The global sea-based trading system is turning us into a single world society, and naval forces such as this U.S. SH-60F Seahawk from the carrier George Washington (CVN-73) are central to that system's defense.
As the Merchant of Venice remarked: "Thou knowest that all my fortunes are at sea." Shakespeare might not have been a maritime strategist, but the words he gave Shylock are as true now as they were then—perhaps more so, given mankind's growing reliance on the resources of the sea and the dependence of international trade on the capacity to move people and goods across its face. On top of this, we have to accept the rise of the perceived importance of the sea as an environment, both for the future enjoyment of its resources and for the physical health, even future, of the planet and all life on it.
The Result: A System Exists
These interests all intersect; the result is a global sea-based system based on the merchant ship and the container. The system essentially is transnational. Typically, a merchant ship is owned by one shifting international conglomeration, insured by another; the cargo is owned by a third; and the crew comes from all over. When it is attacked, it is hard to tell who is being hurt beyond the crew. It may seem curious to expect state-based entities such as individual navies to protect other people's property, especially when it is not easy to tell who those "other" people are.
But this way of looking at the sea-based trading system is not new. Alfred Thayer Mahan himself was aware of it:
This, with the vast increase in rapidity of communication, has multiplied and strengthened the bonds knitting the interests of nations to one another, till the whole now forms an articulated system not only of prodigious size and activity, but of excessive sensitiveness, unequalled in former ages. (1)
Whether we like it or not, this sea-based trading system is turning us into a single world society. We are all stakeholders in its success, but some are more willing and better able to defend that stake against anything that threatens the system. The United States and the Europeans are obvious contenders, but only somewhat less obvious are maritime sea-based trading countries such as India, Singapore, and Japan. It is increasingly clear that, in the words of Singapore's recent defense statement,
We depend on the world economy for a living. We will have to work more actively with others to safeguard peace and stability in the region and beyond, to promote a peaceful environment conducive to socio-economic development. (2)
The same might be said of China. At the moment, its exports amount to some 6% of the world total, but according to some estimates, by 2020 its population will need 900 million tons of grain a year; the most it will be able to produce is some 615 million tons. This gigantic deficit can be met only by trading it in with greatly expanded exports. To survive, China has to trade even more than it does now. Instead of seeing globalization merely as a threat, China is beginning to see it as a safeguard and is talking of assuming more responsibility in its protection, simply because it has to.
Threats to the System
As Mahan also spotted, it is a system under permanent threat. Sometimes the threat is unintended, the accidental effect of local wars and disturbances. Sometimes it is the result of criminals and others seeking to exploit the system for their own benefit. Sometimes, and more insidiously, the threat proceeds from different and hostile value systems, involving wholesale rejection of the assumptions of economic rationality that underpin the system.
Nor should the environmental aspects be forgotten. According to many analysts, global warming could be more of a threat to international stability than international terrorism. Three thousand died in the twin towers; 138,000 in the 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh. The physical health of the ocean is both a cause and a consequence of an incipient environmental crisis. The United Nations declared 1998 the Year of the Ocean to draw attention to the fact that much of the world ocean is in a state of near crisis, environmentally. And marine environmentalists point out that neglect of this will imperil mankind's ability to use the sea in all the other ways just mentioned. If this goes, everything goes.
Sea Power to the Rescue?
Just as the sea is central to the system, so maritime power is to its defense— hence, the growing importance of navies and coast guards. Partly, it is a matter of spreading ideas and values in the ways mariners always have—only in this case the ideas that matter are those that facilitate stable international trade. It is less a matter of encouraging Western-style democracy than of striking equitable balances between God and mammon, liberty and license, and individualism and community. It is unhistorical, politically counterproductive, and, worst of all, quite unnecessary to argue that the West has a monopoly in the civic virtues that stabilize and encourage trade. Nonetheless, by helping provide the conditions in which the world economy can flourish, navies strengthen the trading values that make the system work and that can, in turn, contribute to correction of the world's democratic deficit. (3)
Naval Contributions
If this is their indirect contribution to a stable future, navies have much to offer in three more-direct ways, too:
• Maritime Power Projection. One characteristic of the system is that it has hugely increased the level of economic interdependence and drastically decreased the importance of geographic distance—so that what happens "over there" matters far more to us "here" than it once did. Hence, navies are being required to act together in common cause to project military power ashore, particularly in expeditionary operations at a distance from the home base. Freed in many cases from the requirements of peer competition and the need to fight to make use of the open ocean, navies now can concentrate on exploiting that control. Making use of the vast size and ubiquity of the world ocean and of their own inherent flexibility, navies contribute critically to the military capacity to maneuver at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. But this requires them, to some extent at least, to shift priorities from the sea to the land, from power at sea to power from the sea.
The U.S. Navy's helicopter carrier Peleliu (LHA-5) demonstrated the variety of forms of this in late 2001. In November, with 2,100 Marines on board, she and two other warships took up station off Qatar to help guard a meeting of the World Trade Organization at Doha. Later that month, she was one of the ships that projected U.S. Marines 400 miles inland into southern Afghanistan as part of an international and initially sea-based operation against the Taliban and al Qaeda. Both were clear examples of the way in which cooperative maritime endeavor helps defend a globalized trading system through the projection of power ashore.
Maritime forces have qualities and attributes that make them particularly valuable in the conduct of expeditionary operations. They usually are more flexible and more controllable than their land-based equivalents. They often are more readily available, indeed, first on the spot. They provide a means by which diplomats can slide the intensity of the operation from coerce to compel or deter, to limited conflict and back again. They have increasing reach, and they can sustain operations ashore. They seem to be uniquely useful, in other words, as a means of policing the system.
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Source: Reuters Photo Archive
In November 2001, the U.S. amphibious assault ship Peleliu (LHA-5) demonstrated the variety of power from the sea, taking station qi Qatar to help guard a meeting of the World Trade Organization and later that month loading U.S. Marines for projection into southern Afghanistan as part of the war on terror.
This does not mean they can do all that is required on their own. Their reach tends to be ephemeral when compared to the long-term effect of boots on the ground. There are innumerable types of instability ashore that are better handled ashore, or can be handled only ashore. And there are instabilities that cannot be resolved by military action in the first place. The current Iraq situation amply illustrates both the contribution and the limitations of maritime and military power.
Accordingly, around the world, and perhaps especially in the United States, Europe, and the Far East, navies are being rebalanced into a more expeditionary format, with emphasis on the capacity to project power (both hard and soft) ashore, in distant places, for long periods of time, in common with others.
To do this, they need not just to develop the means to project power ashore in a timely and discriminating way, but also to have sufficient security at sea to do so. They have to cope with the very different challenges of maintaining sea control in the narrow seas and littoral against everything from shore-based aviation, missiles, and artillery, through mines, coastal submarines, and fast attack craft, to swarming attacks from terrorists on jet skis.
Maritime power projection also mandates a thoroughly joint force, which is much more than the sum of its parts. This requires a shift from looking at general input (Are carrier-based aircraft more or less useful than land-based ones?) to specific output (What is the required effect and how might it best be achieved in this case?). This shift toward effects-based operations is both facilitated by and predicated on network-enabled capabilities that challenge traditional naval ways of doing things and some ancient naval expectations about operational independence and freedom of maneuver.
• Dealing with Threats to Good Order at Sea. These threats include terrorism, maritime crime (piracy, drugs, and people smuggling), resource degradation from overexploitation and/or pollution, accidents, the quarrels of competing users (e.g., oilmen versus fishermen versus submariners), and inadvertent involvement in the quarrels of others, such as the 1980s tanker war or jurisdictional disputes such as those in the South China Sea.
These disputes often involve navies acting in defense of national interest, usually as instruments of diplomacy, deterring or cajoling as necessary. Sometimes though, navies may be a means of exerting potentially lethal force against adversaries (the recurrent maritime conflicts of the Koreas in the Yellow Sea, the wary preparations of the navies of China and Taiwan, India and Pakistan). Though navies generally are getting more collective in their responses to challenge, for many, old-fashioned national objectives still are crucial.
In many cases, maritime disorders can be attributed to wider disorders ashore— the crisis in governance in Indonesia increasing piracy rates in local waters, or al Qaeda extending its activities to the sea. The result is a vortex of interconnected threats, such as al Qaeda funding its operations through the drug trade, that need to be considered as a whole.
This calls for defensive and preventative action against smugglers, pirates, snake-heads, polluters, and poachers. Because many of these problems are transnational, local, regional, even global responses rather than just national ones will be necessary. And since many of these threats are in the grey area between civilian and military aspects of sea use, the response also calls for cooperative action by coast guards and navies. Above all, it calls for an all-round oceans policy decided and implemented by properly joined-up governments.
These diversifying maritime threats to the system may well require a shift in emphasis from the military to the civil aspects of sea power. Navies may need to redefine their relationships with coast guard forces, or even produce forces that essentially act as coast guards, which are a crucial component of homeland security as it is now understood.
If the meaning of maritime security is widened like this, and if it is accepted as increasingly important, then all this is likely to have implications for the traditional concept of freedom of navigation. Perhaps sea space will need to be treated more and more like airspace—with merchant ships getting more like airliners, handed from one land-based sea traffic controller to another. The International Ship and Port Facility Code first announced in late 2002 is ushering in a quiet revolution in world shipping and is a major step in this direction. For this and other reasons, the 21st century may prove a very challenging time for navies.
• Diplomacy and Coalition Building. A hidden bonus of this sort of collective action is that it encourages multinational naval cooperation, which in turn makes possible such activities as the current international maritime interception operation in the Gulf and the Proliferation Security Initiative (designed to intercept the trafficking of weapons of mass destruction even on the high seas). The range and number of navies engaged in this kind of collective response to common threats is extraordinary, and likely to grow.
Naval diplomacy in all its forms makes this possible. Through their capacity to make free use of the comparatively unencumbered ocean and being armed with weapons and sensors of increasing range, navies have unique advantages as agents of diplomacy.
They can be a means to compel wrongdoers to do things they would rather not do (such as Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait in 1990) or to deter them from committing such acts in the first place. In the tanker war, Western navies deterred attacks on passing shipping by both the promise of denial (you will not be able to do it) and the threat of punishment (if you try). All this is critically dependent on naval presence and the capacity to build and maintain a picture of what is happening everywhere. Failures in intelligence can be catastrophic in human, political, and operational terms.
Because for the United States, and certainly for everyone else, pressure on budgets, the growing expense of naval weaponry, and the political costs of unilateralism mean there is a growing gal) between maritime assets and their potential commitments, and increasing incentive for navies to operate together against common threats, hence the importance of coalition building and the need for navies to develop ways of working together. There is nothing new about this. Mahan talked about maritime multilateralism at the beginning of the last century and advocated "a community of commercial interests and righteous ideals." But as we move further into the 21st century, the need for collective maritime action in defense of the common sea-based system on which the whole world depends becomes ever more obvious. At one level, this might not seem quite so obvious to some Americans since they know they have a relative level of military and naval power probably unparalleled since the end of the Roman empire. Why, they might ask, do we need to slow down so the posse can keep up—especially when national sensitivities have been outraged by the horrors of 11 September?
Recent events have supplied the answer. The "system" will survive only if most buy into it and contribute to its defense. As Amitai Etzioni has so powerfully argued, national governments and inter-government organizations simply cannot cope with threats such as international terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, transnational crime, environmental degradation, humanitarian disasters, and pandemics of infectious diseases. What is called for, instead, is a World community acting together in defense of common interests. Of course, we need to ensure the interests are sufficiently common for everyone—or at least a majority—to accept them as such. If a majority of the world's population were ever to see globalization as it is portrayed by its critics (raw, unrestrained U.S. economic imperialism trampling everything that is equitable and decent), the system would be rejected by too many as indefensible.
But assuming we are talking about a world system from which everyone is seen to benefit, even if not to the same degree, then navies have a huge role in rallying the defenders. This explains the growing emphasis on maritime coalition-building operations ranging from naval visits and cross-training to top combined procurement, exercises, and, ultimately, operations such as Enduring Freedom. This activity is by no means confined to large navies; small navies do all this, too. This essential naval diplomacy is one of the factors that keeps the posse together and makes it easier for them to interact with the sheriff.
It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this kind of naval activity and of the need to defend it against its twin enemies: On the one hand, mandarins from the Treasury dismiss it as social junketing, cocktail parties on the water, something whose value is impossible to quantify and hard to justify. On the other, steely eyed war fighters regard it as little more than a distraction from the real business of honing their operational preparedness.
Both are wrong to dismiss the advantages of the "soft" security that such activities help provide. It is still too early to see how events in Iraq will play out, but if things eventually do improve in that tortured country, then success will be the result not just of the warfighting professionalism of the U.S., British, and Australian navies but also of their capacity to contribute to the consolidation of victory afterward.
Because this was a quintessentially political conflict, navies acted as instruments of diplomacy at every step. Before the war, the allied sanctions campaign intercepted more than 900 Iraqi dhows and other smuggling craft in 2003 alone, depriving Saddam Hussein of significant illicit revenue. This depended on effective multinational naval cooperation between the U.S., British, Canadian, Australian, French, Japanese, and Polish navies and on a working relationship with local navies, too. (4)
Diplomacy does not stop when the fighting starts, of course. One incentive for the early amphibious operation against the Al-Faw Peninsula, for example, was to get humanitarian supplies into Umm Qasr as soon as possible. For this reason, minesweeping of that port's approaches became not merely an enabler of maritime operations, but almost their whole point, given the overwhelming need to fight the war politically and to win over world opinion. In the same way, low-level and scarcely remarked allied efforts to reconstitute the Iraqi River Patrol and Iraqi Coastal Defense force are an essential part of winning the peace. And so are the continuing antismuggling and antiterrorist patrols in the Gulf and elsewhere. But all this can hope to work only if the naval forces responsible for carrying it out are used to operating with the locals and with allies from further afield.
Changes and Challenges
There can be little doubt that maritime power is transforming away from its historic fixation on peer competition and that, because of this, the sea and the forces that operate on it are going to be critical for the future development of the new world order. At the same time, these changes and challenges suggest that sailors around the world are having to do some hard thinking about how they cope and the extent to which they need to reconsider some long-standing assumptions. Shylock may have been exaggerating, but there is still a lot in what he said.
- Alfred Thayer Mahan, Retrospect and Prospect (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, 1902), p. 144.
- Defending Singapore in the 21st Century, Ministry of Defence, Singapore, 2000, p. 35.
- Amitai Etzioni, From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations (New York: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 13-41, for an interesting discussion of these ideas. For a maritime take, see Peter Padfield, Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the Western Mind (Woodstock and New York: Overlook Press, 1999), pp. 1-5.
- "British Warship Puts the Squeeze on Iraq," The Guardian, 21 December 2003; "U.S. Warships Pinching Persian Gulf Drugs Trade," San Diego Union Tribune, 9 February 2004.
Mr. Till is Dean of Academic Studies at the British Staff College and has written/edited some 15 books on maritime strategy.