Sharing this rather lengthy MifNavy piece. It's about a 20-minute read, but serious, thoughtful, and informative. Worth your time.
Old Man Wardell David Wardell (757) 561-0582 <mailto:da...@wardell.org> da...@wardell.org <https://wardell.us/url/b5s86> <https://wardell.us/url/s9qvz> _____ https://nationalinterest.org/feature/america-is-finally-getting-its-maritime -strategy-right The US Navy vacated the Mahanian world of sea battle at almost precisely the historical instant China entered it. A long-overdue course correction is underway. [The following essay is adapted from Dr. Holmes' remarks at the Current Strategy Forum of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, on June 9, 2025. It has been lightly edited for clarity.] The organizers asked me to look at the past, present, and future of U.S. maritime strategy, all in fifteen minutes, so let's start with the basics. What is "maritime strategy?" I define "strategy" as the art and science of using power to fulfill purposes, and "maritime strategy" as the art and science of using sea power to fulfill purposes relating to the sea. So what is "sea power?" Two things. It's a "virtuous cycle" among commerce, policy, and military might that makes a seafaring society rich and powerful, and it's an implement of maritime strategy employed for geopolitical gain. We forge the tool through the cycle, then political and military leaders wield the tool for purposes they and the larger society deem fruitful. How "Sea Power" Really Works First, the virtuous cycle. Mahan spelled out the classic definition of sea power, defining it as a "chain" connecting industrial production at home, with merchant and naval shipping, with commercial, diplomatic, and military access to harbors or naval stations in important trading regions. Commerce, ships, and bases are shorthand for sea power. Commerce is king for Mahan. All three links in the sea-power chain-domestic, nautical, and foreign-must be solid for the maritime enterprise to prosper. Without production, you have nothing to sell overseas, so you need neither a merchant fleet nor a navy to protect it. Without merchantmen and warships, you're dependent on others to safeguard the goods you manufacture to sell to foreign customers. Dependency entrusts national well-being to the whims of others. And without access to foreign harbors, it doesn't matter what you're making at home, or can transport across the sea; no one will consume your wares, and you will not profit from seaborne commerce. Now-at the risk of offending the ghost of Mahan-I've taken to amending his formula to distinguish more clearly between mercantile and military sea power and, hopefully, clarify how the virtuous cycle among commerce, shipping, and bases works. He merges the two, and thus obscures how the cycle works. I define sea power as twin, parallel supply chains. The first is the familiar commercial supply chain connecting domestic manufacturers, with a merchant fleet to carry goods manufactured at home across the transport network that is the sea to harbors overseas for offloading and sale, so buyers can satisfy their wants and needs. The second is a naval supply chain connecting domestic naval shipbuilding, to an armed fleet to safeguard trade, to foreign harbors or naval bases to defend commercial and diplomatic access while supporting fleet operations logistically. So the commercial supply chain enriches a seagoing society, the government skims off tax revenue from commercial transactions, and some of that revenue goes into a navy to protect the commercial supply chain. In turn, commerce funds its own guardian via the naval supply chain, which in turn ensures the free flow of commerce. And on and on the virtuous cycle turns-into the indefinite future, provided political and military leaders remain mindful of their duty to act as executors of maritime statecraft. What do we do with sea power as an implement? Maritime strategy puts sea power to a variety of uses, harnessing the familiar logic of ends, ways, and means. Canvassing the United States' diplomatic and military history, four constants in maritime strategy stand out. One, the Monroe Doctrine placed the Americas off-limits to European empires as a zone of future conquest or proxy rule. We seldom cite Monroe by name any more, but the proprietary impulse persists. Witness the recent talk about Greenland and the Panama Canal. Two, the Open Door sought to keep the rimlands of East Asia-China in particular-open to American trading interests, preserving commercial access. Three, geopolitical balancing in the rimlands of Western Europe and East Asia sought to keep any aggressor from unifying one or both rimlands under its control-and thus constituting a threat to the United States across the oceans. This was forward defense of the Western Hemisphere. And four-and closely related to the previous point-containment sought to keep aggressors from projecting their sway beyond Eurasia to the detriment of U.S. interests and purposes. These were all uses of sea power as an implement of geostrategy. They remain recurring themes, even though the language to express them changes. "Mahanian" and "Post-Mahanian" Maritime Strategy Which brings us to contemporary U.S. maritime strategy. I would propose four metrics for evaluating a maritime strategy. First, how "Mahanian" or "post-Mahanian" is it? In other words, how adversarial is it? In the casual sense, a Mahanian maritime power takes a bare-knuckles approach to the profession of arms at sea, girding to face a peer challenger. By contrast, a post-Mahanian sea power tends to assume peer challengers are at bay more or less permanently, if they exist at all, and thus that compelling outmatched state adversaries while suppressing substate lawbreakers is what navies exist to do. Professor Geoff Till of King's College London crafted the Mahanian/post-Mahanian lingo in the journal Orbis circa 2007, positing that Western and Asian powers are on opposite cultural trajectories, and that there are ramifications of serious gravity to this mismatch. Geoff also hints at an important question. Namely, do you need to have an adversary to have a strategy? I would say yes. An adversary supplies an indispensable benchmark for the adequacy of your strategy, operational design, and fleet design. Think about it. Mahan articulates a formula for sizing and configuring fleets or fleet detachments. He declares that you need a fleet adequate to take to the sea and fight, with reasonable prospects of success, the largest force it is likely to meet at the place and time of battle. Force, space, time, as operational artists put it. But how do you run that calculation unless you identify your most likely antagonist? You cannot. There is no substitute for naming an opponent, sizing up its forces, and estimating what fraction of its forces the hostile leadership will commit to action at the place and time of battle, and how long it will keep its combat power on scene to enforce its will. As Captain Harry Yarnell put it in 1919-when the U.S. Navy was surveying the post-World War I seascape to divine the next big thing in naval warfare-designing a force with no enemy in mind is like forging a machine tool without knowing whether you intend to manufacture hair pins or locomotives. An opponent lends focus. Or, as the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, no wind is fair if you have no idea what port you're steering for. With no idea what it's preparing for, a navy drifts around aimlessly, uncertain whether its forces and methods fit the times and circumstances. In short, a post-Mahanian force inhabits a different intellectual universe than a Mahanian one. It lacks that focus. The two are guided by conflicting assumptions about the saltwater arena. Let's hold up the mirror to start with. End-of-history thinking swept this nation-and the sea services-amid triumphalism over the Cold War's outcome. In 1992, a directive called ".From the Sea," the services' first effort at framing post-Cold War strategy, in effect proclaimed that peer enemies were no more. The United States and its allies ruled the sea, no one could resist them, and thus they could more or less set aside their first and foremost function-preparing to fight for command of the sea. That declaration gave American naval operations a post-Mahanian cast for well over a decade. Contrast that with the mindset in China. China resolved to construct a navy of serious heft by the mid-1990s, around the time the United States stood down. By 2004, a State Council defense white paper announced that China intended to bid for command of the sea and sky in an ever-widening offshore belt. The 2004 white paper was deeply Mahanian in tenor. China wanted control of maritime space, by force of arms if necessary. Subsequent statements of purpose out of Beijing have only entrenched that battle-minded outlook. Bottom line: the US Navy vacated the Mahanian world of sea battle at almost precisely the historical instant China entered it. Professor Till would remind us that it is extremely hard for a post-Mahanian navy steeped in constabulary duty to reinvent itself for Mahanian times. This is true in the material sense. Why in the world are we celebrating having developed a Maritime Strike Tomahawk now, in the eleventh hour in our competition with China, when we had one in the armory thirty-plus years ago and chose to discard it? Imagine what we would have now had we kept that and improved on it. But it's even more true in the human sense. It's hard to regenerate the fighting habit of thought, feeling, and deed once it has atrophied-especially if senior leaders decreed that it atrophy. Fortunately, we have been edging back toward the Mahanian world, albeit fitfully, since around 2012, with Xi Jinping's ascent. I call that time of transition America's "Voldemort" moment. Everyone knew a new antagonist was on the rise in the Western Pacific, but refused to speak its name for fear of infernal consequences. Our reticence held us back. How do you convey a sense of urgency to the services, lawmakers, and American taxpayers if you decline to explain why urgency is imperative? Thankfully, we have exited that transitional phase. Since about 2015, with the "refreshed," more combative "Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower," Voldemort's name can be spoken aloud. But the hour is late. Beijing took to naming us as the next likely foe three decades ago-and preparing accordingly while we did other things. That suggests China retains an edge in imagination and fervor for the competition at sea. Beijing claimed the mantle of Mahan long ago, while we are trying to reclaim it. You foreswear your primary function at your peril. The Navy Cannot Fight the Next Sea War Alone Second, how joint is US maritime strategy? This is an age of joint sea power, when armies and aerospace and cyber forces are implements of maritime strategy as surely as navies and marines. The reason is simple: the stronger force gathered at the time and place of battle prevails, not necessarily the stronger navy. China gets that; America seems to be belatedly getting it. At the recent Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Secretary Hegseth announced that we are posturing the joint force to defend the first and second island chains. Doing so denies the islands, which are allied territory, to China. Forces on and around the islands for territorial defense can also close the straits between the islands, denying the PLA and Chinese merchant fleet access to the vast maneuver space that is the Western Pacific. Joint sea power can put the military and economic hurt on China. Consequently, our ground-based services have embraced, or re-embraced, their heritage as sea services. Under the rubric of "Force Design 2030," the US Marine Corps is reinventing itself, in part, as an island-defense force to help our fleet deny and win control of geographic space. In a similar vein, the Army is pursuing "Multi-Domain Operations" in Asia's island chains. And I would be remiss not to mention the Air Force, which has pursued such capabilities as Quickstrike precision minefields and Quicksink munitions for antiship missions. This while the Space Force maintains sleepless overwatch, helping us detect, track, and target the red team. It has been inspiring to watch the joint force remake itself as an implement of maritime strategy. Someone Needs to Be in Charge of the Strategy Third, how "maritime" is the strategy? Does it span all government agencies that play a part in seaborne endeavors, plus private-sector players? None of ours do. America has never codified a true maritime strategy. Again, Mahan views sea power as an all-encompassing national endeavor, and no one is in charge of it all. Authority is dispersed among such agencies as the Navy Department, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Transportation Department. And much of the endeavor lies beyond the direct control of the government, most notably in the defense-industrial complex. I have made the case that the National Security Council should become the seat of U.S. maritime strategy, simply because the White House does wield authority over government stakeholders in the maritime enterprise. It can choreograph their efforts. The White House is also the logical actor to oversee relations with private actors in the saltwater arena. Congress seems to agree, judging from the "SHIPS for America Act" now making its way through the House and Senate. Given the fragmented nature of America's current maritime strategy, I see little alternative to centralizing power over it. Someone has to manage the Mahanian cycle among commerce, diplomacy, and military might, lest maritime statecraft remain adrift. Dependable Allies Aid American Sea Power Fourth, and lastly, how multinational is a strategy? To one degree or another, all US maritime strategies have been multinational since World War II. We always fight alongside allies. But some have been more unilateral than others. Because the United States was the dominant ally in hegemonic alliances during the Cold War, it tended to set the agenda and allies tended to follow. The sea services broke with that pattern, in part, with the 2007 and 2015 "Cooperative Strategies for 21st Century Seapower," which envisioned rallying a seagoing consortium to police the sea. In theory our sea services founded an alliance of equals, a "thousand-ship navy" as Admiral Mike Mullen called it. If the United States expected allies, partners, and friends to contribute the bulk of that multinational fleet, it would have to defer more to their wishes. It would have to be more multilateral. The nature of the competitive setting, realities of power, and alliance dynamics help determine how multinational, and unilateral, a US maritime strategy is. America's Naval Strategy Keeps Changing These are the four axes for classifying maritime strategy: adversarial (or not), joint, maritime, and multinational. Looking back, America's maritime strategy tends to oscillate between Mahanian and post-Mahanian phases as the world changes around us. The danger is that we are laggards when a post-Mahanian world witnesses the rise of a Mahanian challenger. After all, it is easier to reconfigure a force built for high-end combat to police substate lawbreakers, in a relatively low-threat environment, than it is for a constabulary force to ramp up to meet a peer competitor on some oceanic battleground. I think we can discern five distinct generations of U.S. maritime strategy since 1945. First, though uncodified, the early Cold War strategy was a peculiar hybrid of Mahanian and post-Mahanian strategy. On the one hand, we were competing strategically against a designated peer foe, the Soviet Union. That's the Mahanian element. But on the other hand, the Soviet Navy did not emerge as a serious rival until the 1970s. That interlude of calm lulled our navy into thinking of the sea in post-Mahanian terms, as a safe sanctuary from which our transoceanic fleet could project power into theaters like Korea and Vietnam. After that strategic holiday, sea-service leaders were stunned in the 1970s when the Soviet Navy seemingly burst out as a peer fighting force. And early Cold War maritime strategy was not especially joint or maritime in tone. As far as alliance politics went, the US Navy and Marine Corps more or less set the agenda, and others followed. Second, the John Lehman/James Watkins "Maritime Strategy" unveiled in the 1980s was staunchly Mahanian in outlook. Having surrendered our fighting edge during the early Cold War, when command of the sea looked like a birthright, we had to get it back in the late Cold War, when we realized we would once again have to fight for maritime command before we could use the sea to project power. The strategy announced that we would go after the Soviet Union around its coastal periphery, stretching and thinning out Soviet resources and thus easing the pressure along the inter-German frontier, assumed to be the major combat theater. You will get some pushback from framers of that strategy, but I would argue that the Lehman/Watkins strategy was not particularly joint or maritime in outlook, while it remained multinational in the sense that the United States headed hegemonic alliances within which our leadership had the dominant say. Third, the ".From the Sea" strategy, which I have already picked on, proclaimed that the Navy and Marine Corps would transform themselves into a "fundamentally different naval force" with little need to prepare for pitched battle at sea. The sea services lurched from a Mahanian into a post-Mahanian world thanks to a mandate from sea-service leaders. Another strategic holiday was at hand! In a sense, the 1990s saw a return to the 1950s and 1960s approach, with the sea services deploying a strategy that perceived no enemy and was neither especially joint nor maritime nor multinational in outlook. We rested on our laurels. Fourth, the "Cooperative Strategy" era, which spanned from about 2005 to 2015, saw an ardently post-Mahanian strategy, even though the 2007 and 2015 strategy documents had some Mahanian flourishes. Of note, the word China appears not once in the 2007 edition. These strategies were not especially joint, or maritime as I have defined it, but they were intensely multinational in outlook, premised on multilateral trusteeship over the system of liberal trade and commerce at sea. This did not last. Following the transitional "Voldemort" phase, the 2015 "refresh" strategy heralded a competitive turn. Sea-service chieftains now acknowledged that while cooperation remained desirable, great-power rivals would have to be outcompeted, and perhaps defeated. And fifth, the "Advantage at Sea" strategy, under which the sea services have operated since 2020-the Biden administration neither disavowed it nor replaced it with another-marks a return to the world of Mahan. It names names, stating outright that strategic competition is upon the sea services. "Advantage at Sea" genuflects to joint sea power, making mention of the US Air Force, Army, and Space Force on a number of occasions. But the joint dimension does not stand at the strategy's forefront. Similarly, the document raises the importance of commerce from time to time, imparting a maritime inflection. In my judgment, however, the directive does not fully reflect the Mahanian centrality of trade and commerce, or of the nonmilitary elements of sea power. However, the strategy is deeply, deeply multinational in character. It makes clear, time and again, that allies, partners, and friends are crucial to American success on the high seas. So what are the trendlines? We are trending toward joining China as a Mahanian competitor; we are increasingly joint in our maritime operations; our leadership is sidling toward our first genuinely maritime strategy; and we acknowledge our reliance on allies, partners, and friends in the region. All of which is good. We have our minds right. Now we just need to execute. And fast. About the Author: James Holmes <https://www.usni.org/people/james-holmes> James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College, a Distinguished Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare, and a Faculty Fellow at the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. A former U.S. Navy surface-warfare officer and combat veteran of the first Gulf War, he served as a weapons and engineering officer in the battleship Wisconsin, engineering and firefighting instructor at the Surface Warfare Officers School Command, and military professor of strategy at the Naval War College. He holds a PhD in international affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and MAs in mathematics and international relations from Providence College and Salve Regina University. The views voiced here are his alone. Image: Shutterstock.
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