Seablindness. Seth Cropsey
the United States today maintains two permanent brigades, with a rotating armored brigade to be added in 2017.18 One corps is made of two divisions and includes between 40,000 and 100,000 troops. One brigade is made up of between 3,000 and 5,000 troops. The Army reports that only twenty of its sixty brigades—with members from active duty, reserves, and the National Guard—are combat ready, eleven of which are committed to ongoing missions.19 Russian forces in the regions that abut Eastern Europe are at least twenty times the size of U.S. ground forces. They are equipped with modern and effective weapons, both offensive and defensive.
The Air Force chief of staff, General David L. Goldfein, told Congress in 2016 that, contrary to the nation’s military strategy, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) is not fully prepared to handle more than one of the required two major regional contingencies.20 The United States has been shrinking the size and, by failing sufficiently to modernize, the capability of its entire armed forces as our potential adversaries grow in numbers and combat ability.
These facts inclined the Obama administration’s third secretary of Defense, former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, to share his immediate predecessors’ views. His experience in the Vietnam War as an Army infantry soldier also contributed to his understanding. He spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in July 2013 on the sixtieth anniversary of the armistice that ended the hostilities of the Korean War: “Many of you—especially those veterans of the Korean War—have seen the costs, measured in precious American lives, that come with sending a hollow force into battle. We cannot repeat the mistakes of the past.”21
Hagel meant that we should not repeat the mistakes of the past. We did.
IT’S AN OLD STORY
History warns of the consequences. The falls of the Dutch and English from their positions as great seapowers and great powers are commonly cited. The eclipse of Spanish naval power was more dramatic. It shows how seapower is linked to superpower status and how quickly—and simultaneously—both can unravel.
The Spanish Empire of the sixteenth century was so extensive that a priest, Fray Francisco de Ugalde, earned a small place in history when he told his sovereign, Charles I, that Spain had become “el imperio en el que nunca se pone el sol,” the empire on which the sun never sets. The Spanish Empire extended from its northern and southern European possessions, including the Kingdom of Naples, to the Atlantic islands, widely separated African outposts, and millions of square miles in the Americas. Charles’s son, Philip II, solidified and expanded Spain’s imperial holdings in the islands named for him, the Philippines.
But reach exceeded grasp. Empires must be held together, and only ships could link such large and glittering imperial jewels with the crown in Madrid. Alfred Thayer Mahan writes in The Influence of Sea Power upon History, “Spain . . . afforded an impressive lesson of the weakness caused by . . . separation when the parts are not knit together by a strong sea power.”22
Key to the collapse of Spain’s maritime dominance was the disastrous Spanish Armada of 1588. The “Invincible” Armada was ill-prepared and poorly equipped. Built amid consistent royal bankruptcies and a treasury stretched thin by Spanish struggles in the Netherlands, the Armada that sailed for England was short on leadership, training, and tactics. Notwithstanding advances in naval weaponry that improved the range and accuracy of its guns, the Spanish navy’s doctrine required Spanish ships to travel in tight formation.
The Armada, weighed down by its lumbering troop transports, proceeded very slowly and was at a serious disadvantage to England’s swifter and more maneuverable warships.23 In the event, this mattered little. Only six Spanish ships of the 129-vessel invasion force were destroyed as a direct result of naval combat. Dirty weather favored the English. So did the fighting spirit of England’s indomitable queen. Elizabeth I told her forces, assembled at Til-bury to quash a possible Spanish march up the Thames, that “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king—and of a king of England too.”
At least fifty ships were lost during the North Atlantic storms that decimated the fleet as it attempted to return to Spain past Ireland’s west coast. More than 13,500 sailors and soldiers died, not from English cannon fire, but as the result of insufficient supplies, disease, and deficient leadership—a hollow military if ever there were one. Had Spain’s 27,000-strong invasion force reached England, the survival of Elizabeth’s Protestant realm would have been at serious risk.24
While the riches of the Western Hemisphere still flowed across the Atlantic, the Spanish treasury was pushed time and again to its breaking point. The debt of the Spanish Empire had become crippling. The royal bankruptcies of 1596, 1607, 1627, and 1645 weighed heavily on a nation engaged in land campaigns against England, France, and various opponents in the melee of the Thirty Years’ War.25 Spain’s attachment to the Mediterranean tactics of boarding enemy galleys blinkered its high command to the lessons of firepower and maneuverability. The English understood these tactics and applied them on the high seas. The distraction of continental warfare left Madrid seablind.
The Council of Finance’s reluctant and consistently slow financial support to the Junta de Armadas, a royal advisory group with directive powers over the navy, resulted in a naval force that experienced sharp rises and declines in size and capability. As do his successors the world over, Martin de Aróztegui, the secretary of the Spanish navy, argued that the consistent provision of money was the “principal foundation” of naval preparations, and without proper funding nothing could be accomplished.26 David Goodman writes in his analysis of the decline of Spanish naval power that every aspect of Spain’s naval planning and preparation was subject to delay and collapse owing to insufficient funding. It is rare to encounter documents, he writes, that are free from warnings of serious consequences if funds were not forthcoming.27
By 1663, the Spanish treasury had become so strained that the president of finance, Juan de Góngora, announced that he had not one real to give to the fleet.28 The Junta de Armadas warned that the fleet was being left with “only the bones and scraps” and, shortly after Philip IV’s death, announced it had no funds, only debts.29 The term “hollow force” did not exist at the time, but Spain’s was a hollow force caused by the twin enemies of a robust one: strategic distraction in the form of land wars and accompanying impoverishment.
The Council of War and the Junta de Armadas had failed to establish a fleet that could answer imperial commitments, a goal they struggled to achieve for almost half a century. Spain never recovered from the rout of its great Armada. While there were limited successes in the early seventeenth century, Spain’s navy had begun a decline from which neither it nor the state recovered. In less than a century, Spanish seapower descended from the top drawer to a third-rate force. So low had Spanish naval power fallen that, by the late seventeenth century, the Spanish coast was navigated by a few Dutch ships and seamen hired by the Spanish. Shipping from the Indies to Spain could be conducted easily by Dutch shipping in peacetime but was easily interrupted in time of war.30 Spain maintained skeletal parts of its former global power, holding lands and influence in the Americas until the early nineteenth century. But seapower hollowed by penuriousness withered the muscle and rotted the empire’s connective tissue.
FROM GALLEONS TO GUIDED MISSILE CRUISERS
The initial signs of a hollow U.S. naval force existed long before sequestration. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan redirected U.S. military spending priorities throughout the 2000s, just as the Vietnam War had affected subsequent military budgets and resulted in a hollow force. The United States’s post–Cold War military drawdown shrank the Navy from its 594-ship high to 316 ships by September 2001.31 Combat operations from then on shifted funding away from the Navy and Marine Corps. U.S. ship numbers steadily declined during the Iraq War as the Navy pared its surface warship fleet down from 127 to 118, cut its submarine fleet by four boats, and trimmed its amphibious fleet from 41 to 33 ships.32 Force cuts alone might not create a hollow navy, but, combined with the concept of “transformation” and the financial squeezes of the Iraq and Afghan wars, these force cuts indicate that this is exactly what happened.
Secretary