The United States needs a maritime strategy to guide the creation and application of its naval power. Sea Power 21's operational concepts maintain the U.S. Navy's post-World War II orientation on projecting power ashore, but are no substitute for a comprehensive strategy. Because it does not link national objectives with the means necessary to achieve them, the plan does not provide a foundation for sound force-shaping decisions or offer the necessary framework for developing effective operational art. Linking national policy objectives with the capabilities articulated in Sea Power 21 requires a sealand maritime strategy that supports the national military strategy by shaping the combatant commanders' theater strategies and plans. A comprehensive maritime strategy is a necessary complement to joint warfighting doctrine.
Today's Strategic Environment
During the Cold War, the U.S. Army and Air Force prepared to counter the Soviets in their European heartland and consequently developed a mastery of conventional land warfare. Similarly, the Navy developed a maritime strategy to disrupt a Soviet offensive thrust through the Fulda Gap.2 Paradoxically, this mastery resulted in making such a conflict an unlikely prospect for the United States. At sea, American power remains uncontested, as potential rivals-such as China-remain narrowly focused on regional access denial and naval presence missions. While China's maritime capabilities may grow in the future, it is not clear if this traditionally insular state has the desire to challenge the United States on the high seas.
Throughout the early- and mid-20th century, U.S. enemies were states—Germany, Japan, North Korea, North Vietnam, and the Soviet Union. However, since the fall of the Berlin Wall the primary antagonists have been thirdrate thugs bent on regional hegemony-Manuel Noriega in Panama, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Farah Adid in Somalia, Raoul Cedras in Haiti, Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, and Osama Bin Laden and Mohammad Omar in Afghanistan.3 Our record in post-Cold War conflicts is mixed. Increasingly our rivals remain free to choose their means of resistance, so it should not surprise us when they adopt terrorism out of weakness or desperation and employ guerrilla tactics to degrade conventional strength.
Astute adversaries realize that victory is unlikely in symmetrical, force-on-force engagements with the U.S. military. The high-entry cost for successful conventional competition also severely limits the field of potential adversaries. The result is to collapse belligerents' options into unconventional war.4 It is worth noting that the unconventional 9/11 attacks occurred in the littorals, and the Navy, like the rest of the country, failed to foresee the audacity of the assault, despite having experienced the use of aircraft as an asymmetric weapon during World War II. Therefore, it is worth asking if the Navy could have done more to respond to transnational and non-traditional dangers before the threat came to American soil.
During the Cold War, the superpowers had the means and incentives to place belligerents on a short leash. Thus, the threat of Soviet-American nuclear escalation quelled regional conflicts. America myopically focused on the Soviet menace during this period, dealing with sub-regional unconventional conflicts either within the context of Soviet-American competition or not at all. The absence of the Soviet peril highlighted the existence of these threats and today, the U.S. military is struggling to understand and adapt to unconventional and asymmetric conflict.
Understanding the new strategic environment is vital to developing a future joint force capable of achieving American interests. Acculturating the Navy to this uncertain environment is at the heart of today's transformational efforts. Various national strategies provide a touchstone for the Navy.5 While national strategic direction provides the basis for the regional combatant commander's theater activities, the Navy provides no formal guidance to shape theater strategies or plans. A comprehensive strategy is required to guide the Navy's joint activities in peacetime, crisis, and war.
The events of 9/11 demonstrated how unprepared U.S. naval power was in preventing an unconventional strike in the littorals. In all fairness, the ability of non-state actors to project power globally and the lethality of non-military technology surprised almost everyone. What is not new, however, is the utility of conflict and the use of force to achieve political aims. The United States is a useful proxy for hostile foreign insurgents seeking to demonstrate their prowess, score political points at home, or intimidate governments viewed as friendly to the West. Such attacks can also yield political dividends if they provoke a heavy-handed response or prompt an engagement on the attacker's terms.
U.S. military supremacy in post-Cold War conflict zones such as Panama. Somalia, the Balkans. Afghanistan, and Iraq all required direct troop engagement to apply American political will. However, military involvement in these areas required the Navy to provide the initial force application and the means for sustaining joint military power on the ground. These experiences demonstrate that command of the sea is a strategic condition for the global employment of the joint force.6 Command of the sea, however, is only the ante for entering the fray. Success requires more. In today's strategic environment, establishing favorable security conditions requires a navy with a compelling strategic vision for achieving military objectives by direct engagement ashore.
Toward a New Maritime Strategy
The bequest Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan left the Navy was not his sea power theories that stressed fleeton-fleet offensive engagements to achieve command of the sea. In fact, the Navy abandoned his vision of maritime warfare less than 50 years later on entry into World War II in favor of power projection ashore.7 Mahan's true legacy was in demonstrating the transformational power of a strategy. His vision of sea power reached such levels of popular and political support that it became the United States' de facto national military policy-a feat never duplicated by subsequent maritime theorists-and, more important, he assured funding for a new wave of naval construction.8 Mahan's strategic concepts were so readily and completely adopted because they provided a naval means of achieving the nation's national interests-eliminating European influence in the Americas and maintaining access to Far Eastern trade.9
In the early 1980s, the Navy synthesized the idea of achieving sea control through power projection ashore in a series of publications that coalesced into the maritime strategy. The Navy would attack through the Soviet fleet to destroy its strategic nuclear reserve and secure the trans-Atlantic sea-lanes.
10 In addition, the Navy and Marine Corps would block a Soviet thrust through Western Europe with amphibious attacks along the Soviet Union's periphery. 11 This strategy evolved from the 1960s, yet it created a sensation because the Navy had not publicly explained its wartime mission since the 1940s.12 The Reagan administration never officially adopted the strategy because, while flexible and with provisions for non-nuclear escalation options, it was feared to be aggressive enough to provoke a preemptive Soviet strike. Because a figurative rising tide lifts all boats, Navy construction got a shot in the arm from a significant increase in the Reagan-era defense budgets. Thus there was subsequently no urgency to adopt the strategy-as long as funds were available to create a fleet capable of executing one.The end of the Cold War set the Navy adrift in a strategic sense. Previously the service could justify its existence as a counterweight to the Soviet navy, and perhaps even Warsaw Pact land forces. The subsequent withering of the Soviet fleet left no symmetrical naval threat, and potential candidates were in the distance. Therefore, the Navy shifted gears and focused on close collaboration with the Marine Corps. Despite this effort, decades of procurement left the Navy with platform-centric legacy forces designed for conventional symmetrical war against a peer navy. It is ill equipped for today's unconventional strategic environment. By focusing exclusively on Navy capabilities, Sea Power 21 puts U.S. national interests in jeopardy and leads the Navy down a path of strategic irrelevance. With no strategy to link the plan's capabilities with national security goals, the Navy risks procuring either insufficient capabilities, the wrong capabilities, or wastefully acquiring excessive capabilities. In addition, Sea Power 21 is an island unto itself outside of joint doctrine and the sphere of interagency collaboration, and provides little hint on how its capabilities support the combatant commanders' theater strategies and plans.
Today, the paradigm in projecting naval power has shifted from the primacy of the platform to the supremacy of the sailor. At the outset of World War II, the loss of U.S. battleships at the hands of Japanese aviators at Pearl Harbor accelerated the Navy's acceptance of the shift from the dominance of naval gunfire to the greater flexibility and range of carrier aviation's fire and maneuver. The surprise attacks of 9/11 left our carrier fleet as metaphorically damaged as the battleships at Pearl Harbor by rendering them equally unable to respond to the new geo-strategic environment that laid bare our industrial-age naval stratagems. The carriers that saw action post-9/11 did so as sea bases for soldiers, airmen, and sailors employed ashore or for the aircraft under joint command that supported them.
The Sea-Land Strategy
To succeed in today's new strategic environment and achieve our national objectives, the Navy needs a strategy that shifts the force away from a peripheral conventional naval reaction to events on land toward achieving a principle impact on shaping events ashore. This new paradigm is termed the Sea-Land strategy. Through this strategy, the Navy will become a direct-as opposed to indirect-agent of influence capable of engaging friends and enemies to accomplish the United States' desired political goals. Naval forces will close and engage directly with forces ashore by conventional and unconventional means, returning to the sea on mission completion or for reconstitution. Political objectives will drive this strategy as the old roles-and-missions paradigms give way to a force that flexibly capitalizes on unique competencies. As Navy forces move ashore, they will increasingly complement their sister services in achieving national and theater objectives.
The Navy's experience in formulating maritime strategy illustrates five key functions the Sea-Land strategy will perform:
* It will assist decision makers in the budget process by focusing naval procurement funding on only those capabilities that achieve national objectives. In this manner, the strategy can resolve program trade-offs, determine affordability. and identify risks. This would strengthen ties between political ends and the naval means for achieving them.
* It will provide the intellectual starting point for analysis as well as developing supporting naval policy and fleet tactics. The strategy should evolve over time as either the threats facing the United States, or the perception of the threats, change. It will be the focal point for continued debate and organizational development.
* The strategy will represent a common vision that all Navy interest groups accept. While this opens it to criticism as the lowest common denominator, a collective vision is important to ensure unity of effort across the Navy's broad warfare communities. Once adopted, the strategy will be the basis for professional training and education.
* It can support the combatant commanders by providing clear campaign-planning guidance for employing the Fleet. The strategy will outline concepts for lesser contingencies and major war, giving the commanders clear expectations of how the Navy contributes to theater strategies and plans. It will serve as a useful reference tool during the adaptive planning process to integrate the Navy into joint, interagency, and multinational efforts.
* The strategy will serve to explain the role of the Navy to key public-opinion shapers and civilian decision makers. This is vitally important to ensure the Navy achieves the support necessary to build its capabilities. The unambiguous articulation of strategy provides civilian leaders a clear understanding of the Navy's contribution to national security in an increasingly complex and interrelated world.
Engagement ashore will require teams or groups of sailors with the language and cultural skills to interact directly with members of the host nation to develop maritime security solutions. Sea-land teams will be the vanguard naval force with maritime security, stability, and warfighting capabilities. Teams will have the knowledge necessary to develop long-term relationships required in politically sensitive areas. They will also be expert at gathering and exploiting intelligence. Sea-land groups will provide the echelon above teams that furnishes logistics support, command, and control.
These forces will be provisional, organized by tasks, on an ad hoc basis for specific missions. Operating in tandem with legacy platform-centered units (i.e., carrier or expeditionary strike groups), the human-centric sea-land force teams and groups will seamlessly blend into a naval force capable of exploiting opportunities and operating against a wide variety of threats. The Sea-Land strategy will embed the Navy in joint, combined, and interagency operations. Groups will also have the capability to act as the Joint Force Maritime Component Commander or as the Navy Service Component Commander. The sea-land force will be capable of point or area defense and limited offensive operations against lightly-equipped forces at sea or ashore. Sustained combat ashore still requires the capabilities of the Marine Corps.
The Way Ahead
Sea Power 21 provides a convincing argument for the Navy's existence, in part by demystifying naval capabilities. By departing from the Navy's historical focus on hardware-hulls, aircraft, etc.-it achieved a significant paradigm shift. Clearly, the Navy contributes important capabilities to the joint force, and Sea Power 21 convincingly makes that argument. It fails, however, to link Navy capabilities (means) to our national security goals (ends). Without this link, the Navy leaves the nation with unanswered questions over how much of which capabilities are required to support our national security goals and how the joint force commander will employ these capabilities.
To secure strategic access and retain global freedom of action, the Sea-Land strategy envisions a greatly scaled-back U.S. blue-water legacy fleet as an economy-of-force navy for prestige, as a hedge against a distant conventional near-peer, and to sea base sea-land teams and groups. Today, the Navy expends relatively little effort on security cooperation activities, choosing instead to concentrate on deploying decisive force during lesser contingencies and major wars. This mismatch in time and talent is unsustainable in today's strategic environment and challenges the Navy's relevance. Security cooperation activities aim to stop a crisis from erupting-the best of all possible outcomes. Failing this, security cooperation seeks to ensure that the joint force has theater access, capable friends, and the intelligence needed to effectively deal with a crisis or conflict. The Sea-Land strategy will provide the theater combatant commander security cooperation options that establish favorable security conditions.
In today's strategic environment, the Navy must also provide the combatant commander with timely response options for deterring conflicts. The Sea-Land strategy will further balance Navy capabilities by providing commanders with flexible deterrent options prior to or during a crisis that will strengthen alliances, g coalitions, and partnerships. Under the strategy, the commanders will be provided with a broad menu of interrelated choices that are preplanned and rapidly executable. Sea-land sailors will operate directly with joint, interagency, and multinational forces to align the military instrument of power with our partners' informational, diplomatic, and informational elements of power. The strategy will guide the deployment and employment of decisive naval force through all phases of crisis and conflict. All told, it will provide the umbrella under which security and stability operations secure the United States from attack.
The Sea-Land Force
The strategy will be human-capital intensive and require fundamental changes in how the Navy will recruit, train, retain, and promote sailors. There will be less focus on technical skills and an increased emphasis on cultural, political, and language proficiency. Assignments linked to regions instead of platforms will become the norm. Sailors will increasingly be required to operate independently or in small teams, with little or no supervision, for extended periods. Instead of training designed to mass-produce skills, the focus will shift to the mass customization of specialized capabilities based on individual talents. Frequent rotations will give way to long-term assignments that can pay higher dividends in crisis prevention and conflict management. Short- and mid-term contracting for niche civilian capabilities or individual military talents will increasingly become the norm. The sailor will be more important than the ship, because sailors cannot be mass-produced after a crisis occurs. It will be the quality of the sea-land force that matters, not the quantity.
Creating such a force of 115,000 sailors (including a reserve component of 22,500) needed to carry out this strategy will involve freeing up capital-both human and hardware. The strategy will require cutting in half the number of carriers and attack submarines, while eliminating three-fourths of the ballistic-missile submarines. The current inventory of surface ships will remain largely untouched. However, future procurement will gradually shift the force mix toward amphibious or sea-basing platforms capable of supporting joint operations ashore. To free human capital, crew size reductions of one-fourth will occur within the next five years, and, in ten years, crew sizes will shrink to half what they are today.
The Navy will need to aggressively automate and dramatically shrink the base of the shipboard, submarine, and squadron staffing pyramids. This is already starting, with Navy chief petty officers assigned to division officer billets. The result will be an increase in the knowledge and skill content of the remaining jobs, resulting in mature and highly-educated crews. Crew rotations and habitability improvements from space freed by labor cuts will result in increased endurance. More space-per-sailor will lead to an improved standard of living at sea, as sailors enjoy greater access to higher quality food, better amenities, and greater bandwidth.
The Bottom Line
The limited strategic utility of the post-9/11 Fleet in tracking down terrorists, quelling insurgencies, and fostering stability and security calls for a new strategy. Today's strategic environment has changed, bringing new transnational and non-traditional threats to which the Navy must adapt. If the Navy continues to focus on a peer adversary, it should expect American public support akin to an Arizonan's enthusiasm for paying a monthly flood-insurance premium. Funding for high-technology, big-ticket prestige combat systems will lag or expire altogether without a transformation to the Sea-Land strategy. This maritime strategy is an organizational imperative. Without it. the Navy has no hope of aligning itself with national objectives, and it faces an uncertain future. For this reason the Navy must adopt the Sea-Land strategy for achieving our national objectives.
1 Naval Operations and Concepts section of the NATO Introduction to Maritime Operations retrieved 27 March 2006. http://pfp.ethz.ch.
2 John B. Hattendorf. The Evolution of the U.S. Navy's Maritime Strategy, 1977-1986, Newport Papers, No. 19, (Newport, RI: Naval War College, 2004), 5.
3 H. H. Gaffney, "The American Way of War Through 2020," Washington, DC: NIC 2020 Project http://www.cia.gov/nic/NIC_2020_2004_05_25 intro.html, 25 May 2004.
4 Daniel Marston. "Force Structure of High- and Low-Intensily Warfare: The Anglo-American Experience and Lessons of the Future." Washington, DC: NIC 2020 Project http://www.cia.gov/nic/NIC_2020_2004_05_25 intro.html. 25 May 2004.
5 American strategic direction is provided in the U.S. president's National Security Strategy for the United States of America (September 2002). the U.S. Secretary of Defense's National Defense Strategy of the United States of America (March 2005) and Quadrennial Defense Review Report (September 30. 2001). and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff's National Military Strategy of the United States (Washington. DC: 2004)
6 Colin S. Gray, The Leverage of Sea Power: The Strategic Advantage of Navies in War. (New York. NY: The Free Press, 1992). 283.
7 George W. Baer, One Hundred Years of Sea Power: The U.S. Navy, 1890 to 1990, (Stanford. CA: Stanford University Press. 1994). 14-15.
8 Ibid, 120-121.
9 Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, (Princeton. NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 444-447.
10 Hattendorf, The Evolution of the U.S. Navy's Maritime Strategy, 54-56.
11 Norman Friedman, The Fifty-Year War: Conflict and Strategy in the Cold War, (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1999), 461.
12 Ibid, 262.
Commander Davis is a U.S. Navy Reserve officer assigned to Supreme Allied Command Transformation. He holds a B.S. degree from the California Maritime Academy, an MBA from Loyola Marymount University, and a masters in Strategic Studies from the U.S. Army War College.