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Current Operations, History

A Navy Astray: Remembering How the Fleet Forgot to Fight

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The following is adapted from remarks delivered at the annual CIMSEC Forum for Authors and Readers, covering the “How the Fleet Forgot to Fight” article series.

By Dmitry Filipoff

The article series covered many topics so I’ll try to narrow it down and focus on what I feel are some of the more important points.

When those two major reviews came out to try to explain why those fatal collisions happened out in the Pacific, one term that got used to describe how the Navy went wrong was the “normalization of deviation.” And this term is the main theme behind this article series, that the Navy is suffering from very serious self-inflicted problems and is deviating in many of its most important efforts in how it prepares for war. 

What specifically inspired these articles was writing published in Proceedings. Specifically, writing on the new Fleet Problem exercises by Pacific Fleet commander Admiral Scott Swift, and also writing by the Pacific Fleet intelligence director, Captain Dale Rielage, especially an article of his called “An Open letter to the U.S. Navy from Red.” These articles helped spark the series because of how they describe the character of the Navy’s exercises. And given the incredible importance that military exercises have, this issue really sheds light on systemic problems throughout the Navy.

When looking into the Navy’s major exercises, the keywords and themes that kept coming up were traits such as high kill ratios, training one skillset at a time, poor debriefing, and weak opposition.

The structure of training certification in the Navy usually took the form of focusing on individual skillsets and warfare areas – anti-surface warfare and anti-air warfare, and so on. But these things were not often combined in a true, multi-domain fashion. Instead, exercise and training certification regimes often took the form of a linear progression of individual events.

Opposition forces were made to behave in such a way as to facilitate these events. However, a more realistic and thinking adversary would probably employ the multi-domain tactics and operations that are the bread and butter of war at sea. But instead the opposition often acted more as facilitators for simplistic target practice it seems, which is why very high kill ratios were the norm. But more importantly, a steady theme that kept reappearing was that the opposition pretty much never won.

There are so many of these events, so many training certifications that had to be earned in order to be considered deployable that Sailors feel extremely rushed to get through them. And these severe time pressures help encourage this kind of training.

If you are losing and taking heavy losses then you should be taking that extra time to do after action reviews and extensive debriefing to figure out what went wrong, how to do better, and understand why in real war your mistakes would’ve gotten your people killed. The way this kind of conversation plays out is fundamental to the professional development of the warfighter, and it is an important expression of the culture of the organization.

When it comes to debriefing culture within the Navy’s communities you can see a difference in the strike-fighter community, where candid debriefing is a more inherent part of the way they do business, but the opposite was very much true of the surface Navy’s system. And what is being described here also applies more broadly to how things were done for larger groups of ships such as at the strike group level.

But overall the Navy’s major exercises often took a scripted character, where the outcomes were generally known beforehand and the opposition was usually made to lose. Training only one thing at a time against opposition that never wins barely scratches the surface of war, but for the most part this was the best the Navy could do to train its strike groups for years.

So is this common? It looks like all the services have done heavily scripted exercises to some degree, but there is a major difference between what the Navy was doing, and what the Air Force and the Army have been doing for a long time.

Unlike the Navy, the Army and Air Force have true high-end training events that they rotate their people through. For the Air Force this is a major exercise called Red Flag, and for the Army this happens at the National Training Center. They compete against opposition forces that often inflict heavy losses and employ a variety of assets simultaneously. Those forces are composed of units that are dedicated toward acting as full-time opposition for these events, such as the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, where units across the Army rotate through the National Training Center to face off against them specifically. The job of these standing opposition forces is to learn and practice the doctrine of foreign adversaries, and then put that into practice at these events to make for a more realistic fight.

But by comparison it seems the Navy doesn’t have a major standing formation to act as full-time opposition for the high-end fight. And as far as the Marines go, it looks like they have a history of issues that more closely resembles that of the Navy’s.

Now when it comes to the Chinese Navy, those public reports that the Office of Naval Intelligence puts out on foreign militaries paint a very different picture from what the U.S. Navy was doing. The Chinese Navy often trains multiple skillsets at a time, they do not always know the composition and disposition of the opposing forces they are facing off against, and they do not always know exactly what will happen when the event is about to go down.

They’ve been training like this for some time now, and with a specific emphasis on high-end warfighting at the very same time the U.S. Navy was focusing on the low-end spectrum of operations. The Chinese Navy has been focused on learning the more lethal skillset. So in very important respects, the Chinese Navy has been training much harder than the U.S. Navy for years.

Recently there have been some major changes for the U.S. Navy. There are the Fleet Problem exercises Admiral Swift started which seem to be the first consistent and truly challenging high-end exercise events the Navy has had in decades. The COMPTUEX exercise ships do before deploying is becoming more difficult, but through more virtual augmentation. The Surface Navy is going through these SWATT exercises which are now some of the most advanced events surface ships experience before integrating with strike groups.

But what all of these changes have in common is that they only began around two or three years ago. The extent to which the Navy will make the most of them is uncertain. What is clear however is that the corporate memory of the modern U.S. Navy is still heavily shaped by decades of quite unrealistic training.

But exercises go far beyond training. At the tactical level, they are the one activity that comes closest to real war. So exercises are supposed to play a vital function as proving grounds for all sorts of concepts, ideas, and capabilities. This goes to the very heart of one of the most important missions of a peacetime military, which is to develop the force for future conflict. The Navy’s exercise shortfall is far more than an issue of operator skill, it is a sweeping developmental problem.

Consider how you could go about exploring a new tactic, a wargame, or an operating concept. You come up with an idea, and refine it as much as possible through simulations or other methods. And then you finally try it out in the real world through an exercise. You make sure to use serious opposition to see where things may go wrong or backfire. You then rinse and repeat until you have a sturdy, resilient concept. And once you have that, you convert lessons learned in that experimentation into new training, you update the training events, and then rotate your people through those events so they have a chance to learn and apply the new thing.

But this isn’t how force development worked in the U.S. Navy.

When it comes to at-sea experimentation, relatively few warfighting ideas were ever tried in the real world to begin with. But if an idea managed to get tested in some sort of combat exercise it often went up against heavily scripted opposition. As a result, it had few (if any) rounds of trial and error.

But if they moved on in spite of that, the idea was perhaps turned into some publication that was then tucked away in a doctrine library somewhere. And there it’ll sit among many other publications that hardly anyone is really familiar with. 

But if they do happen to be familiar with it, they will not often have the chance to actually practice it and learn it in a live training event. But if they do have the chance to actually practice it, it most likely turned into just another check-in-the-box scripted certification event, lost among the dozens if not hundreds of other certification events that are all competing with each other for the time of the extremely busy Sailor. And the Sailors have no real choice but to rush through them and cut corners just to make due and get out on time for deployment.

What’s important to understand is that training is what makes force development stick. Training is what establishes that final connection between the skill of the deckplate Sailor, and all these warfighting concepts that are allegedly trying to evolve the force.

But so much of what the Navy did for force development didn’t go far because this habit of unrealistic exercising and this overflowing training certification system combined to doom so many warfighting concepts to being untested, unrefined, and untaught.  

For another important example on why training has to be linked with other parts of force development, you can look to the Navy’s wargaming enterprise. These wargames are really important to how the Navy thinks about the future, and among many things these wargames can inform war planning. But if you read more into it, these wargames aren’t nearly as scripted or as easy as the training events, and the fleet often takes very serious losses in these wargames. Especially against China. 

So what could be the implications of having a large disparity between the realism of training and the realism in wargaming? For one, it means the war plans the United States has drawn up for great power conflict are filled with tactics and operations for which the U.S. Navy has made barely any effort to actually teach to its people. To paraphrase a certain Defense Secretary, you go to war with the fleet you trained, not the one you wargamed.

Another major implication of the exercise shortfall was in how the Navy applied strategy to operations, or what the fleet was doing on deployment all these years. The Navy not only has the opportunity to work on force development within the work-up cycle, but also once ships are out on deployment. However, once ships deployed, their operations were mostly focused on missions that contributed little in the way of developing the fleet. 

It should be remembered that many of the low-end power projection missions that dominated Navy deployments during these past few decades, things like security cooperation, presence, and maritime security, were at first not seen as overriding demand signals for the Navy’s time. The strategy and policy documents the Navy was putting out just after the Cold War ended characterized the opportunity to do these missions as a luxury, one that was afforded to the Navy only through the demise of a great power competitor.

When it comes to the major campaigns the U.S. was involved in these past few decades, mainly Iraq and Afghanistan, what needs to be understood is that blue water naval power struggles to find relevance in these kinds of wars. A destroyer or a submarine can hardly do much to fight insurgencies or nation-build. So for the vast majority of the fleet’s ships they usually had to find other things for them to do with their time, including numerous missions that were certainly helpful but often optional. 

But because blue water naval power just cannot do much for counterinsurgency and nation-building campaigns, in the past twenty or so years of insurgent wars, if any of the services could have made the time to work on itself, it is the Navy.

In spite of their own crushing operational tempos the other services made sure to guarantee a large amount of time and forces for large-scale exercise events. Every year, hundreds of aircraft rotate through the Air Force’s Red Flag exercise, and a full third of the Army’s active duty brigades rotate through the National Training Center.

Compared to this the Navy is very different. It looks like for the past few decades the Navy has been spending almost all of its ready naval power on what the combatant commanders want.

So as the Navy looks to strike a new balance between spending its time on force development versus forward operations, this should be seen as an opportunity for the Navy to finally reclaim some of the fleet for itself, to devote ready naval power toward working on the Navy’s agenda and not just what combatant commanders want.

For example, the Navy will soon be standing up a surface development squadron that is exclusively focused on experimenting for force development. That is an example of guaranteeing time and ready naval power to be spent on solving Navy problems.

But overall, the Navy as an institution hardly recognizes force development as a major driver of fleet operations. Things like trying out wargames and concepts of operation in the real world must be recognized as some of the strongest possible demand signals for the Navy’s time and forces. So as the Navy reconfigures itself for great power competition it has to think about how it will strike a new balance between spending time on forward operations, versus spending time on working on itself.

The fleet can start with the strategic guidance the Navy has to align itself with. There is a new national defense and national security strategy that officially make great power competition the main priority. There is a mandate from the Chief of Naval Operations, for high-velocity learning, to learn better and faster. So what does the Navy need to learn about in an era of great power competition? A large part of that is high-end warfighting. So the Navy needs to identify what specific things have the most learning value when it comes to getting better at that specific problem set.

Look at the learning value of a Fleet Problem or a SWATT exercise, and compare it to maritime security missions or doing security cooperation with a third world nation. It should become plainly clear that these exercise events can teach the Navy far more about high-end warfighting than almost any forward operation. 

Some might say the Navy actually did work on itself in forward operations through exercising with numerous partners and allies. But the U.S. Navy often does not like sharing even moderately classified information with those partner fleets. This greatly limits the willingness of the Navy to flex its capability in front of partners abroad. There is also a lot of wariness over being watched by others when exercising in forward areas. 

And this is one of the major arguments that gets frequently raised about why the Navy shouldn’t do these exercises as much, that great power competitors are watching.

However, this is the modern state of competition. Great power competitors have their own satellite constellations, and they are hacking into your systems every single day, and they already know all kinds of things about you that you’d rather they not know. But this kind of heightened transparency between great power militaries is the new status quo. And for what it’s worth, when it comes to their exercises the Chinese realize they are being watched all the time but that doesn’t seem to be stopping them as much.

If the fact they are watching is enough to stop you from doing these events, then you will have allowed them to deter you from carrying out a vital learning experience. And if your forces are pushing hard in these exercises and defeating some serious opposition while competitors watch, then that could end up deterring them and working in your favor. But if they do happen to learn something from spying on your training then at least recognize that one thing they can never hack or steal is the skill of the warfighter. 

What the Navy has to do is break away from this tunnel vision-like focus it has had on forward operations for these past few decades, and do more to feed the colossal demand signal that is coming from the needs of force development. There are two elements that can drive this demand signal. One is the force development of competitors, and the other is the ever-evolving nature of disruptive capability surprise.

Looking at China, it is critical to understand that the Chinese military is an organization that is completely focused on its force development. They have no significant overseas operations that draw their attention elsewhere. And you can see the aggressiveness of their force development in the scale of their reforms. A few years ago they overhauled their theater command structure, created a new branch in the form of the Strategic Support Force, and cut several hundred thousand troops to shrink the size of the force for more even modernization. So it is important to recognize that the Chinese Military has made sure to retain enough decision space to make significant changes to its force development.

Looking at the Chinese Navy today, because their force has very few overseas commitments, the operating posture of their fleet has far more in common with the interwar period U.S. Navy than the modern U.S. Navy does. This can make them quite dangerous, because like the interwar period U.S. Navy (the Navy that would of course go on to win WWII) their operating posture allows them to spend most of their time on working on themselves.

Going to a second major demand signal of force development, that is disruptive capability surprise. Look at WWI, the machine gun, the trench, and big-gun artillery. When they finally put all these new capabilities together, it created a type of warfare that nobody had really seen before. Because of new technology the nature of tactical success had changed so much, but their peacetime force development failed to detect that. The surprise that came from those new weapons and the deadly tactics they produced was so disruptive that it ripped apart the operational and strategic plans of nations caught in great power war. 

So how to get a sense of that burden, of how much real-world experimentation needs to go into modern force development? Look to how networked combat between great power militaries has never happened before, or how fleet combat between great powers hasn’t happened since WWII. Look at everything that’s evolved since then. Electronic warfare, cyber, missiles, satellites, so much has changed, and our ability to truly know how all of that will actually come together to produce specific tactical dynamics and winning combinations is very difficult to know for sure.

Exploring the cross-domain nature of modern warfighting will be fundamental to understanding this problem. Consider the battleship, how if something is set up to where it’s gun line versus gun line, battleships will rule those engagements. But once other platforms are included, platforms that can act through other domains such as carriers, submarines, and land-based air, you can start to see how the tactics of one can rule out the tactics of another. So how could modern cross-domain interactions play out and reveal what’s decisive? This will drive up the resource burden for force development since it will demand experimenting with many different kinds of opposition at the same time, such as joint forces.

A lot of these questions are already being looked at by organizations within the Navy, but the furthest the analysis is able to go is often limited by virtual simulations. Some months ago we published an excellent piece on CIMSEC where people from the Naval Postgraduate School, mainly wargamers and operations research folks, discussed doing tens of thousands of simulations and models to discover tactics and operating concepts for a new unmanned surface ship. Those kinds of people certainly learn a lot about new tactics. But they will also tell you that they are absolutely craving more real-world experimentation.

Even so, it is still not enough to do realistic warfighting experiments and simulations. What is necessary is the candor and the will to act on their results, and the understanding that if a weapon is failing in the context of its application, then recourse must come through innovating its tactics. And if no tactical innovation can preserve a weapon’s utility, then it must be discarded. However, all the services and not just the Navy have some history of scripting their wargames and exercises in order to satisfy preexisting prejudices. But the politics of programmatics, the industrial base, and service identity should never be allowed to trump responsible force development. What is programatically comfortable today can easily cost lives and wars tomorrow. 

Whether it be the Navy’s paltry offensive firepower, its seriously degraded surge capacity, or poor standards for its vaunted Aegis combat system, the fleet is in dire need of course corrections. Now the U.S. Navy finds itself locked in great power competition against a rising maritime superpower, but only major change can ensure the American fleet will still command the seas. 

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Content@cimsec.org.

Featured Image: PACIFIC OCEAN (Aug. 4, 2018) – An F/A-18E Super Hornet takes off from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Devin M. Langer/Released)

Announcements, Events

Watch the CIMSEC Forum for Authors and Readers Online

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By Dmitry Filipoff

On July 16, 2019, the annual CIMSEC Forum for Authors and Readers was held at the Center for Naval Analyses in Arlington, VA. Readers were invited to nominate and vote on their top CIMSEC articles of the preceding year as well as studies by CNA scholars. The winners were invited to present on their articles, offer any updates, and field questions from the audience. 

We thank the authors for their writings and presentations. Feel free to watch and read below. 

CNA Category Winners

The Case for Maritime Security in an Era of Great Power Competition – Joshua Tallis @ 26:15

Nuclear Arms Control without a Treaty? Risks and Options After NEW START – Vince Manzo and Madison Estes @ 1:28:45

CIMSEC Category Winners

Sea Control at the Tactical Level of War – Adam Humayun @4:30

Then What? Wargaming the Interface Between Strategy and Operations – Barney Rubel @ 42:00

How the Fleet Forgot to Fight – Dmitry Filipoff @  57:50

The Nanxun Jiao Crisis and the Dawn of Autonomous Undersea Conflict by David Strachan (runner-up) @ 1:16:05

CIMSEC Category Winners Who Were Unable to Attend

Chinese Shipbuilding and Seapower: Full Steam Ahead, Destination Uncharted – Andrew Erickson

The Deep Ocean: Seabed Warfare and the Defense of Undersea Infrastructure – Bill Glenney

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Content@cimsec.org. 

Call for Articles

Call for Short Submissions: Notes to the New Chief of Naval Operations

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By Dmitry Filipoff

Submissions Due: September 16, 2019
Week Dates: September 23-27, 2019
Submission Length: 500 words
Submit to: Content@cimsec.org

In 500 words or less, what would you want the new Chief of Naval Operations to know? CIMSEC is launching a special topic week series featuring short contributions that look to convey pressing points to the U.S. Navy’s new top leadership.

On August 22, 2019, Admiral Michael Gilday assumed command as the 32nd Chief of Naval Operations of the U.S. Navy.

In some of his first remarks as CNO, Admiral Gilday remarked on the changing strategic environment, in that “For the first time in a very long time, we face serious challenges at sea around the world. For decades, we took for granted that no other blue-water navy would dare take us on. That’s no longer true.” Admiral Gilday also vowed that “We will question our assumptions. We will think differently about the competition we are now in. We will be the Navy the nation needs now, and we will build the Navy the nation needs to fight and win in the future.”

How can Admiral Gilday lead the way toward these objectives and meet the challenge of great power competition? Contributors can answer these questions and many others as they seek to convey their message. 

Given the broadly international nature of the U.S. Navy’s mandate and the numerous partners and allies that often work with American naval forces, international contributors are encouraged to share their perspectives. 

Please submit all contributions for consideration to Content@cimsec.org. 

This is an independent CIMSEC initiative and is not produced in cooperation with any U.S. Navy organization or entity. 

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Content@cimsec.org. 

Featured Image: Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday delivers his first remarks as the 32nd CNO during a change of office ceremony held at the Washington Navy Yard. (US Navy Photo)

Indo-Asia-Pacific

Red Star Over the Pacific: A Conversation with James Holmes on China’s Maritime Rise

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By Dmitry Filipoff

CIMSEC had the opportunity to discuss the second edition of Red Star Over the Pacific with James Holmes, current J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College. In this conversation Holmes lays out how the theories of Alfred Thayer Mahan helped inform China’s maritime rise, how China built a formidable naval warfighting capability, and how the U.S. and its allies can more effectively deter China militarily. 

Q: Throughout the book you note that China’s approach to building maritime power is very comprehensive and “Mahanian” in nature. What do you mean by this, and how has maritime power contributed to China’s rise as a great power?

JH: China’s rise is avowedly Mahanian in terms of both purpose and power. Sea power proponents in Beijing and places like that will tell you so. In terms of purpose, Mahan declares that commercial, diplomatic, and military access to important trading regions is the uppermost goal of maritime strategy, bar none. Because of China’s exceptionally forbidding strategic geography, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chiefs have to worry about access from the time a ship leaves harbor in East Asia until the time it docks in an Indian Ocean, Persian Gulf, or European seaport. Hence Beijing’s effort to erect an anti-access buffer to hold the U.S. Navy at a distance: it eases the challenge of gaining access from the China seas to the Western Pacific, Indian Ocean, and points beyond.

In terms of power, Mahan’s famous six “determinants” of sea power indicate which would-be seafaring societies have the right stuff to go to sea in the search for commercial, diplomatic, and military access and the prosperity and power it promises. The determinants also suggest what the leadership of a prospective seafaring society should do to hasten the process along and make it more robust, such as enacting laws and policies encouraging people to engage in maritime industries, construct the infrastructure to support merchant and naval fleets, and on and on. His writings describe and prescribe.

It’s important to note that Mahan’s influence on naval operations can, and we believe does, stop with his injunction to seek “command of the sea,” meaning relative supremacy in waters that matter to China. There are many ways to skin a cat. Navies and affiliated joint forces can seek maritime command through a variety of methods, not just by sending out battle fleets for symmetrical force-on-force engagements as in the age of sail, and to a lesser degree, the age of steam. For instance, they can execute an “active defense” until such time as they are strong enough to venture a decisive battle. People’s Liberation Army (PLA) strategists read Corbett and approve of his concept of active defense, but more importantly, active defense has been graven on the CCP’s way of strategy and operations since Mao fashioned the concept in the 1930s. Beijing’s 2015 white paper, “China’s Military Strategy,” reaffirms that active defense remains the “essence” of the party’s way of war, just as it was for the Red Army during the Chinese civil war. China’s methods are nothing new, even though it uses different implements to put them into effect at sea.

So people should not make too much of the operational and tactical implications of Mahan’s writings for China’s navy. They should pay a great deal of attention to what he says about maritime strategy and amassing sea power to execute strategy. These are the ideas to which CCP leaders have declared fealty.

Q: For millennia China was a continental power, primarily focused on land. Now within only the past generation or two has China made a historic transition into becoming a maritime superpower. How did this shift change Chinese strategic thinking and threat perception?

JH: As I noted earlier, maritime strategy rivets attention on the problem of access, and for China that means guaranteed passage between the China seas and the Pacific or Indian ocean first and foremost. CCP leaders are acutely conscious that the first island chain encloses the entire continental crest—no city outflanks it—that U.S. allies or friends occupy the first island chain, and that the United States used the island chain to fetter maritime movement in the Western Pacific throughout the Cold War. So if Beijing seems morbidly obsessed with its geographic plight, that’s because it is. And for good reason. Its worries constitute our opportunity.

Q: In Chapter 4 of the book, you discuss China’s “strategic will” to the sea. What do you mean by strategic will, and how has China’s strategic will to the sea grown over the years?

JH: The term comes from Wolfgang Wegener, an admiral in the World War I German High Seas Fleet and the author of The Naval Strategy of the World War, a blistering critique of Germany’s failure as a sea power and a fine work of sea power theory. Strategic will for Wegener is nothing more than the Nietzschean “will to power” turned to the sea in pursuit of strategic position and a great navy able to seek out key strategic locations to further overseas commerce. We prefer Wegener’s concept to Mahan’s, which is valid but rather static. There’s a real dynamism to the will to power, yet it is also perishable. Wegener is vehement about urging political and naval leaders to rouse and husband strategic will to the sea—which is precisely what CCP leaders have done over the past quarter-century or so as China amasses the trappings of sea power. If only U.S. and allied leaders were as single-mindedly focused and persuasive about seaborne endeavors.

Q: You argue that concepts like active defense and the fortress fleet are core components of China’s maritime warfighting strategy and operational thinking. How may these concepts and others animate China’s prosecution of a future war at sea?

JH: We should be clear about the terminology here. Active defense is a Maoist term and ubiquitous in CCP writings about strategy, operations, and tactics. (It’s far from uncommon in Western writings as well, not just in Corbett’s works but those of Bradley Fiske and many others.)

“Fortress fleet” is a term we use to describe the PLA’s use of shore-based firepower to supplement the power of the battle fleet. The term comes from Mahan’s critique of Russian naval strategy during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. Russian naval commanders had a bad habit of huddling under the guns of Port Arthur for protection against the superior Imperial Japanese Navy. Mahan deemed this a “radically erroneous” way of naval operations because the range of a gun was so short in those days—a fortress fleet was confined to a very small circle on the map whose range was the effective firing range of a cannon circa 1904-1905. That had all manner of ill effects. But that doesn’t render the concept of shore-based fire support moot. If I have the scouting capability, command and control, and firepower to rain ordnance on an enemy fleet scores, hundreds, or thousands of miles out to sea, exactly what is the objection to a fortress fleet? None whatsoever. You have plenty of sea room to roam while still tapping fire support. You can have the best of both worlds, blue-water mobility plus that great shore-based equalizer.

Bottom line, it is misleading in the extreme to run direct comparisons between the PLA Navy and the U.S. Navy and console ourselves that we remain ahead. If we run comparisons between the fraction of the U.S. Navy that would appear on scene at likely battlegrounds in the Western Pacific and the massed PLA Navy backed by shore-based firepower and we look like we’re behind, well, that reflects reality. It matters not a whit who has the stronger navy overall; it matters who can concentrate the most firepower at scenes of action for as long as it takes to accomplish tactical and operational goals. As Nelson quipped, a ship’s a fool to fight a fort. If Fortress China can reach far out to sea and lend accurate firepower in support of the battle fleet, that’s a discomfiting prospect. Do not give in to the temptation to view maritime competition and warfare solely as a navy-on-navy thing.

Q: You discuss a dichotomy in the orientation of a fleet, where a Mahanian fleet is focused on preparing to secure command of the seas in the event of conflict, and where a post-Mahanian fleet is mostly focused on exploiting command of the seas in peacetime. It appears the Chinese Navy has been developing itself as a Mahanian fleet focused on the high-end fight at the same time the U.S. Navy has been focusing on post-Mahanian missions such as power projection and constabulary functions. How do you compare these two navies through the lens of this dichotomy, and how could a Mahanian/post-Mahanian mismatch between rival fleets create strategic risk?

JH: Here I should give credit to my friend Geoff Till, who articulated the distinction between Mahanian and post-Mahanian navies back in 2007. It’s a cultural mismatch translated into force structure and doctrine. After the Cold War we told ourselves the Soviet Navy was gone and no one would replace it as a peer adversary. So we could lay down arms—the arms needed to fight for command of the sea, anyway—and deemphasize missions such as surface warfare, anti-submarine warfare, and anti-air warfare. We assumed away our first and foremost function, the fight for command—hence “post-Mahanian.”

Meanwhile future challengers resolved to prepare for that fight against a U.S. Navy that had persuaded itself naval history had ended—hence those challengers were “Mahanian.” If a bloody-minded Mahanian fleet backed by shore-based firepower encounters an inattentive post-Mahanian fleet, who wins—even if the material advantage happens to favor the latter?

Never, ever assume away your primary reason for existence. It’s ahistorical for fighting forces, and dangerous in the extreme.

Q: Near the conclusion of the book you argue that American diplomats and troops must prepare themselves for Beijing’s “hyper-Mahanian approach to seapower.” What could such preparations look like as the U.S. calibrates its strategy toward China?

JH: It doesn’t mean reciprocating China’s naval preparations in symmetrical fashion, although a lot of what we must do is regenerate habits, skills, and hardware we need to compete the way we did against the Soviet Navy. That part will look symmetrical. We started delving into an asymmetrical approach back in 2012, after the first edition of Red Star over the Pacific, but before the idea of island-chain defense became common wisdom in journals, think tanks, and the Pentagon. We preached island-chain defense before it was cool. The basic idea is that we need to turn geography, alliances, and asymmetric advantages in hardware and tactics into a decisive strategic edge. If Beijing frets about access, and if we and our allies stand athwart its access to the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean, that constitutes invaluable potential leverage.

In other words, we can mount an anti-access strategy of our own along the first island chain, using submarines, sea mines, unmanned vehicles of various kinds, aircraft, and land-based firepower to seal up the straits between the islands constituting the island chain. We can convert the island chain into a “Great Wall in reverse,” a barrier to Chinese maritime movement rather than an edifice that keeps out China’s foes. Display the capability to do all of that at manageable cost to ourselves and allied governments, and we will have erected a formidable deterrent to CCP mischief. A few weeks back The Economist ran an article about China’s strategic geography, including a nice mention of Red Star over the Pacific, and closed by quoting Professor Hu Bo—one of China’s preeminent maritime strategists—as observing that challenging island-chain defense would be a “suicide mission” for China’s armed forces. We agree—and hope the CCP leadership does as well.

I noted that the PLA Navy need not be Mahanian in its operational and tactical methods, however Mahanian it may be in larger things. The same goes for America and its allies. We can repay Beijing’s anti-access efforts with interest by staging an anti-access strategy of our own—and dare Beijing to undertake Hu’s suicide mission.

Q: What are your predictions for how Chinese maritime power will continue to evolve into the future?

JH: My predictions are usually about as venturesome as Clubber Lang’s in Rocky III: “Prediction? Pain!” In fact, that one probably applies here as well. I think it is safe to say that, barring some black swan-like economic collapse or political revolution, the CCP will remain a serious player at sea. China will not somehow return to port or otherwise revert to being its traditional continental self on the day after the conquest of Taiwan, or whatever. The leadership has connected sea power to sovereignty, to China’s banishment of the century of humiliation, to China’s very sense of itself and its place in the world. You don’t rouse sentiments like that and then let the seaward quest fizzle out from inattention.

So this is a lasting challenge. I think it’s also fair to prophesy—because we see it happening now—that U.S.-China relations will take that competitive swerve we thought the relationship might take when we came out with the first edition, and took a fairly upbeat view. Which is why the second edition has a keener edge to it than the first. The first edition was a plea to take these people seriously; this edition is about getting ready. If we don’t get ready and convince Beijing we are ready, our efforts at deterrence are apt to falter—and we may find ourselves in a very bad place. The hour is late.

Q: Any final thoughts you would like to share?

JH: Just that there is no reason to resign ourselves to failure. In fact, this strategic competition is ours to lose when you take account of geography, our slate of allies compared to China’s, and so forth. Those are all formidable assets. But we do have to get serious about competing and act accordingly. We are trying to come from behind.

James Holmes holds the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and served on the faculty of the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. A former U.S. Navy surface-warfare officer, he was the last gunnery officer in history to fire a battleship’s big guns in anger, during the first Gulf War in 1991. He earned the Naval War College Foundation Award in 1994, signifying the top graduate in his class. His books include Red Star over the Pacific, an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of 2010 and a fixture on the Navy Professional Reading List. General James Mattis deems him “troublesome.” The views expressed here are his own. 

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Nextwar@cimsec.org. 

Featured Image: Chinese Navy’s 055-class guided missile destroyer Nanchang takes part in a naval parade off the eastern port city of Qingdao, to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy, China, April 23, 2019. (Reuters/Jason Lee)