Seth Cropsey, Mayday: The Twilight of American Naval Superiority (New York: Overlook, 2013), 336 pp., $29.95.

SEA POWER is a conscious political choice. A maritime power’s world standing depends on keeping taut the sinews of naval might. According to the famed American geostrategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, that means amassing international commerce, forward bases, and merchant and naval shipping. But just as Great Britain, in a “fit of absentmindedness,” assembled an empire on which the sun never set, it may be possible to abdicate world leadership thoughtlessly. Indeed, slipping into imperial retrenchment would be easier for the United States, which maintains no colonies abroad, than it was for bygone empires that conquered vast territories and then—having connected national dignity and pride to geographic objects—had to defend them. Withdrawing from diplomatic entanglements and drawing down armed forces are easier than surrendering territory.

That’s doubly true since the benefits of policing the global system are remote and abstract, while the benefits of pulling back—cost savings in particular—are concrete and quantifiable. No wonder naval proponents fret about what the future may hold. They fear the United States will back into a decision of enormous importance, letting dollars and cents drive the process rather than strategic thinking. Such fiscal imprudence is not uncommon. As the late admiral J. C. Wylie observes in his treatise, Military Strategy, lawmakers make strategic decisions through the budget process, whether they realize it or not.

Which brings us to Seth Cropsey’s new book, Mayday. Cropsey warns that the United States, consciously or not, is allowing a chasm to open between political ends and the ways and means of strategy. Much like Walter Lippmann, who lacerated early twentieth-century presidents for “monstrous imprudence” in foreign policy, Cropsey maintains that—with apologies to Theodore Roosevelt—America still comports itself like a hyperpower while toting smaller and smaller sticks. It has neglected the hard national power needed to back up ambitious policies. Misaligning purpose and power invites challenge and failure. That’s especially true in Asia, where a new maritime contender, China, is on the make.

American sea power, says Cropsey, is in a parlous state. He has the chops to make such a case. A senior fellow at the Washington-based Hudson Institute, Cropsey served as deputy under secretary of the navy during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Thus, he was intimately involved in developing the 1986 maritime strategy, the guiding document for maintaining sea supremacy in the event of war with the Soviet Union. Since then, his career has included stints at the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Cropsey comments on naval matters regularly in such outlets as the Weekly Standard. He writes fluently about affairs in great waters.

It’s difficult to gainsay Cropsey’s central message, which is that the U.S. sea services—the navy, Marines and coast guard—are under mounting strain. Arresting this decline, in both numbers and capability, is crucial if Washington wants to sustain the dominant position it inherited after World War II. Failing that, national leaders will have to scale back their policy aims to more modest goals that are executable despite straitened circumstances. There are few other alternatives. Nothing good comes from a mismatch between policy, strategy and means—as Lippmann testified. He blamed the power vacuum created by U.S. ineptitude for encouraging Japanese troublemaking in the 1930s.

CROPSEY APPLIES a back-to-basics approach to his topic. He starts with Mahan and his groundbreaking book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, which served as a kind of blueprint for the creation of the modern U.S. Navy. A prolific writer and thinker, Mahan also served as the second president of the Naval War College (the institution I call home). Historian Margaret Tuttle Sprout dubbed him America’s “evangelist” of sea power, and indeed he beseeched Americans to build up domestic industrial production at home and trade commerce abroad; create fleets of merchantmen and warships; and establish forward bases to support the voyages of fuel-hungry vessels. For him, sea power consisted of this merger of geographic, economic and military implements. Mahan envisioned a symbiotic relationship whereby trade and commerce would generate sufficient tariff revenue to maintain a navy, which in turn would protect commerce. He coined the term “statesmanship directing arms” to denote the art of using naval power for political ends. Sea power thus connotes far more than fleets of armored dreadnoughts battering away at each other on the high seas. It encompasses national purpose, as well as operations and tactics.

Mayday next surveys U.S. maritime history, touching on the classical history that molded the thinking of sea-oriented founders such as John Adams. Oddly, Cropsey spends far more pages reviewing the half-forgotten War of 1812 than he does World War II, a conflict of far greater magnitude and strategic consequence. But he correctly portrays the War of 1812 as a debacle. Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt wrote histories of the war precisely to debunk the popular fantasy that the plucky U.S. Navy had whipped the foremost navy of the day. Cropsey, too, refrains from hyping the single-ship victories of the war’s first year. Henry Adams, in his chronicle of the war, rightly points out that the suffocating Royal Navy blockade drove the American economy to “exhaustion.” A shift in British tactics broke U.S. heavy frigates’ string of early successes, even as the approaching defeat of Napoleonic France freed up warships in Europe for blockade duty off North America. Sobriety, not euphoria, represents the proper attitude as Americans now mark the bicentennial of the War of 1812.

Following this capsule history, the book is largely a venture in net assessment. Net assessment refers to the art of sizing up the physical, diplomatic and military surroundings within which an endeavor will unfold. Carl von Clausewitz provides probably the handiest checklist for assessments, urging statesmen and commanders to appraise the strength and situation of the competitors; the nature of their political goals and the importance they attach to those goals; the capacity of the contending governments, societies and armed forces; and the competition’s likely influence on third parties and bystanders. Cropsey roughly follows the Clausewitzian template, though not explicitly. He finds the United States increasingly wanting across all of these parameters, in stark contrast to ambitious competitors on the march. He takes stock of such factors as budget deficits and the national debt, competing demands on taxpayer dollars, and the escalating cost of fielding ships, aircraft and naval weaponry. These factors have merged into a perfect storm, buffeting efforts to sustain a robust fleet.

How much stress the inventory can stand is open to question. The author notes that, in simple numbers of hulls, the fleet is now smaller than it has been in nearly a century. He also points out that the navy is modifying the composition of the fleet—and attenuating its striking power in the process. It is important to note that not every ship is a shooter. Carrier and amphibious groups travel with entourages of escorts, logistics vessels and other support craft. Each of these vessels, however light or heavy its armament, counts toward the overall tally as one hull.

Numbers, then, can be deceptive. For example, a three-hundred-ship fleet composed entirely of aircraft carriers or destroyers bristling with weapons would clearly be a different creature from a three-hundred-ship fleet made up of unarmed oilers and ammunition ships. Yet the United States could claim to have fielded a three-hundred-ship navy in both instances. Cropsey argues that the navy, in its effort to keep up overall numbers, is diluting its fleet’s combat power. To estimate the navy’s true combat strength, it is necessary to factor in the proportion of battle-force combatants, light combatants such as the new Littoral Combat Ships and support vessels.

Cropsey bemoans this U.S. strategic drift particularly in light of the activities of prospective competitors. Foremost among these is China. In focusing on China’s impressive naval and military buildup of the past two decades, the author points out that the military balance is a relative thing. If the U.S. Navy thins out its combat power and its capacity to project that power into far-flung regions such as East Asia, it in effect accelerates China’s rise to great maritime stature. Summoning up the resolve and the resources to sustain U.S. maritime primacy is critical to preserving the Far Eastern military balance. Americans, says Cropsey, must make the conscious political choice anew for sea power.

IT’S DIFFICULT to fault Cropsey’s general conclusions. American sea power does face perilous times—times that warrant soul-searching on the part of officialdom and rank-and-file citizens. Still, it is possible to take issue with the route by which he reaches his conclusions. I offer here a few thoughts designed not to contradict his overarching thesis but rather to enrich the debate over America’s nautical destiny.

For one thing, the author presents a rather static, all-or-nothing view of the strategic setting. On several occasions he makes the doubtful claim that maritime decline is irrevocable. Indeed, he opens his treatise by proclaiming, “No state that has allowed its seapower to decline has succeeded at recovering it.” Really? Cropsey himself acknowledges that the downfall of classical Athens, recounted by Xenophon, lasted only a minute against the sweep of history. After crushing the vaunted Athenian navy at Aegospotami, Spartan commanders ordered that navy dismantled. Athens was permitted to maintain a minuscule twelve-ship flotilla. The long walls that had enclosed the city and its seaport were pulled down, rendering Athens vulnerable to overland assault.

Within scant decades, the Athenians refurbished their democracy, restored the long walls, constructed a new navy and assembled a new maritime league. They repaired all of the lineaments of sea power. True, the quarrelsome Greek city-states subsequently fell under Persian domination, and Athens ultimately ran into a buzz saw named Alexander the Great. That may testify to poor Athenian diplomacy and strategy, but it says little about the resilience of seagoing peoples.

Sea power, then, is not as perishable as Mayday maintains. Other examples of resilience come from American and British history, as ably retold by Mahan himself. A central theme of his Influence of Sea Power series is that British governments let the Royal Navy slip following the smashing victory over France in 1763. The 1781 battle of the Virginia Capes, when the Comte de Grasse’s fleet fought the British to a standstill—and thereby sealed off Lord Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown, allowing George Washington to prevail—marked a nadir of British naval prowess. But the Royal Navy bounced back within a year, crushing de Grasse’s fleet at the battle of the Saintes, far to the south in the West Indies. British naval might remained on the upswing through the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, when British mariners won the laurels Cropsey rightly acclaims.

Similar tales can be found in U.S. maritime history. Neglect of the U.S. Navy was commonplace in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, despite spasms of popular and elite enthusiasm for naval preparedness. During the Civil War, the Union Navy briefly stood at the forefront of technological innovation while boasting impressive numbers. But after the war, the U.S. Navy atrophied. Mahan, a veteran of Civil War blockade duty, wrote in his memoir, From Sail to Steam, that the service endured an interval of “dead apathy.” The fleet shriveled to about fifty creaky, largely obsolete wooden men-of-war by the late 1870s, inferior even to minor forces such as the Chilean Navy.

Congress inaugurated a naval renaissance in the 1880s, when it ordered the keels laid for the U.S. Navy’s first steel-hulled, steam-propelled battle fleet. The navy destroyed two Spanish fleets in 1898, wresting an island empire from that hapless power. Americans accepted a second-rank navy during the prelude to World War I. Only with the 1916 Naval Expansion Act did Congress and President Woodrow Wilson lead the Republic into its quest for a navy “second to none.” Even then, the sea services sank into another interlude of decline during the interwar years. The navy failed to build even to treaty limits until the late 1930s. Sea powers go through ups and downs, and they can restore their fortunes through determined effort.

Similarly, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force rose from the wreckage of the Imperial Japanese Navy within scant years after World War II. The Soviet Navy that mounted such a stiff challenge to the West in the 1970s and 1980s was a descendant of the Russian Pacific and Baltic fleets whose remains lay strewn across the bottom of the Yellow Sea and Tsushima Strait following the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Sea power can be rebuilt even if it slips owing to enemy action, slipshod decision making, economic malaise or other maladies that work against naval preparedness. Let’s not succumb to determinism.

IN ADDITION, no commitment or theater appears secondary or expendable for Cropsey. No foreign power seems capable of helping balance a hegemon or keeping order in its environs. No alliance or coalition is worthy of joint stewardship over all or part of the system of global trade and commerce. He discounts the capacity of any entente to balance China, for instance, and brands a combined fleet “as politically unimaginable as it is tactically unmanageable.” A power vacuum would be the “certain outcome” if Washington were to “vacate or substantially abbreviate its global maritime duties.” Even drawing down U.S. participation in the modest counterpiracy operation in the Gulf of Aden would have an “immediate” and “shattering” effect on the global economy, not to mention “longer-term negative effects on the region—and the world.” Grim stuff.

Cropsey is hardly alone in his reluctance to shed old or secondary commitments while concentrating policy energy and military resources on the most vital ones. Great powers appear to face a ratchet effect. The 2007 U.S. maritime strategy, for instance, purports to focus on the western Pacific and greater Indian Ocean. Yet its framers also declare that the sea services will maintain their capacity to seize command of any navigable expanse on the face of the globe—unilaterally if need be. The Obama administration’s pivot to Asia has encountered fierce pushback from “Europe first” advocates, who insist on retaining a strong Atlantic naval presence for—well, for some reason.

Cropsey’s logic is unassailable if you accept his premises. If the United States refuses to disentangle itself from any theater or contingency, if its military resources keep dwindling and if it cannot entrust part of the load to others, then it will spread itself thin trying to uphold its interests. Forces that try to do everything, everywhere, end up accomplishing little, anywhere. Commanders and political officials on every scene will clamor in vain for more ships and planes. Top leaders will find themselves compelled to shift resources around in an effort to accomplish the same expansive goals with less.

But is there really no alternative to U.S. marine hegemony, in the same form we have seen it in since 1945? It’s worth looking back, and ahead, to get some purchase on this question. Looking back, we see that before the Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940, when Congress ordered construction of a Pacific navy, few could imagine that the U.S. sea services could manage all of the earth’s seas. Mahan saw the U.S. Navy mainly as a force of the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, shooing hostile—probably German—fleets away from sea-lanes leading to the Panama Canal, and thence to the Far East. Along with kindred naval enthusiasts such as TR, he fretted over the prospect of European naval stations athwart southern sea lines of communication.

Mahan’s vision, then, was one of regional preponderance, not global supremacy. America need not rule the waves—or not all of them, anyway—to make itself a seafaring power of consequence.

Naval officials of Mahan’s day argued ceaselessly about where to position the fleet to manage risk. How could they apportion assets in peacetime to enable the fleet to combine quickly for wartime action? To what degree could detachments be dispersed between the Atlantic and Pacific, and between the eastern Pacific and Asiatic stations? For example, shortly after the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Mahan exchanged notes with former president Theodore Roosevelt and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt on where to station the battle fleet. They decided it should remain concentrated, and thus superior to any single foe. Moreover, it should drop anchor in Pacific waters, lest Imperial Japan make mischief as European navies evacuated the Far East to prosecute the European war. Should the unexpected occur, the U.S. East Coast would have to take its chances until the fleet could reposition itself.

This more fatalistic and realistic attitude toward risk is worth rediscovering in today’s strategic debates. U.S. leaders should learn to say no to new commitments while divesting themselves of legacy obligations.

Looking forward, it can be seen that these are challenging times for good order at sea. Cropsey rightly maintains that a single trustee has overseen the nautical order since Great Britain rose to world power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, supplanting the Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch. As Walter Russell Mead documents in his book God and Gold, Britain in effect passed the torch to the United States sometime in the early twentieth century. The “weary Titan,” in Joseph Chamberlain’s memorable phrase, had exhausted itself in a naval arms race against Germany and in the two world wars that followed. Cropsey also notes that there is no successor-in-waiting to supplant the United States. Over time, China may amass the capacity to manage the system. Thus far, however, Chinese leaders have evinced little appetite for policing the briny main beyond Asia. Furthermore, Beijing scarcely shares the liberal vision of a Washington or London, predicated on freedom of the seas. Whether anyone would want to live in a world dominated by the People’s Liberation Army Navy, rather than the U.S. Navy, is a question worth pondering.

Still, alternative models of custodianship over the commons could emerge. The choice need not be between a single world-straddling hegemon and a war of all against all on the high seas. Why not experiment with a multinational guarantor of maritime security, or with a patchwork of regional alliances and partnerships—an idea countenanced by the 2007 maritime strategy? Fashioning such arrangements would doubtless be messier, and certainly less uniform, than superintending a Pax Americana. Coalition politics are like that. But it behooves pundits and practitioners of sea power to think ahead to a world where the United States remains first among equals—where it encourages local powers to shoulder constabulary duty in their neighborhoods while consolidating its own effort and assets where compelling political and strategic interests lie. Judging from official statements of purpose, that means East and South Asia.

CLASSIC WORKS offer strategists ample insights into the future. Although Cropsey puts Mahan’s face on his case for shoring up the sea services, his reading of Mahan is partial and fails to engage with much of Mahan’s corpus. For example, he writes, “If Mahan’s history had continued beyond the Treaty of Paris in 1783, he might have illustrated his explanation of naval power’s silent influence by pointing to England’s success following the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805,” when a close blockade applied stifling pressure on French seaports and shipping. In fact, Mahan continued his series with a two-volume account of The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812,and a two-volume chronicle of Sea Power in Its Relations to the War of 1812.

That five-volume cycle brings the story up to 1815, even leaving aside his commentaries on later conflicts such as the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese War. The bibliography of his works is itself a book. In his tale of the Napoleonic wars, Mahan waxed lyrical about the “far distant, storm-beaten ships, upon which [Napoleon’s] Grand Army never looked.” These ships purportedly stood between France and “the dominion of the world.” From his pen also issued a glowing two-volume biography of Lord Nelson, the victor of Trafalgar. Mahan styled Nelson “the embodiment of the sea power of Great Britain.”

Other theorists besides Mahan can help illuminate possible future strategies. His contemporary and occasional foil Sir Julian Corbett is eminently worth consulting to complete the picture. Whereas the American theorist writes about “overbearing power” wrested from rival navies, the Briton notes that an “uncommanded sea” is the norm. The oceans are too big, the biggest navy too small, to exert absolute sea command. Mahan urges battle on the high seas. Corbett observes that since men live on land, wars are settled there. For him, the art of maritime strategy is figuring out how to use navies in concert with armies to shape events ashore. Mahan concentrates on capital ships. Corbett gives capital ships their due while inquiring into how lesser craft exercise control of the sea once it’s in hand. Continental theories of sea power also may be worth exploring in this high-tech age, when the seaward reach of land-based combat aircraft, antiship cruise and ballistic missiles, and other weaponry can empower coastal states to influence events off their coasts without ever putting battle fleets to sea. Sea power is not just about navies. Increasingly, it is accessible to land powers. In any event, a fuller reading of maritime theory would help the United States mold its seaborne future.

It’s also important to establish appropriate benchmarks for fleet size. During the 2012 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Mitt Romney noted that the U.S. Navy is now the smallest it has been since 1917. True. And Cropsey draws that comparison as well. But how significant is the World War I tally? Numbers do matter, no doubt. But today’s threat environment, not that of some bygone age, is the proper yardstick for sizing the fleet. The navy may need more assets than it possessed during the Wilson administration if it hopes to ride out an increasingly stressful “antiaccess” setting and keep punching. I suspect that is the case. Nonetheless, the 1917 figure tells observers little, one way or the other.

During the same campaign, the Barack Obama camp emphasized that the U.S. Navy is bigger than the next thirteen fleets combined. But the reference was to aggregate tonnage—not firepower or any other meaningful measure of battle performance. Like raw numbers, tonnage matters. But it isn’t everything. Myriad factors determine how much it matters, just as many factors determine how many hulls is enough to accomplish operational and strategic goals. Unless, that is, you consider the 157,000-ton container ship Emma Maersk more powerful than the supercarrier USS George H. W. Bush. After all, the mammoth merchantman displaces one and a half times as much as the nuclear-powered flattop.

THE CHIEF strength of Mayday falls in its final two chapters, where the author mulls over future force structures. This is the ground where he seemingly feels most comfortable. Earlier on, Cropsey insists that strategy, not budgets, must determine the size and shape of the sea services. His position is both understandable and theoretically sound. It is also, alas, unrealistic. Policy makers and politicians have the final say in strategic decisions, and dollars and cents often dominate their deliberations. A fit of legislative absentmindedness could carry grave repercussions. That is the American way.

Nevertheless, the author explores several less expensive, ostensibly more battleworthy configurations for the U.S. Navy. He pays special heed to a 2009 Naval Postgraduate School report titled “The New Navy Fighting Machine.” The monograph was compiled by a team headed by one of my heroes, retired captain Wayne Hughes, who literally wrote the book on Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat. The Hughes report recommends boosting fleet numbers by introducing smaller, more numerous, less expensive platforms that still pack a wallop. One example among many: the team suggests gradually scaling back the number of big-deck aircraft carriers from the current eleven to six or eight. It would use the savings to construct eighteen smaller carriers. Such moves would expand the U.S. Navy’s geographic coverage, diversify its combat power and reduce the consequences of losing any individual ship.

Cropsey appears much taken with such ideas, and justifiably so. Mayday offers an excellent starting point for thinking through the vexing challenges before the United States and its maritime services—challenges that will confront the nation for a long time to come.

James Holmes is professor of strategy at the Naval War College and coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific, which is forthcoming in paperback later this year. The views presented here are his alone.

Pullquote: The benefits of policing the global system are remote and abstract, while the benefits of pulling back are concrete and quantifiable. No wonder naval proponents fret about what the future may hold.Image: Essay Types: Book Review