FEATURE ARTICLE

January 2007

‘Conversation with the Country’ yields a cacophony of opinions

By Grace Jean

NEWPORT, R.I. — All that was missing was Regis Philbin, a couple of lifelines and a million dollar check.

At the Navy’s first “Conversation with the Country” maritime strategy symposium here at the Naval War College, handheld polling devices were distributed to audience members, who were asked for opinions on how they viewed the Navy’s role in the nation’s defense.

Snippets of music, a la “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” played as audience members, the majority clad in service uniforms, voted on 10 questions that ranged from characterizing U.S. strategy since 9/11 to selecting which countries could cause the most harm to U.S. interests.

No one requested to call a friend or use a 50-50 lifeline.

The responses were tallied in seconds and displayed immediately onstage.

The results can’t be used in any scientific way. But they can provide useful insight for Navy officials seeking to figure out how to tell the Navy story to policy makers and taxpayers who may wonder why, while the nation is engaged in a ground war, the Defense Department should spend $130 billion a year on the sea service.

Such feedback may spur additional research by the Navy as it looks to formulate a new maritime strategy and find the final answer to the question, “What is the Navy’s value to the nation?”

Here in Newport, a Navy-friendly town that is home to the Naval War College, the service hosted the first of eight outreach events planned for the next several months. Subsequent forums are intentionally avoiding areas with naval concentrations because the Navy wants to reach beyond the people who already support it, said Vice Adm. John Morgan, deputy chief of naval operations for information, plans and strategy.

The next conversation takes place later this month in landlocked Phoenix. “It’s going to be harder when we start going out to the rest of the country,” Morgan said.

Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Navy has struggled to define its functions and responsibilities in non-traditional conflicts.

A cadre of experts who gathered in Newport offered the Navy a cacophony of opinions, and hinted at the difficulties the service faces in articulating a solid vision for the future of naval power.

The new strategy, officials said, will be unveiled this summer. It will replace the previous document, which became obsolete with the end of the Cold War.

James Kurth, professor of political science at Swarthmore College and visiting professor at the Naval War College, said the future strategy, to be successful, should make a convincing case that the Navy is critical to the defense of the nation. It also should specify those threats that the Navy will be equipped to defeat, he said. “I personally believe we will not get a budget for any strategy, including maritime,” unless an enemy is identified clearly in the minds of members of Congress and other key decision makers.

“One of the greatest strengths of the original maritime strategy, of the 1980s, was that it defined the enemy, it identified geography, which in turn determined weaponry,” he said. It named the Soviet Union as the enemy, focused on four maritime areas — the Norwegian Sea, the North Sea, the Mediterranean Sea and the Sea of Japan — and set forth nuclear deterrence and conventional deterrence as a military strategy. Ballistic missile and attack submarines, surface ships, carriers and the Marines and Coast Guard were the means to win a “global non-nuclear war with the Soviet Union,” he said.

At this point, he said, China is the only obvious enemy, with its rapidly expanding military and rising global influence. Others potentially are Iran, Pakistan and India, which all have significant maritime environments and geographies.

Another possible threat is the reemergence of terrorism and piracy in two important “sea lanes of communications,” in the Straits of Malacca and the Red Sea, he added.

“If we allow that to percolate, ultimately all the pieces of pre-modern piracy, of modern oil dependency and post-modern Islamist terrorism will come together, and will cause serious problems. This obviously would be another test for a new maritime strategy,” he said.

The central tenet of the current maritime strategy is deterrence, which neatly fit the reality of the Cold War. But the foundation of the new maritime strategy, he said, should be the protection of the maritime channels for global commerce.

The ocean has value because it’s a common space, said George Baer, a member of the Naval War College faculty. Entire societies depend on maritime commerce and food from the sea, which is plied by 40,000 merchant sailors. Global maritime trade is expected to double in the next 20 years.

“In that sense, I think maritime forces are not only essential for the defense of the United States, but for preserving and shaping the world of the future, and especially for guiding the path of that country in the future that can most challenge this vision,” said Kurth.

Paul Bracken, professor of business and management at Yale University, told the conference that technology must be at the center of the new maritime strategy.

“The only way the U.S. can have global presence is by using technology,” Bracken said.

The Navy also must prepare for small-scale interventions in the global south due to ethnic strife, and it must monitor national independence movements as sources for political violence. This layered maritime strategy also must allow for the Navy to develop capabilities to deter satellite attacks and reconstitute those systems, he added.

Chinese doctrine reveals that one of its first strategies in a conflict with the United States is to take out satellite systems, upon which the nation has become increasingly dependent for intelligence and communications, said Peter Schwartz, a business consultant and an advisor to Navy officials.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the Navy is involved to protect those assets,” he said.

In formulating its maritime strategy, the Navy must consider the full range of scenarios, from implications of a long democratic peace to those of an American empire, said Schwartz, author of the book, “The Art of the Long View,” which appears to have influenced Navy leaders in their approach to crafting the service’s strategy.

Decisions on the future are not based on the real world, but on perceptions of why things happen the way they do, he said.

As an example of failed vision, he cited IBM’s decision in 1980 to gamble the company’s future on the premise that personal computers would be a passing fad.

To prevent a similar sort of visionary failure, the Navy needs to consider additional scenarios as it devises its strategy, said Schwartz. At the top of his list is global climate change.

For the past 10,000 years, the Earth has been experiencing an interglacial period with slight temperature fluctuations. Schwartz contended that this stable warm climate is not the norm, and that a return to the Earth’s turbulent and cold climate is imminent.

“We will begin to experience the severe effects of climate change in the next 10 to 20 years, not the next 200 years. Climate change is the single greatest crisis that human civilization has ever faced,” said Schwartz. “It is a civilization crisis of enormous proportions.”

Access to water will be a source of conflict in 10 to 20 years, he contended, and food supplies will be disrupted as ecosystems change in response to the climate, he alleged. Though he tempered his alarmist statements by saying that the proper investments in technologies and other policies can make some difference in this situation, the implications of altered states of resources will remain an issue.

Additionally, there are changes taking place in human society as well. Of largest concern is an emerging caliphate, a rising Arab-Islamist coalition stretching from Africa through the Middle East to the western border of China.

“This is where World War Three is emerging in real-time,” he said. There are loosely connected conflicts in numerous countries in that region, and there potentially could be wider conflict from Nigeria to Chechnya, to Pakistan, and even Indonesia.

There also could be possible conflicts with non-state actors as well, not only terrorists, but also non-governmental organizations and super-empowered individuals that can constrain nation-state power with activism and large checkbooks, respectively.

Schwartz said that he expects the United States to face “coalitions of denial”— nations collaborating to constrain U.S. power by using unrestricted warfare. “They will fight on every front but the military one to limit what the United States can do in the world,” he said. Such a coalition is already under way, he added.

The United States military in recent years has become worried about losing access to bases overseas. Schwartz said he thinks it is extremely likely that all of its overseas bases, including those in the Pacific and in Europe, will be lost in the near future.

“We will have to do everything from our homeland the way everyone else has to,” he said. That will be an enormous logistics challenge to move large amounts of war fighters and materials over great distances in hours and days, not weeks and months, he said.

But one of the biggest challenges for the military will be domestic terrorism.

“I am absolutely convinced we will fight on the homeland, and we’re going to have to do it with zero collateral damage,” he said. Consider the 2002 Chechen takeover of a Moscow theater that resulted in more than 129 hostage deaths. How would the United States have handled that situation, he asked the audience. “Would the U.S. have done better? I don’t think so,” he said. There is a lack of technology, doctrine and command structure for that particular scenario.

“The maritime strategy must cross a spectrum of violence. It will show the services what they need to prepare for, and gives a common purpose, which must be clear and specific,” Baer said.

The Navy must prepare for homeland defense, but it also must be ready to give humanitarian assistance around the globe. It must support armed interventions, and thus position itself for ballistic missile defense. It must deliver fires ashore and also must be ready to fight interstate war. It must assist in sea-use management, and it may be called for offshore command and control in the case of a terrorist pandemic. It must monitor the cyber sphere as well as merchant ships. Because 90 percent of the world’s information flows beneath the oceans through fiber optic cables, the Navy must protect those lines to ensure the free movement of electrons.

“I mention these many and varied functions — some traditional uses of navies and some new — because these are what the Navy must prepare for,” said Baer.

Please email your comments to GJean@ndia.org

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