So it appears the congressionally mandated National Commission on the Future of the Navy has commenced work at long last. As Breaking Defense recalls, the Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act instituted the eight-member commission to “undertake a comprehensive study of the structure of the Navy and policy assumptions related to the size and force mixture of the Navy, in order to:

I) Make recommendations on the size and force mixture of ships 

II) to make recommendations on the size and force mixture of naval aviation.” 

Commissioners were supposed to have wrapped up their reportage and recommendations by now, but several lawmakers were tardy about nominating members. They have since remedied that.

Leaving naval aviation aside, here’s some counsel on future fleet design courtesy of the greats in the field. Historian and theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan advised fleet architects to center forces on “capital ships,” heavy hitters capable of dishing out and absorbing major blows in bouts with rival capital ships. 

A brawl between capital-ship fleets determines which force will command the sea, barring the maritime common to enemy naval and mercantile shipping while putting the common to use for strategic gain of its own. For Mahan, these brawlers are the decisive implement of naval strategy. 

He writes that “the backbone and real power of any navy are the vessels which, by a due proportion of defensive and offensive powers, are capable of taking and giving hard knocks. All others are but subservient to these, and exist only for them.”

Capital ships could dish out and withstand extreme punishment.

Commissioners should ponder these bracing words: was Mahan right about the primacy of the capital ship, does such a ship ride the waves today, and if so, what is it? 

Today’s capital ship is not the steam-driven battleship, the apex predator of Mahan’s day. The supercarrier has had a long and successful run at the forefront of American sea power. Whether it has run its course should and doubtless will be central to the commission’s debates. Maybe the guided-missile destroyer is the new capital ship, especially as new weaponry comes online, amplifying a tin can reach and destructive potential against hostile capital ships and aircraft. Maybe it’s an attack submarine if armed with some of that same long-range precision firepower.

Or maybe, bewildering the ghost of Mahan, there is no singular capital ship in today’s high-tech age. Dispersed swarms of small combatants able to concentrate firepower at the time and place of battle could be what hands the U.S. Navy a decisive edge in combat. Such a force would boast substantial offensive striking power in Mahanian parlance, while brute numbers along with dispersion in physical space would constitute its defensive power. 

Such a fighting force could lose substantial numbers of hulls to enemy action while, like the armored battleship of yesteryear, remaining resilient enough to stand in action against enemy ships of the line. That’s what happens when only a small percentage of a fleet’s fighting strength resides in any given hull.

Build Small, Lose Small

Speaking of which, Mahan goes on to propose a “broad formula” for gauging a navy’s sufficiency for ambient strategic surroundings. How to size a fleet or fleet contingent? The enemy force acts as a yardstick. 

The historian declares that a force must be “great enough to take the sea and to fight, with reasonable chances of success, the largest force likely to be brought against it…” 

The answer is simple: the friendly force must match up with the most powerful rival force likely to appear on the scene of battle. In the age of Mahan, determining the proportions of that hostile force demanded that U.S. commanders know their prospective foe, judging how compelling its interests were in the Western Hemisphere, the likeliest battleground, and thus how large a share of its fleet the hostile leadership would commit to action there. A potential antagonist like Great Britain or imperial Germany had commitments elsewhere around the globe that likewise demanded forces.

What London or Berlin could spare for Western Hemisphere contingencies after factoring in competing demands set the benchmark for U.S. naval adequacy at likely flashpoints. America need not run an open-ended arms race to accomplish its goals in expanses its leadership and society cared about.

However, commissioners need to update and amend the Mahanian formula, which after all is of 1890s vintage, for contemporary times and surroundings. He was writing for the America of his day, a rising maritime power on the make that aspired to predominance in its near seas, chiefly the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. 

In other words, he was thinking in terms of regional defense of American waters, where the United States enjoyed the advantages that go to any home team even when confronted by a brawnier away team.

But where Mahan was contemplating how to dominate the Americas’ near seas against a distant aggressor, today’s U.S. Navy will be the distant contender trying to outmuscle a regional defender in its near seas. From regional to global: Marine history has witnessed an acute case of role reversal since the time of Mahan.

This is where Mahan’s English contemporary and foil Julian S. Corbett comes in. Unlike Mahan, the evangelist of regional sea power, Corbett was writing for the Royal Navy, a globe-spanning force that did little but play away games across an empire on which the sun never set. That’s because such a force, the Royal Navy back then, the U.S. Navy today, is typically scattered across the nautical chart performing a multitude of errands at the behest of political magnates. 

No force, not even the world’s supreme sea force, can be stronger than every potential opponent, every place, all the time. Naval affairs don’t work that way. Oceans and seas are too big, challenges too numerous, and the biggest navy too small.

Corbett grasped that a contender can be globally superior yet locally inferior. That being the case, officialdom had to devise workarounds to offset and overcome regional opponents’ homefield advantages.

To prevail in a contest off faraway shores, Corbett beseeched Royal Navy commanders to learn to play what he called “active defense” at the outset of the war. Active defense is a strategy whereby weak but cagey combatants flip the script on the strong over time and win. Practitioners of active defense try to balk at a locally superior antagonist’s strategy, keeping it from achieving its goals, and to weaken that antagonist while they gather combat power at the scene of battle sufficient to prevail. 

Corbett was no defeatist, then. He was all about offense and decisive victory at sea, just like his American counterpart. He merely saw victory as something that the Royal Navy would attain ultimately but probably not on day one of a high-seas conflict, the way too-exuberant navalists insisted. That’s why the English sage inveighed vehemently against chest-thumping among the Royal Navy old guard, whose Mahanians insisted that “seeking out” the enemy fleet in its home waters at the outset of war constituted the be-all-and-end-all of naval strategy.

In place of triumphalism, Corbett prescribed sobriety, realism, and patience. In a humble scribe’s view, molding attitudes represents probably his greatest single contribution to maritime strategic theory. 

No One Can Play Offense All the Time

Jointery, the art and science of getting armed services that inhabit different domains to work together in harmony, is his other great contribution. Corbett insisted that the fleet was not a war-winning implement in itself. It was an enabler that helped the army achieve its goals on dry earth. After all, land is the decisive theater in any war. People live there, therefore wars are settled there, and he was right. 

Here again, though, we see some role reversal between then and now. Corbett saw the navy as an implement for projecting power ashore in support of ground forces. That function endures. Today, though, ground-based air and missile forces working in concert with numerous, light, short-range naval forces can make things exceedingly tough on hostile fleets prowling offshore.

Corbett foresaw this turn of events at least dimly. He bewailed a technological “revolution” that seemed to render traditional fleet design, rooted in practices from the age of sail, moot. In the past, ships of the line had little need to concern themselves with lesser warships. Gunnery was the measure of a ship in yesteryear. Capital ships mounted more guns and would blast ships from lesser rates to kindling if challenged. 

That mismatch began to erode during the age of steam, as newfangled weaponry such as torpedoes and sea mines made its debut. All of a sudden small craft, rudimentary submarines, torpedo boats, and minelayers could do grave harm to capital ships that ventured within their reach.

Corbett called these flotilla craft, and he fretted at how they had upended his scheme for fleet design.

If new technology superempowered the flotilla in Corbett’s lifetime, it has hyperempowered it in ours. In particular, long-range, precision anti-ship cruise missiles have given surface patrol craft and submarines deadly striking power for any navy that avails itself of them. Commissioners should look at this as both a danger and an opportunity for the U.S. Navy.