Commander Jeff Vandenengel has written the most rigorous analysis of the Navy’s strategic concept since Samuel Huntington. His diagnosis is correct, his framework is sound, and his argument that sea control must now be the Navy’s primary operational focus deserves to be read by every flag officer. The Navy’s transoceanic era is over. (From: US Naval Institute News.)
The service has many challenges, but its crisis is the loss of uncontested command of the sea. The surface fleet must shift from a defensive to an offensive force. Distributed missiles, submarines, and robotic and autonomous systems are the weapons of the panoceanic Navy. On all of these points, Vandenengel is right.
But Vandenengel’s framework is incomplete in one critical respect, and the incompleteness matters for force design, for resource allocation, and for the question that ultimately determines what kind of Navy the nation needs: how does the maritime war end on terms favorable to the United States?
What Sea Control Does Not Achieve
Vandenengel establishes sea control as the Navy’s operational aim in support of the long-term strategic goal of reestablishing command of the sea. He addresses with considerable sophistication how the Navy would fight for sea control—distributed forces, attack effectively first, maximize offensive missile weight of effort, leverage the undersea domain, and free robotic and autonomous systems from supporting manned platforms to operate independently and offensively. What Vandenengel does not adequately address is what happens after sea control is achieved. He gestures at the answer through Mahan: Controlling the highways of commerce “embarrasses the finances” of the enemy and creates political leverage to end the war on U.S. terms. That is correct as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough against the specific adversary the panoceanic Navy is designed to confront. Getting this wrong does not produce an incomplete strategy. It produces the wrong Navy.
The historical record is instructive. In the Pacific War, U.S. submarines and mines had by the summer of 1945 reduced Japanese maritime imports by more than 90 percent. The country was being strangled. Sea control produced the conditions in which strategic bombing and, ultimately, the atomic bomb and Soviet entry into the war could force a decision. Yet, as military historian John C. McManus has documented, the Pacific War was ultimately consummated on the ground. From Bataan to Okinawa, the will of one side eventually prevailed over the other through land combat. Sea control was the necessary precondition, but the terminating act did not take place on the oceans.
The European theater of World War II reinforces the point. The Anglo-American coalition relied principally on sea power and strategic airpower. But, as Tami Davis Biddle, the former Elihu Root Chair of Military Studies at the U.S. Army War College, has observed, “neither power can control terrain.” In 1945, it was the physical disposition of troops across Europe—not the dominance of the Atlantic sea lines or the bombing of German cities—that shaped the peace. Churchill understood this, which is why he fought so hard over where Allied armies would stand when Germany surrendered. Sea control and air power created the conditions for victory. Soldiers on the ground determined its terms.
The Royal Navy’s blockade of Imperial Germany during World War I most directly answers what sea control against a continental adversary can and cannot achieve. The United Kingdom held uncontested command of the sea from the first day of the war. Its blockade tightened progressively, and by 1918, it had contributed significantly to Germany’s economic exhaustion. Naval historian Nicholas Lambert, in Planning Armageddon, documents how the British Admiralty had conceived a far more aggressive plan before the war—a rapid disruption of Germany’s financial system through London’s dominance of global banking, credit, and cable communications. It backed away from full implementation because of the likely collateral damage to British commercial interests and the risk of alienating neutral countries, particularly the United States. What resulted was a slower, porous blockade that took four years, contributed to the deaths of an estimated 763,000 German civilians, and required constant diplomatic management of neutral trade.
Even then, the blockade did not end the war. Germany’s armies had to be defeated in the field—in the Hundred Days Offensive of 1918—before Kaiser Wilhelm II’s government sought armistice. Again, sea control was indispensable. And again, war termination required ground forces.
Against China, the problem of ending a war is harder still. China is a nuclear-armed continental power of 1.4 billion people with a massive land army, leaders whose primary concern is regime survival, and an economy that has spent the past decade deliberately reducing maritime dependency. Beijing has built overland pipelines from Russia and Central Asia, developed the Belt and Road Initiative’s continental trade routes, and accumulated strategic reserves of oil, food, and critical materials—precisely because it has studied the history of blockade and drawn the appropriate lessons.
A naval blockade of China would also trigger the neutral country problem the United Kingdom faced in World War I at vastly greater scale. Russia, Central Asia, and much of the Global South would not cooperate. The economic interdependencies that made the United Kingdom hesitate in 1914 are far more binding today. A blockade—even a successful one—would take years to produce effects severe enough to force political concessions, and it would do so while a nuclear-armed adversary faces what it perceives as an existential threat to the regime. Blockade is not a viable primary war termination strategy against a nuclear-armed continental power of 1.4 billion people. It is a contributing pressure, not a decision.
Vandenengel’s panoceanic Navy tells the Navy how to fight the maritime war. It does not tell the nation how that war ends on terms favorable to the United States. Nor could it. That is a goal for the unified joint force. Winston Churchill understood this problem instinctively. As First Lord of the Admiralty and later Prime Minister, he recognized that winning the Battle of the Atlantic was existential—without sea control, Britain could not survive. Yet he consistently favored funding Bomber Command over the Royal Navy because air power could strike what Germany valued: its cities, its industrial base, its population’s will to continue. Sea control without the ability to threaten what the enemy values most produces stalemate, not victory. The panoceanic Navy, as Vandenengel describes it, is the instrument for achieving sea control. It is not yet a theory for ending the war.
The question Vandenengel’s framework leaves unanswered is therefore this: Once the panoceanic Navy achieves sea control in the Western Pacific, what does it do with it?
Building on a Strategic Foundation
If the answer is blockade, the historical record suggests it will be slow, porous, diplomatically costly, and insufficient by itself to produce war termination against a nuclear-armed continental power. If the answer is strike—using sea control to deliver long-range fires against targets the Chinese leadership values—then the force design implications are significantly different from those that sea control alone would suggest, requiring a different magazine depth, a different target set, and a different theory of escalation management than interdicting Chinese surface forces in the Philippine Sea.
Vandenengel’s central argument is correct. Sea control is the right primary operational focus for the Navy during this Pacific Phase of its history. The surface fleet must become an offensive force. Robotic and autonomous systems must be freed to operate independently. Submarines remain the most survivable and strategically consequential platforms in the fleet. These are correct conclusions, well argued and historically grounded.
But a strategic concept for the panoceanic Navy is not complete until it explicitly answers the war termination question. The 1986 Maritime Strategy answered it at least implicitly: Threatening Soviet ballistic missile submarines in their bastions forced the Soviet Navy into a defensive posture, altered the strategic balance, and created leverage for war termination without requiring an invasion of the Soviet Union. The panoceanic Navy needs an equivalent theory—not just how to fight China at sea, but how fighting China at sea, combined with the joint force and allied ground and air power, produces the political result the nation requires. McManus, Biddle, and Lambert, read together, point toward the same conclusion: Sea power is the essential enabler, but people live on the land, armies control terrain, and in the final analysis, decisions about war termination will be made—and enforced—there.
Vandenengel’s framework is the right foundation for the Navy. The next task—for naval strategists, for the Chief of Naval Operations’ classified Navy Warfighting Concept, and ultimately for a public document with the analytical depth and specificity the 1986 Maritime Strategy provided—is to build the war termination argument on top of it. Sea control is not enough. Deterring or defeating China in this century will require a joint strategy, with sea control as a foundational element.
