Every other year the Royal Australian Navy hosts a sea-power conference and exposition in Sydney. This year’s focus is on what the Australians call “maintaining good order at sea,” which it happens was also the focus of the most recent explicit U.S. naval strategy, A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower, released in late 2007. Now may be a good time to examine the problem.
“Good order” is what is needed to keep world seaborne trade moving. It means things like suppressing pirates and also protecting neutral shipping in the face of local conflicts, such as the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. It shades over into dealing with the current Iranian threat to close the Strait of Hormuz if anyone should have the nerve to embargo their own oil trade. Inevitably, anyone focused on “good order” looks back to a golden age in which the Royal Navy guaranteed the safety of shipping on a worldwide basis, dealing with pirates and rogue warships. For example, when the Peruvian ironclad Huascar went rogue in 1877, two British frigates hunted her down and attacked (their actions included the first open-sea torpedo firing in history—which failed).
The U.S. Navy argued in its strategy that global seaborne trade increasingly underpinned world prosperity, and that prosperity in turn was the only realistic answer to the sort of local anger which fuels terrorism and other social scourges. The point of the argument was that maintaining good order at sea was obviously a shared goal of so many governments that it could and should be a unifying principle. The other side of this particular coin was that the U.S. Navy alone lacked the necessary means to do so, because it lacked ships in sufficient numbers.
Sometimes the argument is turned around. If our security depends on global prosperity, and if that depends so heavily on the sea lanes, then perhaps the most important role of the U.S. Navy, at least in peacetime, is to defend those sea lanes from incidental attacks. The sea lanes are a form of “commons,” territory no one owns, but all use. If we are the only ones with the firepower to protect the commons, then perhaps that role quite adequately justifies our investment in a large fleet. Other commons are world airspace and world cyberspace, and our connection with the Internet certainly makes us major shareholders in the latter commons.
The idea of the Navy as primarily a public or international utility feels novel, and it seems difficult to justify in the face of serious fiscal problems. That drives anyone interested in “good order” to look back at the golden age of the Royal Navy a little more closely. How did the wise men of yore explain to their masters that the Royal Navy should be designed specifically to protect shipping off the coast of Peru? To attack pirates near the Malacca Strait? Did it build ships specifically for such roles?
The British Learn the Hard Way
The 19th-century commons was protected by cruisers and by gunboats. We know how that golden age ended. Under intense financial pressure, the Royal Navy felt compelled to regroup soon after the turn of the 20th century. It appointed “Radical Jack” Fisher as First Sea Lord (broadly equivalent to the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations). Fisher is best known for having ignited a battleship revolution by building HMS Dreadnought and the first battlecruisers, but at least as important to him was a reorganization in which the mass of small ships abroad—of little fighting value, but important for commons maintenance—were brought home and laid up or scrapped. So what did 19th-century British governments understand, but their successors suddenly not understand?
One thing did not change. Both in the 1880s and about 1910 Britain accounted for the great bulk of world shipping, so it was easy to argue that protecting the commons at sea meant protecting British trade and the economy. U.S.-flag ships are relatively rare, but ships owned by U.S. corporations are not, and as the largest economy in the world, ours is very much dependent on seaborne trade. In theory we are not too far from where the British were during the golden age. Is the main difference that so few Americans realize how important seaborne trade is to us?
One other thing did change between 1880 and 1905 (when Fisher built HMS Dreadnought), and it has kept changing ever since. As naval technology has advanced, the share of a ship’s cost devoted to weapons has increased steadily. Hulls have not become very much more expensive, but warships have, because in order to survive in wartime they have to be a lot more sophisticated than their predecessors. In Fisher’s era the change was reflected in the need for larger and larger capital ships. Just prior to his time there was a building race in large armored cruisers, used to threaten (or protect) trade in wartime. The cost of the high-end ships squeezed out the resources formerly devoted to lower-end ships, those that protected the commons in peacetime.
It is possible to fight a war with relatively few high-end warships, as long as they are so high-end that they survive. It is even possible for a few high-end ships to dominate large areas, as carriers with long-range aircraft do. However, that is a special kind of dominance. The carrier can sink enemy ships, but it cannot, at a distance, carry out the sort of police actions that are involved in protecting the maritime commons in peacetime. Even at the high end of commons protection, the protection of neutral shipping in a war zone, someone must be present to shield the possible targets. Admiral Fisher’s unhappy discovery was that he could not maintain the number of small commons-protecting ships while preparing for war against navies, such as that of Imperial Germany, that had little interest in protecting the commons themselves.
It turned out that the World War I Royal Navy needed numerous small ships for duties such as mine countermeasures and convoy escort. The wartime programs generated a new fleet that in turn gave the Royal Navy another golden age of commons protection. World War II produced further small ships, and some of them were also used for patrol work in places such as the Malacca Strait. But in the end, the problem was not only hulls but also personnel. No matter how many small hulls it retained from various building programs, the Royal Navy could not go on patrolling the world’s oceans. Moreover, by the end of World War II the British government was painfully aware that it had to cut its commitments.
The U.S. Navy took over, but without any explicit understanding that its role was to protect the oceanic commons. Piracy was suppressed because many U.S. warships were active in areas in which pirates had flourished in the past. As the U.S. Navy shrank in numbers—for much the same reason the Royal Navy had shrunk circa 1905—its activities became more focused, and pirates and other seaborne troublemakers found themselves a lot freer to act (pirates also became active in areas, such as the Horn of Africa, which had not previously been major venues for them).
What happens now? The Navy cannot afford to vastly increase its numbers by exchanging the high-end part of the Fleet for numerous low-end ships suited mainly for patrolling the commons. It probably cannot even justify such a course to Congress. The United States does not, after all, have pretensions of being a world government, and does not have an empire that might justify the presence of numerous gunboats for police work. We may find it possible to cut costs a bit by taking initiatives such as adopting unmanned aircraft (and other craft) in numbers, but those will not reshape the Fleet.
To the extent that the United States has a seaborne police force, which might be considered adapted to protecting seaborne trade in the commons in peacetime, it is the U.S. Coast Guard, but that service has limited resources, and it barely suffices for U.S. waters. Even so, the Coast Guard’s recent experience may indicate the shape of future commons protection, if there is any. In the 1990s the Coast Guard began to face the problem of bloc obsolescence. The cost of ships (and personnel) was rising, so it was impossible for the service to maintain its numbers. What could it do, given that so many of its missions required that its vessels be able to come alongside suspect ships and craft (not to mention its rescue functions)?
The service’s solution, embodied in Project Deepwater, was to rethink the way it was carrying out its mission, based on new command-and-control technology. The radical change was to replace patrolling with surveillance, mainly by aircraft (manned and unmanned). Surveillance would make it possible, at least in theory, to choose ships and craft at sea deserving or requiring the direct attention of Coast Guard personnel. Large cutters operating offshore would launch fast boats and helicopters that would provide the personnel and the close attention. Thus the cutters would be more mobile bases than patrol assets in themselves; the patrollers would be the aircraft feeding data to analysis centers.
The change did not receive anything close to adequate public attention, but it seems to point to where commons protection must go. The other side of such protection must be cooperation by local navies, in whose interests it is (hopefully) to share surveillance information and also local information that makes the surveillance data meaningful.
And, yes, anyone who looks at the small British cruisers of the golden age must feel some regret that we have gone so far from them, and that we cannot go back to what they were.