THE U.S. NAVY AT THE DAWN of the twenty-first century is grappling with the development of an appropriate strategy to help guide its operations, exercises, doctrine, and programs. That strategy—the naval component of the national strategy—must take numerous elements and trends into account, particularly the overall national security, defense, and military strategies.1 Among the most salient strategic issues, the U.S. Navy must address is its roles vis-à-vis the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Peoples Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), and the PLAN’s nuclear submarine force, now and in the future.2
The U.S. Navy has had long experience in positing appropriate U.S. maritime and naval strategies with regard to other world and regional powers.3 Civilian and uniformed U.S. Navy leaders throughout the nineteenth century would periodically ponder the proper approaches for America’s Navy to take in the event of war with Great Britain or France. The lectures and writings of Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan at the end of that century gave this planning particular elegance, coherence, and power. Specifically, strategic naval planning in the 1890s against Spain proved both prescient and useful as the century ended.
Strategic naval thinking in the first few decades of the twentieth century was carried out within the bounds of the various joint “color plans,” the most important of which were Plan Black (against Imperial Germany), Plan Red (against the British Empire), and Plan Orange (against Imperial Japan). Before and during World War II, Navy strategic planning against the Axis powers was conducted within a joint strategic planning framework and in accordance with the Europe First precepts laid out in 1940 by the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) in Plan Dog.
Following World War II, U.S. Navy strategic thinking focused on the Navy’s role in joint and combined operations against the Soviet Union and its allies, within the contexts of the Cold War and evolving joint and allied strategic planning systems.4 The Navy envisioned global wartime forward offensive naval sea control and power projection operations in the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic, and the Western Pacific. By the late 1970s, the salience of naval operations in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf had become an important strategic issue as well.
During the 1980s, U.S. Navy Cold War strategic thought was crystallized into a construct that became known as The Maritime Strategy, written down and disseminated in both classified and unclassified forms.5 The Maritime Strategy, however, was more than just a set of documents. It represented a global, forward, offensive, joint, and combined approach to the use of naval power against the Soviets and their allies that the Navy’s leaders and staff officers used to inform the national and regional strategic planning documents and war plans of the day. It also provided the objectives of many joint, combined, and naval operations and exercises of the period, and of much of the Navy’s operational and tactical training.6
The Maritime Strategy thus represents a major recent Navy strategic planning effort, and one of the most significant such efforts in its history.7 It was the product of a decade in which the U.S. Navy made a conscious effort to think through the utility of naval power to deter and defend against a major perceived threat to the country. Therefore, it may prove useful to examine the U.S. Navy’s experience with The Maritime Strategy, to illuminate aspects of the Navy’s current and potential interest in the PRC, the PLAN, and the PLAN’s nuclear submarine force.
Such an examination, if done comprehensively, could address dozens of issue areas and fill enough pages for a book. This preliminary effort will not be that extensive, and will cover only a sampling of possible topics:
•Intelligence on the threat
•Time frame
•Geography
•Jointness
•Allies
•Domestic political and bureaucratic factors
•Competing strategic approaches
•Force structure and technology
•Nuclear strategy
•Perception management
•Uncertainties
Conducting this exercise should in no way suggest that the Soviet Union of the 1980s and the PRC of the present and future represent identical threats to the United States. They do not. A major reason to undertake such comparisons, however, is to identify key differences, as well as occasional similarities.
The Soviet Union posed, by the 1980s, a generally accepted military threat to the United States and its allies. Almost everyone—the public, the President, the Congress, the State Department, the other services—saw the Soviets as opponents, to a greater or lesser degree. President Reagan publicly damned them as the “Evil Empire”—a characterization that stirred up some controversy at home and abroad, but which resonated with a large segment of the American electorate. The Maritime Strategy was therefore unexceptional in its view of the Soviet military, especially the Soviet navy, as its principal projected wartime target, in both its classified and unclassified formats. The Navy’s—and the nation’s—public and secret stances were thus quite similar, and major aspects of The Maritime Strategy could be—and were—freely debated in the press, in open academic and trade publications, and at numerous conferences and meetings, by civilians and naval officers alike.8 This included some quite sophisticated public discussions of Soviet, American, and allied nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) and nuclear-powered strategic ballistic-missile submarine (SSBN) operations. The Maritime Strategy was embedded in a wide and rich public discussion and consensus.
China at the beginning of the twenty-first century represents a quite different case. There is no such sense of agreement in the nation or among its allies that China currently represents a military threat to the United States, although there appears to be a consensus supporting the nation’s announced policy to oppose a use of force by the PRC to incorporate Taiwan into its domain. The evolving public face of U.S. official government positions regarding China does not conform to the stance that would have to be taken behind closed doors to undertake serious operational military planning against that country, beyond the Taiwan contingency. Therefore, public discussions of war planning in relation to China are—and must be—muted, seldom informed by actual planning being conducted by the military, and almost never with serving U.S. officers as discussants. By the same token, whatever prudent military planning may or may not be currently underway involving the PRC, it is not being informed by a public and professional debate on naval policy and strategy as open as that which characterized The Maritime Strategy.
The situation today may be in some ways more analogous to that of the 1920s and 1930s, when the U.S. military developed and exercised its color plans, especially Plan Orange, in the absence of any clear direction to do so from the President and his cabinet, and without a similar approach being taken toward the threat (in that case, Imperial Japan) by the State Department.9 On the other hand, the richness of the current public debate on U.S. China policy by academics, policy experts, journalists, and others—but not many active duty military officers—seems to derive in part from America’s Cold War experience and the development of important policy-oriented communities. During the 1920s and 1930s, the number of policy specialists had been far less, their writings were far fewer, and most of the public paid them scant attention.
One significant aspect of The Maritime Strategy was the extent to which it relied on sophisticated high-level intelligence products agreed across the intelligence community, obtained in part through deep penetration of the adversary.10 The nature of the Soviet naval threat—including that posed by its SSN and SSBN force—had been a hotly debated topic as late as the 1970s, with sharp internal disagreements among the various intelligence agencies that could be discerned even in the public statements of senior agency and service leaders. By the 1980s, almost all of these disagreements had been resolved, due in large part to the credibility of certain sources. A heretofore fractious intelligence community now put forward a single, coherent view of the nature of the Soviet threat at sea that simplified greatly the problem of crafting a coherent family of joint, allied, and service strategies to counter that threat. That unified view by the intelligence community, rendered even more powerful by the memory of previous disagreements, provided a firm foundation that contributed greatly to the success of The Maritime Strategy as an organizing concept for the application of U.S. naval power.11
The public face of internal U.S. government estimates on the nature of a Chinese military threat to the United States—if indeed China is considered to pose a threat at all—is far more opaque today than was true of U.S. intelligence community views of the Soviets two decades ago.12 The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review flatly declares that “Secrecy, moreover, envelopes most aspects of Chinese security affairs. The outside world has little knowledge of Chinese motivations and decision-making or of key capabilities supporting its military modernization.”13 There is little public understanding of whether or not the U.S. intelligence community is internally united or divided regarding China. Whatever the actual situation, however, it is important for this discussion to remind that much of the power of The Maritime Strategy derived from that of the unified intelligence estimate on which it was based, which in turn rested on confidence in a certain set of highly credible sources. If such a unified estimate cannot be said to exist today regarding the Chinese and their projected use of naval power, the power and influence of U.S. joint and naval strategies devised to confront China will be weaker.
The Maritime Strategy presumed that war with the Soviet Union could break out at any time—today, tomorrow, or far into the future. Whenever it broke out, however, its basic underlying strategic principles were presumed to remain the same, or at least to evolve in a slow and steady fashion. The enemy thus could be the Soviet Union of the 1980s, or the 1990s, or the twenty-first century, and that enemy would evolve at a pace that would be understood and countered by the United States and its allies. The Soviets would continue to grow in power, as would we. Current symmetries and asymmetries would probably be maintained in the foreseeable—and even unforeseeable—future. The allocation of American and allied military resources for war with the Soviets had to be spread over current and future contingencies, with the future not looking all that different from the present.
There is no such predicted steadiness in the evolution of the American-Chinese power relationship. The explosive growth of the Chinese economy—and its interdependence on that of the United States—has spawned a variety of predictions on its future character. China today is not considered a military enemy by the U.S. Government nor the American people, but few predict that that view will necessarily hold ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years hence. As China’s future economic and military power grows and as Chinese foreign policy evolves, the relationship of China to the United States may well not remain stable and similar to that which now exists. The Maritime Strategy seemed (at the time) eternal, so future radical changes were not foreseen or developed. Few believe that current U.S. maritime strategy regarding the China of 2006 will be the same as one regarding the China of 2016 or 2026 or beyond.
The Soviet Union was a global superpower spanning a dozen time zones itself, from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific, and tightly allied through the Warsaw Pact with Baltic and Black Sea littoral satellite nations. Moreover, it had military outposts of varying kinds in Cuba, Vietnam, and elsewhere, plus the availability of facilities and perhaps indigenous allied forces in such locales as North Korea, Syria, Libya, Ethiopia, and Angola. The Soviet navy was deployed on a global scale, with fleets in the North Atlantic, Black Sea, Baltic Sea, and Pacific, and squadrons in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and African waters. The Maritime Strategy was therefore likewise global: contemplating forward offensive U.S. operations in the North Atlantic, North Pacific, Arctic, and Mediterranean; allied operations in the Baltic and Black Seas and the Sea of Japan; and perhaps operations in the Caribbean, the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the South Atlantic as well.
The Chinese situation is nothing like that of the Soviet Union—or, for that matter, the Russian Federation today. While a vast East Asian nation, as has been the case for millennia, China is just that—an East Asian power. The PRC’s extensive coastline fronts only one ocean area—the western Pacific. While it is certainly within the realm of possibility that a China of the future could acquire allies, forward bases far afield, and a global naval reach—especially with SSNs—there is almost nothing in Chinese history that indicates such an impulse. Thus, a U.S. maritime strategy vis-à-vis China would be almost exclusively a western Pacific strategy, unlike The Maritime Strategy of the 1980s.
Moreover, despite the probable regional nature of a conflict with China, the United States remains and will remain a global superpower, deploying and using its navy in many regions of the world. For example, during the entire post–Cold War era to date, despite the unquestioned importance of the western Pacific, U.S.-Chinese defense and military relationships, and U.S. forward-deployed forces off the East Asian rim, the center of gravity for U.S. naval operations has actually been elsewhere—in and around the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. And significant U.S. naval deployments occurred routinely in the Caribbean, around Latin America, off Africa, and in European waters. These non-East Asian deployments have been driven by political, diplomatic, and defense considerations far different from those driving deployments to the western Pacific, and often with differently configured force packages.
During a hypothetical future conflict with the Chinese, at least some non-Chinese-related U.S. Navy deployments could be expected to persist, given the continuing significant worldwide interests of the United States. What forces would they require? During the era of The Maritime Strategy, most U.S. Navy forces planned to engage similarly-configured Soviet forces wherever they deployed in the North Pacific, North Atlantic, or Mediterranean. Consequently, U.S. Navy force packages in those areas were similarly configured, centering on carrier battle groups, amphibious ready groups, and independently operating submarines. Would future conflict with the Chinese, however, require force packages significantly different from those needed to pursue U.S. military goals in other parts of the world? Should the U.S. Navy therefore, from here on out, plan, organize, equip, and exercise different forces for different regions?
The Maritime Strategy was an avowedly joint concept. It fully discussed the contributions to be made by U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard forces in its implementation. Moreover, it incorporated the vital roles in U.S. strategy played in peacetime, crises, and war by the U.S. Army and Air Force. And it explored the wartime relationships among U.S. naval, ground, and air forces, and the synergies and mutual support that were both necessary and expected.14 Examples included the employment of Army missile batteries and Air Force fighters in Iceland, the availability of Air Force tanker aircraft and minelaying bombers, and the central necessity for the protection of reinforcement and resupply shipping from North America to Europe. Fleet commanders regularly exercised aspects of The Maritime Strategy with elements of the other services, especially the Air Force. Many of the Global War Games conducted at the Naval War College in Newport during the 1980s strove to include as much ground and air play as naval operations.15
To the Navy, however, jointness meant conducting operations that maintained autonomous Navy commands conducting maritime campaigns, but coordinating these with air-land and air campaigns being waged ashore. The Navy remained wary of more integrated joint forces, and of placing naval sea, air, and amphibious forces under the immediate operational command of Army or Air Force generals.
Interestingly, The Maritime Strategy often was castigated by its opponents as being a U.S. Navy go-it-alone strategy. This parochial reputation of one of the least parochial documents in the Navy’s history had at least two possible explanations:
•While the Navy was hard at work ensuring that The Maritime Strategy stressed joint cooperative operations, the Navy was simultaneously waging a bitter campaign on Capitol Hill to defeat passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Act, with its numerous requirements for a more integrated total U.S. defense force.16 The Navy’s reputation as an organization focused on retaining the autonomy of its forces thus overshadowed whatever steps toward cooperative jointness were being made by the Navy’s fleet commanders, war gamers, and strategists in articulating and exercising The Maritime Strategy.17
•For those caught up in the internal bureaucratic battles over budget share in the Pentagon, imbued with the ethos of zero-sum games, all perceived successes by one service on any front were considered defeats by the other services.18 As The Maritime Strategy received publicity and even accolades in various quarters, some civilian analysts in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and some U.S. Army and Air Force programmers decried its success and criticized it on general principles, stressing its Navy Department origins, and refusing to consider its merits.19
In developing The Maritime Strategy, one of the Navy’s goals was to articulate well its roles as it saw them in any confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Navy was concerned that the narrow focus that some analysts and planners took toward such a confrontation—concentrating almost all attention on the NATO-Warsaw Pact border in Central Europe—inevitably led toward a view that only the Army and Air Force could fundamentally contribute to such a conflict. The Navy sought to explain not only how its forces would coordinate with those of the other services in peace, crises, and war, but also the variety of critical roles it envisioned naval forces playing across that spectrum of activity, especially on the NATO flanks and in the Arctic and Pacific.
The role of the forces of each of the services will be an important consideration in planning with regard to China. The oft-repeated cliché that “the U.S. will engage in no more land wars in Asia” implies little role for the U.S. Army should hostilities occur—unless they occur in Korea. Thus the Army as an institution could plausibly have little concern for non-Korean East Asian contingencies, focus its attention elsewhere—like the Middle East—and urge civilian policy-makers to do likewise. Or the Army could take an opposite tack and seek to cut out for itself unrealistic roles in East Asia.
The Navy, by contrast, might counter that it is the Navy that is the nation’s hedge force against a militarily assertive China, and that the major roles envisaged for naval forces in the western Pacific argue for Navy-dominated command structures and larger Navy budget shares. In some ways, current and future positions of the Army and Navy on East Asian contingencies could be the obverse of what they were during the Cold War regarding European contingencies. While during the Cold War the Navy often felt that its relevance to deterring and—if necessary, fighting—the Soviets was questioned by some, the Navy has no such concerns today, given the dearth of U.S. forward land-based forces south of Northeast Asia, and the critical necessity in many possible scenarios to control the sea-air battlespace in the western Pacific.
At the end of the day, however, any operation undertaken by the U.S. military, against China or any other power, will be a joint one, involving all the services in varying degrees. Sorting out individual service roles within joint campaigns will merit close attention.
One possible significant difference between the Cold War and a future confrontation with China emerges from this discussion: It is unclear whether there would be significant reinforcement and resupply shipping that the U.S. Navy would be required to protect, in the event of hostilities with China. True, a significant U.S. Army, Marine Corps, and Air Force presence is likely to remain forward on the ground in East Asia, in Korea, Japan, and Guam. In the event of a limited conflict confined to, say, the Taiwan Straits or the South China Sea, however, the threat to the military sea lines of communication supporting those forces might prove to be only a tertiary consideration. The Navy would probably then only need to protect its own forces and logistics against a PRC SSN force, not the lifelines of its sister services as well.20
The Maritime Strategy was, despite ill-informed claims to the contrary by its detractors, conceived to be part of an immense allied cooperative endeavor.21 Allied naval and air forces around the globe were viewed as vital partners in the effort to protect U.S. and allied reinforcement and resupply shipping and to sink the Soviet navy. U.S. naval forces were to implement the Maritime Strategy embedded in allied and coalition military structures derived from the North Atlantic Treaty, the Rio Pact, the ANZUS and Southeast Asia treaties, and bilateral defense agreements with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand.
NATO itself developed a Concept of Maritime Operations (CONMAROPS) in the 1980s that echoed the principles underlying The Maritime Strategy, especially the importance of forward operations.22 For example, British and Dutch submarine forces were expected to operate forward in the Northeastern Atlantic; and German and Turkish naval forces anticipated forward operations in the Baltic and Black Seas respectively.23 Meanwhile, the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force was expected to help keep the waters around Japan—and therefore off the Soviet Pacific Coast—free of Soviet naval forces; and friendly Latin American navies planned on supportive naval control and protection of shipping (NCAPS) operations in the South Atlantic and Eastern Pacific. Significant specialized areas of naval endeavor, such as NCAPS and mine countermeasures, lacking major U.S. Navy resources, had become largely the domain of allied forces.
Planning for and exercising these wide-ranging and disparate cooperative operations preoccupied U.S. and allied naval forces alike, supported—and directed—by national governments and international military institutions.24 Significant debates on the efficacy and modalities of The Maritime Strategy, CONMAROPS, and complementary allied national naval strategic concepts roiled the domestic political scenes in Britain, Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, and elsewhere.
What of possible hostilities with China? Who would America’s allies be? What forces could they bring to bear to complement or supplement U.S. Navy ships and aircraft, including for operations against Chinese SSNs? What antisubmarine warfare planning and exercising would need to be done beforehand? In this case, unlike The Maritime Strategy, far fewer allied assets could be expected to be made available, and from far fewer allies (Taiwan? Japan? Australia? South Korea?). Australia and its navy are today among the very closest of America’s allies; and U.S.-Japanese relationships appear to be strengthening, including naval cooperation at sea. U.S.-Singapore naval relations are quite close, and new bonds between the U.S. and Indian navies are currently being forged. On the other hand, not many allied assets might be needed in many hypothetical United States-PRC contingencies.
Nevertheless, increased attention to fostering allied and friendly nation capabilities at sea has become a hallmark of the initial year in office of the current chief of naval operations of the U.S. Navy, Adm. Michael Mullen. While the announced policy appears to be global and generic, with a focus on maritime security issues such as maritime domain awareness rather than war-fighting, it does support active efforts to build even closer ties among Pacific navies that might prove useful in a contingency involving the PRC.25
U.S. naval policy and strategy derives from national policy and strategy. The Maritime Strategy was strategically forward, tactically offensive, widely advertised as such, and required significant power to implement. It nested comfortably within publicly-supported Reagan administration policies that branded the Soviet Union as an evil empire, conceded it nothing, sought to deter it through declarations and demonstrations of strength, and poured money into the defense budget for several years to improve fleet force levels and readiness.26 John Lehman, President Reagan’s first secretary of the Navy and a well-connected Republican, was arguably the major public spokesman for The Maritime Strategy. Lehman was no figurehead or mere mouthpiece, however. He was a major ideological influence on and spokesman for overall administration defense policy and strategy, and embodied the close linkage between national strategy and its implementation by the Navy. The tone and substance of Reagan-era national security strategy and documents fit well with that of The Maritime Strategy, and the Navy became central to the country’s overall defense strategy and posture. Consequently, the Navy’s claim on the nation’s defense resources also increased.
It is true that The Maritime Strategy represented the preferred strategic outlook of the uniformed leadership of the Navy regarding the sensible use of their service in time of war, but that outlook was able to be translated into policy because it found a resonance within the Reagan administration—which also saw it as sensible. The Navy’s strategic preferences had not found such resonance in the previous Democrat-controlled White House of President Jimmy Carter and Secretary of Defense Harold Brown. During the Carter years, the Navy as a bureaucratic actor often found itself on the defensive in internal administration policy debates, especially regarding the relative importance of sea power, operations in the Pacific, carrier strike capabilities, and anti-SSBN operations in a possible future conflict with the Soviets. Consequently, Carter-era national security strategy documents often provided little in the way of solid underpinnings for Navy views.27 While the aggressive concepts that emerged in The Maritime Strategy were certainly current in internal U.S. Navy thinking during the 1970s, their articulation was necessarily muted in the keystone Navy strategy and policy documents of the period, such as “The Strategic Concept of the U.S. Navy” (NWP-1). Also, the tight defense budgets of the 1970s reflected the Navy’s problematic status within the Defense Department, with under-funding—as the Navy saw it—of significant Navy programs and a perceived “tilt” toward improving Army and Air Force postures at the expense of the Navy.
What is the situation today? The Bush administration famously exercises fairly tight control over the development and implementation of U.S. defense strategy and policy. The administration came into office much concerned with the unfolding prickly defense relationship with the PRC, and aiming to shore up the nation’s defense posture in the Pacific, including its naval posture.28 The 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq drastically shifted the center of gravity of the Bush administration’s defense thinking and activity to the Middle East, but while administration rhetoric in relation to China may have become muted, concerns over the growth of China’s military muscle and over her policies toward Taiwan, the South China Sea, and Northeast Asia remain.
The official 2006 Defense Department Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) characterized China as having “the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States and field disruptive military technologies that could over time offset traditional U.S. military advantages absent U.S. counter strategies,” and called attention to Chinese military modernization programs. It also announced an increased U.S. Navy focus on the Pacific, with six operational aircraft carriers to be deployed there, along with 60 percent of the total Navy submarine force; and a policy of attempting to “dissuade any military competitor from developing disruptive or other capabilities that could enable regional hegemony or hostile action against the United States or other friendly countries, and it will seek to deter aggression or coercion.” On the other hand, the same document declared that “U.S. policy remains focused on encouraging China to play a constructive, peaceful role in the Asia-Pacific region and to serve as a partner in addressing common security challenges,” and that “U.S. Policy seeks to encourage China to choose a path of peaceful economic growth and political liberalization, rather than military threat and intimidation.”29
The Navy provides important but secondary forces to the global war on terrorism (GWOT), especially the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Army, Marine Corps, and Special Operations Forces occupy center stage there and have first claim—in their view—on the nation’s defense resources. What may emerge in policy and budget debates within the administration and on Capitol Hill is a sense that GWOT and Middle East wars require strong ground (and special) forces—even at the expense of funding other forces, like those of the Navy—while the appropriate defense posture in East Asia requires significant and powerful naval and air forces, even at the expense of funding ground forces. If the nation’s focus continues to be on the ground in the Middle East, what are the implications for future naval strategy and policy—and resources—focused on the rising power of the PRC, including its emerging SSN force? If the United States were to disengage from the Middle East, would that free up resources to bolster the Navy, and increase Navy influence in the halls of the Pentagon? And would another terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland cause a shift in resource allocation to more close-in homeland defense measures, like continental air defense, or sea defense of the approaches to North America?
The concepts underpinning The Maritime Strategy were not the only ones that the nation and its defense establishment could have adopted in the 1980s. At least two other strategic concepts competed with The Maritime Strategy at the time:
•Convoy escort primacy: This view saw the Navy’s wartime role as principally one of ensuring the safety of reinforcement and resupply shipping for U.S. ground and air forces in Germany, largely through the organization and protection of convoys, and the establishment of submarine barriers. Strike operations on the NATO flanks were ignored or condemned as unproductive sideshows. Strike operations against the Soviet Union itself, including its naval air bases in the Crimea and the Kola Peninsula were dismissed as dangerously escalatory, as were forward attack submarine operations. Operations in the Pacific to secure lines of communication to U.S. forces in Northeast Asia, to draw or keep Japan in the conflict, and to force the Soviets to fight a global war in all theaters were downplayed or ignored. Strike or amphibious operations against the Soviet Far East deliberately to tie down the large Soviet air forces deployed there were dismissed as fanciful. Not only was NCAPS in the North Atlantic the only preferred mission for U.S. Navy forces, but all other types of ASW operations beside convoy escort and submarine barriers there were considered wasteful. Proponents of this strategic view had held sway in the U.S. Department of Defense during the Carter administration, and permeated strategic thinking in the U.S. Army, much of the U.S. Air Force, and among most staff officers of the U.S. European Command and Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). Not many in the U.S. Navy espoused such a position, however.30
•Third World contingency primacy: This countervailing view saw most concerns with the U.S.-Soviet military balance and preparation for war with the Soviets as irrelevant. Proponents regarded the Cold War balance between NATO and the Warsaw Pact as stable and unchanging, guaranteed by the nuclear balance of terror and the phenomenon of strategic deterrence. The real threats facing the United States were not seen as being on the Inner-German Border (IGB), in the Mediterranean, or under the Norwegian Sea, but rather in the deserts and jungles of the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. There indigenous forces, Soviet proxies, and perhaps even Soviets themselves some day posed the real current and future threats to U.S. interests, and there U.S. forces had to be prepared to fight in low intensity conflicts (LIC). This view informed the so-called “Iklé Study,” Discriminate Deterrence, and became U.S. Marine Corps policy once Gen. Al Gray took the helm of that service in 1987.31 It was also held by a small minority of serving U.S. Navy officers (including some flag officers). In this view, amphibious forces needed major increases, and aircraft carriers were quite useful, but largely to support ground forces ashore. Spending on submarines, the SOSUS net, and maritime patrol aircraft was seen as simply profligate. In terms of current operations, the fleet should be ready to perform presence and crisis response operations throughout the globe, but should throttle back its extensive planning and exercise program for war with the Soviets.
During the 1980s, these two alternative strategies were often discussed and debated in academia and at think tanks, but The Maritime Strategy maintained its conceptual power and priority in administration and U.S. Navy thinking until the collapse of the Warsaw Pact at the end of the decade.32
The premise of this chapter is that a focus on the PRC and its potential threat to U.S. interests is one of the important strands of strategic and naval thought in the United States—including the U.S. government—today.33 What equivalent strategic concepts compete for policy approval and resource allocations today with this view? There seem to be at least four at this time:
•One view holds that the United States should embrace rather than oppose China, and touts one of the major differences between the current U.S.-PRC relationship and that between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War: the huge—and increasing—economic interdependence between the United States and China, especially the enormous and increasing volume of trade and investment flows between the two countries. (By contrast, U.S.-Soviet trade was miniscule, and U.S. investment in the Soviet Union almost nonexistent.) In this view, the United States should focus its defense concerns elsewhere—and if that means acknowledging Chinese sway over Taiwan and other areas in East Asia, so be it. Thus a U.S. Navy priority on antisubmarine warfare—whose targets would mostly be Chinese—seems ill-advised.34
•Another view holds that, in any event, it is the Middle East, not East Asia, that should hold center stage in American military thinking. The United States should hedge against problems with China, but the real focus of U.S. policy should be on reconstructing the Middle East and opposing the various threats to America and its partners that emanate from there. For this the United States needs stronger ground, diplomatic, intelligence, special operations, “brown water,” and maritime intercept forces, with submarine and antisubmarine forces among the bill payers.
•A third view would have the United States pull in its forces and establish a close-in defense perimeter around the North American continent. This view sees homeland security and homeland defense as the major focus for U.S. military forces—a focus often stated in contemporary administration defense rhetoric. (Administration statements, however, seem to be translated into forward homeland-defense operations that seem indistinguishable from the forward naval presence and crisis-response operations that have characterized the employment of U.S. naval forces for more than a decade.) The primary threats here are seen to be terrorists and ballistic missiles, so U.S. naval forces optimized for maritime domain awareness, coastal warfare, and ballistic missile defense would receive priority; forces optimized for forward deployments would not.
•A fourth view holds that the world is much too uncertain a place right now to be able to optimize strategic thinking or forces along one particular line. China, the Middle East, Iran, North Korea, drug lords, terrorists, and pirates are all significant current or potential dangers. With limited defense resources available, the United States should therefore invest in a variety of military capabilities to defend against as many of these threats as possible. Putting more resources into ASW to guard against PRC SSNs is seen as a good idea, but one that must be balanced against the competing demands of carrier aviation, missile defense, maritime intercept, “brown water operations,” and maritime domain awareness. A balanced fleet is what is needed, and no one part of the balance will, probably, be able to be optimized against a particular threat.35
It currently appears that no one focused strategic strand is predominant in U.S. defense or naval thinking right now, unlike the era of The Maritime Strategy.36 The cacophony of contemporary competing strategic visions will affect the nation and the U.S. Navy’s approach to the PRC, the PLAN, and the emerging PLAN nuclear submarine force.
The Maritime Strategy provided a threat-based template with which to develop U.S. Navy force structure. To implement The Maritime Strategy, the Navy developed some capabilities that were primarily of use in deterring or fighting the Soviets in a general war, and some that were useful across a much wider spectrum of conflict, especially for forward presence and crisis-response operations. SSBNs, SSNs, maritime patrol and Tomcat aircraft, the SOSUS net, and much of the naval intelligence establishment were necessarily focused almost exclusively on a Soviet enemy that had many characteristics unique to itself. Likewise, many of the Navy’s advanced bases—like Iceland, Bermuda, London, the Azores, Adak, and La Maddalena—existed primarily to support an anti-Soviet posture. U.S. Navy carrier battle groups (CVBGs), amphibious ready groups (ARGs), and surface action groups (SAGs), on the other hand, had a broader range of potential uses.
During the 1990s, following the demise of the Soviet Union, the more specialized anti-Soviet forces were refocused on other threats, but were also cut substantially. Forward bases focused solely on the Soviets were consolidated or closed down. CVBGs, ARGs, and SAGs were pared less severely, and their capabilities were greatly enhanced.
China today exhibits its own unique set of geographic, political, and military characteristics. If China is the significant emerging threat, then U.S. forces—including naval forces—and America’s forward basing posture should be optimized against the PRC and its particular antiaccess, force projection, and nuclear weapons delivery systems. This would mean focusing the U.S. Navy’s strike, antiair, antimissile, antisurface, antisubmarine, and mine and information warfare capabilities on neutralizing or killing specific PRC systems or systems of systems. Today’s Pentagon, however, has sought a more generic, country-neutral, capabilities-based approach to developing force structure and fielding new military and naval technology.
The deterrent role of nuclear weapons was central to strategic thinking throughout the Cold War, inside and outside governments. As part of the overall nuclear balance, Soviet, U.S., and NATO allied forces deployed strategic and theater nuclear weapons at sea, targeting opposing naval and other military and civilian forces, facilities, and centers. Thinking about both deterrent and war-fighting roles of nuclear weapons—and especially about anti-SSBN campaigns—was one of the central characteristics of The Maritime Strategy.37
The threat of nuclear weapons use loomed large over calculations regarding all levels of confrontation between the United States and the Soviets: from peacetime exercises at sea through Third World crises through potential flashpoints on the NATO flanks and at sea through possible conflict in central Europe. The designers of The Maritime Strategy had to develop and articulate clear and compelling views on the possibilities and dangers of nuclear escalation—an issue that became central to policy debates on the strategy among defense experts.38
No such overwhelming nuclear concerns characterize U.S.-PRC defense relations today. While both powers possess nuclear weapons and launchers, the arsenal of the United States far outstrips that of the Chinese. On the other hand, U.S. naval and other forces deploy a far smaller nuclear battery than had been the case during the Cold War. The role that nuclear weapons could play in a U.S.-China crisis seems much more questionable than during both real and hypothetical U.S.-Soviet Cold War crises. Moreover, while the United States and U.S. Navy of the Cold War era faced the possibility of waging war that could obliterate one or both sides, plausible future war scenarios between the United States and China (over Taiwan, sea lines of communications, threats to U.S. allies, etc.) lack this Armageddon-like quality. Thus, nuclear considerations probably play a considerably smaller role in developing U.S. Navy strategies vis-à-vis the PLAN than they did during the era of The Maritime Strategy.
That said, the Navy has a responsibility to develop as wide a range of operational and tactical surveillance, targeting, and kill capabilities as national military policy allows—probably including the ability to trail and attack PRC SSBNs. The enormous differences between the geography, force levels, and operational skills of contemporary China and those of the Soviet Union of the 1980s, must necessarily drive the U.S. Navy to develop very different operational and tactical approaches to any anti-SSBN measures it may contemplate.
Perception management was one of the naval roles articulated in The Maritime Strategy; and promulgation and exercising of The Maritime Strategy was itself part of the nation’s perception management efforts with regard to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Perception management—what would be called information operations today—was an integral part of the Reagan administration’s foreign and defense policies.39 The administration sought to convince the Soviet Union that America was resolved, powerful, and militarily superior.40 Above all, it sought to deter Soviet aggression and weaken Soviet resolve. For deterrence to work, however, an adversary has to have a certain understanding of American capabilities and intentions. This understanding is based—at least in part—on deliberate conveying of information about those capabilities and intentions to the adversary.
Trumpeting America’s naval prowess through publication of The Maritime Strategy and the actual conduct of related operations at sea were the results of calculated policy decisions, not random products of bureaucratic interservice rivalries or personally pugnacious naval leaders.41 The public announcement of America’s anti-SSBN capabilities and intentions was part of the perception management campaign, as were multi-carrier battle force exercises in far northern waters, periodic surge deployments of U.S. submarines from their home ports, submarine surfacings through the Arctic ice, and overt intelligence-gathering operations off Soviet and other Warsaw Pact members’ coasts.
Successful perception management requires accurate intelligence as to the perceptions that matter most for an adversary, and how they might be managed. The high confidence in its intelligence on the Soviet navy was a powerful underpinning to the perception management campaign waged by the naval leaders who created The Maritime Strategy.
Perception management is presumably a function of U.S. naval strategy today, especially in relation to China. U.S. naval pronouncements, deployments, and other activities may well be parts of orchestrated national military information operations campaigns. The perception management campaign toward the Soviets, including The Maritime Strategy, was considered highly successful by administration and U.S. Navy leaders and analysts. It is an effort that should be carefully studied and perhaps emulated today.
One of the hallmarks—and great strengths—of The Maritime Strategy was its crucial treatment of uncertainty. The Maritime Strategy was written in narrative form. It unfolded like a story:
•U.S. Navy and other joint and allied forces were used to perform forward peacetime presence missions to help try to deter the outbreak of crises or war.
•Should this deterrence fail, the Navy would provide vital afloat forces to the nation’s joint unified commanders to respond to crises or begin the move toward general war with the Soviets.
•Should the forward surge deployment of American and allied naval and other forces fail to deter the Soviets from aggression, the U.S. Navy and others would engage the Soviets as far forward as possible, sinking their fleet—including SSNs and SSBNs—and defending against and attacking Soviet forces invading allied countries on the European flanks and in the Pacific.
•If called upon by the national command authorities, significant Soviet forces on the perimeter of the Soviet homeland itself would be attacked and defeated, in the Arctic, the Mediterranean, and/or the North Pacific.
•Meanwhile, reinforcement and resupply of ground and air forces in central Europe would flow, protected by a combination of largely American forward operations against deploying Soviet subsurface, surface, and air forces, and heavily allied area antisubmarine operations, close-in convoy escort, and forward port security.42
•The Soviet Union would presumably call off the war, having been stymied at sea by implementation of The Maritime Strategy and CONMAROPS, and on land by operations that had unfolded in accordance with NATO’s Follow-On Forces Attack (FOFA) doctrine, U.S. Army’s AirLand Battle Doctrine, and the U.S. Air Force’s Aerospace Doctrine.
The authors of The Maritime Strategy insisted, however, that while this was the baseline story of the strategy, they hardly expected things to flow so smoothly. They recognized—and did so as an integral part of their documents—that they had made numerous assumptions in weaving their tale, but that many of these assumptions could fail to pan out, in which case the ability of The Maritime Strategy to play itself out as written would be uncertain. Many versions of The Maritime Strategy explicitly listed many of these uncertainties.43 The Navy paid a great deal of attention during the 1980s to exercising, gaming, and analyzing the effects of various manifestations and combinations of these uncertainties on implementing the strategy, and how to counter or mitigate these effects.
The various uncertainties analyzed included:
•Political decisions: What would they be? When would they be taken? How would they change prewar plans? What constraints would be placed on the use of naval forces, if any? Would the territory of the Soviet Union and/or Soviet strategic nuclear forces be considered inviolate? Would early operations against Soviet SSBNs be authorized?
•U.S. allies: Which would join the United States? Which would not? Which would need protection? Which would provide what forces? How might their operations be restricted?
•Soviet strategy: Was the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) correct? What if the Soviets did something different? What if they employed their SSNs differently? Their SSBNs? Their naval aviation?
•Soviet forward allies: Would North Korea attack the South? Would Cuba, Libya, Syria, Angola, or Vietnam support and assist the Soviet navy? What effect would that have on U.S. operations? Which of them might have to be neutralized? How and when?
•China: What role would the PRC play? Stay neutral? Join the United States? Join the Soviets?44
•Other U.S. services: Would the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force devote the forces to the maritime and flank campaigns that they had planned before the war? Would they need naval assistance in Central Europe?
•Nuclear escalation: Would it occur? When? How? Would it operate differently at sea than on land?
•Chemical and biological warfare: Would it occur? What effect would it have at sea and on the littorals?
•War termination: What would U.S. war aims be? How would war termination occur? What roles would naval places play during and after war termination?
The situation today and in the future vis-à-vis China is arguably rife with even more uncertainties. Whatever the agreed baseline scenario of the maritime portions of a joint campaign of some type against the PRC, the implications of its underlying assumptions not panning out should be the subject of close examination. For example: What are the key uncertainties regarding hostilities with China? How do they differ from those of the past? How can they be mitigated? What would Russia’s position be, or Japan’s? Will the President see the Chinese mainland as immune from attack? What about Chinese strategic nuclear forces? As was true in the 1980s, to best serve their country, contemporary American strategists will have to work their way through an analysis of the most significant uncertainties regarding a conflict with the Chinese—including those pertaining to PLAN employment of its SSN and SSBN forces, and U.S. policy, strategy, and tactics to counter them.
This treatment of The Maritime Strategy has been brief and selected. Those aspects of The Maritime Strategy chosen for discussion were done so with a view of highlighting some salient issues addressed by its authors in the U.S. Navy with regard to the Soviet Union and Soviet navy of the 1980s, so as to illuminate related issues that may be faced by civilian, military, and naval planners and operators today, as they ponder the nation’s correct naval response to the challenges presented by the rise of PRC military power today and tomorrow, and especially by its prospective deployment of a sophisticated PLAN submarine force.
1. These are both informal bodies of strategic policy as well as series of formal documents issued every year or so by the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
2. The author is indebted to the comments of Henry H. Gaffney, Michael A. McDevitt, and David Perin—colleagues at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA)—for their pointed and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
3. For an excellent overview, see George W. Baer, “U.S. Naval Strategy 1890–1945,” Naval War College Review 44 (Winter 1991): 6–33.
4. A thoughtful analysis of the evolution of post–World War II U.S. naval strategic thinking is in Mackubin Thomas Owens, “U.S. Maritime Strategy and the Cold War,” in Stephen J. Cimbala, ed., Mysteries of the Cold War (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1999), 147–241. A briefer overview is George W. Baer, “Purposes and Platforms in the U.S. Navy,” in Phillips Payson O’Brien, ed., Technology and Naval Combat: In the Twentieth Century and Beyond (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 200–215. On the late 1940s and early 1950s, see Michael A. Palmer, Origins of the Maritime Strategy: American Naval Strategy in the First Postwar Decade (Washington, D.C.: Naval Historical Center, 1988), Contributions to Naval History No. 1. Navy strategic thought in the 1950s and 1960s is analyzed in Richard Erik Hegmann, “In Search of Strategy: the Navy and the Depths of the Maritime Strategy” (Ph.D. diss.: Brandeis University, 1991); and Hegmann, “Reconsidering the Evolution of the U.S. Maritime Strategy 1955–1965,” Journal of Strategic Studies 14 (September 1991): 299–336.
5. Classified versions of The Maritime Strategy have yet to be declassified. The unclassified version was issued as a special supplement to the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 112 (January 1986).
6. The best single work on The Maritime Strategy is John B. Hattendorf, The Evolution of the U.S. Navy’s Maritime Strategy, 1977–1986 (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College Press, 2004), Newport Paper Number Nineteen. See also David A. Rosenberg, “Process: The Realities of Formulating Modern Naval Strategy,” in James Goldrick and John B. Hattendorf, eds., Mahan is Not Enough: The Proceedings of a Conference on the Works of Sir Julian Corbett and Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College Press, 1993), 141–75. On submarine warfare strategies during The Maritime Strategy era, before, and since, see Owen R. Coté, Jr., The Third Battle: Innovation in the U.S. Navy’s Silent Cold War Struggle with Soviet Submarines (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College Press, 2003), Newport Paper Number Sixteen.
7. The Navy has continued to develop and codify its strategic concepts following the end of the Cold War. See, for example, Edward Rhodes, ‘. . . From the Sea’ and Back Again: Naval Power in National Strategy in the Second American Century,” in Pelham G. Boyer and Robert S. Wood, eds., Strategic Transformation and Naval Power in the 21st Century (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College Press, 1988), 307–53; Edward A. Smith, Jr., “What ‘. . . From the Sea’ Didn’t Say,” Naval War College Review 48 (Winter 1995): 9–33; Bradd C. Hayes, “Keeping the Naval Service Relevant,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 119 (October 1993): 57–60; Stewart Fraser, US Maritime Strategy: Issues and Implications (Lancaster, U.K.: Lancaster University, Centre for Defence and International Security Studies, 1997); Thomas P. M. Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 2004), 63–79; and Jason Sherman, “Getting it Right,” Seapower 48 (June 2005): 14–16.
8. For an attempt to capture the extent of the public discourse, see Peter M. Swartz, “The Maritime Strategy Debates: A Bibliographic Guide to the Renaissance of U.S. Naval Strategic Thinking in the 1980s,” in Hattendorf, The Evolution of the U.S. Navy’s Maritime Strategy, 185–277.
9. For naval planning in the interwar period, see especially Edward S. Miller, War Plan Orange, 1897–1945: The Naval Campaign through the Central Pacific (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1988).
10. On the role played by naval intelligence in the development and implementation of The Maritime Strategy, see Christopher A. Ford and David A. Rosenberg, “The Naval Intelligence Underpinnings of Reagan’s Maritime Strategy,” The Journal of Strategic Studies 28 (April 2005): 379–409.
11. The declassified secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) Soviet Naval Strategy and Programs through the 1990s is reprinted as Appendix I in Hattendorf, Evolution of the U.S. Navy’s Maritime Strategy, 101–84.
12. In response to Congressional direction, the U.S. Department of Defense publishes an annual unclassified assessment of Chinese military policy and strategy. The latest edition is Annual Report to Congress: The Military Power of the People’s Republic of China: 2005 (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2005).
13. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Quadrennial Defense Review Report (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, February 6, 2006), 29.
14. On the complementarity of Army, Navy, and other service concepts, see William Pendley, “The U.S. Navy, Forward Defense, and the Air-Land Battle,” in Robert Pfaltzgraff, Jr., et al., eds., Emerging Doctrines and Technologies (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1987).
15. On the Navy’s efforts to game The Maritime Strategy, see Bud Hay and Bob Gile, Global War Game: The First Five Years (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College Press, June 1993), Newport Paper Number Four; and Robert H. Gile, Global War Game: Second Series, 1984–1988 (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College Press, 2004), Newport Paper Number Twenty.
16. The Navy was not alone in its opposition to Goldwater-Nichols. Secretary of Defense Weinberger and others were also against its passage.
17. On the Navy’s dogged opposition to the Goldwater-Nichols Act, see James R. Locher III, Victory on the Potomac: The Goldwater-Nichols Act Unifies the Pentagon (College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 2002).
18. Ambassador Robert W. Komer, a major critic of The Maritime Strategy, argued that among its vices was its potential diversion of defense budget resources from the Army to the Navy. See his Maritime Strategy or Coalition Defense? (Cambridge, Mass.: Abt Books, 1984). John Mearsheimer made similar arguments in his more sophisticated critique “A Strategic Misstep: The Maritime Strategy and Deterrence in Europe,” International Security 11 (Fall 1986): 3–57.
19. U.S. Army concerns that it was not doing as well as the Navy in strategic planning caused Army leaders to commission a study by Carl H. Builder, The Army in the Strategic Planning Process: Who Shall Bell the Cat? (Bethesda, Md.: U.S. Army Concepts Analysis Agency, October 1986). The study was revised and reissued as a RAND Corporation publication in 1987. It was further revised and republished as the influential The Masks of War: American Military Styles in Strategy and Analysis (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
20. I am indebted to Owen Coté and Michael McDevitt for nuances on this point.
21. Note the specious title of Ambassador Komer’s critique of The Maritime Strategy: Maritime Strategy or Coalition Warfare?
22. On CONMAROPS, see Peter M. Swartz, “Preventing the Bear’s Last Swim: The NATO Concept of Maritime Operations (ConMarOps) of the Last Cold War Decade,” in NATO’s Maritime Power 1949–1990 (Piraeas, Greece: European Institute of Maritime Studies and Research [INMER], 2003), 47–61.
23. On coordinated Royal Navy forward submarine plans and operations, see Jim Ring, We Come Unseen: The Untold Story of Britain’s Cold War Submariners (London: John Murray, 2001). On complementary Federal German Navy far forward operational intentions in the Baltic, see Rear Admiral Vice Admiral Helmut Kampe, Federal German Navy, “Defending the Baltic Approaches,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 112 (March 1986): 93; and Rear Admiral Gerhard Bing, Federal German Navy, “Tornado in the Naval Role,” NATO’s Sixteen Nations, Special Edition (April 1990): 23–24.
24. On exercising The Maritime Strategy and CONMAROPS, see Henry C. Mustin, “The Role of the Navy and Marines in the Norwegian Sea,” Naval War College Review 39 (March–April 1986): 2–6; and Eric Grove, with Graham Thompson, Battle for the Fiords: NATO’s Forward Maritime Strategy in Action (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1991).
25. On Admiral Mullen’s initiative to strengthen alliance and coalition integration at sea, see John G. Morgan and Charles W. Martoglio, “The 1,000-Ship Navy: Building a Global Maritime Network,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 131 (November 2005): 14–17. For responses by commanders of other navies—including the commanders of the Australian, Indian, Indonesian, and New Zealand navies and the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force—see “The Commanders Respond,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 132 (March 2006): 34–51.
26. On Reagan administration defense policies, see Dale R. Herspring, The Pentagon and the Presidency: Civil-Military Relations from FDR to George W. Bush (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 265–96; and John Lewis Gaddis, “National Security: Strategies of Containment, Past and Future,” Hoover Digest no. 2 (2001).
27. For an analysis of the difference in outlook between the Carter administration and its U.S. Navy leadership, see Thomas H. Etzold, “The Navy and National Security Policy in the 1970s,” in Harry R. Borowski, ed., Military Planning in the Twentieth Century: Proceedings of the Eleventh Military History Symposium: U.S. Air Force Academy: 1984 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1986), 275–94.
28. For an assessment of initial Bush administration attitudes toward China, see Michael A. McDevitt, “The China Factor in Future U.S. Defense Planning,” in Jonathan D. Pollack, ed., Strategic Surprise: U.S. China Relations in the Early Twenty-first Century (Newport, R.I.: Naval War College Press, 2003), 149–57.
29. Quadrennial Defense Review Report, 29–30.
30. But see R. A. Bowling, “Keeping Open the Sea-Lanes,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 111 (December 1985): 92–98; and E. Cameron Williams, “The Four ‘Iron Laws’ of Naval Protection of Merchant Shipping,” Naval War College Review 39 (May–June 1986): 35–42.
31. The high-level and influential “Iklé Study” tried to refocus American strategic attention on the Third World. See Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, Fred C. Iklé and Albert Wohlstetter, cochairmen, Discriminate Deterrence: Report of the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy (Washington, D.C.: The Commission, January 1988). On the Marines’ refocusing away from The Maritime Strategy under General Gray (and their endorsement of Discriminate Deterrence), see John C. Scharfen, “The Marine Corps in 1987,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 114 (May 1988): 160–64; “Interview with USMC Commandant Gen. A. M. Gray,” Seapower 31 (November 1988): 19–21; and Allan R. Millett, Semper Fidelis: The History of the United States Marine Corps: Revised and Expanded Edition (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 630–34.
32. Stansfield Turner argued that both alternatives were needed, and in combination were preferable to The Maritime Strategy. See his “U.S. Naval Policy,” Naval Forces no. 3 (1985): 15–25.
33. For an example of an unofficial view in this vein, see John J. Tkacik, Jr., “China’s Submarine Challenge,” Heritage Foundation Web Memo #1001, March 1, 2006, www.heritage.org/Research/AsiaandthePacific/wm1001.
34. Thomas P. M. Barnett has become a leading exponent of this view. See his Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating (New York: Putnam, 2005).
35. This seems to be the current U.S. Navy public view. See Michael Mullen, “Edited Remarks As Delivered,” Surface Navy Association National Symposium (10 January 2006).
36. For another analysis of rival contemporary U.S. defense and naval concepts and strategies, see Barnett, Blueprint for Action, especially 8–9, 39, 172–76.
37. Nuclear considerations behind The Maritime Strategy were publicly laid out in Linton F. Brooks, “Naval Power and National Security: The Case for the Maritime Strategy,” International Security 11 (Fall 1986): 58–87; and “The Nuclear Maritime Strategy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 113. See also “Comment and Discussion,” Proceedings (May 1987): 14, 17; and Proceedings (August 1987): 27–28.
38. Two of the best known contemporary critiques of the allegedly escalatory nature of The Maritime Strategy were Barry A. Posen, “Inadvertent Nuclear War? Escalation and NATO’s Northern Flank,” International Security 7 (Fall 1982): 28–54; and Mearsheimer, “A Strategic Misstep.”
39. For an overview of perception management as an American military tool, see Pascale Combelles Siegel, “Perception Management: IO’s Stepchild?” Low Intensity Conflict & Law Enforcement 13 (Autumn 2005): 117–34.
40. On Reagan administration perception management efforts, see Caspar W. Weinberger, “U.S. Defense Strategy,” Foreign Affairs 64 (Spring 1986): 677–78; Ben B. Fisher, A Cold War Conundrum: the 1983 Soviet War Scare (Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1997), 6–11; Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994), xii–xix, 6–9, 190–91, 235–36; Peter Schweizer, Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph over Communism (New York: Doubleday, 2002), 130–33, 141, 205–7, 216–17; William E. Burrows, By Any Means Necessary: America’s Secret Air War in the Cold War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 294–96.
41. On the Navy’s perception management efforts during The Maritime Strategy era, see Ford and Rosenberg, “The Naval Intelligence Underpinnings of Reagan’s Maritime Strategy”; Coté, The Third Battle, 70–76; and Tom Brooks and Bill Manthorpe, “Setting the Record Straight: A Critical Review of Fall from Glory,” Naval Intelligence Professionals Quarterly 12 (April 1996): 1–2.
42. On the residual role of the U.S. Navy in convoy escort, within the larger context of The Maritime Strategy, see Stuart D. Landersman, “Naval Protection of Shipping: A Lost Art?” Naval War College Review 39 (March–April 1986): 23–34. See also his “I Am a . . . Convoy Commodore,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 112 (June 1986): 56–63.
43. On The Maritime Strategy and its uncertainties, see, for example, Linton F. Brooks, “Naval Power and National Security: The Case for the Maritime Strategy,” International Security 11 (Fall 1986): 58–87; and Lee Baggett, Jr., “U.S. Maritime Strategy,” in Ellmann Ellingsen, ed., NATO and U.S. Maritime Strategy: Diverging Interests or Cooperative Effort (Oslo: The Norwegian Atlantic Committee, 1987), 5–28.
44. On Chinese-U.S. Navy relationships during the 1980s, see Andrew C. A. Jampoler, “The Politics of Port Visits,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 130 (August 2004): 66–69.