Thinking Navy

Although American arms have been heavily engaged in the Middle East and elsewhere for the better part of the last five years, the United States Navy has remained very much on the fringes of the various controversies that have dogged the country's military policy and performance in its recent conflicts. In fact, not since the last decade of the Cold War has there been anything resembling a public debate over naval strategy or the role of the Navy in American national security policy. There is some concern in the Navy that the service risks irrelevance in the eyes of many Americans to the extent that it fails to define a clear role for itself in the global war on terror. Clearly, the unparalleled dominance the Navy now enjoys in the world's oceans following the demise of the Soviet Union is a vital component of America's global military reach, but it is also apparent that this dominance is easy to take for granted. It is not difficult to imagine that a continuation of the current American "continental commitment" in the Middle East will come to exert irresistible pressure on the Navy's budget allocations in the coming years. Already it is uncertain whether the Navy will be able to fund the development and acquisition of the new generation of major surface vessels it now has on the drawing board.

With these concerns in mind, the current Navy leadership recently launched a major initiative to rethink the requirements for naval forces in the current strategic environment, and devise a new strategy to address them. Part of this effort — which harks back directly to the so-called "maritime strategy" developed within the Navy in the early 1980s — involves an attempt to engage the attention of the broader public in a conversation on the nature and future of naval power for the United States. For navies are not only about the application of military force; they also have a fundamental, if not always visible, role to play in sustaining global order on the high seas, protecting maritime commercial activities, deterring hostile actors, and cultivating vital relationships with foreign allies and partners. For these reasons, navies are not merely one military instrument among many, but a vital national asset that needs to be appreciated as such.

For any American interested in such a conversation on the future of U. S. naval power, there is no better place to start than its past. Americans tend to be reasonably familiar with the exploits of the U. S. Navy during World War II in the Pacific — the largest naval conflict in the history of the world; but earlier epochs in American naval history are for the most part little known today. Part of the reason for this is how profoundly unfashionable the study of military history has become in our schools and colleges. Military history tends to be viewed by American academics not only with a generalized distaste but as a subject that is narrowly technical or professional, one that can therefore be neatly abstracted from the main flow of political, social, economic, and cultural events that make up history in the sense they would like to understand it. The good news, on the other hand, is that military history survives, indeed flourishes, in America today. This is so because it attracts many firstrate writers who are not primarily academic historians, but who appeal to a wide audience among ordinary Americans — an audience that understands instinctively that war is among the most interesting and important human phenomena.

"Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U. S. Navy" (Norton, 592 pages, $27.95) is an outstanding case in point. Ian Toll, an independent financial analyst without apparent academic affiliation, has produced an immensely learned, intelligent, and readable account of the early years of the American Navy, from its origins through the end of the War of 1812. Mr. Toll is not ashamed to advertise this history as an epic, which alone would have him expelled from the faculty lounge. And yet this is not simply a work of celebration or hero-worship. Mr. Toll's guiding spirit is not so much C. S. Forrester as the eccentric, ultrarealist novelist Patrick O'Brian, chronicler of the British Navy during the Napoleonic era. (Indeed, readers should compare Mr. Toll's treatment of two key encounters between American and British frigates with O'Brian's description of the same battles from the British perspective.) Mr. Toll's account is unsparing in its treatment of political folly, administrative incompetence, and crippling personal rivalries that are so often central to this story. And far from romanticizing the battles themselves, he provides graphic descriptions — very much in the style of O'Brian — of the frequently grotesque carnage produced by the naval fighting of this era. Not even the genuinely great American naval heroes of the time come away completely unscathed. Stephen Decatur's surrender of the frigate President to the British in an encounter in New York harbor at the very end of the War of 1812, for example, causes Mr. Toll to raise an eyebrow.

But America's captains and admirals, outmatched as they were by the enormous British fleet, were far from "shy"; they possessed magnificent instruments of war in the six frigates of Mr. Toll's title, the Navy's first major vessels (one of them, the Constitution, is still in commission); they pursued an intelligent and effective strategy (commerce raiding), and at the end of the day, in view of the mostly mediocre performance of American ground forces during the conflict, they virtually single-handedly prevented an American defeat, or at any rate denied a decisive British victory, depending on one's view of the outcome of this very odd war. In view of the vital role naval power played here, in retrospect it is incredible that the nation's Founding Fathers were originally deeply divided about the need for any kind of ocean-going navy. This is a sobering lesson as we begin to contemplate the future course for the Navy in the shadow of a new global challenge.

Carnes Lord is the professor of military and naval strategy in the Strategic Research Department of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the U.S. Naval War College. His most recent book is "Losing Hearts and Minds?: Public Diplomacy and Strategic Influence in the Age of Terror" (Praeger).