The U.S. Navy has had a long tradition of operating in East Asian waters. The first American warship to appear in those waters was the thirty-six-gun frigate USS Congress in late 1819, which called at Canton while providing protection to American merchant ships. In 1830, USS Vincennes, the first American warship to circumnavigate the globe, passed through the China seas and called at Macao. Two years later, in November 1832, the arrival of the sloop of war USS Peacock marked the beginning of a nearly constant presence of American warships in the Far East and the early beginnings of an American naval squadron cruising regularly to protect American shipping and business interests in the region. A dozen years later, in 1844, USS Brandywine brought the American envoy Caleb Cushing to Macao to negotiate the first treaty of peace, amity, and commerce between China and the United States, signed at the nearby village of Wanghai. Commodore James Biddle returned to China in the ship of the line USS Columbus in January 1846 to return America’s formal ratification of that treaty. Among the officers in Columbus during this voyage was Midshipman Stephen B. Luce, who thus became the first in the long line of officers and faculty members at the Naval War College—the institution Luce founded nearly forty years later—to have had some direct experience of China. From that beginning, the College’s body of expertise in and understanding of China, and of American experience in China, has grown exponentially. For over a century and a quarter, Naval War College students and faculty have had an interest in the subject. In the first part of the twentieth century, officers associated with the Naval War College served in—and even commanded—the Asiatic Fleet, the Yangtze Patrol, the Sino-American Cooperative Organization, and U.S. Naval Group China. Evidence of some of the College’s past interests and connections in these areas may still be found and used in its archives and in its historical document and museum collections. Between 1950 and 1979, during the Cold War, much of the U.S. Navy’s relationship with China centered around the Taiwan Patrol Force, whose duties included patrolling the international waters off mainland China’s Fujian Province, which separates the mainland from the island of Taiwan. Based on Taiwan at Keelung in the north and at Kaohsiung in the south, U.S. Seventh Fleet sailors who were assigned to those patrol duties—mainly in destroyers and destroyer escorts—found on the island the only direct relationship available to them to interact with China and Chinese culture. Mainland China remained distant and obscure, sensed only by the distinctive smell of the land that many a sailor commented on in approaching the Chinese coast, even before it became distantly visible from the deck. American sailors in those years could get closer only during the occasional port visit to the British crown colony of Hong Kong, where they could take an opportunity to go to the far side of Hong Kong’s New Territories to peer across the closed border into the People’s Republic of China and to try to imagine what the mainland was really like. In this volume, Bruce Elleman, research professor in the Maritime History Department at the Naval War College, applies his expertise as one of the College’s specialists in Chinese language and history to provide a pioneering history of American naval experience in the Taiwan Patrol. His focus reflects the Naval War College’s interests in the policy, strategy, and operational levels and is designed to provide a historical complement to other work on current issues being done at the Naval War College—in the China Maritime Studies Institute and in other departments.

High Seas Buffer: The Taiwan Patrol Force, 1950-1979: Naval War College Newport Papers 38

History

Elleman, Bruce A.

Press, Naval War College

Military

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

In a widely noted speech to the Navy League Sea-Air-Space Expo in May 2010, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates warned that “the Navy and Marine Corps must be willing to reexamine and question basic assumptions in light of evolving technologies, new threats, and budget realities.We simply cannot afford to perpetuate a status quo that heaps more and more expensive technologies onto fewer and fewer platforms—thereby risking a situation where some of our greatest capital expenditures go toward weapons and ships that could potentially become wasting assets.” Secretary Gates specifically questioned whether the Navy’s commitment to a force of eleven carrier strike groups through 2040 makes sense, given the extent of the anticipated superiority of the United States over potential adversaries at sea as well as the growing threat of antiship missiles. Though later disclaiming any immediate intention to seek a reduction in the current carrier force, Gates nevertheless laid down a clear marker that all who are concerned over the future of the U.S. Navy would be well advised to take with the utmost seriousness. We may stand, then, at an important watershed in the evolution of carrier aviation, one reflecting not only the nation’s current financial crisis but the changing nature of the threats to, or constraints on, American sea power, as well as—something the secretary did not mention—the advent of a new era of unmanned air and sea platforms of all types. Taken together, these developments argue for resolutely innovative thinking about the future of the nation’s carrier fleet and our surface navy more generally. In Innovation in Carrier Aviation, number thirty-seven in our Newport Papers monograph series, Thomas C. Hone, Norman Friedman, and Mark D.Mandeles examine the watershed period in carrier development that occurred immediately following World War II, when design advances were made that would be crucial to the centrality in national-security policy making that carriers and naval aviation have today. In those years several major technological breakthroughs—notably the jet engine and nuclear weapons—raised large questions about the future and led to an array of innovations in the design and operational utilization of aircraft carriers. Central to this story is the collaboration between the aviation communities in the navies of the United States and Great Britain during these years, building on the intimate relationship they had developed during the war itself. Strikingly, the most important of these innovations, notably the angled flight deck and steam catapult, originated with the British, not the Americans. This study thereby also provides interesting lessons for the U.S. Navy today with respect to its commitment to maritime security cooperation in the context of its new “maritime strategy.” It is a welcome and important addition to the historiography of the Navy in the seminal years of the Cold War.

Innovation in Carrier Aviation: Naval War College Newport Papers 37

Hone, Thomas C.

Friedman, Norman

Mandeles, Mark D.

The emergence of operationally effective submarines in the decade or so preceding the outbreak of World War I revolutionized naval warfare. The pace of change in naval technologies generally in the late nineteenth century was unprecedented, but the submarine represented a true revolution in the nature of war at sea, comparable only to the emergence of naval aviation in the period following the First World War or of ballistic missiles and the atomic bomb following the Second. It is therefore not altogether surprising that the full promise and threat of this novel weapon were not immediately apparent to observers at the time. Even after submarines had proved their effectiveness in the early months of the war, navies were slow to react to the new strategic and operational environment created by them. The Royal Navy in particular failed to foresee the vulnerability of British maritime commerce to the German U-boat, especially after the Germans determined on a campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare—attack without warning on neutral as well as enemy merchant shipping—in 1917. In Defeating the U-boat: Inventing Antisubmarine Warfare, Newport Paper 36, Jan S. Breemer tells the story of the British response to the German submarine threat. His account of Germany’s “asymmetric” challenge (to use the contemporary term) to Britain’s naval mastery holds important lessons for the United States today, the U.S. Navy in particular. The Royal Navy’s obstinate refusal to consider seriously the option of convoying merchant vessels, which turned out to be the key to the solution of the Uboat problem, demonstrates the extent to which professional military cultures can thwart technical and operational innovation even in circumstances of existential threat. Although historical controversy continues to cloud this issue, Breemer concludes that the convoying option was embraced by the Royal Navy only under the pressure of civilian authority. Breemer ends his lively and informative study with some general reflections on military innovation and the requirements for fostering it.

Defeating the U-Boat: Inventing Antisubmarine Warfare: Naval War College Newport Papers 36

Breemer, Jan S.

Piracy is a basic and fundamental concern for all navies. From almost the beginning of state-sponsored navies, piracy suppression has been one of their major responsibilities—when Julius Caesar was captured by pirates in 76 BCE, the first thing he did after paying the pirates’ ransom and being released was to fit “out a squadron of ships to take his revenge.” Despite piracy’s importance and the continued frequency of piratical attacks, however, relatively few scholarly works have been written analyzing cases of modern piracy and piracy suppression in terms of varying strategic, policy, and operational decisions. This edited collection of case studies attempts to fill this gap. There have been a number of important historical studies that have dealt with the subjects of piracy and piracy suppression. Books written from the point of view of those wishing to end piracy have tended to focus on legal issues, including the rights of victims, the procedures and decisions of Admiralty courts in punishing pirates, and the capture of piracy ships as prizes. Others have looked at the existence of piracy in terms of one particular place or time period, with the Barbary Coast and the Caribbean Sea claiming disproportionate shares of attention. At the turn of the eighteenth century, the Royal Navy was primarily responsible for using force to suppress piracy. British privateers continued to roam the seas, preying on Spanish gold. However, several changes in British maritime legal practice made a renewed fight against piracy possible. On 13 October 1696, Sir Charles Hedges, judge of the High Court, revised Admiralty law so that pirates could be punished anywhere: “Now piracy is only a sea term for robbery, piracy being a robbery committed within the jurisdiction of the Admiralty. If any man be assaulted within that jurisdiction, and his ship or goods violently taken away without legal authority, this is robbery and piracy.” Antipiracy reforms were not enacted rapidly, but by the 1720s the Royal Navy had made it easier for its officers to prosecute pirates anywhere in the world. During this period, Newport, R.I. (pictured on the front cover), was used by Thomas Tew to trade in pirate cargo, with one cargo alone valued at £100,000. The Royal Navy attacked pirates in the Caribbean, along the coast of North America, and as far away as the Indian Ocean.With the creation of new bases, such as at Antigua in the West Indies, the Royal Navy gradually extended its range as far as the northwest Pacific and Australia: “Naval stations and cruising areas gradually covered the shipping zones of the world and made possible the Pax Britannica.” For many people, it appeared that piracy had been destroyed for good. Even fairly recent books focusing on the nineteenth century have included chapters entitled “An End to Piracy.” However, piracy never entirely disappeared during the twentieth century, and during the last quarter of that century events turned out far differently than even the most pessimistic observer could have predicted. This monograph is intended as a contribution to both scholarship and professional naval thinking; it is an academic and comparative examination of twelve selected case studies from maritime history used to illuminate a range of concepts and uses of piracy suppression. The twelve case studies provide the basis for the conclusions, an approach that provides a more thorough understanding of the uses and limitations of naval antipiracy operations in the context of new maritime technologies and within a wider range of modern national policy goals than might otherwise be achievable. Above all, this collection provides a sound basis for comparative analysis of varying historical experiences that can stimulate new and original thinking about a basic but often overlooked naval duty.

Piracy and Maritime Crime: Historical and Modern Case Studies: Naval War College Newport Papers 35

At the end of the decades-long Cold War, the United Stated displayed its military capability in a positive manner by responding to a severe humanitarian crisis in Somalia. The goal of providing assistance amid starvation and a chaos appealed to the better natures of the American people and their leaders. Highly influenced by media coverage of starvation and privation, most American happily embraced a series of operations conducted by their government to alleviate the suffering that appeared pervasive through that African nation. Regrettably, the best of intentions could not prevent a continuing drift toward disorder, and the American relief effort devolved into conflict and bloodshed. Although the operations were not entirely without success, the violence and casualties incurred during these actions left a bitter impression that influenced American foreign policy and military thinking for some time thereafter. In “Somalia … From the Sea,” Professor Gary J. Ohls has written an account of those experiences and their subsequent impact on the policies of the United States. Despite the fact that American incursions into Somalia entailed the joint effort of all U.S. services, naval expeditionary forces provided the preponderance of force during much of the involvement. Professor Ohls illustrates this while analyzing the operational and strategic aspects of these events. This is an account of the Somali military relief effort and its impact on the policies of the United States. Although American intervention in Somalia entailed joint effort by all U.S. services, naval expeditionary forces provided the preponderance of force. Three aspects of this study make it unique among the literature about the Somalia experience. First is the effort to address all the military actions of the period-from EASTERN EXIT through UNITED SHIELD. Many accounts have covered one or several aspects, but no major study has addressed the entire series or attempted to describe and analyze their interrelated nature. A second unique element is its inclusion of the U.S. Navy's contribution to America's Somalia involvement. The naval contribution has generally been left out of accounts. The third unique aspect of this study is its intention to connect the Somalia interventions and the operational and strategic concepts of the time. This element of the subject is fascinating, since the two activities, operations and concept development, occurred simultaneously and interactively. Through this analysis we not only understand the activity of the early 1990s but gain a broad insight as to how concepts are influenced by action.

Somalia ... From the Sea: Naval War College Newport Papers 34

Ohls, Gary J.

Two ideas motivated this anthology of articles published in our quarterly, the Naval War College Review. First, the U.S. Navy is today at a critical point in its history. At a time when the nation is at war—with campaigns in two countries and engagements across the globe as part of the war on terror—the roles and missions traditionally assigned to the Navy have been called into question. Budget pressures have forced the service to reevaluate shipbuilding plans for several ships, including the DD(X) family. Second, it has been nearly ten years since selections from the Review have been compiled in a single, easily accessible volume; in that time there have appeared a number of articles that particularly deserve a second or third look by those who study and practice national security and naval affairs. The articles in this volume speak directly to the Navy’s evolving role in the national and military strategies. The collection should serve as a handy reference for scholars, analysts, practitioners, and general readers interested in naval issues, and also that it will be useful for adoption as a reading by national security courses both in the United States and abroad. While the articles here certainly do not exhaust the range of views and important issues involving naval operations, strategy, or tactics, they do form a foundation for those interested in learning more. Moreover, they have enduring value; the perspectives and analyses they offer will not go out of fashion. The articles are reprinted exactly as they originally appeared, except that: proofreading errors noticed since original publication have been silently corrected; biographical notes have been updated; copyrighted art has been omitted; citation format (which evolved over the years) has been standardized in certain respects; and one author has appended a brief commentary. The volume is divided into three sections. The first introduces the changing security environment facing the United States and, by extension, the U.S. Navy. The articles examine both the external position of the nation and the emerging internal political and institutional contexts that constrain military and naval policies and decision making. The second part looks specifically at the roles and missions of the Navy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Its articles cover both long-standing issues, such as forward presence, and the new missions the Navy has assumed in recent years—from projecting power far inland to providing theater and national missile defense, especially against opponents armed with nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. The last part of the volume concentrates on military and naval transformation. The articles in this section provide some perspective on, perhaps even ballast for, the claims of proponents of the revolution in military affairs. Finally, I supply a conclusion reviewing the main themes of the articles and the avenues to which they point. The Naval War College Review remains one of the premier journals dedicated to publishing articles and essays with a naval and maritime focus. The chapters in the volume provide many of the intellectual building blocks for a maritime strategy designed to maintain American primacy and, if mandated by political leaderships, support a liberal empire that helps protect and spread the ideals of democracy and markets. The Navy’s role will be arduous, and the need for continuous adjustments to the prevailing international security environment great. By reading or rereading the chapters that follow, specialists and nonspecialists alike can gain greater insights into the challenges ahead.

Naval Power in the Twenty-First Century: A Naval War College Review Reader: Naval War College Newport Papers 24

This collection of documents reflecting the evolution of official thinking within the United States Navy and Marine Corps during the post–Cold War era concerning the fundamental missions and strategy of the sea services is part of a larger project designed to bring greater transparency to an important dimension of our recent naval history. This project was initiated by Professor John Hattendorf with his authoritative study in Newport Paper 19, which utilized much previously classified material, of the so-called Maritime Strategy developed and promulgated by the Navy during the 1980s. In the present volume, Newport Paper 27, covering the decade of the 1990s, Professor Hattendorf assembles for the first time in a single publication all the major naval strategy and policy statements of this period. Though all are public documents, most of these statements remain very little known and relatively inaccessible, at any rate outside the Navy itself. They are also not always easy to interpret, reflecting as they often do subtle shifts in emphasis or the nuances of internal bureaucratic argument rather than broadly understandable major changes in strategic thought or practice. Accordingly, the documents are accompanied by an introductory essay that attempts to put them in the proper historical and institutional perspective, as well as by a brief commentary for each that provides additional pertinent information and attempts to assess wider significance. A second Newport Paper dealing with comparable naval strategy statements of the 1970s and 1980s, in the same format and also edited by Professor Hattendorf. It is important to bear in mind that this material is not merely of historical interest. In his address to the annual Current Strategy Forum at the Naval War College in June 2006, the Chief of Naval Operations. Adm. Michael Mullen, announced his intention to craft what he called a new “maritime strategy” geared to the contemporary and emerging global security environment. The complex and not altogether happy story of earlier efforts within the Navy along similar lines can contribute in vital ways to preparing essential groundwork for such an undertaking.

U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1990s: Selected Documents: Naval War College Newport Papers 27

Shaping the Security Environment;Naval War College Newport Papers

U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1970s: Selected Documents, edited by John Hattendorf, is the thirtieth in the Newport Paper monograph series and the second in a projected four volume set of authoritative documents on U.S. Navy strategy and strategic planning. The first volume in this series, U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1990s: Selected Documents, Newport Paper 27, also edited by Professor Hattendorf, appeared in September 2006. The current volume was originally intended to include documents relating to the development of the Navy's "Maritime Strategy" during the 1980s, but the bulk of relevant material has made it advisable to dedicate a separate volume to that period; this is due to appear shortly. A final volume will then cover documents from the 1950s and 1960s.When combined with Professor Hattendorf 's authoritative narrative of the genesis and development of the "Maritime Strategy," The Evolution of the U.S. Navy's Maritime Strategy, 1977-1986, Newport Paper 19, these volumes will provide for the first time a comprehensive picture of the evolution of high-level U.S. Navy (and to some extent U.S. Marine Corps) strategic thinking over the half-century following the end of World War II. Many of the documents reprinted here were-and were intended to be-public statements. In all cases, however, these documents remain little known and mostly inaccessible, certainly outside the Navy itself. It is important to emphasize that they need to be read with careful attention to their historical and institutional contexts. They are in any case not always easy to interpret, and they differ substantially in the weight they carried at the time or later. For these reasons, we have felt it essential to present the documents accompanied by a general introductory essay that locates them in their appropriate contexts, as well as by brief commentaries on each providing additional pertinent information and attempting to assess their wider significances. This project, it is hoped, will contribute importantly not just to our understanding of our recent naval history but also to the serious study of military institutions, strategy, and planning more generally. Also, it is worth noting that this material is of more than merely historical interest. The U.S. Navy (with its sister sea services, the Marine Corps and the Coast Guard) is currently on the verge of completing a major review of its naval and maritime strategy in a new era of protracted low-intensity warfare and growing global economic interdependence. This exercise, whatever the immediate result may prove to be, has unquestionably served the valuable purpose of stimulating serious thought about fundamental strategic issues at many levels throughout the Navy. These volumes can be expected to be an important resource in a continuing process of strategic assessment and education as the Navy continues to adjust to a rapidly evolving security environment.

U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1970s: Selected Documents: Naval War College Newport Papers 30

Naval history as generally recounted is a story of battles at sea. However, it has to be admitted that since 1945 neither the United States nor any other contemporary naval power has had much of a naval history in this sense. Domination of the oceans by the United States and its allies, together with the fortunate failure of the Cold War to culminate in a test of strength between the American and Soviet navies, meant that classic naval battle gradually faded from center stage in the education and professional orientation of American naval officers. Beginning in the early years of the Cold War, the Navy became preoccupied largely with technology and the tactical proficiency that rapidly advancing naval and weapons technologies made increasingly necessary. At the extreme, of course, the advent of nuclear weapons seemed to many to leave the Navy little role in a major global conflict other than to provide invulnerable launch platforms for these weapons—and thereby a powerful deterrent that would, as it was thought, obviate their actual use. Beyond that, though, the switch to nuclear propulsion for the Navy’s capital ships laid heavy technical demands on new generations of naval officers, with concomitant impact on their education and training. The result—or so contends Milan Vego in On Major Naval Operations, the thirty-second volume in the Naval War College Press’s Newport Papers series—has been a long-standing neglect by the U.S. Navy of major naval operations and, more broadly, of the “operational” level of war or of naval “operational art.” The term “operational art” is apt to be unfamiliar to most Americans. American military officers encounter it routinely as a fixture of contemporary joint military doctrine, but even today the concept has substantially less traction within the U.S. Navy than it does in the other services. The reason is plainly that its origins are in land warfare—specifically, in large-scale land warfare as theorized by the German and (especially) Soviet militaries during the interwar period and practiced by these countries in World War II. From the latter, it migrated to the U.S. Army in the late 1970s, as the Army sought novel ways to grapple with the increasingly formidable prospect of a Soviet ground assault against Western Europe. Essentially, “operational art” refers to a level of command intermediate between the tactical and the strategic, one associated with ground command at the level of field army or corps and with the conduct of “campaigns” that unfold as a series of interconnected battles over time. That many naval officers remain unconvinced of its applicability to their own domain is not surprising, given the narrowly tactical focus of much naval warfare of the past. (Wayne Hughes’s classic treatise Fleet Tactics, for example, begins by dismissing the utility of the concept of operational-level warfare for naval combat.) On the other hand, it is difficult to deny that naval command and control doctrine and practice today are insufficiently attentive to what in Army parlance would be called a “combined arms” approach to warfare. The tenuous relationship between the three principal naval warfare communities remains the strongest argument for a serious reconsideration by the Navy of major naval operations and operational art. Dr. Milan Vego is a professor in the Joint Military Operations Department of the Naval War College. He has published widely on the history of German and Soviet military doctrine, and he is the author of Operational Art (2001) and Joint Operational Warfare (2008), an authoritative textbook currently utilized in the department’s curriculum. In this work, he looks back to the richly instructive experience of the U.S. Navy in World War II (as well as in more recent operations during the Korean and Vietnam wars and in the Persian Gulf) in order to develop a taxonomy of naval operational art that can help inform the thinking of the Navy as a whole today.

Major Naval Operations: Naval War College Newport Papers 32

Vego, Milan

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