By Joshua Tallis

Coming on the heels of the new tri-service maritime strategy (“Advantage at Sea”), the Department of the Navy has now released an updated framework for the Arctic region— “A Blue Arctic: A Strategic Blueprint for the Arctic.” The document is a marked improvement on the brisk 2019 Navy version. It is particularly innovative (as strategies go) in including the Marine Corps in a “Blue/Green” approach to the region and in its navigation of cooperative themes in a moment dominated by great power competition. Yet it also has room for growth, in particular on how to connect loftier concepts with operational realities.

As the title implies, the strategy leans into framing the Arctic as “blue” (as opposed to “white”). The “Blue Arctic” conceit is likely to be among the document’s most enduring legacies. Coming on the tail end of a Trump presidency, the strategy may not be officially in force for long. As a result, its rhetorical contributions could outlast any specific policy proposals. On that score, the Blue Arctic push might be a success. Given the realities of climate change, the real novelty that the Navy, Marine Corps, and US policymakers must wrestle with in the Arctic’s future is how rapidly its maritime character is changing. It makes sense to grapple with that reality directly, and to give it a moniker that the bureaucracy can grab hold of.

That maritime focus does not displace the long-term role of aerospace defense in the Arctic, as attested by the enduring US-Canada partnership through the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Yet going back to documents from the Obama administration, like the 2016 implementation framework for the 2013 national strategy, it was clear (via tasking to the Coast Guard and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) that the maritime angle was rising in importance. Similarly, the Blue Arctic framing well highlights emerging challenges—climate change is the central factor reshaping Arctic geopolitics. Coming with an opening seascape is the greater likelihood for accidents at sea and the prospect of miscalculation that accompanies rival navies operating near one another. So, as a framework for thinking about what is strategically salient in the Arctic today, the Blue Arctic is a helpful construct.

Similarly innovative is the strategy’s authorship. Although the document is not fully tri-service like its recent partner, it is notable as the first modern joint Navy/Marine Corps Arctic strategy. This is not just a bureaucratic feat. The Marine Corps has long-standing operational requirements in the Arctic—as evinced by High North amphibious exercises off Alaska and Norway. 

Integrating Navy and Marine Corps operations is part of a bigger trend, as seen in the commandant’s planning guidance and the release of new operational concepts like Expeditionary Advanced Basing Operations and Littoral Operations in Contested Environments (LOCE). Some of these, particularly LOCE, also feature in the Arctic strategy. Yet considering those operational concepts were developed for a potential crisis in the Pacific theater, their reapplication to the Arctic warrants some further scrutiny.

Where the document is at its best, however, is in the focus on the US’s objectives in the Arctic. The document should be lauded—in a moment dominated by great power competition—for foregrounding stability, governance, and peace as the main political objectives guiding US engagement in the Arctic. The invocation of peace through strength is vague and opens the potential for a more confrontational approach to the Arctic, but it does not require that interpretation.

This pivot to stability can also be seen, if subtly, in the document’s treatment of Russia and China. The Department of Defense’s 2019 Arctic strategy, by comparison, references Russia and China in near equal measure. The new Department of the Navy strategy leans slightly more to Russia, which makes sense for an Arctic document. Qualitatively, the document probably also does better differentiating between the two countries compared to the DOD document. That is most evident in its treatment of the theme of cooperation with Russia, where feasible. The strategy is shy about saying so out loud sometimes, but such is evidently the subtext behind the “new partners” section on page 16, for example.

The recent Air Force and the Space Force Arctic strategy offers another useful comparison. That document is forward leaning on the theme of cooperation—but mostly in the context of allies and partners (it names Greenland and Thule frequently to reinforce the Arctic equities of the two services). The Navy/Marine Corps strategy names names too, but with a savvy eye towards domestic readers. Alaska is an obvious hallmark of US Arctic strategies and the Alaska delegation is the key constituency on the Hill for Arctic products. But the Navy document also elevates Maine to new heights, likely given the state’s burgeoning economic emphasis on ties to Greenland and Senator King’s co-chairing of the Arctic caucus.

The move to focus on stability and engagement is not a full pivot from competition. In fact, as in the new tri-service maritime strategy, day-to-day competition is a notable undercurrent throughout the Arctic document. As I’ve written previously, the question of what it means to compete day-to-day for maritime services can be split along two axes: positional and political competition. 

Positional competition means posturing forces to deter a conflict or, failing that, creating the conditions for success in the event of a fight. That boils down to a persistent need for basing, access, and allies. 

Political competition is about continued US security and economic leadership of an international order that reflects its interests and values. That invites a competition over global agenda setting, defending maritime norms, and not strictly a perspective on winning the big fight. 

The new Arctic framework hints strongly at political competition when it talks about the need to compete in “a way that protects vital national interests and preserves regional security without undermining trust and triggering conflict.” That is, I believe, the right approach, and those responsible for implementing the strategy should look to the new tri-service document for its extended treatment of the idea of day-to-day competition.

Presence typically rhymes with competition for the Navy, and it is no surprise that the strategy emphasizes that issue at length. As others have noted, the strategy takes a big picture view of the Arctic as one space for policy-making (a circumpolar perspective). That is understandable for a document that lives at the high altitude of strategy, but it challenges building connective tissue between the idea of presence and specific operational recommendations on where presence is most useful to pursue stability, peace, or rule of law. Strategy is ultimately about helping shape hard choices on the application of finite resources, and when it comes to where presence is most needed, an implementation framework is particularly critical to help translate the broad (and standardly Navy) idea into practice.

Then there is the question of presence with what? In the Arctic, that question has implications for whether the Navy buys different kinds of assets (ice hardened vessels?) or how it plans to compete day-to-day in an austere domain. Submarines commonly operate in the Arctic, but they are high demand, low density assets and are famously bad at overt signaling (by design). Aircraft carriers have gone north (see exercises Northern Edge or Trident Juncture) but are even scarcer and can be quite provocative. Destroyers are versatile platforms but constrained in operational range by the presence of ice in some regions at some times of year. Because service strategies can most directly influence service activities—staffing, training, and equipping the fleet—the issue of platforms is also one that an implementation plan should tackle directly.

There is a lot more to the new blueprint. It laudably addresses the need to plug data gaps for issues of weather modeling, for example, and it emphasizes the role of the professional military education complex in better preparing future military leaders for the Arctic’s political and strategic character. Yet its greatest innovations may be the ones that require the least digging. The subtle but evident broadening of cooperation, to occasionally include Russia, is a key feature of addressing stability in the Arctic and managing China’s rise. Most evidently, the framework clearly stakes a claim to the Arctic as fundamentally maritime and littoral. Following on that geography, it invites the Navy and Marine Corps to collaborate strategically where so far they have mostly done so operationally. That marriage necessitates more critical analysis about how Blue/Green operational ideas translate to the Arctic, but the underlying shift the framework represents is a notable achievement in its own right.

Dr. Joshua Tallis is a research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses and an adjunct professor at the George Washington University specializing in maritime security, polar affairs, and naval strategy. He is the author of the 2019 book, The War for Muddy Waters: Pirates, Terrorists, Traffickers, and Maritime Insecurity. The opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect those of CNA or the U.S. Navy.

Featured Image: Scientist carrying equipment on ice in front of RV Polarstern during the MOSAiC expedition in September 2019. (Wikimedia Commons)

By Robert C. Rubel

The Navy routinely publishes capstone documents that serve as top-level policy statements and guidance for the Service. Some are either directly titled maritime strategies or are at least referred to as such, implying that they describe ways that naval forces will be used to achieve national objectives. In truth this cannot be the case because the Navy has no authority to determine such ways; that is the province of the joint chain of command that runs from the President through the Secretary of Defense down to the Unified Combatant Commanders, bypassing both the Joint Staff and the Services. If the Navy has no authority to engage in such strategizing, why issue such documents, the latest of which is entitled “Advantage at Sea” but is commonly called the Tri-Service Maritime Strategy (TSMS)?

The widely accepted strategic syllogism is ends/ways/means; strategy specifically constituting the ways. As previously stated, developing ways in which the means – the military forces – can be used to achieve the ends – national security objectives – is the business of the joint chain of command. The Services are tasked to provide the means, so any top-down document the Navy issues must be somehow connected to that responsibility. The context in which such documents are issued is commonly resource scarcity, which means that in some way the document either outlines a way for the Service to deal with that scarcity or pleads for more resources. When internally focused, the documents tend to be straightforward guidance for adapting the Service to existing conditions. When externally focused, the actual Service strategy is to get what it wants by publishing a “strategy” document that it hopes will influence its target outside audience, be it Congress, the American public, potential adversaries or friendly countries. This desire to achieve influence via a public document appears to be behind the TSMS thus requiring us to read between its lines to infer the underlying ways.

Strategies can be thought of as solutions to problems, and the TSMS contains a formal problem statement that says China’s and Russia’s “revisionist approaches” in the maritime domain threaten U.S. interests, undermine alliances, and threaten the global order. Moreover, their aggressive naval growth and modernization are eroding U.S. military superiority. Left unchecked this will leave the Naval Services unprepared to ensure U.S. advantage at sea (this last printed in bold). There are a couple of ways to read this, one being that the Naval Services must check gray zone operations, which, as discussed, is outside Service authority. The second is that Chinese and Russian naval growth, at least in relative terms, must be checked. Presumably this is the real problem that must be solved, a view supported by the paragraph preceding the problem statement, which lists challenges to building additional capacity, including increased costs and developmental timelines of systems and weapons, and continuing budget pressures; in other words, resource scarcity.

From all this we can infer that the basic strategy behind TSMS is to publish a strategy document to add to the momentum for building a bigger fleet that was created by the Secretary of Defense’s Battle Force 2045 plan. As such, a key element of the pleading purpose of the document is to articulate a persuasive utility argument – why the nation should invest more in its Naval Services – and the TSMS is full of such language. 

But the document also contains a more novel and dramatic element; it asserts that the three Naval Services will more closely integrate their efforts. In the face of resource scarcity it makes sense to try and find efficiencies and synergies, and to the extent that this is the motivation behind this part of the problem solution it is a brilliant move.

However, a close reading of the TSMS reveals a somewhat more problematic motivation and strategy. The document clearly colors outside the lines of Service authority by asserting the Naval Services will more aggressively confront Chinese and Russian gray zone operations even at the cost of incurring greater risk. In several places the document mentions the advantage the unique authorities possessed by the Coast Guard brings to the table. This implies that an underlying deal with the Department of Homeland Security has been reached to empower some anti-gray zone operational strategy. One hopes the relevant combatant commanders have been consulted, but in any case it seems to be an end run around joint authority and also appears to preempt policy making by the incoming Biden Administration. Aggressive and even risky forward naval maneuvers to intimidate an adversary was a key provision of the 1980s Maritime Strategy, which the TSMS seems to echo, but the times and the adversaries are different, and one wonders if such a frontal assault strategy is appropriate in current conditions. The document itself might be intended as a means of such intimidation since it articulates how U.S. naval forces would be successful in confronting and defeating the enemy, including the implication that U.S. forces either have or shortly will possess hypersonic weapons.

Beyond the motivations and underlying strategies just mentioned there seems to be a third element in the TSMS: relationships with allies. In a number of places the document calls for increased cooperation with international navies, especially at the higher levels on the spectrum of conflict. This echoes language in the 2015 Cooperative Strategy, but absent some kind of underlying strategy for achieving it, the words are only boilerplate. But giving the TSMS writing team credit for strategic thinking, such language can be interpreted as a move to counteract the Trump Administration’s confrontational approach to allies and partners. This echoes but is not the same as the approach taken by the 2007 Cooperative Strategy. That document portrayed the US on the strategic defensive and emphasized the peacetime uses of seapower to allay the suspicions of other nations concerning U.S. intentions due to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That document was a part of an underlying strategy of courting international cooperation on maritime security that also involved extensive international consultation during strategy development and bringing international officers into the process. The document itself did not directly spell out any of this.

The TSMS appears to be anticipating a more internationalist policy and approach by the Biden Administration, but simply calling for more cooperation, especially in warfighting, is not an actual strategy for securing it, and other than envisioning increased exercises, the document gives us little indication of how it will be achieved. In fact, more aggressive confrontation of Chinese and Russian gray zone operations, or even their international naval engagement activities and perhaps instances of gunboat diplomacy, might serve to alarm potential partners and allies who do not want to be dragged into conflict by the U.S. In any case it is all a policy matter above the pay grade of the Services, so in the best case the TSMS will serve as an educational document for those duly authorized to make and implement such policies.

There is one element of the TSMS that is puzzling and harder to decode. On the one hand it calls for emphasizing future warfighting readiness over near term demand. On the other hand, the document calls for robust forward presence as well as conducting large fleet exercises. It is not clear how the Services will square this circle. Besides, the combatant commanders call the shots on what forces will be deployed where. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, who had also previously served as Undersecretary of the Navy, attempted to establish a “supply-side” approach to force deployment and was unsuccessful. While integration of the Naval Services to achieve efficiencies is laudable, it is not clear that this in itself will relieve the pressure to send forces forward.

Finally, the TSMS may be a tool for mending organizational discontinuities within the Navy. For decades the resources directorate, N8, has operated in an insular manner, repelling any attempts by the strategy office, which had been in the N3/5 directorate but which now resides within the N7 directorate, to influence the Navy’s programming. N8 relies on a numerical, computer-based analysis process called campaign analysis to determine what kinds of ships should be built, what kinds of weapons procured, etc. The more qualitative ideas coming out of the strategy process cannot be easily accommodated by the campaign analysis process and have been therefore largely disregarded. The TSMS, in addition to calling not only for a new fleet design but also a new integrated Naval Analytic Master Plan, seems to be aiming to break the logjam between the two directorates – a good thing. However, it should be noted that the team that penned the TSMS was likely composed of N7 folks and it remains to be seen what effect the document will have on the flow of influence from strategy to programming.

The intent here is not to critique the TSMS, although I have done a little of that, but rather, understanding the true nature of strategy documents issued by the Navy, to divine the intent behind it. The Navy has not had a formal strategy process, most capstone documents being the products of an ad hoc effort, so it is never a routine occurrence when one is issued. Thus it is a worthwhile exercise to try and read between the lines of a new document. Hopefully this exercise will be of use to readers.

Robert C. Rubel is a retired Navy captain and professor emeritus of the Naval War College. He served on active duty in the Navy as a light attack/strike fighter aviator. At the Naval War College he served in various positions, including planning and decision-making instructor, joint education adviser, chairman of the Wargaming Department, and dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. He retired in 2014, but on occasion continues to serve as a special adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations. He has published over thirty journal articles and several book chapters.

FEATURED IMAGE: ATLANTIC OCEAN (Nov. 2, 2012) A U.S. Coast Guard helicopter prepares to land on the flight deck of the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp (LHD 1). For prudent planning, the Navy has begun to preposition Wasp, USS San Antonio (LPD 17) and USS Carter Hall (LSD 50) for primary assistance in the affected North East region if required by FEMA following the devastation brought on by Hurricane Sandy. San Antonio and Carter Hall got underway Oct. 31 from Norfolk, Va., and began transiting north to the affected areas on Nov. 1. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Markus Castaneda/Released) 121102-N-WI365-326