Refocusing the Navy on a Maritime Deterrent Strategy

 

[By James Wirtz]

As great power competition becomes an increasingly grim reality, senior officers are coming to terms with the end of a globally permissive, power projection environment. Strategists and planners can no longer assume that limited naval forces in theater can transit to some crisis epicenter and influence events by threatening or projecting power ashore with little interference. While this operational reality has been in the works for some time, its impact is only now reverberating across various Navy communities, raising the specter of profound disruption of long-standing procedures and the obsolescence of familiar capabilities.

Several emerging warfighting concepts also shape today’s Navy operations, adding further complexity. The quest to develop distributed maritime operations – that is, to disperse long-range fires, sensors, communications, and command and control nodes across platforms separated by significant distances – is an ongoing project intended to defeat opposing anti-access and area denial capabilities. The “One Atlantic” initiative, by contrast, is intended to transcend the command and control seams that exist between U.S. Northern Command and U.S. European Command to increase de facto availability of maritime assets for European contingencies. In the Pacific, non-traditional sea denial capabilities, so-called “hellscape” swarms of autonomous platforms, have become a centerpiece of the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s plan to defeat a cross-strait assault on the Island of Taiwan.

This operational churn is a healthy reaction to the waves of techno-strategic change confronting the Navy. Nevertheless, it complicates efforts for Navy leaders to describe the maritime force’s outsized contribution to the Joint Force and today’s Joint Warfighting Concept. These competing operational initiatives and maritime concepts, however, are primarily internal Navy matters – the Joint Force is more concerned with the operational effects and strategic impact the Navy provides rather than the specific processes behind them. Additionally, since these operational concepts focus on warfighting, they fail to address the movement of U.S. defense strategy towards a more robust deterrent posture.

Eventually, the Navy will develop a more pervasive operational concept that reflects emergent techno-strategic realities. Until then, it needs to identify how the Navy of today and tomorrow will help deter great power war. The Navy needs to explain to a broader audience what it is trying to do – not how it is trying to do it. The Navy must identify its contribution to the emerging U.S. deterrent strategy. Synchronization of competing warfighting concepts can then follow in strategy’s wake.

The Navy’s Contribution to Deterrence Today

How does the Navy contribute to the U.S. deterrence posture from both a regional and global standpoint? Although the Biden administration introduced the notion of “integrated deterrence” into the strategic lexicon in 2022, Navy officials, academics, and defense observers have been relatively silent about the Navy’s contribution to deterrence in today’s techno-strategic setting. The integrated deterrence concept is simple enough: “In a world of multiple adversaries, emerging technologies, new domains of warfare, and globalized economic ties, deterrence requires a broader approach than traditional military methods alone.”

The new concept addresses these developments by calling for a whole-of-government, whole-of-alliance strategy that utilizes both non-kinetic and kinetic deterrent threats and capabilities. Integrated deterrence is ambitious; there is no formula to integrate the way these domains, agencies, and allies contribute to deterrence. Although the policy and academic response to the notion of integrated deterrence has been modest, virtually no one participating in this discussion has deemed it necessary to describe the Navy’s contribution to national security as strategic, or the role the Navy would play in an integrated deterrence strategy. This last observation should disturb naval strategists.

The Navy can make two key contributions to deterrence that signal to friend and foe alike the U.S. capability and willingness to make good on its diplomatic and military commitments. These contributions to deterrence take the form of a bi-modal deterrent strategy and concept of operations that draws a distinction between sea control and sea denial forces.

Sea Control

Across the conflict spectrum, the Navy’s sea control capability signals that the United States is ready to uphold its deterrence policies and to assure allies of the U.S. commitment to their defense. Come what may, the U.S. Navy will maintain global communications with allies and partners, preventing the isolation of key friends, countering coercion, and facilitating the movement of forces and materials to conflict regions. James H. Bergeron, for instance, describes how sea control plays an important role in bolstering NATO’s deterrent posture:

“The maritime dimension of NATO is a spectrum and continuum; a strategic unity that links the Sea Lines of Communication (SLOCS) across the Atlantic, the North Atlantic and GIUK Gap, the Norwegian Sea, the Arctic passages to the Pole, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea. But also, beyond that, to the global seas and oceans that feed our trade and commerce . . .. the seas matter tactically due to the potential threat of sea-based missile attack on Allied ships or indeed land targets. It matters operationally in the ability of an adversary to disrupt SLOCs between North America and Europe and within the NATO Area of Responsibility. And it matters politically and strategically as the symbol of our essential connectedness as an Alliance.”

America has global deterrent commitments, and its friends and allies are near great powers that are increasingly capable and belligerent. Sea control demonstrates that the United States will always be able to influence worldwide events and that opponents will not succeed in efforts to isolate allies and partners. Sea control is the glue that binds America’s alliances together.

Sea Denial

The Navy’s sea denial capability, which exists both in a day-alert and, if necessary, a generated-alert status, signals to all concerned that the United States is unwilling to cede the opening move in a nascent conflict or fait accompli to its adversary. Put simply, the U.S. Navy will always be prepared to disrupt hostile actions, and that the Navy’s response will be geared to the warning time available (whether that is hours, days, or weeks). A ready sea denial capability bolsters deterrence by compelling the adversary to anticipate active resistance, and to assess continuously evolving sea denial capabilities. The ongoing improvement of the sea denial force injects doubts into the opponent’s planning process – one can never be sure if some exquisite operation planned against a specific capability has accounted for the latest innovation. A ready sea denial capability reduces the attractiveness of attempting a fait accompli, which by definition would shift the onus of escalation onto Washington. Sea denial suggests that war will commence when aggression begins, not weeks or months later in the form of a long attritional campaign to return to the status quo ante bellum.

Sea denial deters aggression by complicating opponents’ planning, by placing the onus for initiating a significant conflict on the opponent, and by holding the line until the full weight of the Joint Force can be brought to bear in battle. A ready sea denial capability reduces the likelihood that an opponent might come to believe that U.S. officials might choose not to respond to some fait accompli – sea denial suggests to the opponent that there is no way to sidestep an active opponent, achieve limited objectives, and plan for the best.

A Bi-modal Maritime Deterrent

The concept of a bi-modal deterrent strategy not only aligns maritime strategy with today’s political demands, it also suggests a way to organize the operational and tactical churn within the Navy. When placed within the context of a maritime deterrent strategy, the Navy’s operational concepts no longer appear to be competitive but more complementary. The Hellscape initiative contributes to deterrence by providing sea denial, while the One Atlantic initiative bolsters the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deterrence in Europe by increasing Atlantic sea control and even force projection onto the continent of Europe. 

Distributed maritime operations (DMO) could be seen as increasing both sea denial and sea control capabilities by harnessing the offensive capability of far-flung forces, while minimizing their vulnerability to hostile action. Most importantly, a maritime deterrent strategy that emphasizes bi-modal operations gives renewed emphasis to the Navy’s contribution to strategic deterrence and the role of the Joint Force in deterring aggression. This is the primary techno-strategic change that is unsettling Navy planners today, that is, the shift from globally permissive, power projection environment that emphasized warfighting to a world where deterrence dominates U.S. defense policy. 

Conclusion

The bi-modal, sea denial and sea control concept is not new. Wayne Hughes described the idea in a seminal article published in the Naval War College Review in 2007. Today, a bi-modal fleet is being advanced as an operational concept that would allow the Navy to use new technologies to deal with the proliferation of anti-access and area denial threats, while putting the existing Fleet to good use to achieve sea control. A maritime deterrent strategy, particularly one suited to today’s great power competition, can leverage the bi-modal concept to synchronize the many ideas and capabilities that are emerging in response to the changing techno-strategic environment. The proliferation of these innovations is a positive sign. It demonstrates that strategists, planners, and developers are searching for new ways to incorporate new capabilities and ideas to deal with increasingly significant threats. Nevertheless, this burst of creativity requires an overarching strategy to identify objectives and how new and existing capabilities might be used to obtain them. A Maritime Deterrent Strategy that adapts a bi-modal operational concept of operations would serve as a useful blueprint to synchronize the Navy’s response to today’s security setting.

James J. Wirtz is a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA.

This article appears courtesy of CIMSEC and may be found in its original form here.