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“Looks Like a Chilean War”: The Baltimore Incident as Counterfactual Exercise

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Alternate History Topic Week

By Thomas Jamison

On October 16th 1891, a group of USS Baltimore sailors, no doubt happy to have liberty after months at sea, set off to enjoy the delights of Valparaiso, Chile. After several hours (of, let’s be honest, presumably heavy drinking), a scuffle broke out between local Chileans and the American crew. The ensuing violence left two U.S. sailors dead, seventeen injured and a hemispheric relationship in tatters. Unable to resolve the issue locally, the USS Baltimore’s commander telegraphed Washington for instructions. The Chileans, meanwhile, held fast to their jurisdiction over the U.S. personnel, and the investigative proceedings more broadly, as a matter of national sovereignty. From these humble sparks came a war crisis over hemispheric leadership and the relative standing of the United States as a “great power.”

To date, scholars have tended to underestimate the Baltimore Incident as “a mere tempest in a teapot,” or at best a signpost en route to the War of 1898. That the crisis has inspired relatively little comment in English literature should obscure neither its significance to contemporaries nor its enduring relevance to strategic planners. Indeed, the Baltimore Incident  might better be understood as an acute manifestation of the larger, chronic competition between the United States and Chile over regional autonomy and control. When, in 1891, Chilean leaders provoked a confrontation with the U.S, they sought political advantage from the crisis (at a domestic and international level) and had good reason to be optimistic. Chile had used its maritime forces and commercial partnerships to defeat Spain (1866), Peru (1884) and to overawe the United States into diplomatic concessions in 1882, 1885 and 1888. By 1891, however, the realities of power-politics in the American Pacific had shifted dramatically. In the United States imperialist sentiment, domestic military production and a dedicated navalist lobby all underwrote a newfound bellicosity and assertiveness. Opinion in Washington held that Chilean regional primacy represented a substantial threat to American expansionism and, moreover, the self-image of the United States in the “great power” system. National “honor” was no idle phrase in the Harrison administration.

At this 1891 juncture for the “dominant position in the Western Hemisphere,” war seemed likely, perhaps even inevitable. As The New York Times reported on Christmas Day 1891: “Looks like a Chilean War, Little Hope Now of a Peaceful Settlement.” Nonetheless, and  to the chagrin of many, hostilities were averted in late January 1892 when Chile acceded to U.S. demands. The tantalizing question remains, what might have been? What if the United States and Chile went to War in 1890? What ramifications would conflict have had for the U.S. emergence in the great power system? And as long as we’re entertaining counterfactuals, what might defeat at the hands of “little Chili” have spelled for navalist ambitions and the U.S. role in South America?

The United States, Chile and the Pacific at the Fin-De-Siècle Such an outcome was hardly a remote possibility. In 1884, Chile emerged from the War of the Pacific (its territorial struggle with Peru and Bolivia over nitrate deposits), as the dominant naval power in the Pacific. That result seems as incredible today as it was obvious to contemporary observes. Secretary of the Navy John Long complained that in the 1880s, “the American Navy was inferior to that of any European and at least one South American power. Little Chile, triumphant over Peru, could have sent her Admiral Cochrane and Huascar against San Francisco and the United States would have been unable to repel them.” Likewise, the prize winning essay of the U.S. Naval Institute in 1884 lamented, “in our present condition, Brazil, Chili or the Argentine Republic might send a fleet of ironclads to devastate our seaport cities.” Overseas, in 1881, the London Standard noted (smugly, but with little exaggeration), “The American Navy, if not a phantom fleet, would certainly find it difficult to compete successfully with the Chilean fleet.”

Those observations reflected the scope of Chile’s investment in naval supremacy along the Pacific Slope in the 1880s and 90s. Chilean President Jose Manuel Balmaceda argued in 1891: Chile should be able to resist on its own territory any possible coalition, and if it cannot succeed in attaining the naval power of the great powers, it should at least prove, on the base of a secure port and a fleet proportionate to its resources, that there is no possible profit in starting a war against the Republic of Chile. Resources were appropriated accordingly and with some notable success. The most prolific Chilean naval historian estimated that (in absolute terms) the “peak of Chilean naval power was in 1899.” In 1882 Chile rebuffed—rudely—U.S. attempts to mediate an end to the War of the Pacific. In 1885, it countered U.S. incursions against the Colombians by deploying a gunboat to Panama. Most tangibly, in 1888 Chile annexed Easter Island as a symbol of its hemispheric stature and, more practically, a strategic (coaling/early warning) asset. By 1894, in a revealing detail, Santiago even began to export surplus warships to Japan.

Of the Pacific’s many foreign observes, none eyed Chile’s position with more concern than the United States. The central U.S. political objectives of the late nineteenth century were hemispheric expansion and the development of overseas markets, primarily in Asia—what Seward called “the chief theater of events in the world’s great hereafter.” Both efforts were contingent on an Isthmian Canal and/or sea lines of communication around South America, which in practice pushed the U.S. toward a policy of hemispheric hegemony. Andrew Carnegie captured the spirit of the age in 1882 when he wrote to then Secretary of State James Blaine, “You are exactly right. America is going to control anything and everything on this Continent. That’s settled. . . . No joint arrangements, no entangling alliances with monarchical, war-like Europe. America will take this Continent in hand alone.” In such an environment of imperial  ascendancy (U.S.) and regional resistance (Chile), the Baltimore Incident, or some similar provocation, was almost inevitable. 

By December 1891, institutional and political incentives had pushed the would-be belligerents to the “ragged edge” of war. That month, as a U.S. task force transited toward South America, the USS Baltimore was replaced on station by the USS Yorktown, commanded by “Fighting Bob” Evans (an officer who could calmly confide in his journal, “I cannot see any good reason why I should not be perfectly civil and polite to [the Chileans], even if I have to shoot them tomorrow.”) Relations deteriorated further when, on New Year’s Eve 1891, the Chileans provocatively fired rockets in the Yorktown’s vicinity, and days later—some sources say —conducted torpedo drills using the U.S. vessel as a notional target. “Fighting Bob” Evans, surveying the scene from the Yorktown was typically blunt, “I don’t see how war can now be avoided.”

RADM Robley Dunglison "Fighting Bob" Evans
RADM Robley Dunglison “Fighting Bob” Evans

Waging War with “Little Chili” Bombast and hindsight aside, if it came to war between the U.S. and Chile the outcome remained highly contingent. U.S. navalist pretensions belied a central irony of the crisis. American leaders managed to assert that Chile was simultaneously a real threat to U.S. regional hegemony and that it would be relatively easy to defeat in an offensive war. That dissonance spoke to the larger uncertainty about the balance of power in the Pacific. Perceptions of Chilean naval expansion had helped spur U.S. naval expansion in the 1880s, but in 1891 U.S. forces remained relatively limited, and decidedly untested. Tracy, for one, was shocked to learn that “the best American naval expeditionary force which could be mustered at this time numbered scarcely twenty warships.” Moreover, many of these ships teetered on obsolescence. As the Naval Historian Timothy Wolters convincingly documented, in the 1890s:

Naval recapitalization in the United States lagged well behind political debates over, and public perceptions of, the new American navy. Intriguingly, the data show that immediately prior to the country’s war with Spain in 1898, the old navy still consumed about one-third of the navy’s fiscal resources, contributed three-sevenths of the service’s aggregate tonnage, and accounted for just over half of all vessels in the navy’s inventory.

The gap between perception and capability bred miscalculation. Establishing a clear balance of “real power” from which to base strategic planning was frustratingly imprecise.

That was all the more true because naval assessments at the fin-de-siècle were complicated by recent and largely untested developments in naval technology. Innovations in naval architecture (low-freeboard, armored warships; rapid firing guns) and the application of second industrial revolution technologies (electric firing systems; navigational aids; armor piercing shells) rendered traditional assessments of naval efficacy unsure. Chile’s fleet of torpedo boats, for example, presented a novel form of power in the Pacific. It was widely noted that during the Chilean Civil War, the Balmacedist navy had become the first in history to successfully use a propelled “automobile” torpedo to sink another warship. What impact these new weapons might have on the ability of the Chilean’s to defend their coast against aggression was hotly debated.

Complicating matters further were geographic realities that hampered U.S. deployments and ensnared military preparations with European shipyards. The Peruvian minister in Washington, Jose Yrigoyen, appreciated as much, cabling his government to describe “the difficulties the [U.S.] squadron will have in a war with Chile.” Without “coaling station in the Pacific,” he argued perceptibly, the U.S. ships would be forced to ferry coal from San Francisco, a “difficult task, above all if Chile dedicates a few of its ships to capturing this important element of the American squadron.” These geographic challenges injected a sobering realism into the United States’ preparations for war. No less than Mahan wrote, “we are so confident in our bigness and so little realize the great extra load entailed by the distance of Chili, in case of war.” Relatedly, in the winter of 1891, Chile retained the services of a British shipyard for additional ship construction over the objections of the Harrison administration. How the interruption of global supply lines via an Atlantic guerre de course might effect power projection in the Southern Hemisphere defied clear assessment. All this is to say, the war was hardly a foregone conclusion.

Indeed—looking forward to the 1905 Russo-Japanese War—we might even speculate about the use of torpedoes to asymmetrically attack U.S. capital ships (that is to apply a key innovation in second industrial revolution technology to obviate investments in steel, ships, guns etc…). The New York Times certainly did, arguing that “Naval constructors who advocate and powers that have adopted the policy of building larger and larger war ships with constantly- increasing thickness of armor will devote much study and sober thought to [Chile’s] first decisive exhibition of the effectiveness of the automobile torpedo in actual warfare.” Distance, new weapons systems and interruptible lines of communication all suggested that the United States might have fared no better than Spain had a generation (1866-72) earlier in its unsuccessful war with Peru and Chile (one which ended with the Spanish commander committing suicide to avoid humiliation). 

If Chile had defeated the United States in a limited regional war, it might have proved a a major setback for Tracy, Mahan and the like. It would likely have undermined U.S. stature in the great power system and elevated Chile on a par with, say, Japan. Indeed in the same way that Russian defeat in 1905 saw it recast as backwards, U.S. defeat might have seriously altered the time, place and manner in which it entered into the European great power system. It might also have seen Chile, backed by a commercial relationship with Great Britain, double-down on its program of navalist expansion and develop into a long-term regional competitor with the United States. It might even have encouraged Santiago to follow up on its territorial annexations (in the Atacama and Easter Island) to become a regional hegemon in its own right.

Conclusion

The resolution of the Baltimore Incident is at once a case study in crisis management and a cautionary tale of military and civilian leaders using war to advance their institutional interests. It is an equally useful reminder (and perhaps necessary corrective) of the limits of U.S. hemispheric control before 1890, and of the speed of the imperial-navalist transformation by 1898. The offensive capabilities of the United States morphed from a near-peer competitor with Chile in the 1880s into those of a global power in under a generation. In this sense, the Baltimore Incident is a window onto the United States “adapting to the status of a world power” amid a period of technological change and imperial rivalry.  The great diplomatic historian Ernest May argued that the United States became “a world power in many respects comparable to Great Britain or Russia or Imperial Germany” after the War of 1898. Looking back a decade, the Baltimore Incident marks an important precedent in a longer process of ascendancy. Considering alternative outcomes (namely defeat) further reminds us of that ascendancy’s contingent nature. As a nomological exercise, the Baltimore Incident suggests a raft conclusions. Namely, that regional actors often resist imperial hegemony in order to secure domestic cohesion; that military bureaucracies incentivize the militarization of foreign policy; and that technological progress can rapidly destabilize the balance of power, encouraging misperceptions and bellicosity. These tendencies belong as much to the twenty first century as they do the nineteenth. Parallels between the Baltimore Incident and recent Sino-Japanese tensions, to name one possible example, are almost irresistible. Consider in this analogy China as the Harrisonian United States and Japan as Chile; supported then, as now, by the world’s leading commercial power. It is conceivable, as in 1891, that a minor incident, like an attack on a foreign owned business, could encourage nationalist posturing in Beijing as a means to (1) rally domestic support, (2) advance the interests of recapitalizing military forces (a process ongoing in both China and Japan), and (3) assert regional primacy. That possibility should be especially concerning because of the comparative proximity of China and Japan and the profound uncertainties created by the militarization of digital technology. A critical perspective on the Baltimore Incident should sensitize policymakers to this relevant, but under-appreciated war scare. It should also reinforce the imperative of clear assessments of power as a tool for conflict mitigation amid the exaggerations of modern-day nationalism.

Tommy Jamison is a PhD candidate in International History at Harvard University. From 2009 to 2014 he served as an officer in the U.S. Navy. The views expressed here are his own. 

Asia-Pacific, Fiction, History

President McCormack and the Vietnam War

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Alternate History Topic Week

By Ben Lamont

President John W. McCormack assumed office on November 23, 1963, less than twenty-four hours after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, following the accidental killing of Lyndon B. Johnson by a Secret Service agent. Born into a Boston family of Irish immigrants and a lawyer by training, McCormack served in the U.S. Army during the final years of World War One and began his long political career shortly after returning. He was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1928.

McCormack was a staunch democrat and supporter of the New Deal. In the lead up to World War Two, he rose to prominence as chair of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, which sought  to unmask U.S. citizens with Nazi or communist ties. McCormack also played a key role in the passage, in the face of isolationist resistance, of the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, which initiated the first peacetime conscription in U.S. history.

Speaker of the House John W. McCormack (D-Massachusettes) (standing), addresses those attending a luncheon at the US Capitol honoring top Department of Defense executives. Left to right are Congressman George H. Mahon (D-Texas), committee chairman of the US House of Representatives Appropriations Committee; General (GEN) Earle G. Wheeler, Chairman, US Army Joint Chiefs of Staff; Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and Congressman McCormack.
Speaker of the House John W. McCormack (D-Massachusettes) (standing), addresses those attending a luncheon at the US Capitol honoring top Department of Defense executives. Left to right are Congressman George H. Mahon (D-Texas), committee chairman of the US House of Representatives Appropriations Committee; General (GEN) Earle G. Wheeler, Chairman, US Army Joint Chiefs of Staff; Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and Congressman McCormack.

Despite having served in the House of Representatives since 1928, McCormack came into the Oval Office with relatively little foreign policy expertise. As a result, McCormack was initially deferential to the stable of charismatic foreign policy advisors he inherited from President Kennedy: Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense William McNamara, CIA Director John McCone, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell Taylor.

While managing the ongoing strategic competition with the Soviet Union always loomed, during his time in office McCormack’s foreign policy agenda was dominated by the war in Vietnam, which was at a crossroads when he arrived. Based on the advice of Bundy and others, McCormack authorized the deployment of hundreds more U.S. military advisers during the first few months of his presidency.

In the midst of the 1964 election cycle (McCormack won the Democratic primary virtually unopposed), the Gulf of Tonkin incident made Vietnam an election issue. McCormack sought and won the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in part to project an image of strength in the face of accusations by his rival in the general election, Barry Goldwater, that he wasn’t doing enough to roll back communist expansion. The resolution granted McCormack greater authority over how to use U.S. military force, which he used to deepen U.S. engagement in Vietnam over the following year. McCormack won the 1964 presidential election against Goldwater easily.

Over the next two years however, McCormack grew increasingly uncomfortable with U.S. involvement in Vietnam. A veteran and staunch Catholic, McCormack wrote to the widows and families of hundreds of service members who were killed in Vietnam over the course of his presidency. These interactions had a profound effect on McCormack, and his willingness to commit U.S. soldiers to the conflict began to erode in the winter of 1965-66, as U.S. casualties mounted.

U.S. troop levels in Vietnam reached a peak of 200,000 in the summer of 1966, which McCormack reduced to 40,000 by the spring of 1967. In his public speeches, McCormack cited his concern for veterans and his faith as the reasons behind his decision to disengage from Vietnam. McCormack was particularly affected by the activist Julia Moore, who brought attention how after the Battle of Ia Drang, widows were notified of their husbands’ deaths via telegrams delivered by cab drivers.

In late January 1968, around the time of the Tet holiday, North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong forces launched major attacks against the weakened U.S. positions that remained in Vietnam. Around three thousand Marines stationed at Khe Sanh Combat Base, close to the DMZ with North Vietnam, came under siege and had to be airlifted out under intense enemy fire. U.S. and South Vietnamese Army forces fell back to the perimeter of the Capital Military District around Saigon.

Although the U.S. government sought to portray the agreements between the United States and North Vietnam that McCormack oversaw as ceasefires, they were widely viewed as articles of surrender, and allowed U.S. forces to retreat from South Vietnam relatively peacefully in the latter half of 1968.

McCormack took massive criticism for his decisions from foreign policy hawks who believed that he had capitulated to the Soviet Union and communism. During the 1968 presidential race, McCormack’s opponent Richard Nixon hammered McCormack on the issue of Vietnam. While Nixon publicly championed the idea of “peace with honor”, The New York Times reported that Nixon called McCormack a “traitor” in a private speech to Republican donors a few months before the election.

After winning the 1968 election, President Nixon appointed a special task force to investigate the reasons behind America’s defeat in Vietnam, which became known as the Gates Commission after its chairman, former Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates. The Gates Commission was highly critical of President McCormack’s decision-making during the war and recommended that the responsibility of commander-in-chief should be shared by the president and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rather than be the sole prerogative of the president. However the recommendations never materialized because of concerns about their constitutional legality.

After leaving the White House, McCormack became a fellow at Boston College, where he wrote a memoir of his long career entitled “Leadership in Turmoil”. He died in 1975.

Ben Lamont works in the Asia program at The German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Fiction, History, North America

President Charles Stewart and the Making of American Naval Power

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Alternate History Topic Week

By Claude Berube

Having just completed his latest assignment as Commodore of the Home Squadron, Charles Stewart had returned to his intermittent business interests that had afforded opportunities to officers without orders.  He had seen the flyers, his stately image emblazoned above the appeals for him to run for president of the United States.  At the behest of fellow Philadelphian merchants, he agreed to join them in Baltimore where both the Whigs and Democrats held their conventions.  Henry Clay was already certain to be the Whig nominee; the fight for the Democratic nomination was far more complex.

Martin van Buren’s lock began to falter based on his position on slavery and opposition to the annexation of Texas.  War of 1812 hero Lewis Cass supported annexation.  There were other contenders: James Buchanan, John C. Calhoun, and Silas Wright.  In the background was the decidedly non-political hero of the War with the French in 1798, the Barbary War, and the War of 1812.  Van Buren was gone by the seventh ballot.  Massachusetts delegate George Bancroft offered Speaker of the House James Knox Polk as a running mate for Van Buren or Stewart.  Polk’s supporters vowed to endorse Stewart if he selected Polk as his vice president.

The matter was offered to Stewart at a dinner.  He said nothing, appearing unusually nervous and fidgety.  This was the moment of decision.  If he turned them away, there would never be another opportunity and he would return to his estate in Bordentown to live out his days as the chance for another sea command – particularly as he had already been commodore of the Mediterranean, Pacific and Home Squadrons – was unlikely. 

“If nominated,” he finally said, “I will accept.” His nomination was immediately reported by Samuel Morse’s new telegraph.

With Jackson’s protégé, Polk, by his side, and the delegates from Pennsylvania and New York committing to the ticket, the northern and western states soon followed suit.  The sixty-six year old Stewart provided a heroic narrative for the newspapers, much as Jackson’s army experience had vaulted him into the presidency.  In the general election, Polk’s Tennessee roots offset Clay’s enough for Stewart to be elected president.

Though his vice president kept pushing an agenda to annex Texas and secure the northwestern territories, Stewart was resistant to fighting on too many fronts for a nation with a small army and navy. He named his friend and navalist James Fenimore Cooper Secretary of the Navy, a move not unprecedented since another of the literary Knickerbocker Group James Kirke Paulding, had held the same position under Van Buren.  Cooper’s extensive non-fiction writing in the previous decade about building up the fleet convinced Stewart that he was the right man for his administration. Stewart focused his administration on building and modernizing the navy and providing new markets for the merchant fleet.  Westward expansion held no interest to the sailor-president. 

Naming Matthew Perry America’s first admiral, Stewart had read his 1839 report on the navies of Europe.  A young French ship designer had also come to his attention.  The days of wooden frigates and ships of the line designed by Stewart’s former colleagues, the Humphreys, were passing.  Stewart realized that the country had to make a leap forward if it was to become a great power.  He hired Henri Dupuy de Lome, a French ship designer proposing an iron-hulled-screw-driven frigate.  Together with Commodore James Barron, who had designed a steam-powered tri-hulled ram ship in the 1830s, and a young engineer Charles Ellet proposing his own ram ship, the team built a new naval force.

In late 1845, Stewart sent his Secretary of State Richard Rush, a former Minister to Great Britain, to issue demands of the British Empire including accepting U.S. terms on the Oregon Territory.  Rush and Stewart alone remained from their Philadelphia schoolyard from where two other friends perished – first Richard Somers at Tripoli and then Stephen Decatur in a duel.  Stewart built a coalition of those defeated by the Royal Navy that had allowed it to rule the seas.  Spain had a small navy with some ships that remained in harbor since the days of Trafalgar.  But France offered Stewart more hope.

In 1836, Louis-Napoleon, the nephew of Bonaparte, had attempted a coup.  Failing that, he sailed for the United States.  He met in New York with the elite including generals and naval officers.  He vowed to poet Fitz-Greene Halleck – one of the Knickerbockers – that he would become Emperor.  He was welcomed at the Naval Lyceum at the Brooklyn Navy Yard then he traveled to Bordentown where his uncle Joseph – the dethroned King of Spain – had exiled himself.   Here Louis-Napoleon became acquainted with Stewart and his family.  Stewart funded Napoleon in 1845 to overthrow the government then sent his own son, Charles Tudor Stewart, as emissary to the throne of Napoleon III.

England rebuked Rush and when he returned, Stewart asked for a declaration of war.

Queen Victoria, Prime Minister Robert Peel by her side, sent the British Fleet under the aged Admiral of the Fleet James Hawkins-Whitshed off to the Americas to put the upstart nation down quickly, lest other nations be inspired by their defiance.  The Royal Navy hadn’t been defeated in forty years and its wooden walls would not fail now.  Its objective was the Chesapeake Bay where transport ships would land in Norfolk, Baltimore, and up the Potomac River to Washington.

A recognized Constitutionalist, Stewart had averted a war with Algiers in 1805 when he pointed out to the squadron’s Commodore that only Congress could declare war and again in 1815 when notified that the Treaty of Ghent had been signed pressed the crew of the Constitution to continue its wartime footing since only the Senate could ratify a treaty – and there had been no such news.   It allowed him just a few weeks later his greatest victory of the USS Constitution over the HMS Cyane and HMS Levant. Now, he followed the Constitution again while anti-British fervor in Congress overwhelmingly supported a third war for American independence and reduce England’s control of the oceans and the trade it dominated.  He also knew Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution which stated that the President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy.  He would lead the fleet.

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Perry objected as the honor should have been his as Admiral until Stewart divided the fleet.  One squadron under Perry steamed south from Baltimore toward Norfolk.  The English fleet of nearly one hundred ships sailed slowly into the mouth of the Chesapeake toward the unmistakable plumes steamships to the north.  Stewart’s fleet waited in Gosport.  Thirty years before, Stewart was in command of USS Constellation and was prevented from getting underway because of Admiral Sir John Warren’s squadron.  This new British fleet had several steamships, but no ironclads.  Unfortunately the British, who had always been prone to overpowering their ships at the risk of maneuverability, sent their expedited screw-propelled ships-of-the-line like the QUEEN and ALBION classes at the head of the fleet.

Perry’s squadron was the first to fire upon the fleet while Stewart’s squadron of iron-clad ram ships steamed east into the heart of British fleet.  Ships of the line and frigates were holed one after the other while others fell to Perry’s barrage.  A quarter of the fleet, including most of the transports, tried to escape to the Atlantic, but soon encountered a joint French-Spanish fleet at the mouth of the Chesapeake.  The remaining ships surrendered without firing a shot.  In just a few hours with the Battle of the Chesapeake, Stewart had achieved the greatest maritime victory since Trafalgar.

England soon sent diplomats to negotiate a peace.   During negotiations, Stewart provided aid to his son-in-law, John Parnell, to foster a rebellion in Ireland as Napoleon III became more active in the English Channel.  The Peel government acquiesced to Stewart’s primary demand and lost not only claims to the Oregon territory but all of Canada.  Stewart had doubled the size of the country in a short war, secured a western coast for the country with additional ports, increased the number of free states, and assured additional pro-Stewart members of Congress in the 1846 election. 

Stewart was able to turn to domestic issues, particularly that of slavery which continued to politically divide the country.  With the addition of the new northern states, Stewart had enough support in Congress to outlaw slavery, fomenting revolt in the South.  Stewart averted a civil war by listening to his vice president who for years had been advocating Texas annexation and a war with Mexico.

Encouraged by Stewart’s stance, Napoleon III launched an invasion of Mexico claiming the right of free trade was being denied by President Farias and then Santa Anna.  Stewart announced support for France as he ordered squadrons to support US operations in Texas and California.  After a long-standing feud with General Winfield Scott (Stewart’s marriage of proposal to Maria Mayo, Scott’s eventual wife, was rebuked,) Stewart appointed General Zachary Taylor to command the Army.

Within two months, the US controlled all of Mexico’s territory north of the Rio Grande while France controlled all territories to the south.  The final battle occurred outside Mexico City where the French defeated and killed Santa Anna on the fifth of May, 1847, a day still celebrated in 21st century France as “Cinque de Mai.”  With this war concluded, Stewart dispatched a squadron under Commodore John Aulick to open trade with Japan and expand trade with China.

After the First Franco-American Coalition War, Stewart knew he could not avert a civil war with pro-slavery and states’ rights forces demanding that Texas and the new territories become slave-holding states.  While Congress debated the Great Compromise of 1848, Stewart took preemptive action and sent the fleet under Commodore David Conner to secure southern ports and Admiral Perry into New Orleans to take the Mississippi River.  Taylor took his army and advanced them on all federal arsenals and depots before the southern states could organize. 

The south began a guerilla campaign led by a young hero of the Coalition War, Robert E. Lee.  But Lee, an engineer accustomed to large troop operations was either by temperament or experience unable to conduct the only warfare option available to the south.  Within four months, Lee’s Raiders and their associated militias were captured with the loss of nearly one thousand Union troops.  Stewart was criticized for such a costly operation but soon found favor from both the north and south with the Stewart Proviso.  A delegation composed of Stewart, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Lewis Cass, Stephen Douglas, and Nicholas Trist, agreed that: 1) slavery would be abolished in the United States, 2) any freed slaves would be offered five acres of land in the new Canadian states, 3) federal occupation of the port cities would end, and 4) the former slave states would receive exclusive trade rights due to the recent agreements in southeast Asia.

Having gained control of most of North America fulfilling his party’s dreams of Manifest Destiny, diminishing the role of the world’s superpower, increased America’s geopolitical position, and enriching the country – particularly the South which enjoyed unprecedented riches, enabled Stewart to easily defeat his opponent in the 1848 election, the Whig nominee Winfield Scott.  The Free Soil Party dissolved before the election because of the resolution of slavery.

His first term marked by rapid military operations and overtures to both Europe and Asia, Stewart’s second term soon took advantage of the European Revolutions of 1848.  Stewart’s son-in-law John Parnell took control of an independent Ireland as his wife gave birth to their son, Charles Stewart Parnell.  Stewart formed global squadrons to secure America’s interests and expand commerce in South America and Africa as European powers yielded what little control they had in the wake of the revolutions.

In 1852, the seventy-four year old chose to run for a final, third term.  James Fenimore Cooper remained one of his closest cabinet members and penned a major treatise on the American navy’s global imperative.  The tome was advanced by Stewart in his third inaugural address and embraced by Congress which supported the Naval Expansion Act of 1853 assuring construction of the largest fleet in the world and ensuring global security for nearly sixty years.

Claude Berube is the co-author of “A Call to the Sea: Captain Charles Stewart of the USS Constitution” and has taught in the Political Science and History Departments since 2005.  His latest novel, “SYREN’S SONG,” will be published in November by Naval Institute Press.

Capability Analysis, Current Operations, Europe, History

Protraction: A 21st Century Flavor of Deterrence

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This interview originally appeared on the Small Wars Journal website and was republished with permission. You may find the interview in its original form here. 

Interview with Jim Thomas (CSBA) conducted by Octavian Manea

Jim Thomas is Vice President and Director of Studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA). He served for thirteen years in a variety of policy, planning and resource analysis posts in the Department of Defense, culminating in his dual appointment as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Resources and Plans and Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy. In these capacities, he was responsible for the development of defense strategy, conventional force planning, resource assessment, and the oversight of war plans. He spearheaded the 2005-2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), and was the principal author of the QDR report to Congress.

During the last sequences of the Cold War, the US and NATO emphasized new capabilities and new operational concepts – Assault Breaker, Air Land Battle, Follow-On Forces Attack. What role did these elements have in changing Soviet perceptions about the military balance, including restoring a credible deterrence on the NATO’s Central Front?

Four things stand out as contributing to allied success in influencing the military balance in the early 1980s.

The first and probably the most important was political: allied solidarity. The Alliance successfully deployed highly controversial systems like Pershing 2 to force the Soviet Union back to the negotiating table on intermediate nuclear forces. Showing the alliance solidarity surprised the Soviet leaders and made the situation more difficult for them. Soviet leaders had high hopes that peace movements in Western Europe would scuttle any such deal and they were dead wrong.

The second is financial: beginning in the last year of the Carter Administration and continuing into, and intensifying during the Reagan Administration, decisions were taken to increase military spending. The so-called Reagan rearmament began and continued throughout the 1980s as an effort to outspend the Warsaw Pact forces.

The third is the development of new operational concepts, the American Air Land Battle concept and NATO’s complementary Follow-On Forces Attack, which emphasized being able to hold at risk second echelon forces, to “look deep and shoot deep.”

And that leads to the fourth element: technology. A DARPA initiative called Assault Breaker that was designed to harness advanced technologies that would allow for the implementation of Air Land Battle. It was the R&D centerpiece of a new technological investment strategy and the second offset strategy launched by Harold Brown and Bill Perry during the Carter Administration focusing on three technological areas: precision warfare, low observable aircraft, and the ability to use micro-processors to create the datalinks between sensors, controllers and shooters. Assault Breaker helped to spur development of new airborne sensors, networking, stealthy strike aircraft, and precision guided munitions.

All these trends were observed in Moscow. In 1984, Marshal Ogarkov, the chief of the Soviet General Staff, acknowledged that the so-called reconnaissance strike complex was emerging and that it offered a new revolution in military affairs beyond the nuclear revolution in which conventional weaponry with precision guidance could assume some roles that were previously monopolized by nuclear forces. He was also very pessimistic about the ability of the Soviet military and its defense industry to keep pace with these developments. This military pessimism converged with also changing political currents in Moscow. It wasn’t a decisive factor, but I think it contributed to the decisions made by the Soviet political leadership in the late 1980s to seek a better relationship with the West and try to reduce military competition, which increasingly was seen as a losing proposition.

How do Russia’s contemporary A2/AD capabilities change the security landscape in Europe?

First, Russia has some very capable air and sea denial systems. Russia’s ability not only to protect its own airspace but also to deny the use of airspace over the territory of NATO frontline states in a crisis or conflict has improved dramatically. This poses real problems to the Alliance especially if NATO continues to maintain a defense in depth posture with only lightly defended frontline states.

Second, since the end of the Cold War and especially since the NATO-Russia Founding Act and the adoption of the so called 3 No’s [“no intention, no plan and no reason to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of new members”], the alliance relied on expeditionary, so-called rapid reaction forces that in a crisis or conflict would be dispatched from the more Western countries of NATO to reinforce the Eastern frontline states. But in the presence of advanced Russian air and sea denial systems this may be very difficult. In a crisis it may be in fact destabilizing to deploy NATO forces eastwards and in conflict it could be even suicidal as transport aircraft and ships, not to mention receiving ports and airbases would be vulnerable to Russian surface-to-air, anti-ship and land-attack missiles.

Third, there is this intermingling of anti-access/area denial capabilities that can essentially check conventional power-projection by other traditional militaries to reinforce frontline allies and at the same time this greater emphasis on non-linear/sub-conventional operations as emphasized by Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Russian general staff. These two types of endeavors really work hand in glove. It is this non-linear warfare area where NATO has been quite slow in terms of both defense (how it addresses these threats) as well as how it too might opportunistically exploit these similar approaches. The same can be said when it comes to A2/AD: how can the frontline states emulate or mimic some of the A2/AD approaches others are adopting to create an effective bear trap. And NATO countries also need to rethink the so called 3 NOs. It may be past time to return to a forward defense posture and permanently station US and other allied forces on the territory of the frontline states. We shouldn’t wait until the next crisis to move in this direction.

Is it accidental that revisionist powers in the Middle East, Far East and Europe are projecting their anti-status-quo interests at a time when they are feeling more confident in their own A2/AD capabilities and their ability to keep at bay traditional power projection?

Definitionally, the intention of a revisionist power is to challenge the status-quo and try to maximize its power and expand its sphere of influence. The character of revisionism is different across the three regions. Many in Europe were surprised by Putin’s annexation of Crimea because they took for granted the borders that were established at the end of the Cold War and that were perceived as indisputable as opposed to the situations in Middle East or maritime Asia.

All these revisionist powers appear less hesitant about employing irregular operations as a surrogate or as a complement to traditional military power projection. Especially when confronting other great powers, the ambiguous nature of irregular actions undertaken not by uniform soldiers, but by fishermen, by civilian protesters or by “little green men” offers a more insidious form of power projection.

Is this an incentivize for a revisionist power that had the intent, and now increasingly the capabilities and the ability, to wage low cost irregular warfare campaigns under an A2/AD umbrella?

Yes, that appears to be the case. Anti-access/area denial at the conventional level buys time and space for revisionist powers to conduct salami-slicing creeping aggression or coercion underneath whether it is in Crimea, in East China Sea, or in the future in the Middle East. Anti-access capabilities can enable conventional or unconventional forms of power projection by providing the umbrella to protect them from conventional counter-attacks especially during movements.

Rather than seeing the irregular gambit as a form of warfare distinct from conventional warfare, the revisionist powers appear to integrate these concepts in ways that combine different approaches. They are able to combine anti-access and area-denial, conventional capabilities with these irregular and sub-conventional capabilities in very effective combinations. These combinations could be differentially applied depending on the circumstances and their specific objectives at any time whether it is in Georgia, Ukraine or perhaps the Baltics or Moldova in the future. The anti-access/area-denial capabilities allow them to hold off conventional military forces and create an umbrella underneath which they can use their sub-conventional capabilities.

Do nuclear weapons have an A2/AD role? Can a nuclear umbrella play the role of an A2/AD umbrella underneath which a revisionist power can employ conventional or sub-conventional forces?

Nuclear weapons are sort of the original A2/AD threat. States that have them tend to be far more effective in dissuading others not to get too close or to think twice before attacking. Coupled with conventional A2/AD capabilities, Russia’s posture poses a vexing problem for allied planners. The range of Russia’s conventional air defense, anti-ship, and land-attack missiles blankets large portions of some frontline allies like the Baltics. Russia has declared that any attack against its territory could invite nuclear retaliation. Thus, its nuclear forces may be perceived as providing some form of sanctuary for its western conventional A2/AD capabilities.

Does NATO need a new updated 21st century Air Land Battle doctrine? How should NATO be re-postured for a security environment where parts of its territories are covered by the competitor’s A2/AD umbrella?

For NATO, the highest priority should be improving local defense of the countries on the frontline. I like Wess Mitchell and Jakub Grygiel’s proposal to establish a preclusive defense posture. Frontline states with assistance from their allies need to develop their own air, sea, land denial capabilities to negate and reduce the risks posed by the Russian conventional force aggression.

At the same time, NATO needs to develop an irregular dimension or irregular characteristics to Alliance deterrence to complement the conventional and nuclear forces. We need to expand the capacity of all NATO frontline states to conduct popular resistance, a defense that is highly irregular in its characteristics and holds out in particular a much greater risk of protracted warfare, denying quick wins for potential adversaries. We want to raise the costs dramatically for any potential aggression against NATO states and hold out the prospect of conflict widening while buying time for allies to respond and avoiding any fait-accompli on the ground. The emphasis should be put on the small highly distributed irregular resistance forces, prepositioned concealed weapons and clandestine support networks and auxiliaries. Modern guerilla forces armed with short-range man and truck portable guided rockets, guided artillery, guided mortars can conduct very rapid and very lethal maneuvers, ambushes and sabotages. We talk a lot about deterrence by denial and deterrence by punishment, but I think increasingly in the 21st century we must talk in terms of deterrence via protraction.

Should NATO have the ability to put in danger the Russian anti-access/area-denial capabilities more along the lines of the Air-Sea battle concept articulated in East Asia?

In Europe, the frontline states should make themselves indigestible and at the same time, NATO should expand its conventional strike capabilities, kinetic and non-kinetic, while preserving its nuclear options for escalation control. We want to demonstrate that there can be no possibility of aggression against NATO frontline states whether that would be classic armed conflict or would be subtle, insidious forms of subversion. We have to demonstrate unquestionable intolerance for the full range of threats that could be posed.

How should emphasis on defense modernization look like for a country like Romania exposed to the Russian A2/AD capabilities and in a time when the Black Sea is rapidly becoming a Russian A2/AD lake?

The sine-qua-non should probably be land, air, sea denial capabilities with greater emphasis on ground based air and coastal defenses, as well as distributed anti-tank weapons and mines. Romania has to return to its history and reintroduce its unique concept of popular resistance. In the long term, it may be an option to build a small fleet of coastal submarines as an asymmetric sea denial force.

This interview was published in the context of the Romania Energy Center project “Black Sea in Access Denial Age”, a project co-financed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). To read more, go to http://www.roec.biz/bsad/