Shaping the Global Conversation

To a degree, anyway. Back then naval grandees, administration officials, and lawmakers discerned grave dangers gathering along the Western European and East Asian rimlands and resolved to rebuild American military might to manage them. Today naval grandees, administration officials, and lawmakers discern grave dangers gathering along the East Asian rimland and are saying the right things about rebuilding American maritime might to manage them.

The German Army of 1918 offers a cautionary tale about the perils of being too slow to develop new hardware to put new concepts into effect. Let’s not risk a German fate.

The coming weeks and months may see irregular warfare prosecuted with newfound vigor through such familiar unconventional warmaking methods. It’s doubtful Tehran would launch into conventional operations, stepping onto ground it knows America dominates. To launch full-scale military reprisals would justify full-scale U.S. military reprisals that, in all likelihood, would outstrip Iran’s in firepower and ferocity.

In home water, no. Far away, for sure. One of the world's top naval experts explains.

Over at the South China Morning Post, analyst Yogesh Joshi reminds us that great-power strategic competition isn’t just a U.S.-China or U.S.-Russia thing. There are other geopolitical heavyweights out there. Many take an interest in the Indian Ocean. For example, both Britain and France have vowed to mount a frequent, if not standing, naval presence in the Indo-Pacific to help offset Chinese and Russian ambitions.

As strategist Edward Luttwak might put it, the United States and its allies can harness military capability and political resolve to cast a “shadow” across strategic deliberations in North Korea, biasing decision-making against aggression. But—unlike Christmas-morning gift-giving around the tree—shadows seldom yield immediate, tangible, or unequivocal results.

What will Moscow do now that its carrier just had another major setback?

Would World War II have taken a different course had Admiral Chester W. Nimitz been in charge at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese hammer blow fell? Almost assuredly. History may have followed a more positive trajectory had U.S. forces on Oahu been prepared for an aerial assault. Or it may have turned out worse—perhaps far, far worse.

Long ago an inscription at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi advised supplicants to know thyself. Chinese sage Sun Tzu outdid the Greek oracle, instructing disciples to know the enemy and know yourself. Heed this counsel and in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.

In a day’s fighting, then, the Imperial Japanese Navy upended the region’s Sinocentric pecking order. In turn, the Sino-Japanese War set in motion a maritime strategic contest—sometimes peaceful, sometimes not—that persists to this day.

So it seems remote war is easy to wage, hard to win, and carries hidden moral hazards. Beware the allure of the latest gadgetry. It cannot exorcise the ghosts of wars past—or present.

Today the time has come to expand and deepen the transpacific relationship beyond periodic U.S. Marine deployments and air-force exercises.

What can be done?

Historian Craig Symonds pronounces Midway “the most complete naval victory” since 1805, when Lord Horatio Nelson’s Royal Navy swept the combined French and Spanish fleets from the briny main at Trafalgar. Was it a “decisive” victory as well as complete?

Anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles—latter-day counterparts to cannon fired from land—replicate this dynamic from the age of close-range gunnery. What should the Navy do about it?