Advantage at Sea is a statement of the self-concept and objectives of the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and the national defense components of the Coast Guard—the explanation of their purpose and value. Unfortunately, the document appears to have no effect whatsoever on the public defense dialog in the United States. This lack of interest is not a positive indicator concerning the future of public support for the Sea Services, and the Navy in particular.1 There are at least five political, bureaucratic, or doctrinal issues that prevent any U.S. Navy strategy document from having a public, or even an internal Department of Defense, effect. These “disadvantages ashore” include: (1) public perceptions of maritime security, (2) the current size of the U.S. fleet, (3) the change of jointness from interoperability to ideology, (4) the conflicting demands of combatant commanders, and (5) the unrestrained belief in technological solutions to military competition. To succeed, a Navy strategy document must be written to specifically overcome these disadvantages.
The Impact of Advantage at Sea
It is hard to find a reference to Advantage at Sea within U.S. news media.2 Further, it is difficult to find a senior official outside of the Department of the Navy who has publicly acknowledged Advantage at Sea or suggested that it could be an element of integrated deterrence. The Joint Staff proceeds with drafting doctrine and strategic concepts as if Advantage at Sea does not exist.3
More important, Advantage at Sea seems to have gained no traction in Congress, even with the House and Senate Armed Services Committees and Seapower Subcommittees. Even Congress members who are the most supportive of the Navy seem unimpressed. Former-Congresswoman Elaine Luria (D-VA) stated, “This document is not a strategy. It is a vision. One cannot design a fleet to meet current challenges, develop a naval force structure for the future, or create a budget input solely from a vision—these require a global maritime strategy to fight and win against a peer competitor, while simultaneously deterring other malign actors.” When even fervent supporters of a strong Navy suggest such a document is ineffective, one must doubt its affect elsewhere.4
An Effective Service Strategy
An unclassified strategy is effective if its objectives are clear and understandable to both the naval community and the American public, it provides a core vision of the future from which to guide naval programs, and it can generate strong resource support from Congress.5
It is difficult to parse these three objectives in Advantage at Sea. The document opens with a letter by the Secretary of the Navy addressing it “To the American people.” However, the immediate and long-term missions of the naval services are described as “shaping the maritime balance of power for the rest of the century” and maintaining a “free and open rules based international order.” It is unclear whether the average U.S. taxpayer thinks in terms of a “maritime balance of power” or a “rules based international order”—and likewise for U.S. sailors. It is further unclear whether a Congress member can explain to his or her constituents that the primary purpose of their Navy (and the result of their tax dollars) is to “shape a maritime balance of power.” The American public may be unwilling to risk war for a “rules based international order”—particularly when the Russian invasion of Ukraine and China’s actions in the South China Sea seem to indicate there is no “order.” Given the outcome of interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is uncertain that such terms remain persuasive.6
What Advantage at Sea Does Well (and Not)
It is unfair to criticize Advantage at Sea without pointing to its virtues. First, it clearly identifies Russia and China as the primary threats to the maritime security of other nations as well as the United States—and the fact that Russia and China are building naval forces to operate on a global scale. Advantage at Sea makes a prescient statement foreshadowing the invasion of Ukraine: “In the event of conflict, China and Russia will likely attempt to seize territory before the United States and its allies can mount an effective response.”
Second, it broaches the fact that, as the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) expands in size, it will routinely operate in the open ocean beyond the two island chains. Unfortunately, Advantage at Sea does not openly state that the PLAN seeks to displace the Unites States as the global Navy; but it does identify that “China’s navy battle force has more than tripled in size in only two decades.” It includes the official estimate is that the PLAN is currently “numerically the largest navy in the world with an overall battle force of approximately 355 ships and submarines.”
Third, Advantage at Sea also attempts to connect the “the Service Chiefs’ statutory roles” of “developing naval forces” with their responsibility of “providing best military advice for employing naval forces.” The emphasis on providing best military advice on employment to national leaders reinforces recent moves by Congress to provide more authority to service chiefs. It recognizes that strategy-making is entwined with developing the forces necessary and there is only a small separation between the roles.
Fourth, it clarifies two significant changes: the naval service’s “emphasis on sea control relative to other naval missions” and in acquiring “greater numbers of distributed capabilities over fewer exquisite platforms.” These two mark a growing shift in the naval philosophy of force design since the last formal public strategy document.7
However, it does not strategize the colliding interests that will create considerable friction during the voyage naval services face toward the achievement of the strategy’s goals.8
A Maritime Nation
Advantage at Sea begins with the statement, “The United States is a maritime nation.” However, some argue this is untrue as the U.S. economy is not completely dependent on overseas trade. Others claim that although the United States possesses sea power, it is also a continental military superpower, therefore “the sea is at best a marginal factor” in forming U.S. national identity.9 Until the publicization of recent pandemic-induced container ship bottlenecks, the maritime aspects of international trade were infrequently discussed in public media. While 90 percent of international trade travels by sea when measured by weight or volume, most of that weight and volume is in raw materials that few Americans directly encounter. Oceangoing trade does still carry the largest percent of exports and imports by dollar value—the durable goods that stock retail shelves. However, the relationship between the freedom of the seas and international trade is not immediately apparent if shelves are stocked.10
To be persuasive, more dramatic arguments—backed by quantitative evidence—must be made, such as: “Two-thirds of everything you touched today came across the ocean;” “The value of the dollar is ultimately dependent on control of the seas;” and “Success of our foreign policies relies on unconstrained use of the sea: tanks don’t swim, bombs don’t win, words don’t deter without it.”11 Bold words are needed to shake public lethargy.12
Size of the U.S. Fleet
The present size of the U.S. fleet and the debate concerning its future contradicts the logic of Advantage at Sea and diminishes its public value. The U.S. fleet is shrinking to its smallest size since 1916 in terms of ship numbers.13 Meanwhile, the PLAN continues to expand. Advantage at Sea maintains that “China’s and Russia’s aggressive naval growth and modernization are eroding U.S. military advantages. Unchecked, these trends will leave the Naval Service unprepared to ensure our advantage at sea and protect national interests within the next decade [emphasis original].”
However, Advantage at Sea has been unable to persuade Congress that the Navy has an effective strategy guiding its force design and acquisition decisions. This lack of trust creates a vicious cycle in which the size of the current fleet is insufficient to implement the goals of Advantage at Sea, yet the document itself is unable to persuade Congress to increase the size of the fleet.14
Thus, it is logical to ask how the Navy intends to check erosion of relative military capabilities and maintain “our advantage at sea” with a fleet that is near to half the size of its primary potential opponent.15 That is a question Advantage at Sea does not answer. A meaningful strategy must do so.
Effects of Joint Ideology and Demands of the Combatant Commanders
The concept of jointness has cemented into a belief that all services should have an equal share in operations, defense policies, joint doctrine, and, inevitably, the DoD budget.16 In the case of contingencies or operations, every service (and perhaps defense agencies as well) should participate, even if the contribution is small or shoehorned in.17
This ideology is also fueled by the unrelenting desire of the combatant commands (CCMDs) for almost any resource that could conceivably be useful for deterrence or operations within their specified theater. Service force development is to serve the needs of the CCMDs. But each CCMD defines its own needs. Thus, services that present strategic visions proposing (or assuming) a more-global or less-regionally directed architecture for their force development (such as Advantage at Sea) are not perceived as supporting a joint approach to strategy.18
The corrosive influence of joint ideology was demonstrated in the fate of the joint U.S. Navy–U.S. Air Force (2009–2013) Air-Sea Battle concept to defeat PLA/PLAN antiaccess systems, an effort praised by then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as a farsighted approach on what the DoD would soon see as the “pacing threat.” If a Navy–Air Force collaborative program directed at coordinating their capabilities and resources to defeat antiaccess/area denial (A2/AD) in a region and scenario dominated by the maritime domain is not considered joint enough, there is little if any space for service strategies to influence joint programs.
Therein lies the dilemma. To justify a greater share of the overall pot requires a persuasive argument as to why the service(s) have a greater potential for solving a strategic or operational problem or dealing with a perceived threat than other elements of the joint force. However, to make such an argument violates joint ideology.19
Let General Milley Lead the Way
Under these conditions, there is little room for service strategies that emphasize uniqueness and provide the optimal capabilities for a specific threat, scenario, or region. But that is not to say that the optimal capabilities may not be recognized by a few senior DoD leaders. As former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General Mark Milley, acknowledged in 2020, “Look, I’m an Army guy. And I love the Army . . . but the fundamental defense of the United States and the ability to project power forward will always be for America naval and air and space power.” General Milley predicted a shift in Pentagon resources to fund a larger fleet, going as far as to state (prior to Advantage at Sea), that “we’re a maritime nation . . . and the defense of the United States depends on air power and sea power primarily. People can say what they want and argue what they want, but that’s a reality.” Yet, such a shift has not occurred.
Disruptive Technologies
Advantage at Sea states, “New and converging technologies will have profound impacts on the security environment. Artificial intelligence, autonomy, additive manufacturing, quantum computing, and new communications and energy technologies could each, individually, generate enormous disruptive change.” This choice of technologies does not include an examination of whether they would actually have direct effects on maritime operations.20 The most significant one—autonomy—is a mode of operation rather than a technology.
This raises the question of whether Advantage at Sea views disruptive technologies as necessary for the implementation of the strategy, or simply as part of the environment in which the strategy will be implemented. The danger is that it provides an excuse for not resourcing an expansion of the fleet to match the strategies, based on the premise that waiting for a disruptive technology to develop represents a more farsighted and economic approach.
To be effective, the strategy must speak to today’s technology. And it must focus on threats and the means to overcome them in the near term, not images of technologies that might be. Thirsting for technologies that might be resulted in the littoral combat ship and Zumwalt-class destroyer programs, not a popular legacy with Congress.
Fortune Favors the Bold
It is not enough to write a strategic construct; it is necessary to explain why the strategy is the best option to achieving the nation’s national security goals.
The next Sea Services strategy must be written with the goal of overcoming the doctrinal-political-bureaucratic impediments firmly in mind. To be effective, it must have a boldness that has not been demonstrated in naval documents since The Maritime Strategy in 1986.
The time is now to rewrite Advantage at Sea, and it must be crafted to overcome the disadvantages ashore.
Parts of this article previously appeared in “Disadvantages Ashore: Constraints on Achieving Integrated All Domain Naval Power” in the Naval War College Review.
1. Publicly, the U.S. Marine Corps is more closely associated with their expeditionary advanced base operations documents than Advantage at Sea. Since the U.S. Coast Guard has many more functions than armed national security, Advantage at Sea cannot be said to be the overall strategy for the service.
2. Among U.S. think tanks, only the Brookings Institution and Heritage Foundation published any analysis.
3. This argument peaked in the late 1990s. However, the effects remain evident in joint doctrine. For example, the 1 December 2020 edition of Joint Publication 5.0: Joint Planning, which is intended to describe the military planning process in the Department of Defense, mentions the individual services but once (in a diagram on page II-11). It does, however, have a short list of the titles of selective service concept and doctrine documents in Appendix M (M-5, 6). It is hard not to develop the impression that the individual services play no role whatsoever in the overall strategic planning in the Department of Defense, at least from the perspective of the Joint Staff.
4. On identification of “strategic concept,” see Samuel P. Huntington, “National Policy and the Transoceanic Navy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 80, no. 5 (May 1954), 483–93. On the term ‘strategic vision,’ see discussion in Sam J. Tangredi, “Running Silent and Algorithmic: The U.S. Navy Strategic Vision in 2019,” Naval War College Review 72, no. 2 (Spring 2019), 129–165.
5. Similar criteria or measures of effectiveness for naval strategies are explained in in Bruce Stubbs, Crafting Naval Strategy: Observations and Recommendations for the Development of Future Strategies (Newport, RI: Leidos Chair of Future Warfare Studies/Naval War College Press, September 2021), 24–25, 36–38, 58–59, 68–70.
6. One might argue that such wording is necessary to be in conformance with the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy, and there is merit to that argument. But conformance does not mean effective.
7. See, A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower: Forward, Engaged, Ready of March 2015.
8. See former Secretary of the Navy James Webb in “The Silence of the Admirals,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 125, no. 1 (January 1999), 29–34: “Military subservience to political control applies to existing policy, not to policy debates. The political process requires the unfettered opinions of military leaders, and military leaders who lack the courage to offer such opinions are just as accountable to their people as the politicians who have secured their silence.”
9. Andrew Lambert, Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World (New Haven, CT: Tale University Press, 2018), 6.
10. With oceangoing shipping confined to a few hub ports for efficiency, even Americans living in coastal areas rarely see a transoceanic vessel, and certainly few flying the American flag. Given these optics, American awareness (or favorable perception) concerning maritime aspects of national security cannot be assumed. With the decades-long focus on decidedly land-based threats of terrorism and instability, the role of naval forces (apart from U.S. Marine Corps operations in Iraq and Afghanistan) has faded far from the national policy dialog. To some extent the U.S. Navy is a victim of its own success in dominating the world’s oceans.
11. Advantage at Sea does include some quantitative measures, stating, “By value, 90 percent of global trade travels by sea, facilitating $5.4 trillion of U.S. annual commerce and supporting 31 million American jobs. Undersea cables transmit 95 percent of international communications and roughly $10 trillion in financial transactions each day.”
12. Perhaps a strategy document such as Advantage at Sea may not be the most appropriate forum for such an extended discussion. However, a better supporting dialog needs to be generated if Advantage at Sea can be justified on the maritime nation argument.
13. A Congressional goal of 355 ships as U.S. policy was set by Section 1025 of the FY2018 National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 2810/P.L. 115- 91 of December 12, 2017).
14. This is compounded by Navy leaders who state that the Navy needs 500 ships to “meet its commitments to the soon-to-be released National Defense Strategy” (as well as Advantage at Sea) but appears resigned to accepting a much smaller fleet. This contradiction sinks the tenets of the strategy.
15. See James E. Fanell in “Asia Rising: China’s Global Naval Strategy and Expanding Force Strategy,” Naval War College Review 72, no. 1 (Winter 2019), 13: “Numbers matter. In the past, it was fair to say that numbers of hulls, or even tonnage, were not a complete measure of force-on-force capabilities and that American technology would outweigh the PLAN’s numbers. Today, that argument is no longer credible.”
16. As the 2018 Congressionally-chartered assessment of the National Defense Strategy (NDS) of 2018 states “The [Defense] Department has not clearly explained how it will implement the NDS with the resources available; in fact, many of the additional resources made available so far have been distributed uniformly across the defense bureaucracy so that ‘everybody wins,’ rather than being strategically prioritized to build key future capabilities.”
17. A recent discussion of how this distorts concepts and strategy is John Schaus, “Bad Ideas in National Security: Overprioritizing “Jointness” in the Joint Warfighting Concept,” CSIS Defense 360, 10 December 2021.
18. Steven Wills, The Collapse of Cold War Naval Strategic Planning (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2021),184.
19. Advantage at Sea does make a bold statement that could be the basis for the argument for an increased share of overall defense resources: “The Naval Service—forward deployed and capable of both rapid response and sustained operations globally—remains America’s most persistent and versatile instrument of military influence.” However, in Advantage at Sea it appears solely on the reverse of the front cover, a location likely missed by many readers. Perhaps an avoidance of joint rivalry did not motivate the placement, but it has the effect. A weaker statement—“our Nation’s most persistent and versatile maneuver force”—does appear in the conclusion.
20. If perfected, these technologies are likely to have evolutionary effects, not “enormous disruptive change” on naval war fighting—both because of long development times and the fact they are largely improvements of existing capabilities.
