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By Michael Vlahos
From the sailing vessel to the ironclad to the aircraft carrier, major sea changes in the U.S. Navy have always followed major shifts in our nation’s world view. Today’s breathtaking global flux will ultimately result in still another Navy, built around a ship of the future.
he U.S. Navy likes to think in terms of code truths and permanent premises: sea power, “America is a maritime nation,’’ sea con, power protection. But the Navy as a service a culture within a culture. Where American society goes, the Navy must also go.
The United States is indeed a maritime nation, but it has been more maritime when it has also been more engaged in the world. When 'less engaged, it has distinctly been a continental nation. This is not the 1850s, and we no longer have the world’s largest merchant marine. What's Americans don’t rerespond to and sea-
The Navy mission in the postwar world was to help create and defend a Free World. If Americans decide that they don’t want to police the world scene, then the Navy must have something more to offer than slogans afeout protection of trade—that is, if the Navy wants a major defense mission. As the United States changes, the Navy is going to have to learn how to talk to Americans in a new way.
Global changes unlock American reinterpretation and create a changing frame of national relerence. lhc Cold War perception of the United States as world leader may fade. Already a new nationalism is emerging in American politics. Old globalists are elitists not necessarily in sync with an electorate fretting over domestic ills. Domestic problems long shunted aside by Cold War claims are now demanding priority. That means some major rethinking of the American agenda and implies real political realignment—big change. Foreign and defense policy begins at home, and what happens here could mean an end of our postwar ethos: of every premise we had about the U.S. mission and world role.
In turn, U.S. big change will bring a new reality and a new Navy. New national security truths will emerge. They may be very traditional in spirit; they may focus simply on defense of the nation. Or they may be limited to North American defense. The Navy must understand and accept the nation’s agenda if it is to have a trusted role in its defense.
These big picture issues affect traditional service choices and needs. In determining what ships to buy, what technology to test, and what operations to imagine, the Navy must consider three dynamic pressures, which are converging now:
► Change in American Society: The transition period we are in now already is radically revising U.S. relations with the world, even though we (in particular the U.S. govern-
ment) don’t yet see it. There is a shifting American mood. One authoritative survey of public opinion, “Americans Talk Security,” reveals a continuing shift away from world commitments. There is also a conscious connecting of the decline of the Soviet threat and the need for American renewal. This awareness is clearly captured by the way Americans now see Japan: as more of a national security challenge than the Soviet Union. In addition, there is a distinct turning away from foreign bases in places where the United States is not absolutely welcome, a scaling down in places where it is, and a visible recalibrating of what the nation is willing to fight for.
The American voter’s attitude seems, in general, to be that U.S. world commitment was contingent on a world threat, which is now gone. With it, the sense of a military threat has declined and Americans’ feelings about their allies have changed. These allies are no longer dependents, and as economic competitors they may be the United States’s biggest strategic challenge. In this new world, Americans do not yet understand what their vital interests will be.
So world change indeed converges with change in the United States. American problems, as Americans see them, are at home—drugs, education, the environment, the economy, individual and group rights. U.S. foreign policy is driven by its domestic connections. And today, this connection drives Americans to think either that the threat is gone, so they can turn to problems here, or that the threat from abroad is drugs or economic competition, so the nation should reorient its national priorities and spend less on defense. In addition, the new nationalism takes both liberal and conservative forms and is gaining ground in both parties. There is a chance that old postwar globalism will come to be painted as a kind of Washington establishment trilateralism; as the bankrupt old politics.
► World Change: If world change and domestic politics make an uncomfortable fit for the national security establishment as a whole, the Navy may do well regardless, now that it is again the United States’s first line of defense. This depends on where the new threat comes from, in the American political mind. We should look at world change from this angle—as future threat driver.
Considered this way, world dynamics are creating several juicy problems for U.S. security downstream. A successful Euroconfederation will bring lots of competition first. But, for example in 2010, NATO could be dead and buried and the former Soviet Union could have become an economic satrapy of German money. Japan may have a working strategic defense initiative, gas-cooled reactor nuclear submarines, and an aerospace plane shuttling between its earthport and space station. With their superior production technology, it’s possible that the Japanese could do these things first.
Way-out developments? Hardly. Americans are willing to entertain all these concepts, but only from their familiar postwar reference frame—as collaborative efforts where the United States (of course!) takes the lead. Imagine, instead, the same developments, but from the vantage point of a world of equal but separate world powers: the
European Community, North America, and Japan. The United States’s former allies and strategic dependents would be its competitors, and the competition would be fierce. The American way of life would be on the line. These may be the true national security terms of the next century. .
Americans want to believe that in the absence of threat, ^ the alliance built by the same threat will continue. But it can’t and it won’t. Some global collegiality will, of course, remain; Americans have nothing against the Europeans and Japanese, and everyone has a stake in global growth. But the Navy needs to think about what happens when the harmony goes. How much of a national security concern will Japan and Europe pose? How will the new competition work into continuing arenas of conflict in the Third World? Watching the slow, guarded European (with British exception) and Japanese responses brings out their very different perspectives, interests, and needs when it comes to the Third World. Will growing differences eventually separate Europe and Japan from the United States on Third World issues?
► Technology Choices: The Navy needs to concentrate on technology paths that will give it the most leverage in the new national defense regime. Once the Navy fathoms what form U.S. military posture is likely to take, it must carve out its missions based on where the United States and the rest of the world are going. Right now the Navy has mentally exchanged the Third World for the Soviet threat as its primary force rationale. This is a natural alternative for two reasons. First, there is no other in sight; second, it encourages the Navy and the political establishment to think in terms of familiar naval operations. It lets the Navy keep building the fleet it’s used to; the fleet it likes.
We must be wary of this thought process. The Third World threat, as Iraq has shown, may not turn out to be the kind of foreign engagement that simply showcases the primacy of naval power. In fact, the challenge in the Third World may demand very different platform concepts than those developed for the postwar paradigm: nuclear- powered submarines and carrier battle groups for assaulting the Soviet Union.
Technology gives the Navy options to assert itself in non-traditional areas that suddenly become the new focus of national security. Clearly, Polaris did this in the late 1950s. We must explore national defense in this new world as a waiting opportunity. It must be accepted that the case for a dozen or so big carriers may lose force in the American political mind. The waning of the carrier battle group should not be seen as a judgment on the aircraft carrier’s declining capability, but rather as a consequence of a changing American world view.
If it is imaginative and reflective, the Navy can reassert its centrality in a new U.S. defense vision without being forever dependent on the weapon that brought it such success in the old paradigm. But technology is the Navy’s opportunity only if it builds on world change and the changing U.S. agenda, not if it is used simply to defend the old fleet.
The Navy and Big Change
For the past two years, the Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs at the Department of State has been building a framework for better understanding how the United States responds to world change. The Center reached the conclusion that this country’s response to the world is really conditioned by how it changes itself.
The Center then went on to look at how the United States changes. It identified five major shifts in American society, what can be labeled “big change.” Each of these shifts, or big change periods, represented in effect a reinterpretation of Americans’ reality; not just how they look at things, but how they describe themselves and how they do business. Each of these change periods involved major political realignment and the rise of a new political establishment—a new party system. Those who made the big change also created their own language so the new reality would have its own frame of reference.
The United States is now overdue for another big change. The lingering claims of the Cold War have postponed the sixth through the 1980s. World change today will unlock big change in American society tomorrow. This will also inevitably mean big change for the Navy. Navy big change has tracked big change in American society and its party system throughout U.S. history (see Table 1).
The historical record shows that major shifts in American society are quickly translated into new national security terms, new forces, and a new fleet.
In the 1790s, the nation was struggling to survive. Its agenda was maintaining its physical integrity. The Navy was given only a very small role defending U.S. interests abroad. The primary national defense need was addressed by the Militia Act and elevated coastal defense over other naval missions. Indeed, the Navy was almost subsumed into this role as a gunboat-only force by the Jefferson administration. Capital ships implied state diplomacy inimical to many Americans, and Hamilton’s battleship program was rejected in 1800.
In the late 1820s the United States became more exuberant. The public vision was one of popular sovereignty. As every man received the right to vote, the democratic surge centered around the figure of Andrew Jackson. The Navy’s role in the War of 1812 came also to symbolize a heroic new nationalism. The Navy’s string of victories and Jackson’s romp over the British in 1815 promoted a more confident vision of national security. The United States was a stronger nation than it had thought. Navy battleships were now seen as a symbol of this newfound U.S. strength. Indeed, building battleships bigger and better than any in the world was a great source of Yankee pride for the next four decades. In imagined war, a mobilized U.S. Navy was expected to be able to break through any blockade.
During the Civil War, the Navy dropped its ocean-cruising focus and transformed itself. The U.S. Navy was one of the decisive elements in Union victory, and it achieved what amounted to a technology revolution at sea. At war’s end, the U.S. Navy was equal to the world’s largest, and
Watershed
National
Election
Navy
Response
1792
Table 1 The Navy and American Paradigms 1828 1860 1896
1932-48
1796
1815
1865
1903
1945
National
Agenda
Establishment Enfranchisement Revolution
Reform
Crusade
Party
System
Elite
Leadership
Jacksonian Mass Parties
Republican
Framework
"Progressive"
Realignment
FDR's
Framework
National | Defense | Dominate | Equality with | Defend Free |
Integrity | Mobilization | North America | Great Powers | World |
*Coast Defense *Raid Enemy Commerce
*Escape Blockade *Coast Defense *Raid Enemy Commerce
*Defeat BLACK * Attack Soviet Union
Offensive (All.) *Support Regional
*Blue Offensive (Pac.) Theaters
*Global Peacetime Deployment
Defense
Paradigm
Navy
Paradigm
Primary
Instrument
Big Independent Cruisers
*Defeat Blockade *Paralyze Enemy Commerce
Big Independent Battleships
| Confusion: BM or FF? |
|
| ||
Battlefleet CVBG
[SSBN]
its ships were the world’s most advanced. But the Navy did not like the primary vehicle developed for this coastal and river war: the monitor. It wanted to return to its cruising role. Ever since the first frigates authorized in 1797, the Navy in peacetime had represented U.S. interests around the world. The ships, although now steam-driven, had not changed much in 70 years. After the war the nation focused inward, on reconstruction and industrial development. The Navy accepted this and went back to what it liked: cruising.
In the election of 1896 the last pastoral vision in American politics—populism—went down to defeat. The vision that triumphed would dominate U.S. politics for the next 35 years, and it was a progressive, outward-looking world view. The Navy, starting with the Great White Fleet, fit in easily at the cutting edge of this vision. The Navy was happy with a political agenda that saw the United States as a great power, that planned for national security to more actively defend and extend U.S. interests worldwide. And the Navy was soon given a splendid tool, the battle fleet, to realize it.
The Great Depression and World War II combined to create a national mission that aimed at nothing less than a U.S. global culture. The strategic posture to promote this was called containment and revolved around a doctrine called nuclear deterrence. The Navy was not initially well suited to take the lead. It was, however, the perfect instrument to prosecute containment’s flip side: sustaining the vision of a Free World. This implied global operations and substantial Navy forward deployment, and only a truly global Navy could keep the peace. This the Navy did with another splendid weapon system: the attack aircraft carrier. Eater, in a master stroke of imagination, the nuclear- powered ballistic-missile submarine gave the Navy the major piece of the nuclear deterrent mission. The United States was committed to the world, and the Navy symbolized this broader national agenda.
The Navy’s performance in the political arena throughout history reveals much that is of relevance today.
► After the Civil War: Opportunity Lost: The United States’s inward focus after 1865 was inevitable, and maybe the Navy could have done nothing.
But the Navy discarded the important gains it had made during the war. It forgot its own decisive role in winning a continental land campaign and it repressed the implications of technology change.
The monitor was a coastal defense ship at best, and who would blame Navy ethos for wanting to go back to its beautiful canvas-sheeted frigates? But the American people had, during the war, come to identify emotionally with the monitor type. It was a source of national pride as a technology achievement; it fit the national mood as the best weapon system for U.S. defense needs. At the end of the war, the Navy could have taken the monitor concept on a path of battleship evolution, which would have given the Navy a head start on the next century and the next paradigm. Instead, it languished in decay.
- Mahan’s Success: The Easy Kind: Alfred Thayer Mahan captured the national imagination because he verbalized a vision of the United States’s destiny that no one yet had put into words. When a sympathetic political vision came into power, the Navy went right with it. Even the Wilson administration, after initially cutting battleship construction, ended up pushing “a Navy second to none.” Before the Progressives, the Navy was idling along in the early 1890s still building coastal defense battleships and cruisers. The new national agenda was what really propelled the Navy into an ocean-capable strategic force. This was the Navy’s easiest political victory. The keys to success were a powerful mind (Mahan), politically minded officers (like William Sowden Sims), and a booster president (Theodore Roosevelt).
- Cold War Success: Doing It the Hard Way: Even the battle against the U.S. Air Force in the late 1940s had the seeds of political triumph built in. The Navy had proven itself as a global force in world war; it now had to show that in Cold War peace, it could do the same. After the loss of the United States (CVA-58), it got the attack aircraft carrier. Then it built its reputation as upholder of peace everywhere but the Central Front, from Korea to Quemoy to Lebanon. In the 1960s it got into the deterrence business with the Polaris, just as the Air Force lost the B-70. The final triumph came in the 1980s with the Maritime Strategy, where the Navy showed it could assert a major war role on the Central Front. Each of these successes would have been impossible if the American people had not actively sought global engagement. It was helpful, in addition, to have some savvy officers on political point, like Arleigh Burke, to push the decisive arguments.
Conclusions
World change has already set in train a shift in U.S. national security. The Navy must get a fix on the context of change. As we enter a transition between old and new national security, the Navy’s stock may rise and fall
among Americans and in Congress. We began this transition process with the peace-dividend future, and now we are well into the “police the tin pot dictators” future. This is part of a larger coming to recognition of how this new world will work and how Americans will relate to it. Each step opens a dimension, lighting a corner in the spaces of an emerging world still much in shadow. We must accept that there is, for now, more shadow than light. Right now, for example, it is not clear politically whether the Navy has fared well or poorly in the latest Gulf crisis.
In addition, the Navy must not make the mistake of responding to each succeeding political fashion as though it were the enduring, post-Cold War current that will shape the future Navy. The Navy of 2010 will be recast by the sum of pressures on the United States during the transition. But Navy leadership must not wait for the full exposure of a new world. This transition could take a decade, and the fleet of 2010 must be planned in the next few years. This means doing something the Navy hasn’t done since the late 1940s and before that the late 1890s: rethink itself. One of the greatest challenges of the 1990s will be describing to Americans what the Navy does, and to do that successfully the Navy must actually have a leg-up on where the United States is going. This is not impossible, witness the Mahanian revolution, which actually set the spirit of an age.
It is up to the Navy to come up with a force packaging that makes sense to Americans in this new world. This will involve technology choices. The Navy of 2010 will operate in a different world, defending a different American agenda with less money.
We know the big constraints. Budget limitations will mean that the postwar fleet cannot be sustained. We just can’t keep all the traditional ship types at the same force levels. Overseas bases will be limited, even though temporary access may remain or even expand (say, Singapore). But the distinction between bases and access should be clear. So we have to face the prospect of a fleet that is smaller and perhaps less balanced but that must also be more far-ranging, with longer legs and higher combat endurance.
Fortunately, the Soviet recession also allows recession from a fleet geared to global war. And the challenge to U.S. interests in the Third World is now clearly more demanding of the Navy than Cold War imagination would ever have allowed. We are shifting from a highly sophisticated Soviet problem to a surprisingly sophisticated Third World problem. And the problem is not just in weapons sophistication but in political complexity. Iraq has been easy in terms of international cooperation and support for the United States, so far. Future situations are likely to be far murkier, and the defense of U.S. interests may depend on the United States (and its Navy) alone. This means independent, fully capable battle groups, carrier-centered or not.
Another trend, unfortunately, is the increasing historical inefficiency of the carrier battle group. Inefficient because in order to work properly it pulls down too much by way of ships and assets. We need ways to project naval Power that can go places big carrier groups can’t. What will be the new battleship in 2010, the working backbone of the Navy, the future equivalent of the 74-gun ship? The big flattop undoubtedly will remain, but a fleet built around maybe eight carrier battle groups simply cannot cover our deployment needs.
Contemporary fleet escorts are still called by their old Mahanian names of cruiser and destroyer, even while evolving into specialized antiair and antisubmarine warfare escorts. In them may lie the prototype new ship concept. This is the next evolution to which the Navy must turn. Could the Arleigh Burke (DDG-51)-class guided- missile destroyer, for example, develop into a high-endurance, truly battle-worthy power-projection platform? Or is a different ship concept, like Captain Clark Graham’s flexible ship, the so-called “carrier of large objects” (see Proceedings, “There Is No Customer for Change,” May 1990), the best way to go?
The imperatives of change are driving the Navy: threats, missions, budgets, bases, deployments. The big carrier is but a symbol of how the Navy has done business for fifty years. And today, the business is changing.
Dr. Vlahos is Director of the Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.