The U.S. Navy battle fleet, a.k.a. the Great White Fleet for the alabaster paint slathered on the ships’ hulls, made a triumphant return to Hampton Roads 110 years ago this month, in time for Washington’s birthday. The fleet’s world cruise was a failure—at least insofar as it sought to deter Japan from seaborne conquests.
Deterrence was President Theodore Roosevelt’s goal vis-à-vis imperial Japan. TR wanted to disabuse Tokyo of any notion that the Imperial Japanese Navy could do to the U.S. Navy what it had done to the Russian Navy during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905: crush a Western navy that was fragmented among many seas and limped into Far Eastern waters after a long, debilitating voyage.
Japan’s navy demolished the Russian Pacific Squadron in the Yellow Sea in August 1904, then turned around and smashed the Russian Baltic Fleet—which had steamed 18,000 miles to reach the combat zone—in the Tsushima Strait the following May. A Japanese fleet fresh from refit and cruising familiar waters fell on the weary Russian fleet. The outcome verged on a foregone conclusion.
Experience imprinted this way of naval strategy indelibly on Japanese minds. The Great White Fleet would have had to mount a truly impressive show of force to shock Japanese mariners out of warmaking methods that had been tested and reaffirmed in battle, first against China’s navy during the 1890s and then against Russia’s.
Such a display was beyond TR’s or the navy’s grasp by 1907–1909, when the fleet lumbered across the globe. In 1906 the revolutionary Royal Navy battleship HMS Dreadnought took to the seas, demoting older capital ships—including the vessels comprising the Great White Fleet—to second-class status. The all-big-gun, steam-turbine-driven Dreadnought reset the U.S.-Japanese naval competition in the Pacific. It detracted from the U.S. Navy’s deterrent power simply because Japanese strategists knew the Great White Fleet would no longer qualify as a frontline fighting force once dreadnoughts became the coin of the realm in naval warfare.
The lesson? The state of military and naval technology can reinforce diplomacy or impair it. It’s worth mulling whether today’s fleet of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers—descendants of Roosevelt’s battleships as the core of U.S. Navy combat power—can still deter as great-power competitors outfit great navies of their own and strew airfields and anti-ship missiles along their shores. If adversaries no longer believe heavy U.S. Navy forces would prevail in battle, they may not be deterred from actions Washington forbids—and bad things could happen in the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, or elsewhere around the Asian periphery.
If carrier groups no longer deter, then what will? There’s an echo from 1909 worth pondering.
