Making the Case for Maritime Power with ADM Jamie Foggo, USN (Ret.) - on Midrats
ideas matter
Just a cursory glance at any map will tell you the United States of America is a maritime nation whose economic power and national security is intimately linked to the sea.
This simple reality is not as well understood as one would expect. Command of the sea and access to the world’s oceans has never been easy or an entitlement for any nation. It is something that each generation must understand, resource, and be a steward of for the next.
With domestic distractions and competing priorities combined with the accelerating challenge by the People’s Republic of China, bringing the topic of maritime power above the natsec ambient noise has never been more important.
This fall a new voice joined the conversation, the Navy League of the United States’ Center for Maritime Strategy.
Our guest for the full hour this Sunday from 5-6pm Eastern to discuss the message it will bring to the conversation will be its inaugural Dean, Admiral Jamie Foggo, USN (Ret.).
Admiral Foggo is a 1981 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. He is also an Olmsted Scholar and Moreau Scholar, earning a Master of Public Administration at Harvard University and a Diplome d’Etudes Approfondies in defense and strategic studies from the University of Strasbourg, France.
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This was a bunch of the same ol’ stuff. I’m just not sure if asking those who enabled the problems our Navy is struggling with to fix those problems is a good sign.
Maritime power -- also land, cyber, air, and space power -- is a non-sequitur in an absence of, strategically, rational grand national strategic objective, and tactically, true joint force deployment. That absence is the chief characteristic today of D.C. think tanks and all three branches of the federal powers. Right now, for example, Navy and Air Force are trying to push Army out of practically everywhere as a land-holding force, especially the Indo-Pacific, and want Army re-missioned, to base perimeter for Navy and Air Force. So, lacking a strategic ground and dismissing the joint force, of what use is study of and advocacy for maritime power . . . or land, cyber, air, or space power, for that matter? None whatsoever. In fact, harm is done because reality is ignored.
Additionally, it is no secret that the bulk of D.C. think tank power assumes, or wants to assume, or thinks they can assume, that "nation" is unacceptable in the matrix of allowable thought. So, who owns this maritime power, who are they protecting? When their leader cadre dismisses the very notion of a nation, as is done now, for whom do this maritime power work? Themselves? Drug-addled global elites, "trans-national" rich people, Davos minions, Prince Charles, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Ivy League faculty, CIA, CCP?
US grand national strategic objective today cannot be resolved into clarity unless assumed to arise in and function from an alliance structure comprising three sovereign nation states -- India, USA, Russia -- with the possible addition of Japan and Egypt to make the structure pentagonal rather than triangular. No rational (viable, non-trivial) US national security and strategic assessment or decision can be made outside this alliance structure.
Joint force orders of battle and operations objectives (tactics writ large) -- and the budget priorities they mandate -- make sense only within this strategic alliance structure and only to execute on rational grand national strategic objectives generated jointly by its principals.
First, admit whom you are protecting, your countrymen, not "trans-national" elites drenched in visions of global governance (after they produce a controlled mass human die-off). Then, figure out, jointly with those who matter most to you -- for top-level statecraft, this is India and Russia, perhaps also Japan and Egypt -- what you want as rational joint-and single-nation grand strategic objective. Then, figure out how to execute on that, jointly and singly. Budget follows accordingly, being driven by, not driving, decisions for execution on strategic objective. Finally, orchestrate and conduct as joint force -- space, air, cyber, sea, land -- in both strategic and tactical domains. A service force self-promoting in the absence of rational, multi-nation resolve on grand strategic objective is hurtful to Americans.