Abstract
Captain Peter Haynes is an American naval aviation officer with a distinguished professional and academic record. A graduate at doctoral and master’s level in, respectively, security studies and strategic planning from the Naval Postgraduate School, he has served four tours in strategy making positions on senior staffs. At the time he wrote this book he was Deputy Director Strategy, Plans and Policy at US Special Operations Command.
He is a decorated combat veteran and is clearly a courageous man. In this study of American naval thinking in the Cold War he is unafraid to make critical judgements on the makers of policy in the period from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to 2007 and the publication by the US Navy of ‘A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Sea Power’. It is to the credit of the US Navy and the Naval Institute that such a frank commentary on recent events is allowed in the public domain.
Captain Haynes sets the scene by discussing the Cold War period when, despite difficulties, especially during the 1970s, which the author characterises as ‘The Navy’s Cold War Nadir’ the USN moved to a strategic ‘Zenith’, with the Maritime Strategy of the 1980s. The latter, he correctly argues, provided unusual alignment of ‘the Navy’s operational, programmatic, administrative, intelligence and pedagogic activities’ which ‘reinvigorated the institution’.
When he moves on to the post-Cold War era he is critical of the then Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Trost, for lack of both vision and charisma which meant that his efforts to shift strategic emphasis to presence, coercive diplomacy and limited war were ‘unconvincing’. His successor Admiral Kelso was no intellectual and had a background in operations, programming and bureaucratic politics. His Deputy CNO Vice Admiral Kelly, with overall responsibility for policy, reflected his superior’s lack of interest in strategy and did not task his Strategic Concepts Branch to come up with a new approach.
It was left to the USN’s unofficial ‘Maritime Strategy Mafia’ to take the lead. In after work meetings these officers developed a post-Cold War vision. The leader and spokesman of this group was Captain Richard Diamond who sold his ideas to Kelly. Eventually he presented the group’s ideas To Kelso who gave him a very hostile reception. On the following day, however, the CNO accepted the logic of the strategists that the future emphasis should be crisis response and expeditionary warfare in the littoral environment. This led to a ‘Naval Force Capabilities Planning Effort’ that led in turn to the publication in September 1992 of the important statement ‘… From the Sea’ subtitled ‘Preparing the Naval Service for the 21st Century’.
One of its recommendations of this statement was the setting up of a Naval Doctrine Command to integrate the Navy into joint operations. The Command was duly set up at Norfolk Virginia in March 1993. Its first production was NDP-1, ‘Naval Warfare’. This asserted the naval forces preferred ‘manoeuver’ warfare to ‘attritional’ but, as Haynes frankly states, no-one with a naval background in the Doctrine Command really knew what manoeuver meant! The document was, however, approved at the top as an authoritative doctrine and it received generally good reviews. To the fleet, however, Haynes argues ‘it was neither significant nor important’. Less uncontroversial was NDP-3 ‘Naval Operations’ that brought out simmering US Navy and US Marine Corps differences. NDP-3 went through forty drafts between 1995 to 1997 and never appeared, rather undermining the whole Doctrine project.
Kelso had fallen in 1994 as a result of the Tailhook Scandal and was replaced by Admiral Boorda, a charismatic personnel expert. Boorda was tasked with modifying ‘… From the Sea’ for the Clinton Administration’s National Security Strategy. The main objective, so Haynes cynically argues, was to produce a document signed by a Democrat. The result was ‘Forward … From the Sea’ published at the end of 1994. There were, however, important differences of substance from the earlier document, notably an emphasis on joint operations and the USA’s global interests. ‘Forward … From the Sea’ insisted that naval forces were ‘well-suited to the entire range of military operations’ and were ‘an indispensable and exceptional instrument of U.S. foreign policy.’ Unlike its predecessor, it also emphasised the forward presence mission. Captain Haynes argues that ‘in its structure and tone’ ‘Forward … From the Sea’ ‘was more like the Maritime Strategy than any other of the Navy’s post-cold war strategic statements.’ Its overall impact on the other two services and on Congress was, however, apparently disappointing.
Given the controversies and scandals of the period it was perhaps unsurprising that Admiral Boorda committed suicide in 1996. His successor Admiral Jay Johnson was sceptical of top down strategy statements and preoccupied with aircraft procurement issues. Johnson did, however, oversee the development of the ‘Naval Operational Concept’ that stressed projection of power from the sea ‘to influence events in the littoral regions of the world across the operational spectrum of peace, crisis and war.’ Its authors seemed to understand manoeuvre warfare and stressed the importance of network centric capabilities. Despite its virtues, however, Johnson’s dislike of such strategic documents meant it was decided not to publish it like previous statements. It was emailed to admirals and posted on the internet, only later appearing in ‘Sea Power’ magazine rather than the more usual and prestigious ‘Proceedings’ of the US Naval Institute. Haynes concludes that ‘despite being one of the Navy’s most impressive post war documents’ ‘Naval Operational Concept’ was ‘all but ignored in the Navy’. A little more impact, within the service at least, was created by a short November 1997 Proceedings article, ‘Anytime Anywhere: A Navy for the 21st Century’. It was popular and accessible but lacked an official imprimatur.
Even more abortive was ‘A Maritime Strategy for the 21st Century’ that went through several drafts but died at the end of 1999. The subsequent period of Admiral Vernon E. Clark as CNO and the George W. Bush administration ‘caused the Navy’s capability for strategic thinking “to atrophy to a level not seen since the early 1970s.”’ To justify a 375 ship fleet Clark got Captain Frank Pandolfe of a newly created Strategic Actions Group to produce an operationally orientated paper, ‘Sea Power 21’, with three primary concepts – ‘Sea Strike’, ‘Sea Shield’, and ‘Sea Basing’ – tied together by network centric ‘Forcenet’. It was published in 2002. This Haynes considers was ‘a logical continuation of “… From the Sea” in the sense “that it also leveraged the promise of revolutionary technology to argue that the US naval forces were even more decisive and their reach was even more global.”’ The document continued to neglect wider contextual factors such as globalisation, international trade or the global economy. Nor did it cover ‘presence missions in support of political and economic objectives’. The USN in ‘Sea Power 21’ was still very much focused on major conflict. Perhaps because of this, ‘Sea Power 21’ was influential internally over a longer period than any statement other than ‘… From the Sea’. Haynes, however, argues that its influence outside the navy was limited as it was ‘overly parochial’.
The invasion of Iraq seemed to justify the American emphasis on ‘transformation’ and superior technology but, the author cogently argues, as things began to ‘unravel … the war mercilessly exposed the limitations of the American’s reductionist strike oriented way of war. The promises of the revolution in military affairs based on the more precise violence of a new generation of weapons were proving empty.’ Signs of change appeared in the 2005 ‘National Defense Strategy’ which took a new approach, arguing ‘for a systemic and collective understanding of America’s security, and that of its allies and partners.’ The Navy was, however in trouble as land warfare had come to the fore in Iraq and Afghanistan and its strike warfare expertise seemed less important. New officers were able to turn the situation round in the context of the new national strategy. Vice Admiral John G. Morgan was appointed to head what was eventually renamed as an Information, Plans and Strategy Department. He emphasised the importance of globalisation and the interests of the United States and its allies ‘to protect and sustain the international system’. Morgan soon obtained an ally in Admiral Mike Mullen, who became CNO in July 2005. The stage was set for a true transformation in US Navy strategic thinking.
In 2005–6 there appeared the ‘1000 Ship Navy’ concept, ‘a self-organising, self-generating come-as-you-are global maritime security network that coordinated the activities of volunteer nations’ navies, coast guards and constabulary units.’ This was developed into ‘A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower’, signed off in 2007 by the new CNO, Admiral Roughead (Mullen having been promoted Chairman of the Joint Chiefs) and the commandants of the Marine Corps and Coastguard. The new CNO’s influence was shown by a reversion to a greater emphasis on ‘regionally concentrated, credible combat power’ but this was combined with ‘globally distributed, mission tailored maritime forces … establishing a persistent worldwide presence that was organised by missions ranging from humanitarian relief, counterterrorism and irregular warfare to peacetime activities in the increasingly important areas of Africa and the Western Hemisphere’. There emphasis on international cooperation continued. As the document put it in a notable section: ‘Although our forces can surged when necessary to respond to crises trust and cooperation cannot be surged’ (emphasis in original).
The author concludes that despite these successes the USN still has some way to go to be certain of continuing to make strategic progress. It ‘will need to admit more theory into its thinking and accept that operational flexibility and readiness and programmatic expertise are no substitute for analytic rigour of a strategic sort.’ One hopes that the rigorous analysis in this book does not prevent Captain Haynes continuing in his role in this vital and continuing process. In the meantime his study is a remarkable insight into the development of the US Navy in recent decades. One hopes the service and its officers will take it all in good part. As my old colleague Professor Colin Gray puts it on the cover: ‘This book is of outstanding importance. Haynes argues convincingly for a real revival of thought and action for an American global maritime strategy. This will make for uncomfortable reading to many, but read it they must. It is criticism, but of a constructive and fundamentally friendly kind.’