The United States is over-invested in large-scale capital ships that are a liability in this new age of irregular warfare. That is the premise behind the upcoming book, American Sea Power and the Obsolescence of Capital Ship Theory by R.B. Watts. Watts, a retired Captain in the United States Coast Guard, says that this text is a culmination of 30 years of research and observation. He does not rule out the possibility of conventional war between states; instead, he emphasizes the greater likelihood of irregular conflict and the Navy’s need to prepare for these types of conflicts. The book itself separates into three distinct sections: a historical analysis of predominant theories and their alternatives; an examination of the evolution since the Cold War; and an assessment of the new requirements of irregular warfare.
Watts does an admirable job of covering the historical basis for his theory. He begins with a detailed explanation of A.T. Mahan and his prevailing theory on the importance of the large scale capital ship fleet. He next explores the ascendancy, use, and effectiveness of the capital ship. From the dreadnought, to the battleship, to the fleet carrier, all the way to the nuclear super carrier, he examines the use and effectiveness of each in their prevailing conflict. During the Cold War, the Western policy of containment was a boon for navalists wedded to Mahanian theory. Containment implies encirclement and encirclement of the Soviet Union by sea was a major part of the NATO response. The capital ship theory though did not fit into the new paradigm. Vietnam and the Reagan reforms of the 1980’s were a strategic negative and positive for the Navy respectively.
Where he truly does excel is looking at the modern naval implications after 9/11. During the Global War on Terror naval air power was used to great effect in the beginning of ENDURING FREEDOM. It was used so successfully that the pilots soon ran out of targets. New developments have come to bear in the last decade. The Littoral Combat Ship, a small “streetfighter” designed to operate in the littorals and close to shore, has now been re-purposed to fight with the blue-water fleet. This led to massive cost overruns and concerns over survivability. China has risen to fill the gap left by the Soviet Union in capital ship theory. Coming from the GWOT and the threat of China, was the concept of “jointness”. The idea is that by working together and collaborating, the force can be more efficient and relevant to irregular and regular missions. “Air-Sea Battle” announced in 2011 codified “jointness”, bringing with it capital ship theory at the forefront. He concludes that the United States must change its objectives to meet the new challenges of irregular war. As long as the United States remains a superpower, it should expect to be challenged using irregular methods.
American Sea Power and the Obsolescence of Capital Ship Theory is a noteworthy entry into an area that is rarely explored, the risk of over-reliance on capital ships in the United States Navy. The experience of the author and his meticulous research truly shows through the pages. His exploration of the Cyclone-class patrol craft, the LCS, and the need for a small surface combatant designed for operations in the littoral is quite compelling. The Navy is sorely missing a patrol craft that can operate on presence missions in the South China Sea, Persian Gulf, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean. One area that is missing is the lack of the contributions of PT boats in the Second World War. Captain Watts’ book is a worthwhile read for anyone in the sea service and those interested in alternatives to current trends within the US Navy.
David Roush received his Master’s degree in National Security Affairs emphasizing naval affairs from the Institute of World Politics. He also holds a bachelor’s degree from Western Michigan University in Political Science. David currently serves as CIMSEC’s Director of Content Management.
CIMSEC content is and always will be free; consider a voluntary monthly donation to offset our operational costs. As always, it is your support and patronage that have allowed us to build this community – and we are incredibly grateful.
James Bradley. The China Mirage: the Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia. Little, Brown and Company. 417pp. $35.00.
The United States has a troubled relationship with China. The confrontations over military budgets and the South China Sea are profound but they are not the first flash-points to develop in the relationship. The details of American involvement in China’s so-called “Century of Humiliation” are not widely known among Americans. In steps James Bradley, author of Flags of our Fathers, with his newest offering: The China Mirage. Bradley offers in the introduction to examine “the American perception of Asia and the gap between perception and reality.” While the book’s direction and intent are admirable, The China Mirage lapses into a mirage of its own, in which every American action in China is driven by economic exploitation, abject naivety, or criminal gullibility.
The China Mirage is organized chronologically and examines American involvement and missteps in East Asia. It begins with detailed treatment of the life of Warren Delano, the grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who made the family’s fortune by opium smuggling and conveniently described his activities as “the China trade.” It continues in a grand historical arc covering both Roosevelt presidencies, both Sino-Japanese Wars (from 1894-1895 and 1937-1945), the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Chiang Kai-Shek, Mao Zedong, the outbreak of World War II, the Chinese Civil War, the “who lost China” debate in the United States, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. This feat is a tall order for any author and Bradley manages to keep the pace moving throughout his 400-page tome with vignettes from lives of Great People.
While the book is nominally about China, it spends a large portion examining the United States’ relationship with Japan. The long treatment of characters such as Theodore Roosevelt (TR) and Baron Kaneko, Japan’s
A photo of Kitaro Kaneko at his Harvard Graduation
Harvard-educated diplomat who built a strong relationship with TR, mentions China on the periphery but the reader can clearly see the fruits of Bradley’s research in his earlier book about TR’s presidency, The Imperial Cruise, shining through in this newest text. While the United States’ treatment of Japan was somewhat connected to China, the amount included in The China Mirage was excessive and distracting. At times, the narrative style is frenetic, moving back and forth between China and Japan fast enough to induce whiplash. Bradley’s style is, at its core, polemic and his words drip with venom. He uses vivid portraits to weave a narrative about the various decision-makers on both sides of the Pacific who drove the hundred-year drama. Lurid details and shortcomings are front-and-center with the author’s voice providing commentary. The Republic of China is referred to as “The Soong-Chiang Syndicate”; American missionaries are called Chiang Kai-Shek’s “favorite sycophants”; Baron Kaneko’s interactions with TR are described as “canoodling.” China’s population is referred to as “Noble Chinese Peasants” to reflect American incorrect assumptions that the Chinese were ignorant and eager to adopt America’s Christian culture. The style is certainly not boring but, as the narrative progresses, it became more of a burden than a boon. The sarcastic use of terms such as “Southern Methodist Chiang” or “foreign devils” became distracting as they were used repeated throughout the entire book, implying that they were not just rhetorical flourishes but an opportunity for the author to express his disdain for many of the players involved.
In an ironic twist, The China Mirage ends up crafting caricatures which cleve as much to a fantasy as the American vision of the Noble Chinese Peasant which Bradley derides throughout the entire book. Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt appear as bumbling fools who were taken in respectively by the Japanese or Chiang Kai-Shek. The reader is treated to vivid, often unnecessary, digressions into the men’s Harvard connections and material opulence. FDR is essentially a
FDR sits between Chiang Kei Shek and Winston Churchill at the Cairo Conference.
tottering fool who lives large off opium money while being seduced by bureaucratic charlatans and bamboozled by colorful maps. These analyses both ignore the savviness of both of these men in their Presidential roles as well as the fact that one person, even a President, is unable to successfully implement policy without buy-in from others in the policy-making world. The book’s implied belief that these men’s personal failings single-handedly lead to policy-blunders is overstated.
On the other hand, Bradley lionizes Mao Zedong as a people’s champion who was a better choice than Chiang Kai-Shek to lead China. Mao is portrayed as the key character in anti-Japanese resistance during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), exhorting the corrupt Chiang to “show some spine.” The problem with this assertion is that, unlike Bradley claims, Mao’s forces were barely ever involved in fighting against the Japanese. A vivid portrait is painted of Mao’s seemingly saintly activities in his Yan’an enclave in the 1930s without any mention of the thousands of Communists who were purged during those years to cement his hold on power. One could assume that this omission was mere oversight were not for the fact that, in a preceding chapter, Chiang Kai-Shek’s execution of a few journalists was given top-billing in the narrative. The reader gets the impression that the book has a purposeful slant and bias.
There are other conclusions which might cause some arched eyebrows. The decades-long recognition of Taiwan as the seat of the Chinese government is portrayed as a singular act of American arrogance and ignorance, yet non-recognition was the exactly same policy used by the United States with the German annexation of Austria in 1938 and the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States in 1940. A condemnation of the FDR Administration’s Lend-Lease policy, derided as an “attractive fiction that, after their wars were over, England, Russia, and China would return the materials the U.S. lent to them,” misses the fact that many of those materials were returned, even by the Soviet Union during the early stages of the Cold War. These attacks indicate that the objective of the narrative is to find any and every way to undermine the people whom the author does not like rather than focusing on the book’s main purpose: analyzing the United States’ relationship with China.
While the style and content might at times be suspect, Bradley does a valuable service by introducing historical issues which are not in the American mainstream: the sad legacy of the Exclusion Act and anti-Chinese violence in mid-19th century America; the lingering distrust in China of outsiders who preach a noble message but are perceived to act in their self-interest; the role the United States oil embargo played in the outbreak of war with Japan; the opportunity, though overstated and oversimplified, for the United States to broker an agreement with Mao before the Chinese Civil War formally began; the abominable treatment of people with China experience in the State Department during the early days of McCarthyism. These are important topics that should be more widely known so that the average American can have a more nuanced understanding how the Chinese people, rather than just the Chinese government, will react to American policy. American policymakers will need to get the US-China relationship right if they want to successfully navigate a turbulent 21st Century. To achieve this, they will need to shelve preconceived notions of what China is and view on-the-ground facts rather than projecting their own culture and worldview. The China Mirage can be a jumping-off point for the uninitiated but recognize that, just like other historical narratives about China, it has its own shortcomings.
Matthew Merighi is CIMSEC’s Directors of Publications. He is also a Master of Arts candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy studying Pacific Asia and International Security.
CIMSEC content is and always will be free; consider a voluntary monthly donation to offset our operational costs. As always, it is your support and patronage that have allowed us to build this community – and we are incredibly grateful.
The following book review is by guest author Shane Halton.
Peter Fitzsimons. Gallipoli. Random House Australia, Feb 01, 2015. Hardcover. 800 pages. $45.00.
When writing about World War I, it can be difficult to strike the correct philosophical balance. Make the story too bleak or nihilistic and you risk misunderstanding the very real patriotic enthusiasm that characterized the first months of the War. Conversely, one can’t make the story too romantic and heroic at the risk of ignoring the fact that most of World War I was a brutal slog with moments of individual gallantry, often overwhelmed by pointless slaughter exacerbated by terrible generalship.
World War I had so many different facets that it can be hard to meld the stories of political scheming in London, Berlin, and Constantinople with the existential drama of soldiers clinging to their lives in trenches under constant enemy fire while waiting for the order to ‘fix bayonets’ and go over the top. Simply put, most stories of World War I don’t scale well: they work best as individual stories (depending on your temperament I recommend either Storm of Steel or the equally classic All Quiet on the Western Front) or sweeping grand histories (my favorite one volume is the comparably slim The World Undone or Robert Massie’s Dreadnaught and Castles of Steel combination for the nautically inclined). Rarely does a history come along that can fuse the two genres. That’s why Peter Fitzsimons’ masterful new volume Gallipoli is such a treat.
The task of the Allies at Gallipoli was truly Sisyphean. They held the low ground: thin trenches carved into the sides of steep cliffs, downhill from the Turkish trenches, exposed to artillery fire. A few times a month they were
A modern view of ANZAC cove
directed to fix bayonets and, often in the cover of darkness and always over terrain with minimal cover, take the hill and break the Turkish lines. It was an impossible task. After over a year of grinding attrition from disease and enemy fire, the Allied troops were withdrawn in secret, in good order and with no casualties. The Gallipoli peninsula was ceded to the Turks.
How did it all go so wrong? Despite opting to spend most of the book with the ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) troops in the trenches, Fitzsimons does an admirable job decoding the mix of over-optimism, managerial muddle, and lack of appreciation for local conditions that combined to make an Allied amphibious landing in Gallipoli seem like such a good idea… at least to those sitting in London. A young and manic Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, speed walks through Whitehall, obsessed with finding a way to use the Royal Navy to end the grinding stalemate on the Western Front. His genius brainwave? Send a flotilla of minesweepers and battleships up the Dardanelles and onward to Constantinople to scare the Turks into surrender. Had that plan worked it would have stood as history’s grandest example of gunboat diplomacy.
But the plan didn’t work. The Ottomans and their German advisors mustered just enough of a defensive effort, using a combination of minefields and artillery, to drive back the minesweepers and batter the fleet. Churchill was forced back to the drawing board, eventually convincing the Army to support the Naval force with an amphibious landing on the Gallipoli peninsula. The previously all-Navy operation thus
An Australian Sniper peers over a trench in 1915.
became a joint Army-Navy invasion. Until the following year’s Allied withdrawal from the peninsula, the Army was to take the brunt of the punishment, with the Navy providing mainly logistical support and transport with the occasional desultory gunfire support to ground operations.
What redeems the story of this quagmire is the piss, vinegar, and rude good humor of the ANZAC soldier as he departs home for the first time, trains for combat in Egypt under the nose of the Sphynx, disembarks on the coast of the Peninsula during the cold predawn hours, and scrambles up the hill again and again as Allied fortunes slowly dwindle and the bodies of his friends pile up around him. Though the story has many individual heroes on both sides (Fitzsimons has a deep respect for the tenacious Turks, enduring stoically in conditions at least as poor as those of the Allies), it is the archetype of the ANZAC soldier that shines through most brightly.
The first third of book covers the transportation and training of the ANZACs and culminates in the shock of their initial (opposed) landings. It reads like a nineteenth century boy’s adventure novel. Everything is bustle and forward motion; the world outside Australia is crammed with dangerous and seductive wonders. The reader is invited to stand among the troops and stare in awe as their transport ships glide quietly up the Suez Canal at night. Later, as the ANZACs train and assemble for the invasion in Alexandria, the story briefly becomes a cautionary tale about the dangers of allowing relatively well paid young soldiers unfettered access to Egypt’s renowned brothels. Letting the reader get to know and love the jovial ANZACs before hurling them on the beaches of Gallipoli is a painful and effective way of keeping one glued in through the rest of the often grueling narrative.
One of the reasons that Fitzsimons succeeds in capturing the huge scale of the landings and subsequent battles while never losing sight of the plight of the common soldier is that Gallipoli itself is just the right size. Most important locations are a single hill, valley, or inlet. The enemy is always very close, the sounds of shrapnel and thud of artillery create a hellish sonic micro-climate, and the freshly dug cemeteries are never far off. The scenes feel both intimate and comprehensive, in a way that histories of Somme or Verdun can never be.
This text is recommended for readers who want to understand why such a massive undertaking seemed so poorly thought through and how victory was almost snatched from the jaws of defeat by the unyielding heroism of the average ANZAC. Read it to renew your appreciation for the military genius and iron willpower of the Ottoman commander, Mustafa Kemal – a figure whose obvious talent and ambition mark him out for even greater deeds after the War. Read it because it’s a crackling good yarn and a minor masterpiece of the genre.
Lieutenant Junior Grade Halton is assigned to the Joint Improvised Threat Defeat Agency. He served as an enlisted intelligence specialist before commissioning as an Intelligence Officer through the STA-21 program. He has written about cyber security and the effects of big data on intelligence analysis for Proceedings magazine. The views above are the authors and do not represent those of the US Navy or the US Department of Defense.
Andrew Cockburn. Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins. Henry Holt Publishers. 307pp. $28.00.
It’s not often that a book review coincides with current events. Books, particularly nonfiction, are usually written and published months, if not years after an event has occurred. That’s because good nonfiction is written in retrospect: writers have spent some time absorbing their subject, researching and analyzing the facts; authors are hesitant to be rash in judgment or thought.
However, there are exceptions. Some pieces of nonfiction, particularly journalists’ works, are appropriate now — not later. Andrew Cockburn’s new book, Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins, is one of them. Cockburn’s book is timely. In just the past few weeks there has been a flood of reporting from media outlets stating that a drone strike killed an American and an Italian hostage when targeting a group of Al-Qaeda members operating near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Suddenly, questions about drone strikes, the debate about targeted killing, and the transparency of the drone program are on the front page of print and online news media worldwide.
Yes, timely indeed.
Although Cockburn’s book cover is plastered with silhouettes of unmanned aerial vehicles — with what appears to be the X-47B, Predator, Global Hawk, and Fire Scout, among others — he is making a larger argument. Cockburn it seems, is arguing that all technology is suspect. It’s not simply unmanned aerial vehicles, but it’s the idea that human beings are continuously so bold as to come up with technological solutions that will win our wars. History, however, tells us a much different story.
Cockburn, then, starts his book with an interesting tale.
In 1966 the Vietnam War was not going well. Secretary McNamara, a man who was fond of scientific solutions to difficult problems, turned his attention to “The Jasons.” The Jasons, Cockburn says, were a small group of scientists and scholars, many of whom would go on to become Nobel Prize winners. These were also some of the same men — Carl Kaysen, Richard Garwin, George Kistiakowski — that were part of the Manhattan Project some twenty years earlier.
The Jasons tried to do what Rolling Thunder could not — they tried to figure out a way to defeat North Vietnam’s ability to use the Ho Chi Minh trail — to cut off their supply routes. They ended up deploying small sensors along the trail that could, presumably, pick up the noise, vibration, and in some cases, the ammonia of someone urinating, all in an attempt to locate men and machines moving goods to the South. Then, if they could hear them and find them, U.S. commanders could task air strikes against the communists on the trail. It didn’t take long, Cockburn says, for the North Vietnamese to find a work-around. How long? It took one week. Cockburn notes that all the North Vietnamese had to do was to use cows and trucks, often running over an area of the trail multiple times to create a diversion while the real logistical effort was moved elsewhere. So simple and so effective — and relatively inexpensive. However, Cockburn says the cost of the electronic barrier for the U.S. was around six billion dollars.
This formula is repeated throughout the rest of the book. That is 1) There is a military problem 2) Someone always tries to find a technological solution, and then 3) Spends a lot of money only to find out the U.S. has made the problem worse.
Now fast forward almost sixty-years to the age of drones, and Cockburn introduces us to Rex Rivolo, an analyst at the Institute of Defense Analysis. It’s 2007 and improvised explosive devices are a major problem; they are killing and maiming hundreds of U.S. troops in Iraq. Asked to analyze the networks behind the IEDs, Rivolo, Cockburn says, discovers that targeted killings of these networks lead to more attacks, not fewer. This is because someone more aggressive fills the place of the leader who was recently killed. Rivolo would return to D.C., even getting the ear of the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, telling him that attacking high- value targets was not the right strategy — the IED networks and individuals setting them off were more autonomous then was initially thought. Going after the senior guy, Rivolo noted, was not the answer. But, as Cockburn says, nothing changed. Now people simply refer to the continous cycle of targeting and killing high-value targets as “mowing the grass.”
The idea of killing senior leaders or HVTs is not new, it’s been around for a long time (think Caesar). Cockburn, then, brings up one of the more interesting “what if’s” that military officers — or any student of military history — likes to debate. That is, what if someone had killed Hitler before the end of the war? Would the war have ended? Or would he have become a martyr and someone worse or someone better have taken his place? Cockburn tells us about British Lieutenant Colonel Robert Thornley, who argued during WWII that, no, the Fuhrer should not be killed. Thornley noted, that if Hitler was killed, his death would likely make him a martyr for national socialism. And that Hitler was often a man that “override completely the soundest military appreciation and thereby helped the Allied cause tremendously.” Therefore, the thinking went, we should let Hitler live and dig his own grave.
However, the problem with this debate is that context matters. Was it Germany in 1933? 1938? Or 1944? It matters because while Cockburn does not differentiate between the killing of a leader of a state and the leader of a terrorist network, they are indeed different systems that have different levers of power and legitimacy.
He is on firmer ground when he rightly notes how difficult it is for anyone to predict systemic effects when targeting a network. He reiterates these difficulties throughout the book. The most historical compelling case is WWII and the strategic bombing campaign. All one has to do is pick up the WWII U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey and read the fine work done by John K. Galbraith, Paul Nitze, and others. Disrupting or destroying networks from the air — in this case, Germany’s economy — was incredibly difficult. In many cases, assumptions of German capabilities or weaknesses were far from correct. And as Cockburn notes, the term “effects based operations,” namely, operations that are military and nonmilitary that can disrupt complex systems while minimizing risk, was a term that was outlawed in 2008 by General Mattis while the head of Joint Forces Command.
Ultimately, the debate over drones — who should control them, what should they be used for, should the U.S. target particular individuals — will continue. It’s an important topic. There are, however, a few shortcomings in this book. One of the biggest questions that goes unanswered is this: If the U.S. should not strike identified enemies or high-value targets…then what? Do nothing? Allow a Hitler to simply remain in power? Is this not a form of moral ignorance?
The questions military planners and policy makers should ask is this: Do we understand the character of this war? And are these the right tools we should use to win this war? We should not blame a drone — or any other type of tech for that matter — for bad strategies, poor operational planning, and gooned up tactics.
Drones are the future. But we should read Cockburn’s book as a cautionary tale. We should disabuse ourselves of the illusion that future technologies will be our savior. And finally, we should not let those illusions crowd out the very difficult task of understanding our adversaries and the enduring nature of war.
Andrew Cockburn’s book is worth reading. But have your pencil ready — you’ll want to argue with him in the margins.
Lieutenant Commander Christopher Nelson, USN, is a naval intelligence officer and recent graduate of the U.S. Naval War College and the Navy’s operational planning school, the Maritime Advanced Warfighting School in Newport, RI. LCDR Nelson is also CIMSEC’s book review editor and is looking for readers interested in reviewing books for CIMSEC. You can contact him at books@cimsec.org. The views above are the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the US Navy or the US Department of Defense.
Obsolescence of Capital Ship Theory by R.B. Watts. Watts, a retired Captain in the United States Coast Guard, says that this text is a culmination of 30 years of research and observation. He does not rule out the possibility of conventional war between states; instead, he emphasizes the greater likelihood of irregular conflict and the Navy’s need to prepare for these types of conflicts. The book itself separates into three distinct sections: a historical analysis of predominant theories and their alternatives; an examination of the evolution since the Cold War; and an assessment of the new requirements of irregular warfare.
carrier, all the way to the nuclear super carrier, he examines the use and effectiveness of each in their prevailing conflict. During the Cold War, the Western policy of containment was a boon for navalists wedded to Mahanian theory. Containment implies encirclement and encirclement of the Soviet Union by sea was a major part of the NATO response. The capital ship theory though did not fit into the new paradigm. Vietnam and the Reagan reforms of the 1980’s were a strategic negative and positive for the Navy respectively.
the LCS, and the need for a small surface combatant designed for operations in the littoral is quite compelling. The Navy is sorely missing a patrol craft that can operate on presence missions in the South China Sea, Persian Gulf, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean. One area that is missing is the lack of the contributions of PT boats in the Second World War. Captain Watts’ book is a worthwhile read for anyone in the sea service and those interested in alternatives to current trends within the US Navy.
