In October the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard jointly issued a new maritime strategy, A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower, that was printed in last month's Proceedings. The fruit of a long effort, including a series of "conversations with the country," the document was greeted by many with the criticism that it seemed pedestrian. The long process of consensus-building that produced it had apparently eliminated whatever sharp edges it may have initially possessed.
But the critics miss the point. The first job of public naval strategy is to educate said public, which often means policy-makers, in the basic realities of the maritime world. The Sea Services are expensive. They operate mainly in places few civilians see, since most who travel outside the United States do so by air. The reality, which has not changed, is that most goods move by sea and most people in the world live near the sea (or near major rivers), because transportation by water is so much easier than any other sort. If fuel becomes far more expensive, the sea is likely to become more, not less, vital as a means of transportation.
Ease of transportation may sound simple, but it is why the U.S. Navy can move an air base at a speed of over 30 miles per hour for weeks on end, or why the Marines can move their bases around the world. When the United States was about to engage in Afghanistan, a Russian commentator suggested that without nearby air bases, all we could do was make either symbolic strikes or nuclear ones. He failed to take into account those mobile, gray-painted air bases the U.S. Navy had moved into the Arabian Sea.
Seas Unify, Not Divide
Navies gain their power from their astonishing mobility. The usual expression is that it costs less to ship a car from Japan to New York by sea than from Detroit to New York. In a vital sense, the sea unites rather than divides. If you live in a seaport, that is fairly obvious, although less so now that what comes from abroad generally arrives at a container facility far from the public. If you live deep inland it is not obvious at all. There is a reason that many on the East Coast understood, in 1914 and in 1939, that events across the Atlantic affected them, whereas those in the Midwest tended to feel that each time it was "Europe's quarrel, not ours." Saudi Arabia and Iraq are a lot closer to the United States than many may imagine. Conversely, our maritime power can be a lot closer to al Qaeda's bases than its adherents may suppose—as the war in Afghanistan showed.
If we can use the sea as our highway, so can others. In 1889, Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Tracy asked naval officers to sketch a future U.S. national strategy. They knew the facts of maritime life. They concluded that the United States could not be defended at its coasts, because the sea highway offered far too many opportunities for an attacker. The only viable option was to build a seagoing fleet capable of threatening potential attackers much closer to their own shores so they would either be deterred or, at worst, forced onto the defensive.
Although derided at the time, this concept of forward defense became U.S. national strategy. Now the United States faces an attack problem not entirely different from what Tracy's naval board imagined. Years of discussion on homeland defense show that however much we invest, terrorists have opportunities to attack us. The new strategy echoes Tracy's: we have to occupy a forward position. We have to take the initiative, to make them concentrate on surviving rather than on attacking us.
The new strategy emphasizes that the sea unites the world rather than divides it. For years the U.S. national position has been that free trade, which is largely seaborne, is the main hope for any country hoping to become prosperous. To the extent that poverty and misery fuel terrorism, helping countries develop may be our best defense. We can expect that other governments share our hopes in this regard. Thus the new strategy refers to ongoing U.S. Navy attempts to use our strengths, in areas such as ocean surveillance and command and control, as a basis for a maritime coalition of the willing. Those looking back can see NATO as exactly such a coalition, and a very successful one.
Lehman Understood
Go back to the Maritime Strategy produced in the 1980s. Then-Secretary of the Navy John Lehman well understood the potential of sea power, but he had to persuade Congress to underwrite naval expansion. Six hundred ships had been proposed earlier as the force the United States could afford (20 ships per year, 30-year lifetime), but it took a definite strategy to decide what types of ships were needed. The Navy of the Maritime Strategy was built around strike forces—carrier and amphibious groups, with battleship-led surface action groups to make up for limited carrier numbers. That was a radical departure from the previous administration's emphasis on frigates for sea control.
The genius of the 1986 Maritime Strategy was the realization that projecting power and achieving sea control were not opposite roles. They were, and actually should be, different aspects of a single seapower concept. This unified concept took into account the fact that the enemy, the Soviet Navy, combined its own air- and sea-based power. No strategy that failed to deal with those big Soviet missile-carrying bombers had the slightest chance of success. That may seem obvious in retrospect, but when it was first published, it seemed radical. As Secretary Lehman pointed out in the November Proceedings, the Soviets certainly understood what was happening; they had finally been checkmated.
Historical research shows that strategists within the Navy well understood what was needed in wartime. The Maritime Strategy was written by stitching together the war plans of the various senior naval commanders. Their plans in turn could be traced back to the Navy's initial responses to the problem of dealing with a land power, circa 1947. The new Maritime Strategy was classic strategy brought up to date by exploiting new technology. It was a modern expression of the way in which naval strategists generally approach the problem of a land power with some sea access.
Because navies are so expensive, they cannot deploy as many ships as they would like. Six hundred ships sounded like a lot only because people forgot the 1,200 the Navy deployed in the early 1960s, or the thousands available in 1945. How can a few ships influence events as effectively as hundreds of thousands of troops or thousands of aircraft? One answer is that the ships are far easier to concentrate in one place. Another is that because heavy weights are easy to move by water, the ships can individually be quite powerful.
Mobility and concentration are not too valuable, however, if the ships are limited to specialized roles. Separation of roles, as in power projection vs. sea control, is a convenient way to allocate resources within a larger defense budget, and it seems quite rational. It was certainly a convenient basis for the analysis used to allocate resources. To accept this division implicitly wastes what the sea can offer. The idea of such separation was radical, not conventional, within the naval community when it was first made a basis for policy in 1970. At the time an anonymous captain commented that to abandon offensive action was to invite defeat by the Soviets. The sea is too vast to defend as such.
In 1982, to the extent that the policy community understood sea power, it generally thought in terms of separate naval functions. Congress had been educated to do so. As Secretary, it was Lehman's job to educate Congress and other policy-makers not only in what the Navy might want, but far more important, in what the Navy could do for the country if the Cold War turned hot—to educate the Washington political establishment in the realities of the naval world. Many outside the Navy found the Maritime Strategy shocking, because they had never thought through what the Navy could do. Surely this kind of aggressive forward strategy was something new and, in the terms then current, "provocative."
Because discussions of strategy in Washington were often really about how to allocate money, the Maritime Strategy was attacked as little more than an excuse for more naval spending. In fact it showed how U.S. naval power could make existing national strategy more effective. Many, for example, doubted that affordable standing ground forces in Germany could stop the Soviets from pushing to the English Channel. The Maritime Strategy—and many earlier U.S. naval strategists—pointed out that attacking or threatening the strategic flanks of the Soviet Union might well slow down such an attack enough to allow NATO to build up sufficient opposition on the ground. The same naval power could also deter the Soviets, because it would become obvious that reaching the Channel would not win the war.
It is not 1982, and the new strategy is not explicit because the war we are in is not very well defined. However, the sea is still there, and it is still highway rather than barrier. That message, with all its implications, is the single vital one the Sea Services must send out to a world that needs to understand it.