Like the annual media story trumpeting a “Drop In Crime Even As Prison Population Surges”, the cause and effect nature of Gates statistics seem simply to evade him. The plain truth of the matter is that we have a world full of free riders, content to spend meager portions of their defense budgets on navies BECAUSE we have such a dominant one. That Navy—our Navy—performs a critical function in the global system, one performed at different times by the leading maritime nation of the world. The English, the Portuguese and the Dutch all provided a “global good” by being as powerful as they were and ensuring that others could safely and reliably conduct commerce across wide expanses. What is most dangerous of all about Gates riff here is where it could lead—and that is to a naval arms race. Our spending on a dominant Navy discourages virtually every nation on earth from building bigger more powerful navies (more on that in a bit). Should we begin to show signs of walking away from that dominance—other nations will see themselves has having no other option than to build more ships. While we may short-sightedly think that is just fine, in the long run, such a naval arms race would be destabilizing.
Bryan argues that Gates fundamentally misses the point by asking why the United States has eleven carrier battle groups while no other country has more than one. While I appreciate Bryan's argument (the United States has special responsibilities, including global maritime maintenance and the prevention of regional arms races), I can't accept that US force structure should have no relation to international procurement. The argument fails on a simple thought experiment; if the Chinese in the next twenty years build six carrier battle groups, would anyone still think that eleven USN carriers are sufficient for US needs? They certainly would NOT be sufficient for the mission that Bryan suggests (maintaining a hegemonic position in order to deter arms races), yet at the same time I doubt that anyone would advocate for the deployment of sixty-six carrier groups in order to maintain our current level of dominance. Accordingly, it's simply not true that foreign naval procurement and force structure should have no effect on discussions about how many carriers the United States ought to deploy. At best, we can say that there's a floor below which the United States cannot accomplish the tasks associated with benign maritime hegemony, and that this floor is affected by the force size of major potential competitors. Recognition of this hardly makes Gates' comparison of the USN with its foreign competitors irrelevant, however.
The second issue is that Gates really understates US supremacy. It's not simply that the United States has eleven carrier battle groups and the Russians have only one; the US is close allies with most of the other major naval powers in the world. The British, French, Japanese, Italian, South Korean, Spanish, Canadian, and Australian navies are all quite large by worlds standards, and are all tied to the United States by formal treaty arrangements. It's fair to ask whether all of these treaty arrangements would withstand a serious maritime crisis, but it's absurd to assume that none of them will. Moreover, one of the insights of the Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower is that naval power is not entirely zero sum. Even Chinese and Russian naval capabilities contribute to some of the missions that are associated with the maintenance of the maritime domain. US, allied, and competitor forces can't simply be added together, but they do complement one another. Thus, allied capabilities in particularly serve to lower the floor of minimum USN capacity. They also affect US force structure; allies are probably less likely to become involved in intense, peer competitor type conflicts than the US, and less likely to have capabilities that can contribute to such fights. Nevertheless, the naval capabilities of both allies and competitors matter for discussions of the optimal size of the USN.
Now, all of this is different than the question of where the USN currently sits in regard to the floor under which benign maritime hegemony is no longer necessary. It's possible that this floor is eleven carrier battle groups, ten amphibious assault ships, etc. It's also possible that the floor is above this, and that the US and its allies are already incapable of accomplishing the tasks associated with benign maritime hegemony, although if this were the case it would be worth investigating whether force structure rather than size was the real culprit. Anyway, if we're under the floor then Gates' questions about carrier battle groups aren't quite irrelevant, but do miss the point. I don't believe we're under that floor; in short, I think that the ability of the USN to bust down doors and beat down competitors is considerably greater now than it was in 1988, largely because the only viable competitor disappeared in 1992. I also think that the Cooperative Strategy provides a framework through which we and our allies can accomplish the other tasks of benign maritime hegemony with a minimum of friction.
I think that there's also a point of comparison problem. The United States Navy has enjoyed two moments in the last sixty five years of utter, uncontestable maritime hegemony. The first followed the wake of World War II, and the second the collapse of the Soviet Union. At both points, the USN enjoyed not simply dominance, but complete maritime command. Both points, as it turned out, were unsustainable. Even a modest Soviet post-war construction program would have made maintaining the level of dominance enjoyed by the US in 1945 economically impossible. Similarly, the effective and sudden disappearance of the Soviet Navy in 1992 again rendered the USN utterly dominant in every corner of the globe. Again, even modest naval construction programs on the part of China or Russia would make that level of dominance economically infeasible for the United States. As it turns out, Russian naval reconstruction has yet to achieve the level "modest", while Chinese construction has substantially exceeded modest, but the point remains. This is why I find efforts like Robert Kaplan's "Elegant Decline" hypothesis nearly worthless; the idea of relative decline is tied to a particular point of reference, and that point of reference may not be sensibly chosen. As I suggested above, the USN is relatively less dominant now than in 1992, but is considerably more dominant than it was in 1988. Why the former is considered a more relevant comparison that the latter eludes me. In this context, wondering about the relationship between the USN and other major competitors is, again, on point.
The question of how foreign naval construction ought to affect US naval procurement echoes a larger debate about the relationship between the US defense budget and world defense spending. We know, of course, that the US accounts for roughly half (possibly more) of aggregate world defense spending; the only question is what this fact means. I tend to believe it means that the US is overspending, especially given the fact that five of the top seven and ten of the top thirteen spenders are US allies, but this belief is not a necessary implication of the facts on the ground. It might be best for the US to account for 3/4 of aggregate world defense spending; I would still doubt, however, that foreign capabilities (high or low) should play no role in determining the level of US financial commitments.
What I appreciated most about Gates speech was open the recognition of US world military supremacy. This supremacy doesn't allow the United States to do anything it wants (as Kenneth Waltz has argued, "To say that militarily strong states are feeble because they cannot easily bring order to minor states is like saying that a pneumatic hammer is weak because it is not suitable for drilling decayed teeth"). Nevertheless, conversations inside the defense community often seem to have an almost scholastic character, in which the assumption of utter US hegemonic dominance is almost unspoken. Gates, at the very least, recognizes that we're simply talking about modifying the degree of US dominance, and trying to find the floor under which benign maritime hegemony can no longer hold.
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