After 20 years a new maritime strategy if being crafted for the new century. But those charged with drafting it are finding that the challenges the nation faces today present obstacles no one could have imagined two decades ago.
On 14 June 2006, Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chief of Naval Operations, announced plans to draft a new maritime strategy to replace the current document, which has been in force since 1986. Early indications are that the task will be daunting.
There's little doubt that the effort is needed. The 1986 strategy marked a major turning point when it was issued. By citing Soviet ballistic-missile submarines as one of the key military threats facing the nation—and suggesting that the U.S. Navy be tasked to contain them in their home waters—it added a new dimension to U.S. strategy for the Cold War. The document served as the cornerstone of the Navy's thinking about what kind of fleet would be needed over the next several years. And it laid the groundwork for the Reagan administration's ambitious plan to expand the naval force to 600 ships.
But the Cold War is long over, and the Navy now faces a serious mismatch between its capabilities and challenges. "Today's Navy lacks such a cornerstone," retired Marine Corps Reserve Lieutenant Colonel Frank G. Hoffman, now at the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities at Quantico, Virginia, said in a recent paper, referring to the 1986 document, which is now obsolete. The idea of devising a new strategy "is timely and necessary," he said, and "is critical if America's security interests are to be preserved."
Not as Easy as 1986
Yet, as Colonel Hoffman points out, the complexity of today's challenges will make the drafting job a lot more difficult than it was in the 1980s. Unlike the earlier period, there's no national consensus today about who the enemy is and how much Americans are willing to pay to neutralize the threat. Current potential adversaries include both governments and transnational groups, such as terrorist organizations. And the United States lacks the on-ground intelligence needed to understand them the way it eventually did the Soviet Union.
"The drafters of the [1986] Maritime Strategy had it relatively easy—they had a single, clearly identified, clearly agreed-upon enemy toward which to focus their effort," Navy Captain Sam J. Tangredi, director of strategic planning and business development in the Navy International Program Office, told a conference at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) in Alexandria, Virginia, on 25-26 October. The conference was called to help spur the debate about what the new maritime strategy should contain.
There are other important differences between now and the mid-1980s: The growing globalization of world commerce and the diffusion of critical technology around the globe today have made the U.S. economy significantly more dependent on other countries, and have given America's adversaries easier access to sophisticated weapons. And without the pressure from the Cold War threat, the United States is finding it more difficult to assemble and maintain the sorts of international partnerships and coalitions that the Soviet-era challenges once encouraged.
Even more fundamental, the Navy's success in overcoming the Soviet naval threat has left it with no single nemesis in its longstanding mission to control the seas. While there's still an overarching need to keep global sea lanes open, today's military conflicts are most likely to be best won through ground and air operations, most often involving infantry troops and special forces units. The Navy's newest role will most likely continue to be in littoral areas, interdicting terrorists and smugglers and providing fire-support for troops. The traditional blue-water mission is less acute.
With financial resources constrained by mounting budget deficits, that means the Navy must seek help wherever it can get it, relying more heavily than ever on the Marines and the Coast Guard to enable U.S. forces to perform these new missions, Admiral Mullen has argued. It also must coax other navies and foreign coast guard forces to join the effort, and even merchant vessels, which can serve as additional eyes and ears. Admiral Mullen tentatively calls the concept a "1,000-ship Navy," as it includes the Coast Guard and foreign vessels as well.
A True Team Effort
To shape the new strategy, the admiral has set down some opening markers—and a lightning-fast schedule. The strategy will be written with heavy input from the Marine Corps and the Coast Guard. Foreign navies and commercial shipping firms will be widely consulted. And the Navy will conduct a series of seminars across the country to talk with business groups and community leaders as part of a "consensus-building" effort that seems designed to ensure broad approval when the plan is unveiled in June. The Naval War College will provide an analytical framework for the new strategy by the end of March 2007, and the document will be written during the spring and unveiled formally in June.
The two-day brainstorming session sponsored by CNA last month underscored how daunting the task will be. Although the guest-list read like a who's who of well-known naval strategists and historians, the conference yielded no sweeping concepts that OpNav staffers could take back for drafting the new maritime strategy. (The meeting was held under ground rules that participants wouldn't be quoted directly without their permission, but several agreed later to put their comments on the record.)
Panelists tackled individual parts of the overall challenge. One group wrestled with the question of whether the Navy should now target China as its major "peer competitor" in place of the old Soviet Union. (Answer: Not yet, but it still isn't clear what to do about that potential challenge.) Another talked about how to change the Navy's force structure to meet the need for both blue-water ships and those that can fight in littoral areas. (Retired Navy Captain Wayne P. Hughes Jr. of the Naval Postgraduate School suggested building a "bi-modal" force that could do both, but others doubted that that would work.) What will the increasing globalization mean for the Navy? (Answer: A lot, but there was no consensus on how to deal with it.)
Several harked back to the watershed article by the renowned Harvard University political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington, in the May 1954 issue of Proceedings, which urged the Navy to use the global command of the seas that it had acquired in World War II to achieve supremacy on the land—a shift that would require "a real revolution in naval thought and operations," as Huntington described it. And University of Maryland naval historian Jon Sumida likened Admiral Mullen's call for a 1,000-ship navy to the global use of sea power advocated by Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, regarded as the father of maritime strategy. "It's nothing more than a restatement of Mahan's strategy," Dr. Sumida said.
Indeed, one of the most interesting presentations was a contrarian warning from retired Navy Captain Joseph F. Bouchard, now a senior program executive for Zel Technologies, LLC, in Hampton, Virginia, that from a political perspective, the timing of the new strategy might prove a stumbling block. While agreeing that the Navy badly needs to replace the 1986 Maritime Strategy, Captain Bouchard cautioned that mid-2007 will be the middle of "the second-to-the-last year of a lame-duck administration;" that Congress' two major parties may well remain polarized; that voters will be frustrated over the war in Iraq; and that Senator John Warner (R-Va.), a former Secretary of the Navy, no longer will be chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
"I can't think of a worse time to publish a national maritime strategy than June 2007," he told the group.
Many Challenges
Missing from the discussion was what the Navy might be prepared to lose with a new maritime strategy. Building a new fleet designed to operate in littoral areas might well cut into the shipbuilding budgets for blue-water vessels, from aircraft carriers to high-technology destroyers. In a post-conference interview, Retired Air Force Colonel Thomas A. Keaney, executive director of the Foreign Policy Institute at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, pointed out that eventually strategy-drafters "are going to have to go back and say, 'What are you willing to give up?'"
And several participants reminded Navy planners during hallway conversations that for all the public relations efforts, such as conducting conferences and public seminars, the new strategy should be written mainly by warfighters-active-duty officers with the necessary experience and the responsibility for carrying it out.
"The preparers of the strategy should be practitioners—Navy and Marine Corps officers with saltwater in their veins and relevant education," said retired Navy Captain Roger W. Barnett, professor emeritus at the Naval War College. One participant worried later that in seeking outside advice from so many groups, Navy leaders may have "punted away their responsibility."
To be sure, the effort is still in its early stages, and public debate has only just begun. Navy drafters still plan to craft a document that will fulfill Admiral Mullen's hopes for a sweeping strategy that will help guide the Navy through the next two decades or more.
Nevertheless, as Lieutenant Colonel Hoffman noted in his own paper, written for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the 1986 strategy "was the culmination of years of internal studies and critical debates about the Navy's Cold War role." Whether the current strategy team can come up with a worthy successor this quickly remains to be seen.
Mr. Pine, a former naval officer and veteran reporter, covered military affairs for the Los Angeles Times and also reported for the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He is a free-lance writer living in Chevy Chase, Maryland. In October 2006, Mr. Pine was recognized as one of Proceedings' Co-Authors of the Year.