In 1954 Proceedings published an article by political scientist Samuel Huntington entitled "National Policy and the Transoceanic Navy." Huntington asserted the U.S. Navy faced a crisis after World War II in which its very reason for existence was in question. The Navy, Huntington said, needed to codify a new strategic concept. Huntington suggested the Transoceanic Navy, a concept that would support national policy by projecting power along “that decisive strip of littoral encircling the Eurasian continent.” The Navy would shift its focus from gaining command of the sea to projecting power ashore.
The emergence of a powerful Soviet Navy in the 1970s caused a partial shift in focus. But after the fall of the USSR the Navy’s focus snapped back to power projection over the shore. Now that China has built a powerful and competitive navy, the U.S. Navy’s focus is shifting again. A number of factors bedevil the Navy’s attempts to grow its fleet in response to the challenge from China, and despite calls from some outside the Navy to generate a new maritime strategy document like that of the Maritime Strategy of the 1980s, the documents issued by a succession of chiefs of naval operations do not achieve such strategic focus. The United States still needs a concept on which to base a new maritime strategy that would underpin fleet design, build public support for adequate resourcing, and perhaps influence U.S. foreign policy.
Traditional Functions, Contemporary Emphasis
Huntington wrote, “Shifts in the international balance of power will inevitably bring about changes in the principal threats to the security of any given nation. These must be met by shifts in national policy and corresponding changes in service strategic concepts.”
The U.S. Navy has traditionally performed a range of functions, including deterrence, support of maritime commerce, sea control, and power projection over the shore. Some functions attain greater relevance than others as geopolitical circumstances evolve, but all remain in the Navy’s mission portfolio. A strategic concept creates a focus around which to develop a maritime strategy document that emphasizes the service’s circumstances and those of the country. The Transoceanic Navy concept underpinned the 1986 Maritime Strategy, which prescribed aggressive forward operations in the Soviet littorals outside the NATO central region to help weaken any Soviet attack across the Inner German border.
The United States has always seen freedom of the seas as the basis for its economic wellbeing. Once it became a strong industrial power in the late 1800s, it set about constructing a powerful fleet that would deter outside powers from adventurism in the Americas but also fight for command of the sea. The massive U.S. fleet of World War II swept the Imperial Japanese Navy from the sea and in conjunction with allied navies, it defeated the Nazi U-boat threat. In the lee of World War II the United States, by virtue of its dominant naval power, adopted freedom of the seas as a policy which became enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Routine freedom of navigation operations prevented oceanic territorial claims from being effective. But now China is attempting to claim almost the entire South China Sea as sovereign territory, threatening the whole edifice of freedom of the seas. China has built fortified artificial islands to enforce its claims and has used its coast guard to interfere with the Philippine Navy’s operations to enforce Manila’s legitimate claims in the area. In addition, China claims Taiwan as sovereign territory and explicitly threatens an invasion if the Taiwanese government does not submit.
Concurrently, the U.S. Navy is suffering a crisis of resources. Its fleet size has fallen below 300 ships, a number inadequate to support the demands of the geographic combatant commanders unless deployments are extended and maintenance and training curtailed. Delays in the construction of authorized vessels and a lack of shipyard capacity are dimming the prospects for increasing fleet size. To compensate, the latest strategic document from the Navy, Navigation Plan 2024, envisions a fleet augmented by numerous unmanned systems. Importantly, the plan also calls for integrating “allies and partners into our designs to drive the tactical interoperability we need to fight effectively together.” This followed the logic of the preceding triservice strategic document issued by Admiral Michael Gilday, Advantage at Sea. The former CNO called for increased international naval cooperation 15 times in the document. The Navy finds itself again facing something like what Huntington described: The service is in crisis, and it needs a new, revolutionary strategic concept to offer a path out of that crisis.
Hints of a Future Strategy
When Huntington wrote his 1954 article, the Navy was already deploying forward around the periphery of Eurasia. He simply articulated the strategic focus individual deployments represented. That is, he attempted to see the forest for the trees. The situation today calls for a similar intervention. The Navy is busy integrating with the navies of other countries in various ways, but these efforts are not part of an overall strategic concept that would give them focus. I propose the “Transnational Navy” as that concept. Assuming that Navigation Plan 2024 does not use the term “integration” lightly, the Navy is following a course that fundamentally changes how it deploys, operates, and fights.
The unipolar world of the post-Cold War era is fading into memory. An economically powerful and geopolitically assertive China is making common cause with a revanchist Russia. The threats Beijing and Moscow pose are driving policy changes among varied nations. Countries such as Australia that previously sought to balance between the United States and China have now shifted toward allegiance with Washington, as indicated by Australia’s decision to procure Virginia-class nuclear attack submarines and the establishment of the AUKUS trilateral security pact. European nations such as France, Italy, and the United Kingdom are recognizing their strategic interests are increasingly tied to security in the western Pacific, and their navies are starting to deploy to that region. Beyond the kinetic power such navies could add to that of the U.S. Navy, the political weight of a broad multinational front against Chinese aggression is likely to be important. There are hints of this in a recent passage through the Taiwan Strait by a naval task force consisting of a Japanese destroyer, an Australian destroyer, and a New Zealand oiler. Chinese reaction to the passage was muted, unlike its strident objections to similar U.S. Navy ship passages.
There are more examples of the course the Navy is following. The U.S. Constellation-class frigate is based on an Italian design and being built by a U.S. subsidiary of the Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri. A U.S. subsidiary of the Australian shipbuilder Austal builds several classes of vessels, including the Independence-class littoral combat ship and the expeditionary fast transport. Secretary of the Navy Carlos del Toro recently visited the South Korean Hyundai shipyard to explore cooperation on ship maintenance. The Norwegian chief of defense announced that a new frigate would feature interoperability with the U.S. and other navies and not represent “a Norwegian solution.” All these examples go beyond the traditional and ongoing series of international naval exercises that focus on tactical interoperability. And this is potentially just the tip of the integration iceberg. Neither Advantage at Sea nor Navigation Plan 2024 provide any details of how integration would work, nor do they specify how integration would be achieved. It is likely the various initiatives just discussed are not elements of a global strategy of integration, if only because a specific strategy for integration has not been worked out.
How to Encourage Cooperation
Proposing a strategy for integration is the work of the CNO’s staff (OPNAV), but we can put some channel markers in place. First, the term Transnational Navy needs to be defined. Considering how the Navigation Plan 2024 uses the term “integration,” it could be defined as a Navy dependent on support and contributions from the navies and maritime infrastructure of other nations to carry out its missions. This is nothing new. The Navy has depended on overseas bases since World War II and has used foreign countries for maintenance and support, including Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy, Bahrain, and Japan, among others. But even though the Navy always seeks to operate with allies and partners, it has been a sovereign national force that can function unilaterally if necessary. Because of its dominant power, the Navy has been paternalistic in its international relations. A Transnational Navy would shift to a more egalitarian and interdependent approach. The importance of this approach is reflected by the statement of recently elected Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba that he intends to remake the defense alliance with the U.S. to make it “more equal.”
The Navy already successfully took such an approach when it developed the 2007 Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower (CS21). After the 9/11 attacks, the Navy and Coast Guard struggled with the question of how to secure the homeland from attacks mounted or supported from the sea. There were not enough ships and aircraft to make a patrolling strategy feasible. After several months of games and discussions, it became clear that all the seas must be secured, each nation attending to its own waters and sharing relevant information with others. But then-CNO Admiral Mike Mullen had trouble selling the idea to other navies, even those of our closest allies. I vividly remember foreign naval officers using curse words to express how uninterested they were in cooperating with the U.S. Navy on maritime domain awareness (MDA). There was widespread suspicion of U.S. motives after the 2003 Iraq invasion. Finally, in a June 2006 speech, Mullen called for the development of a new maritime strategy. The following week his deputy for operations and strategy, Vice Admiral John Morgan, visited the Naval War College to explain the tasking. I was tapped to design and lead the research effort to support strategy development, and I asked Morgan if he could invite foreign officers into the development effort. The admiral said yes.
The college invited foreign naval officers to participate in workshops and conferences that were part of the project, and it also sent delegations around the world to consult with other navies for their views on what a new U.S. Navy strategy should look like. This was something different. Rear Admiral Pablo Niemann Figari of the Chilean Naval War College, when informed that we were coming to get their ideas on maritime strategy, exclaimed, “You mean the gringos are coming to listen?”
The development project itself became part of the execution of the strategy. An OPNAV writing team carefully worded the resulting document to depict the United States on the strategic defensive. It raised peacetime functions to equal prominence with warfighting and asserted that preventing war was as important as winning it. The strategy was rolled out at the 2007 International Seapower Symposium at Newport. Normally around 65 navies attend the biennial event, but because of the interest the CS21 development project sparked, 99 navies attended. Over the next four years we observed a mushrooming of international naval cooperation on maritime domain awareness. Regional leaders such as Italy, Brazil, Sweden, and India established subscription-based MDA systems, and ISS attendance set new records in 2009 and 2011. Several foreign heads of navy told me that the U.S. strategy gave them the political cover with their own governments they needed to cooperate with the U.S. Navy.
Avoid Overengineering
The lesson from the CS21 experience is that nations want U.S. leadership but not its command. When they are regarded as peers and their interests are taken seriously—when the United States actually listens—they cooperate enthusiastically. CS21 was built on each nation looking after its own maritime security interests and then contributing to global security by sharing information with others. From a strategy perspective, CS21—the document plus the development project—did two things. It provided a basis for unity of purpose, and it removed an obstacle to cooperation, namely the image of a selfish, interventionist United States. The rest was carried out by navies, coast guards, and customs and law enforcement agencies working in their own interest but collaborating.
Global MDA sits at the lower-intensity side of a conflict spectrum that ranges from peacetime operations to nuclear warfare. Significantly more work is required to obtain international naval cooperation at higher levels on the spectrum. Perceptions of shared threats are a strong motivator of cooperation, but truly the devil is in the details. Alliances are a traditional basis for cooperation in war, but even close allies, such as the United States and United Kingdom in World War II, fight over command relationships. This suggests that trying to engineer a unity of command wiring diagram for international naval integration is likely to fail. Admiral Mullen’s bumper sticker of “The Thousand Ship Navy” was meant only to denote expanded international maritime security cooperation, but it was seen by other nations as a U.S. scheme to gain control of their forces. In contrast, Operation Prosperity Guardian in the Red Sea sees 14 navies working together in a loose U.S.-led collaboration, in which the United States has the preponderance of forces and command facilities.
Fighting an opponent more capable than the Houthis will require closer cooperation, but in an age of advanced digital technologies and unmanned systems, international naval integration may be easier than it was in decades past. Integrating other navies’ ships into a U.S. carrier strike group involves challenging interoperability issues. Hardware compatibility is one concern. Doctrine and training are others, not to mention the matter of national command in a high-end naval fight. However, distributed maritime operations may offer a framework for easier integration of multiple navies into a unified fight. Navigation Plan 2024 calls for a maritime operations center to be capable of integrating with allies and partners, preventing a range of potential interoperability problems and lowering the cost of entry for potential partners.
The Chinese and Russian navies cooperate to challenge the readiness of a shrunken U.S. Navy. But the possibility of facing multiple allied navies working together could be a decisive deterrent to Moscow and Beijing, and such cooperation offers a better chance of victory at sea. Navigation Plan 2024 provides basic policy for seeking integration. But to create a modern version of Admiral Mullen’s Thousand Ship Navy, much more needs to be done. A useful approach is to not try and engineer a solution, but instead take simple measures to remove obstacles and create overall unity of purpose—such as was done with CS21. Doing so empowers the initiative and creativity of other nations and their navies. Clearly, such work goes beyond the Navy’s statutory authority, so supporting action from the Department of Defense and the White House would be necessary, but the Navy has a track record of devising solutions to global strategic problems.
Individual integration initiatives ought to be rooted in an overall strategy. The Transnational Navy is simply a bumper sticker. But it conveys an idea that could be fleshed out into a strategic concept that would inform all aspects of the Navy’s Title X responsibilities to raise, train, and equip, as well as to establish operational and tactical doctrine. CS21’s successful development was a partnership of OPNAV and the Naval War College, as well as the contributions of many foreign navies. That approach ought to be adopted once more.
