Can the US afford to be both Leviathan and Nanny?
Thursday, February 25, 2010 at 10:01PM POST: Towards the "Terrible 20's", By CDRSalamander, USNI Blog, February 10, 2010
Overall, a good post if a bit meandering (always a hypocritical comment from me) and a deep dive for non-professional readers.
Have no trouble with the logic of more budget pressure inexorably appearing, especially as Boomers retire out of the system and the domestic pressures worsen. Just remember, that's happening soon enough to ANYBODY we can dream up as serious opponents of the Leviathan--to include the rapidly aging Chinese and the Iranians right on their heels (long-term birth dearths are a bitch).
So buy the basic thesis of bad budgetary waters ahead. Then again, don't see any growing naval threats out there either (yes, I read the projections and remain generally unimpressed after years of studying the far greater effort of the Sovs in this regard--and they never even came close to matching us naval-wise as a blue-water Leviathan), so not sure how much I care in big-picture sense. Outside of the increasingly fantastic naval battle scenarios (all getting more long in the tooth since there have been no such battles since 1945), we've got pirates (how quaint and frontier-like) and terrorists and not a whole lot else. China has its brief moment now of being flush, but it will not last. All of its structural issues are bad-in-the-making and sure to grow worse, plus it's so loath to pick up ANY responsibilities. Yes, their flags flap on, mouth-wise, but this is a military that hasn't fought a sustained conflict since the Revolution over 60 years ago. Meanwhile, Iran's already passed its moment of possibility, and is grappling with an immediately worst set of problems across its system. At best, both threats, such as they are, offer spoiler, complicating roles for the foreseeable future, whereas the underlying big scenarios just don't work: Who wants to fight a naval battle/blockade around Taiwan? For what exactly? The details of an impending free trade agreement? And all the closing-of-the-Hormuz scenarios bleed plausibility as anything lengthy and profound enough to justify force structure for the long haul. And these are the two big sources for the new sea-air thinking!
In general, then, I see no bright futures anywhere, threat-wise, for the Leviathan, so its sustainment is a huge issue for the main provider (US) and even all the wannabes who suffer looming demographic issues (ours, quite frankly, being not that bad in comparison). Surprisingly, the situation is really no better than in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War's end. Two decades later, post-9/11 and in the midst of tying off two wars, and this is all we've got? Asymmetrical tactics very geographically focused from two players who will not be able to sustain the costs for a variety of negative domestic issues (e.g., both will suffer aging issues due to birth dearths starting to impact the demographic spread).
Long term, I think we must admit that future is simply a global extrapolation of Norm Augustine's bit that the future U.S. military will have only one carrier, one bomber, one fighter jet, one tank, etc., due to continuing skyrocketing costs: in effect, the world in aggregate can afford only one coalition-derived Leviathan. It's simply too expensive for any one great power or even a superpower to sustain. The threat environment does not sustain it. The domestic agendas do not sustain it. And the operational environment simply works against it (it's a COIN/nation-building world, whether we engage or not).
But then there's your larger conundrum: once this global Leviathan is achieved, the potential opposition underwhelms, so only way to justify movement down this path--separately--is for major players to keep citing each other's "impressive" build-ups. But they aren't all that impressive, reflect fairly limited geostrategic ambitions among the wannabes, and thus strain credulity as a sales item to publics. You can say, no problem for Iran and China today, but remember, navies aren't built in a day.
In sum, I see no easy logic here, and the whole subject makes me come back to that Proceedings article about the "post-navy era."
And all that tells me is that the Navy inevitably embraces what I call System Administration functions (getting in touch with its inner Coast Guard) or withers. The scare-the-hell-out-of-Americans option is not viable long term.
So, short answer to title of post is rather easy: the US will not be able to afford a Navy that pretends the Leviathan argument justifies its force structure when the environment only justifies the "nanny" role (here, likewise extrapolated globally) of administering to the system, working weak states, extending nets and resiliency, etc.
The Brits come to that realization faster, as does Europe in general. When I spoke throughout the Dutch government a couple of years back, their eyes all just rolled when I suggested the Leviathan-SysAdmin trade-off was inevitably moving toward the latter's favor. I was engaging in the intellectual equivalent of carrying coal to Newcastle. You could just read it in their faces: "Ah, you silly Americans. Just adjust yourself to reality and move on already!"
