We wrapped up seminars for the Strategy & War Course this week at the U.S. Naval War College. The Naval Diplomat always gets a little weepy when another crew of disciplined, purposeful students moves on to one of the other core courses or graduates into post-Naval War College life. (Tell no one.) During the last week of the course we look ahead for the first time, applying insights from the great strategic theorists as well as findings from the historical case studies to current and prospective controversies—contingencies in which our graduates will take a direct hand as they ascend the ranks of the military services and other federal agencies.
We also return to the marine realm for the first time since we studied World War II in the Pacific in early January. That navies have taken a back seat to armies and air forces since World War II—in hot wars, at any rate—is an interesting finding in itself. Leyte Gulf, in late 1944, was history’s last major fleet battle. To date.
Maritime conflicts often pit “whales” against “elephants.” A whale is predominantly a sea power. Whales encountered during our grand tour of military history include classical Athens, Great Britain in the age of Pax Britannica, and the United States since the naval buildup of the 1880s. An elephant is a continental power. Classical Sparta, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union were elephants. To win in such an asymmetric conflagration, one antagonist has to get at the other in its element. Whales try to overcome elephants in the terrestrial arena, and vice versa. Sparta borrowed a whale, in the form of the Persian navy. Britain made a habit of renting elephants for land warfare on the European continent in the 18th and 19th centuries. Few powers can straddle the land-sea divide.
Professor Robert Ross authored an article in the late 1990s contending that an uneasy peace will prevail in the Far East well into the future. Our students read his essay during this closing week. China is a prototypical elephant. It will dominate continental Asia into the indefinite future. The United States is the Western Pacific’s alpha whale. China, prophesies Ross, will remain unchallengeable on land, America unchallengeable at sea. The result is a “geography of the peace” at the land-sea interface. Ross’s article invariably gives rise to lively in-class debates. That’s especially true in recent years, as the Chinese elephant demonstrates the ability to swim and the American whale flounders—doubtless temporarily.
But this all feels a bit artificial. Is every power a whale or an elephant? Couldn’t there be hawks soaring around out there? Interwar Italian air-power theorist Giulio Douhet and retired U.S. Air Force colonel John Warden suggest so. For Douhet and Warden, warfare is all about defeating enemy air forces and bombarding enemy societies into submission. Air power can do it all! Hawks, then, are intensely offensive creatures. What would a natural air power look like? History teaches that it’s possible for, say, an elephant to transmute itself into a whale through artificial measures. By building the Long Walls connecting Athens with the nearby seaport of Piraeus, for example, land-bound Athenians made themselves into a whale. They could think of themselves as islanders, invulnerable to land assault and free to push outward at sea.
Similarly, a hawk would possess some combination of natural and prepared defenses against attack from land and sea. Relative immunity to attack would free the air force for offensive action. The hawk would boast lethal offensive air power,enabling its air force to strike at enemy leaders, industrial capacity, infrastructure, and military forces. ‘Pears to me there is such a thing as natural air powers, rare though they may be. So get out there, air-power enthusiasts, and convince us.
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Chuck Hill
What makes a natural "Hawk"? A strong aviation industry. Strong general aviation sector. A political and social system that encourages individual initiative.
Chuck Hill
It is always going to be easier to transport and concentrate massive amounts of firepower by sea than over land or though the air. That is a matter of physics of the mediums and has been true for several thousand years.
The sea is also less restrictive than the land, rwhich is contrained by mountains, roads, bridges, rivers, etc.
It seems unlikely that the whales will go extinct, though they may spend more time under water.
Frank
If China is elephant, then what is India? Dog?
John Mc
Well, this is a bit of a straw man, and certainly looks like the setup for a future final exam question.
First, let’s disassemble the straw man. Warden never said, “Air power can do it all.” Warden said, “Air power can do what you’re asking.” Defeating an enemy’s air forces is a means to an end; after that, the question turns to, “What would you like to accomplish? What is your Desired End State?”
If the DES is total defeat and occupation of the enemy’s country, then turn to boots on the ground. But, even considering Iraq and Afghanistan, how often does that happen, compared to all other uses of military power? To paraphrase former SecDef Gates, “Anyone who proposes a land invasion of Iran should be fired for terminal stupidity.”
Douhet did hypothesize that airpower might be able to do it all. After seeing the horror that was WWI, he can hardly be faulted for thinking outside the box, even if he turned out to be wrong. We’ve run that experiment several times, and the results are fairly conclusive: you can bomb a country flat; you can use incendiaries until it’s ash; you can even use atom bombs. The people may not like it, but they don’t rise up against their governments and demand an end. The one Douhet excursion no one has tried is chemical weapons. Let’s agree not to test that one, but no serious airpower theorist today argues that strategic bombardment can break the will of the people.
You may, however, be able to get the government to change. That’s what Warden proposed. Punch him in the face enough times, rapidly, while giving him an acceptable alternative to inevitable death, and he’s likely to see it your way. It’s deterrence theory that you’ve been forced to implement: impose costs, deny benefits, provide an option he can say “yes” to.
To the question at hand, then, how is an aircraft carrier not simply a way to get hawks to the battle? And how does the whale engage the elephant, anyway? The majority of the planet’s population lives within 200 miles of a shoreline, but neither ships nor whales can live 20 miles inland. Neither can an army march 20 miles to sea. Of course, both need food, and that often requires access to the other’s world.
Hawks bridge that divide. Whether through aircraft, land-attack cruise missiles, or anti-ship cruise missiles, elephants and whales can enter the other’s sphere by getting some hawks. Hawks are intensely offensive—even inherently, if the objective in having one is more than an “air fleet in being.” The dogma “airpower attacks even when it defends” succinctly captures the idea.
The theory: natural hawks can exist when certain conditions are met. 1) The technology exists to build air vehicles and for them to accurately hit their targets as a matter of routine. Until that happens, the wannabe hawk is an eyas. 2) The hawk must have a nest not completely vulnerable to elephant or whale. (It needn’t be invulnerable.) 3) The hawk must have goals compatible with being a hawk. If you want to conquer land, you need to be, or get, an elephant. If you want to deny others the use of the land or sea, you can be a hawk. You will need a place to perch if you want to go halfway around the world and do more than look around. Options to consider include a friendly local elephant or your own whale.
Brad
So I suppose that makes naval aviatiors flying whales? I think with an adequate naval infantry and naval aviation, a whale can overcome an elephant. Especially since most elephants are used to fighting other elephants.
Whichwaydidhegogeorge?
Interesting analogies Mr. Holmes. I think the use of animals to describe the world powers is stretching things a bit in order to fit our anthropromorphic world view where objects or animals are attributed human characteristics in order to better understand them. IMO it's too simplistic a view as a way to make sense of the current geopolitics but fits in well with the human mind continually trying to make sense out of chaos.
In the interconnected battlespaces of the future taking place over cyberspace, the electromagnetic spectrum, air, sea, and land an unbalanced power could find itself at a major disadvantage to another power with better or sufficient balance. An example would be China currently being unable to credibly invade Taiwan without taking heavy losses. This may change in the future but is an aspect of the Middle Kingdom being an elephant learning how to swim (which is actually something some real elephants can do).
@DaveH, you make a good point about how technology could render navies as obsolete, much like naval aviation rendered battleships obsolete, but IMO as someone who's participated in these operational tests for years our Navy (and other services) is much more deadlier than they were even 10-15 years ago as we know that we have several platforms that provide anti-ballistic capabilities that have been proven to work in real world testing in all circumstances except during the boost phase.
Even with all the money put up by the Air Force & Army to develop & field their interceptors (including the ill fated ABL), the Navy's SM-2s & 3s remain our most consistent dependable platform for intercepting missiles. The recent MDA ballistic test this week shows just how much better they're getting at integrating terrestrial and space based sensors to provide high speed tracking & viable firing solutions. Railguns & lasers will only serve to make the USN even deadlier & provide an unlimited anti-ballistic magazine. The first jet mounted laser defence systems are scheduled to begin flight tests next year which will only improve all of our jets defensive capabilities. The X-47B should also be operational in the next decade esp. since there's no new weapons platforms to have to integrate thereby improving & extending the power & strike range of our carrier groups.
We are a naval power. Using this animal analogy, when circumstances make it necessary we've forcibly temporarily transformed into an elephant (or at least a whale/elephant hybrid) at certain times in our history such as during the Civil War, WW1 & WW2. A powerful Navy is the foundation of our country's strength & allows us to metaphorically move our borders and first line defenses well away from our coastlines. Essentially for the foreseeable future the USN will continue to be the tip of the spear for power projection esp. during this strategic pivot to Asia as our country's technological advances will continue to often show up first in our Navy.
Kurt
Isn't the US navy spending more on aircrafts than on ships?
What if you see ships as floating airfields and protection platforms for more airfields and supply shipping? Aircrafts can operate from land and sea, but there's no safe global supply route without blue water sea lines of communication control.
Are the hawks really something new? Wouldn't a naval system that relies on boarding be very similar to one that relies on aircrafts from ships and shores? As soon as infantry on ships is the decisive factor, the attack pattern similarly aims at the enemy economy (with less costs and more payback via plunder). The cruise missile example would be like the many encounters between Egypt and the Sea Peoples, well documented in stone such as the Battle of the Delta. The Egyptians did defend themselves, but neither did their old zone of influence beyond the Nile survive, nor did they fend of the Bronze Age collapse and keep alive the military marjannu charioteer system of highly trained mobile infantry.
DaveH
With each passing year, it becomes ever harder to exclude the hawks from the equation.
To borrow another analogy, if elephant/whale/hawk is rock, paper, scissors, then technology is probably making the whales an endangered species.
After all, remind me how many serious naval campaigns have been fought in the missile age? Exactly one (Falklands), and that nearly ended in disaster for the British Navy.
One imagines that an AEGIS-equipped navy can be survivable, but one can also imagine that it isn't. Maybe I've spent too many years playing Harpoon on the computer, but one thing that all wargames, for fun or for work, have shown me is that once serious lead and silicon start flying, modern navies disappear in hours, if not minutes. Given missile power, modern naval campaigns are the Battle of Midway, only reenacted every hour of every day of every week until one side or the other is at the bottom of the sea.
And, IMO, it's only going to get worse as UAVs acquire more persistence. In the past, the Hawks were limited by time on station. Give me a ship-spotting missile-carrying UAV that can loiter for 24 hours, and pretty soon you're approaching a scenario that makes surface vessels obsolete. Oh, you've got 40 SM-3's in your VLS? That's nice– I've got 50 cruise missiles on land and in the air, you lose.
That all said, for this very reason, I expect the next ten years is going to see an increasingly serious investment in railgun and DEW technologies, as only those two techs appear to afford any realistic chance to make surface ships survivable in the missile age.
mareo2
"… Oh, you've got 40 SM-3's in your VLS? That's nice– I've got 50 cruise missiles on land and in the air, you lose…"
Did your computer game simulate that in the JMSDF every Kongo class destroyer carrying SM-3 is already escorted by default with an Akizuki class "destroyer" (AKA japenese Aegis frigate) and this escort 32 cell magaizne carryi quad-packed ESSM and ASROC? I may be wrong but I think thart you may need a lot more than 50 missiles in your imagined scenario againsts ships with quad-paqued missiles.