Buy More Ships And Renovate The Culture: The Navy’s New Plan To Prepare For War
ByJames HolmesPublishedJuly 26, 2022
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Today the chief of naval operations, Admiral Mike Gilday, released an updated “Navigation Plan” for 2022. In effect, the Navigation Plan represents Admiral Gilday’s instructions to the service on how to execute the Triservice Maritime Strategy (2020), along with higher-order directives such as the National Defense Strategy and the interim National Security Strategy. Several things are worthy of note in the Navigation Plan, some of them head-scratchers.
First, a head-scratcher. The Navigation Plan’s drafters make much of the concept of “integrated deterrence,” taking their cue from the Biden Pentagon. Integrated deterrence seems to mean using all levers of national might in concert with allies, friends, and partners to discourage misadventures on the part of the Chinas and Russias of the world. The document declares that integrated deterrence “leverages the Joint Force’s combined capabilities in all domains—in concert with our allies, partners, and the entire U.S. Government—to make the costs of aggression against our vital national interests prohibitive.”
Which raises the question, what has the U.S. foreign-policy apparatus been pursuing in the past? Disjointed deterrence?
If so, shame on us. Deterrence means impressing on potential malefactors that the United States has the capability to defeat or punish aggression and the willpower to deploy that capability under circumstances it says it will. That’s a grand-strategic endeavor, not a solely military one. Deterrence should always be integrated—and should always have been. In any event, the naval contributions to deterrence outlined by CNO Gilday are familiar ones, including undersea nuclear deterrence and a U.S. Navy-Marine Corps fleet able to prevail in conventional combat. He maintains that “our Navy must deploy forward and campaign with a ready, capable, combat-credible fleet.”
