A recent opinion piece at The American Conservative had a number of military officers scratching their heads. In “An Officer Corps that Can’t Score,” William Lind purports to discuss how careerism in the military breeds “habits of defeat.” He tells us that:
Defeat in Vietnam bred a generation of military reformers, men such as Col. John Boyd USAF, Col. Mike Wyly USMC, and Col. Huba Wass de Czege USA, each of whom led a major effort to reorient his service. Today, the landscape is barren. Not a military voice is heard calling for thoughtful, substantive change.
This is quite a claim, and rather damning of today’s officer corps with a very broad brushstroke. But is it true? Based on my personal and professional experiences in the U.S. Navy, I would say no. Lind errs on the side of being insulting to some of the dedicated men and women in uniform, but that does not really worry me. They have thick skin. More seriously, he leads his civilian readers astray, leaving them with an inaccurate depiction of a military completely unused to debate.
One needs only to start here at War on the Rocks to see that there is debate by active duty and reserve personnel about the present and future of our armed forces and the use of military means in the 21st century. True, one publication certainly does not indicate a healthy state of discourse. But one need only look around a bit to find one.
BJ Armstrong is a naval officer, PhD candidate in War Studies with King’s College, London, and a member of the Editorial Board at the U.S. Naval Institute. The opinions and views expressed are those of the author alone. They do not represent the views of U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Navy, or any other agency.
Putin’s annexation of the Crimea shifts NATO’s focus back to Europe. Therefrom, maritime security’s relevance for the Alliance will suffer. Nevertheless, Russia’s new assertiveness has massive impact on NATO’s maritime priorities. Other than expeditionary missions, European homewaters are now the theaters of concern.
All Opportunities Gone
After the Cold War, NATO was never threatening Russia, but rather sent dozens of cooperation offers to Moscow. Moreover, if Russia would sincerely have seeked NATO membership, Putin would fly to NATO’s September Summit. However, in NATO, Russia would never have been eye-on-eye with the US, but rather would have found itself on a level with Germany, France and the UK. Thus, Russia would never have found the global prestige and geopolitical influence it was looking for. That is the real reason why Russia never joined the Alliance. Since 1991, there were many opportunities for naval cooperation between NATO and Russia.
Ukraine has no significant navy anymore. Instead, Ukraine’s warships were taken over by Russia, which makes Moscow’s navy, by numbers, larger than the US Navy. However, due to the warships’ poor quality, this increase in naval power does not present a game changer. Surely, a plus for Putin’s navy is that Sevastopol will remain a Russian naval base for decades.
After Sevastopol is lost, Ukraine’s only significant port left is Odessa. NATO’s response should be to support Ukraine in keeping at least a small navy. Moreover, NATO should give a guarantee that, in case of further Russian aggression, Ukrainian ships can find shelter in Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey or Greece. In addition, SNMGs and SNMCMGs should pay regular visits to Odessa; on the one hand for partnership with Ukraine and on the other hand as show of force to Russia. Trips to Georgia should go along.
Like it or not – The Bosporus has become a bargaining chip. NATO should make contingency plans how to close the Bosporus for Russian warships, should Russia invade Eastern Ukraine or Moldova. NATO must make clear to Russia that a price to pay for further annexation of territories would the loss of access through the Bosporus.France, Please Cancel the Mistral Deal
Russia could have done military campaigns like Georgia 2008 or Crimea 2014 much easier with one of the Mistrals. One of these LHD would also be useful for Russia’s navy in campaigns against Moldova, with regard to Gagauzia and Transnistria, or even against Estonia, because the Mistrals can serve as a platform for command and control, attack helicopters and landing troops.
Regarding the military balance in Europe, France would do its allies a disservice, if it would deliver the Mistrals to Putin. Instead, these vessels should remain either in Europe or in a like-minded country. Options where to sell the ships could be South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa or India; countries, which are looking for new LHD.
An even better idea comes from Jeff Lightfoot. He argues that “NATO should buy the Mistrals“. Like AWACS and AGS, the Mistrals could become a shared NATO asset. Although I fully support Lightfoot’s arguments for a NATO-nization of the Mistrals, I disagree with him about how to do that. After NRF and EU-Battlegroups failed, NATO’s Standing Maritime Groups are the only multinational units with combat capabilities, which ever really worked. Moreover, Europe was carrying most of the burdens in the SNMG, which face a serious of lack amphibious capabilities. Thus, the Mistral purchase should be mostly funded by the Europeans. Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland and Belgium could go for “NATO Mistral 1”, while the US, Canada, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Turkey could go for “NATO Mistral 2”. A NATO LHD in the Baltic or Black Sea would send clear message to Russia. Deployments to the Med’ or Indian Ocean would help to pursue Western maritime interests.
With the entry of the Baltic Countries and Poland into NATO and EU, the Baltic Sea was a solely political issue, not worth military considerations. This has changed, too. However, this does not mean that we are on the brink of war. Nevertheless, NATO needs to make plans how to deter Russia from threatening the Baltic Countries from the sea. The Alliance must make sure that its naval superiority in Baltic remains clear. Deploying an SNMCMG to the Baltic and regular naval exercises, such as BALTOPS (non-NATO), are efforts worth doing. Moreover, Sweden and Finland should join NATO. Both countries would bring great contributions to NATO and their membership would even increase Russia’s isolation in the Baltic Sea.
Russia is no partner for cooperation in the Med’ anymore. Beside the consequences of Crimea, Russia’s show-of-force in the Eastern Med to cover Syria made clear that Putin is willing to use naval power in missions targeted against Western interests. In consequence, the Europeans have to prevent – politically – that Russia opens new naval bases in the Med’, for example in Cyprus or Egypt. EU member Cyprus must receive the clear message from Brussels that a Russian base on Cyrus is unacceptable. In addition, NATO should closely monitor all Russian naval activities in the Med’ and make plans about how to deal with them in case of further Russian aggression. Moreover, NATO states should close their ports for Russian ships to be replenished.
Besides guaranteeing NATO’s future, Putin’s Crimea annexation also ends the American and British debates about the need for a sea-based nuclear deterrent. The argument for retiring the SSBN was that state-to-state conflict was unlikely and, therefore, nuclear deterrence was outdated. However, sea-based nuclear deterrence provides the minimum of global stability we need to prevent devastating state-to-state conflict. Where could the conflict with Russia go, if global zero was reality? What would prevent Putin from sending Russian tanks through Tallinn via Riga to Vilnius? Surely not statements from Berlin to keep the diplomatic hotlines open.
No matter about the massive unpopularity – Europe will need the nuclear umbrella provided by the US, UK and France. We are not yet back in the pre-1989 times. There is not yet a Cold War 2.0 at sea. However, if we forget the lessons learned of nuclear and conventional deterrence, we may find ourselves in exactly these situations much sooner than we think.
NATO-Building Starts at Home
NATO’s pivot to Russia will shift attention away from the maritime domain back to the continent. Armies and air forces will receive, once again, much more attention than navies. While Putin’s aggression increased the importance of NATO for its member states, maritime security’s relevance for member states and, therefore, for the Alliance will decrease. In consequence, theaters like the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean will become of much less concern for NATO.
In case the Crimea Crisis did not happen, NATO, to sustain its relevance, would probably have looked for new maritime tasks in the Med’, Gulf of Guinea and the Indian Ocean, maybe even in Southeast Asia. However, thanks to Putin, we will find NATO’s warships deployed back in the Baltic and the Black Sea. Given Operation Ocean Shield ends this year, we will not see NATO back in the Indian Ocean very soon; except maybe for a few friendly port visits. After Crimea and with Putin’s hands on Eastern Ukraine and Moldova, NATO’s debates about partners across the globe and global alliance are finally dead.
In response to Putin, NATO-building begins at home. We need NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division, fully focused on the Alliance’s core business, reaching out to the member states’ ordinary taxpayers. The changing European security environment requires an emphasis on the big messages: Defense, deterrence and security. Thus, zeitgeist-motivated campaigns should be stopped. In these times, NATO must tell the people what armies, air forces really are for and how our soldiers serve their countries and our Alliance.
Felix Seidler is a fellow at the Institute for Security Policy, University of Kiel, Germany, and runs the site Seidlers-Sicherheitspolitik.net (Seidler’s Security Policy).
Sailors Returning to their Ships After Combat Ashore in Veracruz (Naval Historical and Heritage Command)
This is the third of a three part series on the American occupation of Veracuz in 1914. The first and second installments can be found here and here.
24 April marked the end of the combat phase of the U.S. invasion of Veracruz, with the “ABC Powers” of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile offering to mediate between the U.S. and Mexico. President Wilson agreed to participate in these talks and ordered the troops ashore to refrain from offensive operations.
The negotiations proceeded to drag on even though one of Wilson’s original objectives behind the operation was was met in July when Mexican President Victoriano Huerta resigned. However, negotiations with Venustiano Carranza, the head of the Constitutionalist opposition to Huerta who then took power, proved to be not particularly fruitful either, with the parties only coming to a satisfactory agreement for the withdrawal of American troops in November.
Of note, the other main reason for the invasion, preventing the delivery of the weapons onboard Ypiranga to Huerta’s army, was never achieved and did not matter regardless, as they were eventually delivered (the Americans let the ship leave Veracruz in early May and deliver its cargo at Puerto Mexico), but Huerta resigned before they could have any impact on helping the Army keep him in power.
Probably the main reason why some history buffs know about Veracruz is the number of medals awarded to the participants, including men like Smedley Butler and John McCloy who each earned one of their two Medals of Honor there. Members of the sea services earned fifty-five Medals of Honor for heroism or service during the four days of fighting. One reason for that high number was that Veracruz was the first action in which Navy or Marine officers were eligible for the award. Butler was embarrassed by his, stating in his biography that
“I received one, but I returned it to the Navy Department with the statement that I had done nothing which entitled me to this supreme decoration. The correspondence was referred to Admiral Fletcher, who insisted that I certainly deserved the decoration. The Navy Department sent the medal back to me with the order that I should not only keep it this time, but wear it also.”
Another frequently told anecdote has an admiral conducting an inspection in the 1920s, who upon seeing the medal on the chest of a man that had earned it in the First World War exclaimed “Holy smoke! Here’s a Medal of Honor that’s not for Veracruz!”
The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps both learned some lessons from Veracruz. It marked Naval aviation’s first involvement in anything resembling combat. It also marked one of the last instances that ship’s company sailors fought ashore as infantry, something that had been relatively common up to that time, with U.S. sailors having recently fought ashore in Latin America, Hawaii, Korea, Samoa, China, and the Philippines. As for the Marine Corps, the 3,000 Marines eventually assembled and sent ashore was “the largest concentration of Marines in the history of the Corps, to date.”
While U.S. memories of Veracruz are almost non-existent today, it had a massive and lasting impact on Mexican attitudes towards its northern neighbor. In Jack Sweetman’s the Landing at Veracruz: 1914, he describes the occupation as “a kind of Caribbean Pearl Harbor.” Even the Constitutionalists fighting against Huerta opposed U.S. military intervention in Mexican affairs, with Pancho Villa the only leading figure in Mexican politics who did not oppose the U.S. landing, ironic in light of him being the main target of another U.S. invasion a few years later. Just as the niños heroiques of 1847 entered the pantheon of national heroes, martyred defenders of the Naval Academy like Cadet Virgilio Uribe and Lieutenant Luis Felipe José Azueta are remembered to this day. A new adjective was added to the title of the Naval Academy, now known as the Heroica Escuela Naval Militar in honor of the cadets’ resistance to the norteamericano invasion. This year the Mexican Navy is participating in a months-long series of events to mark the centenary of an event that the service actually played little part in.
Whether or not the Veracruz operation was a success is difficult to determine. Huerta was forced from office, but one would be hard pressed to prove that the American attack against Veracruz caused his removal. It did not end the Civil War, with Mexico undergoing several more years (or decades, depending on when one believes that the Civil War actually ended) of chaos and violence. A prominent event in Mexican history, it remains mostly a source of obscure service lore to Americans.
Lieutenant Commander Mark Munson is a Naval Intelligence officer currently serving on the OPNAV staff. He has previously served at Naval Special Warfare Group FOUR, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and onboard USS Essex (LHD 2). The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official viewpoints or policies of the Department of Defense or the US Government.
Sailors Parading through Veracruz (Naval Historical and Heritage Command)
This is the second installment in a three part series on the American occupation of Veracuz in 1914. The first article can be found here.
On the morning of 21 April 1914, Rear Admiral Frank F. Fletcher, commander of the U.S. Navy task force offshore Veracruz, Mexico, complied with the order he had received from from Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels the night before. Fletcher ordered the landing of 1200 Marines and sailors from his ships to seize the customs house in Veracruz in order to prevent the delivery of the weapons onboard the German freighter Ypiranga to the Mexican Army, even before he was reinforced by ships commanded by his counterpart off Tampico, Rear Admiral Henry T. Mayo, and the Atlantic Fleet’s steaming from Norfolk. According to John Eisenhower’sIntervention! The United States and the Mexican Revolution, the Americans anticipated resistance from the Veracruz garrison of 600 soldiers, and 2000-3000 other Mexican troops in the region that could be augmented by militia and freed prisoners. Fletcher hoped that moving ashore quickly would preempt a defense by local troops, enable a potential occupation, and allow him to avoid using his ships’ big guns to obliterate the city.
According to another account of the Veracruz operation, Jack Sweetman’s the Landing at Veracruz: 1914, the “Naval Brigade,” commanded by Captain William Rees Rush, the commanding officer of USS Florida, was composed of two regiments: the First Marine Regiment (22 officers and 578 men assembled from Marines onboard Fletcher’s ships) and the First Seaman Regiment (30 officers and 570 sailors from Florida and USS Utah). They went ashore from their ships anchored in the harbor onboard whaleboats towed by motor launches to Pier Four in the port.
As soon the landings started, the American consul in Veracruz telephoned General Gustavo Maass, the local Mexican commander, encouraging him not to fight back and allow the Sailors and Marines to come ashore unopposed. Maass, in a rage, instead immediately informed 100 men from a regiment billeted nearby to engage the Americans. After a conversation with the Minister of Defense, Maass was forced to reverse himself, however, as the Minister instructed him to withdraw his troops ten miles inland to the town of Tejería. The Mexican Army’s involvement in the fight thus almost immediately ended, with the bulk of resistance over the next few days conducted by Veracruz’s civilian residents, who had some military training and organization as a militia (the “Society of Defenders of the Port of Veracruz”) as part of a program Huerta had implemented the previous year.
That same morning, Ypiranga was sighted steaming towards the harbor and was interdicted by crew from USS Utah. The master cooperated and provided shipping documents to the boarding team, which ironically showed that the weapons on the ship had not originated in Hamburg, but were Remingtons made in the U.S. that had been routed through Europe to evade Wilson’s embargo on arms exports to Huerta’s army.
With the Mexican Army out of the fight, one of the main sources of resistance left was from the Naval Academy, where cadets fired at the at the Americans landing at Pier Four. They emulated the example of the niños heroiques, cadets at the Mexican military academy in Mexico City in 1847 who threw themselves to their deaths from the cliffs of Chapultepec to save the flag and avoid surrender to a previous generation of American invaders. The cadets defending the Naval Academy in 1914 soon joined the ranks of the honored dead after fire from the guns of Fletcher’s ships silenced their resistance (enabled by Chief Boatswain John McCloy, who drove the motor launch he commanded towards the Academy, fired against it to draw a response, thus allowing the location of the defending cadets to be spotted and engaged by the ships’ guns, an act earning McCloy his second Medal of Honor).
That afternoon Admiral Fletcher cabled Washington with his first report of the landing stating that
“Mexican forces…opened fire with rifle and artillery after our seizure of the Custom House…Ypiranga arrived Veracruz two PM anchored in outer harbor and [was] notified he would not be allowed to leave port with munitions of war aboard. Holding Custom House and section of city in vicinity of wharves and Consulate. Casualties two PM four dead twenty wounded.”
The following day on 22 April, additional forces flowed into Veracruz with the arrival of ships and Marines from both Tampico and the Norfolk-based Atlantic Fleet, with the additional Sailors and Marines augmenting the Brigade ashore and expanding the American occupation throughout the whole city by engaging in fierce house-to-house fighting. The famous Marine hero Smedley Butler, then a Major, described a urban battle scene not particularly different from those in which Marines would fight throughout the next century:
“The sailors who traveled openly through the streets were badly shot up, not only by Mexicans but in at least one instance by their own men, but the Marine casualties were slight. Two of my men were killed and four or five wounded. We Marines decided on different tactics than the sailors. Stationing a machine gunner at one end of the street as a lookout, we advanced under cover, cutting our way through the adobe walls from one house to another with axes and picks. We drove everybody from the houses and then climbed up on the flat roofs to wipe out the snipers.”
Meanwhile, in Washington, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan apologized to the German government for the unlawful detention of Ypiranga. Bryan, like President Woodrow Wilson and Navy Secretary Daniels was well known as a devout Christian with a pacifist reputation and opposition to the military adventurism of the previous Republican administrations in Latin America and the Philippines, but was ironically overseeing the violent invasion of one of the U.S.’s closest neighbors on remarkably flimsy grounds.
By 23 April Admiral Fletcher had transferred his command ashore with most of the resistance having melted away, but, according to Sweetman’s account, was unable to convince any of the local authorities to restore some form of government, as a law passed in the wake of the 1862 French invasion of Mexico made holding “office under a foreign power occupying Mexican soil” a criminal offense. The official casualty figures by 24 April listed 126 Mexicans killed and 195 wounded (an amount probably significantly lower than the actual total, since these numbers were based only on wounded and dead recorded by local hospitals), with 17 killed and 63 wounded Americans.
Although the Naval Brigade had been reinforced and occupied virtually all of Veracruz, Admiral Fletcher was concerned that the Mexican Army was massing up to 16,000 troops in the vicinity of the city, dwarfing the number of Marines and Sailors ashore, many of whom were also needed back on ship in case of future operations at sea. Therefore the U.S. Army’s Fifth Reinforced Brigade, commanded by Brigadier General Frederick Funston, was dispatched from the U.S. on 24 April, arriving a few days later. After negotiating the status of the Marines, the Army troops went ashore and took responsibility for the city from the naval units in a ceremony on 30 April (the debate over who “owned” the Marines foreshadowed future arguments over task organization in a joint force. Ultimately the Marines that were attached to Navy ships returned to their afloat commands, while the rest of the force “chopped” to Army control). Despite significant support for a broader war with Mexico in the press and segments of Congress, Funston led an uneventful, combat-free, occupation of Veracruz for another seven months as the machinations associated with a diplomatic solution to the crisis were worked out.
Stay tuned for the third and final installment of this series, which discusses the aftermath of the occupation.
Lieutenant Commander Mark Munson is a Naval Intelligence officer currently serving on the OPNAV staff. He has previously served at Naval Special Warfare Group FOUR, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and onboard USS Essex (LHD 2). The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official viewpoints or policies of the Department of Defense or the US Government.
