U.S. Navy Must Compete for Maritime Supremacy

Writing recently in the Los Angeles Times, Gordon Chang and retired Adm. James Lyons pointed with alarm to China's naval expansion.

That sea power represents the path to national greatness is now axiomatic for the Chinese state and society. China is bolting together a great navy with aplomb, and the United States had better take notice.

Beijing is thinking hard about how to use this new implement to advance national power and purposes. This poses a challenge of the first order. America and its allies must brace themselves for a permanent Chinese presence in maritime Asia — or beyond.

Their first step: jettison the decades-old assumption that American sea power is an unchallengeable arbiter of Asian affairs. No longer does the U.S. Navy rule the Asian seas by virtual birthright. Our navy must compete for what it has long taken for granted.

Sure, that means rebuilding the material component of sea power, manifest in ships, weaponry and bases. Gadgetry obsesses Western pundits. But the service must also think. It must relearn the habits of mind needed to compete and win.

Rediscovering musty old books from America's seagoing past is a good place to start rebuilding its strategic literacy. Reacquainting itself with its own traditions can help the U.S. Navy navigate today's discomfiting new normal.

Beijing views seaborne might as a prerequisite for its ascent to great power. At the Chinese Communist Party congress late last year, outgoing President Hu Jintao vowed to "build China into a maritime power." Hu's words marked the first time officialdom had used such a high-profile public forum to promote China's seafaring project.

His directive, since reaffirmed by successor Xi Jinping, signifies a radical break with China's historic preoccupation with continental affairs.

The People's Liberation Army Navy is way ahead of Hu's and Xi's policy pronouncements. The fleet is already making its presence felt across the region.

It recently commissioned its first aircraft carrier, dubbed Liaoning. It has mounted shows of force in the farthest reaches of the South China Sea, putting steel behind Beijing's territorial claims. And on and on. The PLA Navy is clearly a service on the make.

History's Lessons

But the story doesn't end there. Sea power is about more than navies. It also incorporates land-based missiles and aircraft capable of striking at sea.

Moreover, nonmilitary law-enforcement agencies have dispatched vessels to confront Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Fishing fleets — even cruise ships — have gotten into the act, daring rival claimants to evict them from contested expanses. China could prevail in maritime disputes without ever sending the navy. In fact, it would prefer to.

Sea power is also about more than physical brawn. It demands intellect. It demands vigor and resolve, qualities the Chinese boast in abundance.

Accordingly, Beijing has invested lavish intellectual capital in shaping its seaward turn.

For over a decade now, the leadership has nurtured a freewheeling academic environment, encouraging officials and scholars of various stripes to hold forth on China's seaborne future. The discourse has been impressive.

But China remains a closed society. Why would the leadership fan raucous debate over marine affairs while crushing political dissent?

Probably out of expediency. It takes a clash of ideas among fearless minds to yield creative thinking of sufficient quality to inform policy and strategy.

And by grooming a cohort of (relative) freethinkers, China solidifies the popular and elite consensus that sea power is a natural if not inevitable choice for the nation.

Furthermore, the Chinese are acutely conscious that mindless pursuit of sea power — shipbuilding unmoored from rational strategy — could abort China's rise. It's happened before.

History reminds Beijing that Imperial Germany staged an imprudent naval challenge to Great Britain during the age of Pax Britannica. Imperial Japan undertook an illusory quest of its own, seeking a cataclysmic battleship duel against the U.S. Navy.

Whimsy helped bring down great empires. Only through careful study can China avoid similar blunders.

Letting a hundred flowers bloom, then, has let intellectual curiosity flourish, to the benefit of China's nautical cause.

Chinese strategists commonly consult Western sea-power theorists — most prominently Alfred Thayer Mahan, the second president of the Naval War College — to school their thinking. Multiple translations of Mahan's celebrated treatise "The Influence of Sea Power upon History" (1890) now festoon Chinese bookshelves.

The Chinese are avid consumers of ideas, merging concepts from foreign thinkers into a distinctive brand of maritime strategy.

Their voracity stands in sharp contrast to the apathy many American naval officers, strategists and academics exhibit toward sea-power history and theory, the fields that furnish the raw material for strategy-making.

To cope with China's march to the sea, the U.S. Navy must not just outpace PLA hardware development. It must match the industry and acumen of Chinese thinkers.

It's tough for a long-time champ to stay hungry. Complacency is easier.

But our navy must rekindle its determination to learn and compete — or risk losing its title to Asia's No. 1 contender.

 Holmes and Yoshihara are professors of strategy at the Naval War College, where Yoshihara occupies the John A. van Beuren Chair of Asia-Pacific Studies. They're also co-authors of "Red Star Over the Pacific" (in paperback this summer). Their views here are theirs alone.