A destroyer nabs Somali pirates. Helicopters from an amphibious ship deliver humanitarian supplies. A frigate interdicts cocaine smugglers. Is this what these modern, highly capable warships were designed for? Hardly. Every day, U.S. Navy vessels perform important peacetime tasks far different from the naval-warfare missions they were designed for. Forces that were organized, trained, and equipped for combat spend much of their time conducting such diverse activities as sanction enforcement, security cooperation, and humanitarian assistance.1 And well they should. These peacetime naval missions are increasingly vital to our national security and economic interests. They are also increasingly complex and challenging, and fundamentally different from naval warfare.
Unfortunately, the Navy doesn’t fully appreciate the importance or the growing complexity of today’s peacetime missions, and doesn’t take them seriously. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, current naval thinking largely takes peacetime tasks for granted. The Navy’s approach presumes that these undertakings can be mastered on the fly without much prior thought or analysis. As esteemed colleague Dr. Milan Vego recently put it, “Obviously, a navy that is capable of defeating an enemy in a high-intensity conventional confrontation could, with the proper doctrine and training, successfully accomplish diverse tasks in peacetime and operations short of war.”2 Perhaps. The problem is that our Navy does not have the proper doctrine or training, or the theory to underpin doctrine and training, for the important roles it fills in peacetime today.
There are two reasons for this. One is the legitimate concern that time spent chasing pirates or handing out bottled water comes at the expense of preparing for war at sea against a conventional enemy.3 Fair enough. Our Navy exists to fight and win the nation’s wars at sea. The world is an uncertain place. The current lack of a naval peer competitor is no guarantee that we won’t face one in the future. There can be no question that our Navy’s top priority must be maintaining its excellence in high-end conventional warfighting. That said, it is not an either-or question. The Navy can prepare for war and be good at peace, too. This is not about force structure. We don’t have to trade carriers for patrol craft to get serious about peacetime operations. Instead, it means approaching these functions like real naval missions and developing the theory, doctrine, and training necessary to be good at them. This has yet to be done.
The second reason the Navy gives short shrift to peacetime missions is that many naval officers implicitly assume that warfare concepts and methods are adequate, with minor adjustment, to achieve peacetime objectives. They think of many of the things navies do in peacetime as just less-violent versions of the things they do in war. As such, peacetime naval operations shouldn’t need their own body of theory, doctrine, or training. This line of thinking is myopic and not helpful. The maritime domain has grown more complicated and more strategically important in recent decades. Wartime missions have fundamentally different objectives, methods, and underlying principles than seemingly similar peacetime missions. Conflating the two puts us at risk of unintended and unfavorable strategic consequences.
Increasingly Important, Increasingly Complex
The Navy’s peacetime role today is strategically important in ways it never was before. One factor in this is globalization and the world’s dependence on free-flowing maritime commerce. Cheap, fast, reliable shipping is the cornerstone of the global economy. By some estimates, almost a third of the U.S. economy directly depends on efficient, uninterrupted oceanic transportation; other developed nations are similarly dependent.4 The trend is to be even more so. Unfortunately, the marine transportation system is not only vital, but fragile. Today, non-state actors can cause a level of disruption previously the exclusive purview of state-sponsored navies. The system’s vulnerability is compounded by its intrinsic interconnectedness such that any significant disruption hurts everyone.5
The maritime domain has grown in strategic importance in other ways, too. Transnational terror groups use the sea as both a mode of communication and as a means of attack, and international criminal organizations use the sea to transport narcotics, weapons, and people. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction almost exclusively happens via the sea. The potential exists for a modus vivendi between criminals and terrorists where criminal maritime networks could be used to infiltrate terrorists into the country. The marine environment is also an important source of economic resources that are vulnerable and need protection. All in all, the importance of the sea for diverse national interests has never been greater.6
Naval activities in peacetime are not only important, but they are increasingly complex. A big part of this is due to the way maritime commerce operates today. In the past, nations maintained their own merchant fleets. A nationally owned merchant ship flew the flag and carried the cargo of her home country. That is no longer the case. Today, most merchant ships are flagged (registered) by nations that have no enduring interest in the ship, crew, or cargo beyond the collection of registration fees. The amalgamating effect of these flags of convenience is compounded by the ubiquity of the shipping container and its associated intermodal technology. Cargoes of all the world’s trading nations are intermingled on board ships of all flags. The significance for navies is that you can no longer protect your own economic interests by safeguarding your own merchant ships. Today, you have to protect the whole vulnerable system.
International maritime law is another factor increasing the complexity of the peacetime operating environment. It has evolved and is now a factor in ways it never used to be. This presents both opportunities and risks. In the past, international law applied to navies in peacetime only tangentially, largely by imposing a degree of fairness on their conduct as potential belligerents. Today, a growing canon of treaties and agreements has changed the dominant maritime-law paradigm from one of separation to one of cooperation on matters of common interest.7 The law now legitimizes the use of carefully applied, limited naval force in a variety of new circumstances. The bottom line for naval officers is that operations in peacetime must be designed and conducted with a full appreciation of the law if they are to be seen as legitimate uses of naval power. The question of legitimacy is further amplified by the rapid global flow of information. Nothing a naval force does, anywhere on the globe, will remain secret for long. Perceptions become reality, and legitimacy is crucial to success in the peacetime maritime domain.
Still another complicating factor is the inevitable and necessary interagency involvement in almost any mission a naval force might tackle in peacetime.8 Naval forces doing counternarcotics must work closely with law-enforcement agencies for successful prosecutions of smugglers. Naval participation in disaster-response missions is actually in direct support of civilian agencies—FEMA for domestic disasters and an element of the U.S. Agency for International Development in a foreign country. Counterterrorism and counter-weapons-of-mass-destruction missions have a strong interagency component, and the Navy has learned hard lessons about the importance of close interagency coordination for quick handoff of captured pirates so they don’t tie up surface combatants interminably as holding facilities.9 The bottom line is that successful peacetime naval operations today involve a number of complexities that have little or no parallel in naval warfare.
Warfare Doctrine Doesn’t Fit the Bill
The Navy’s role in peacetime is demanding and different enough to warrant its own body of theory and doctrine. Unfortunately, the Navy hasn’t invested the intellectual capital to develop such theory or doctrine, despite rhetoric to the contrary. In the absence of sufficiently thought-through peacetime concepts, naval officers and strategists misapply naval-warfare theory and doctrine to peacetime tasks. This is wrongheaded. It leads to a weak understanding of the opportunities and challenges, failure to recognize the distinctive challenges of peacetime missions, and strategic risk.
Sea control is the warfare concept most often misapplied to peacetime activities. It is the task of setting conditions such that the enemy is unable to interfere significantly with the accomplishment of one’s military objectives at sea.10 The key word here is enemy. The existence of an enemy means that the context of sea control is one of a state of hostilities, and the legal regime is the law of war. In other words, sea control is only applicable to belligerents engaged in an armed conflict. You can set the conditions for sea control during peacetime, and you can use force in a law-enforcement or constabulary context, but you can’t take military action to achieve sea control until you are in a state of hostilities.
Using the concept of sea control as a rubric to conceptualize counterpiracy or similar peacetime constabulary tasks can lead to dangerous misunderstandings. It is a question of which legal regime governs the use of military force. The law of war applies during hostilities, while the employment of military force in peacetime is governed by the law of the sea and other enforcement-based legal regimes.11 The rules for dealing with enemies during war and with criminals during peacetime are different. Invoking the right legal regime or authority is essential for naval activities to be seen as legitimate on the international stage. Legitimacy is crucial to achieving peacetime objectives. Relying on the wrong regime of authority can compromise legitimacy and lead to strategic failure.
The Navy hasn’t taken a serious approach to intellectually preparing for peacetime missions. Evidence of this can be found in current strategic and doctrinal writing. The 2007 Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower devotes quite a few pages to noncombat missions, but the treatment is cursory, long on platitudes, and unmoored from any sound theoretical underpinnings. For example, the Cooperative Strategy almost entirely ignores the key tenets that distinguish peacetime operations from naval warfare. International law is barely mentioned, and there is no discussion at all of the crucial principle of legitimacy. The Naval Operating Concept 2010 is similarly lacking in peacetime fundamentals and goes even further by explicitly conflating the concept of sea control with the peacetime concept of freedom of navigation.12 It seems clear that these documents were written from a warfighting perspective, and the underlying naval-warfare concepts were only superficially adapted to address the new peacetime emphasis. The contemporary peacetime roles and missions of the Navy were not subjected to a rigorous comprehensive analysis to derive their fundamental tenets and principles, but they should be.
Does all this matter? Absolutely. Vital national interests are at stake, and the Navy’s peacetime job is growing ever more complex and demanding. Its activities in peacetime, particularly when they involve or threaten the use of force, must be seen as legitimate by the world community if we are to achieve our objectives. Legitimacy for naval operations in peacetime hinges on whether those operations are designed and conducted with a full appreciation of the fundamentals. The risk of strategic misstep is too great to continue to treat peacetime naval operations as watered-down versions of wartime tasks.
In sum, the Navy needs to get serious about peacetime naval operations. It should develop the theory and doctrine necessary to support a full understanding of the Navy’s important role in today’s peacetime maritime domain, and then it should train and exercise accordingly. We don’t need to restructure the Fleet, but we do need to restructure Fleet thinking. An opportunity to do this currently exists, because there is an ongoing effort to revise and update the Cooperative Strategy. Presumably, an update of the Naval Operating Concept will follow. Now is the time to give peacetime operations their due attention. It need not come at the expense of warfighting capability. The Navy must retain its primary focus on high-end naval combat. That does not mean, though, that peacetime activities can continue to be taken for granted.
The Naval War College scholar Rear Admiral Henry E. Eccles once wrote that theory is the key to understanding the effects one can and cannot achieve through the use of military forces.13 It is vitally important today that the Navy commit the intellectual capital necessary to fully understand the key principles and tenets of this new challenge. Continuing to rely on naval-warfare concepts to deal with increasingly complex and strategically important peacetime functions is a recipe for strategic failure.
1. For a more extensive list of contemporary naval activities short of war, see Milan Vego, “On Naval Power,” Joint Forces Quarterly, no. 50 (Third Quarter 2008), 8–17.
2. Milan Vego, “Study War Much More,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, vol. 139, no. 1 (January 2013), 59–63.
3. Ibid.
4. James J. Carafano and Martin E Anderson, Trade Security at Sea: Setting National Priorities for Safeguarding America’s Economic Lifeline (Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, 2006), 1.
5. See, for example, Stephen E. Flynn, America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us from Terrorism (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).
6. Michael D. Greenberg et al., Maritime Terrorism, Risk and Liability (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2006).
7. James Kraska, “Grasping ‘the Influence of Law on Sea Power,’” Naval War College Review, vol. 62, no. 3 (Summer 2009), pp. 122–30.
8. Robert B. Watts, “The New Normalcy: Sea Power and Contingency Operations in the Twenty-First Century,” Naval War College Review, vol. 65, no. 23 (Summer 2012), 47–64.
9. Craig Whitlock, “Lack Of Prosecution Poses Challenge For Foreign Navies That Capture Pirates,” Washington Post, 24 May 2010.
10. Milan Vego, Operational Warfare at Sea (London: Routledge, 2009), 25.
11. Law of War Program, Department of Defense Directive 2311.01E (Washington, DC: DOD, 9 May 2006), 2. The Commander’s Handbook on the Law of Naval Operations, Naval Warfare Publication 1-14M (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, July 2007), 1-1, 6-1, 6-2.
12. Naval Operations Concept 2010: Implementing the Maritime Strategy (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, 2010), 52.
13. Henry E. Eccles, Military Concepts and Philosophy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1965), 22.