Diplomacy & Crisis News

Why the tech giant is on the wrong side of history yet again.

Stephen Silver

Politics, Americas

In the meantime, more rounds of stimulus appear unlikely to arrive, at least not from the federal government.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The borrowing took place in 2020 before it was clear that more stimulus would pass from the federal government, although just such a bill was passed in March of 2021 after President Joe Biden took office. The American Rescue Plan Act, in addition to its checks to individuals, provided a massive amount of aid to state and local governments. 

Back in December, the city of Chicago took out $500 million in short-term debt. More recently, the city announced that it will be using money from the American Rescue Plan Act to pay down that debt, according to a Marketwatch report.

The report explained how the maneuver worked. 

“Last November, facing a near–$800 million fiscal 2020 budget gap, due mostly to the pandemic, city managers decided to take on $450 million in short-term debt, plus interest. City managers reached out to several banks and found JPMorgan Chase & Co. offered the best rate. The deal was finalized in December. The one-year credit line offered a set of advantages. Most notably, it bought the city time to see whether more fiscal stimulus money would become available.” 

The borrowing took place in 2020 before it was clear that more stimulus would pass from the federal government, although just such a bill was passed in March of 2021 after President Joe Biden took office. The American Rescue Plan Act, in addition to its checks to individuals, provided a massive amount of aid to state and local governments. 

Some have questioned whether the move on Chicago’s part was proper. 

“State and local governments aren’t supposed to borrow to keep their budgets balanced,” according to the Marketwatch report. “While many use lines of credit or short-term debt (often called Revenue Anticipation Notes), those are primarily for expected, ongoing revenues that just happen to be lumpy throughout the fiscal year, leaving certain periods of time with no money coming in to support ongoing spending.”

Amanda Kass, who was a source for the Marketwatch story, talked about Chicago’s move on her blog. She said that while the move itself isn’t particularly problematic, the lack of transparency is. 

“One reason the Mayor’s ARPA spending plans are confusing for a general audience is that the discourse used to explain the plans is largely directed at the municipal bond market, including credit rating agencies, bank underwriters, and investors,” Kass wrote in the blog post. “At the May 2021, investor conference, city officials made it clear that the Mayor is proposing to use 40% of Chicago’s ARPA funds to pay-off short-term borrowing and cancel long-term debt refunding and restructuring (or “scoop-and-toss”) that the City Council had previously approved (see a screenshot of the slide below).”

In the meantime, more rounds of stimulus appear unlikely to arrive, at least not from the federal government. None of the negotiations in Washington have anything to do with additional checks, and it does not appear that political will is there in either party to pass more checks for everyone, or massive aid to cities and states.

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for the National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver. This article is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Sebastien Roblin

Security, Americas

Meet Skunk Works: America’s Secret Weapon Program 

Key point: This special division helped to invent many important weapons, including stealth planes. What is the history of this amazing group of engineers?

In June 1943, aeronautical engineer Clarence “Kelly” Johnson received a momentous request. The Nazis were only a year away from deploying the first operational jet fighter into service in World War II, which would have a tremendous speed advantage over Allied piston-engine fighters. The Pentagon wanted Johnson to develop an operational jet fighter, using then-new turbojet engines as quickly as possible—and it didn’t want Johnson to wait for the fine print to be signed in the contract.

This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest. ​

Kelly was told he had just five months (150 days) to produce a flying next-generation jet prototype.

The Michiganian of Swedish descent had originally joined Lockheed as a tool designer with an $83 monthly salary. However, after devising an innovative fix for the Model 10 airliner, he rose through the ranks to become the company’s chief designer in 1938.

Johnson’s first major military design was the P-38 Lightning, a very fast, hard-hitting and far-flying twin-engine fighter that used a twin-boom configuration unlike any other aircraft then in service. Johnson assembled a small team of engineers, walled them off from other company operations, and settled on the Lightning’s design after exploring numerous other unconventional concepts.

Johnson used similar methods to structure his XP-80 project at a new, top-secret facility in Burbank, California, adjoining a local airport. Johnson handpicked a team of thirty engineers and thirty mechanics who began working on the XP-80 under the shadow of a huge circus tent. One of them was a Cherokee mathematician named Mary Golda Ross, who had earlier helped fix aerodynamic flaws in the P-38s and became the first Native American flight engineer.

A nearby chemical factory nearby caused an unpleasant stench to drift over facility, leading to the nickname “Skunk Work,” adapted from a foul-smelling moonshine factory depicted in the satiric comic strip Li'l’ Abner. Later, copyright concerns led the nickname to be changed just as aptly to “Skunk Work,” reflected in the branch’s skunk logo to this day.

Johnson’s management philosophy, later consolidated in a list of “Fourteen Principles,” focused on moving rapidly to prototype development rather than sweating every last detail; maintaining creative autonomy from other company operations; remaining externally secretive, but transparent to government clients; keeping diligent monthly accounting of expenses to avoid cost overruns; and minimizing bureaucratic red-tape of all varieties by simply implementing fixes instead of subjecting every little change to review by committee.

Just 143 days later—seven days ahead of schedule—the Skunk Works team had produced a flying XP-80 prototype which would become the U.S.’s first operational jet fighter. Though too late to fly more than a few patrols at the end of World War II, the F-80 Shooting Star production model would see extensive action in the Korean War, and possibly scored the first jet-on-jet kill in history.

Design Philosophy

Engineering cutting-edge aircraft requires both creative vision and scientific rigor. Innovative out-of-the-box ideas must be subjected to mathematical scrutiny and then relentlessly tested to determine whether they actually work when subjected to the harsh and often inscrutable laws of physics. And unforeseen problems inevitably crop up.

Project managers need the freedom to explore diverse concepts and repeatedly iterate upon the more promising ones until they deliver results, while exercising the discipline to prevent projects from running way over schedule and budget, like the infamous Spruce Goose—a huge mega-transport plane that only flew once for thirty seconds.

These qualities fly in the face of the usual bureaucracy required in the military industrial-sector. Governments, understandably, want to ensure every tax dollar is spent on projects with low risks of failure—and examples of expensive projects sucking billions of dollars in funding only to fail abound.

Johnson’s high-independence, low-red tape model for the Skunk Works proved so successful a template that “Skunk Works” became a byword for any task force within a company assigned additional independence to pursue innovative, cutting-edge projects. Lockheed’s competitor Boeing, for example, has a Phantom Works division which recently was awarded a contract for a new tanker drone.

In the 1950s, Johnson was made the manager of the Burbank facility, technically designated the “Advanced Development Projects.” Under his management, the ADP developed a remarkable number of revolutionary new aircraft—many of which made their mark on American history.

The U-2, for example, was a bizarre super-high-flying spy plane originally modeled off a concept for a spy glider. A U-2 spy mission brought the United States to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union when it photographed Soviet nuclear missiles recently deployed to Cuba in 1962.

By the late 1950s, however, Johnson was aware the U-2 could not fly high enough to evade Soviet missiles and interceptors. Thus the Skunk Works then set out to develop the Blackbird family of aircraft—codenamed Archangel—that would use speed and radar stealth for protection. Lockheed had to sneakily purchase titanium from the Soviet Union through shell companies and develop new tools to work the super-hard metal.

The Blackbird was certainly fast, able to blaze past missiles while cruising at Mach 3.2, but even its angular profile failed to evade radar detection. In the mid-1970, the Skunk Works made a second go at developing a stealth jet. Johnson, who was then retiring, originally proposed curved surfaces for the new stealth plane. However, his friend Ben Rich convinced him that stealth could be achieved with faceted surfaces that the design computers of the time were more capable of handling.

The concept led to the aerodynamically unstable Have Blue prototype tested in Area 51, that evolved into the faceted F-117 Nighthawk attack jet. Though the Nighthawk’s capabilities were limited in many respects, it was the first true stealth aircraft to enter operational service.

In 1989, the Skunk Works moved to a new facility in Palmdale, California. Johnson passed away the following year. By then the division was working on two new projects that will continue to define U.S. airpower well into the twenty-first century: the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II.

The twin-engine Raptor essentially married the high-performance characteristics of fourth-generation fighters like the F-15 Eagle with the stealth capabilities that far exceeded those of the Nighthawk—resulting in the world’s reigning air superiority fighter.

The single-engine F-35 fulfilled a very different concept of an affordable multirole stealth fighter that could be exported abroad and operated by the Marines, Navy and Air Force. However, designers in the Skunk Works again pursued an innovative but still controversial solution: instead of pursuing high kinematic flight performance as was done for the F-22, the F-35 instead relies on advanced sensors and computers to stay out of the detection range of opposing fighters or air defense missiles, and either engage them with long-range missiles or shuffle that targeting data to another “shooter.”

Though Kelly’s earlier projects certainly experienced growing pains, the F-35 has proven slower and rockier than its predecessors. Its developers intended to build a versatile swiss-army knife of a plane that could be upgraded with new capabilities via software patches. The many ambitious new technologies proved difficult to integrate, leading to major delays and cost overruns.

Today, the Skunk Works appears to be working on another unconventional project to build a (likely unmanned) hypersonic spy/bomber jet unofficially dubbed the SR-72. It has also developed numerous spy drones that remained veiled in secrecy, particularly the RQ-170 stealth drone.

As jet fighters grow more expensive and vastly more complex, the innovative high-speed project management methods used by the Skunk Works may prove harder to sustain due to the need to integrate more and more advanced avionics and computers developed by industrial partners.

Nonetheless, Johnson’s innovation-focused approach made an invaluable contribution to an understanding in sectors ranging well beyond military aviation that groundbreaking achievements sometimes require allowing a small team of brilliant thinkers to assume more risk and responsibility.

Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest. ​

Image: U.S. Air Force

James Holmes

Military Affairs, Global

Ship types have displaced one another from the cores of fleets across the decades and centuries. But maybe it’s time to unseat the "ship" itself. 

Here's What You Need to Remember: Customizing a fleet for likely battle settings constitutes the challenge before U.S. maritime strategists and the warriors who will prosecute strategy. Breaking the mold might mean demoting the ship from its central place in sea power. It certainly demands a supple way of thinking about warlike encounters at different places and times, and against different antagonists.

Is the “ship” still the arbiter—and the proper unit of measurement—of naval power? Perhaps not. Maybe fleet designers need to shatter their fealty to tradition and do something altogether new to win future high-seas wars. They may need to fashion a new U.S. Navy “fleet” that incorporates ships alongside such not-strictly-naval implements as unmanned vehicles prowling sea and sky, U.S. Air Force bombers unleashing anti-ship missiles or minefields, or even U.S. Army rocketeers equipped to pummel enemy ships and warbirds. Artfully constituted, this hybrid fleet will bring to bear any asset able to shape events at sea.

And so it should. When tabulating naval power, estimate strength relative to opponents; don’t count up widgets except insofar as they buttress strength.

Such ships as help make up this new-age fleet may look drastically different from traditional men-of-war. They could be winsome diesel-electric submarines of a sort the U.S. Navy hasn’t operated in decades. Converted merchantmen or even superempowered fishing craft could act as fighting ships. Vessels could be manufactured at foreign yards or leased from foreign navies or commercial fleets. Imagination must roam free when you need lots of platforms in a hurry, and on the cheap, to haul ordnance to scenes of battle and deposit it on target.

This wouldn’t be the first time some mix of gee-whiz technology and novel warmaking methods turned the world upside down. According to maritime historian Julian S. Corbett a “revolution beyond all previous experience” upended fleet design more than a century ago, when the sea mine, torpedo, and submarine debuted—rendering hulking battleships and cruisers suddenly vulnerable. The aircraft carrier eclipsed the battleship during World War II. The nuclear-powered submarine has arguably eclipsed the carrier since the Cold War.

And on the rhythm of naval history goes. No ship type rules the waves forever.

That being the case, it may be possible to wring decisive combat power out of the current U.S. Navy fleet of 280-odd ships without building up to 355 hulls, the figure Congress wrote into law to help the navy cope with this age of great-power competition against the likes of China and Russia. Whether such a feat is possible is one question among many tackled by last week’s “Breaking the Mold 2.0” workshop in Newport. My boss, Rear Adm. Jeff Harley, charged the gathering with devising “novel and radical” ideas to break the “mold” manifest in orthodox thinking.

Ship types have displaced one another other from the cores of fleets across the decades and centuries. Maybe it’s time to unseat the ship itself. That would fulfill Admiral Harley’s mandate on behalf of radicalism.

Whence comes orthodoxy? It stems in part from human nature, as transcribed into institutional and even national culture. Philosophers warn that the timber of humanity primes us to project past trends into the future, assuming that past performance guarantees future results. Breaking the mold is hard absent some cataclysm that breaks it for us. The carrier and its complement of fighter and attack planes existed at the outbreak of war in 1941 thanks to naval visionaries. Yet it still took the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor to jolt U.S. naval potentates out of their battleship-centric worldview.

Bureaucracy is like a machine. It exists to perform a repertoire of routine functions over and over again, the same way every time. This is its blessing and its curse. It handles mundane tasks with efficiency, yet it prejudges the answers to important questions. When the time comes to retire a ship or aircraft type, the bureaucratic machinery tends to replace it with an improved version of the old—a new ship or aircraft that executes the same basic missions with better sensors and armaments. Lawmakers and the electorate reinforce this mass-production mindset. Try explaining to Congress or the American people that the U.S. Navy need not be made up of ships!

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The workshop organizers saw tapping outsiders and youthful voices as one way to smash the mold of conventional maritime thought. Three-quarters of the Breaking the Mold attendees were new to the series, which got its start last March. A third of them held the rank of O-5 or below, meaning they were U.S. Navy commanders or below or their equivalents from the Marine Corps, Army, and Air Force. A handful of whippersnapper civilian officials also took part. This was no colloquium for gray-haired eminences. Not entirely, at any rate.

One imagines mixing youth with age would have set Theodore Roosevelt’s heart aglow. After all, this was someone who empowered youth and moxie. When junior officer Lieutenant W. S. Sims saw his proposals for improving the dismal state of U.S. Navy gunfire control rebuffed by senior leadership, he wrote directly to President Roosevelt—and the president put him in charge of target practice for the whole navy. TR steamed to Newport late in his presidency to preside over a conference designed to break the mold in battleship design, then the state of the art in naval technology. The “Battleship Conference” gave junior to mid-career officers a voice vis-à-vis the highest authority.

And TR seemed sincere about affording youngsters their say. Late in 1908 the president informed Congress that “wise radicalism and wise conservatism go hand in hand, one bent on progress, the other bent on seeing that no change is made unless in the right direction.” At the time Roosevelt was musing about social and industrial conditions that demanded progressive reform, not about naval or military affairs. Still, his formula—mold-breakers push for change while conservatives try to preserve what exists and works—bolsters the likelihood of productive debate.

Including debates about maritime strategy, doctrine, and force design. Wise radicals formulate wacky-sounding hypotheses. Wise conservatives object that all such hypotheses must undergo the test of reality before the establishment endorses them. Naysayers demand proof, insisting—rightly—that to leap without looking courts disaster.

In theory, then, the push-and-pull interplay between radicalism and conservatism should beget an experimental ethos within the sea services. Young Turks in the ranks might decry gauging naval power by the number of ships in the inventory. That’s oldthink, they might say. Ripostes from the old guard would accent the perils and downsides of decoupling force design from time-tested methods. Rigor in field trials would be oldtimers’ watchword. Insurgents would hit the gas on change, traditionalists the brakes. The scientific method would help the U.S. Navy identify and avoid dead ends and stay moored in reality while also embracing ideas that prove their worth.

Grandmaster Carl von Clausewitz would nod knowingly at this debate. “The best strategy,” proclaims the Prussian sage, “is always to be very strong; first in general, and then at the decisive point. Apart from the effort needed to create military strength, which does not always emanate from the general, there is no higher and simpler law of strategy than that of keeping one’s forces concentrated. No force should ever be detached from the main body unless the need is definite and urgent.”

Ground warfare between contiguous nineteenth-century European states constituted Clausewitz’s frame of reference. He was a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, with their massed formations of infantrymen, cavalry, and artillerymen. Yet he refuses to be held captive by his times. He declines to designate specific army formations or weaponry as universal repositories of combat power. The point of strategy, maintains Clausewitz, is to concentrate superior firepower at the decisive place on the map at the decisive time in order to overcome the foe. To be stronger when and where it matters, in other words, while abjuring lesser commitments that attenuate battle strength.

The Prussian master declines to specify what form strength should take. It seems the delivery system for firepower represents a secondary matter for him.

Clausewitz paid waterborne combat next to no attention, but he would doubtless project his principles seaward if asked. He would exhort U.S. naval officialdom to amass superior strength, making itself more powerful on the whole than likely antagonists. And he would urge strategists to study where likely hotspots lie on the nautical chart and to devise forces to make America the dominant contender there. There is no preordained determinant of high-seas battle power.

What type of fleet the U.S. Navy and its fellow services field may vary from theater to theater and contingency to contingency—and should. Carrier battle groups might remain the primary implements for waging, say, expeditions off the northern coast of Norway or Russia, where land-based weaponry is sparse. Seagoing forces stand mainly alone. Light surface combatants, conventional submarines, minelayers, and missile-armed ground forces might be the instruments of choice for slamming shut the first island chain to Chinese shipping and aircraft. Nuclear-powered attack subs might play the dominant part in Eastern Mediterranean or South China Sea imbroglios. U.S. Coast Guard cutters might spearhead operations in Arctic climes.

Customizing a fleet for likely battle settings constitutes the challenge before U.S. maritime strategists and the warriors who will prosecute strategy. Breaking the mold might mean demoting the ship from its central place in sea power. It certainly demands a supple way of thinking about warlike encounters at different places and times, and against different antagonists. The right fleet inventory might include 280 ships or even fewer, or it might include 355 or far more.

It depends. There’s no substitute for exercising imagination in an effort to foresee what prospective adversaries want at different places, how much they want it, how many and what forces they might deploy to get it, and how they might wield those forces in times of strife. These—not arbitrary ship counts—are the metrics against which American sea power will be judged. Only through such acts of foresight can U.S. naval commanders and their political masters determine the composition of the future fleet as well as the best ways to handle the fleet in action.

TR and Clausewitz would tell wise radicals and wise conservatives to hop to it.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone.

This piece first appeared earlier and is being reprinted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Muhammad Bakr Ghbeis, Mohammed Alzoubi

Syrian Civil War, Middle East

The Syrian uprising was born in Daraa, and it would be poetic justice after all the loss if it is there that the Assad regime goes away for good.

The Syrian uprising erupted in the southern province of Daraa when kids wrote on public walls “your turn has come Doctor Assad.” Since then, Daraa has proven to be one of the icons of the Syrian uprising and calls for freedom, democracy, self-governance, and rule of law in Syria. The Assad government has responded to those calls with live bullets, siege, murder, and destruction. The city and province of Daraa hold a critical geopolitical role in the country. It borders two of the United States’ strategic partners, Jordan and Israel. The main trade pathways through Syria must go through Daraa, from the Arabian Gulf countries all the way to Lebanon, Turkey, and Europe. The Nassib Jaber border crossing port represents the busiest Syrian port of its kind.

I, Dr. Ghbeis, write as an American medical doctor of Syrian descent. I was educated in Syria and the United States, and in the past decade returned to Syria several times to support those Syrians most in medical need. I witnessed first-hand the devastating, inhuman conditions internally displaced Syrians have gone through. I witnessed how whole neighborhoods have been affected by a strategy of siege by the Assad government and its backers, which have targeted the most vulnerable components of society in Syria, the elderly, and children.

Unfortunately, that same strategy of siege has been used by the Syrian government on Daraa al-Balad for the past several weeks. As a result, the humanitarian and medical conditions of 55,000 men, women, and children have become unbearable. The regime is using collective punishment measures and reprisal against large groups of civilian populations in Daraa, both of which are recognized crimes against humanity. Furthermore, in Daraa, all the medical supplies provided to local hospitals and clinics by western NGOs were stolen by Assad’s government-backed militia for financial gain on the black market. What makes the situation even worse is the lack of doctors in Daraa because they, too, were targeted by the Syrian government since the peaceful uprising began a decade ago. Many doctors have fled, but others have not made it out. They and their families were assassinated before they could get out from under the siege.

Since the uprising began, Bashar al-Assad has made every effort to label those opposing it, including doctors, as terrorists. The regime’s false narratives include stating that Daraa’s residents are seeking to build a radical Islamic government in the southern part of Syria. In fact, as time passed, the province has proven to be one of the most resilient against extremist ideologies, despite the terrible hardship. ISIS was unable to hold territory in the area despite the government’s efforts to infiltrate it with ISIS cells, such as the “Yarmouk Martyrs” militia. Free Syrian Army (FSA) brigades in Daraa seized the opportunity to fight extremist groups, including the Yarmouk Martyrs, and for several years, up until 2018, they maintained a tough stand against these groups. In 2018, Daraa province was handed over to Assad under the guise of “reconstitution. At that point, Assad claimed that his regime would take extremist elements and move them to other territories in the Syrian desert and areas near Deir ez-Zor under the watchful eye of the regime and its backers.

Following a 2018 agreement, brokered mainly by Russia and the Trump administration, control of the southern region of Syria was handed back to Assad. Among other things agreed upon in 2018, it is important to highlight the presence of Iranian militias and the requirement to keep them at a distance of no less than fifty miles from the Syrian borders adjacent to Jordan and Israel. This condition, however, was never met. On the other hand, a number of other key provisions in the agreement were met, including regime forces not being allowed to enter Daraa; local FSA fighters handing over heavy weapons and maintaining only small arms, and some of the FSA fighters being rolled into a new brigade under Russian command.

In the meantime, Iranian militias were infiltrating Syrian communities and neighborhoods in different ways across the country. Some of the militias operate under the leadership of Lebanese Hezbollah and other militias under different names, such as Fatemiyoun and Zainabiyoun. These foreign militias move around Syrian society wearing the same military fatigues as members of Assad’s army. Some are organized under the Syrian Army’s 4th Division, which is commanded by Assad’s brother, Maher. This Syrian army division is fully controlled by Iranian interests. The siege in Daraa and the effort to displace the 55,000 Syrian civilians from their homes there in order to tighten control of the southern Syrian region was notably conducted by Assad’s government forces and Iranian militias.

Iran is clearly seeking to control areas in southern Syria, such as Daraa, in order to expand its influence in a wider space in Syria. Iran had done the same in southern Lebanon with Hezbollah. Eventually, Iranian influence expanded in Lebanon to areas far beyond southern Lebanon including the capital, Beirut. In fact, Iran would like to use southern Syria as it did southern Lebanon all in the name of the goals of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. 

The Iranian initiative in Syria is unacceptable to the people of Daraa. The opposite is true. While the residents of southern Lebanon may have shared sectarian beliefs with Iran, the same is not the case in southern Syria, which is a melting pot of Muslims, Christians, and Druze, and the Shia sect presence is weak in the area.

Prior to 2018, the United States supported Syrian society in southern Syria and backed FSA fighters as well. It was a positive influence on local Syrian communities, in places like Daraa, helping to maintain stability and counter efforts at radicalization as well. However, in 2018, American engagement and influence were lost in that part of Syria to Russia and Iran. The recent escalation in Daraa presents an opportunity for the Biden administration to re-engage communities in this critical region of Syria and impact them in positive ways. Such U.S. engagement will in turn put pressure on Assad and his backers to re-engage diplomatically toward a negotiated settlement on the future of Syria.

The recent events in Daraa make it very clear that the communities in southern Syria are not interested in taking orders from the regime despite the terrible human toll suffered because of it. It would be timely indeed if the United States and its allies fully understood this point and led a diplomatic initiative to end Syria’s decade-long humanitarian crisis by calling the regime to the table and insisting that it compensate the millions of Syrians that have suffered from its policies. Assad will not compromise if he is not made to understand that to do otherwise is far more dangerous for him. Daraa and southern Syria represent an opening to a much-needed political transition in Syria for the sake of all Syrians and the international community. The Syrian uprising was born in Daraa, and it would be poetic justice after all the loss if it is there that the Assad regime goes away for good.

Dr. Muhammad Bakr Ghbeis is the President of C4SSA. Ghbeis was born and raised in the Damascus suburbs and graduated from Damascus University’s School of Medicine before immigrating to the United States in 2004. He now serves as a staff cardiac critical care physician and instructor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and has worked for several American NGOs including the Syrian Expatriates Organization; the Syrian American Medical Society; the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations, and Kayla's list PAC.

Mohammed Alzoubi is a board member of C4SSA. He is originally from Daraa, in southern Syria. He is a founder and a board member of an NGO called Promise for Relief and Human Development, which established and managed a university and two colleges in Syria from 2016 to 2018. The program had more than 1200 students and employed more than 175 staff.

Image: Reuters.

James Holmes

Military Affairs, East Asia

America might be underestimating Chinese strength.

Here's What You Need to Know: If China commands South China Sea waters and airspace—or can deny the U.S. Navy the use of the regional commons—it can turn Mahan’s island-defense logic to its advantage. This is a real prospect. Think about the DF-26 anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) paraded through Beijing. Lower-end estimates peg that bird’s range at 1,800 miles, upper-end estimates at 2,500 miles. Use the lesser figure for the sake of discussion. Pick up a compass, set it to 1,800 miles according to your map’s scale, and swing a circle around China’s Hainan Island.

It’s dangerous to live by the unexamined assumption. Exhibit A: the oft-heard claim that U.S. sea and air forces sporting precision-guided arms will make short work of military facilities on South China Sea islets. “So what?” says one Pentagon official of Beijing’s island-building project. “If China wants to build vulnerable airstrips on these rocks, let them—they just constitute a bunch of easy targets that would be taken out within minutes of a real contingency.”

RAND, too, softpedals the islands’ longevity in combat. In a generally estimable report on the correlation of forces between America and China, RAND researchers maintain that South China Sea outposts could host only “a handful of SAMs and fighter aircraft.” It’s doubtful, they say, that People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces forward-deployed to “reclaimed” reefs or atolls would comprise “a significant factor in high-intensity military operations beyond the first hours of a conflict.” Nothing to see here, move along.

The syllogism behind such wartime prognoses seems to go like this: Island fortresses can’t stand against assault unless they’re entirely self-sufficient. China’s manmade islands aren’t self-sufficient in terms of defenses or logistics. So why fret about them?

To start with, a fundamental point: assuming away a foe’s ingenuity, martial skill, and thirst for victory ranks among the most egregious sins a strategist or tactician can commit. As military sage Carl von Clausewitz counsels, the enemy isn’t some lifeless, inert mass on which we work our will. Instead war involves a “collision of two living forces,” both intent on getting their way. “So long as I have not overthrown my opponent,” he adds, “I am bound to fear that he may overthrow me.”

“Thus,” concludes Clausewitz, “I am not in control: he dictates to me as much as I dictate to him.” Or, in simpler terms, respect the adversary. No serious competitor is a potted plant.

On to operational specifics. At first blush it makes sense that U.S. forces could pummel airfields, piers, and shore infrastructure from the sea and sky. We’ve seen missiles lofted by aircraft, surface vessels, or submarines hitting targets on CNN for the past quarter-century. And there’s no gainsaying the fact that these are tiny sites. Sparse real estate will compel their occupants to group warplanes, ships, and infrastructure closely—packaging targets neatly for destruction.

Right? Well, yes, if PLA commanders leave their island bastions isolated and exposed, subjecting them to American attack. But why would they? China is not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, nor the Taliban, nor al Qaeda. It is a near-peer competitor vis-à-vis the United States. The PLA bears a panoply of high-tech armaments, is amassing more with gusto, and will be fighting on home ground. Unlike the second-tier adversaries the U.S. armed forces have faced since the Cold War, PLA gunners can shoot back with real prospects of success.

PLA commanders are apt to envelop the islands with overlapping, interlocking fields of fire emanating from nearby islands, ships and aircraft, and metropolitan China. Sea-power historian Alfred Thayer Mahan illuminates the intricacies of seizing and defending islands. Yes, he makes position, strength, and resources the litmus tests for coastal or island bases. Strength means defensibility, resources the base’s capacity to replenish stores and armaments without undue enemy interference.

Taken in isolation, no manmade Southeast Asian island fares well by Mahanian standards. Each is weak, and unable to resupply itself. But Mahan also notes that whoever commands the seas adjoining an island will ultimately control the island. If forces friendly to its defenders dominate the sea—and the sky, in this air-power age—they can guard it, augmenting its defenses, while ferrying stores to its tenants to help them ride out enemy action.

An island’s innate strength and resources recede in importance under these circumstances. Islands and naval forces, then, are interdependent—a point Mahan hammers home while recounting the Anglo-French maritime war of 1778. He likens naval war in the Caribbean Sea to a “war of posts”—the islands over which Britain and France were wrangling being the posts. Navies were the arbiters of maritime command in the age of sail. Mahan reproaches the French Navy in particular for shunning a decisive engagement against its British enemy.

Instead French commanders focused on wresting islands from Great Britain. Making real estate the main goal was their mistake in Mahan’s eyes. Defeat the forces that control the commons, and the islands will wilt on the vine—letting the victor collect the spoils. Fail to go after the enemy fleet, and the islanders may hold out.

If China commands South China Sea waters and airspace—or can deny the U.S. Navy the use of the regional commons—it can turn Mahan’s island-defense logic to its advantage. This is a real prospect. Think about the DF-26 anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) paraded through Beijing last month. Lower-end estimates peg that bird’s range at 1,800 miles, upper-end estimates at 2,500 miles. Use the lesser figure for the sake of discussion. Pick up a compass, set it to 1,800 miles according to your map’s scale, and swing a circle around China’s Hainan Island.

You’ve just traced out the DF-26 range arc. You’ll notice that it spans the entire South China Sea—well beyond in many places. The contested Spratlys and Paracels nestle deep within. If the new missile, its fire control, and associated sensors pan out for PLA rocketeers on the technical side—always a fitting disclaimer when appraising new military technologies—then ships cruising within that arc are cruising within reach of shore-based PLA firepower.

Do the same using a 900-mile radius, and you’ve sketched the range arc for the older-generation DF-21D ASBM. The DF-21D envelope too encompasses much of the contested zone. That one-two punch makes for an intensely menacing tactical setting—even leaving aside the missile-armed tactical aircraft, patrol boats, and subs prowling sea and sky to drive up the costs of American access to Southeast Asia.

Mahan condemned “fortress fleets” like imperial Russia’s, which during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) huddled within reach of protective gunfire from coastal fastnesses like Port Arthur. He deemed relying on land-based firepower a “radically erroneous” warmaking method. Shore gunnery generally outranged and outmatched shipboard gunnery, making it perilous for ships to fight forts. But even land-based guns had short range in those days—meaning they could sweep only small sea areas of hostile fleets. Skippers who sheltered within range of shore fire support, consequently, were timid and defensive-minded. Seldom were they venturesome—or victorious.

Hence Mahan’s ire. Multiply the range of the fort’s guns from under 10 to 900 or 1,800 miles, though, and you change his calculus entirely. One doubts he would object to a navy like China’s that could roam the China seas—and far beyond—while remaining the beneficiary of fire support from Fortress China. PLA Navy skippers can be awfully offensive-minded within that vast maneuver space. Long-range fire support, then, represents a difference-maker for the PLA Navy. It likewise promises to be a difference-maker for air or naval forces forward-deployed to the artificial islands. Insignificant in themselves, these static bastions could become useful outer sentinels once integrated into a defense-in-depth merging ships, planes, and missiles.

That puts a different gloss on matters, doesn’t it? It suggests that U.S. forces will pay a price—potentially a heavy one—for pelting South China Sea airstrips and support infrastructure from the sea. The U.S. platforms doing the pelting may have to venture into harm’s way to accomplish their goals. The penalty island defenders levy against U.S. forces could come in direct costs, measured in ships and aircraft lost in the attempt. Such are the hazards of confronting peer adversaries.

U.S. forces, moreover, will certainly pay a penalty manifest in opportunity costs. U.S. Navy ships and submarines disgorge missiles from vertical launchers that can’t be reloaded at sea. They will expend rounds against the islands that can’t be replaced short of returning to base to rearm. That takes time, a commodity in short supply in wartime, while exposing them to further attack as they exit and reenter the battle zone. All of this depletes U.S. forces’ battle potential: a task force with half-empty or empty magazines accomplishes less and less.

Circumstances thus may compel naval commanders to delay follow-on combat operations, curtail them because ammunition is short, or forego them entirely. Inflicting combat losses, disrupting enemy logistics, throwing a kink into an enemy campaign: pretty valuable contributions for a bunch of rocks, aren’t they?

Think about a land-warfare (and, as a bonus, pop-culture) analogy from a bygone Southeast Asian conflict: the Vietnam War. Fifty years ago next month, U.S. Army lieutenant colonel Hal Moore’s airmobile unit vaulted into the Central Highlands of South Vietnam by helicopter—and found itself alone and badly outnumbered and outgunned. It was stranded like, well, like an island in a hostile sea. To use the RAND team’s words, few observers would have thought a detachment from the 7th Cavalry would represent a significant factor in high-intensity military operations beyond the first hours of a conflict.

And yet Moore & Co. weren’t just relevant. They prevailed in the Battle of Ia Drang despite an overpowering numerical mismatch. On-call artillery from rear areas coupled with air strikes from U.S. Navy and Air Force warplanes overhead evened the balance against the North Vietnamese Army. Distant fire support empowered the American contingent to fight and win. Ripping a local tactical engagement out of its larger context, then, can mislead observers about the likelihood of victory or defeat. Flyspecks in the South China Sea may look helpless on the map—but they could prove far from helpless if the PLA can support them from afar.

Yes, this is an age of precision weaponry—but more than one combatant fields a precision-strike complex in Asia. And it’s the home team, boasting all the advantages defending your own turf confers. Take it from a one-time denizen of the fire-support and precision-strike worlds: don’t discount the island-building enterprise in Southeast Asia so blithely.

This is a grim diagnosis, to be sure. What’s the remedy? For one, take a page from Clausewitz. Refuse to lowball the rival competitor’s creativity and desire to get its way. Dredging up artificial islands would have sounded like a madcap idea as recently as two years ago, wouldn’t it? And yet here we are, debating how to manage these artifacts of Chinese ingenuity. Once Washington and its allies take the challenge seriously, they will improve their prospects of managing the situation in Southeast Asia in the cause of peace and maritime freedom.

Bear in mind that I’ve consciously oversimplified the situation in the South China Sea—and understated the PLA’s potential options in the bargain. For example, Hainan is far from the only candidate site for anti-access forces (although it does occupy a central, if northward, position). PLA commanders could compound the difficulties confronting U.S. air and sea forces by, say, forward-deploying mobile ASBMs to sites farther to the south. Including the islands themselves: military engineers could build hardened emplacements to protect these truck-launched weapons from enemy fire until the time comes to use them. That may or may not provide foolproof protection, but in all likelihood it would consume additional U.S. rounds during an offensive—raising the cost to the United States of reducing the islands.

Or, why should the PLA settle for static defenses? If ASBMs prove affordable in substantial numbers, why not deploy them aboard mobile landing platforms, or even aboard merchantmen anchored or loitering within reach of the islands? Doing so would extend PLA missile coverage even farther beyond the South China Sea rim. Better yet from Beijing’s standpoint, launch platforms could move around periodically to complicate the task of finding and targeting them. And think about the political optics: if a U.S. missile struck a harmless-looking commercial vessel, who would look like the bad guy once propagandists in China spun their narrative about the incident?

For another, U.S. military officials should lose no opportunity to fashion creative options of their own. If the South China Sea constitutes an increasingly lethal environment for airmen and surface-ship mariners, it also affords opportunities. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Why not take a page from the PLA’s playbook, for example, and transform islands into outposts of sea power? The Philippines is an archipelago, and it’s on the business end of Chinese aggression. Beleaguered Manila might well grant the U.S. Army permission to station missile-armed ground units on outlying islands—thence to threaten PLA ships, aircraft, and ground support facilities from dug-in positions. Let’s ask.

If the army wants to find its place in Asia-Pacific strategy, there could scarcely be a better venue. Ground pounders could help conserve precious U.S. Navy and Air Force platforms for bigger things. In so doing the army would spare the platforms able to penetrate the anti-access envelope with relative impunity—chiefly B-2 stealth bombers, nuclear-powered guided-missile submarines, or nuclear-powered attack submarines fitted with extra missile payload capacity—from wasting rounds better used to defend Taiwan, or Japan, or whatever may have come under threat.

Call it asymmetric warfare, American style, or archipelagic defense, or whatever your favorite catchy slogan might be. Let’s borrow from Mahan and stage some mutual access denial. Denying the PLA control of the seas and skies around its artificial islands would consign them to oblivion, should the worst happen. Knowing that, Beijing might refrain from further troublemaking in the region so long as the deterrent remains robust. Prolonged, uneasy deterrence is not a strategy to relish—just better than the alternatives.

James Holmes is Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific, an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of 2010. The views voiced here are his alone.

This article first appeared in October 2015.

Image: Reuters.

Jakarta is Asia’s greatest geopolitical prize. But its foreign-policy reflexes are long outdated.

James Holmes

U.S. Navy, Global

The Zumwalt class destroyer is a one-dimensional vessel, while battleships remained multimission vessels throughout their service lives.

Here's What You Need to Remember: The only sense in which the DDG-1000’s plight does resemble a battleship is that Ii’s a heavy hitter whose reach is woefully short. Defense firms are developing new long-range anti-ship cruise missiles. The U.S. Navy has experimented with repurposing land-attack cruise missiles for surface warfare—resurrecting a capability the leadership shortsightedly allowed to lapse after the Cold War.

Over the years it’s become commonplace for writers to sex up their descriptions of guided-missile destroyer (DDG) Zumwalt, the U.S. Navy’s newest surface combatant. Commentators of such leanings depict the ultra-high-tech DDG-1000 as a battleship. Better yet, it’s a “stealth battleship”—a fit subject for sci-fi!

Not so. And getting the nomenclature right matters: calling a man-of-war a battleship conjures up images in the popular mind of thickly armored dreadnoughts bristling with big guns blazing away at one another on the high seas, pummeling shore targets in Normandy or Kuwait, or belching smoke and flame after Nagumo’s warplanes struck at Pearl Harbor.

Such images mislead. Battleships were multi-mission warships capable of engaging enemy surface navies, fighting off swarms of propeller-driven aircraft, or pounding hostile beaches with gunfire. The DDG-1000 is a gee-whiz but modestly armed surface combatant optimized for one mission: shore bombardment. The shoe just doesn’t fit.

Now, there’s no problem affixing the label stealth to Zumwalt, which at present is undergoing its first round of sea trials off the New England coast. Shipbuilders went to elaborate lengths to disguise the ship from radar detection. Radar emits electromagnetic energy to search out, track and target ships and aircraft. It shouts, then listens for an echo from hulls or airframes—much as sightseers shout and listen when visiting the Grand Canyon.

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Quieting the echo is the trick. This 15,000-ton behemoth displaces half-again as much as a Ticonderoga-class cruiser yet reportedly has just one-fiftieth the radar cross-section of the fleet’s workhorse Arleigh Burke-class DDGs. While not entirely undetectable, DDG-1000 will look like a fishing vessel or other small craft on enemy radar scopes—if it’s picked up at all. Blending into surface traffic is no mean feat for an outsized destroyer.

How did shipwrights pull this off? For one thing, the geometry of the DDG-1000’s hull, superstructure, and armaments deflects rather than reflects electromagnetic energy. Right angles and surfaces perpendicular to the axis of EM radiation bounce back energy—boosting an object’s radar signature. Accordingly, the DDG-1000 design includes few right angles. Everything slopes. And while radar antennae, smokestacks, and other fittings clutter the decks of conventional warships, such items are mostly concealed within Zumwalt’s hull or deckhouse. That accounts for the vessel’s clean, otherworldly look.

For another, radar-absorbent coatings slathered on the ship’s external surfaces muffle such radar returns as do occur. While hardly invisible to the naked eye, this big ship will prove hard to detect—let alone track or target—while cruising over the horizon.

If stealth is an accurate adjective, though, dubbing Zumwalt a battleship conveys false impressions. First of all, there’s the matter of linguistic hygiene. It’s all too common among laymen to use battleship as a generic term for any ship of war. Indeed, I got my start as a columnist in 2000 precisely because reporters took to labeling the destroyer USS Cole a battleship. An explosives-laden small craft struck that unfortunate vessel in Aden, blowing a massive hole in her side. How could that happen if Cole was a battleship? Battlewagons are ruggedly built, with vulnerable spaces sheathed in a foot or more of armor. They were built on the assumption that they would take a punch in a slugfest with enemy battleships.

Destroyers aren’t built on that assumption. Describing Cole as a battleship obscured a basic fact about modern warships. U.S. mariners try to bring down the “archer,” namely a hostile ship or warbird, before he lets fly his “arrow,” a torpedo or anti-ship missile. That’s because few ships are built to withstand battle damage. Crewmen call them “tin cans” for a reason: it’s easy to pierce an American ship’s sides should an enemy round evade the ship’s defenses. So it should have come as no surprise that a small craft packed with shaped-charge explosives could land a crushing blow against one of the U.S. Navy’s premier combatants. Again: calling things by their proper names constitutes the beginning of wisdom.

Second, those who portray Zumwalt as a dreadnought seem to be thinking of dreadnoughts not in their prime but in their age of senescence. This too blurs important facts. Aircraft carriers supplanted battleships as capital ships—the fleet’s heaviest and rangiest hitters—during World War II. Dreadnoughts found new life as auxiliary platforms. They pummeled enemy beaches during amphibious operations. They rendered escort duty, employing their secondary batteries to help screen carrier task forces against aerial attack.

The DDG-1000 is optimized for that sort of auxiliary duty. In particular, the vessel sports a couple of long-range guns optimized for bombarding foreign shores, along with eighty vertical launchers capable of lofting land-attack cruise missiles hundreds of miles inland. The vessel thus meets the navy’s need to supply offshore fire support to troops fighting in coastal areas. Gunfire support is a capability that lapsed when the last battleship retired in 1992. In a narrow sense, then, it’s fitting to liken the Zumwalts to battlewagons.

But battleships never fully relinquished their multimission character. In their days of nautical supremacy, they dueled hostile battle fleets to determine who would command the sea. They then protected cruisers, destroyers, and amphibious craft that fanned out in large numbers to exploit maritime command. Dreadnoughts retained that primacy until the flattop and its air wing came into their own during World War II.

But they remained hard-hitting surface-warfare platforms even after being eclipsed. Carrier aviation didn’t render them obsolete. For example, the battleships Washington and South Dakota played a pivotal part in the naval battles off Guadalcanal in 1942. The Pearl Harbor fleet got some vengeance in a surface gun battle in Surigao Strait in 1944. Surigao Strait comprised part of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, history’s last major fleet action. Iowa-class battlewagons resumed their surface-warfare function during a short-lived revival during the 1980s and 1990s. Equipped with Harpoon and Tomahawk anti-ship missiles to complement their nine 16- and twelve 5-inch guns, they formed the core of surface action groups while also discharging shore-bombardment missions.

In short, battleships remained multimission vessels throughout their service lives—even after technological progress relegated them to secondary status. The Zumwalt is one-dimensional by contrast. Each ship is armed with two “advanced gun systems” capable of raining precision fire—albeit with lightweight projectiles compared to battleships’ 1,900- and 2,700-lb. rounds—on land targets some 83 nautical miles distant. Marines will welcome the backup.

It remains unclear, however, how capable the advanced gun will prove against enemy surface fleets. For example, a recent report from the Congressional Research Service pays tribute to the gun’s long-range land-attack projectiles but makes scant mention of how the DDG-1000 would fare in surface warfare. The gun’s manufacturer touts the weapon’s “highly-advanced gunfire capabilities for anti-surface warfare,” yet—like the ship’s other boosters—overwhelmingly emphasizes the littoral-combat mission. To date, then, surface action appears to be an afterthought for the DDG-1000s—unlike their dreadnought forebears. That’s another nuance masked by the moniker stealth battleship.

In that vein, it’s fair to say the DDG-1000 suffers from the same problem bedeviling the rest of the U.S. Navy surface fleet. Assume the advanced gun system eventually boasts the same range against warships it boasts against land targets, eighty-three nautical miles. Guns can disgorge a large volume of fire, to the tune of hundreds of rounds, compared to the ship’s eighty-round missile magazine. That’s good.

But it matters little if the ship never gets within range to fire its guns. However impressive for a gun, eighty-three nautical miles is only a fraction of, say, the range sported by China’s YJ-18 anti-ship cruise missile. Currently being deployed aboard People’s Liberation Army Navy ships and subs, the YJ-18 can strike at targets 290 nautical miles distant. Nor, apparently, will the Zumwalts carry Harpoons, whose range falls short of the advanced gun system’s in any event.

Like the rest of the surface warships, then, the DDG-1000 will find itself sorely outranged by the missile-armed submarines, warplanes and surface combatants that comprise the core of naval fighting forces around the Eurasian perimeter. Chinese or Russian forces can blast away from beyond the reach of American guns or missiles. And if U.S. forces try to close the gap, they will do so under fire—fire that will enfeeble them on the way.

In that the DDG-1000’s plight does resemble the battleship’s plight after Pearl Harbor. It’s a heavy hitter whose reach is woefully short. Defense firms are developing new long-range anti-ship cruise missiles. The U.S. Navy has experimented with repurposing land-attack cruise missiles for surface warfare—resurrecting a capability the leadership shortsightedly allowed to lapse after the Cold War.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone.

This piece first appeared several years ago and is being reprinted due to reader interest.

Image: U.S. Navy Flickr.

James Holmes

China, South China Sea

An antagonist who stumbles into the arena of combat is different from one who strides into the arena.

Here's What You Need to Know:  It’s the job of all strategic leaders to prepare for confrontation. To do otherwise courts disaster should confrontation come. But few sane leaders crave strife.

It’s been said that groupthink is a bad thing, that creative tension is a good thing and that appointing a “devil’s advocate” represents the best way to counteract the former while generating the latter. With any luck the give-and-take of debate yields better insights into ambient circumstances and how to manage them. To assure there is some give-and-take against the pressure of groupthink, the wise leader nominates a devil’s advocate to his team—namely a contrarian whose appointed task is to confound emerging wisdom by lodging arguments fair or foul.

The ornerier the better when you’re playing the part of Screwtape. So it’s with a whiff of fire and brimstone that I take issue with my friend Gordon Chang, who maintains that “China Wants Confrontation in the South China Sea.” Hence Beijing’s decision to disclose that USS Hopper executed a freedom-of-navigation cruise last week while Washington initially remained silent about it. Gordon regards Chinese bombast as proof that Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders are spoiling for a fight of some sort, rather than as yet more proof that bombast is encoded in Communist China’s political DNA.

Keyword: wants. It’s the job of all strategic leaders to prepare for confrontation. To do otherwise courts disaster should confrontation come. But few sane leaders crave strife.

That includes Chinese leaders. We make much of Chinese sage Sun Tzu’s maxim that winning without fighting constitutes the supreme excellence in statecraft. Short of that, Master Sun implores generals and sovereigns to take enemy states intact, and to wage short, sharp wars in order to avoid bankrupting the treasury and national manpower. Their paramount mission is to win. Next most important is to hold down the expense in resources and lives for both combatants. Sun Tzu’s Art of War remains a staple of strategic discourses in China today, and justifiably so.

CCP chieftains may be pursuing self-defeating policies and strategies in the South China Sea. They may have resigned themselves to a rumble. And opportunism is their watchword: they will doubtless attempt to turn such encounters as do occur to diplomatic and strategic advantage.

But wanting to fight is another thing altogether—and would warrant different American and Asian countermeasures. An antagonist who stumbles into the arena of combat is different from one who strides into the arena. Word choices matter. As the quintessential devil’s advocate Mark Twain wisecracks, “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ‘Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

Strategists in the United States, its allies, and its friends should respond to Chinese deeds far differently if the problem is a lightning bug as opposed to a lightning strike. Mistake one for the other and you’re apt to overreact, underreact or mis-react (if that’s a word). Gordon takes his brief for Chinese belligerence just a trifle too far—but that’s a trifle that could beget errant strategy.

Nor, it bears mentioning, is the quest for bloodless victory an exclusively Eastern specialty. Strategists and philosophers from the Western canon tell us so. But their insight should come as cold comfort: winning without fighting should not connote collegial, noncoercive negotiations that yield compromises everyone can live with.

Sunny uplands do not await. Indeed, martial thinker Carl von Clausewitz interprets this phenomenon in characteristically bleak Prussian terms, vouchsafing that

[The] aggressor is always peace-loving (as [Napoleon] always claimed to be); he would prefer to take over our country unopposed. To prevent his doing so one must be willing to make war and be prepared for it. In other words it is the weak, those likely to need defense, who should always be armed in order not to be overwhelmed. Thus decrees the art of war.

If we submit to an aggressor’s demands or succumb to gauzy illusions that artful diplomacy always triumphs, we’re apt to find ourselves in a Clausewitzian predicament.

Linguistic precision, then, constitutes a virtue of no small moment not just for commentators, but for practitioners of statecraft. It helps us calibrate words and deeds to the surroundings.

Which brings us back to the voyage of USS Hopper. The linguistics of freedom of navigation—or, more accurately, freedom of the sea—matter just as much as how we describe China’s intent to seek or shun conflict on the briny main. As Maritime Executive and other press accounts report, an anonymous U.S. official classified the operation as an “innocent passage” close to Scarborough Shoal while maintaining the passage sent the same “message” as a freedom-of-navigation demonstration.

Not so! Under the law of the sea innocent passage is something vessels do when passing close aboard territory belonging to sovereign coastal states. This legal regimen obliges warships to desist from any activity that infringes on the coastal state’s security, such as military surveys, flight operations and the like. In other words, ships may transit through territorial waters—and do nothing else. So if Hopper indeed executed an innocent passage past Scarborough Shoal, and if the Pentagon branded it as such, then the operation conceded what it purported to dispute: that China can command sovereignty over geographic features deep within a neighboring coastal state’s offshore exclusive economic zone.

The cruise thus broadcast no other message than that anonymous spokesmen in Washington are befuddled—and that the Pentagon, which has stopped publicizing its efforts on behalf of nautical freedom, might be as well. Advantage: China.

Mischaracterizing your own actions, in short, amounts to self-defeating behavior in strategist-speak—or to shooting yourself in the foot in layman’s terms. And that leaves aside the fact that Scarborough entitles its owner to no jurisdiction over surrounding waters in the first place: it doesn’t even qualify as a rock by treaty standards, and thus bestows no rights or privileges on anyone that relate to freedom of the sea. Ships of any nation can lawfully do most anything there except fish or extract undersea natural resources. And they should.

While China has asserted squatter’s rights to the reef by virtue of its powerful navy and coast guard, the Philippines enjoys the sole right to harvest natural resources around the shoal. It enjoys that right not because Scarborough is a land feature conferring such jurisdiction, but because Scarborough lies within 200 nautical miles of Philippine shorelines—deep within Manila’s exclusive economic zone. So here again, portraying Hopper’s passage as an innocent passage affirms what friends of maritime freedom ought to contest, early and often. Seafarers must do nothing—wittingly or unwittingly—that ratifies lawless territorial claims.

Classical Chinese philosopher Confucius proclaims that calling things by their correct names constitutes the beginning of wisdom. What holds in life holds in diplomacy and strategy. Any devil’s advocate would agree.

James Holmes is the inaugural holder of the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone.

This article first appeared in January 2018 and is being reprinted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

James Holmes

China, East Asia

Washington should be wary about a Beijing that has taken incremental steps toward small-stick diplomacy.

Here's What You Need to Know: Over the past couple of decades, likewise, Beijing has devised a variety of stratagems to flummox those who defy its claims to sovereignty over islands, sea, and sky. China started out with light-gray, largely inoffensive gray-zone tactics twenty-five years ago, but they darkened into coercion over time as its ambitions and power mounted.

Deterring aggression in the “gray zone” is hard. The keeper of an existing order—an order such as freedom of the sea—finds itself conflicted. That’s because gray-zone aggressors deliberately refuse to breach the threshold between uneasy peace and armed conflict, justifying a martial response. Instead they demolish the status quo little by little and replace it with something new.

Piecemeal assaults compel the status quo’s defenders to consider unappealing options. They can act first and bear the blame for the outbreak of war, for taking excessive risk, for provoking the revisionist power or for destabilizing the peace. Or, unwilling to incur such costs, they resign themselves to inaction or half-measures. Predisposed to put off difficult decisions, politicians can waffle, and surrender the initiative. Or they can escalate, and see their nation branded a bully.

An unpalatable choice. Gray-zone strategies are designed precisely to impose such quandaries on custodians of an existing order.

The stepwise approach is reminiscent of the late Thomas Schelling’s parable of the rebellious child who whittles down his parents’ willpower at the seashore. “Tell a child not to go in the water,” maintains Schelling, “and he’ll sit on the bank and submerge his bare feet; he is not yet ‘in’ the water. Acquiesce, and he’ll stand up; no more of him is in the water than before. Think it over, and he’ll start wading, not going any deeper; take a moment to decide whether this is different and he’ll go a little deeper, arguing that since he goes back and forth it all averages out. Pretty soon we are calling to him not to swim out of sight, wondering whatever happened to all our discipline.”

Over the past couple of decades, likewise, Beijing has devised a variety of stratagems to flummox those who defy its claims to sovereignty over islands, sea and sky. China started out with light-gray, largely inoffensive gray-zone tactics twenty-five years ago, but they darkened into coercion over time as its ambitions and power mounted.

First, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership codified its claim to offshore territory in domestic law in 1992, proclaiming that China held jurisdiction over disputed land features in the East and South China seas along with the surrounding waters. Western governments and press outlets deemed this development barely newsworthy, in large measure because Beijing made little effort to enforce the law. Though light in tincture, however, this Law on the Territorial Sea and Contiguous Zone comprised an extravagant statement of purpose toward China’s near seas.

This largely forgotten edict prepared the way for additional assertions of legal authority while justifying more muscular gray-zone strategies. In 2009, for instance, the CCP leadership delivered a map of the South China Sea to the United Nations bearing a “nine-dash line” that delineated its claim to “indisputable” or “irrefutable” sovereignty over some 80–90 percent of that waterway. It later flouted a 2016 ruling from the Permanent Court of Arbitration that gutted its legal case for sovereignty. Beijing, it seems, has little fealty to commitments it has freely undertaken—commitments such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea—when operating in the gray zone.

China also projected its claims skyward. In 2013 the leadership declared an air-defense identification zone over the East China Sea, encompassing Japanese- and Korean-administered islands. It asserted the power to regulate air traffic moving up and down the Asian seaboard, parallel to the coast, rather than traffic bound for China. Controlling airspace—not defending China against inbound aircraft—represented its true aim. Yet here, too, Beijing has only halfheartedly sought to enforce its air-defense zone—most recently by challenging a U.S. Air Force bomber bound for South Korea. Its skyward strategy remains light gray in execution, if not in principle.

Second, China’s “smile diplomacy” ranked as the lightest of light-gray ventures. Commencing in the early 2000s, Beijing fashioned a diplomatic narrative drawing on the charisma of China’s ancient mariner, Zheng He. The Ming Dynasty admiral commanded a series of “treasure voyages” six centuries ago, reinvigorating China’s tribute system in Southeast and South Asia without indulging in territorial conquest. Modern-day officialdom took pains to reassure fellow Asians that China would follow Zheng He’s pattern. It would make itself a potent yet beneficent sea power. It could be trusted not to abuse lesser neighbors.

In short, smile diplomacy constituted an effort to brand China as a uniquely trustworthy great power—and mute resistance to its maritime rise. Until the late 2000s, when China turned more assertive, regional audiences were by and large receptive to this soothing message.

Third, gray-zone tactics tended in a darker, more coercive direction after Beijing unveiled the nine-dash line in 2009. Zheng He found himself summarily jettisoned in favor of what we dubbed “small-stick diplomacy.” Rather than flourish the big stick of naval power, that is, CCP leaders unlimbered the small stick of maritime law enforcement coupled with militiamen embedded within the fishing fleet. Small-stick diplomacy represented a masterful gray-zone strategy. The small stick was big enough to cow Asian neighbors whose navies barely rated as coast guards, but it was too small to goad the United States into sending its navy to defend allies and friends.

Routine harassment of Asian coastal states projected the image that China’s coast guard and maritime enforcement services were simply policing waters that had belonged to China since remote antiquity. It was an effort to quash lawbreakers trespassing on Chinese territory. Small-stick diplomacy, in short, comprised a gray-zone strategy vis-à-vis the U.S. Navy but exhibited a dark, coercive hue toward Asian claimants. And that dualism suited Beijing just fine.

Fourth, China attempted a variant of small-stick diplomacy in the East China Sea but found the setting far less permissive. Since 2010 or thereabouts, China’s coast guard has conducted regular patrols in the waters around the Senkaku Islands. Its purpose: to challenge Japan’s administrative control of the islands and adjoining seas. For its part, Tokyo has staged a standing coast-guard presence in the archipelago’s territorial sea, buttressing its own control. The result is a curious form of joint Sino-Japanese administration of waters around the islets. Both sides police what they regard as their own.

While the Obama administration and Trump administration reaffirmed that the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty applies to the Senkaku Islands, obliging Washington, DC to help defend them against attack, China’s East China Sea strategy displays the same kind of dualism as in the South China Sea. It’s coercive toward Japan yet stops short of triggering U.S. countermeasures. This tactic was enough to alter the status quo in China’s favor but not enough to trigger escalatory action-reaction cycles with Japan. And it keeps in play Tokyo’s insecurities about America’s commitment to Japan’s defense, granting China leverage over the alliance. In all likelihood this state of affairs will persist so long as Beijing refrains from trying to wrest the islets from Japan—so long, that is, as China keeps its strategy gray.

And fifth, CCP chieftains have discovered that building artificial islands—or fortifying existing ones—constitutes an effective gray-zone strategy. Its island-building enterprise has taken several forms over the years. In 1994, for example, China occupied Mischief Reef, deep within the Philippine exclusive economic zone. It commenced constructing structures at the reef soon afterward, converted it into a military outpost in 1998, and expanded it sufficiently to host an airstrip and defensive armaments by 2016.

If gradualism suited its purposes at Mischief Reef, China has exercised even more forbearance at Scarborough Shoal, another feature within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. Its occupation of Scarborough Shoal in 2012 marked the final transition from smile diplomacy to small-stick diplomacy. China’s seagoing law-enforcement services shooed away Philippine mariners from this traditional fishing ground, imposing control over access to the shoal. Engineers, however, have yet to begin reclaiming seafloor around it to erect another armed redoubt.

Why such restraint? Geography may have dissuaded Beijing from acting. Unlike the other contested features, Scarborough Shoal perches near the principal Philippine island of Luzon. China’s leadership may fear drawing in the U.S. military, which is obligated to defend the Philippines under a longstanding mutual-defense pact, if it constructs a fortified outpost so close to an American ally. Politics is at work as well. Elected in 2016, furthermore, Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte has signaled his willingness to loosen the alliance with America while cozying up to China. That being the case, refraining from provocative acts probably appears prudent to CCP leaders. Why alienate a prospective ally?

And lastly, China went big, and fast, elsewhere in the Spratly and Paracel archipelagoes. Starting in 2013, civil engineers manufactured island bases from rocks and atolls scattered across the South China Sea. Chinese president Xi Jinping pledged not to “militarize” the artificial islands, freezing any serious response from the Obama administration, only to proceed with construction of airfields and other infrastructure. The result: a fait accompli.

It’s one thing to deter an aggressor from seizing ground, quite another to evict an aggressor from ground it has already seized. Island-building tactics of all three varieties have left China in possession of territory—and it’s hard to see how such gains can be reversed short of open warfare. Beijing has, in essence, forced the region and the United States to live with a new and largely irreversible strategic reality.

This typology of gray-zone tactics suggests that China is bringing to bear all elements of national power on the maritime disputes in the East and South China Seas. Beijing has employed legal, diplomatic, maritime and material elements of statecraft to chip away at the U.S.-led liberal international order. Even its construction prowess, honed over decades of massive infrastructure-building, has been on dazzling display in the heart of the South China Sea—contributing to strategic success.

For custodians of the current order, consequently, it is not enough to think exclusively about the marine dimensions of strategy. To balk China’s gray-zone stratagems, Washington and its allies must take a page from Beijing and adopt a holistic, grand-strategic posture that applies patient, vigilant countervailing pressure on many fronts simultaneously. In short, the defenders of the status quo must think in shades of gray and must accustom themselves to acting in the twilight between peace and war. To do any less would concede to China the initiative—and the future shape of the regional order.

Thomas Schelling would nod knowingly at the challenges before Washington and its partners. Unlike his milquetoast parents, let’s muster some strategic discipline.

James Holmes is Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone.

Toshi Yoshihara, also a coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific, is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

This article first appeared in May 2017 and is being reprinted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Kris Osborn

military, Americas

The Defense Department is moving quickly to deploy this new missile detection technology given the seriousness of the growing Chinese missile threat.

The Defense Department is accelerating a new program intended to bring an entirely new dimension to missile warning operations, by engineering a new Overhead Persistent Infrared (OPIR) detection system intended to both identify the heat signature generated by the launch of an enemy missile as well as establish a flight track of a threat as it transits through space. 

Developers say next-generation OPIR includes several key upgrades over the existing Space-Based Infrared Satellites (SBIRS). First, OPIR detects more missiles including dimmer and quicker boosting types. Second, it provides coverage of missile targets with higher accuracy by using a more sensitive, accurate and faster frame rate sensor. Third, its sensors can resolve multiple targets with an image that is 25 percent better quality than SBIRS that improves incoming missile target counting. Finally, the hardened spacecraft includes modern cybersecurity plus significant other measures for added resiliency and survivability against potential adversary space capabilities. 

It is unsurprising that the Defense Department is moving quickly to deploy this new missile detection technology given the seriousness of the growing Chinese missile threat. China has new weapons, and more of them are capable of reaching the United States

“Commercial satellite imagery discovered what is accepted to be nuclear missile fields in Western China. Each has nearly 120 ICBM silos,” Admiral Charles Richard, Commander, U.S. Strategic Command, said at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. 

The challenge of organizing or distilling information while networking, pooling or aggregating vast volumes of information has inspired Lockheed Martin’s OPIR to connect with Raytheon Intelligence & Space and focus on an innovative approach called the Future Operationally Resilient Ground Evolution (FORGE) Mission Data Processing Application Framework.

The OPIR-Integrated FORGE system helps architect the technical apparatus to gather, store, safeguard and network OPIR-related sensor information. It involves synchronizing fixed ground terminals with other nodes such as air and space assets; it also leverages cloud technology. In effect, when Spaced-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) sensors detect the key indicators of an important mission event, the data is then pooled, organized, analyzed and made available to key decisionmakers. This process will be substantially faster, more streamlined and comprehensive when networked with the merging OPIR system. 

Air Force’s strategic vision regarding the evolution of modern space and air warfare, as thinking regarding a technical and tactical transition from SBIRS to OPIR has been evolving along an interesting and highly impactful trajectory.  

A 2013 op-ed published by the Air and Space Journal from the Air Force’s Air University discusses the strategic transition inspired in large measure by the advent of new technology platforms such as OPIR, and data application systems such as FORGE. As part of a discussion about the architectural transition concepts from SBIRS to OPIR, the analysis, makes a point to address the advent of “disaggregation.”

“Initial concepts introduced by the center (Space and Missile Systems Center) include changing from SBIRS to a wide field of view (WFOV) disaggregated approach,” the paper writes.

This WFOV is exactly what OPIR seeks to establish, meaning that it is not only more precise, cyber hardened, resilient and networked, but it also removes any potential “gaps” or area in the GEO orbit in which a target could be tracked. 

“Although the OPIR mission area has existed for decades as overhead non-imaging infrared with SBIRS and other systems, it is now the new kid on the block, integrating target-signature nuances, time, and place into persistent intelligence and operational products,” according to the authors of the op-ed, Jeffrey Harris and Gilbert Siegert.

By operating without risky “gaps” in coverage, OPIR can perform the increasingly crucial task of establishing a continuous “track” on a fast-moving threat, such as hypersonics. There is great concern with certain threats which move beyond the earth’s atmosphere into space at unprecedented speeds, transitioning from one radar aperture field of view into another. As a threat travels from one segmented field of view to another, it can get lost and make it extremely difficult for sensing systems and networks to establish a continuous “track” of a fast target such as a hypersonic missile traveling at five times the speed of sound. 

This is why OPIR is being engineered with a decided emphasis upon upgradeability, meaning it is architected with a set of common, modular technical standards such that it can easily accommodate or integrate next-generation sensing technologies as they emerge. In fact, the Air Force has fast-tracked its efforts to obtain OPIR using something called 804 funding to create a compressed schedule that preserves quality yet expedites development to meet a pressing need. 

Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Master's Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Image: Reuters

James Holmes

U.S. Navy, Global

The time-tested method is to gather freighters, transports and tankers into convoys, provide them a retinue of escort ships—generally light surface combatants such as corvettes, frigates, or destroyers—and send them on their way through embattled waters.

Here's What You Need to Remember: Convoy duty is strategically defensive but tactically offensive in outlook. During the transit, in other words, the escorts keep company with the civilian vessels entrusted to them and await attack. When submarines or surface raiders come calling, the defenders try to blunt the attack and then hunt down the assailants. Through offensive defense they safeguard the merchantmen and the precious supplies they bear.

Jerry Seinfeld could make convoys the subject of a standup routine: what’s the deal with them? Or, more to the point, what’s the deal with navies that seem bent on unlearning hard-won lessons from past oceanic wars? Navies such as our own. The U.S. Navy leadership has reportedly informed the chiefs of the U.S. Military Sealift Command and Maritime Administration that “you’re on your own” when trying to run supplies or manpower across the Atlantic, Pacific or Indian oceans to support operations along the Eurasian rimlands. The navy can spare no escort ships to protect them.

That’s right: the threadbare U.S. sealift fleet must shift for itself in a far more lethal strategic environment than merchant mariners faced during the world wars, when the likes of Germany and Japan sought to cut the sea lanes U.S. armies, air forces and their logistical trains had to traverse just to reach battlegrounds in Western Europe and the Far East. It appears about 231 civilian ships are available for the logistical effort. That sounds impressive—until you consider that Axis submarines and surface raiders sank or damaged over five hundred U.S. merchantmen in 1942 alone.

And Axis boats were rudimentary diesel contraptions, not the nuclear-powered killers bristling with anti-ship missiles and sophisticated torpedoes that now prowl the deep. The logic behind open-seas raiding is simple and irresistible: defeat the logistical effort supporting a great-power military operating far from home and you defeat that military. The most overpowering expeditionary army accomplishes little if it can’t reach the theater of conflict or has little food to eat, ordnance to fire or spares to repair equipment.

If there’s one lesson high-seas warfare teaches, then, it’s that lesser powers go after merchantmen. Revolutionary America did it; Napoleonic France did it; Imperial and Nazi Germany did it; Imperial Japan did it. Weaker antagonists strive to interrupt shipments of manpower, ordnance and stores of all sorts needed to support expeditionary operations on distant battlegrounds. Or they damage the commerce on which seafaring nations depend to fund war making. Either way, a weaker antagonist can do a stronger foe grave harm by chipping away at its merchant fleet. Better yet, the weak can strike piecemeal without risking a toe-to-toe battle they might lose.

How to counter raiders? The time-tested method is to gather freighters, transports and tankers into convoys, provide them a retinue of escort ships—generally light surface combatants such as corvettes, frigates or destroyers—and send them on their way through embattled waters. Convoy duty is strategically defensive but tactically offensive in outlook. During the transit, in other words, the escorts keep company with the civilian vessels entrusted to them and await attack. When submarines or surface raiders come calling, the defenders try to blunt the attack and then hunt down the assailants. Through offensive defense they safeguard the merchantmen and the precious supplies they bear.

Over the years I’ve postulated that convoy operations bear a striking resemblance to counterinsurgent (COIN) operations in certain respects. Both strategies aim at defending the defenseless—villagers in the case of COIN, freighters, tankers and transports in the case of convoy duty. Thus, they deny attackers what they crave, namely access to the village or convoy. If predators come after villages or merchantmen, the wise protector stations sentries sporting superior firepower to guard them. After all, defenders know the foe must either show up on the scene or forfeit its strategic aims. The enemy has to come to you if you’re the guardian of a village or convoy.

But there’s another parallel between counterinsurgent warfare and convoy duty: armed forces hate both chores. They’re unsexy. They offer little glamour or renown, unlike big-unit battles. There’s no way to win in an afternoon. You have to win by increments and over time. Over time, commanders either grow neglectful toward the “other war,” expend their energies chasing around enemy main units in the countryside or the brine, or both. Few relish the humdrum, less than satisfying, day-in-and-day-out missions needed to vanquish insurgents or saltwater predators.

The U.S. Army resolved never again to fight insurgents after the debacle in Vietnam. It deliberately forgot—and had to rediscover the art and science of counterinsurgent warfare in the crucibles of Afghanistan and Iraq. Hence the acclaim heaped on General David Petraeus’ brilliant “new” COIN manual for Iraq—a manual that refurbished time-worn, but forgotten ideas.

Nor is forgetfulness a solely American thing. Having grudgingly embraced convoys during the Napoleonic Wars, Great Britain’s Royal Navy had to learn afresh during World War I, when Imperial German U-boats transformed the Atlantic Ocean into a killing ground for Allied merchantmen. Britain could have well starved under the press of undersea warfare. And having entered the Great War because of unrestricted submarine warfare and spent 1917–1918 combating the U-boat menace, the U.S. Navy had to relearn elementary facts about anti-submarine warfare during World War II. Hence the grievous losses off American shores in 1941–1942. These were the wages of institutional forgetfulness.

It seems the Seinfeld effect spans centuries of sea combat. What’s the deal?

Something even more basic may help account for such myopia. It may be that there’s a quirk to dominant combatants’ cultures. A force accustomed to dominating all it surveys may assume away challenges from lesser foes, especially if such foes have proved troublesome in the past. Having been stymied by Vietcong fighters and their North Vietnamese backers, U.S. Army commanders in effect erased counterinsurgent warfare from their institutional memory. The Vietcong were at once beneath notice and unbeatable at a price America was prepared to pay.

Dominant navies—the Royal Navy in its imperial heyday, the U.S. Navy today—likewise prefer to gird against rival battle fleets rather than invest scarce resources in vessels, methods and tactics useful for escort duty. The greats of maritime history would be aghast. Sir Julian Corbett, arguably Britain’s premier sea-power theorist, portrays control of the sea lanes as the core purpose of maritime strategy. In turn, the purpose of sea-lane control is to allow friendly merchantmen to pass across the oceans unmolested. The battle fleet is merely the protector of unarmed shipping and an enabler for this unglamorous-seeming function. If a major battle takes place, it takes place to protect commerce and logistics that underwrite the war effort on land.

No one covets sentry duty. British tars found naval raiders and privateers of old an unworthy but also stubborn foe. U.S. mariners may be repeating their mistake. If so, the first year of the next war could be 1942 all over again. That’s a trauma no one should want to relive.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone.

This piece first appeared earlier and is being reprinted due to reader interest.

Image: Flickr.

James Holmes

India, South Asia

New Delhi needs to be clear-eyed about Beijing's ambitions.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Here’s the crux of our dispute in Jaipur: the Indian dignitaries seem to think China can’t mount a naval threat to India in the Indian Ocean, whereas I think it could but has little incentive to do so. Change the incentives, though, and the situation could change abruptly—to India’s detriment.

There are worse things than fleeing the bleak New England midwinter for warmer climes—such as Jaipur, India’s famed “Pink City.” So cold was it when I departed Providence last month that the nozzle on my plane’s fuel hose froze shut, grounding the plane until the crew could unfreeze it.

Frolicking around in shirtsleeves at a Mughal dynasty fort in Rajasthan was a welcome relief from frostbite. The occasion for the trip, though, was three days of “quad-plus dialogue” about sundry topics important to Indian Ocean powers. The “quad,” or standing membership for these unofficial “track II” gatherings, refers to India, Australia, Japan and the United States. Sri Lanka is the “plus,” or rotating participant, for this year.

Maritime governance in the Pacific and Indian oceans was the subject of my panel. China came up repeatedly during the gathering, which should shock no one. After all, China—a great power on the make—constitutes a menace to freedom of the seas in East Asia. Communist Party apparatchiks and ordinary Chinese alike seem to view water and sky as territory to be occupied, controlled and ruled through domestic law. And the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), predictably, is militarizing the South China Sea with verve, protestations from top leaders notwithstanding.

How to manage a great-power challenge to nautical freedom is a question of a higher order altogether than how to police the Indian Ocean. Think about it. Ne’er-do-wells like corsairs, weapons traffickers and seagoing terrorists are the main threats to free navigation in maritime South Asia. Everyone, including Beijing, can agree to work together to combat brigandage in the Gulf of Aden or Bay of Bengal, expanses largely free of great-power entanglements. China plays reasonably well with others to the west of Malacca.

To date, anyway. During the Q and A following our panel, I got into a cordial shouting match with a retired Indian admiral and general about how long the present era of good feelings would endure. (We almost had to resort to pistols at daybreak.) The debate boils down to this: When will the PLA Navy be strong enough to overpower the Indian Navy in the Indian Ocean, an expanse that New Delhi considers an Indian preserve, if Beijing gives the word?

The good news: we all agreed that doom is not nigh. While occasionally irksome, the burgeoning PLA Navy presence in regional waters poses little threat for now. But we arrived at that happy conclusion by different routes, and drew different implications from it. The Indian delegates cited shortfalls in Chinese “capability,” opining that it will take the PLA Navy “at least fifteen years” to station a standing, battle-worthy naval squadron in the Indian Ocean. Such a sanguine view rules out a Chinese threat; it lulls Indians.

That might not be such a good thing, considering the growth of Chinese military might over the past couple of decades. Nonetheless, let’s parse the optimists’ view. What constitutes “capability” for the PLA Navy? By that, Indians must be referring to some amalgam of technologically sophisticated hardware; the number of ships, planes and armaments cranked out by defense production lines or procured abroad; and the seamanship, tactical prowess and élan displayed by the mariners who operate this shiny new kit.

“Capability” also encompasses logistics—especially when a navy contemplates instituting a standing presence in distant seas. Modern navies are far from self-sufficient. Ships of war, even nuclear-powered ones, cannot ply the briny main for long without a ready supply of bullets, beans and black oil. That’s U.S. Navy shorthand for the manifold stores demanded by fuel- and maintenance-intensive vessels. And ships and warplanes need regular upkeep. It’s most convenient to perform maintenance in the theater—close to likely hotspots—rather than subject hulls and crews to long voyages back home for overhaul.

To deploy a fleet permanently to remote waterways, in short, a navy needs bases—facilities complete with supply and ammunition depots, dry docks, all manner of workshops, and more. Without one or more lavishly appointed naval stations, Beijing will find it hard to stage more than a fitful presence in the Indian Ocean.

It may be taking steps to correct the logistical shortfall. Last month, engineers broke ground on what reporters touted as China’s first overseas naval base, at Djibouti in East Africa. Well, maybe. In all likelihood the facility will remain a more humble affair than American naval stations such as Yokosuka and Sasebo, which anchor the U.S. Seventh Fleet presence in Japan. It’s worth pointing out, moreover, that the U.S. Navy and Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force also operate out of Djibouti.

And China does need some sort of logistical hub. The PLA Navy generally keeps a three-ship squadron on station for antipiracy duty. A small flotilla demands logistical support, but can get by without a true naval base. Each flotilla rotates back home once another takes its place. Returning ships undergo major maintenance at Chinese shipyards.

Nevertheless, construction at Djibouti furnishes an index for tracking China’s naval ambitions in the Indian Ocean. Monitoring what Chinese engineers build and how seafarers use it may help fellow Indian Ocean powers glimpse what comes next for the PLA Navy in the region. Minimal infrastructure implies a transitory presence, commensurate with police duty, while major infrastructure suggests something bigger. Beijing may want to lay the groundwork for a presence aimed less at scouring the sea of lawbreakers and more at entrenching Chinese naval power in South Asia.

Indians afford such developments close scrutiny, as they have for at least a decade. I lost count of the number of times various quad-plus interlocutors stated, more or less as fact, that China is fashioning a “string of pearls” in the region. That’s the commonplace imagery for an array of Chinese naval bases. It could mean full-fledged naval stations. It could connote lesser arrangements—say, agreements with coastal-state governments that open their seaports to China, letting PLA Navy vessels tarry there routinely but impermanently.

Or a string of pearls could combine both types of arrangements, much as U.S. Navy fleets make their homes at hubs like Yokosuka and Bahrain, yet call at harbors like Singapore for sustenance and R&R from time to time.

And China? It’s doubtful that China is operating under some grand plan to make itself master of the Indian Ocean. In all likelihood, Beijing is amassing options for itself should it someday see the need for a standing presence in the region. Bankrolling development of strategically located seaports like Gwadar in western Pakistan, or Colombo in Sri Lanka, stores up goodwill with prospective host nations while presumably creating a sense of indebtedness on their governments’ part. China could call in such favors during future negotiations over naval access.

It would consolidate its strategic position in the Indian Ocean in the process. The phrase string of pearls, accordingly, has taken on sinister overtones for many Indian observers. One quad-plus delegate upbraided China for encroaching on India’s environs, voicing a wish that New Delhi and friendly governments will prod Beijing to keep its naval expeditions in the region brief, episodic and geared to specific missions, such as succoring those struck by natural disasters. Indians, in short, want China to forego permanent bases—the logistical pillar of sea power.

One Chinese ship type in particular rankles with Indians: submarines. The Indian delegates at Jaipur fretted repeatedly at PLA Navy subs’ presence in regional waters. Beijing has pushed the official line that Chinese boats cruise the Indian Ocean to battle piracy. Indians regard this as a charade. Undersea craft are decidedly suboptimal platforms for chasing speedboats around the Gulf of Aden. Skeptical Indians thus view Beijing’s story as flimsy cover for missions that are meant to acquaint Chinese submariners with future patrol grounds.

Taken in total, this seems to be what Indians mean by capability: naval hardware, access to seaports, the human factor and familiarity with operating terrain. Whether it would really take the PLA Navy fifteen years to amass the makings of Indian Ocean sea power, however, remains an open question. Resolute nations have built great regional navies from scratch in about fifteen years, global navies in about thirty—and China is hardly starting from scratch, two decades into its naval enterprise. The Indian take on China’s maritime prospects seems unduly upbeat.

As for me, I’d say Beijing could stage a potent force in the Indian Ocean almost overnight—if it were prepared to make the PLA Navy battle fleet an expeditionary fleet, and thus if it accepted major risk to its interests and purposes in the China seas. And, of course, such a strategy would turn on whether regional partners proved willing to host such an imposing fleet while riling up India, South Asia’s natural hegemon.

The bottom line is that, if China trusted its anti-access/area-denial weaponry to fend off competitors closer to home, then it could outmatch the Indian Navy in its home region. Do the arithmetic: the PLA Navy boasts the numbers to do so.

That’s a lot of ifs, though. Diverting most of the navy would leave the China seas largely unguarded by heavy forces—an unappealing prospect for Beijing. China will keep its strategic priorities straight unless something truly dire happens in the Indian Ocean, reconciling the leadership to hazards at which it would usually blanch. Those priorities lie mainly off the East Asian coast—mandating that the fleet remain close to home to defend them.

In short, strategy—not capability per se—will dissuade China’s leadership from mounting a major naval presence in South Asia. Look to the strategic canon to see why. Sea-power sage Alfred Thayer Mahan explains how to size fleets for battle. Says Mahan, naval officialdom must apportion a fleet enough ships and armaments to “fight, with reasonable chances of success, the largest force likely to be brought against it.” Shortchanging a formation on numbers or capability, or ignoring what a foe is apt to do with its navy, courts defeat and disaster.

All well and good. Estimating relative combat power is far from simple, but it is doable: tabulate the quality and quantity of platforms deployed by each contender, estimate how a foe’s tactics and skill measure up to yours, add a little surplus, and you have a contingent that can enter the lists with reasonable prospects of success. But what about Mahan’s element of probability? How big a fraction of its strength is that opponent likely to commit to potential scenes of action?

Do some red-teaming to find out. Get to know the adversary and the logic impelling its decision calculus. For that, there’s no better than to start with another of the greats, a man who scarcely acknowledged that oceans and seas exist—namely, Prussia’s Carl von Clausewitz. Clausewitz was forever urging statesmen and generals to stay on target. Once military leaders define an enemy’s “center of gravity,” they should rain “blow after blow” against that “hub of all power and movement” until the foe either calls “uncle” or can no longer put up a fight.

Clausewitz’s monomania primed him to set a high standard for diverting manpower and material into secondary theaters or operations. A combatant, he writes, should refrain from lesser pursuits unless deemed “exceptionally rewarding.” But even if the likely rewards appear exceptional, generals should abjure secondary endeavors unless undertaking them won’t imperil the main theater. For Clausewitz, then, only “decisive superiority” of forces in the main theater warrants detaching resources for peripheral efforts. Stay on target!

And China? It’s far from clear that the PLA Navy commands decisive superiority in the China seas, even when backed up by shore-based fire support—as it is when cruising within reach of airfields and missile batteries arrayed along the mainland’s coastlines. Nor does China stand to gain anything exceptional in the Indian Ocean at present. Yes, Beijing cares deeply about the safety of merchantmen crisscrossing the Indian Ocean. But the PLA Navy can help ward off nonstate scourges like pirates without running undue risk in East Asia—as it has since joining the antipiracy expedition seven years ago. Modest rewards, for modest expenditure of naval resources.

Here’s the crux of our dispute in Jaipur: the Indian dignitaries seem to think China can’t mount a naval threat to India in the Indian Ocean, whereas I think it could but has little incentive to do so. Change the incentives, though, and the situation could change abruptly—to India’s detriment. Never discount the possibility of a “Black Swan.” And bear in mind that Clausewitzian logic will prove less and less forbidding for Beijing over time. As the PLA Navy matures and swells in numbers, China may come to command decisive superiority in the most crucial theater (the Western Pacific) with forces to spare for Indian Ocean adventures. The ghosts of Clausewitz and Mahan will smile.

So the quad-plus dialogue exposed a significant difference in perspectives—one worth belaboring. Let’s not assume away the potential of Chinese sea power, and let’s not assume away Chinese political resolve, the instigator for martial enterprises. Last week one leading Chinese commentator, Fudan University’s Shen Dingli, prophesied that Beijing could summon the resolve to dispatch aircraft-carrier task forces to the Indian Ocean to “hurt” India. If India joins a seafaring league alongside America and its allies, says Shen, “of course we can put a navy at your doorstep.”

PLA Navy flattops at Gwadar: that prospect should give Indians pause.

James Holmes is Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific and Indian Naval Strategy in the 21st Century. The views voiced here are his alone.

This piece first appeared in 2016 and is being reprinted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

James Holmes

U.S. Navy, Global

Battleships still have much to contribute to fleet design, just not as active surface combatants.

Here's What You Need to Know:  Alfred Thayer Mahan describes a capital ship—the core of any battle fleet—as a vessel able to dish out and absorb punishment against a peer navy. While surface combatants pack plenty of offensive punch nowadays, the innate capacity to take a punch is something that has been lost in today’s lightly armored warships.

There’s a mystique to battleships. Whenever inside-the-Beltway dwellers debate how to bulk up the U.S. Navy fleet, odds are sentimentalists will clamor to return the Iowa-class dreadnoughts to service. Nor is the idea of bringing back grizzled World War II veterans as zany as it sounds. We aren’t talking equipping the 1914-vintage USS Texas with superweapons to blast the Soviet Navy, or resurrecting the sunken Imperial Japanese Navy superbattleship Yamato for duty in outer space, or keeping USS Missouri battleworthy in case aliens menace the Hawaiian Islands. Such proposals are not mere whimsy.

Built to duel Japan in World War II, in fact, battleships were recommissioned for the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War. The last returned to action in 1988. The Iowa class sat in mothballs for about three decades after Korea (except for USS New Jersey, which returned to duty briefly during the Vietnam War). That’s about how long the battlewagons have been in retirement since the Cold War. History thus seems to indicate they could stage yet another comeback. At this remove from their past lives, though, it’s doubtful in the extreme that the operational return on investment would repay the cost, effort, and human capital necessary to bring them back to life.

Numbers deceive. It cost the U.S. Navy $1.7 billion in 1988 dollars to put four battlewagons back in service during the Reagan naval buildup. That comes to about $878 million per hull in 2017 dollars. This figure implies the navy could refurbish two ships bristling with firepower for the price of one Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. One copy of the latest-model Burke will set the taxpayers back $1.9 billion according to Congressional Budget Office figures. Two for the price of one: a low, low price! Or, better yet, the navy could get two battlewagons for the price of three littoral combat ships—the modern equivalent of gunboats. Sounds like a good deal all around.

But colossal practical difficulties would work against reactivating the dreadnoughts at low cost, despite these superficially plausible figures. First of all, the vessels no longer belong to the U.S. Navy. They’re museums. New Jersey and Missouri were struck from the navy list during the 1990s. Engineers preserved Iowa and Wisconsin in “reactivation” status for quite some time, meaning they hypothetically could return to duty. But they too were struck from the rolls, in 2006. Sure, the U.S. government could probably get them back during a national emergency, but resolving legal complications would consume time and money in peacetime.

Second, chronological age matters. A standard talking point among battleship enthusiasts holds that the Iowas resemble a little old lady’s car, an aged auto with little mileage on the odometer. A used-car salesman would laud its longevity, assuring would-be buyers they could put lots more miles on it. This too makes intuitive sense. My old ship, USS Wisconsin, amassed just fourteen years of steaming time despite deploying for World War II, Korea, and Desert Storm. At a time when the U.S. Navy hopes to wring fifty years of life out of aircraft carriers and forty out of cruisers and destroyers, refitted battleships could seemingly serve for decades to come.

And it is true: stout battleship hulls could doubtless withstand the rigors of sea service. But what about their internals? Mechanical age tells only part of the story. Had the Iowa class remained in continuous service, with regular upkeep and overhauls, they probably could have steamed around for decades. After all, the World War II flattop USS Lexington served until 1991, the same year the Iowas retired. But they didn’t get that treatment during the decades they spent slumbering. As a consequence, battleships were already hard ships to maintain a quarter-century ago. Sailors had to scavenge spares from still older battleships. Machinists, welders, and shipfitters were constantly on the go fabricating replacements for worn-out parts dating from the 1930s or 1940s.

This problem would be still worse another quarter-century on, and a decade-plus after the navy stopped preserving the vessels and their innards. Managing that problem would be far more expensive. An old joke among yachtsmen holds that a boat is a hole in the water into which the owner dumps money. A battleship would represent a far bigger hole in the water, devouring taxpayer dollars in bulk. Even if the U.S. Navy could reactivate the Iowas for a pittance, the cost of operating and maintaining them could prove prohibitive. That’s why they were shut down in the 1990s, and time has done nothing to ease that remorseless logic.

Third, what about the big guns the Iowa class sports—naval rifles able to fling projectiles weighing the same as a VW Bug over twenty miles? These are the battleships’ signature weapon, and there is no counterpart to them in today’s fleet. Massive firepower might seem to justify the expense of recommissioning and maintaining the ships. But gun barrels wear out after being fired enough times. No one has manufactured replacement barrels for 16-inch, 50-caliber guns in decades, and the inventory of spares has evidently been scrapped or donated to museums. That shortage would cap the battleships’ combat usefulness.

Nor, evidently, is there any safe ammunition for battleship big guns to fire. We used 1950s-vintage 16-inch rounds and powder during the 1980s and 1990s. Any such rounds still in existence are now over sixty years old, while the U.S. Navy is apparently looking to demilitarize and dispose of them. Gearing up to produce barrels and ammunition in small batches would represent a nonstarter for defense firms. The navy recently canceled the destroyer USS Zumwalt’s advanced gun rounds because costs spiraled above $800,000 apiece. That was a function of ordering few munitions for what is just a three-ship class. Ammunition was simply unaffordable. Modernized Iowas would find themselves in the same predicament, if not more so.

And lastly, it’s unclear where the U.S. Navy would find the human expertise to operate 16-inch gun turrets or the M-type Babcock & Wilcox boilers that propel and power battleships. No one has trained on these systems since 1991, meaning experts in using and maintaining them have, ahem, aged and grown rusty at their profession. Heck, steam engineers are in short supply, full stop, as the navy turns to electric drive, gas turbines, and diesel engines to propel its ships. Older amphibious helicopter docks (LHDs) are steam-powered, but even this contingent is getting a gradual divorce from steam as newer LHDs driven by gas turbines join the fleet while their steam-propelled forebears approach decommissioning.

Steam isn’t dead, then, but it is a technology of the past—just like 16-inch guns. Technicians are few and dwindling in numbers while battleship crews would demand them in large numbers. I rank among the youngest mariners to have operated battleship guns and propulsion-plant machinery in yesteryear, and trust me, folks: you don’t want the U.S. Navy conscripting me to regain my proficiency in engineering and weapons after twenty-six years away from it, let alone training youngsters to operate elderly hardware themselves. In short, it’s as tough to regenerate human capital as it is to rejuvenate the material dimension after a long lapse. The human factor—all by itself—could constitute a showstopper for battleship reactivation.

Battleships still have much to contribute to fleet design, just not as active surface combatants. Alfred Thayer Mahan describes a capital ship—the core of any battle fleet—as a vessel able to dish out and absorb punishment against a peer navy. While surface combatants pack plenty of offensive punch nowadays, the innate capacity to take a punch is something that has been lost in today’s lightly armored warships. Naval architects could do worse than study the battleships’ history and design philosophy, rediscovering what it means to construct a true capital ship. The U.S. Navy would be better off for their inquiry.

Let’s learn what we can from the past—but leave battleship reactivation to science fiction.

James Holmes is Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone.

This article first appeared in June 2017 and is being reprinted due to reader interest.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

U.S. officials had repeatedly warned of threats from the Islamic State’s branch in Afghanistan this week.

James Holmes

Military Affairs, Global

It's not just about coming up with a plan; you also have to be able to sell it.

Here's What You Need to Know: Make an analogy or metaphor short and punchy, and make it speak to your particular audience. In the ideal case, it should be expressible as a parable, a simple story with takeaways immediately intelligible to hearers or readers. Too much ambiguity or nuance subtracts power from the metaphor.

“Branding,” or labeling, people, ideas, and things is a competitive sport in Washington, DC, and America has a president who delights in it. For two Harvard Business School professors branding means learning to “strategically craft powerful, resonant, and unique brand positions to help products stand out amidst the cacophony of the marketplace.” Entrepreneurs search for that memorable image, catchphrase, or tagline that lodges in the brains of influential folk—and earns influence for producers of goods and services.

Nor are strategists exempt from marketing their ideas. Far from it: we’re like marketers on Madison Avenue, forever on the hunt for the strategic counterpart to the Most Interesting Man in the World or the GEICO Gecko—the jingle or ad campaign that administration officials, congressmen, or whatever important audience we’re targeting can’t get out of their heads. “Containment,” “offshore balancing,” “restrainment,” “congagement,” “frenemies,” and of course “Thucydides trap” are just a few catchphrases strategic entrepreneurs have dreamt up over the decades.

Strategists being strategists, we often turn to history—or to historical figures—to help brand our ideas. Thucydides Trap, for instance, caught on in large part because the Peloponnesian War and its chronicler still exude glamour two millennia after Athens’ fall to Sparta and its league of allies. Or, because few are familiar nowadays with the Roman dictator Fabius Maximus, it’s commonplace to put George Washington’s face on “Fabian” strategies. Washington remains a popular figure and was a deft practitioner of Fabius’ brand of delaying measures. The imagery stays with students—and so does the strategic concept.

Branding

Not every effort to use history as salesmanship works, though. What makes a good historical metaphor? First of all, pick from history that’s familiar to a critical mass of the demographic you’re attempting to persuade. World War II is an obvious source of analogies for reaching out to American audiences. It’s our Iliad. Failing that, choose history that may be unfamiliar but broadcasts a simple message and has proven appeal even for newcomers. The classics abound with analogies.

Important lessons can manifest themselves in obscure cases; they commonly do. But the more historical background you have to cover to explain the metaphor, the less readily it will register with readers or listeners. Some world-historical events are now largely forgotten, while attention spans expire in a hurry. Think about the battles that made Great Britain master of North America and the maritime world in 1759. These were victories that changed the fates of nations, including our own. Yet it would be hard to make the Battles of Quebec or Quiberon Bay household names. You’d spend too long reviewing the basic facts of the Seven Years’ War to put the analogy in context. Eyes would glaze over.

So historical episodes that are well known, straightforward, or both should constitute your first resort. When addressing a Chinese audience or China specialists, for example, citing the Great Wall evokes a great deal. Toshi Yoshihara and I once likened a first island chain fortified by U.S. allies to a “Great Wall in reverse” that imprisons Chinese ships and aircraft within the China seas. The imagery struck a chord. Viewed from China, the notion of a barrier that keeps China in—rather than nomadic raiders or other foes out—is deeply unsettling.

So make the analogy or metaphor short and punchy, and make it speak to your particular audience. In the ideal case it should be expressible as a parable, a simple story with takeaways immediately intelligible to hearers or readers. Too much ambiguity or nuance subtracts power from the metaphor.

Second, beware when pulling ideas from historical figures. Concepts from diplomatic or military theory may seem straightforward to you, but many are not in the everyday lexicon—even for lawmakers or military officialdom.

What sorts of ideas from the strategic canon resonate? Here’s one: it oftentimes seems that strategy comes in threes. Clausewitz has his “trinity” of rationality, passion, and chance and creativity—the three elements he says make up any warring combatant. Thucydides designates fear, honor, and interest as the “strongest motives” impelling human affairs. Mahan has two threes: he defines sea power as commerce, bases, and ships, and he proclaims that commercial, political, and military access to important trading regions represents the purpose of sea power. And so forth. Numerology? Maybe. But there’s something about threes.

Select theoretical ideas with care

Certain analogies to battlefield strategy retain their appeal for centuries if not millennia. Take Cannae. Cannae was a battle from Roman antiquity (216 BC, to be exact) during which the Carthaginian general Hannibal deployed guile and deception to stage a “double envelopment,” oftentimes simplified to “pincer movement,” against a Roman army. The Carthaginian host encircled and slaughtered the Romans almost to the last man, and it did so on Italian ground—earning Hannibal his place on the honor roll of fighting generals.

Now, Carthage ended up losing the Second Punic War—but not until after Hannibal had rampaged up and down the Italian peninsula for seventeen years. Few fault him for eventual defeat. Soldiers studied Cannae well into the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries. For instance, the battle inspired German strategists mapping out strategy for the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). So successful was the Prussian Army’s Carthaginian approach at the Battle of Sedan (September 1870) that Sedan achieved the stature of a historical metaphor in its own right.

In fact, General Alfred von Schlieffen, the architect of Germany’s famous Schlieffen Plan for World War I, commissioned a series of “Cannae Studies” of encounters including both Cannae and Sedan. After reviewing the history of land warfare from antiquity to modernity, the framers of the Cannae Studies concluded that double envelopment, the gold standard during the age of close-quarters combat, remained the key to triumph on industrial-age battlegrounds. So there’s a parable for you: execute an effective double envelopment and you can engrave your name in martial history alongside Hannibal’s.

Cannae reverberates throughout the ages. The U.S. Army reprinted Schlieffen’s studies as recently as the 1980s.

Third, an effective analogy cites a successful strategy, commander, or statesman. Why associate your big idea with failure in your audience’s minds? No one would name a strategic concept after Fort Necessity (1754), George Washington’s cataclysmic failure as a commander—not even to capture Washington’s allure. Dien Bien Phu, the French Army’s debacle in Indochina (1954), likewise makes a loser for branding strategic ideas. The audience may reject your pitch even in the best of circumstances; why start off at a credibility deficit by branding yourself as someone who entertains suspect ideas?

Channel success—not disaster—and make a favorable first impression

That warning also applies to good ideas that failed. Mahan appraises the strategic logic behind Athens’ Sicilian campaign (415 BC) and finds it impeccable, but hitching your proposal to a venture that cost a major power its entire expeditionary fleet and army would be a winner with few audiences. Results matter. Do not label your strategic idea A Sicilian Campaign That Works!

Similarly, avoiding the Schlieffen Plan would be astute. Yes, Schlieffen was acclaimed one of nineteenth-century Germany’s most gifted soldiers, and yes, his campaign design made sense. But it failed. If you cite a historical analogy and immediately have to start making excuses for it, you’re better off looking elsewhere to brand your concept.

I always giggle when preparing to teach Desert Storm, “my” war. Likening some aspect of the coalition offensive to the Schlieffen Plan became a bit of a fad back then. For example, Col. John Warden, the architect of the air campaign, depicted it as an aerial Schlieffen Plan. Many compared the ground offensive to Schlieffen’s handiwork as well. And unwittingly telegraphed this message: I am selling you a masterpiece of an idea that will fail when put to the test of combat, the true arbiter of what does and doesn’t work in martial competition.

The air and ground campaigns worked in Desert Storm to great fanfare, but commanders’ salesmanship for them was so-so at best.

The Maginot Line is another example worth shunning. Edward Luttwak rightly points out that the French fortifications never fell to German arms in World War II. But so what? The Maginot Line was defeated. France fell. An utter defeat doesn’t make an inspiring banner for your great idea. Indeed, naval proponents used the Maginot Line to warn about the “hollow” U.S. Navy of the 1970s. It’s better as a cautionary tale than for branding.

And lastly, beware of altogether successful analogies if they took place amid dubious circumstances. Think about the French Army’s Morice Line in Algeria (1957). FLN militants broke an army against the Morice Line. It ranks as one of history’s most impenetrable defensive frontiers. But the French-Algerian War (1954–1962) barely even qualifies as forgotten for your average American, it was a decolonization struggle in which torture played a prominent part, and France ended up losing the war despite French engineers’ excellence at defensive works. In short, the Morice Line is tainted by association with the larger North African conflict.

Strategic branding is about conveying ideas persuasively. So be choosy when sifting through history to help sell your ideas, and connect yourself with proven winners. Do that—and stand out among the voices clamoring for attention in the marketplace.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. An archive of his works is available at his personal blog, The Naval Diplomat. The views voiced here are his alone.

This article first appeared in March 2018 and is being reprinted due to reader interest.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Ethen Kim Lieser

Child Tax Credit,

Despite being only two months into the disbursement of the funds, it appears that the tax credits are having a great impact on millions of children.

The advance payments from the new and expanded Child Tax Credits that have been issued over the past two months have the potential to raise the average monthly income for families receiving federal housing assistance by nearly forty percent, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

“The average monthly income for HUD-assisted families with children is approximately $1,460, or $8,760 over six months,” the report states. “On average, Advance Child Tax Credit payments will increase monthly income by $550 among these families.”

CTC Benefiting Low-Income Families

Writing on the website HUD User, the report’s authors Veronica Helms Garrison and Janet Li added: “The Child Tax Credit will directly impact millions of families receiving rental assistance from HUD. Among the nearly 4.6 million HUD-assisted households in 2020, approximately 1.6 million, or thirty-four percent, are families with children.”

They continued: “Ninety-one percent of these HUD-assisted families with children are single-parent households, and sixty-two percent have two or more children. Overall, approximately 3.3 million children live in HUD-assisted households, including around 897,000 children under the age of six.”

President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, passed in the spring, has enabled the federal government to give eligible parents as much as $3,600 per year for a child under the age of six and up to $3,000 for children between ages six and seventeen. Broken down, this means that a $250 or a $300 payment for each child will be direct deposited each month through the end of the year.

Positive Impact on Children

Despite being only two months into the disbursement of the funds, it appears that the tax credits are having a great impact on millions of children.

“Sixty-one million children across America are benefiting from the advance Child Tax Credit, helping families put food on the table and meet the needs of the next generation,” the Treasury Department’s Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo said in a statement.

In addition, a survey from ParentsTogether Action suggested that all it took was one payment from the credits to reduce the financial anxiety of fifty-six percent of American families. More than half of the respondents agreed that the direct cash payments were a “huge deal” and another forty percent said the money was “helpful” to the overall family budget.

Another bout of recent research released by the Census Bureau showed that parents who have received the credits reported less trouble paying for groceries and basic household expenses. It also noted that approximately ten percent of American households with children sometimes or often didn’t have enough to eat over the past week—the lowest percentage registered since the pandemic began a year and a half ago.

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Washington state-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek, and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn.

Image: Reuters

James Holmes

China, South China Sea

Beijing has a way of using wordplay to redefine and expand its political and strategic prerogatives.

Here's What You Need to Know: Assent to China’s demands for the sake of comity, and creeping encroachment will proceed on the surface beneath.

Chinese maritime strategy is a misnomer, methinks. It should be strategies, plural. China may harbor the same goals in, say, the East China Sea that it does in the South China Sea. Namely, it may aspire to wrest physical control—a.k.a. sovereignty—from its neighbors throughout a given expanse and the airspace overhead. The Chinese Communist Party’s word would become law. Others would obey.

The aggregate result, should these strategies work: de facto sovereignty for China within Asia’s first offshore island chain, backed up by the armed might of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

But Beijing is treading disparate pathways toward that end. Indeed, its approach in the East China Sea is a geospatial inverse of its approach in the South China Sea. Exhibit A: last month Chinese air-traffic controllers warned the crew of a U.S. Air Force B-1B bomber that the aircraft had entered “Chinese airspace” and should begone forthwith. In reality, the bomber was transiting China’s air-defense identification zone (ADIZ), declared to great fanfare back in 2013.

Coastal states commonly erect such zones to monitor air traffic heading toward their shores, but China’s ADIZ represents a thinly veiled grab for sovereignty over the airways. It’s an airborne counterpart to the “nine-dashed line” inscribed on China’s map of the South China Sea. Beijing claims the right to regulate not just flights bound for China, but any aircraft transiting the zone—even if well out to sea and parallel to the mainland coastline. It claims to regulate overflight over geographic features administered by other Asian governments, notably the Japan-administered Senkaku Islands.

And party spokesmen have taken to blurring the language they deploy to describe the ADIZ. They increasingly refer to it as territorial airspace, where foreign aircraft may pass only if they desist from all military activities. That’s entirely fitting in the airspace over China’s territorial sea, which extends twelve nautical miles offshore. Beyond the twelve-mile limit, however, no coastal state has the right to dictate what aircrews may or may not do. That’s the avian commons, a domain where virtually untrammeled freedom prevails.

The Obama administration and friendly governments thus rejected Beijing’s ADIZ unequivocally, and for good reason. China has a way of using wordplay to redefine and expand its political and strategic prerogatives. Defenders of the commons must debunk attempted sleights of hand early and often. The Trump administration appeared set to embrace the same approach as its predecessor. The U.S. Air Force aviators reminded the air-traffic controllers that they were conducting lawful operations in international airspace, seventy miles offshore. They refused to deviate from their flight path.

Good. Assent to China’s demands for the sake of comity, and creeping encroachment will proceed on the surface beneath. If airspace belongs to China, so must the sea and land below. QED. Rebuff China’s demands aloft, and it will have a hard time redefining its ADIZ as national territory. The sea below will remain a commons as well.

As noted before, China’s South China Sea strategy is an upside-down cousin to its East China Sea strategy: Beijing started by claiming the sea and its archipelagos, and projected its supposed jurisdiction skyward. If the sea is part of Greater China, goes the logic, then so is the wild blue yonder above. That’s why party officialdom uses the language of “innocent passage” for the South China Sea commons. It insists that foreign ships and aircraft forswear all military activities there—the way they must within coastal states’ territorial waters.

Why the disparity between strategies? Why not replicate the proven Southeast Asian approach to the north? First of all, there’s expediency. Chinese diplomats can point to the map to justify their claim to South China Sea waters and islands. To the 1947 map, that is, that bears a nine-dashed line enclosing waters that have supposedly belonged to China since remote antiquity. That’s an image with long provenance, and something to sustain a diplomatic campaign.

There is no similar map of the East China Sea, where Japan wrested Taiwan and the Senkakus from dynastic China during a short, sharp war in 1894–95. Proclaiming an ADIZ supplied a way to sketch a new map of the East China Sea—and start the process of asserting jurisdiction there.

Second, the East China Sea is simply a less hospitable theater for Chinese strategy compared to the South China Sea. The South China Sea is a long, distended body of water dotted with islands, atolls and reefs. Except for China, weak coastal states form its rim. Unless Southeast Asian states make common cause—as they seldom do—Beijing will command a forbidding advantage in any contest for control of regional islands, sea or air.

If the South China Sea offers relatively permissive surroundings, the East China Sea is uninviting. It is compact by contrast to the South China Sea. Strong military powers hostile to Chinese territorial aggrandizement comprise its eastern rim. Among these potential foes, Taiwan is unofficially allied with the United States. Japan is formally allied with the United States, and indeed, its world-class navy operates as part of a combined fleet alongside the U.S. Seventh Fleet.

In short, little territory remains for Beijing to prise loose in the East China Sea. What islands there are belong to powerful antagonists backed by the predominant naval power of the age. Small wonder that China’s coast guard, maritime militia and navy have confined themselves to harrying Japanese forces policing the sea around the Senkakus. And small wonder Beijing started staking its claims with an ADIZ. Declaring such a zone represented one among a lean menu of options.

In his last major work, titled Naval Strategy (1911), historian Alfred Thayer Mahan hinted at the differences between Southeast and Northeast Asia today. Notes Mahan, regions that are “rich by nature and important both commercially and politically, but politically insecure, compel the attention and excite the jealousies of more powerful nations.” Southeast Asia is a quintessential economically vibrant yet weak and disunited region. It makes an ideal setting for a jealous, united China that wants to rewrite the rules of the regional order.

To Chinese eyes, by contrast, Northeast Asia is a prosperous theater, occupied by an antagonist boasting the world’s third-largest economy, allied to a superpower boasting the world’s largest economy. This is a tough neighborhood for would-be hegemons in Beijing. Badgering others to acquiesce in its air-defense zone may be the most China can do unless the military balance comes to favor China so lopsidedly that it can entertain new options.

Will Beijing’s air-first strategy work? Doubtful. China has achieved a measure of success in Southeast Asia because the sea lends itself to “gray-zone” tactics prosecuted by paramilitary and nonmilitary implements of sea power. Maritime militiamen operating within the fishing fleet—and backed by the China Coast Guard—can overwhelm regional coast guards and navies. The surface-first approach lends itself to gray-zone tactics.

Not so aviation. The nature of air and sea traffic is just different. Fishing or coast-guard craft can obstruct passage by foreign fishing boats, coast-guard cutters, or even warships. Block a slow-moving ship’s path and it stops or turns away. The burden of deciding whether to escalate or capitulate falls on the victim of Chinese gray-zone tactics—and Beijing gets to play the aggrieved party if the victim chooses escalation.

Yet there’s no obvious aerial equivalent to China’s swarm of fishing craft. Military aircraft operating under ground control constitute the airborne arm of China’s offshore strategy. Intercepting and blocking the movements of foreign aircraft is dicey compared to playing chicken down on the surface. Collision and death are far more likely, the diplomatic repercussions unpalatable in the extreme. Nor can officialdom distance itself from what PLA pilots do the way it can from maritime militiamen.

One doubts Beijing relishes a repeat of the 2001 EP-3 incident, when a Chinese fighter was hotdogging near a U.S. surveillance plane over the South China Sea, collided with the American plane and set loose a diplomatic ruckus. It certainly doesn’t relish lots of repeats. And yet such would be a foreseeable outcome of sending planes to operate routinely in close proximity to foreign aircraft. The burden would fall on China—not China’s opponents—to justify its behavior. Beijing would have painted itself as the aggressor.

The upshot? The U.S.-Japan alliance should remain confident and united while shoring up its side of the military balance. If the allies do, they will expose China’s ADIZ as hollow—and keep China from exploiting it to seek bigger things.

James Holmes is Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone.

This article first appeared in April 2017 and is being reprinted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

James Holmes

Japan, East Asia

Tokyo seeks to conserve the U.S.-led order in East Asia, while Beijing wants to overturn it.

Here's What You Need to Know: The outcome may come down to who wants it more. Will China or the transpacific alliance muster more, and more sustained, enthusiasm for its cause?

Let's not understate the likelihood of war in East Asia or kid ourselves that the United States can remain aloof should China and Japan enter the lists. It's tough for Westerners to fathom the nature of the competition or the passions it stokes. From an intellectual standpoint, we have little trouble comprehending the disputes pitting the Asian rivals against each other. For example, both Tokyo and Beijing claim sovereignty over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, a tiny archipelago near Taiwan and the Ryukyus. China covets control of offshore air and sea traffic, hence its new East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) and its efforts to rewrite the rules governing use of the nautical commons. Undersea energy resources beget frictions about where to draw the lines bounding exclusive economic zones (EEZs). And so on.

The facts of these cases are outwardly simple. They're about how to divvy up territory and stuff. Outsiders get that. But therein lies a danger -- the danger of assuming that tangible, quantifiable things are all there is to an impasse. That's doubly true when the territory and stuff under dispute command trivial worth. By strategist Carl von Clausewitz's cost-benefit logic, the Senkakus or Scarborough Shoal merit minimal time or resources from any of the protagonists. Hence commentators wonder why compromise appears so hard when the stakes are so small by objective standards. They find it baffling that great powers would risk war over "uninhabited rocks in the East China Sea.” Some Asia-watchers strike a world-weary tone at the willingness of societies to struggle over "intrinsically worthless" geographic features.

Why, they ask, can't the contenders just split the difference -- restoring regional harmony in the bargain, and sparing others needless entanglements and hardships? To cling fast to objects of little obvious value seems obtuse, if not irrational and self-defeating.

Is it? Sci-fi master Robert A. Heinlein might jest that Westerners understand these matters but don't grok them. Great questions encompass not just the concrete interests at issue but also larger principles. Heinlein coined the term grok for his classic Stranger in a Strange Land. It means "to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed." It means feeling something in your gut, not just knowing it intellectually. He appeared to despair at one person's capacity to truly know another. To grok "means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science." But such "deeper understanding," vouchsafes Heinlein, eludes most people as color eludes "a blind man." The result: an unwitting empathy deficit toward allies and prospective adversaries alike.

Yet grok grim strategic realities we must. This competition is about more than islets or ADIZs. Nothing less than the nature of the Asian order is at stake. Making the world safe for democracy, or oligarchy, or whatever regime holds power at home constitutes a basic impulse for foreign policy. From the age of Thucydides forward, nations have spent lavishly to preserve or install regional orders hospitable to their own national interests and aspirations. By surrounding itself with like-minded regimes, a nation hopes to lock in a favorable, tranquil status quo. As it was in antiquity, so it remains today. Imperial Japan upended the Asian hierarchy in 1894-1895, smashing the Qing Dynasty's navy and seizing such choice sites as Port Arthur on the Liaotung Peninsula. It began making Asia safe for a Japanese empire.

Military triumphs often underperform their political goals. But as my colleague and friend Sally Paine notes, the first Sino-Japanese War was a limited war whose effects were anything but limited. The Qing regime remained in place following its defeat, but the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which terminated the conflict, signified Japan's eclipse of China as Asia's central power. The treaty's terms -- in particular its transfer of Taiwan to Japan -- modified the regional order in ways we still live with today. Indeed, Professor Paine points out that Chinese foreign policy since 1895 has striven to repeal Shimonoseki, while Japanese foreign policy has sought to reaffirm it.

In short, Imperial Japan ousted China from its place atop the Asian hierarchy through limited war. China would like to repay the favor, regaining its rightful -- to Chinese minds -- station through similarly limited coercive diplomacy. Classical strategist Sun Tzu instructs commanders to look for opportunities to achieve disproportionate effects through minute amounts of force. Beijing evidently discerns such an opportunity in the East China Sea. It hopes to make Asia safe for its brand of communism-cum-authoritarian capitalism.

But the geometry of any future conflict will be more complex than the one-on-one Sino-Japanese War. Curiously, the United States is a not-so-silent partner in guaranteeing the remnants of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, as modified by the outcomes of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), and the Pacific War (1941-1945). American officials insist that Washington has no particular stake in whose flag flies over the islands and atolls dotting Asian waters. That's true. But it has a strong interest in preserving the system it has presided over since 1945.

Permitting any one coastal state to change the rules by fiat -- to abridge freedom of the seas and skies, or wrest territory or waters from another -- would set a dangerous precedent. If Beijing gets away with amending the system once, why not again and again? And if China, why not regional powers elsewhere in the world? For the United States, then, this is a quarrel not over flyspecks on the map, but over principle. That's why the Senkakus and the ADIZ matter to Americans. Call it entrapment if you must. But it's doubtful any U.S. administration could lightly abstain from a Sino-Japanese trial of arms.

So Tokyo, Beijing, and Washington all have vital stakes in this contest. What does that imply about a hypothetical war? Clausewitz urges statesmen to let the value they assign their "political object," or political aims, govern the "magnitude" and "duration" of the effort they mount to obtain those aims. The more important the goal, the more lives, treasure, and hardware a combatant expends -- and for longer. Massive interests warrant massive investment. All three Asian stakeholders thus may prove willing to spend heavily, and for a long time, to get their way.

Here's the rub: Clausewitz prophesies that each contender, mindful that it could be outdone, will apply more force than the bare minimum to avoid surrendering the first-mover advantage to the adversary. Leaders fear letting the opponent get the drop on them. Doing more, sooner, helps a protagonist stay ahead of the competition and bolster its prospects of victory. An escalatory dynamic takes hold if everyone does more than simple cost-benefit logic dictates. Washington and Tokyo should acknowledge this in their internal and joint deliberations.

Clausewitzian fatalism represents the beginning of strategic wisdom. It's safe to assume the contestants will all strive to achieve their goals through minimal force -- preferably without fighting at all. No one relishes the hazards of war. It's equally safe to assume that they see yielding territory, status, or maritime freedoms as even worse than war.

A fight over seemingly minor stakes, then, could mushroom into a major conflagration arraying China against the US-Japan alliance. How much passion would an East China Sea imbroglio rouse among the combatants? China and Japan would be all in. Disputes involving sovereignty -- particularly territory and resources -- tend to drive the perceived value of the political object through the roof. Tokyo and Beijing, moreover, are acutely conscious that the post-1895 status quo is in play. In Clausewitzian parlance, goals of such value merit open-ended efforts of potentially vast magnitude.

American fervor is the key unknown. The United States could be conflicted about its part in a protracted endeavor. It could confront a mismatch between compelling yet seemingly abstract interests, and popular apathy toward these interests. Freedom to use the global commons is indubitably a vital U.S. interest. So is standing beside friends in peril. Everyman would doubtless agree if you put these questions to him. But how many rank-and-file citizens truly grok the system's importance to their daily lives? Few, one suspects.

If so, two antagonists attaching immense value to their objectives will face off in the East China Sea, one backed by a strong but faraway ally whose commitment could prove tepid. Clausewitz -- yep, he speaks out on contemporary affairs once again -- alleges that no one attaches the same urgency to another's cause that he assigns to his own. The ally with less skin in the game makes a halfhearted commitment to the cause, and looks for the exit when the going gets tough.

If the old skeptic is right, the U.S.-Japan alliance could come under stress in wartime. Tokyo and Washington share the same immediate goal, conserving the US-led order in East Asia. Consensus about the surroundings and how to manage them would seem to cement allied unity. But as Clausewitz reminds us, the importance assigned to a goal -- not just the goal itself -- matters. One ally can place so-so value on a goal that another prizes dearly. Tokyo has status and territorial interests at stake, riveting its attention and energies on the dispute. Yet it's far from clear that the American polity -- state and society -- values custodianship of the maritime order or the defense of Japanese-held lands that highly. Suspicions could seep into allied consultations, with Tokyo questioning Washington's devotion and Washington resenting being dragged into war.

In the end, then, the outcome may come down to who wants it more. Will China or the transpacific alliance muster more, and more sustained, enthusiasm for its cause? Thucydides reminds posterity that fear and honor -- not just objective interests -- propel human affairs. Scottish philosopher David Hume seconds the thought, adding that "Interest and ambition, honour and shame, friendship and enmity, gratitude and revenge, are the prime movers in all public transactions; and these passions are of a very stubborn and intractable nature."

Philosophers thus maintain that passions color the most rational calculations. Nearby threats to crucial interests concentrate minds. Threats to remote, seemingly ethereal interests elicit less ardor, and thus less political support, from the man on the street -- even if he agrees on the need to combat such threats. If U.S. leaders take the nation to war in the Western Pacific, quite a salesmanship challenge awaits them. War or no war, it's worth rallying support behind America's responsibilities. Now would be a good time to start.

Where does this all leave us? Sino-Japanese war could break out over matters Westerners deem inconsequential. It would be a coalition war, and it could be big, bad, and long. The US-Japan alliance might appear solid in the early going, obscuring subterranean fractures within the alliance. Yet transpacific unity might dissipate should the struggle wear on and American resolve flag -- exposing these fissures. These are matters worth clarifying in allied circles now, before things turn ugly.

Let's grok strategic reality. Heinlein would expect no less.

James Holmes is Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College. The views voiced here are his alone.

This article first appeared in January 2014 and is being reprinted due to reader interest.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

James Holmes

Great Britain, Europe

That domestic politics intercedes in strategy and fleet design hardly constitutes a novel observation.

Here's What You Need to Know: If operating two Queen Elizabeth ships and their stealth aircraft proves pricier than forecast—hardly an unlikely prospect—the carriers themselves might come under scrutiny. Having reduced the Royal Navy to a couple of fleet units to save money, lawmakers might deploy the same bean-counting logic to justify dismantling the fleet units themselves. Allied effectiveness would suffer.

Talk about role reversal. A long century ago, starting in 1909, Great Britain entreated its Pacific dominions—Canada, New Zealand, Australia—to construct “fleet units” to supplement a Royal Navy that confronted multiple challengers in multiple theaters. A fleet unit was a modular task force composed of a cruiser and its coterie of destroyers. Naval potentates such as Adm. Jacky Fisher expected each dominion to construct and maintain one. It would serve as the national navy while doubling as a module in an imperial navy. In peacetime each fleet unit could perform routine functions on its own, acting as a standalone armada. Or dominion navies could merge into a grand Pacific fleet alongside Royal Navy forces when storm clouds gathered. Having massed for action, the imperial fleet would face down some predator—presumably the Imperial Japanese Navy, a force casting covetous eyes on maritime Asia.

The fleet unit, then, was a strategic concept for a mass-production age. Fleet units comprise building blocks of a multinational navy. In theory they’re interchangeable, featuring standard hardware, training and doctrine. A common language, cultural heritage and worldview helps. Plug and play!

Assembling an interoperable imperial navy while conscripting dominion governments to help bear the burden represented Britain’s way of regenerating its naval posture in the Pacific Ocean. In those days Europe was choosing up sides for the Great War. The Kaiser’s Germany was bolting together a battleship fleet hard by the British Isles, and menacing British shores with each keel laid. The German High Seas Fleet taking shape in the North Sea thus beckoned Royal Navy ships homeward from distant stations, there to run a naval arms race in defense of the homeland. Evacuating Britain’s Pacific holdings to compete with Germany left a power vacuum, tempting an Imperial Japan flush with high-seas victories over Russia and China. The fleet-unit concept purported to fill that vacuum—applying counterpressure to offset Japanese ambitions.

Today, though not in so many words—and, in fact, perhaps with little deliberate strategic design—Britain is reconfiguring its Royal Navy as a fleet unit for service in an imperial fleet. America is the liberal imperium now under strain. It’s in need of material aid in the Far East to offset another would-be hegemon, namely China.

That seems an unlikely role for a Royal Navy in decline. London is reportedly set to divest the Royal Navy of its “gator” fleet, the amphibious transports and support vessels that land Royal Marines on foreign shores. Much of a navy’s capacity to exploit control of the sea resides in amphibious ships and marines—the very forces now on the chopping block. In effect top political leaders are demoting amphibian power projection to an afterthought in British strategy. Others will project power onto foreign shores after the Royal Navy helps win fleet battles. No longer will Great Britain possess the wherewithal to conduct maritime campaigns as an independent great power. It is relegating itself to supporting-actor status.

Decommissioning the amphibious contingent will leave behind a specialist surface navy centered on two Queen Elizabeth-class supercarriers now preparing to join the fleet. The Royal Navy is morphing from a balanced fleet into something less.

We can consult a Briton for insight into these matters. Crudely speaking, Britain’s homegrown sea-power theorist, Julian S. Corbett, partitions naval warfare into two phases. Two fleets fight for “command” of important waterways. Command of the sea means driving off or sinking rival fleets, and thereby creating a safe nautical sanctuary from which to wage war at sea, on land, or aloft. Antagonists try to deny command to each other while wresting it away for themselves.

And afterward? Success entitles the victor to exercise command of waters scoured of enemy forces. Command represents an enabler for such workmanlike missions as policing the sea, raiding enemy merchantmen, pummeling targets on foreign shores, or landing forces on dry ground to project power inland. These are the dividends of maritime command. Seamen think in terms of garnering glory on the high seas, yet boots slogging across muddy battlegrounds are what win wars. And depositing troops, equipment, and stores on land in bulk demands amphibious transports—ship types whose days appear numbered in Great Britain.

In that sense the Royal Navy appears destined to become a partial navy: it will excel at fleet-on-fleet combat while boasting minimal capacity to exploit the gains from fleet combat. The revamped Royal Navy will fall short after the fight.

Why the turnabout in British maritime strategy? It owes to a mix of financial constraints and strategic considerations, but cost-cutting seems to predominate. It’s been decades since Britannia ruled the waves. Having gotten by for so long without a globe-spanning navy, it seems British leaders have concluded they no longer need to fund a balanced fleet—in other words, a force equipped and trained to execute missions throughout the continuum from peacetime to wartime missions.

To shed costs, accordingly, Parliament and Prime Minister Theresa May’s government are consciously unbalancing the Royal Navy. Rather than disperse finite resources in an effort to maintain ever-dwindling numbers of all ship types, they are concentrating resources on a few specialist capabilities—chiefly those comprising carrier aviation forces—alongside traditional strengths in undersea warfare and mine countermeasures. They’re refocusing Britain’s navy on functions associated with battling for and holding command of the sea, while soft-pedalling capabilities associated with exercising nautical command.

British seafarers, in other words, will concern themselves mainly with blue-water operations, mainly with fleet-on-fleet duels, and mainly with the early stages of marine conflict.

Now, this is largely unobjectionable from my parochial ‘Mercan standpoint. The United States is struggling to “rebalance” enough naval forces to the Pacific to offset China’s swelling military might. The U.S. Navy could use the help in sea fights, whereas it can probably satisfice with the gator fleet it fields.

The Royal Navy could render direct aid, returning to regional seaways decades after withdrawing from east of Suez. Once there, British task forces could help shore up deterrence vis-à-vis China. Three U.S. Navy carrier strike groups just operated together in Northeast Asia. In the future a Royal Navy flattop might join in—helping constitute a formidable striking arm while telegraphing a powerful message about allied solidarity.

Or, more plausibly, allied leaders could draw up a geographic division of labor. British seamen could assume more responsibility for maritime defense in the Atlantic theater, making sure the Atlantic remains tranquil while American carrier forces ply Far Eastern waters. In the process the Royal Navy would free up U.S. forces for East Asia.

Either way, fleet-unit logic remains as compelling today as it was a century ago. Direct or indirect, British help with managing high-seas affairs would prove invaluable to the common cause. True to the fleet-unit approach, the Royal Navy should shape naval forces that are as interoperable with their U.S. Navy counterparts as possible. An aircraft-carrier flotilla able to plug-and-play into a U.S.-led carrier task force, or even take command of such a task force, would be ideal. That the Queen Elizabeth carriers will deploy air wings centered on the same aircraft as U.S. Navy nuclear-powered flattops—F-35 Lightning II stealth fighters—augurs well for combined naval operations.

The advent of a modular Royal Navy, then, represents a good-news, bad-news story for those of us on this side of the Atlantic. A carrier-centric navy can contend for mastery of the sea, the first and foremost mission for any sea service. Its specialty, open-seas combat, is something the U.S. Navy and other allied forces can sorely use. Presumably, though, the Royal Navy will delegate the job of projecting power ashore to allies. Dismantling the Royal Navy’s gator fleet will swivel British maritime strategy away from land toward managing events on the high seas—and in the process foreclose strategic options for Britain as a freestanding great power.

Thus London will need allied support to prosecute any major seaborne campaign. If no help is forthcoming, Britain might forfeit worthwhile goals. Or Britain’s allies might join an enterprise solely to preserve alliance relations—and thus with little fervor for the enterprise. Popular disillusionment with the transatlantic special relationship could result. Such are the quandaries of entangling alliances—which is why America’s founders warned against them. Seemingly technical questions about navy budgets and fleet design in Great Britain thus raise larger questions about the health and longevity of transatlantic ties.

Denuding the Royal Navy of its capacity for amphibious warfare, then, could give rise to self-defeating entanglements. If London saw the need to act in, say, North Africa yet lacked the capacity to land marines, that might tempt Washington to join in—lending U.S. Navy and Marine Corps capabilities to a venture that might not suit American interests, or that might siphon off resources from U.S. sea services that are already scattered across the seven seas for manifold purposes. U.S. leaders must exercise some self-discipline to avoid further overextending the services.

Domestic politics, moreover, can upset the soundest strategic schemes. Alliances are fissile things, dependent on the vagaries of domestic politics among their members. It remains unclear whether the fleet-unit approach is popular enough in Britain to endure changes of party. Indeed, it’s unclear whether officialdom has even explained the approach to ruling elites and rank-and-file Britons in strategic terms. If not, an Anglo-American division of labor has little political ballast to it. If a cost-cutting exercise—not conscious strategic choice—brought London to its new fleet design, then future rounds of budgetary debate could see the concept discarded on similar penny-pinching grounds.

That’s what happens when saving money takes precedence over strategic effectiveness. If operating two Queen Elizabeth ships and their stealth aircraft proves pricier than forecast—hardly an unlikely prospect—the carriers themselves might come under scrutiny. Having reduced the Royal Navy to a couple of fleet units to save money, lawmakers might deploy the same bean-counting logic to justify dismantling the fleet units themselves. Allied effectiveness would suffer.

That domestic politics intercedes in strategy and fleet design hardly constitutes a novel observation. Adm. J. C. Wylie points out that lawmakers make strategic decisions through what they choose to fund—and not to fund—all the time. Heck, dominion governments didn’t submit meekly to Great Britain’s modular fleet design a century ago. Mindful of Canada’s modest GDP and bicoastal geography, for instance, Canadian leaders protested the expense of a cruiser/destroyer force. And they objected to British plans to base the Royal Canadian Navy fleet unit in the Pacific. A westward orientation, they complained, would leave Canadian interests in the Atlantic unguarded except through the good graces of Britain’s navy. What made sense for imperial defense made a tough sell with Canadian constituents.

Carl von Clausewitz would nod sardonically at all of this. The martial scribe observes that everything in strategy is simple, yet “the simplest thing is difficult.” Minor difficulties “accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction” that impairs rational strategy-making and operations. And Clausewitz is alluding to friction within a single state’s military and diplomatic apparatus. Trying to orchestrate multinational strategies, forces, and doctrine only compounds friction in the machinery’s innards.

In particular, half-heartedness bedevils allied ventures. “One country may support another’s cause,” contends Clausewitz, “but will never take it so seriously as it takes its own. A moderately-sized force will be sent to its help; but if things go wrong the operation is pretty well written off, and one tries to withdraw at the smallest possible cost.” Tepid political commitment begets lackluster strategic results. Clearly, then, a modular transatlantic fleet design will not come together or sustain itself of its own accord—any more than it did within the British Empire in days of yore.

Executing such a design will take constant, painstaking effort. Like all alliances, coalitions, and ententes, an Anglo-American navy—if indeed one is in the offing—will demand careful tending from diplomats and senior commanders on both sides of the Atlantic. Let’s not entrust alliance-building and maintenance to shipwrights and tacticians.

James Holmes is a professor of strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific. The views voiced here are his alone.

This article first appeared some time ago and is being reprinted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters,