3/25/2021 The Navy’s New Flat-Earth Strategy - The Atlantic

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e Navy’s New Flat-Earth Strategy
e U.S. unveils a collaborative plan for policing the seas
ROBERT D. KAPLAN OCTOBER 2007 ISSUE

Over the decades our Navy has been slowly disappearing on us. At the end of
World War II we had 6,700 ships. roughout the Cold War we had around 600
ships. In the 1990s we had more than 350. Now we are down to fewer than 280.
is decline is occurring while China is in the midst of a shipbuilding and
acquisition craze that will result in the People’s Liberation Army Navy having more
ships than the United States Navy sometime in the next decade. Qualitatively, the
United States will still very much have the edge, but China is catching up. And
China is merely one of many challenges—terrorism, piracy, port security, and
humanitarian disaster assistance are others—that the Navy now faces.

e Navy has plans to increase the number of ships from below 280 to more than
310. But according to the Congressional Budget Office and the Congressional
Research Service, cost overruns of 34 percent, plus other factors, mean that these
plans may be overly optimistic. In fact, over the next decade and beyond, if the
Navy builds only seven ships per year with a eet whose life expectancy is 30 years,
the total number of its ships may dwindle to the low 200s. And yet we live in a
world where 75 percent of the Earth’s population is within 200 miles of the sea, and
in an era when 90 percent of commerce travels by sea, including two-thirds of
petroleum exports.

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Such is the sobering context for the United States’s new maritime strategy, just
released after many months of study—particularly at the Naval War College in
Newport, Rhode Island. e study was commissioned by Chief of Naval
Operations Michael Mullen, recently promoted to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff. It was released by the Navy, Marine Corps, and the Coast Guard—the rst
time the three maritime services have jointly authored a common strategy.

is is very much a diplomatic document, meaning it is necessary to read between

the lines. Without mentioning China and without going into speci c numbers—or
even asserting the need for more ships—the 16-page document makes the case for a
Navy that must do, if not everything, then nearly everything. And it makes its case
within an intellectual framework that should resonate with the public and a
Democratic Congress: the dialectic of globalization. “Our Nation’s interests are best
served by fostering a peaceful global system comprised of interdependent networks
of trade, nance, information, law, people and governance.”

As this document sees it, our world is interconnected, its population clustered in
dense, pulsing demographic ganglia near the seas that will be prone to disruptions
such as asymmetric attacks and natural disasters. e document pointedly does not
rule out great-power military con icts, asserting that “peace does not preserve
itself.” But according to the new strategy, even great-power con icts are apt to be
subtle and asymmetric. ere is little talk here of conventional sea and land battles
and the need to spread democracy. is is a post-Iraq document, with an emphasis
on soft power. Indeed, the war in Iraq appears less relevant to the document than
the Indian Ocean tsunami emergency of December 2004/January 2005. To wit:
“Building on relationships forged in times of calm, we will continue to mitigate
human suffering as the vanguard of interagency and multinational efforts ...
Human suffering moves us to act, and the expeditionary character of maritime
forces uniquely positions them to provide assistance.”
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3/25/2021 The Navy’s New Flat-Earth Strategy - The Atlantic

e title of the report aptly describes its essence: “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st
Century Seapower” is all about cooperation between the three maritime services
and, more signi cantly, between the United States and allied nations. For the past
few years, Admiral Mullen has been talking about a 1,000-ship Navy—an
international coalition of friendly navies to share intelligence and help each other
police the world’s coasts and seas. e phrase “1,000-ship Navy” does not appear in
the document. (I heard reports and rumors that the Bush administration did not
like it.) But the spirit of the 1,000-ship Navy and “collective security” is everywhere
in these pages. In fact, the new strategy goes further than Admiral Mullen’s concept,
expanding the de nition of partnership beyond friendly navies to other institutions.
“No one nation has the resources required to provide safety and security
throughout the entire maritime domain. Increasingly, governments, non-
governmental organizations, international organizations, and the private sector will
form partnerships of common interest to counter ... emerging threats.”

In essence, this new maritime strategy represents a restrained, nuanced yearning for
a bigger Navy, albeit one whose mission will be cooperation with other navies. at
requires more than just new ships. “A key to fostering such relationships is
development of sufficient cultural, historical, and linguistic expertise among our
Sailors, Marines and Coast Guardsmen to nurture effective interaction with diverse
international partners.” Such training costs money and creates bureaucratic
challenges, but it helps lay the groundwork for an exceedingly gradual, elegant
decline of the Navy’s capabilities—a future in which it has fewer platforms but gets
more out of the ones it does have by working more closely with others.

Strategies make bets, often subtly. is document does not disappoint. While it
refers to the need to project massive power in a conventional con ict, its focus
represents a clear wager that it would be a mistake to mirror-image a future peer
competitor like China. “Adversaries are unlikely to attempt conventional force-on-
force con ict and, to the extent that maritime forces could be openly challenged,
their plans will almost certainly rely on asymmetric attack and surprise, achieved
through stealth, deception, or ambiguity.” In other words, even if China does
emerge as a peer competitor as the Soviet Union once was, it will act subtly and be
just one of myriad threats that the United States is best positioned to handle
through a Navy that’s forward deployed and interlocked with allied ones. As bets
go, this seems like a reasonable one—but it’s still a bet.
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3/25/2021 The Navy’s New Flat-Earth Strategy - The Atlantic

Bottom line: e new maritime strategy posits an unconventional naval vision for a
at world, as omas Friedman calls it. Consistent with that vision, it also calls for
a powered-down command structure, with junior officers better trained and more
in uential than ever, working in dispersed networks around the world, in which
marines and coastguardsmen are integrated with sailors in the same units: each unit
built around a speci c task, be it combat, irregular warfare, or humanitarian relief.

Hard-liners will be frustrated by the spirit of the new maritime strategy, if not its
language. Yet because the new strategy travels with the prevailing political winds in
Washington, it is likely to win support among Congress and the larger public. And
that could produce what the Navy needs but the new strategy doesn’t really talk
about: more ships.

ROBERT D. KAPLAN is a former contributing editor at e Atlantic and the author of In

Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a irty-Year Journey rough Romania and
Beyond.

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