A cheery huzzah! goes out from the ghost of Harry Yarnell to Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the U.S. Navy Chief of Naval Operations. Just over a century ago, as the Navy staff was surveying the strategic seascape following World War I, Captain Yarnell held forth on a timeless question: do you need an enemy to have a strategy? Yes, he proclaimed, the Navy needed to identify its next potential enemy. Trying to design a force without an antagonist in view, or without a war plan to vanquish that antagonist, was like “trying to design a machine tool without knowing whether it is going to manufacture hair pins or locomotives.”
Yarnell believed an armed force needs a prospective foe to focus strategy, war plans, and fleet design. So, apparently, does Admiral Franchetti. By their logic your nascent foe is your friend. It hands you a measuring stick to gauge your adequacy. The Imperial Japanese Navy set the standard of adequacy for Yarnell’s U.S. Navy. Studying the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy, paramilitary forces such as the China Coast Guard and maritime militia, and the shore-based arms of military might that back up Beijing’s hybrid fleet helps Franchetti’s Navy judge its efficacy and figure out how to correct deficiencies.
That China is the next big thing for our Navy became plain this week when CNO Franchetti and her entourage descended on the Naval War College to roll out her “Navigation Plan,” her vision for how to take the U.S. Navy from where it stands to where it needs to be in terms of combat readiness. Read the whole thing. She names names right up front, pronouncing Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party the “pacing threat.” China is the most menacing denizen of the wretched hive of scum and villainy trying to bring down the liberal world order presided over by the United States and likeminded countries. Moreover, Franchetti puts the Navy on a deadline. She vows that the service will be “more ready” for war than the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) by 2027. That’s the year when Xi has ordered the PLA to be ready to move against Taiwan.
Two years is a tight timetable.
The Navigation Plan is pitch-perfect in its take on the China challenge. Though not in so many words, the CNO confirms that we inhabit an age of joint sea power. Gone forever are the days when determining which combatant was fittest for sea warfare meant comparing fleet against fleet by such indices as aggregate tonnage and numbers of hulls. High-seas pitched battles such as Trafalgar (1805), Tsushima (1905), and Jutland (1916) were purely navy-on-navy affairs. Each took place beyond the reach of shore-based weaponry.
That era has passed. All likely oceanic battlegrounds now lie under the shadow of land-based aircraft and missiles. Access denial enlists air forces, armies, and strategic rocket forces as sea services. Operational art means mustering enough combat power at the time and place of battle to win. In this era of long-range precision armaments, an access-denial weapon can deliver combat power to the scene from dry earth as surely as a ship of war can from seaward.
Any future war, then, will pit joint force against joint force. The operational arithmetic is daunting. The fraction of U.S. joint forces forward-deployed to the western Pacific, joined by such U.S.-based forces as can make their way to the theater under antiaccess fire, will face off against the combined might of the PLA, whose commanders tend to husband their forces close to home. For good measure the CNO adds that “the PRC’s defense industrial base is on a wartime footing.” Even as America struggles to build and refit warships in peacetime, the world’s largest shipbuilding sector stands ready to repair damage and replace PLA Navy ships lost in action. The U.S. maritime complex is brittle where China’s is resilient.
Such are the challenges before us.
Press commentary has dwelt in large part on CNO Franchetti’s embrace of robotics in fleet design. Navy folk do love their widgets. And harnessing gee-whiz technology is important to be sure. But two things relating to strategy stand out to me as even more noteworthy. One, the Navigation Plan contends that “highly interconnected threats make peace brittle.” What Franchetti means is that state and substate adversaries around the Eurasian periphery—China, Russia, Iran, Yemen’s Houthis—seem to be coordinating efforts to make the seas adjoining that supercontinent into no-go zones for naval and merchant fleets operated by the United States, its allies, and its partners. At a bare minimum, these adversaries are watching one another and acting when opportunity beckons.
In so doing they impose multiple, simultaneous dilemmas on U.S. and friendly navies—stretching them out around the periphery, and thus weakening the forces available at any one hotspot. No power, no matter how strong, can be supreme everywhere. Recognizing that, Eurasian opponents might roll the iron dice, striking militarily in hopes of expelling the United States and its allies from nearby seas.
And there is sound logic to such a strategy. During World War II, the Yale geopolitics maven Nicholas Spykman observed that a dominant oceangoing navy like the U.S. Navy could shape events in the “rimlands” of Western Europe and East Asia, those intermediate regions lying between the deep continental interior and the sea. But only insofar as the Navy could get close to the rimlands. It could do little to project influence unless it could wrest command of “marginal seas” washing against Eurasia from local defenders.
Seizing control of maritime theaters gets harder by the day. Strategic success is increasingly elusive.
AGM-158C Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles shown here on an F-35C Lightning II strike-fighter.
(Credit: U.S. Navy/Dane Wiedman)
And two, the Navigation Plan acknowledges that “sea denial” is a potent strategy both for U.S. foes and for the United States. Sea denial is a strategy of the weaker combatant, not a hegemon like the U.S. Navy that’s accustomed to ruling the waves. It’s one thing to acknowledge the power of hostile “asymmetric sea denial,” as the document does. The CNO points to Ukraine’s stunning success against the Russian Black Sea Fleet using antiship missiles and drones—archetypal sea-denial weapons.
But CNO Franchetti also designates “non-traditional sea denial” as one of nine “key capabilities” the U.S. Navy must hone to be ready by 2027. The Navigation Plan, then, seems to admit the unsettling reality that the Navy will be weaker than its major foe at the outset of a Pacific contest of arms. It’s jarring for America’s top uniformed naval officer to confess that in writing. She is setting in motion a cultural revolution meant to transform the Navy from a service that assumes it commands the sea by right into one that understands it must fight for command from a position of weakness.
In other words, Admiral Franchetti has instructed the U.S. Navy to prepare itself to play defense. It will acquire novel implements of war. Deciding whether the Navy needs hair pins or locomotives is crucial. But revolutions take place in the minds of human beings and their institutions. How skillfully and zestfully mariners embrace defensive-minded doctrine, operations, and tactics will determine whether the Franchetti Revolution succeeds or fails.
Vive la Révolution.