Hulls in the water could soon displace boots on the ground as the most important military catchphrase of our time. But our Navy is stretched thin.
... We may finally master the art of counterinsurgency just in time for
it to recede in importance ..."Regular wars" between major states could be as frequent in the 21st century as they were in the 20th. In his 2005 book, Another Bloody Century, the British scholar Colin Gray, a professor of international politics and strategic studies at the University of Reading, explains convincingly that these future wars will not require any "manifestation of insanity by political leaders," nor even an "aberration from normal statecraft," but may come about merely because of what Thucydides recognized as "fear, honour, and interest." Wars between the United States and a Sino-Russian axis or between the United States and a coalition of rogue states are just two of the scenarios Gray imagines.
Are we prepared to fight these wars?
... [today we are] obsessed with dirty land wars, and our 300-ship Navy is roughly half the size it was in the mid-1980s ...
Great navies help preserve international stability. When the British navy began to decline, the vacuum it left behind helped engender the competition among major powers that led to World War I. After the U.S. Navy was forced to depart Subic Bay in the Philippines in 1992, piracy quintupled in the Southeast Asian archipelago – which includes one of the world's busiest waterways ...
... the Indian navy, which may soon be the third-largest in the world ...
... the now-expanding Chinese submarine fleet ... the eventual incorporation of Taiwan into China will ... dramatically [redirect] their military energies outward, beyond their coastal waters ...
Admiral Michael Mullen [new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] ... "our Maritime Strategy must recognize that the economic tide of all nations rises not when the seas are controlled by one [nation], but rather when they are made safe and free for all ... I'm after that proverbial 1,000-ship Navy – a fleet-in-being, if you will, comprised of all freedom-loving nations, standing watch over the seas, standing watch over each other." ... a grand maritime coalition
But while the 1,000-ship navy would help cut down on smuggling and piracy, and possibly terrorism, it doesn't really deal with the basic strategic function of the U.S. Navy: the need to offer a serious, inviolable instrument for inflicting great punishment – a stare-down capability.
... development of a 1,000-ship international navy ... is a way of elegantly managing American decline
As noted, today we have only half the nearly 600 ships that the U.S. Navy had in the 1980s ... "we're on the way to a 150-ship Navy [because we are building only five ships per year]." [former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman]