The MOC

The Sea Services’ Strategy Imperative

The United States has produced three maritime “strategies” since the beginning of the twenty-first century: A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower (2007), Forward, Engaged, Ready: A Cooperative Strategy for21st Century Seapower (2015), and Advantage at Sea: Prevailing with Integrated All-Domain Naval Power (2020). Fundamentally, however, these publications are not strategies. They are, in fact, vague declaratory white papers reiterating the general aims of the President, most frequently expressed through each’s National Security Strategy, and later contextualized with the maritime language of the Sea Services.

There is great continuity across the three maritime white papers, emphasizing broad and lofty aims. Each affirms the central role of maintaining combat credible, forward naval presence in the national security architecture of the United States. They identify various threats and the need to continue cultivating naval power to counter them.

None, however, meaningfully answer: “how,” and for the layman, “why.” How will 355 ships be used? Are 355 ships truly enough in a world of renewed interstate strategic competition? What will their wartime roles be? Is the existing concentration of forces sufficient? Can the existing scale of forward presence be sustained? What of their peacetime applications?

Of course, strategy is not simply an operational plan laying out the mechanics of what is to be done, but nor is it a collection of pleasant aphorisms that one finds replete in the 2007, 2015, and 2020 papers. The existing web of navigation plans, shipbuilding programs, maritime white papers, and strategic guidelines is both too obtuse to be useful for Congress, who necessarily must empower the Sea Services with its hold on the purse strings, and too simplistic to guide the actual planning by warfighters and national security experts alike. In short, the Sea Services have relapsed in failing to sufficiently produce a Huntingtonian “strategic concept.”

The last time the Sea Services truly had an operationalized maritime strategy was during the 1980s which the Department of the Navy utilized to educate Congress on the need for greater investment in naval forces by demonstrating the purpose of its force structure requests. The 1980s maritime strategy identified a threat from the Soviet Union and provided clear information on how the Sea Services would operate in a potential conflict. The 600 ship navy was the authorized force component for executing that strategy with known, expressed risks.

Regardless of the genuine efficacy of the strategy, its formation was instrumental in demonstrating the key applications and needs of sea power. The combination of operational strategy, numerically defined force structure, and associated budget plan to execute it received bipartisan support through the decade until the end of the Cold War and ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union. Then-Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Frank Kelso famously put the Maritime Strategy “on the shelf” in June 1990, citing the absence of an opponent around which to organize an operational strategic effort.

Today, we have entered an era of renewed interstate strategic competition where major state actors seek to deconstruct American influence abroad and threaten the security of not only the United States, but also American allies and partners. Whereas China and Russia were not recognized in the 2007 maritime paper, and that of 2015 recognized the challenge of Russia but nonetheless believed in China’s relatively equal potential to be both a partner and an adversary, Advantage at Sea of 2020 squarely identified both China and Russia as the greatest security challenges for the United States.

Despite this shift in threat recognition, Advantage at Sea did not meaningfully explain how the Sea Services would meet the threats posed by China and Russia, in terms of force development, concentrations, or operations. When the People’s Liberation Army Navy alone has already out-scaled the U.S. Navy – 355 to 298 battle force platforms – and is projected to continue to do so in the long term, blithe statements about maintaining “combat-credible naval forces” abroad and developing “capabilities” are no longer sufficient for the challenge at hand. Indeed, members of Congress have voiced their dissatisfaction.

The American Sea Services need a combined, operationalized maritime strategy that sufficiently grounds itself in the pillars of sea power – including the naval industrial base which allows the Sea Services to exist at all, the platforms by which naval operations are made possible, and sealift capacity to deploy as well as sustain American presence abroad – not only for their own success, but to demonstrate their importance and purpose to an American people and Congress increasingly weary with them. No longer can the Sea Services afford to publish irregular schemas on shipbuilding that undercut long-term industrial investment, nor can they simply rely on blasé phrases stating that they will “grow capacity,” “ensure readiness,” “maintain combat-credible forces,” and that “the Naval Service will fight alongside the Army, Air Force, Space Force, our allies, and our partners to deny enemy objectives, destroy enemy forces, and compel war termination” – they are insufficient to the scale of the threats faced today. The geography of today’s competition, especially in the Indo-Pacific and the Arctic, is clearly a maritime one, necessitating a focus on maritime forces in a way not seen since the Second World War.

It is questionable whether the Sea Services will be capable of meeting the many and varied challenges of the twenty-first century without a comprehensive maritime strategy that meaningfully engages with how its aims will be achieved and what the applications of the capabilities and capacities needed are.

Thus, it is the goal of The MOC to provide the Sea Services, Congress, and public at large an open-access forum to guide the development of such a strategy in all its components, from how to cultivate the naval industrial base to distributed maritime logistics and warfighting concepts. We look forward to the conversation!

Benjamin E. Mainardi is an analyst at the Center for Maritime Strategy. He holds a master’s in War Studies from King’s College London.

The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.