New directions in maritime strategy? Implications for the U.S. Navy

Naval War College Review, Autumn, 2007 by Geoffrey Till

Globalization, with its impact on strategic environment, is the central fact of the early twenty-first century. Some, in the traditions of the nineteenthcentury Manchester School, welcome it as ushering in an era of peace and plenty by replacing competitive, aggressive balance-of-power politics with a much greater sense of international community. Others see globalization as undermining their ways of life, their independence, their beliefs, and their future prospects. Still others dispute assumptions of globalization's assumed longevity and worry, on the contrary, about its prospective, if not imminent, collapse. Either way, the present and future state of globalization will be a major determinant of the shape and nature of world politics, and governmental attitudes to it will in turn be major determinants of strategy and of defense and naval policy.

Several more points need to be made about globalization, however. First, it encourages the development of a "borderless world," in which the autarchy of the national units of which it is composed is gradually whittled away by a variety of transnational economic and technological trends. The focus will increasingly be on the system, not the units; plans and strategy will, an argument goes, need to serve that system as a whole. Nations will become relaxed about their borders, because they have to be. But this cuts both ways: they will be relaxed about the borders of other nations too. In a globalizing world, systems thinking pulls strategists forward geographically. This forward-leaning approach to the making and implementation of strategy has been a marked characteristic of European and American defense thinking for a decade now. Thus Tony Blair in early 2007: "The frontiers of our security no longer stop at the Channel. What happens in the Middle East affects us. ... The new frontiers for our security are global. Our Armed Forces will be deployed in the lands of other nations far from home, with no immediate threat to our territory, in environments and in ways unfamiliar to them." (1)

Second, globalization is a dynamic system, since, among other things, trade and business produce a constantly changing hierarchy of winners and losers, and because, historically, conflict seems to be particularly associated with economic volatility. (2) New players in the game have to be accommodated, its victims supported, and future directions anticipated. The defense of the system has therefore to be constant and proactive, rather than merely intermittent and reactive. This calls for continuous action along all the diplomatic, economic, social, and military lines of development, with the latter's requirements based on the need to "shape the international security environment."

Third, globalization depends absolutely on the free flow of trade--and this goes largely by sea. For this reason alone, seapower is at the heart of the globalization process in a way that land and air power are not. This provides both an opportunity and a challenge, not least because sea-based globalization is potentially vulnerable to disruption. In itself, this is not new, for Mahan warned us of it over a century ago: "This, with the vast increase in rapidity of communication, has multiplied and strengthened the bonds knitting together the interests of nations to one another, till the whole now forms an articulated system not only of prodigious size and activity, but of excessive sensitiveness, unequaled in former ages." (3)

The "excessive sensitiveness" that Mahan had in mind derives from the fact that interdependence, and indeed dependency of any sort, inevitably produces targets for the malign to attack. But there is special point in his warnings now, partly because the extraordinary extent and depth of today's version of globalization depend on a supply-chain philosophy of "just enough, just in time" that increases the system's vulnerability to disruption. Moreover, there have emerged various groups and situations that could exploit or exacerbate that increased vulnerability. Such threats include, obviously, direct attack by groups or states hostile to the values and outcomes that the system encourages. Less obviously, international maritime crime in its manifold forms (piracy, drugs, and people smuggling) and the unsustainable plundering of marine resources all threaten to undermine the good order on which the safe and timely passage of shipping depends. Conflict and instability ashore, moreover, can have disruptive effects in neighboring seas, as was demonstrated all too clearly in the Tanker War of the 1980s, for example.

The protective function of naval activity will plainly be a significant part of any defensive response, because so many of these threats to the system can, and do, take a maritime form or have important maritime consequences and require maritime responses. Indeed, the Tanker War just mentioned is a particularly clear example of the many ways in which navies "protect the system," both directly by what they do at sea and indirectly by what they do from it. Identifying, prioritizing, and preparing, from among the range of possible naval responses, the platforms, weapons, and skill sets that will realize those responses are the chief tasks of today's naval planners. To repeat the point made earlier, many of these requirements are bound to pull sailors forward, geographically. This should not be news to sailors, since a forward-leaning policy was a characteristic of Pax Britannica--the last great age of globalization. Thus: