By Steve Brock and Hunter Stires

With shipping and shipbuilding receiving high-level political and diplomatic attention across two administrations after decades of neglect, the United States has the chance to realize a much-needed maritime revival. Having initiated a change in course from the past forty years of stagnation, Washington should double down on its winning bipartisan strategy to build maritime power through allied investments in U.S. shipping and shipbuilding—and keep off the rocks and shoals that could run the nascent American maritime renaissance aground.

History demonstrates that no great naval power has long endured without also being a great commercial maritime power. Yet for the past four decades, America has attempted to defy this maxim, starting in 1981 with the choice to cut off government support for American commercial shipping and shipbuilding, allowing those industries to wither at home and ultimately move abroad. Since that decision, successive administrations of both parties have lulled themselves into the false reassurance that in this latest era of globalization the United States did not need a vibrant commercial maritime industry, and that America would still be able to affordably field a dominant Navy without one. Similarly, the outcome of the Cold War seemed to have rendered a conclusive verdict that the American-style capitalist economy—one characterized by robust marketplace competition—was superior to the Soviet-style planned economy. Yet starting with the infamous “Last Supper” in 1993, the U.S. government and industry have effectively engineered competition out of the defense industrial base. Successive administrations of both parties have since assured themselves that real competition is unnecessary and even counterproductive to national defense, and that monopolies across most individual ship classes, aircraft types, and weapon systems would in fact be more efficient for the government to manage than a competitive business environment with multiple rival vendors.

It is now clear that these two calculations were wrong. The past thirty years of ballooning costs and delays in Navy shipbuilding programs, the growing gaps in the U.S. Merchant Marine’s capacity to support wartime contingencies, and the domestic industrial base’s inability to affordably recapitalize the reserve sealift fleet all point to the same conclusion. The twin experiments in attempting to field a blue water Navy without a commercial maritime industry to support it, and concurrently eliminating competition from the defense procurement landscape, have failed. As Colin Gray writes, “tactical mistakes may kill you today, while operational error may prove fatal in days or perhaps weeks…. A strategic error in statecraft or strategy may take years to reveal itself in its full horror.” Today the United States is experiencing the compounding consequences of two such strategic errors committed decades ago.

Over the same period that the sinews of American seapower have atrophied, China has systematically expanded its own seapower, creating globally dominant, state-backed commercial shipping and shipbuilding industries. China has used this industrial base to rapidly build the People’s Liberation Army Navy from humble coastal origins into a blue water force capable of credibly threatening the U.S. Navy at sea. Those concerned by China’s rapidly expanding navy should be even more alarmed by its ability to set the terms for the global movement of goods in peacetime or crisis using its levers in global maritime finance, shipbuilding, shipping, bunkering, port ownership, and shoreside logistics.

Washington’s decades-long run of political seablindness has not changed America’s immutable geographic relationship to the world’s oceans. The United States remains inherently dependent on the sea for political, economic, and military access to the world’s population and markets, the overwhelming majority of which reside outside North America. China’s emergence as a full spectrum maritime power – and not just a naval power – means that the United States can no longer indulge its longstanding strategic errors to mortgage its maritime future.

To address this critical national strategic vulnerability, the authors formulated and began implementing under the leadership of Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro an innovative new strategy to build and apply American seapower. This approach, now known as Maritime Statecraft, begins from the recognition that naval shipbuilding, commercial shipbuilding, and commercial shipping are not distinct problem sets as they have been treated for many years, but are in fact inextricably linked parts of a national seapower ecosystem. Many of the solutions to the Navy’s most pressing challenges lie outside the Department’s own lifelines, demanding a creative, multi-pronged approach to solve them, leveraging the unique position of the Secretary of the Navy to drive results only possible through collaboration at the highest levels of government and industry. Maritime Statecraft has proven durable, with notable bipartisan continuity through the transition into the new administration.

From the perspective of naval shipbuilding, the primary objective of the Maritime Statecraft strategy is to disrupt the current broken paradigm by reinjecting real competition and best-in-class practices into the U.S. naval shipbuilding marketplace. The most effective way of doing this is to attract new market entrants in the form of world-class shipbuilders from overseas allies, incentivizing these firms to open modern dual-use commercial and naval shipyards in the United States. Introducing the integrated naval and commercial model which has proven so successful abroad necessitates creating demand among global shipping firms for U.S.-built commercial ships. Accordingly, the architects of the Maritime Statecraft strategy worked extensively with partners across the Executive Branch and in Congress to broaden government support of U.S. commercial shipping and shipbuilding on the basis of economic security rather than strictly national defense, structuring this government support to make the U.S. shipbuilding industry and the U.S. Merchant Marine economically competitive on the open international market. This expanded approach will create a broader market demand and order volume that will increase overall capacity and health across the industrial base and design enterprise. Re-creating a vibrant commercial shipbuilding industry in America will accrue significant direct benefits to the Navy, driving long term improvement and lower costs across the Naval shipbuilding portfolio. This will create an opening to invigorate and reimagine key alliance relationships at a moment of strain, offering new opportunities to strengthen the common defense while rebalancing the burdens of its maintenance to a more politically sustainable equilibrium.

Standing Into Danger

In a healthy seapower ecosystem, a national navy draws on a relatively small portion of a nation’s overall physical and human maritime resources—shipyards, suppliers, industry workers, and mariners. The majority of those resources are typically devoted to building prosperity through domestic and overseas commerce, creating both the taxable wealth and competitive industrial base that also pays for and builds the Navy. From the Navy’s perspective, such a healthy system enables construction and maintenance of warships at much lower cost, since shipyards and suppliers would distribute their overhead costs to both civilian and government customers, as opposed to just the government.

At present, the American seapower ecosystem is out of balance. The U.S. Navy is the nation’s primary buyer of large ships, with a fleet of 297 battle force warships plus another 130 Military Sealift Command auxiliaries. By contrast, the U.S. Merchant Marine has just 177 commercial ships out of more than 60,000 merchant ships on the world’s oceans today. This reduces the United States to being a strictly naval power and a maritime consumer—dependent on foreign-built and foreign-controlled commercial fleets to move American trade.

A key factor in creating these conditions has been the elimination of internationally competitive U.S.-built and U.S.-flagged commercial shipping over the past forty years. While it has long been more expensive to build commercial ships in the United States and operate them under the U.S. flag, for most of the 20^th century an interlocking system of imperfect but intelligent government interventions in the commercial shipping and shipbuilding sectors served to fully offset the higher cost of U.S. ships and mariners relative to foreign counterparts, either through construction and operational differentials in peacetime, or direct government construction of standardized commercial ships during the World Wars. These measures enabled U.S. shipping companies to compete for cargo on the international market at prevailing rates.

Unfortunately, flaws in the subsidy system’s structure, particularly its lack of competitive incentives and its reliance on inaccurate government estimates of foreign ship construction and operating costs, contributed to a loss of effectiveness, and eventually a collapse in political support for the program. In 1981, the Reagan Administration repealed the Operational Differential Subsidy and defunded the Construction Differential Subsidy under the belief that a free-market approach would produce better results and inspire other nations to drop their subsidies. No other country followed suit, and so this policy choice led most of the U.S. commercial shipping sector to either close or move abroad, particularly to countries which continued subsidizing their shipping and shipbuilding industries. This in turn resulted in a wholesale collapse of demand for the U.S. shipbuilding industry, apart from the naval and relatively small domestic commercial Jones Act markets.

While the Clinton Administration created the Maritime Security Program (MSP) in the 1990s to provide a stopgap source of militarily useful commercial sealift in international trade, this program has proved a poor substitute for the prior method of fostering development of a healthy U.S. Merchant Marine. MSP supports a hodgepodge of used, foreign-built ships lacking fleetwide standardization, with the fleet sized to support strictly military requirements for a 1990s-era regional contingency in a permissive maritime environment. MSP’s model of a partial operational subsidy supplemented in peacetime by government preference cargo effectively caps the size of the U.S.-flag merchant fleet at however many ships U.S. government preference and military cargo can economically support in peacetime. It does not factor in the larger requirements for assured sealift for U.S. economic security in either peace or war. MSP is not structured to incentivize U.S. shipping firms to become more competitive over time and, most damaging of all, does nothing to create demand for a competitive U.S. shipbuilding industry.

The resulting situation presents a number of troubling implications for Navy shipbuilding. To begin with, the Navy bears the brunt of virtually all the overhead costs of the shipyards that build and maintain warships, since the Navy is those companies’ primary, if not only customer. Accordingly, the remaining naval-focused shipbuilding industry has sized itself based on what the Navy’s peacetime steady-state procurement budget can economically support. As a result, even though threat-informed studies and Congress consistently signal support for a bigger Navy, the national industrial base lacks the commercial capacity that a healthier ecosystem would be able to draw upon to surge to meet an influx of new naval demand.

The loss of the commercial shipbuilding sector has been compounded by the consolidation of the defense industrial base after the Cold War. These two developments have had the combined effect of all but eliminating real competition between shipyards. The U.S. naval shipbuilding sector has become an uncompetitive series of monopoly-monopsony relationships, with only one yard building a given ship class (the sole exceptions being destroyers and attack submarines, which have duopolies) and the U.S. government as their sole customer. This lack of competition allows shipyards to drive up the prices they charge the Navy while also reducing those companies’ incentives to find efficiencies or make needed capital investments, such as facility modernization.

“We Must Bring Our Shipbuilding Allies to us”

By contrast, South Korean and Japanese yards are engaged in a commercial deathmatch with China’s state-backed juggernaut for control of the global commercial shipbuilding market. This unrelenting competitive environment forces yards to invest in state-of-the-art technology and production processes. Intense commercial competition has compelled such a high degree of effectiveness that these three countries now produce 90 percent of the world’s commercial ships. Importantly, their broad international customer bases and integrated naval and commercial facilities allow Chinese, South Korean, and Japanese shipbuilders to effectively subsidize their national naval production with the profits from their commercial work, increasing the purchasing power of their respective national navies. Using their robust dual-use yards, Korean and Japanese shipbuilders are able to construct high-end Aegis surface combatants of respected quality for a fraction of the cost of U.S. equivalents.

The competition in Asia has technological implications as well. Many U.S. shipyards are decades behind the global technological standard set by Korean and Japanese shipbuilders, which was clearly evidenced during a firsthand visit to the facilities of HD Hyundai and Hanwha Ocean by Secretary Del Toro in February 2024. The highly automated shipbuilding and sea trial technologies in use at these facilities are more advanced than anything now in operation in the United States. Unlike their American counterparts, these yards also consistently make substantial, self-funded investments in both production processes and worker quality of life, including housing and training facilities for employees and the crews of visiting ships. Both Hyundai and Hanwha reported near-perfect on-time performance—even during COVID—and can tell customers when their ships will be delivered to the day. This is a far cry from the PowerPoint slides that American shipbuilders often present in the Pentagon, explaining that a given vessel is going to be somewhere between one and three years late.

Given the cutthroat competition among shipbuilders in Asia and the lack of a competitive shipbuilding marketplace in the United States, this result should be unsurprising. At its best, capitalism demands that firms continually invest in innovation and adaptation to find a new competitive edge over their opponents in a Darwinian evolutionary arms race. In the U.S. shipbuilding sector, that process of rivalry, adaptation, and renewal has mostly ground to a halt. U.S. shipbuilders demand the government pay for new infrastructure investments and workforce salary increases—while too often investing their profits into stock buybacks and dividends rather than into improving their core businesses, which are falling behind on their contractual obligations to the Navy. Building the world’s best warships in 1960s-era shipyards is unaffordable and slow, and is unacceptable if the United States is to prevail in the increasingly tense geopolitical competition for the 21^st century.

It should be emphasized that outsourcing U.S. government shipbuilding overseas remains—and should remain—a non-starter. Beyond the legal requirement and political imperative to build U.S. government ships in U.S. shipyards, outsourcing new construction to yards in East Asia would be strategic malpractice, not least because the Korean and Japanese shipyards capable of producing U.S.-equivalent combatants are ranged by thousands of Chinese short and medium range missiles. In the course of the implementation of the Maritime Statecraft strategy, Asian shipbuilders and their customers around the world have increasingly come to recognize the value of “defense in depth” and geostrategic diversification of ship production and repair provided by the strategic sanctuary of the United States. One cannot discount the possibility that China could destroy the shipbuilding infrastructure of U.S. allies during a Pacific war to set the stage for even greater PRC maritime dominance in the postwar world.

Additionally, suggestions that the U.S. government might outsource shipbuilding overseas in the future—even temporarily while U.S. production ramps up—surrenders valuable negotiating leverage with major shipbuilders, reducing their incentive to open critically needed shipyards in America, which is a primary objective of the strategy. This led us to a similar approach as drove the inception of the Mulberry Harbors used in the Allied landings at Normandy in World War II. Just as the chief naval planner of D-Day recognized that “if we cannot capture a port, we must take one with us,” the Maritime Statecraft strategy is derived from the similar insight that “if we cannot build ships in the world-class shipyards of our allies, then we must bring our allies to us.” An American maritime revival requires the help of allies, but is only possible if they invest in the alliance by investing in America.

Creating a Better Paradigm

After Secretary Del Toro articulated the vision of Maritime Statecraft in a series of speeches at Columbia, Harvard, and several major naval conferences, the first step in executing this new strategy to restart competition in U.S. shipbuilding was to make contact with the leaders of the foremost Korean and Japanese shipbuilders who build both commercial and naval vessels. This began in February 2024 via meetings in Seoul led by Secretary Del Toro with the Vice Chairmen and CEOs of Hanwha and HD Hyundai, followed by tours of their respective shipyards. Our central message going into each of these engagements in Seoul and Tokyo was a simple, yet profound opportunity – invest in America.

The response has been remarkable and swift. Just over three months after engaging with the Secretary in South Korea, Hanwha announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the Philly Shipyard, a former naval facility now building commercial ships, and successfully closed this transaction in December 2024. Hanwha has since announced plans to invest $5 billion to expand the yard’s facilities, update its technology and production processes, and create more than 7,000 new jobs in order to multiply output tenfold over the next decade and compete for both commercial and naval shipbuilding contracts. Since the Philly Shipyard has not built a naval vessel since 1970, restoring this facility to the naval-facing industrial base will be a significant capacity expansion and value-add for Navy shipbuilding.

HD Hyundai has also taken steps to engage. A major accomplishment was brokering a partnership between HD Hyundai, Seoul National University, and the University of Michigan to create academic and professional exchange opportunities in the education of naval architects, a foundational element of a healthy white collar shipbuilding workforce. HD Hyundai has since signed agreements to collaborate with several U.S. shipyards serving both the naval and commercial markets, and has now publicly announced its intent to acquire of a U.S. yard of its own. Seeing the growing momentum and opportunity of Maritime Statecraft, Davie Shipbuilding of Canada and Finland reached out and met with Secretary Del Toro on multiple occasions, and in July 2024 announced intentions to purchase a U.S. shipyard (subsequently announced to be Gulf Copper and Manufacturing Corporation in Texas) to bring the firm’s world-class icebreaker capabilities to bear on U.S. government programs. Bringing the advanced technologies, production processes, and dual-use commercial and naval business model that have been so successful abroad to American shores heralds a paradigm shift that will transform the U.S. competitive marketplace and incentivize modernization investments by legacy players.

Creating a business case for dual-use shipbuilding in the United States also requires incentivizing commercial demand. The first step on this line of effort was to leverage existing government programs to create favorable options both for dual-use shipbuilders looking to finance investments in their businesses as well as prospective ship buyers looking to finance purchases of U.S.-built vessels. In the spring of 2024, after a year of collaborative engagement and negotiation, the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office expanded the eligibility of its multibillion-dollar Title 17 Clean Energy Financing and Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Programs to include the maritime industry. Title 17 Clean Energy Financing allows for commercial ship buyers to secure Treasury rate loans and loan guarantees to purchase U.S.-built ships that achieve a 10 percent improvement in carbon emissions over legacy single-fuel diesel ships. The Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program enables dual-use shipbuilders and secondary suppliers to secure financing at Treasury rates for technology improvements, plant expansions, and other investments in their production facilities.

At home, another important line of effort was recruiting unions as critical partners and stakeholders to advance the strategy across multiple lines of effort. The United Steelworkers led the way in catalyzing the Section 301 investigation of anticompetitive Chinese shipbuilding practices, a key offensive step to push back directly on Chinese dominance of the global maritime industry while also stimulating demand for American steel at a moment when most U.S. steel plate facilities are producing at less than 50 percent of their designed capacity. Domestically, unions have also championed innovative solutions to fill blue collar workforce gaps in many American shipyards. An illustrative example is a partnership with the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers which recruits itinerant welders in the construction trades and provides them with the requisite training and certification to work on Navy shipbuilding programs during lulls in construction demand ashore. After launching a pilot program recruiting skilled welders across five midwestern states in 2024, this rotational expeditionary workforce program was quickly oversubscribed, and cohorts are now working in Newport News to deliver new aircraft carriers.

On the legislative front, the Maritime Statecraft strategy’s implementation took the form of significant technical assistance on the SHIPS for America Act co-sponsored by Senator Mark Kelly, Senator Todd Young, Representative John Garamendi, and Representative Trent Kelly, with Representative Mike Waltz and a large cross-functional working group from government, industry, and academia providing invaluable input to the drafting process. This legislation revitalizes the Title 46 authority for the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of Transportation to grant shipbuilding construction differentials on a competitive basis. The bill also creates a new Strategic Commercial Fleet of 250 U.S.-built, U.S.-flagged, U.S.-crewed ships in international trade that would compete for a stipend that would fully offset the higher cost of U.S. construction and operation, to be resourced through a dedicated new Maritime Trust Fund. These and other measures will help prime the pump to incentivize shipping firms to begin buying U.S. ships built by world-class shipbuilders in U.S. yards.

The next phase of the strategy was to directly engage the leaders of the world’s foremost shipowners, beginning with Secretary Del Toro’s visit to the CEO of A.P. Moller-Maersk in Copenhagen. Going into this meeting, we were aware that Maersk and a number of its European peers were discounting the strategic risk of dependence on Chinese shipbuilding and were directing disproportionate shares of their newbuild orderbooks to Chinese shipyards, which continually seek to undercut their Korean and Japanese rivals on price. At the same time, we were aware that European shipping giants were beginning to find themselves under increasing direct pressure from Chinese competitors in the shipping market, with Chinese lines the fastest growing players in the global container trade.

A key objective of our engagements with the European shipping firms was to help them better understand the connection between these two phenomena: whatever discount Chinese yards offer a European ship buyer relative to Korean and Japanese builders, Chinese yards almost certainly offer Chinese shipping firms a far steeper discount. With every new order the European firms place with Chinese shipyards, they directly subsidize the growth of their new biggest competitor in the global shipping market while placing their own companies at geopolitical risk without a fallback shipbuilding alternative outside Northeast Asia. This message is resonating. Indeed, within days of the Secretary’s meeting with Maersk, the CEO of France’s CMA CGM, the world’s third largest shipping firm, reached out to discuss expanding their U.S. footprint, beginning months of productive discussion and collaboration. In March, CMA CGM announced that they would be investing $20 billion into the United States, tripling the size of their U.S.-flag commercial fleet, and creating 10,000 new jobs.

What Must Happen Next

Maritime Statecraft has demonstrated remarkable intellectual staying power through the political transition, with its central pillars publicly embraced by President Trump, Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, and the new White House Office of Shipbuilding in engagements with South Korea and in the April 2025 executive order on Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance. The new administration’s focus on expanding on the blueprint created by its predecessor presages a lasting commitment to a long-overdue national maritime revival that will endure across future administrations of either party.

Going forward, Washington should focus its efforts on supporting and expanding the U.S. investments and commitments already made by players like Hanwha and CMA CGM, and encouraging additional dual-use shipbuilders from Korea, Japan, and Europe to follow through on contemplated U.S. investments. Congressional approval of the SHIPS for America Act and appropriations for the Strategic Commercial Fleet and the Maritime Trust Fund will provide a concrete demand signal for the long-term development of internationally competitive U.S. commercial shipping and shipbuilding. This Fall, the United States Trade Representative and the Department of Commerce must ensure effective and timely enforcement of Section 301 remedies levied on Chinese vessels calling on U.S. ports and must work to ensure that these proceeds directly accrue to U.S. shipbuilding investment needs. Once passed into law, the Maritime Trust Fund should serve as the primary vehicle for transferring the Chinese 301 duties to the build-out of U.S maritime power.

Maritime Statecraft presents an opening for the United States and its maritime partners to strengthen the foundations of coalition seapower and rebalance defense burden sharing at the same time. Investments by allies in shipbuilding in the United States is one now-proven avenue. The South Korean government in particular leveraged our engagement with its shipbuilders and trade ministry to develop its Make American Shipbuilding Great Again proposal, which proved instrumental to Seoul’s success in recent tariff negotiations. The Asia Pacific Economic Community (APEC) summit in Korea this year presents further opportunity to build on the accomplishments to date through deeper investment in shipyards and secondary shipbuilding suppliers in the United States, translating the Korea Development Bank’s promised $150 billion in shipbuilding loans and loan guarantees from paper promises into steel and concrete on American waterfronts. A presidential visit to a shipyard in Korea on the sidelines of APEC, like President Lee’s visit to the Hanwha Philly Shipyard in July, would offer a firsthand view of what Korean investment can do to revitalize the U.S. shipbuilding industry and workforce. It would also showcase the tremendous talent that the United States should incentivize to come to American shipyards with their skills and best practices. There are several steps the administration can take on devising more effective and collaborative visa and immigration programs to facilitate the entry of the managers and technical experts needed to train the U.S. shipbuilding workforce.

Beware the Rocks and Shoals

There are nevertheless challenges ahead. The biggest immediate risk is the continuing allure of foreign outsourcing that some in the national security establishment see as a quick fix to the nation’s naval shipbuilding woes. An attempt by the administration to go around Congress’s clear wishes, either now or in the future, would derail a shipbuilding strategy embraced by both political parties and instead put a restoration of American seapower out of reach. Outsourcing U.S. government shipbuilding abroad, even temporarily, as the administration has indicated it plans to do with U.S. Coast Guard icebreakers, would surrender the United States’s most powerful source of leverage for a negligible short term gain while undermining the business incentive for world-class shipyards to follow through on investing in America.

A related outsourcing challenge that can be quickly corrected with executive action are the loopholes that allow U.S.-flagged vessels receiving MSP stipends and carrying government preference cargo to be maintained and repaired in China, instead of at underutilized U.S. repair yards. This corrosive practice aids the Chinese maritime industry and introduces a security risk to vessels that the Department of Defense depends on while denying U.S. based shipyards critically needed contracts.

Over the medium to long term, a new and growing risk to the administration’s ability to carry forward the shipbuilding priorities it shares with its predecessor is its increasingly coercive approach to trade and foreign investment, as well as its aggressive immigration enforcement actions. The recent immigration raid on Hyundai Motor’s electric vehicle plant in Georgia could frighten off firms from making new investments in U.S. shipbuilding or completing previously-pledged commitments. Its brusque treatment of South Korean engineers, who had entered the country legally to support domestic American electric car manufacturing, damaged South Korean popular perceptions of the United States as a safe place to work. Indeed, the Hyundai Motor action was starkly incongruous with successful Administration efforts just weeks prior to obtain major South Korean commitments to help revive the American maritime industry. Perceptions matter, as those much needed and welcome commitments will ultimately require the recruitment of large numbers of skilled South Korean managers and engineers to move to the United States.

During our engagements with global shipbuilding executives on investing in America, the Koreans in particular asked whether they would be treated fairly on a level playing field as their prospective U.S. competitors, or if instead they would be regarded as foreigners and treated as second-class citizens. We assured them, as we did others, that by investing in the United States and setting up fully compliant U.S. subsidiaries, they would indeed be treated as any other U.S. company according to the rule of law, with access to the same certifications, security clearances, and opportunities to compete fully and fairly for Navy contracts. This was a key catalyst for their decision to enter the U.S. market as forcefully as they have.

The American tradition of a welcoming business climate under the rule of law that values direct foreign investment and participation must continue. Strategic industries such as the maritime sector must be supported by Administration policies that do not dissuade but rather incentivize world-class corporations, experts, and workers to come to America—particularly from long-standing allies that share our democratic values such as South Korea, Japan, Canada, Italy, Australia and Finland. If the administration can keep off these clearly marked rocks and shoals, it has the opportunity to follow through on achieving the rewards for the U.S. Navy and maritime industry that Maritime Statecraft can make possible.

For too long, policymakers of all political stripes have neglected the cornerstone of American power, which is its seapower. Through diligent effort, Maritime Statecraft has become a bipartisan movement, and has created the largest market opportunity in the U.S. maritime sector in half a century. America’s maritime renaissance is just getting started. Its success depends on a sustained, long-term recognition that for the United States, maritime strategy is grand strategy.

Steven V. Brock was appointed by the White House as the Senior Advisor to the 78^th Secretary of the Navy, where from 2022 to 2025 he served as a chief strategist and key implementor of the Secretary’s highest priorities, including as a principal architect of Maritime Statecraft. A former member of the Senior Executive Service and retired U.S. Navy Captain, he currently is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Del Toro Global Associates.

Hunter Stires served as the Maritime Strategist to the 78^th Secretary of the Navy, where he was recognized for his work as one of the principal architects of the Maritime Statecraft strategy. He serves as the Project Director of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Maritime Counterinsurgency Project, a Non-Resident Fellow with the Navy League’s Center for Maritime Strategy, and the Founder and CEO of The Maritime Strategy Group.

Featured Image: Port of Jakarta, Indonesia. (Photo by Tom Fisk via Pexels)

By Alex Crosby

The 1778 French entry into the American War for Independence imposed several strategic conundrums for the British that fatally impaired chances of victory. First, French entry initiated a pattern of European opportunism to challenge British global hegemony, specifically with the cooperative involvement of France and Spain. Second, peripheral theaters in the West Indies, India, and Europe diffused British naval forces and strained limited manpower, devastating the British capability to conduct land warfare successfully. Finally, French entry bolstered American international legitimacy and domestic determination, which prevented Britain from regaining the strategic initiative. Ultimately, these combined challenges had adverse effects that made any remaining chance of British victory impossible.

European Opportunism

In the years leading up to its entry into the war, France aligned strategic resources to capitalize on opportunities that challenged British hegemony, particularly in the maritime domain. The French Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Vergennes, spearheaded ambitions to restore France to its perceived rightful dominant place in Europe by attacking British influence abroad instead of the historical strategy of targeting Britain itself.¹ Additionally, both the French Director-General of Finance and Secretary of State for the Navy, Jacques Necker and Gabriel de Sartine, respectively, established policy decisions from 1774-1780 that supported France’s ability to pay for domestic war support, including the robust reformation of its naval forces.² This preparation allowed France to be generally well suited to confront British naval forces, a physical representation of British hegemony, and directly contributed to British defeats in the maritime domain.

Following the commencement of the war, France identified the unique opportunity this far-off conflict presented for restoring order and balance to European power dynamics, which would also weaken British military successes. Specifically, the strained state that British forces were in following the Saratoga and Philadelphia campaigns provided the ideal timing for the French to enter the war. While Britain was considering negotiations to cease hostilities after these two campaign failures, France sought to prolong the war for its own benefit.³ France had long desired a revengeful opportunity to damage Britain in a manner that would increase maritime and political superiority in France’s favor.⁴ The tyranny of distance associated with European conflict in North America was capitalized on by France and continued to be a monumental struggle for Britain.

France’s entry into the war placed it in the unique position of being able to leverage American Revolutionary aims for independence as the catalyst for its grand strategy to challenge British hegemony and defeat it when opportunities presented themselves. Although France had expressed genuine interest in the American colonies seeking independence, this disturbance ultimately served France as a lever to restore global colonial balance and French influence.⁵ France embodied its role as a catalyst for challenging British hegemony and, in doing so, spurred Spain and Holland into later cooperation to ensure British victory in the American War for Independence would be impossible.

Motivated by decades of simmering retaliation and individual self-identification as the rightful European hegemon, France’s entry into the war forced Britain into a defensive maritime fight that prevented victory after 1778. Since 1763, the French-led House of Bourbon had been conducting robust shipbuilding efforts with the anticipation of likely conflict with Britain’s notoriously strong naval fleet. Unburdened by any land warfare entanglements in Europe, the House of Bourbon majorly oriented its resources towards increasing its combined maritime power.⁶ By 1775, France and Spain’s relative combined naval power exceeded Britain by approximately 25 percent and continued to grow throughout the remainder of the war.⁷ This prioritization of the maritime domain forced Britain into a strategic defensive posture, with alternating concerns between the North American land campaigns and countering Bourbon maritime threats across the globe.⁸

Peripheral Theaters

French entry into the American War for Independence created pervasive and politically deadly dilemmas for British control of its far-flung naval bases and ports across the globe.⁹ Except for the Spanish-controlled naval shipbuilding port of Havana, overseas locations for European countries were typically resource deficient and required significant garrison forces to maintain order.¹⁰ The vast distances and garrison requirements complicated British efforts to counter French attempts at harassment, isolation, or invasion. Due to French threats to British colonial garrison forces and the maritime sea lines of communication between them, Britain reoriented its forces and resources towards France and decreased allocations to combating the American colonialists.¹¹ Britain eventually further ensured its strategic defeat with its declaration of hostilities on Holland. France capitalized on the resulting Fourth Anglo-Dutch War and gained a critical extension of control into the Indian Ocean and West Indies.¹² This unification of European powers, led by France, signaled a shift in global British control and turned the weight of Britain’s colonial possessions won during the Seven Year’s War in 1763 into an overwhelmingly taxing drain that prevented the British from bringing its full combat potential to bear at the locations of its choosing.¹³

France’s entry also led to the defense of Britain becoming the primary strategic objective when threats of attack from the House of Bourbon culminated between 1778-1780.¹⁴ In particular, the British Admiralty tended to be riveted by fears of potential invasion and over-insured home waters with British naval forces that could have proved decisive elsewhere.¹⁵ This fear was further flamed as Britain entered hostilities without any continental allies.¹⁶ Despite focusing maritime forces in its home waters, the British navy would have had no legitimate chance against a combined Franco-Spanish naval fleet if they had pursued a determined invasion of Britain. Britain’s shift from offensive operations in the American colonies, King George’s original strategic objective, to defensive operations displayed the genuinely destructive nature of French entry into the war.

Due to this refocusing towards Europe, Britain overly fixated on French naval dockyards in their misguided pursuit of a decisive naval engagement.¹⁷ The First Lord of the Admiralty, John Montagu, preferred concentration of the British naval fleet in Europe to force the House of Bourbon alliance to reallocate their respective naval forces from North America and the West Indies. However, the British navy lacked proper military intelligence on the intentions of enemy fleet movements.¹⁸ This intelligence gap resulted in the British fleet predominately failing to locate and engage the House of Bourbon naval forces. Additionally, France exploited its geographical position to facilitate an increasing operation focusing on guerre de course to harass British shipping.¹⁹ This missed opportunity of British naval forces countering France at sea allowed the French to operate with general freedom of action and inflict terminally damaging economic and military costs on Britain.

Bolstered Americanism

American Revolution leaders had framed their political narrative as a legitimate protest movement with traditional values grounded in English law and classical political philosophy to protect against British accusations and attract powerful European political and intellectual elites’ support.²⁰ This political narrative would result in an increasing European acknowledgment of American Revolution legitimacy in the international system, albeit initially limited. Additionally, the radical changes in principles, opinion, sentiments, and affections of people from the republican ideals in the Declaration of Independence improved American legitimacy and furthered domestic determination. The American Revolution leadership hoped that a potential French recognition of an established United States of America would pave the way for other European nations to join the war and understand the long-term economic benefits of a British defeat.²¹ By incorporating principles of English society into their cause, the American revolutionaries had created a brilliant situation where British resentment fueled a growing fire of emboldened Americanism. Having been satisfactorily impressed by the intricate efforts of the American Revolution leadership like Benjamin Franklin, France became the spark that lit the eternal fire of American determination to defeat Britain.²²

American leadership had long depended on France’s entry into the war and recognized the significance it would have on inhibiting Britain’s chance of victory. Even in the darkest moments after conflict initiation, George Washington remained faithfully committed that a French entry would inevitably occur. Specifically, Washington understood that the strategic complication of Britain fighting a land battle in the American colonies and contending with French naval forces across the globe would ensure a British defeat.²³ American leadership hoped that the British failure during the Saratoga Campaign would be a turning point for French war support, which proved valid with France’s entry shortly afterward.²⁴ Further hopes of a more meaningful alliance and a long-awaited desire to decisively defeat the British would come to fruition in August 1781 at the Battle of Yorktown with a sixteen thousand man-strong combined force of French and American troops.²⁵

France’s entry also brought tangible aid to the American colonists that ensured war efforts could continue and drain Britain’s overseas land combat potential. French military leaders identified that the American colonists organically possessed relatively proficient skills with handling weapons and that they maintained the ability to fight in the near-limitless space across the American colonies. Additionally, France perceived the American colonists as being fearless of losing cities as they had no legitimate political, moral, or industrial foundation for military efforts, unlike the cities of Europe.²⁶ This unique degree of American colonial resolve to reach war termination in their favor spurred on French, Spanish, and Dutch military aid in the forms of gunpowder, loans, and various equipment.²⁷ Specific to the French, the first shipment crossed the Atlantic Ocean just after conflict initiation in 1776 clandestinely through a fabricated commercial entity and continued until war termination.²⁸ The tangible aid that came with French entry, combined with the character of American warfighting, sapped British land forces of necessary combat potential.

In addition to tangible military aid, France provided a maritime-based capability to project power shore and inflict military costs on the British. While the American colonists focused almost exclusively on land warfare to drain British military resources, France focused its military efforts at sea.²⁹ This French naval strategy ideally supported land operations and had been doctrinally implemented with the anticipation of a potential war with Britain in the American colonies.³⁰ The September 1779 French fleet bombardment of Savannah displayed this ability against British land targets, and although limited in tactical success, contributed to furthering American determination against Britain.³¹ Following French entry, British naval and land combat potential in North America would never recover to 1776 levels.³²

Although traditional American naval action was limited during the American War for Independence, French entry bolstered American privateering against British shipping and the land pressuring of naval bases, providing morale boosts that kept American colonial determination strong. Before there was a French naval presence on the Atlantic Coast, British sea control was locally uncontested and prevented consistent privateering near the coastal waters.³³ American privateering increased and challenged British maritime security efforts once French naval forces provided limited sea control.³⁴ The presence of Comte d’Estaing’s ships forced Britain to abandon blockade efforts, which dramatically increased opportunities for privateering and the flow of European goods shipments.³⁵ This privateering went practically uncontested by the British for the remainder of the war and highlighted the general decrease in British maritime superiority upon French war entry.³⁶ Additionally, French entry spurred American determination to put pressure on and control the naval hubs of Boston, Narraganset Bay, and New York.³⁷ The threat of privateering and loss of strategically important naval bases in North America, enabled by the French, directly contributed to overall British defeat in the American War for Independence.

Contrarian Viewpoint

Some might argue that the House of Bourbon alliance was fragmented between drastically different political objectives, leading to opportunities for Britain’s exploitation and regaining the initiative towards achieving favorable war termination. This fragmentation is supported by French awareness of the necessity for Spain to provide resources for a combined naval force to place the British naval fleet at risk. Likewise, Spain was exceptionally aware that France depended on their involvement and actively leveraged this to steer the House of Bourbon alliance to achieve its land seizure objectives. Spain had specific war objectives of seizing Minorca, Gibraltar, and Jamaica from British control but was generally less committed to holistically orienting strategic resources towards successful operational execution.³⁸ Additionally, Spain contrasted France in that it had no intentions of supporting the Americans or recognizing their moves towards independence.³⁹ Finally, Spanish political resolve for conflict was limited and nearly led to withdrawal from the war following Spanish failure at Gibraltar.⁴⁰ This vulnerable situation required France to direct resources to maintain a particular strategic objective of preventing Spanish capitulation from hindering French benefit or enabling a British victory.⁴¹

Despite these contrary views, these opposing objectives were overcome by an overall common unity to challenge British hegemony and cause culminating burdens. Neither France nor Spain were aggressively opposed to each other’s objectives and successfully found compromise to leverage each other’s military advantages. In particular, Spanish renewed efforts to pressure Britain in the West Indies allowed France to increase maritime and power projection operations in North America.⁴² France and Spain were deeply bound by desires for reprisal against British actions several decades prior and held sentiments of European rightfulness to supersede British hegemony.⁴³

Additionally, others might argue that British naval forces were doctrinally and capability superior to their French equivalents, which could have led to a British victory. In general, British naval forces were able to maintain a degree of local sea control around their sea lines of communication, thus ensuring the strategic sustainment of its North American land forces. Likewise, the British were confident in their naval superiority and assessed that one or two decisive maritime engagements would have terminally altered the threat of the Franco-Spanish naval fleet and regained the complete strategic initiative in British favor.⁴⁴

While this perspective holds some merit, British strategic decisions like those made by George Germaine, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, had severely limited British maritime strategy.⁴⁵ British fears of upsetting France and British taxpayers that response to the American rebellion was a prelude to invading the French West Indies led to limited naval mobilization in 1775. These limitations were also coupled with broad navy funding cuts and rules of engagement additions that dictated there be no interception of French ships carrying munitions and supplies to the American colonies. These measures ultimately negated any possibility of a successful blockade on the Atlantic Coast being effectively implemented.⁴⁶

Additionally, the French recognized the immense risks of becoming involved in a decisive naval battle with the British and instead focused efforts on attacking seaborne trade, launching land assaults against colonial possessions, enhancing French overseas control, and escorting French trade.⁴⁷ Compounding the problem of France not being a cooperative target set, the British failed to internally coordinate intelligence of French and Spanish naval dockyards, which led to the House of Bourbon operating with near impunity across the Atlantic Ocean.⁴⁸ With French entry pressing Britain into an overly defensive posture, British naval forces became too burdened by global mission tasking to guarantee local sea control of its Atlantic Ocean sea lines of communications.⁴⁹

Finally, the British would have ultimately had to prioritize the North American theater over its other colonies to mitigate the risk posed by the combined French-Spanish naval forces. This prioritization would have suicidally sacrificed British economic priorities in other colonies, such as the West Indies, which had become a focal point of French maritime operations.⁵⁰ Likewise, British naval focus on protecting the homeland was predicated on poor strategic assumptions that France intended to conduct an amphibious landing. Although there were discussions within the House of Bourbon to conduct such an invasion, this strategy was smartly abandoned for a more appropriate increase in maritime trade interdiction that would place Britain at greater strategic risk. Additionally, the British land forces in North America contended with unparalleled exterior lines of communication that measured more than three thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean.⁵¹ This vast distance required overseas locations, with corresponding garrison forces, that Britain could not maintain after French entry.⁵² Ultimately, French entry into the American War for Independence in 1778 negated any possibility of Britain achieving victory. 

Lieutenant Commander Alex Crosby, an active duty naval intelligence officer, began his career as a surface warfare officer. His assignments have included the USS Lassen (DDG-82), USS Iwo Jima (LHD-7), U.S. Seventh Fleet, and the Office of Naval Intelligence, with multiple deployments supporting naval expeditionary and special warfare commands. He is a Maritime Advanced Warfighting School–qualified maritime operational planner and an intelligence operations warfare tactics instructor. He holds master’s degrees from the American Military University and the Naval War College.

Endnotes

[1] Pritchard, James. “French Strategy in the American Revolution: A Reappraisal.” Naval War College Review, vol. 47, no. 4 (Autumn 1994): 86-87.

[2] Ibid., 85.

[3] Ferling, John. Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015: 207.

[4] Mahan, Alfred Thayer. The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1890: 510-513

[5] “French Strategy in the American Revolution: A Reappraisal.” 88.

[6] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 505.

[7] O’Shaughnessy, Andrew Jackson. The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013: 343.

[8] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 508.

[9] Ibid., 511.

[10] Ibid., 520.

[11] Ibid., 520.

[12] Ibid., 521.

[13] Jasanoff, Maya. Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. New York: Knopf, 2011: 24.

[14] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 14.

[15] Mackesy, Piers. “British Strategy in the War of American Independence.” Yale Review, vol. 52 (1963): 555.

[16] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 334.

[17] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 526.

[18] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 333-334.

[19] Mahan, Alfred Thayer. “Introductory” and “Discussion of the Elements of Sea Power.” In Mahan on Naval Strategy. John B. Hattendorf, ed. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2015: 33

[20] Genest, Marc. “The Message Heard ‘Round the World.” In Quills to Tweets: How America Communicates about War and Revolution. Andrea J. Dew, Marc A. Genest, S.C.M. Paine, eds. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2019: 10.

[21] Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It. 205-206.

[22] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 114.

[23] Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It. 205-206.

[24] Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. 40.

[25] Ibid., 52.

[26] British Strategy in the War of American Independence. 541.

[27] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 14.

[28] Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It. 205-206.

[29] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 508.

[30] French Strategy in the American Revolution: A Reappraisal. 91.

[31] Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. 44.

[32] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 14.

[33] Ibid., 333-334.

[34] Ibid., 343.

[35] French Strategy in the American Revolution: A Reappraisal. 93.

[36] Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War That Won It. 209.

[37] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 520.

[38] Ibid., 510.

[39] French Strategy in the American Revolution: A Reappraisal. 87.

[40] Ibid., 94.

[41] Ibid., 96-97.

[42] Ibid., 99.

[43] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 509.

[44] British Strategy in the War of American Independence. 554.

[45] Ibid., 548.

[46] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 13-14.

[47] French Strategy in the American Revolution: A Reappraisal. 92.

[48] The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. 346-347.

[49] British Strategy in the War of American Independence. 541.

[50] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 513.

[51] British Strategy in the War of American Independence. 543.

[52] The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. 515.

Featured Image: Battle of the Virginia Capes, 5 September 1781. Oil on canvas by v. Zveg, 1962, depicting the French fleet (at left), commanded by Vice Admiral the Comte de Grasse, engaging the British fleet (at right) under Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Graves off the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. (Courtesy of the U.S. Navy Art Collection, U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph)

By James Wirtz

As great power competition becomes an increasingly grim reality, senior officers are coming to terms with the end of a globally permissive, power projection environment. Strategists and planners can no longer assume that limited naval forces in theater can transit to some crisis epicenter and influence events by threatening or projecting power ashore with little interference.¹ While this operational reality has been in the works for some time, its impact is only now reverberating across various Navy communities, raising the specter of profound disruption of long-standing procedures and the obsolescence of familiar capabilities.

Several emerging warfighting concepts also shape today’s Navy operations, adding further complexity. The quest to develop distributed maritime operations – that is, to disperse long-range fires, sensors, communications, and command and control nodes across platforms separated by significant distances – is an ongoing project intended to defeat opposing anti-access and area denial capabilities.² The “One Atlantic” initiative, by contrast, is intended to transcend the command and control seams that exist between U.S. Northern Command and U.S. European Command to increase de facto availability of maritime assets for European contingencies.³ In the Pacific, non-traditional sea denial capabilities, so-called “hellscape” swarms of autonomous platforms, have become a centerpiece of the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s plan to defeat a cross-strait assault on the Island of Taiwan.⁴

This operational churn is a healthy reaction to the waves of techno-strategic change confronting the Navy. Nevertheless, it complicates efforts for Navy leaders to describe the maritime force’s outsized contribution to the Joint Force and today’s Joint Warfighting Concept. These competing operational initiatives and maritime concepts, however, are primarily internal Navy matters – the Joint Force is more concerned with the operational effects and strategic impact the Navy provides rather than the specific processes behind them. Additionally, since these operational concepts focus on warfighting, they fail to address the movement of U.S. defense strategy towards a more robust deterrent posture.

Eventually, the Navy will develop a more pervasive operational concept that reflects emergent techno-strategic realities. Until then, it needs to identify how the Navy of today and tomorrow will help deter great power war. The Navy needs to explain to a broader audience what it is trying to do – not how it is trying to do it. The Navy must identify its contribution to the emerging U.S. deterrent strategy. Synchronization of competing warfighting concepts can then follow in strategy’s wake.

The Navy’s Contribution to Deterrence Today

How does the Navy contribute to the U.S. deterrence posture from both a regional and global standpoint? Although the Biden administration introduced the notion of “integrated deterrence” into the strategic lexicon in 2022, Navy officials, academics, and defense observers have been relatively silent about the Navy’s contribution to deterrence in today’s techno-strategic setting.⁵ The integrated deterrence concept is simple enough: “In a world of multiple adversaries, emerging technologies, new domains of warfare, and globalized economic ties, deterrence requires a broader approach than traditional military methods alone.”

The new concept addresses these developments by calling for a whole-of-government, whole-of-alliance strategy that utilizes both non-kinetic and kinetic deterrent threats and capabilities. Integrated deterrence is ambitious; there is no formula to integrate the way these domains, agencies, and allies contribute to deterrence.⁶ Although the policy and academic response to the notion of integrated deterrence has been modest, virtually no one participating in this discussion has deemed it necessary to describe the Navy’s contribution to national security as strategic, or the role the Navy would play in an integrated deterrence strategy. This last observation should disturb naval strategists.

The Navy can make two key contributions to deterrence that signal to friend and foe alike the U.S. capability and willingness to make good on its diplomatic and military commitments. These contributions to deterrence take the form of a bi-modal deterrent strategy and concept of operations that draws a distinction between sea control and sea denial forces.

Sea Control

Across the conflict spectrum, the Navy’s sea control capability signals that the United States is ready to uphold its deterrence policies and to assure allies of the U.S. commitment to their defense. Come what may, the U.S. Navy will maintain global communications with allies and partners, preventing the isolation of key friends, countering coercion, and facilitating the movement of forces and materials to conflict regions. James H. Bergeron, for instance, describes how sea control plays an important role in bolstering NATO’s deterrent posture:

“The maritime dimension of NATO is a spectrum and continuum; a strategic unity that links the Sea Lines of Communication (SLOCS) across the Atlantic, the North Atlantic and GIUK Gap, the Norwegian Sea, the Arctic passages to the Pole, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea. But also, beyond that, to the global seas and oceans that feed our trade and commerce . . .. the seas matter tactically due to the potential threat of sea-based missile attack on Allied ships or indeed land targets. It matters operationally in the ability of an adversary to disrupt SLOCs between North America and Europe and within the NATO Area of Responsibility. And it matters politically and strategically as the symbol of our essential connectedness as an Alliance.”⁷

America has global deterrent commitments, and its friends and allies are near great powers that are increasingly capable and belligerent. Sea control demonstrates that the United States will always be able to influence worldwide events and that opponents will not succeed in efforts to isolate allies and partners. Sea control is the glue that binds America’s alliances together.

Sea Denial

The Navy’s sea denial capability, which exists both in a day-alert and, if necessary, a generated-alert status, signals to all concerned that the United States is unwilling to cede the opening move in a nascent conflict or fait accompli to its adversary. Put simply, the U.S. Navy will always be prepared to disrupt hostile actions, and that the Navy’s response will be geared to the warning time available (whether that is hours, days, or weeks). A ready sea denial capability bolsters deterrence by compelling the adversary to anticipate active resistance, and to assess continuously evolving sea denial capabilities. The ongoing improvement of the sea denial force injects doubts into the opponent’s planning process – one can never be sure if some exquisite operation planned against a specific capability has accounted for the latest innovation. A ready sea denial capability reduces the attractiveness of attempting a fait accompli, which by definition would shift the onus of escalation onto Washington. Sea denial suggests that war will commence when aggression begins, not weeks or months later in the form of a long attritional campaign to return to the status quo ante bellum.

Sea denial deters aggression by complicating opponents’ planning, by placing the onus for initiating a significant conflict on the opponent, and by holding the line until the full weight of the Joint Force can be brought to bear in battle. A ready sea denial capability reduces the likelihood that an opponent might come to believe that U.S. officials might choose not to respond to some fait accompli – sea denial suggests to the opponent that there is no way to sidestep an active opponent, achieve limited objectives, and plan for the best.

A Bi-modal Maritime Deterrent

The concept of a bi-modal deterrent strategy not only aligns maritime strategy with today’s political demands, it also suggests a way to organize the operational and tactical churn within the Navy. When placed within the context of a maritime deterrent strategy, the Navy’s operational concepts no longer appear to be competitive but more complementary. The Hellscape initiative contributes to deterrence by providing sea denial, while the One Atlantic initiative bolsters the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deterrence in Europe by increasing Atlantic sea control and even force projection onto the continent of Europe. 

Distributed maritime operations (DMO) could be seen as increasing both sea denial and sea control capabilities by harnessing the offensive capability of far-flung forces, while minimizing their vulnerability to hostile action. Most importantly, a maritime deterrent strategy that emphasizes bi-modal operations gives renewed emphasis to the Navy’s contribution to strategic deterrence and the role of the Joint Force in deterring aggression. This is the primary techno-strategic change that is unsettling Navy planners today, that is, the shift from globally permissive, power projection environment that emphasized warfighting to a world where deterrence dominates U.S. defense policy. 

Conclusion

The bi-modal, sea denial and sea control concept is not new. Wayne Hughes described the idea in a seminal article published in the Naval War College Review in 2007.⁸ Today, a bi-modal fleet is being advanced as an operational concept that would allow the Navy to use new technologies to deal with the proliferation of anti-access and area denial threats, while putting the existing Fleet to good use to achieve sea control.⁹ A maritime deterrent strategy, particularly one suited to today’s great power competition, can leverage the bi-modal concept to synchronize the many ideas and capabilities that are emerging in response to the changing techno-strategic environment. The proliferation of these innovations is a positive sign. It demonstrates that strategists, planners, and developers are searching for new ways to incorporate new capabilities and ideas to deal with increasingly significant threats. Nevertheless, this burst of creativity requires an overarching strategy to identify objectives and how new and existing capabilities might be used to obtain them. A Maritime Deterrent Strategy that adapts a bi-modal operational concept of operations would serve as a useful blueprint to synchronize the Navy’s response to today’s security setting.¹⁰

James J. Wirtz is a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA.

References

[1] James J. Wirtz, Jeffrey E. Kline, and James A. Russell, “A Maritime Conversation with America,” Orbis, Vol. 66, Iss. 2, 2022, pp. 166-183.

[2] “Report to Congress on Navy Distributed Maritime Operations,” Congressional Research Service, 3 July 2024. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/download/IF/IF12599/IF12599.pdf/

[3] Meagan Eckstein, “Fleet forces chief wants to make a smaller Navy more lethal,” Defense News, 3 May 2024. https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2023/05/03/fleet-forces-chief-wants-to-make-a-smaller-navy-more-lethal/

[4] John Grady, “’Hellscape’ Swarms Could be a Cost-Effective Taiwan Defense, Report Says,” USNI News, 1 July 2024. https://news.usni.org/2024/07/01/hellscape-swarms-could-be-as-cost-effective-taiwan-defense-says-report

[5] See The White House, National Security Strategy (Washington: 12 October 2022), 8-November-Combined-PDF-for-Upload.pdf (whitehouse.gov); and 2022 Nuclear Posture Review, Annex 1 to 2022 US National Defense Strategy (Washington: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 27 October 2022), https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/trecms/pdf/AD1183514.pdf, 

[6] James J. Wirtz and Jeffrey A. Larsen, “Wanted: A Strategy to Integrate Deterrence,” Defense and Security Analysis, pp. 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14751798.2024.2352943

[7] James H. Bergeron, “Reflecting on One Year of War: A Transformational Year in Maritime NATO,” Center for Maritime Strategy, February 17, 2023. https://centerformaritimestrategy.org/publications/reflecting-on-one-year-of-war-a-transformational-year-in-maritime-nato/

[8] Wayne P. Hughes, “A Bi-Modal Force for the National Maritime Strategy,” Naval War College Review, Vol. 60: No. 2, Article 5, 2007. https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol60/iss2/5

[9] James J. Wirtz, Jeffrey E. Kline and James A. Russell, The U.S. Navy and the Rise of Great Power Competition: Looking Beyond the Western Pacific (London: Routledge, 2024), pp. 129-143.

[10] The opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not reflect the position of any government, government agency, commercial firm, or other organization.

Featured Image: SASEBO, JAPAN (Sept. 19, 2024) Amphibious transport dock ship USS San Diego (LPD 22) arrives pierside at Commander Fleet Activities Sasebo as part of a scheduled home port shift to Sasebo, Japan. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Darian Lord)

This article is an authorized republication from the Center for International Strategic Studies. It can be read in its original form here.

By Muhammad Azam Khan

It is essential to know how a military doctrine differs from a maritime doctrine. The former embodies hard military power with defined set of principles for its application. The latter denotes sum total of sea power, the physical, demographic, geographic and military resources derived from or related to the sea. The sea power of a nation involves but is not limited to, mercantile marine (commercial shipping), marine or civil maritime industries, ports, harbors, shipyards, maritime zones (EEZ) with marine resources therein, seabed minerals, navies, coastguards, and where relevant includes contribution of land and air forces of a country. It further implies power both, at and from the sea. To sum up, a maritime doctrine is a combination of soft as well as hard power or the aggregate of a nation’s ability, inclusive of policy apparatus, to ensure control and safeguard of its maritime zones and other maritime interests during peace and war.

Put another way, while a military doctrine involves application of kinetic power alone, a maritime doctrine by contrast encompasses all elements of sea power including economic dimension (soft power) besides maritime military (combat) power (vested in navies, coast guard, coastal police etc.). A maritime doctrine must allude to national maritime interests’ preservation and protection of which both, at home and abroad is entrusted to a navy. Unlike an army or air force with combat operations restricted broadly within the geographical limits of a country, a navy largely operates in international waters just outside 12 nautical miles from a country’s coast and could carry a nation’s flag to farthest reaches of the planet. For the record, there is also a huge body of international maritime law that governs maritime operations which must also be complied with.

Founded on historical experiences and changes occurring in strategic environment, a doctrine serves as benchmark in policy making. A defense policy issued by the government dictates and drives the two elements of a military (land, air and naval) strategy i.e. developmental and employment strategies. In most countries while the title “maritime doctrine” has been retained, more often than not it is the respective navies that have lead and composed such a document. Therefore, Australian, British and Indian maritime doctrines have been devised by navies in each country.

A doctrine widely differs from Fleet orders, Compendiums, Temporary Memoranda, etc. In the Pakistan Navy, these are defined in Navy Regulations (NR) of 1988 as:

“Orders and instructions of the Chief of the Naval Staff on day to day administrative matters in the Navy. These are in addition to various books of regulations, PBRs, Navy Instructions and Joint Services Instructions. Government letters may also be reproduced in Fleet Orders.” 

The first edition of Maritime Doctrine of Pakistan (MDP) was unveiled in 2018 by Mr. Arif Alvi, the President of Pakistan. The ceremony was held at Pakistan Navy War College (PNWC), the premier seat of learning in Pakistan Navy. The ownership of the Maritime Doctrine was and still continues to rest with Pakistan Navy War College. It was at this institute that over a period of some six years several drafts were constructed, extensively studied and deliberated by a range of accomplished practitioners, scholars as well as reputed international maritime experts before the first edition was formally authorized for release. The issue of ‘jointness’ with other services was widely contemplated as well. In Pakistan the joint (tri) services operations is nevertheless a progressing phenomenon. The first edition of MDP consequently restricts itself to brief discourse on peacetime and wartime operations by Pakistan navy.

The role of Pakistan navy during 1971 war is worth recalling here. It was PN submarine Ghazi which kept the bulk of Indian navy’s eastern fleet confined to fringes of Bay of Bengal until its own sinking. Another PN submarine Hangor meanwhile turned the strategic tide in favour of Pakistan in North Arabian Sea after it sank an Indian frigate Khukri. All this meant pushing the Indian navy to a defensive posture. These are classical cases in history which aided in improving overall freedom of action to the benefit of Pakistan’s military.

Given the cold war dynamics and a colonial legacy of so called martial races joining the armed forces, Pakistan has perennially suffered from what is called “maritime blindness” (also sea blindness). It is an affliction in which large segments of general population and governments remain ignorant of maritime future and matters related to oceans. It is not specific to any one country. Many advance countries too suffer from this disorder.

There was a widely held belief in the Pakistan Navy that despite its enormous contributions both, during war as well as in peace, the service is not well understood even at the inter-services level let alone in country’s north. The inextricable link between import driven national economy underpinned by sea based commerce particularly, critically important fossil fuels (oil, LNG, and coal) was never understood in major parts of the country. As a measure, at an average 2.5 ships disembarked energy related cargo at Pakistani ports on daily basis in 2020, according to credible statistics. In a crisis, without such fuel reshipments, the strategic reserves could deplete rapidly. In the event, no military tank, fighter aircraft, or other combatant will be able to mobilize.

Major shifts in strategic environment following events of September 2001 reinforced the belief that Pakistan navy must come up with a document which quintessentially serves dual purpose: educational cum informational as well as an introductory doctrinal source. The “purpose” of first edition of MDP is accordingly defined at the onset: “to provide understanding to all stakeholders on the distinctive attributes of national maritime sector and the role of Pakistan navy in national security” (pg. 3).

The first edition of MDP was formulated as part of maritime and naval outreach initiative by Pakistan navy. It provides introductory narrative for in-country and overseas readership. The elementary knowledge on the national maritime sector and variety of naval features is meant for academia, intelligentsia, and bureaucracy besides others. It is predominantly an “informative” endeavor to “educate” stakeholders and interested parties. As such MDP had little to demonstrate classical military doctrinal approach and embarked upon a course to be more “informational” and less “doctrinal”. The first five chapters in the MDP educate a reader with essentials like military instruments of sea power, distinctive characteristics of maritime environment, brief history of developments in Indian Ocean, various dimensions of maritime environment besides Pakistan’s maritime interests and myriad non-traditional threats and challenges like piracy, trafficking etc. which infest the maritime commons. This is of course beyond the pale of hard-core military threats that endure.

On the issue of ‘doctrinal and strategic’ ambiguity, readers may note that Pakistan’s overall strategic posture is one that remains ambiguous and indistinct for well-known reasons. Pakistan has not formally published any strategic doctrine either. The available material is only through formal statements of top officials rendered in national, international foras including local and overseas think tanks of repute. Weapons development is meanwhile an ongoing process in strategic posturing. Also, at the time of publication of first edition, strategic developments like AUKUS, Quad, BECA, LEMOA, COMCASA, and MSRA had not occurred. The geopolitical landscape too was quite different. The end of war in Yemen and Somali piracy, emergence of Israel as a player in the Indian Ocean, withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan, INS Arihant, the Indian navy SSBN completing first deterrent patrol etc. are subsequent developments. Though apportionment of share in defense budget has undoubtedly been a concern for Pakistan navy, it is nowhere central to MDP. Given the innate dynamic attributes of strategic environment, MDP was envisaged to be reviewed only after five years.

The second edition of MDP currently under process is intended to build on the inaugural edition. It will dilate on the roles of Pakistan navy; what it does at and from the sea in much more eloquent manner and greater depth. It will also provide stakeholders with an extensive insight into military strategic environment in the Indian Ocean and its influence upon Pakistan’s maritime interests. The new edition will expound blue economy and its relationship with maritime security. It will explain Gwadar port under CPEC and prospective regional connectivity that it importantly offers. The benchmark for new edition will be National Security Policy of 2022-2026.

The narrative appearing in some recent papers examining MDP and carried by prominent publications is more or less regurgitation of worn out clichés without any breakthrough or noteworthy research critique. If access to a primary source is available and is not availed, in this case (PNWC), it unquestionably runs counter to the spirit of research ethics.

Muhammad Azam Khan is a retired naval officer with over 47 years of experience as practitioner in the field of maritime security and nuclear research studies. He can be reached at mazamkhan54@gmail.com.

Note: The views expressed in the article are those of the author and not necessarily that of Pakistan Navy or Pakistan Navy War College. The article aims to clarify some of the views expressed in, “Major power competition in the Indian Ocean and doctrinal development in Pakistan,” published in Comparative Strategy, Volume 42-Issue 4, authored by Dr. Khurram Iqbal & Muneeb Salman and, “Advocating by Doctrine: The Pakistan Navy’s Experience,” published by CIMSEC, October 16, 2023.

Featured Image: Pakistan navy frigate F-22P Zulfiquar visit to Port Klang, Malaysia. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)