The ocean is the greatest of all highways. It is much easier to move a ton of goods from Shanghai to Los Angeles than from Chicago to Los Angeles, in terms of energy expended (if not in terms of time spent). This reality is even more pronounced for massive items like air bases and missile fields. Yet, navies routinely move air bases in the form of carriers, and missile fields in the form of strategic submarines. This fact is the basis of a seapower outlook, yet it is often forgotten. Perhaps most importantly, there is a single world ocean. There are no natural boundaries between areas of the world ocean, although we generally speak of one sea or another
A Maritime Point of View
From a maritime point of view, the United States enjoys an enormous advantage in that its land borders are relatively secure. That is not the case for China, which has a long land border with a historically (though not currently) hostile Russia, and a disputed border with India. Relative security on land allows the United States to choose when and how to intervene abroad. Although foreign wars have seemed costly to the United States, they have not been nearly as devastating as land wars fought across land borders. A maritime point of view emphasizes the vulnerability of land enemies with potential risks on their land borders.
Global Sea Power
The Europeans were the first to appreciate what sea power could mean on a global scale. They realized that the ocean highway connected them to the riches of the world. Once they seized control of those overseas riches, their wars inevitably became global. A fight against the Spanish in Europe could be won by attacking the source of Spanish power, the gold and silver the Spanish mined in the New World. For example, Sir Francis Drake won a great victory against Spain when he led a force which sacked Panama, where the gold and silver were concentrated for shipment to Spain.
Global mobility means that a maritime or naval approach to war may be very different from one oriented towards a particular territory ashore. The first question ashore is how to protect a particular place. Navies mean flexibility. They make it possible to ask what the objective really is. Is it to preserve control over some place, or is it to put the enemy out of action?
World War I
At the outset, British and Allied control of the world ocean offered them access to world resources. For example, the British were able to bring many Empire troops—such as Australians, Canadians, Indians, and New Zealanders—to fight in Europe. Many of their weapons and munitions came across the sea from the United States and even Japan. Allied control of the Atlantic made it possible to bring a powerful American army to France, which may have tipped the balance in 1918.
What is missing from this story is how a more maritime approach might have affected the outcome. It seems arguable that the problem was that no one in Britain, either before the war or during it, asked the question: what is the object of the war? For the French, it was obviously to preserve France. The British had the luxury of not bordering the attacker. They could ask whether the Germans could be defeated by some other sort of attack made possible by British sea power.
There were some proposals, but they were never made articulately enough. No one asked whether the object of the war should be preservation of France or the defeat of Germany, or even whether the two were mutually exclusive. Admiral Sir John Fisher of the British Royal Navy pointed out that the Germans would feel compelled to defend their provinces bordering on the Baltic, but he never managed to convince anyone. An attack on the Turkish Straits (Gallipoli) was mounted, but without enough support to make it successful. A century later, it is typically dismissed as a foolish waste of resources.
As for France, whose defense the British accepted as the object of the war, in 1914 the British commander there, Lord French, told the British Cabinet that nothing which could be done in France could possibly cause the Germans to give up. No one seems to have asked the obvious question: if nothing which could be done in France really mattered, what would work? The failure to neither ask nor answer this question was costly.
The Cold War
The U.S. Navy’s Cold War maritime strategy is a good example of what a seapower approach would mean in what might otherwise be seen as a land war. The obvious military issue was whether the Soviets could extend their sway over Central Europe, particularly by conquering West Germany. If war broke out, was the objective to keep a Soviet army out of West Germany? Was it to damage the Soviets so badly that they would break? The second emerged as the U.S. Navy’s maritime strategy.
In the mid-1970s, a U.S. analysis concluded that at best, NATO could limit the Soviets to conquering about a third of West Germany. The U.S. official view was that it might be possible to deter the Soviets by threatening to make the cost of such a victory very high, but the Soviets were unlikely to risk a war in Europe unless they had a compelling reason to attack in the first place. It was assumed that for the Soviets, victory would mean reaching the Channel.
The Navy asked what would happen then. Was there a way in which the Soviets could not end a European war even if they overran all of Western Europe? True, the Soviet onslaught would have flanks on the seas around Europe and—in a larger sense—Eurasia. There, the Navy could threaten the Soviets. Since the attacking naval force enjoyed great flexibility, the Soviets would have to defend many places, spreading out their force and reducing whatever they could throw at NATO defenders in Central Europe. If the risks on the flanks were great enough, the Soviets might have so much on their hands that—even in a terrible crisis—they might not find an attack in Central Europe a good idea.
In the Far East, the Soviets faced a hostile China, with which they fought a battle in 1969. Although the Chinese had limited technology and fairly primitive forces, the Soviets felt compelled to assign a quarter of their army to deal with them. They also had a large air force in the region, and substantial naval forces. The more the Soviets were compelled to keep in the Far East, the less they would have to throw at NATO in Europe. Conversely, anything the Soviets could move from the Far East increased the weight of a potential Soviet offensive in Europe.
The Soviets could not easily write off their own flanks in Europe. They might extend into the Baltic, even to Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Working backwards, U.S. naval strategists became interested in gaining freedom of action by destroying the Soviet fleet centered on the Kola Peninsula. That in turn made the Norwegian Sea a vital battle area.
Even better, it turned out that the Soviets offered a vital target on their flank. By the 1970s, the Soviets had moved much of their nuclear deterrent to sea. The Soviets assumed that Westerners would take much the same view. Discovering that U.S. and British submariners could trail (and hence, in wartime, sink) their strategic submarines, the Soviets decided to protect them in ‘bastions,’ in the Barents Sea in the West and in the Sea of Okhotsk in the East.
During the 1980s, the U.S. Navy demonstrated in exercises that it could destroy the Soviet naval forces covering the bastions. The Soviets took the demonstrations seriously, and the Soviet navy was compelled to say that it needed far more resources to keep the bastions alive. After the Cold War, the former Soviet leadership said that this was a major factor convincing it to abandon any hope of winning a war. That was a maritime approach. Those who developed it asked from the outset what the object of the strategy should be, and whether the approach should be direct (reinforcing the army in Europe) or instead should rely on the mobility of the navy, which could range around the entire land mass of the enemy.
More broadly, the navy argued that it was impossible to limit a war to Europe. The United States and the West relied on resources from around the world and the Soviets would feel compelled to cut off that access. The NATO strategy was intended to prolong any war in Germany, and the longer the war, the more important NATO access to the world, not just to the supply route across the Atlantic.
Modern Sea Strategy
Now that the United States faces China, there is a choice between effective national strategy as exercised during the latter part of the Cold War, and the direct but horrific choices made during World War I. The question is really whether the United States understands what a flanking maritime strategy can mean. That includes understanding our own potential maritime vulnerabilities. The United States lead a commonwealth tied together by the sea, as we have since World War II. Recent Chinese acquisition of base rights, and attempts to gain bases, suggest that the Chinese understand this, and plan to threaten U.S. access to world resources.
As in the Cold War, the United States and the Chinese are both nuclear powers. Neither is likely to undertake a direct attack on the other (though cyber-attacks may be a different proposition). During the Cold War, tensions shifted to the periphery, where attacks were relatively safe. The new Cold War equivalent might be a series of coups to shut the United States out of important places.
Then there is the Chinese threat to seize Taiwan, and thus to demonstrate to everyone in the Far East that the United States is impotent. It should matter that whatever the United States threatens is something the Chinese take seriously, just as the Soviets were compelled to view the threat to the bastions. For example, in making the case for a larger navy, Chinese naval advocates have repeatedly argued that China depends heavily on seaborne trade. This is not just a matter of protecting its export trade; China lacks some key natural resources. Surely, the United States should be pointing to that vulnerability. At the very least, pressure on Chinese seaborne trade routes will compel the Chinese to divert vital naval assets, such as destroyers and frigates, to protect that trade.
The Chinese currently apply considerable pressure to countries around the South China Sea, as they demand control of the islets there. The area is an important fishery, which provides much of the protein those living around it eat. It may also be a massive oil field, as yet suspected but undeveloped. U.S. maritime pressure in favor of the countries China is bullying may affect the Chinese leadership. It may find concentration on Taiwan more difficult.
Ultimately, the deterring question for China, as for the Soviet Union, is whether the central government can compel obedience by its population. Although obedience is generally compelled by the police, ultimately the prestige of the military seems to decide whether people obey. That is why the failed war in Afghanistan—a war on the periphery—so badly damaged the Soviet state. Presumably military failure would also weaken the Chinese state, particularly since it would entail the deaths of many sons, whose deaths would impact their families more thanks to the one-child policy of the past. A lot depends on whether the Chinese leadership appreciates this vulnerability. Past leaders were unwilling to seize Taiwan after the Chinese military told them that it would cost ‘only’ 20,000 Chinese troops. It is not clear whether President Xi Jinping feels similarly, but Americans seem to underestimate the possibility of this kind of deterrence.
The United States can also take advantage of what seems to be a limited understanding of sea power in Beijing. The Chinese write of successive chains of islands as though they are bulwarks against the penetration of U.S. seapower. They certainly look that way on a map, but in reality, the sea is vast and trackless, and chains of islands leave a lot of ocean between them.
The current situation is not that of 1914 or 1944 or 1984. It is now far easier to find ships at sea, and long-range missiles make it easier to attack them. However, sea-based mobility is still the central fact of maritime warfare, and it still makes sense to force a land power to disperse its strength. To use this leverage, the United States must understand that there is only one ocean, over which ships and other maritime assets can maneuver more or less freely.
