Chapter 30

Will Globalization Sink the Navy?

Of course, the Navy and Marines needed to continue to engage in technological and doctrinal transformation to increase the firepower, accuracy, and range of their weapons in order to project power ashore. But in a global age, a carrier battlegroup combined with Marine units that can operate virtually anywhere while using organic logistics can have a major influence on most events on land. If these forward-deployed naval units cannot bring a conflict to a speedy conclusion, then they can contain the situation until the rest of the Navy, Army, and Air Force arrive.

Even more important than the apparent fit between naval capabilities and conventional threats is the link between globalization, economic prosperity, and the U.S. Navy. As discussed in the first chapter and elsewhere in the current volume, globalization and the strategic thinking articulated by Alfred Thayer Mahan go hand in hand.⁸ Mahan’s vision of a United States growing rich from its ability to use the seas as a means of communication fits well with contemporary thinking about how the information revolution has facilitated international commerce, contacts among individuals, and cultural exchange. The Navy plays a critical role in the process of globalization because it controls access to the world’s primary means of communication (ocean transportation) and, by implication, access to global resources and markets. The Navy guarantees that the United States, its allies, and its friends will have access to the wealth produced by global trade among market economies. The Navy helps to create and maintain the political, commercial, and security conditions necessary for globalization to occur. The Navy patrols and protects the sea lines of communication/commerce that spread democracy and create global markets.

Despite plenty of hand wringing about the proliferation of antiaccess technologies and strategies, the greatest challenges that faced the U.S. Navy at the turn of the 21st century appeared to be a disinterested American public and a new Republican administration that sought to shed what it saw as its predecessor’s excessive overseas commitments. Navy strategy documents in this period thus dwelled not on issues of true strategy, but instead upon reiterating basic ideas about what a navy can do (for example, navies are more useful at sea, not in port; the United States depends upon maritime trade; forward-deployed forces can respond quickly to crises).⁹ To preserve its force structure in an age of globalization, the overriding goal of naval strategy was to win the hearts and minds of the American public and Congress. In terms of military threats, there was a general expectation that the Navy would be able to defeat any challenge from the land or sea.

The Return of Naval Strategy

The September attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon showed Americans what can happen when forward presence fails to deter or defeat attacks upon the United States. The U.S. military, including forward-deployed naval forces, did not place the slightest impediment in the path of the terrorists. In the parlance of the Cold War, al Qaeda was able to engage in the diplomacy of violence by directly attacking countervalue targets in the United States without first defeating the U.S. defense establishment.¹⁰ At the price of a few hundred thousand dollars and 19 lives, al Qaeda killed thousands of people, inflicted billions of dollars worth of property damage, and negatively affected the national economy.

Senior Navy officers no longer have to worry about public disinterest in international affairs or a lack of support for a strong Navy. But they do need to develop a new naval strategy to defeat the challenge posed by the emergence of hostile nonstate actors and a variety of asymmetric threats to U.S. security. As events would play out, the Navy did deliver on a decade’s worth of promises: Navy carrier battlegroups and Marine amphibious ready groups quickly took the fight to al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Given the distances involved, this was no small accomplishment; one would hazard to guess that before September 2001, most observers would have estimated that Afghanistan was beyond the reach of the Navy. But because they are little more than the statement of the obvious, strategies that simply extol the importance of forward presence have been rendered obsolete by the events of September 11. Everyone now recognizes that it is important to deal with the bad guys over there before they get over here. It is up to naval officers to decide exactly where and how they intend to use existing and planned forces to defend their fellow citizens and family members against real threats to the security of the United States.

The idea that September 11 should force a complete overhaul of naval strategy, however, would probably be viewed by senior Navy officers as alarmist or at best counterproductive. Some might dismiss the terrorist attacks launched by al Qaeda as a bizarre or anomalous event. Why change everything because of the actions of a bunch of fanatics? Given the devastating attacks inflicted on terrorists as they ran for their lives in the hills and deserts of Afghanistan, the Navy also has helped reduce the likelihood that similar attacks will occur in the future. Terrorists, rogue states, or groups of lunatics can act up, but some officer might argue that the real-time global surveillance and precision-guided munitions incorporated in Navy operations will guarantee that they will not act up for long.

Yet the September attacks marked a new kind of warfare that is not only a response to globalization but also is itself facilitated by globalization. Globalization instills in people the idea that they should take their destiny into their own hands. It also empowers and equips them to shape that destiny by affecting world events. In an ironic twist, globalization has not only produced a dangerous political backlash, but it has also produced a new actor—a syndicate of religious fanatics, revolutionaries, and anarchists—to threaten directly U.S. security. The fact that the Navy dominates the world’s oceans did not matter September 11. That data point alone should cause a reassessment of naval strategy.

Origins of the New Challenges

The September attacks have cast the relationship between naval strategy and globalization in a new light. While naval strategists focused on the diplomatic, military, and economic implications of globalization, the information revolution was producing a profound social transformation and skill revolution among individuals who were lucky enough to gain access to the new information technologies. Bill Gates, for instance, has not hidden his hope that individuals will be empowered when they gain access to computers and the Internet. He suggested that the Internet would give individuals capabilities only possessed by bureaucracies less than a generation ago, thereby transforming the world.¹¹ In a series of analyses written over the last decade, James Rosenau also has identified “four flows of influence” that are transforming social and political relationships:

(1) a technological revolution has facilitated the rapid flow of ideas, information, pictures, and money across continents; (2) a transportation revolution has hastened the boundary-spanning flow of elites, ordinary folk, and whole populations; (3) an organizational revolution has shifted the flow of authority, influence, and power beyond traditional boundaries; and (4) an economic revolution has redirected the flow of goods, services and capital, and ownership among countries.¹²

Naval strategy has responded to Rosenau’s fourth flow of influence: forward presence was often justified as a way to facilitate the flow of goods, services, and capital among countries. Naval doctrine also was intended to capitalize on the technological revolution: Net-Centric Operations and FORCEnet concepts will integrate new technologies into existing ships and aircraft.¹³ Planners and strategists, however, paid little attention to the second and third influence flows mentioned by Rosenau, the ones that had the greatest impact on individuals. Globalization and the information revolution had combined to give average individuals the ability to become actors on the world stage, a role once reserved for the brilliant, rich, fortunate, or truly evil.

Evidence of the transportation revolution and the breakdown of traditional authority relationships is everywhere, but it never received much attention from Navy planners. The decrease in the cost and increase in the availability of intercontinental jet transportation might pose a problem for customs officers or health officials, but it was not a matter of strategic consequence for the Navy. Similarly, the Navy, when compared to other sectors of American society, was probably less affected by the breakdown in traditional authority and the way new computer and communication technology empowered individuals. Senior officers had staff that could shield them from the leveling effects produced by the availability of e-mail and the Internet. Navy tradition produced important continuities in shipboard life, despite the introduction of co-ed crews and the ability of individual sailors to maintain private global communication networks while at sea. Throughout the rest of society, by contrast, leaders in business, education, or government lacked the resources or traditions needed to shield them from the direct communications and increased scrutiny of their employees or constituents. As the distance between the leaders and the led shrinks, officials find it increasingly difficult to use their bureaucratic position to justify their decisions or to deflect criticism. The mystique of leadership is undermined by accessibility and transparency. E-mail facilitates networks, not hierarchical communications. We are all on a first name basis on the Internet.

Navy officers along with most individuals failed to recognize that there is an ideology (or a logic, so to speak) embedded in every technology. This ideology affects the way individuals are likely to employ a given technology and the long-term effects a new technology is likely to have on society.¹⁴ Sometimes the inventor of the technology recognizes and understands this ideology: Bill Gates hoped that his work would have a revolutionary impact on society. More often, the inventor of a machine is unaware of the logic inherent in the technology he or she is creating. Gutenberg was a Catholic, but his printing press made the Protestant Reformation possible because printing facilitates the dissemination of competing ideas (that is, heresy).¹⁵ The automobile transformed America—dispersing extended families, creating suburbs and new American cultures.¹⁶ But the automobile’s effects were perceived only when the transformation of society was under way.

The Internet and the personal computer empower people by giving them the ability to process data and communicate globally at virtually no cost, capabilities that only states or enormous bureaucracies (for example, the Internal Revenue Service) possessed as late as the 1980s. The fact that people, not just states, have the technology needed to begin to overcome time and distance in communication will have a profound effect on international relations. Access to the Internet allows people to coordinate activities globally, to gather detailed information about local conditions and infrastructure for just about anywhere on the planet, and to move financial resources at virtually no cost. Powerful tools have been placed in the hands of individuals, and as September 11 demonstrated, they will not necessarily be put to good use.

Globalization and the information revolution have produced two profound changes in the international security environment. First, they have created new mediums of global communication. The Internet, global satellite television, transnational financial flows, international jet travel, and a host of grassroots organizations and informal networks of individuals have emerged to link people together in faraway places. Although the world’s oceans remain as the dominant means of communication in terms of the flow of goods and trade, they no longer are the dominant way in which people, ideas, or even wealth move across borders.¹⁷ Unlike maritime communications, which are best exploited by nations or large corporations (oceangoing vessels constitute a significant capital investment), nonstate actors and individuals can easily exploit these new methods of communication. Globalization itself suggests that nation states and their military instruments no longer dominate emerging transnational networks.

Second, people have come to believe that they ought to make use of these new technologies to take matters into their own hands. The ideology embodied in the new communication and data processing tools shapes individual and collective behavior in a way that empowers individuals and groups at the expense of governments or bureaucracies. Rosenau, for example, has written extensively about how the information revolution and globalization have produced a global authority crisis as traditional institutions are now undermined by the changing behavior and expectations of individuals. From Madison Avenue comes the message that the information revolution not only can be used to empower the consumer, but it can also level the playing field between the corporation and the individual when it comes to investing on Wall Street, buying a car, or shopping for a home mortgage.

These empowered individuals and groups create a new challenge for naval strategists. As chapter 1 notes, while armies control territory, navies control access to territory and communications. Navies, according to Tangredi, are the portions of military forces that operate “in the fluid mediums that humans use for information, transportation, and exchange but cannot normally inhabit. Its prime purpose is to ensure or deny access.”¹⁸ Prior to September 11, the Navy failed to deny access to these new mediums of communication and al Qaeda took advantage of that opening. Globalization and the information revolution have created new kinds of electronic oceans, and millions of individuals, groups, and organizations have moved quickly to exploit them for their own purposes.

Defending America

Homeland defense strikes fear in the hearts of naval officers everywhere, conjuring up images of maritime patrols along America’s coasts, ships’ crews being turned out to form naval infantry, and the transformation of the Navy into a Coast Guard auxiliary. Admittedly, the clamor for homeland defense casts doubt on much of the naval strategy of the 1990s because the political and military basis for strategy has changed in the aftermath of September 11. Before the tragedy, Navy strategists were forced constantly to explain fundamental maritime concepts to a disinterested public and Congress. After the tragedy, Navy strategists now face a far more difficult problem; they must explain to an alarmed U.S. public and Congress how they intend to protect average Americans from the murderous assaults of fanatics. They must devise a way of patrolling and protecting, so to speak, the new mediums of communication that were exploited with devastating effect by al Qaeda.

How can a carrier battlegroup steaming across the Pacific Ocean affect the way someone in Paris, Kabul, or Hong Kong uses a computer? How can the Navy decrease the appeal of millenarians who preach salvation through violence? How can the Navy disrupt and destroy shadowy networks of state and nonstate actors who conspire to kill Americans and discredit the United States? These are important questions, but there are no readily available answers. It will take time and some creative thinking to bring to bear existing Navy assets to counter emerging transnational threats. But U.S. sailors and marines have accomplished extraordinarily difficult missions—such as storming heavily defended beaches, tracking hostile submarines, and landing on pitching flight decks—that are considered nearly impossible (or prohibitively dangerous) by other navies. What is needed is an honest appraisal of the threat facing the United States and a sustained effort to devise ways to direct naval power against America’s enemies.

In bringing naval power to bear against emerging threats, planners would do well to keep several principles in mind as they contemplate future strategy. First, it makes no sense for naval strategists to ignore the events of September 2001 by simply restating the benefits provided by forward presence. Suggestions that the Navy “does not do homeland defense” or that the Navy should concentrate on the “away game” will only generate public and Congressional hostility. Instead, senior officers and officials must state repeatedly that the primary mission of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps is to protect America, its allies, and its interests overseas. People are less interested in how the Navy accomplishes this primary mission than in the fact that the Navy and Marines are doing everything in their power to keep fellow citizens and friends safe. Strategists should avoid highlighting the particular military benefits provided by global maritime dominance (a theme repeatedly stated during the 1990s) and concentrate instead on specific missions that the Navy can undertake to protect the United States.¹⁹

Second, the ability of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps to project power on short notice to distant parts of the planet was demonstrated clearly in the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda. Navy ability to conduct and support joint operations (here the use of the USS Kitty Hawk as a special operations platform comes to mind) was evident during the battle in Afghanistan. The Navy also demonstrated an outstanding ability to make use of real-time intelligence and to employ extensively precision-guided weapons. But all of these capabilities need to be enhanced greatly so that naval forces can more effectively and quickly attack a vast array of targets.

If Navy officers and Marines want to continue to provide the primary short-notice strike capability available to the United States (a primary mission in the war against terrorism), they need to exploit new technologies (to improve networks, sensors, weapons, and platforms), strategies, and tactics, especially in the effort to attack very small targets at great distances. For example, aircraft carriers should be supplied with long-range unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can linger over a target for hours or days, looking for targets of opportunity. New long-range precision strike weapons—such as missiles, cruise missiles, or perhaps even UAVs—need to be developed for surface combatants and submarines so that they too can take advantage of real-time intelligence and support ground operations. In other words, the Navy already possesses a significant capability to deliver sustained precision strikes against large target sets given a few weeks notice. What it needs to develop now is a capability to deliver limited long-range strikes (against a manufacturing complex, a terrorist cell meeting in a specific location, or even a lone individual) in real time.

Third, to combat the rise of nonstate opponents, the Navy needs to exploit weapons and technologies that are not painted gray and offer no opportunity for command at sea. Coast Guard captain Stephen Flynn in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, for example, has identified a relatively inexpensive method to identify suspicious containers among the millions of containers annually carried by ship into the United States. According to Flynn, if the world’s shipping megaports (Long Beach, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Singapore, Hamburg, Antwerp, and Rotterdam ²⁰) implemented a standard security and tracking system, smaller port facilities would be forced to adopt the system. It then would be relatively easy to use computers, global positioning system (GPS) transponders, and electronic tags to track containers. Possible instances of tampering or shipments from shadowy locations could be identified. Navy warships could then target suspicious vessels far from America’s shores.²¹ This sort of system would actually constitute a naval presence in the specific portion of cyberspace that controls the commercial movement of goods around the globe. Both state and nonstate actors are making use of off-the-shelf technologies to achieve objectives. Navy planners must make use of the same technologies to develop a presence in the same mediums of communication exploited by America’s enemies.

Fourth, Navy planners should stop to consider an important counterfactual question: what would have happened if the terrorists had struck the three carriers docked in Norfolk, Virginia, on September 11, 2001? They must consider the threat of asymmetric attacks intended to cripple U.S. military capabilities before they can be brought to battle. There is little that nonstate actors can do to stop a carrier battlegroup as it moves across the Pacific Ocean, but there are many ways terrorists armed with chemical, biological, or radiological weapons might achieve a mission kill against vital assets. In fact, scholars have recently called attention to the fact that surprise and asymmetric strategies hold an often exaggerated and unrealistic appeal to weaker parties in a conflict who hope, by striking a critical node, they can attack the will of their stronger opponents.²² Navy officers also must embrace the fundamental idea behind force protection: the distinction between the threat involved in combat operations and peacetime is vanishing. Navy officers died at their desks in the Pentagon during peacetime; by contrast, combat operations over the skies of Afghanistan mercifully proved to be less lethal for the Navy. Al Qaeda sought to target the Navy in Singapore, a place that appeared to be a safe haven as carrier battlegroups transited to the war zone. For the moment, at least, America’s enemies intend to engage U.S. military forces not on some recognized battlefield, but when and where we least expect it.

Conclusion

Will globalization sink the Navy? The answer to the question is no, but globalization and the information revolution have produced a challenging set of circumstances. Like the rise of aviation, new mediums of communication have emerged over the last 20 years that have complicated the ability of navies to control access to a country’s shores. The terrorist attacks launched against the United States in the fall of 2001 demonstrated that nonstate actors are willing to make use of these mediums to achieve their objectives. The opportunities and trends unleashed by the information revolution and globalization will only multiply and accelerate in the years ahead. Navy planners must devise ways to respond to the real security challenges that are now clearly on America’s strategic horizon.

James J. Wirtz is chairman and professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California. He is the author of The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), and the coeditor of numerous volumes, most recently of which include (with Jeffrey A. Larsen) Rocket’s Red Glare: Missile Defense and the Future of World Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001) and (with John Baylis, Eliot Cohen, and Colin S. Gray) Strategy in the Contemporary World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Notes

¹ This is evident through the contrast between the vibrant concept development effort of the U.S. Marine Corps and a fragmented Navy effort. A significant part of the problem is that senior leadership has consistently avoided identifying which Navy organization among the centers of policy analysis and development—OPNAV N3/5, N513 Strategy and Concepts Branch, OPNAV N7, Naval War College, Naval Warfare Development Command, CNO Executive Panel, CNO Strategic Studies Group, the VCNO Long Range Planners, OPNAV QDR Cell (now Naval Operations Group), or the Center for Naval Analyses (now CNA Corporation)—has the lead in developing the future Navy vision. Whichever organization has the lead should be given the power to task and coordinate the active support of the other organizations in order to generate an efficient, thoughtful, and comprehensive product. In contrast, the Marine Corps Doctrine Command, supported by other Marine elements, appears to have led the efforts for new strategic and operational concepts in the Corps. On June 11, 2002, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Vernon E. Clark announced a new “concept” of naval operations called Sea Power 21 at the annual Current Strategy Forum Conference at the Naval War College. This concept immediately received negative media coverage as “old wine in a new bottle” and lacking a transformational vision. One critic described it as a “vision of the 21st century Navy you would expect from a 19th century officer.” See Gopal Ratnam, “Critics Question Depth of Navy’s Sea Power Vision,” Defense News, June 24–30, 2002, 12. It is unclear which policy analysis and development centers participated in drafting the Sea Power 21 concept. [BACK]

² According to Ellen L. Frost, “A fundamental enabler of globalization in most regions of the world is the absence of a major war or major internal strife. A stable, secure environment is often taken for granted, but it is the underpinning of growth. Since sound business decisions require a degree of stability, investments tend to be postponed when nations are at war or on the brink of war.” Frost, “Globalization and National Security: A Strategic Agenda,” in The Global Century: Globalization and National Security, ed. Richard L. Kugler and Ellen L. Frost (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2001), 42. [BACK]

³ Adversity produces inertia in naval strategy. This is not surprising, given the role played by tradition in the Navy. According to Carl Builder, “In tradition, the Navy finds a secure anchor for the institution against the dangers it must face. If in doubt, or if confronted with a changing environment, the Navy looks to its traditions to keep it safe.” See Builder, The Masks of War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 18. [BACK]

⁴ Daniel Goure, “The Tyranny of Forward Presence,” Naval War College Review 54, no. 3 (Summer 2001), 11–24. [BACK]

⁵ Robert Looney, David Schrady, and Ronald Brown, “Estimating the Economic Benefits Engaged Naval Forces,” Interfaces, July/August 2001, 74–86; Dov S. Zakheim, et al., The Political and Economic Implications of Global Naval Presence (Arlington, VA: System Planning Corporation, 1996); Daniel J. Whiteneck, Naval Forward Presence and Regional Stability (Alexandria, VA: Center For Naval Analyses, 2001); and Edward Rhodes, et al., “Forward Presence and Engagement: Historical Insights into the Problem of ‘Shaping,’” Naval War College Review, Winter 2000, 25–61. [BACK]

⁶ For an explanation of both the advantages and disadvantages of a strategy based on naval forward presence, see Sam J. Tangredi, “The Fall and Rise of Naval Forward Presence,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 126, no. 5 (May 2000), 28–32. [BACK]

⁷ James J. Wirtz, “QDR 2001: The Navy and the Revolution in Military Affairs,” National Security Studies Quarterly, Autumn 1999, 43–60. [BACK]

⁸ Sam J. Tangredi, “Security from the Oceans,” in Global Century, 475–496. [BACK]

⁹ Forward . . . From the Sea is the title of a U.S. Navy document, produced in the 1990s, that outlines policy and strategy for the sea services. The title captures the mood at the time; it could be interpreted to mean “let’s go boating.” Notice that what is going to be done with, from, or to the boat, is captured by the inherently vacuous ellipse. [BACK]

¹⁰ Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966). [BACK]

¹¹ Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (New York: Penguin, 1996). [BACK]

¹² James N. Rosenau, “Stability, Stasis, and Change: A Fragmegrating World,” in Global Century, 137. [BACK]

¹³ The definitive sources on network-centric operations remain Arthur K. Cebrowski and John J. Gartska, “Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 124, no. 1 (January 1998), 28–35; and David S. Alperts, John J. Gartska, and Frederick P. Stein, Network Centric Warfare: Developing and Leveraging Information Superiority, 2d ed. (Washington, DC: DoD C4ISR Cooperative Research Program, February 2000). FORCEnet is a study concept of the CNO Strategic Study Group that is defined in their various papers as “the architecture and building bloc of sensors, networks, decision aids, weapons, warriors, and supporting systems integrated into a highly adaptive, human-centric, comprehensive systems [sic] that operates from seabed to space, from sea to land.” [BACK]

¹⁴ There is a rich literature on the effect of the information revolution on society. Several critics are especially provocative. See Gene I. Rochlin, Trapped in the Net: The Unanticipated Consequences of Computerization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). [BACK]

¹⁵ Printing increased literacy because it provided common people with something to read. Without printing, Martin Luther could not have encouraged people to read the Bible themselves. [BACK]

¹⁶ George F. Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill (New York: Norton, 1994). [BACK]

¹⁷ The Introduction and chapter 1 of the current volume point out that ultimately ideas and wealth are translated into goods, which do require oceanic transportation. However, I consider the phenomenon of global flows of people, ideas, and wealth as having even more significant effects in themselves. [BACK]

¹⁸ Tangredi, “Security from the Oceans,” 473. [BACK]

¹⁹ One source that does so, albeit at a high level of abstraction, is Sam J. Tangredi and Randall G. Bowdish, “Core of Naval Operations: Strategic and Operational Concepts of the U.S. Navy, Submarine Review, January 1999, 11–23. [BACK]

²⁰ Contrast Flynn’s list with Donna J. Nincic’s list in chapter 8 of the current volume. [BACK]

²¹ Stephen E. Flynn, “America the Vulnerable,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2002, 60–74. [BACK]

²²Thomas J. Christensen, “Posing Problems without Catching Up: China’s Rise and Challenges for U.S. Security Policy,” International Security, Spring 2001, 5–40. See the thorough discussion of asymmetric strategies and their appeal to weaker states in Kenneth F. McKenzie, Jr., The Revenge of the Melians: Asymmetric Threats and the Next QDR (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2000). [BACK]