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PREFACE

The United States, bounded on three of its five sides by the seas, is a maritime state. We depend on safe transit over the Earth’s watery surface for a large portion of our commerce. We depend on the same freedom of maneuver upon the seas for our ability to communicate with allies, to project power as we did at Normandy in 1944, to prevent crises from reaching our shores, and to block enemies from using the oceans to their advantage. I hope that the observations in this discussion about the importance of seapower to a maritime state will endure.

What I hope will not endure is the dangerous condition of depleted seapower that existed as an administration elected in 2008 transferred power to the one that Americans chose in 2016. This account is in large measure a picture of where American seapower stood as one administration ended and another took power. It is a description of the challenge that faces the recently elected president.

Measured in size, the U.S. combatant fleet today stands at 276 ships, the smallest since before World War I. Propelled by the prospect of aging ships—built during the Reagan buildup and which must be withdrawn from service—world events, and the rise of would-be competitors, the U.S. Navy plans for a larger fleet—over the next thirty years.

When complete, the fleet that the George W. Bush administration planned for construction over this three-decade period would have numbered 375 vessels. The fleet size that the Obama administration planned to reach at the end of thirty years shrank to 306 vessels, a reduction of nearly one-fifth. Both the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) agree that achieving even the reduced fleet size requires significantly more money than the average amount that the Navy has received for shipbuilding over recent decades. At the same time, the actual fleet size fell by 3 percent during the Obama administration. These numbers say nothing about the problematic combat readiness of U.S. seapower, logistic support, and the infrastructure needed to support a fleet. Years of diminished funding have resulted in a hollow Navy as well as a similar hollowing out of the other armed services of the United States.

This book is not a political document. Responsibility for the state of American seapower in 2017 rests not with a single administration nor with a single Congress. Rather, it is the sum of decisions made by policy makers of both major parties and in both the executive and legislative branches of government as Cold War tensions lifted and as elected and appointed officials turned their gaze from great power issues to terrorism and wars in the Middle East, all the while assuming that the transoceanic dominance of the United States was a given.

Like sheep that have gone astray, we forgot that competition among the great powers may recede or abate, but only temporarily. Great power competition to establish the terms of international order is one of history’s defining characteristics. Throughout history, great maritime powers that forgot, neglected, or were otherwise distracted from the oceanic anchor of their commerce and security fell from their high positions. Such amnesia or strategic befuddlement is called seablindness.

The assumption of American dominance at sea is as unwarranted as the supposition that the history of great power competition has come to an end. What follows is a portrait of the actual and possible consequences of the political decision to permit American seapower to fade. It is in large measure an illustration of how U.S. seapower fared at what may turn out to be the pivotal moment when the electorate gave its mandate to a candidate who promised to rebuild America’s defenses. It is neither my intent nor is it within the scope of this book to answer the difficult question of how the restoration of America’s armed forces can be financed—which remains a vexing obstacle to restoring the armed forces of the United States. But history provides clear answers about the dire consequences for a great maritime state if it neglects its seapower. The risk that the United States will follow Britain, Spain, Holland, and ancient Athens into a naval decline that preceded and in large measure caused their descent from great power status is real. Descriptions of the current woes of American seapower appear in this book’s chapters. The Trump administration’s proposed 10 percent increase in defense spending will likely go to restocking depleted weapons inventories, purchasing spare parts, repairing equipment that has been overused, and other important accounts that have been drawn down so that the United States could maintain its global presence. The administration’s proposed 10 percent increase in defense spending will not begin to address the large capital costs of rebuilding or modernizing an aging fleet, much less reconfiguring it to meet the growing threat that China and Russia pose.

Large existing debt and the prospect of servicing an even larger debt obligation make the choice that the United States faces unusually serious. Simultaneous with the American electorate’s apparent call for a reinvigoration of its military, events unfolded that American policy makers twenty-five years ago agreed must never recur. This was the rise of another great power to challenge the United States and the world order that American policy sought to shape throughout the twentieth century. What follows is a snapshot of how American seapower—the most effective strategic guarantor for keeping threats at a distance and preserving the liberal international order—stands on the cusp.

I am grateful to the Smith Richardson Foundation for their generous support in the research and writing of Seablindness. Very few other such organizations continue to demonstrate Smith Richardson’s breadth of strategic vision. I am grateful as well to my literary agent, Don Fehr, for his belief in the importance of this subject and his efforts on the book’s behalf. I am indebted to a host of able, highly motivated, and dedicated researchers and interns whose work I depended on as this book took shape. In particular, I would like to thank Kevin Truitte, Harry Halem, Chris Zeller, Elias Riskin, Justus Vorwerk, Kevin Philpott, Iris Hsu, Liam Cardon, Titus Techera, Matt Whiting, and Craig Hooper.

Finally, I am deeply grateful to Roger Kimball at Encounter Books for his confidence in this project, and for the support of Katherine Wong and Wilsted and Taylor’s Christine Taylor and Nancy Evans, whose editorial judgment turned a manuscript into a book.