It is irony, IMHO, that every great history-changing event was preceded by a great sea battle. I.e. at Salamis, had not the smaller Athenian fleet whipped Xerxes' armada, the center of future western civilization would have been from Persia instead of Greece (hence no democractic tradition). Again, at Actium, Cleopatra and Mark Anthony were inexplicably defeated by a much less powerful Roman fleet that Augustus Ceasar had launched, thus saving Rome as the sphere of influence instead of Egypt.
Then, there was Elizabeth the Great's race galleons soundly whipping Philip II's huge force in the late 1500s and securing England on a road to an empire where the sun never set.
Napoleon's downfall came not at Waterloo or his long dreadful retreat from Moscow, but rather at the hands of Nelson and Trafalgar.
Our own history is full of similiar examples. The real reason that Cornwallis surrendered to Washington was because he was bottled up at Yorktown by Compte de Grasse's French fleet; and had the CSS Virginia prevailed at Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862 against the USS Monitor the South would have been immediately been recognized by both Queen Victoria and Louis Napoleon's governments as both had envoys in Virginia then to determine if the South could break the blockade on the James River and its capitol city of Richmond.
Again, at Midway, when we caught the four IJN carriers with decks full of planes and fuel, the Pacific war turned on its head; and, in the Atlantic, D-Day was an amphibious landing where one of its four beaches, Omaha, was saved only by a line of destroyer laying keels on the ocean bottom to pound German gun emplacements.
The Navy is now in the process of reducing its ranks--80,000 less sailors by 2008. Meanwhile, the Chinese are rapidly building a Navy and, IMHO, it won't be long before the Mideastern countries of Iran and Saudi Arabia do the same. Frightful!
Well, China is worrisome and Iran is a bother, but I must say the thought of a "frightful" Saudi Arabian Navy makes me laugh.
If there is a man less suited to military prowess than the Arab, and particularly less so than the pampered and lazy Saudi, I can't imagine who it would be. Maybe an African pygmy.
If Saddam had cared to continue south from Kuwait in 1990, he'd have met more resistance from a troop of Boy Scouts than from the Saudi defense forces. Only the threat of American force held him back.
-ccm