Red Star Over the Pacific

Unsurprisingly, the concept is a fixture in statements pertaining to U.S. maritime strategy, but this chapter is not specifically about the “Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower,” the directive published in October 2007. Nor do we intend to chronicle the history of U.S. maritime strategy in any comprehensive manner. Rather, we intend to compare and contrast two past efforts at strategy making: the Reagan administration’s Maritime Strategy, published in 1986, and the Cooperative Strategy itself. We believe this retrospective approach has the virtue of parsimony while effectively illuminating the challenges, opportunities, and tradeoffs confronting American strategists and tacticians today. Roughly speaking, we use the 1986 strategy as a proxy for devising strategy for “neo-Mahanian” strategic surroundings in the loose sense that “Mahanian” connotes antagonism, naval rivalry, and combat. In Clausewitzian terms, it is a grammatical document, spelling out how the Cold War navy intended to cope with a peer competitor should a clash of arms ensue. And it is executable, specifying the sorts of platforms and weaponry needed for a high-intensity fight with a specific foe, the Soviet navy. Small wonder that naval officers, an intensely practical lot, tend to favor the 1986 strategy over its distant 2007 descendant.

By contrast, the “Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower” elaborates a logic of sea power while saying next to nothing about grammatical matters—hence the oft-heard complaint that the strategy is not a strategy at all but a public relations venture. And indeed, by contrast with the 1986 Maritime Strategy, it is less an actionable document than a statement of principle. In Geoffrey Till’s words, the Cooperative Strategy is designed for a “post-Mahanian,” “postmodern” world in which sea combat recedes—though not disappearing entirely—and police actions such as counterpiracy, counterproliferation, and different varieties of antitrafficking come to the fore. It sets forth the sea services’ vision of a world closer to Norman Angell’s ideal, in which economic interdependence exerts a palliative effect on international relations, raising the costs of armed conflict to almost unbearable levels.² In such a world order, protecting the system of seagoing trade becomes a matter of mutual concern for all industrial nations, warranting combined action. Because it is a document premised on naval diplomacy and strategic communications, however, the Cooperative Strategy has an ethereal feel to it that discomfits many practitioners of naval operations.

The Mahanian and post-Mahanian paradigms are not mutually exclusive, nor are the missions they embrace anything new. Take piracy. Thucydides relates how King Minos of Crete founded the first Greek navy to combat piracy before the days of Homer. Julius Caesar was once taken captive by pirates only to return and exact vengeance. Ming dynasty admiral Zheng He defeated a pirate fleet off Malacca six hundred years ago. The Barbary Wars gave new life to a U.S. Navy at risk of being dismantled to cut federal expenses. The U.S. Navy performed police functions during the Cold War, albeit as a “lesser included” element of its strategy. The current strategy, founded on international partnerships to shore up globalization, declares that the sea services remain ready to wage fleet actions and discharge other warfighting missions should the need arise. There is little new under the sun. That both traditional and nontraditional challenges persist is why uncertain surroundings confound one-size-fits-all solutions.

To get some purchase on the 2007 Maritime Strategy, it is worth reviewing the development, tenets, and critiques of the James Watkins–John Lehman strategy of the 1980s—the last official maritime strategy document.³ Unveiled in a supplement to a 1986 issue of the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, the Maritime Strategy was a product of interaction, reassessment, and adaptation during preparations for war—a phase that encompassed the entire Cold War. The debate over the nature of the Soviet threat and proper U.S. strategies to meet that threat remained largely abstract. Thucydides proclaims that war is a violent teacher. But without actual war at sea between the West and the Soviet Union, the U.S. Maritime Strategy and the strategic concepts on which it was founded were never put to the test of actual combat. Still, the 1980s effort to make maritime strategy for an uncertain environment inhabited by a “peer competitor” and characterized by heavy fiscal constraints illustrates perennial themes.

Crafting strategy is an iterative process. That is, efforts to match ends with means inevitably undergo many phases as new ideas are offered, accepted, rejected, or modified. As Carl von Clausewitz and Michael Handel point out, strategy involves two belligerents jockeying for comparative advantage. Clausewitz contends that “war consists of a continuous interaction of opposites,” making it inherently unpredictable.⁴ Handel adds that the “interaction of the warring states, each searching for a comparative advantage, defines the unique nature of each war”⁵ (his emphasis). Interaction, reassessment, and adaptation were continual throughout the Cold War—as they will be in Asia, the principal locus for U.S. maritime endeavors under the 2007 Maritime Strategy.

The U.S. Navy performed a variety of functions from 1945 through 1970. It imposed a blockade during the Cuban Missile Crisis, projected power ashore in Korea and Vietnam, deterred Soviet military aggression, and undertook routine naval diplomacy, showing the flag in key regions. Significantly, it fought no fleet actions during this time. Its last major fleet-on-fleet engagement took place in October 1944, when it met the Japanese Combined Fleet in Leyte Gulf. In a classic article on the “Transoceanic Strategy,” Samuel Huntington observed that the postwar epoch left the U.S. Navy without a great-power competitor. During the 1950s and 1960s, while the Soviet navy remained anemic, the lack of Leyte-type engagements freed the Navy for missions remote from command of the sea.⁶ In one sense, perversely, the United States was a victim of its wartime success, deprived of a rival fleet around which to structure its strategy and forces.

The rise of an oceangoing, capable Soviet navy following the Cuban Missile Crisis changed all that. The Soviet navy was traditionally a homeland defense force. Josef Stalin had ordained the construction of a Mahanian battle fleet before World War II, but Moscow’s Mahanian ambitions came up empty, frustrated by a backward shipbuilding industry and the competing demands of land defense.⁷ Stalin had fretted over the likelihood of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) amphibious assaults along the Eurasian periphery, but his successors took a more relaxed view of the maritime threat. They let the surface fleet languish. By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet navy was unable to dispute U.S. and Western sea control beyond Warsaw Pact coastal waters.

Moscow, consequently, found itself unable to contest the U.S. maritime exclusion zone—a blockade in all but name—imposed around Cuba in 1962. The Cuban debacle exposed Soviet maritime weaknesses, jolting Moscow into action. Grand Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, the father of the Soviet blue water fleet, superintended the effort to renovate Soviet naval strategy and build a fleet able to execute it. Like China, Russia is traditionally a land power. Its most recent foray into sea power had ended disastrously in 1905, when the Japanese Combined Fleet commanded by Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō sent the Russian Baltic Fleet to the bottom of the Tsushima Strait, the narrow sea separating Korea from Japan.

Russian and Soviet maritime history, then, offered the West little help charting the future of Soviet sea power. Official statements and writings were unreliable guides to Soviet strategy, colored as they were by Marxist-Leninist theory, the national interest, alliance politics, and even the whims of top political leaders. Shipbuilding patterns likewise represented a crude indicator of Soviet strategy and intentions. In the Soviet Union, as elsewhere, ships performed a variety of missions, some far removed from those for which they were designed. As in other attempts at Kremlinology, divining the principles and purposes behind Soviet maritime strategy was an exercise in conjecture.

One concept that molded Soviet thinking about maritime matters was the “blue belt of defense.”⁸ The blue belt was a geographically defined offshore zone within range of land-based air and sea assets. Like contemporary China’s way of thinking about the China seas, the Soviet concept envisioned enclosing and defending vital expanses, much as armies sought to do on land. Russian and Soviet strategists, then, applied land-warfare concepts to the nautical domain. Much as Stalin and his advisers wanted to ring Soviet borders with friendly or neutral states, creating a buffer against overland invasion, Gorshkov and his disciples wanted to erect a defensive barrier against advancing NATO fleets.

Alfred Thayer Mahan lambasted the Imperial Russian Navy for its concept of the “fortress-fleet,” which in effect reduced the navy to a seaward appendage of shore fortifications.⁹ Even so, the fortress-fleet concept persisted in Soviet naval thought. New technologies such as antiship missiles and antisubmarine warfare (ASW) could expand the blue belt outward, denying the United States and its allies control of seas washing against Warsaw Pact shores. This was sound logic. Europe is in effect a large peninsula jutting out of Asia—a peninsula that lets a dominant navy roam freely around the periphery, setting the terms for naval action. Huntington’s work on the transoceanic strategy urged the U.S. Navy to think of the Mediterranean as an inlet in Eurasia, a platform from which to project power into the Soviet bloc. Holding off Western power projection required vying with NATO for control of this inlet. Gorshkov never said how wide a defensive belt he foresaw. Presumably it should be as wide as Soviet naval capabilities could make it—hence the swift quantitative and qualitative buildup from the 1960s onward.

In the realm of hardware, undersea warfare was central to the Soviet naval buildup. The Soviet navy deployed fifty nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs) by the early 1970s, along with some three hundred nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs). It is important not to overrate the submarine fleet, despite its numbers, for all Gorshkov’s (and before him Stalin’s) claims that quantity has a quality all its own. Quality lagged. A retired American submariner jokes that, for sonar operators, detecting early classes of Soviet submarines was like listening for two skeletons making love inside a metal trash can. The acoustic problem rendered Soviet numbers largely moot in the early days. Compounding the problem for Soviet submariners, the short range of early submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) compelled Soviet SSBNs to patrol far forward if they were to range American cities. Soviet strategic preferences had to give way under prevailing circumstances.

By the early 1970s, Soviet navy operating practices showed that Moscow was gaining confidence in its ability to dispute waters the U.S. Navy had ruled since 1945. For example, the Soviets executed an impressive series of exercises dubbed Okean (Ocean) during the 1970s. In 1970 Moscow deployed fleets in traditional U.S. Navy preserves such as the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic while also venturing into the Norwegian Sea and the Indian Ocean. No longer was American sea control a given. The exercises even cast doubt on whether the United States could count on using Atlantic sea-lanes to reinforce NATO-Europe during a land war. The 1973 Arab-Israeli war reinforced the impression of an increasingly offensive-minded, blue water Soviet navy. Indeed, the Soviet Mediterranean Squadron outnumbered the U.S. Sixth Fleet during the conflict—sending a shock through the U.S. naval leadership and the Nixon administration. The growing mismatch in numbers was hard to dismiss, throwing the disparity between U.S. and Soviet shipbuilding rates and budgets into stark relief.

Certain anomalies became apparent. Despite the enormous effort and resources allocated to Gorshkov’s blue water fleet, the Soviet navy was not symmetrical with the U.S. Navy. First, there was no obvious push to construct big-deck aircraft carriers comparable to U.S. flattops. Second, the naval leadership displayed little urgency about moving from sea denial to sea control. The Soviet surface fleet evidently considered ASW a secondary concern, even though guarding against undersea attack has always been essential to effective sea control. Third, as naval technology matured, extending SLBM ranges, Soviet SSBNs started operating closer to home. They could strike at American targets without venturing beyond shore support. In short, strategic preferences of centuries’ standing reasserted themselves as the Soviet navy improved its combat capacity.

These patterns defied Western assumptions. In 1981 Admiral Thomas Hayward, the chief of naval operations (CNO), reportedly voiced disbelief that the Soviets would operate a great navy in such a manner. The disparity between Soviet platforms apparently designed for offense and defensive operating patterns baffled Western analysts, who debated whether the Soviets even had a naval doctrine. They debated the degree to which Soviet leaders distinguished between nuclear and nonnuclear warfare, having planned to use tactical nuclear weapons during a European land war during the 1960s. And, perhaps most importantly, the question arose whether possessing an imposing navy would generate new intentions and strategic preferences on Soviet leaders’ part. If Moscow possessed a hammer, challenges might start to look like nails.

The leadership’s words furnished one indicator. Admiral Gorshkov was a prolific writer. His book The Sea Power of the State contradicted Mahan, proclaiming that the Soviet Union was at once a mighty land power and a mighty sea power. Naval war was important, but defeating the imperialists’ seagoing “big stick”—not wresting sea control from the West—was Moscow’s chief goal. Defeating Western efforts at coercion would grant Moscow new freedom of action, something statesmen and commanders crave. Gorshkov lauded SSBNs for their survivability while insisting they were best patrolling waters within range of land-based support. In fact, he predicted the United States would take the same approach with its Trident SSBN fleet, mirror-imaging U.S. Navy deployment practices.¹⁰

As it upgraded the fleet’s capabilities, the Soviet navy also shifted its center of buoyancy to the east, reestablishing a serious presence in East Asian waters for the first time since the Battle of Tsushima. Based at Vladivostok, the Pacific Fleet allowed the Soviet navy to diversify its nuclear deterrent. SSBNs now cruised an eastern bastion in the seas of Okhotsk and Japan. The eastern presence also enabled the navy to perform functions such as coercive diplomacy around the Asian periphery, shadowing forward-deployed U.S. Navy assets while opening up new options vis-à-vis an increasingly hostile China. The Pacific Fleet was a serious force, comprising more ships than the Northern Fleet. Thirty percent of the total Soviet fleet, or some ninety surface combatants, were based in the Far East.

It was unclear whether the United States still ruled the waves, faced by such an adversary. But by the 1970s, Kremlinologists and naval strategists were rethinking the nature of the Soviet maritime challenge. An emerging consensus held that the U.S. Navy had an opportunity to regain the initiative at sea. It appeared, for example, that Soviets had abandoned hopes that capitalism would collapse under its internal contradictions. Nor did they seem intent on giving capitalism a push, toppling it. It these premises were correct, nuclear escalation was not a foregone conclusion in wartime. The Soviet regime may have mellowed, much as George F. Kennan had famously prophesied.¹¹ And strains on the Soviet economic system were starting to show, especially once Moscow’s invasion of Afghanistan began siphoning off resources that might have gone to naval power.

If the Soviet Union was indeed reverting to the defensive, the United States might be able to use its central geographic position—its ability to reach out across the Atlantic and Pacific—to regain its accustomed maritime supremacy. By acting boldly at the outset of a conflict with the Soviet bloc, the United States could blunt some of the advantages the Soviets had built up in the previous decade. How it should go about this was the question.

George Baer observes that effective strategy requires a threat, a focal point. Accurately estimating the Soviet threat was central to adapting U.S. strategy to new realities. Numbers and types of platforms were never far from the minds of American naval strategists. Whether aircraft carriers should remain the centerpiece of U.S. naval power, as they had been since World War II, ranked foremost among these. But even if the carrier remained king, it was doubtful whether it was politically thinkable to risk the nuclear-powered flattops then building in a showdown with the Soviet navy off Eurasian shores.

Different chiefs of naval operations had different ideas about these questions, although the overall trend was toward retaking the offensive. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, who had the mixed fortune to serve as CNO in the late Vietnam years, believed the U.S. Navy should refocus its strategy on sea control. The Korean and Vietnam wars had allowed the Navy to project power onto Asian shores with little fear of enemy interference. That was no longer true with the rise of a Soviet navy that could put more than two hundred ships to sea around the world simultaneously, as it had during the Okean-70 exercise. There existed a threat to NATO sea lines of communication (SLOCs) for the first time. Sea control, maintained Zumwalt, would ensure the United States the ability to surge men and materiel across the Atlantic at the outbreak of war.

Admiral Zumwalt instigated a long-overdue discussion of U.S. naval strategy, missions, and platforms. He also admitted that painful tradeoffs lay in store should the Navy rededicate itself to sea control. Most controversially, he insisted that the Navy must accept a smaller force structure in the short term to free up funds for new construction for the longer term. This involved risk. Zumwalt espoused a fleet founded on a “high/low mix,” blending a large number of inexpensive, less capable platforms—the Oliver Hazard Perry frigates were the best example—with costly, high-end platforms like Nimitz-class nuclear carriers and cruisers and destroyers outfitted with the gee-whiz Aegis combat system. For Zumwalt, who served during the economic malaise of the 1970s, this was simple reality.

The CNO pushed a quantitative approach oriented more toward acquisitions than strategy. Policy and strategy largely disappeared. For example, Project 60, a Zumwalt-sponsored planning effort, dwelt almost entirely on fleet numbers, technological innovations, and new platforms and weapons systems such as the Perry-class FFG, the Sea Control Ship—a sort of low-cost carrier that could be risked more easily than an expensive CVN—and the Harpoon antiship cruise missile. The analytical shortfalls of Project 60 and similar initiatives convinced many officers they needed to rejuvenate the sea services’ tradition of strategic thought. Zumwalt’s critics contended that a high/low mix would leave the Navy a defensive force, able to exercise sea control but unable to win it in the first place. Higher-end ships and platforms, that is, would likely be too few and pack too little punch to win a Mahanian victory that would let the lower-end platforms do their job. They insisted in effect that the best defense was a good offense, and that the U.S. Navy was abandoning the offensive.

Zumwalt also exaggerated the rationality of the budget process in Washington. Congress gleefully pocketed the savings the Navy offered by decommissioning old ships, but lawmakers felt no obligation to reciprocate, funding replacements in sufficient numbers.¹² Shipbuilding rates plummeted by some two-thirds from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s, dragging the fleet size inexorably down. The fleet dropped from nearly nine hundred ships in 1965 to just more than five hundred in 1980. Quality improved on a ship-for-ship basis as the Navy phased out aged vessels. But quality was not everything against a numerically superior Soviet navy.

Admiral James Holloway, Zumwalt’s successor as CNO, commissioned several studies to examine the repercussions of dwindling force structure.¹³ “With the continuing decline in our naval force levels,” Holloway told Congress, the service “had become a one-ocean navy.” The Pacific Ocean was now a zone of American neglect.¹⁴ Analysts reached likewise dismal findings. One study in effect argued that a five-hundred-ship fleet would stand little chance of prevailing in critical waterways such as the Atlantic SLOCs on which NATO strategy relied; the Mediterranean, the inlet where Huntington had insisted a transoceanic navy needed liberty to operate; and the western Pacific, a region inhabited by key allies like Japan. The naval leadership voiced confidence that an eight-hundred-ship fleet could discharge all missions assigned it.

Such findings stunned the civilian and uniformed leadership. Still, in 1978 alone, the rate of new construction fell by half. President Jimmy Carter and his secretary of defense, Harold Brown, proposed reducing carrier numbers, halting construction of new nuclear-powered carriers. Carter and Brown proposed building less expensive VSTOL (very short takeoff and landing) carriers such as those operated by smaller navies around the world. Admiral Thomas Hayward, who succeeded Holloway in 1978, publicly deplored the trend toward a “Third World strategy.”¹⁵ Not to be outdone, Secretary of the Navy Graham Claytor worried that the administration would reduce the navy to a nautical “Maginot Line.”¹⁶ Claytor doubtless chose his historical analogies carefully, implying that such a navy courted abject defeat.

However sensible Navy leaders’ lobbying on behalf of a bigger force, however, they were out of step with reigning views of foreign policy and maritime power. The 1970s was a heyday of arms control and disarmament, not only for the Carter administration but also for its Republican predecessors. The Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty were only some of the treaties and accords negotiated in the Nixon, Ford, and Carter years. Those who think in terms of arms control assume that parity—not superiority or victorious battle—is the goal of military strategy and forces. It probably seemed natural for elected officials to think in terms of naval parity, not commanding the sea.

Nor was it obvious that the Navy had much role to play in a NATO-European war. NATO’s doctrine of “Flexible Response” posited that the Alliance would use tactical nuclear weapons early in a war on the Central Front, halting a Warsaw Pact ground offensive. The matter would be decided, one way or the other, before naval power came to bear. In short, the U.S. Navy took a back seat to other instruments of national power for policymakers of the 1970s. Diplomacy was the option of first resort, naval power the last. Secretary of Defense Brown simply made this explicit, relegating the Navy to lesser missions such as convoy duty and presence functions. Self-isolating the Navy from national policy is a perilous business, whatever the merits of service leaders’ arguments.

But the Navy did so. Already in the Carter years, various new studies and strategic concepts were under development, bearing names like Sea Plan 2000 and Project Sea Strike.¹⁷ Several common themes emerged within the Navy, and among academic experts at the Center for Naval Analyses and other think tanks. First, naval proponents took to declaring that Mahanian command of the sea was the prerequisite for all other naval missions, and thus that offense should be the entering assumption for debates over strategy. The U.S. Navy should reassert its maritime supremacy. Second, experts claimed technological advances were again making Mahanian command feasible. New systems such as Aegis, improved ASW hardware and software, and cruise missiles would let the surface fleet survive and thrive, even in a high-intensity threat environment. In short, battle groups could project power, even against a Soviet navy using combined arms to defend its offshore blue belt.

Third, the U.S. fleet should seize the initiative at the outbreak of war, carrying the fight to the enemy around the Eurasian periphery. Peripheral operations would compel the Soviets and their allies to defend everywhere rather than concentrate their efforts in Germany. Maritime operations around the margins, that is, could shape the battle space ashore. Naval analysts accordingly concluded that the Carter administration should abandon plans to “swing,” or transfer, ships from the Pacific Fleet to the Atlantic Fleet in times of crisis. The administration should concentrate the Atlantic Fleet to support its Europe-first strategy while the Pacific Fleet should hold the Soviet Pacific Fleet and its Pacific submarine bastion at risk—menacing the Soviet oceanic periphery. Opening a Pacific theater would force Moscow to expend scarce resources defending the Far East, thereby relieving the NATO-European theater.

The upshot was that the U.S. Navy should pierce the Soviet blue belt all around the Eurasian periphery, giving Moscow more to think about than prosecuting a ground war in Europe. A dominant navy, not one made up of a high/low mix of ships, could turn the blue-belt concept inward against the Soviet navy, making offshore waters a zone of peril for Soviet mariners. Admiral Hayward’s successor as CNO, Admiral James Watkins, and his civilian superior, Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, saw fit to codify this strain of strategic thought in a formal statement of maritime strategy. The strategy was briefed to numerous different audiences in classified forums and underwent numerous refinements. It went public in 1986 in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings.

Watkins and Lehman bragged that the Maritime Strategy put the Navy and Marines on the “same set of sheet music” with the national leadership for the first time in years, if not decades.¹⁸ It rejected claims that any NATO–Warsaw Pact war would automatically go nuclear, negating naval power as a warfighting instrument. It insisted that the United States could wage cumulative naval operations around the Soviet periphery, protracting the war and driving up costs to an unbearable level for Moscow. Indirection would allow the United States to end the war “on favorable terms.”¹⁹

The strategy had its detractors. Critics questioned its framers’ assumptions about the nature of the war. They doubted the strategy would drain resources from Warsaw Pact ground and air forces in Europe, where the main effort would take place, and they depicted it as a venture in scriptwriting and “brochuresmanship.” Some of the most telling criticism came from University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer, who presented a paper at the Naval War College in 1985 and later published it in the journal International Security. Mearsheimer roundly condemned the strategy for employing naval power to shift the nuclear balance in a conventional war. Striking at the Soviet undersea fleet during a conventional conflict, that is, would face Moscow with a use-it-or-lose-it quandary vis-à-vis nuclear weapons. Moscow might turn loose a barrage of SLBMs rather than lose its SSBN fleet to U.S. naval attack.²⁰

There is no need to refight these debates here, nor is the outcome especially important for our purposes. The important point is that, however imposing a foe the Soviet navy presented, the intellectual challenge of confronting it was relatively straightforward. The existence of a discrete threat reduced the strategy-making process to a discrete set of questions, setting the parameters for debate—much as the Imperial Japanese Navy concentrated American efforts during the interwar years, when naval planners thrashed out the famous color-coded war plans for war in the Pacific. For instance, could aircraft carriers survive naval action in the Barents Sea, where the Soviet navy fought under cover of land-based weaponry? How many ASW assets did the U.S. Navy and its allies need to cover the large yet technologically backward Soviet submarine force?

And there was something to the claims of brochuresmanship. For strategic-communications purposes, an imposing rival fleet simplified the task of rallying the American government, electorate, and military behind a forward-leaning maritime strategy. Mahan himself recalled ruefully how difficult it was to persuade nineteenth-century Americans to demand naval preparedness. The nation’s “dead apathy” following the traumas of the Civil War consigned the Navy to an “almost incredible” age of stagnation. He ascribed this “inertness” in large measure to “the paralysis of idea, of mental development corresponding to the movement of the world.” Absent public or government support, the U.S. Navy fell into “the habit of living from day to day on expedients, on makeshifts.”²¹

It was entirely reasonable, for instance, for the likes of Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt to accentuate the great-power threat to the Caribbean. But abstract arguments lack heft unless real, compelling evidence backs them up. Only war with Spain, wrote Mahan, could bring “the abstract conceptions of theorists and extremists, as they then seemed, down to earth in very concrete realization!” The Spanish-American War wrought a radical change in the American worldview. It prompted citizens to look outward across the Pacific—particularly toward the Philippine Islands, now an American naval beachhead off the China coast. “What once were visions,” concluded Mahan, “are now accepted as solid present matters of course by our very practical nation.” The Republic rethought its venerable but outdated “Bible of American political tradition.”²² A Mahanian strategy, it seems, demands Mahanian threats to focus public discourse.

Now as then, there is a peculiar duality to Washington’s predicament. Threats like piracy are now a matter of course in expanses like the Strait of Malacca or the Gulf of Aden, but they are remote from the daily lives of people and governments. Conversely, the threat that would impinge on daily life—the emergence of a near-peer competitor that strives with the United States for maritime dominance—has not yet emerged, if indeed it ever does. A serious Chinese threat remains years off, and it may prove a mirage. It remains an abstract conception, to borrow Mahan’s phrase, magnifying the dilemma for statesmen, strategists, and force planners.

We have also seen that China has used astute diplomacy to ease worries about its return to regional eminence and depict its rise as an international public good, benefiting all Asians. Chinese leaders want to keep any naval threat to the United States or its Asian allies abstract, precisely to avoid supplying an excuse for Washington to rebuild its force posture in the region. Beijing has made good use of the drift among Western scholars and practitioners of international affairs. Westerners increasingly agree with Norman Angell that the world has largely transcended power politics. If so, realpolitik implements such as battle fleets have been rendered moot.²⁴ Unless Beijing egregiously aggravates matters in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea, no stimulus comparable to the Spanish-American War, Pacific War, or Cold War will crystallize American thinking about naval strife.

Sir Julian Corbett’s wisdom bears on this strategic problem. Corbett vouchsafes that an uncommanded sea is the normal state of affairs. The blanket coverage Mahan envisioned with his notion of “overbearing power” that sweeps enemy fleets from the sea is too resource-intensive to sustain for any meaningful period of time.²⁵ Former CNO (and subsequently Joint Chiefs chairman) Admiral Mike Mullen evidently concluded as much in 2005, surveying a strategic setting characterized by flat or declining resources and multiplying operational demands. The key to protecting shipping is having the ability to scatter forces over wide expanses while concentrating them at vital points—much as Corbett implored navies that wanted to approximate command of the sea to work toward “elastic cohesion” on the high seas.²⁶ For Admiral Mullen, coaxing allies and partners into an informal “1,000-ship navy,” or seagoing coalition, looked like the best way to realize Corbett’s ideal. The thousand-ship navy—since renamed the “Global Maritime Partnership” after foreign officials objected to the term “navy,” claiming it implied they must submit to U.S. command—represented the only way to apply sufficient resources in vital waters and airspace.²⁷

Enter the 2007 Maritime Strategy, unveiled at the Naval War College to great fanfare. Some one hundred chiefs of navies and coast guards from around the world traveled to Newport in October 2007 to debate the merits and drawbacks of the strategy. The “Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower” is a concise statement of aims cosigned by the service chiefs of the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. If we accept Corbett’s depiction of maritime strategy as the art of determining the relations between ground and sea forces, then the Cooperative Strategy qualifies as the United States’ most genuinely “maritime” strategy, encompassing not only warfighting but also police functions.

The strategy document rightly boasts that “never before have the maritime forces of the United States—the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard—come together to create a unified maritime strategy.”²⁸ In reality, the 1986 Maritime Strategy was a naval strategy, published in unclassified form in Proceedings articles authored by the chief of naval operations, Admiral James Watkins, and the Marine commandant, General P. X. Kelley. Ensuing strategic documents such as “. . . From the Sea” (1992) and “Forward . . . from the Sea” (1995) were cosigned by the secretary of the navy, the chief of naval operations, and the Marine commandant, purporting to embody the sea services’ consensus strategic vision.²⁹

While it is important not to read too much into the reasons behind why this or that official signed a certain document, it is instructive to speculate. Again, the 2007 Maritime Strategy is the first to incorporate the U.S. Coast Guard, signifying the sea services’ embrace of counterpiracy, counterproliferation, and other operations resembling law enforcement. It is signed solely by the three service chiefs. No political appointee affixed his signature, in contrast to previous documents approved by secretaries of the navy. Why not? First, there is a pragmatic reason. Unlike previous strategies, the 2007 strategy extends to bodies beyond the Department of Defense, specifically the U.S. Coast Guard, now a component of the Department of Homeland Security. Issuing a joint document would have set in motion interagency negotiations common within the U.S. government. By taking ownership of the strategy, the service chiefs skirted the intricate, perhaps prolonged and fractious process of getting two cabinet departments with very different worldviews and cultures to agree on purposes and principles.

Second, the document probably constituted an effort to influence opinion beyond the George W. Bush years, molding attitudes not only beyond American shores, with governments capable of augmenting (or obstructing) U.S. maritime strategy, but within whatever administration followed Bush in 2009. Secretary of the Navy Donald Winter would depart the Pentagon a bit over a year after the strategy was published. If Winter had acted as the final approval authority for the Maritime Strategy, he might have foreshortened the document’s shelf-life. Presidential administrations distance themselves from policies created by their predecessors, putting their own stamp on policy. This is especially true when the White House changes hands between parties, and perhaps even more so given the controversial nature of the outgoing Bush administration. The service chiefs probably believed their strategic views would endure into a new administration if they kept the Bush administration’s fingerprints off the Maritime Strategy.

This helps explain the service chiefs’ decision to publish the strategy in 2007, in the waning months of the Bush presidency. They hoped to help set a new tone after the perceived confrontational stances taken by Washington during the first Bush term, and to codify the more consensual approach the second Bush administration deemed wise. And indeed, the framers of the Cooperative Strategy have laid the groundwork for an enduring strategic approach. The strategy’s principles of defending the global system, preserving a healthy quotient of combat power, and shifting the sea services’ gaze to Asia conform to the inclinations of the Barack Obama administration, despite some possible variations in emphasis. There is no escaping the persistence of both power politics and systemic problems.

So much for the origins of the 2007 Maritime Strategy. The authors point out that, unlike past strategies drafted behind closed doors, the Cooperative Strategy was developed in the full glare of publicity, with a sea-service delegation soliciting public input during “Conversations with the Country” carried on while barnstorming the United States.³⁰ The public response indicated that the American people wanted their armed forces to remain strong, to work with foreign partners to prevent war, and to concentrate on defending the homeland. What does this imply about the staying power of the Maritime Strategy, and of the United States as the world’s preeminent sea power?

Alfred Thayer Mahan worried that the character of the American people and their government might inhibit sea power. The United States spanned a continent; like France, it boasted a pleasant climate and abundant resources. America’s ability to provide for itself tended to distract attention from seafaring pursuits. French humiliation in the recurrent naval competition with Great Britain offered a cautionary tale for the United States “in this our period of commercial and naval decadence.”³¹ This made a sharp contrast with hardscrabble conditions in the British Isles, which drove Britons to the sea in search of trade and prosperity.³² Or, suggested Mahan, Americans might come to resemble the Dutch during their golden age of sea power. Ruled by merchants reluctant to raise taxes, Amsterdam “would not pay” for a navy able to sustain Holland’s position vis-à-vis an avaricious England.³³

Americans might mimic the French or Dutch examples, losing out in the struggle for sea power through sheer neglect. By Mahanian indices, there is some cause for concern today. “If sea power be really based upon a peaceful and extensive commerce,” he contended, “aptitude for commercial pursuits must be a distinguishing feature of the nations that have at one time or another been great upon the sea.”³⁴ Despite the global financial crisis, the United States continues to enjoy robust commerce, buoyed by the international economic system it helped create after World War II. Hawaii and Guam are American soil, giving the U.S. military a stronghold in the second island chain. Projecting power into the first island chain, however, is a matter of adroit alliance management with nations like Japan and South Korea. With regard to shipping, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps remain the world’s foremost seagoing force, but the U.S.-flagged merchant fleet is little more than an afterthought. The vast bulk of American goods travels in foreign-flagged hulls. The outlook for U.S. staying power in the Asia-Pacific is decidedly mixed.

The Maritime Strategy, consequently, handles strategic communications toward Asian audiences delicately. The strategy’s drafters shied away from naming an enemy, and indeed China is conspicuously absent from the document. The sentiment is understandable. If the strategy is a statement of principle intended to last for the next decade and a half, then singling out a particular competitor might run counter to its concept of tightening old partnerships and seeking out new ones. Beijing has remained aloof from the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), for instance, and targeting it as the next great antagonist would probably foreclose any efforts at PSI courtship.

Nor is the Maritime Strategy necessarily the right forum to profile a Chinese threat in any event. The Pentagon publishes annual reports to Congress on the military power of the People’s Republic of China that update estimates of the PLA’s military potential and evolving strategy on an ongoing basis. Chinese naval power today and over the next decade is not likely to match the global reach and capabilities that the Soviets amassed in the 1970s. The Gulf of Aden antipiracy mission, for example, pales in comparison to the Okean naval exercises in 1975, which showcased Moscow’s blue water prowess. Unless or until Chinese actions bring the naval threat into focus, sea-service leaders will see little need to risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Avoiding self-defeating behavior was central to the framing of the Cooperative Strategy.

The downside of assuaging Chinese sensibilities is that U.S. allies in Asia, particularly Japan, worry that Washington will take conciliation too far. Tokyo long ago tethered its national security to the United States under the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. Declares a recent defense white paper, “Defense of Japan 2009,” “it would be practically impossible for Japan to ensure its national security by solely independent efforts given its population, land and economy”; thus, “Japan maintains an alliance with the world’s dominant military superpower,” the United States. The transpacific alliance constitutes a “central pillar of Japan’s national defense.”³⁵ Having bound their fortunes inextricably to America, Japanese leaders monitor shifts in U.S. policy and strategy carefully, looking for signs of abandonment.

But Japan’s strategic community is deeply conflicted about the future of China, and about Tokyo’s long-term relationship with its giant neighbor. By no means is Japanese ambivalence about Chinese ascendancy unanimous. Those who advocate continued engagement with China were probably relieved to find that explicit references to China were absent from the Maritime Strategy. They rightfully fear that a provocative document that set its U.S. ally on a maritime collision course with China would substantially increase the risk of entrapment for Japan. If a nautical rivalry emerges as a result, Tokyo could find itself compelled to distance its policy from Washington while striving for a more independent policy toward Beijing. Washington in turn needs the alliance to anchor its military presence in the region, and thus to sustain its preeminence. Similarly, querulous Southeast Asian leaders count on the United States to counterbalance Chinese pretensions in their home region. Excessive deference or hostility to Beijing, then, could corrode the maritime order presided over by the U.S. Navy since 1945. Striking a delicate balance in any policy initiative for Asia is no easy feat.

Several aspects of the Maritime Strategy warrant special scrutiny. The authors start by taking note of the interconnected nature of the globalized world. They side firmly with those, such as Harvard scholar Joseph Nye or long-dead British diplomat Eyre Crowe, who portray defense of the system as an international public good, something that benefits all seafaring nations.³⁶ By providing for maritime security over the past six decades, the U.S. Navy has legitimized American rule of the seas, much as the Royal Navy legitimized British supremacy before. It comes as little surprise that the Maritime Strategy displays the imprint of international relations theory, given its origins in the research wing of the Naval War College.³⁷ While the document makes no mention of Mahan, moreover, it is consistent with his writings on the primacy of commerce, as outlined in chapter 1, and thus with his grand logic of sea power:

The security, prosperity, and vital interests of the United States are increasingly coupled to those of other nations. Our Nation’s interests are best served by fostering a peaceful global system comprised of interdependent networks of trade, finance, information, law, people and governance.

We prosper because of this system of exchange among nations, yet recognize it is vulnerable to a range of disruptions that can produce cascading and harmful effects far from their sources. Major power war, regional conflict, terrorism, lawlessness and natural disasters—all have the potential to threaten U.S. national security and world prosperity.³⁸

Wars, large or small, may persist according to the service chiefs, but the Maritime Strategy portrays them primarily as disruptions to the system, not as direct threats to U.S. maritime preponderance. It also folds war into a list of ills that includes not only threats—that is, challenges that join capability to the deliberate intent of a living opponent—but also natural disasters, the uneven advance of economic liberalization, and other phenomena that are not products of human action. And the strategy’s talk of preventing second-and third-order effects of these phenomena opens up the possibility of acting in a myriad of contingencies. Tracing “cascading and harmful effects” to their source, attacking that source, and doing so without serious, unforeseen consequences is no simple matter.

Clearly, this is quite a different perspective on strategy than the enemy-centric one advanced during the Reagan administration, and that is no accident. The Cold War divided the world up into rival camps. The 2007 Maritime Strategy sends the message that all nations are stakeholders in the system and should help preserve it, jointly supplying the public good of free navigation. In the process, combined action at sea will “build confidence and trust among nations through collective security efforts that focus on common threats and mutual interests in an open, multipolar world.” Building the habits of trust and cooperation on functional matters, proclaims the Maritime Strategy, will foster a healthier world system. The key passage in the document assigns the maritime services six “strategic imperatives”:

Where tensions are high or where we wish to demonstrate to our friends and allies our commitment to security and stability, U.S. maritime forces will be characterized by regionally concentrated, forward-deployed task forces with the combat power to limit regional conflict, deter major power war, and should deterrence fail, win our Nation’s wars as part of a joint or combined campaign. In addition, persistent, mission-tailored maritime forces will be globally distributed in order to contribute to homeland defense-in-depth, foster and sustain cooperative relationships with an expanding set of international partners, and prevent or mitigate disruptions and crises.³⁹

Loosely speaking, this means that the sea services must at once preserve their battle readiness, guarding against traditional military conflict, and hone their proficiency at police functions, nation building, naval diplomacy, and the like. The Maritime Strategy suggests a neat partition of functions, with combat and constabulary forces designated according to their skills and capabilities. More likely, U.S. Navy, Marine, and Coast Guard units will find themselves pressed into service in either capacity. This has been the case since antiquity, when Greek navies fought one another on the high seas, attacked or defended merchant shipping, or struck at pirates, as ordained by their political masters.

What of the means to these expansive ends? The Maritime Strategy directs the maritime services to pursue six “expanded core capabilities,” including forward presence, deterrence, sea control, power projection ashore, maritime security, and humanitarian assistance and disaster response. To realize these capabilities, the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard are directed to improve interoperability among themselves and with foreign allies and partners, bolster maritime domain awareness and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capacity, and prepare their people for the intensely interactive strategic environment they will encounter in the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific. The chiefs are blunt about sea control:

There are many challenges to our ability to exercise sea control, perhaps none as significant as the growing number of nations operating submarines, both advanced diesel-electric and nuclear propelled. We will continue to hone the tactics, training and technologies needed to neutralize this threat. We will not permit conditions under which our maritime forces would be impeded from freedom of maneuver and freedom of access, nor will we permit an adversary to disrupt the global supply chain by attempting to block vital sea-lines of communication and commerce. We will be able to impose local sea control wherever necessary, ideally in concert with friends and allies, but by ourselves if we must.⁴⁰ (our emphasis)

The document strikes a martial note, evoking Mahan’s grammar of naval strategy, and it focuses squarely on Asia. The specific mention of potential enemy capabilities, namely submarines, is particularly noteworthy. China is the only naval power in the world that has amassed undersea power prodigiously in both the conventional and nuclear domains. Since the 1990s, the PLA Navy has introduced three new classes of advanced diesel-electric boats (the Kilo, the Song, and the Yuan) and two classes of second-generation nuclear-powered subs (the Jin SSBN and the Shang SSN). This is unrivaled anywhere. The passage above is perhaps the closest the Maritime Strategy ever comes to identifying China’s naval modernization as a major challenge to the U.S. Navy’s sea-control mission. If the threat to American command of the sea is measured in terms of an adversary’s capacity to sortie and operate large numbers of modern submarines, then China will likely rank atop or near the top of the list.

“Critical to this notion [of sea control],” insists the Cooperative Strategy, “is the maintenance of a powerful fleet—ships, aircraft, Marine forces, and shore-based fleet activities—capable of selectively controlling the seas, projecting power ashore, and protecting friendly forces and civilian populations from attack.” This is a function of forward-deployed naval power. “Credible combat power will be continuously postured in the Western Pacific and the Arabian Gulf/Indian Ocean to protect our vital interests, assure our friends and allies of our continuing commitment to regional security, and deter and dissuade potential adversaries and peer competitors.”⁴¹ Such language would have been instantly familiar to Mahan in his most warlike moods.

Beyond that, the Maritime Strategy says little about force structure, and this is by design. The sea-service chiefs had their gaze squarely on Mahan’s first trident, as befits the document’s cooperative nature. As noted before, the strategy intends to set forth a logic of sea power predicated on U.S. leadership, and its primary audiences reside in foreign capitals and the international community. Advocating a particular makeup for the national fleet would serve little purpose in such a document, especially given the unsettled conditions it foresees in an unevenly globalizing world and given the need to frame a message convivial to overseas observers. Still less could it predict in advance which foreign partners would join in which specific endeavors. The service chiefs, it seems, are content to let debates over the grammar of maritime strategy and forces sort themselves out elsewhere. In all likelihood, Mahan’s second trident will change its shape from contingency to contingency, depending on the kind and magnitude of foreign support Washington can round up.

Work and van Tol first ask whether the Maritime Strategy is a strategy at all. Tellingly, they frame their analysis using the definition of strategy set forth in a Pentagon publication—Joint Publication 1-02, the “DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms”—rather than one of the great works of strategic theory. They credit the Cooperative Strategy with spelling out the ends and ways of strategy but conclude that “the strategy suffers the same general weakness that [infects] many US strategy documents, which are often long on lists of laudable goals, sub-goals, and core capabilities, but short on how these goals and sub-goals might be achieved” (their emphasis). Worse, “it is the lack of any substantive discussion on the means necessary to accomplish its ways and ends, or how resources will be diverted toward its implementation priorities, that cause it to fall short as a true strategy. Indeed, the new strategy steers completely away from delving into its specific resource implications.”⁴³ By failing to elucidate resource requirements, matching ends with means, the strategy falls short. Work and van Tol concede the importance of the “Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower,” but they describe it not as a strategy but as a maritime “strategic concept.” In Samuel Huntington’s words, a strategic concept is a “description of how, when, and where the military service expects to protect the nation against some threat to its security.”⁴⁴ Without a governing concept, a service finds itself intellectually, morally, and materially rudderless.

As such, Work and van Tol find that, on the “macro level,” the strategy “stacks up quite well” with the cooperative themes articulated in documents such as the 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review and the 2006 National Defense Strategy.⁴⁵ They take the Maritime Strategy to task for remaining silent on a number of significant topics, notably the rise of Chinese sea power: “most readers of the document would likely deduce that the concept’s authors discount the rise of China as a potential maritime competitor and have concluded that no counterstrategies for this potential outcome are necessary.” The laudable goal of avoiding making Beijing an enemy does not “excuse the leaders of the three Sea Services from failing to acknowledge that the United States and China are clearly on the edge of a maritime competition.”⁴⁶ Absent any discussion of China or the kinds of wars the United States may wage, they conclude, the sea services and Congress will find it impossible to set priorities or allocate resources—especially when, by objective measures, nontraditional threats in the maritime domain are at low ebb.

The CSBA analysts hint at but do not fully flesh out a problem Washington may encounter while prosecuting the Maritime Strategy. They point out, reasonably enough, that classified planning may add the specifics they criticize the strategy document for omitting. The Navy leadership, by contrast, insists there is no classified version of the Maritime Strategy. This is no doubt true in a strict sense. But it also finesses reality, for classified directives such as the Navy Operating Concept or the Navy Strategic Concept address controversial subjects such as how to fight China. Foreign leaders worry about signing onto the Global Maritime Partnerships initiative simply because they fear agreeing to a division of labor in which the U.S. military dedicates itself to combat readiness while relegating its foreign partners to police duty. Should that come about, their governments fear they would be complicit in American misdeeds, real or perceived. There are pitfalls to diplomatic documents that compel readers to read between the lines. There they may discern meaning the drafters never intended to include.⁴⁷

Sea-service officers and officials have not analyzed the Maritime Strategy in these terms, but there is a pronounced Clausewitzian tenor to the debate. Specifically, is it possible to orient a people, their government, and their military absent a tangible threat to plan around? This is not a new observation; it came up during the 1990s’ debate over “capabilities-based planning,” which abstracted U.S. military capabilities from the threats these capabilities would be used to counter. If sea-service leaders studiously avert their gaze from China’s rise, are they not tacitly admitting that the United States does not need a dominant battle fleet? Active-duty officers in particular fear diffusing the rationale for a vibrant fleet, and being caught flatfooted should a peer competitor emerge. They understand it is easy for an adversary to change its intentions, and it is hard for navies to rebuild capabilities allowed to atrophy amid a seeming era of good feelings. This is a basic fact of life in an industrial age.

At the same time, however, Japanese officials fret that the strategy makes no mention of China’s rise or of the fundamental importance of the U.S.-Japan alliance. To them, the strategy looks suspiciously like a precursor to Washington’s conciliating Beijing. They fear this could mean downgrading its relationship with Tokyo or, in the extreme case, disengaging from the alliance altogether.⁴⁸ The Maritime Strategy, then, pulls Japan in two divergent directions. On the one hand, the document’s emphasis on good order at sea dovetails with Tokyo’s increasing enthusiasm for what Japanese policymakers call “international peace support operations.” On the other hand, its conspicuous silence on China seemingly confirms long-standing Japanese concerns that Washington is too sanguine about one of Tokyo’s most nettlesome regional security challenges.

Generally speaking, commentators in what Andrew Erickson calls China’s “public intellectual complex” have praised the Maritime Strategy document while reserving judgment about American sincerity. For the most part, pundits such as Su Hao of China Foreign Affairs University agree that the strategy marks a new strategic direction for the United States, they hail its emphasis on preventing war, and they acclaim its acknowledgment of noncombat missions—a mode of operations embraced by Beijing in recent years, as discussed in chapter 6.⁴⁹ But skepticism lingers. National Defense University researcher Wang Baofu traces the U.S. sea services’ persistent “maritime hegemonic mentality” to Mahanian thought. U.S. maritime strategies have come and gone, says Wang, but the services have never disavowed the Mahanian approach to naval strategy.⁵⁰

Wang is clearly thinking in grammatical terms, imputing bloody-minded acceptance of sea combat to American mariners. He also acknowledges the strategic-communications aspect of the strategy but interprets this in the worst light, alleging that “some people and military industrial interest groups” have fabricated “a ‘Chinese naval threat theory’ or ‘Russian maritime threat’ argument” to lobby on behalf of bigger naval budgets.⁵¹ Agrees Lu Rude of the Dalian Naval Vessel Academy, cooperative ventures are all very well, but it is up to the United States to live up to the principles enunciated in the strategy. Lu points to the mission of “deterring potential competitors,” which he—rightly—interprets as code for China. Lu denies that the Maritime Strategy has altered underlying realities: “Obviously, “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower” has not changed the [U.S.] strategic goal of dominating the world’s oceans. The United States still attempts to rely on its formidable sea power to control the world’s oceans, carry out global deployments, [and] continue to brandish military force to ‘deter wars between great powers,’ thus maintaining its domination of the world’s oceans.”⁵² He also appears to project Chinese assumptions onto the framers of the Maritime Strategy, editorializing that Washington has “implemented island chain defense” under the strategy and intends to “contain” the nameless strategic competitors of which it speaks.⁵³ As previous chapters showed, the island chain and the legacy of containment are freighted concepts for Beijing, evoking the nation’s past maritime impotency. Chinese analysts tend to draw a straight line from Dean Acheson’s “defense perimeter of the Pacific” to U.S. strategy today, inferring continuity where none may exist.

Indeed, this ambivalence about U.S. maritime intentions predates the unveiling of the Maritime Strategy. Chinese analysts, for example, inferred ulterior motives from Admiral Mullen’s call for a thousand-ship navy in 2005 (much as Indians read the worst into the PLA Navy counterpiracy operation today). Du Chaoping levels a sweeping charge at the American maritime services: “After the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military’s appetite for hegemony grew larger and larger. But the combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq produced an acute awareness that the absence of allied cooperation and support makes it difficult to fill this unceasingly expanding appetite while laboring under limited resources. Through the establishment of the ‘thousand-ship navy,’ it can strap its allies onto a single warship, thus benefiting its own pursuit of the anti-terror war.”⁵⁴ Respected military analyst Li Jie lists four possible motives for promoting the thousand-ship-navy concept. For Li, the U.S. Navy is attempting to (1) leverage the power of other navies, easing its own financial burden; (2) exploit regional players’ situational awareness of and familiarity with the intricacies of their maritime environs; (3) extract detailed data from its partners about the hydrology and meteorology of local waters, aiding U.S. naval operations in peacetime and conflict; and (4) enhance information sharing and establish joint command systems, speeding up U.S. responses to shifts in regional affairs.⁵⁵

Chinese observers find especially persuasive the notion that financial concerns are driving this burden-sharing project. For example, they compare the Pentagon’s plan for a “hundred-satellite constellation” for its NATO allies unfavorably to the thousand-ship-navy construct, branding it a crude scheme to spread the financial pain of developing new space technology.⁵⁶ Some Chinese, then, see weakness rather than strength in U.S. cooperative initiatives. There is an object lesson here: what Washington hopes to convey can depart completely, and unhelpfully, from how recipients of the message want to interpret it.

How do Indians size up the “Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower”? In 2008 one Indian naval officer told CNO Admiral Gary Roughead that the Indian Navy hierarchy had parsed the document and found “not a word out of place.”⁵⁷ No doubt this overstates things, but Indian officials and pundits have generally hailed the Maritime Strategy. Commander Gurpreet Khurana, formerly a research fellow at the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, New Delhi, also renders a favorable verdict while hinting at problems that could emerge.⁵⁸ The document’s stress on surmounting threats to global networks of trade, commerce, and transportation prompts applause in the Indian naval establishment, the main guardian of New Delhi’s interests at sea. Also welcome is the clause stating that the U.S. sea services will station credible combat power in the Indian Ocean region for the foreseeable future—presumably the next fifteen years, judging by the intended life span of the Cooperative Strategy. The forward deployment, believes Khurana, will reassure friends and allies of America’s commitment while dissuading prospective opponents from harmful actions. Furthermore, combined maneuvers such as the Malabar exercises help New Delhi generate strategic deterrence vis-à-vis Beijing.

And the trouble signs? While India has repeatedly espoused a multipolar world, “it realizes well that this [will] not happen any time soon,” and thus it greets Washington’s effort to project a benign image. For the time being, perpetuating U.S. power is “necessary for global and regional security.” But Washington must beware of creating a “hegemonic impression” of itself—that is, conveying the impression that it is willing to bully lesser powers. This would have “a spillover effect on India’s own image in the region.” A backlash could result from some action that damaged America’s standing in the region, eroding Indian soft power and by extension U.S.-Indian amity and cooperation. “Dissonance” could separate the two sea powers under certain circumstances. Even seemingly innocuous ventures such as counterpiracy could conceivably cause problems if, say, the United States decided to carry the fight ashore in Somalia and its action created hardships for the Somali people.

On balance, concludes Khurana, “the U.S. strategy connects very well” with “present Indian thought” about sea power and its uses. It may represent the foundation on which a durable seagoing partnership can be erected. Keeping up the United States’ good name in the region, managing controversies that might strain diplomatic relations with India, and remaining patient while India sorts through the politics and operational details of maritime partnership will be central to success. While the logic of maritime cooperation embodied in the Maritime Strategy is sound, occasional disagreements over the grammar may give New Delhi pause.

The rough consensus in Asia, then, seems to be that Asian maritime history is undergoing an interim phase. The United States still rules the seas, but its margin of qualitative and quantitative superiority over prospective rivals is on the decline. Tokyo worries that the maritime order may indeed be in transition, with the U.S. security guarantee becoming increasingly flimsy. For India, the U.S. sea services are an agent of stability, helping maintain great-power equilibrium in the Indian Ocean. New Delhi appears grateful for the strategic holiday granted it by U.S. predominance. This interlude lets the Indian military amass sea power at leisure, without launching itself into a crash naval arms program that might interfere with economic development, the top priority for all emerging great powers.

Beijing, too, seems to have resigned itself to U.S. preponderance in East Asia—for now. This has its advantages for China, as for India. As long as the U.S. Navy remains the steward of maritime security, the PLA Navy can continue fleet experimentation, tailoring its fleet and strategy to Chinese interests. It seems imperative for Washington to reinforce its strategic position in Asia—and to be seen doing so—if it hopes to forge a lasting partnership with India, work with China where interests coincide, and reassure Japan that the security guarantee remains the mainstay of the transpacific relationship.

It is possible, then, that a grammatically driven approach to U.S. maritime strategy would have not only reinforced the proclivity of key elements of the Chinese foreign- and security-policy establishment to assume the worst about the United States but also politically sidelined those more open to engagement with Washington. Whether Sino-U.S. enmity would have resulted is not clear, but a China-driven document premised on warfighting functions would surely have foreclosed prospects for cooperation at sea. While we should always be skeptical of casual claims that forthrightness with China will induce a self-fulfilling prophecy, giving rise to rivalry and antagonism, a revival of the 1986 strategy would have darkened the maritime environment in Asia, alarming allies and undecided powers alike.

Under certain circumstances, then, strategy statements themselves become part of strategic interaction with adversaries, allies, or bystanders. Careless phrasing is tantamount to self-defeating behavior. Both the 1986 and 2007 maritime strategies constituted exercises in strategic communication. The audiences for strategic communication correspond to the Clausewitzian trinity—roughly speaking, the government, the people, and the armed forces—for each party to an interactive relationship, plus international bodies like the UN Security Council or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that take an interest in oceanic affairs. Clearly, the strategic-communications geometry becomes more and more complex as the number of parties increases. The geometry of the 1986 Maritime Strategy was relatively straightforward, encompassing the American trinity, the Soviet trinity, and the NATO allies. By aiming to draw all seafaring nations into a maritime consortium, the 2007 Maritime Strategy attempts a far more difficult feat. Because it elaborates principles without going into specifics, the 2007 strategy may be more durable than its predecessor was, and better fitted for regions like Asia where the configuration of power and interests remains fluid.

The upshot: candor matters, but it also has its pitfalls. Theodore Roosevelt was fond of invoking the West African proverb, “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.” But speaking softly is not the same thing as dissembling about uncomfortable subjects such as Sino-American naval rivalry. Soft-pedaling the chances for traditional naval conflict undercuts the case for expensive platforms such as carriers and Aegis destroyers, and it does so while fanning speculation in Asia about what U.S. leaders really think, given the undeniable reality of a rising, militarily strong China. This is the worst of all possible worlds for strategic communicators. History primes Chinese officials and scholars to be skeptical about American sea power, no matter what Washington says. As a general rule, it is better to speak softly—but also forthrightly—about the proper uses of maritime power.

STRATEGY FOR A MAHANIAN WORLD: THE 1986 MARITIME STRATEGY

MAKING STRATEGY FOR A GLOBALIZED WORLD

CRITIQUES OF THE COOPERATIVE STRATEGY

REGIONAL RESPONSES TO THE MARITIME STRATEGY

A TALE OF TWO STRATEGIES