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Little stirs greater fear in the heart of a sailor than being caught adrift in uncharted waters. A close second, of course, is attempting to negotiate dangerous waters, proper charts on board, but with an unqualified navigator plotting the course. Present planning and execution of U. S. national security policy strike one as incorporating depressingly similar perils for the American Ship of State.
That policy is clearly fragmented, not only with respect to its formulation, but also in its implementation. Too many governmental agencies and departments insist on pressing parochial views, one or another periodically predominating, with the result seldom meeting the true national interest. Confusing the situation even further is a state of affairs perceived—with varying degrees of incredulity—by many countries allied to or friendly with the United States. Their governments now often assert that they need two ambassadors in Washington: one accredited to the executive branch of the government and a second to Capitol Hill. This notion—that there are 535 would-be Secretaries of State resident in the halls of Congress—could be applied equally to the position of Secretary of Defense.
As a result of the foregoing conditions, external problems are generally attacked in piecemeal fashion. Possible solutions are warped by pressures—foreign and domestic—which all too frequently are at considerable variance with overall American interests. Significantly, these compulsions often include demands for immediate action, without regard for the long-term consequences that action will ultimately produce. It need hardly be said that policies devised and executed in this manner will certainly ignore the country’s future well-being, in regional as well as global contexts.
The fundamental reasorj for the manifest disarray in U. S. national security policy is not that a host of disparate offices has a hand in stirring the foreign and defense brews. This does, of course, have a deleterious effect, but even worse is the fact that there is no recipe to guide any of them. Although indisputably still the leader of the Free World, the United States possesses no coherent, clearly articulated national strategy. Prosecution of its international policies, therefore, is essentially ad hoc in nature, producing a drifting, reactive posture. It is daily becoming more universally recognized as such by friend and foe alike.
That which does pass for national strategy is a melange of incompletely considered and poorly analyzed initiatives and responses, patched together, and generally out of context with the changing world in which man lives. At the moment, it features single-minded concentration on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, especially on its central front area. The strategic focus herein is indeed so narrow that it encompasses serious neglect even of NATO’s exceedingly vulnerable flanks. Presumably, the belief is that so long as there is a reasonable chance the U.S.S.R. will be deterred from launching its armored divisions across the north German plain, the remainder of the world will also be safe.
Only such a premise could explain withdrawals from Korea, the Philippines, North Africa, and elsewhere, while concurrently, the American armed forces are being steadily reduced in capability relative to those of the Soviet Union. One can be forgiven for assuming that the primary motivation behind such policies is an attempt to effect economies in the nation’s defenses in order to place the released funds in other portions of the budget. But this is being done, despite the clearly evident storm signals flapping in the international political winds.
To a careful observer, it would appear well past time for the U. S. Government to undertake an indepth analysis of the current international environment. The study should be conducted without preconceptions deriving from that environment as it used to be. This has not been the case to date, and I
“Thou, too, sail on, 0 Ship of State! Sail on, 0 Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
submit that such an examination would clearly reveal the extent to which the world in which we live has changed in recent years. From the American point of view, the most important aspect of that altered world lies in the hard, unaccustomed reality that the United States is no longer the single most powerful nation on earth.
Militarily, the United States has already been overtaken by the Soviet Union in many categories of armed strength and is en route to being overhauled in most of the remainder. The decline began when the U.S.S.R. shattered the American nuclear monopoly in 1949, and it has accelerated ever since as the Kremlin exerted every effort to erase the initial gap. Today, the U. S. strategic nuclear superiority is gone, and the United States is in grave danger of seeing the Soviet Union achieve supreme power in this crucial field. This is the case, not only in reality, but equally important, in the perceptions of the rest of the world. The first casualty of such a transformation in international power would be a serious loss of U. S. credibility and influence among both its allies and its antagonists. Moreover, the change would contain the seeds of nuclear blackmail, fear of nuclear devastation possibly immobilizing Washington in the face of challenges wherein U. S. national survival was not directly at issue.
Tactical nuclear superiority has also been lost. No longer do the 7,000 or so “tactical” nuclear weapons in Europe pose the bar to Warsaw Pact aggression they once did. Demurrals of some past U. S. Secretaries of Defense notwithstanding, strategic and tactical nuclear weapons are and always have been “coupled.” In view of the absence of any readily distinguishable dividing line between the two categories, superiority in strategic weapons automatically confers similar superiority on the associated battlefield weapons—and the Soviet tactical inventory is impressive in its own right. And, of course, since the massive Allied demobilization following World War II, the United States and its European allies have been able to match the Gargantuan ground and air forces of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact minions.
Further investigation reveals that the overall U. S. maritime superiority is gone too. The U.S.S.R. disposes the largest and most modern naval, merchant marine, oceanographic, and fishing fleets on the face of the globe. Even naval superiority itself has all but evaporated. With regard to this aspect of maritime power, only in aircraft carriers and amphibious forces does the United States still retain an edge. Even so, current trends are decidedly unfavorable. Amphibious capability is one of the fastest growing elements of the Soviet Navy, and Moscow is building aircraft carriers—albeit comparatively primitive ones, given the state of the art—while the United States, at least for the moment, is not.
If to this mosaic the manifest erosion of global confidence in the power and will of the United States is then added, the picture becomes even more disturbing. The Vietnam War and more recent events in Angola and the Horn of Africa have convinced those remaining allies and friends of the United States that Washington cannot be counted on to contest Soviet incursions, unless American national survival is directly involved. This belief is already prevalent in Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and portions of South America. It is growing in Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and Africa, and it is becoming evident in parts of Western Europe.
The foregoing mutation of U. S. power—military and diplomatic—must be read against the backdrop of a rapidly changing international political environment. Major realignments have taken place in the past few years, developments which, it seems clear, have received far too little attention in the councils of the U. S. Government. The demise of colonialism and the rise of the so-called Third World have altered the geopolitical face of the world. Western nations, heretofore of great import in global affairs, now find themselves all but impotent. Dissolution of the British Empire and the decline of the Royal Navy—once the world’s premier maritime police force—provide a striking example of this.
Accompanying these changes has been the appearance of new regional power centers—military and economic—and dramatic shifts in the attitudes of lesser nations in those regions. In the Far East, for example, the rise of mainland China and alteration of political positions previously espoused by such nations as Japan, the Philippines, Indochina, and Taiwan spotlight the upheavals which have occurred. Introduction of the Soviet Union’s Cuban surrogates has generated profound modifications in the political face of Africa. Events in Angola and Ethiopia, of course, underscore the effects of nationalistic pressures, the Russo-Cuban intervention, and the departure of European influence. Finally, both economic and political changes have been abetted by the increasing dependence of industrialized Western nations on the raw materials and other resources to be found for the most part in the emerging countries of the Third World; petroleum is the foremost example at present.
Yet, despite the complexities these changes have introduced, it would be foolhardy to assert that a series of constants does not still govern insofar as the
United States is concerned. The first of these is geographic. Although continental in scope—a fact which has led many to lose sight of reality—the United States is nonetheless an insular nation. Since the first colonists struggled for survival in Virginia and Massachusetts, this nation has always looked seaward for succor. Today, it is not for the food and tools and clothing of early colonial days, but rather for the raw materials without which the nation’s economy could not continue to function; for the markets to provide the wherewithal to pay for those indispensable imports; and for the help of allies without which the United States could not hope to prevail over its projected enemies. Unfortunately, this obvious dependence upon the seas all too often goes unrecognized in the United States.
For instance, the excruciating experience with the 1973-1974 oil embargo, incident to the fourth Arab-Israeli War, should have driven home to the American people a vital energy lesson. A glance at annual U. S. oil consumption figures five years later—from foreign and domestic sources and with the root causes of the war still far from resolved-— demonstrates that the lesson ultimately fell on totally deaf ears. Even less appreciated in this country is an equally unpalatable truth: many other raw materials are only slightly less critical to the nation’s industrial and economic well-being, and the bulk of them also must come from overseas.
The foregoing picture, alone, should be enough to give pause to any American national security planner. He cannot, however, adequately assess U. S. national strategy requirements unless he takes into account an ominous challenge which has been mounted by the Soviet Union. A central focus of Western attention over the past decade has been the spectacular tise of the Soviet Navy under the guidance and tutelage of Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergei G. Gorshkov. Incident to this growth, the U.S.S.R. has been conducting a politico-maritime campaign which strongly suggests that the leaders in the Kremlin have been reading not only Alfred Thayer Mahan but the history of the British Empire as well. Tragically, the Soviet effort has produced gains that have been essentially unremarked in the United States and the West.
One can recall the geography books of days long gone, when the far-flung colonial holdings of the United Kingdom were invariably portrayed in red or pink colors. A glance at a map of that world reveals clearly why the sun did, indeed, never set on the British Empire. Not universally appreciated about the mosaic presented by those maps was the fact that practically every shipping choke point or maritime crossroads on the face of the globe was bracketed or otherwise overshadowed by those omnipresent colors. And altogether unnoticed today is the sinister reality that most of those locations are currently being exploited by the Soviet Union.
Whether the leaders in the Kremlin have been studying the works of Mahan or the history of the British Empire is not terribly relevant. That they seem to be putting to use the lessons that can be derived therefrom, however, is of supreme importance to every nation which depends on free use of the seas. No one can reasonably dispute the thesis that Britain early learned a vital maritime truth: dominance over shipping choke points carries with it two distinct advantages. First, during transit of these restricted passages, that dominance safeguards the controlling nation’s seaborne commerce against interdiction or the depredations of others. Of considerably greater significance, that control encompasses the ability to regulate the maritime traffic of every other nation using such waters. No country understood these verities better than did Great Britain, and it now appears that the U.S.S.R. has taken that lesson aboard too. Examination of a world map is illuminating.
If one begins a brief, global survey in the Caribbean Sea, Soviet actions in Cuba immediately appear center stage. From Havana and Cienfuegos, Soviet warships and naval aircraft routinely operate in the Caribbean, frequently in the Gulf of Mexico, and, of course, out into the broad reaches of the Atlantic Ocean. Staging from Northern Fleet bases, these same ships and aircraft ply the waters of the Atlantic en route to Cuban ports, crossing every major shipping lane in the North Atlantic as well as skirting the entire eastern seaboard of the United States.
Then, if one looks southeastward toward the African littoral, the Soviets are again in evidence, in this instance operating from ports and airfields in Guinea, the Congo, and Angola. Moscow’s initiatives—overt, covert, and surrogate—which have led to Soviet use of these facilities are sufficiently well known and documented as to require no elaboration.
If one now draws lines connecting the North Cape, Cuba, and the West African coast, the magnitude of Soviet maritime advances becomes clear, and the resulting picture is not exactly comforting. Those lines cut every important shipping lane in the Atlantic—North and South—as well as those in the Caribbean. Those maritime routes connect the United States with Western Europe, the Panama Canal, South America, and the Indian Ocean.
The Russo-Cuban intervention in Angola, a previous Marxist triumph in Mozambique, and current
Soviet machinations with respect to Rhodesia and the Republic of South Africa suggest rather strongly that the Kremlin has its eye on the windy corner of Western oil traffic: the Cape of Good Hope. The prospect of Soviet warships, submarines, and aircraft operating from Cape Town and the huge ex-British naval base at Simonstown should unsettle even the most casual observer. Moreover, the corollary to such a development would be denial to the United States and other Western nations of naval access to ports from Monrovia in West Africa to Mombasa in East Africa. A few moments with a National Geographic map and a paint-store yardstick then disclose that 5,000 miles of the main Middle Eastern petroleum lifeline serving the United States and Western Europe would have become completely subject to Soviet whim. Doubling the cape, one finds the Soviets busily nibbling away around the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and in the subcontinent. The Bab el Mandeb, the Strait of Hormuz, the Maidive Islands, and Southeast Asia are all regions where the Soviet politico-maritime hand is in evidence today.
In the Pacific, Moscow’s opportunities are somewhat less numerous and the pattern is, therefore, not so obvious. Nevertheless, it is there. The U.S.S.R. has long supported subversive forces in Malaysia and the Philippines. Blandishments to Samoa and Tonga—newly independent and astride the main routes between the United States and Australasia— further evidence of Moscow’s determination to exploit its new-found maritime outreach. So does massive aid to Peru, a nation whose geographic position dominates north-south sea routes in the Eastern Pacific. The 19th century U. S. Pacific Squadron certainly understood Peru’s strategic importance.
To be sure, there have been some notable failures on the part of the Soviets. No one would argue that these Soviet efforts were all motivated solely or even predominantly by the drive for global maritime hegemony, for they certainly were not. Nevertheless, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Egypt, Somalia, and other locations bear a clear relationship to the historic pattern of British dominion over global sea routes.
If one overlays those old high school maps with the obvious design of Soviet maritime moves in recent years and then considers the remarkable concurrent expansion of Soviet seapower, the challenge becomes too visible to be ignored. And yet, insofar as the United States is concerned, that seems to be precisely what is happening.
Given the changing nature of the world in which we live, the interdependent position of the United States within that environment, and the manifest maritime gauntlet being cast down by the Soviet Union, the future can only be viewed with something approaching alarm. It would seem axiomatic that an insular nation, though continental in size as the United States unquestionably is but one nonetheless held in thrall by those things which can only be transported across the seas—Mahan’s “broad common”—should seek nothing less than a strong maritime strategy. Further, it should be expected that while general incomprehension of America’s dependence on the oceans might inflict the country’s body politic as a whole, the true imperatives of U. S. national security would not escape what must be deemed to be the better-informed national leadership. That those imperatives are obviously not recognized must be ascribed to a lamentable failure of the U. S. Government.
Agreed, a fundamental problem confronting every administration is limited resources. Since funds are subject to finite constraints, they cannot and, indeed, should not be squandered on some fruitless quest for absolute security—an admittedly unachievable goal. Priorities must be established so as to ensure that the available monies are channeled into those military investments best calculated to guarantee the nation’s future security. The difficulty is that U. S. priorities are, at present, all wrong.
In current global terms, the United States can be compared to the United Kingdom in the pre-World War II European context. Absent assured access to overseas resources, markets, and allies—all indispensable to its existence—Great Britain could not have hoped to survive, Winston Churchill’s rhetoric notwithstanding. Twentieth century America finds itself in strikingly similar circumstances.
Yet, the U. S. Government’s continuing fixation with NATO’s central front dominates what strategic thinking is now being done. Tragically, the policy thrust resulting therefrom patently disregards two obvious factors which dictate the adoption and determined prosecution of a maritime national strategy. Those factors include the necessity to exert control over the seas, at times and in the places required, to keep the American economy running, and the need to assure uninterrupted seaborne communications with those overseas allies which, alone, can supply the real estate and augmenting manpower necessary to forestall achievement of Soviet state objectives.
To implement a successful maritime strategy, the U. S. seapower trident must feature, first and foremost, a strong, modern navy capable of ensuring unfettered use of the world’s sea-lanes. It must also include a viable merchant marine providing the capability to exploit that guaranteed access and a
large, d iverse, healthy industrial base.
Critics often contend that military power will be of little avail if the nation bankrupts itself through excessive spending on defense. One cannot fairly dispute that assertion. On the other hand, these critics fail to mention that the nation will assuredly fail economically—an identical outcome—if the maritime power necessary to guarantee unrestricted use of the seas is not available.
Contrary to the considerable body of evidence inescapably pointing to the necessity for the United States to be pursuing a maritime-oriented national strategy, an examination of the direction currently being taken by Washington reveals a state of maritime lethargy—indeed, retrenchment. Historically neglected, in spite of a multitude of warnings and pleas, the U. S. merchant marine now carries but 6% of this nation’s overseas trade. This, of course, leaves the country hostage to the political vagaries of those nations in whose ships the other 94% travels. In this regard, it should not be forgotten that even close allies will, when the international chips are down, invariably take political steps deemed, on balance, to be in their own best interests. Witness the closing of ports and denial of overflight rights by European allies—confronted with the threat of an Arab oil cutoff—when the United States initiated its massive resupply of Israel during the 1973 Middle East War.
With respect to naval forces—the cutting edge of seapower—one finds the United States fleet shrunken to its smallest size since the early days of the 1930s. The naval numbers game is always replete with pitfalls, of course, because many other factors enter into calculations of relative naval prowess. Nonetheless, since transoceanic distances have not contracted, and warships as modern as those of today still cannot be in two places simultaneously, numbers are important. If the host of smallcraft possessed by the Soviet Union is disregarded—naval critics consistently cite these as inflating Soviet seapower strength—and consideration restricted to the main combatants, the following levels are obtained.
Addressing the heart of naval power—aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and attack submarines—one discovers that the U. S. Navy of 1940 numbered 253, the comparable Navy of 1979 totals 245, and the current strength of the Soviet fleet is 560. If submarines are now eliminated—the Soviet Union enjoys an overwhelming advantage in this category—the respective figures are 197, 168, and 300. The anomaly thus presented is that a land power, the Soviet Union, possesses a navy nearly twice the size of that of the United States, a nation heavily dependent upon free use of the world’s sea-lanes. And, it should be noted, the United States no longer has a powerful, wide-ranging Royal Navy alongside, prepared to help counter maritime threats.
In light of radically changed international conditions which confront the United States as the 1980s are about to dawn, several things need to be said about this nation’s future. To begin with, it is mandatory that a sound national strategy be formulated and implemented. Given America’s insular position in an interdependent world, elementary logic suggests that the strategy must be maritime in character. The United States has no other rational choice. Rather than masquerading as a global land power, the United States should be drawing on its 200-year, seapower heritage. Herein lie the experience, knowledge, and technology which America can and should exploit to ensure its survival.
Only a fool accepts combat on an opponent’s own ground. Since the first colonists landed in the new world, Americans have, of necessity, been a people which looked seaward for survival. Never has this been more true than it is today. To abdicate the singular advantage of that heritage to the U.S.S.R. and to attempt to best the Soviet Union on land would be the height of folly. An even greater folly would be to permit the Soviet Union—traditionally a land power—to best the United States on its own grounds, the sea. This, after all, would constitute the ultimate irony.
Unless the U. S. Government again turns its attention seaward, however, and does so before it is too late, this could become the ultimate fate of the nation. There could be no greater tragedy.
■ 5* -1 A graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy with the Class
of 1946, Rear Admiral Hanks served in the USS St. Paul (CA-73) from August 1945 to January 1949. He t {■ was assigned to Air Antisubmarine Squadron 892 in 1951-1952 and to the NROTC Unit at Oregon State ■ University from 1952 to 1954. He was operations officer of the USS Arnold J. Isbell (DD-869) from 1954 to 1956, and on the staff of Commander Destroyer Squadron Eleven in 1956-1957. After serving as executive officer of the USS Floyd B. Parks (DD-884) from 1960-1961, he commanded the USS Boyd (DD-544) from 1961 to 1963. Following two years on the staff of Commander Cruiser-Destroyer Force, Pacific Fleet, he attended the Naval War College and then served first as Assistant for NATO Affairs, and later as Deputy Director for Nuclear Planning Affairs in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs). While serving as Commander Destroyer Squadron Thirteen (June 1969 to September 1970), he won the 1970 Prize Essay Contest. From 1972 to 1975, he was Commander, Middle East Force, then moved to the OpNav staff. He was successively Director, Security Assistance Division and Director, Strategic Plans, Policy and Nuclear Systems Division before retiring from activedutyin 1977.