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CHAPTER IV

FAILURE OF IMAGINATION

Scenarios are the military’s time-tested instrument for juxtaposing current or anticipated forces alongside possible crises. Called “war games,” “command post,” or “table-top” exercises, they enlist the participation of senior civilian and military officials or defense experts to understand how they react to events that could happen. If such exercises are sufficiently difficult and innovative, they can yield valuable clues about strategy, tactics, escalation, logistics, and a host of other variables that challenge commanders in peace, in the dim light between peace and war, and in war itself. The U.S. Naval War College has long specialized in war games. Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz wrote of his experience there in the early 1920s that “the enemy of our games was always—Japan,” adding that, because of his preparation, “nothing that happened in the Pacific was strange or unexpected.”¹

By 1939, American cryptanalysts could read Japan’s highest level of diplomatic code, which they code-named Purple. The yield from this rich vein was referred to as “Magic.” In late September 1941, U.S. codebreakers intercepted a message from Tokyo to an agent in Hawaii.² Two weeks later, the message was decoded and passed along to Army, Navy, and State Department recipients. In the message, Japan’s Hawaiian agent was asked to divide the relatively small (ca. 5 square miles) naval area of the harbor into five zones. He was further instructed to report on the location and type of ships in each zone.

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Harold R. Stark read the report. He admired Japan’s efficient intelligence services and their attention to detail. Opinion remains divided today about Admiral Stark’s failure to send this intelligence to Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. On December 3, the U.S. high command was also aware that the Japanese had destroyed their codes and encryption devices in Asian consulates as well as in London and Washington. In congressional investigations that followed the end of World War II, Admiral Kimmel stated correctly that not all Japanese codes were being destroyed and that “Such reports had been made to me three or four times in the course of the year.”³

Less senior officers peered into the approaching whirlwind’s opacity with similar results. Because of a November 28 war-warning message from Washington, Lieutenant General Walter Short, who was responsible for Hawaii’s defense, changed the Aircraft Warning Service’s (AWS) watch, which had lasted from 0600 to 1130. Thus, radar screens would now be manned from 0400 to 0700, the general’s estimate of the most likely time for an attack.

However, the watch standers and their immediate superiors were not told the reason for the added hours. Fewer than ten minutes after sunrise—at 0703—on December 7, the watch stander at the Opana radar station, just south of Kawela Bay at the northern tip of Oahu, saw planes approaching the islands 137 miles to the north and reported it to an Army lieutenant at the AWS center. The lieutenant, who was wholly inexperienced, judged that the unidentified aircraft were a flight of B-17s that was due to arrive from the mainland in the morning.

As with most mishaps, hindsight uncovered a host of other miscalculations, errors, and faulty interpretations. But the nub of the attack’s success was the failure of imagination among American political leadership and the high command. The idea that Japan could dispatch six aircraft carriers across the Northern Pacific undetected to strike Hawaii did not fit with what civilian and military policy makers believed was possible. As Roberta Wohlstetter observes:

For every signal that came into the information net in 1941 there were usually several plausible alternative explanations, and it is not surprising that our observers and analysts were inclined to select the explanations that fitted the popular hypotheses. They sometimes set down new contradictory evidence side by side with existing hypotheses, and they also sometimes held two contradictory beliefs at the same time. . . . Apparently human beings have a stubborn attachment to old beliefs and an equally stubborn resistance to new material that will upset them.⁴

The 9/11 Commission reached similar conclusions. Established by Congress and the president, the bipartisan commission found that the attacks of September 11, 2001, revealed failures in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management. The commission report listed “imagination” first.

The 9/11 Commission report noted that, following the crash of TWA flight 800 in 1996, which the FBI concluded was not the result of a crime, President Bill Clinton had established a commission headed by Vice President Al Gore. The Gore Commission was scrupulously exhaustive in its concentration on the dangers of bringing explosives aboard civilian aircraft, as had been planned—but foiled—in the so-called Manila plot of 1995, in which Islamists planned to place bombs aboard eleven passenger aircraft and destroy them as they flew from Asia to the United States. The Gore Commission identified a lack of rigor in searching passengers before they boarded. It did not mention the possibility of using aircraft themselves as weapons.

Other oversights complement that of the Gore Commission. In August 1999, the Federal Aviation Administration’s Civil Aviation Security intelligence office worried that al-Qaeda might try to hijack a plane. One of its scenarios was a suicide hijacking operation. The scenario was dismissed within the FAA because, as the 9/11 Commission recorded, “it does not offer an opportunity for dialogue to achieve the key goal of obtaining [i.e., releasing Omar Abdel-] Rahman and other key captive extremists.”⁵ “A suicide hijacking,” said FAA analysts, “is assessed to be an option of last resort.”⁶

In short, scholarly and official inquiries into the two largest and most lethal attacks against the U.S. military and the American homeland in the past three-quarters of a century identify a failure of imagination as critical in the unpreparedness that preceded disaster. Imagination is as essential in thinking about the consequences of sharply reduced or strategically distracted seapower as it is in considering future threats.

STRATEGIC CHANGE

The threats the United States faces have changed radically in a little over one generation. In 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev resigned his position as president of the Soviet Union. He was succeeded by Boris Yeltsin, president of the newly formed independent state of Russia. U.S. policy makers bent their efforts to ensure that the United States would never again face a peer competitor that could cripple the nation in minutes and destroy it within hours.

Embers of the Soviet Union ignited in the Balkans, and Russia faced a constitutional crisis that was resolved by force. Terrorism grew. A short war was fought at the northern end of the Persian Gulf. China started its rise and began to invest heavily in arms. But great power competition seemed to have ended as the Soviet Union was replaced by a weak state, whose natural resources were more valuable than the finished products manufactured from them.

A single generation later, all has changed. The United States today faces a heretofore unfamiliar strategic challenge: the possibility of three linked hegemonies that span the Eurasian land mass. Russia is on the ramparts in Ukraine, Georgia, and the Middle East. Its Baltic State ambitions are no secret. NATO’s failure to respond in a real crisis means the end of the alliance and a maturing Russian hegemony that stretches from Central Asia to the Atlantic. China actively seeks to become Asia’s hegemon, while its unruly satellite North Korea has become a nuclear power. Iran’s rulers, armed with missiles of increasing range, added financial resources, and the likelihood of nuclear weapons, have their eye on dominating the strategic space between Moscow’s influence and Beijing’s.

A single hegemony on the Eurasian land mass threatens U.S. markets, our ability to keep conflict at a distance, regional stability, and democracy. At a minimum, the three hegemonies would overturn the current liberal international order. If the United States does not take effective action to prevent this, its run as a preeminent global power will end. Proximity to the oceans and seas offers the United States the opportunity to leverage its still-dominant seapower as the key to countering or, if necessary, opposing the three would-be hegemons.

Since Woodrow Wilson, the goal of American foreign policy has been to prevent regional hegemony. Two decades after Wilson, President Franklin D. Roosevelt led the United States in another global conflict, against Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan. Both Europe and Asia were—and remain—critical to our hopes for greater prosperity, security, and an increasingly democratic world. The United States and its allies destroyed both totalitarian hegemons. Finally, the United States contained the Soviet Union for almost half a century, blunting its threat to Europe, and confronting its expanding influence in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.

Emerging from this century of nearly continuous global conflict, the United States was the unquestioned global power. No state could challenge it economically, politically, or militarily. The United States destroyed the Iraqi military twice in slightly over a decade, and put a stop to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.

New threats have ended this brief period of America’s benevolent international leadership. Three competitors are at odds with the American-led international system. The sum of their ambitions is to undermine U.S. global power.

A resurgent Russia aims to reclaim its previous glory and capitalize on the current U.S. administration’s idea that America can make itself great again with a minimum of cooperation from others.

The European refugee crisis and potential destabilization in the European Union challenge the American alliance system in Europe—the cornerstone of American security policy since the end of World War II. America’s remaining allies show little resolve. Meager European defense budgets make matters worse. They offer ammunition to demagogic politicians who seek to exploit the undercurrent of American isolationism.

In Asia, a rising China focuses on cultivating and marshaling its economic resources to develop its military power. China’s island-building campaign aims to extend its territorial claims into international waters and directly confronts the international order. As Admiral Harry Harris, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, told Congress in early 2017, “China has fundamentally altered the physical and political landscape in the South China Sea.”⁷ Beijing combines its land reclamation campaign with high-tempo presence operations conducted by the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and coast guard in contested areas of the South and East China Seas. The Chinese are also accelerating their ability to project naval power and control the seas by constructing troop transports, large surface combatants, and a second aircraft carrier.

This situation bears a resemblance to the world America faced before World War II, when Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan initially overwhelmed the European powers that had refused to rearm following World War I.

But the semblance is passing. America faces not two aspiring hegemons, but three. The Middle East is the critical link between Europe and Asia. Its oil-rich states supply a large amount of the world’s energy resources and facilitate exchange between the two hemispheres. With the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Arabian Sea in the south, the Mediterranean to the west, and the Caspian and Black Seas to the north, the Middle East is more like an island than a contiguous land mass.

On this island, Iran attempts to assert its dominance. Russia aids Iran with weapons transfers and its support of Iranian proxy Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Relieved of sanctions, the Islamic Republic has begun to receive massive financial inflows and has actively directed some of its profits toward obtaining dual-use military technology such as jet engines. Iranian Special Forces, known as the Quds Force, conduct paramilitary operations in Iraq and Syria, expanding Tehran’s influence over its neighbors.

Although America’s adversaries have worked with one another in the past, the current degree of cooperation between China, Russia, and Iran is a strategic terra incognita. Iranian oil shipped into Chinese ports generates financial resources that the Islamic Republic uses to purchase advanced weapons from Russia. Russia helps Iran fight its proxy wars, while Iran supports growing Russian influence in the Eastern Mediterranean.

America’s three strategic competitors oppose the United States in similar ways. China, Russia, and Iran understand the lessons of the First Gulf War. Since the Cold War’s end, America’s style of warfare has been to build coalitions, amass men and resources in neighboring countries, and launch combined arms assaults that overwhelm the enemy technologically and operationally. In the First Gulf War, the American-led coalition of nearly 1 million soldiers eviscerated an entrenched Iraqi army of more than 1.5 million. However, without neighboring Saudi Arabia’s willingness, the United States would have been unable to conduct the operation. A naval assault would have been smaller, and Kuwait’s crowded coastline could have meant high casualties.

The First Gulf War suggested a clear strategy to counter the United States. Deny American forces access to a region, and the United States loses power. Chinese, Russian, and Iranian efforts have all focused on denying America access to their respective regions. As it turns up the heat on the Baltic States, Russia is proscribing options for a rapid buildup by deploying long-range air-defense and strike missiles at NATO’s borders.

This is consistent with U.S. European Command commander General Philip Breedlove’s February 2016 statement to Congress that “President Putin has sought to undermine the rules-based system of European security and attempted to maximize his power on the world stage.”⁸ China’s land reclamation campaign, increasing naval power, and anti-ship missiles aim to keep American forces at a distance from which effective combat power cannot readily be applied. Iran’s low-cost missile boats, midget subs, large numbers of ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as mines, and its influence at the Strait of Hormuz seek to offset American escalation. Instability in Iraq and America’s shaky relations with Pakistan further restrict staging points for an American attack.

Declining U.S. military budgets and a shrinking force combined with poor treatment of critical allies have made things worse, calling into question the ability of the United States to honor its commitments. The Obama administration’s 2009 abrogation of ballistic-missile defense agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic; its prolonged interruption of defensive arms sales to Taiwan; and its failure to keep the Saudis informed about its 2015 deal with Iran (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) are examples of treating allies shabbily. Thus, the United States is less able to rely on adequate basing rights where they are needed both to deter and, if necessary, to fight.

President Trump faces a new challenge to U.S. national security that calls for changes to American strategy. The access that once allowed us to deter the Soviets has been eroded. Its resurrection in today’s Europe is unlikely. Such access is largely nonexistent in the Middle East and is tenuous in East Asia.

Coalitions of allied and partner nations remain extremely important—as they have since the United States became a major power. U.S. ground forces will not go it alone. They rarely have. Even the 1994 operation to remove Haiti’s military junta engaged coalition partners: Poland and Argentina. A combat operation, had one been necessary, would have been staged out of the mainland United States, Puerto Rico, and Guantanamo.

Equally reliable options are limited in Eurasia. While alliances and partnerships—for example, of Sunni states opposed to ISIS—are vital, they may not always be available or dependable. If North Korea were to invade the South, there is no guarantee that Japan would allow its bases to be used for repelling the invaders or for striking deep into North Korea.

Seapower possesses the advantages of geography, mobility, and—with sufficient investment—numbers and growing technological edge. It will be essential in future conflicts because it allows us to depend less on nearby bases. Logistics ships in sufficient number can keep battle groups, including amphibious forces, on station, present, and combat ready largely independent of basing agreements. Maritime coalitions will likely offer more security in the future. But there is no alternative to dominant U.S. seapower today. Allies like Japan lack the industrial capacity to make up the deficit between the U.S. Navy and the expanding Chinese PLAN. Newer partners like Vietnam cannot hope to hold out against a Chinese onslaught without American support. Taiwan can defend against a PRC assault, but not indefinitely. Seapower is the surest means to ensure constant access to effective combat capability in the Western Pacific.

The same shift in thinking applies to the greater Middle East. Its gulfs and seas allow access that is largely independent of diplomatic agreements. Robust seapower may not be sufficient to cover our security interests in the Middle East, but its usefulness increases proportionately to the territorial holdings on which ISIS has staked its claim as a caliphate. The Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman are Iran’s southwest and southern borders. It’s a long haul from there or from the Eastern Mediterranean to Tehran, but a doable one with refueling tankers based in Gulf States or, in the foreseeable future, carrier-launched drones that can refuel a ship’s strike aircraft.

The Cold War plan to mass land forces in defense of Europe has been voided by continental hopes that perpetual peace has arrived. Even the most stalwart American partners, such as the United Kingdom, have cut military capacity and capability. But Europe is a peninsula. It is surrounded by accessible waters from St. Petersburg to the Crimea. Seapower cannot stop a Russian ground invasion of the Baltics, but it can snap the supply lines of an attack and give such ground forces as NATO can muster a chance to prevail. The ability of naval vessels to control the Baltic Sea and project power inland can also deter Russia from launching an attack.

The United States has emerged into a new world. To the potential for nuclear warfare with China—a would-be peer competitor—that American statesmen most wished to avoid after the Cold War have been added threats from a nuclear-armed Russia, North Korea, and, sooner or later, Iran. The more immediate prospect of a triple hegemony may not be an existential threat, but its outcome would unravel such order as exists in the world, cripple our markets, shatter our alliances, and imperil us at home. All this can be avoided by a grand strategy that continues to hold threats at a distance as it relies on the independence, accessibility, and technological superiority of seapower.

What will the consequences be if U.S. strategy proves as insufficient as the nation’s ability to execute it, owing to a lack of seapower?