CHAPTER EIGHT

U.S. MARITIME STRATEGY IN ASIA

Times change. Strategists must change with them or find themselves behind the times and risk coming to grief. This is a problem for American maritime strategists in particular. U.S. naval history seems to oscillate between “Mahanian” and “post-Mahanian” phases, in the casual sense that the name of Alfred Thayer Mahan connotes battle between rival navies. Battle comes in countless varieties. There are epic sea fights that drive an enemy’s flag from the seas or at most allow it to appear as a fugitive. This was how Mahan himself defined maritime command. Or one navy could vanquish another in piecemeal fashion, wearing away its strength through repeated small-scale triumphs. Either way, a Mahanian navy sees its chief purpose as combat. This assumption governs its force acquisitions and training.

If battle constitutes a navy’s focal point for fleet design and tactical and doctrinal development, then that navy inhabits a Mahanian age. If the primacy of battle recedes, letting a navy devote itself mainly to constabulary missions or power projection, then that navy dwells in post-Mahanian times. Yet there is a danger that naval leaders could mistake one milieu for the other. A Mahanian navy could thrive in post-Mahanian times, assuming government and society consented to fund a pricey force that confronted no peer antagonist. A musclebound navy boasts excess capacity and capability during placid times and overmatches post-Mahanian foes.

The reverse is not true. A force that reconfigures itself for noncombat functions suffers from material and human deficits even as challengers driven by competitive instincts amass combat power for sea fights. A post-Mahanian force trying to reacclimate to Mahanian surroundings must upgrade obsolescent hardware, sensors, and weaponry. Fielding new assets is no quick feat in a high-tech industrial era. Crews must relearn tactics, techniques, and procedures befitting a force that expects to venture in harm’s way. And perhaps most important, such a force must don its game face—acculturating itself afresh to Mahanian habits of mind and action. Material and cultural revolutions come neither easily nor swiftly. Competitors that start from behind could race ahead in the meantime. Consequently, it constitutes a grave error for post-Mahanian U.S. Navy leaders to ignore gathering Mahanian perils.

Though admittedly imprecise, classifying epochs as Mahanian or post-Mahanian makes convenient shorthand. First consider the U.S. Navy’s Mahanian eras. The Navy displayed a Mahanian bent in 1898 when it crushed the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay. It was a Mahanian force inhabiting post-Mahanian times during World War I. Destroyers dueled U-boats in the Atlantic Ocean, clearing the way for an armada of transports to ferry manpower and war materiel to Europe. The navy fought the U-boats again during World War II while lunging across the Pacific Ocean toward Japan. And, most recently, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps published an intensely Mahanian strategy during the 1980s. Straightforwardly titled “The Maritime Strategy,” the document instructed the sea services to gird themselves to pummel the Soviet Navy in times of strife. In short, battle was the U.S. Navy’s overriding purpose during times of high-end naval warfare.

Post-Mahanian times followed each Mahanian victory. Shipbuilding continued at a desultory pace after Manila Bay, but U.S. presidents employed the U.S. Navy mainly as a diplomatic and constabulary force. The interwar decades represented an interlude of decay. Naval arms control was in place, and no obvious foe was visible on the horizon. The vast armada that overcame Japan and Germany was broken up during the early Cold War, when the Soviet Navy that would vex Americans by the 1970s was still years away. No one mounted serious opposition to U.S. rule of Korean or Vietnamese waters, letting aviators and surface gunners pound shore targets with impunity.

And then came the endgame to the Cold War. In light of this pattern, it was perhaps inevitable that U.S. maritime strategy would take a post-Mahanian swerve after the Soviet Navy’s demise. The Cold War victory was a peculiar victory. The U.S. sea services dispatched their archfoe in thoroughgoing fashion, as they had the IJN during World War II. But they did so without actually fighting that foe and without suffering damage and loss of life that might have imparted sobriety to post–Cold War strategic thought. Having won big without fighting, naval leaders may have indulged the illusion that command of the sea is America’s birthright. If bringing about an enemy’s demise was that easy and pain-free, the U.S. Navy could devote itself exclusively to radiating power onto foreign shores and policing the sea.

Ambient conditions, in short, seemed to have rendered timeless features of maritime strategy moot. Whatever the psychology impelling decision makers, the leadership released a markedly post-Mahanian strategic directive after the Cold War. Dubbed “… From the Sea,” it declared in effect that America and its allies owned the oceans and seas. There was no one left to fight, and thus the victors could reinvent their sea services for functions not oriented toward battle against peer navies. A post-Mahanian navy could shrink by deemphasizing such combat capabilities as surface and antisubmarine warfare. The sea services could transform themselves into “fundamentally different” forces, to quote the preamble to “… From the Sea.” The sea was an offshore haven. Naval history had ended, much as international-relations pundits proclaimed that political history had reached its end with the end of the Cold War.

After assuming its Mahanian state during the 1980s, U.S. maritime strategy resumed its post-Mahanian character for the quarter-century following the Cold War. To all appearances, it is now reverting to a Mahanian outlook at the same time that prospective antagonists are building up sea power to challenge the maritime supremacy American seafarers have long taken for granted. This is where the sea services stand today—as recent strategic directives attest. A Mahanian future awaits.

Opposing Trajectories

The world has changed since the first edition of this book appeared, and the U.S. sea services are trying to change with it. A decade ago sea-power scholar Geoffrey Till postulated that Western and Asian navies had set themselves on opposite trajectories.1 Western fleets were on the decline, and Asian fleets were on the ascent.

Till’s brief centered in part on material measures. Hull and airframe counts listed in Jane’s Fighting Ships or Combat Fleets of the World lent credence to his observation. The U.S. Navy had dwindled to half its Cold War self in brute numerical terms, from almost six hundred ships to fewer than three hundred. European navies found themselves in even worse straits. Pacifist Japan imposed such stringent budgetary limits on its armed forces that the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, though highly professional, remained stagnant in numbers. Chinese shipyards, meanwhile, were bolting together ships of war with aplomb.

But Till went further, positing that Western and Asian mariners had come to inhabit separate mental worlds. The two groups entertained different assumptions about the nature of seafaring forces and as a result were configuring and training fleets to execute markedly different missions. Asians were readying themselves for sea fights in time-honored fashion, while Westerners saw maritime strategy mainly as a constabulary venture. In short, Asians dwelt in the “modern” world of Mahanian battle while Westerners lived in a “postmodern,” post-Mahanian world that had transcended the need to fight for maritime command. Or so Westerners thought.

Beliefs have consequences. For Asians it was axiomatic that other navies constituted their likeliest foes. Driven by that assumption, they constructed warships and warplanes bristling with weaponry. Westerners concentrated on ridding the oceans of nonstate challengers such as terrorists, gunrunners, and traffickers in unconventional weaponry. They saw themselves chiefly as custodians of the globalized system of trade and commerce, not as defenders of the national interest against malevolent great powers. They rebalanced their fleets toward lighter combatants that could be built in large numbers and yet still outmatch lawbreakers.

That disjuncture was a hint that times of peril awaited America, its allies, and its friends. Till fretted that cultural and psychological disadvantages afflict post-Mahanian navies compared to navies with Mahanian instincts and habits. Westerners might remain stronger in raw physical terms and yet still lose their fighting edge. They might lose that tragic sense that the next peer challenger will come along sooner or later, and that someday they will have to contend for maritime mastery once again. In short, navies intent on police duty are ill prepared to confront rivals intent on battle, no matter what tallies of their armaments or manpower might imply.

Perhaps it is natural for postmodern modes of thinking to take hold after a smashing Mahanian triumph. Sooner or later, though, the next major challenger emerges and compels naval leaders to rejoin the hardscrabble world of strategic competition and warfare.

Readjusting to Mahanian times after a tranquil interval is far from easy or certain. A navy can find itself cruising in what historian Andrew Gordon dubs the “long calm lee” of victory.2 Think about Gordon’s metaphor. Leeward conditions deceive. On the leeward side, the bulk of a ship or a landmass blocks the wind and elements. The lee offers fleeting shelter, though, lasting only until the ship turns or the wind shifts. But if history grants a navy a long lee, its leadership may come to see calm weather not as a reprieve but as the permanent state of things. A navy may remake itself as a fair-weather force, unready to ride out the tempests certain to buffet it sooner or later.

Whether a navy inhabits a post-Mahanian or a Mahanian world thus matters a great deal. First of all, much depends on whether an enemy—a peer or near-peer competitor fielded by a hostile state—has yet to come into view. A post-Mahanian navy discerns no equal or, perhaps, overlooks an enemy on the rise. It relegates combat to secondary status. A Mahanian navy, by contrast, designates its most probable or most forbidding foe and orients itself toward vanquishing that foe should the need arise. It makes equipping and preparing for battle the sine qua non of peacetime endeavors.

Naming an enemy imparts clarity to strategy making, force design, and war planning. As Captain Harry Yarnell complained in 1919, devising strategy with no antagonist in sight is like “trying to design a machine tool without knowing whether it is going to manufacture hairpins or locomotives.”3 The U.S. Navy perceived no clear enemy when it came out of World War I, just as it saw no clear enemy after World War II or the Cold War. Naval planners chafed in these post-Mahanian years. In the former case the IJN, a force on the make, ultimately furnished the yardstick for American strategy and fleet design—and resolved Yarnell’s analytical dilemma.

Second, a post-Mahanian navy concerns itself with exploiting maritime command while a Mahanian navy concentrates on winning it. Sir Julian Corbett partitions the conduct of naval war into three broad phases: “disputing command” through defensive operations or small-scale counterattacks, “securing command” through battle or blockade, and “exercising command” once control of the sea is in hand.⁴ A post-Mahanian navy devotes itself to exercising command—the least burdensome of naval functions—whereas a Mahanian navy girds itself to win or contest an opponent’s command of vital waters. Preparing for the most taxing missions hones a fleet’s fighting edge. Preparing for less demanding missions leaves it off balance when combat looms.

And third, post-Mahanian forces tend to scatter across the map in peacetime while Mahanian forces tend to mass for action. This makes sense. Constabulary forces must disperse to combat law-breaking. Dispersal thins out the combat power they can bring to bear at any particular place on the map. A battle-minded navy acknowledges its weakness and thus keeps forces together in hopes of making itself the stronger contender at likely scenes of impact.

A concentrated force of Mahanian leanings could overpower a superior yet dispersed opponent at decisive times and places. Mahan proffers a “broad formula” that hints at how. A fleet contingent, he maintains, “must be great enough to take the sea, and to fight, with reasonable chances of success, the largest force likely to be brought against it.”5 In other words, it must concentrate enough ships and armaments to prevail at likely scenes of combat. A lesser navy can prevail if it stages stronger forces where it matters, when it matters.

Here again, assumptions are crucial. A navy can afford to disperse if its leadership assumes it faces only nonstate opponents. If it assumes it may face a peer competitor, it must array fleets on the map to meet that competitor. The challenge a post-Mahanian fleet in Mahanian surroundings faces, then, is to realign assumptions that are fitting for a globalized world to conform to a bare-knuckles world of power politics. Only thus will the leadership take nascent menaces as seriously as they deserve.

We will employ Till’s modern/postmodern taxonomy to trace broad trends dating from the Reagan administration’s major effort at strategy making—the 1986 Maritime Strategy—through the present day with a view toward comprehending the difficulties the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps face in adjusting to the brave new world of high-seas strategic competition. We cull evidence from the Reagan Maritime Strategy;⁶ “… From the Sea,” the sea services’ initial effort at post–Cold War strategy;⁷ the 2007 “Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower”; and the revised 2015 edition of the “Cooperative Strategy.”8

First and foremost, we find that the times have changed since the age of Reagan, and changed back again. We postulate that the sea services inhabited a modern, Mahanian world of power politics during the late Cold War. They declared the advent of a postmodern, post-Mahanian world in the 1990s. And now, spurred by new circumstances, they are making a fitful return to the Mahanian world of power politics.

Second, we observe that the services went from naming a prospective foe to declaring there were no foes. This imparted a dangerously abstract quality to strategy, war plans, and operational practices. Strategy is about interaction between combatants determined to get their way. With no adversary, it is difficult to judge one’s own efficacy.

Third, having soft-pedaled prospects for combat, the sea services went from stressing battle readiness to honing their capacity for projecting power ashore and conducting constabulary duty.

And fourth, as service chieftains and their political masters grudgingly came to accept the reality of a rising China, Washington adjusted U.S. Navy fleet dispositions to meet the new challenger. In 2012 the Obama administration announced that the sea services would “pivot,” or “rebalance,” to the Indo-Pacific theater.⁹ Fleet dispositions went from the traditional fifty-fifty split between the Atlantic and Pacific fleets to favor the Indo-Pacific by a sixty-forty margin, measured by numbers of hulls allocated to regional commands.

By tracing how the strategic environment has changed around the sea services in recent decades, we project how U.S. maritime interactions with China and other Asian societies may unfold in the coming decades. Understanding what went before will help sea-service leaders fashion wise counterstrategies for the future.

A Mahanian Maritime Strategy (1986)

To get some purchase on the 2007 Maritime Strategy (subsequently “refreshed” in 2015), 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 until 2007.10 Made public in a supplement to a 1986 issue of the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, the Maritime Strategy was a statement about how the sea services meant to thrash the Soviet Union during the late Cold War. Roughly speaking, we use the 1986 Maritime Strategy as a proxy for how sea-service chieftains devise strategy for Mahanian strategic surroundings. In Clausewitzian parlance, the 1986 strategy dwelt on the “grammar” of operations and tactics, explaining how the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps would fulfill America’s strategic and political goals. Its purpose, or “logic,” was straightforward: “We win, they lose,” as President Reagan put it in one oft-quoted statement.¹¹ The United States, that is, would apply all of its diplomatic, economic, and martial resources to put an end to the Cold War.

The directive’s framers, accordingly, spelled out how the Cold War U.S. Navy meant to defeat a “peer competitor” should a clash of arms ensue. The strategy specified the sorts of platforms and weaponry needed for a high-intensity fight with the Soviet Navy. The U.S. Navy performed police functions during the Cold War, to be sure, but considered them a “lesser included” element of its strategy—something to be prepared for and prosecuted on a not-to-interfere basis with battle preparations.

And to all appearances it worked. Indeed, a triumphal afterglow has come to suffuse memories of the Cold War’s denouement among American seafarers. To counteract such hubris, it is crucial to bear in mind that the U.S. Maritime Strategy and the strategic concepts on which it was founded were never put to the test of actual combat. Battle is the final arbiter of what works and what doesn’t work in martial enterprises. No one knows how a sea war between East and West would have unfolded, and no one should draw fixed conclusions from the Cold War’s outcome. Nevertheless, the 1980s effort to make maritime strategy under heavy fiscal constraints, and for an uncertain environment populated by peer competitors, illustrates perennial themes.

Crafting strategy is an iterative, synthetic process. Efforts to match ends with means undergo many phases as new ideas are offered, accepted, rejected, or modified. As 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.”12 That makes it inherently unpredictable. Handel adds that the “interaction of the warring states, each searching for a comparative advantage, defines the unique nature of each war” (his emphasis).¹³

Interaction, reassessment, and adaptation were constants throughout the Cold War—as they will be in Asia, the principal locus for U.S. maritime endeavors for the foreseeable future. Cold War interactions, however, remained largely hypothetical. The U.S. Navy performed a variety of functions from 1945 through 1970. It quarantined Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, projected power ashore in Korea and Vietnam, deterred Soviet military aggression, and undertook routine naval diplomacy by showing the flag in key regions.

Significantly, though, the U.S. Navy fought no fleet actions. Its last major fleet-on-fleet engagement took place in October 1944 when it met the IJN’s Combined Fleet in Leyte Gulf. In a classic 1954 Naval Institute Proceedings article, Samuel Huntington beseeched the U.S. Navy to undertake a “transoceanic strategy.” Huntington observed that the relative calm of the postwar epoch had left the service without a great-power competitor to supply a benchmark for success and failure.¹⁴ The Navy was aimless, bereft of a “strategic concept” to guide its endeavors and force development. Transoceanic operations offered a solution and a sense of purpose.

Huntington’s strategy worked for a time. During the 1950s and early 1960s, when the Soviet Navy remained an afterthought for American strategists, the lack of Leyte Gulf–type clashes freed the U.S. Navy for missions remote from command of the sea. Habits, doctrine, and hardware for maritime command atrophied even as the Soviet Navy commenced building itself into a serious blue-water competitor. In one sense, perversely, the United States was a victim of wartime success, deprived of a rival fleet around which to structure strategy and forces. It won too big in 1945 and drifted toward a post-Mahanian world in which the United States could exercise maritime command without fighting for it.

The advent of an oceangoing Soviet Navy following the Cuban Missile Crisis changed that state of affairs. The Soviet Navy was traditionally a homeland defense force. Josef Stalin had ordained the construction of a Mahanian battle fleet before World War II. Moscow’s Mahanian ambitions came up empty, however, frustrated by the Soviet Union’s backward shipbuilding industry and the competing demands of land defense.15 Stalin had fretted over the likelihood of NATO amphibious assaults along the Eurasian periphery, but his successors took a more relaxed view of the seaborne threat. They let the surface fleet languish. By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Navy was unable to dispute 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 and jolted 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 by tradition a continental power. Its most recent foray into sea power had ended disastrously in 1905 when the Japanese Combined Fleet commanded by Admiral Togo Heihachiro sent the Russian Baltic Fleet to the bottom of the Tsushima Strait.

Russian and Soviet maritime history thus offered the West little information on which to chart the future of Soviet sea power. Official statements and writings made 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 remained for the most part an exercise in conjecture.

One of the concepts that molded Soviet thinking about nautical matters was the “blue belt of defense,” a geographically defined offshore zone within range of land-based air and sea assets.16 Similar to 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 applied land-warfare concepts to the nautical domain. Much as Stalin and his advisers wanted to ring the USSR’s borders with friendly or neutral states, erecting a buffer against overland invasion, Gorshkov and his disciples wanted to erect a defensive barrier against NATO fleets.

Alfred Thayer Mahan inveighed against the Imperial Russian Navy for its concept of the “fortress-fleet,” contending that it reduced the navy to a seaward appendage of shore fortifications.¹⁷ A fortress fleet ostensibly acted as a forward defense of the fortress. In reality it was the other way around. Mahan pointed out that Russian fleet commanders made a practice of sheltering under the guns of the fort for protection against stronger antagonists. Nor were his concerns misplaced. The early twentieth century remained an age of short-range gunnery, owing in large measure to rudimentary fire control. Commanders who wanted fire support from shore were confined to the miniscule sea areas under a fort’s guns.

For Mahan this added up to a “radically erroneous” mode of sea combat that rendered navies unduly timid and conservative.¹⁸ Even so, the fortress fleet concept persisted in Soviet naval thought. And it started to come into its own as long-range, precision-guided firepower extended the reach of shore-based implements of sea power. New technologies such as antiship and surface-to-air missiles could push the blue belt outward, denying the United States and its allies control of seas washing against Warsaw Pact shores.

This constituted sound logic. Europe is in effect a large peninsula jutting westward from Asia, and a dominant navy can roam freely around the periphery, setting the terms for naval and military action. Huntington’s transoceanic strategy urged the U.S. Navy to think of the Mediterranean as an inlet into Eurasia, a platform from which to project power into the Soviet bloc. For the Soviets, holding off Western power projection required vying with NATO for control of this bay. Gorshkov never specified how wide a defensive belt he foresaw. He presumably wanted to extend it as far offshore as Soviet arms could carry it. In the ideal case, the Soviet Navy might make itself master of the Mediterranean Sea.

That strategy was behind Soviet forces’ swift buildup in numbers and capability from the 1960s onward. In the realm of hardware, undersea warfare took a central place in the Soviet naval buildup. The Soviet Navy deployed fifty SSBNs by the early 1970s and some three hundred SSNs. It is important not to overrate the submarine fleet on the basis of its numbers. Quality lagged, for all of Gorshkov’s—and before him Stalin’s—boasting that quantity possesses a quality all its own. 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. Acoustics, in other words, rendered Soviet submarine numbers largely meaningless in the Cold War’s early days.

Compounding the problem for Soviet submariners, the short range of early sea-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) compelled Soviet SSBNs to patrol far forward if they were to come within range of American cities. Soviet strategic preferences had to give way under prevailing circumstances. Skippers had to run risks to do their job at a time when backward technology amplified those risks.

By the early 1970s, Soviet Navy operating practices showed that Moscow was gaining confidence in its ability to contest waters the U.S. Navy had ruled since 1945. It was becoming a modern Mahanian force, in Geoffrey Till’s terms. 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 standing into the Norwegian Sea and the Indian Ocean. No longer was American sea control a given.

Indeed, these exercises even cast doubt on whether the United States could count on using Atlantic sea-lanes to reinforce NATO-European allies during a land war. The 1973 Arab-Israeli War reinforced the impression of an increasingly offensive-minded, blue-water Soviet Navy. The Soviet Mediterranean Squadron outnumbered the Mediterranean-based U.S. Sixth Fleet during the conflict—sending shockwaves rippling through the U.S. naval leadership and the Nixon administration. The growing mismatch in numbers was hard to dismiss, especially when strategists took into account the disparity between U.S. and Soviet shipbuilding rates and budgets.

Certain anomalies became apparent. Despite the enormous effort and resources it allocated to Gorshkov’s oceangoing fleet, the Soviet Union was not constructing a navy symmetrical with the U.S. Navy. First, the Soviet Navy made no obvious push to construct big-deck aircraft carriers comparable with U.S. flattops. Second, despite the naval leadership’s increasingly Mahanian outlook, the leadership displayed little urgency about moving from a sea-denial to a sea-control strategy. The Soviet surface fleet, for example, evidently considered ASW a secondary concern, even though guarding against undersea attack is 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 reach of shore support. In short, defensive strategic preferences of centuries’ standing reasserted themselves as the Soviet Navy improved its combat capacity. Soviet skippers retreated from open-ocean operations even as quieting and other concealment technologies rendered such operations less risky and allowed them to become more venturesome.

These patterns defied Westerners’ assumptions. In 1981 the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Thomas Hayward, reportedly voiced disbelief that the Soviets would operate a great navy in such a peculiar manner. The disparity between defensive operating patterns and platforms apparently designed for offense baffled Western analysts. Some wondered whether the Soviets even had a naval doctrine. Westerners also debated the degree to which Soviet leaders distinguished between nuclear and nonnuclear warfare, since they had evidently planned to use tactical nuclear weapons during a European land war during the 1960s.

And perhaps most important, Westerners questioned whether new Soviet capabilities would generate new intentions. It was possible, that is, that Moscow would seek more ambitious strategic aims once it possessed the wherewithal to attain them. Seaborne challenges might start to look like nails once Soviet leaders possessed a hammer—and Soviet practices might converge with those of Western fleets.

The leadership’s words furnished one indicator. Admiral Gorshkov was a fairly prolific writer. His book The Sea Power of the State contradicted Mahan’s maxim that no nation can be a dominant maritime and a dominant land power for long. Gorshkov proclaimed that the Soviet Union was both. Yet while naval war was important, defeating the imperialists’ seagoing “big stick”—not wresting away sea control—represented Moscow’s chief goal. Frustrating Western coercion would grant Moscow the freedom of action all government leaders and commanders covet.19

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 in 1905. The Pacific Fleet, based at Vladivostok, expanded the Soviet Navy’s nuclear deterrent. SSBNs now cruised an eastern bastion in the Sea of Okhotsk and Sea of Japan. The eastern presence also enabled the navy to conduct 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 Navy—including some ninety surface combatants—was based in the Far East.

It was unclear whether the United States still ruled the waves in Mahanian fashion when 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 the Soviets had abandoned hopes that capitalism would collapse under the weight of internal contradictions. Nor did they seem intent on giving capitalism a shove in hopes of toppling it. If these premises were correct, nuclear escalation was not a foregone conclusion in wartime. The Soviet regime may have mellowed, as George F. Kennan had famously prophesied it would.20 And strains on the Soviet economic system were starting to show, especially after the invasion of Afghanistan began funneling off Soviet resources that might have gone to naval power.

If the Soviet Union was indeed reverting to defensive strategy, 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 the Navy should go about resuming Mahanian primacy was the question before the American naval leadership.

George Baer observes that effective strategy requires a threat. A menace concentrates minds while handing strategists a yardstick to judge their endeavors’ efficacy. 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 the questions raised. Even if the carrier remained king, however, was it politically thinkable to risk the nuclear-powered, capital-intensive flattops then building in action off Eurasian shores?

Successive CNOs harbored different ideas about naval strategy, although the overall trend favored 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 existence 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. NATO sea lines of communication (SLOCs) were threatened for the first time. Sea control, maintained Zumwalt, would assure the United States of the ability to surge manpower and materiel across the Atlantic at the outbreak of war.

In the face of the new Soviet threat Admiral Zumwalt instigated a long-overdue debate about U.S. naval strategy, missions, and platforms. He admitted that painful tradeoffs lay in store should the Navy rededicate itself to sea control. Most controversially, he insisted 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” that blended large numbers of inexpensive, less capable platforms—the Oliver Hazard Perry frigates being the best example—into a mixed fleet alongside such costly, high-end platforms as Nimitz-class nuclear carriers and cruisers outfitted with the Aegis combat system. For Zumwalt, who served during the economic malaise of the 1970s, such economies represented simple necessity.

Zumwalt pushed a quantitative approach oriented more toward acquisitions than strategy; policy and strategy largely disappeared. His “Project 60” agenda, for example, dwelt almost entirely on fleet numbers, technological innovations, and new platforms and weapons systems like the Perry-class guided-missile frigate, the “Sea Control Ship”—a sort of low-cost carrier that could be hazarded in battle more readily than an expensive nuclear-powered aircraft carrier—and the Harpoon ASBM.

The analytical shortfalls of Project 60 and similar Zumwalt 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. The critics insisted in effect that the best defense was a good offense—and that the U.S. Navy was abandoning offense.

Zumwalt also exaggerated the rationality of the budget process in Washington. Congress gleefully pocketed the savings the Navy offered by decommissioning old ships but did not reciprocate by funding replacements in sufficient numbers.21 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 over five hundred in 1980. Quality improved on a ship-for-ship basis as the Navy phased out aged vessels, but high-tech wizardry was not everything against a numerically preponderant Soviet Navy. At some point mass would start to tell.

Admiral James Holloway, Zumwalt’s successor as CNO, commissioned several studies to examine the repercussions of the dwindling force structure.²² “With the continuing decline in our naval force levels,” Holloway told Congress, the service “had become a one-ocean navy” for the first time since World War II. The Pacific Ocean was now a zone of American neglect.²³ Analysts reached similarly dismal findings. One study in effect argued that a five-hundred-ship fleet would stand little chance of prevailing in such critical waterways 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 of the missions assigned it.

Those findings stunned the nation’s leaders, both civilian and uniformed. 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 by halting construction of new nuclear-powered carriers and building less expensive VSTOL (very short takeoff and landing) carriers resembling those smaller navies around the world operated. Admiral Thomas Hayward, who succeeded Holloway in 1978, publicly deplored the descent toward such a “Third World strategy.”24 Not to be outdone, Secretary of the Navy Graham Claytor worried that the administration would make the Navy a nautical “Maginot Line.”²⁵ Claytor doubtless chose his historical analogies carefully, implying that such a Navy courted abject defeat.

No matter how sensible Navy leaders’ lobbying on behalf of a bigger force was, 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 victory in battle—represents the goal of military strategy and forces. It probably seemed natural for elected officials to think in terms of naval parity rather than maritime command. The times ran against a Mahanian strategy.

Nor was it obvious that the Navy would have much of a 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 before naval power came to bear. In short, the U.S. Navy took a backseat to other instruments of national power for policy makers of the 1970s. Diplomacy was the option of first resort, naval power the last. Secretary of Defense Brown simply made this explicit by 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 leadership did just that. Various new studies and strategic concepts were already under development during the Carter years, bearing such names as Sea Plan 2000 and Project Sea Strike.26 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 wielding combined arms to defend its offshore blue belt.

Third, the U.S. fleet should grasp 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 themselves everywhere and keep them from concentrating their efforts in Germany. Maritime operations around the margins, that is, could shape the battle space ashore.

Naval analysts concluded that the Carter administration should abandon plans to “swing” 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 offshore submarine bastion at bay, menacing the Soviet oceanic periphery. Opening a Pacific theater would force Moscow to expend scarce resources defending the Far East and thereby relieve the NATO-European theater.

The upshot was that the U.S. Navy should puncture 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, codified 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 U.S. Naval Institue Proceedings.

Watkins and Lehman bragged that their 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.27 The Maritime Strategy rejected claims that any NATO–Warsaw Pact war would automatically go nuclear, nullifying the value of naval power as a warfighting instrument. It insisted that the United States could wage cumulative naval operations along the Soviet periphery, protracting the war while driving up costs to an unbearable level for Moscow. Such indirection would allow the United States to terminate the war “on favorable terms.”²⁸

Reagan administration leaders fixed their force-structure goal at six hundred ships, giving the administration a readily intelligible slogan around which to rally popular and congressional support. They derived that number from past studies estimating how a U.S. Navy of various sizes would fare against Warsaw Pact navies in contested expanses from the North Atlantic to the Indian Ocean to the western Pacific. Six hundred ships was not the number of ships the administration and naval leaders actually coveted, though; it was a middling figure. Like the naval leadership of the Carter years, Reagan officials believed it would take an eight-hundred-ship navy to guarantee success in all contingencies.

Indeed, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended such a fleet in fiscal year 1984 while casting seven-hundred-ship and six-hundred-ship navies as riskier alternatives.²⁹ At six hundred the outcome would remain in doubt. That conclusion should give today’s fleet designers pause. It should also dampen the afterglow that still colors the Cold War’s outcome in the U.S. Navy’s corporate memory—and sometimes prompts naval officers to make light of China’s marine challenge today.

The Maritime Strategy had its detractors. Critics questioned the drafters’ assumptions about the nature of the war. They doubted that operations along the eastern and western Soviet borders would drain resources from Warsaw Pact ground and air forces in Europe, where the main effort would take place, and they decried it as a venture in “brochuresmanship.”

Some of the most cutting 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 condemned the Maritime Strategy for employing naval power to shift the nuclear balance in a conventional war. Striking at the Soviet undersea fleet during a conventional conflict, he maintained, would present Moscow with a use-it-or-lose-it quandary vis-à-vis nuclear weapons. Soviet leaders might order a barrage of SLBMs rather than lose the SSBN fleet to U.S. naval attack.30 It is worth noting, however, that few critics questioned the Mahanian assumption that force-on-force engagements ought to constitute the core of U.S. maritime strategy. The debate centered more on the mechanics of how to beat the Soviet Navy than on the need to do so.

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 IJN 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, naval planners eyeing the Soviet Navy debated whether aircraft carriers could survive naval action in the Barents Sea, where Soviet surface and subsurface craft fought under the cover of land-based weaponry. They estimated how many ASW assets the U.S. Navy and its allies needed to cover a large yet technologically backward Soviet submarine force, and so on. Designating a prospective antagonist, in short, lends a concreteness to strategic discourse and force design that is lacking when naval leaders refuse to accept the reality that some rising challenger could make itself master of the seas—or at least a deadly troublemaker.

And there was something to critics’ claims that the Maritime Strategy was an exercise in salesmanship to the American public. A hulking rival fleet bristling with weapons gave Americans something to rally against. It simplified Navy leaders’ task of uniting the government, electorate, and military behind a forward-leaning strategy. A Mahanian strategy, it seems, demands Mahanian threats to concentrate the popular mind.

“… From the Sea” (1992)

As the Cold War drew to a close, fanciful ideas about what the future might bring beguiled the American sea services. Nor were they alone. In 1992 the political scientist Francis Fukuyama published his landmark book, The End of History and the Last Man.31 Fukuyama maintained, in brief, that all possible forms of government had now been developed and tested and that liberal democracy was best. The pathway to the end of history could and likely would prove turbulent. What the end of history would look like was now clear.

By happenstance the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps published their first venture in post–Cold War strategy making the same year Fukuyama’s treatise appeared. Though not in so many words, sea-service chieftains proclaimed that the end of naval history had arrived. The preamble to “… From the Sea: Preparing the Naval Service for the 21st Century” proclaims:

Our ability to command the seas in areas where we anticipate future operations allows us to resize our naval forces and to concentrate more on capabilities required in the complex operating environment of the “littoral” or coastlines of the earth. With the demise of the Soviet Union, the free nations of the world claim preeminent control of the seas and ensure freedom of commercial maritime passage. As a result, our national maritime policies can afford to deemphasize efforts in some naval warfare areas. But the challenge is much more complex than simply reducing our present naval forces. We must structure a fundamentally different naval force to respond to strategic demands.32 (Our emphasis)

The architects of “… From the Sea” were saying something dramatic: that the U.S. sea services should remake themselves for a post-Mahanian age. Mahan depicts wresting command of the sea from rival navies as the summit of maritime strategic achievement, while Corbett points out that a navy must win command before it can exercise command. Battle thus constitutes a navy’s central purpose for the masters of sea power. Only after they prevail can the victors project power onto foreign shores, police the sea-lanes, and otherwise harvest the fruits of command.

“…From the Sea” notified the sea services that they no longer needed to prepare to duel peer navies. In effect the directive declared that America owned the sea. It instructed the services to deemphasize traditional warfare functions that would never again be needed and reinvent themselves as an armed force fundamentally different from the one that waged the Cold War at sea.

Naval potentates, then, wanted the services to concentrate on honing their capacity to exercise command of the sea from the vast offshore sanctuary that was the world’s oceans and seas. They should cease wasting time and resources preparing for a fight that would never occur. Small wonder that hardware and human acumen for missions such as surface warfare and ASW decayed starting in the 1990s. Top leaders had telegraphed a powerful bureaucratic signal indicating that the sea services had other priorities than combat. And then, having reinvented themselves as a postmodern force, the services found themselves scrambling to reconstitute basic naval missions when a new challenger—China—took shape.

“… From the Sea” set the naval services on an ahistorical pathway. What service chiefs saw as an effort to adapt to transformed strategic circumstances was in fact a proclamation that navies no longer needed to prepare to fight other navies—in other words, to fulfill their primary enabling function. The aftereffects linger to this day, wrong-footing the U.S. Navy for high-seas strategic competition.

China burst into naval history shortly after the U.S. leadership proclaimed an end to it. Beijing thus wrested away the initiative in the incipient U.S.-China strategic competition. China was the only nation competing in Asian waters for a decade following the 1995–96 Taiwan Strait crises, which supplied a catalyst for China’s bid for maritime mastery. Yesterday’s forebodings about China have become today’s facts—mandating that America and its allies compete in earnest. It is high time for the U.S. Navy to return to history—Mahanian history—with its attendant worldview and ethos.

“A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower” (2007)

Mahan would probably sympathize with today’s sea-service leaders. First, like the post–Civil War Navy in which he served, today’s Navy confronts strategic surroundings in which traditional naval competition or conflict is a real prospect, but the threat has not fully taken form. Debates over maritime matters remain largely abstract and speculative.

Second, Mahan had the luxury of worrying about safeguarding America’s “gateway” to Asia and the Pacific, the Panama Canal. That potential threat concentrated his intellectual energy by aiming it at a single, readily intelligible spot on the map. Today’s sea services confront challenges all around the globe—and will do so as long as the United States remains the self-appointed guardian of maritime security.

Third, while no subnational challenge poses the same menace as a strong enemy fleet, managing challenges such as piracy and proliferation demands ships, aircraft, and surveillance assets in large numbers. Otherwise a navy cannot provide adequate geographic coverage of afflicted sea areas. Capital ships are unnecessary to combat pirates or weapons traffickers, who have neither the need nor the ability to command the sea. Large numbers of low-end craft are more suitable for police duty. Indeed, the maxim that quantity has a quality all its own is especially apt for navies and coast guards performing constabulary work.

But large-scale construction of patrol craft diverts resources from building the warships needed to win command. The dilemma for a nation like the United States, which regards itself both as the trustee of the sea-lanes and as defender of its own interests and prerogatives against rival sea powers, is to allocate scarce resources wisely. It must preserve adequate combat capacity while fielding sufficient numbers to exercise sea control.

This is not a new debate. Writing in 1897, the editor of Harper’s, the anti-imperialist Carl Schurz, pronounced Theodore Roosevelt’s advocacy of a great battle fleet self-defeating. Across the Atlantic, far removed from great-power strife, the United States “should have a smart little navy enabling us to do our share of police duty on the seas,” Schurz declared. Aside from that, the American people should enjoy the blessings of “an unarmed peace.”33

Now as in the age of Schurz, Roosevelt, and Mahan, there is a dualism to Washington’s strategic predicament. Piracy is now a matter of course in the Strait of Malacca and the Gulf of Aden, but those areas and the threats there are remote from the daily lives of Americans. On the other hand, the threat that would impinge on daily life—a near-peer competitor that strives with the United States for maritime dominance—has not yet fully gestated. China’s navy remains an abstract conception for the moment—magnifying the dilemmas before statesmen, strategists, and force planners trying to meet the challenge.

Chinese leaders want to keep any naval threat to the United States or its Asian allies as abstract as possible commensurate with Beijing’s aims, of course. By lying low, they believe they will avoid supplying Washington an excuse—and the political momentum—to rebuild America’s force posture in the region. China has nevertheless aggravated matters in the South China Sea and East China Sea with its attempts to establish sovereign jurisdiction over islands, atolls, and reefs; the adjoining waters; and the skies overhead. Whether its actions apply a stimulus comparable to World War II or the Cold War—crystallizing Americans’ thinking about the possibility of Mahanian naval strife—remains doubtful.

Julian Corbett’s wisdom bears on this strategic problem. Corbett vouchsafes that an uncommanded sea is the normal state of affairs, hinting that the blanket coverage implied by Mahan’s notion of “overbearing power” sweeping enemies from the sea is too resource-intensive to sustain for any meaningful period of time.34 Former CNO and Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, surveying a strategic setting typified by stagnant or declining resources and manifold operational demands, evidently concluded as much in 2005.

The ability to scatter forces over wide expanses while concentrating them at vital points is the key to protecting shipping. Corbett, accordingly, implores naval commanders who want to approximate command of the sea to work toward “elastic cohesion” on the high seas.³⁵ The fleet should spread out as far as possible while remaining able to coalesce for action at some contested point. Admiral Mullen saw coaxing allies and partners into an informal “thousand-ship navy,” or seagoing coalition, as the best way to realize Corbett’s ideal.

Foreign officials objected to Mullen’s term “navy,” claiming it implied they must submit to American command. Such qualms prompted naval leaders to rename the thousand-ship navy the “Global Maritime Partnership.” For them the collective approach represented the only way to deploy sufficient resources in vital waters and airspace.³⁶ Enter the 2007 Maritime Strategy. The “Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower” represented 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 ever.

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.”37 In fact, the 1986 Maritime Strategy was a naval strategy promulgated by CNO James Watkins and the U.S. Marine Commandant, General P. X. Kelley. Ensuing strategic documents like “… From the Sea” (1992) and “Forward … from the Sea” (1995) were co-signed by the secretary of the navy, the CNO, and the commandant, and purported to embody the sea services’ consensus strategic vision.³⁸ The 2007 Maritime Strategy was the first to incorporate the U.S. Coast Guard, signifying the sea services’ embrace of counterpiracy, counter-proliferation, and other operations resembling law enforcement.

The makers of the Cooperative Strategy 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 conformed to the Obama administration’s leanings. How the Trump administration and future presidencies will manage the tension between police and combat functions remains to be seen, but there is no escaping the persistence of both power politics and systemic maladies. The Cooperative Strategy acknowledges this, vowing to stage “credible combat power” in the western Pacific, Indian Ocean, and Persian Gulf for the foreseeable future while also overseeing the liberal system of maritime trade and commerce over which the United States has presided since 1945.

Will the American body politic support such an open-ended, resource-intensive maritime strategy? The outlook remains uncertain. Mahan himself worried that the character of the American people and their government might work against sea power. The incentives just might not be there. For instance, he wrote, the United States spanned a continent. And like France, it boasted a pleasant climate and abundant resources. America’s ability to provide for itself tended to distract attention from seafaring pursuits “in this our period of commercial and naval decadence.”³⁹ Americans might—and perhaps will—turn inward again.

The convivial North American surroundings contrasted starkly with the British Isles, whose poverty of natural resources drove Britons to the sea in search of trade and prosperity.40 Or, suggested Mahan, Americans might resemble the Dutch during their golden age of seafaring. Ruled by merchants loath to levy taxes, the Dutch “would not pay” for a navy able to sustain their republic’s position vis-à-vis an England on the make.⁴¹ Mahan deemed Dutchmen too tightfisted to endure.

If they mimicked the French or Dutch examples, Americans would lose out in the struggle for maritime supremacy through sheer neglect. There is some cause for concern today by Mahanian indices. “If sea power be really based upon a peaceful and extensive commerce,” contends Mahan, “aptitude for commercial pursuits must be a distinguishing feature of the nations that have at one time or another been great upon the sea.”⁴² The United States enjoys robust commerce buoyed by the international economic system it helped create after World War II. Geography remains favorable, furthermore. Hawaii and Guam are American soil, giving the U.S. military a stronghold in the second island chain and a lifeline to it.

Yet projecting power into the first island chain is a matter of adroit alliance management with nations such as Japan and South Korea. Indeed, America has no strategic position in Asia without alliances. With regard to shipping, the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard remain the world’s foremost national fleet, but the U.S.-flagged merchant fleet is little more than an afterthought. The vast bulk of American goods travel in foreign-flagged hulls. The prospects for U.S. staying power in the Indo-Pacific, then, appear decidedly mixed by Mahanian measures.

As a result, the 2007 Maritime Strategy handled diplomacy toward Asian audiences delicately. Its drafters shied away from naming an enemy. China is conspicuously absent from the document. Nor is a maritime-strategy document necessarily the right forum to profile specific threats in any event. After all, the Pentagon already publishes annual reports to Congress on Chinese military power, updating its estimates of the PLA’s military potential and evolving strategy on an ongoing basis.

Nor, a decade ago, was it obvious what trajectory Chinese naval development would take. At that time the PLA Navy appeared unlikely to match the global reach and capability the Soviet Navy displayed in the 1970s. China’s navy partook of the Gulf of Aden counterpiracy expedition almost from its inception, generally keeping a three-ship contingent on station off Somalia and ultimately opening a support base at nearby Djibouti. That modest deployment pales by comparison with the Okean-75 naval exercises that showcased the Soviet Navy’s blue-water prowess. Since China’s maritime ambitions appeared unassuming, U.S. sea-service leaders refused to name China as a foe and risk creating the self-fulfilling prophecy of U.S.-China enmity.

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. Tokyo’s annual defense white papers, entitled Defense of Japan, concede that Japan cannot guarantee its national security solely through independent efforts. Defense of Japan 2016 thus pronounces the U.S.-Japan alliance the “centerpiece of Japan’s security” and a “cornerstone of the peace and prosperity of the Asia-Pacific region.” The alliance, moreover, will become “indispensable,” the white paper says, as the “security environment surrounding Japan becomes increasingly severe.”43

Having bound their fortunes inextricably to America, Japanese leaders monitor shifts in U.S. policy and strategy carefully. They look for signs that Washington will abandon Japan in its hour of need. Alternatively, they fear that Washington may do something unwise, entrapping Tokyo into actions counter to its interests. Japan, in short, is wary of its superpower patron. At the same time, Japan’s strategic community is deeply conflicted about China’s future and about Tokyo’s long-term relationship with its giant neighbor.

Japanese ambivalence about Chinese ascendancy is by no means unanimous. Those who advocate continued engagement with China were probably relieved to find no explicit references to China in the 2007 Maritime Strategy, rightfully fearing 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.

Querulous Southeast Asian leaders likewise count on the United States to counterbalance China’s pretensions to dominance in their home region. This has become increasingly difficult since Beijing commenced trying to enforce its claims to “indisputable sovereignty” over most of the South China Sea and began manufacturing islands and infrastructure to support military aircraft and shipping there.44 Excessive deference or hostility to Beijing, then, could corrode the maritime order the U.S. Navy has presided over since 1945. Striking a delicate balance within any policy initiative for Asia is no easy feat.

Several aspects of the 2007 Cooperative Strategy warrant special scrutiny. The authors start by taking note of the interconnected nature of the globalized world. They side firmly with Harvard scholar Joseph Nye and long-dead British diplomat Eyre Crowe, who portray defense of the system as an international public good—something that benefits all seafaring nations.⁴⁵ By providing for maritime security over the past seven-plus decades, the U.S. Navy earned legitimacy for American rule of the seas, much as the Royal Navy legitimized British supremacy during the age of sail. While the document makes no mention of Mahan, moreover, it conforms to his ideas about the primacy of commerce, as outlined in chapter 1, and thus to his 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.46

Wars large or small may persist the service chiefs say, but the Maritime Strategy portrays them more as disruptions to the system than as direct threats to U.S. maritime preponderance. The document’s architects also include war on a list of ills that includes not only threats—that is, challenges that fuse 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 baneful phenomena opens up the possibility of the Navy’s acting in myriad contingencies. Tracing “cascading and harmful effects” to their source, attacking that source, and doing so without serious unforeseen consequences is no simple matter.

The Cooperative Strategy took a starkly different perspective on strategy than did the Reagan administration’s strategy. That is no accident: it was a strategy for a different world. The Cold War divided the world up into rival camps. The 2007 Maritime Strategy broadcast the message that all nations are stakeholders in the system and should help preserve it by jointly supplying the public good of freedom of the sea. Combined action, furthermore, would nurture “confidence and trust among nations through collective security efforts that focus on common threats and mutual interests in an open, multipolar world.” In turn, a healthier world system would result. The document’s key passage 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.47

Loosely speaking, this means the sea services must simultaneously preserve their battle readiness to guard against traditional military conflict and hone their proficiency at police functions, nation building, naval diplomacy, and the like. The Maritime Strategy implies that such functions can be neatly partitioned, with separate combat and constabulary forces executing their missions. In reality U.S. Navy, Marine, and Coast Guard units have found themselves pressed into service in either capacity. Such has been the burden for seafarers since antiquity, when Greek navies fought one another on the high seas, attacked or defended merchant shipping, or struck at pirates, depending on the wishes of their political masters.

What of the means to these expansive ends? The Maritime Strategy directs the maritime services to pursue six “expanded core capabilities”: forward presence, deterrence, sea control, power projection ashore, maritime security, and humanitarian assistance and disaster response. To realize these capabilities it orders the sea services 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. Despite all their talk about cooperation, 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.48 (Our emphasis)

The document thus strikes a martial note, evoking the Mahanian grammar of maritime operations while focusing squarely on Asia. Indeed, it goes beyond anything Mahan himself would have espoused. Mahan wanted a U.S. Navy able to dominate the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea along with the Pacific lifeline to the Philippine Islands; the 2007 Maritime Strategy reserves the right to command any navigable expanse on the planet at Washington’s discretion. The directive’s specific mention of potential enemy capabilities, namely submarines, is particularly noteworthy. While Russia has made headlines in recent years as it renews its maritime activism, China remains the only naval power in the world that has amassed undersea might 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) along with two classes of second-generation nuclear-powered subs (the Jin SSBN and the Shang SSN). Additional nuclear boats are reportedly in the works. Such concerted effort is unrivaled anywhere. The passage quoted above marks the closest the 2007 Maritime Strategy comes to identifying China’s naval modernization as a major challenge to U.S. Navy sea command. If the threat is measured in terms of an adversary’s capacity to sortie and operate large numbers of modern submarines, then China must rank atop or near the top of any list of competitors.

“Critical to this notion [of sea control],” declares 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.”49 Such language would have been instantly familiar to Mahan in his most warlike mood—even though he scarcely foresaw a globe-spanning U.S. Navy.

Beyond that, the Maritime Strategy says little about force structure. This too is by design. The strategy’s authors took inspiration from Mahan’s logic of commercial, political, and military access, as befitted their emphasis on cooperation. As we noted before, the Maritime Strategy sets forth a logic of sea power predicated on U.S. leadership. Its primary audiences reside in foreign capitals and the international community. Advocating a particular makeup for a U.S. national fleet would fall flat with audiences overseas—especially given the unsettled conditions the strategy predicts in an unevenly globalizing world and the imperative to deliver a message congenial to overseas observers.

Still less could the document’s authors predict in advance which foreign partners would join which specific endeavors. This is the nature of founding and leading a standing coalition or coalitions to oversee freedom of the maritime common. The service chiefs appeared content to let debates over the grammar of maritime strategy and forces sort themselves out elsewhere. Operational grammar seemed likely to need modifying from contingency to contingency, depending on the challenge and the kind and magnitude of foreign support Washington hoped to assemble. In short, combined maritime strategy promised to be a kaleidoscopic affair, with maritime consortiums shifting according to the partners’ needs and interests of the moment.

From Hybrid toward Mahanian Strategy: The 2015 “Refresh”

Three things are noteworthy about the “refreshed”—or more accurately, revised and expanded—2015 “Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower.” First, China puts in several appearances; the service chiefs are no longer so reticent about naming potential antagonists. Second, the 2015 derivative propagates the trend inaugurated in 2007 toward a more Mahanian outlook. And third, despite these differences, the document’s release elicited little commentary within naval officialdom or the affiliated scholarly community. The 2007 Cooperative Strategy, in contrast, occasioned months of debate among stakeholders.

That China now rates explicit mention is a function of changes to the strategic and operational setting since 2007—chiefly changes wrought by China’s bellicose conduct since the 2010 time frame. While China’s high-seas activism does present some opportunities for collaboration, notes the document, “China’s naval expansion also presents challenges when it employs force or intimidation against other sovereign nations to assert territorial claims. This behavior, along with a lack of transparency in its military intentions, contributes to tension and instability, potentially leading to miscalculation or even escalation.”50

The strategy also refers to China by proxy, noting that anti-access and area-denial weaponry “allows potential adversaries to threaten naval and air forces at greater ranges,” complicating U.S. “access to some maritime regions … as well as our ability to maneuver within those regions … including the littoral and landward access.”⁵¹ China, of course, has invested lavishly in such an arsenal.

But China constitutes just one among a dizzying multitude of hostile actors and challenges the Maritime Strategy catalogues. Indeed, the 2015 strategy bulks forty-eight pages, more than twice the length of its predecessor. The sea services declare that they will help manage all of these challenges. Strategy is first and foremost a matter of setting and enforcing priorities. The sheer size of the Maritime Strategy suggests that, as of 2015, the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard were not yet ready to embrace the reality of long-term strategic competition against an assertive China—and make that their priority.

While the refreshed strategy is more Mahanian in outlook than its 2007 forerunner, it scarcely even approaches the grim tenor of the 1986 Maritime Strategy. It marks incremental cultural readjustment to a world of renewed great-power politics. Perhaps that is why it occasioned little debate among navalists following its publication. The 2007 Cooperative Strategy marked something entirely new in maritime history, but however much the 2015 strategy differed from its predecessor in cosmetic terms, it constituted a venture in gradualism.

A Tale of Evolving Strategies

What guidance can we distill from the U.S. Navy’s evolving strategies? We treat the 2007 and 2015 editions of the Cooperative Strategy as a unit for simplicity’s sake; the former swiveled the sea services toward a more Mahanian world, and the latter kept the Mahanian pivot going. What do the likenesses and disparities between the 1986 and 2007/2015 maritime strategies say about making and adapting strategy in today’s increasingly competitive Asian nautical environment?

First, the strategies are written on two different analytical planes. The 1986 document speaks primarily to operational-level commanders, corresponding to the Mahanian grammar of sea combat and to Mahan’s and Corbett’s writings on fleet tactics. The 2007 and 2015 variants are pitched at the grand-strategic level, corresponding to Mahan’s sea-power philosophy; to the logic of commercial, diplomatic, and military access; and to Huntington’s definition of a strategic concept. Ideas about sea power manifest themselves in the Cooperative Strategy. Specific insight into operations, tactics, and fleet design is in short supply.

Second, there is considerable interplay between the operational and strategic levels, as we demonstrated while perusing the interactions between undersea deterrence and maritime anti-access. The Watkins-Lehman strategy, for instance, envisioned skewing the nuclear balance in America’s favor even in a conventional conflict, as the strategy’s critics pointed out. An operational vision of offensive naval warfare thus took on strategic and political repercussions. Even though it remains silent on operations and tactics, the Cooperative Strategy too will impinge on such practical matters.

Moreover, the 2007/2015 strategy in effect—and perhaps unbeknownst to its framers—inaugurated a project of world-historical scope. For roughly the past five centuries a single predominant sea power has exercised trusteeship over the global system of maritime trade and commerce. The Cooperative Strategy, by contrast, proclaims in effect that the United States will found and lead a standing coalition or family of coalitions and partnerships—a “global network of navies,” to quote the 2015 strategy—to preside over the system.52 This is unprecedented. And the United States will do all of this from a position of relative weakness and at a time when it has fewer and fewer resources to devote to the enterprise.

As a result, America’s say in coalition circles is on the wane while it tries to orchestrate something uniquely ambitious. Call it the Golden Rule of coalition building: he who has the gold makes the rules, with the corollary that he who has less gold has less say about the rules. Managing a partnership with little to contribute to it promises to prove tough. Thus, executing the Cooperative Strategy will demand naval diplomacy of extraordinary dexterity long into the future.⁵³ Whether officialdom has come to terms with the coalition dynamics it is likely to encounter remains to be seen.

Having an adversary to impart focus, and having a leadership willing to be frank about identifying and planning against that adversary, simplifies the intellectual challenge before strategists. That was the case when naval leaders formulated the 1986 strategy. But there are vast differences between the strategic contexts then and now. The Soviet naval threat had been real and compelling for well over a decade by the time Watkins and Lehman began pushing their new approach. The drafters of the 2007 strategy had no such luck. By 2015 the service chiefs were edging in a more competitive direction as it became increasingly hard to deny that China posed a serious challenge to American maritime supremacy.

The Cooperative Strategy could itself help shape the nature and magnitude of a Chinese threat. Think of how the 1986 strategy would have influenced strategic debates in Moscow had it been released in, say, 1960—before Admiral Gorshkov embarked on his fleet-building enterprise and before the Soviet Navy posed more than a nuisance. In all likelihood a declaratory strategy proclaiming that the U.S. Navy intended to sink its Soviet antagonist in its home waters would have strengthened Gorshkov’s hand in internal quarrels with the army and air force over strategy and resources.

Warlike talk from the U.S. Navy and Marines might have prompted Moscow to take a far more offensive stance at sea, overriding the Soviets’ strategic preference for fighting within their blue belt of defense. The same logic applies to China. Updating the 1986 strategy in the 2007 timeframe might well have proved counterproductive in Asian waters. A bellicose U.S. document might have undermined the policy agenda of top Chinese leaders who to date had exhibited a preference for moderation and conciliation while projecting a pacific image of Chinese sea power.

Such a strategy, then, would have been premature in 2007. It appeared more prudent to give Beijing a chance to vindicate the leadership’s assurances about the beneficent nature of Chinese sea power. Issued back then, a grammatically driven approach to U.S. maritime strategy might well have foreclosed prospects for cooperation at sea. We should always be skeptical of casual claims that being forthright with China will bring about a self-fulfilling prophecy, giving rise to rivalry and antagonism. Such claims too readily devolve into excuses for doing nothing about this emerging challenge. Still, reviving the 1986 strategy too soon would have darkened the maritime environment in Asia, alarming allies and undecided powers alike.

By 2015, however, China had had its chance to act beneficently and had squandered it through overbearing conduct toward fellow Asians. Its actions reshaped the strategic environment to a point where something more along the lines of the 1986 Maritime Strategy appeared more fitting. Nevertheless, strategy statements can themselves become part of strategic interaction with adversaries, allies, or bystanders. Careless phrasing is tantamount to self-defeating behavior.

This basic fact molded both the 1986 and 2007/2015 maritime strategies. The audiences for U.S. nautical outreach 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 and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that take an interest in oceanic affairs.54 Clearly, the diplomatic geometry becomes more and more unwieldy 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 2007/2015 Maritime Strategy attempts a far more difficult feat. Because it elaborates principles without going deeply into specifics, the 2007/2015 strategy may prove more durable than its predecessor and better suited to 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 such uncomfortable subjects as U.S.-China naval rivalry. Roosevelt simply meant that governments should foreswear bluster. Soft-pedaling the chances for naval conflict undercuts the case for platforms like aircraft carriers and Aegis destroyers, potentially debilitating American naval might. And it does so while fanning speculation in Asia about American fortitude in the face of a militarily strong if not militant China.

That would constitute 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, consequently, it is better to speak softly—but also frankly—about the proper uses of maritime power.

A Full-Bore Mahanian Strategy?

Signs indicate that the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard have come to embrace the coming Mahanian future and have started girding themselves for it. In 2011, for example, CNO Jonathan Greenert issued a set of “Sailing Directions” ranking warfighting first among the “tenets” of U.S. naval operations.55 This terse directive signaled a turnabout in attitudes from the 2007 Cooperative Strategy, which afforded noncombat functions coequal standing with combat. Mahanian utterances were increasingly commonplace within a few short years after 2007—suggesting that events were turning naval leaders’ post-Mahanian world upside down.

Admiral John Richardson continued to sound these themes after succeeding Admiral Greenert as CNO in 2015. CNO Richardson published a “Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority” in 2016, acknowledging that “the United States is facing a return to great power competition” for the first time since the Cold War, singling out China and Russia as serious competitors, and pledging to “maintain a fleet that is trained and ready to operate and fight decisively—from the deep ocean to the littorals, from the sea floor to space, and in the information domain.”⁵⁶ And in 2017, in a similar vein, Admiral Thomas Rowden, the commander of U.S. Navy surface forces, released a strategy statement vowing to “return to sea control” and thus making it the North Star of naval operations once again.⁵⁷

Suppose naval overseers persevere with their Mahanian turn. What would a latter-day counterpart to the 1986 Maritime Strategy look like? Clear similarities to the Cold War would mold any such strategy. For one, China is a competitor on the march, just as the Soviet Union went on its march during the 1970s. China’s rise to economic and military eminence is compelling the United States to choose between building up armed strength and forfeiting crucial national interests, just as Soviet adventurism prodded the U.S. Navy to reawaken from its post-Mahanian slumber of the 1950s and 1960s and the post-Vietnam funk of the 1970s. Returning to Mahanian history involves wrenching cultural and material changes.

For another, China’s military has fielded a reconnaissance-strike complex designed to proscribe unwanted entry into offshore waters or, failing that, to impose forbidding costs on hostile forces that dare venture into those waters. But while the Soviet military never perfected an ASBM, the PLA evidently has. Operating in concert with shore-based aircraft and missiles and short-range submarines and patrol craft, ASBMs have hoisted a protective aegis over the China seas and western Pacific, augmenting the firepower of the PLA Navy surface fleet. In effect the PLA has amalgamated the ideas of the fortress fleet, the jeune école, and the offensively minded battle fleet into a single implement of sea combat. It took Chinese weapons engineering to fulfill the promise of the Russian concepts of the fortress fleet and the blue belt of defense. The U.S. Navy, meanwhile, is struggling to crack China’s anti-access defenses, in part by developing new weaponry and in part by concentrating combat power in maritime Asia.

So there is a whiff of the 1980s about U.S.-China strategic competition. Now, for the differences separating the Cold War from today: First of all, Moscow faced the prospect of a two-front war. Soviet forces would find themselves fighting to their west in continental Europe and also around the marine periphery as the U.S. sea services carried the fight into the offshore bastions. But whereas the sea represented a secondary theater for the Soviet Union, it is the primary theater for China. China, after all, faces few overland threats that might deflect attention and assets from seaborne competition. Beijing places enormous weight on managing the seas landward of the first island chain as well as a buffer to the islands’ east, and it can afford to allocate the bulk of its efforts and resources there. The PLA, then, promises to be a more troublesome high-seas competitor than the Soviet military ever was.

Second, the U.S. sea services’ operational objectives would differ in a China contingency from those assigned during the Cold War. The Lehman-Watkins strategy directed U.S. Navy task forces to steam into Soviet nautical bastions to assail the Soviet SSBN fleet. In theory the imperative to defend SSBNs would stretch Soviet defenses out around the Soviet Union’s geographic periphery—alleviating pressure on the Central Front in Europe and tilting the military balance toward NATO. That theory may not apply to China. While the PLAN has made strides in undersea deterrence, the Chinese leadership evidently does not affix the same importance to SSBNs as did Soviet potentates.

If that is the case, threatening them would not summon forth the overreaction the framers of the 1986 strategy expected from Soviet defenders. It would not distort PLA defenses in the allies’ favor. The U.S. leadership, consequently, should make sinking the PLAN surface fleet the objective of U.S. naval operations in the western Pacific. Beijing does appear to care about the fleet it has invested such time, treasure, and effort assembling. A Mahanian strategy, then, could aspire to operational and tactical goals that would elicit a smile from Mahan himself.

And third, U.S. joint forces can turn geography to advantage today in a way they never could vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Access to the oceans is a vital interest for China today in a way it never was for the Soviets, or even for China’s Cold War self. U.S. allies occupy the first island chain. Forces stationed there could close the straits piercing the island chain to Chinese submarines, surface shipping, and aircraft. U.S. and allied ground forces could emplace mobile missile-armed detachments on islands adjoining the straits to imperil PLA forces attempting east-west movement between the China seas and western Pacific, not to mention north-south movement along the Asian seaboard. Submarine, surface, and air forces prowling along the island chain would solidify the barricade. In effect the allies would mount a reciprocal anti-access strategy, putting PLA commanders on notice that they are not the only ones who can restrict an antagonist’s access to crucial waters and skies.

This is a lot to accomplish. The contest matches up a fraction of U.S. maritime forces against the combined weight of a concentrated PLA on its own home ground, far from American ground. U.S. naval officialdom must revisit the 1980s as it charts a Mahanian strategy to handle such adverse strategic conditions. Officials must be brutally honest with themselves as they inquire into history. And they must stay humble. Hubris is a deadly sin of naval warfare, and it manifests itself from time to time in naval circles. It does no one any good to crow—as two admirals did not long ago—that PLA Navy ships can’t “fight their way out of a wet paper bag” while a U.S. Navy ship “will rock anything that it comes up against,” or that comparing Chinese and American submarines is like “comparing a Model T with a Corvette.”58

That the U.S. Navy outcompeted its chief antagonist during the 1980s does not mean it is fated to do the same today. If China represents a tougher seaborne competitor now than the Soviet Union was then, and if the Reagan administration believed it would take a six-hundred-ship navy to prosecute a Mahanian strategy against the Soviet Navy, what does this imply about the size and shape a Mahanian U.S. Navy should take to outcompete the PLA? The answer may be that the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard need to be far larger and brawnier than protagonists to the debate over sizing and configuring the sea services allow.

The Mahanian future that awaits may demand nothing less.