For 50 years the Australian Naval Institute has been able to elicit contributions from some of the most eminent naval thinkers of the day. Among that first rank is Professor John B. Hattendorf*, the Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the US Naval War College. His article ‘Sea Power and Sea Control in Contemporary Times’ discusses these concepts which have vexed Australian strategic policymakers and strategists for decades. It appeared in the April/June 1997 edition of the Journal of the Australian Naval Institute.
Sea Power and Sea Control in Contemporary Times
Today, sea power and sea control have a new context. Like so much in the era in which we live, everything seems to have changed. Navies, themselves, have changed. Compared to the situation a mere fifty years ago, ships look different and have different propulsion systems; aircraft are faster and have a wider variety of capabilities. Naval weapons are much more accurate and more devastating in their effects. Communications have proliferated in every imaginable way. Each of us now can have global communications through the internet, while navies have vastly more complex means to obtain, share, store, sort, and present information to decision-makers at various levels of command. The art of navigation and our very understanding of “the way of a ship” have changed through the use of satellites and global positioning systems.
The pace of change in navies is remarkable. Virtually every day, navies are faced with some new technological innovation. Everyday, a new technology seems to overtake an old. One of the most difficult and fundamental questions for naval leaders is how to deal with this type of change. While new technological ideas appear every day, it takes time to bring them to fruition – time during which a whole range of other ideas could appear. The practical problem involves identifying the most important new technologies, selecting them for testing and developing, and then, with some confidence that they have not inadvertently excluded something critical for future conditions, deciding which new technologies to distribute widely to the fleet.
To deal with the wide-spread technological nature of navies, there has been a fundamental change among sailors. We can no longer personify them by the bluff and hearty line-haulers who were so essential to the sailing-ship navy. Today, men and women in navies around the world are sophisticated in science and deeply educated in technology.
In this environment of ever more rapidly increasing technological change, navies around the world are faced with developing adequate naval force and maintaining it while costs rise and budgets decrease. It is more than a question of new technologies, it is further complicated by questions of national finance, bureaucratic decision-making, the personalities of leaders, and legislative understanding of and support for navies.
While navies were once separate, autonomous entities within a government structure, they are no longer so today. One of the most telling lessons of the Second World War was the need to coordinate more closely the joint operations of all the armed services. Throughout the world, over the past half century, ministries of defence have slowly unified admiralties and naval ministries with war departments, ministries of the army, and air ministries, often adding to them in the same defence ministry or department, the munitions and logistics support agencies involved with armed forces. Moreover, naval officers have had to learn to talk with colleagues in other armed forces using the same terms, the same approaches to planning and budgeting, and sharing the same appropriations of tax dollars. Each of the services is increasingly becoming part of this same process, dependent upon one another and essential to one another in planning, budgeting, and operations.
At the same time that this lengthy process of unifying armed forces is occurring within nations, another process of integration is developing beyond and across national borders. While once we could think of a navy entirely in terms of one country and one country’s maritime concerns, today we are learning to think of navies operating as part of United Nations forces, in terms of regional alliances, or even, in terms of ad hoc coalitions gathered together to undertake some particular, mutually agreed upon task. Additionally, one is no longer just concerned about coordinating the ships and aircraft of one country, but now increasingly in finding ways by which the forces of one country can operate effectively with those from another. This is an immensely difficult task that involves not only the obvious differences in language, culture, and tradition, but also the basic patterns of solving practical problems and carrying out routine tasks. Moreover, it means sharing a certain number of procedures and certain types of information that we were once state secrets.
In recent years, ships of various navies have operated together very successfully under the UN as well as under NATO and under other regional organizations and agreements. We have seen them during the Gulf War, in Somalia, in the Adriatic, and off Haiti. Our recent experience with such multilateral naval forces has emphasized the common concerns and natural ties that exist among sailors around the world.
It was these fundamental ties, found in the shared heritage of centuries of naval tradition and the mutual understanding of ships and the sea, that NATO built upon in the late 1940s in bringing together the naval forces of many European countries. It was the fundamental basis that helped to form the still-continuing Inter-American Naval Symposia in 1959. It was the initial starting point for the successful initiative in 1967 to create the NATO Standing Naval Force, Atlantic, and in 1959 to establish the first world-wide gathering of navies at the International Seapower Symposium.
In subsequent years, the Standing Naval Force has become a model for several other multinational naval forces. The International Seapower Symposium continues to meet each odd-numbered and has proliferated into regional meetings, in the even-numbered years, with the Western Pacific Naval Symposium in 1988 and the West African Naval Symposium in 1992. Further initiatives along these lines continue to develop.
Old ideas seem to be disappearing. Among them are the traditional view that navies are a nation’s “first line of defence”, that a navy and its battle fleet exists to fight a huge battle with a similar kind of enemy battle fleet, that a navy is somehow always connected to the growth of imperial power.
In large countries, some citizens wonder why they need naval forces at all, when there is no aggressive naval force threatening them. Large navies are becoming much smaller. In terms of its ships, the US Navy is 40% of what it was five years ago; the Royal Navy, today, is one-tenth of the size of the US Navy. Yet, at the same time, small and medium-sized naval forces are proliferating. There are more countries in the world today and there are more naval forces in the world today. In 1946, the editor of authoritative reference work. Jane’s Fighting Ships, listed 52 navies, fifty years later in 1996, there were 166 listed. What is the role of a navy today and what is the purpose of sea power and sea control in the contemporary world?
The fundamental answer to this question lies in the fact that navies operate, not only in the context of national defence, but also in the context of the broad scope of general maritime affairs. One cannot separate the traditional roles of naval force from its wartime uses. Certainly, it derives its strength for peacetime applications from its military potential in the event of war. Today, we understand that, in addition to fighting, navies also have policing and international diplomatic roles to play.
When we think about strategies for a navy, we are thinking of ways of using a navy that will achieve particular ends. Strategy is not something limited to battles and conflict, but to achieving specific goals in any interaction with another power. It is something that is inextricably bound up with the broad context of a situation. This means that navies are not only part of the broader context of national defence issues, but also part of the much broader maritime world and its issues. Thus, navies are inextricably connected with two traditions and two lines of thought which, in modern thinking, are often separate from one another. Maritime affairs are essentially peacetime and civilian activities that range from fishing to shipbuilding, from activities in ports and harbours to long sea passages across the ocean. A navy does not normally dominate or overwhelm such maritime activities, but it is fundamentally connected with them as part of its own basic nature. Thus, navies need to understand themselves as part of a wider, maritime strategy.
Maritime strategy is a kind of sub-set of national grand strategy that touches on the whole range of a nation’s activities and interests at sea. In its broadest sense, grand strategy is the comprehensive direction of power to achieve particular national goals; within it, maritime strategy is the comprehensive direction of all aspects of national power that relate to a nation’s interests at sea. The Navy serves this purpose, but maritime strategy is not purely a naval preserve.
Maritime strategy involves the other functions of state power that include diplomacy, the safety and defence of merchant trade at sea, fishing, the exploitation, conservation, regulation and defence of the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) at sea, coastal defence, security of national borders, the protection of offshore islands as well as participation in regional and world-wide concerns relating to the use of oceans, the skies over the oceans and the land under the seas. Such issues include expanding scientific and technological understanding of the entire maritime environment, working with the full range of national organizations, (the navy, the army, the air force, customs, coast guard, commerce and trade, to name but a few of the ministries, bureaus, and departments that touch on these issues) in order to bring forth a truly national concept and plan tin ihe maritime aspects of national life.
This broader understanding emphasizes that different nations have individual forms and types of interest in maritime affairs. Thus, their strategies and approaches to the use of national power in the maritime environment are different. Maritime powers, continental states, and coastal states, each use and value navies for different functions, some navies playing a relatively more important role in the exercise of national power than in others. For maritime nations, the navy is traditionally its main arm with an offensive strategic stance on the open ocean. Continental powers have depended mainly on armies and land-based air forces, using its navy to complement and enhance the army’s and the air force’s role as part of a generally defensive strategic stance. Traditionally, small navies have had to rely on alliances and had to adjust their stance according to the capabilities of their larger partners.
Today, one can detect some new differences in the way that a major maritime power and the way that a coastal state thinks about contemporary sea power and sea control.
For a major maritime power, the fundamental focus of the military element in maritime strategy centres on the large-scale control of human activity at sea, through the use of armed force in order to contribute to the broad ends established in a national maritime policy. There are two parts to this: (1) establishing control and (2) using control, once it has been established.
In the effort to establish control and, along with it, to deny control to an enemy, there are gradations that range from an abstract ideal to that which is practical, possible, or merely desirable. In this, one can consider whether control is to be general or limited, absolute or merely governing, widespread or local, permanent or temporary. Generally speaking, it is not practically possible to have direct control for an indefinite period of time. The normal situation is a kind of equilibrium that has been set in balance in some previous period of control. When any degree of control is exercised, whether it be through gentle influence or aggressive seizure, it is exercised with a specified amount of force, for some discrete period of time, and to achieve a specific object.
Following the establishment of control, there is another aspect: the use of the situation that has been created in order to achieve further goals. The effort to achieve control, by itself, means nothing unless that control has an effect. Thus, in war, the point is not merely to have a battle, but to create a situation that has a larger effect. In the wide spectrum of activity that this can involve, the most important aspect is the use of maritime control to influence, and, ultimately, to assist in controlling events on land. In this, the fundamental key is to have an effect on those places, times, or routes of travel to which an adversary is sensitive, and which are critical and essential enough to move an adversary to alter plans or actions so as to accommodate one’s own objectives.
In wartime, a nation can seek a degree of control at sea that will allow it to carry on its merchant shipping and fishing, to secure its coastline and offshore resources, to move troops, and to support land operations.
The manner in which a navy seeks this control and handles its forces today has changed in the last fifty years. The way that naval forces form themselves and the effectiveness of their weapons are integral considerations to new methods to search for and detect enemy forces and countermeasures that can neutralize an enemy. The most important naval weapon today is the missile designed to sink enemy ships. Below it in effectiveness come torpedoes, mines, gunfire, and bombs from aircraft.
Throughout naval history, naval battles have mainly taken place close to land. The only major exception to that has been in World War II with the mid ocean struggle against Axis U-boats in the Atlantic and the battles between opposing carrier air forces in the Pacific. In the past fifty years, the US Navy has supported air and land operations and also carried out a variety of amphibious landings and coastal blockades. In the past few years, these traditional types of naval operations have come to be called “littoral warfare,” and renewed emphasis has been placed on the way in which such military operations in coastal areas are carried out as joint-service operations.
The use of highly effective missile weapons in areas close to land creates a tactical environment for navies that reinforces the tendency in both grand strategy and in defence management for close interaction between land, sea, and air forces. In the environment of “littoral warfare” the distinctions between armed services quickly blur as all engage in complementary activities to achieve a shared object.
Today, high-speed and maneuverability characterize operations. Fast, small vessels operating in coastal waters have the ability to put much larger warships out of action. Amphibious assaults are made with high speed surface-effect vessels and with armed helicopters launched from large ships offshore. High-speed missiles can be launched from great distances with great effect. Detecting such attacks are particularly important today, as the range and power of weapons have increased. Today, some equipment can detect ships and aircraft at ranges of thousands of miles, merging strategic and tactical considerations.
In this, the uses and the analysis of the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum have become as important in modem warfare as the weapons that electronics control and guide. In facing a difficult, fast-moving environment responsible commanders in maritime areas depend upon fast and reliable transmission of large amounts of data. While essential to one’s own exercise of command and control over forces, the situation also provides another area for manipulation, blocking, and interfering with an enemy’s essential needs. In short, warfare in coastal areas requires the close interaction of army, air force, and amphibious landing forces. The interaction of forces with the complexity and speed of operations have shifted emphasis from the craft carrying weapons and the colour of the uniform behind them to the effectiveness and countering of the weapon itself.
This change in the character and in the focus of contemporary naval warfare is paralleled by a larger mat-ici of maritime interest that also emphasizes coastal regions, The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has now come into effect and has been ratified by the majority of the world’s states. This development in international law has granted coastal states specific rights and responsibilities in offshore waters.
These changes include the extension of territorial seas to twelve nautical miles and the extension of some rights to an EEZ out to 200 nautical miles and on the continental shelf. These responsibilities and rights in these areas include such matters as the establishment of artificial islands, the conduct of maritime scientific research, and the protection and conservation of the natural marine environment, including controlling the catch of fish and exploiting other natural underwater resources on and under the continental shelf.
This extension of a coastal state’s jurisdiction at sea has placed certain limitations on the freedom that the great naval powers have traditionally and exclusively exercised. In effect, it has transferred them, in many cases, to small and medium-sized coastal states, just at a time when those offshore resources are becoming increasingly important, both economically and politically, this situation demands that coastal states have the adequate power to manage their responsibilities. This fact, combined with the capabilities of modern naval weapons, has made small and medium-sized navies into major actors. This position is enhanced even further as the world’s major naval powers reduce their size. Today, we must take seriously an entirely new dimension in naval affairs: the sea power of the coastal state.
Coastal states exercise their naval power in a different manner and with a different concept than navies that focus on the high seas. The coastal environment provides an advantage that an approaching naval power does not have. One’s home waters provide protection to defending forces, particularly when they are intimately acquainted with them and specifically trained to deal with them. At the time, such coastal naval forces can be directly supported by land-based aircraft and coastal defenses, including missile defences, mines, and torpedoes. Coastal states will be able to employ their entire range of armed services to support their navy, from the point of view of force development, a coastal state can more advantageously than others share roles and missions with its other uniformed services. Coastal navies have their secure support facilities nearby, designed directly to support them in a full range of combat conditions, as they meet any threat. With supplies so close, a coastal navy is not so concerned about onboard supplies and the logistics involved in their more limited radii of action.
Small coastal states use their armed forces in a more restricted manner than those of much larger powers. By their very size, their limited industrial and economic base, and their smaller military capacity, small and medium-sized often cannot maintain all their interests by themselves. Small states can rarely hope to defeat completely a larger power. They can, however, use their armed forces to control an enemy’s actions in a way that will shape the outcome of a conflict or a crisis.
Coastal naval forces exercise national sovereignty over offshore areas and enforce national jurisdiction and management over maritime resources. Their capacity for wartime operations allows them to serve as a deterrent to others who might wish to seize or dispute sovereignly. In war, the coastal navy continues to serve a deterrent purpose as its very presence raises the stakes of a foreign navy operating in those waters. It can be a delaying, and an increasingly costly and distracting, obstacle to another power, from the smaller, coastal states’ point of view, the objective is to preserve its own identity and sovereignty when the struggle is over. In this, there are alternative courses of action that a small coastal state can choose. It can seek direct opposition on its own, it can align itself with other states, or it can even acquiesce with an opposing power, allowing the opposition to take certain actions as long as they do not fundamentally alter the primary national interests of the coastal state.
The power of coastal states’ objectives and rights lie fundamentally in maintaining and carrying out the guiding spirit of international law. Thus, many of them agree that the UNCLOS regime and the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war are currently the essential criteria for determining a favorable conclusion to any conflict and for guiding peacetime policy.
Emphasis on international law is particularly important to states that focus on the quality of their position after a war is over. By adhering to international law, they would hope to secure both popular support at home as well as international support for their position, while also avoiding recriminating penalties in a post-war era. Among other things, this leads to focusing one’s military and naval forces and one’s military objectives in terms of an enemy’s armed forces, not the civil sector of any enemy’s society. In following this policy, a coastal state would not want to initiate attacks on a belligerent’s merchant shipping. Without a seagoing force, a coastal state could do relatively little harm to a major maritime power’s merchant shipping and would probably suffer more from retaliatory attacks on its own civilian maritime activities. The coastal state’s primary naval objective in war will be to deter a belligerent’s naval attack by having forces that are so effective that it would make such an attack too costly to risk. Should the attack be made, however, the coastal state’s objective is only to stop the attack, to force the enemy away from one’s own waters, and to prevent an enemy from attaining his goals. With such objectives, it is unnecessary for a coastal state to destroy the enemy naval force when the primary object is merely to disable it.
In developing maritime defences, a coastal state may develop a highly specialized naval force that is designed to deal with one particular dimension of defence, leaving other aspects to its other armed services or its allies. Taking such a choice, a country might choose to develop a relatively large force of sophisticated shallow water, defensive submarines, or alternatively it might choose to invest in a large number of highly sophisticated sea mines, to prevent an enemy seaborne attack.
In its fundamental interest to avoid military conflict, a coastal state has an obligation to exercise its sovereignty in the appropriate areas designated by International Law. Maintenance of appropriately firm and consistent authority in the maritime EEZ will help to reduce conflict among nations and prevent the problems that arise from other nations unilaterally assuming control of an area outside its own jurisdiction or when an area is left in anarchic conditions. International Law does not yet provide for all situations; a variety in practice may arise as nations take up their responsibilities in these new areas and one may need to make changes for the future. This situation, however, is better than one of neglect. Effective surveillance and control of sea areas are positive means that can assist to control a crisis and are useful means to help avert war.
If we look at this new development from another perspective, however, it suggests new possibilities that could spark a crisis or even a war. As coastal states expand their sovereignty outward on the open sea, they may easily create friction with their neighbours, who have conflicting interpretations of the facts or overlapping claims in a region. Additionally, the new interest of coastal states in maintaining control in offshore areas put them potentially in opposition to large naval powers who have traditionally maintained the right of warships to pass on the high seas. It creates potential restrictions for major maritime powers who would like to use their navies as direct adjuncts to diplomacy. At the very least, it moves a coastal state’s naval forces further offshore, into positions where a misunderstanding could take place and create a conflict or a crisis.
Here, we see the possibility of a major problem for contemporary sea power and sea control. The very increase in areas under sovereign control, the increase in range and capabilities of naval armaments, and the increase in the number of nations with navies increases the potential for conflict.
The parallel rise in the use of multinational naval forces, however, suggests one possible antidote to the situation. While multinational naval cooperation is one very practical means to augment one’s limited resources, by complementing one nation’s naval capabilities with those of another, it also requires close co-operation and interaction between the participating navies. This interaction builds understanding between nations, providing direct links of communication and discussion.
Through such multilateral cooperation, neighbouring navies in a particular region can join forces, share responsibilities and costs for surveillance, and the control of maritime regions. These shared duties could prevent conflict that could arise from neglect. The very means by which such cooperation takes place is also a major avenue to prevent misunderstanding. It builds the connections that could serve mutual solutions to problems and be essential to defusing a crisis. Through such connections, one side could explain to another the rationale for actions that might otherwise appear threatening. In the context of contemporary sea power and sea control, multilateral cooperation can be a positive influence in three ways: (1) helping to maintain lower defence costs at home, and (2) at the same time making it unnecessary to increase naval armaments, while also (3) lowering tensions.
As one looks toward the future, international cooperation among naval forces is quickly becoming a key issue. It is useful, therefore, to think more precisely about it. Of course, it will never be possible for all navies to cooperate all of the time on every matter. It is a matter of great political sensitivity, involving very expensive forces and highly trained sailors. No nation can afford to use them indiscriminately or wastefully.
To avoid this, one naval leader has suggested three criteria for naval cooperation. The first is to cooperate with those countries who share fundamental values. These values could be the shared concepts of democracy, human rights, free market exchanges, and recognition of the fundamental importance of the UN Charter.
A second criteria is to cooperate with neighbouring navies in geographical proximity to one another. In practical terms, it is easiest to start cooperation on a sub-regional basis and to expand gradually. Yet, there is a difficulty here in identifying regions and in drawing the boundaries too narrowly. In some cases cooperation needs to span the boundaries between conventional regions. Further problems arise with this criteria in those cases where one country falls into two or more regions. The solution may be merely to cooperate in whatever multidimensional way that includes one’s neighbours.
The third criteria is to cooperate with navies that share similar national interests. While the recent fragmentation of larger states into smaller ones might suggest to some observers that a kind of tribalism is being rekindled, this diffusion of national power is also creating a similarity of certain security interests. This is particularly true for maritime interests.
Using the triple criteria of shared values, geographical proximity, and shared interests, one can develop a plan of multinational naval cooperation that includes both regional navies and distant navies with regional capabilities and local interests.
The agenda for such cooperation could be nearly anything imaginable, but UN Secretary-General Boutrous-Ghali’s “An Agenda for Peace” provides some very valuable ideas for consideration: preventive diplomacy, peacekeeping, post-conflict peace building, peace enforcement. In more specific terms, neighboring navies, sharing mutual values and complementary interests, could undertake such broad missions as:
- providing humanitarian assistance;
- intervening to evacuate civilian at risk;
- making a show of force to stop a universally unacceptable action;
- conducting maritime peacekeeping operations;
- protecting sea and air traffic;
- controlling armaments and enforcing demilitarization;
- enforcing maritime agreements; and
- respond to a mutual threat.
Among these missions, there are some specific maritime tasks that could be shared by multilateral naval forces:
- protecting the maritime environment;
- regulating the use of maritime resources;
- preventing and controlling pollution;
- enforcing laws relating to fishing and sea bed use;
- controlling illegal immigration;
- interdicting illegal trade; and
- suppressing piracy; and enforcing the UNCLOS.
These are some of the primary issues in the maritime world today. Such tasks are difficult and complex to carry out at sea, often requiring advanced capabilities in surveillance, readiness, and specialized equipment for command, control, and communications. The threats they involve are often regional, not national. All these aspects point again to the need for cooperative, multinational solutions.
In conclusion, sea power and sea control are increasingly important factors in contemporary affairs, but as such they have a new context. Navies, themselves, have changed, as have many of their most important future missions and tasks. Yet because of the increased scale of naval proliferation, the expansion of maritime interests among coastal states, as well as the very mobility of naval forces and their multidimensional capabilities, the issues surrounding sea power and sea control continue to be important at present. There is every indication that they will become even more important for the future.
The views expressed in this paper are entirely the views of the author. They do not represent any official policy or position of the Naval War College. The US Navy, or any other US agency.
*Professor John Hattendorf was born in 1941. He is the Ernest J. King Professor Emeritus of Maritime History, a chair he occupied at the US Naval War College from 1984-2016. He served as chairman of the College’s Advanced Research Department from 1986-2003, chairman, Maritime History Department and director of the Naval War College Museum from 2003-16. He is a former surface warfare officer and a Vietnam War veteran. He gained degrees in history from Kenyon College, Brown University and the University of Oxford (D.Phil and D.Litt). He is the author or editor of more than 50 books, including Sailors and Scholars and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History. In 2011, the US Naval War College established the Hattendorf Prize for Distinguished Original Research in Maritime History. Former ANI President, the late Rear Admiral James Goldrick was the 2021 recipient of the prestigious medal.
