Maritime Strategy Into The Twenty-First Century
AUTHOR LCDR Alton A. Lovvorn, USN
CSC 1991
SUBJECT AREA - National Military Strategy
Executive Summary
Maritime Strategy into the Twenty-First Century
I. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to review the
foundations of the current Maritime Strategy, discuss the
role of the Maritime Strategy in today's world, and the
continuing, positive role the Maritime Strategy can play in
the future.
II. Problem: With the internal chaos in the Soviet Union,
the signing of the START Accords, and the discussions
between the United States and the Soviet Union on the
reduction of Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE), there are
many within the United States that are calling for a
scrapping of our Maritime Strategy.
III. Data: The destruction of the Berlin Wall combined
with the reunification of Germany provides the United States
with the opportunity to reduce its military presence in
Europe. However, with the retrenchment of the Soviet Union
in eastern Europe, the potential for unrest in the newly
democratized countries has increased. The economic strength
of a resurgent Japan and the military muscle of an outward
looking China cause all nations within the Pacific Rim to
look toward a "balancer" of power in the region. The
emergence of India as a naval power in Southwest Asia adds
to the instability of the region and is perceived as a
threat by her neighbors. Since the strategy of the United
States is deterrence, and since the United States ranks
number one in the volume of exports to Europe, Asia and
Latin America, the United States must maintain the sea lines
of communication.
IV. Conclusion: The Soviet Union, though retrenching
militarily, still is the only nation to have the military
power to threaten the United States. Other countries of the
world rely on the United States to maintain a status quo in
their region. Since the United States is essentially an
island nation, a forward-deployed Navy is necessary to
maintain free the sea lines of communication and support our
allies overseas.
V. Recommendation: Refocusing of the Maritime Strategy is
necessary in order to reflect the growing regionalism of the
world and to sever the Eurocentric fixation of the United
States; however, the basic premise of the Maritime Strategy
is sound and will safely carry the United States through the
twenty-first century.
Maritime Strategy into the Twenty-First Century
Outline
Thesis: Public debate of our national goals and policies is
necessary for the maintenance of a strong, informed
republic; however, the current maritime strategy requires
not a scrapping so much as it does a review and refocusing.
I. Development of Naval Strategy
A. Birth of the nation
1. Jefferson and the gunboat Navy
2. Civil War
B. Alfred Thayer Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt
C. Post-World War II
D. The 1983 "Maritime Strategy"
II. Focus of the current strategy
A. National strategy
B. Eurocentric/Soviet orientation
III. Political Realities
A. Maritime nature of the U.S.
B. Fiscal realities of defense
C. Soviet Union
1. START and CFE
2. Continued military capability
D. Pacific Rim
1. Japanese economic clout
2. Chinese military capability
3. U.S. as a regional "balancer"
E. Southwest Asia
1. Kuwait and Iraq
2. India
IV. Refocusing
A. Severing Eurocentric fixation
B. Necessity of broad, balanced regional strategy
MARITIME STRATEGY INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
by LCDR A. A. S. Lovvorn, USN
CG -12
Since 1988 the world has witnessed dramatic changes in
the world order. President Gorbachev has led the Soviet
Union from its diplomacy of "nyet" to a diplomacy described
by Gennady Gerasimov as the "Sinatra Doctrine" -- each
country going its own way. With each step the Soviet Union
has taken to integrate itself fully into the world order,
the United States has seen long-held assumptions crumble
into the pages of history books. General Colin L. Powell,
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, referring to lost
"Army buddies," acknowledged these disappearing assumptions:
I've lost the Fulda Gap on the border in
Germany where I began my first Army assignment
. . .during the height of the Cold War. . .
The Berlin Wall is gone. . . . The Warsaw Pact
is about gone . . . The Brezhnev Doctrine is
gone.(13:12)
With each dying assumption, calls ring out from Congress,
the news media, and the public for a discarding of our
maritime and military strategies.
Public debate of our national goals and policies is
necessary for the maintenance of a strong, informed
republic; however, the current maritime strategy requires
not a scrapping so much as it does a review and refocusing.
There are enduring defense needs that must be met on a daily
basis to ensure the maintenance of our national goals. To
understand the validity of the maritime strategy, one must
have an understanding of the formation of America's maritime
thought since the founding of the country.
Since the birth of the United States, interest in the
Navy has waned more than waxed and maritime strategy has
received even less attention. Thomas Jefferson argued for a
strategy of gunboats to protect the coast, but his strategy
was proven erroneous with the War of 1812. America built a
Navy to defend and preserve her national honor; however,
there was no serious thought to defining a maritime strategy
for the nation. The Civil War saw a dramatic increase in
the size of the Navy; yet, after the successful
strangulation of the Confederacy's maritime trade, the Navy
was again forgotten. The end of the war resulted in the
slow rotting of the Navy's wooden hulls, and any thought of
a maritime strategy was discarded quickly as the nation
turned inward. Declining from the largest navy in the world
in 1865 to a navy of old, tired, and obsolescent ships in
the late 1880's, the U. S. Navy needed a champion.
Alfred Thayer Mahan in 1890 was the advocate. First to
offer a true strategy for the employment of the United
States Navy, he argued that a nation's greatness,
specifically using Great Britain as an example, was
predicated on the ability of the nation to project its power
across the seas via a strong navy. His argument reached
then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt.
An ardent navalist and expansionist, Roosevelt was the
champion needed to define the role of the Navy as the United
States entered the twentieth century.
Grasping the trident offered by Mahan and Roosevelt,
the United States stepped into the new century using her
modern, pre-Dreadnought navy to protect her expansive, new
empire. The end of World War I saw the United States
achieve a rough parity in naval forces with Great Britain,
the preeminent maritime power. This parity was recognized
and formalized with naval building treaties during the
1920's. Standing on the world's stage as an equal in
maritime strength, there was no thought to redefining the
maritime strategy of Mahan, and the United States came to
World War II with the same strategy that had brought her
into the century.
Following World War II, the first reevaluations began
of maritime strategy. Antisubmarine warfare and the Navy's
role in nuclear sttike warfare dominated the late 1940's.
During the late 1950's and 1960's limited war and deterrence
through ballistic missile submarines were the watchwords.
In the early 1970's, Admiral Elmo R. Zumalt, Chief of Naval
Operations, formulated his "Four Missions of the Navy." He
defined the United States maritime strategy as strategic
deterrence, sea control, power projection, and peacetime
presence. Continuing the renaissance of naval strategic
thinking, Admiral Thomas B. Hayward, the Chief of Naval
Operations in 1979, proposed a revised maritime strategy.
He focused on a flexible offensive forward power projection,
conducted globally and in conjunction with allies and sister
services, especially against the Soviet Union and its
attacking forces. Though Admiral Zumalt had started the
process, Admiral Hayward was the first to totally integrate
maritime strategy into the national military
strategy. (18:41)
The resurgence of the United States Navy in the early
1980's, during the Reagan administration, fueled a public
debate on the role of the Navy in meeting America's national
goals. Guided by Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman, Jr.
and Admiral James D. Watkins, Admiral Hayward's successor,
the Navy organized its strategic thought into one coherent
official declaratory statement, a classified briefing and a
publication. In 1983, after congressional testimony, the
initial edition of the styled "Maritime Strategy" was
released to the public.
The current Maritime Strategy is integrated fully
within the milieu of national strategy. Coupled within the
framework is the demand for cooperation with the Navy's
sister services. Our national strategy is built on three
pillars: deterrence, forward defense, and alliance
solidarity. Oriented on the Soviet Union, the current
Maritime Strategy emphasizes coalition warfare and the
criticality of allies to ensure the safety of the
international order supportive of the vital interests of the
United States and its allies.
Because of the Eurocentric/Soviet orientation of the
current national and maritime strategies, the United States
has practised an almost benign neglect of the remainder of
the world except when containment of the Soviet Union was an
issue. As stated by Theodore Sorensen:
The touchstone for our nation's security
concept -- the containment of Soviet military
and ideological power -- is gone. . . . the
current strategic vacuum is likely to be filled
not only haphazardly but unwisely as
well.(15:1)
As we move into a new decade and a new century, we must
reach a credible consensus on our new goals to guide our
military planning for the long term. As Admiral Kelso has
stated, we must not discard our strategy but must shift it
from one of a "Global Containment Strategy to one of a
Global Stability Strategy."(7) Concomitantly, we must shift
from our Eurocentric fixation to a broad, balanced regional
planning strategy and be able to react swiftly to any
regional crisis that affects U. S. national interests no
matter where the crisis occurs.
Before we can shift the focus of our national and
maritime strategies, the United States must - recognize
intellectual and physical truths. Currently, the United
States is surrounded by friends and water. The economic
friendly borders between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada allow
the United States to concentrate on other hemispheres. The
drive to maintain the United States as a world power
requires that the sea lines of communication all over the
world remain open and free to the products from the United
States and those that are bound for it. The United States
is strong in foreign trade, and now ranks first in volume of
exports to Europe, Asia and Latin America.(8:1) However,
there are rough waters ahead. Only one merchant ship was on
the ways in a United States shipyard in 1990. And to
protect the sea lines of communication, the United States
turns to the Navy.
The ability of the Navy to protect the maritime
interests of the United States and of the merchant marine to
move the maritime trade of the United States is dependent on
the far-sightedness of national leaders. In a time of
fiscal austerity and military retrenchment due to the
perceived lessening threat from the Soviet Union and the
successful conclusion to the Gulf War with Iraq, the budget
conference has allocated the Defense Department 3.65 percent
of the Gross National Product for fiscal year 1992.(7) Even
as the Defense budget is being reduced to its lowest level
since 1939 and the Navy is being told to retire ships to
achieve a fleet of 451 vice the 600 planned in the
mid-1980s (16:22), additional requirements are being levied
on the U.S. Navy. The tensions remain in Southwest Asia and
the United States naval presence will remain at a high level
for many years to come to ensure stability. In order to
achieve the goals of the United States, a transformation
must occur that allows the defense budget to be strategy
driven versus the strategy being budget driven.
As we reevaluate our defense priorities, and
consequently our Maritime Strategy, we must shift to a
revised naval strategy of "stability, focusing on peacetime
presence and regional conflict."(16:22) The call to forego
the Eurocentrism of the current Maritime Strategy is valid;
however, neither Europe nor the Soviet Union can be either
disregarded or ignored.
Influential hard-liners within the Soviet hierarchy
argue to varying degrees that six years of President
Gorbachev's "new thinking" in diplomacy have seriously
undermined the prestige and security of the Soviet Union.
Just as the hard liners can never hope to turn the clock
back completely on domestic politics in the Soviet Union,
the "new thinking" in foreign policy can be slowed, even
halted, but not reversed. "With the conservatives showing
their muscle now, the danger is of a reappearance of a Cold
War mentality," said Andrei Melville, a foreign policy
academic in Moscow.(14:11)
The orientation on the Soviet Union of our Maritime
Strategy, coupled with the current internal focus of the
Soviet Union plus the democratization of eastern European
countries that had once been within the sphere of Soviet
domination, leads critics of the strategy to declare its
obsolescence. Additionally, critics point to the Strategic
Arms Reduction Talks, known as START Accords, signed between
the two countries, the discussions on reducing conventional
forces in Europe, and the joint diplomatic efforts of the
United States and the Soviet Union to restore the
sovereignty of Kuwait, as proof that the current Maritime
Strategy has outlived its usefulness and is ready for
scraping. Others point out the economic turbulence
occurring within the Soviet Union as reason to discount the
USSR's threat.
We cannot discount the Soviet Union as a threat
however. Gennady Gerasimov, a Soviet spokesman, iterated a
list of failures of his government and when ending his talk
to his American college student audience stated:
We haven't done everything wrong, there are some
things we have done right. We are a military
superpower.(13:13 - 14)
Nuclear weapons and military power unmatched by anyone but
the United States make a country a superpower no matter how
economically devastated the country. When there are only
two players on the world stage controlling the power to
destroy a world, national interests, irregardless of current
political relaxation, will sometimes collide and the
continuation of our political identity, framework, and
institutions demand that the United States have the ability
to positively influence the outcome of events.
To influence those events, our Maritime Strategy is
predicated on deterrence or the transition to war, seizing
the initiative, and carrying the fight to the enemy in
forward areas. As stated in Maritime Strategy: "That is
where our allies are and where our adversary will be."(18:7)
The U. S. Navy must be able to counter the Soviet fleet.
NATO's defense ministers are faced with refocusing
their strategies with the military retrenchment of the
Soviet Union. Viewing a Europe threatened less by the
Soviet Union and relying less on the United States for
protection, the alliance wants a "stronger Europeanization"
of its defense.(11:70) However, a top British military
official, Admiral Sir Benjamin Bathurst, cautions against a
cavalier approach to defense reductions within NATO.(2O:14)
While reliance on the United States must decrease, both the
United States and the other members of NATO recognize that
the 3,000-mile lines of communication over which Western
Europe must be reinforced in times of military tension will
still necessitate the forward deployment of U. S. naval
forces.
Though the Soviet Navy is reducing its size because of
block obsolescence, its capabilities are improving as it
grows smaller; it has become a more modern, more
sustainable, and much more difficult force to defeat. And a
smaller, modern fleet is more economical to maintain.
Though there have been unilateral reductions in the Soviet
armed forces, the Soviet Navy has avoided any large
reductions primarily because of the perceived inferiority of
the Soviet fleet. Consequently, senior Soviet naval
officers are able to make an argument for continued fleet
modernization.(2:74) In 1990 the Soviet Union built more
submarine tonnage than has been built in any other year.(7)
The U. S. Maritime Strategy should not be tied specifically
to a Soviet threat, but it must still reflect the reality of
Soviet capability.
Though not focused on the Pacific and its geopolitical
realities, the Maritime Strategy does meet the requirements
for crisis response in that theater. Home to a third of
humanity, the Pacific has an economic dynamism that seems
unbounded. United States trade with the Pacific nations, at
$300 billion last year, is about 50 percent greater than U.S.
trade across the Atlantic.(6:1) Since 37 percent of
total U. S. trade is with Asia and since within the last
fifty years the United States has fought three major wars
there, a forward-deployed naval presence is essential. The
Pacific is primarily a maritime theater which will evolve as
our relationships evolve with China, Japan, Korea, the
Philippines, the Soviet Union, and others in the region.
As the Soviet Union's influence wanes in the Far East
due to their own internal concerns, Asian leaders long
fearful of Chinese domination or Japanese expansionism are
viewing the U. S. economic and military presence as a
convient counterweight to both.(6:1) Japan sees China as
the most dangerous threat to the long-term stability in the
Asia-Pacific region. Of particular concern to Japan is the
Chinese Navy with nearly 100 submarines. Further, China is
a nuclear power. The country has deployed eight
intercontinental ballistic missiles and an additional
nuclear-tipped missile on a submarine. Because of a
constitutional restriction on the use of military force,
Japan is seeking to extend its role in the Pacific region
with its economic might. China, faced with different
limitations, maintains a sizable military to define its
interests since China remains economically weak compared to
Japan. (1:23)
The nations of the Pacific and East Asia look to the
United States for leadership and for security. American
forward-deployed forces in the Asia/Pacific region play a
role of regional balancer and ultimate security guarantor.
Regional instabilities, e.g., Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the
Philippines, coupled with other nations' concerns over the
growing power and presence of China, Japan and India,
require the United States to remain involved. Regional
insecurities and the inability of any other country to fill
the role of "balancer" necessitate the continued presence of
the U. S. Navy.
The issue, though, is how much presence is enough? As
stated by Assistant Secretary of State Richard Solomon, "We
view nuclear proliferation on the Korean peninsula as the
number one threat to stability in East Asia."(6:1) Yet, the
United States has begun to scale back militarily somewhat on
the Korean peninsula and is moving to an air and naval
presence based on access rights in several ports in
Southeast Asia rather than a massive military presence in
the Philippines. In a truly ironic development, Vietnamese
Communist Party chief Nguyen Van Linh offered both Tokyo and
Washington the use of the U. S.-built naval facility at Cam
Ranh Bay. As the United States reduces its static military
forces in the Pacific Rim, it has no choice but to rely more
heavily on a forward deployed naval presence and must define
the amount of forces necessary to remain credible.
The most recent concern to world stability was in
Southwest Asia. The ability of the United States to react
forcefully, decisively, and rapidly was possible only
through the forward deployment of our naval forces. On day
one of being ordered to stop Iraqi maritime traffic, the
Navy had succeeded in quarantining all of the Iraqi ports
through the use of ships forward deployed to the Persian
Gulf. When tasked to deploy ground forces, once again
supplies were in the region in days because of the
investment in forward-deployed Maritime Prepositioned Ships.
Another issue in Southwest Asia is the growing naval
power of India. The emergence of India as a regional power
broker has heightened tensions in the region. Not only are
less powerful countries concerned for their independence,
there are major powers concerned about the Strait of Hormuz
since the Indian Navy can potentially block access. With
the Indian Navy looking at the Indian Ocean as its sphere of
influence, more countries look to the United States to be
the guarantor of stability, peace, and open sea lines of
communication within the region.
Finally, the validity of the Maritime Strategy is
hammered home by the subsequent actions of the U. S.
government in regard to the Kuwait Crisis. When sending the
fast battleship, USS WISCONSIN (BB 64), at best speed from
her homeport in Norfolk, Virginia to assume a blocking
position in the northern Persian Gulf, she required sixteen
days to reach station. A slightly greater amount of time is
required for a deployment from the U. S. west coast to the
Persian Gulf. A change to a strategy of continental basing
of the U. S. Navy would have resulted in an inability to
react swiftly in this decade of challenge and a change of
the world order not in the interests of the United States.
The United States occupies a pivotal place in the
changing constellation of world politics: our economy
remains the largest, our military strength unequalled, and
our values widely acclaimed.(17:79) The desire of the
United States is to maintain the status quo; hence, the
strategy of deterrence. The current Maritime Strategy
integrates within the national strategy by providing
stability through presence and the ability to react rapidly
in crisis due to the Navy's forward deployment. The
strategy is not without risks and depends on early reaction
to crisis. Refocusing of the strategy is in order; the
United States must sever its fixation on Europe and develop
a broad, balanced regional strategy stressing stability
through the continued presence of a forward-deployed navy.
With the political will to act in a crisis, the United
States will find that the Maritime Strategy still provides
the options necessary to achieve our national goals.
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