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War between the United States and China in the western Pacific is a real possibility in the next several years. Although both sides have conducted military exercises and “war games” in the region, predicting the course and outcome of such a war is problematic. Military strategists and war planners, even armed as they are with the latest information technologies and precision weapons, have yet to overcome Clausewitzian “friction” and the Luttwakian “paradoxical logic” of strategy. Strategies and plans often fail to survive contact with the enemy. What Bismarck said about statesmen is also true of generals and admirals: They “cannot control the current of events [but] can only float with them and steer.”
In any future U.S. war with China, sea power will play a major role in the fighting. In the Asia-Pacific, China has the obvious advantages of geographical proximity to the arena of conflict and has been assiduously expanding its naval power to achieve regional naval superiority–at least in numbers of warships. As Sam Tangredi of the U.S. Naval War College has noted, numbers matter, and by the end of the decade if current trends continue China’s PLA Navy (PLAN) may reach a total of 460 warships, while the U.S. fleet may decrease to 260 warships. Tangredi contends that those who claim America’s technological advantages will tip the balance in war against China are ignoring history which shows that “[i]n a naval struggle between near-peers, mass (numbers), and the ability to replace losses bests technological advantage.” “At a certain point of imbalance in mass,” Tangredi continues, “the larger naval force cannot be defeated.” Tangredi’s conclusion: “If the United States wants to retain global influence, maintain deterrence in multiple regions, and conduct combat operations against a near peer that is expanding its global military footprint, it needs a large number of naval platforms.”
Tangredi’s conclusion is based on history, which is the best teacher. He studied the outcomes of 28 wars that involved significant naval clashes, including the Peloponnesian Wars, the Punic Wars, Rome’s civil wars, Anglo-Spanish and Anglo-Dutch-French wars, the Seven Years’ War, the wars of the French Revolution and Empire, the Opium Wars, the American Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the Russo-Japanese War, World Wars I and II, and the Cold War. In all but three of the 28 naval clashes, the nation with superior numbers won.
Tangredi’s observations reaffirmed the broader study by the great British geopolitical writer Colin S. Gray in his book The Leverage of Sea Power: The Strategic Advantage of Navies in War. Gray studied 10 major conflicts from ancient times to the Cold War and concluded that “Great sea powers or maritime coalitions have either won or, occasionally, drawn every major war in modern history.” Gray urged Western policymakers to recognize that “[t]here is a historical pattern to the repeated success of great sea powers over great land powers that defies dismissal as mere chance.” His thesis was that “superior sea power generates a strategic leverage which enables wars to be won.”
The leverage of sea power has economic/logistical, geopolitical, and military elements. Throughout history, insular powers with superior navies and command of the sea—most recently Great Britain and the United States—have provided economic and logistical support to continental coalitions to defeat Eurasian-based powers (Louis XIV and Napoleonic France, Imperial and Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union). Both Great Britain and the United States understood that, to be effective, superior sea power needed to translate into land power, and, later, air power. None of that leverage was possible without what Alfred Thayer Mahan called “command of the sea,” which can only be achieved by superior naval power.
Winston Churchill understood this when he served as First Lord of the Admiralty in both world wars of the 20th century. In The World Crisis and The Gathering Storm, Churchill wrote about the value of superior sea power to achieve victory over continental powers who sought Eurasian and global hegemony. Churchill looked to British history and saw that it was British sea power that enabled Marlborough’s armies and Britain’s continental allies to defeat Louis XIV’s forces; that enabled Wellington to bleed Napoleon’s forces in Spain and defeat Napoleon at Waterloo; and that enabled Britain to neutralize the German High Seas Fleet while sending British and imperial troops to France, the Balkans, and the Near East in the First World War. In the Second World War, Anglo-American sea power (and air power) enabled the Allies to transport troops and supplies to every theater of global war, while winning the Battle of the Atlantic and the island campaigns of the Central and Southwest Pacific.
War in the western Pacific, of course, may also involve other powers. Japan, Australia, and England might add their considerable naval forces to the U.S. side of the conflict, but Russia might also side with China. That would likely mean a Third World War whose consequences, including possible nuclear escalation, would be dire and unpredictable.
War with China is not inevitable. Hopefully, the new Cold War between the U.S. and China remains cold. But who wins that Cold War will likely be determined by sea power in its broadest sense. Geopolitically, the United States is an insular maritime power, with friendly and comparatively weak powers to its north and south on the North American continent. China is both a sea power and a land power in a part of Eurasia that contains hostile sea powers (Japan, Australia), potentially hostile land powers (India, Vietnam, South Korea), and another great power (Russia) that currently is aligned with China.
During the 1980s, U.S. Navy Secretary John Lehman translated sea power theory into policy by formulating and implementing a “Maritime Strategy” that played an essential role in America’s Cold War victory, which Lehman explained in his 2018 book Oceans Ventured: Winning the Cold War at Sea. Lehman served as President Ronald Reagan’s Navy Secretary from 1981 to 1986. He was a former Navy flier and an aid to Richard Allen and later Henry Kissinger in the Nixon administration. Lehman read Thucydides and Gibbon, Mahan and Spykman, and studied geopolitics under the legendary Robert Strausz-Hupe, the author of Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power, The Balance of Tomorrow, and the founder of the foreign Policy Research Institute.
Lehman writes that he witnessed the decline of U.S. naval power ironically under the presidency of Naval Academy graduate Jimmy Carter. Lehman and like-minded national security strategists and political leaders (including Ronald Reagan) formed the Committee on the Present Danger that proposed a dramatic increase in military, and especially naval, power to meet the Soviet geopolitical challenge. As Navy Secretary, Lehman oversaw the building of a 600-ship navy and the formulation of the Maritime Strategy that was designed to place at risk important Soviet military assets. This was part of Reagan’s overall strategy of “rollback” or “liberation” that Reagan once explained simply as “We win, they lose.”
Lehman credits then Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas Hayward with establishing a Strategic Studies Group at the Naval War College which kept the Maritime Strategy “constantly evolving and incorporat[ed] the latest technology, lessons learned, and intelligence for the remainder of the Reagan administration.” U.S. and allied naval forces engaged in massive, offense-oriented naval exercises that provided operational training for the growing fleet and sent a message to Soviet leaders that U.S. naval capabilities and strategy could directly threaten their key military installations. According to Lehman, after a few of these annual exercises and the growth of the U.S. Navy, the Soviet General Staff warned Kremlin leaders that Soviet air and naval budgets would have to be trebled to adequately defend against U.S. and allied naval power. The Soviet economy, as Mikhail Gorbachev recognized, was not up to this task.
In the conclusion of his book, Lehman warned that the post-Cold War naval decline invited today’s challenges by China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. The Biden administration appears oblivious to this fact as evidenced by its proposed 2024 naval budget which seeks to “enact sharp cuts to the U.S. Navy,” forcing it to prematurely retire nearly a dozen ships and “take offline critical missile systems that serve as a primary deterrent to Chinese aggression,” according to the Washington Free Beacon. The proposed budget also contains no new amphibious ships for the Marines, which requested 31 new ships. Perhaps this has something to do with our current Navy Secretary who has stated that climate change is the top priority for the U.S. Navy.
Lehman wrote in 2018 that we have forgotten the lessons of history. “States that wish to wield global influence maintain global navies, whereas states that abandon their focus in the seas . . . see their power decline and their hopes fade.” He also quoted Churchill from 1935: “Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong–these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.” Sadly, they are being repeated today.
Francis P. Sempa writes on foreign policy and geopolitics. His Best Defense columns appear at the beginning of each month.
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