What’s Wrong with Continuity, Consistency, and Professionalism?
By Lieutenant Commander John Hannon, U.S. Coast Guard Reserve
On an April day in 1865, a Mississippi River steamboat named the Sultana was in Vicksburg, Mississippi, loading Union Army soldiers, most of them recently released from Confederate prison camps. The big side-wheeler, designed to carry fewer than 400 passengers, departed with an estimated 2,500 soldiers crammed on board. Her boilers were in bad condition, but her engineers had been told to patch things up as best they could and keep her running.
Just north of Memphis, Tennessee—about two o’clock in the morning—the boilers exploded. The steamboat’s wooden structure burned rapidly; many of the soldiers died on board or jumped overboard and drowned in the fast moving Mississippi. An estimated 1,500 persons died in what remains the single largest incident of accidental loss of life involving a U.S. commercial vessel.
Steamboat boiler explosions were not new, even in 1865, but it took a tragedy of this magnitude to move Congress to regulate the safety of marine boilers. In time, the Bureau of Marine Inspection increased the scope of vessels and equipment inspected in response to successive maritime disasters.
At the beginning of World War II, responsibility for inspecting commercial ships was shifted from what had become the Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation to the U.S. Coast Guard. Although motivated by the urgency of war, there were precedents. Indeed, many Coast Guard functions had their roots in civilian safety agencies; the U.S. Lifesaving Service and the U.S. Lighthouse Service are two examples. It is this historical mix of military and civilian safety functions that gives the Coast Guard its unusual character—at once a source of its organizational strength and one of its principal weaknesses.
Inspecting ships was, and is, a logical mission for a service charged with saving lives. Because of the legal and regulatory nature of marine inspection, and the need for technically skilled and credible inspectors, the program relies almost exclusively on a commissioned officer work force.
To provide expertise and continuity, many of the civilian agency inspectors were simply given direct commissions in the Coast Guard in the 1940s and 1950s. Later, the ranks were augmented by granting direct commissions to senior Merchant Marine officers and—later still—with Maritime Academy graduates. Ultimately, Officer Candidate School and Coast Guard Academy graduates, traditional officer sources for the Coast Guard in general, filled the slots.
The mix has shifted subtly but significantly toward officers with roots more firmly embedded in a broad range of other Coast Guard missions. Even so, the Marine Inspection Program has maintained its merchant marine character. It requires focused effort and extensive training to become proficient; these are, in part, the greatest drawbacks to maintaining a steady flow of bright newcomers. While the program is akin in many ways to those required to qualify as a deck watch officer or engineer, the latter roles involve much greater leadership opportunities. The marine inspector must be technically proficient, but the job is more of an individual achievement than is being part of a ship’s crew. It is this emphasis on individual effort that drives the marine inspector to become a technical expert—but it also isolates an officer from the mainstream of career advancement.
The level of professionalism has remained high, and the shift toward the use of regular Coast Guard officers does not appear to have diminished the bonds of partnership forged with the maritime industry.
Coast Guard ship inspection offices are located in almost every major U.S. coastal port, as well as in many of the major inland river ports. In addition, there are two overseas offices, one in the Netherlands and one in Japan. With few exceptions, wherever on this globe a U.S.-flag commercial ship must undergo an inspection by the Coast Guard, a marine inspector will be there.
Congress, however, has directed the Coast Guard to impose fees for its inspection services, which has hastened the debate over whether the government should compete with private-sector ship inspectors. Commercial ship inspectors, known as classification societies, historically have provided a service—similar to that performed by the Coast Guard—for the benefit of insurance underwriters. The idea of delegating government-mandated safety inspections is not a new one, and most nations rely exclusively on class societies to act on their behalf.
In 1995, the Coast Guard initiated a partnership with the only U.S.-based, private-sector, ship classification society, the American Bureau of Shipping, in an effort designated as the Alternative Compliance Program. A pilot program is under way and, if legislation contained in the 1996 Coast Guard Authorization is passed, the program could be expanded to include non-U.S.-based ship classification societies. The change has caused some in government, industry, and the Coast Guard to question whether the service should conduct any commercial vessel safety inspections at all.
On the other hand, one of the Coast Guard’s strategic goals is to become the world’s premier maritime safety agency, and it follows that prevention of maritime disasters must rank high in any equation that provides for maritime safety. Yet despite the logic of prevention versus response considerations, the Coast Guard continues to be best known for its response efforts during search-and-rescue missions. Response, however, can be measured in terms of lives saved, a notable advantage over difficult-to-quantify prevention programs.
Prevention has always suffered in the publicity department, far overshadowed by the heroic acts associated with response. Although none of us may want to admit it, our heroes are the daring risk takers, not the conservative and safety-conscious inspectors. It is no accident that recruiting posters feature search-and-res- cue craft pounding through heavy seas rather than marine inspectors in dirty coveralls emerging from the bowels of a dimly lit commercial ship compartment.
Both jobs take great skill and involve real risk, and it is true that people want to prevent accidents before they happen. But in today’s bottom-line-driven market, costly prevention efforts are weighed against how much risk can be managed safely—and it is this question that lies at the heart of today’s deregulation movement.
The marine inspector job is a tough one, requiring extensive training and experience to do well. Nevertheless, marine inspectors perceive that they have never received the recognition or status that their specialty deserves come promotion time. Many believe that lingering in marine inspection for an extended period will derail even the most talented junior officer’s career. Personnel management officers say this is a myth, especially in the ranks of junior officers—but the myth lives on and it is having a devastating effect on the overall quality and morale of the marine inspection work force.
Highly qualified marine inspectors have pursued what they hope will be perceived as more visible assignments either in or out of the Marine Safety Program. The strong perception that marine inspection is not a good long-term career choice has created a revolving door that is spinning faster with each passing year. Downsizing has increased the level of career paranoia to all-time highs. Officers are not likely to choose marine inspection for the long haul when it is perceived as a good ticket to punch but damaging to long-term personal goals.
The net result is that the flow of new marine inspectors into the entry-level training course currently exceeds 100% of the field-level billets within any five- year period—hardly a prescription for continuity and stability.
Complicating the issue is internal division between those who have taken a field-oriented career path—the inspectors—and those whose have focused on the more academic and technical path of developing the standards for commercial vessel safety—the technicians. The latter sometimes minimize the importance of the inspection function—or dismiss it as something that can be delegated to classification societies (although, not surprisingly, they expect the Coast Guard to retain responsibility for the standards).
Assuming that a near-total delegation of field enforcement could be managed effectively, this approach fails to acknowledge that technical prowess untempered by field experience provides a two-dimensional solution to a three-dimensional problem.
In truth, the Coast Guard technical program now suffers from the same career pressures affecting the overall marine safety program. Technical specialists are driven to diversify their resumes with field tours in inspection, lest they fail to demonstrate the leadership qualities necessary for promotion—not altogether a bad thing when viewed as the infusion of field experience in what is essentially a technical support function.
The unfortunate result of mid-level career cross-training, however, is that it puts inexperienced officers with completely technical backgrounds into management jobs—rather than where they can gain maximum hands-on exposure to the actual conduct of ship inspections first. It serves neither program to create competition rather than partnership.
The prevention of marine accidents involves an assessment of the ship and the people who manage and operate it; the latter part of the equation—the people and how they interact with each other and the ship—is getting increased emphasis. To meet the challenge of transforming our inspectors from hardware and structure examiners into evaluators of the human element is tomorrow’s challenge. It requires a solid foundation of technical knowledge and practical skill, and the shift of focus to the human element embodies all the best traditions of the Coast Guard and the commercial vessel safety program.
Beyond the technical skill issue lies the larger and more insidious problem: promotion and retention of talented people. The Coast Guard must commit to supporting and protecting its best people. The marine inspectors’ revolving door will not slow down until officers perceive that career opportunity is not in conflict with the acquisition of expertise that is achieved through continuity of training and of purpose.
Few, if any, of these issues will come as startling revelations to the officers in the Marine Safety Program. In fact, these issues have been identified and confirmed by several separate Coast Guard working groups and independent studies during the past ten years. Solutions have been offered—and some attempted—but they have offered only limited success because they must acknowledge as an immutable constant an officer promotion system that is perceived by many as hostile to technical specialization.
Yet despite this constraint, I believe that the Coast Guard has done—and continues to do—a very creditable job in marine inspection. Much has been done to improve training and increase knowledge, but we can and must do more. Our prime ingredient for success will remain our exceptional work force, which is made up of bright, dedicated, and hard-working individuals who believe in what they do and want to do it better. It is because of this work force that the Coast Guard remains the right government organization to lead our national program of commercial vessel safety.
All we need to do is look inward and find ways to overcome our own limitations. First, we must focus on a real and meaningful solution to our officer career- path issues and develop a system that will support long-term training and professional growth. Second, we must view a partial delegation of ship inspection to classification societies not as a sign of our own failures, but as a successful partnership that enhances the broader goal of safety at sea, while freeing our marine inspectors to increase inspections of foreign-flag vessels under a port-state control program.
The personnel in a premier maritime safety agency must be as professional as the persons and organizations with which they deal. We can be that organization, but we must accept the notion that we must change and adapt to fit the circumstances. For as long as officers perceive that their careers are in jeopardy when they pursue technical specialization and true expertise, we will never be that organization. The choice is ours to make. Let us choose wisely.
Lieutenant Commander Hannon is a senior civilian program manager in the Vessel Compliance Division at Coast Guard Headquarters. He has held regular and reserve commissions in the Coast Guard and has served multiple assignments as a marine inspector, senior marine investigator, and instructor at Marine Safety School.
A Visit to the Polish Naval Academy
By Captain William B. Garrett, U.S. Navy (Retired)
Imagine visiting a Soviet-built Kilo-class submarine or a Kashin-class guided-missile destroyer with detailed tours provided by the commanding officers. During the summer of 1995, a four- member team from the U.S. Naval Academy did just that while visiting the Polish Naval Academy at Gdynia, near Gdansk—a major home port for the Polish Navy and headquarters for Admiral Romuald Waga, Commander of Polish Naval Forces. As part of the visit, we toured the submarine Orzel and the guided-missile destroyer Warszawa, flagship of the Polish Fleet.
Our team consisted of Professor Arthur A. Rachwald of the Political Science Department; Commander Michael P. Campbell, U.S. Navy, Division of Professional Development; Lieutenant Mary K. Williams, U.S. Navy, Admissions Department and Women’s Advocate; and the author, Vice Academic Dean. We focused on the academic, professional, and admissions programs at Gdynia and compared them with our own. The visit was sponsored by the Military-to-Military/Joint Contact Team Program approved by both the Secretaries of State and Defense.
The Polish Naval Academy has a proud history. Courses for Polish naval officers began in 1921 and led to the establishment of the Naval Officers School in Torun in 1922; shortly thereafter, the school was moved to Gdynia. On I September 1939, when the Nazi forces attacked Gdansk, Polish Naval Academy midshipmen responded quickly and defended the nearby arsenal at Westerplatte. Although eventually overrun, they continued their defense even after the city of Danzig had surrendered.
As World War II broke out, four destroyers and three submarines escaped from the Baltic and served for the duration of the war in support of the Allies as part of the Royal Navy. By the end of the war more than 600,000 Poles were serving the Allies in uniform in Europe; every eighth Allied pilot in the Battle of Britain was a Pole. The Royal Air Force’s 303 Squadron composed entirely of Polish pilots was the highest scoring squadron in the RAF. Polish infantry fought at Narvik, Tobruk, Monte Cassino, the Falaise Gap, and Arnhem. The Polish destroyer Piorun was the first Allied ship to engage the German battleship Bismarck. The destroyer Blyskawica supported the Normandy invasion and now serves as a museum ship dockside in Gdynia. She is immaculately maintained and hosts many military ceremonies; the graduates of the Naval Academy are commissioned on board the ship.
With the start of the war, the Naval School was shifted to Plymouth, England, and then to Devon for the duration of the war, and was reestablished in Gdynia in 1946. In 1955, the school was granted the status of a university and the name was changed to the Westerplatte Naval Heroes School in honor of the midshipmen who died in battle in 1939. The name changed again in 1987 to the Polish Naval Academy of the Westerplatte Heroes. More than 400 male midshipmen attend the Naval Academy, which has a faculty of 150 officers and civilian men and women.
The curriculum has undergone a number of changes and improvements. A steady emphasis on academic excellence and rigor through the 1960s and ‘70s led to the establishment of a new standard curriculum in 1974—a five-year master’s program heavily oriented toward seamanship and navigation.
Last year, the school shifted to a four-year bachelor’s program. Prior to entry, each midshipman chooses one of two majors, either navigation and weapons or mechanical and electrical engineering. The summers are filled with two months of practical training at sea. The Academy has three training cutters and three training vessels, including the sailing ship Iskra, which made a ten-month around- the-world cruise in 1995 with 35 midshipmen and 8 officers on board. From all indications, the newly graduating ensigns are extremely well prepared for their first assignments at sea and are well trained professionally for their first watch duties on board ship.
The Academy location provides other support for the Polish Navy, including:
- The two-year Naval Warrant Officers School
- The Naval Command and Staff Institute, which provides training for officers in courses up to ten months
The Academy also serves as the scientific center for research for the Polish Navy. At any one time there could be up to 1,500 students at the Naval Academy complex.
We also visited the naval base at Hel. located at the end of a long peninsula across the Bay of Gdansk. Famous as the site of resolute resistance to the Nazi invaders, it held out even after Poland had surrendered at the beginning of World War II. We also visited Westerplatte, the shipyards at Gdansk, the seaport of Sopot, the 13th century fortress and castle of the Teutonic Knights at Marlbork, and the Naval Academy recreational center located in the nearby Kaszubian Lakes region.
Other initiatives are ongoing between our navies. These include the visit of U.S. ships to Polish ports, exercises such as BALTOPS 95 in which U.S. combatants hosted Polish officers and midshipmen at sea then made port visits, and a program that invites Polish nationals to attend the U.S. Naval Academy. The first Polish midshipman graduated with the class of 1996 and has been commissioned in the Polish Navy. Two others are midshipmen. In addition, two Polish Naval Academy midshipmen attended the 1996 Naval Academy Foreign Affairs Conference in Annapolis. We hope to see the sailing ship Iskra in Annapolis during one of her long training voyages.
Our visit to Gdynia was memorable and we are indebted to the officers, staff, and midshipmen of the Polish Naval Academy and the Polish Navy for their hospitality. They are dedicated professionals.
Captain Garrett is Vice Academic Dean at the U.S. Naval Academy. A submariner while on active duty, he commanded the USS Grenadier (SS-525), served as executive officer of the USS Hunley (AS-31), and was a planner in the office of the Chief of Naval Operations. He holds a PhD from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Biting On a Bullet Is Not Enough
By Lieutenant Colonels Jerry L. Brown, Medical Corps, and Eugene J. Murdock, Jr., CRNA, MSN, Nurse Corps, U.S. Army Reserve; Major Dewey Galeas, CRNA, MSN, Nurse Corps, U.S. Army (Retired); and Captain Arthur M. Smith, Medical Corps, U.S. Naval Reserve
As we prepare to conduct military operations in two simultaneous major regional conflicts, supported by a downsized military medical cadre, medical operational readiness assumes a greater priority. The administration of field anesthesia to combat casualties and disaster victims is an important component of today’s medical readiness mission. Military anesthesia providers may be called on to provide emergency care under suboptimal conditions, without the security of the sophisticated equipment, drugs, and compressed gases that are now considered essential. Unfortunately, there are substantial obstacles to adequate peacetime training of anesthesia providers in operational (field) anesthesia.
Operational Anesthesia:Fundamental Requirements
Familiarity with the implements and techniques of operational anesthesia is a critical component of military medical readiness. The techniques of total intravenous and regional anesthesia, as well as local nerve blocks, may be very useful under certain conditions. To complete their formal training in anesthesia care delivery within the austere environment, military anesthesia providers also need training in the use of the field equipment presently available.
One of the prime targets of the debate over operational readiness is the decades- old field anesthesia machine or FAM 885(A),1 which has been used with great proficiency by U.S. military anesthesia personnel since the Vietnam War. The FAM 885(A) is a standard component of field medical equipment and one of the principal forms of anesthesia equipment on board the larger Navy amphibious assault ships. Because it lacks many of the technical specifications now commonly included in modern state-of-the- art equipment, however, it is considered to be below the minimum standards for use in fixed surgical facilities within the United States. Nevertheless, even during the Vietnam War, its unimproved predecessor proved to be a very reliable and durable instrument, with an exceptional safety record.
Most standard anesthesia machines, including the FAM 885(A), depend on medical gases for vaporization of the volatile anesthesia agent. An adequate supply of cylinders of compressed gases, most notably oxygen, may be a major logistical problem in the combat setting. For rapid deployment and field anesthesia, therefore, the alternative drawover anesthetic system is the most versatile solution; it has no absolute requirement for a compressed gas supply, because air can be used as the carrier gas. This minimizes or eliminates the need to transport heavy oxygen cylinders.
The drawover system is a portable anesthetic apparatus that is small, light, portable, and simple to use, but sufficiently versatile to meet the more sophisticated anesthetic requirements of a field or base hospital. It also can operate under reduced barometric pressure (i.e., in aircraft or mountainous regions), and its performance has been well documented between sea level and a height of 4,000 meters.
Medical units of the Israeli armed forces used drawover units during the Yom Kippur War in October 1973. British medical units involved in the high-temperature environment of Oman and in the ongoing conflict in Northern Ireland have used them extensively.
During May 1982, British naval forces in the Falkland Islands provided the first example of prolonged use of the drawover apparatus under field conditions. Two anesthetists from the Royal Army Medical Corps, who were part of the initial Parachute Field Surgical Team, reported that 133 inhalation anesthetic procedures were performed with this apparatus. The distribution of injuries is important to note, however. In keeping with the historical record from most previous military conflicts, 65% of all injuries were to the extremities, and 75% of all general anesthetics were for cleaning and removal of debris and dead tissue from these wounds. Only 4% of cases required abdominal exploration, and surgical procedures within the chest composed only 1% of the total.
Variations of drawover anesthesia equipment are still in regular use in many Third World countries. Similarly, it is still used by some armies as a field apparatus, where it is employed for simple as well as complex surgery, including major trauma cases. During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, drawover devices were used in U.S. field hospitals when supplies of compressed oxygen were in short supply- The spartan but easily transportable Universal PAC drawover anesthesia equipment was used effectively by U.S. Army medical personnel attached to Forward Area Surgical Teams during Operation Just Cause in Panama and during operations in Honduras, the Persian Gulf, and elsewhere.
Drawover anesthesia thus remains a useful concept that expands the delivery of anesthetic care in the field, both in civilian and military settings. Recent armed conflicts, natural disasters, and ongoing humanitarian missions have renewed interest in these devices. Ironically, in the United States the drawover vaporizer is available only to the military, which nevertheless is forbidden to use it in its own hospitals during peacetime.
The Current Paradox
During Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, many military physicians were exposed for the first time to the array of 1970s- and 1980s-vintage technology contained within deployable medical facilities (DepMeds or fleet hospitals). Because the equipment did not incorporate contemporary technical advances, healthcare personnel often judged it to be of poor quality or archaic. Lacking adequate prior training on the field equipment, many physicians resorted to telephoning private resources in the United States, hoping to obtain personal delivery of “up-to-date” medical technology. Was this a reflection of the adequacy, durability, and safety of the equipment? More likely it was the result of the medical personnel’s inadequate preparation for functioning within the “austere but adequate” field environment of combat. The current problems with training on field anesthesia equipment are analogous.
The Field Anesthesia Machine and the drawover apparatus have been demonstrated as remarkably effective in the austere and logistically restricted settings of combat, yet they bear the onus of being declared as unsafe for use within peacetime surgical facilities in the United States. Medical, legal, and product-liability issues, combined with risk-management guidelines, do not allow the prudent use of either technology in any U.S. hospital.2 Anesthesia providers, therefore, cannot use them on a daily basis in peacetime and thus have no opportunity to train with them prior to using them in combat. This paradox has major implications for our military medical readiness posture.
Do we possess updated technology and the expertise to develop new and probably better anesthesia equipment? Certainly, but there is little incentive for private industry or the military to dedicate constrained research and development funds to the task. Reasonable modifications to the Field Anesthesia Machine—such as the incorporation of an oxygen-concentrating device to reduce dependence on logistically cumbersome oxygen cylinders—are germane, but in reality, industry will not expend the capital needed to develop anesthesia equipment that has such a limited commercial application.
Consequently, military medical services are left with two equally compelling mandates:
► Realistically modify existing equipment to upgrade efficiency and safety.
► Implement mandatory training on deployable anesthesia equipment in such a manner that training requirements are met without compromising patient safety.
Training Imperatives
Anesthesia equipment commonly used in the operational theater must be compact, light, durable, and capable of being carried to any part of the world at very short notice. In addition, it must be versatile, capable of working over a wide range of temperatures and altitudes, and require a minimum of maintenance. Rarely will the sophisticated anesthesia technology of the modern surgical suite satisfy such criteria. Anesthesia providers therefore must be capable of functioning without “cutting edge” technology, and must learn to monitor the status of their patients using skills not normally required in modern peacetime surgical facilities.
To achieve credible operational medical readiness, every deployable military anesthesia care provider must receive sufficient training in the use of the present field equipment and become competent in its operation. This must be accomplished despite the caveats issued by the FDA and the manufacturer—warnings that primarily are attempts at avoiding liability issues. In fact, such training already has been accomplished at various Army medical training facilities. In some Army nurse anesthesia training programs, for example, students had to perform a minimum of ten cases on the 885(A) Field Anesthesia Machine. In at least one major Army medical center, during preparation for deployment to Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, some providers were trained to perform anesthesia on active-duty personnel using the Field Anesthesia Machine. During surgical procedures, the device was used in series with modern hospital-based monitoring equipment to ensure patient safety.
To provide safe anesthesia care to our soldiers and sailors in all environments, DoD and service leaders must acknowledge their responsibility for training practitioners on the available anesthesia equipment, as well as field techniques, before their use is required. This need is indisputable. Legal obstacles must be identified and overcome. Innovative means for facilitating training—such as the previous programs of the triservice Joint Medical Readiness Training Command at Ft. Sam Houston, which provided a combat anesthesia training program aimed primarily at Special Forces medics—must be encouraged. In our quest for medical readiness, these should be priority issues for military medical leadership and must be promptly and realistically addressed.
1 See Capt. William C. Petty and Capt. Robert M. Gantt, Medical Corps, USN, “We Need Better Field Anesthesia Machines,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, February 1995, pp. 76-78.
2 Ibid.
Colonel Brown was Chief of Anesthesia and Operative Services at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Army Medical Center and now is Assistant Professor of Anesthesia at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta. Colonel Murdock is Director of Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist Services at the Medical College of Georgia. Major Galeas is a member of the Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist staff at the Medical College of Georgia. Captain Smith is Clinical Professor of Surgery and Clinical Professor of Military and Emergency Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda. Maryland, and Professor of Surgery (Urology) at the Medical College of Georgia.
Conflict Beneath the Sea in 2020
By Mark R. Shulman
Dr. John P. Craven, then serving as Chief Scientist, Department of the Navy Special Projects office, and Chief Scientist of the Deep Submergence Systems Project, 30 years ago forecast an era in which the United States would exploit the sea beds, and concluded that “history, law, technology, and the principles of sea power have been parochially invoked to state the case for ‘inner space.’ The test of time, or even more quickly the test of analysis may demonstrate the hypothesis faulty and the assumptions rashly made. The challenge of the deep ocean may not be the most important international problem of the last half of this century; but it may be.”
Those words appeared in his Proceedings article, “Sea Power and the Sea Bed,” (April 1966, pages 36-51). Today, hindsight answers Craven’s rhetorical question: It was not, but it may still be.
Most of the world lies beneath the sea; a long generation from now, we could be looking at a myriad of uses for this world. If so, we will almost undoubtedly be looking at a new kind of naval warfare contesting for its control. We could, in short, see the end of the Mahanian view of the seas as a medium for transit and a place of counter-force operations; the seas will be revaluated. Much as they were during the age of sail and of wealthy fisheries, the seas will become a place of value themselves. They also are likely to become a medium for counter-value warfare in the next century.
Strategists traditionally have divided the world into land, sea, air, and, recently, cyberspace. If pushed, land-war specialists will note subsurface elements of land war such as access to and control of underground resources, as well as trench mining and tunneling. Air war specialists quickly will acknowledge several regimes: low altitude, high altitude, low space, high space, and deep space. The seas generally are divided into two or possibly three arenas: surface, subsurface, and deep sea. (The new information warriors have too many media to discuss in this brief essay.)
Most naval analysts, however, acknowledge that within a generation, a definition of the seas will include the shelf surfaces, the deep sea beds—and what lies below them. Nonetheless, the vision expressed in Michael Vickers’s recent paper, “A Concept for Theater Warfare in 2020” (U.S. Department of Defense Office of Net Assessment), foresees a world virtually unchanged. Only the weapons will be new—or improved. The paradigm of war at sea will be the same as that expressed by Alfred Thayer Mahan a century ago—the seas as highways, a reasonably good assessment for the technical capabilities of the 19th century. To control these highways, he noted, man traditionally had fought counterforce wars. The U.S. Navy adopted Mahan as the prophet who could justify the largest, most powerful battleships designed to win counter-force actions on the high seas. These behemoths, and their aircraft carrier successors, have controlled the seas for a century.
Mahan described what he considered immutable laws of the seas, but he based his theories on a flawed interpretation of history: a world completely dominated by nation-states competing in a zero-sum game. One’s gain was another’s loss. Mahan wrote, after all, in an era of high tariffs and increasingly strengthening states, when piracy had been eliminated and large trading companies owed their existence to particular state regimes.
Free trade has been disproving part of his axiom for at least half a century, and competition is making people wealthier. Evidence is accumulating that states are losing some of their hegemony as the only important international actors.
The seas, however, also are changing. Where island nations such as Britain, Japan, and the United States (which is both an island and a continental nation) have long used the seas as trade highways, in the 21st century, states bordering the earth’s oceans will plow the seas for their own value. Because of its immense size, and because its southern portion does not border on any great powers, the Pacific is the ocean most likely to be exploited. Many of the new maritime states on its rim, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Indonesia, have large populations and technical expertise.
Japan—with its tremendous financial resources—is the most likely to lead the pack. Other competitors might include China or Russia, either as whole countries or as maritime-oriented rump states. Finally, non-state actors also may drive change, be they multinational corporations or mafia-like pirate groups heavily armed and only vaguely affiliated with patron rogue states.
Initially, sea bed exploitation probably will focus on shelves such as those around the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, which already are hotly contested. From there one can easily envision development of subsurface regions across the seas and, eventually, even of the deep sea beds. Each stage of this frontier will increase the likelihood that naval warfare will include major counter- value components.
Given new hardening technology, developments in micro-engineering, near- Malthusian population growth, environmental decay on the globe’s surface, loss of the ozone layer, and the proliferation of weapons that threaten every surface dwellers’ existence, I suspect that the seas will be exploited in the coming century. Although current technologies make such exploitation prohibitively expensive at this time, they offer virtually unlimited potential for mining, power generation, fresh water and oxygen generation, food production, and safety.
Considering that man will not be able to survive at great depths in great numbers for extended duration prior to 2020, exploitation remains feasible. Man easily could move to the shelves at depths of 200 feet without pushing our current technological capabilities very far. Beyond that, 2020 might well see robotics-based exploitation of the deeps.
Several areas offer promise:
Mining. The seas have long provided petroleum and more recently natural gas. They could just as readily provide gold, silver, uranium, and other minerals. Presently, mining is not economically feasible, but it could become so if we developed safe, secure, and reasonably inexpensive stations planted on the bottom. Mining techniques for precious ores might range from an advanced version of panning to a sea-bed version of strip-mining. Large-scale exploitation could not really begin, however, without inexpensive power; breathing at these depths would require a helium-rich atmosphere that would itself require tremendous amounts of energy simply to maintain tolerable temperatures in such frigid waters. Even if man does not venture there for long periods, the lands beneath the seas might offer safe, secure places for robots to store nuclear, biological, or chemical waste.
Power generation. Presently, there is some hope for generating unlimited power from tidal power or waves—perhaps best exploited not by waves lapping against the littoral but by tides or currents. Furthermore, power may well be j generated by geothermal heat that surges beneath the sea bed. It could conceivably also be generated by the harvesting of microbiological organisms such as those that create their own light in the oceans’ darkest recesses.
Food. The sea has long provided fish and mammals for human consumption. Increasingly, the seas are being used as incubators to nurture fish, kelp, and even plankton artificially. In the future, submerged racks could anchor kelp farms that stretch hundreds of leagues across the sea. Some day, deep sea stations may become self-sufficient or even capable of exporting food stuffs to hungry surface dwellers.
Water and air. Over the centuries, humans have gone to war for access to drinking water. Today—whether polluting it, pouring it on lawns, sprinkling it in fountains, hoarding it behind dams—even the wealthiest societies now pay dearly for fresh water. Today's submarines generate fresh water using a relatively expensive desalinization process. Larger submerged stations would permit inhabitants to use the more space-demanding—but less expensive—reverse-osmosis process.
The competition for fresh air may become even more fierce in the coming century. Yet the seas offer unlimited supplies if one can build the machinery and keep it secure.
Safety. As well as providing a likely place for storing toxic waste, the seas may provide the kind of security that some people might seek in a world that has seen the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, of electromagnetic pulse weapons, and of a degraded environment; one bombarded by solar radiation no longer screened by an ozone layer, lacking oxygen because the rain forests are gone—and one increasingly lawless.
I am not suggesting that man will return to the sea as his natural habitat, but there is a strong argument to be made that the oceans of the future will cease being merely a medium for counter-force warfare.
What will naval warriors need then? The first weapon system probably will resemble an attack submersible with deep-sea capabilities. It could be manned or unmanned. Its arsenal would not require any great technological leaps. In fact, torpedoes would not require such large warheads for the same effect, as the deadly shockwave effect increases at great depths.
The second major system innovation, inevitably, will be defensive—some kind of 21st century fortress. But the sheer magnitude of the underwater world (and the probable application of stealth technology) may force attackers to develop different approaches. Rather than attacking with weapons, they will attempt to make the region uninhabitable. Arsenals may well include the brilliant mines discussed by naval analyst Michael Vickers in “A Concept for Theater Warfare in 2020,” a working paper used at the Air War College. Blockades will be established, much as they always have been, to isolate the stations from the rest of the world. As Vickers remarks, war at sea will increasingly resemble war on land.
The sea will become an arena of counter-value warfare in addition to that of the counter-force wars that have dominated its surface for four centuries. Advantage will go first to those most pressed to seize it. From there, it may well go to the most ruthless, for the sea is unforgiving.
Mr. Shulman is a student at Columbia Law School. Most recently, he was associate professor of conflict and change of the Air War College. Maxwell AFB. Alabama. He wrote Navalism and the Emergence of American Sea Power, 1882-1893 (Naval Institute Press, 1995) and is co-editor with Michael Howard and George Andreoupoulos of The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare In the Western World (Yale University Press, 1994).