Mahan and Corbett addressed different political problems

Mahan and Julian Corbett are often treated as opposing schools, although their arguments overlap in many respects. Both were friends with John Knox Laughton, but friendship does not prove that he mentored or inspired each theorist in the same way. Corbett wrote for an empire concerned with protecting its maritime arteries. Mahan needed to convince a politically hesitant continental nation that a navy deserved support, including inland Americans who could ask why they should pay to defend distant coastal states. Their differences arose as much from their readers' strategic and political circumstances as from doctrine.