Mahan and the selling power of decisive battle

Japanese thinking was not a mechanical copy of Mahan. He advocated battle fleets and valued decisive action, yet his history also contained many battles that settled little. Decisive battle was especially useful when making the political and budgetary case for a navy, while remaining an incomplete operational philosophy on its own. Japanese officers could study Mahan because his arguments had helped Theodore Roosevelt and the U.S. Navy persuade Congress to fund a modern battle fleet.