Seablindness. Seth Cropsey
oil shipped into Chinese ports generates financial resources that the Islamic Republic uses to purchase advanced weapons from Russia. Russia helps Iran fight its proxy wars, while Iran supports growing Russian influence in the Eastern Mediterranean.
America’s three strategic competitors oppose the United States in similar ways. China, Russia, and Iran understand the lessons of the First Gulf War. Since the Cold War’s end, America’s style of warfare has been to build coalitions, amass men and resources in neighboring countries, and launch combined arms assaults that overwhelm the enemy technologically and operationally. In the First Gulf War, the American-led coalition of nearly 1 million soldiers eviscerated an entrenched Iraqi army of more than 1.5 million. However, without neighboring Saudi Arabia’s willingness, the United States would have been unable to conduct the operation. A naval assault would have been smaller, and Kuwait’s crowded coastline could have meant high casualties.
The First Gulf War suggested a clear strategy to counter the United States. Deny American forces access to a region, and the United States loses power. Chinese, Russian, and Iranian efforts have all focused on denying America access to their respective regions. As it turns up the heat on the Baltic States, Russia is proscribing options for a rapid buildup by deploying long-range air-defense and strike missiles at NATO’s borders.
This is consistent with U.S. European Command commander General Philip Breedlove’s February 2016 statement to Congress that “President Putin has sought to undermine the rules-based system of European security and attempted to maximize his power on the world stage.”8 China’s land reclamation campaign, increasing naval power, and anti-ship missiles aim to keep American forces at a distance from which effective combat power cannot readily be applied. Iran’s low-cost missile boats, midget subs, large numbers of ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as mines, and its influence at the Strait of Hormuz seek to offset American escalation. Instability in Iraq and America’s shaky relations with Pakistan further restrict staging points for an American attack.
Declining U.S. military budgets and a shrinking force combined with poor treatment of critical allies have made things worse, calling into question the ability of the United States to honor its commitments. The Obama administration’s 2009 abrogation of ballistic-missile defense agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic; its prolonged interruption of defensive arms sales to Taiwan; and its failure to keep the Saudis informed about its 2015 deal with Iran (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) are examples of treating allies shabbily. Thus, the United States is less able to rely on adequate basing rights where they are needed both to deter and, if necessary, to fight.
President Trump faces a new challenge to U.S. national security that calls for changes to American strategy. The access that once allowed us to deter the Soviets has been eroded. Its resurrection in today’s Europe is unlikely. Such access is largely nonexistent in the Middle East and is tenuous in East Asia.
Coalitions of allied and partner nations remain extremely important—as they have since the United States became a major power. U.S. ground forces will not go it alone. They rarely have. Even the 1994 operation to remove Haiti’s military junta engaged coalition partners: Poland and Argentina. A combat operation, had one been necessary, would have been staged out of the mainland United States, Puerto Rico, and Guantanamo.
Equally reliable options are limited in Eurasia. While alliances and partnerships—for example, of Sunni states opposed to ISIS—are vital, they may not always be available or dependable. If North Korea were to invade the South, there is no guarantee that Japan would allow its bases to be used for repelling the invaders or for striking deep into North Korea.
Seapower possesses the advantages of geography, mobility, and—with sufficient investment—numbers and growing technological edge. It will be essential in future conflicts because it allows us to depend less on nearby bases. Logistics ships in sufficient number can keep battle groups, including amphibious forces, on station, present, and combat ready largely independent of basing agreements. Maritime coalitions will likely offer more security in the future. But there is no alternative to dominant U.S. seapower today. Allies like Japan lack the industrial capacity to make up the deficit between the U.S. Navy and the expanding Chinese PLAN. Newer partners like Vietnam cannot hope to hold out against a Chinese onslaught without American support. Taiwan can defend against a PRC assault, but not indefinitely. Seapower is the surest means to ensure constant access to effective combat capability in the Western Pacific.
The same shift in thinking applies to the greater Middle East. Its gulfs and seas allow access that is largely independent of diplomatic agreements. Robust seapower may not be sufficient to cover our security interests in the Middle East, but its usefulness increases proportionately to the territorial holdings on which ISIS has staked its claim as a caliphate. The Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman are Iran’s southwest and southern borders. It’s a long haul from there or from the Eastern Mediterranean to Tehran, but a doable one with refueling tankers based in Gulf States or, in the foreseeable future, carrier-launched drones that can refuel a ship’s strike aircraft.
The Cold War plan to mass land forces in defense of Europe has been voided by continental hopes that perpetual peace has arrived. Even the most stalwart American partners, such as the United Kingdom, have cut military capacity and capability. But Europe is a peninsula. It is surrounded by accessible waters from St. Petersburg to the Crimea. Seapower cannot stop a Russian ground invasion of the Baltics, but it can snap the supply lines of an attack and give such ground forces as NATO can muster a chance to prevail. The ability of naval vessels to control the Baltic Sea and project power inland can also deter Russia from launching an attack.
The United States has emerged into a new world. To the potential for nuclear warfare with China—a would-be peer competitor—that American statesmen most wished to avoid after the Cold War have been added threats from a nuclear-armed Russia, North Korea, and, sooner or later, Iran. The more immediate prospect of a triple hegemony may not be an existential threat, but its outcome would unravel such order as exists in the world, cripple our markets, shatter our alliances, and imperil us at home. All this can be avoided by a grand strategy that continues to hold threats at a distance as it relies on the independence, accessibility, and technological superiority of seapower.
What will the consequences be if U.S. strategy proves as insufficient as the nation’s ability to execute it, owing to a lack of seapower?
The object of this and subsequent scenarios is to illustrate the challenges that American seapower faces today and will face in the future: a diminishing fleet; unresolved strategic decisions; and miscalculations in fleet design (which can be the result of insufficient funding, slow adaptation to large geopolitical shifts, or the swift pace of technological change, to name a few). One important element of creating useful war games, scenarios, or plans is imagination. War and architecture on a grand scale, for example, are two complex human activities that require forethought, organization, and decisive leadership. But a civil engineer does not have to worry that a river will alter its course to avoid a planned bridge. Intelligent military officers know that this is exactly what the enemy will do: change his plan to achieve his goal. This fact puts a premium on imagination and thus exacts a very high price for failures of imagination.
During the Cold War’s final years, U.S. maritime strategy came to regard the land mass from the Soviet Union’s western border to the Atlantic as a peninsula surrounded on the north by the Baltic and North Seas and on the south by the Mediterranean. Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact’s high commands believed that a conventional war would most likely spark where the two sides’ forces abutted one another: in the center of Germany. American naval strategists operated two aircraft carrier battle groups in the Mediterranean, whose 140 tactical aircraft could attack targets in the USSR