Robert Kaplan Advocates an Off-shore Shift

While Galrahn may think my views on Jointness and the primacy of a maritime approach to grand strategy a bit extreme, I don't see many folks accusing Robert Kaplan similarly.  But he's saying essentially the same things: 

"Then there is America's military power. Armies win wars, but in an age when the theater of conflict is global, navies and air forces are more accurate registers of national might. (Any attack on Iran, for example, would be a sea and air campaign.) The U.S. Navy has gone from nearly 600 warships in the Reagan era to fewer than 300 today, while the navies of China and India grow apace. Such trends will accelerate with the defense cuts that are surely coming in order to rescue America from its fiscal crisis."

And this

"Husbanding our power in an effort to slow America's decline in a post-Iraq and post-Afghanistan world would mean avoiding debilitating land entanglements and focusing instead on being more of an offshore balancer: that is, lurking with our air and sea forces over the horizon, intervening only when outrages are committed that unquestionably threaten our allies and world order in general."

We have a choice.  We can hasten our decline by wastefully building and re-building land forces for promiscuous use, or we can sustain and extend our position of global leadership through a more judicious application of American Seapower. 

Bryan McGrath