Some have argued that to develop a coherent maritime strategy that could form the basis for its shipbuilding plans and budget requests, the Navy should couch it in terms of the foreign policy it is supposed to support.1 This is eminently good advice, but the reality is that the geopolitical momentum of U.S. policy choices in the wake of World War II shapes policy-making even today.
Despite many different policy articulations by administrations from Truman to Biden, the goals and overall strategy of U.S. security policy have remained remarkably consistent. The United States seeks to avert another world war by supporting a global liberal trading order. Maintaining and exercising command of the sea allows it to adopt and enforce a policy of a free and open global commons that facilitates and stimulates that trade. It also allows the United States to maintain credible contact with an array of allies, partners, and neutrals, support forward military presence, and exert political influence globally.
These are the basic geopolitical parameters of U.S. security strategy. Any new articulation of U.S. maritime strategy must relate fleet structure and doctrine to overall U.S. security strategy and foreign policy goals. But it also must deal with what is rather than what might be or what is convenient for the Navy.
For example, in 2006 I helped design a research and development process in response to a call by then–Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Mullen for a new strategy to facilitate greater international maritime security cooperation. Although the strategy was aimed at solving an existing problem, we felt any high-level strategy must look ahead at least five years. Since there would be a new administration in 2009, we had to reckon with the possibility that U.S. security policy might change. We decided to provide options from which Navy leaders could choose.
We established options based on three national security policy “schools” articulated by Harvard professor Barry Posen: primacy, collective security, and offshore balancing. In primacy, the United States would seek to maintain its geopolitical dominance by either suppressing or outcompeting challengers. Collective security policy required forming deep security partnerships with as many nations as practicable. Offshore balancing featured a degree of retrenchment by the United States, responding only to policy red lines. The first two policy options required a forward-deployed Navy, much as has been the case since the late 1940s. The third called for keeping most of the fleet in home waters.
This third option was rejected out of hand by a panel of Navy and Coast Guard admirals and a Marine general. Their reasoning was that it was inconsistent with service culture, but in reality, it was inconsistent with existing U.S. security strategy, over which they had no influence. The new strategy document had no discernible effect on fleet design or congressional resourcing and was wholly consistent with then-existing U.S. security strategy and policy, which, in its essentials, has carried through to now despite the very different philosophies of the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations.
The Great Power Difference
Since the onset of the global age, there have been two kinds of nations: those that can determine the nature of the global order and those that cannot. To better understand the distinction, it is necessary to establish a framework for national security needs. The most fundamental is defense of the homeland. Absent the ability to defend one’s borders and maintain a coherent government, a nation cannot be said to exist.
The second requirement is economic well-being, something needed in at least a minimum degree to enable a government to satisfy the first need. For most nations, this involves some kind of cross-border or international trade.
The third need is a favorable world order or, for most nations, a favorable local or regional order. At base, this means no neighbor attempting to invade or subvert one’s government or society. In a global sense, it means at minimum the absence of a world war and at best an order in which nations adhere to a rule set that recognizes existing national borders and promotes fair free trade and human rights. The question is how such an order is to be obtained and maintained. This is the arena of the great powers, which have the ability to establish and defend an order they find congenial to their interests.
Finally, there is the matter of promoting one’s values—cultural and political. This is important, especially for great powers, because the ability to influence the global order depends on a sufficient number of nations accepting the legitimacy of those values.
Until World War II, the United States did not meet the criteria for being a great power. It had global commercial interests and, after building a powerful navy in the early 20th century, was capable of enforcing the Monroe Doctrine, but it had no ability or intent to use its power to influence the global order. After World War II it became the global power. It undertook to underwrite a rules-based global liberal trading order, whose purpose was to avoid another world war.
The United States has found it necessary to use its military to defend the order against threats posed by the Soviet Union, regional aggressors, global terrorist networks, and, most recently, Russia and China. But it has not been powerful enough politically, economically, and militarily to carry out its policy unilaterally; it has needed a web of formal allies, temporary coalition partners, and a large number of nations friendly to and accepting of the global order.
As China’s economic and military power grows and various elements of U.S. power recede, at least in a relative sense, the United States will have to either devote greater resources and effort to defending the current system or enter into more intimate security relationships with other nations to retain a favorable world order. Retrenchment—eschewing great power status as defined here—likely would result in either a new world order inimical to U.S. security interests or another, possibly nuclear, world war.
Play the Hand That’s Dealt
In crafting a new global maritime strategy to support fleet design and budget requests, the Navy has to play the policy hand it is dealt. That traditionally has consisted of a somewhat shifting combination of what have been termed the Hamiltonian and Wilsonian schools of foreign policy.2 The variable, to some degree, has been the willingness to engage in land wars around the periphery of Eurasia.
Both the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian schools to one extent or another cede great power status. The Trump administration attempted to adopt a fleet design based on the Jacksonian school, but U.S. policy momentum prevented any effective movement toward either Trump’s policy or the fleet his Navy Secretary proposed. So the Navy will be required to furnish forward-deployed forces to defend the global order and at the same time be capable of maintaining global command of the sea. It is the fundamental importance of these two functions to U.S. foreign and security policy that the Navy must deal with in crafting a new strategy document.
When the Navy was large and competition less of an issue, the two functions did not force a strategic dilemma on either the Navy or the nation. A much smaller Navy and a burgeoning competitor in China do create a dilemma, and a maritime strategy is needed to deal with it. Throwing resources at it—at least the amount of money, industrial plant capacity, and time the United States will have available—will not be enough.
The Navy must articulate what failing to deal effectively with the dilemma means to the prospects for U.S. security policy and strategy. Whether or not the United States chooses to retain its great power status, failure to contend with the dilemma will decide things for it. The issue is not simply a matter of Congress providing adequate funding; it is a matter of the Navy designing a strategy to do its part in supporting U.S. strategy and policy as it is—and designing a fleet to carry out that strategy. If it is successful, much as was the 1986 Maritime Strategy, Congress will have a road map for resourcing the Navy that compellingly links means with ends.
1. See LCDR Aaron Marchant, USN, “Strategy by Other Means,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 149, no. 3 (March 2023).
2. The four classic schools of foreign policy are Hamiltonian, Wilsonian, Jeffersonian, and Jacksonian. See Marchant, “Strategy by Other Means.”