"If We Can't Afford the Navy We Need, What Kind of Navy Should We Have?"

This coming Thursday morning (18 July), I am honored to appear as part of the Navy Warfare Development Command's Speaker Series, in which I'll take a stab at answering at least part of the question posed in the title of this post. 

If you're in the Hampton Roads area and can access the Naval Station, please RSVP and stop by.  My talk is from 0930 to 1030, with about 20-25 minutes of remarks, and the remainder for Q and A. 

NWDC will post the video on their Youtube site when available; I will post a link on this blog when it is up.

Hope to see you there.

Bryan McGrath

5 AirSea Battle Myths

I have posted a long-ish piece over at War on the Rocks about AirSea Battle that Information Dissemination Readers might find worthwhile.

Bryan McGrath

We Live in Interesting Times

A year ago the world watched as the Chinese landed an piloted aircraft on an aircraft carrier, a capability few in the world possess even in the early 21st century. On Wednesday the United States landed an unmanned vehicle moving at 145 knots autonomously piloted by software on a ship moving at over 20 knots. It is the most impressive thing an unmanned aviation vehicle has ever done.

The success of the X-47B delivers many choices to the Navy. Unmanned aviation is bigger than the evolution from propeller to jet engines, or the evolution from guns to missiles - both of which were natural technological evolutions for naval aviation. UCLASS brings disruptive change to naval aviation unlike anything else the community has seen in 100 years.

The decisions of the very near future will define the community for the next half century. We live in interesting times.

Why Afghanistan Continues to Matter

Afghanistan's "ring road roundabout provides many connections

   
     This week a number of papers have again trumpeted the headline that the U.S. govt. may yet again speed up its planned military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Continuing Taliban resistance, inability of the Afghans to rise to the challenge of self-governance, and the continuing costs of U.S. and NATO military involvement have all combined to sap the will of Western powers to finish the task of stabilizing the Afghan state. Before we again consign Afghanistan to the backwaters of our collective strategic mind, perhaps we should review some remote and recent Afghan history and consider its enduring strategic importance. Hardly a "graveyard of empires," Afghanistan has been and remains the vital strategic hub of central Asia whose importance will only grow in the 21st century.

     Afghanistan's geography has made it a virtual "roundabout" for transportation across the vast Eurasian continent. This unique feature (seen above in blue in the form of the Soviet-era ring road) has allowed overland communication for travelers, conquerers and kings since the time of the ancient Persian empire of the 6th century BC. It provided Alexander the Great access to the Indian subcontinent from the plains of Iran. It allowed travelers such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta free movement from the Mediterranean to China. It allowed an upstart Pashtun Afghan leader named Mahmud Khan to invade and depose the tottering Persian Safavid Empire in 1722. It served as a vital buffer state for the British Empire against Imperial Russian and Persian designs on India for nearly a century. In recent times the Afghan ring road started by U.S. builders (the Morrison Knudsen Company) in the 1950s and finished by the Soviets continues as a transportion system. It may yet serve as a maintenance road for an even more important highway of petroleum products in the near future.

     Just who controls this vital hub of Central Asia may become very important in the next century as the Central Asian hydrocarbons market seeks new customers and greater profits. The Chinese in the quest to fill their deepening industrial thirst for oil and natural gas have explored possibilities for overland pipelines (for both oil and natural gas) through Pakistan and Afghanistan. Afghanistan's unique geographic position would place it directly athwart a potential pipeline's path. Chinese tankers and liquid natural gas carriers could stop and discharge their cargoes at a port such as Gwadar in Pakistan rather than brave a potentially hostile Indian ocean and Malacca strait guarded by U.S. and other friendly nation seapower. Such a choice might enable China to undertake more aggressive action in its designated "First Island Chain" without regard for a distant maritime blockade.  These pipelines could also serve to tie potential U.S. competitors like China to friendly petroleum and natural gas  suppliers like Russia and Iran. Such a strong combination would inevitably become a powerful competitor against U.S. economic, financial and military interests. It could also de-stabilize the relationship between India and Pakistan. China is a strong supporter of the Pakistani military while India and China maintain a wary eye on each other over a fortified border on the old Silk road pass of Nathu La. Tensions flared there as late as May of this year over control of a set of bunkers. India takes pride in its place as the guardian of stability in the Indian Ocean littoral. A recent (2010) article in The American Interest by Indian strategist C. Raja Mohan advanced a concept of Indian strategic thinking more in line with early 20th century British Indian Viceroy Lord Curzon rather than Jawaharlal Nehru. Mohan envisions a more muscular India exerting power in Central Asia much as the British Empire once did through Indian Viceroys like Curzon.  How is India likely to respond to a China with a new northern overland energy route, out of range of most assets of Indian military power, and buffered by India's main rival Pakistan?

A stable Afghanistan is good for the Afghan people and the world in general, but just who provides this stability really matters. Two recent books directly examine the centrality of Afghanistan to Central Asia and the Eurasian continent. The Revenge of Geography by Robert Kaplan and The New Continentalism, Energy and Twenty First Century Eurasian Geopolitics by Kent Calder both address this issue as does Kaplan's earlier book Monsoon, The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power. While Afghanistan may still seem to some as a useless backwater unworthy on continued Western stabilization efforts, it is actually a vital strategic hub on which many potential conflicts of this century may yet hang. Previous powers such as the Persian and British empires were able to successfully exercise significant influence in Afghanistan over long periods. While their use of financial support and occasional military action in favor of friendly Afghan rulers may seem corrupt or antiquarian to current western leaders, these methods remain the currency of choice in a divided and unstable Afghanistan. Western powers, most notably the United States must not precipitously withdraw military forces from Afghanistan without ensuring a peaceful pro-Westerm regime remains in control of the country. Any other result could later be disastrous to both Western economies and peace and stability in the region.

   

HASC Leaders on Fair-Share Budgeting

Who says bi-partisanship is dead?  In this piece, HASC members Randy Forbes (R-VA) and Rick Larsen (D-WA) argue eloquently for an approach to National Security resource allocation that derives primarily from strategic thinking rather than the annual arithmetic problem that guides how money is split among the Services.
 

People like to talk about a 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 split in the defense budget.  This is not now true, nor has it been true for some time.  Mostly because only about 80% of the defense budget actually gets split among the services, with OSD skimming off 19% or so for its growing fiefdoms.  What is true is that through multiple strategic reviews, National Military Strategies, QDR's and Bottom Up Reviews--the Department of the Navy, Air Force and Army get a remarkably consistent portion of the defense budget.  The Navy—with two services—gets about 29%, the Army about 25% and the Air Force about 27%.  That’s right.  No matter WHAT military strategy our nation has pursued since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we’ve split the base defense budget in essentially the same way.  

Forbes and Larsen could be taken to task (given their interests in Seapower and Strategic Forces) if this article had been simply vacuous advocacy for building more ships (the kind I write here).  But it isn't.  It is a call from two very influential members of the HASC to try and inject logic and realism into a process that has come to favor consensus purchased with inefficiency.

Bryan McGrath