Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Vladomirovich Putin (KGB) Ret., who managed to create great warmth in the hearts of both George Bush and Barack Obama in his post-service employment, has moved on after his Sochi 2014 triumph to a well-timed Putin's move is driven by a number of factors, not the least of which is the continued ownership of a naval base at Sevastopol, his desire to rebuild a non-communist inheritor of the greatness of the Soviet Union, and his desire to secure Russia's "near abroad". I am no expert in matters of Russian History or European realpolitik, and so my analysis cannot go much deeper than reading and understanding the thinking of others who are. Twitter is aflame with their opinions, some of which make sense.
I find myself generally in agreement with those who lament that we do not have many military options in this matter, though I do believe we have some diplomatic cards to play, and it sounds as if the Administration is largely playing that hand well. That said, my reading of history leads me to believe that diplomacy becomes more effective when there is military power available to supplement it.
Were I a Joint Staff Officer I would be busy with contingency planning, but since I am not, I will restrict my musings to the subject of how we got here.
Simply put, we got here because V.V. Putin made a calculation that the price he would pay for his actions in Ukraine was less than the benefit he could accrue. Some may try to make it more than that, but they would be wrong. This is a straightforward calculation of strength and weakness, and in Putin's mind, the West is weak, or at least not strong enough to make a difference.
Logical contributors to Putin's mindset must surely be the geographic insularity of the region by land, and while proximate to the sea, the paucity of any available naval strength to contend with his adventurism. So while the West may recall Ambassadors and cancel meetings (these are not unserious moves), Putin calculates that he will quickly consolidate his gains and a new normal will prevail. He is likely correct in this assumption.
He is correct because Russian forces WILL quickly consolidate their gains--because there is nothing to get in the way.
We got here because the United States vacated the Mediterranean as a hub for forward deployed naval combat power in the 1990's, and Europe's navies responded to the vacuum by getting even smaller. While some may wonder whether military action would have been in our interest here, it is an academic discussion. There is little we could do. I make no claims about land or land-based air power, but from the perspective of what seapower can accomplish, the key to it accomplishing anything worthy at all is to be there, or close by. Where we choose to "be" these days is in the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean/Arabian Gulf, and these are good decisions, though the diminishing size of our Fleet will make posturing force in even these two areas more problematic.
Seapower is about options and options become more limited where it is not employed. Here is where the false choice between capacity and capability arises, one heard a great deal in these days of defense budget cuts and strategy-making. We are led to believe that faced with declining resources, it is best to choose capability over capacity, that we can and should assume additional near and mid-term risk while we protect long range advances and technology. This is the argument for cutting an aircraft carrier and its related argument, reducing the number of air wings. This is the argument for cutting the fleet size, and for regrettable (but innovative) necessities like subjecting ships to inactive modernization periods. But options--the kind of options that the world's most important nation (I believe) still (I believe) wishes to to consider--are a function of capacity. Already unable to provide the combat power required in the two hubs mentioned due to insufficient capacity (Fleet size), we find ourselves with the growing realization that we can longer ignore the Mediterranean and its related waters. Libya and Benghazi, Syria and now Ukraine--each situations in which the options available to the President were limited by the capacity of the force at his disposal. There is not enough naval power to deter and dissuade, and to provide forceful backup to our diplomacy. And so the Mediterranean--once a center of our national security interest--becomes a conservation of force theater.
As I lamented the other day, I believe our system to be horribly broken, and it is that system upon which we must rely to reach the conclusion that I have--that we need a larger Navy, more widely fielded, and assuming a larger share of the national security burden. Until that day comes, we must be more prepared for events to occur that we find distasteful, but for which we have no answer and no capacity to mitigate in situ. We will lodge protests, issue stern condemnations, recall diplomats and cancel summits. But we will be smaller and we will less consequential. And we will have chosen that path.
Bryan McGrath
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