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...moment at least, but mainly because of the impact of globalization, the concept of security has expanded from notions that are mainly military to encompass the dimensions of political security, economic security, societal security, and environmental security. All of these may apply at the level of the individual citizen, groups in the national population, the nation, the region, or the world. Moreover, these dimensions and levels are intimately connected with one another, vertically and horizontally, so that response to a discerned threat at one of these intersections is likely to have a range of effects, both good and bad, everywhere else.
Moreover, there is a temporal dimension to all this: what a country does now, in response to a clear and immediate danger, may have untold implications for its ability to respond to other challenges farther up the line. Such issues require a "comprehensive approach;' in which military action is carefully integrated with political and economic approaches in order to produce desired effects. To make their full contribution, military forces will need to think about their traditional tasks in new ways and to accept new ones. The searing experience of Iraq and Afghanistan adds urgency to the call--or so, at least, the argument goes.
Other analysts, however, wonder how real, how new, or how permanent this development actually is. They argue that the Cold War really did not seem so simple at the time and that while the major focus may have been on the potentially deadly confrontation between East and West over the established battle lines of Europe, many quite important things were going on elsewhere that called upon Western forces to respond in a variety of ways far removed from the brutal simplicities of the Central Front. Moreover, Colin Gray is not alone in writing of "another bloody century," in which many new threats may seem much less dominant when compared to the possible recurrence of traditional state-on-state wars. (1) These potential wars continue to call for a set of approaches, military disciplines, and capabilities that seem really quite familiar. Therefore, goes the alternative view, what we have is at most a difference of degree, and it is far too early to conclude that the elements of change, to the extent that they exist, constitute a permanent trend to which military forces need to adapt, rather than a temporary blip that they need to absorb.
These two approaches have been labeled, respectively, the "postmodern," or "nontraditional," way of thinking about the role and character of military forces, and the "modern," or "traditional." When it comes to sizing and shaping the fleet, there are obvious tensions between these two approaches. Many navies around the world are thinking through their own answers to this set of conundrums, and there has been a great deal of interest in how the U.S. Navy would seek to square this particular circle. How will its strategic thinking develop? How will it structure the fleet? How will it operate? How should everyone else respond? Accordingly, the rest of the world has awaited "A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower" with, if not bated breath, at least real interest in both the process and the outcome of the debate.
SO WHAT'S NEW?
The U.S. Navy's approach to strategy making was certainly intended to be novel. The former Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), Admiral Mike Mullen, launched the campaign for a new strategy in June 2006. "When I initiated the discussion of what it should be," he said, "my view was that we needed one. We hadn't had one in 20-plus years and you need a strategy which is going to underpin how we operate, what our concepts were, and literally how we invest." The scope and scale of new threats, the complexity of globalization, and the staggering rate of change seemed to make a major rethinking necessary. The task was handed over to Vice Admiral John Morgan, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information, Plans and Strategy.
Rather as the British had done a decade earlier with their Strategic Defence Review of 1997, the U.S. Navy decided to make the process as inclusive of all major stakeholders as possible. "One of the things I [Mullen] said when I came in as CNO [was that] I am not going to move ahead on major decisions without doing this with my other four stars. So the U.S. Marine Corps and Coastguard were in the process from the start. The Navy also decided to hold a series of 'conversations with America.'" (2) In some ways, the process was as important as the product, since if successful it would yield not only a strategy but also a constituency of opinion that might be expected to help with its implementation later on. Finally, foreign engagement was sought in aspects of the strategy, through the International Seapower Symposiums of 2005 and 2007, a variety of naval staff talks, and academic engagements abroad. The new CNO, Admiral Gary Roughead, argues that "this was an approach that was very different than in the past when we engaged more than just a very small cell of Navy thinkers. We heard from other leaders in our country about the use of maritime power." (3)
The problem with this, paradoxically, was that the degree of prior involvement in the process and the extent to which developing concepts, such as the "thousand-ship navy"/Global Maritime Partnership, were telegraphed in advance combined to make the new strategy appear less than wholly new when it finally appeared. Moreover, at least some of the ideas it contained had appeared before in earlier formulations. Recognizing the tectonic shifts in strategy caused by the end of the Cold War, another doctrinal formulation, "... From the...
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Commercial shipping and the maritime strategy., March 22, 2008
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No oil for the lamps of China?, March 22, 2008
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