Retired Navy officer and vice chair of the House Armed Services Committee Representative Elaine Luria (D-VA) recently wrote about the future of the U.S. fleet: “If the United States is to remain a global power, it needs a Navy fit for the purpose and the United States, as a nation, needs to make the commitment to prioritize national defense. . . .”
Her concerns reflected those of naval leaders of yesteryear, specifically the General Board of the Navy that oversaw the design of the fleet from 1900 to 1950 and found itself in a somewhat similar situation in 1933 vis-à-vis the Navy. The Board, after reviewing the nearly non-existent naval construction of the four years of the Herbert Hoover administration, issued this warning, presumably to President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR): “Present preparedness must not be sacrificed to an illusory future readiness. National emergencies cannot be foreseen and must be met by existing forces.”1 The United States cannot maintain its position as a “global power” with an inadequate fleet—and crumbling port infrastructures—that is inadequate to address emergent crises. The United States has a deficit of sea power.
FDR and the General Board solved two problems—worldwide depression and anemic warship construction that had led to a weak and aging fleet—with several mechanisms. The first involved jobs and the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which set aside more than $240 million to build ships the Congress already had approved for construction. NIRA included reopening and revitalizing shipyards that had been effectively closed, such as the Brooklyn Naval Shipyard.2 The second mechanism involved legislation to ensure that what had happened under President Hoover, and to a lesser degree President Calvin Coolidge, would not happen again. Those administrations had used the limitations of the Washington Naval Treaty and the threat of more cuts and limitations at naval conferences to justify a meager shipbuilding program. Representative Carl Vinson (D-GA) sponsored legislation, now known as the Vinson-Trammel Bills, that mandated a building schedule to build to the limits set in the Washington (1922) and London (1930) naval treaties (as the Japanese had done). FDR and Vinson pitched their (successful) effort to refurbish and improve the Navy to a skeptical and economically reeling U.S. public within the constraints of isolationist neutrality as a means to prevent and deter war.3 Representative Luria should look to the 1930s as well as the 1980s to make her case for a better future fleet.
Sea Power and Culture
In October 1952, the early days of the Cold War, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) aired the first episode of Victory at Sea, a documentary culled and organized from more than 13,000 hours of film footage shot by the Imperial Japanese, German, U.S., and British Royal navies from World War II. There were 26 episodes, broadcast roughly one each week until May 1953. This saga of the sea held Americans spellbound in front of the latest information technology, television, as it told the story of victory on the oceans in World War II in film, words, and music composed by Richard Rodgers of South Pacific fame. It won Emmy and Peabody awards and included footage taken during the war by such film greats as the director John Ford, who endured Japanese bombing on Midway during that major battle as he filmed.4
Television’s emerging monopoly on information dissemination at the time, and NBC’s oversized place in that new market, enhanced the effect of the sea power narrative that Victory at Sea encompassed. The program captured a large audience, particularly among the large and influential U.S. middle class. The context of the airing is extremely important to understanding the impact it had on the strategic culture as well as the larger American cultural psyche. The early Cold War was not going well for the United States. Beginning in 1948, with the Soviet Berlin Air Blockade (and air lift in response), the United States’ post-war strategy for a new internationalist world order seemed to be in retreat. In 1949, the Chinese Civil War concluded in favor of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party. Amid cries of “Who lost China?,” Americans learned that the Soviet Union had detonated its first atomic weapon, thus ending the U.S. monopoly on nuclear weapons and changing its strategic calculus. Finally, as President Harry S. Truman slashed naval funding and replaced the Chief of Naval Operations for testifying honestly to Congress, an unexpected war broke out in Korea in June 1950. After a desperate defense at Pusan and exhilarating allied victory at Inchon, the Chinese intervened and the war degraded into a World War I–type stalemate. At the time, most Americans regarded the war’s stalemate more as a defeat than a victory.5
Against this depressing backdrop, a new strategy had emerged for a protracted conflict and contest of wills with what was then called “worldwide communism.” Diplomat-historian George Kennan had initiated within the government what became known as the “containment” strategy—“a long-term patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” Many elites inside and outside the U.S. government supported his vision in a protracted contest with the Soviet-led communist world. Kennan’s vision of containment was to use the economic, political, and diplomatic instruments of U.S. national power for a protracted conflict that would cause the Soviet Union to eventually collapse from its own internal political-economic contradictions.6
However, the setbacks mentioned above—especially the outbreak of the Korean War—underwrote a more militarily muscular approach orchestrated by Paul Nitze of the State Department’s Policy Planning section for the National Security Council (NSC). Nitze had had a brilliant career as a lawyer prior to World War II and later was one of the analysts for the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey that examined the efficacy of the Allied protracted bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan. After the war, he continued his government service, ending up in the State Department (just like Kennan). In April 1950, his section produced NSC-68, which advocated for a strong military component to containment and included building up the Navy as part of an enhanced security strategy.7 The Korean War, coming on the heels of the Truman Administration’s consideration of NSC-68, resulted in that policy prescription being adopted as the principal strategy for containment on top of Kennan’s more restrained approach.8
Kennan and Nitze’s versions of containment strategy aligned serendipitously with the impact of Victory at Sea on the American television viewing public. Victory at Sea, in a graphic way, showed the American public that the United States could win a protracted and sustained conflict against Germany and Japan. Both these enemies represented totalitarian threats to the world order. Over the 26 weeks of its airing, Victory at Sea served as both a cheerleader and gritty reminder that the although the United States was in for a long haul with communism, it also had been in a “hard slog” at sea against Germany and Japan, and it had prevailed. But it needed a globe-spanning Navy to do so, and one that worked closely with its maritime allies.9 Victory at Sea and the example of the Navy instilled confidence in the U.S. public that it could prevail. It sent the message, “We’ve done this before, and we can do this again.”
Recommendations—Leveraging the Past
Representative Luria specifically recommends that the nation turn to the 1980s to inform the design of the fleet for the current set of challenges in a multipolar world and to regain global sea power capability. Although this advice has merit, especially designing a maritime strategy that matches fleet size and capability to global interests, it should not be the only consideration. The Biden administration, and not just the Department of the Navy and Department of Defense, would do well to look toward the collective experience of the past in a troubled time of peace. FDR before World War II and the airing of Victory at Sea on national television during the first decade of the Cold War should also be studied.
First, FDR’s NIRA program of jobs and ships provides insight. President Joe Biden’s infrastructure package, or a successor legislative initiative, should have NIRA-like features including not only improvements for warship capacity and construction but also for civilian ship-building and commercial port infrastructure. On the face of it, there is little maritime flavor in the current bill for shipbuilding or port infrastructure improvements, which were last seriously considered under the Obama administration. Either this bill or some other could address these needs, and certainly the congressional representatives and senators from seacoast states, such as Luria’s Virginia, will be willing supporters. It is an open secret that the United States cannot keep pace with China’s frenetic shipbuilding efforts because of U.S. shipyard capacity. Building proven designs up to some new number, whether 330 or 350 ships or some higher number, would stress existing facilities and give the United States little flexibility in ramping up shipbuilding in case of another need for “National emergencies [that] cannot be foreseen.”10
Another area of promise that reflects the experience of the past is in naval armaments. There is a naval arms race underway and the United States is losing. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Washington and London treaties did restrain the major naval powers in their building, although the United States unwisely chose not to build versus building to the limits allowed by treaty.11 The Biden administration, along with potential allies in Congress, should expand the currently modest efforts at international arms limitation and control, a system greatly damaged by the Trump administration. Naval armaments should be included in any discussions with Russia and China along with nuclear arms limitation and even reduction. The centennial anniversary of the Washington Arms Treaty occurs in 2022, and attempting to bring the global arms races under control would be a good way to commemorate it. Ironically, experience has shown that the best way to do this is to have a healthy naval building program, with the yards, dry docks, and port infrastructure to support it busy building the fleet. The Washington Conference of 1921–22 proved a success because of U.S. naval construction, not because a lack of it.12
Finally, there is the example of Victory at Sea. Today the medium has changed, but not the message. The internet, social media, streaming services, and all the other information technologies are out there, waiting to convince the U.S. voting public about the advantages of sea power, maritime policy, and a healthy capacity to build ships —both for peace and war, and to influence other nations. Unlike the period in which Victory at Sea occurred, there is no one medium to hold Americans spellbound over such a long period. But that challenge should not dissuade the Biden administration, and the Navy, from attempting something as grand. Perhaps a Ken Burns–like documentary on the maritime aspects of the Cold War that shows how port capacity and fleet size fluctuations played a role in that protracted, but ultimately successful, struggle—and all without the bloodshed at sea on the scale witnessed in World War II. It might even be entitled “Victory at Sea: The Road to the 600-ship Navy,” which takes us back to Luria’s references to the 1980s. But it would not begin with the 1980s. The challenge is clear; all that is wanting is the will.
- Cited in John T. Kuehn, Agents of Innovation: The General Board and the Design of the Fleet That Defeated the Japanese Navy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2008), 58.
- John T. Kuehn, “The U.S. Navy General Board and Naval Arms Limitation: 1922–37 in The Journal of Military History, Vol. 74, no. 4 (October 2010): 1154–1156.
- Kuehn, Agents of Innovation, 58–59.
- Various, Victory at Sea, 50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition, National Broadcasting Company and The History Channel, 2003. Four DVD set. For John Ford at Midway see Disc 1, episode 4, “Midway Is East.”
- See Jeffrey G. Barlow, From Hot War to Cold: The U.S. Navy and National Security Affairs, 1945–1955 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). See also Michael Carver, “Conventional Warfare in the Nuclear Age,” in Makers of Modern Strategy, 2nd ed., ed. Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 779–780.
- George F. Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” by X, Foreign Affairs (July 1947): 566–82.
- John Lewis Gaddis and Paul H. Nitze, “NSC 68 and the Soviet Threat Reconsidered,” International Security 4 (Spring 1980): 164–76.
- Robert Jervis, “The Impact of the Korean War on the Cold War,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 24, no. 4 (December 1980): 563–92.
- See Corbin Williamson, The U.S. Navy and Its Cold War Alliances, 1945-1953, Modern War Studies Series (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2020): 6–8.
- For a discussion of ship-building capacity needs see John Bowser, “Across the Expanse: The Sealift Dilemma in a War Against China,” 22 June 2021, Center for International Maritime Security, cimsec.org/across-the-expanse-the-sealift-dilemma-in-a-war-against-china/.
- See Kuehn, Agents of Innovation, chapter 4.
- John T. Kuehn, America’s First General Staff: A Short History of the Rise and Fall of the General Board of the Navy, 1900-1950 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2017), 116–120. This text discusses the so-called “Naval Battle of Paris,” in which President Wilson used naval construction to get the British to agree to certain concessions. The same occurred at Washington in 1921, when Secretary of State Charles E. Hughes used naval construction as a “stick” to get Britain and Japan to agree to limit their navies and cutting construction and decommissioning ships as the “carrot.”
