Years ago, I came across Carl Builder's The Masks of War, which sought to explain how the different services viewed the world, each other, and their relative places within the world, i.e. their strategic culture. I've found the idea fascinating, and found it meaningful even at my level to ask how the unique culture of an organization shapes its actions. In my little corner, individuals wield enough influence to equal or exceed institutional inertia to shape an organizational culture. This has left me sensitive to seeking explanations centered around the characteristics of the people who wield the power, rather than the power itself or the circumstances in which it is wielded.
Toward a New Maritime Strategy: American Naval Thinking in the Post-Cold War World adopts a similar focus, and attempts to answer the question of how unique individuals shaped, or often failed to shape, the direction of the Navy. Even though he explicitly faults the institution of the Navy, rather than any given set of individuals, for failing to develop a new post-Cold War strategy, his analytic lens is firmly humanistic. Unlike other large organizations, where personnel rotate between senior VPs of different companies and their golden parachute lands them at a competing firm, the military home-grows all its senior leaders. Broadening experiences like civilian education are informative and shaping, yet the professional focus on the service and years spent in it's echo-chamber shape the personalities of commanders. This makes the military a unique population to examine how organization breeds its own future.
To be honest, the central question of what is or was not the Navy's strategy was the least interesting part of the book for me. Within pages, CAPT Haynes asserts that the business of the Navy is the maintenance of the global commons to perpetuate American dominance in the globalized economy, and thereafter uses the congruence of published Navy strategic documents with this idea as his metric to gauge sound reasoning. I wish CAPT Haynes had spent more time developing why a "maritime" strategy, as opposed to a merely "naval" strategy, was the correct focus of the Navy, but CAPT Haynes finds this as self-evident to the globalized economy and only elaborates on the growth of globalization. It was surprising to hear how resistant the naval community was to the implications of globalization. I would have liked to read more differentiation between maritime and naval strategy to give greater insight into the mindset of the Navy and its intellectual hobbyhorses.
More than anything, this is a book about how people. Individuals are products of their times and their cultures, and this book explores their chance to reciprocate that influence. Each time CAPT Haynes introduced a new character, he gave a brief professional CV, and always mentioned in which community (surface warfare, aviation, or submariner) the individual had grown up. Each community had developed its own cultures and strategic assumptions (such as the zero-defect culture of nuclear engineers), and these shaped where each new Chief of Naval Operations stood. Additionally, the technocratic engineering backgrounds that had forced career specialized and had guided naval PME profoundly shaped the worldviews of naval officers. It focused them on solving the "how" of problems, rather than the "why". CAPT Haynes calls out a number of CNOs for abdicating their role in strategic decision making to civilian leadership. Yet the CNO has at least three civilians to whom he directly reports in the Pentagon alone, and the Navy is but one national asset, so to fault the Navy for a lack of strategic planning seems fairly parochial. That there was no strategy that situated the Navy within the broader national security apparatus is certainly concerning and merits urgent redress, yet situating responsibility for developing the why and how for an asset by the asset seems to empower the asset to refuse being used in a way it dislikes, rather than making it conform into an agent of the national authorities. This tension was found in the absence of Iraq and Afghanistan as influences, and how the longest wars in American history either validated or questioned his strategic emphasis is never explored.
Equally interesting was contrasting the strategic culture of the Navy with that of its sister services. The Marines are the most developed here due to their shared status within the Department of the Navy, which only highlights the often radical difference between the two services. In contrast to the Navy's technocentric approach where the capabilities of material dictated their application, the Marines sought "constant innovation". Especially in light of how much the current woes of the F-35 stem from the Marine's insistence on VTOL capability, I'd be very curious to read a more detailed exploration of why the two services are so far apart on strategic and operational considerations. Builder regretted not investigating the Marines as a fourth service. Because the Marines incorporate aspects of all three services, contrasting the Marines' culture with that of a given service, or especially with the intersection of two other services, would provide fertile grounds to highlight woes of jointness and strategic myopia.
Lastly, it was very interesting to note the impressions of an O-6 in the Navy and the lessons learned from both Desert Storm and OEF. It's illuminating that he treats these victories axiomatically as simple validations of strike craft. This nests the tactical effects of the Navy firmly within the strategic bombing framework so favored by the Air Force, while also minimizing the effects of ground power. Given how much the strategic bombing predicates using carriers or Tomahawks, I wish CAPT Haynes had better explored the ways in which the Navy differed from the Air Force in how it influenced strategic effects, especially non-kinetically. This would have been a great way to contrast how maritime strategy effects global commerce to provide categorically different national benefits beyond the ability to smash things. Additionally, this would have been a chance to delineate between maritime and naval strategy as a way of contrasting how the use (versus merely the presence or threat) of military power vouchsafes commerce. As I read it, if the function of a maritime strategy is to ensure access to the global commons, then force would be used when that access is jeopardized, and I would have enjoyed an exploration of what such scenarios might be. Iran may have missile batteries that give them primacy over the Straits of Hormuz, yet if the oil tankers continue to run, who cares? China may assert dominion of the South China Sea, yet if container ships filled with TVs still make it to Tokyo or LA, is that of concern to the US? Or does the US suspect China may attempt to impose tariffs on goods moving through those waters? How does the Navy shape itself when the most likely reason goods no longer flow from Guangzhou is because of political boycotts, rather than sunken ships?
In the end, Towards a New Maritime Strategy was a great read, and a fascinating look at who shaped naval policy over the last 25 years. Even individuals without a strategic bent created the organizational flexibilities than enabled them to respond well to emerging threats and to make the necessary changes. Its a welcome humanistic approach to studying strategy, and how policy is a function of the people who make it.
