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northern exercises of the Second Fleet with NATO. This has troubled the Soviets as much as it has pleased the Scandinavians. The political effect has been to lessen the shadow of the Soviets’ power and deprive them of a pressure point in a crisis. The Soviet threat to isolate Norway was one of the prime reasons in the late 1940s leading to the creation of NATO. The threat of Soviet bullying or nibbling tactics in severe crisis is reduced when NATO has appropriate responses other than escalation to full-scale war. The Maritime Strategy has provided such a response on the Northern Flank.
Second, only ten years ago, Chinese and Japanese leaders expressed directly to senior U. S. defense officials their concern that the United States had neither the naval power nor the national will to hold open the logistical lifelines across the Pacific in the event of Soviet aggression. Today, the issue is how to communicate to our Asian friends how and why, in a global conflict, we plan to carry the war to the Soviets in the Pacific. That is quite a difference in perspective.
Third, when the President has decided to use naval forces in the Mediterranean—whether near Lebanon or Libya—Soviet naval forces have not been an impeding factor. Many reasons for this exist in terms of bilateral relations and other Soviet objectives. Nevertheless, there is quite a contrast between the Soviet fleet’s behavior in the Mediterranean in the 1973 period, when some senior
U. S. Navy officers were publicly doubtful of U. S. naval capabilities, and the behavior of the Soviet fleet and the Sixth Fleet in the 1980s. Whatever other factors are affecting Soviet decisionmaking and inhibiting naval interpositioning, the trend since 1973 has not led to a decrease in U. S. naval confidence, to include air strikes against Soviet air defenses.
It could have, if the U. S. Navy had followed a path that concentrated on the close-in defense of the SLOCs and accepted uncritically the defensive strategic frameworks advocated in the 1970s. The progenitors of the Maritime Strategy in the 1970s were Navy Secretary Graham Claytor, Under Secretary R. James Woolsey, and the former CNO, Admiral Thomas B. Hayward, who resisted sustained pressure to accept a defensive strategic construct for the U. S. Navy. As a result, Secretary Lehman and Admiral Watkins did not have to change an institutional or doctrinal mind-set within the Navy before developing new concepts and a strategic framework different from the defense of SLOCs to Europe.
The climate was right for strategic change.
Much energy has been wasted debating the Maritime Strategy in a vain effort to drag naval thinking back into the defensive and NATO-centric constraints of the 1970s. It is the duty of the military professionals to offer alternatives. The Maritime Strategy is the beginning of the alternatives; the next step is to enlarge it until it is an all-serv-
What determines a nation’s military power? A simple question, with a simple answer, at first glance. Obviously, a nation’s military power consists of the army divisions, the air force wings, the navy ships comprising its armed forces. To use current jargon, force structure is the basis of military power.
But wait a minute. Does that mean a nation’s military strength is simply a function of the hardware and materiel it owns? Not entirely. How one employs that force structure also affects military power. The collection of doctrine and war plans that establishes how force structure will be used can be labeled strategy. This combination of strategy and force structure determines military power.
That may be a good answer for a war that starts today or tomorrow, but are strategy and force structure the only determinants of a nation’s military power further into the future?
Certainly they have a bearing on the question. Force structure has enormous inertia. The capital investment needed to purchase the implements of war is so large that the primary mode of changing the force structure must be evolution, not substitution. The replacement of force structure components usually occurs at the 20- or 30-year point when the hardware is too obsolete or too worn out for further service. Cost limits the amount replaced to about l/20th or l/30th a year.
Therefore, the force structure we own now not only constrains today’s strategy but also holds in its grip the strategy of the future, releasing that grip only gradually. Of course, strategy affects force structure also— directly in deciding what to buy, and indirectly through the investment strategy that accompanies procurement. Yet, there is even a third determinant of future military power—the resource input that establishes the size of future defense efforts.
The resource input to defense is more than just dollars, though this is a good way to keep score. Beyond money are matters such as the quality of the industrial base, the strength of political will, the condition of the economy, and the nature of public opinion. In the long run, the summation of such elements into the amount of national treasure devoted each year to
ice strategy with the same premise: defense without initiating nuclear war. This task requires major planning by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
For the United States to reduce reliance upon the threat of the first use of nuclear weapons would be an extraordinary strategic shift. But at the Reykjavik Summit in October, President Reagan reaffirmed his goal of a world free of nuclear ballistic missiles. So the U. S. threat of first nuclear use is becoming less and less credible. And at reasonable budget levels, the NATO emerging conventional technologies may not persuade both East and West that the current political strategy of holding a Maginot forward defense line has a high chance of success, if challenged. Therefore, it is to be expected that, as professional military officers, the members of the JCS and their Chairman will develop a thoughtful, coordinated blueprint of how they would fight conventionally, taking into account the possibility of early, severe setbacks. The Joint Chiefs do not have to advertise this planning; they do not have to undercut the nuclear deterrent; and they do not have to unsettle allies. But they must do more than game crises in which the Soviets conveniently blink once the United States deploys.
At issue is how the United States would fight conventionally. The Maritime Strategy is premised on a protracted conventional war. If the U. S. military plan for the future, however, is the same as the present—an initial conventional defense followed by the early release of nuclear weapons—then the Maritime Strategy should be dropped (and so should many of the publicly declared goals for strategic defense and arms control).
On the other hand, if a combination of several trends is rendering the NATO nuclear threat less credible—and I believe that is the case—then it is necessary that the JCS, and not just the Department of the Navy, develop and game conventional warfighting plans which are not based upon the early use of nuclear weapons. The Maritime Strategy contributes to such plans.
"Bing” West received a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and a master’s degree from the Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He went to Vietnam both as a Marine platoon leader and as a civilian correspondent. Later, he worked at the Rand Corporation and then was Special Assistant to Secretary of Defense Schlesinger. In 1978, he directed the U. S. Naval Force Planning Study, called “Sea Plan 2000,” which articulated a strategy based on offense and a total force of 600 ships. His article “A Fleet for the Year 2000: Future Force Structure” was published in the May 1980 Naval Review issue of Proceedings. He held two billets simultaneously at the Naval War College—as a Professor of Management and the Dean of Research. From 1981 to 1983, he served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. He is currently president of the Gama Corporation, specializing in gaming and analysis.
By Captain John L. Byron, U. S. Navy
defense is a third primary determinant of military power, one constraining both future strategy and future force structure.
There we have it, right? In future years, military power will be determined by our strategy, our current force structure as evolved, and our resource input.
All true, but yet a fourth determinant exists, a wild card that
in the past has had more to do with the result than is realized. Technology determines military power in the future to an extraordinary degree, if one considers the impact on warfare of such devices as the airplane, the modem submarine, computers, radar, smart weapons, and the thermonuclear bomb—the list is quite long, and each item is essential to the equation of military power. We can know with certainty that the future will produce similar technological advances of enormous influence on warfare, but predicting the nature of the new technology is at best a murky art. We have to keep looking, however. Our strategy must include investing some share of the resource input to searching out new technology for improved force structure.
Figure 1 sums up this equation, tying together the four determinants of military power to show that none of the four is the engine driving the others. Each is driven by and drives the other three. There is a message here for those who think strategy is a prime mover. A mover, yes, but only in balance with the other three elements. Strategy is a tempting toy for those who tinker with national defense. Figure 1 illustrates that changes to strategy are reckless if not related to future resource inputs, if not based in evolution of current force structure, and if not anticipating future technology.
Captain Byron was Executive Assistant in the Office of Program Appraisal before becoming the Head of Training Systems Branch, Strategic Systems Program Office.