The U.S. Navy has been working on a new strategy document. CDR Bryan McGrath has discussed it and the 2007 Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower here at War on the Rocks. In the 21st century, everyone and everything appears to have something they call a strategy, from Silicon Valley start-ups to your home-owners association. But while they call their ideas, plans, and statements “strategies,” they usually don’t deserve the label.
A few weeks ago, the Naval War College held its annual strategy conference, the Current Strategy Forum. This year’s event focused on the Navy’s forthcoming strategy and looked to ask the kinds of questions that would help Navy strategists do their work. Over the past several decades, there have been a number of official Navy documents that have been considered strategies, from the 1990s when papers like “From the Sea” and “Forward … From the Sea” were issued, to the current one, which the Navy staff is endeavoring to update. Some bore the strategy label, others did not.
Many navalists chart the Navy’s strategic course through these documents back to the 1980s. Military analysts of all stripes likely remember the call for a “600 Ship Navy” during the Reagan administration. The fleet size wasn’t just a talking point. It came alongside a document developed by the Navy staff under the leadership of then Chief of Naval Operations James Watkins and Secretary of the Navy John Lehman. AirLand Battle and the NATO plans for the Fulda Gap cast maritime forces in the role of supply chain, necessary for hauling material across the pond, as in World War I and World War II, but not really central to the fight. The Navy and Marine Corps saw things differently. The 1986 “Maritime Strategy” proposed an approach to war with the Soviet Union that included major naval operations around the Eurasian land mass. These would serve to help defend vital American allies while also siphoning Russian combat power away from the plains of Eastern Europe, stretching the Soviets into a multi-front war.
At the Naval War College, retired Captain Robby Harris asked Dr. Geoffrey Till an important question: “Some would argue that the high water point of maritime strategy, naval strategy, was John Lehman and Jim Watkins’ Maritime Strategy of the 1980s. Do you agree, why or why not?” Till’s answer was interesting (and worth watching), but I don’t think it got at the heart of the question. Some members of the audience thought the question seemed to be saying, “Look, we’ve done this pretty well before, we just need to do the same thing.” Then again, as Harris said, it might not even be a valid comparison.
That comparison is built upon a very significant problem. We are not engaged in a Cold War with anyone. We are not moments away from the outbreak of a global shooting war in quite the way we were when facing the Soviets. The Maritime Strategy of 1986 was designed to face that Soviet threat (as Till’s answer illuminated). It had very clear “ends” in the axiomatic approach to strategy described as “ends-ways-means.”
I would suggest that today we don’t have an “ends.” We do not have a goal for naval force in quite the same way Harris and the strategists laboring in the Pentagon did in the 1980s. As a result, what is being discussed in the rewriting of 2007’s Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower, and what McGrath has addressed here at War on the Rocks, is not actually strategy, but instead a clear outlining of naval policy — the Navy’s view of things. And it should be; sound naval policy lies at the foundation of any future strategy.
From Sun Tzu to Clausewitz to Mahan, the grand masters have written in one form or another that war is an extension of policy or politics. The objective of war is for one side to bend the will of the other through force of arms to achieve a political goal. If today’s naval strategists in the Pentagon are struggling with a grand overarching strategy like the one in 1986, it may be because we don’t have a single country that we anticipate having to force into a specific political result. Instead, as we heard at the Current Strategy Forum, there are a wealth of potential challenges and issues around the world that we may have to deal with in the future. It seems reasonable to suggest that what needs to be written is not a strategy at all, but instead a clear statement of our nation’s naval policies. A policy document like this explains the “means” and illuminates the different “ways” that may be used strategically in the future, once an “end” is determined.
Now this may all be semantics. Or maybe not. Adm. Jonathan Greenert, Chief of Naval Operations, asked an important question in his CSF14 opening remarks. It was one that hasn’t really been addressed in the after-action writing about the conference. Wondering about what strategy is, he asked, “Is it in a book somewhere, what’s the definition?” Maybe defining strategy is one of the things that needs to be considered.
BJ Armstrong is a naval officer, helicopter pilot, and a PhD candidate in War Studies with King’s College, London. He has served as an amphibious search & rescue pilot and led an MH-60S gunship detachment in Operation UNIFIED PROTECTOR and in counter-piracy and counter-terror operations in the Middle East. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the U.S. Naval Institute and the editor of 21st Century Mahan: Sound Military Conclusions for the Modern Era. The views expressed are those of the author alone and are presented in his private capacity.
Image: US Navy
Bryan McGrath 
TP Jones 
hgaffney 
Mike Steinmetz 
steveA 
From a friend:
Strategy is applied to tactics with a theater. You cannot have/develop a strategy unless you have:
1. A policy that accepts the use of violent means
2. An enemy who objects to the policy sought.
Seems pretty straight-forward and my guess is the identification of “enemies” is a large part of the confusion.
Good post.
The more I work in this field, the more convinced I am that the only group more numerous than those who consider themselves strategists, is those who spend their time determining what is and isn’t “strategy”. It is a cottage industry of navel gazers and dancers on heads of pins. The relevant question for me has always been “does the strategy (policy, narrative, whatever) lead to useful organizational change?” If so, then sign me up.
When were we ever “moments away” from armed conflict with the Soviets in the 1980s? Really. By the 1980s the Soviets were clearly a fading empire. The world had long since moved on to a multipolar world and one based on economic interdependence and competition. The Navy, along with the rest of the Pentagon, focused heavily on fighting the Soviets, all the while places like Libya and Lebanon reflected the real world and the real places US military forces became engaged. THe Maritime Strategy was largely irrelevant to reality. Forward…From the Sea would have been more appropriate in the 1980s, but then nobody ever accused the Pentagon of being up to date.
Having worked on NATO strategy for 13 intensive years from 1966 to the end of 1978, TP Jones is right-on. The Soviets were clearly fading, and diplomacy had solved the Berlin problem, detente had huge effects, the Helsinki Final Act showed Brezhnev in a very defensive posture, and Communist rule effectively ended when Jaruzelski declared martial law in Poland, following the unstoppable revolution beginning in Gdansk. Just as the Fulda Gap was a mere dimple in the landscape (those of us who worked NATO worried far more about the North German Plain, and AirLand Battle was lost in the (good)noise. In 1980, there were 27 NATO divisions in the Central Region (4.3 U.S.)and 27 Soviet Divisions in East Europe (couldn’t count on other Warsaw Pact anymore), and the NATO divisions were twice as big. No wonder Ogarkov talked about Spetsnaz instead (and got fired).
The current revision of Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower remains in the staff review process. The base document was completed by the Navy officers in N-51 and members of the Ellis Group in the Marine Corps. Unfortunately, with the SCMR and QDR efforts, the final approval of the strategy was delayed. I think in the end, “CS-21” will do well in laying out the roadmap for how the Naval Team will operationalize the elements of the latest National Security Strategy guidance from the White House, as it should. Is the document a true strategy? Shipmate Armstrong implies the right question. The military services execute our NSS as the means to an end. If we understood correctly what a strategy is, I think we would do a better job of successfully acomplishing the tasks attendant to the strategy. Even spend our money wisely. And as my friend Byran McGrath indicates, we could also be the innovative organization we wish ourselves to be. Tell me what my job is as a Marine and I’ll do my job.
No strategy ever written or to be written will yield more money for the Navy or change the proportions among the Services in the defense budget. Thus, any strategy to be written must help the Navy to make the best use of the resources the Administration and the Congress appropriate to them. My own experience in following Navy programming is that they make this fit very well and are the only ones that really can do that. But writing of strategy cannot be done with expectations that it will yield more resources.
I believe the clarity of the Navy’s mid-90s strategy was a by- product of a much clearer political aim. If given the latitude to articulate the branches and sequels of where US interests would require Naval power I believe the US Navy could write a credible 20 year strategy to move itself from its current posture to one which better supports those (political, cultural and practical) eventualities.
The question in my mind is will they be allowed to think through those branches sequels and eventual outcomes in a manner that would allow for construction of a strategy with both the credibility and clarity needed for successful execution?
Remember, the defense budget is going to stay flat into the 2020s under the current sequestration law and given the paralyzed American political situation — about which there is no sign whatsoever that it will break. Words will not be enough. Whatever program will have to fit that flat budget. That is the hardest strategic question the Navy will have to face — it is not the feared vertical scenarios out there in the world, but the horizontal scenario of adapting to the flat budget.
I worked for Army Recruiting during the days of the 600-ship Navy. We kept waiting, but never saw an increase in Navy recruiting stations, recruiters, or recruits. Best I could tell from my foxhole, it was all smoke-and-mirrors designed for Soviet consumption, as there was no design to man those ships.