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As the Navy’s focus shifts from sea control to land control—signified by this Tomahawk missile’s 400-mile trip from a submerged submarine to its target—the time is ripe for a global maritime strategy of nonintrusive engagement that straddles the extremes of national isolation and continental commitment.
In the fall of 1992, the U.S. Navy formally unveiled its vision of the role of U.S. sea power in the post- Cold War world. In “ . . . From the Sea,” the service announced “a fundamental shift away from open-ocean warfighting on the sea toward joint operations conducted from the sea” (emphasis in the original).1 With “preeminent control” of the oceanic lines of communications taken for granted, the white paper announced that U.S. naval Power in the next century will be resized, reshaped, and reindoctrinated to concentrate on crisis management and Warfare in the world’s littoral regions.
Sailors naturally have been inclined to focus on the wet Portion of littoral warfare, concentrating on the challenge of operations in coastal and shallow waters. Consequently, the Navy has been preoccupied with mines and diesel-electric submarines. The tendency also has been to minimize “ . .. From the Sea” as little more than a codification of the kinds of regional presence and crisis operations that, regardless of decades of preparations for the “big one” with the Soviet fleet, have constituted the Navy’s bread-and-butter all along. Both tendencies miss the mark. It is important to guard against identifying littoral warfare too closely with coastal or shallow waters. A glance at a map of the world’s oceans quickly disabuses one of the belief that the continental landmasses are
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washed by green water only. Translating “littoral” into “coastal" does not help matters either, because it conveys an image of naval forces projecting their power onto land—and defending themselves against attack from land—within sight of the beach. Littoral naval warfare can be coastal (e.g., an amphibious assault), but it need not be so under all circumstances. To paraphrase ”... From the Sea,” the seaward portion of littoral warfare “expands and contracts and has limits,” depending on the task at hand and, most important, on the reach of enemy land- and sea-based strike systems.2
The core message of “ . . . From the Sea” is not about a naval-strategic shift from deep to shallow water, but from water to land. The Navy’s preoccupation in the foreseeable future will be land control, not sea control. The document portends the most dramatic change in the Navy’s contribution to the nation’s security since the creation of the “New American Navy” one century ago.’ In order to really understand what is different about the “ . . . From the Sea” message, we need to first understand what naval power—especially U.S. naval power—has been about in the past.
Naval Power: The Past
49
The known history of the use of ships for organized fighting on or from the sea is about 2,300 years old. (Helmut Pemsel cites a clash between Hittite and Cypriot fleets in 1210 B.C. as the first recorded sea battle that can be dated.4) Until the end of the 16th century, most of the fighting was done from the sea. Until ships were able to stay at sea for weeks instead of days, fleets were used mainly to transport soldiers across narrow bodies of water. Sometimes, opposing fleets crossed each other’s paths, and a battle might ensue, most often in bays or quiet waters. At times, the results were “decisive” in the sense that one side suffered disproportionate losses. Before the
age of sail, however, fleets rarely sought each other out with the deliberate ulterior aim of deciding which side would have command of the sea.
Admiral Philip Colomb, a contemporary of Alfred Thayer Mahan, pinpointed the emergence of “true naval war” to two 16th-century developments: first, the creation of oceangoing vessels, and second, the rapid expansion of seagoing commerce, rich enough to justify organized attack and therefore in need of systematic protection.
Colomb’s true naval war has dominated the Western practice and theory of naval strategy for the past 400 years. Its essence has been the idea of command of the sea, or, as its modern interpreters prefer to call it, sea control. Countless naval commentators since Colomb have repeated his insistence that, “nothing can be done of consequence in naval war till one side secures the control of the water area.”5 During the heyday of blue-water fighting—from about 1600 to the late 19th century—this unwritten rule propelled fleets to battle. Colomb, Mahan, and Corbett codified the rule in their great navalist writings at the turn of the century. Their body of thought, written in a period of unprecedented technological change in the makeup of navies, also spelled out how fleets achieved command of the sea, i.e., naval strategy.
Yet, it is precisely because of their limited yet balanced capacity for violence that naval forces are tailor- made for a post-Cold War international system that is marked by “the real threat we face ... the threat of the unknown, the uncertain.”
Naval strategy means nothing more than the use of military forces for the purpose of winning—or denying— command of the sea. Winning command is the objective of the side that needs the sea in order to project military power onto the opponent’s soil. The side that merely needs to prevent the projection of hostile power from the sea can be satisfied with a strategy of denial.
In either case, command of the sea, and therefore naval strategy, is solely concerned with control over the use of the sea lines of communications. The
terms naval strategy and maritime strategy are frequently used interchangeably, but they are not the same. The first is the seagoing variant of military strategy and is the business of admirals. The second is a grand and national strategy that is shaped by geostrategic circumstances and that is the choice of statesmen. Conversely, a national grand strategy that is dominated by events on land is labeled a “continental strategy”—which does not preclude the pursuit of a naval strategy. By the same token, a nation may fight a maritime strategy without the need for a naval strategy.
Regardless of whether naval strategy is the handmaiden of a maritime strategy or a continental strategy, its purpose is to contest the control of the sea lines of communications. Particular tasks may include protection against invasion, an amphibious assault, or stopping enemy shipping. No matter how varied the tasks, however, the common denominator of success “must always be directly or indirectly either to secure the command of the sea or to prevent the enemy from securing it.”6 Naval strategy and command of the sea enable a military decision on land.
One of Corbett’s most meaningful but frequently overlooked observations was that a theory of naval strategy
presupposed that command of the sea “is normally in dis pute.”7 Simple as it sounds, the implications of this com mentary are far-reaching. For one, if the first principle ( of naval strategy is about the struggle for control of tft sea lines of communications, it follows that this “should be found giving shape not only to strategy and tactics, also to material, whatever methods and means of naval warfare may be in use at any given time.”8 For anothd if command of the sea is not in dispute, perhaps becau^ one side has lost or won it, or because there is no opp°" nent to contest it, “pure naval strategy comes to an ent (emphasis added).9 The successful fleet does not go ou* of business at this point; it merely ceases to fight a nav strategy, and instead brings its powers directly to betf on the struggle on land.
U.S. Naval Power: The Past
Spurred on by Mahan’s vision of command of the se} as the royal road to naval and national greatness, the U.S Navy discarded coastal defense and commerce raiding to ; embrace “true naval warfare” one century ago. In littM more than two decades, the fleet’s “alphabet of floating jj washtubs” was replaced by a “New American Navy,” second to none.10 Despite its revolutionary significance, the transformation was easy. The U.S. Navy only had to look to the British experience for a ready made body of prim
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50
Proceedings / February
ciples and rules. In addition- members of the officer corp> had long agitated for a fleet if accordance with what Maha® called the “sounder military understanding of a Navy.”11 Ironically, even as the U.S Navy was re-creating itself- new technologies stood poised to revolutionize the familiar command-of-the-sea Strategy- Modern gunnery had made a truly annihilating battle possible for the first time in his' tory, but in World War I, fear of heavy losses, even i" victory, caused the British and the Germans to turn the'r decisive battlefleets into fleets-in-being. The British resorted to the time-honored alternative of a blockade, bu1 the fear of mines and the low station-keeping endurance of coal and oil-fueled warships, forced a “distant” version that never prevented the High Sea Fleet from leaving pod- Even more telling for the future of naval strategy wed the changes wrought by the submarine, which upset the familiar meaning of command of the sea (and therefore of naval strategy) in two ways. For one, traditional methods of securing the sea lines of communications failed to keep the U-boat at bay, signaling the bifurcation of coif' mand of the sea. Thus, even though the British Grand Flee’ managed to deny the German use of the seas, it could n°' ensure the safety of Britain’s own shipping. The British had to create a second, “mystery fleet” of trawled minesweepers, and Grand Fleet castoffs, which fought a struggle very different from the expectations of classic naval strategy. Unlike dreadnoughts, submarines fough1 alone, were difficult to find, and had to be defeated ofe at a time. Moreover, because submarines could be bfH1
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quickly and cheaply, antisubmarine forces could not keep pace with the construction of new submarines, which completely transformed the operations of naval strategy. In the past, naval strategy had been concerned with maneuver and battle, and now it had to encompass campaigns of attrition and exhaustion.
The U.S. Navy formally entered World War I in May 1917 when a handful of its destroyers arrived in Queenstown, Ireland, to combat the U-boats. U.S. Navy officers learned to respect thoroughly the difficulties of antisubmarine warfare, but when the war was over, the near-success of the U-boat tended be underestimated as a unique event that was peculiar to Britain’s extreme dependence on overseas supplies. Most U.S. Navy officers were more concerned with the newer implications of the aircraft for sea warfare.
Few American military men believed that the submarine could have more than an ancillary role in the country’s defense and naval strategy. The aircraft was a different matter. Sailors rejected the air power enthusiasts’ claim that the aircraft had replaced the battleship as the nation’s first line of defense; but the argument alone indicated an emerging awareness that a long chapter in the history of war at sea was about to end. The struggle for command of the sea was no longer the monopoly of grey hulls at sea. Indeed, the ability of land-based aircraft to contest the safety of shipping at sea had opened up the prospect of naval strategy without navies.
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The Navy responded by making the aircraft its own and building aircraft carriers. Naturally, in the way that mili-
An Allied convoy and its escorts steaming steadily toward Sicily during World War II epitomize the command of the sea—or naval—strategy that dominated naval operations in varying degrees until “ ... From the Sea” outlined a new thought process.
tary organizations typically have responded to new-in- principle weapons, the service initially sought to graft the airplane onto the familiar battleship-centered vision of naval strategy. Aircraft were to act as the “eyes” of the battleships in preparation for the decision by gunfire. This auxiliary purpose lasted until Pearl Harbor; at the end of World War II the airplane had become the predominant form of naval force, as it is to this day.
The carrier aviators of World War II had been trained to attack and defend ships at sea. As the war progressed, however, and U.S. naval forces advanced to within reach of Japanese land-based aviation, attacking land targets gained importance. Modem power projection from the sea was born. Ironically, it took the combination of this very un-Mahanian concept and the weapon that only a few years before seemed to have undermined the continued relevance of fleets, to ensure the survival of the U.S. Navy as a modern fighting instrument.
In the years immediately after World War II, the U.S. Navy suffered an identity crisis for geostrategic and technological reasons. Not long after the war, the Soviet Union became the next most likely opponent. Navy planners were at a loss though as to how to use a fleet that had been built and indoctrinated to fight decisive battles, against a country that seemed immune to naval pressure and had no navy to speak of. Navy spokesmen still resorted to the first-line- of-defense argument as the core rationale for a strong fleet, but most Americans were inclined to believe that the Air Force’s “absolute weapon” had inherited this title. The service solved its crisis of purpose by merging power projection, the aircraft carrier, and the atomic bomb in a new strategic concept, redirecting U.S. naval power away from the sea, against the Soviet rimlands. Contrary to popular belief, however, naval atomic power projection did not duplicate the Strategic Air Command’s general air atomic offensive. Most of the Navy’s nuclear strike planning was directed against targets of naval interest, e.g., ports, submarine pens, and shipyards. Thus, even at the height of the era of massive retaliation, when many commentators maintained that navies had outlived their usefulness, the Navy’s air-atomic power projection served sea control first and general targeting second.
The primacy of atomic power projection in what Samuel Huntington called the fleet’s new “transoceanic” strategy, was shortlived.12 By 1950, it became apparent that Soviet submarine capabilities had not advanced as quickly as U.S. Navy planners thought; the Soviets’ submarine fleet of the early 1950s was actually inferior to that of the Germans in World War II. This meant that existing and emerging antisubmarine warfare equipments and techniques were sufficient after all. Nuclear strikes against enemy submarine bases remained a part of the Navy’s overall ASW strategy, but its general tenor betrayed a return to more traditional open-ocean methods, such as hunter-killer groups and escort strategies.
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Proceedings/ February 1994
Another event that contributed to the U.S. Navy refocusing its strategic thinking to warfare on the sea was the emergence of the Soviet Union’s own nuclear capability. As early as 1951, Secretary of State Dean Acheson reminded the Senate that the country’s nuclear superiority could only be a temporary shield to buy time for the United States and its NATO allies to create nonatomic “balanced collective forces.”13 The warning was obvious: If NATO failed to raise a robust conventional posture, the Soviet Union would exploit an eventual nuclear stalemate and overrun the Alliance with the Red Army. The importance of a NATO forward defense with ground forces signaled the importance, in turn, of a naval strategy to en-
U.S. Naval Power: The Future
sure the safe delivery of transatlantic reinforcements and resupplies. As it was doubtful that attacking Soviet submarine bases alone would be enough, U.S. and allied planners reverted to the World War II-style strategy of convoys, escort carriers, and hunter-killer groups.
During the 1960s, a “real” Soviet fleet emerged. This fleet, complete with cruisers and aircraft carriers, sealed the rehabilitation of sea control as U.S. naval power’s central purpose. To be sure, professional preferences varied during the next two decades or so, on how the United States and its allies were to win sea control in a war with the Soviet Union. Defense planners in the 1970s leaned toward an interpretation that would have restricted the fleet’s sea-control task to guarding the Atlantic seabridge. A decade later, the Maritime Strategy emphasized forward operations and offensive carrier strikes.
Planners might have disagreed on how to best secure the seas, but they were of one mind that sea control remained “the fundamental function of the U.S. Navy,” and that power projection, though available to a land campaign on a “collateral” basis, served the ends of sea control first (emphasis in the original).14 “ ... From the Sea” has overturned this maxim.
The publication of the “Maritime Strategy” in 1986 triggered an unprecedented outpouring of naval commentary' By contrast, the volume of ink spilled so far in response to “ . . . From the Sea” is surprisingly small. Some of the language of the Maritime Strategy may have sounded novel, but its substance was quite conventional and in the mainstream of classic blue-water strategic thought. The same hardly can be said of “ . . . From the Sea.” It is unprecedented in that it codifies the decision by a major naval power to relegate preparations to fight for command of the sea to a secondary concern. Navies historically have spent most of their time between major wars “policing” the seas, intervening in minor crises, and conducting presence operations. This was the main business of the U.S. NavJ even at the height of the Cold War It is incorrect, however, to conclude that “ ... From the Sea” merely codifies those activities. The U.S. Navy practiced “force without war” as a collateral preoccupation—it buih ships, trained crews, and organized fleets in preparation for the next big war.15 “ . . . From the Sea” does no1 anticipate a big war at sea in the foreseeable future. The implications of a fleet that does not need to fight for command of the sea, and whose foremost task therefore will be to control events on land, are mut more far-reaching than the Maritime Strategy’s rejection of the “Magino1 Line mentality” of the 1970s.16 So3 control by default means, by definition, the end of naval strategy. The U.S. Navy will still need a strategie framework for linking its capabilities with national mil1' tary goals, but that framework will only be marginally concerned with the naval planner’s old preoccupation with a balanced fleet for the purpose of securing the sea. Thb does not rule out the importance of sea control altogether1 the ability of the fleet to influence events on land remain5 predicated on the ability to keep the littoral sea. Nevertheless, a fleet strategy whose first priority is to influence events on land implies that sea control and power pr°" jection will cohabit in a different relationship than whe'1 oceanic security dominated U.S. naval planning.
Naval power from the sea signifies a 180-degree reversal of the classic relationship between sea control and power projection. With the exception of a brief period after World War II when, without an oceanic challenge^ carrier aviation was oriented to an independent (nuclei] land strike role, power projection has been conceive largely as an adjunct to sea control. The battlespat dominance concept of “ . . . From the Sea” overturn5 this hierarchy. It says, in effect, that the control of the l]t' toral waters matters only for the ability to project poWef onto land.
This new order of priorities has particular significant
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52
Proceedings / February
for amphibious power projection. When command of the sea was the naval commander’s central preoccupation, naval strategy and amphibious strategy coexisted uncomfortably; securing a beachhead might be the fleet’s strategic objective, but it was a conjunct operation nevertheless. As long as security on the sea was the fleet’s first purpose, the requirements of those on the beach took second place to those at sea.
The shift of the center of gravity for naval operations from sea to land will bring a different philosophy: The requirements of amphibious operations will be central to the fleet. The fleet will exist to ensure the success of an expeditionary force first and its own safety second.
Conclusion: Birth of a Maritime Strategy?
For years, the Navy has been criticized for spending too many dollars for so-called defensive purposes; aircraft carriers seemed to be armed mainly for self-protection. The absence of a blue-water opponent opens the door for a much more cost-effective use of sea-based military power. The grand-strategic implication is that the opportunity has been created for a global maritime strategy of nonintrusive engagement that straddles the extremes of national isolation and continental commitment.
Unfortunately, maritime strategy has become identified in the minds of many as a parochial Navy-first claim. The naval strategy of the 1980s by that name has not helped matters; some critics contended that the Maritime Strategy meant the abandonment of alliances and a choice for going-it-alone. Yet, maritime strategy is not a choice for grey hulls and against armies, while rejecting allies. On the contrary, all successful maritime strategies of the past have hinged on coalition partnerships.
Maritime strategy is a grand-strategic opportunity that few nations are fortunate enough to have. The United States is one of them. Two conditions are necessary for a maritime strategy to flourish, and both prevail in the new world order. The first is an insular geography, and the second a “loose” international system without the imminent threat of war between major powers. Insularity does not mean that the country must literally be an island; it means that the nation need not provide for defense against a continental opponent. Two reasons dictated the continental predisposition of U.S. grand strategy during the Cold War. First, the U.S. Navy was expected to have to fight its way across the Atlantic in order to reinforce a beleaguered Europe, tying up most of its power in the struggle for command of the sea; naval power projection could make an indirect contribution at best to the decisive campaign on land. Next, and more important, the credibility of the American security guarantee to NATO demanded a “permanent” commitment of ground forces. Large numbers of U.S. troops were necessary so that the allies did not have to resort to an early use of nuclear weapons, and, at the same time, underscored America’s willingness to go nuclear in extremis.
The second condition acknowledges the limitations of seagoing power against a capable continental opponent, and admits that power from the sea can make a decisive impact only in less than total war. In a tight international system—such as existed on the eve of World Wars 1 and
II, and again during the Cold War—when the global balance of power is at stake, maritime strategy must give way to continental commitment and the decisive role of territory-seizing armies and punishment-inflicting air forces. The U.S. Navy boasts both capabilities—its Marines can seize and occupy territory, and carrier aviation can inflict punishment—but it can do so only in limited measure. Yet, it is precisely because of their limited, yet balanced capacity for violence that naval forces are tailor-made for a post-Cold War international system that is marked by “the real threat we face ... the threat of the unknown, the uncertain.”17
Naval forces alone are not suitable for bringing another Desert Storm-like war to a successful conclusion; they can contribute, but big wars on land are the forte of armies and land-based air forces. The U.S. Navy’s specialty is to secure the nation’s interests in the kinds of recurring crises and hostilities short of major war that are much more likely to characterize the international environment than a repeat of Desert Storm. In “ . . . From the Sea,” the U.S. Navy has laid out a blueprint for a more efficient contribution to America’s regional interests. It is up to the statesman to turn this blueprint into a grand-strategic vision of the way the United States intends to remain globally engaged.
'The full title of the document is . . From the Sea: Preparing the Naval Service for the 21st Century.” Several editions have been published, including one in the November 1992 issue of the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings. All references in this article pertain to the original September 1992 edition.
2Ibid.
\John D. Long, The New American Navy (New York: The Outlook Co., 1903). 4Helmut Pemsel, A History of War at Sea (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1975), p. 11.
5VAdm. P. H. Colomb, RN, Naval Warfare: Its Ruling Principles and Practice Theoretically Treated, 2nd ed. (London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1895), p. 3. ‘Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond, RN, Statesmen and Sea Power (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1946), p. 87.
’Julian S. Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (1911) (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1972), p. 87.
'Ibid., p. 110.
’Ibid., p. 87.
l0Peter D. Karsten, ‘‘The Naval Aristocracy: United States Naval Officers from the 1840’s to the 1920’s—Mahan’s Messmates” (Ph.D. diss.. University of Wisconsin, 1969), p. 340.
"Capt. A. T. Mahan, USN, Naval Strategy: Compared and Contrasted with the Principles of Military Operations on Land (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1911), p. 151.
i:Samuel P. Huntington, “National Policy and the Transoceanic Navy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 1954, p. 484.
13U.S. Congress, Senate Committees on Foreign Relations and Armed Services, Hearings, Assignment of Ground Forces of the United States to Duty in the European Area, 82d Cong., 1st sess., 1951, p. 79.
l4Chief of Naval Operations, U.S. Navy Analysis of Congressional Budget Office Budget Issue Paper: “General Purpose Forces Navy," report prepared for the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, 95th Cong., 1st sess., 1977 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977), pp. 8, 12, 13-14. See also Naval Warfare Publication I (Rev. A.), Strategic Concepts of the U.S. Navy (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, May 1978) pp. 1-3-1, and 1-3-2. 15Barry M. Blechman and Stephen S. Kaplan, Force Without War: U.S. Armed Forces As a Political Instrument (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1978).
“SecNav Graham Claytor, Jr., “Claytor Fires Back: Disputes New Defense Strategy,” Sea Power, April 1978, p. 30.
17Gen. Colin Powell, USA, National Military Strategy of the United States, 1992 ed. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, January 1992), p. 4.
Dr. Breemer is currently Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He served six months in 1992 as a Secretary of the Navy Senior Research Fellow at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He has published a number of books and articles.
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Proceedings / February 1994