Foreign Policy

Grand Strategy and the U.S.-U.K. ‘Special Relationship’

The United States faces several key national security challenges as the Trump administration’s national security team continues to establish its baseline strategy. These challenges range from Islamic extremism, to an emergent Russia, to Chinese encroachments in East Asia, to a continuing hotbed of trouble in Syria and the Middle East in general, characterized by the Sunni–Shiite theocratic divide. Myriad other threats, including penetration of global and domestic cyber networks, international drug cartels, illicit arms transfers, human trafficking, piracy, and the movement of terrorists, combine to create sleepless nights for the defense, intelligence, and homeland security communities. These communities are adept at the what and how for meeting requirements to counter specific threats. The weak link in the U.S. national security chain is the why. Chains are only as strong as the weakest link.

Why are defense programs pursued at great expense to U.S. and U.K. taxpayers? This is a simple and critical question. What is the grand strategy for the United States and its major long-term ally, the United Kingdom, in the protection of their vital national interests and those of their mutual allies? The U.S.-U.K. “special relationship” was conceived on August 10, 1941 by Winston Churchill (his mother was American) and Franklin Roosevelt, on board HMS Prince of Wales in Placentia Bay, off Newfoundland. The backdrop was the signing of the Atlantic Charter, but in private there were sensitive discussions of Enigma, the Magics, and Bletchley Park. It was about intelligence and how this would be combined with U.S. and British naval power to defeat Hitler and the Nazi scourge in a grand strategic plan. That historic relationship abides today in spite of some ups and downs in U.S.-U.K. relations (Suez and Vietnam come to mind) over the past 76 years.

A new book from the Naval Institute Press, A Tale of Two Navies, Geopolitics, Technology, and Strategy in the United States Navy and the Royal Navy, 1960-2015, shows us unequivocally a way ahead to meet threats to the global order. We are asked what is the key lesson of the past 55 years that this book covers, and then to address what is the grand strategy that the U.S. and the U.K. should pursue together in the future. It demonstrates from exhaustive analysis that the closest and most enduing relationships between these two allies is that between the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Marine Corps and the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines, and that together they provide the answer to the future grand strategy. We are asked to examine one dominant statement, that “The substance of strategic expeditionary naval diplomacy and warfare, its core characteristic values, is its ability to signal, to influence, deter, and, at worst case, provide the full range of measured force to meet all known and projected military-political-economic contingencies in support of the U.S.-U.K. vital national interests. This is the key lesson of naval history and grand strategy.” We are shown the essence of this grand strategy, past, present, and future. We also are shown that large armies do not meet U.S.-U.K. strategic needs, and that historically, they are citizen armies recruited from untrained civilians to meet dire national emergencies, such as World War Two.

Maritime expeditionary warfare and its inherent capabilities are embodied in U.S. Marine Expeditionary Forces, together with the elements of naval warfare: air, space, surface, subsurface, electronic warfare, and special forces. These provide the forward-deployed persistent presence required, with zero requirements for land basing, land based logistics support, airfields, over flight rights, and diplomatic approvals for access. The sea is the international commons from which international order can be both controlled and enforced at the strategic level. The U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps and the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines represent a prodigious capability to meet flexible and powerful responses at the time and place of choosing by the U.S. Commander-in-Chief and his national security team, and the British Prime Minister.

At a time of budgetary reassessment in both the United States and Britian, the corollary to this analysis is that the defense and national security pie needs to be cut in keeping with the critical national security interests of these two major allies, and not the programmatic requirements of individual services with needs that are dysfunctional within the strategic context described above. The British in particular need to become deeply focused on this critical issue. Congress may need to divest itself of out-of-date mind-sets of amphibious warfare that inhibit recognizing one key strategic element—that U.S. Marine and naval forces represent the most flexible persistent forward presence and maneuver, with the capability to launch forces from the sea by multiple means in a diverse set of scenarios to counter underlying threats. Central to all is one simple word: intelligence. The “special relationship” endures today as it has during and since World War II, and the heart and soul is the special relationship between the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps, and the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines. Let the U.S. Secretary of Defense and the National Security Council, and the British Secretary of State for Defence and their respective staffs, step back, take a deep breath, read diligently, think wisely, plan boldly, act swiftly, and remember the key lesson of grand strategy.

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