Red Phoenix Burning

Bond, Larry and Chris Carlson. Red Phoenix Burning. Larry Bond and Chris Carlson, 2016. Kindle. 510pp. $11.99

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By Bret Perry

When it comes to the techno-thriller, most defense wonks reminisce about older titles from authors such as Tom Clancy, Dale Brown, and Stephen Coonts as the genre has moved away from its roots. So when I discovered that techno-thriller extraordinaire Larry Bond (read CIMSEC interview the authors here) planned to publish a sequel to his classic novel Red Phoenix on a large-scale Korea war co-authored with Chris Carlson, I immediately became excited.

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For readers new to Bond, Red Phoenix was his second book, following his collaborative effort with Clancy on Red Storm Rising. It revolved around a massive conventional war in Korea featuring a North Korea invasion of the South and a desperate counteroffensive by the Republic of Korea (ROK) and her American ally. When I picked up Red Phoenix Burning, I didn’t know what to expect. Would it just be a third massive conventional Korean conflict with even more explosions than its predecessor? It turns out that I was only right about the explosions.

Red Phoenix Burning takes place in the modern day featuring the notorious Kim Jong-Un regime in power. Even though the Kim regime was removed in Red Phoenix after the ceasefire brokered by Beijing, Bond and Carlson explain how Chinese displeasure with Seoul’s growth and American alignment triggered them to put Kim Jong-Un in power in order to maintain a balanced Korean Peninsula. This, combined with a US administration focused on more pressing conflicts in the Middle East, effectively creates a 2016 geo-political feel.

Keeping with what’s believable, Red Phoenix Burning does not open with another massive invasion of South Korea by Pyongyang. Rather, Bond and Carlson focus on the stability (or to others, instability) of the North Korean regime. After an assassination attempt eliminates much of Kim’s inside circle (who is shortly finished off afterwards in a brutal manner), civil war emerges in North Korea featuring three sides: loyalists to the Kim regime, the Korean People’s Army (KPA), and Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK). The obvious loser: the people of North Korea.

The way Bond and Carlson set up and present this three-sided civil war is one of the most interesting aspects of the novel. To many, including this reviewer, the Hermit Kingdom’s secrecy and propaganda make it hard for normal observers to identify the different power structures driving the Kim regime. The authors of Red Phoenix Burning fill this gap and provide a tremendous amount of insight as they describe the strengths and weaknesses of the three factions. One would expect for the KPA to easily sweep control with its military resources, but the WPK’s numbers and extensive involvement throughout North Korean society make them a formidable opponent. Loyalists to the Kim regime are nearly just as threatening due to their access to the state’s chemical and nuclear weapons of mass destruction (WMD). As a result, clashes endure, only creating more causalities and a worsening humanitarian catastrophe.

Meanwhile, less than a couple hundred miles to the south, South Korea is trying to determine not only what is going on, but what they should do. At first, Seoul launches a couple of thrilling special operations forces reconnaissance missions into North Korea, but eventually decides to initiate a full scale invasion to achieve something very close to the hearts of the Korean people: reunification. As North Korean forces are bogged down in a civil war, the South Korean military is able to push north quickly and easily outmaneuver what remnants of the KPA try to defend their territory. Seoul’s American ally provides limited intelligence and humanitarian support as movement north of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) would trigger Chinese military intervention.

Nevertheless, the prospect of bordering a unified Korea led by Seoul and the uncertainty surrounding the former Kim regime’s WMDs force the Chinese to intervene. Like the South Koreans, the PRC’s military invasion faces minimal resistance and turns into a race to seize as much territory as possible. The US is forced to react and begins pressuring Chinese interests in both the Yellow Sea and South China Sea, but is hesitant to escalate the conflict and potentially start a third world war. Without revealing the ending—what’s left of the KPA command recognizes that a Chinese occupation would ultimately prevent reunification and attempts to reach a ceasefire with the WPK in order to ally with the ROK. More importantly, the firing of SCUD missiles by Kim loyalists reminds all factions of the risks of North Korea’s scattered and destructive WMD arsenal.

As the aforementioned plot illustrates, Bond and Carlson do an excellent job with creating a believable geopolitical environment. Their defense expertise, wargaming experience, and extensive research allows them to color in well-written military engagements—most notably the urban assault on Pyongyang. But unlike some of Bond’s previous titles that revolved around epic conventional conflicts (such as Vortexthis reviewer’s personal favorite), Red Phoenix Burning is not a novel purely focused on the military dimension of another flashpoint crisis-turned-war. Rather, Bond and Carlson place a greater emphasis on political factors such as US-PRC relations, the ramifications of a North Korean humanitarian crisis, America’s reluctance to dive into a Korean crisis due to more pressing Middle East engagements, and how the world’s superpowers treat North Korea’s WMDs.  Although this entails fewer scenes featuring first person accounts of tank battles and naval engagements, it creates a more plausible environment that readers can buy into and envision as a potential future scenario for the Korean peninsula.  Even though Red Phoenix Burning features less battlefield action than some of Bond’s previous novels, it demonstrates how fiction can better help us understand the most significant geopolitical ramifications of the collapse of the Hermit Kingdom.

Although readers might have appreciated some maps accompanying the military engagements, Red Phoenix Burning is a solid book for defense professionals eager for some fiction, and a must for those interested in the Korean Peninsula. For readers, Red Phoenix Burning will keep you entertained while feeding your intellectual curiosity.

Bret Perry is a graduate of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. The comments and questions above are those of the author alone and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not necessarily reflect those of any organization.

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Sea Control 113 – Abraham Lincoln’s Self-Education

Most people know that Abraham Lincoln was an avid reader and self-educated man. But how much did this education influence his conduct during the Civil War?

A tower of books about Abraham Lincoln as seen from the top down.
A tower of books about Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater (Photo from NPR)

Join Sea Control: North America for an interview with Matthew “Matty” Keller, a retired member of the U.S. Navy who is working out the answer to that very question. During the course of the discussion, he addresses how Lincoln taught himself to be a military leader, how a First Lieutenant’s thoughts remade the Union Army, and how reading a map led to the destruction of a Confederate ironclad.

DOWNLOAD: Sea Control 113 – Abraham Lincoln’s Self-Education

Transparency as Strategy: The Maritime Security Initiative and the South China Sea

The following article is adapted from a report by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS): Networked Transparency: Constructing a Common Operational Picture of the South China Sea.

By Dr. Van Jackson, Dr. Mira Rapp-Hooper, Paul Scharre, Harry Krejsa, and Jeff Chism.

South China Sea watchers know it as a strategically important and resource-rich area, crucial to the lifeblood of U.S. and Indo-Pacific economies. It is also a highly contested space, and the proximate sources of tensions are well-known. Ongoing sovereignty disputes among China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Brunei lead to competition over hundreds of islands, reefs, and reclaimed land.

Yet underlying these resource and sovereignty tensions is something even more pernicious: The South China Sea is an opaque, low-information environment. Most South China Sea islets are hundreds of miles from shore, making it especially difficult for governments and commercial entities to monitor events at sea when they occur. This dearth of situational awareness worsens regional competition in the South China Sea. The region is already rife with rapid military modernization, resurgent nationalism, the blurring of economic and security interests, and heightened geopolitical wrangling with China (by great and small powers alike). Left unchecked, these pressures make conflict more likely by tempting major military accidents and crises that could drag down the economic and political future of the region.

These negative trends converging in the South China Sea also create missed opportunities among regional stakeholders for positive gains. South China Sea stakeholders have many transnational and economic interests of growing importance in common – from counterpiracy to maritime commerce and disaster response – but the competitive nature of the South China Sea today impedes collective action to solve shared problems. States have trouble engaging in cooperation, even when it would advance shared interests. This challenges the foundations of a stable regional order. The more states believe they live in an anarchical neighborhood, the more likely the region sees the worst of geopolitics: security dilemmas, arms races, and policies motivated by fear and greed rather than reason and restraint. 

There is no silver bullet to entirely resolve the historical, strategic, and technological factors that are contributing to a more contentious security environment in Asia. Nevertheless, there remain practical and politically viable initiatives that could have a substantial effect in mitigating insecurities while fostering cooperation on issues of common interest.

Our new report with the Center for a New American Security—Networked Transparency: Constructing a Common Operational Picture of the South China Sea—proposes that enhanced, shared maritime domain awareness (MDA) among ASEAN states is a realistic means of addressing some of the underlying and proximate problems facing this strategic waterway. An MDA architecture may engender cooperation in a region devoid of trust, prevent misunderstandings, encourage operational transparency, and lead to capacity-building efforts that contribute to the regional public good. Our report explores how advances in commercial technology services, regional information-sharing, and security cooperation can contribute to enhanced regional security. We believe these advances can do so by moving the region closer to establishing a common, layered, and regularly updated picture of air and maritime activity in the South China Sea – a common operational picture (COP) for a tempestuous domain. 

Transparency: The Next Phase of the Rebalance

Over the past year, U.S. policymakers made two major public commitments linking South China Sea transparency to larger goals of stability and assured access. The first, the Asia-Pacific Maritime Security Strategy, lays out what the Department of Defense sees as the most pressing challenges facing the region, as well as the most promising openings for future collaboration and improvement. The second, the Maritime Security Initiative, seeks to make these opportunities reality, funding regional capacity-building efforts to the tune of $425 million. Both initiatives rightly prioritize enhancing local partner military abilities, regional cooperation, and maritime domain awareness in the South China Sea, but they focus much more on framing past actions and justifying present initiatives than on laying out a road map for the future.

Our report builds on these initiatives, prescribing for the United States a maritime domain awareness road map comprising four broad lines of effort:

  • Coordinated capacity-building among a concert of outside stakeholder powers;
  • A U.S.-centric effort relying heavily on U.S.-controlled information collection and distribution;
  • Expansion of the capacity and reach of extant institutions that perform maritime awareness and information-sharing functions in the region; and
  • An inclusive approach that empowers regional institutions and relies on private-sector partnerships.

Each of these strategies—detailed at length in our report—prioritizes different ways of enhancing maritime domain awareness, and each has distinct benefits and drawbacks. In aggregate, the types of activities constituting these strategies offer policymakers menus from which they can pick and choose to build better maritime domain awareness given political realities, cost constraints, trust, and other salient conditions that may shift over time. Advancing shared situational awareness in practice will likely require drawing on all four strategic approaches, and our report identifies several key near-term tasks for policymakers and operators to render the region’s most volatile waterway into an open, transparent, and stable one. 

Read the full report: Networked Transparency: Constructing a Common Operational Picture of the South China Sea.

Dr. Van Jackson is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at CNAS and an Associate Professor in the College of Security Studies at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. The views expressed are his own.

Dr. Mira Rapp-Hooper is a Senior Fellow with the Asia-Pacific Security program at CNAS.

Paul Scharre is a Senior Fellow and Director of the 20YY Warfare Initiative at CNAS.

Harry Krejsa is a Research Associate with the Asia-Pacific Security program at CNAS.

Jeff Chism is a Commander in the U.S. Navy and at the time of writing was a Military Fellow at CNAS. The views expressed are his own.

Opinion: The Uses of the U.S. Navy’s Fourth Fleet

By W. Alejandro Sanchez

On March 10 Admiral Kurt Tidd, the new commander of Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee and presented his posture statement. In his analysis of Western Hemisphere geopolitics and security issues, he acknowledged that he does not possess sufficient vessels to carry out SOUTHCOM’s multiple maritime operations. This statement serves as an ideal point of departure for one of SOUTHCOM’s arguably least well-known agencies, the U.S. Fourth Fleet (FOURTHFLT).

A (Very) Brief History

The history of the Fourth Fleet is actually fairly brief. It was created in 1943 and tasked with protecting the South Atlantic Ocean from Axis warships and submarines. Nazi German vessels had a fairly constant presence in that area, best exemplified by the Admiral Graf Spee incident in 1939. The FOURTHFLT existed for a short period after the war ended as it was dissolved in 1950 and its area of operations was inherited by the Second Fleet.

In 2008, then-President George W. Bush reactivated the Fourth Fleet. It was officially reestablished on July 12 and its headquarters is shared with U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command (USNAVSO). The commander of USNAVSO (COMUSNAVSO) is also the commander of the Fourth Fleet; currently that officer is Rear Admiral George Ballance.

It is important to note that the current SOUTHCOM commander is no stranger to the Fourth Fleet since then-Rear Admiral Tidd was the COMUSNAVSO/FOURTHFLT commander from 2011 to 2012. He first relieved Rear Admiral Vic Guillory and was subsequently relieved by Rear Admiral Sinclair Harris a year later. “The mission executed day in and day out by the men and women of the NAVSO/4th Fleet team is important; we are operating on the seas and in the littorals throughout the region every day, building and strengthening partnerships with nations who share a common heritage and a common sense of purpose with us,” Admiral Tidd said during the 2012 change of command ceremony. Admiral Tidd would return to SOUTHCOM this past January 14, when he became its newest commander.

Commander Bio Photo: Adm. Kurt W. Tidd. Source: SOUTHCOM.
Commander Bio Photo: Adm. Kurt W. Tidd. Source: SOUTHCOM.

The Fourth Fleet’s reestablishment must be placed in the proper geopolitical context. In 2008, the hemisphere was sprinkled with several Latin American governments that held anti-U.S. sentiments. Then-President Hugo Chavez spent billions of Venezuelan petro-dollars to modernize his country’s military by purchasing equipment from Russia and China, while critiquing “el imperio.” The governments in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua had a similar ideology, while the Lula government in Brazil and the Kirchners in Argentina were neutral at best, if not occasional critics of Washington’s historical hegemony in the region. Moreover, in 2008 Russian warships visited the Caribbean, carrying out exercises with the Venezuelan Navy.

In other words, in 2008 there was a geopolitical logic for reestablishing the Fourth Fleet. This was a highly-visible method for Washington to remind the world that it remained the sole military power in the Western Hemisphere.

Current Activities

The Fourth Fleet/COMUSNAVSO’s website summarizes its activities:

No vessels or aircrafts will be permanently assigned to U.S. Fourth Fleet as part of the re-establishment. U.S. Fourth Fleet is an organizational fleet staffed to fulfill a planning and coordination mission. U.S. Fourth Fleet is focused on strengthening friendships and partnerships and will have five missions: support for peacekeeping, Humanitarian Assistance, Disaster Relief, traditional maritime exercises, and counterdrug support operations.

Even though it has no permanently assigned vessels, the ships it oversees have helped the FOURTHFLT have an ongoing presence in Latin American and Caribbean waters. A major initiative occurred in late 2015 when the carrier USS George Washington and its support vessels (i.e. the USS Bighorn, USS Guadalupe, among others), took part in the Southern Seas 2015 deployment. This included their participation in the multinational UNITAS 2015 exercises as well as making port calls in Brazil, Chile, and Peru. The previous year, the USS America took a tour of the Western Hemisphere during which it docked in Colombia, Brazil, Chile, and Peru.

As impressive as the carrier George Washington is, it is the USNS Comfort which arguably has the most continuous presence in the region. The U.S. Navy’s hospital vessel regularly travels throughout the Caribbean and Central America to provide humanitarian support. From April to September of last year, the vessel took in part in Continuing Promise 2015, in which the Comfort visited a total of 11 countries, from Guatemala to Dominica, carrying out procedures like general surgery, ophthalmologic surgery, veterinary services and public health training. This was the Comfort’s fourth trip as part of the Continuing Promise initiative. According to SOUTHCOM, the vessel previously participated in the mission’s 2007, 2009 and 2011 incarnations.

Finally, various U.S. Navy warships regularly patrol the Caribbean Sea in order to help partner nations combat illicit trafficking. In the interest of brevity we will provide only a couple of examples. In 2014, the USS Vandegrift, in a joint operation with the U.S. Coast Guard, successfully stopped a suspicious vessel off the coast of Central America. Upon boarding the vessel, security personnel found almost two thousand pounds of cocaine. More recently, in January 2015, the USS Gary and the U.S. Coast Guard successfully seized more than 1644 kilograms of cocaine from a “go fast” vessel. These two operations were part of Operation Martillo.

Coast Guard and other federal law enforcement officials work together to offload more than eight and a half tons of cocaine from the USS Vandergrift at Naval Base San Diego, Dec. 19, 2014. (USCG photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Connie Terrell).
Coast Guard and other federal law enforcement officials work together to offload more than eight and a half tons of cocaine from the USS Vandergrift at Naval Base San Diego, Dec. 19, 2014. (USCG photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Connie Terrell).

As for the Fourth Fleet’s upcoming operations, in an interview with the author, a USNAVSO/FOURTHFLT spokesperson explained that it “will conduct Southern Partnership Station 2016 with USNS Spearhead (JHSV-1) and multinational exercises UNITAS and PANAMAX 2016. We are also supporting a bilateral exercise with Peru, Silent Forces Exercise, and Integrated Advance with SOUTHCOM, this year being a mass migration exercise.” Additionally, ships like the USS Lassen and USS Shamal will participate in Operation Martillo.

The aforementioned examples demonstrate how the FOURFLT has an active presence in Latin American and Caribbean waters, and has successfully partnered with friendly nations to jointly crack down on transnational maritime crimes.  

Does the Navy Need The FOURTHFLT?

The intention of this commentary is not to criticize U.S. naval operations in Latin America and the Caribbean. Rather, the goal here is to understand how the FOURTHFLT has helped SOUTHCOM.

On February 12, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) organized an on-the-record event entitled “A Navy in Balance? A Conversation with Admiral John Richardson, Chief of Naval Operations.”During the Question & Answer section, this author asked Admiral Richardson whether the Fourth Fleet is necessary, given that it only seems to have the USNS Comfort on a quasi-regular basis while it rotates its other vessels instead of having any permanently deployed to it. The Admiral responded that the Fourth Fleet is “very important” and mentioned the aforementioned USS George Washington deployment and the success of security operations in the Caribbean. “The productivity of that fleet continues to show its value,” the Admiral declared.

The uses of the Fourth Fleet can be divided in three arguments:

1. This author asked the aforementioned FOURTHFLT spokesperson how its reestablishment has helped SOUTHCOM, particularly from an administrative and logistical point of view. The response was that by being “dual-hatted” and reporting to both the CNO and SOUTHCOM, “we are able to represent multiple operations and opportunities for our partner nations in the Navy specific chain of command as well as the Combatant Command chain of command. The establishment of Fourth Fleet elevated us from an echelon 3 command to echelon 2.” Moreover, the reestablishment of the FOURTHFLT has allowed the training of a Maritime Operations Center Staff “to include the USNAVSO Fleet Command Center that planned and executed Lines of Operations in support of USSOUTHCOMs Theater Campaign Plan.”

Indeed, having a Fourth Fleet has also provided a command chain that allows SOUTHCOM to deal with major operations. As the FOURTHFLT spokesperson explains, “a key event was our response to the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010 where 4th Fleet served as the Navy Component Commander during Operation Unified Response, the Navy’s largest ever Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief (HA/DR) contingency response. The response consisted of 17 ships, 89 aircraft, and over 15,000 Sailors and Marines assigned to Commander, Task Force Forty, and the Joint Force Maritime Component Commander in support of Joint Task Force Haiti.”

010120-N-4995K-038 PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Jan. 20, 2010) ÐThe 1,000 bed hospital ship USNS Comfort is anchored just off of the coast of Haiti in support of Operation Unified Relief: Haiti. The Navy currently has 11 ships supporting the operation with approximately 11,000 Sailors, Marines, and civilians who are providing humanitarian and medical aid to the battered nation after it was struck by a powerful earthquake Jan 12. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class (AW) Chelsea Kennedy/RELEASED)
010120-N-4995K-038 PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Jan. 20, 2010) The 1,000 bed hospital ship USNS Comfort anchored just off of the coast of Haiti in support of Operation Unified Relief: Haiti. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class (AW) Chelsea Kennedy/RELEASED).

2. Another issue is whether the Fourth Fleet has brought any clear budget or equipment-related advantages to SOUTHCOM. In 2014, six years after the Fourth Fleet was reinstated, then-SOUTHCOM commander General John Kelly declared in his posture statement to the House Armed Services Committee that, “as the lowest priority Geographic Combatant Command, U.S. Southern Command will likely receive little, if any, ‘trickle down’ of restored funding. Ultimately, the cumulative impact of our reduced engagement will be measured in terms of U.S. influence, leadership, and relationships in the Western Hemisphere.”The former commander indirectly talked about the Fourth Fleet, stating that “insufficient maritime surface vessels and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms impair our primary mission to detect threats and defend the southern approaches to the U.S. homeland.” (The 2014, 2015, and 2016 posture statements list activities carried out by USNAVSO/FOURTHFLT).

Regarding the acquisition of additional equipment, in an interview with the author, SOUTHCOM spokesperson Jose Ruiz explained that SOUTHCOM “submits requests for naval resources, including personnel, ships and aircraft, through the Joint Staff. We work the requests with our naval component, [USNAVSO]. The military services weigh all geographic combatant command requests for people and platforms against prioritized national security requirements around the globe, and allocate resources to our command based on what is available after higher priority national security needs are met.” Spokesperson Ruiz added SOUTHCOM does not exclusively rely on the U.S. Navy “for maritime resources to accomplish important missions […] Other important interagency partners, such as the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Customs and Border Protection also provide key sea and air platforms and forces to support those missions.” (This author has discussed U.S. Coast Guard activities in the Greater Caribbean in “The US Coast Guard’s Western Hemisphere Strategy”).

In his posture statement Admiral Tidd explained the success of the various U.S. security and defense agencies (including the Coast Guard and law enforcement agencies) that come together under the umbrella of Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATF-S) to combat transnational organized crime (TOC) in SOUTHCOM’s area of operations. Nevertheless, during his testimony to the Senate, when asked about his lack of resources he simply stated that “I do not have the ships, I do not have the aircraft” to deal with the amount of TOC in the region. He explained that at any given time, he may have on average five to six surface ships, namely Coast Guard platforms, and one to two Navy platforms, while he ideally needs 21 vessels. Thus, it would appear that the FOURTFLT has not brought additional resources to SOUTHCOM.

3. The one clear advantage brought by the reestablishment of the Fleet is that it helped the U.S. military appear to have a bigger presence in the Western Hemisphere in the eyes of Latin American and Caribbean states, not to mention nations like Russia and China. The word “fleet” conjures images of a plethora of frigates, submarines, and a carrier or two docked in Florida, under SOUTHCOM’s command. Hence, it comes as no surprise when the FOURTHFLT was reinstated, media outlets around the region published numerous commentaries about Washington’s plans – case in point, a 2008 commentary in the Colombian daily El Espectador has the headline “The Return of the Fourth Fleet: What is the objective of this new initiative by the U.S. government?” Unsurprisingly, the Venezuelan government critiqued this decision.

Nevertheless, Admiral Tidd’s posture statement explains that “Russia’s actions [in Latin America and the Caribbean] are directly connected to its broader global efforts to demonstrate that Russia is a global power capable of challenging U.S. leadership and the established rules-based international system.” (P. 8-9). Thus, the FOURTHFLT’s shortage of Naval platforms (Coast Guard vessels notwithstanding) is arguably affecting SOUTHCOM’s, and by extension Washington’s, influence in Latin America and the Caribbean to Moscow’s benefit.

Final Thoughts

At the aforementioned AEI event CNO Admiral Richardson declared that the Navy “will continue to support [the Fourth Fleet] with every resource that we can spare.” Nevertheless, the CNO also stated that allocating resources is “fundamentally a matter of prioritization.” It is clear that SOUTHCOM is low in Washington’s list of defense priorities. Admiral Tidd understands this as he stated in his 2016 posture statement that “because no nation in the region poses a direct, conventional military threat to the United States, Latin America tends to rank fairly low on force allocation priorities.” (P. 2)

To recapitulate, the objective of this analysis is not to critique U.S. naval operations, but rather question the necessity of the Fourth Fleet itself. U.S. Navy vessels have participated in training exercises with regional partners as well as security initiatives like Operation Martillo. Moreover, the 2010 Haiti earthquake highlights how having the Fourth Fleet has provided a more robust command chain which SOUTHCOM can utilize for future major operations.

Nevertheless, it is the opinion of this author that the Fourth Fleet’s reestablishment has not brought any major budgetary or equipment-related advantages. Moreover, given Washington’s focus on Syria, Russia and China, it is unlikely that SOUTHCOM will receive additional naval resources soon.

The views presented in this essay are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of any institutions with which the author is associated.

W. Alejandro Sanchez is a researcher who focuses on geopolitical, military and cyber security issues in the Western Hemisphere. Follow him on Twitter: @W_Alex_Sanchez.

The author would like to thank the Public Affairs offices of SOUTHCOM and USNAVSO/FOURTHFLT for their help in drafting this report.

Featured Image: 160310-N-MD297-161 PACIFIC OCEAN (March 10, 2016) Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Lassen (DDG 82) patrols the Eastern Pacific. Lassen is currently underway in support of Operation Martillo, a joint operation with the U.S. Coast Guard and partner nations within the 4th Fleet area of responsibility. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Huey D. Younger Jr./Released)

Fostering the Discussion on Securing the Seas.