Second Honorable Mention Colin L. Powell Jointwarfighting Essay Contest
In today's world, there are no navies. This might seem an overdramatic statement. There is, in fact, a navy. The U.S. Navy is now the only, and possibly the last, global navy. In effect, it has become the world's navy.
There are other national naval forces. The British Royal Navy and the French Navy can sustain out-of-area deployments of a battle group equivalent. Canadian, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and Australian ships frequently conduct forward deployments, though often as adjuncts to U.S. fleet operations. Other national naval forces operate on a regional basis with the U.S. fleet. Japan has an increasingly more powerful naval force built around U.S. naval technology, although technically it is not a navy. Russia retains the hope of a navy, and China the dream of one.
But most nations neither desire nor can afford an oceangoing navy. This is a reflection of resource capabilities and the result of the Cold War victory. It provides a tremendous advantage to the security and prosperity of the United States—but it also threatens the current paradigm of jointness.
In addition, it raises a host of difficult questions. If there is but one navy, does naval warfare—traditionally defined—still exist? Have maritime operations become just a spoke in the purple umbrella of joint military operations, without their own logic and grammar? If decisive war at sea between opposing fleets is implausible, of what actual use is a navy? In the contemporary world of globalization, instant communications, and weapons of mass destruction proliferation, is there any point to discussing naval strategy at all?
To answer these questions requires a sort of deconstructionist approach. First, we must examine exactly what is a navy. Then we must look at the relationship of armies and navies in the 21st century, a period defined by the phenomenon called globalization. If, in fact, we are in a "strategic pause" that allows us the time to transform our military to face radically different future threats, then the first step is to take a radically new look at what armies and navies are designed to do. For the U.S. Navy, the conclusion is that its role no longer is tied to the physical ocean, but now lies "beyond the sea." And because it lies beyond the sea, it no longer can be defined in terms of current concepts of jointness.
What Is a Navy?
The answer to this question cuts on the difference between a navy as an officially defined organization and naval operations as a military function. From the narrow perspective of organization, the obvious but only partially correct answer is that a navy is a military force that operates primarily at sea.
From this point of view, it easy to categorize naval warfare as one corner of overall joint military operations: the army fights on land, the air force fights in the air, and the navy fights at sea. Even this simplistic formula is made more complex by the fact that U.S. naval forces also include the U.S. Marine Corps, as well as sea-based strike aviation and a host of other land-oriented functions. Yet, it is comforting for a joint planner to be able to divide the battlefield into such equal pieces. It is an image in sync with the reigning ideology of the Department of Defense: jointness defined as the relative equivalence of all missions and services.
But there is a significant difference between the functioning of navies and that of land-based military forces. Naval forces are designed primarily and uniquely to control the flow of contact through the dominant mediums of human interaction and exchange, rather than directly to control territory or areas of human habitation. In short, armies are designed to control territory; navies are designed to control access.
Fighting in a multiplicity of mediums—undersea, on the surface of the sea, in the air, the littorals, space, and the infosphere—navies contest for control of interactions rather than populations. The classical naval struggle for sea control is for dominance of oceans—not all of them wet—which are mediums that humans use but cannot permanently inhabit. Once dominated, these oceans can provide access to the areas where humans live as well as control of the links between these areas and the rest of the globe.
The difference between this concept and the organizational view is more than semantics. To occupy territory requires one to close with the enemy, defeat him, and garrison his state. Controlling access, however, involves cutting off the enemy state from the world. The fruits of being a nation-state—formalized trade relationships, interactions with other ideas and cultures, even the motivation for nationalism itself—cannot exist without interaction with the rest of the international system. These interactions require access to the fluid mediums of communications and exchange. Such access can be checked by physical blockades, interdiction, actual combat, or cyberwar or intimidated by nearby military presence.
Because of the earth's geography and the less-physical restraints of common international law, all of these things are most easily done by military forces (actually naval forces) located within those fluid mediums of exchange. To cut off access does not necessarily require closing with the enemy or occupying his territory—at least not for a sea power nation. The 17th-century political philosopher Sir Francis Bacon got it right when he said that a sea power could "take as much or as little of war as it desires."
Of course, a state of access denial in which the machinations of an aggressor are merely blocked does not appear to lead to long-term peace any more than occupation. A timely illustration is the brooding presence of Saddam Hussein, apparently unconverted by sanctions or periodic air strikes. However, this can be countered by the one huge example of an access denial strategy that worked: the containment of the Soviet Union.
A navy is that portion of military forces that operates in the mediums humans use for communications, transportation, and exchange but cannot normally inhabit. Its prime purpose is to ensure or deny access. Its effect on territories and population generally is indirect; however, technology and the freedom of operation permitted in the international commons of the ocean provide for an ever-increasing reach into the littoral regions.
Under this deconstructionist definition, organizations wearing other uniforms but operating within the mediums of communications and exchange can be seen as naval in function or tone. For example, the U.S. Air Force—in its role of strategic bombing and long-range strike-operates essentially as a navy. It uses a fluid medium in which humans normally cannot survive to deny aggressors access to political goals. This is the heart of effects-based operations, even if it usually is not described in that fashion. In its interdiction and close air support roles, however, the U.S. Air Force functions like the long-range artillery of a traditional army.
This deconstructionist view of armies and navies contradicts organizational definitions and challenges some of the current jointness dogma. If armies and navies perform different functions—territory control and access control—that overlap only at the margins, can there be a joint concept of operations that integrates both equally? Or does the search for absolute jointness simply obscure the dynamic balance between territory and access control that the U.S. military had mastered during the Cold War?
Why No Other Navies?
Let's go back to the opening statement, there are no navies, and ask why.
We are defining navies as oceangoing fleets capable of sustained out-of-area power projection operations. In accordance with this approach, they also could be defined in terms of air forces capable of conducting sustained intercontinental strike or transport. As noted, most nations have given up maintaining fleets capable of sustained operations in distant regions. Similarly, intercontinental strike/bomber forces also have been reduced.
An obvious reason for the demise of navies is economics. Navies require tremendous resources to operate effectively in the fluid mediums. The main costs are maintaining the logistic capabilities required by a long-range power projection fleet, and the technology to make such a fleet combat credible. Most nations simply cannot or do not want to afford either. But perhaps even more important is the general lack of a naval threat, and hence the lack of motivation to afford an oceangoing navy. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fact that the United States intended to keep a superpower-sized navy, there seemed little reason for most nations to maintain an oceangoing navy at all.
The result is that the U.S. Navy can be considered a globalized as well as a global navy. In essence, it no longer is solely the United States' navy; it has become the world's navy—delivering the security of access function across the entire world system. When Asian tiger economies, such as that of Taiwan, are shaken by the bellicose posturing of a neighbor, it is the movement of U.S. naval forces into the region of potential crisis that provides the prime means of psychological restabilization? Under the concept of Air Expeditionary Forces, the U.S. Air Force has moved to adopt a similar role.
In addition, with the exception of the "states formerly known as rogues" and the Chinese Communist Party, no one seems to expect any harm from the U.S. Navy. Japan, which is potentially the United States' number one economic rival, even allows the U.S. Navy to homeport both a carrier battle group and an amphibious ready group in its port cities—and pays for the infrastructure to do so. Russia, with a military still vaguely suspicious of the West, has conducted post-Cold War exercises with NATO (and U.S.) naval forces. The U.S. Navy is welcomed in ports around the globe, and the forward presence of U.S. warships is accepted—if not advocated—by most nations as a sound policy for maintaining regional security. This, again, dissuades most states from making considerable investment in navies.'
Extending the Effects of Access Control
Navies and armies overlap on the margins. For the U.S. Navy, this margin is growing ever wider as the reach of U.S. naval forces keeps extending over land.
The most recent evidence of this growth is the use of sea-based cruise missiles to attack and neutralize sites connected with terrorism and with the development of weapons of mass destruction. The 1998 Tomahawk strike against Bin Laden's terrorism network headquarters in Afghanistan appears the first use of naval power as the sole means of striking targets in a land-locked country. Metaphorically, this represents the projection of power from the margins of the maritime world—described as "rimlands" in earlier geopolitical theory—into the very heartland of global terrorism. Heartlands previously were the exclusive province of armies.
These developments are the tip of the iceberg of the ever-increasing ability of forces "from the sea" to direct their effect-producing efforts and energies onto land. They do not yet represent a replacement of an army's capability to occupy territory. However, this extension of access control and denial is made possible by the intertwining of three threads: an evolution in naval technology that extends the reach of naval forces, a revolution in naval affairs in which the U.S. Navy became the world's navy, and globalization.
Access as the Key to Globalization
If globalization is a "process of expansion of cross-border networks and flows," then naval forces, broadly defined, are both potential protectors and potential inhibitors of such expansion. The language of sea power—with its concern for sea lines of communications, blockades, fleets-in-being, and naval presence—may seem like a quaint legacy dialogue to those schooled in information technology and e-commerce. But though it may not use the same grammar, it uses the same logic.
The traditional goal of sea power is unfettered access to the world's common transportation routes for raw materials and manufactured products, as well as access to the actual markets and sources of materials themselves. The emerging concept of the new economy revolves around access to the world's common electronic information routes—such as the Internet—and the sources of information, as well as the potential markets for value added to the information. Like every other such shaping process, globalization, at its heart, involves a struggle for economic and political power—a struggle for access to the fruits of the process.
This struggle includes access to the infosphere, to financial markets, to raw materials (of which information is one), to the means of production, and to the market population. And just as a hacker can use information warfare to delay, disrupt, distort, or deny access to the infosphere, more traditional military forces—and primarily those that operate from within the mediums of interaction—can deny access to the sources of the production of wealth. The maintenance of a force that can operate from within the mediums, i.e., a navy, is a form of insurance that such physical access could not be cut by other military force, at least not without a war. And navies also are the means of denying access to opponents or rivals.
If globalization is breaking down the territorial barriers of our world—which is what most of proponents of globalization suggest—then access to information, markets, or resources is becoming even more important to the world's political economy than control of territory, no matter how fertile or resource-filled, or control of populations, no matter how productive. This would suggest that navies are becoming more important as well. But, as was stated in the beginning, there is only one navy.
Toward a Redefinition of Jointness
Benefiting from continuing evolutions in naval technology, the U.S. Navy—as the dominant world's navy—indeed has shifted its strategic vision to using its control over access to affect events on land directly. Such a shift is made possible by the elimination of any serious challenge to U.S. sea (and air) control. This allows the U.S. Navy to focus "beyond the sea," which is a natural development because the functional definition of naval power is to be the military instrument within the fluid mediums of interaction and exchange. As these fluid mediums expand to include space and cyberspace, it is natural to use naval forces (no matter what uniform they wear) to control access.
So what does this mean for jointness?
The focus beyond the sea carries with it a shrinking of the gap between armies and navies and the potential subsuming of land power into a broader conception of sea power. This blend is made salient by the fact that in a globalized world, the United States might no longer need to control an opponent's territory to achieve its strategic effects. Thinkers within the U.S. Air Force have made similar arguments, but they have spoken solely in terms of air-centric precision strike, rather than in terms of multiple-fluid medium access control. Such a blend between land and sea (and air) power concepts would have undeniable effects on the way future joint and naval strategy are perceived. It could lead to an end to joint strategy, as currently practiced, as well as to the end of naval strategy.' In fact, these effects could lead to ultimate jointness, as the United States adapts its military to best use its unique advantages of access control in a globalizing world.
In the contemporary world there are no navies. That does not mean they might not be re-created in the future. There may even be some return to naval strategy as it is traditionally conceived: strategy for military forces fighting at sea. But in having to develop a naval strategy for an era without navies, the U.S. Navy is poised to take naval power beyond the constraints of time and tide and apply it, not merely from the sea, but truly beyond the sea. If it is willing to take this step, the Department of Defense may find itself in a new era of redefined jointness.