out of the mainland United States, Puerto Rico, and Guantanamo.
Equally reliable options are limited in Eurasia. While alliances and partnerships—for example, of Sunni states opposed to ISIS—are vital, they may not always be available or dependable. If North Korea were to invade the South, there is no guarantee that Japan would allow its bases to be used for repelling the invaders or for striking deep into North Korea.
Seapower possesses the advantages of geography, mobility, and—with sufficient investment—numbers and growing technological edge. It will be essential in future conflicts because it allows us to depend less on nearby bases. Logistics ships in sufficient number can keep battle groups, including amphibious forces, on station, present, and combat ready largely independent of basing agreements. Maritime coalitions will likely offer more security in the future. But there is no alternative to dominant U.S. seapower today. Allies like Japan lack the industrial capacity to make up the deficit between the U.S. Navy and the expanding Chinese PLAN. Newer partners like Vietnam cannot hope to hold out against a Chinese onslaught without American support. Taiwan can defend against a PRC assault, but not indefinitely. Seapower is the surest means to ensure constant access to effective combat capability in the Western Pacific.
The same shift in thinking applies to the greater Middle East. Its gulfs and seas allow access that is largely independent of diplomatic agreements. Robust seapower may not be sufficient to cover our security interests in the Middle East, but its usefulness increases proportionately to the territorial holdings on which ISIS has staked its claim as a caliphate. The Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman are Iran’s southwest and southern borders. It’s a long haul from there or from the Eastern Mediterranean to Tehran, but a doable one with refueling tankers based in Gulf States or, in the foreseeable future, carrier-launched drones that can refuel a ship’s strike aircraft.
The Cold War plan to mass land forces in defense of Europe has been voided by continental hopes that perpetual peace has arrived. Even the most stalwart American partners, such as the United Kingdom, have cut military capacity and capability. But Europe is a peninsula. It is surrounded by accessible waters from St. Petersburg to the Crimea. Seapower cannot stop a Russian ground invasion of the Baltics, but it can snap the supply lines of an attack and give such ground forces as NATO can muster a chance to prevail. The ability of naval vessels to control the Baltic Sea and project power inland can also deter Russia from launching an attack.
The United States has emerged into a new world. To the potential for nuclear warfare with China—a would-be peer competitor—that American statesmen most wished to avoid after the Cold War have been added threats from a nuclear-armed Russia, North Korea, and, sooner or later, Iran. The more immediate prospect of a triple hegemony may not be an existential threat, but its outcome would unravel such order as exists in the world, cripple our markets, shatter our alliances, and imperil us at home. All this can be avoided by a grand strategy that continues to hold threats at a distance as it relies on the independence, accessibility, and technological superiority of seapower.
What will the consequences be if U.S. strategy proves as insufficient as the nation’s ability to execute it, owing to a lack of seapower?
The object of this and subsequent scenarios is to illustrate the challenges that American seapower faces today and will face in the future: a diminishing fleet; unresolved strategic decisions; and miscalculations in fleet design (which can be the result of insufficient funding, slow adaptation to large geopolitical shifts, or the swift pace of technological change, to name a few). One important element of creating useful war games, scenarios, or plans is imagination. War and architecture on a grand scale, for example, are two complex human activities that require forethought, organization, and decisive leadership. But a civil engineer does not have to worry that a river will alter its course to avoid a planned bridge. Intelligent military officers know that this is exactly what the enemy will do: change his plan to achieve his goal. This fact puts a premium on imagination and thus exacts a very high price for failures of imagination.
During the Cold War’s final years, U.S. maritime strategy came to regard the land mass from the Soviet Union’s western border to the Atlantic as a peninsula surrounded on the north by the Baltic and North Seas and on the south by the Mediterranean. Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact’s high commands believed that a conventional war would most likely spark where the two sides’ forces abutted one another: in the center of Germany. American naval strategists operated two aircraft carrier battle groups in the Mediterranean, whose 140 tactical aircraft could attack targets in the USSR proper and help cut off Moscow’s supply lines that would sustain an armed thrust into Western Europe.
To the north, U.S. aircraft carriers accompanied by attack submarines were added to the mix. Together with its Mediterranean fleet, the United States had effectively encircled the European peninsula—just as the Royal Navy had done during the Napoleonic Wars. If, as the expression of the time had it, “the balloon went up,” U.S. naval forces would hunt for and destroy Soviet ballistic-missile submarines that hid in the northern seas waiting for the order to launch their weapons against North American targets. According to the then-current theory, the submerged Soviet arsenal guaranteed that whatever might happen to the rest of Moscow’s nuclear forces, one part would remain intact and lethal.
The ability to roll back and eventually destroy this so-called second-strike nuclear capability would—American strategists thought—help deter Moscow from launching a first strike. At the same time, U.S. aircraft carrier attacks against Soviet naval bases and infrastructure in the vicinity of Murmansk were planned to distract attention from the central front—just as aircraft carriers were expected to attack key southern targets from the Mediterranean.
No one ever learned whether this scheme would have worked. However, the presence of powerful U.S. naval forces on the Soviets’ northern flank helped divert the Warsaw Pact leader’s intelligence, logistic, air, and naval defenses from the center. Washington saw this as a good thing.
A Scenario In 2025, thirty-four years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. naval fleet was less than one-third the size of its Cold War predecessor. An extraordinarily wealthy autocrat at the top of a small pyramid of oligarchs ruled Russia, much as the czar did before the Bolsheviks seized power. Vladimir Putin had announced in 2013 his plan to spend 4 trillion rubles, or $132 billion, to expand Russia’s combat fleet over the next seven years. As those seven fat years ended, Putin promised to spend an additional $150 billion on naval modernization by 2027. Several U.S. analysts had noted that the delivered—and promised—largesse was close to 30 percent more than the United States planned to spend on shipbuilding during the same period. No one paid them any attention—except in Moscow and Beijing.
Between Putin’s announcement and 2025, eighteen new frigates had joined the Russian Federation combat fleet, along with twenty-four missile-carrying corvettes and a host of smaller, agile combatants. Ten new boomers—nuclear-tipped ballistic-missile submarines—and eleven nuclear-powered attack subs had also been constructed and undergone successful sea trials. At a third or less than the cost of one nuclear-powered sub, Moscow had been turning out far quieter diesel-electric boats that were as well suited for the lucrative export market as they were for operating in the relatively shallow waters of the Baltic and North Seas.
Still, the Russian Federation’s military was a shadow of its communist predecessor’s armed forces. In nearly all categories of weaponry, even with
