A Navy deployed forward, ready to respond quickly to any crisis, and able to take the fight to the adversary's shores is still America's best defense.
The United States will prevail in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and wherever else the war on terror leads. But safeguarding America's security and achieving peace require that the Navy execute missions that may have little to do with defeating Islamic extremists—missions that more broadly promote all elements of American foreign policy and economic security. As Admiral Mike Mullen, the CNO, states in the preceding article, our nation and its leaders need to reassess the value of sea power in an environment characterized by the emergence of regional powers, the spread of terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the growth of piracy and illicit commerce, and the imperative to defend the U.S. homeland. The challenge for our leadership, facing simultaneous pressures to fund the war on terror, transform military capabilities, and identify greater savings and efficiencies, is to decide whether to build and sustain a Navy capable of protecting America's interests; to reshape the Navy to address specific threats; or to reduce the Navy outright to offset increased spending on other priorities.
Realistic Assumptions
Four key assumptions shape the subsequent discussions and the conclusions that follow. It is important for the sake of conceptual integrity to outline them.
First, even while our nation is engaged in a protracted struggle against extremist totalitarianism, other developments will continue to threaten vital American interests. Nations that seek general or focused parity with the U.S. on economic, political, technological, or military terms will remain a strategic concern.
second, because the Navy is a capital-intensive service whose primary assets require years to develop and produce, it must account for this constraint and move deliberately in its acquisition of new ships, aircraft, sensors, and weapon systems—and in its divestiture of current ones.
Third, our allies and partners will continue to view through the prism of self-interest every request by the United States to stage operations from or over their territory. Uzbekistan's recent decision to renege on its support, for example, may prove to be more the rule than the exception. Any future denial that restricts our use of foreign airfields, staging bases, and airspace will reduce the coalition aspect of our operations and highlight our inherent maritime access advantage-and therefore give our joint operations a greater naval flavor.
Fourth, the President, secretary of Defense, and others have made clear that the United States has no fixed date for terminating its stability and reconstruction operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Given the depth and breadth of our commitment in those two countries, it is important for the nation to determine how its large ground and special operations force presence in Southwest Asia affects the strategic calculus and, consequently, how profoundly it alters the Navy's value.
Maritime Tenets of National security
Homeland Defense and Major Combat Operations. Defending the U.S. homeland and conducting major combat operations retain their places of prominence in our strategic thinking and planning. A Navy operating forward—what some would call a good offense—is still the best defense. The National security Strategy and National Military Strategy reaffirm our long-held belief that it is preferable to identify and counter threats overseas and on the high seas than in the approaches to U.S. ports. Although the aftermath of recent natural disasters may lead to a larger role for the Navy in future relief and recovery operations at home, a forward-postured Navy is an essential component of defending American soil and American interests.
The power of a forward, mobile Navy also enhances joint strike effects and reduces risk to the joint force during major combat operations. If anti-access trends, whether political and military, should continue, access ashore will be severely curtailed. Under such circumstances, Fleet forces will provide viable options to the combatant commanders and, collectively or individually, will add significant value to the joint force.
Addressing Expanding Needs. America's combatant commanders are signaling a growing need for two other broad categories of capabilities: (1) deterrence, influence and shaping, and (2) maritime security. These demands are captured in the National Strategy for Maritime security, which the President signed in September 2005. This document makes clear that the United States will play a major role in a collaborative and collective maritime security effort to protect maritime commerce, develop partner capabilities, and stop seaborne threats before they reach their destinations. Every nation that can contribute has a seat at this table. But the U.S. Navy, with its persistent forward presence, extensive command and control, and global communications capabilities, is the logical choice to lead this worldwide undertaking.
Deterrence, Influence, and Shaping Operations. Known in joint vernacular as "Phase O" missions, these tasks allow the United States to keep an eye on potential adversaries while offering assistance to friends around the world, particularly in Africa, Southwest Asia, and the Western Pacific. For this mission, the key lies in strength—strength that is forward, persistent, and credible. The joint force needs to be capable of deterring a broad range of potential threats, from global challenges to regional threats to transnational entities.
Deterring and shaping operations involve influencing nations at crossroads and dissuading nations whose intentions are more ominous. They involve denying the maritime domain to organizations and individuals who would use them for illegal or terror purposes. The challenge is clear: we must be able to influence China; we must deter and dissuade Iran. We must continue to shape the future of the Korean peninsula. These objectives require high-end capabilities—forces that show American resolve and the might that makes that message clear. Scalable, forward, and ready Navy forces provide the range of military and diplomatic options to meet current and future Phase O challenges, although our present capacity does not allow us to be everywhere we need to be.
Maritime security and the Global War on Terror Operations. The key to successful maritime security and war on terrorism operations lies in employing networked ships and individual units where they can best affect local and regional outcomes and contribute to global maritime awareness-the descriptive title given to a real-time, comprehensive, and widely distributed operational picture of what is happening on and around the sea. Although the expression Global War on Terror has acquired something of an American accent, every coastal nation has maritime security challenges, and presence is 90% of the battle. If we wish to stop terrorists, insurgents, arms traffickers, pirates, and smugglers overseas, we have to be present, because the window of opportunity to identify and neutralize such targets is critically short. We must be able to strike accurately and lethally in minutes or hours at the most. We need a force operating forward and prepared to shift instantly from something akin to routine operations to combat, and back to "ops normal." American sailors and their coalition counterparts, working, training, and operating together, can share their expertise to strengthen our combined regional impact.
Adapting and Delivering
Given the challenges we face because of our low recapitalization rate and the combatant commanders' growing need to provide deterrence, shaping, and maritime security capabilities, the Navy is meeting its evolving commitments largely through changes to its complementary readiness generation and operational employment models. On the input side, the Navy has implemented the Fleet Response Plan, a flexible maintenance, training, and certification process that tailors the capabilities of deploying units in response to theater-specific needs. On the output side, we are adjusting our operational model to maximize the utility of our forward, distributed units, while preserving their ability to operate as a larger force. Together, these changes yield a powerful, flexible, and responsive Navy capable of executing a wide array of missions, but in particular, missions that facilitate security and deterrence.
Fleet Response Plan. Using the Fleet Response Plan, the Navy no longer concentrates its readiness resources to support a fixed deployment window. Instead, we build and preserve readiness throughout a Fleet unit's operational cycle. This approach has given us a higher degree of agility and has allowed us to generate readiness more efficiently. We now build readiness from the unit to the group and force levels to generate what the combatant commanders need when they need it, down to specific mission-essential tasks. We can tailor an attack submarine's training cycle to make that ship optimally suited for surveillance operations; similarly, we can focus a surface combatant's training on maritime security and/or on major combat capabilities such as air defense. The Fleet Response Plan delivers a Navy that is strong, rotational, and flexible-a force that is prepared for major joint combat operations and high-stakes Phase O missions, and a force that can surge on short notice to expand a combatant commander's ability to counter specific threats.
U.S. Navy's Operational Model. While Fleet units must be able to operate and fight effectively en masse during major combat and high-end deterrence operations, they are also called on to operate in smaller units, often individually, in support of global maritime security operations or the war on terrorism. The Navy's operational model recognizes and addresses this divergent nature of our tasking. First, we train Fleet forces to the standard of major combat operations, the pinnacle of Fleet and joint training, to ensure that we will dominate and deliver access through the sea, while providing broad deterrent capabilities from the sea. Next, we provide specialized training so that we can engage in theater security cooperation through our numbered fleet commanders, who are increasingly networked and able to generate, and capitalize upon, maritime domain awareness. Finally, Navy forces assigned to geographic theaters are distributed to support regional maritime security initiatives, such as counter-narcotics, counter-piracy, maritime interdiction, and partner capability development. They are subsequently re-aggregated as required to conduct major combat or deterrence operations.
These regional Fleet forces are led by joint force maritime component commanders—the warfighting component designation of our numbered fleet commanders—who exercise joint command authority for their respective combatant commander. The ability to operate effectively as a unified force or as networked individual units is the transformational result that our Fleet Response Plan and operational model yields, and explains why Fleet forces can deliver such versatile and valuable joint effects.
The Combined Yield. The Fleet Response Plan and the Navy's operational model provide a Navy that is forward, persistent, and dominant. Being forward yields inherent speed and reach. It reduces our response time, allowing us to operate effectively inside the confined but high-tempo engagement cycle associated with maritime security and the war on terrorism. It allows the Navy to change gears in stride, moving seamlessly from bilateral training exercises to strike operations to humanitarian assistance. Because we are already where we need to be, we can strike quickly and strike deep, and we can add defense to the joint force and to our partners. While we prefer to operate as part of an effective coalition force, we retain for the President the sovereign ability to operate on our own if circumstances should so dictate.
An inherent value derived from operating forward is America's ability to use the Navy as a diplomatic rheostat-a means of signaling support, disagreement, or determination. We can and do vary the intensity of our message based on the desires of the President, the secretary of Defense, or the regional combatant commander. Our forces can steam near contested areas or assemble quietly several hundred miles away. For instance, we can transit overtly through the Strait of Hormuz, or operate less visibly in the Gulf of Oman and North Arabian Sea.
If Not Us, Who?
The world's heavily populated, politically unstable, and frequently traveled maritime regions highlight the strategic importance of the U.S. Navy. Operating forward is the linchpin of our strategy, and two powerful cases can be made for maintaining a robust Phase O naval presence force. First is the operational case. Such a force will allow the United States to develop coalition partner capabilities, to take the war on terror to our adversaries, to defend our homeland by identifying and engaging threats while they are far from our shores, and to provide a credible deterrent against nations that may think that we are too preoccupied, or overcommitted, to counter their adventurism. second is the business case. By deterring armed conflict, the right naval force may help our nation avoid some expensive and consuming stability and reconstruction endeavors in the future. This investment will pay off over time with a maritime commons shaped to the advantage of the United States and our allies.
As a result of America's past investments in naval capabilities, today's Fleet is prepared and postured to keep a watchful eye on regions beyond Southwest Asia, although not always at the levels that our combatant commanders desire. America's doctrine of confronting adversaries at the time and place of our choosing derives from our possession of strategic and operational initiative; retaining that initiative becomes problematic as the Navy's force structure approaches its lowest level in decades, and as the majority of our joint warfighting efforts remain focused on Iraq and Afghanistan. Our leaders, accordingly, face dauntingly complex issues as they assess the recommendations of the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review-among them, the need to determine whether the threat of deferred retaliation or the preventive value of forward-postured U.S. naval power is more likely to shape the behavior of potential aggressors, pariah states, and transnational thugs.
Those entrusted to make decisions that will have enormous consequences for the future of our nation must be willing to look beyond Iraq to discover the inherent strategic value of their Navy. As the clout of some regional powers increases, so does the need for U.S. forces to influence, dissuade, deter and, if necessary, dominate.
Today's principal struggle pits the United States and its partners against radical Islamists, but if the past is prologue, America will again find itself confronting an aggressive state. As the U.S. Navy expands its capabilities to promote maritime security and pursue terrorists abroad, it will continue to prepare for major combat operations. Prudence, custom, and history dictate that we be ready to deliver that level of power whenever the need arises. Although difficult to predict where or when the next crisis will occur, achieving an outcome favorable to U.S. interests will hinge on the Navy's ability to respond quickly with forces that are not handicapped by the tyranny of time, speed, distance, or the wavering commitment of a coalition member.
By staying strong, flexible and deployed forward in potential trouble spots around the world, we preserve America's ability to extend both a helping hand or a mailed fist. "Events of October 1962," noted President John F. Kennedy in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, "indicated, as they had all through history, that control of the sea means security. Control of the seas can mean peace. Control of the seas can mean victory. The United States must control the seas if it is to protect your security."
Admiral Nathman, a former Vice Chief of Naval Operations, is the current Commander, U.S. Fleet Forces Command (CFFC). Fleet Forces Command organizes, mans, trains, and equips naval forces for assignment to combatant commanders and articulates Fleet warfighting and readiness requirements to the Chief of Naval Operations. Commander Harris serves in Fleet Forces Command's Capabilities and Resources Integration Directorate.