The Future of American Naval Power: Propositions and Recommendations

Donald C.F. Daniel

This chapter sets down eight propositions about American naval power over the next 25 years, a period many would characterize as an era of increased globalization.¹ Several propositions are hypotheses subject to being judged true or false. Others are more properly postulates, statements not so much provably true or false as subject to validation (that is, to being judged as to whether they provide sensible bases for follow-on analysis and policymaking). Nine recommendations that flow naturally from these propositions are also listed for consideration by U.S. decisionmakers. The purpose for both propositions and recommendations is to help contribute to the ongoing [olicy debates on the role of naval power in the future international security environment.

U.S. Naval Superiority

The United States will possess the world’s premier navy for at least 2 to 3 decades. No one disputes the Navy’s present superiority, only the degree, and it is probably increasing as evidenced in the lament of allies who fear a loss of interoperability if they fall too far behind.² American efforts to develop network-centric naval operational capabilities have only compounded these fears. Network-centric operations involve interconnecting dispersed command elements, sensors, and weapons platforms so that informed combat decisions can be made at a speed that overwhelms enemy ability to keep up. That vision today is as much promise as it is reality, but over the next 2 decades, the Navy should move significantly down the road toward achievement.³

Unless there is a radical transformation in the type of naval platforms that the Navy will build, the force will continue to dwindle in number. With a near 50 percent decrease in the last decade alone, the Navy today has 315 mostly large, capital-intensive ships. This number could well drop to about 285 over the next 2 to 3 decades at present building trends.⁴

Nevertheless, the quality of the platforms and their supporting infrastructure means no other navy will match it. As the Soviet Union experienced during the Cold War, growing a world-class naval capability is expensive and involves more than just building platforms and supporting elements; it requires sorting out how to use them, and that process takes considerable time.

Indeed, the best option available for most state-based adversaries would be to build an anti-navy, not a comparable navy. This anti-navy is a relatively inexpensive sea denial force of afloat expendable surface elements, small quiet submarines, mines, shore-based aircraft, antiship missiles, and associated sensors and jammers. Its aim would be to deny U.S. naval forces access to littoral areas,⁵ and, depending upon circumstances, its threat could be significant in coastal waters and the high seas approaches.⁶

During the Falklands/Malvinas War, for example, the British Royal Navy, with 2 antisubmarine aircraft carriers,7 destroyers, 15 frigates, and 6 submarines, had to engage in extensive efforts to deal with only 2 Argentine submarines, one of which was caught on the surface early in the conflict. The campaign showed that antisubmarine warfare aimed at protecting surface ships operating in predictable areas familiar to an enemy is an inherently unfair game biased in favor of enemy submarines (see chapter 17).⁷ Similarly, during Operation Desert Storm, both the amphibious ship Tripoli and the guided missile cruiser Princeton struck Iraqi mines, developments that probably contributed to the allied decision not to undertake an amphibious landing (see chapter 20).

Unique Tasks and Roles?

What difference will it make that the United States will have the premier navy for the next quarter century? What does the U.S. Navy have to offer that is special or unique? Its assigned tasks include several overlapping activities, many of which come under the general rubric of contingency response and some of which have only recently come into prominence: maintaining a presence in various distant regions; providing humanitarian assistance; enforcing international sanctions (such as embargoes and no-fly zones); participating in or supporting peace operations, as well as supporting civil authorities including law enforcement agencies; evacuating Americans from danger areas; controlling sea areas so as to allow follow-on military operations or the secure transport of goods; deterring nuclear weapons strategically; engaging in retaliatory or compellence strikes; defending the American homeland and that of friends and allies; and conducting sustained offensive combat operations including interdiction of an enemy’s sea lines and the opposed seizure of coastal regions.

Of these activities, the only ones specific to the Navy involve sea control, the interdiction of sea lines, and the seizure of hostile coasts.⁸ Yet being able to perform these tasks in the past constituted a necessary feature of the infrastructure ⁹ for success in land-sea wars (that is, wars that “include a significant maritime aspect”¹⁰). With these capabilities, the winning coalition could adjust to setbacks on land,¹¹ compel its enemy to disperse his forces to deal with the threat of amphibious assault, and limit its enemy’s ability to draw on and consolidate resources from his friends and suppliers across water boundaries. Conversely, such capabilities could allow coalition members to bring to the fight—often at times and places of their own choosing—assets drawn from within and without their nations.¹² This is not to say that naval capabilities were the principal contributors to victory, but without them victory in land-sea wars might not have been achieved.

All of the other listed tasks and subtasks could or are regularly performed by the other services, and the issue thus becomes whether the Navy can make a special contribution to carrying them out.

Certainly the naval element of the U.S. strategic nuclear deterrence arsenal has been and will likely remain for another 25 years or so the foundation for strategic nuclear stability.¹³ Deployed U.S. ballistic missile submarines, unlike their fixed land-based counterparts, are and almost certainly will remain immune from attack since there is no evidence of any potential adversary nation being close to the technological breakthrough required to challenge underwater stealth. In fact, submarines now carry a significantly higher percentage of the Nation’s attributed missile warheads—63 percent in 2000, scheduled to rise to 77 percent in 2007, according to Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) II provisions (that is, if the United States goes to allowable limits.) ¹⁴

Some hold, however, that the special Navy role could eventually be eliminated. Their logic is that ballistic missile submarines are so expensive to develop and maintain that, when time comes to build a new fleet or if the United States significantly reduces its arsenal of strategic weapons, U.S. decisionmakers may conclude that the cost per warhead is too prohibitive. In either case, this argument goes, it would make more sense overall—notwithstanding the invulnerability of submarine basing—to revert to a nuclear dyad of land-based missiles and bombers.¹⁵

Until that happens, the special nuclear role of the Navy will remain, and it may complement a no less significant new responsibility: ballistic missile defense.¹⁶ Specifically, if the United States deploys a missile defense shield for itself or allies, basing parts at sea may be sensible should its combatant-based Aegis air defense system also prove effective as a missile interceptor.¹⁷ Seabasing is attractive because it can provide the capability to strike at missiles in boost or cruise phase while still relatively distant from the U.S. homeland or that of an ally (see chapter 24).

This role, however, would tie down valuable ships in an essentially static mission. Also, since they would be restricted to operating in predictable areas, extensive resources would have to be applied to protect them. But seabasing would still be attractive if alternative systems, most notably the Air Force experimental airborne laser, do not become operational.

Many of the Navy’s remaining tasks fall under the rubric of contingency response, and here the Navy does indeed have much to offer—but not as much as some naval proponents would argue. A baseline for discussion is the fact that U.S. naval surface ships responded to 325 political crises or an average of 6 times per year during the Cold War.¹⁸ They did so in 81 cases or 8 times yearly in the 1990s with 50 percent of the latter consisting of sequential operations involving Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, and Yugoslavia (Bosnia/Kosovo).¹⁹ Considering the longevity of the trend of six responses a year and the fact that there was no lessening with the end of the Cold War, it seems reasonable to extrapolate that level of utilization forward. In addition, naval use should further become more attractive as the United States reduces its reliance on foreign bases ²⁰ and traditional allies and as Asia “moves to the forefront” of America’s geopolitical planning in Washington.²¹

Globalization, Flexibility, and Contingency Response

Reinforcing these trends are the characteristics of U.S. naval forces that have made their use almost second nature to American policymakers ²² and that seem in tune with changing conceptions of strategy and scenarios. Jean-Marie Guehenno has argued that, because of globalization, determining long-term goals and political strategies to attain them “may become increasingly unrealistic: too many factors are beyond our control, and there are too many unknowns.” Hence, he concludes:

A successful [political] strategy may be no more than a series of successful tactics. Under these circumstances, strategy’s goal becomes, not identifying the best outcome and finding the means to attain it, but keeping as many options open for as long as possible to provide maximum tactical flexibility. The intrinsic value of having the option to make or not to make a decision, long recognized in the financial world, may increasingly become part of politics.²³

In line with Guehenno’s call for flexibility is the rising significance of what Thomas Barnett and Henry Gaffney call “horizontal scenarios,” such as those that have characterized our dealing with the Iraqi and Yugoslav leaderships. These entail a recurring pattern of unfriendly interactions that may go on for years and in which specific issues and contexts for each crisis or encounter may well differ. Barnett and Gaffney stated, “In horizontal scenarios, everything and everyone is free to evolve over time, meaning positions change, allies come and go, and definitions of ‘what the real issue is’ abound.”²⁴

The critical quality of a naval task force is that it inherently offers political leaders flexibility. Such flexibility enables leaders to deal with the strategic uncertainties of a globalizing world and the inconstancies of horizontal scenarios.²⁵ Without legal constraint, the Navy can readily transit to and operate off foreign littorals. Its smaller footprint makes “maritime presence...most welcome” to local friends for whom “there is absolutely no enthusiasm whatsoever for increasing the levels of land-based forces in the Eastern Mediterranean, or the Arabian Peninsula, or East Asia.”²⁶ It can modulate the visibility, level, and makeup of its presence to match the political situation. It can loiter indefinitely in international waters off a coast, ready to go into action on short notice.²⁷ While loitering, its underway replenishment capability makes it relatively less dependent on nearby land bases,²⁸ and, notwithstanding the USS Cole tragedy, its afloat mobility minimizes the prospect of its personnel being captured or subjected to sabotage.²⁹

Naval task forces are generally more assured of arriving fully prepared for combat operations compared with ground-based forces that may need weeks to set up if their support infrastructure is not already in place.³⁰ With today’s aircraft carriers, cruise missile shooters, and marines, a naval task force can provide the full spectrum of conventional power projection for small to mid-level contingencies in coastal and adjacent areas, as well as enable the entry of ground-based army and air forces for larger events.³¹ Finally, should the Navy transform into a network-centric force, it would significantly increase the scope of what it could accomplish on its own against shore as well as sea targets.

The Effect of Presence?

In sum, there would seem to be a special role for the U.S. Navy in contingency response along littorals, but, outside the context of a specific crisis, constant day-to-day presence does not do much to deter unwanted behavior.³²

Thus, it would seem a raising of false expectations to argue, for example, that the “gapping of aircraft carriers in areas of potential crisis is an invitation to disaster—and therefore represents culpable negligence on the part of America’s defense decision-makers.”³³ In the early 1960s, the United States maintained three aircraft carrier battlegroups in the Mediterranean Sea but later gradually found that it needed to scale back. Currently, a single battlegroup operates there for less than 9 months of the year on average. This is a significant reduction, but no one can prove that the Mediterranean region became less stable. Conversely, the Navy began to maintain a regular presence in the Arabian Gulf in 1979, but this did not prevent Iran or Iraq from attacking ships during their war. In the 1980s, attacks generally increased in number over the 8 years of the war.³⁴

As for deterring the initiation of a crisis in the first place, it is essentially impossible for an outsider to prove that such deterrence was successful except in the rare case in which a deterred party admits that he was deterred and states the reasons.³⁵ Adam Siegel, John Arquilla, Paul Huth, Paul Davis, and a Rutgers Center for Global Security and Democracy team led by Edward Rhodes have each attempted to study the effects of forward presence and general deterrence. The deficiency of such study is always in making the definitive link between them. The majority of these studies suggest that “[h]istorically seapower has not done well as a deterrent” in preventing the outbreak of conflicts,³⁶ principally because land-based powers not dependent on overseas trade are relatively “insensitive” to the operations of naval forces.³⁷

One instance when continuous noncrisis naval presence may have contributed to general deterrence may have been in the Cold War when the U.S. and Soviet navies regularly rubbed shoulders in the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean. Each navy maintained forward-deployed forces that could be counted upon to react to one another in a crisis. Hence it seems reasonable to assume that this reality became incorporated in each side’s calculations and may have had some deterrent effect, but, again, evidence is the problem.³⁸

If the evidence is slim concerning deterring the onset of a crisis, it is only slightly better when it comes to the issue of shaping events (that is, to positively changing the political landscape of an area in a manner favoring American interests). Systematic analytic attempts are few and definitive results are sparse. The Rutgers team did conclude in their study on shaping that it works best when it is limited to deterring external actions and is not based on a sweeping set of goals.³⁹

As against that conclusion, several studies that involved interviews of U.S. country teams and foreign political leaders suggest that military presence can be seen by friendly nations as a commitment to a security environment in which stability provides for greater economic development. This environment of stability leads to both greater local investment and trade by U.S. companies and greater local support for U.S. policies. Some foreign interviewees specifically linked their willingness to support the U.S. politically to the reassurance they received from a U.S. presence.⁴⁰

In short, then, to say that “balanced forward naval presence will be increasingly vital in shaping the peace”⁴¹ seems true only vis-à-vis friends but not potential adversaries or third parties. It would not seem to have much direct impact on the shape of a friend’s domestic politics but could affect its economy (and thus indirectly the domestic political scene) and its willingness to support U.S. foreign policy. There is no evidence, however, that presence need be continuous to achieve these effects. The Mediterranean analysis suggests that, at the end of the day, what is vital instead is that U.S. naval forces show up when needed—that is, during the run-up to and the onset of a contingency—and because of prior operations with regional friends, that it immediately act effectively in concert with them.

Recommendations

If the above propositions do in fact accurately represent the prospective and potential roles of naval forces in the future security environment characterized by globalization, then nine recommendations are worthy of consideration for future defense policy:

1. The United States must maintain a force that can exercise sea control throughout the oceans and in chokepoints and littoral regions. Considering its geographic location, if the United States is to fight wars in the next quarter-century, they will almost surely be “land-sea” affairs—if only to use the seas to move military cargoes—at far removed areas from its homeland. As a consequence, it should maintain in its military arsenal those capabilities—to control the seas, interdict sea lines, and seize hostile coasts—that form part of the infrastructure of success in land-sea campaigns.

2. This sea-control force should be part of a transformed fleet that can fight through enemy anti-access systems, maximizing its knowledge of the enemy while, at the same time, being able to absorb his initial strike.⁴² Transformation could involve significantly spreading out the sensors and firepower of the fleet so that they are not concentrated in a decreasing number of large and expensive hulls. Consistent with the network-centric concept, it would certainly mean developing or blending with existing intelligence, communications, and command infrastructures to produce a rapid reaction, synergistic fighting force whose overall capability exceeds the sum of its parts.

3. Due to their relative invulnerability, ballistic missile submarines should be retained as prime guarantors of strategic nuclear stability, even if the cost per warhead continues to increase. At some point the cost per warhead of relying on submarines may indeed become too high, but significant price tolerance should be accepted.

4. If land- or air-based national missile defense forces are deployed and prove capable, they should retain primary responsibility for the task rather than Aegis ships. Assuming that they can do the job, the opportunity costs of employing Aegis-capable surface ships in ballistic missile defense are high because the mission toes down versatile platforms to one role and to specific areas of operation dictated by the geometry of missile flight.

5. The inherent flexibility of naval forces optimizes them for small- and medium-level contingencies along the littorals and reassures friends and allies of U.S. support. The United States ought to capitalize on the inherent flexibility of naval forces to respond to small- and medium-level contingencies along littorals, and when appropriate, enable the entry of army and air forces for medium- to high-level contingencies along littorals, and reassure friends, thereby helping to shape their economic development and willingness to support U.S. policies.

6. Naval advocates should take care not to oversell the impact that day-to-day naval presence might have on deterring the onset of crises. It is unclear whether day-to-day naval presence actually deters regional crises.

7. A new formula is needed for determining routine (noncrisis) naval presence. If the United States possessed the 600-ship navy that it aimed for in the 1980s, meeting its presence requirements would not be a problem, but it is roughly half that size and getting smaller. As such, it needs to rethink how it will do presence. What should drive U.S. decisions on noncrisis forward deployments is not a relatively inflexible set of standards (such as one carrier group full time in region A and another present three-quarters time in region B with a tether of so many days transit to region C), but rather a more flexible rule set based on the requirements for being prepared for quick action. Preparing would necessitate periodically deploying to areas where contingencies might arise. The U.S. Coast Guard should be included in this formula.

8. Routine naval presence should be tailored to meet a very specific set of objectives rather as a general effort to “deter” crises. The military objectives should include acclimating U.S. naval forces to those physical and meteorological idiosyncrasies of the area that affect how well sailors and systems would perform; and exercising with indigenous militaries so as to enhance interoperability should they combine with the United States to respond to a contingency. Political objectives should include reassuring friends that America will help defend them, while also helping condition them and others to support U.S. efforts if and when a crisis does occur.⁴³

9. Top quality strategic intelligence should be as much a U.S. naval priority as buying the next capital ship. The efficient and timely deployment of American naval forces depends on the quality of the strategic intelligence available to those authorities that direct movement. The right mix of ships needs to be deployed to the right spot with the right missions or tactics, rather than deploying a standard package to a standard location. Quality information maximizes the time available for U.S. naval forces to assemble the right mix at the right spots with the right mission capabilities, or, as with the USS Cole, to avoid certain spots altogether.

Conclusion

While the United States will possess the world’s premier Navy for the foreseeable future, it will nevertheless face crucial decisions about how to transform and employ it. The force should be employed to ensure that its comparative advantages are maximized with full recognition of where limits exist. The point of the above recommendations is to emphasis that naval forces possess unique flexibility as politico-military instruments, but there are also limitations to what they can achieve as elements of conventional deterrence to regional crises. Naval forces can be effective instruments in training toward interoperability with friends, allies, and potential coalition members and do appear to have a reassuring effect on treaty allies. But this does not necessarily require the current rigorous force deployment schedule.

In the globalizing world, naval forces will be critical elements in responding to crises and will have a modest role in shaping the environment, but it is not certain that they can have considerable direct effect in deterring the inevitable politico-military crises that will occur in less stable regions buffeted by the effects of globalization. U.S. Navy force structure should be optimized for what it can do, not for tasks that cannot be proven effective.

Notes

¹ The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of William Murray, Bradd Hayes, Frank Uhlig, Edward Rhodes, Henry Kamradt, Robert Rubel, George Kasten, Roger Barnett, Peter Swartz, Harlan Ullman, Thomas Barnett, Henry Gaffney, Timothy Somes, Ronald O’Rourke, Robert Reilly, and 35 participants at a Naval War College workshop called to debate the propositions offered in this article. [BACK]

² On the prospect of continued superiority in the future, see Congressional Budget Office, Budgeting for Naval Forces: Structuring Tomorrow’s Navy at Today’s Funding Level (October 2000), 13–15, accessed at <http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index-2603&sequcncc=0&from-7>. [BACK]

³ The promise of a network-centric navy is well summarized in a recent report of the Naval Studies Board: “Within the physical limits of time required for movement and weapon range and speed, the force commanders operating in a network-centric mode will be able to concentrate widely dispersed forces’ fire and maneuvers at decisive locations and times. The forces will be able to achieve the precision needed to identify and engage opposing forces and specific targets with minimal casualties and least civilian damage. And they will be able to do so at a pace that overwhelms the opposition’s ability to prevent the actions or to respond in time to avoid defeat.” See National Research Council, Naval Studies Board, Network-Centric Naval Forces: A Transition Strategy for Enhancing Operational Capabilities (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2000), 2. William Owens provides some sense of the spatial dimension within which a network-centric naval force might operate when he writes that the technology available today “can give us the ability to see a ‘battlefield’ as large as Iraq or Korea—an area 200 miles on a side...all the time.” Owens with Edward Offley, Lifting the Fog of War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 14. [BACK]

⁴ To have a fleet of 305 ships in the year 2030, it would be necessary to build 8.7 ships a year, but the projected building rate through 2005 is only 7.5 a year with little expectation that it will rise much beyond that as long as the Navy continues to opt for high-end ships such as are presently programmed. See “Cohen Sends Navy Shipbuilding Report To Congress,” Inside the Navy, July 3, 2000, 6–7; Statement of Ronald O’Rourke, Specialist in National Defense, Congressional Research Service, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Seapower, Hearing on Ship Procurement and Research and Development Programs, March 2, 2000, photocopy, 6; Ronald O’Rourke, Navy Ship Procurement Rate and the Planned Size of the Navy: Background and Issues for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, April 4, 2000); and Congressional Budget Office, chapter 2. [BACK]

⁵ It may be worth noting that “population diminishes rapidly with elevation and with distance from coastlines and major rivers.” In particular, “there are far more people per available land area within 100 km of the coastlines and within 200 meters of sea level than further inland or at higher elevations.” Christopher Small and Joel Cohen, “Continental Physiography, Climate and the Global Distribution of Human Population,” Proceedings of the International Symposium on Digital Earth, 1999, accessed at <http:/www.ldeo.columbia.edu/-small/pdf/isde_mallcohen.pdf>. [BACK]

⁶ It would also put Americans off balance if the sea-denial force included capability to attack transport ships on the open ocean. With the increased size of such ships, the value of each attack could be quite significant. Such guerre de course would be the oceanic equivalent of guerrilla warfare, forcing Americans to expend time and considerable resources to contend with it (especially if the attacks were against military transports), but it would require the attackers to have access to sources of resupply if the threat is to be maintained. Americans presumably would be blockading whatever ports such attackers would operate from. They might also have prior intelligence of such a threat and seek to deal with it early on before it becomes an extensive open-ocean menace. [BACK]

⁷ Donald C. Daniel, “Antisubmarine Warfare in the Nuclear Age,” Orbis (Fall 1984), 549–551. [BACK]

⁸ In its effort to become expeditionary, the U.S. Army is investigating the purchase of its own tactical support vessels to bring its troops ashore. The troops would move in after an air assault had secured a point of entry. [BACK]

⁹ George Modelski and William R. Thompson, Seapower in Global Politics, 1494–1993 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 22. [BACK]

¹⁰ John Arquilla, Dubious Battles (Washington, DC: Crane Russak, 1992), 132. [BACK]

¹¹ S.W. Roskill points out that it is often because of setbacks on land that states with seapower potential capitalize on it. He states, “To turn to the manner in which our strategy developed during [World War II], it is something of a paradox that it was our total expulsion from the European continent in 1940 that forced us to change from a predominantly continental to a predominantly maritime strategy: and the reason for the change was that no other means of achieving victory then remained to us. Thus the reversion to a strategy which strongly resembled that of the elder Pitt in the Seven Years War, and also that adopted during the greater part of the Napoleonic War, took place not under any voluntary act on our part, but under the Axis victories on land.” See Roskill, The Strategy of Sea Power (London: Collin’s, 1962), 240. [BACK]

¹² Modelski and Thompson, 11–12; Colin Gray, The Leverage of Sea Power: The Strategic Advantage of Navies in War (New York: Free Press, 1992), 283; Colin Gray, The Navy in the Post-Cold War Period: The Uses and Value of Strategic Sea Power (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 162–163, 193; Colin Gray, “Seapower and Landpower;” in Seapower and Strategy, ed. Colin Gray and Roger Barnett (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1989), 23; and Arquilla, 55–59. [BACK]

¹³ See Donald C.F. Daniel, Antisubmarine Warfare and Superpower Strategic Stability (London: Brassey’s, 1986). [BACK]

¹⁴ William S. Cohen, Annual Report to the President and the Congress 2000, chapter 6, 2, accessed at <www.dtic.rnil/execsec/adr2000/chap6.html>. [BACK]

¹⁵ Also, a near-term reduction to 1,000 warheads, for example, could appear to place too many eggs in too few baskets since, at present, ballistic missile submarines deploy with as many as 192 warheads, but presumably a submarine would not have to deploy with that number under the 1,000 restriction. Alternatively, the nuclear deterrent might be placed on single-warhead, submarine-based cruise missiles, but their radius of attack would be much shorter. One of the best studies on the use of missiles to strike land targets from the sea is Owen R. Cote, Jr., Precision Strike From the Sea: New Missions for a New Navy (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Security Studies Program, n.d.) [BACK]

¹⁶ But if the U.S. deploys an effective national defense system, it would certainly encourage a reduction in offensive weapons. [BACK]

¹⁷ See Richard J. Newman, “Shooting from the Ship,” U.S. News and World Report, July 3, 2000, accessed at <http://ebird.dtic.mil/Jun 2000/e20000626shootingfrom.htm>. [BACK]

¹⁸ These numbers probably do not reflect ship movements (including by submarines in circumstances where stealth is a premium) that were never publicly acknowledged. On the Cold War years, see Edward A. Smith, Jr., “. . . From the Sea: The Process of Defining a New Role for Naval Forces in the Post-Cold War World,” in The Politics of Strategic Adjustment: Ideas, Institutions and Interests, ed. Peter Trubowitz, Emily Goldman, and Edward Rhodes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 288–289. [BACK]

¹⁹ For the 1990s, see Thomas P.M. Barnett and Henry H. Gaffney, Jr., “Top Ten Post-Cold War Myths,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 127, no. 2 (February 2001), 32–38. Counting responses is as much art as science. Barnett and Gaffney point out, for example, that their total of 81 reflects uncertainty about “how to interpret the lengthy strings of sequential operations clustered around Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, and Yugoslavia.” See also Adam Siegel’s discussion of “Methodological Issues” in The Use of Naval Force in the Post-War Era: U.S. Navy and Marine Corps Crisis Response Activity, 1946–1990, ed. Adam Siegel (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, February 1991), 5–6. [BACK]

²⁰ This is not to say that navies can do without bases. See Barry M. Blechman and Robert G. Weinland, “Why Coaling Stations Are Necessary in the Nuclear Age,” International Security (Summer 1977), 88–99.[BACK]

²¹ Thomas E. Ricks, “For Pentagon Asia Moving to the Forefront,” The Washington Post, May 26, 2000, 1. The Australian defense analyst Paul Dibb united some of these themes in a conclusion to a recent paper: “Potential military operations in the Asia-Pacific region will be essentially maritime in nature. Apart from the Korean peninsula, U.S. military forces are not likely to be involved in large-scale, land forces operations. The dominant geopolitical change...has been the virtual elimination...of allied continental commitments. The emerging struggle for power in Asia will focus on fault lines that are maritime rather than continental in aspect. The development of China’s military power, and the response by India and Japan, is likely to put pressure on the chain of America’s friends and allies in the long littoral extending between South Korean and Taiwan in the north...to the ASEAN countries and Australia in the south.” See Dibb, “Strategic Trends in the Asia-Pacific Region,” Paper prepared for the Current Strategy Forum, U.S. Naval War College, Newport, RI, June 13, 2000, 16. [BACK]

²² Two anecdotes illustrate the second nature claim and associate it with aircraft carriers in particular. Former Secretary of Defense and now Vice President Dick Cheney has related that when he would meet with President George H.W. Bush to deal with a crisis, “literally the first thing he always [said was], ‘How are we fixed for carriers?’” See Grant Willis, “Secretary Receives First-hand View of Carrier Operations,” Navy Times, November 13, 1989, 4. Along the same lines, former Vice President Al Gore’s chief national security advisor, Leon Fuerth, gave the following answer during the 2000 Presidential campaign when asked what Mr. Gore might do about defense strategy: “I think his view is that the two major contingency strategies have served us very well, and it is possible to see exactly where the vice president has been in the Cabinet Room with the president and others when we had to ask ourselves whether if we move a carrier...we are opening ourselves up to adventures by one opponent or the next.” See Elaine Sciolino, “A Gore Advisor Who Basks in the Shadows,” The New York Times, April 25, 2000, A14. [BACK]

²³ Jean-Marie Guehenno, “The Impact of Globalization on Strategy,” Survival (Winter 1998–1999), 14. [BACK]

²⁴ See discussion in Barnett and Gaffney, 32–33. [BACK]

²⁵ See Donald C.F. Daniel, Beyond the 600-Ship Navy, Adelphi Paper 261 (London: Brassey’s, 1991), 24–30. [BACK]

²⁶ Dov Zakheim, et al., Political and Economic Implications of Global Naval Presence, Technical Report SPC Log No.: 96–0989 (Arlington, VA: System Planning Corporation, September 30, 1996), 12, 21 . The report, prepared for the Navy, is based on an unspecified number of interviews with “opinion leaders-government minister, senior officials, active and retired senior military officers, academics and businessmen” in each region as well as foreign officials visiting Washington. [BACK]

²⁷ Colin Powell once praised this versatility of naval forces by remarking, “It’s hard to lie offshore with a C–141 or C–130 [aircraft] full of airborne troops.” See Jeffrey Record, “Strike from the Sea,” Baltimore Sun, April 25, 1990, 17. A possible argument against reliance on naval forces is that, unless they are already on scene, they are too slow to respond, but a conclusion of an ongoing project by analysts at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) is that response time by deployed forces was generally not a problem because contingencies usually do not arise out of the blue, but rather consisted of situations that the United States had been tracking. The author is indebted to the CNA project leader, Henry H. Gaffney, Jr., for this point. [BACK]

²⁸ A troubling counterpoint to the claim made in the text above about the Navy’s relative independence from land bases is evidenced by the USS Cole’s need to refuel in Aden where it was attacked. It had to refuel there because of a reduction in the number of replenishment oilers. The issue is priorities: which ships get serviced by what oilers? [BACK]

²⁹ Immediately after the USS Cole incident, the Navy ordered its 22 ships in the Persian Gulf area to deploy to sea. It then ordered three amphibious ships to Aden waters to provide marine protection and “hotel services” for civilian and military investigators sent to Aden. Robert Drogin and David Kelly, “3 Warships Head to Yemen to Bolster Investigative Team,” Los Angeles Times, October 17, 2000, 8. [BACK]

³¹ An important issue is the level of response most suited for naval forces. In a recent article, Eliot Cohen argues for the need for U.S. conventional dominance over any potential opponent. He also says that such “dominance, particularly against China, will involve long-range forces, primarily aerial and naval, that could cope with events such as an assault on Taiwan.” See Cohen, “Defending America in the Twentieth Century,” Foreign Affairs (November/December 2000), 48. [BACK]

³² Edward A Smith, Jr., was part of a group of 25 officers assembled from around the world for several months to consider a new strategic concept for the U.S. Navy after the end of the Cold War. He writes, “there was a vigorous debate even among the...officers...over how if at all, ‘presence’ contributed to deterring crises and conflicts.” See Smith, “. . . From the Sea: The Process of Defining a New Role for Naval Forces in the Post-Cold War World,” 288. Sam J. Tangredi argues persuasively that the Navy must prove the case for presence, although naval presence would intuitively appear to have some deterrent effects. See Tangredi, “The Fall and Rise of Naval Forward Presence,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 126, no. 5 (May 2000), 28–32. [BACK]

³³ John R. Fisher, “A Tale of Two Centuries,” Seapower, 2000 Almanac Issue (January 2000), 4. [BACK]

³⁴ Ronald A. O’Rourke, “Gulf Ops,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (May 1989), 43. [BACK]

³⁵ Trying to prove deterrence runs against the fallacy of proving a negative. Adam Siegel deals with this issue quite well in “To Deter, Compel, and Reassure in Internatio nal Crises: The Role of U.S. Naval Forces,” CRM 94–193 (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, February 1995). [BACK]

³⁶ Arquilla, 143, 150. [BACK]

³⁷ See discussion in Edward Rhodes, “Conventional Deterrence,” Comparative Strategy (July-September 2000), 221–254. [BACK]

³⁸ James McConnell contends, once a crisis had occurred involving U.S. and Soviet client states, that both navies operated according to “rules of the game” that contributed to deterring escalation between them. See McConnell, “The ‘Rules of the Game’: A Theory on the Practice of Superpower Naval Diplomacy,” in Bradford Dismukes and James McConnell, Soviet Naval Diplomacy (New York: Pergamon Press, 1979), 240–280. [BACK]

³⁹ Edward Rhodes, Jonathan DiCicco, Sarah Milburn Moore, and Tom Walker, “Forward Presence and Engagement: Historical Insights into the Problem of Shaping,” Naval War College Review 53, no. 1 (Winter 2000), 45–49. The cases that the team drew on are broad, leading to questions about the strengths of the conclusions. For example, one particularly naval case concerns the British Royal Navy’s presence in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea from 1816 to 1852. That presence was credited with deterring Egyptian attack on the Ottoman Empire, but the paucity of specific details makes it hard to credit the claim fully. Nevertheless, this remains an interesting article. [BACK]

⁴⁰ Results of the country team interviews can be found in Bradford Dismukes, National Security Strategy and Forward Presence: Implications for Acquisitions and Use of Naval Forces, CRM 93–7 (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, March 1994), and Dismukes, The Political-Strategic Case for Presence—Implications for Force Structure and Force Employment, CAB 93–7 (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, June 1993). Results of the interviews of foreign leaders can be found in Zakheim, et al. [BACK]

⁴¹ Jay Johnson, “Anytime. Anywhere: A Navy for the 21st Century,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 123, no. 6 (November 1997), 50. [BACK]

⁴² See Donald C.F. Daniel, “The Evolution of Naval Power to the Year 2010,” Naval War College Review 48, no. 3 (Summer 1995), 70–71. [BACK]

⁴³ See Robert G. Weinland, A Somewhat Different View of Optimal Naval Posture, Center for Naval Analyses Professional Paper 214 (Arlington, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, 1978).