THERE ARE TWO ELEMENTS affecting the future of warfare that relate specifically to the fact that nearly three-quarters of the earth are covered by oceans.
The first is that it is upon the oceans that the vast bulk of the oil, textiles, food, machinery, and other manufactured products in overseas exchange are carried. Since trade is the principal concern of all nations, the United States is the most important factor in determining whether the world will remain open to trade or succumb to protectionism. This is not because the United States has the world’s largest economy but because it possesses the world’s greatest navy.
The second element is that the U.S. Navy, primarily by means of carrier task forces, can project power to any coast on earth where the nation decides it must gain control. There it can blockade an enemy’s ports or, with the air force, form a shield for army or marine forces to invade.
The United States also is the only power that can exert the necessary force to stop any other state from projecting a major military operation by sea to a distant shore, or to promote or prevent trade. As the classic definer of sea power, Alfred Thayer Mahan, pointed out a century ago, the greatest navy can sweep the navies—and the commerce—of all other countries from the seas.
The U.S. Navy advertises that it has adopted a new strategy of concentrating on maneuver from the sea and warfare around the littorals (coastal regions) of the world’s oceans. This change, the navy says, “represents a fundamental shift away from open-ocean warfighting on the sea toward joint operations conducted from the sea.”1 However, no navy—including that of the Soviet Union—has challenged American control of the open oceans since the U.S. Navy destroyed Japan’s last fleet off the Philippines in 1944. Since World War II, all naval military actions have been maneuvers or threats onto the littoral “from the sea”: Korea, Quemoy and Matsu islands off China, Vietnam, Lebanon, and the Persian Gulf War, plus many smaller force projections.
The great military advantage of carrier task forces is that they permit the United States to make its power felt on any shore where ships can sail and on the hinterland behind that shore. Since the major potential dangers to the United States are countries with seacoasts, carriers are always a latent threat. The navy can physically reach almost any spot in the world where it may have to exert its force. Once there, it can establish a virtually permanent presence. The navy also permits the United States to maintain its military superiority, because by controlling the seas, it can assure seaborne delivery of American ground forces wherever they have to be sent.
As discussed in chapter 1, the U.S. Navy finds itself now with the same capability the Royal Navy possessed from the seventeenth century through World War I. In that era the Royal Navy exploited its command of the seas by insuring that world trade would flow on terms advantageous to Britain. Any country that challenged Britain suffered the destruction not only of its navy but of its seaborne commerce. In this period Holland, Spain, and France contested Britain and, losing, endured enormous economic damage. Britain succeeded because it had the most men-of-war and the best seamen and because it acquired colonies or safe ports at the ends of trade routes. There its ships, military and merchant, could lie in safety.
Today such bases are no longer necessary. The U.S. Navy’s Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers can go one million miles without refueling. Though support ships have shorter ranges and may have to be resupplied with fuel or replaced on long voyages, an eight-to-twelve-ship American carrier task force can project enormous power wherever the ocean rolls.
Moreover, forward-deployed carriers can reach a danger spot faster than any other major force. When Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, the nuclear carrier Eisenhower was at Naples, Italy, and the nonnuclear carrier Independence was in the eastern Indian Ocean. Within forty-eight hours these ships were at points within range of Iraqi targets. This may have played some role in stopping Iraq from marching into Saudi Arabia.2
In addition, a carrier task force at sea is extremely hard to hit. This is despite the doubts raised about the survivability of warships after an Argentine airplane destroyed the Royal Navy’s most modern vessel, HMS Sheffield, with a single French-made Exocet missile in the Falklands War of 1982. The Sheffield did not possess enough defensive weapons to ward off a missile attack, whereas a carrier task force has an immense array of guns, missiles, and aerial platforms that can stop practically any missile, aircraft, or submarine thrown against it.3
A task force’s first line of defense consists of specially designed early-warning aircraft, operating two-hundred or more miles from the force. These aircraft detect air and surface objects, including incoming missiles, and can direct U.S. aircraft or weapons to destroy missiles or attackers. Backing up these early-warning aircraft are nuclear-powered attack submarines and antisubmarine fixed-wing aircraft with sensors and weapons to destroy enemy subs. Closer in to the force are antisubmarine helicopters working with surface escorts with antiair and antisub weapons. Consequently, a task force can detect, identify, locate, and destroy an enemy threat well before it can reach the core of the force, the carrier.
There have been suggestions that jet-propelled cruise missiles on the order of American Tomahawks could replace aircraft carriers. Tomahawks can be dispatched at ranges of more than 500 miles, can get under enemy radar by flying as close as fifty feet to the surface, and can confuse defenders by following evasive flight paths. Naval ships launched them with great effect against targets on shore during the Gulf War. They also can be fired against other ships, giving rise to the argument that they may be a less-vulnerable substitute for a carrier task force. But cruise missiles, even guided by inerrant satellite navigation, will have great difficulty hitting ships at sea. Ships are constantly moving, whereas a cruise missile, to be deadly accurate, must be plotted against a stationary target. Also, cruise missile aiming radar cannot distinguish the size of a ship, seeing a small vessel and the heart of a task force, the carrier, as the same. In addition, sophisticated defense systems such as a carrier task force deploys can detect and destroy most cruise missiles. Finally, present-day cruise missiles carry only about a thousand pounds of payload.4
By comparison, a nuclear carrier mounts eighty-five to ninety aircraft and these can fly 100 to 150 sorties a day, around the clock, for weeks at a time. About half will be defensive sorties to protect the carrier group, the other half attack strikes by upgraded F-14s and F / A-18s.5 But the F-14 can carry four tons of payload (plus four air-to-air missiles) and the F / A-18 8.5 tons. These aircraft can deliver about 450 tons of ordnance in a day—or the equivalent of 900 Tomahawks.6 Although cruise missiles are important offensive weapons, they cannot produce the enormous concentrated striking power of a carrier task force.
The U.S. Air Force can use overseas land bases outside of immediate combat areas to mount air strikes at potential danger spots. From such bases (like those in Turkey in the Persian Gulf War), air force stealth aircraft and increased-range aircraft should reduce air losses from ground attacks dramatically. However, aircraft at fixed forward bases within a combat area tend to be more vulnerable. The United States does not have enough overseas land bases to mount air strikes at all potential danger spots, and may not get enough of them in the future. In the Vietnam War, more than 400 U.S. and allied aircraft were lost from ground attacks and more than 4,000 additional were damaged. But, since North Vietnamese aircraft could not reach the carriers, not a single sea-based aircraft was lost or damaged on them.7
The navy has a weakness as well: controlling close-in approaches to land and choke points. Retired Vice Admiral M. W. Cagle says an enemy with few or no ships in some cases can make it difficult to land soldiers or marines on shore in narrow waters by deploying mines, missiles, and submarines. “Today’s terrible mines, magnetic, pressure, contact, and with ingenious ways for them to ‘count’ passing vessels before becoming activated, pose one great problem for us and a smart and inexpensive counter by an opponent.”8
In summary, the combination of the strengths of all the services can optimize their effects, while offsetting their weaknesses. The air force is the nation’s “long arm,” capable of swift, devastating strikes from great distances. The navy can project a forward presence on any shoreline. The army can deliver sustained combat, a process that can destroy enemy forces. No country in the world can defeat this combination.9
It is impossible to predict whether a major Eurasian power will embark, as Germany did twice and Japan once in this century, on a march to gain regional or continental hegemony. History shows that economic problems combined with national avarice can produce the toxic reaction of aggression. However, if the United States maintains its superior military power and if it challenges aggressors the first time they show their nature, aggression may be averted—or stopped in time.
Even without overt aggression by ambitious powers, however, economic issues are so important to people that chances of collisions over them are great. Most nations and groups of nations attempt to exploit economic opportunities wherever they find them and try to carve out domains which favor themselves and discourage or exclude others.10
The United States can now dominate the world’s economy, if it chooses. As shown in chapter I, its navy rules the oceans and can order sea-borne trade to its liking, and it can control the oil production and reserves of the Persian Gulf or anywhere else oil is carried by sea. Persian Gulf petroleum, plus that of North America which the United States already controls, equals 35 percent of world oil production and harbors 65 percent of world reserves. Other nations have awakened to the realization that U.S. domination of the Persian Gulf means it has the power to set production quotas and prices, and direct the movement of oil.11
Since any U.S. effort to hold oil and the sea lanes hostage would result in an immense anti-American alliance, the United States is far more likely to use other devices to advance its economic interests. The rise of great regional trading blocs, like the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement, arouses the greatest anxiety because they erect barriers against outsiders.
The world is far from achieving economic laissez-faire or unrestricted trade as advocated by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations in 1776 and ballyhooed by numerous politicians as the goal today. Instead, the world still faces the enormous dangers of protectionism. After World War I numerous governments attempted to restrict trade by seeking autarky, or economic self-sufficiency within their countries or empires and reducing imports from the outside. This not only exacerbated the worldwide economic depression of the 1930s but was one of the causes of World War II.
An expression of this effort was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which set the highest import duties in U.S. history, led to retaliation in Europe, reduced world trade greatly, and contributed to an already powerful urge by Japan to carve out an empire in East Asia. American opposition led directly to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and to American entrance into World War II.
Today nearly all national governments realize that the world depends upon international trade and there are strong movements to reduce tariff barriers and other restrictions limiting traffic between countries and blocs of countries. But history shows that peoples seek their economic advancement, even at the expense of others. Human cupidity will always threaten overt or covert efforts to inhibit trade—and this tendency constitutes a great potential source of war.
One instance of the sorts of problems we will face: cobalt, chromium, platinum, and manganese are essential to some industrial production and cannot be substituted. For example, chromium is required to make alloys hard enough to withstand the high combustion temperatures of gas-turbine engines. Most of the world’s cobalt comes from Zaire and Zambia; most of its chromium, platinum, and manganese, vital in some industrial processes, comes from South Africa. Political problems in these countries could hurt all industrial powers. Likewise, efforts to corral supplies of these minerals by the United States or its major industrial competitors, Japan, the European Union, and the Pacific Rim countries, could destabilize the world.12
The United States, through military intervention in regions of contention, or through the force of its navy upon the oceans, can restrict world trade to its advantage. The United States is extremely unlikely to exercise this power. It seeks peace and prosperity throughout the world, and will almost assuredly keep world trade relatively open. Nevertheless, protectionist systems such as the European Union and NAFTA leave the question open as to whether there will be a resurrection of efforts at autarkic self-sufficiency.