In his endless searchings after peace during the past three years, the average American may well consider himself able to count all his blessings on the fingers of one hand. If he does so at all, it is fairly certain that among the first he numbers is the fortuitous circumstance that has placed his country some three thousand miles away from its nearest possible major enemy. Even in these days of supersonic planes and missiles, it is still a matter of 3,300 miles from Gibraltar to Norfolk, 3,500 miles from Berlin to New York, 4,300 miles from Yokohama to Seattle, and in no way are the distances separating these points to become any less. Spatially, the Atlantic Ocean will still be as wide in 1960 as it was in 1900.
As a good many blessings are likely to be, this is of course not a wholly unmixed one. Writing in the Proceedings of April, 1947, Lt. William H. Hessler took some pains to point out that while the United States was “ . . . the only major power in the world all of whose possible major enemies are at least an ocean’s breadth away,” it was also “ . . . the only major power all of whose probable major allies are cut off by oceanic space.” These lines were written in support of the general thesis that the United States is of the great states of the world the only remaining truly insular power, and from that premise a further important conclusion can be drawn: namely, that we are utterly dependent upon sea transport for certain vital materials which are not found upon this continent in sufficient quantities to support our industrial economy. Chrome, manganese, cobalt, tungsten, bauxite, and copper are six items of a list of 110 whose importance is emphasized by the descriptive terms “strategic and critical.” In many of them our endurance upon present stockpiles is measured in months or even weeks. Some are the sine qua non of whole industries. Without manganese, not a single ton of commercially acceptable steel could be manufactured in this country. Bauxite has an identical meaning to the airframe industry.
It is not alone in our external relationships with other nations that geography bears importantly upon our security. There is perhaps nowhere an anomaly so gross that the almost incredible pattern of political and geologic accidents which presented us with the sinews of a great nation have now in the Atomic Age become the source of our greatest concern. We have become accustomed with a supercilious pride to point to New York as the “biggest city in the world”; we now note soberly that almost eight million souls are jammed into its 321 square miles, that its port handles a fourth of this country’s ocean-borne commerce, and that the value of its manufactures exceeds those of Detroit, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland combined. Economists, industrialists, and bankers used to philosophize mellowly over the monumental stroke of luck which placed billions of tons of iron ore at one end of the Great Lakes chain and still more billions of tons of coal at the other. Today men in both industry and government work honestly and intensely over the fact that here in the smudgy valleys of the Pittsburgh-Youngs- town area is concentrated 40 per cent of the nation’s basic steel making capacity, and that last year every ton of iron ore which moved out of the Messabi had to pass through the needle’s-eye of the Soo Canal, whose fragile locks could be put out of commission with dynamite or black gunpowder, if need be. Nor do their worries stop here. No less than twenty through railroad lines run into and out of Chicago, making it a nexus of commerce second in importance only to New York. In Detroit—and nowhere else—there are half a million people, complete with shops and tools, who know how to make automobiles or their component parts. People compelled to think in terms of national security understand perfectly well that certain industries have become identified with particular areas out of economic, not strategical, reasons, and that by and large they are destined to remain so. Aside from a few inconsequential changes there is nothing to suggest that the industrial complex of our Northeast will be of any less importance to our economy twenty years from now than it is at this moment.
The nature of our economy being what it is, certain important reservations upon our use of the term “self-sufficiency” appear to be in order. Examined against the backdrop of disaster conditions, it would appear that American self-sufficiency, even when applied to items which we are able to export in considerable abundance, is a pompous myth. Section by section and area by area we are, in fact, hardly self-sufficient in anything. Let the railroad lines be cut at Chicago and St. Louis, and the East would be reduced to starvation rations within weeks. Blast New York, and the whole of New England would wither like fruit on a blighted tree. Destroy the mills at Youngstown, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, and we would perish as a nation. In our characteristic drive toward specialization we have created an economy so intricately balanced and geographically particularized that few if any of its parts are capable of maintaining themselves without the full assistance of all the others. We are not, nor is it our wish to be, a nation of agrarian peasants, each family unit of which is almost entirely self-sufficient—albeit in a state of utter wretchedness—into itself. We are the orderly assembly of a vast number of interdependent producing components, but it is well to recognize the peculiar emphasis which our way of life has placed upon the shape of our requirements for security.
Of further significance to our security policy is the special problem created by the location, within the narrow band of territory extending inward for one hundred miles from our frontiers, of all but four of our fifteen largest cities, which number within their crowded confines some twenty millions of people. Of these frontiers some six thousand miles look upon the sea. Almost by design, it appears, we have succeeded in placing almost all our prime strategic targets in the most vulnerable possible position for attack by enemy aircraft or submarine. Such at the moment is the nature of our “peril of the periphery.”
These then are the immutable factors which our geography and the peculiarities of our industrial civilization have thrown into the balance of our military commitments: We are separated from friend and foe alike by a vast expanse of blue water; we are half way across the globe from the sources of some of our most vital materials; we must reckon with the possibility of attack both by sea and by air, and we have so disposed our targets to favor that attack rather than the defense against it. Where our security demands that we diversify and disperse, our economy has demanded that we concentrate and specialize, as indeed we have done, to the point where the destruction of any important segment of our industrial complex raises the question not merely of our defeat but of our survival.
There are other factors in the balance. Bearing directly upon our geographical complexities and our position in the world is the alarming tendency toward the absolute exhibited in the development of offensive weapons over the past thirty years—a circumstance by the way which appears to bear more than a coincidental relationship to the collapse of political morality into totalitarianism during the same period. Throughout the welter of speculation about the properties of the atomic bomb and the untried but undeniably potent biological and chemical agents, this much at least emerges with disturbing clarity: these destructive weapons, combined with the offensive capabilities of the long range bomber and the submarine in the hands of a powerful and resolute enemy, comprise the first threat to the integrity of our soil in one hundred and thirty-five years. It is by all odds the most grave.
Such a threat is heightened by the fact that the capabilities of offensive weapons have approached the absolute at a vastly more rapid pace than have the capabilities of the measures taken against them, a trend which was clearly visible five years before the advent of the atomic bomb. In the air war between England and Germany from 1940 to 1945, some bombers on each side always “got through” despite the best and most determined efforts of the defense, and both belligerents suffered horribly as a result. Though history records the German air offensive against Britain in 1940 as a strategic failure, it is also forced to record that some 36,000 tons of explosives fell upon that unfortunate country, of which 7,500 tons were deposited upon London alone.
In the light of what we now know about weapon capabilities, the reasons for the failure of the German attack appear to stem from the limitations of the bombs used and not particularly from the limitations of the vehicles that carried them. The outcome of that campaign seems now to have been determined less by the gallant efforts of the Royal Air Force than by the fact that at that time there still existed a tolerable relationship between the destructive capabilities of the Germans’ bombs and the capacity of their targets to absorb punishment. What we can project in the way of such a relationship between cities and present-day mass destruction weapons is not encouraging to those who must think in terms of their defense.
This tendency toward the absolute in offensive weapons has progressed to the point where degrees of effectiveness have ceased to be reliable as a measure of relative value. A bomb of the Hiroshima type in the possession of one belligerent is capable of so much destruction that there appears little advantage to another belligerent to own one twice as powerful. The measure of value in such a case becomes quantitative rather than qualitative, and even that criterion operates only to the point where each belligerent possesses a stockpile adequate to liquidate the power of potentials of all its prospective enemies. Beyond such a point, factors other than those attaching to the weapons themselves must be relied upon to provide the margin of security.
It necessarily follows that absolute security in the face of near-absolute weapons which demonstrably can be delivered in appreciable quantities is altogether an impossibility. To be quite accurate, our national security has never been more than a matter of degree, and it is now popular to speak of our security as being “relative,” which is an eminently correct, if trite, way of describing it. Here again, however, the utmost caution should govern our interpretation of a word. If by the term “relative” we imply a relationship that exists between the present state of our security and what it might or ideally should be, we place ourselves in great peril, for we thereby establish a false, if not impossible, objective. If, however, by “relative security” we intend a measured—and favorable—relationship between the degree of our own security and that of our prospective enemies, we are not only dealing in realities but we are taking the strongest possible action toward establishing a balance of power which holds within it the promise of peace.
Such a discussion of what our security is and what it is not, in the light of contemporary strategic concepts, leads directly into some almost ready-made conclusions:
a. We must recognize that with our intricately balanced, highly technical, intensely specialized economy we are defense-wise at a marked disadvantage in any contest involving an exchange of mass-destruction weapons with an enemy who does not happen to be so constituted.
b. The degree of effectiveness in offensive weapons which has already been achieved warns us against the false security of basing our military policy solely or even principally upon our superiority of weapons—or even more dangerous—the employment of a particular weapon, to the exclusion of other important considerations.
c. We can entertain no hope for absolute security. What hope there remains for a reasonable degree of security appears to be related to the degree of insecurity we are able to create for those who would attack us. We gain in real security only as we improve the measure of our own security over that of our prospective enemies.
It must occur at some stage in this development to ask ourselves just what, indeed, must we do to be saved. Since we as a people have given a good account of ourselves over the past three hundred years, at times against discouraging odds, the answer is patently not to throw up our hands, as some of our more faint-hearted citizens are doing, and insist that there is no answer to our problems, or that we must supinely concede ourselves into an estate worse than utter annihilation. Nor can we permit ourselves the unconscionable folly of a preventive war of conquest against our prospective enemies, which we could never afford morally even if it lay within our means to do so physically. We are, at least for the time being, cut off from the use of such devices as agreement and compromise by the circumstance that the only threat to our security, both within and without, stems from a godless order of fanatics who are by every drop of their blood and every last element of their philosophy dedicated to our destruction. Whatever the ultimate form taken by world peace, it is clear that for the time being the only expedient which holds any promise at all is the weight of our own political, economic, and military power in the balance of world affairs. Knowing this, American taxpayers are able to draw some comfort from the thought that the objectives of peace and security at least lie at the end of the same road. Peace for the moment being maintained in a climate of reprisal rather than of rapport, thinking people need no longer ponder the issue that the measures taken in the interest of security may conflict with, or at least not support, the measures taken in the interest of peace. At this particular moment in history they are identical.
The problems of maintaining a de facto peace through power are, like those of security, rooted in geography and differ profoundly in the demands they make upon the policies of individual states. It is important, certainly to the nationals of a state, to see clearly what those demands are and to establish them correctly within the frame of reference of their geographical position. There seems to persist in American thinking, for example, the hazy and untrue notion that we in North America, for the intents and purposes of war-making, are geographically surrounded by the Eurasian land mass. And so we are, it would appear, but for the fact that it is we—not our prospective enemies— who control the oceans interposed between.
As the first preliminary toward an appreciation of what our capabilities are, it becomes necessary for Americans in all walks of life to discard the sophistry that we are surrounded by the Old World and begin to think in terms of the reality that it is we who surround it. We must learn to regard as our proper zone of security a huge segment of the earth’s surface which extends from the Baltic and Mediterranean to the China Seas in an unbroken sweep, which is our concern principally by virtue of the control we are able to exercise over its sea reaches. The reasons which require this understanding of our outlook upon the world are of the most compelling nature, foremost of which being that in so doing we change the whole complex of our security policy from one of defense and response to one of offense and initiative.
The basis for this fundamental transition from a concept of strategic defense to one of strategic offense rests naturally and quite soundly upon the employment of our forte, sea power, to avail ourselves of the advantage inherent in our peculiar geographical position. By our possession of sea power we shall always, as long as we possess it, be able to place and maintain our attacking forces some three to five thousand miles closer to their objectives in an enemy’s territory than the enemy can place his attack forces in relation to their objectives in our territory. This reality is fundamental and is affected not at all by the character of the forces involved, be they land armies, groups of strategic bombers, or batteries of guided missile launching devices. The advantage is ours as long as we keep the seas.
The military import of such an advantage is enormous. It enables us to make war upon an enemy’s submarines in their own harbors and in the narrow waters through which they must pass in their transit to and from the open seas rather than assume the almost insuperable burden of hunting them down all over the globe. It multiplies the number of strategic bombers and the weight of their deadly payload which we can maintain on strike missions over enemy territory by the simple expedient of halving the distance they are required to fly in order to reach their objectives. We are spared the intolerable expense of maintaining a huge land army at home for no other purpose than to repel an invasion of our shores. We are permitted the tactical luxury of having fighter squadrons which may be employed with complete flexibility for either offensive or defensive operations. Based upon the edges of our new frontier they may be used to provide cover for our strategic bombers or as interceptors against the aircraft of an enemy. Our amphibious troops, in readiness to attack from very short range against a dozen targets, exert an influence shockingly out of any proportion to their numerical strength. Our vulnerable coastal cities, instead of being on the unprotected fringes of our zone of security may, under its new definition, be considered as lying rather close to its center, protected by the gigantic cushion of space between them and our outer defenses.
Of vastly greater importance than the simple military advantage which thus accrues to us is the corollary proposition that as the initiative passes to us it passes out of the hands of those who would do us harm. Those hostile to us are thus required to set their objectives, do their planning, and employ their forces according to the limitations set upon them by the strategic defense. And global wars of aggression are not begun by powers on the strategic defense. War, it is now quite clear, was never close upon Europe until Germany had achieved parity in ground and air strength with England and France; it became inevitable once she attained the degree of superiority which gave her the strategic initiative. It would serve us well to observe what we have so recently learned at so great a price: that he who would keep the peace must keep the initiative.
The responsibilities which devolve upon us in support of any such general concept as the one outlined are heavy. We have to do a great deal with comparatively little. The factor of military posture assumes an importance which in our half-hearted preparedness programs of the past we never attached to it. The size of our military establishment, while important, will be much less a consideration than its state of readiness, which is the principal index of our strength in being, something altogether apart from the nebulous factor of potential strength.
The precise manner in which our military posture is destined to be maintained over the coming years is not subject to reliable analysis, nor indeed can it be successfully predicted from one month to the next. There are, however, certain important considerations which will endure as the very foundation stones of any national security policy we may adopt: Allies, Advanced Bases, and Naval Forces,
a. Allies: One of the less spectacular, but singularly important by-products of our tragic disillusionment following the end of hostilities in 1945 was the decision of the American people to go on seeking after peace instead of lapsing into the state which characterized our political behavior of the ’Twenties. After three years of doggedly pursuing an objective which never seemed quite so far away as it does at this moment, we are more than ever determined to will our way to an honorable peace. We seem at last to recognize that we are a world power and that we intend to stay that way.
From its inception the Marshall Plan was accorded immediate and almost unanimous approval in principle by our people, the only points of difference being the matter of how many billions were needed and the administrative provisions which would insure that the maximum benefit was derived from the funds committed. We now talk openly and sincerely about alliances, both military and political, in a manner which would have shocked and stunned us twenty years ago. Possessing no acceptable alternative, we plainly intend to play the game of power politics for all it is worth.
Our immediate principal objective in this respect is of course the rehabilitation of the power center of Western Europe, including Great Britain. It is no easy job. We have already expended close to six billion dollars and face the prospect of expending similar amounts each year at least until 1952. Aware that in so doing we are increasing substantially our risk of inflation, we unhesitatingly continue to shovel huge quantities of almost every conceivable commodity into Europe’s rickety industrial machine. Without knowing precisely whether all our dollars and goods are enough to save Europe’s moribund economy and her exhausted people but knowing only too well what we face as an alternative, we intend to go on giving them every assistance we are capable of rendering.
It is apparent from the nature of our investment in Western Europe that, while we do not yet have a definitive political alliance as such with these countries, we most certainly have an economic one, and it is fairly certain that any lengthening of the shadow of aggression across Europe would bring us face to face with the prospect of actual mutual assistance agreements.
A staunch ally is a priceless asset. It would have been demonstrably impossible for us to have won the last two wars without allies, and there is nothing about our current position which suggests that allies would figure any less importantly in our future plans than they have in the past. Such allies are not without cost, however. They must be fed and they must be armed, and in committing ourselves to such a program we must reckon with the extent to which, under unfavorable conditions, we may find ourselves obligated in terms of men, ships, and material. In 1943 we shipped to England and Russia alone a total of twenty-four million tons of goods under Lend Lease billings. It required the continuous employment of six hundred ships, each capable of carrying twice the daily tonnage now being airlifted into Berlin. Our total overseas lift of goods that year, not including military shipments to our own armed forces, amounted to 96 millions of tons, and we strained our merchant shipping pool to the limit to accomplish that movement.
The Englishman does not refer to the commercial sea lanes which converge upon Bristol and Liverpool by such a term. He simply calls them “the lifeline,” and in every sense of the word he means exactly that. What Americans never fully understood in the last war and what we must learn to appreciate in any future one is that it is our lifeline and that as our allies stand or fall by it, so also must we. Had the Battle of the Atlantic gone against us in 1943 and England fallen as its inevitable result, we should have lost the war, or—using a more narrowly phrased equivalent—lost all chance of ever winning it. The degree of our control of the seas is the factor which determines whether we and our allies are to be separated or joined; whether we fight as isolated, partially effective units or as a team whose total power equivalent is immensely greater than the sum of that of its components. History waited upon this precarious issue in two past wars; it may well do so in a future one.
b. Advanced Bases: It is apparent in the cold-blooded business of applied power that we are bound to regard as effective only those allies whose strategic location or whose contributions in manpower and material are of sufficient importance to be a factor in the application of that power. There are, moreover, certain areas whose control is demanded by our security policy and which do not happen to coincide, either geographically or politically, with territory controlled by our allies. Thus the necessity for a worldwide system of bases arises quite naturally as a complementary problem to the matter of our alliances in almost the same manner by which it presented itself to the British some three hundred years ago, subsequently described in Mahan’s closely-reasoned papers on sea power at the turn of our own century. The dramatic way in which it impinged upon our national consciousness in World War II suggests nothing more than our own previous failure to recognize the obvious.
The fact that the Navy alone spent over two billions of dollars in the construction of over four hundred advanced bases during World War II furnishes some clue to the importance they assumed in that conflict. Our strategy in the Pacific was regulated by the strength of the forces which we were able to support at a given time either directly or indirectly through our system of advanced bases. Our landfall on victory was made in that theatre when the Marianas passed into our hands, for then it became possible to apply our power directly to Japan herself. To be sure, the denouement was to continue for another year while the Japanese helplessly watched the garroting of their lifeline to the remainder of their ill-gotten empire and the extirpation of their garrisons in the Philippines and Okinawa. The end came inescapably when Japan, her cities bludgeoned incessantly by both land and carrier-based air, her shores open to invasion by a seaborne army of overwhelming strength, and the agonized remnants of her fleet dying wretchedly in their own harbors, decided she had had enough.
The employment of the advanced base as a fulcrum for applying the physical power of our armed forces against an enemy is due to endure as one of the basic elements of our military policy. It is worth noting also that the more closely the fulcrum—or base—can be placed to the objective, the more power we can bring to bear upon it, and the more effectively we can employ our resources, for bases so situated can be used either as springboards for attack or as bastions of defense.
The effectiveness of a system of advanced bases—except in the relatively few cases where their support by sea is not a factor— is, like a system of alliances, dependent upon sea power. Bases can be strong points or traps, depending entirely upon the state of their communications with the homeland and with each other. Where those communications are interdicted, as in the case of the Japanese outposts in the Marshalls and the Carolines in the Pacific War, the bases themselves lose every reason for their existence.
Where they are supported and protected they present a matchless device for the projection of force into areas which would otherwise be denied it.
c. Naval Forces: The most important limitations upon advanced bases stem from their immense cost and their immobility. It is, after all, the target which determines the location of the base, not vice versa, and along the enormous perimeter of the Old World there are, as could be expected, certain areas whose control is not one whit the less important because of our inability to reach them either through allies or bases. They appear as great, yawning holidays in the matrix of our security system, and the problems which they pose can be countered only by the application of the only force which can be brought to bear directly upon them: sea-air power. Used defensively in close coordination with land-based air forces, it represents our only promise of relief from the nightmare of submarine and air-borne atomic attack upon our coastal cities. Offensively the principles of mass, mobility, and surprise converge dramatically upon the carrier striking force to make it the most spectacular weapon in our arsenal and to give us the assurance that the distant reaches of the globe which cannot be adequately controlled by our allies and bases do not become our Achilles’ Heel. Guaranteeing our communications between our homeland, our allies, and our bases, protecting them and tying them together into a mutually-sup- porting, effective system, posing an everpresent threat to the industrial heart of our would-be enemies, sea-air power is, as never before, our catalyst of victory.
If the opportunities of sea-air power are great, so are its responsibilities. The threat of the snorkel submarine is intense and by no means mastered. Lest we become unduly discouraged, however, it is well to remember that the history of our technology over the past fifty years argues persuasively the point that there are few if any problems of physical science which will not yield to applied research if the subsidy in brains and money is heavy enough. The atomic bomb is the most sensational, but by no means the most important, achievement in this respect. While to say that the snorkel menace will be countered because it must be countered appears to beg the question, we are confronted with the proposition that we shall either solve the problem or we shall lose any war which comes upon us. To say that we can make no reply to the snorkel or that navies have been rendered obsolete by the atomic bomb—-or any other weapon—is to imply that we possess an alternative to sea power as an instrument of national policy. The plain fact is that we do not. As long as men and trucks and tanks and guns are moved by sea, we must go on recognizing that our claim to national greatness is founded upon sea power, and that we are destined to live or die according to our ability to control the avenues by which friendly commerce—or hostile armies—are brought to our shores.
Thus we take up our long vigil while we set about assembling the fragments of Europe’s shattered economy and restoring the hopes of its despairing peoples. We know now that America’s peace and prosperity are inseparable from the rest of the world’s, and we recognize that the only remaining obstacle standing between those who would do away with our way of life and the goal they would achieve is our economic and military power. While we say “Let us have peace,” it must be our kind of peace: a peace with honor; a peace in which we and those who would be like us may live without fear and distrust; a peace in which we can show to the world how our system can make it a realistic possibility for every human being to have the basic necessities and the reasonable comforts of life.
We are in no way close to that kind of peace. Until we are, we can woo peace only with power, and hope fervently that one of history’s imponderables may yet intervene to free us of the necessity of using that power. Meanwhile we of the Navy must stand ready to guard our nation’s life with the princely legacy which we hold in our trust: America’s Sea Power.
The opinions or assertions in this article are the private ones of the author, and are not to be construed as official or reflecting the views of the Navy Department or the naval service at large.