The Navy’s answer to a rapid response time was the second sea concept of forward presence. Briefly discussed in …From the Sea, forward presence is highlighted as imperative in Forward…From the Sea. ‘Our most recent experiences … underscore the premise that the most important role of naval forces in situations short of war is to be engaged in forward areas’ (emphasis in original).27 The building blocks of forward presence operations are stated as Carrier Battle Groups and Amphibious Ready Groups, thereby providing one answer to Mahan’s unanswered question of whether it is best to focus on a smaller number of big ships or a larger number of medium ships.
Should a crisis response be necessary, this would be taken in the context of joint operations, a third area of conceptual emphasis. Examples include the Navy and Marine Corps working together to seize an enemy’s coastal bases to allow the entry of friendly ground and air forces, and strikes from carrier-based aviation against land targets in the context of power projection. The idea, notes Forward…From the Sea, was to combine the capabilities and resources of other services, including the Army and Air Force along with the Navy and Marine Corps, to create decisive military power.28 Indeed, the Commandant of the US Marine Corps at the time stressed that the ability to wage littoral warfare would be dependent on the services waging effective joint warfare.29 Naval fighter training during this time period took a ‘pronounced swing’ toward precision ground attack operations, enabling carrier-based aviation to participate in joint strike operations ashore as part of an overall strategic bombardment campaign.30 Box 1.1 provides one example of such an operation.
Box 1.1 Naval ground attack operations in Bosnia
• At the end of the Cold War the six republics of former Yugoslavia broke away to form their own states. Civil war broke out in many areas but especially in the Bosnian republic, which further disintegrated into its three major component nationalities or cultures.
• To enforce a no-fly zone over Bosnia, provide close air support to United Nations peacekeepers trying to deliver humanitarian aid, and conduct strategic strikes against Serbian tanks and mortars shelling Croats and Muslims in Sarajevo, NATO and the United Nations agreed to the use of precision airpower. By the summer of 1993 NATO aircraft were on station on NATO bases in Italy and on US aircraft carriers in the Adriatic.
• NATO airpower was used on several occasions in 1994 and 1995, culminating in a sustained air campaign against Serb positions and facilities throughout Bosnia in the late summer of 1995, and leading to a balance of power among the factions that paved the way to the Dayton Peace Accords.
• Precision strikes by carrier-based aircraft and sea-launched cruise missiles in Bosnia marked the US Navy’s first major use of force ‘from the sea’ against land targets as a means of post-Cold War crisis management.
Thus the naval strategy documents …From the Sea and Forward…From the Sea did much to push forward strategic thinking about seapower in the 1990s. The centrepiece was expeditionary warfare in a maritime (and Corbettian) sense. The requirements were sea control on the open ocean and in the littorals and the projection of power ashore (including troops and precision strike). But could this be done using existing assets, incorporating advanced technology? Or were new ships and approaches necessary?
In 1998 a group of naval officers led by Arthur Cebrowski began to argue that the Navy’s new strategic focus required a new set of assets. An academically inclined US Navy admiral who, like Mahan before him, became President of the US Naval War College, Cebrowski was very interested in seapower. He argued that increasingly sophisticated land-based anti-ship cruise missiles would put at risk the large ships and carriers, holdovers from the Cold War era, that were now expected to ensure sea control in littoral areas. Even small coastal navies, especially those featuring diesel electric submarines, could force the US Navy to operate some distance from shore, fighting for access to coastal waters. For the reformers the answer to Mahan’s unanswered question on fleet composition was not a combat fleet of large multi-mission surface combatants but rather numerous smaller, cheaper platforms. These vessels, dubbed ‘Streetfighters’, could either operate independently to conduct a wide range of missions, from drug, piracy and terrorism patrols to support to humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations, or their combat effectiveness could be dramatically enhanced by being tightly integrated into a ‘network-centric’ force.
Cebrowski is considered the father of the NCW concept, a vision of the conduct of war that is fundamentally ‘joint’ in nature and is therefore discussed in Chapter 7. Whereas ‘platform-centric warfare’ focuses on the individual attributes of a particular military platform (bigger and better tanks, for example), NCW centres on the combat power generated by having many (perhaps smaller and less capable) platforms linked together through advanced technologies. In a naval environment the concept translated into ‘the small, the fast, the many’; it ‘eschew[ed] big ships and major weapons for a diffuse, ever changing and adaptable military force that shares information instantly’.31 The concrete manifestation of the approach was the Streetfighter, which also responded to the littoral warfare requirements of the post-Cold War strategic environment.
To a service organized since the early 1940s around ‘big-deck’ aviation platforms, the move toward smaller, networked vessels proved a difficult sell. But the idea survived in the form of the larger and more capable littoral combat ship (LCS), designed to operate in highly contested waters near shorelines to counter mines, submarines and fast-attack boats. For some, the Pentagon’s 2002 decision to develop the LCS concept indicated the acceptance at the highest levels of the US Navy of new thinking that had originated with Cebrowski. Leaders had embraced a future that was about assuring joint force access to coastal waters and they had endorsed a move from a battle fleet organized around carriers, to one characterized by a network of tightly connected carriers, ships and submarines.32
This future came under increasing scrutiny as Chinese naval power grew in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Growing concern about LCS survivability in the face of Chinese capabilities has meant that while two variants of the ship were chosen, and several ships have been launched in each class, in 2015 numbers were cut back significantly in favour of a frigate better suited to a state-based adversary and high-intensity warfare. The LCS’s modified future is a concrete manifestation of changes in the strategic environment that once again must account for the prospect of great-power war (see below).
The 2000s
‘In 1992’, notes one assessment of US seapower, ‘the US Navy, after one hundred years, closed its book on seapower doctrine in the image of Mahan. For how long remained to be seen.’33 One could argue the book remained closed for only a decade and a half. In 2007 Mahanian ideas re-emerged, in adjusted form, in a new strategy that had its intellectual origins in the ideas of Chief of Naval Operations, and subsequently Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen. In Mullen’s view, seapower was about more than projecting force ashore in the context of joint littoral warfare. This remained important, but it was only one component of a more expansive view of seapower. For Mullen it was not a case of prioritizing the high-seas, blue-water domain of Mahan, or the littoral, brown-water domain of Corbett. Rather, there is only one domain – the maritime – a product of the ubiquitous nature of accelerated globalization.
In such an environment, warfighting may be necessary, but other activities are also important, such as securing sea lanes and delivering humanitarian aid. Moreover, there are a whole host of threat scenarios that fall well short of actual war but nevertheless need to be addressed. ‘I’m here to challenge you first to rid yourself of the old notion … that maritime strategy exists solely to win wars at sea and the rest will take care of itself’, he argued in 2006. ‘[I]n a globalized, flat world, the rest matters a lot.’34 Piracy, for example, ‘can no longer be viewed as someone else’s problem … It is a global threat to security because of its deepening ties to internat
ional criminal networks, smuggling of hazardous cargoes, and disruption of vital commerce.’35 Securing the seas is in the interests of all nations, and the benefits of free markets should be spread to everyone. This formulation led naturally to the changed understanding of sea control noted earlier. In Mullen’s view ‘the economic tide of all nations rises not when the seas are controlled by one but rather when they are made safe and free for all’.36
But governing or exerting influence across the globe is far beyond US naval capabilities. The necessity, it was argued, was for a cooperative approach among nations. In 2006 Mullen put forward a naval concept he called ‘the 1,000-ship navy’, not a literal notion but rather a metaphor for ‘a free-form, self-organizing network of maritime partners’ cooperating to halt or divert the movement of threats on the high seas, or address concerns in the littorals.37 Concrete examples included coordinated operations by Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore to counter piracy and terrorist movements in the Strait of Malacca; the Proliferation Security Initiative, under which nations voluntarily intercept ships in international or (more likely) local waters suspected of transporting WMDs; humanitarian assistance operations in the Indian Ocean after the 2004 tsunami and along the US Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina; and maritime evacuation operations, like off the coast of Lebanon in 2006. All of these reflected an informal maritime coalition to address common threats (manmade or natural) to common interests.
Mullen’s ideas found formal expression in A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower, jointly prepared by the US Navy, US Marine Corps and – uniquely – the US Coast Guard, and released in 2007. The strategy was premised on an expansive notion of the maritime environment that was consistent with Mullen’s perspective. The maritime domain, it argued, includes coastal areas, bays, estuaries, islands and littorals, but it also encompasses the world’s oceans and seas, and all the airspace above them. It thus straddles the Mahanian and Corbettian perspectives, explicitly reaffirming ‘the use of seapower to influence actions and activities at sea and ashore’ (emphasis added).38
The unifying theme running throughout the Cooperative Strategy was that ‘preventing wars is as important as winning wars’.39 The goal was to prevent or contain wars that would otherwise disrupt the maritime domain, ‘an area covering three quarters of the planet’ and representing ‘the lifeblood of a global system that links every country on earth’. The focus was on ‘the system’ and systemic security, rather than on any particular units or components. Specific missions for the maritime services included controlling the seas, projecting power ashore and protecting friendly forces and civilian populations from attack. A particular concern was to mitigate threats to good order at sea, such as piracy, terrorism, weapons proliferation and drug trafficking. The ability to do all this in a timely fashion required maritime forces that were persistently present and globally positioned. Moreover, it required, above all, working in cooperation with multinational partners along the lines of Mullen’s original 1,000-ship navy vision, later renamed the Global Maritime Partnership initiative. Box 1.2 gives an example of a set of operations that fit within Mullen’s conceptualization.
Box 1.2 Anti-piracy operations off the coast of Somalia
• Growing piracy off the coast of Somali in the mid-2000s sparked the UN World Food Program to request assistance escorting cargo vessels from Kenya to Somalia delivering humanitarian aid.
• A 2008 UN resolution authorized all states with vessels in the region to use force to suppress piracy.
• Since that time, three multinational naval task forces have been deployed and continue to operate off the Horn of Africa and in the Gulf of Aden: a European Union contingent, Operation Atalanta; a NATO standing maritime group, Operation Ocean Shield; and a wider international effort under US command, Combined Joint Task Force 151.
• All these operations and their component vessels have a general anti-piracy role, as do the naval forces from several other countries – including China, India and Japan, among others – that are operating in the region under national command.
• The existence of multiple players united by a common mission fits well with the 2007 Cooperative Strategy’s vision of a self-organizing network of maritime partners cooperating to address threats on the high seas.
• The combined naval forces have had some success. World Food Program supplies are getting through and the strategically important Gulf of Aden has experienced significantly fewer attacks.
• But the overall effect of anti-piracy operations, which address the symptom and not the cause, has been not so much to stop piracy but to push it further out into the ocean. Ultimately, long-term solutions to these sorts of maritime threats lie on shore with functioning states that offer pirates and their families a better way of life.
The 2007 version of A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower was not without its critics. Robert Work questioned the strategy’s unifying theme, noting that saying ‘preventing wars is as important as winning wars’ was far different from saying ‘preventing wars is preferable to winning wars’.40 In Work’s view, the latter formulation was the better one, coupled with the unambiguous assertion that ‘nothing is more important than winning wars’ (emphasis in original).41 The crux of the issue may have been that the new strategy was a post-modern document in a largely modern world. Around the time of the 2007 strategy’s release Geoffrey Till made a useful distinction between post-modern and modern navies and states. The navies of post-modern states pursue sea control, especially in the littoral regions; they are engaged in expeditionary operations; and they focus on the system, promoting general good order and the conditions for globalization that benefit one and all. Modern states and their navies, by contrast, ‘will be warier about the implications of globalization for their own security … and less inclined to collaborate with others in the maintenance of the world’s trading system’.42 For Till, there was much evidence that countries are focusing on their own defence and immediate interests, not those of the system – and this suggested a future involving more traditional Mahanian concepts of sea control, including fleet-on-fleet engagements.
The 2010s
In 2015 A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower was updated under the same name but with a much different tone. In the intervening years the naval forces and doctrines of Russia and China had undergone significant change. Russia is building up its navy, including ships and submarines, in geostrategic regions around Europe such as the Norwegian, Baltic, Black and Eastern Mediterranean Seas. Responding to the perceived threat of NATO, its strategy could involve blocking the sea lines of communication between North America and Europe in a manner reminiscent of the Cold War. China’s ambitious naval modernization programme since the late 2000s includes new ships, amphibious vessels, patrol aircraft, an aircraft carrier and submarines. These are to be used not only in offshore defence of Taiwan but also in the open-ocean waters of the South China Sea to defend its claims, and in the Philippine Sea to keep the US Navy at bay. Both sets of strategies and concepts are captured by the phrase anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) (see Box 1.3).
Box 1.3 Countering A2/AD strategies
• In the first decade and a half after the Cold War ended US forces could operate from bases and carriers without being threatened.
• In the latter 2000s this became less and less the case in many areas of the world but especially in the Asia-Pacific.
• Analysts started to discern an anti-access (preventing US forces from getting to a theatre) and area denial (limiting US forces’ freedom of action within a theatre) strategy on the part of China as a means of countering America’s preponderant strength.
• China was investing, and continues to invest, significantly in its navy and in technologies that can engage US forces at ever greater range. This includes platforms that would prevent US Navy access to Taiwan in the event of a crisis, such as anti-ship cruise and ballistic missiles, maritime bombers, submarines and fast patrol boats.
• America’s military is developing specific platforms (e.g. the Joint Strike Fighter) and doctrines (e.g. AirSea Battle, now renamed Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver) to help counter A2/AD strategies.
• Russia is also thought to be pursuing an A2/AD strategy in areas around Western Europe.
• A Cooperative Strategy (2015) identifies ‘the ability to project forces into contested areas with sufficient freedom to operate effectively’ as critical in light of the ongoing development and fielding of A2/AD capabilities.
See: United States Navy, Marine Corps & Coast Guard. A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2015), 19.
America’s response has been a shift toward warfighting and hard power thinking. Both Mahanian and Corbettian themes can be seen in A Cooperative Strategy (2015), each presented to greater degree (as compared to 2007) in terms of national security interests. Apart from strategic nuclear deterrence, essential roles of the US Navy are stated as sea control, power projection, maritime security and all domain access. Sea control of the sea lines of communication, central to Mahan’s thought, remains critical. But whereas in 2007 it was presented in systemic terms – to defend the global sea-based trading system to make it safe and free for all – in 2015 a range of blue-water platforms is necessary for ‘the destruction of enemy naval forces, suppression of enemy sea commerce, and protection of vital sea lanes’.43
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