You can expect some backsplash when you stir the pot.
In a nutshell, I maintained that the U.S. Navy may continue to shrink
as the costs of ships, aircraft, and weaponry soar, budgets stagnate,
and national priorities shift. In effect, if not by conscious strategic
design, Washington may be dismantling the second navy it has maintained
since the Second World War. If so, policymakers and commanders must
think ahead about how to deploy scarce resources more efficiently.
Severely reducing the Atlantic Fleet to assure a surplus of naval might
in the Pacific appears prudent if the navy indeed remains in decline.
This take on the situation occasioned a fair amount of pushback, mostly
from sailors and officers on sea duty aboard navy warships and aircraft.
One of the few downsides to serving as professor at the Naval War
College is that faculty spend very little time on the "deckplates"
conversing with the executors of U.S. maritime strategy. Hearing from
seafarers doing business in great waters is always a pleasure, even when
we part company on important matters.
The objections took several forms. First, some interlocutors inferred
that I advocate a smaller navy. Far from it. Given my druthers,
Americans would make the conscious political choice to preserve and
extend their mastery of the seas. U.S. sea power has served the nation
and the world well for seven decades. The U.S. Navy is smaller in raw
numerical terms than it has been since President Woodrow Wilson vowed to
construct a "navy second to none" nearly a century ago. Expanding the
current
285 ship fleet
to the 346 ships espoused by the 2010 Quadrennial Defence Review, or
even the 313 ships the navy establishment deems minimally acceptable,
would reverse the downward drift in U.S. naval power. Such an expansion,
furthermore, should take place in balanced fashion—not just by adding
less expensive platforms like the new Littoral Combat Ships now entering
the fleet. Such vessels are adequate for lesser missions, but are
unable to take much punishment in a serious fight. They can boost the fleet’s numerical strength on paper but dilute its overall combat capacity.
But strategists must accept and work within unpleasant realities
rather than wishing them away. The process of drafting strategy and
matching it with sufficient means is very orderly—in theory. Senior
political leaders draft a strategy in concert with military commanders
and Congress, and lawmakers levy resources to procure the means
necessary to execute it. Political and fiscal realities being what they
are, however, the process is seldom that neat. Rear Adm. J. C. Wylie,
America’s foremost sea-power thinker since World War II, describes
strategy straightforwardly as a "plan of action" that harnesses
means—forces, in the military context—to fulfil national purposes.
Wylie observes that congressmen making budgetary decisions are making
fundamental strategic decisions, whether they know it or not. If they
set a dollar figure too low to fund the necessary means, the armed
services may find themselves short on the manpower and hardware they
need to reach the goals entrusted to them. The hard reality is that the
U.S. Navy appears set to shrink further. Whether the United States will
continue funding a complete navy for both the Atlantic and Pacific
theatres is doubtful. It behoves naval leaders, public officials, and
the electorate to whom they are accountable to think ahead toward a day
when the U.S. Navy may remain second to none but can no longer do
everything, everywhere, at all times.
Second, some of my correspondents objected to denuding the Atlantic
coast of high-end naval forces. They commonly invoked the German naval
menace during the world wars. In 1942-1943, for instance, U-boats
rampaged within sight of the U.S. east coast and in the Caribbean Sea
and Gulf of Mexico. The Soviet Navy comprised a two-ocean challenge from
the late 1960s through the 1980s. It provided the impetus for
maintaining a two-ocean U.S. Navy until the Soviet downfall in 1991.
U.S. naval strategists were startled at the massive Soviet "Okean" naval
manoeuvres during the 1970s, when hundreds of Eastern Bloc men-of-war
took to the seas simultaneously. A Soviet squadron dispatched to the
Eastern Mediterranean outnumbered the U.S. Sixth Fleet during the 1973
Arab-Israeli war. And so forth. But who plays the part of the German
High Seas Fleet or Reichsmarine today? Where’s the counterpart to the Soviet Navy?
Nowhere. No "peer competitor," or major adversary, looms over the
Atlantic horizon, demanding that a major portion of the U.S. battle
fleet remain in east coast seaports. Europe is friendly. Russia has made
noises about staging a naval comeback, but its progress remains fitful
at best. There are no serious naval powers in Africa or Latin America.
The chief banes to navigation in Atlantic sea-lanes are nuisances like
piracy in the Gulf of Guinea, drug-running in the Caribbean and Gulf,
and—potentially—maritime terrorism. It doesn’t take an Aegis destroyer
or a big-deck aircraft carrier to combat such scourges. So why not
station low-end assets like Littoral Combat Ships and guided-missile
frigates on the East Coast, where they can discharge constabulary
functions, while shifting the main battle force to the Pacific?
Augmented by a Marine expeditionary contingent centred on amphibious
carriers and transports for humanitarian and disaster response, a
police-like force could anchor the U.S. naval presence in "permissive"
Atlantic waters. Let’s not allow strategic inertia or worst-case
thinking to govern fleet dispositions.
Such a redeployment would conform to current strategic guidance. The 2007
U.S. Maritime Strategy
calls on the U.S. sea services—the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast
Guard—to stage "credible combat power" in the Western Pacific and Indian
Ocean for the foreseeable future, remaining the dominant maritime force
in East, Southeast, and South Asia. Yet some 40 percent of the navy
remains in the Atlantic, where it risks becoming a wasting asset. It’s
high time to reallocate forces in to support the Maritime Strategy, and
to back up
President Barack Obama’s pledge
to keep the U.S. military number one in this critical region. China’s
People’s Liberation Army would be the yardstick for a new "one-power
standard." Once concentrated in the Pacific—arrayed not only along the
West Coast, Hawaii, and Guam but at forward bases in Japan and,
preferably, in central positions like Australia—preponderant U.S. forces
would dissuade China from mischief-making, much as Theodore Roosevelt’s
"Great White Fleet" did vis-à-vis Imperial Japan a century ago. In the
unlikely event a serious threat coalesced in the Atlantic, the fleet
could "swing" into eastern waters through the Panama Canal.
And third, some of the critics intimated that I disregard intervening
factors working against a wholesale shift of forces from the Atlantic
to the Indo-Pacific. Not so. Politics is a messy business. I harbor no
illusions that this process will unfold strictly according to strategic
logic. Myriad factors shape—and misshape—big, complex decisions like
realigning the U.S. sea services. For one thing, it's excruciatingly
hard for large institutions to relinquish longstanding commitments. In a
way, naval proponents had it easy a century ago: the navy was building
up to a one-power standard rather than shedding loads.
Today, by contrast, scaling back commitments engages strong passions
like fear and honor. Wouldn’t withdrawing from the Atlantic signal a
return to isolationism, collapsing the edifice of U.S. leadership? And
then there’s domestic politics. If the Base Realignment and Closure, or
BRAC, process showed nothing else, it's that closing military bases or
shifting major assets around represents an uphill struggle. The thought
of losing defense-related revenues renders lawmakers apoplectic. Legal
challenges are commonplace. The Virginia congressional delegation, for
instance, pitched a fit last year over proposed plans to transfer one
carrier strike group—a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and its
entourage of escorts and support vessels—from Hampton Roads to Mayport,
Florida. Imagine the uproar that would greet plans to move all such
groups to Pacific or Indian Ocean seaports! A decision of such moment
will be neither swift nor easy nor politically painless.
Strategy, it bears repeating, isn't devised in some abstract realm
where thinkers boasting forty-pound heads size up the strategic
surroundings, set goals, and apportion funding and resources to attain
those goals. But approximating such a process should be the objective.
In the final analysis, the American people elect their leaders to
lead. One hopes they will choose officeholders wisely at the ballot box,
with a view not only to advancing parochial state and local interests,
but also to upholding America’s strategic standing.
* Article publicat a The Diplomat. Davant el context actual de retallades, creiem que el replantejament de l'estratègia global de la U.S. Navy és quelcom de fran interés.
