Notes to the New Administration Week

By William Martin

The Yellow Sea is a vital maritime lane for trade and security in Northeast Asia. A 2012 CNA study found that “nearly 57 percent of China’s total trade volume and over 70 percent of South Korea’s total trade volume emanates from the Yellow Sea.”¹ It is also home to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Northern Theater Command (NTC).

Despite the strategic significance of these waters, for too long the United States has ceded maneuver space in the Yellow Sea to the PLA Navy. In recent years, China has increased its aggressive activity in this vital maritime lane, to the detriment of U.S. interests, the security of allies, and the maintenance of a free and open Indo-Pacific. The United States and its allies must increase force presence along this key maritime terrain to disrupt PLA confidence in freely maneuvering through these waters as they conduct operations counter to U.S. interests.

China has begun installing physical structures in international waters that represent overlapping claims with South Korea, a major U.S. ally.² This is reminiscent of actions in the South China Sea that allowed China to increase control of sea lanes there in violation of international law. Tensions between China and South Korea have been on the rise for years, including Chinese incursions across the 124th meridian, which has been a maritime control line between the two for decades.³ The PLA NTC routinely exercises with its carrier in the Yellow Sea, and has conducted joint exercises with Russia in the Sea of Japan, further raising tensions in the region.⁴

Although the U.S. Navy has conducted some recent exercises in the area, they have been restricted to the Korean coast and directed against the DPRK, without reference to PLA aggression.⁵ The U.S. Navy has long been absent from the broader areas where the PLA NTC is based, including international waters that are critical to U.S. allies and fundamental to regional stability.

Not only does the PLA NTC pose a significant and unaccounted-for threat in any contingency on the Korean Peninsula, those forces are also essential to the PLA’s Taiwan plans.⁶ The PLA NTC has already been seen performing vital missions during Taiwan scenario exercises, such as securing the Tsushima Strait.⁷ Moreover, the NTC controls one of the PLA’s two active carriers, several cruisers, scores of 5th generation fighter aircraft, and China’s most powerful destroyer variants.⁸ All of these assets could easily be sent to reinforce a Taiwan invasion, and the sea lanes they transit would remain largely uncontested. Increasing U.S. and allied presence in these international waters will strongly affect the PRC decision calculus regarding offensive operations against Taiwan.

It is critical for the United States to increase its naval presence in the Yellow Sea to disrupt the PLA’s belief in a near absolute freedom of maneuver through these critical waters. This requirement is not unlike ongoing actions to maintain allied freedom of action in the South China Sea and elsewhere.⁹ Such presence is fundamental to maintaining “peace through strength” in Northeast Asia.

William Martin is a pseudonym for a senior joint information planner and policy advisor for the Department of Defense. He holds a master of arts degree in history with a focus on East Asia.

The views presented here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official positions of the United States Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

References

1. Michael A. McDevitt, Catherine K. Lea, Abraham M. Denmark, Ken E. Gause, Bonnie S. Glaser, Richard C. Bush III, and Daniel M. Hartnett, The Long Littoral Project: East China and Yellow Seas, A Maritime Perspective on Indo-Pacific Security (CNA, September 2012).

2. Lee Min-seok, Kim Dong-hyun, and Park Su-hyeon, “Exclusive: Beijing Resumes Disputed Installations in West Sea amid S. Korea’s Turmoil,” The Chosun Ilbo, January 10, 2025, https://www.chosun.com/english/national-en/2025/01/10/2VZWCDVB2JEOBKDIM5TOW5S634/.

3. Lee Chul-jae and Park Yong-han, “Beijing Ships Cross the Line Again,” Korea JoongAng Daily, January 26, 2021, https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2021/01/26/national/defense/China-124th-meridian-Yellow-Sea/20210126183100580.html.

4. Choi Hyun-june and Gil Yun-hyung, “As Theater for Shows of Force, Korea’s East Sea Becomes a New Powder Keg,” The Hankyoreh, November 30, 2024, https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_international/1101036.html.

5. David Choi, “US, South Korean, Canadian Warships Train in Yellow Sea Ahead of Incheon Anniversary,” Stars and Stripes, September 15, 2023, https://www.stripes.com/branches/navy/2023-09-15/trilateral-naval-drill-yellow-sea-incheon-11383145.html.

6. Ashton H.S. Cho and Yuan-Chou Jing, “Tipping the Balance? China’s PLA Northern Theater Command and the Korean Peninsula,” The Korean Journal of Defense Analysis 36, no.2 (2024), https://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/ci/sereArticleSearch/ciSereArtiView.kci?sereArticleSearchBean.artiId=ART003084667

7. Ki-Yong Kim, “China’s Shandong Performs 5-Day Blitz Exercise Against Taiwan,” Donga Daily, September 18, 2023, https://www.donga.com/en/article/all/20230918/4434721/1.

8. Marielle Descalsota, “Take a Look at China’s Biggest Destroyer, a $920 Million Cruiser That’s Said to Be the 2nd Most Powerful in the World After the USS Zumwalt,” Yahoo News, June 21, 2022, https://www.yahoo.com/news/look-chinas-biggest-destroyer-920-063256052.html.

9. Lt. j. g. Rebecca Moore, “Netherlands, US Naval Forces Conduct South China Sea Operations,” US Navy’s Pacific Fleet News, accessed January 21, 2025, https://www.cpf.navy.mil/Newsroom/News/Article/3784611/netherlands-us-naval-forces-conduct-south-china-sea-operations/.

Featured Image: SEA OF JAPAN (Oct 6, 2022) The Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Chancellorsville (CG 62), front, the Republic of Korea navy destroyer ROKS Sejong the Great (DDG 991) and the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyer JS Chokai (DDG 176) transit the Sea of Japan during a trilateral ballistic missile defense exercise. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Gray Gibson)

Notes to the New Administration Week

By Claude Berube

The Navy needs to reform its education by merging the commissioning sources of the U.S. Naval Academy, ROTC, and Officer Candidate School. This recommendation is based on current conditions, educational opportunities for midshipmen, and cost savings. Commissioning of U.S. Navy midshipmen (“mids” weren’t allowed to commission as Marines until the 1880s) has changed since the early republic, from at-sea training to the U.S. Naval Academy as the sole source of commissioning, to it changing from a two- to four-year program, to accreditation and the first bachelor’s degree awarded with the class of 1933. Other commissioning sources were created in the early twentieth century given emerging threats, including the Navy Reserve, the Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), and Officer Candidate School (OCS).

Proposed changes in the mid-twentieth century were not successful. Various attempts were made to move or create additional academies in Chicago, Washington state, Los Angeles, and the Gulf of Mexico. A women’s naval academy was proposed by congress in WWII. In 1945, the House and Senate Naval Affairs Committees considered the proposal, which was opposed by House Chair Carl Vinson due to cost and internal naval rivalries that would emerge with competing naval academies. But today is not WWII.

Today, the Academy graduates approximately 1,100 midshipmen annually when the fleet has fewer than 300 ships. USNA is graduating nearly three times the number of officers as it did in 1933 when the navy had 311 ships and nearly twice the number as in 1943 when the Navy had approximately 3,900 vessels. The U.S. Navy will never return to WWII ship numbers, nor is it expected to exceed 300 in the foreseeable future despite the promises of the past two decades. Consequently, adaptation is required in this environment.

The average cost of U.S. college tuition is $35,000. For Navy ROTC colleges and universities, the average tuition and fees range from $25,000 for in-state students and $37,500 for out-of-state students. The cost to educate each midshipman in reportedly at least three times that amount annually. In addition, the four-year Academy program largely insulates midshipmen from exposure to other cultures and experiences (except for a few programs such as a semester abroad).

The Navy should have one commissioning source – the U.S. Naval Academy. But it should be adapted to benefit from other educational programs and experiences domestically. All applicants would still go through a congressional nomination process and reviewed by the admissions board. This would give members of congress even more opportunities to nominate qualified students. Those accepted would participate in a plebe summer and then be distributed to the current ROTC programs throughout the United States for a period of two years during which time they would be supervised and evaluated by the current ROTC structure for ensuring potential as an officer. At the end of the two years, those students meriting continuation would arrive at Annapolis as a two-year school for completing their bachelor’s degree with a focus on service-specific needs.

This process would reduce the cost of educating midshipmen through other tuition programs, eliminating courses at the Academy that are already offered at civilian schools, and reduce administration, staff, and faculty positions. It would focus the sole commissioning source on warfighting. It would also create a more experienced junior officer benefiting from the diversity of cultures and education better prepared to face today’s international challenges with all officers having a common two-year experience in Annapolis.

Claude Berube, PhD, is a retired Navy Commander and taught for nearly twenty years at the U.S. Naval Academy. Among his nine books are A Call to the Sea, On Wide Seas, and Rickover Uncensored. He is a CIMSEC Senior Editor.

Featured Image: ANNAPOLIS, Md. (June 27, 2024) Midshipman candidates from the class of 2028 listen to remarks from the Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro during Induction Day 2024. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class William Bennett IV)

Notes to the New Administration Week

By Brian Kerg

The People’s Republic of China is vastly outpacing the United States in terms of shipbuilding and deployed and afloat naval power. Ship-for-ship, munition-for-munition, China has gained dominance in this area and is set to increase the gap between China and the U.S. This will grant China the increased ability to apply military pressure throughout the seas adjacent to it, adversely impacting U.S. interests, and the interests of allies and partners. If China remains unchecked, the U.S. will be seen as an increasingly unreliable security partner, assurance of allies and partners will erode, and the U.S. will be regionally boxed out as China reshapes the international order in its favor.

While the U.S. must seek to close this gap in conventional naval power such as surface combatants and other ships, doing so is a systemic challenge that will take years and likely decades to achieve, even with the political will and economic resourcing to do so.

The U.S. cannot afford to wait decades to conventionally offset the military advantage of China at sea and protect its interests. Instead, the U.S. can quickly regain advantage asymmetrically by putting the right fit of combat credible military power at key maritime terrain now. While it may take the U.S. years to build a single ship, it can raise, man, and equip ground forces optimized for operations on key maritime terrain at the speed of relevance, raising minimally required forces in under a year. Such forces, once raised, can achieve asymmetric and decisive strategic deterrent effects through permanent deployment to decisive points within the territory of U.S. allies such as Japan and the Philippines, and partners such as Taiwan.

Whether permanently based forward (a cheaper, more sustainable option) or with forces persistently deployed on a rotational basis (a more expensive, but often more diplomatically palatable solution), the U.S. must increase its footprint of ground-based, stand-in forces and keep them in position where they can project fires and effects into the littorals and secure their positions. This will enable them to present a credible check on Chinese naval power and military pressure. Doing so requires the growth of the authorized end strength of those ground forces in question, and diplomatic arrangements with allies and partners to make such basing acceptable.

Critically, the authorized end strength of such forces within the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Army must be raised to account for the forces in question. Current end strength remains assigned or otherwise fenced off for current U.S. security commitments, and is arguably overstretched already. Simply redeploying elements of the current force will stretch the force too thin, creating a brittle, hollow force rather than the resilient, credible force intended. To meet the need, these additionally raised formations must be littoral in mission and capability, such as those in the Marine Littoral Regiments and the Multi-Domain Task Forces.

In addition, diplomatic arrangements must account for their permanent deployment. Simply housing additional forces in the continental United States offers no check against China, especially when lines of communication are contested in conflict. Regarding Japan, the Defense Posture Review Initiative must be re-assessed with the government of Japan. Rather than moving U.S. forces out of Japan, they should be re-introduced and increased. With the Philippines, permanent U.S. basing arrangements must be reestablished, as they were prior to 1992. Finally, and while most diplomatically difficult it will prove most militarily critical, a U.S. ground force must be placed in Taiwan, whether in the manner of the former U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group-Taiwan, or the U.S. Taiwan Defense Command. Political escalation could be avoided by doing so as a defense service vice an overt military organization.

China’s naval dominance has arrived and will only grow. The U.S. must seek to regain naval dominance over the long term, but this goal is likely out of reach for decades. To regain U.S. security advantage vis-à-vis China now, the U.S. must raise and permanently deploy the right ground formations to key maritime terrain as soon as possible.

Brian Kerg is an operational planner and a Non-Resident Fellow in the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. He is also a 2025 Non-Resident Fellow with the Irregular Warfare Initiative, a 501(c)3 partnered with Princeton’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent the positions or opinions of the US Marine Corps, the Department of Defense, or any part of the US government.

Featured Image: U.S. Marines with 3d Littoral Combat Team, 3d Marine Littoral Regiment, 3d Marine Division, U.S. Soldiers with 25th Infantry Division, and Philippine Marines, with Battalion Landing Team 10, secure a landing zone during a joint, bilateral, littoral campaign as part of Balikatan 23 on Basco, Philippines, April 23, 2023. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Patrick King)

Notes to the New Administration Week

By Captain Robert C. Rubel, USN (ret.)

The Navy is busy incorporating new technology into its fleet design, but is not paying commensurate attention to developing the officers who will fight that new fleet.

The Naval War College was the critical engine that drove the warfighting education of the officer corps that designed, perfected, and fought the fleet that produced victory at sea in World War II. But today, the college has become moribund in terms of its relevance to the emerging warfare environment. The current curriculum structure was adopted in 1972 when geopolitical and operational conditions were far different than today. In 1972, Rear Admiral Stansfield Turner imposed a new curriculum on both the senior and junior courses, one that emphasized academic rigor and focused on national strategy and policy. This curriculum remains in place, now heavily augmented by joint education requirements.

After World War II, the combination of American naval supremacy, the advent of nuclear weapons, and the maritime strategy of sustained forward deployments around the periphery of Eurasia served to sideline the Naval War College. In that environment the Bureau of Naval Personnel ceased assigning officers with the highest potential as students, making the college an unattractive career move for aspiring officers. Internally, research and teaching became largely separated, a situation that still exists to this day.

Wargaming, the core of the college’s teaching prior to WWII, is no longer heavily featured in the curriculum. Instead, the college now mostly focuses on providing joint education requirements and master’s degrees. Support to the fleet is provided by multiple branches, but the college still fails to be an engine of innovation and officer development as it once was. The modern college has drifted far from what it was in the decades before World War II.

The tool for revitalizing the Naval War College into a major engine of officer warfighting education exists in the form of the Halsey Groups, small advanced research programs based on rigorous classified wargaming that have been in operation since the early 2000s. But these classes are currently far too small to produce enough graduates that create a critical mass of officers with intensive wargaming experience. These classes and their procedures should be scaled up and used as the basis for a new junior course at the college that is strongly incentivized by the personnel system. Such a course could produce a hundred or more graduates per year that investigate warfighting concepts, campaign plans, and fleet designs through iterative wargaming, much like their interwar-period ancestors who would go on to win World War II.

The most recent high-profile Navy professional military education study, the Education for Seapower (E4S) study, focused on high-level strategic thinking and failed to recognize the importance of warfare education or the attendant research needed. Warfighting education is a prerequisite for developing higher-level strategic thinking later in an officer’s career. Moreover, while only a few officers have the opportunity to engage in high-level strategy, most officers occupy warfighting positions at some point in their careers.

Small groups such as the Strategic Studies Group, Deep Blue, and others have largely failed to achieve influence over Navy warfighting development regardless of the merit of their ideas. What is needed is a critical mass of officers with rigorous wargaming and research experience populating fleet units and staffs, like what occurred in the years from the Naval War College’s founding up to World War II. However, the college in recent times has demonstrated little interest in updating its core courses or expanding its wargaming programs to replicate its interwar-period success. Therefore, clear direction from OPNAV and SECNAV is required.

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. On occasion he served as a special adviser to the 31st Chief of Naval Operations. He has published over thirty journal articles and several book chapters.

Featured Image: SOUTH CHINA SEA (Jan. 12, 2025) Lt. Clint Vance, of Montana, signals an F/A-18F Super Hornet, assigned to the “Bounty Hunters” of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 2, to launch from the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Nate Jordan)