Robert Kaplan Returns to the Pier

fundamentals

One of the great things about writing for so long on the maritime beat—2004 in my case—is that I’ve had the chance to travel along this path with other people who have been in the game as long or longer than I have.

In the November 2007 issue of The Atlantic, Robert D. Kaplan published an essay, America's Elegant Decline. I first mentioned it ten months after its publication while I was in Afghanistan, and then only briefly. It was more or less taken aboard as background info.

Fifteen years after its publication, I revisited its points and covered some of it in detail. It says something for Kaplan that a decade and a half later, it still popped into my nogg’n for consideration. You can read that if you wish. No reason to rehash my points on it again.

There are plenty of things that I disagree with Robert Kaplan about, but he always gives me a reason to ponder a thing or two, and he has a good eye and I think makes a better than honest effort to see where things are with a long-time-constant.

On May 1st, he wrote an article, this time for NYT, titled “The Tragic Decline of the American Navy” that, in a way, is a companion piece to the almost 19 year old, America’s Elegant Decline article.

An interesting side note: when it first came out, if you linked to it on X, the title came out, “America No Longer Rules the Waves.”

I guess they decided to downshift it a bit...because as we’ve seen the last few years around the Arabian Peninsula and Eastern Mediterranean—in spite of all our challenges—in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

I won’t do a full fisking, but enough people over the weekend asked for my thoughts that it would be rude if I didn’t pull out a few pull quotes for discussion.

As Mahan wrote, “a peaceful, gain-loving nation” like the United States “is not farsighted, and farsightedness is needed for adequate military preparation.”

You can rarely go wrong quoting Mahan, and this essence of the American mind remains in place…but I would argue that relatively speaking, this no longer holds.

Yes, as we discuss often here, this issue remains, but it is but a shadow compared to the rapid decline of farsightedness we have seen among our European allies in their domestic, foreign, and defense policies over the last few decades. While they mostly dither and decay, there is vibrancy and forward thinking budding in, of all places, the Arabian Peninsula and more reliably, the ring of western Pacific nations.

One of the cornerstones of my elevator speech regulars here have heard over and over (as only when you are sick of saying something will people finally start to listen), is that the U.S. is a maritime and aerospace power. That is also our comparative advantage…a fact that the events of the last few years have only underlined.

That said, there are centers of power in our nation who not only refuse to see and act on that, they seem determined to weaken and dilute this foundational characteristic of our nation’s military power.

The U.S. Navy is in decline relative to its own history and to the growth of the Chinese Navy, and has surrendered the control of the world’s vital choke points that it had at the beginning of the 21st century. The South China Sea, through which up to 40 percent of global maritime trade passes, in addition to oil and natural gas, is now dominated by China. The Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, the crucial transit point out of the Red Sea, is harassed by the Yemen-based Shiite Houthis.

Now we can add the Strait of Hormuz to the list. Just 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest, the strait offers oil tankers and other large vessels only a limited path through. Iran’s Islamic revolutionary regime, aided by a coastline of mountains and coves, has managed to effectively shut down the waterway with drones, speedboats and mines. American warships may be able to enforce a blockade, but the Navy still can’t open the Strait. And even then, this concentration of U.S. ships in the region is robbing the Navy of assets it should be using to patrol and project power in the Pacific. Whereas in the past the United States could cover all its bases or choke points, now in an age of gradual decline it has to make choices.

Two points need to be made here:

1. There is no military force, or combination of military forces, that can counter the threats to the free flow of goods at market prices through international straits other than the U.S. and her Navy. This was proved again.

2. Both Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb are threatened by the aggressive stance of the Islamic Republic of Iran and her proxies in her drive against the entire globe. Both parties are in a much degraded state than they were three years ago, when they were waxing in their power—and Iran’s march to nuclear weapons was unimpeded. That has changed drastically, and they are weakened only through the power of the U.S. and Israel. China is concerned with the Western Pacific.

3. The South China Sea is not being ignored, but is being dealt with in a low-risk manner as possible—as everyone waits for a super-typhoon to fix the problem. In any event, the time to nip that problem in the bud was during the second Obama administration when the U.S. was leading from behind and appreciating the problem when not monitoring the situation. Benchmarking a few centuries of best practices, China saw the weakness, took advantage of it, and simply changed the facts on the ground, or sea as it were. If I were in a PRC planning cell, I’d advise doing the same exact thing. Once it was done once unchallenged effectively, I’d advise doing so on an industrial scale. That isn’t 3D chess thinking, that is checkers. Talk to the Obama natsec team.

The global elite at watering holes like Davos and Bilderberg could never have prospered without the U.S. Navy, even if members of this elite are unaware of the fact. Though we live in the jet age, as much as 80 percent to 90 percent of global trade by tonnage is transported by water. That means the seas have to be relatively safe, especially around places such as Hormuz. The recent struggles of Dubai, an icon of globalization, demonstrates just how fragile our world is and always has been.

Nice swipe of the Davos crowd. Never before have so many been so wrong about things so important—intentionally.

Moreover, as I learned as a teacher at the U.S. Naval Academy during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it was the navies of China and India that had become avid followers of Mahan. His ideas languished somewhat at Annapolis, despite there being a building named after him. While the role of the U.S. Navy was, by then, already publicly diminished, Beijing and New Delhi were concentrating on naval expansion and warfighting. To compensate for its stagnating number of warships, the U.S. Navy was intent on partnering with allied navies as a means to mask its own relative decline.

As we have chronicled here, this is no surprise. I would encourage everyone to review—and you can get the documents if you ask for them—the hiring practices and selection criteria of historians hired at USNA, NHHC, and NWC in the decade from 2014 to 2024…but especially the worst years 2018-2022.

People are policy. You get what you hire. What is retained, blooms again. We’ll touch on that a bit more tomorrow, but let’s get back to Kaplan.

In November 2007, in The Atlantic magazine, I warned of the Navy’s “elegant decline.” I emphasized that the number of hulls in the water would eventually be more important than the number of boots on the ground. But naval power was the furthest thing from people’s minds amid all the fevered discussions about counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan and how to reverse the downward trajectory of our fortunes in the chaotic deserts of the greater Middle East.

Yes, but that critique is incomplete. What was needed at that time was a CNO who was willing to argue the long-term requirements in the face of short-term contingencies.

If you want to see patient-zero, look at Admiral Mike Mullen, USN (Ret.), CNO from 2004-2007 and picked an admiralty in his own image that haunted the Navy for the next decade. I mean, Mullen pushed the “1,000 Ship Navy” cope, and his hand-selected successor Admiral Roughead extended the concept to include—no you can’t make this stuff up—NGOs.

The most damaging CNO of this century to our Navy…and we’re naming a DDG after him. Amazing.

Keep in mind that as a fleet stagnates, quantity increasingly equals quality, since a warship cannot be in two places at once. The U.S. buildup near the Strait of Hormuz hurts our deterrence against China in the South China Sea and near Taiwan. And this is to say nothing about our current long deployments that have led to maintenance problems and put undue stress on crews and their families. The Gerald R. Ford, an aircraft carrier deployed in the Middle East with a crew of over 4,500, has been at sea for 10 months now, a post-Cold War record.

Correct. We do not have a large enough Navy…or enough carriers. We are an almost11-CVN navy in a 15-CVN world.

Mahan was born in 1840 at West Point, the son of a professor at the United States Military Academy. His middle name, Thayer, honors the “father of the military academy,” Sylvanus Thayer, who brought the institution up to modern standards. His great, burgeoning Navy may sound like a warmonger’s dream. But Mahan was a realist. He wanted a great fleet for a purpose, because he believed in America’s spiritual mission.

What kind of world do we want to live in? A world united by democracies that uphold a certain standard of human rights is incompatible with a weak Navy. That’s because a stable, humane world requires economic prosperity. That, in turn, requires relatively unimpeded intercontinental trade and commerce. And that requires secure waterways.

That last paragraph is superb. Outstanding. In some way, we should all try to fold that into our conversations with people who don’t have a grasp of this simple, but powerful, concept.