One month ago, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter sent a stinging letter to Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus entitled “Program Balance.” The memo offered a stark reminder that Budget Control Act-imposed defense shortfalls will change much more than just the endstrength of our land forces. Secretary Mabus was ordered to re-program the Navy’s 2017 budget to place a higher priority on advanced warfighting capabilities while cutting the number of planned ship purchases by 12, thus curtailing the number of ships available for presence operations. The language used in the memo includes an implicit strategic decision that is about more than just the relative slicing of the budget pie. Carter goes on to say that a combination of higher advanced capabilities and the posturing of the force will be enough to compensate for decreased naval presence around the world. This statement betrays either a misunderstanding of the characteristics of naval presence or a dangerous devaluing of its role in our nation’s overall military strategy. Others, perhaps anxious to defend their own strategic agendas, have promoted Carter’s arguments.
Recently, my friend Cmdr. B.J. Armstrong and I authored a paper for the Center for a New American Security on the topic of naval presence that seeks to improve understanding of its strategic implications and work toward a modern definition of the term. The U.S. Navy has been globally deployed since the late 18th century, providing presence to forward American national interests: from Captain Preble and the Essex in the Pacific and Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet to Cold War submarine patrols and today’s deployments in the Arabian Gulf. For the past 70 years, the international community has enjoyed a pax oceania that leveraged free navigation and free trade to produce more economic expansion than at any other time in human history. However, recent years have imposed significant pressures on America’s naval presence calculations unlike anything seen in generations. This is largely the result of a change in one of the variables of that calculation: the size of the battle fleet, which has shrunk to the point that the U.S. Navy is no longer able to be persistently deployed.
While the average size of the U.S. fleet in the post-World War II era was around 740 ships, today’s ship count numbers only 273, leaving the Navy unable to keep ships forward deployed to various regions that make up the global maritime environment. If these gaps in naval deployments continue, they will introduce — and arguably have introduced — questions into the minds of local and international actors about the level of U.S. commitment. Such questions invite other rising global powers to attempt to establish new local sets of rules. This is in keeping with certain aspects of a theory that illuminates coming challenges for the United States if it continues down the path of capabilities over capacity.
Power-law theory suggests that the surest way of avoiding high-casualty conflicts is to increase the number of interactions between nation-states during peacetime. These interactions — be they through planned training exercises, port visits, or unplanned at-sea meetings — allow powers to take each other’s measure, delineate their national interests, and demonstrate what they deem acceptable and unacceptable in naval conduct. Persistent interactions allow competing powers to reduce friction slowly, but consistently. Inconsistent interactions allow tensions to rise precipitously and raise the specter of open warfare. To remain forward-deployed and in contact with the challenges presented in the various regions of the globe, the U.S. Navy needs around 350 ships — far beyond the maximum 308 ships that Secretary Carter believes meets “the Department’s warfighting requirements.”
Naval presence is a combination of effect, persistence, and influence. Effect measures the ability of a naval unit to exert immediate impact on the environment around it at any given moment. This definition implies that effect is temporal in nature: It precedes a naval unit’s approach to a given point, has its maximum impact at the moment it occupies the given geographic space, and then declines as the unit moves away.
Persistence measures the ability of the naval unit to remain in the area for a prolonged period of time, retaining sovereign characteristics with minimum demands upon local actors. Persistence derives from numerous contributions: the design of the individual naval units, their fuel and food storage, the density of the fuel involved, the efficiency of their hull-forms, and the strength of the logistics force resupplying ships at sea. Persistence creates the ancillary effect of increasing our knowledge of the local environment, as well as informing local actors of our interests and intentions.
This adds to our influence, which can be broken down into subcomponents of awareness, knowledge, and reach. Influence translates into how far away we can sense the environment around us, how much we truly understand what we are sensing, and our ability to directly change that environment to have it align with our interests. Naval officers (a category which has included Marine officers throughout American history) instinctively understand the character of naval presence — it’s second nature, like breathing — but seldom think about it enough to stop and explain to outsiders. Why should they? They have been doing it for hundreds of years.
There’s good reason to consider the character of naval presence and discuss it openly as part of the national strategic debate: to ensure that presence is understood even by those who do not “breath it.” Secretary Carter’s directive to increase advanced capabilities in the fleet at the expense of the size of the fleet — and specifically at the expense of small combatants which have historically been central to naval operations — ignores the importance of presence and runs counter to the long history of American national strategy. In the end, it will decrease naval presence, allow tensions to rise among local actors, and invite a competition in the maritime environment that has been suppressed for 70 years by constant presence. Historically, these are the very steps that led to war. The commitment of Navy leadership to the construction of frigates, a balanced high-low mix of ships, and a larger fleet overall has demonstrated a deep understanding of the importance of naval presence and a commitment to preserving the pax oceania that has marked the past 70 years of global progress.
The nation’s leadership needs to come back to an understanding of the ideals voiced in the 2007 Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower, which espoused the American belief that preventing wars is just as important as winning wars. Global competition is the condition — the continuing diagnosis of our day — and naval presence is the prescription. We need to take the prescribed dosage.
Dr. Jerry Hendrix is a senior fellow and director of the Defense Strategies and Assessments Program at the Center for a New American Security. He is a retired Navy Captain and career naval flight officer.
Photo credit: Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Erik Foster, U.S. Navy
usmc0846 
Interest comment well presented. But a couple of quick off the cuff questions:
1. Who pays for this forward presence in an environment of competing needs with a government and, likely, congressional reticence to write these checks ?
2. By what measure is is the sole responsibility of the US to fund, supply, man (and woman I suppose) all these yet to be built ships so that our forward presence is assured?
Constrained economic resources and its resultant political environment force decisions that will require compromise. AKA: You can’t have everything you want.
As a former Navy Officer, I would completely agree with the Captain’s analysis. As he noted:
“Carter goes on to say that a combination of higher advanced capabilities and the posturing of the force will be enough to compensate for decreased naval presence around the world. This statement betrays either a misunderstanding of the characteristics of naval presence or a dangerous devaluing of its role in our nation’s overall military strategy.”
Given the current Presidents attitude toward reducing America’s position in the world and Carter being willing to serve as Obama’s SecDef, it is clear that he is both dangerously devaluing the role of the Navy in our nation’s military strategy and it is also clear that, just like Obama, he has no understanding or comprehension that increased capabilities of various types on a lesser number of ships simply does not (and cannot) provide the varied capabilities and force presence needed if the U.S. Navy is to be able to insure that we have adequate control of the seas in current and potential areas of conflict. Neither Carter nor Obama (nor many others) grasp that different missions (e.g. ASW, Mine Sweeping, Anti-Missile capabilities, Amphibious Operations, etc., etc., etc.) require completely different types and sizes of ships.
The military (all branches of the services) can only hope that the next Commander-In-Chief will rescue it from the disastrous strategic policies (at the military level) of the current administration. Like Obama, the aptly named Carter needs to go and be replaced with someone both technically intelligent AND strategically knowledgeable.
“Power-law theory suggests that the surest way of avoiding high-casualty conflicts is to increase the number of interactions between nation-states during peacetime.” I wonder. Few navies have ever interacted as much in peacetime as the British and German navies in the years prior to WWI, the one long dominant, the other a brash challenger. The uncomfortable application to today’s U.S. and Chinese navies is hard to avoid.
For the last number of years the U.S.Navy has been acquiring New Warships where one type is replacing up to three or four previous ship types this has had a lot to do with the sudden decrease in numbers. The LPD’s and LCS are the main culprits. Already we are seeing some backtracking where these Types are having to be reconfigured as the concept was seen ”belatedly” to not be as capable as was originally toted. Most of the larger adversary Navies build ships that are heavily armed and robust.
Dr/Captain Hendrix makes several interesting points about the US Navy securing the capacity to make persistent global presence part of its inherent capability-portfolio. They appear logically sound in the general calculus of deterrence, compellence and combat-capability. In terms of the USN’s historic evolution as a global provider of oceanic peace, it might not be incongruous here to examine several apparent assumptions underpinning Dr Hendrix’s commentary.
1. While the USN may have had a global presence for ’70 years,’ it was not an unchallenged actor for all of these 70 years. Even after the Japanese Navy was vanquished, quarantined, sunk and destroyed, other fleets e.g., the British, French and Soviet ones, operated across East Asia/Western Pacific with objectives not exactly consonant with the USN’s. The French flotilla declined in both numbers and capabilities by the late 1950s but the Royal Navy did not entirely depart until over a decade later. The Soviet Pacific Fleet grew in strength to fill some of the maritime space vacated by these rapidly evanescent powers.
2. The US Pacific/7th Fleets expanded since the 1960s primarily to assist with US military/ strategic goals in Indochina where, as the author will recall, a substantial war was raging. The region was not yet the USN’s oyster and, in fact, by the mid-1970s, after the US tacitly accepted defeat in the hands of the North Vietnamese and their southern allies and Sino-Soviet patrons, the USN was not in a position to dominate Asian waters. Defeat in Indochina may now be glossed over or even forgotten, but records of post-1975 deployments are still available for scrutiny.
3. Grand-strategic changes in the perceptions dominating policy-making in both Washington and Beijing in 1969-72 transformed US and Chinese strategic and operational praxis in the 1970s and 1980s, as a tacit Sino-US strategic alliance pursued shared anti-Soviet goals in as disparate theatres as Central America, Southern Africa, the Horn of Africa, Indochina and, most spectacularly, Afghanistan. The USN’s role and presence were adapted to reflect these shifts.
4. China graduated from a tacit US ally to a marginal player in 1989-1995/96. Since then, as Washington sought to extend its monopoly of the systemic core-space, and China pursued a defensive development of its military capability, given the asymmetry of Sino-US global goals, interests and concerns, the PLA assumed the role of the DoD’s default adversary. However, shifts in systemic power-balances, apparent in the steady increase in economic, scientific-technological and military power of several states, in addition to the US’s, have altered the global geopolitical landscape. The systemic core, still heavily tilted in favour of the US, is no longer as clearly unipolar as it was directly following the Soviet state’s evisceration. Still, the USN’s design and role have not adapted themselves to that reality.
5. This commentary is a helpful trigger for further discussions on the subject of what the USN is for and how it can adapt itself to a dynamic future. It is, therefore, to be commended.
Jerry Hendrix has laid out the pro-US defense challenges and options. But in a globalized world we need to look for more constructive solutions, like declaring the islands in question as common property, under the protection of the UN, with “development” or “resource exploitation” rights assigned to certain countries. We could also have an Arctic Council like governance structure with rotating chairmanship.
And part of that worldview is that the beneficiaries (mainly NOT the US) should help pay for the international patrolling. Where are the Navies of the other interested parties, both locally (Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam) and internationally (British, French, German, Italian, Russian, etc.)? Sitting at home waiting for the US Navy to protect them! Personally, I believe those other countries have already voted with their pocketbooks, and left it to the US to protect their interests. If that’s the case, we shouldn’t worry about patrolling the SCS, which is mainly transited by Chinese ships, carrying Chinese goods, to Chinese customers.
There are 2 issues going on.
The politicians have made decisions about how much money can be spent on defence and then the DoD has to make some decisions around within the money and guidance given by congress how much to spend on Army v Air Force v Navy.
The Navy (and the Army is doing the same), is arguing ‘it’s not fair we want more money because we refuse to make a decision about priorities’. Carter is saying we might want more money but we are not going to get it so if you will not decide priorities I’m doing it for you and get on with it.
It might be nice to both be able to have the capacity to fight a major peer competetitor and have lots of ships to provide presence everywhere. If you have to make the choice Carter is saying we need to provide the peer to peer heavy commitment because other allies can provide the presence.
If you are talking about pirates or terrorists in the South China Sea then Singapore or Philipines should be able to deal with it and China and Japan are on our side in that one. Pirates off the coast of Somalia have been dramatically reduced with naval presence of Korea and Japan and China and India as well as Europe.
If you are talking war between Japan and China we already have a CVN and several air bases in Japan, what more presence do you need.
Most traffic in the SCS is China and Japan importing oil and other commodities and exporting to rest of Asia and Europe, again in the Indian Ocean it is the same with also the exports from the rest of South East Asia going to Europe, there is very little in the way of US goods in either direction.