alfred Thayer Mahan and Sir Halford Mackinder. Parry's Super Highway has provided a lot of the underpinning for what must be a new debate on sea power in a world which is dependent upon the oceans to a degree which the great ages of discovery could not have imagined. RADM Parry introduces his topic with parallels between the ocean arteries and the electronic super highway of the world-wide web, and this is effective. This is, indeed, a contemporary book, rather than an book of enduring strategic truth. It has, in other words, a shelf life, because it deals with issues which are currently of critical importance, but which are vital for any re-thinking of national maritime strategies.
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