Kohnen, David. King’s Navy: Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King and the Rise of American Sea Power, 1897-1947
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The recent publication of King's Navy by David Kohnen represents a landmark achievement in the historiography of twentieth-century naval affairs.Written with the insight of both a professional naval officer and a seasoned historian, Kohnen's monumental biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King is the most comprehensive re-evaluation of one of the United States Navy's most influential figures in a generation.It is a work of scholarship that repositions King squarely within the central arc of American and Allied naval ascendancy from the Spanish-American War through to the Second World War.Kohnen's central thesis is as ambitious as it is persuasive: Fleet Admiral King was not merely an operational commander but the intellectual architect of a distinctly American theory of sea power, one that evolved from its British imperial antecedents and came to define the transoceanic order of the twentieth century.In so arguing, King's Navy makes an essential contribution to the literature of strategic studies, naval command, and international security policy.It also offers a subtle yet significant reframing of Anglo-American naval relations, highlighting transatlantic collaboration rooted in shared maritime assumptions rather than convenient wartime alliances.Kohnen organises his work thematically and chronologically, moving through three distinct but interlinked sections: "Remain Cheerful," "Waging Peace," and "Make Best with What You Have."These parts trace King's career from his formative years through his interwar evolution into a visionary strategist, culminating in his wartime leadership as Commander-in-Chief of the US Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations.Drawing on previously unseen archival materials, including King family documents and declassified intelligence records, Kohnen deftly reconstructs how King combined the lessons of early twentieth-century naval warfare, air power development, and Allied cooperation into a holistic strategic vision.Of particular interest to scholars of the Royal Canadian Navy is Kohnen's exploration of King's influence on Allied maritime strategy in the North Atlantic.While Canadian perspectives are not central to the narrative, the reader will find a rich analytical context for understanding the collaborative frameworks that supported Battle of the Atlantic operations, convoy systems, and the integration of Commonwealth navies into a unified maritime strategy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".