Sea Power – The Missing Ingredient in a Strategy of Denial​

On August 28, 1942, USS Washington (BB-56) transited the Panama Canal bound for the South Pacific. The new battleship, commissioned just a year earlier, had been operating in the North Atlantic with the British Home Fleet since March, escorting several convoys to Murmansk. After a brief refit at New York Navy Yard, she headed for the Pacific where just over two months later she single-handedly won the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, the decisive action in the decisive campaign of the Pacific War.

This example epitomizes the unique utility of sea power: to use the inherent flexibility and mobility of naval forces to operate wherever in the world they are needed for whatever task.

The Trump Administration has made much of its intent to revitalize and enlarge the U.S. Navy, including a particular focus on shipbuilding, with the President saying: “We’re going to build them [ships] very fast, very soon. It will have a huge impact.” The administration has not yet said much about how these ships will be used or how these naval forces will enhance and perpetuate American sea power, whether in peace or in war. That is a matter of strategy, a strategy that will substantially be written in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.

In his confirmation hearing, the current holder of that office, Elbridge Colby, made a strong case for his so-called “strategy of denial” that aims to make clear to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that the United States will not allow it to seize Taiwan or another Asian ally by force. What remained unclear was his vision for the role of sea power in carrying out that strategy. However, a careful review of his book, other writings, and comments made in interviews reveals that sea power, as understood by navalists, does not factor heavily in Colby’s thinking. Indeed, in many respects he seems rather dismissive of the concept.

Colby’s book, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in the Age of Great Power Conflict, is a long-winded argument for why the United States must focus its available resources on preparing to defend Taiwan, or possibly the Philippines, from an armed attack by the PRC. Yet, it does not offer any detail on how the United States would support Taiwan in that conflict. Never mind the value of a strategy that does not include ways and means of achieving it, how to support Taiwan is an especially tricky puzzle and a decidedly naval one. Colby seemingly overlooks, or at least fails to discuss, the problems naval forces will have in doing so: Taiwan’s geography with its favorable conditions for amphibious operations on its west coast facing China; the difficulties of resupplying the country via its mountainous east coast; the challenges of operating under the PRC’s extensive anti-access/area-denial umbrella; and the unfavorable bathymetry for operating large submarines in the Taiwan Strait.

He also argues for keeping any war with the PRC limited, focusing merely on repelling an invasion, fearing that a broader war could escalate into an existential (i.e. nuclear) conflict. In so doing, he dismisses the value of blockade or other options to disrupt China’s economy and appears to ignore the PRC’s susceptibility thereto or the advantages such actions could have in forcing the issue during a Taiwan Crisis.

More generally, Strategy of Denial displays Colby’s non-maritime perspective in simple yet noticeable ways. For instance, he speaks of projecting “military forces” rather than “naval forces”. His maps delineate air distance in kilometers rather than sea distances in nautical miles. He criticizes Japan’s overall level of defense spending without accounting for the value of its large and capable navy. But perhaps nowhere is this perspective more evident than in his attitude towards Singapore’s importance as an ally in the anti-PRC coalition for which he advocates. Once called the “mightiest fortress in all the East” and currently home to a U.S. naval base, Singapore controls the most important access point for shipping between East Asia and the Indian Ocean. It is the key to cutting off the PRC from the flow of goods from its Belt and Road investments, without which she would presumably starve. Together with Malaysia it is vital to keeping the seas and the air space of the southern South China Sea clear of PRC forces. Colby, ignoring that Singapore lies just three days sailing from the PRC’s Hainan Island, where amphibious operations could be mounted, believes it and Malaysia are most vulnerable to attack over land via Thailand and recommends that the United States extend neither country a security guarantee.

In other writings and interviews, Mr. Colby has decried navalists’ arguments for larger fleets simply for the sake of greater sea power. He argues that the traditional attributes of naval forces—global scale, mobility, and the ability to threaten maritime commerce—are not relevant to his denial strategy (though he does not describe which attributes would be useful) and that all naval operations and posture in theaters other than Asia should cease. He appears skeptical that the Navy has peacetime functions, like naval diplomacy (which could bring him into conflict with U.S. law). Similarly, he has also been dismissive of the rules-based international order and sea power’s role in upholding that order, stating that navies do not exist to police sea lanes. He has stated that Napoleon’s France was the most powerful nation on earth at the time, evidently overlooking that the Royal Navy confined Napoleon’s reach to the shores of continental Europe while itself projecting British power across the globe and ultimately underpinning a coalition that successfully brought about Napoleon’s downfall.

Not only do these statements display a lack of appreciation of sea power in general, but they also miss the point that navies have both peacetime and wartime responsibilities (acknowledged in U.S. law since 2022) and reflect a tendency to confuse the tactical with the strategic. This should be especially concerning given that, with his assistant secretary for strategy having an Army intel background, with neither the Secretary of Defense nor the Secretary of the Navy having any experience of naval operations or the sea, with no confirmed Chief of Naval Operations, and with the two most vocal advocates for sea power in recent Congresses—Representatives Mike Gallagher and Elaine Luria—no longer serving in government, it is not clear who in the administration is the champion for sea power. In light of this (and given Colby’s own comments on Napoleon), it is worth revisiting Alfred Thayer Mahan’s explanation of how the French Navy in the early days of the French Revolution fell so far from the high standards of performance set by it just ten years earlier:

“to a service of a very special character, involving special exigencies, calling for special aptitudes, and consequently demanding special knowledge of its requirements in order to deal wisely with it were applied the theories of men wholly ignorant of those requirements, men who did not even believe that these existed. Entirely without experimental knowledge, or any other kind of knowledge, of the conditions of sea life, they were unable to realize the obstacles to those processes by which they would build up their navy, and according to which they proposed to handle it. This was true not only of the wild experiments of the early days of the Republic; the reproach may fairly be addressed to the great emperor himself, that he had scarcely any appreciation of the factors conditioning efficiency at sea; nor did he seemingly ever reach any such sense of them as would enable him to understand why the French navy failed.”

Any future war with a near-peer rival will be a naval war. In order to be successful, the strategy for that war needs to be based on a solid understanding of sea power and how to use it. This begins with a recognition that large and balanced naval forces can be whatever one needs them to be anywhere in the world. Whether in peacetime or in war, naval forces’ global scale, mobility, and the ability to threaten maritime commerce—the very attributes Colby sees as irrelevant—give the United States a potent tool for shaping events, wherever and whenever needed. Dug-in land forces on islands can easily be cut off and left to wither—look no further than the Japanese garrison on Rabaul in 1945—but naval striking forces can appear and disappear, advance or pull back, mass or disperse with tremendous flexibility. The Atlantic Fleet can reinforce the Pacific Fleet at a speed of 500 nautical miles a day, just as USS Washington did in the fall of 1942. A DDG exercising with NATO Allies in the Baltic can be launching Tomahawks against the Houthis a week later with no more effort than a fleet commander sending an order and a few hours alongside an oiler en route. And while land forces stationed in Europe or the continental United States can be used in the Pacific, they can only be deployed quickly and efficiently (along with all their equipment) by sea.

Navies exist in peacetime to ensure the freedom of the seas and in wartime to destroy an enemy’s commerce or, as Nicholas Lambert puts it, to “facilitate—or derange—international trade”. Blockades of any specific region or port are just one tactical tool that can support the strategic goal of destroying an enemy’s commerce. They may or may not be the right answer in a Taiwan crisis, but since presumably no merchant shipping will be leaving Shanghai for Long Beach during one anyway, there is no strategic reason for the PRC to be allowed to continue to trade by sea with anyone else, nor for its fishing vessels to continue to rape the seas, whether in the vast Pacific or off the coast of Africa. The damage naval forces can do to the PRC’s economy is as credible a deterrent as any plan to reinforce Taiwanese guerillas.

Likewise, while it is tactically true that coast guards, not navies, generally “police the seas”, seen geo-strategically, it is the existence of powerful naval forces that guarantees the freedom of the seas upon which depends global commerce, the single greatest generator of wealth in human history. And global commerce more than perhaps anything else in international affairs depends on the rules-based international order to run smoothly. Indeed, freedom of the seas was a principal goal of those who worked to establish the rules-based international order which, rather than being “vague and tendentious”, is no more than a set of explicit agreements between like-minded nations on how they are going to interact with the goal of preventing one nation from dominating others while also preventing war. In so doing they permit trade to flourish and wealth to grow,

Colby rightly recognizes that this order is upheld by power, but evidently not the naval contribution to that power. Furthermore, he seems willing to throw the order away to prevent the PRC from gaining a dominant position that would allow it to reset its rules. Yet surely freedom of the seas is needed now more than ever, with the emergence of a navy that will have the potential to challenge the current order, one that is being built by a government that likely sees little benefit to free and open seas for its rivals. A successful strategy of denial will recognize that this order is worth upholding, that it is as important to the interests of the United States as preventing the PRC from seizing an ally’s territory by force. Those allies—the center of gravity in Colby’s strategy of denying the PRC’s expansionist approach—depend just as much or more on freedom of the seas as the United States does. Working to maintain an order that has helped make the United States and its partners immensely rich is worth the effort and can serve as a rallying point for strengthening the anti-PRC coalition while thwarting the PRC in its ambitions that go beyond mere territorial control.

As Admiral Samuel Paparo has said, as long as ships remain the most efficient means of moving large quantities of stuff around, naval forces will be the most important element in any defense force makeup. Sea power will remain the primary means of exercising real and persistent national power globally and is critical for countering the PRC’s nefarious attempts to reshape the international order. In crafting the administration’s strategy to thwart the PRC, Under Secretary Colby would do well to rely on the full spectrum of American sea power—still the United States’ greatest geopolitical strength despite decades of government neglect of the sea services.