Sea Control: The Navy’s Purpose
By First Lieutenant David Alman, Alabama Air National Guard
October 2023 Proceedings Vol. 149/20/1,448
“If a service does not possess a well-defined strategic concept, the public and the political leaders will be confused as to the role of the service, uncertain as to the necessity of its existence, and apathetic or hostile to the claims made by the service upon the resources of society.”1
Samuel Huntington wrote these timeless words in Proceedings nearly 70 years ago, not even a decade after the end of World War II and the peak of U.S. maritime power. Huntington contended the Navy, at the time, was too focused on fighting other navies at sea—too “Mahanite,” he termed it. Instead, he argued, the Navy’s “purpose now is not to acquire command of the sea but rather to utilize its command of the sea to achieve supremacy on the land.” Carrier aviation, amphibious power, and naval artillery would be the Navy’s means to strategic impact. Since the 1950s, except for a brief interlude, the Navy roughly has followed this advice.
Unfortunately, the Navy’s focus on projecting power ashore has led it astray because of both an incomplete reading of history and decades of great power peace that left ideas unchallenged by peer conflict. The Navy needs a new strategic concept for the 21st century. To tell the nation a compelling story about the purpose of its Navy, the service must return to its roots: sea control. Doing so, however, requires returning to the defining event in the history of the Navy: World War II.
A War Won, But How?
If there is any lesson to be learned from World War II, it is that individual battles are rarely decisive. Instead, what matters is a nation’s ability to degrade and destroy the systems an adversary uses to generate, deploy, and sustain its armed forces. These “superbattlefields,” as historian Phillips O’Brien terms them, stretch thousands of miles and include the raw materials, factories, training grounds, and other systems that feed into the battlefield.2 Within this framework, navies are essential.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/october/sea-control-navys-purpose
