Europe, Middle East

The Med Migrant Crisis and Defend Europe

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By Claude Berube and Chris Rawley

This summer while many European vacationers bask on sunny Mediterranean beaches, out in the water, hundreds of people are fighting for their lives while an increasingly more complex and robust collection of maritime non-government organizations (NGOs) (see Table 1) alternatively try to rescue them from drowning or send them back to Africa. The line between maritime human trafficking and a flow of refugees at sea has been blurred. In response to the ongoing migrant wave, the group Defend Europe recently raised enough money to charter a 422-ton ship, the C-Star, to convey a team of its activists to Libya. They arrived in the search-and-rescue zone off the Libyan coast on August 4-5. 

The authors understand the complexities of this situation in the central Mediterranean particularly with regard to strongly held political positions by both sides. We try not to take sides in political battles, especially as we sit on the board of directors of the Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC). Our interest is simply to discuss how organizations use the sea as a venue to proactively accomplish their own goals and deter their opponents’ goals. Our piece at War on the Rocks discusses the search-and-rescue NGOs and the approaching counter-NGO ship C-Star. As it has arrived on station off Libyan territorial waters, we spoke with Thorsten Schmidt, spokesman for Defend Europe.

What is the C-Star’s mission?  “We came to the conclusion,” Schmidt says, “to get activists who are independent and fair. We need to get our own ship to get people there and to observe the left-wing NGOs.” Schmidt contends that the media has been embedded with the NGOs and therefore have a bias in support of their work. When asked if C-Star had an embedded reporter or asked for a reporter from any media organization, he stated that they just wanted their own activists to report with cameras.

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C-Star from the perspective of the vessel Aquarius on August 5 around 20 nm off the Libyan coast. (via Paco Anselmi/Twitter)

The search-and-rescue (SAR) NGOs have operated between Libya and Sicily for two years. When Defend Europe began to consider their own maritime mission, they were approached by the owner of a ship to charter. The ship was the C-Star (formerly the Suunta – a Djibouti-flagged floating armory in the Red Sea). The owner is Sven Tomas Egerstrom, formerly associated with the Cardiff-based Sea Marshals which he was terminated from on 26 March 2014. Although there have been some questions as to whether C-Star has armed guards aboard, it is unlikely. Schmidt told us that the ship had no weapons aboard. More practically, we assessed in our previous piece that Defend Europe does not have the funds to support a ship for an extended mission beyond two weeks as well as the more costly endeavor of an armed guard team. Ships transiting the Gulf of Aden will only pay armed guards for a few days. That is a function of both need and cost in higher-risk areas.

The ship was detained both as it transited the Suez Canal and when it pulled in to Famagusta, Cyprus. It is unknown what exactly happened. Several reports suggested the ship had false documents or was transporting foreign nationals to Europe. Schmidt states that in both cases the authorities found nothing on the ships.

Once on station, C-Star will spend a week in the company of search-and-rescue NGOs and on the lookout for both migrant boats and human traffickers. Their cameras will be their weapons. According to Schmidt, nine out of ten migrants using the sea do not migrate from war-torn countries as refugees. When they reach the Libyan coast, he says, human traffickers put them on gray rafts and enough food and fuel to get to the 12 nautical mile territorial limit of Libya where search-and-rescue NGOs then pick up the migrants and take them to Europe. The traffickers use smaller, high-speed boats to follow the rafts then, when the NGOs have rescued the migrants, the traffickers take the motors and return them to Libya. Schmidt notes that in some cases, the traffickers join the migrants so that they can establish networks in Sicily and beyond. Italian authorities in Lampedusa this week seized the Iuventa, owned by the SAR NGO Jugend Rettet, accusing them of aiding and abetting traffickers.

NGO Rescue Vessels off the Libyan Coast – 30 July 2017 (via MarineTraffic.com)

If C-Star encounters a migrant boat in distress, Schmidt says it will render assistance first by notifying the MRCC in Rome, and then bring them aboard. According to Schmidt, the ship has “hundreds of life vests.” When asked about how it might accommodate for potentially dozens of refugees from a boat in distress, he says “the ship is fully equipped with an extra amount of water and food. Of course there are several activists on board with medical aid skills.” Instead of taking the migrants to Sicily or other European ports, they intend to take the migrants to closer, non-European ports such as in Tunisia. It is unknown if they have secured the diplomatic agreements to make those transfers happen. Defend Europe argues that this makes sense since there are closer countries than Italy that aren’t unstable like Libya.

Defend Europe wants an end to human trafficking but, as Schmidt says, “we are just one ship and you can’t stop it with just one ship…We are an avant garde but need help.” Though they have an abbreviated mission this time, the $185,000 they have raised ensures that they will look to a second and third mission. Already, he says, two more ship owners have contacted them.

Table 1: NGO Rescue & Interdiction Vessels Operating in the Mediterranean

OrganizationVesselGross TonnageFlag
Jugend Rettet IUVENTA184 Netherlands
Lifeboat Project MindenUnk.Germany
MOASPhoenix483 Belize
MOASTopaz Responder1198Marshall Islands
MSFBourbon Argos2343Luxembourg
MSFDignity I648 Panama
MSFVos Prudence 2937Italy
Proactiva Open Arms AstralUnk.United Kingdom
Proactiva Open Arms Golfo Azzurro*350 Panama
Proactiva Open Arms Open Arms427 Spain
Save the ChildrenVos Hestia1678 Italy
Sea EyeSee-EyeUnk.Netherlands
Sea EyeSeefuchsUnk.Netherlands
Sea WatchSea Watch-2Unk.Netherlands
SOS MéditerranéeAquarius1812Gibraltar
Defend EuropeC-Star422Mongolia

Claude Berube teaches at the United States Naval Academy and is an officer in the Navy Reserve. He has published three non-fiction books and two novels. Follow him on Twitter @cgberube. Chris Rawley is a Navy Reserve surface warfare officer and entrepreneur. Follow him on Twitter @navaldrones. Rawley and Berube frequently write and speak on maritime organizations and both serve on the Board of Directors of CIMSEC. The views expressed are theirs alone and not of any organization with which they are affiliated.

Featured Image: A banner reading ‘Stop Human Trafficking’ attached to the side of the C-Star. (Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP)

Capability Analysis

A Thoroughly Efficient Navy for the 21st Century, Pt.1

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By David Tier

America has grown weary of the post-9/11 wars. Long, drawn-out conflicts have worn down American resolve and left many defense officials nostalgic for “the good-old days” when adversaries were easier to describe and devoted military efforts toward preparing for conventional warfare. Seizing an opportunity, the U.S. Navy has capitalized on growing disillusionment and sought to exaggerate the military challenges posed by an ascendant China for parochial benefit in terms of gaining larger budgets and greater quantities of more expensive ships. The Navy should consider an external strategy review that accounts for efficiency as an aspect of its operating concept. This article reviews America’s current naval strategy and is divided into two parts. Part 1, below, analyzes U.S. naval defense strategy in light of 21st Century national defense threats. Part 2 will recommend changes to the Navy’s force structure to gain significant cost savings while still satisfying America’s naval defense requirements. 

Introduction

In 1987, William W. Kaufmann analyzed U.S. Navy force requirements and determined that the Navy sought to procure a force much larger than necessary to meet realistic Cold War-era force projection demands.1 His review dissected the Navy’s threat assessments and his work was used as a successful tool to stunt the Navy’s attempts at inducing greater budgets. Today, in much the same way as then, we see the Navy favor approaches like AirSea Battle and “sea-basing” that counter anti-access/area-denial strategies but are anchored in conventional warfare concepts that discount the less-sophisticated threats more likely to challenge our nation. The attention and resources diverted from chasing terrorists on land will almost surely have negative consequences for the U.S., while the challenge of using naval power to forcefully gain access into contested regions will likely not be necessary, or perhaps even suicidal if tried. Despite implications to the contrary of the Navy’s parochial interests, naval officers should advise America’s leaders that the danger of being denied military access to a theater of operation is manageable and that the threat of terrorism is the greater national security problem. To do otherwise puts American interests at greater risk. This article explores the Navy’s missions in the context of the current strategic environment, proposes adjustments to its missions to align with its national defense role, analyzes the number of platforms and capabilities required to counter projected threats, and recommends reallocating budget to reduce excessive capacity in the Navy’s force projection mission in favor of sustaining the Army and Marines’ counterinsurgency capability.

The Navy’s Missions

Throughout its nearly 70-year history, the Department of Defense has struggled to build a joint force portfolio that distributed resources in proportion to priorities established in the national defense strategy. However, intra-service politics often hampered efforts to cross-level in line with the strategy and each Service wound-up with nearly equal budgets instead. There have been a couple of noteworthy exceptions to this strategy-to-resources mismatch, however. The Eisenhower Administration’s policy of “massive retaliation” emphasized the role of nuclear forces over conventional, whereby the Air Force and Navy benefitted from budget increases at the expense of the Army. The Kennedy Administration reversed Eisenhower’s course with its “flexible response” policy, which sought to improve the Army’s ability to withstand a conventional attack in Europe as well as to develop counterinsurgency forces.

The military strategies that followed these policy changes gave birth to a principle that the U.S. should maintain capability to simultaneously fight at least two major regional wars. The U.S. maintained this defense strategy for decades and only recently sought to scale back. Still, not all was smooth sailing in the Defense Department, as defense analysts noted the need to curb budget waste that resulted from factors ranging from Congressional pork barrel projects to misplaced Service priorities. Kaufmann observed that the Navy had drifted off course in his 1987 analysis titled, A Thoroughly Efficient Navy.

At the time the Navy sought a 622-ship fleet cruising with 15 aircraft carriers, and submitted budget requests based on a vision articulated in 1986’s The Maritime Strategy. Overseen by then-Chief of Naval Operations Admiral James Watkins, the document went so far as to envision decisive warfare against the Soviet Navy called “Carrying the Fight to the Enemy,” which advocated using naval power to attack the flanks of the Soviet Union during the course of a potential war.2 The Maritime Strategy persuaded defense planners of the need for a large Navy to accomplish this end.3 Although the Navy advertised its conclusions to justify necessary means to accomplish assigned missions, outsiders viewed it as a parochial argument intended to gain force structure.

Kaufmann deconstructed the Navy’s approach and determined that a naval attack against the Soviet Union would incur losses that outweighed the value of the strikes, or might even be suicidal.4 In his analysis of the maritime threats, he observed an overstated stated need for aircraft carriers, and proposed force reductions that would have substantially curbed Navy carrier-building. 

Like The Maritime Strategy, the Navy’s 2015 A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower is similarly off course. Section III of the document, titled “Seapower in Support of National Security,” overstates the need to achieve “all domain access” and to project power. It conditions the reader to expect that inflated anti-access threats imply that the most prudent solution is to apply brute force of naval power. One must examine the Navy’s purpose and missions within the context of today’s strategic security environment to establish a baseline for more reasonable Navy force requirements.

Notwithstanding the national defense strategy’s pivot to the Asia-Pacific, the Navy’s enduring missions in priority sequence are:

1. Protect the U.S. and deter enemy attack, particularly from seaborne threats
2. Secure economic sea lines of communication (SLOCs) to support national livelihood
3. Deny an adversary the use of the sea for military advantage
4. Secure military SLOCs to ensure access to distant theaters of operation, and enable military transport vessels safe transit to discharge their matériel in support of joint operations inland from the sea
5. Project forces that can attack adversary interests on land in support of other combat operations

Some may argue that these missions omit important tasks that the Navy is required to perform and others may argue that they are incorrectly prioritized. However, these arguments do not hold water. Although there is no mission listed above to provide “presence,” humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, or establish maritime superiority, these missions can be accomplished with the same assets needed for the other missions described, or otherwise derived from a combination of them. Forces conducting the first mission could assist humanitarian relief efforts and, in effect, the second, third, and fourth missions combine to describe graduating levels of sea superiority. No further forces would be necessary to accomplish these other missions. A close examination of the five listed missions can help identify and determine the capabilities required of America’s Navy.

Reconsidering Threats and Missions

First, protecting the nation from attack is the purview of all armed forces. Military threats to the U.S. are the primary reason America should procure military capability. Naturally, the Navy’s portion of this mission should focus on seaborne threats and, to an extent overlapping with the Air Force, threats overflying the sea. The primary maritime military threat to the United States today is the threat of ballistic missile submarines operating within firing range of American shores. There is no real threat of an amphibious attack against the U.S. There is also no serious threat of any enemy carrier or surface strike group threatening American territory, nor will there be any in the foreseeable future. The threat of submarine-launched missiles however, particularly nuclear ballistic missiles, should be the number one priority for the Navy to defeat. Therefore, the capability to detect, track, and destroy “boomers,” and even intercepting their missiles, should be the Navy’s primary focus. This places a premium on anti-submarine warfare (ASW) platforms such as long-range patrol aircraft, attack submarines, ASW helicopter-equipped surface action groups, and ballistic missile defense systems such as Aegis-equipped ships. Although fixed-wing ASW aircraft aboard an aircraft carrier also perform well in this role, aircraft carriers are not optimally employed in ASW and are an inefficient means to address this threat. Likewise, nuclear deterrence through deployment of U.S. ballistic missile submarines is an important capability for the Navy to maintain as part of the strategic deterrence triad. In conjunction with the other legs, it helps discourage enemy attacks against the U.S. by providing a credible second-strike threat.

Second, securing SLOCs to enable global maritime traffic and foiling an enemy’s attempt to blockade the U.S. is a vital maritime mission that ensures the nation’s way of life can continue despite attempts to wage war against it. This mission does not include protecting traffic in or through an active theater of war, but requires a capability for the Navy to establish safe lanes of transit from the territorial waters of the U.S. to the territorial waters of major international shipping ports around the globe. The primary military threat that sea-going commercial traffic might encounter would be attack submarines, although land-based long-range attack aircraft, and, to a lesser extent, surface groups or small water craft, could pose a threat. Accordingly, these threats require the Navy to maintain a transoceanic ASW capability, defensive anti-air warfare (AAW) capability, and the capability to defend against smaller surface threats. These are largely the same capabilities required in the first mission above, and greater numbers of the same types of assets can effectively be used for this second purpose. 

The third mission for the Navy is to deny, or at least inhibit, enemy use of the sea for military advantage. An enemy must not be able to outflank land forces using maritime maneuver. This is where the need for sea-based fixed-wing attack and air-intercept aircraft makes their first appearance, as the Navy needs a limited strike and air combat capability to prevent an enemy from gaining localized sea control. America’s potential adversaries, however, do not furnish a strong blue-water capability that threatens to overturn the Navy’s long-established control of the sea. Even the most vaunted projected maritime threat, the People’s Liberation Army Navy of China (PLAN), will possibly field three aircraft carriers in the coming years, 85 ocean-going surface combatants, and nine nuclear-powered attack submarines.5 Although this may sound like a substantial challenge at first glance, a closer look assuages concern about blue water contests with the Navy. In a potential war against the U.S., the PLAN would not survive beyond the reach of land-based air cover since the Navy’s attack submarines would almost assuredly destroy their task forces on the open seas, and even be a significant threat for PLAN forces in their home waters. Furthermore, the Air Force’s long-range bombers would severely hamper Chinese maritime freedom of maneuver outside of the East and South China Seas. Therefore, only a few cruise missile-equipped ships, and possibly a single aircraft carrier with multi-role fixed-wing aircraft would be necessary to accomplish this third mission per theater of war. Even the amphibious assault ship-based U.S. Marine Corps attack aircraft may sufficiently address this role. A joint task force of attack submarines, amphibious assault ships, and Air Force strike aircraft could fulfill this task, thus lessening the demand for supercarriers. 

The fourth mission for the Navy is to secure SLOCs into a theater of war, which necessitates a stronger offensive capability. This mission includes the possibility of forcefully gaining access to contested theaters and, combined with the second and third, accounts for the Navy’s desired capability of sea control as articulated in the Navy’s vision statement, A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower.6 The AirSea Battle concept envisions the most challenging aspect of this fourth mission. AirSea Battle considers a worst-case scenario where the Navy must escort military transports into the full weight of sophisticated enemy defenses—within ample range of the enemy’s inventory of attack aircraft, cruise missiles, attack submarines, and mines. However, there are only a few locations in the world where Navy forces would have to confront this most challenging task by themselves, and only one current location where this is even conceivable: the South China Sea. Regardless, even the worst-case scenario there would probably require no more naval forces than required during Operation Desert Storm or in the opening phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom where the Navy deployed six aircraft carriers in each instance.7 Although this may seemingly vindicate the Navy’s need to maintain a double-digit number of carriers, we must be realistic about the threat faced. Admittedly, the challenge to escort convoys would substantially increase as task forces approached theaters of war but the chance that regional partners would not allow greater basing access assumed in some studies is overly pessimistic. This, combined with the low likelihood that a severe South China Sea problem would actually occur, reduces the challenges posed.

From a different perspective, consider more pessimistic accounts such that there were no bases in the region from which American forces could launch attacks, no allies contributing meaningful forces to assist the cause, and an enemy force that actually developed into the great adversary it is predicted to become. Were six carriers required in both wars against Iraq that sought to eject entrenched forces from an occupied country or force regime change as the 1991 and 2003 military missions respectively, or was that overkill? Couldn’t four carriers have accomplished the more limited objective of simply “gaining access” to that theater?  Self-serving parochial aspects aside, the Navy should recognize that overselling the capability to execute a highly-contested South China Sea mission under the worst circumstances promises to divert resources that could be employed against other, more likely threats, such as transnational terrorism.

The Navy has encountered difficulties persuading defense planners of the full narrative for its fifth mission—power projection—since the end of the Cold War. The Navy should indeed maintain a capability to project power into distant theaters of operation since there is great value in an ability to assail an enemy in as many ways as possible. The main problem with the Navy’s approach, however, is that it single-mindedly envisions large carrier strike groups for this role. Carrier strike groups should, at best, only be one part of a comprehensive package that could be accomplished by guided missile-capable attack submarines alone or with surface combatants, and possibly to a greater degree, by long-range bombers and tactical aircraft controlled by the Air Force. This is a joint, overlapping mission set. Because the power projection argument has lost favor in recent years, the Navy has sought a different narrative to justify its service size. Hence, the AirSea Battle concept was born.

Conclusion

This examination has identified, prioritized, and placed limiting stipulations on five core missions the Navy must accomplish. Next, an examination of the Navy’s present forces it has to carry out these missions, particularly its aircraft carriers, will help determine if there is excess capability it could reduce in favor of other national defense interests. 

David Tier is a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army and serves as a strategic plans and policy officer. He holds a Master in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School, has served three combat tours of duty in Iraq, served a tour of duty in the Pentagon, and has authored several articles. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, or any of their components.

References

1. William W. Kaufmann, A Thoroughly Efficient Navy (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1987), 123.

2. Admiral James D. Watkins, The Maritime Strategy, (Annapolis, MD.: US Naval Institute Proceedings Supplement, January 1986), 9-13; John B. Hattendorf, Ph.D., Peter M. Swartz and Eds., U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1980s, (Newport, R.I.:  Naval War College Press, 2008), 221.

3. Hattendorf, Swartz, and Eds., U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1980s, 204.

4. Kaufmann, A Thoroughly Efficient Navy, 102-104.

5. Kenji, Minemura, “China to start construction of 1st aircraft carriers next year,” The Asahi Shimbun, December 31, 2008, available online at http://web.archive.org/web/20090526192305/http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200812310046.html, accessed on October 16, 2014.

6. Department of the Navy, A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower, March 2015, 22.

7. U.S. Navy Captain (Ret.) Marty Erdossy, “Why Does The United States Only Have Eleven Aircraft Carriers?” Forbes.com, available online at http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/07/17/why-does-the-united-states-only-have-eleven-aircraft-carriers/, accessed on October 16, 2014.

Featured Image: PACIFIC OCEAN (May 3, 2017) Sailors aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) observe the guided-missile destroyers USS Sampson (DDG 102), USS Halsey (DDG 97), USS Preble (DDG 86) and guided-missile cruiser USS Bunker Hill (CG 52) during a Group Sail training unit exercise with the Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group. (U.S. Navy Photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Spencer Roberts/Released)

Asia-Pacific

Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

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Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017, $18.30/hardcover, 384 pp.

By David Edgar

The “Thucydides Trap” refers to the line in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War which states “it was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this inspired in Sparta, that made war inevitable,” and the application of this insight, that rising powers can easily come into conflict with established powers, to present-day relations between the United States and China. Graham Allison’s book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap, is instructive about the nature of this challenge for policymakers and strategists and lays out what options are available to avoid conflict. But value of the book’s contribution to advancing the discussion reflects the challenging nature of the subject it covers and leaves the reader still in search of answers.

The Thucydides Trap is at the same time one of the most-discussed and the most not-discussed-enough topics among scholars, journalists, and practitioners of international relations. On the one hand, new developments in South China Sea territorial disputes consistently make headlines around the world, with the Obama Administration’s “pivot to Asia” often discussed and critiqued in the same settings. Comparisons between the contemporary United States-China relationship and historical relations between, for example, pre-WWI Great Britain and Germany are hard to miss in magazines and books that examine issues of national security. Allison did much to further this discussion with his 2015 Atlantic article on the Thucydides Trap. On the other hand, some argue that the United States’ reaction to China’s rise lacks a clear direction and that regional tensions in the Middle East and Eastern Europe are taking policymakers’ attention away from East Asia.

Destined for War restates much of the previous discussion about China, the United States, and the dynamics of relative power that led potential rivals to go to war in the past. As such, it is a good overview of the current state of discussion, and one that is remarkably in-depth without being daunting to a reader who is not already familiar with the subject matter. Allison presents an impeccably well-researched history of the lead-up to WWI as well as the Thucydidean relationship between the United States and Great Britain at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Furthermore, Allison ably depicts the current relationship between the United States and China, with particular attention to statistics showing that China has already surpassed the United States in many meaningful measures of economic power. The strength of the book, alongside Allison’s painstaking research, is its presentation of the historical record and economic statistics in a readable way.

But while the book is an excellent introduction for those who are not already up-to-speed on the present and potential state of relations between the United States and China, it will likely leave the reader wanting more. He does not firmly answer the question of what can be done about it. Allison himself admits that the Thucydides Trap is too monumental to have an easy solution, that proposing such a solution “would demonstrate only one thing: failure to understand the essence of the dilemma that this book has identified.” He calls for a “multiyear, multiminded effort. It will be no less ambitious than the four-year debate that ran from Kennan’s Long Telegram to Nitze’s NSC-68 to shape what ultimately became America’s Cold War strategy.”

In Allison’s defense, he provides a series of “hints for peace” drawn from previous “Thucydides Trap” international relationships and gives several approaches that the United States can take to either confront or accommodate China’s rise. This shows the potential of Destined for War – had these lessons from history and potential avenues for future discussion been the focus of the book, it would surely have been a strong start to the discussion that Allison calls for.

Instead, despite ably presenting the current state of discussion about the Thucydides Trap, Destined for War does little to further that discussion. The book’s “Big Idea,” Allison says, is “in a phrase, Thucydides’s Trap. When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, alarm bells should sound: danger ahead.” This is neither groundbreaking nor controversial. History is replete with examples of such conflicts, and political scientists account for them in their theories of why wars happen. Indeed, Destined for War is by no means the first book to introduce this idea, and Allison himself stated it much more concisely in the Atlantic article.

Allison is right – America needs a sustained, honest, and focused discussion about how to react to the fact that China is rising and will rival the United States for hegemony in East Asia sooner rather than later. It is disappointing that Destined for War was a yet another call for such discussion, rather than a start to it.

David Hervey is a senior at Emory University, studying Political Science and Economics. He is writing his senior thesis on The History of the Peloponnesian War.

Featured Image: President Donald Trump meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G20 Summit, Saturday, July 8, 2017, in Hamburg, Germany. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

History

Why Does the United States of America Need a Strong Navy?

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The following essay is the winning entry of the CIMSEC 2017 Commodore John Barry Maritime Security Scholarship Contest.

By Patrick C. Lanham

The United States of America was, is, and will remain a maritime nation. Flanked by vast oceans, covered from the north by Canadian arctic and the south by Mexican desert, the United States occupies one of the strongest strategic positions of any nation in history. This, however, comes at a cost: to trade and interact with most of the world, America must cross the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This exposes American trade to hostile nations, even relatively weak ones. This is not a new concept for American strategic planners. The United States’ first overseas conflict, the Barbary Wars, stemmed from this exact vulnerability. That struggle continues to this day, with the most recent example being U.S. Navy intervention in the Maersk Alabama hijacking by pirates off Somalia in 2009. Therefore, it has always been in the vital interest of this country to maintain a strong, well-resourced, and well-led navy. Without one, there is no conceivable way the United States could continue to maintain the world’s greatest economy in today’s globalized world.

Whenever America was most threatened or imperiled by conflict, the United States Navy has always stepped up to meet the challenge. From sparring with the great powers of Europe, to constricting the Confederacy, decisively defeating the Imperial Japanese Navy, and deterring the Soviet Union, the U.S. Navy has a proven track record of keeping America safe. By projecting outwards, the United States has kept war and devastation away from American shores. This is a solid policy, but it is one that requires a strong navy to pursue in any meaningful manner. This is further enhanced by a robust network of allies which the United States currently enjoys, but these nations will not sit on the frontlines without clear evidence of credible and capable American commitment to their own security. In this regard, what better signal of commitment is there than the strongest Navy in the world off their coast?

A strong navy, used in concert with allied nations and backed up by a vigorous economy, is a potent deterrent to conflict and enables diplomacy. It convinces adversaries that war is either unwinnable or too costly to wage. This helps the United States negotiate favorable outcomes through diplomacy, which will always be preferable to war. Some might argue that by building a strong navy or military in general, it promotes jingoism and can escalate tensions between rivals. While this is certainly true in some historical instances, I would argue that in America’s case it has prevented conflict much more than it has incited it. For example, during the Cold War, the U.S. Navy integrated with the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and played a crucial role in containing the Soviet Navy in the North Atlantic. If not for their strong presence, any effort to reinforce NATO forces at the inner German border, in the event of a war with the Warsaw Pact, would have been spoiled by Soviet submarines. As we know, that war never happened and that is due in no small part to the U.S. Navy, which was both large and technologically advanced during that time period.

Yet again the United States stands at another crossroads in history. The post-Cold War peace is slowly eroding as revisionist powers seek to alter, through coercion, the international order to their benefit. Some nations, considered “near-peer” competitors, boast strong naval capabilities of their own. China is in the midst of a particularly large naval buildup using their extensive industrial base and newfound wealth to rapidly increase the quality and quantity of their naval forces. The U.S. Navy once again finds itself center stage in a great power rivalry after a nearly three-decade hiatus. The conflicts are dynamic, the competition is intense, and the advantages are fleeting. This is the new reality that we face today as a nation returning to competition with near-peer states. A strong United States Navy brings with it many tools that are useful to strategically outmaneuver these competitors. Chief among these tools is flexibility. In a world diseased with uncertainty, flexibility is the cure. It is not only critical to warfighting, but critical to avoiding conflict. A strong, well-trained, flexible navy is able to respond and adapt to new situations to maintain escalation control, but also fight to win if things go south. More on the warfighting side of the house, flexibility better enables U.S. forces in key regions to counter asymmetric threats or weapons – a favorite among some of the more prominent American adversaries. Another key tool is presence. A bigger, stronger navy is able to be deployed to build partnerships, deter potential enemies, and quickly respond to threats in more places across the globe. One only has to look at the recent chemical weapons use in Syria and the subsequent American response to realize that this not an abstract theory, but a proven concept.

For the United States, a strong navy is not a “want” but a “need.” Historically, it has been extremely effective at advancing U.S. national interests.  It is critical to deterring foreign adversaries and maintaining prosperity, not just for the U.S., but for all nations. Nations that have free and unrestricted access to global sea lanes for trade are more likely to grow and prosper which reduces the chance of conflict inside and outside its own borders. Throughout history, a strong navy has been a source of national pride and the United States is no exception. It gives us confidence and optimism as a society, and allows us to sleep at night knowing that someone has our backs.

Patrick C. Lanham graduated from Cocoa Beach High School and will be attending the University of Central Florida to study International and Global Studies. He may be reached on Twitter @p_lanham or via e-mail at pclanham@cfl.rr.com.

Featured Image: USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) transits the Pacific Ocean with ships participating in the RIMPAC 2010 combined task force. (U.S. Navy/MC3 Dylan McCord)

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.