“Developing Trust in Asia Amidst New US Military Deployments: An Indonesian Perspective,” by Maria Monica Wihardja, Asia Pacific Bulletin No. 142, East-West Center, Washington, D.C., December 8, 2011. If we think the Chinese were upset about the announcement that 2,500 U.S. Marines would soon be station on Australia’s north coast, the Indonesians were much more upset. As the US makes more use of Australia as a part of its Pacific defense system, it will need to turn up the public diplomacy in Southeast Asia to counteract the Jihadist agitprop that is certain to be an unwelcome byproduct.
Category Archives: National Security
Asian Security in the Year of the Dragon
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Each year, Japan’s National Institute for Defense Studies conducts an exchange program that invites national security scholars from around the world to take a collective look at the Asian security environment and offer their points of view on the issues the region faces. This year they have produced another excellent collection, and it is available at the link above.
What I enjoy about this series is the often unexpected perspectives thes authors offer. My favorites from this collection are H.J.S. Kraft’s chapter on “The Continuing Malaise of National Security in the Philippines,” which strikes me as particularly fascinating given the evolving situation in the South China Sea; You Ji’s perspective on how China’s defense posture is evolving in response to America’s “Strategic Shift” away from Europe, Iraq, and Pakistan and toward the Pacific; and, of course, Andrew Erickson’s superb review of U.S. security concerns in the region.
As we ease into Chinese New Year, this would be an excellent time to peruse this collection. The Year of the Dragon promises much change, but a read through these chapters should minimize the surprises.
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- ASEAN Defense: China co-host ASEAN defense education meet to “Seamlessly integrate national security knowledge across society” (thaiintelligentnews.wordpress.com)
eBlame
In a provocative essay, Ting Xu makes the important point that both China and the US are turning cyber warfare into a lever to divide the two nations, a means to heighten tension and conflict. Ting thinks this is the wrong approach.
Rather than turn the internet into a new battlefield for superpowers, strategists on both sides should use the issue as a means to bring the two countries together in an effort to manage a species of violence that neither government truly controls. Ting suggests that it is time to end the mistrust and start chasing miscreants: neither side can afford for this issue to sunder the world’s most important relationship. Equally important, however, is that unless the world’s powers coordinate strategy, tools, and tactics to respond to cyber warfare, eventually it will be used as the ultimate asymmetric weapon against all human institutions.
You may not fully agree, but Ting’s viewpoint is an important addition to the discussion of both cyberwar and Sino-US relations.
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China’s Rough Edges
Managing Instability on China’s Periphery – Council on Foreign Relations.
A fair amount of attention has gone in recent years to China’s growing influence far from its shores, in particular in Africa and Latin America. The western powers are predisposed to hypersensitivity in these areas. Africa is no longer the southern extension of European empires, but the EU is not anxious to allow the continent to fall under the influence of any other power. In the Americas, the Monroe Doctrine is much changed but it is not dead: witness the reactions to Russian or Chinese warship visits to Venezuela or Cuba.
But as five scholars from the Council on Foreign Relations remind us, we would be foolish to forget that where China’s influence is felt strongest is in the Middle Kingdom’s near abroad, in the nations lining China’s extensive borders. What is more, China’s borderlands house some of the world’s most volatile hot spots: North Korea, Myanmar, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan.
The authors of Managing Instability on China’s Periphery seek policy options to try and prevent crises from emerging in those countries and potentially undermining the US-China relationship. The publication, released in September, is timely not simply because of the recent death of Kim Jong-Il and the resultant uncertainty over the Korean peninsula, but because many of us watching China (myself included) underweight the instability in China’s borderlands when analyzing how and why China thinking about the drivers shaping the PRC’s foreign and security policy.
That’s a significant oversight, and this book is a forceful reminder that we must change our calculus. China’s credible ascent to global power depends on the PRC first securing its own borders: if it cannot, the nation will have to focus its arms and treasure on keeping instability out rather than extending influence far from its shores. If, on the other hand, China can arbitrate peaceful transitions for each of these weak states, the nation will gain prestige and influence worldwide.
China understands what is at stake, and will thus view American initiatives in this de facto sphere of Chinese influence with suspicion. This is the minefield the authors seek to navigate for us, and as such their book is an essential read.
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- Analysis: North Korea after Kim (globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com)
Bipolarity, Proxy Wars, and the Rise of China
In the new Strategic Studies Quarterly from the U.S. Air Force Air University: “Bipolarity, Proxy Wars, and the Rise of China,” by Lieutenant. Colonel Mark Yeisley, USAF. Colonel Yeisley is an assistant professor at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies at Maxwell Air Force Base.
China and Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Missiles
China and Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Missiles: Policy Issues – Open CRS. A Congressional Research Service report looks at China’s role in WMD proliferation around the world and evaluates the effectiveness of the US policy response.
America’s Cyberspace Strategy
Defense.gov News Release: DOD Announces First Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace. This is the first unified strategy that brings together Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force doctrine for cyberwar. The strategy will govern the operations of the U.S. Cyber Command. Click on the link for the document.
Watching the Wall
US Army Border Operations in Germany, 1945-1983, by William E. Stacy. This superb, detailed history offers an interesting retrospective on the people who patrolled the Iron Curtain, and why they did it for over four decades.
How Does China See the U.S. Security Threat
In a concise summary of the single most important international relationship in the world today, Bonnie Glaser deconstructs how China sees the U.S. and its changing role in global security.
What leaps out of Glaser’s summary is that even as China defines itself in terms of the U.S., for all of the U.S. military’s transparency, China is still split in how it sees U.S. intentions in the wake of the global financial crisis. We can ascribe that to one of two things: a lack of sophistication about the U.S. among America-watchers in China (which I don’t deem likely,) or, more likely, that it is in the political interest of different parties inside of China to interpret U.S. moves in different ways.
Glaser, for her part, tracks these internal differences and offers ides for how the U.S. should respond. Excellent analysis.
Will North Korea Start a New Cold War in Asia?
The New Cold War in Asia? | Center for Strategic and International Studies
Victor Cha at the CSIS explores several scenarios for how a crisis over North Korea in 2012 might turn into a larger standoff. Cha’s concise albeit unsurprising analysis correctly identifies Beijing as the reluctant party in a Sino-US-Korean partnership to contain the problem, because China wants stability rather than change on the peninsula.
The buried lede in the story, however, is Cha’s assertion that it is Chinese domestic politics, rather than calculation based on grand strategy, that compels China’s standoffish attitude toward Washington and Seoul. Indeed, Cha notes, Chinese domestic politics are what constrains the PRC from forming a grand strategy in the first place.
This is an assertion that begs for further exploration. What are the domestic political dynamics around the Korea issue? What could change inside of China – or inside of North Korea – to shift China toward the role of strong-armed peacekeeper? To what extend is China already using its leverage to quietly moderate North Korean behavior? What more could/should it do?
Clearly constrained by space, Cha leaves us with these questions. That should not keep the penny from dropping at Pacific Command in Honolulu or the State Department in Washington. The stratgy-making dynamic in China bears a growing resemblance to our own, and a shrinking resemblance to that of the USSR. Until we shift our understanding, it is we as much as the Chinese who risk making Northeast Asia the center of a new Cold War.
How India Sees American Power in Asia
The great challenge in India’s foreign policy is trying to figure out what role the U.S. wants to play – and what it can play, in the Asian security environment. The U.S. and India have grown closer in the wake of the Cold War, but the relationship is far from an aliance.
Terisita Schaffer at CSIS does a superb job examining how India’s views of the U.S. have changed, how the Indians do not see the United States as a power in decline, and how the growing relationship between America and the Subcontinental power is changing the calculus in the regions’s international security.
If you read or plan to read Robert Kaplan‘s excellent Monsoon, this is a superb introduction or companion piece.
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How Australia Sees America’s Priorities in Asia
U.S. Strategic Priorities in Asia.
by Rod Lyon
Australian Strategic Policy Institute
Canberra
Australia is trying to figure out where it will stand as US strategy and capabilities in Asia evolve. This report offers a fascinating mirror view of how the US is seen by one of its closest – and most nervous – allies.
The Unexpurgated Pentagon Papers
Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnem Task force (The “Pentagon Papers“).
U.S. Department of Defense
1967
7,000pp.
In June of 1971, Daniel Ellsberg leaked significant portions of this report, blowing the lid off of the way the United States had conducted the war in Vietnem.
Today, thanks to the National Archives, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, and the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library, the entire, original, unredacted seven thousand page report has been declassified and made available to the public. It also includes background documentation and a complete account of the peace negotiations, none of which were previously available.
That this release will become one of the most important documents in the study of the war is axiomatic. What is better, it is available at no charge to anyone with the desire and bandwidth to download its 1.5 gigabytes of PDF files. Whether you have read the original edition published by the New York Times or not, historians, political scientists, and Vietnam War buffs will want to grab this. I’m scheduling it for when I am back in the US, or someplace with really fast download speeds.
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- Ah, Those “11 Words”! (nsarchive.wordpress.com)
Can China Stop U.S. Airpower?
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Access Challenges and Implications for Airpower in the Western Pacific
by Eric Stephen Gons
Pardee Rand Graduate School
May 2010
266pp.
As China’s military plans against the possibility of a face-off with the United States, the nation’s generals understand that even with recent advances in the quality of Chinese training and equipment, the PLA is not yet ready to go head-to-head with the U.S. military, even in a limited scenario. As a result, China has been developing a warfighting doctrine based on denying U.S. air and naval forces access to the PRC and areas contiguous to its frontiers.
In a readable doctoral dissertation for the RAND Pardee Graduate School, Eric Gons works through whether this is a viable strategy for the PLA (it is), whether the PLA has the weapons and capabilities to implement it (it does), and whether the U.S., and in particular the U.S. Air Force, can operate effectively against that threat. And that is where things get sticky.
Diving into regional politics, geography, weapons capabilities, and training, Gons notes that if the USAF had to fight China in the Western Pacific, it would go in with highly capable aircraft that are totally unsuited for such a conflict. One insightful conclusion about the mix of aircraft the USAF would bring to the fight will certainly sit badly in the laps of Air Force generals:
The current USAF inventory was designed and optimized for European operations, where basing was close to the likely area of conflict. The Pacific theater, especially in light of anti-access threats, is very different.
Even assuming the absolute superiority of US aircraft on a head-to-head basis, Gons notes, the best efforts of the U.S. military could not sustain air superiority over Taiwan, for example, for very long.
As easy as it would be to dismiss Gons as a tool for the Air Force to cage more budget from Congress, one could only do so by ignoring the gentle yet deft excoriation of Air Force doctrine and force structure that Goss administers in his work. The USAF has used the questionable threat of a fight with China over Taiwan to justify spending on a force largely unsuited to that very task. The result is frightening. An examination of the US options mean that any conflict over Taiwan would be uncontainable: it would, by necessity, expand into a much wider war.
Gons calls for a paradigm shift in thinking, but he stops short of explaining what that shift should be. If the U.S. is serious about defending Taiwan against a PLA attack, however, the Department of the Air Force clearly needs a house-cleaning even more serious that the one it got from former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. The USAF needs to become more Asia-facing, more flexible, more expeditionary, and a lot cheaper. Otherwise it is of no use to the nation in a Pacific century.
For their part, the PLA should be quite pleased with this report. It underscores that since the Taiwan Straits crisis in 1996, the PLA has shifted its ponderous force and thinking far enough all but hog-tie the world’s most powerful military in the Western Pacific.
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- Chinese military growth presents more risks (Marine Corps Times) (thuytinhvo.wordpress.com)
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The PLA’s Modernization Challenge
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The U.S. Navy and Air Force have never been shy about naming China as the USA’s “near-peer” competitor, which makes it interesting that the U.S. Army is a little more circumspect.
In an excellent analysis that is a tad old but by no means dated, Michael Hendricks at the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College explains the barriers that bar the way for the modernization of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), not least of which are domestic politics and an ongoing battle over doctrine. Hendricks also makes a forceful case for military-to-military ties that we all need to keep in mind as those relationships wax and wane.
Well worth the read for the sober and reflective look at a highly politicized topic.
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Dealing with a Nuclear Iran
I am seeing something of a shift among international relations specialists, in particular among the realists, with regards to a nuclear Iran. Following the lead of some of the less ideological experts like Thomas P.M. Barnett, many are contributing to a growing body of literature that deals not with how to keep Iran from getting the bomb, but in how do deal with Iran once it has thermonuclear weapons.
Among those specialists are the team at the RAND Corporation who collaborated on Iran’s Nuclear Future: Critical U.S. Policy Choices. In the book, they examine the challenges Iran faces in its national security, the role nuclear weapons might play in those challenges, and lays out the options open to the U.S. and the world in ensuring that the Islamic Republic’s plutonium scimitar remains sheathed without having to cave to nuclear blackmail.
Quite apart from the case of Iran, learning to deal with a world in which slow proliferation is a fact of life will be one of the great geopolitical challenges of the 21st century. What I suspect is that this slim but thoughtful volume will form the first of a growing body of work that will fundamentally redefine the conduct of international relations in the coming decades.
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- Iran shows UN official all nuclear sites (nation.com.pk)
Russian Nukes and European Security
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Over the past 22 years, the world has grown accustomed to thinking of the Russian military as a decrepit relic of the Cold War. For those who are watching carefully, there are growing signs that the bear is stirring from its post-Soviet hibernation. A recent naval deployment to the Caribbean, resumed long-range bomber patrols, and the conflict in Georgia several years ago are signs that Russia seeks to once again wield a respectable sword.
Part of that sword is Russia’s nuclear arsenal, now considerably smaller than that sported by the USSR, but substantial nonetheless. In 2010, the Russian armed forces laid out a doctrine under which such weapons would be used in the defense (broadly defined) of the motherland. That Russian leaders are once again contemplating the use of such weapons in combat has put Europe on alert.
In Nuclear Deterrence in Europe: Russian Approaches to a New Environment and Implications for the United States, James Quinlivan and Olga Oliker examine Russia’s new nuclear doctrine in the context of how Russia sees itself and its interests in modern Europe. In a post Cold War environment, the nuclear tripwire in Europe is no more as sensitive as it once was, and arguably it rests much further East. At the same time, as the authors point out, Russia sees its interests extending well beyond its geographic borders to countries with which it has “historic” ties.
The questions seem esoteric, but they define the extent to which a conflict with Russia in or around Europe would deteriorate into an atomic slugfest, even of a mere “tactical” nature. Does Russia see its interests extending into the former republics of the USSR, or indeed further into Europe? What is more, as Russian conventional forces are little match for its possible opponents, does this make it more likely that Russia will employ nuclear weapons in a future conflict?
The authors offer no easy answers, but they provide a path forward that makes it possible to act without seeing into the minds of the Russian leadership. Winston Churchill once wrote that, “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”
To their credit, Quinlivan and Oliker recognize that the formulation of Russian policy and action is no more transparent today than it was in Stalin’s Russia. By eschewing an updated version of the Kremlin-watchers craft from the Cold War and focusing instead on Russia’s stated interests, the authors begin to frame Europe’s response to a revived bear.
One final quibble I have with the authors is in their limiting the scope of their report to Russia’s policy vis-a-vis Europe. While they did so in order to keep the scope of the book manageable, or to ensure they did not venture beyond the ken of their own expertise, in so doing they create the illusion that Russia calculates its interests and actions one hemisphere at a time.
That is not the case. Russia and its leaders see themselves as much an Asia power as a European one, and the economic importance of Siberia, the Pacific, and the ‘Stans is now at least on a par with that of Europe. Russian irredentism is as strong in Asia as it is in the Black Sea, and even at the height of the German invasion of the USSR during World War II, Stalin never calculated his next move against Hitler without taking the situation in Asia into consideration. As such, a more encompassing study is in order, one that offers a full appreciation of why Russia sometimes sees itself as beset from all sides, and the strategic calculus that has developed as a result.
This is, however, a quibble. What the authors have wrought is the first of many studies we are likely to see of a re-emergent Russia and the new role it will play on the world stage.
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The Air Force and the War on Drugs
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The conflicts elsewhere in the world have cast the War on Drugs into something of a popular eclipse: it is just not something you hear about much, until the Coast Guard, Border Patrol, or a local police force captures a healthy-sized cache of drugs from someplace. The matter remains at the forefront of many minds, however, not least among those in the Pentagon, where the inter-agency effort to stem the flow of narcotics into North America remains an important, albeit not focal, raison d’etre.
In The Latin American Drug Trade: Scope, Dimensions, Impact and Response, homeland security expert Peter Chalk does offers a detailed update on how the drug trade operates in a day of Mexican cartels and mini-submarines. While the purpose of the study is to examine the role the U.S. Air Force might play in the War on Drugs, most of the book delves into the gritty detail of how drugs move from Latin American fields into American cities.
Smugglers have taken some innovative steps in the drug trade in response to more sophisticated U.S. efforts to stop it, but at its heart the interdiction battle is still a cat-and-mouse game that will get worse until either the entire supply – or most of the demand – dries up. There is no sense in making it easy for criminals, however, and ten years into The Long War, there have been technical and tactical innovations that can be readily applied in the War on Drugs specifically, and in homeland security more broadly.
Chalk’s work is a superb primer for those interested in the narcotics trade, in transnational crime, and in the role the armed forces should be playing in that effort.
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- Drug Legalization in The United States (socyberty.com)
Demographics and Global Security
Image by The U.S. Army via Flickr
When I was in high school, I had a European History teacher who explained to us how countries with an large cohort of breeding-age young men relative to the rest of the population were more likely to make war on their neighbors. The argument was simple: too much young testosterone lying around was a sufficient domestic political liability that it needed to be spent in the advancement of national interests abroad. Hence, war.
I have always found this a tad deterministic, so I was pleased to see Martin Libicki and his co-authors publish Global Demographic Change and its Implications for Military Power. While the authors stop short of a full debunking of the population pressure theory of war, they analyze it in a modern context, incorporating historic data and using data to call into question the prospect of a future (2011-2050) conflict driven by “too many boys.”
The examination is thorough and convincing, but I have to wonder whether or not India’s growing working-age population vis-a-vis China will not, at some point, offer India a manpower advantage over China in any trans-Himalayan conflict. China’s effort to control its population and put its young people to work in more productive pursuits has been admirable, but India has not kept up to the same extent by either measure. Left with lots of young people, would not India choose to reclaim disputed territories on the Chinese border versus allowing their frustrations to fester into sectarian violence?
An excellent and worthy read, especially for those of us focused on Asian security.
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After 9/11: Have We Come A Long Way, Baby?
In a few weeks, we will be marking the 10th anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attacks on the United States. The retrospectives have already begun, including one triumphalist piece I glanced in the Huffington Post this morning that suggested that Al-Queda is essentially collapsing. While I think the latter might be stretching things a bit, there is little question that we are on the verge of a milestone if not a point in what used to be called the Global War on Terror, and has since been renamed The Long War: the great bogeyman is dead, the U.S. is leaving Iraq, and attention is shifting back to southern Asia.
There are still unforeseen challenges and incidents ahead of us: whatever we have accomplished in the past decade, the level of discontent in what Thomas P.M. Barnett calls “the non-integrating gap” running from Northern Africa across to Eastern Indonesia remains high. Those regions are bound to produce individuals and groups who believe that their only course of action is to foment death and destruction.
For that reason, a retrospective at this point is fitting, and the RAND Corporation has crafted one in The Long Shadow of 9/11: America’s Response to Terrorism. The book probes how the U.S. as a government and as a nation responded to 9/11, and the effects that has had on the country and, to a lesser extent, the world. The essays in the book cover everything from military readiness to economic policy to health care implications of terrorism, and significantly warns against the government’s tendency to think too short-term.
They authors take especial aim at the government’s obsession with airline security, and note that the problem is not the increase in security, but the belief that better security (or even better intelligence) will stop the attacks. The aim must continue to be addressing terrorism at its roots, not at its fruits.
This is an essential read for anyone interested in U.S. domestic politics or international relations. While we are preoccupied these days by such mind-numbing sideshows as the budget crisis and the coming election, it is also time to hold up a mirror and look at what has happened to the country as a result of the attacks of September 11.
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The British Army and Modern Counterinsurgency
The attention given to failed efforts to contain insurgencies like Vietnam tend to drown out the cases of successful outcomes where insurgent groups were defeated. Of the successes, the one that proponents and practitioners of counterinsurgency continue to come back to is Britain’s defeat of Malayan communists between 1947 and 1960. Given the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, interest in the lessons of the Malayan Emergency is high again.
As a result, there is plenty of current literature on the topic, the best of which is probably John A. Nagl’s Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. Contemporary accounts, on the other hand, drawn as they are from the context of the times, can often be more enlightening as they lack the additional haze that comes with the passage of time. Such an account is Riley Sunderland’s Army Operations in Malaya, 1947-1960.
Given unprecedented access to the files of the War Office in the United Kingdom, Sunderland made his study just as the U.S. was expanding its involvement in Vietnam. The intent, therefore, was to give the U.S. Army as much insight as possible into how to fight a successful counterinsurgency. The work is interesting not only because it provides some interesting perspective on what the Americans did and did not learn before escalating the Vietnam effort, but also because it informs the today’s conflicts without using Vietnam as a yardstick.
Even a superficial analysis suggests that the U.S. Army could have learned little from the Malayan experience. The British succeeded in their effort because they were able to contain the growth of the insurgency long enough to secure the countryside. By the time the U.S. showed up in Vietnam in force, not only was the guerrilla infrastructure well into its second decade of development, it had a sympathetic and supportive sovereign country next door to sustain it. Nonetheless, some of America’s more successful tactics in Vietnam (the USMC’s Combined Action Platoons, for example) were rooted in the Malayan playbook.
Sunderland’s account is a testament to the need to stop insurgencies early, and the futility of fighting them once they have reached a critical mass. For anyone interested in whether and how it is possible to quell an uprising with armed force, this book will provide much food for thought.
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Bringing the Bad Boys Home
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One of the most important aspects of a successful counterinsurgency effort is how the government handles former insurgents once they have effectively switched sides. Simply letting them go leaves them susceptible to the same forces that put them into the insurgency in the first place, but relocation leaves them both disconnected and alienated, once again making them perfect recruiting fodder for the movements they had left.
In Reintegrating Afghan Insurgents, Seth Jones examines the experience in Afghanistan and comes up with recommendations for turning former insurgents into productive members of society, even as the insurgency continues.
Jones’ recommendations are operational rather than political or strategic: to a certain extent he assumes that the insurgency is on the wrong side of history. Nonetheless, what makes this a worthy read is that the conclusions apply not only to Afghanistan, but to any insurgency. Jones keeps his recommendations short and to the point, making this accessible to the layman as well as the expert. Free download.
Can the Navy Build Bases at Sea?
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Even as its mission expands to include a wide range of operations outside of the scope of traditional naval warfare, the U.S. Navy has realized that it can no longer count on land bases in friendly countries to accomplish the tasks assigned to it. A superb example is the challenges the USN faced in delivering sustained humanitarian relief in the face of the utter devastation of the Haiti earthquake.
For that reason, the Navy has developed a concept it calls “Sea Basing,” an operational capability designed to enable the Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and non-military agencies to carry out a range of military, diplomatic, and humanitarian operations far from American shores without having to worry about friendly ports and airports nearby.
Doing so, however, is not simply a matter of sending a few more cargo ships or helicopter carriers out to sea: it will require an entirely new set of capabilities for a Navy used to using shore facilities when deployed far from home. Sea Basing: Ensuring Joint Force Access from the Sea is the report of the National Research Council on what technologies and capabilities the Navy will need to implement this concept in the coming years, from air and sea platforms that will be needed to the systems and doctrine necessary to make them work.
Is the 1,000 Ship Navy Workable?
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In what can only count as a major step forward in Pentagon thinking, former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Mullen put forth the idea of a 1,000 ship navy made up not of a U.S. navy trebled in size, but of the U.S. navy as a part of an operationally-linked multi-national and multi-agency force. Instead of seeing the U.S. as naval hegemon, the navy’s command saw it instead as the vanguard of a global naval force capable of sustained, integrated operations.
Leaving aside the politics, which are considerable, there are technical and operational challenges that should be no news to anyone familiar with the history of NATO, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), and any of a dozen or more multinational naval forces in the past three decades. As much a blueprint as a reality check, the National Research Council’s Maritime Security Partnerships is an essential read in understanding the scope of options available to the world’s navies in countering anything from a major disaster to, say, the emergence of an aggressive navy from one or more BRIC countries.
Where Warships Come From
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For nearly as long as man has been trying to master the element of water, he has been waging war from platforms floating precariously on its surface. For much of the history of naval warfare, victory was decided by a combination of heavy firepower and the maneuvering to put broadsides of hot steel onto target.
The past century has been something of an anomaly. With the end of the transition from wind to steam as the locomotive force for naval vessels, technology began to grow in importance as a decisive factor in naval success. World War II in particular saw technology play a decisive role in the ultimate outcome. Radar, sonar, and forward-launched depth-charges helped win the Battle of the Atlantic. American inferiority in torpedos led to some serious losses and untold missed opportunities at the beginning of the war against Japan, solved only when fuses and guidance systems were improved: the U.S. Navy overcame a similar deficit in aircraft performance versus its Japanese counterparts. And superior ship design helped win the Battle of Midway and every amphibious landing after 1942.
Little wonder, then, that the Navy puts its smartest thinkers into the business of thinking about technology and, specifically, ship design. We now live in the age of stealth, missiles, terrorist attacks, and what has become to be called green-water or littoral warfare, not to mention the growing need for energy efficiency, lower staffing levels, and environmental friendliness in construction, operation, and decommissioning. The complex demands placed on today’s ships have driven up the costs faster than they have raised operational effectiveness. This means that the science of naval ship design is more exact than ever.
In Naval Engineering in the 21st Century: The Science and Technology Foundation for Future Naval Fleets, the National Science Foundation looks into whether the US actually has the capabilities to design such ships, and describes what will be necessary in order for the US to just be able to forge the navy it will need in the coming decades.
Whether the nation is ready, willing, or able to do so is another matter, but this is an area the report probes tangentially. Great design need not be expensive, but it requires superior work in advance to ensure the nation buys an excellent navy on the cheap. Given the sea service’s consistent failure in this regard over the past two decades, this book is certain to be a seminal work in determining the future of American sea power.
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