The AEGIS Standard Towards Strategic Balance

Many years ago, and specifically the year I turned 21 years old, that uncle flew me out to his place in Los Angeles to show me a bit about his profession as a global businessman. That uncle was often referred to as the rich uncle, but that's not exactly true. He was remarkably smart and successful pulling in money like it grew on the lawn, but he equally blew through money like his wallet was on fire. In those 5 days he spent the equivalent of my annual salary at the time each day. It was obscene yet exciting, but it also explained why he never got married and never started saving a penny until he reached his late 60s.

I had recently started a new company at the time, and he wanted to show me what he did. His plan was simple: I was going to sit beside him for several days as he met with some of the world’s top bankers. Keep in mind this was in 1997; the US economy was booming, and the biggest concern in terms of global shock came from unknowns like Y2K. Y2K was the topic of these meetings, and in every meeting I was introduced as his Y2K expert (which was true).

I learned a lot, no question, and many things I learned that week have stuck with me through the years, but there was one 3 hour meeting I attended where those gathered discussed the shift in the late 70s away from the gold standard towards the global economy today, and over time I have come to accept their argument as a quiet truth understood by those on the global side of big money: The Gold Standard was replaced by the proverbial F-16 Standard in 1979 to save the world during a global energy crisis. It was at that time America's debt economy was born.

Because of overwhelming US military power and because the US was willing to use force when necessary to protect interests, it was believed that no competitor to the US dollar would ever emerge until a competitor to the proverbial F-16 emerged first. Keep in mind, these are bankers and strategy consists mostly of risk management in their world. The only safe bet in the emerging global economic order that included many new players participating as resource contributors was the raw power of the United States to back the US currency by force.

After watching the banking crisis of the last few years and the war of the last decade, I frequently wonder if the proverbial F-16 standard even exists in the minds of global bankers anymore.

I thought about this as I read Robert Kaplan this morning in the Financial Times.

The financial world is obsessed with stock market gyrations and bond yields. But the numbers that matter in the long run are those of U.S. warships. Asia has been at the centre of the world economy for decades because security there can be taken for granted, and that is only because of the dominance of the U.S. navy and air force in the western Pacific.

Because 90 per cent of all commercial goods traded between continents travel by sea, the U.S. navy, which does more than any other entity to protect these lines of communication, is responsible for globalisation as we know it.

There is no guarantee that this situation will last, however. In the 1980s era of high Reaganism, the U.S. Navy boasted close to 600 warships. In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, that number fell to about 350. The U.S. Navy’s current strength is 284 warships. In the short term that number may rise to 313 because of the introduction of littoral combat ships. Over time, however, it may fall to about 250, owing to cost overruns, the need to address domestic debt and the decommissioning of ageing warships in the 2020s. Meanwhile, the bipartisan quadrennial defence review last year recommended that the U.S. move toward a 346-ship navy to fulfil its global responsibilities.

There is a big difference between a 346-ship U.S.navy and a 250-ship navy - the difference between one kind of world order and another.

The very next statement Kaplan writes in this article is important. Kaplan says "Armies respond to unexpected contingencies, but it is navies and air forces that project power." This is similar to something I believe to be a constant of 21st century national security policy; which is that armies project force, but it is navies and air forces that project power.

In my opinion, this is where Malcolm Turnbull and Hugh White lack detail in their arguments for strategic balance in East Asia. Both suggest the best and most realistic strategic outcome for East Asia is one in which the major powers are in balance, but the term balance is used in generic terms and without context. Balance does not mean equal, and it is where things aren't equal that matter the most in the strategic balancing equation.

Does a world where China becomes the worlds largest economy strike me as a strategic concern? Honestly, by itself; nope. China is the most important trading partner to the United States today, and I see that achievement for China in alignment with US economic advancement in the 21st century, and economic advancement by the US has historically also driven social and technological advancement for the United States as well. With that said, the brilliant and creative Stan Lee was right - with great power comes great responsibility.

What concerns me much more is if China fails to mature within the liberal global order over the next few decades and simultaneously attempts to achieve primacy of the global oceans through naval power. If indeed the best and most realistic strategic outcome for East Asia is one in which the major powers are in balance, then it must also be stated that the strategic balance Turnbull believes is best cannot be achieved should China achieve primacy over US Naval power, and I would go further to suggest US naval primacy is today the single condition that allows strategic balance between the major powers if/when China achieves primacy in other areas of national power like economy.

As the global economic trade winds shift from the Middle East to Asia, other shifts are taking place as well. With the emergence of alternative energy, the proverbial F-16 standard - once the replacement for the Gold Standard that placed the US dollar at the center of the global energy currency market - is itself slowly being replaced by the proverbial AEGIS Standard that protects the global trade lines-of-communication towards insuring global currencies can exchange in the spirit of commerce in the 21st century market.

To use a simplistic and imperfect historical analogy as bloggers tend to do, I would suggest strategic balance in East Asia is achieved as long as the US emerges as Athens and China emerges as Sparta, and the global security environment and global economy is managed better than it was by the ancient and modern Greeks respectively. If that happens, the 21st century has an opportunity for a prosperous and promising future. However, if China strives to become Athens and US policy continues to be driven by the Spartans in the DoD; Australia, everyone else in the Pacific, and Washington, DC should not only be preparing for, but expecting war.

US Primacy in Asia: Not Inevitable

With a hat tip to the Lowy Institute Blog, these are some interesting comments by Malcolm Turnbull, the Australian Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband, and a very high ranking leader within Australia's Liberal Party.

This is not the typical party line one often sees in the US or Australia, which from a political view, more frequently looks into the future of Asia in the context of US retaining superiority even when nodding to US relative decline. In this speech, Turnbull repeats a new tone on the subject, first noted by Sam Roggeveen last month, and again yesterday by calling for the pursuit of a future regional balance in Asia.

As Henry Kissinger recently reminded us, history is far from bunk in China “No other country can claim so long a continuous civilisation, or such an intimate link to its ancient past and classical principles of strategy and statesmanship.”

That is why when Deng Xiao Ping opened China up to the world in 1979 he invoked the example of the 15th century Admiral Zheng He who led great voyages across the Indian Ocean. In those days, an open and confident China was the world’s strongest nation. When later emperors closed China off to the world, Deng reminded the hardliners, China became weak and began a decline that ended with 150 years of humiliating invasion, colonisation and exploitation by stronger nations.

A humiliation that in the 20th century included the brutality of the Japanese occupation and rape of Nanjing, and in the 19th, the Opium Wars which were the equivalent of the Medellin Cartel sending a nuclear submarine up the Potomac and threatening, successfully, to destroy the Capitol and White House unless the US disbanded the Drug Enforcement Agency.

China drank deep and long from the well of bitterness and defeat. And so when Mao Ze Dong announced his triumph from atop Tien An Men in 1949 his first words were Zhong Guo ren min zanqilai le - the Chinese people have stood up.

So it is no surprise that as China becomes richer it seeks to strengthen its military capacity. Those who interpret this as necessarily meaning a stronger China is a more aggressive one should reflect on that history and recent events.

China lost in the 19th century vast tracts of land in what is now Siberian Russia - the Amurskaya region for example. These thefts were ratified in unequal treaties in 1858 and 1860. Recognising that depopulating yet resource rich Siberia may constitute an opportunity in the future, China could have decided to leave those treaties as illegitimate artifacts of its century of humiliation, to be redressed when times were propitious.

Instead it has chosen to renegotiate and settle the Sino-Russian borders with minor adjustments. Hardly evidence for imminent territorial expansion.

And as Kissinger has also pointed out, unlike the USSR or even the US, China does not seek to persuade other countries to adopt its values, let alone its system of Government.

The central role of trade in China’s prosperity also argues for its rise to remain peaceful. In 2010 China’s trade was 55 per cent of its GDP - the same as for Britain in the 1870s, the era of the Pax Britannica, and five times larger than trade in the US economy of the 1950s and 1960s when American economic dominance was greatest. Given the importance of a stable economy in the regime’s legitimacy, China’s rulers themselves have more to lose than almost anyone from conflict that disrupts global economic flows.

The best and most realistic strategic outcome for East Asia must be one in which the powers are in balance, with each side effectively able to deny the domination of the other - a scenario which Hugh White has written about extensively in the recent past.

With its energy and resource security depending on long global sea lanes, it is hardly surprising that China would seek to enhance its naval capacity. Suggestions that China’s recent launch of one aircraft carrier and plans to build another are signs of a new belligerence are wide of the mark.

In that regard, I disagree with the underlying premise of the 2009 Australian White Paper that we should base our defence planning and procurement on the contingency of a naval war with China in the South China Sea. Prejudice or wishful thinking is not a substitute for coolly rational analysis.

As I said in London, this is no time for another “long telegram” or talk of containment. It makes no sense for America, or Australia, to base long-term strategic policy on the proposition that we are on an inevitable collision course with a militarily aggressive China.

Yet remarkably, while all of us galahs in the political petshop are talking about the rise of Asia, many are apparently laboring under the misapprehension that while everything can change in the economic balance in our region, nothing will change in strategic terms.

In other words, even though China is about to become the world’s largest economy and is actually in the centre of East Asia, nonetheless the United States will remain the dominant power in the region, in the same way it has been since 1945 and even more so since the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

Au contraire.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose is not a sound basis on which to build Australia’s foreign policy.

Rather, our strategic response to the rise of China therefore should be to continue to deepen our engagement with that nation and with our other neighbours, as friends even if not as allies, and at the same time hedge against improbable but adverse future contingencies, as opposed to seeking to contain (futilely in all likelihood) a rising power.

Of course cool heads are required on all sides. China needs to be more transparent about its goals in the region and on the basis of that build confidence with its neighbours so that misunderstandings can be avoided.

In that light, the decision to host up to 2500 marines at an Australian army base in Darwin could hardly be regarded as a threat to China (just as Australian naval ships exercising with the PLA navy was presumably not regarded by the US as a threat). After all there are over 60,000 American service personnel including 17,000 marines in Japan and Korea - on China’s doorstep in comparison to Darwin.

China’s prickly reaction reflected not the foreshadowed deployment itself, but the context briefed out by the White House - that that this was part of a strategy to stand up to growing Chinese economic and strategic power, a spin reflected in most media commentary despite being contrary to common sense (not to speak of geographic reality).

It suits President Obama’s domestic agenda to be seen to muscle up to China, even if the additional muscling does not bear too much analysis. But an Australian Government needs to be careful not to allow a doe-eyed fascination with the leader of the free world to distract from the reality that our national interest requires us truly (and not just rhetorically) to maintain both an ally in Washington and a good friend in Beijing - which is, after all, our most important trading partner and a principal reason why our unemployment rate is half that of North America or Europe.

If extravagant professions of loyalty and devotion to the United States strike a somewhat awkward note for many Australian ears, how do we imagine they sound in the capitals of our neighbours? And the same may be said in respect of equally extravagant compliments paid to Beijing. Australian leaders should never forget that great powers regard deference as no more than their due.

I have less interest in Australian politics than I do US politics, at least on this topic, because for the most part it is infrequent to see political leaders make bold statements with purpose and wisdom. Some of the issues raised in this speech represent a rare exception.

From a strategic perspective, I note that - finally - we see a legitimate political leader (and as expected, outside the US) at least attempting to raise the topic of policy options should US primacy not be maintained in the Pacific.

Hugh White has been raising the topic for some time, and as he articulated very well in his recent Obama Doctrine article in the Wall Street Journal, President Obama has made clear it is the policy of the United States to resist China's challenge to US primacy in Asia, using all the instruments of its power to strengthen and perpetuate the preeminent leadership the US has exercised in the region for decades. In a news conference in Canberra, Australia, on Nov. 16, President Obama described it as a mistake to suggest the U.S. fears China or is seeking to isolate the world’s most populous nation. He said, “The main message that I’ve said not only publicly but also privately to the Chinese is that with their rise comes increased responsibilities.” He went on to say, “It’s important for them to play by the rules of the road.”

Which is accurate, except it is also accurate to note that US policy is intended to insure they are US sanctioned rules and a road the US maintains some control over.

From Hugh White's recent contribution in the New York Times.

Everything now depends on how China responds. Optimists hope that Beijing will back off in the face of American resolve. Pessimists fear they will push back, escalating strategic rivalry between the world’s two strongest states and threatening the future peace and stability of Asia. Even if the optimists are right in the short term, the longer-term trends favor the pessimists. Historians may well look back at this as the moment that U.S.-China rivalry became overt and unstoppable. The consequences could be disastrous for everyone, including America. China’s economic scale makes it the most formidable strategic adversary America has ever confronted.

Many believe that America has no choice because the only alternative to U.S. primacy is Chinese hegemony. But is that right? Does America need to dominate Asia in order to stop China dominating it? Or could America balance and limit China’s power, while still allowing a rising China more space? Might there be a way to prevent Chinese hegemony and still avoid outright rivalry? We should start asking these questions now, because we are running out of time to answer them.

The Diplomat recently described Hugh White as the Australian Canary. Maybe, but I'm more interested in who will be the US canary. The Republican candidates, one of which is likely to replace Barack Obama unless the President can learn economics in the next 12 months, are almost certain to adopt the Obama doctrine for Asia that centers on US primacy. All evidence suggests that US political leaders cannot take any political stand except one that focuses on US primacy in Asia now and forever. This is a fools gold, but no one ever said politics wasn't foolish.

So we are left to search for other leaders, whether civilian or military, who are ready to promote visions of Americas future foreign policy in Asia and around the world that is congruent with the very real possibility that China may indeed have the largest economy in the world by 2025 - just 15 years from now. If China becomes the worlds largest economy, would that disrupt American primacy in Asia? President Obama's policy record isn't very good, indeed he isn't running a reelection campaign based on his record in case you haven't noticed, so there is certainly no evidence this new Obama Doctrine for Asia will be successful. There is also little evidence that anyone is thinking about a Plan B.

As China builds up military resources and capabilities commensurable with their economic growth, how should the US respond? Whose strategic vision of the future includes US prosperity and security regardless of whether China is the largest economy in the world or not?

The Makin Island Deployment - Another Reminder the US Needs More Amphibs

The Makin Island ARG consisting the amphibious assault ship USS Makin Island (LHD 8), the amphibious transport dock ship USS New Orleans (LPD 18), and amphibious dock landing ship USS Pear Harbor (LSD 52) departed San Diego with Amphibious Squadron (PHIBRON) 5 and the 11th MEU on Tuesday. The deployment has generate a bit of news in the media with articles at DoDBuzz, Marine Times, the San Diego Union Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times. Of the various articles, the Los Angeles Times has this right - pirates should be concerned.

While ARG deployments in the Pacific are old hat for the Navy and Marine Corps, it is becoming increasingly rare to see an ARG deployed from either coast to spend any significant amount of time anywhere other than operating under CENTCOM command in the 5th fleet. I have heard many suggestions that the Makin Island ARG has been working overtime during deployment preparations training for activities specific to activities one might find around Somalia and Yemen - like piracy. If I was a pirate warlord, my advice is to take the best deal you can for ransom as soon as possible, and start looking for a new job with less associated risk.

All I'm saying is that I have noticed the US is giving the Horn of Africa a lot of attention lately, and if we are ever going to see a shift in US policy towards piracy, that policy change will arrive in the form of an ARG that added extra training specific to the piracy issue - and a new ARG just deployed to that region following rumors of intense anti-piracy training.

But while we are talking about Amphibious Ready Groups and CENTCOM, I want to point out that Makin Island hasn't done anything yet, and the real amphibious ready group story is the unfolding record breaking deployment of the Bataan ARG. If you recall, as a response to unfolding events in Libya, the Bataan ARG deployed a few weeks early on March 23, 2024 - 207 days ago (nearly 8 months ago). Lets just say she isn't coming home for Christmas, and if she isn't home by Valentines Day (a legitimate possibility) - the ships will break all records for deployment length since World War II.

Tipping Point much?

Seriously, keeping up with folks on LHD5 has been one of my most enjoyable blog related activities in 2011, and while that deployment has been very challenging for the families, I will pass on that the morale on The 5 is still very high. There are some special folks on those ships, and it's a good thing too because a deployment that will exceed 10 months like that Bataan ARG requires nothing less to be successful.

For the record, Bataan ARG represents a visible data point regarding the need for more amphibious ships. When amphibious ship deployments start breaking modern deployment length records - which WILL happen with Bataan - that means the Navy has not built enough amphibious ships. Politicians in Washington have held many hearings on the topic of dwell time for the Army, but right about now I'm thinking the Navy and Marine Corps folks who have been on ship for over a year in training and deployment are probably wondering who the hell their dwell time advocate is in Washington DC. At what point will Congress get the message that without more amphibious ships - which consistently has by percentage the highest number of days at sea annually of any surface vessel type - the nations leaders are asking way too much of the smaller, always desired but usually-overlooked-by-big-Navy amphibious force. 10 months is a long time for a battalion of Marines at sea, but because they are Marines - no one will ever hear a single complaint about it.

That doesn't mean it isn't a real problem.

The maintenance bill at the end of these very long ARG deployments isn't going to be small. Remember, Kearsarge ARG was at sea for 8+ months and now Bataan ARG will be at sea for 10+ months. I think these are important issues to keep in mind as Makin Island ARG heads to sea.

Mitt Romney's Three Carrier Presence Model

On Tuesday, Nov. 15 the Heritage Foundation and AEI will join CNN in a Foreign Policy debate with the Republican candidates. I've largely avoided most of the previous debates by doing other things, but I am looking forward to this debate.

I have no expectation the debate will be some major moment in election politics for 2012, but I am hoping someone at Heritage or AEI is sharp enough to ask Mitt Romney about this part of his speech. This paragraph in Mitt Romney's recent Foreign Policy speech tells me two things that I am not sure Mitt Romney actually understands, but I welcome being wrong.

I will enhance our deterrent against the Iranian regime by ordering the regular presence of aircraft carrier task forces, one in the Eastern Mediterranean and one in the Persian Gulf region. I will begin discussions with Israel to increase the level of our military assistance and coordination. And I will again reiterate that Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is unacceptable.

Today, the US Navy has a 1.0 carrier requirement in the Pacific and 1.0 carrier requirement in the Middle East - which has actually grown to something like 1.7 for various reasons. This requirement for US aircraft carriers depends strongly on all 11 carriers, and will not actually be possible once there are only 10 carriers after Enterprise retires next year.

Presumably Mitt Romney didn't completely forget the Pacific requirement when he gave his big foreign policy speech, so if we assume he did not, this policy would add a new requirement for an aircraft carrier in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. That is something altogether new, and by new I am speaking directly regarding a 3 hub carrier presence model vs today's 2 hub presence model for aircraft carriers that focuses only on the Pacific Ocean and Middle East/Indian Ocean.

Mitt Romney is basically saying, whether knowingly or not, that the US Navy needs 12 aircraft carrier strike groups, because in order to have 3 sustained aircraft carrier hubs, the nation needs 12 aircraft carriers. In the case of aircraft carriers, one means four (one preparing to deploy, one finishing deployment, one on deployment, and one in maintenance). In order to sustain 12 aircraft carriers, the nation would need to build 1 carrier every 4.1 years - which is different than the current schedule which calls for 1 carrier every 5 years and even better than the 1 carrier every 4.5 years the Navy was dealing with under the 11 aircraft carrier requirement.

Such a policy for three hubs of presence might also suggest the US is trading today's cold war era garrison force in Europe for a more offshore carrier force presence in the Mediterranean Sea. The US could certainly drop a number of bases and forward deployed stations throughout Europe and save a lot of money, particularly if we pulled the Army out of Europe, but would the savings legitimately add up to enough to pay for extra aircraft carriers? Is Mitt Romney even suggesting we move from garrison forces in Europe towards a different organizational model in Europe? It is unclear if he knows what he's even talking about, so more data is clearly needed.

Another, perhaps more legitimate question, would be whether the United States actually has a 1.0 requirement for the Mediterranean Sea? Today, I don't see it. Tomorrow? I'm not quite sure I see that either to be honest, no matter what unfolds politically in North Africa or the Western Middle East region. Aircraft carriers would not be my first choice of offshore naval capability desired, because if it was my choice - I'd want amphibious ships instead for their flexibility and utility for a range of operations from the sea.

I honestly have no idea what Mitt Romney has planned or if he even has a plan. I also do not know if Mitt Romney actually means anything he has said to date in his Foreign Policy speech.

What I do see though is that it appears to me that Mitt Romney is positioning himself to be a navalist candidate in the upcoming election. On November 15, that debate might flesh out some details of Mitt Romney's navalist vision - and I for one am interested (for the first time - ever) what Mitt Romney has to say.

Final Thought

Folks who claim President Obama's record on foreign policy or military affairs will help or hurt him in the upcoming election are ignoring all political history since the cold war. George Bush Sr. had two big military victories, the first in Panama and later in the most spectacular victory in modern US military history - the First Gulf War in Iraq. Bush Sr. still lost to Bill Clinton in 1992.

Bill Clinton suffered the disaster in Somalia and still went on to be reelected in 1996, and despite what was discussed as a victory over Kosovo, Al Gore lost in 2000.

Bush Jr. had what I would call the greatest strategic blunder in American history - fighting two ground wars in Asia at the same time, and was still reelected in 2004. Despite Iraq getting better before 2008, McCain got killed by Barack Obama in 2008 in an election that had nothing to do with wars or foreign policy - despite the US being 7 years into a war while also watching a rising China.

Obama faces the same reality. Despite pulling out of Iraq, or surging troops into Afghanistan, or killing Osama bin Laden, or starting a global drone war that includes bombing Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and even helping regime change in Libya - none of it will actually matter come election day. It doesn't even matter that Obama recently sent the Army into Uganda. The 2012 election will be decided almost entirely on employment rates and economic issues. That doesn't mean foreign policy and military affairs don't matter, only that those issues won't matter to the vast majority of voters relative to other pressing issues facing the American people right now.

For better or worse, the only military issue the Obama administration will be judged by is the results of the super committee that sets the amount of cuts for the DoD, and establishes military force structure for the future beginning in FY13 discussions. In today's political environment, more than anything else - that super committee result will be the military issue that gets the most attention by the average American voter in a political context heading into the election. I believe that for the candidates, their military policies will be compared opposite to the super committee budget result - a result that will be framed politically as the defacto Obama position on military affairs despite anything else listed on the operational side of the President's resume.

Food for thought.

US Launches a WTO Nuke Towards China's Great Firewall

While foreign policy experts in the United States are busy proclaiming the death of the Gaddafi family lineage as some big foreign policy moment, Wired News was quietly reporting what is - in my humble opinion - the single biggest foreign policy uppercut in quite some time by the US Government. With all do respect to the Arab world, the death of another jackass dictator ranks slightly higher than a can of beans in the big picture of United States foreign policy compared to this Texas sized sirloin.

In the emerging 21st century competition between China and the US, this political move represents President Obama ordering the Great Firewall of China nuked from orbit with a brilliant free speech, free economy WTO lawfare chess move. A MUST READ.

The Obama administration publicly admonished China Wednesday for its vast online censorship policies, for the first time officially complaining that blocking U.S.-based internet sites creates “barriers” to free trade.

The administration, citing World Trade Organization rules, is demanding that China explain its censorship policies. U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk’s office made the demands after a three-year lobbying campaign by the First Amendment Coalition.

“This development is important because it signals the U.S. government’s implicit acceptance of FAC’s position that censorship of the internet can breach the international trade rules enforced by the WTO,” said Peter Scheer, the group’s executive director.

U.S.-based websites blocked in whole or in part by the so-called “Great Firewall of China” include YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo and even the Huffington Post.

In response, China on Thursday blasted the administration.

“We oppose using internet freedom as an excuse to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said.

This is a very big deal and the Obama administration is exactly right - this is a big boy money move to open up the Chinese market - and I can tell about ten great personal small business stories on how it will impact the US economy, but I'll focus in on one simple, specific example readers of this blog should be able to easily understand.

For as long as I have written on Information Dissemination, most pol-mil Blogger blogs have been blocked by China. For me - this was never good, because we talk a lot about China. I have many hundreds of Asian readers these days (India 800+ daily, Japan 500+ daily), far more than Europe actually, because believe it or not; it would appear rising maritime powers like to read and comment on websites that discuss maritime issues every day.

In June of 2009, I purchased the Domain Name for informationdissemination.net transitioning from the core Blogger server farm to a private host. The day the transition was made was the day before I attended the Current Strategy Forum in Newport, RH, and while I was getting some email from folks saying they were having website problems (caused by DNS host propagation among US ISPs), I was also seeing booming web traffic on this blog.

From my old Blackberry I was unable to really tell during that first day of the conference where all this web traffic was coming from. I figured maybe it was me passing out cards and mingling with a bunch of smart sailors and civilians at Newport. The real story was not as I thought.

That evening after the first day of the conference, I had accumulated over 2,000 unique visits from China, because for the first time ever - Information Dissemination was not being blocked and I was being ranked in Baidu. That lasted nearly a month until July 13, 2024 when Feng posted this article and ruined the party. Apparently, whether Feng knows it or not, he is blacklisted by the Chinese censors, because as of at least 3 months ago both his blog and mine apparently had a content block (vs the normal procedure of a total Chinese DNS block).

Oh well.

Some time passed and I didn't really think about it much, until last year when I got an email from a maritime attorney based in Hong Kong who works with the shipping industry there. He sent me a link, which was blocked by every US and European ISP I tried, that was basically a Hong Kong web host with an RSS feed of Information Dissemination republishing this blogs content using language translation software. Using a little network voodoo, I was eventually able to see the page - and I was pissed! One of the recent posts had 40+ comments - this Hong Kong thief had ads all over his site and was stealing my content!

After developing plans over a few days, what I ended up doing was purchasing one of the Flash advertisement spaces through the web ad company the Hong Kong site was using, and wrote my own Flash ad which passed their testing and was allowed In the advertisement, because it was Flash - I was able to embed a bit of code that basically tracked visit and hit counter information to another offshore server (accessible to all of China) from all (and only) IP addresses inside China so I could track how many Chinese users this Hong Kong thief was getting per day. To my surprise, and honestly to my frustration, the guy was getting an average of 6,000 Chinese viewers per day for my content.

Now for those who don't know, at bare minimum, 6,000 viewers per day would amount to well over $100 a month on the highly unoptimized ad service ID is using - Google AdWords (I'll start caring about my ads one day, just don't hold your breath). At the very minimum, this Hong Kong thief was basically stealing $1200 a year from me using his little RSS trick to supply my content to Chinese readers that I don't have access to. Earlier this year, my ad expired on that host - and after calling in a few favors, I used the data I had collected and forced that host to no longer host my content. To the best of my knowledge, today only a tiny handful of Chinese read my blog, and I can only presume those specific folks are somehow immune to the content rules of the Great Firewall.

For Information Dissemination alone, access to a public Chinese reader market is (potentially) worth, at minimum, $1200 a month - and potentially much more. That $1200 could potentially represent gross taxable income, and ID is but a rain drop in the cyber ocean in the context of the entire US internet - most of which makes far more money in far more productive ways than my horribly optimized use of Google AdWords.

So while this WTO move by the Obama administration may politically represent a nuclear attack against China's Great Firewall censorship of free speech, the economics of this move is not trivial at all in the internet driven economy of the US today. For years China has systematically attacked the United States with lawfare, including attacking the US Navy indirectly through maritime environment related lawsuits. It is really nice to see the US government turning the tables and now doing the same to China for a change. I want to send a heart felt well done to someone in the State Department!

Remember, the largest English reading nation in the world is China. While unlikely, an additional 5,000+ new Chinese readers interested in maritime affairs on this blog - particularly if they actively engaged in the comments - would be one very interesting open source experiment, and that experiment would likely be repeated throughout the US pol-mil web. If given that opportunity, ID will definitely attempt to support such an experiment in the global naval discussion. I don't know if the Obama administration can effectively get rid of the Great Chinese Firewall, but I do know that if they indeed do get rid of the firewall - we can expect an unpredictable, legitimate impact in the US-Chinese relationship. Social connectivity has proven again and again to be a very powerful cultural influence in 2011 - both here in the US and everywhere else in the world. There is no legitimate reason to expect social connectivity wouldn't also have a cultural influence on the Chinese people.

Observing Offshore Balancing - Not About Preventing War

When I read the New America Foundation Command of the Commons report (PDF), my first thought was that the report represents the first iteration of a genuine attempt to take a hard look at what reducing roles and missions of the United States Navy looks like. I think the report is important to read for that function alone, because a report that implies less seapower can also be more for the nation is immediately going to make a lot of folks in this community uncomfortable.

I personally found some of the assumptions in the report to be broadly optimistic while I found others to be remarkably simplistic. For example, I think the report almost takes it a step too far with an implication that American control of the maritime commons is bad for America. Control of the maritime commons has been conceded to the US Navy since the end of the cold war, I think the authors could have done better by noting that it is how one uses command of the maritime commons that is important, rather than trying to make "control" of those commons in and of itself a path towards problems.

But the report also reminds us that strategic frameworks exist for policy makers towards seeing the US Navy as a balancing force in a world of emerging regional powers. The report never specifically uses the phrase "offshore balancing" and instead tries to introduce "security" as some sort of neutral substitute, but the general strategic concept behind the hedging of bets approach outlined in the report is offshore balancing. For the record, despite what Bryan has previously suggested, I am not in agreement with the report - I simply appreciate that someone is willing to publish a report that defines roles and missions for the US Navy different than we do today. I believe seeing the contrast is important for understanding what the US currently has, and what is on the table to be lost.

If you followed Bryan McGrath's criticisms of the New America Foundation Command of the Commons report, and the other discussions of the report that have taken place by Jonathan Rue (here and here), the latest article at Gunpowder and Lead that expands the discussion on offshore balancing might interest you as it did me. It is basically a response by Jonathan to Bryan's criticisms. This isn't a debate between them, rather more akin to a panel discussion of the merits of the New America Foundation report. What has my attention is the latest post that takes a closer look at offshore balancing as a strategic concept.

Offshore balancing is actually part of a realist strategic worldview, not a (neo)isolationist one. The basic idea is that one country uses friends and allies to check the rise of (potentially) hostile powers (see John Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics for the Full Monty). Rather than committing your own military resources to preventing another power from challenging you, you let friends and allies shoulder that burden. The end results is that a country such as China is too busy worrying about India, Japan, and other countries to challenge the U.S. directly.

This isn’t a novel idea: the U.S. has engaged in offshore balancing at numerous times in history. Support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, the Lend-Lease Act of 1941, and support for the mujahedeen in Afghanistan are just a few examples. Now, I understand that the response to this might be that in none of those instances did offshore balancing work: we ended up fighting World War II, Saddam Hussein became our enemy anyway, and, well, we all know how Afghanistan turned out. But I want to point out that if you assume that U.S. national debt is already a crushing problem and that entitlements are not going away, given the woeful state of the U.S. economy, the inevitable conclusion is that the U.S. Department of Defense cannot continue simultaneously acting as the Japanese, Saudi Arabian, and Western European Departments of Defense too. Offshore balancing must be part and parcel of any U.S. national security strategy going forward because we can’t afford to guarantee everybody’s security by ourselves. Somebody else has to step up to the plate.

The problem with offshore balancing is how to operationalize it. Lalwani and Shifrinson ran headfirst into this problem. They focused on the maritime commons and removed it from a strategic context which, as McGrath notes is problematic. I will be the first to admit that operationalizing it is tricky, and to be frank, I don’t exactly know how to do it. Luckily, that’s not my job… yet.

The Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower is in fact leading to our Asian friends and allies shouldering part of the burden, so we do not necessarily need to transition to the New America Foundation reports proposed model to encourage that activity among our allies. There are also policy issues that come into play in Asia that has the US invested ashore - Japan, South Korea, and Singapore being three primary examples. I would also argue that offshore balancing does exist, and has long existed, in 'part and parcel' U.S. national security strategy all over the globe at various times throughout our nations history.

I do agree with Bryan - the New America Foundation report also reads to me as a "neo-isolationist" variation of offshore balancing - and the New America Foundation is suggesting the US should craft policy that would inform naval strategists towards a domestic centric naval posture to offshore balance globally. I think one needs to be completely disengaged from the American international business community to believe such a policy would benifit the US in today's global economy, and that is before we even get to the political elements of disengaging from certain specific commitments with allies around the globe.

The suggestion that offshore balancing is either a realist strategic worldview or neo-isolationist worldview is a false choice. Offshore balancing is obviously not new and has manifested itself as policy in many ways throughout history - because it is an inherent policy option of seapower. In many ways the maritime strategy of the United States manifested itself throughout the 19th century as a "neo-isolationist" variation of offshore balancing specifically as it related to our national policies at the time in the Caribbean Sea towards keeping European governments out of South America. Both the 6th and 7th fleets today represent tailored manifestations of offshore balancing, and 6th fleet has been doing offshore balancing since at least 1945.

I think the way the New America Foundation report abuses the concept of control of the maritime commons is very annoying, but that's the navalist in me speaking. Control of the global seas is conceded to the United States Navy today. Once control is achieved, and like I said - in our case control is conceded - how one uses control of the sea is a political choice. I'm with Julian Corbett - the default state of the global maritime commons is the absence of control, and when the New America Foundation suggests that our nation can somehow maintain maritime commons "security" through virtual presence instead of through physical presence, I think that's the same mentality of those who suggest the US has a serious Arctic policy even though we have zero operational icebreakers. Security is virtual, not real and not even implied, because it only exists absent a competitor taking control. Once a competitor exists, both control and security are conceded due to our own absence.

The New America Foundation report authors appear to have all kinds of problems with the political choices made once command of the maritime commons is established, but instead of calling out those political policy choices or even examining the range of policy options inherent to seapower, the report authors blames our nations control of the maritime commons as the primary contributing factor towards bad policy decisions exercised by political leaders.

The United States Navy should strive to Project Power globally to be present as necessary to protect the national interests of the United States, because our interests are global in today's economy. What forces are forward deployed, how much power is projected forward, at what levels those forward deployed forces are sustained, and how they operate to secure the interests of the United States is where I believe the debate needs to be. Unlike other elements of the US military, naval forces offer a present, inherent diplomatic function that provides political leaders with a range of policy options, and in some cases - like in the 6th and 7th Fleets, those policy options will be offshore balancing.

If we were looking for a model to operationalize an offshore balancing strategic concept in the emerging geopolitical climate of rising regional powers, wouldn't the 6th Fleet throughout the cold war represent an example of a historical offshore balancing operational model where influence through seapower influenced competing interests? A customized variation of offshore balancing does exist today and has for a long time been in effect for naval forces operating in the 6th Fleet, and even today if one is talking Turkey-Cyprus, Russia-Georgia, Israel-Lebanon-Syria, and several other regional competitions between neighbors - balancing both friends and not so good friends of the United States is a function of US seapower. Some might suggest that because we have seen wars in this region the offshore balancing approach has been unsuccessful, but I would disagree. As the New America Foundation report gets right, offshore balancing is not the direct manipulation of outcomes or exercise of absolute control towards a conclusion, rather in the example of the 6th Fleet, offshore balancing has long manifested itself as a policy of escalation control when political disputes result in the exercise of political power by other means by other states. Where the Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower says "preventing wars," offshore balancing is how escalation control is managed by preventing other powers from engaging in those wars.

The inherent political and diplomatic advantage seapower has over other forms of military power is important, and I thought ignoring the utility of seapower is probably where the New America Foundation report failed the most. This is particularly important in a 21st century security environment where there are many rising powers, mostly regional but some may also have global influence ambitions.

During the cold war the 6th Fleet long operated as a political instrument whose strategic value was inherently understood by Washington political leaders. Facing off against the Soviet Union, political leaders understood that there were only two plausible scenarios in which direct attack upon American naval forces was rational from the Soviet point of view: either in the context of a general attack upon American strategic and forward-deployed forces, or, alternatively, in the event of an attack by our forces against the Soviet Union. The nuclear balance that was in the favor of the United States early on made the first plausible scenario unlikely, and the second scenario was also unlikely given that once an American aircraft carrier launched a nuclear strike, the strategic mission of the 6th Fleet would be exhausted.

Soviet presence in the Mediterranean Sea at the time was almost exclusively submarines and the potential for long range bombers. The focus by the Soviets of these long range strike capabilities played a serious role in our calculations with the Soviets, but for the Soviet Union, those same assets had very limited strategic value for them regarding what those military assets could do for the Soviet Union throughout the region. The 6th Fleet on the other hand was capable of controlling sea lanes, projecting air power, attacking coastal targets, landing troops, and generally support all elements of national power by sea. As it relates to the Soviet Union, 6th Fleet was a strategic power projection force capable of maintaining a balance of power in that region against our primary competitor of the time, but it was also an offshore balancing force throughout the region as it related to other regional political interests of the United States. A list of political uses of naval power in the Mediterranean Sea from 1945-1970 demonstrates the utility of naval forces.

• April 1946 - US Naval forces help support Turkey's resolve to deter Soviet pressure
• July 1946 - US Naval forces balance Yugoslavia and Italy in the Adriatic Sea
• September 1946 and through 1949 - US Naval forces support the Greek government while deterring the Soviet Union
• May 1956 - US Naval forces support the government of Jordon while deterring Egypt
• October-November 1956 - US Naval forces balance and deterrence to UK, France, Israel, and the Soviet Union
• April 1957 - US Naval forces support the government of Jordon while deterring Egypt
• August 1957 - US Naval forces support forces in Syrian politics while deterring Egypt
• May 1958 - US Naval forces support forces in Lebanon politics while deterring Egypt
• August 1958 - US Naval forces support the government of Jordon while deterring the Soviet Union
• April 1963 - US Naval forces support the government of Jordon while deterring Egypt
• June 1967 - US Naval forces deter intervention by the Soviet Union
• September 1970 - US Naval forces coerce Syria in support of Jordon while deterring the Soviet Union
• October 1973 - US Naval forces deter intervention by the Soviet Union

In the 7th fleet today, the United States is looking at similar strategic challenges that the 6th Fleet faced in the cold war. China's anti-access, area denial capabilities are manifesting themselves as anti-ship ballistic missiles and conventional submarines. Regionally, the offensive capabilities being developed by China are ballistic missiles in the specific case of Taiwan, and PLAAF capabilities that are mostly centered - to date - around short ranged fixed wing fighter aircraft.

From a strategic perspective, it is hard to imagine a scenario where China would wish to trade nuclear blows with the United States, as the United States today holds a significant advantage in survivable, credible nuclear strike capabilities. It is also difficult to see strategic value for China in attacking the United States, a nation the current leadership of China is highly dependent upon for economic success - thus legitimacy and survivability. That makes the most plausible scenario by which the US and China would engage is in a military confrontation is a conflict between China and one of their neighbors.

China's missile and submarine capabilities remind me a lot of the Soviet aircraft and submarine threat that faced the 6th Fleet during the cold war. Just as the Soviets had limited strategic utility in their Mediterranean Sea military capabilities, China currently finds limited strategic utility in their Pacific military capabilities of ballistic missiles and submarines.

Today, offshore balancing is effective because the Chinese are yet to field a fleet that is deployed and operating with the strategic utility that the US 7th fleet offers our allies in the region. When the US sells F-16s to Taiwan, it is in part a manifestation of our offshore balancing policy. I also think selling F-16s, which have a very limited capacity for changing the balance between China and Taiwan, represents the beginning of the end of offshore balancing as a legitimate, credible policy in the Pacific as it relates to Taiwan and China. As blog readers know, the Chinese fleet is expanding at a phenomenal rate, and will not be staying in port forever.

By the mid-2020s, a number of nations like China, India, and Russia are going to be operating larger numbers of modern naval forces; in some cases concentrated regionally and in other cases forward deployed globally. As we approach that future, the utility of naval forces is going to grow in importance, but our national policies are also going to require an adjustment to deal with a world where command of the sea is no longer conceded, but it likely will not often be contested either. With global competition the US will operate more commonly under regional political constraints, which will ultimately have impacts on what policies get exercised when our naval forces enjoy control of the maritime commons.

Offshore balancing is going to present a new dynamic for US policy that as a nation, we have not dealt with at a policy level since before WWII. Unlike the Soviet Union, the Chinese have very definite plans for a very large and capable naval force. The Soviet Union naval fleet was never of sufficient power, sufficient size, nor did it ever operate on the same global scale we did to ever leverage a successful offshore balancing policy against the US during the cold war. Given the scope and size of the manufacturing capacity, economic activity, and ambition in the PLA Navy - the Chinese likely will have such a Navy in the future.

I think this is important because the Cuban missile crisis was a variation of Soviet offshore balancing policy, and that clearly didn't work too well for the Soviets due to, among other things, our competitive advantage in seapower. The distance between Florida and Cuba isn't much different than the distance between Taiwan and China. Offshore balancing in the Pacific may be how we function in the Pacific now, but long term the viability of offshore balancing in the Pacific is highly questionable. Will offshore balancing be effective for dealing with China during periods of high tension in their neighborhood when they are fielding a fleet of their own? I remain skeptical.

It is important to remember - offshore balancing doesn't have a solid track record preventing war; indeed the 6th Fleet offshore balancing approach during the cold war failed to prevent war between Israel and Egypt on more than one occasion. As a regional policy, offshore balancing represents a way for seapower to attempt to maintain escalation control during the wars of others.

Mitt Romney Proclaims Love for Seapower

Danger Room has a good article on the Mitt Romney whitepaper, An American Century, A Strategy to Secure America’s Enduring Interests and Ideals. I've read it, and I admit that I haven't taken it very seriously even though I probably should, because it does give quite a bit of focus on the US Navy.

The real issue for me is that I have a hard time taking any of it seriously because the content in the Romney whitepaper is very generic. It reads like someone spent 48 hours with a few Navy Admirals and got the PowerPoint Full Court Press.

What I'm hoping for is that the paper leads to a true defense policy discussion in the 2011 election. The Obama administration went from a President promising to end the wars we are in to being the President who engaged in what is now SEVEN wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and now Uganda. I don't care if these are drone wars, clone wars, or small wars - we are bombing seven nations on two continents and in a few cases - including a nuclear power whose government is publicly against our bombing policy. When this global war foreign policy is matched against the Presidents defense cut economic policy, the Obama administration appears to lack a coherent grand policy or even a coherent foreign policy that can be articulated.

We are a nation that has been at war for 10 years. We are clearly due a defense policy debate.

Is it possible the Mitt Romney white paper will bring about this policy discussion? I suppose it is possible, and I for one hope it does. The white paper spends a lot of time discussing shipbuilding and the US Navy, but can the candidate actually articulate any of it with factual information to an American public audience that has been brainwashed into thinking land war in Asia and drone war in Africa is OK, NP, NET GOOD? I think good defense policy questions related to seapower would stump Mitt Romney and just about every other Presidential candidate except maybe Gingrich. I'm actually surprised Romney hasn't been asked any questions yet on the topic, but that probably means they are waiting for the right time knowing this is low hanging fruit for embarrassing the guy in a public spot.

Anyway, check out the Danger Room article - it's very good, and check out the white paper to get a sense how seapower could enter the election cycle. Should the nation build 15 ships a year as Mitt Romney suggests? In my opinion, not until a President can articulate a national defense policy that drives a national strategy that informs naval leaders what ships to build, and why to build them. No disrespect to Big Navy, but the six ships they would build a year would probably not be the best choices for America today in my opinion, and Admiral Greenert may have called for a strategy to guide his choices, but he hasn't advocated a strategic vision for seapower of his own publicly since becoming CNO.

Finally, last I checked the only Presidential candidate for 2012 with a genuine seapower advocate on their staff who has the intellectual muscle to truly inform a candidate on policy or military strategy discussion related to seapower is Barack Obama, who could easily call on UNDERSECNAV Bob Work to brief him and help him develop seapower policies for his administration.

Until Mitt Romney or some other Republican advocating seapower hires someone who reaches the level of respected seapower professional near Bob Work, like a Seth Cropsey, Bryan McGrath, or Mackenzie Eaglen, don't expect whitepapers written by political advisers who once witnessed a Navy PPT brief to impress me. Seapower is a big boy grand strategy topic that ranges the entire spectrum of foreign policy from global nuclear war to offshore economic security assistance. Absent professional intellectual advisers and experts preparing a politician on the issues, a serious policy discussion with a seapower focus will quickly make uninformed politicians look like the village idiot.

For example, icebreakers is a top five maritime policy topic in October 2011 as part of the Arctic Ocean security discussion. I doubt a single Republican candidate, nor even the POTUS, could name or even count the number of operational icebreakers in the US Navy (zero) or US Coast Guard (zero). Mitt Romney discusses the number of Navy ships, but what is the average age of the nations Coast Guard Cutters (over 40 years). Speaking for myself, I would absolutely love to hear what President Obama has to say about the future of the nuclear triad in the US. These are big boy discussions, and I'm thinking our domestically focused President would struggle - a lot - sounding informed on a topic like that. After 10 years of war, I pray I'm wrong about that, but alas war in Washington appears to have been outsourced to the established bureaucracy.

A defense policy discussion would prove it one way or the other, and after 10 years of land war in Asia, it is certainly time for our nation to have a very serious defense and foreign policy discussion as an election cycle approaches.

AirSea Battle - A Strategy of Tactics?

AirSea Battle is gaining public notoriety, even as an official description is yet to exist. AirSea Battle is now part of general answers and specific questions in Congressional hearings suggesting there is some anticipation on Capitol Hill what exactly this widely touted but never officially discussed series of ideas might be.

The focus of AirSea Battle appears to be to counter the growing challenges to US military power projection in the western Pacific and Persian Gulf, although in public use AirSea Battle is now used almost exclusively in the context of China.

CSBA described AirSea Battle as A Point-of-Departure Operational Concept. The use of the term "operational" implied AirSea Battle is intended to be developed as a battle doctrine for air and sea forces. Milan Vego recently took this one step further in Proceedings and recommended AirSea Battle be developed as one of several operational concepts for littoral warfare, although I think there is room to develop AirSea Battle doctrine for joint operations in several different geographic conditions.

All we really know about AirSea Battle is that we don't know a lot more about it than we do know, so every time someone writes about AirSea Battle from a position of some authority as to what AirSea Battle actually is - it's worth noting. In the latest example, we learn a lot.

A new Armed Forces Journal article by J. Noel Williams titled Air-Sea Battle is perhaps the most important contribution to the AirSea Battle discussion to date, because it starts a valid public discussion with criticisms of AirSea Battle - criticisms that cannot be ignored or dismissed. The article should be read in total - it's worth it. Because the article is very long difficult to cover in a single blogpost, I'm going to focus on only a few specific aspects of the article that stick out to me; a few of the criticisms and the implied competing doctrines.

Criticisms of AirSea Battle

This paragraph contains a lot of room for more discussion. The author's argument is that AirSea Battle doctrine appears to be a symmetrical approach to Chinese military capabilities. It should be noted that AirSea Battle doctrine is specifically being developed as an asymmetrical approach to Chinese area and access denial capabilities.

AirLand Battle posited an asymmetric approach in relation to the Soviet Union. AirLand would attack all echelons of the Soviet force with aviation and long-range fires because NATO was badly outnumbered on the ground. In contrast, ASB is symmetrical, pitting U.S. precision strike against Chinese precision strike. Since ASB is by definition an away game, how can we build sufficient expeditionary naval and air forces to counter Chinese forces that possess a home-court advantage? Is it prudent to expect the weapon magazines of an entire industrial nation to be smaller than those of our Navy and Air Force deployed more than 3,000 miles from home? What happens when the vertical launch systems of our ships and the bomb bays of our aircraft are empty?

Logistics is going to be a challenge in any military campaign where an enemy has the capacity to strike at our lines-of-communication, so in that sense the logistics points are not really a compelling argument for me against AirSea Battle. Logistics is a challenge in any military endeavor that can be applied to any doctrine. It is fair to note logistics is a huge challenge for the US today in Afghanistan, and hardly a major challenge specific to any single theater of war. I do like the last question though, because it is a question Congress needs to be asking all the time as budget pressures force difficult choices on Navy force structure.

The bigger question here is whether AirSea Battle doctrine represents a symmetrical apprach of "pitting U.S. precision strike against Chinese precision strike." I think the authors statement represents a fair question, but I am hesitant to agree with the author that this conclusion is accurate. Any battle doctrine between the US Air Force and US Navy should build towards a precision fires regime, so I am unclear as to why that is implied a problem with AirSea Battle. Furthermore, because AirSea Battle is supposed to be a battle doctrine - a joint US Navy and USAF operational concept - the authors strategic level argument fails because it compares tactical methods as symmetrical comparisons. Just because Taliban forces and US Army forces in Afghanistan might both employ accurate, precision fires, that doesn't mean both sides are engaged in symmetrical warfare on the battlefield. How forces are used on a battlefield is often much more important to measuring the symmetrical or asymmetrical nature of combat than the weapons forces utilize on a battlefield, and I have yet to see much discussed on that aspect of AirSea Battle doctrine development.

A military confrontation with China would be the biggest national security challenge since World War II, yet ASB advocates suggest it can be handled by just two of the four services. To the outside observer, this is astonishing; to the insider skeptic, it is absurd. Many ASB advocates I have talked with or have heard speak on the subject follow the logic that we will never conduct a land war in China, therefore long-range precision strike is the only practical alternative. What is missed in this line of thinking is that there are other, more fundamental choices that also don’t require a land war in China. It would appear there is an unstated assumption by many that conflict with China must include a race across the Pacific to defend Taiwan; many war games over the past decades have solidified this point of view. Unfortunately, this assumption is outdated. Chinese capabilities now, but especially 10 years from now, simply preclude a rush to Taiwan and would require a very deliberate campaign similar to that described in the aforementioned CSBA report to gain access. Without ground forces and with limited magazine capacities, what happens once we get there? What now, lieutenant?

I have heard everything mentioned in that paragraph discussed myself in person by those who are developing AirSea Battle doctrine, and I myself found what was said by AirSea advocates both "astonishing" and "absurd." The parochial, shortsighted nature of AirSea Battle that fails to include ground forces as a capability in major war is so thoroughly shortsighted that even as a hard Navy partisan I have a hard time believing AirSea Battle doctrine development has as much support as it does. The parochial nature of the AirSea Battle discussion informs me, an observer, that AirSea Battle is nothing more than an idea to advance a political agenda for the Navy and Air Force, and by political I am speaking specifically about justification of budgetary investments.

Competing Doctrines

Army Col. Gian Gentile, writing in Infinity Journal, expresses similar concerns about the impact of optimizing the Defense Department for counterinsurgency operations — in other words, optimizing for the opposite end of the spectrum recommended by ASB. The logic of the criticism is the same, nonetheless, since optimizing forces for an uncertain future is a prescription for getting it badly wrong. Gentile argues that counterinsurgency has become a “strategy of tactics.” He explains that when nations “allow the actual doing of war — its tactics — to bury strategy or blinker strategic thinking,” it leads to disaster, such as in Nazi Germany, where the German Army’s tactical excellence in Blitzkrieg could not rescue the regime from its fundamentally flawed strategy.

It is possible that, like Blitzkrieg, the U.S. could prevail in the tactics and operational art of ASB and still suffer strategic defeat.

So what’s the rub specifically? ASB initially was conceived as a way to increase interoperability between the Air Force and Navy through increased training and improved technical interoperability. Given the overlaps in their strike capabilities, especially in aircraft, it makes perfect sense for the two most technical services to work closely to ensure interoperability. But like its progenitor, AirLand Battle, ASB has progressed to an operational concept to address a specific military problem. While AirLand Battle was conceived to counter the Soviet Union, Air-Sea Battle is billed as the answer to growing anti-access/area-denial capabilities generically, but as everyone knows, specifically China.

CSBA described AirSea Battle as "A Point-of-Departure Operational Concept," so I am unclear how ASB progressed into an operational concept when ASB was actually introduced as an operational concept. Operational concepts are what drive doctrinal development, so if a service was going to develop battle doctrine the logical starting place would be to develop an operational concept. Am I missing something here?

I agree with Col. Gian Gentile that counterinsurgency has become a "strategy of tactics," kind of. It is more accurate to say that the US military developed a population centric operational concept intended to address a specific battlefield problem in Iraq, and the operational concept drove development of counterinsurgency doctrine. That operational concept and subsequent doctrine became tactics employed by troops on the battlefield that through trial and error, led to a wealth of lessons learned on the battlefield and ultimately, a political victory by means of military power that our national leaders could live with.

What followed the successful execution of a population centric operational concept, often generically described as "COIN" although it is much more than just counterinsurgency, was an intellectual Enterprise consisting of a politically diverse group military and policy intellectuals, and it was that intellectual Enterprise (or industry) - through open source intellectual rigor and debate - that began a process of broadly articulating strategic and policy ideas and recommendations based on the experiences and lessons learned from the successfully employed battlefield tactics.

Whether intentionally or unintentionally, the author frames AirSea Battle as akin to being a competing doctrine to COIN, pitting a high end warfare AirSea Battle doctrine represented by the US Air Force/US Navy against a small wars COIN doctrine represented by the US Army/US Marine Corps. This competition is political, which is another way of saying it is almost entirely intended to influence budget decisions. I tend to think that would explain why US Army leaders see a future where intervention is required in small states that are more likely to be unstable as a result of the rise of regional powers; and why US Navy leaders see a future where rising regional powers leads to instability throughout the world suggesting the focus should be on deterring hostilities and maintaining escalation control between major powers.

There is not a national security policy that settles this debate, or said another way, the National Security Strategy of the United States (PDF) is so broad, generic, and ultimately useless that almost any version of the future use of military forces is accurate, and the the DoD can do just about everything and anything and meet the strategic guidance.

Which leads me back to reminding folks that since we enacted Goldwater-Nichols, the military services don't actually do strategy. The military services are responsible for the development of tactics and doctrines for forces that get pushed up to the strategic level - which is the COCOMs, who develop and execute strategies from the political policies of US civilian leaders. Because the military services are not effectively engaged in strategic development as a result of Goldwater-Nichols, and all they really develop themselves anymore is doctrine and tactics, the services attempt to leverage the doctrines they develop to influence politically up to strategy and policy. The services manage budget and tactics/doctrine, so for them it is only logical to match budget to doctrine/tactics, not budget to strategy/policy.

COIN and now AirSea Battle are representative of how doctrine becomes advocated in political form for purposes of justifying the budgets of the services. Goldwater-Nichols has built a wall that separates strategy (COCOMs) and budget (Services), and the results are that 25 years later the nation has yet to develop a coherent national security policy or strategy that meets the challenges of the 21st century.

Budgets controlled by the services get aligned with doctrine/tactics resulting in the US military being remarkably brilliant tactically but unquestionably adrift strategically. My concern is, and I think the article by J. Noel Williams suggests, that while AirSea Battle may be a smart development for the US Air Force and US Navy towards a joint battle doctrine; AirSea Battle will also be the next military operational concept forwarded as a political idea that acts as a substitute for the absence of a coherent 21st century national security policy.

You know that strategic process Secretary Panetta discusses that will guide budget decisions? We are going to look globally incompetent if that "strategy" reads like it was informed by a doctrine rather than a policy.

Goldwater-Nichols: 25 Years Later. Call For Papers

October will mark the 25 year anniversary of the Goldwater Nichols Act, the most important DoD reorganization in the lifetimes of most of us. To mark the anniversary I would like to encourage our many readers to contribute articles regarding their thoughts of Goldwater-Nichols. I am under the firm belief that a review of Goldwater-Nichols at this point in time could in fact be useful both for the Congressional audience of this blog as well as the military leadership audience of this blog as both struggle with the current fiscal challenges facing the United States.

With the intent and genuine desire to get folks motivated to give an opinion on Goldwater-Nichols 25 years later, I figured I would start by giving some of my own thoughts on the subject.

I believe a brief history of Goldwater-Nichols can be given by noting there are three phases of Goldwater-Nichols as they have influenced modern American military history: the first five, the next ten, and the last ten.

The First Five refers to the first five years from 1986-1991. In 1987-1988 the major military operation at the time was Operation Earnest Will from July 24, 2024 through September 26, 2024 which also overlapped with Operation Prime Chance. While these operations were mostly naval centric with the protection of tankers, Operation Prime Chance also focused on preventing Iran from disrupting shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf. The use of Army special operations helicopters and special forces from USSOCOM was only a small part of the operation, but nonetheless led to several integration activities so that Army aviation elements of the 160th SOAR could operate from and communicate with Navy ships. While this may seem like a seemingly trivial event, it was an early important first step for interoperability between the two military services following the Joint services mandates of Goldwater-Nichols.

In December of 1989 President George Bush ordered Operation Just Cause, the invasion of Panama where dictator Manuel Noriega was deposed. Operation Just Cause marked another significant Joint services operation that included elements of the US Army, US Navy, US Air Force, and US Marine Corps. A lot of operational lessons were learned in Operation Just Cause regarding the logistics requirements for the Air Force in supporting both Army and Marine units, not to mention several early lessons in joint operations between the services, particularly in regards to communications. A lot of those lessons came in handy only 8 months later when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

With the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 through mid-March of 1991 the United States and coalition partners put on one of the most impressive displays of military power the world had ever seen by completely crushing what was at the time an Iraqi Army rated fourth in size in the world. While mostly an American military operation, the size of the operation with over half a million people involved in the coalition combined with the scope of the destruction rained upon Iraqi military forces was stunning and solidified positive views in Washington related to the merits of Goldwater-Nichols. In the end, more Americans had died from friendly fire in the first Gulf War than by enemy fire, and that drove the necessity for the US military to fully integrate joint service commands towards interoperability and Jointness. The changes made under Goldwater-Nichols specific to the COCOMs was also validated and solidified as a result of the first Gulf War largely thanks to the CENTCOM commander at the time - Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf. The key point as it relates to Goldwater-Nichols is that General Schwarzkopf was able to develop a strategy from policy, call up forced from the individual services, and develop and execute a campaign plan under a Joint forces with a high degree of success.

Two large Joint services campaigns in five years, both with a high degree of military success, had proven Goldwater-Nichols a success.

The Next Ten years from 1992-2001 was spent better integrating the military services under what some now refer to as Jointness. The United States military, under rules for a Joint construct set forth by Goldwater-Nichols, became the most lethal operational military force in the history of human conflict. While political talking heads ran around in the 1990s discussing questionable theories like The End of History following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States failed to recognize that significant national security threats posed by those who were losers in the emerging geopolitical global order still existed, and the United States did not plan properly for the global economic shift from Europe to Asia that would occur only a decade later. During the 1990s under Goldwater-Nichols, two simultaneous events occurred that were thought exclusive to the Act: budget cuts to defense and strategic drift in defense policy.

When seen through the eyes of Goldwater-Nichols, the use of American aircraft carriers to provide naval aviation for operations in Kosovo was an excellent example where duplicate capacity was leveraged in the interest of sharing roles and missions under a Joint construct, rather than streamlining roles and missions between the services during a period of budget cuts. Ultimately, each individual military service sacrificed many capabilities in the 1990s during budget cuts that had to be rebuilt later primarily because the individual military services felt entitled for inclusion in military activities under the Joint construct of Goldwater-Nichols as a way to justify their budgets. The reduction in capabilities of each service and the entitlement expressed by the individual services to be included in military operations should have been a red flag there was a flaw in Goldwater-Nichols, but the operational success credited to Goldwater-Nichols continued to provide spectacular results that served as a rationale for dismissing any criticism.

Throughout the 1990s leading into the 21st century, the United States failed to formulate a national defense strategy that tied COCOM strategic requirements for protecting national interests to the individual military services budget requirements strained under the politics of a world absent major nation conflicts. It wasn't until North Korea, Pakistan, and India started testing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles did the US shake the malaise of a future without war between nation states, but by then it was too late - September 11, 2024 arrived.

The Last Ten years began ten years ago from this Sunday, on September 11, 2001. This Sunday will mark the ten year anniversary of many things, but from the perspective of Goldwater-Nichols, 9/11 marks the ten year anniversary of our ongoing land wars in Asia and air wars throughout Asia and Africa. Without a strategic vision of national defense articulated by both the political leaders of the nation since the Cold War, but also because the military services were never organized around a strategic vision for the defense of the nation, the United States responded to the attacks on 9/11 by 19 terrorists with the longest running military campaign in our nations history.

Obviously the strategic threat to the United States is bigger than the 19 individuals directly involved in 9/11, but it is noteworthy that the government of Afghanistan was toppled without any primary forces of the US Army. It wasn't until after the Taliban was toppled in Afghanistan that the US Army showed up, but we all knew they had to eventually show up - after all, Goldwater-Nichols insures that each service gets a piece of the action.

From a Goldwater-Nichols perspective though, the real justification for the Acts success came with the invasion of Iraq. From a purely military perspective, the invasion of Iraq proved that the Joint military approach the United States had perfected for the previous 14+ years was indeed brilliantly lethal and effective as a military force. The United States military today is unmatched in operational capabilities conducting the ugly, messy, and costly business of war. The precision lethality of military capabilities leveraged by the United States is indeed so capable that the United States today conducts six simultaneous wars in four theaters on two continents: Afghanistan and Pakistan in Asia, Iraq in Asia, Yemen in Asia and Somalia in east Africa, and Libya in North Africa.

But the strategic drift continues. Because of the hollowing of military force within the individual services in the 1990s, and because today each service must get a piece of the action in each theater of war under the COCOM model for Joint services warfare, the defense budget has skyrocketed over the last ten years to support the various wartime capabilities desired by the individual services despite the wars themselves being paid for through a separate overseas contingency operations budget.

How is it possible that after ten years of war and after already suffering one major defense budget cut in the 1990s the US military is still accused of lacking a policy -> strategy -> tactics/training -> doctrine process by which to guide budget decisions? The answer, in part, is Goldwater-Nichols.

One of the consequences of Goldwater-Nichols, and what I believe to be the flaw of the Act, is that defense strategy was shifted from the services to the COCOMs while budget remained the responsibility of the services. By design Goldwater-Nichols separates defense strategy (COCOMS) from budget (the individual services). This problem is evident by the strategic drift the nation has been suffering for the last 25 years, but because Goldwater-Nichols also was instrumental in bringing together interoperability between the military services, the resulting operational brilliance of the US military as a result from Goldwater-Nichols has masked this rather serious flaw.

Defense policy in Washington drives COCOM strategies, who then must go back to Washington to the individual services for resources. From the services perspective, they do not budget policy or strategy, rather they budget the doctrine and tactics/training that will be developed by the individual services who are deployed in support of COCOM resource requests. Because tactics and training now integrate joint services coordination, by the time the units within the individual services arrive at the COCOM level to be leveraged within the context of a strategy driven by policy, those units from each of the US military services are individually and collectively prepared to be operationally excellent under the Joint model - and have proven it time and time again.

The leaders of the military services continue to say that their primary objective is not to repeat the mistakes of the impending budget cuts to defense that are set to begin in FY 2013, but I honestly don't see a scenario right now where any of the services can avoid repeating those mistakes. From the services perspective of budgeting, their focus is on insuring that the tactical/training/doctrinal aspect of each individual military services budget is protected because in the 1990s, that aspect of the defense budget was shorted, and it led to a hollowing of the force structure. From the services perspective, to handle this emerging budget crisis, each military service will contract itself with the primary intent of retaining that precious tactical/training/doctrinal capacity within each individual services budget. The expectation is that when combined with other elements of national power, the Joint force will be operationally brilliant even though there is no question it will be smaller.

I believe this is the second least efficient approach possible for national defense - second behind the least efficient approach, which is the same approach used today except with the higher budget.

The problem with the simple contraction approach to defense budget cuts is that it in no way aligns the budget for the national defense of the United States with the political policies or even the COCOM strategic execution of defense policy of the United States.

I have been told several times by several people that the sole instruction to OSD to date by the Obama administration regarding defense budget cuts is to prevent the services from competing with each other over defense funding. If that is true, that suggests to me the United States will absolutely repeat the mistakes of the 1990s, when the services were also prevented from competing with one another during budget cuts. By removing the obligation of the services to compete at the policy level for funding, the Obama administration is removing the burden from the services to match budget to policy - and furthermore retains the entitlement felt by the individual services to be included in operations overseas rather than matching the right capabilities to the challenges being addressed.

Goldwater Nichols has created a framework that intentionally separates defense strategy executed by the COCOMs from defense budget managed by the individual military services, and the accepted norms for political processes related to national defense policy exclude the individual military services from the obligations of thinking strategically as a Joint force at the budget planning level. As we move into the defense policy and budgeting process for what some are calling the so-called Sword of Damocles cuts, under Goldwater-Nichols the next ten years are very easy to predict.

The military services will remain operationally brilliant as they have been under Goldwater-Nichols, and at the same time the nation will continue to drift strategically as we have been under Goldwater-Nichols. The only way this changes is if the services are forced by the Obama administration, thus obligated, to compete at the strategic and policy level against each other for funding by making the case for what each service brings to the table for the national defense of the United States of America. Should the Obama administration fail to force that competition between the services, I strongly believe they would be insuring the nation will suffer strategic drift for another decade under a flawed Goldwater-Nichols system that disconnects the national defense policies of the United States from the national defense budget of the United States.

If Admiral Mullen is correct, and the national debt is the top national security threat to the United States, it seems to me that an appropriate political response to that top threat to national security would be to insure that any disconnect between defense budget and defense policy is corrected. In my mind that begins by taking a hard look at how Goldwater-Nichols has divided budget and strategy. How will someone measure success? For the Navy, I'd suggest we know things are changing when N5 is no longer a paper pushing afterthought in OPNAV and N8 isn't a ridiculously powerful authority within OPNAV.

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If you, like me, have strong opinions on the impacts of Goldwater-Nichols towards the national defense of the United States 25 years later, I strongly encourage you to write up and submit to me via email an article on the subject that I can post on the blog during the month of October.