Tag Archives: History

Strategic Outlook

House of Cards: Finding a Winning Political Strategy for the Navy

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I was already at work when I heard about the article in Politico Magazine. After descending from Capitol South Metro Station on another windy and frosty day in Washington, D.C., I overheard some staffers talking near the security checkpoint in the Rayburn House Office Building. Unsurprisingly, they were on their phones, retweeting and sharing a link about the Navy with their friends. “The Navy ship count could be a political gamechanger,” a boyish-looking aid in a dark suit remarked. Another staffer, who looked like he was fourteen, claimed it would be a tragedy to decommission the aging Oliver-Hazard Class Frigate. I removed my iPhone from my pocket, took off my winter gloves, and then perused my Facebook news feed to see if anyone posted anything. CDR Salamander – unsurprisingly – had fired the first salvo: “We’ve been saying this for years.”

 The article in question was “The Navy’s Hidden Crisis,” written by Robert C. O’Brien, a former advisor to Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney. In his muddling attempt to explain the Navy’s Crisis – once again using ship count as the only metric to assess fleet strength – he politically mischaracterizes the need for an agile and robust fleet. This type of rhetoric is predictable from Mr. O’Brien, who has always claimed the “waters are getting more dangerous” in explaining the need to build more ships. One could surmise this was a response to President Obama mocking Romney two years ago in the third and final presidential debate. “You mention the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916,” President Obama rebuked that evening, “well governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets.” The President went on, “We have these things called aircraft carriers and planes land on them . . . we have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.”

With only a few weeks left before the election, this decisive broadside to Romney’s foreign policy battleship, combined with the former governor’s “47 percent comments,” sank him in the national election.

It is unlikely the Navy’s ship count will take center stage in 2016 as a campaign talking point. After all, the Navy and foreign policy matters rarely decide elections. The more salient economic issues are, the more likely they will affect which way voters’ decide the next Electoral College. As New Yorker staff writer Amy Davidson has pointed out, “Boat confusion is an old and telling political problem.” The number of ships does not necessarily register as a national imperative, even though open sea lines of communication provide the American culture of consumption. When politicians like Representative Randy Forbes or Senator John McCain talk about the number of ships and its relationship to national security, the public mind simply floats away.

By focusing on ship count, O’Brien’s argument is antiquated and politically irrelevant.

The Capitol Dome is under reconstruction – perhaps the Navy’s political message should also be rebuilt.

Although the public either misinterprets or ignores the need for a strong Navy, in recent years, the Pentagon has provided a strong and clear political narrative to Congress. Through multiple hearings to the House and Senate Armed Service Committee (HASC / SASC) subcommittees in Readiness and Seapower, combined with an aggressive strategy informing our nation’s policymakers, Navy leaders have successfully conveyed the need for a multifaceted force. On the Hill, the House and Senate Offices of Legislative Affairs meet regularly with the Armed Service Committees and ensure their full participation in ongoing strategies and fiscal matters. These engagements, which began centuries ago, have always been the winning political strategy for the Navy.

Lieutenant Junior Grade Rosende makes a convincing argument in the January issue of Proceedings about the Navy’s engagement with the people, but it is not accurate to suggest that the advocates of naval power convinced an “inward-looking citizenry” that a navy was a vital to American interests. History reveals the opposite is true. Leaders in the Gilded Age either made executive decisions or lobbied Congress in backroom deals to pursue the requisite platforms. There was no public discourse on the future of the force and to presume it took place is flatly absurd.

The Navy should not concern itself too much with generating an informed public. Rather, we should continue to educate politicians on both sides of the aisle. While I would certainly like the public to understand where the Navy fits within the national debate on the size and breadth of DoD writ large, it is not a political reality to suggest the Navy will take center stage in 2016. Unfortunately, the Navy does not attract voters. A position we are likely to hear in primaries will be the support of a large and robust naval force, and the continued fiscal support for research and development to keep ahead of our potential adversaries. There will be little discussion on the “right number of ships” because it will be met with the same type of strategy President Obama used in 2012.

Rethinking political messaging in order to avoid the same quagmire that sealed the Navy’s fate the last four years is recommended. Over time, especially after the collapse of the USSR and the reduction of capital ships, the sea services drifted away from counting and tried a new strategy: catchwords. In recent years, the term “readiness” has become the major criterion of training and the political lexicon in the Navy.

  • Individual Ready Reserve
  • Physical Readiness
  • Deployment Readiness
  • Navy Surge Readiness
  • Family Readiness
  • Fleet Readiness
  • CNO’s Warfighting Tennant No. 3: “Be Ready”
  • Sequestration Hurts Readiness

Evidently, Readiness is a bad way for the Navy to assess and encompass the breadth of our problems. Exhibit A: U.S. Navy Ship Count is down to 279 – and falling.

The word “Readiness” may make waves in Congress and especially in HASC and in SASC, but due to the Navy’s inherent complexity in meeting maritime challenges, we should redefine and expand our political employment. As Lincoln Paine aptly points out in The Sea and Civilization, “Maritime Activity includes not only the high seas and coastal voyaging, but also inland navigation.” Thereby the world was shaped in obvious ways by the economic, demographic, and technological attributes by the development of maritime transportation. Maintaining this flow of ideas, goods, people, and perspectives is essential for the global way of life. The oceans inherently knit the world together.

USS MILIUS (DDG-69) underway in the Persian Gulf.
USS MILIUS (DDG-69) underway in the Persian Gulf.

So does the nation need to be educated on the need for a powerful fleet? American history reveals that naval power has been sustainable for centuries without an informed public, but if the Navy decides to move that way, ship count should not be the only metric in which judge the value of the sea service. Many defense critics and the public at large view the Navy’s budget proposal with skepticism. While most naval strategists believe that we should be building ships as quickly as possible for the Pivot to Asia, branding it correctly to Congress means everything, not just proclaiming, “Build! Build! Build!” over and over.

 The Navy is inherently different from the other services – and perhaps infinitely more complicated – so it should stop compartmentalizing itself politically in the same fashion as the Army or the Air Force.   Tell the complete story – not the tale of “Readiness.”

 

LT Alex Smith is a Surface Warfare Officer who serves as a Navy Liaison Officer at the U.S. House of Representatives. He recently completed his Masters in American History at the George Washington University while serving as an NROTC Instructor.

Beans Boots Bullets, History

NATO Defense Spending, Past and Present: Part 1

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Discussions and data presentations surrounding the recent NATO summit on member state spending levels on defense and the now-metronomic domestic squabbles over the United States’ own military budget have centered on the percentage of gross domestic product (% of GDP) benchmark. GDP is a hoary and problematic macroeconomic metric in its own right. Further, % of GDP offers no natural rationale for defense or any other budgetary programming, per se. Indeed, because of its fuzziness, GDP is thus dually ambiguous in its role as a primary measure of economic viability and as a stake in the ground for national planning. Is NATO’s goal to get military spending up to 2% of GDP in the coming decade plausible?  This question inspired a look at the alliance’s GDP and defense budget history.

The following essay is the first in a three-part series which together provide a macroeconomic overview of the 55 year old defense alliance. This first essay presents the history of NATO member nation defense spending since the alliance was founded in 1949. Eleven of the twelve founding members (Iceland is excluded from the analysis in this series for a lack of defense expenditure data) and four Cold War additions (Germany, Greece, Spain, and Turkey) are plotted individually because their longevity provides substantial history for member and alliance defense spending context. The twelve post-Cold War enlargement members are grouped into a single category in this first essay but are considered individually in the second and third papers.

The second paper will look a little closer at the defense spending history and trends of individual member nations and selected sub-groups. The third will examine the concept of command spending models such as setting a goal for each member to spend “2% of GDP” via a look at several other hypothetical spending models.

The source for NATO member nation defense spending for 1949-2013 is the SIPRI Military Expenditure Database. The SIPRI dataset also has a table containing most—but not all—of the expenditure data computed as a percentage of GDP. In order to fill in some of the missing information, for example for Turkey for the 1953-1959 period, an analytical dataset for member nation population and GDP was created from the Penn World, International Monetary Fund World Economic Outlook (IMF WEO), and Maddison Project datasets, using Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index and World Bank Purchasing Power Parity conversion factor for currency conversion to a constant dollar baseline reference. All currency data in this series have been converted into 2014 U.S. dollars (US$2014).

As mentioned at the outset, “GDP” is ambiguous because it can be computed many ways according to the assumptions underlying a given dataset. The Penn World, IMF WEO, and Maddison data sets demonstrate strong correspondence in most cases where their datasets overlap but in some cases they diverge significantly. The Penn World purchasing power parity (PPP) PWT8.0 dataset was supplemented and adjusted with the other datasets and currency conversion sources to provide data for as many years of each member nation’s participation in the alliance as possible. Information on the adjusted dataset assumptions and methodology is available at this link.

The four graphs shown below present NATO member % of GDP spent on defense in direct comparison to, respectively, GDP, per capita GDP, and member share of cumulative NATO defense spending in a scatterplot format. Both horizontal and vertical axis categories are independent and the time-series/chronology is implied in the data rather than explicitly annotated (typically as the independent axis). Thus the entire history of NATO defense spending—who spent how much historically—is available at one glance.

The first graph shows % of GDP verses GDP. Although specific years are not listed, we can infer approximate chronology from the knowledge that constant dollar GDP has generally grown since 1949. Thus, the more recent years are found higher up the vertical logarithmic axis. The basic pattern is a right hook: as a member’s GDP rose, % of GDP spent for defense typically decreased, though, in some cases, there are notable abrupt shifts, as can most noticeably be seen in the last dozen dots for the United Kingdom (dark orange) and the United States (aqua). These shifts to higher % of GDP spending on defense reflect these nations’ budgetary adjustments to the wars of the past decade.

nato_defspnd_part1_img1-1_mbrgdp_v_pergdpMember defense spending as % of GDP v. member GDP (billions)

The second graph plots % of GDP against per capita GDP. This chart in particular illuminates at least one problematic aspect of a %-of-GDP basis for defense spending when per capita national affluence, rather than aggregate national affluence, is emphasized. One may ask why if %-of-GDP is an admittedly arbitrary but plausible defense spending goal, wouldn’t a progressive per capita defense spending rate be more in line with most modern taxation models? Hypothetically, should those individuals who make more, and presumably benefit more from NATO security, perhaps pay more? This and several similar questions about hypothetical defense spending models are briefly examined in the third essay.

nato_defspnd_part1_img1-2_mbrpercapgdp_v_pergdpMember defense spending as % of GDP v. member per capita GDP (thousands)

The second graph shows that defense spending has congregated in the low single digits of % of GDP as per capita GDP has risen. However, several long-serving members have remarkably vertical %-of-GDP defense spending trends: Italy (Kelly green), Luxembourg (lavender), Spain (pink), and Turkey (dark grey) have remained within a relatively tight bracket of from 1-4% of GDP for defense spending throughout their history in the alliance.

The third graph compares % of GDP to the share or percentage each member nation has contributed to annual cumulative defense spending. The U.S. (aqua) and Luxembourg (lavender) are the obvious outliers in terms of magnitude. Generally, the NATO members show fairly consistent behavior, contributing approximately the same relative proportion over time. Only the contributions of Greece (blue-grey), and Italy (Kelly green), Luxembourg (lavender), and Turkey (dark grey) have varied by more than 300% over the duration of their participation in the alliance.

nato_defspnd_part1_img1-3_mbrshareofnato_v_pergdpMember defense spending as % of GDP v. member per share or percentage contribution to cumulative annual NATO defense spending

The format of the fourth graph sets up the more detailed focus on individual member nation spending patterns which will follow in the next two essays. The fourth graph repeats the same data from the third graph but in a simplified format. In place of the dot scatterplot, the centroid or average of each member nations’ data is represented by a single large dot. The data for 2013 is shown as a smaller dot and the 2013 dot is anchored to the average dot to maintain the relationship. The line connecting the two could be interpreted as a curve but keep in mind the log scale of the vertical axis. The dot-connecting lines are primarily a graphical device.

We see in the fourth graph that, in all cases, 2013 defense spending as a % of GDP is significantly lower than the historical average. This is not to advocate for a return to the arbitrary metric of historical average, merely to account for the present in the context of the alliance’s past.

In 2013, the U.S. spent about 4% of its per capita GDP on defense, everyone else paid less than 3%, and some were in the neighborhood of from 1-2%. One may also note by the relative vertical position of the dot pairs that with the exceptions of Luxembourg (lavender), Norway (dark blue), Portugal (light green), Turkey (dark grey), the U.S. (aqua), and the collective post-Cold War group (plum), the other members’ 2013 contributions were also smaller proportions of the NATO whole than their historical averages (smaller dot lower than large dot).

nato_defspnd_part1_img1-4_mbrshareofnato_v_pergdp_simpMember defense spending as % of GDP v. member per share or percentage contribution to cumulative annual NATO defense spending. This is the same information as the third graph simplified.

In sum, any particular member nations’ defense spending in a particular year in terms of historical averages is not necessarily meaningful in the context of the value of the NATO alliance to either the particular member or to the whole. But the history can be useful for framing questions on apportionment, return on investment (in a very broad sense, of course), and the reasonableness (or not) of command spending “requirements” based on gross macroeconomic parameters.

In the next essay, we’ll move from the 30,000′ view and take a more detailed look at the individual members military spending history.

 

Dave Foster is a civilian analyst for the U.S. Navy. He is a former Marine Corps officer and holds degrees in engineering, history, and management. The views expressed here do not represent those of the Department of Defense or the Department of the Navy.

History, Seamanship and Leadership

Lessons From History: Themistocles Builds a Navy

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This article is part of CIMSEC’s “Forgotten Naval Strategists Week.”

“I never learned how to tune a harp or play upon a lute but I know how to raise a small and obscure city to glory and greatness where to all kindred of the Earth will pilgrim.”

Thus spoke the great warrior politician Themistocles in the 5th Century B.C. Themistocles is famous for a lot of things: his heroic actions at the Battle of Salamis, his secret plot to rebuild Athens’ walls after the Second Persian War, and his six-pack abs in “300: Rise of an Empire” (author’s note: thoroughly underwhelmed by that movie). But his biggest impact on history was his fateful advocacy early in his career for Athens to build a first-rate navy. Themistocles should be recognized as one of the earliest naval theorists because he successfully promulgated a sea-view of the world and brought Athens onto the sea.

Themistocles

Portrait of a naval theorist.

Athens has gone down in history as a naval powerhouse but that was not always the case. The city of Athens is actually a few miles away from the sea, could only offer up fifty ships during the First Persian War, and did not even have a defensible port until Themistocles’ rise to prominence. Athens was a continental city-state and a poor one at that; it had little to offer in terms of natural resources. The striking of silver in the mines of Laurium in 483 B.C. changed this. Athens was faced with a choice of how to divide up the windfall. The prevailing idea was to take the money and divide it equally among the population. Themistocles, apparently alone, proposed to use the funds to finance construction of a 200 ship fleet and managed to win over the population. The rationale behind his advocacy is controversial to this day: he claimed that the navy’s purpose was to challenge Athens’ island rival, Aegina, but others have attributed to him the base motivations of wanting to secure power or the foresight to see the invasion of Xerxes coming three years later.

Regardless of Themistocles’ true motivations, though the high-minded ones seem more plausible, his success is remarkable because it achieved a full reorientation of Athens’ politico-military focus from land to sea. This was all the more surprising because ancient Greek culture gave primacy to the strength and heroism of land combat. Even Plato complained that Themistocles’ actions transformed the army “from steady soldiers… into mariners and seamen tossed about the sea… [Themistocles] took away from the Athenians the spear and the shield, and bound them to the bench and the oar.”

History proved Themistocles right. The 200 Athenian ships, combined with his deft admiralship, were instrumental in defeating the Persians at the Battle of Salamis and, far more than the Battle of Thermopylae, turned the tide of the war in Greece’s favor. Moreover, once the Persians retreated across the Aegean Sea, Athens used its fleet to liberate the occupied islands and Ionian cities in modern Turkey. The new Athenian dependencies evolved into the Athenian Empire whose domination of trade in the Aegean launched Athens’ golden age. Their art and architecture are still the standard by which we judge all others classics. It is difficult to say whether Themistocles foresaw all of these circumstances playing out when he first advocated for the fleet but his strategic argument for the Athenians to take to the sea reflects an appreciation for what dominating the sea could achieve.

Athenian_empire_atheight_450_shepherd1923

The Athenian Empire at its height. If not for Themistocles, they would have had to swim to build it.

Lessons Learned

1) It is never too late to become a sea power.

 History is full of examples of continental powers who failed to embrace the sea to their detriment: the Persians, Ming China, and the Ottomans are but a few. Themistocles’ success demonstrates that states, with proper planning and political determination, can alter policy and project their presence onto the water.

2) States should maintain a military force that augments their commercial interests.

For those following politics in the United States, the parable of the silver mines of Laurium might lead one to assume that Themistocles’ argument supports military spending at the expense of social programs. That is not entirely the case. Blanket military spending does not mean financial stability; the Habsburgs are a great cautionary tale for military spending becoming a money pit. The true reason why the Athenian navy was such a boon to the state was not just its military value but the commercial value in trade that it fostered after the Persian Wars ended. We conclude that the United States should be careful about making budget cuts to military forces that make the global trade system work. In particular, one needs to tread lightly around investments that are meant to counter maritime piracy; it is no accident that shipping insurance rates soar in places where the United States Navy does not patrol.

Matthew Merighi is a Masters Degree candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Global Analysis, History, North America

100 Years Ago: Veracruz 1914 (Part 3)

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Sailors Returning to their Ships After Combat Ashore in Veracruz (Naval Historical and Heritage Command)
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.