Today’s occasion calls for words, but I’ll be brief, I promise.

When the First Punic War between the Roman Republic and the Carthaginian Empire broke out in 264 BC, it pitted an Italian land power against the greatest sea power in the Western Mediterranean—in a fight over an island. With Sicily both the battleground and the prize, Rome quickly realized they needed (perish the thought) a navy.

Understanding the folly of simply loading troops onto boats and pretending they had such a force, the Romans sought a way to even the odds a bit and enforce their will upon their maritime opponents. By 241 BC, they’d found it in the invention of the “Corvus”, Latin for “Raven”.

This seemingly minor adaptation to a multi-tiered galley—essentially a drawbridge swung from a bow-mounted pole, that would link the Roman vessel with its adversary and facilitate the rapid deployment of troops to the other ship—changed everything. The Romans had found a way to turn sea battles into land battles, allowing them to take advantage of the strength of their well-trained and disciplined legionaries.

This, and a growing understanding of what it took to conduct war on the sea, altered the course of history and astonishingly, Rome won the First Punic War … then the Second and the Third, establishing and maintaining maritime supremacy throughout the later two conflicts. In a very real sense, Rome had devised a way to use its Army to defeat a Navy.

So … and you can all see where this is going … in honor of the 120th meeting of the United States Military Academy at West Point and the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis on the field of “friendly strife,” I offer this message from the bottom of my heart:

GO ARMY, BEAT NAVY!!

M.G. Haynes