The Secretary of the Navy who was the force behind the last Maritime Strategy evaluates the new one.
This summer, a conference in Bodo, Norway, convened to analyze a document, appropriately titled The Maritime Strategy, from the era of President Ronald Reagan. Former senior Soviet military officers recounted that they well understood the Reagan administration's forward strategy. The U.S. Navy had been exercising annually with multiple carrier battle groups operating with Allied forces in the Norwegian Sea and fjords, and the Soviets knew the published strategy and public declarations were the same as the classified war plans.
They knew the U.S. Navy believed it would succeed in war, and to the surprise of many, the Soviets' own operational analysis convinced them that the United States would indeed succeed, possibly as early as the first week of war. They concluded that they would need to triple their budget for naval and maritime forces to defend against a NATO naval offensive, and they formally proposed such a plan to the Kremlin leadership. That surely was a huge factor in the collapse of the Soviet system.
What Makes a Strategy Successful?
This disclosure clearly illustrates the essence of successful strategy. It must be simple, logical, and compelling. It also must be believed and followed as a framework for training, equipping, and employing naval forces. It must be public, and it must be understandable to the public and even to members of Congress. Above all, it must be understood by all ranks of the U.S. maritime forces and by all potential enemies.
Just more than a quarter-century after the launch of The Maritime Strategy that helped win the Cold War, the U.S. Navy is trying for another big win in the war of ideas with a new naval strategy. My guess is, they'll get their victory, which will be good news for the nation and for the world. The new document articulates the challenges 21st-century America faces as a maritime superpower and provides a well-conceived framework for meeting those challenges in the world's littorals and on the high seas.
The Navy took on a very tough job. It's a jungle out there. New kinds of threats are springing up like weeds: Islamist terrorists planning horrific but spectacular events at sea, nuclear weapons smugglers, drug smugglers in submarines, pirates with training camps, hackers trying to crash whole nations. Whoa! Did someone say the end of history? At the same time, old-fashioned dictatorial leaders and oligarchies of nation-states large, medium, and small continue to exist, plotting in time-honored fashion to take over neighbors, disrupt essential world norms, and eventually even take us on in battle.
So, What's a Superpower Navy to Do?
The Navy's leaders got the basic answer to that question very right: Develop a strategy—not just a PR piece or a slick brochure, but a rigorously logical concept, linking national ends to naval ways and means. Strategy is hard, and not everyone appreciates its importance. But having a carefully crafted strategy is absolutely essential to winning the support of the American people and its political leaders, to energize America's Sailors, and to assure our many allies and partners that we know what we are doing. The most important attributes of A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower are one, that it exists at all, and two, that its development was taken so seriously.
Almost equally important as the document itself is its signature page. It's no secret the Navy was first to pick up and run with the "need-a-new-strategy" ball. But early on, the service's leaders realized that an exclusively Navy strategy is only a third of the loaf. As with The Maritime Strategy, the Navy got its sister Sea Services involved from the get-go in the development of a new strategy. Testimony to that collaboration are the three bold signatures of the Chief of Naval Operations and the Commandants of the Marine Corps and the Coast Guard on the preface page. It's not the Navy's strategy, it's the nation's maritime strategy. And that's a good thing.
A really tough part of devising any strategy for the Sea Services is achieving proper balance. Visionaries and ideologues demand that the new strategy throw out time-honored principles and concepts in favor of whatever is currently fashionable and edgy. Bureaucratic barons emerge growling from their caves to try to drive into the strategy their preferred approaches to solving problems. On the other hand, fixers and E-Ring ballerinas devise intricate paragraphs to satisfy all factions, yielding either pap, 100-item laundry lists, or both.
To me, however, it looks as though the three service chiefs and their staffs held most of these advocates and compromisers in check. This restraint yielded a document that recognizes the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Coast Guard will have to continue to prepare to fight and win America's wars—large and small—while also honing their skills and adjusting their deployment patterns to deal with the new world of transnational threats and globalization. One can quibble about the length or width of this or that paragraph in the document, but on the whole I think the authors got the balance about right.
The Good News
Important as it is to have a strategy, the effort is all but useless if it isn't linked to implementation and doesn't provide some sense of what's most important. The good news is that A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower closes with a section on "Implementation Priorities." The bad news, however, is that while this section has some great strengths, it also exhibits the document's most significant weakness.
Three initiatives are rightly singled out for priority treatment:
• Improve Integration and Interoperability
• Enhance Awareness
• Prepare our People
If I took away one thing from my service on the 9/11 Commission, it's that there were—and there continue to be—glaring deficiencies in the way America's armed forces and intelligence agencies cooperate with each other, share information, and develop their professionals. A Navy Top Secret clearance, for example, still means almost nothing at CIA or NSA. And little has changed since Operation Desert Storm to provide tactical commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan with the product of our vast national intelligence-gathering network soon enough to be of any use. I'm pleased to see that Admiral Roughead, General Conway, and Admiral Allen share my concern—and that of the other 9/11 commissioners—and have gone on record with their determination to solve the problem.
What's Missing
Glaringly and sadly, there is no fourth implementation priority on the order of "Field the Right Gear"—the 21st-century equivalent of the 600-Ship Navy of the 1980s. Surely in the "Conversations with the Country" that preceded the composition of this document, some American citizen, somewhere, asked some questions. For example:
• Where did you come up with a 313-ship Navy?
• Why do the Marines need the V-22 Osprey and the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle?
• How many big cutters does the Coast Guard really need?
All the fine strategy and intelligence-sharing in the world won't save us from our foes if we don't have a clear and well-articulated statement of what we need to implement that strategy—tightly bound to the strategy itself. I know these are questions that daily seize the signatories of the new maritime strategy. I just wish they had taken this great opportunity to explain that their top priorities include finding answers to such questions. The combined budgets of the Sea Services are less than 1 percent of gross domestic product. That's half what it was in the Reagan years and a quarter what it was in the Kennedy years. It would be helpful if an addendum to this document could be written before the new President arrives. It would certainly be useful to review what could be done by returning to the GDP percentage Sea Service budgets of the Reagan years.
To be fair, the timing was far more propitious for the birth of The Maritime Strategy. President Reagan had just been elected on a platform of refurbishing the armed services, and then he asked the Navy Department to tell him how. Thus the 600-ship Navy—featuring its 15 carrier battle groups, 100 attack subs, and 4 battleships—was integral to the new strategy, and vice versa. Admiral Roughead, General Conway, and Admiral Allen must launch their new strategy at the twilight of an unpopular administration. Hence, the final and essential fourth implementation priority must wait for a new President.
What About Power Projection?
I am also not enamored with the new strategy's characterization of Power Projection, one of the Sea Services' core capabilities. It looks as though the fixers wrote that paragraph. The preceding section on Deterrence explicitly highlights maritime ballistic-missile defense and the sea-based strategic deterrent. The section on Sea Control explicitly focuses on antisubmarine warfare. But in the Power Projection section, no comparable explicit emphasis is placed on strike warfare and amphibious assault. These are our crown jewels, and we forget that at our peril.
All in all, however, A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower is a bravura performance by the three service chiefs and their staffs. Now it's up to the services themselves—and the American people and their selected leaders—to move out smartly to organize, train, and equip a force capable of implementing it.
Mr. Lehman was Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and a member of the 9/11 Commission.