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Much has been said and written over the years about U. S. Maritime Strategy that has touched off exceptionally vigorous discussions. As a side effect, some of those discussions have left the province of professional strategists—naval officers ar>d civilians—to parade with other defense issues in the shooting gallery of defense criticism. Watching this happen, I am reminded of a comment by Mark Twain ln his memoir, Life on the Mississippi: “War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the °ioon is likely to be dull.”
In the last several years, there has been a lot of m°on talk about the Maritime Strategy; much of it confuses our Maritime Strategy with employment of forces, campaign plans, or the local strategy of battle force or theater commanders. Some of it overlooks Plain fact and even plainer common sense.
In this article, I would like to share with you my Perspective on the subject.
The Global View: The transcendent fact of modem American history is the emergence of the United States as a world power, with worldwide interests and responsibilities that we ignore only at our peril. The wishful view of a “Fortress America,” secure within its insular shores, ignores reality. Vital alliances, trade, communications, the travel of American citizens, and even our generous spirit and idealistic nature compel us to look overseas.
At the same time, our interests are being contested hy a confederation of powers whose highest priority is to replace all free and democratic societies with totalitarian states. The threat to the security of the Free World is global, capable, and growing daily. Much of it is directed from a center of power in the Soviet Union. Some of it is directed to the same general end by fanatics in other countries.
The Soviet Union, a land power, enormous, sprawling, self-contained, operates on interior lines of communications which require virtually no intercourse with other countries. It doesn’t need a large navy to be secure within its borders, but it has one anyway, a fine navy, larger than our own. Although we have always enjoyed a qualitative advantage over the Soviets, in the talents of our people, their training, their winning tradition, and in the superiority of our technology, that advantage is shrinking. The Soviets are getting better fast. They have operated in proximity to our Navy for many years, have watched and learned, and they have improved. And what they haven’t been able to earn for themselves, they have tried—successfully in the case of Walker-Whitworth and others—to steal.
That navy is out on the oceans every day. It does its level best to influence the decisions of any government with maritime interests. It poses a direct threat that it can back up its demands with airplanes overhead, troops on the beaches, or missiles inbound. It doesn’t care about the human element or about the niceties of civilized behavior. It didn’t stop to pick up the boat people of Southeast Asia; it steamed right by them. It doesn’t respect territorial boundaries, a fact to which millions of Swedes can attest, after repeated sightings of Soviet submarines in Swedish home waters.
On the landmasses, the threat is just as significant.
In Europe and Asia, the Soviets and their surrogates
have stationed the largest armies and air forces in the world. The people are good, the equipment is even better, and you see it everywhere you look, for hundreds of miles. They train every day, and they practice not defensive maneuvers, but attack, the all-out assault.
Elsewhere in the world, in many cases inspired by the Soviets and in most cases equipped by them, are governments of fanatics whose national policy is to destroy what they consider “The Establishment”—the U. S. and our allies. There have always been govern-
[the Maritime Strategy] was not—and is not—a force builder, and it was certainly not the origin of the 600-ship Navy.
ments like this (the entrance of Libyan bandits onto the world stage appears to be a cyclical phenomenon), but the difference today is that they have access to technology nearly as good as our own, and they are less inhibited about using it than the people who supply it to them. Like the Soviets, the fanatics move in wherever they perceive a weakness. They use terrorism as an instrument; they use it coldly and deliberately. In many ways these governments are an even more visible threat to us than the Soviets who manipulate and succor them.
Every naval officer understands the reality of the global situation—the reality of a world where the vital interests of the United States extend into every region, the reality of a world where even the smallest and most innocent presence of things American is at considerable risk. The challenge is to get everyone to understand.
In our modem life we are confronted with a spectrum of violence that ranges from the real to the potential, from isolated terrorist bombings and kidnappings, to communist insurrections in friendly countries like the Philippines, to the threat of all-out assaults in Europe or Asia. As Senator Patrick Moynihan said in his book about the United Nations, the world is truly “a dangerous place.”
National Defense Strategy: Given the situation, our country needs and has a national strategy—a number of directives signed by the President and a body of thought that supports them—whose purpose is to help guide policymakers, civilian and military, in carrying out the responsibilities of the United States in the world today. Our national strategy has consistently rested on three pillars: deterrence, forward defense, and allied solidarity. Obviously, our number one responsibility is to deter war. That has been the centerpiece of American policy for more than 40 years. We have been successful in deterring general war because we have been strong. By the same token, we have been more or less successful in deterring limited conflicts depending on how strong and resolute we were perceived to be in the region at the time.
While we deter war, our strategy is to control crises as they come up, and to support our allies. Both objectives require us to maintain a forward presence. For this reason, we do things such as stationing garrison forces in Europe and Korea and deploying naval forces in international waters, where they can be available at a moment’s notice.
In addition, we in the military are charged with considering, on a daily basis, how we would go to war if deterrence were to fail. This is not a case of gazing into the future but one of considering our own interests and those of our allies, the importance of alliance solidarity, the geopolitical situation, the capabilities of the threat, and our resources-in-being to deal with that threat. Among those resources we include our economy, our industrial base, the advantages of our own geography, the utility of any forward positions from which we are operating, and our national resolve. That is strategy: a way of looking at the world situation. It is not a “game plan” with the first 20 plays already charted.
Sea Power in the National Defense: In this world situation, there is a particular need for American sea power. We are not a fortress, but an island nation, dependent upon other countries for vital raw materials.
The sea lines of communications are our life’s blood. Water is all continuous. The oceans of the world give us the opportunity to protect our interests through forward-deployed ships—but by the same token, these ships provide the only barriers to threats from overseas. Twice in this century an enemy’s sea power has brought war home to our shores. In 1915, the sinking of the liner Lusitania shook this country out of its reverie. In 1942, Americans could look out to seaward from the Boardwalk in Atlantic City and see the fires of ships burning from German submarine attacks.
To avoid such a debacle in the future, we need to maintain a ready, capable Navy, which can bring to bear against any problem—or against several problems at once—sufficient force to carry out our national strategy of deterrence, crisis control, and support of our allies. We have such a Navy today. It is the finest, readiest instrument that I have seen in my more than 37 years of service. It does the job wherever and whenever the assignment takes it, and then if necessary it steams away to do another job somewhere else. Operating in international waters, it enjoys the unique advantage of being able to signal menace without violating sovereignty, and once the need is past, of being able to sail over the horizon without signalling retreat. For this reason, the Navy has been the force of choice in the overwhelming majority of the 200-plus crises our country has faced since World War II.
But the Navy has not always been so capable. Just a few years ago, our worldwide commitments were more than the Navy could meet. The ships were operated until they fell apart, and they couldn’t be repaired because there weren’t enough spare parts and there wasn’t
enough money for overhauls. Even more important than the ships was the personnel situation. Sooner or later a feed pump can be replaced, but the human being to operate it is a perishable commodity. He must be educated in the civilian sector, recruited into the Navy, trained, challenged to excel, coordinated with others, given a chance to be with his family in between six- month deployments, and then, when his period of enlistment is over, retained as a professional. If he leaves the Navy, years of investment go with him, and his replacement is not someone one can hire off the street. Just five or six years ago, people were leaving the Navy by the thousands, and we had ships that weren’t safe to operate simply because they didn’t have enough trained sailors on board. Our capabilities were contract- lng. At the same time, the Soviets were carrying out a long-prepared program of expansion.
Now we have turned that situation around, and the difference is well understood beyond our own shores. Credit goes to everyone concerned: to our people on the deck plates, whose performance has stirred so much admiration; to those in support, from whom many resources have been diverted to meet the requirements of the fleet; to the planners, who have gotten the most out °f every dollar appropriated; and finally, to the Congress, entrusted with their constitutional responsibility f°r raising and maintaining a capable Navy.
The Development of the Maritime Strategy: The rebirth of American sea power and the origins of an American Maritime Strategy have been mutually supportive events. It is hard to distinguish between the tvvo, and it is dangerous to think that one exists with- °ut the other. As we were developing a ready, capable Navy, structured to meet the threat with all its variety, taking into account such things as overseas commitments, personnel and operational (out of homeport) requirements, called PERSTEMPO/OPTEMPO, and the level of risk of having a reduced force structure with
The Maritime Strategy is a part of our overall national strategy to exactly the same extent that sea power is a part of national security.
limited retention of trained/skilled personnel—as we were creating an appropriate capability, we continued to ask ourselves how this revitalized instrument met the national security objectives.
This was not a new question, and when it was asked 'n the late 1970s, we weren’t asking it for the first bme. Over the years our Maritime Strategy has been Very much like the British Constitution—unwritten but moroughly understood by those who must practice it. tven in the years when we had a so-called written strategy, for example, the Rainbow plans just before World War II, the strategy was fluid and had to be adapted to events. Had there not been a Douglas Mac- Arthur in addition to a Chester Nimitz, there wouldn’t have been a twin-track offensive in the Pacific. And had we not had the ships and airplanes to support the offensive, we would have had to come up with a new set of plans. In those days the strategy recognized what we were capable of doing—both the Navy and the industrial base behind it—and where we needed to go. Strategies always do this. In the late 1970s, as we began to evolve the present Maritime Strategy, capabilities and requirements went hand in hand.
As we developed the 600-ship Navy, a general- purpose force sized to meet both a specific and a general threat, we were reviewing the mission of the Navy in support of our national security objectives. Out of this review came the Maritime Strategy. It was not— and is not—a force-builder, and it was certainly not the origin of the 600-ship Navy. Most of the Maritime Strategy is simple common sense. It is not great literature (although the stacks of criticism about it would do justice to Shakespeare), but it does make good reading if one wants to understand our country’s worldwide commitments and the Navy’s vital contribution to their defense.
The Maritime Strategy represents a consensus of professional opinion and carries the acceptance of both the U. S. Government and the governments of our allies. It represents a consensus because, for the most part, naval officers, experienced and knowledgeable in their profession, wrote and revised it. It has been accepted by the President and the Secretary of Defense and by our allies, whose local security interests depend on integrated, common defense plans with the United States. The Maritime Strategy is an intellectual counterpart to those plans, but is not subordinate to them.
The Essence of the Maritime Strategy: Although it is a brief concept, the Maritime Strategy contains several elements that should be looked at as unexceptionally American.
First, it deals with the forces we have at our disposal today. It is not a “wish list.” Americans play the hand they’ve been dealt. In the Navy, carrying out one’s assignment to the best of one’s ability with the resources at hand is an almost sacred tradition. As we built a more capable Navy, we built the strategy to address it. Subsequent revisions always take into account what forces are available.
Second, it is a forward strategy, forward in the sense of meeting our treaty obligations and other commitments by operating away from our own shores. This is typically American as well, as the history of the 20th century shows us. It reflects an American attitude that the best way to solve a problem is to go right to the heart of it. “The best defense is a good offense,” we say; or as General Nathan Bedford Forrest put it in the Civil War, “I always make it a rule to get there first with the most . . . .” We operate forward because this is where the action is, where our allies are, and where they need us. To this end, we are fortunate because our
people and technology give us every confidence that we can operate and win in the forward areas. This was clearly demonstrated during the recent air attack on Libya, in which one of the world’s best air defense systems, alerted both by a high level of diplomatic tension and by rumors of impending attack, was unable to achieve a single hit upon our aircraft from the more than 100 high-quality missiles fired. Aegis antiair warfare cruisers, the F-14/E-2C combination, and our outstanding submarines, along with many other factors, give us confidence that our forward strategy would be highly effective in the event of hostilities. During peacetime operations, and in dealing with conflicts at the lower end of the spectrum, of course, a forward presence is equally advantageous.
Third, the strategy is operative worldwide. In any conflict, Europe would be the vital arena: our culture tells us that. But even then we would have responsibilities in the North Pacific, the South Pacific, the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, and the South Atlantic— anywhere that naval forces can operate in support of our national interests. As Secretary of the Navy John Lehman has pointed out, trans-Pacific communications are currently the most active in the world, and this region is a rival to the Atlantic for our attentions.
Finally, the strategy is flexible, as strategies always must be to be effective. It is not a game plan. Many people who have assailed various aspects of it have confused strategy with employment of forces. The Maritime Strategy discusses a framework of forward operations; anyone who wishes to dispute the correctness of such a framework, assuming that he wishes to challenge a basic tenet of our national outlook, can certainly do so. But to talk about numbers of carrier battle groups or submarines in the context of a particular scenario is misleading. The basis for deterrence is the creation of doubt in the enemy’s mind as to what we would be capable of achieving if he breaks the peace. We have undoubtedly been successful at this. If deterrence fails, what our actions would be at that time is a matter for the commanders involved to determine at that time. Wars are not fought by automatic, preprogrammed responses under the direction of a video game computer. Right now, we can’t say what our exact response would be to a Soviet attack. It would depend on where, when, and how big it was, and who was involved. Even if we knew, we wouldn’t tell. The same message should be understood by any evilly disposed country. Let them worry about what we are capable of doing, and let us not give them any easy assurances ahead of time. The Maritime Strategy reserves the employment of forces to the absolutely indispensable element of the evaluative process.
Antisubmarine Warfare—Mining the Mother Lode: The Maritime Strategy is a part of our overall national strategy to exactly the same extent that sea power is a part of national security. The doctrine of the strategy is a product of the equation that contains our nation’s worldwide interests and responsibilities, the worldwide threat, and the resources at our disposal to meet that threat.
In the same way, the Navy’s missions support national strategy by employing sea power. One mission area of vital importance, in which the challenge of the future is particularly pressing, is antisubmarine warfare (ASW). If we are going to enjoy the advantages of sea power in the 21st century, we must maintain our lead in this area.
The threat is particularly formidable—more than 350 Soviet submarines. When we consider what the Germans were able to achieve in two world wars and what we were able to achieve in the four years of the Pacific campaign; and when we consider that in each case the number of submarines available at the start of the conflict was from one-fifth to one-tenth the size of today’s
. . . we must continue to make good deci sions about the kind of ASW forces we want in the future.
Soviet submarine force, we have to respect the potential of the Soviet Navy to disrupt the sea lines of communications linking us to our allies.
Until now, our antisubmarine capabilities have maintained a comfortable lead over Soviet submarine capabilities because of superior individual quality: again, people and technology. Passive acoustic detection has been the “mother lode” of ASW ever since the advent of the nuclear submarine. Today, our sensors are able to detect and track Soviet submarines at ranges much beyond those at which they themselves can be detected; we have much better sea-legs and endurance than the Soviet submarine force; and we think our weapons are the best in the world. But the advantages are decreasing. Soviet submarines are getting quieter and harder to detect. At some point in the future, it can be postulated that they will become as quiet as the ambient sea, and then we will have to turn to other methods of detection. In the meanwhile, we must continue to mine the mother lode wherever that takes us. We must not relax our present strong commitment to the ASW challenge, and we must continue to make good decisions about the kind of ASW forces we want in the future. This will be one of my principal priorities as Chief of Naval Operations, part of my overall goal of retaining the great Navy that we enjoy today.
In the same way, the Maritime Strategy, a good concept already, will become better as we continue to develop our capabilities. The debate over what those capabilities should be is a healthy one, and 1 welcome it. But those who would use this one concept to prove some separate hypothesis—perhaps a political hypothesis—about the state of America’s defenses, need to look beyond the strategy to the reality of the dangerous world in which we live.