Many well-placed people have argued that the U.S. Navy needs a new strategy to connect what the service is supposed to do for the nation with the resources required to do it.1 Such a logic trail seems to have existed between the 1986 Maritime Strategy and the “600-ship Navy,” and a new one presumably would propel Congress to increase the Navy’s size and budget to respond to the emerging threat from China.
The Navy’s recent struggles with shipbuilding plans suggest the service is having a problem getting a grip on strategy despite possessing a war college noted for its outstanding strategy curriculum.2 There may be organizational reasons for the Navy’s present difficulties with strategy, but its past successes with the 1986 Maritime Strategy and the 2007 Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower indicate it can do strategy when conditions are right.
Current conditions are different from those surrounding the previous efforts, but that does not mean developing a new strategy is impossible. Such an effort will consist of two elements: an understanding of what constitutes a new strategy, and an organizing concept like those that underpinned earlier efforts. That concept should be command of the sea.
The Transoceanic Strategy
Let’s begin with recognizing that the United States already has a maritime strategy, one that has been in place since the late 1940s. Simply stated, the United States surrounds the Eurasian continent with sea power to protect the liberal free-trading system the Allies constructed after World War II. Samuel Huntington formalized this strategy in his May 1954 Proceedings article, “National Policy and the Transoceanic Navy.”3 Huntington suggested that the Navy’s strategic concept was focused on projecting power ashore, in “that decisive strip of littoral encircling the Eurasian continent.”4 The establishment of Unified Command Plans (UCPs) in the late 1940s carved the world into joint theaters whose commanders have responsibility for war planning and theater security. The Navy’s Title X responsibility is to provide forces to these commanders. This global effort constitutes the actual U.S. maritime strategy regardless of what various documents issued by the Navy are called.
Since the end of World War II, the Navy has issued more than 30 such strategy documents.5 They vary widely in form and content but fall into two basic types: organizational strategies and subordinate strategies. The vast majority are of the first type, which is focused on the Navy’s statutory responsibilities. These documents describe the utility of naval forces and offer a framework for fleet development. Many times, they incorporate a pleading function, an argument for retaining or increasing fleet size. Examples of this type of document include the 1990s “. . . From the Sea” series of white papers, the 2002 Sea Power 21, and A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower. The current triservice maritime strategy, Advantage at Sea, also is of this type.
The second species of strategy document strays into the arena of the use of naval forces. The 1986 Maritime Strategy offered a concept for how the Navy’s forces should be globally distributed and used to horizontally escalate a war with the Soviet Union. A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower crossed unified combatant command boundaries to court international maritime security cooperation.
The Navy felt compelled to generate these two strategies because in each case it faced strategic problems the joint command structure was either incapable of or unwilling to solve, problems that resulted from the unitary nature of the World Ocean. Both strategies were successful. The Maritime Strategy not only facilitated the development of the 600-ship Navy, but also arguably contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union.6 The Cooperative Strategy fostered widespread international maritime security cooperation.7 At release, both documents were regarded as the top-level U.S. maritime strategy, but both remained within and subordinate to the existing overall U.S. maritime strategy of forward defense of the international order.
A Star to Strategize By
The success of the Maritime and Cooperative Strategies was predicated on several contemporary factors. A key focus for each was the existence of a specific, addressable strategic problem related to the World Ocean. For the 1986 document, it was the potential maldistribution of U.S. Navy forces in the event of a war with the Soviet Union and the misapplication of naval forces to convoy defense. In 2006, it was foreign mistrust of U.S. motives resulting from the Iraq invasion that impeded international maritime security cooperation, considered key to protecting the U.S. homeland against terrorist smuggling.
Today, the Navy has not been able to articulate such a strategic problem. It could, however, if the concept of command of the sea is resurrected. The Unified Command Plan and its embedded maritime strategy are predicated on U.S. command of the sea, a strategic condition that has existed unchallenged since the Imperial Japanese Navy was defeated in 1945.
U.S. “command of the sea” has been so complete and so unchallenged that it has faded into the background, replaced in 1974 by “sea control.”8Sea control is essentially an operational-level function of protecting something—a convoy or a beachhead, for example—or denying the use of an area of the sea to the enemy. Command of the sea is a strategic condition, not of the water but of the balance of perceived strength among contending navies. As such, it is inherently global and outside the purview of the combatant commanders and likely not an issue with which the Office of the Secretary of Defense is capable of dealing. Thus, it is left to the Navy to develop a new global strategy—or at least strategic concept—to ensure the United States retains command of the sea.
The necessity of the command of the sea concept is resurfacing because of the rise of China, its global political ambitions, and its attendant construction of a powerful navy. Attention currently focuses on the Chinese threat to Taiwan, which is a theater strategic problem for the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. However, China’s strategic initiatives are global, and it is developing a global naval infrastructure to back up those initiatives in the future.9 Moreover, Russia, which possesses a small but capable—in some elements—navy, is making common cause with China. In the aggregate, this presents the United States with a new global naval challenge.10
During the Cold War, the Soviet Navy’s focus was on homeland defense, and it never presented a realistic challenge to U.S. command of the sea; today, indications are that, while China is not yet ready to attempt wresting command from the United States, the potential for the United States to lose command of the sea is growing. Herein lies the strategic problem the U.S. Navy must solve, one that may provide purchase for the development of a compelling strategy.
The noted British historian and naval theorist Sir Julian Corbett defined command of the sea as simply the control of maritime communications, be they for commercial or military purposes.11 The American naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan said it is that overbearing power that drives the enemy’s flag from the seas except as a fugitive.12 Mahan is closer to the crux of the matter; command of the sea is, as previously defined, the perceived balance of power among contending or potentially contending navies. It influences what nations and admirals believe is possible to do at sea.
A George Modelski and William Thompson study revealed long-term geopolitical cycles over the past five centuries in which command of the sea figured prominently.13 Using counts of major combatant warships as a surrogate for overall geopolitical strength, they found that a global war produced a winner who had seized command of the sea.14 That nation then used its navy to achieve the global reach needed to enforce an international order congenial to its interests. However, over the ensuing decades, new challengers arose and eventually another global war broke out. As a matter of correlation rather than causation, Modelski and Thompson found that maintaining command of the sea meant that the nation holding it possessed more than 50 percent of the total warships available to potential challengers for global leadership. When that proportion slipped below 50 percent, global war eventually broke out.15
This implies that retaining command of the sea through robust naval building is at least an ingredient in the maintenance of a favorable world order and peace. Right now, the U.S. Navy has fewer warships than China, a ratio made worse if the Russian Navy is factored in, but the U.S. Navy maintains an edge in tonnage that keeps it above a 50 percent ratio with China and Russia (the navies of North Korea and Iran are negligible). But that margin is shrinking as China pursues its robust naval building program.16 The implication is that the United States must accelerate its own naval construction to keep China from thinking it can successfully contest command of the sea, which might lead to increased chances for a world war.
Controlling to Command
Exercising command of the sea is intimately connected with maintaining it. As someone said, virtual presence is actual absence, so the U.S. Navy must continue to deploy forward in numbers to support the global order. Rightly understood, the defense of Taiwan is connected to the regional exercise of command, whether or not the United States decides to intervene against China.
The Mahanian definition of command and the results of the Modelski and Thompson study lead to a strategic principle that a nation should not risk its overall command of the sea during episodes of exercising it. This suggests that the U.S. Navy should not go “all in” on the defense of Taiwan; depending on Chinese losses, the loss of too many U.S. hulls and too much tonnage could take the United States below the 50 percent threshold for maintaining command. That said, the consequences of a Chinese takeover of Taiwan make U.S. Navy involvement in its defense strategically compelling. The implication is that the U.S. Navy must be able to deploy a force that is sufficiently lethal but without risking overall global command of the sea.
Let’s make the reasonable assumptions that U.S. security strategy will continue to be based on maintaining a favorable world order through forward defense of the rules-based liberal trading system and that this strategy will be carried out through the UCP framework. The Navy’s strategic problem is that it is too small—or perhaps not properly composed—to perform its role in that strategy in the face of the challenge from China and Russia. Whatever the value of Advantage at Sea, it lacks a global strategic concept that compellingly leads to a logical conclusion about the needed size, composition, and even use of the fleet. Command of the sea could fill that gap and become the focus of a new strategic document.
But the first thing the Navy must do is rediscover the concept. The only mention of command of the sea in current Navy doctrine is in NDP-1: Naval Warfare, the newest version of which includes the term once, in its foreword, defining it as “the strategic condition of free and open access and usage of the seas necessary for our nation to flourish.” This confuses cause and effect. Free and open access to the sea is a U.S. policy that results from its command of the sea. A new and important book by Brent Sadler on 21st-century U.S. naval power offers a comprehensive and compelling view of the needed U.S. naval posture and strategy, but it is based on a tacit assumption of U.S. command of the sea.17
There are issues to work out regarding command of the sea. The two components—maintenance and exercise—are fundamental, but other aspects must also be thought through. Strategic conditions are obviously different now than they were when Mahan and Corbett wrote, and serious thought must be given to what capabilities now underpin command of the sea and its attributes and components. All of this is grist for a Navy research mill aimed at producing a new strategy or strategic concept of the subordinate kind. Research is a key element of strategy development. The famous War Plan Orange that formed the basis for U.S. strategy in the Pacific in World War II went through many revisions based on wargaming and research at the Naval War College. A similar process attended development of the 1986 Maritime Strategy, and A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower was the result of a nine-month Naval War College project followed by seven months of staff work.
Thomas Jefferson saw U.S. maritime security as a function of defending individual ports. Alexander Hamilton thought that an American fleet in the Caribbean would influence events in Europe, thereby enhancing U.S. security. Alfred Thayer Mahan advocated for a concentrated battlefleet to put teeth into the Monroe Doctrine. Franklin Roosevelt fought for a two-ocean navy that would defeat the Axis. And Samuel Huntington articulated the need for a U.S. Navy that would patrol the littorals of Eurasia to contain the Soviet threat. The U.S. security perimeter thus expanded to encompass the entire World Ocean.
In wargames and research in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Navy officers realized that the only way to protect the U.S. coasts was to secure all the seas. Until China began its naval building program, the United States could make the strategic assumption that its naval superiority would ensure a free and open World Ocean. It can no longer make that assumption, and, as a consequence, the Navy must again return to the concept of command of the sea to get a grip on how to craft a strategy that will not only deter China from the idea that it can successfully challenge such command, but also will educate Congress and the American public on the nature of the danger to their security that involves the oceans. The new strategy will have to transcend both unified command boundaries and Navy statutory constraints in the way the 1986 and 2007 documents did.
1. ADM James Foggo, USN (Ret.), and Steven Wills, “The U.S. Navy Needs a Comprehensive Strategy to Support Future Fleet Design,” The Hill, 4 April 2023; and CDR Paul S. Giarra and CAPT Gerald Roncolato, USN (Ret.), “The American Sea Power Project,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 147, no. 1 (January 2021).
2. Justin Katz, “Tempting Congressional Ire, Navy Again Plans to Again Offer Three Shipbuilding Paths,” Breaking Defense, 16 March 2023.
3. Samuel P. Huntington, “National Policy and the Transoceanic Navy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 80, no. 5 (May 1954).
4. Huntington, “National Policy and the Transoceanic Navy.”
5. Peter Swartz, U.S. Navy Capstone Strategies and Concepts (CNA Report MISC D0026421.A1/Final) (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analyses, December 2011).
6. Dmitry Filipoff, “Winning the Cold War at Sea with Reagan-Era Navy Secretary John Lehman,” Center for International Maritime Security, 5 June 2018.
7. Several foreign heads of navy told the author that the 2007 Cooperative Strategy gave them the necessary political top cover with their own governments to cooperate more closely with the U.S. Navy.
8. Stansfield Turner, “Missions of the U.S. Navy,” Naval War College Review 27, no. 2 (Spring 1974).
9. Brent Sadler, U.S. Naval Power in the 21st Century (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2023), 49–66.
10. Sadler, U.S. Naval Power in the 21st Century, 68–72.
11. Julian Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1911), 90.
12. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1987), 138.
13. George Modelski and William R. Thompson, Seapower in Global Politics 1494–1993 (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1988).
14. Modelski and Thompson, Seapower in Global Politics 1494–1993, 16–17.
15. Modelski and Thompson, 99.
16. Taifun Ozberk, “How China’s Navy Could Come to Rule the Waves,” Defence Procurement International, 28 September 2021.
17. Sadler, U.S. Naval Power in the 21st Century, 148–69. A map on p. 150 displays current and projected Navy deployment areas around the rim of Eurasia. They assume command of the sea, although the author never uses the term.