 Good morning. Listening to my mentor, Dr. Hattendorf, talk about Lieutenant Matorco-McCarty Littles' promotion. I vehemently protest having been assigned here as a lieutenant many years ago, not being promoted to captain and kept on until the age of 83. So I just wanted to register my disconsent with that. Let's move on. C-Power is a conscious political choice. In order to figure out what C-Power means today, what strategies we need to draw up in order to make it a reality, and what forces resources and manpower we need to amass in order to make those strategies a reality, there's no better place to start off than with the great works of maritime strategy and of strategic theory writ large. So with that, we have assembled a fine panel to get us started off on the right foot at our conference this morning. We have three speakers, as you see from your program. Nick Lambert sitting to my right insists on depicting himself as an international man of mystery. He's a two-time graduate of Oxford University and author most recently of Planning Art of Again, a book on British economic warfare in the First World War. To his right we have Professor Captain Bud Cole from National War College. He's the author of The Great Wall at Sea. Any of you China watchers out there will be intimately familiar with it. It's been a fixture on the Navy reading list and in China maritime studies more broadly for many years now. And finally, last but not least, we have Barney Robel, retired Captain Robel, Dean of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies here at the Naval War College. Barney, many of you will be familiar with him from the making of the 2007 maritime strategy. He oversaw the research and the gaming that went into the making of that strategy, which was unveiled here back in 2007. So with that, why don't I go ahead and turn over to Nick. I think the rules of the game, I think I can afford 10 to 15 minutes for a speaker if they choose to take that long. Then I will rattle on for five or 10 minutes with some commentary and that should leave us with a bad half an hour of Q and A at the end, which will be the most important thing that we will do here this morning. With that, Professor Wendell, whatever you, whatever you choose to do. I'll like to think if you can set his air recording. All right. All right, good morning. First I'd like to thank Father Ian, thank you for the text, also as the director of our writing community here. I'm not sure quite what I was expecting to bring my economist or historian back. You would think by looking at the title of the paper again that it was going to be, that's probably a good idea. What is it? Classical theory is the Seapar and World Economic Systems. I suppose I should apologize for including the word economics in the title. I should know better. The last book I wrote was called Planning Armageddon, British Economic Warfare on the First World War. And one of the first things the press said to me is do you absolutely have to have the word economics in the title? I said, why? And they said, well, it typically slashes potential sales by 50% and switches everybody off. But what could I say? Yes, it's about economic warfare and I couldn't come up with another term appropriate. So it stuck there. I'd been asked to say something about the great maritime theorists which brings back memory of the last time I spoke here 24 years ago. And the title of that conference was called Mahan Is Not Enough. And it was actually a conference all about extolling the virtues of the English theorists, Julian Corbett and Herbert Richmond and one or two others. I think there's one other veteran in the room. Joanna Hattendorf. No, he's not in the room. He was looking over there at one to get. Anyway, the only one who will remember this. In any case, over the last 24 odd years I've been reading and thinking about Mahan and Corbett a great deal more. And I've really come to the conclusion that maybe Mahan is not enough, but in fact, he is the best we've got. I'm not going to read my paper. I've made substantial revisions to it at five o'clock this morning, as is always the way with any academic. Bottom line, I mean really, in gist, in case you didn't do your homework. One of the big difficulties in talking about any of these maritime theories is sifting the wheat from the chaff. Each of these historians, or if they are historians, produced what, 20 volumes, 100 plus articles and polemics. Their volumes are absolutely riddled with subtexts. You have to know a great deal about contemporary arguments, contemporary debates, to be able to decipher and make sense about an awful lot of what they say. So it really does require considerable expertise and knowledge of long forgotten debates to correctly decipher their messages. Also, one has to take consideration the sheer span of their careers. I mean typically as a quarter of a century for each of them. And much happened in this quarter of a century for both of them. So when Mahan first published his first volume in 1890, who was the United States' hereditary enemy? United Kingdom. They were the first draft of war-proud red. When he died in 1914, who was still the hereditary enemy? Probably Great Britain, judging by the fact that when he died in December of 1914, it was looking like the United States and Britain were gonna go to war. Or heading in that direction, should we say, over disputes of maritime rights. So it was 1812 all over again. Certainly there was no special relationship or benevolent neutrality being displayed by Woodrow Wilson towards Britain fighting in its war against fascist Germany. Anyway, but of course, there's a vast outpouring. So much has changed. When you're looking at the works of both of these men, on the surface they appear to be very much saying very much the same thing. In fact, they're not at all. They really have fundamentally different approaches. They're very definitions of the word strategy, different quite dramatically. But really what I want to get to is they have a very different world views, which is a reflection of their different emphasis on an understanding of the world economic system and its significance of the world economic system and its relationship to shaping what you might call strategic environment in which navies operate. Mahan's first book, as I sort of explained, was very carefully structured and it's predicated upon his key idea, which is that there is a close correlation between sea commerce and wealth generation and national strength, the power of the firm. I could talk at great lengths, it's very interesting, his later writings. He becomes increasingly interested in global economics and increasingly convinced of their importance. There is, he differentiates. I know that he's often thought of man who denigrates and disparages Gerda Kors, which you might think is strange. But he drew a very clear distinction between commerce protection and Gerda Kors. The problem is, is he found his audiences not exactly receptive to subtle differences. There's a wonderful exchange of correspondence with theodore Roosevelt about 1904, where he's saying, yes, I know I haven't changed my mind on the main point. Yes, I don't believe in Gerda Kors, but commerce prevention is something very, very different. He, as I say, he has been criticized by an awful lot of people for not being systematic in defining what he meant by sea power, but there's no question, he's very clear as to what it was all about. Sea power is synonymous with the economics of the sea in his mind. Julian Corbett, again, parallels Mahal on the surface to the very different points of departure. Generally speaking, whereas Mahal is focused on the big questions, the big picture, Corbett is much more interested in discussing the much, much more narrow operational focus to how the Navy achieves a kind of sea. Corbett, yes, he uses the language of economics in a few places. He's very unsure, very uncertain. For him, it's a secondary consideration. It's quite contradictory in places, but fundamentally, he's based upon, his understanding of economics is based upon 18th century understanding of how the global trading system actually operated. He was outdated in his own day. As in consequence, in strategic matters at least, he was largely ignored, which brings us back to Mahal. As I say, he's not really a historian as such back in the turn of the century, last century, a story in a very broad church organisation could mean a lot of things. He's much more of a geo-politician. I came across Tilly Roosevelt's obituary, which actually described Mahal as more of a statesman. He described him as a statesman at first rank, and he said he's much more interested in strategy than in tactics. Interesting by what he meant by the word strategy. It's strategy is geopolitics, it's grand strategy. That's what he meant by the term. Again, Mahal is very closely associated with the leading statesman of the day, Elehu Root, John Hay, Harry Cabot Lodge, and of course, Tilly Roosevelt. And much more interestingly, he's very closely, he's in connection, he's in communication with their leading economic advisors, who would include Arthur Hadley at Yale, Jeremiah Jenks Cornell, and Charles Cohnert. This seems to have, I don't know, it's very interesting, he seems to have had a grasp or a fundamental grasp or an instinctive grasp of economics. It's much more, most apparent when Mahal is looking into the future, and Corbett as well. Corbett says it's the commerce prevention. It's gonna become less and less significant over time. Mahal is saying that that tops it. He's saying it's gonna become much, much more important. See, power is going to be much more important and important as time goes by. His later volumes, there's this wonderful bit in metaphor that he knows about in the French Revolutionary Volume, where he described it as an organic, complex, dynamic being. He actually writes, as I say, this correspondence, Mahal and Tilly Roosevelt in December of four. He says that the power to control commerce, the lawful right, international precedent, the precedent's now hampered, probably right on that, is maybe of immense, even decisive importance in future war. But really what is actually Mahal saying and what's he talking about? Really what I think he is talking about is grappling with the strategic implications of what we now call today globalization. This is at the time, late 1890s, early 1900s, there's a growing perception of the transformation in the global economic system. Something really different has emerged. Subsequent development of telecommunications, at least a whole raft of factors, I don't know if I'm getting that specific. As a result of this transformation, basically the economic well-being whole societies has increasingly come to depend upon a highly optimized economic system, which is itself dependent upon access to the infrastructure of the global trade and especially upon access to real-time communications. Particularly in industrialized nation states with large urbanized populations, the societal and political stability really required high levels of economic prosperity made possible by the steady flow of goods and staples through the global trading system. The most basic level, urban populations needed a steady supply of food. How much is actually in the city on the shelves? Very, very little. Producers, of course, are dependent upon selling their produce in a constant stream of commerce. If it starts to pile up on the walls or in the halls, they're indeed in trouble quickly, largely because of their credit financing. And, of course, equally in trouble will be the banking system of the extent that the loans to begin with. The, at the same time, the strategic implications of all this have been considered. Most prominent among these is the bank called I can talk about some fascinating character, talk about him at great length, knew and met Mahan at an 1899 aid conference. And if Mahan actually seems to take on an awful lot of his ideas, most particularly, he's half-persuaded, more than half-persuaded, that the moral and psychological, he's, well, Losh calls into question the moral and psychological stamina of what you might call industrial countries. And Mahan actually adopts this idea. The whole message of interdependence and interconnection is very much popularized by Norman Agile, a British journalist who wrote a book that sold about two million copies before the First World War. Mahan is saying exactly the same thing as I do that Losh. And this is the real difference between calling Mahan. Mahan sees that the world economic system is fundamentally dynamic and that the interruption of flows, as opposed to stocks, flows can produce serious and significant results. He sees that the maritime system, as it were, is the biggest and best wealth generation sheen that exists on the planet. And he insists it must be protected at all costs. Corbett doesn't see any of this. He thinks in terms of stocks, not flows, he thinks that wealth is largely a function of the produce of land, resource, exploitation of land, resources, pretty much my kinderite, rather than anybody who believes and sees that. If I could say one last thing is that, yes, Mahan may be a visionary, but he doesn't absolutely, he didn't see everything there. He sees the outline clearly enough to see the essential characteristics and the dimensions of what he's looking at. He can't necessarily see the detail. And he didn't see what a number of British strategists involved in developing plans for economic warfare for 1914 actually saw, which was a plan to basically marry seapower to the exploitation of effective British monopoly control of the infrastructure of the trading system, which is ships, financial services, communications, the idea of which was to basically, at the beginning of the war, one person bought a British sleeping plan, another as very cleverly and exactly Monterey, Brits Creek, really would rather wish I thought of that. In any case, there is this plan that is put into effect in 1914 to basically isolate Germany from the global trading system. The idea being is just to collapse their underpinning financial systems and bring about an entire collapse or at least push their society towards a collapse and lead me to political settlements in 1914. But the reality was is that the strategists were seriously underestimated, number one, the level of global panic that tended the beginning of the war. Everyone thinks that 1931 or 2008 is the greatest economic crash from last 100 years. It isn't, it's 1914, that's the big one. And they seriously underestimated the resistance from other stakeholders, both domestic and foreign. You mess with the global economic system and you're risking economic harm again and that's something very few politicians are willing to risk. So yes, it's easy enough to come up with this trip. It's not easy, but it is possible enough to come up with a coherent strategic plan but it is not at all easy to implement. So as I said, at the beginning, harm may well not be enough, but it is necessary. Thanks, Nick, Bob. Well, thanks very much. I'd like to particularly thank the Naval War College for inviting me to be here today. I'm really honored. Also, as you can see on the screen, I usually have this disclaimer I have to give but I've started giving a second disclaimer when I talk about the Chinese Navy, which is I'm not Chinese. And as Jim can attest to finding out what the Chinese are thinking in maritime terms, what they really mean is something of a daunting task. I was asked today to reflect on the influence of current maritime strategic thought and I was first gonna use the term venerables and then I realized that there was a certain religious connotation to that which led me to remember Henry Stimson's famous quote here about the U.S. Navy. With respect to maritime strategy generally, what I discovered when I looked at as many maritime strategies in the Asia Pacific as I could in writing my recent book on the topic, I'm firmly convinced that just about all maritime strategies are really, at least the ones that are published, are written as much for domestic and service competition political purposes as they are to provide any real guidelines to naval officers or maritime leaders of any sort. And I'll note here that the Canadian maritime strategy struck me as particularly apt. Probably the best in terms of guidelines for real operations at sea, the best maritime strategy I came across was published by Bon Le Desh, hardly a maritime power. In terms of China, the maritime nature of the nation is obvious. Not only with respect to the long coastline and the many islands they possess and claim, but also to the incredible importance of the rivers, especially if we look at the Tibetan Plateau where the Yellow River and the Yangtze and the Mekong and other rivers all have their headwars. It's an amazing demonstration of how important in the international arena this particular aspect of maritime power can become. I'll also note here that one of the areas of concerns of the Chinese Navy, certainly in the future anyway, are the sea lines of communications. And I'll point out that the sea line communication from Shanghai to the Persian Gulf is over 5,000 nautical miles. Probably too hard to defend in the World War II, World War I classical sense, but we'll speak more about that here in a moment. I tried to come up with some, first I said dates and then I realized some formative points that would contribute to Chinese conceptions of maritime strategies. I mentioned the importance of maritime trade, not just energy, although that's increasingly important, that is the seaborne importation of energy, but also in historic terms, although China historically has been a continentalist power and the army today still dominates the Chinese military, the idea about defending against barbarians remains pertinent. When I lead students on the China trips and we're always accompanied by a couple guys from the foreign affairs office of the Ministry of Defense we refer to them fondly as our barbarian watchers. There have been times during China's history when navies have been raised, but for rather discrete purposes, and of course perhaps the most famous is during the Ming Dynasty when they overthrow the Yuan and then later during the voyages of Zheng He. Although I'm quick to add to editorialize that the constant Chinese claims that Zheng He was a demonstration of the peaceful use of Chinese military powers, nonsense in my view, if you read Ed Dreyer's book on what Zheng He actually did as he traversed the Indian Ocean. It's hard to overestimate the importance from a maritime strategic view of first general then admiral then general again, Luo Haching. He was in power basically from 1982 to 1997, either as commander of the navy or as one of the two most important uniformed individuals in the Chinese military. That was long enough I think for him to make the necessary changes against the inert bureaucracy, any bureaucracy has a certain amount of inertia. Sergei Gorshkov in the Soviet Union was in command of the navy long enough I think to turn the bureaucracy. In the United States, Elmo Zomlach was not. I mean he made some significant changes but in four years of seeing, if he'd been seeing over 10 or 15 years, I suspect we would have seen some really dramatic, increasingly dramatic changes in the navy. I think it was during his tenure in the 1990s, especially spurred by the 1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis, that he really gained importance for the navy in China. And we all have read about his three phase strategy and so forth nailed to dates 2000, 2020, 2050. I think the real purpose of his writings had very little to do with the international regime but really more was internal to the PLA in an attempt to try to gain resources and stature for the navy in which his success is just now I think in the last few years being evidenced in China. I also note 2003, you may recall that the Chinese found a Ming-class submarine floating half submerged with the crew all dead inside, probably from a ventilation lineup problem. That really caused a very significant, even a major reorganization of the supply procedures and the maintenance procedures within the Chinese navy. They fired everybody from the navy commander on down, instituted for the first time a centralized supply system and also began a PMS plan maintenance system type organization within the navy. 2008's important because of the Gulf of Aden deployments. The date that Loha Cheng apparently wrote about for China being able to establish sea control out to the first island chain, I've got a chart here in a moment of that, is usually given as 2000. They didn't meet that date. They probably by 2020 are pretty close to it. The second date, 2049 or 2050 would establish the Chinese capability for sea control out to the second island chain. Now I use sea control advisedly, not command to the sea or maybe not even sea control in the terms employed by Mahana Corbett because I think what the Chinese are doing is trying not to take on the US navy or any other navy one on one, but rather to be able to apply maritime force sufficient to attain very specific strategic objectives at a very specific time, whether it be Taiwan, the East China Sea or the South China Sea. Some of the phrases assigned with that and one we read most often about is anti-access area denial, A2AD. There's nothing new about this concept. I would argue that Jefferson with his gunboat navy, President Thomas Jefferson, Japan during World War II, the Soviet Union during later stages of the Cold War all tried to establish an A2AD sort of strategy and all failed. You have to see what happens in this case. I'll also mention two other phrases we read about a lot that is offshore defense and active defense and this is sort of China's twist on Clausewitz's theory of the offense and defense. What it means is what we might consider offense to Chinese would consider defense and as I constantly remind my students, this is important if we try to estimate what Beijing may do in reaction to specific other foreign nations' moves. I'll also note that the term, that the 2049 date is important if we look at the current president of China, Xi Jinping, who's been talking about his China dream. Largely undefined but apparently based on the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. So I think this is a significant date. The core interests that concern Chinese maritime strategies have been defined by Xi Jinping as, quote, state sovereignty, national security, territorial integrity, and national reunification, obviously meaning Taiwan. China's political system established by the Constitution, overall social stability, and it goes on, that really all boils down, last phrase all boils down to keeping the Chinese Communist Party in power. And these other points you see up here are self-explanatory except I don't think there is any Malacca dilemma. That's referred to by Chinese analysts with the thought that if the US or somebody else closed down the Strait of Malacca, really the Straits of Singapore in Malacca, that it would somehow starve China's energy imports. Well, in fact, only about 10% of China's daily energy needs come from imported oil. And second of all, as many of you realize, the Strait of Malacca is debt-limited, and many of the larger tankers have to steam elsewhere when they enter the South China Sea or go on up to Northeast Asia. But what's important is not the facts of the Malacca dilemma, what's important is if the perception of a Malacca dilemma exists in Beijing, then it will spur a further maritime strategic thought. Now, these are the famous island chains we read about. I'll point out that the distance from Shanghai to Okinawa is about 450 nautical miles, and from Shanghai to Guam is 1,670 nautical miles. These are very large maritime areas in which to try to exert sea control. But I point out that today I'm convinced that China's maritime strategy is based on the ability to control the sea within the three seas or the near seas, East China Sea, South China Sea, and the Yellow Sea. And that their second island chain is really based on the thought that by the mid-century, when the Chinese military is supposedly mature and finally modernized, they'll be able to exert sea control out this nearly 1,800 miles to the line you see there. And these lines swing west through the Indonesian archipelago. For the first time, I was reading a Chinese document about two weeks ago, and for the first time saw the area within the second island chain referred to as the Middle Sea. So near seas, middle seas, and beyond the second island chain as the far seas. This slide shows some quotes by some of the leaders of China, all of whom have emphasized the necessity of a strong navy, although I mentioned that Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping both considered the navy to only be a supporting arm of the army. This is only now beginning to change. Xi Jinping has said that there's going to be a leveling of the effort, if you will, among the three services with the indication that the navy and the Air Force and the Second Artillery will all be gaining manpower and resources. We had a senior military region commander come to National Defense University last fall who indicated the same thing in a one-on-one conversation. But nonetheless, as of right now, the army remains dominant in terms of command positions and certainly manpower. Resources have already shifted to a degree to the navy and Air Force simply because of the expenses of the ships and aircraft and so forth. Influences on Chinese maritime strategy? I mean, suns on Klausowitz probably never saw an ocean. But nonetheless, both are certainly studied at the various professional military education institutions in China and both have a certain amount of influence. The Chinese certainly study the US Navy, particularly John Layman's 1986 maritime strategy and the effort since the end of the Cold War to come up with something equally meaningful efforts I don't think have been very successful. And I cannot emphasize enough the importance not only of geography. And from the Chinese Navy strategist's point of view, the island change remained dominant in their thoughts, perhaps too dominant. But also the importance of domestic and PLA politics in China. The PLA Navy, like most navies, certainly like the US Navy, has to struggle for resources and manpower. When I served on a Navy staff, I thought the immediate enemy was not the Soviets, but really the US Submarine Force. I also have to note that the Chinese learned from these strategists. I'll mention Sunza's emphasis on deception was certainly placed into the informationization, information warfare emphasis we see in Chinese maritime strategic thought today. However, I would caution that I think Sunza seems to assume too much that events can be controlled. And I think the Chinese military is prone today, dangerously prone, to establishing or participating in a situation that would lead to unintended escalation. A particularly respect today to the East China Sea dispute with Japan. I'll also mention that certainly Clausewitz and Mahan are more realistic, I think, about the dangers of unintended consequences at sea, going along with Nelson's supposed statement that, quote, nothing is certain in a sea fight. I also note that China's emphasis on the land features in the East and South China Seas evokes Admiral J.C. Wiley's comments on the importance of power projection short. I use the term in my paper, organizational strategists. And I think we often don't pay enough attention to this. I think if we look in our terms, Arleigh Burke and Elmo Zomel and John Lehman, although we don't often think about those guys as maritime strategists per se, certainly we're able to change the organization. And in China, not only Lu Ha-Cheng, but also more recently, Shui Yunsheng and Wu Shun Li as commanders of the Chinese Navy have been able to establish real differences, whether it be in, rather, pedestrian terms of resources and management, but changes that have had impact on the way the Chinese will strategically be able to use their force. I've written three books on the Chinese maritime, the Navy or maritime strategic thought. The first one I basically completed writing in 2000, the second one in 2009, and then the third one about a year ago. This is what I wrote in 1999 on the paper. And I think over the course of almost 15 years now, China has in fact been developing, a Navy has been in fact developing a maritime strategy, de facto not written, at least not published, that we now have to pay attention to. I think the best way to look at that maritime strategy in writing is the 1998 ocean policy statement and also the various defense white papers that have come out. I close by noting, however, that while China today is attempting to become a maritime as well as a continental power, and they have this de facto maritime strategy that when President Xi Jinping wakes up in the morning, the first thing he thinks about is not Taiwan or the United States or Japan, the first thing he thinks about is as Thomas Tip O'Neill once said, all politics is local, he thinks about domestic problems in China. This doesn't mean we don't have to pay increasing attention to the Chinese Navy and maritime strategic thought, but I do think we have to keep it in perspective. Thank you very much. Thanks, Bob, Barney. Good morning. My paper that's posted on the website and is one of the working papers is a summary of an article I published in the autumn 2013 Naval War College Review and deals with the evolution of U.S. Navy peacetime deployments, which are themselves manifestations of U.S. policy grand strategy such as it's been at any given moment, and of course the maritime component to all of that, which we call rightly or wrongly maritime strategy. I've also got an article coming out in an upcoming proceedings magazine that reflects broadly on U.S. maritime strategies, and I'm gonna blend the main ideas from it in my conference paper into this brief reflection on maritime strategy. The main idea here is simply that the big picture, the forest as it were of U.S. maritime strategy consists of being forward with credibility. The specific reasons for doing this have shifted over the years as geopolitical conditions have changed, but the central fact of presence has remained constant. I think it's worthwhile as we contemplate a post-Crimea world that we consider why this is so. We have to admit that the U.S. pays a pretty penny for maintaining powerful naval forces forward. This presence has been a fact of life for so long that it's easy to take it for granted, a geopolitical terrain feature as it were. It's really useless to try and calculate the return on investment for this massive expenditure of money, manpower, and diplomatic effort. Any number of folks have tried, but without success in my view. In my view, the term investment does not get at the true nature of our strategy. I believe the motivation for sending naval forces forward lies at the intersection of what the U.S. is as a nation and the physical geography of the world. There's no time here to give this idea sufficient development, but let me just touch on a couple points. The U.S. maritime strategy forest is emergent, not designed. All the strategy documents, budgets, and plans that have been crafted over the years are the trees. Looking back over them, we see an underlying congruity despite their differences in structure, style, resources, and technology that underpin them. I believe this congruity stems from the fact that the U.S. has founded on institutions, not on bloodlines, culture, language, or any of the other discriminators that define individual nations elsewhere. Whereas continental powers like Russia seek security through buffering, the U.S. has sought security through relationships based on trade and defense and other issues in different proportions depending on the era. More especially, the U.S. has attempted to pursue security through the establishment of supranational institutions. Institutionalization of security is a natural American reflex that is aided and abetted by the simple geographic fact that the, to kind of quote MacKinder, that the seas are all connected. Richly in doubt with all the factors, Alfred Thayer Mahan identifies as building blocks of sea power, see I invoked him. The U.S. has been at liberty to pursue its institutional agenda, which of course the State Department would tell you is a rules-based international order. And this has been done consistently over the broad sweep of our history. The U.S. Navy is simply the handmaiden of this agenda. So long as this is who we are as a nation, the U.S. Navy will be out and about aiding and abetting. Keeping this assessment in mind, I'm gonna speculate a little bit on potential U.S. strategies going forward in view of a more assertive Russia and China. The first option, of course, is to try and maintain the status quo. And why not? The U.S. primacy is kind of the high road to our institutional agenda. In this option, the Navy stays forward with credible combat power to contain expansionism and to try to engage and bring the revisionist powers back into the system. It should be noted that whatever rebalance to Asia we might have been trying to execute is now kind of overcome by events. Not that I ever thought rebalanced to Asia was a good idea in the first place. The U.S. wants an institutionalized globe, so the U.S. Navy must act out its role in a global basis. If the status quo is too rich for our blood, then one possibility is to make some kind of grand security deal with Russia and China. God knows they would only be too happy to lock in their own regional hegemony. We might, for instance, let them buffer locally, but then, in turn, they would have sent to not expanding their security zones beyond agreed upon limits. The Navy backs off staying outside the EEZs defined by the new baselines. Such a deal may ensure peace in our time, but of course it means that we abandon our institutional agenda and leave a lot of people to the tender mercies of dictators. If that option is too smelly for us, we might consider trying to reshuffle the geopolitical card, so to speak. George Friedman of Stratford just had an article on this this morning talking about a new kind of defensive arrangement, not NATO, in Eastern Europe. What we would do is put together a new arrangement of allies, perhaps arranging from Estonia to Azerbaijan and including others in Southeast Asia. As a globalized defensive consortium or a series of them could take some of the deployment pressure off the U.S. Navy, perhaps allowing it to functionally specialize. The U.S. could still pursue its institutional agenda within the bounds of a more redefined security community. One might expect, as a consequence, however, the formation of a new third world over which there'd be great power of competition and this would necessitate yet different patterns of U.S. Navy deployment. Finally, there could be true retrenchment with the fleet coming home to enforce some new addition of the Monroe Doctrine. The Navy would sortie overseas episodically, responding to intolerable acts, direct attacks, or the occasional diplomatic opportunity. In fact, a version of this option, which we called Offshore Balancing, was presented to a flag panel back in 2007 in conjunction with CS21 development. They rejected it out of hand, which I think reflected both the geopolitical conditions of the time and also the deep-seated culture of floor deployment that exists in the U.S. Navy. But even in a retrenchment scenario, the issue of freedom of the seas cannot simply be set aside. Commerce must flow and the U.S. Navy must be able to go where needed in order to support U.S. interests. In the 19th century, American commerce and indeed the Navy moved about the pleasure of the Royal Navy. I cannot conceive of a situation in which we would allow movement on the seas to be dictated by either the PLAN or the Vojnomorsky Floor. So in the end, the U.S. Navy will have to deploy in some way, shape, or form. So I suppose all I've done in this short expose is to state the obvious, but perhaps the obvious is only so if you actually state it. The problem with sea power is that when it is successful, it becomes invisible. The agent as much for what does not happen as for what does happen. This is another reason that U.S. maritime strategy, writ large, is emergent and not designed. That said, the current maritime strategy document, CS21, is a step in the direction of design. Whereas the 1980s maritime strategy was contingent, specifying what the U.S. would do if the Soviets attacked. And the 1990s from the sea series of white papers were doctrinal. Talking about joint warfare in the literal without specifying who, why, what, or where. CS21 is systemic. It's designed to be executed 24-7, 365. The purposes behind CS21 offer us a clue as to why a forward deployed Navy servant to U.S. institutionalism will most likely remain forward regardless of U.S. future grand strategy direction. The idea with CS21 is to create a global maritime partnership to secure the seas against terrorist smuggling. The job is too large for the U.S. alone. It needs collaborating Natives to share information and this only works in an institutionalized world. CS21 sets a stage for this by asserting the U.S. sea services deployed to defend the global system. This is something that raises all kinds of ire within the Beltway. But this statement generated the necessary political capital overseas that in turn produced the emergence of regional maritime domain awareness system, whether it be Brazil's SISTRAM, TRMN from Italy, MSSIS from Singapore, SUKBAS from Sweden, et cetera. America is now safer because of this emergent but the underlying glue to all this is a globally deployed powerful U.S. Navy. Defense of the global system as a declarative maritime strategy is perhaps the ultimate expression of the intimate intertwining of American institutionalism, its sea power, and the singular nature of the world ocean. So long as America is what it is, the Navy will be out there, wherever there might be but not here. What the Navy shows up with, there will be a matter of technology and available resources but it will be there. And that is our maritime strategy, peace or war. Thanks, Barney. Let me comment just briefly on each one of the papers and perhaps pose a question that the authors might like to follow up on. I actually present that Nick's writing a paper that I couldn't find very little to disagree with. In fact, I spend a lot of time trying to come up with something to nitpick him on. So I think I'm gonna do it by, he has attacked the English theorists and I'm gonna see a word on behalf of the English theorist Corbett. My hands portrait is undoubtedly smiling if we step out into the rotunda right now. In my view, both of the theorists really missed an opportunity to come up with a unified theory of maritime operations and sea power. The way Nick puts it in his paper is almost verbatim the way I put it when I talked to my students here at the War College about the relationship between these two theorists. To me it seems that, as Nick says, and I'm not quite in these terms, but my hand operates on the level of the logic of sea power, whereas Corbett operates down at the grammatical level, talks about how to implement a vision of commerce, spaces, and ships to use my hands' famous shorthand for what sea power is. So that's point one. I actually wish that my hand, instead of writing naval strategy in 1911, would have sat down and essentially condensed his thoughts about sea power into one volume. Similarly, it would have been really great if Corbett had managed to come up with a volume in which he sketched his vision of what sea power was in grand terms, as well as how to execute a maritime strategy. But I guess I don't disagree with your idea that my hand is the best we have, but it does raise the idea that we would be better off if one of these theorists had really taken on this great task. Secondly, and here's the point that I think I might disagree with you on just slightly. You pay a lot of attention to Corbett's views of the economic system. And I think I would come back at you just a little bit by saying that did Corbett really need to justify what Great Britain was doing at the time as far as maintaining that network of commerce, spaces, and ships overseas? Did he really feel the need to justify what Britain had been doing for many decades and centuries? So as a status quo of power, clearly Britain was just trying to defend what it had. And the specific point that you called attention to in your paper comes from the text of Corbett where you talk about, you suggest that he is actually downgrading commerce protection as a function of sea power. And I went back and looked at the word that you used, deflection. Terrible word in our current way of using the English language. And Nick suggests, I think that Corbett was saying that this is just a sideshow. Commerce protection is a sideshow in maritime strategy. In fact, what Corbett is, what he's actually doing is he's discussing the difference between maritime warfare and land warfare and pointing out that in distinction to land armies, navies also have this other function. Not only do they have to go out and seek the enemies fleet for battle, but they also have to think about protecting commerce as well. And in fact, he points out, he's rather out in front saying that not only commerce, but also just politics in general always impinges on the conduct of maritime warfare. So I took this to be more operational than a more operational point than a comment on the nature of the economic system. You might want to comment on that and see if we could come to some meeting of the minds there. And I think that's it for Nick's paper. Let me move on and just say, or at least pose a couple of questions for Bud's paper, which I enjoyed greatly as well. I think that Bud is touching in on one of the big debates that we have when discussing strategic culture. And in particular, if you relate this to the maritime realm, is there a universal logic and a universal way of doing sea power? Or is this a historic accident generated by the fact that all the great theories of sea power have been developed during the era of Western dominance, which I suppose you could trace back about 500 years depending on how you want to count it. And if you relate to this to China, it appears, and if Bud suggests, and I think that I've contributed to this as well, we are suggesting that China is importing or perhaps re-importing Western ideas about sea power. How does that work, Bud? I mean, you suggest quite clearly that the island chains and the use of geographic features is foreign to theories of sea power. But is that just foreign to Western theories of sea power? Or are we likely to see something very different emerge in Asia as China rises to maritime eminence? Perhaps India rises to maritime eminence? You know, how are these ideas going to shake out? And what is Chinese maritime strategy going to look like over the long haul? Oh, just a second question. I just thought I would try to draw you into a contemporary debate. John Mirsheimer a couple of weeks ago out at the University of Chicago suggested that China has no significant military power and that we should say goodbye to Taiwan. And I was just wondering whether, what you think about, I don't know if you saw that article in The National Interest, but I just thought I'd try to draw you in and get you to say something inflammatory about that, or perhaps not. And finally, let me move on to Barney's paper. I very much enjoyed the way that he read, that he spelled out several different potential futures for the United States moving ahead. For example, I think his idea of a grand bargain that we could actually call that a reversion to the Four Policemen theory of Franklin Roosevelt needing into the foundation of the UN Security Council, the idea that the big powers would police their own neighborhoods and essentially get along that way. And I think Barney also suggested, and I fully agree with this, that that's fine as long as the policemen agree on what the laws are that they're enforcing. If the policemen have very different visions of what maritime order they are enforcing, I think you could run into a serious quarrel and really have a prospect for some bad times ahead. And so on and so forth. I guess my question for you, Barney, is if we bring in Klausovitz briefly and talk about the trinity, the trinity of chance and probability, the trinity of great passions, and the trinity of rational subordination of policy, or of strategy to policy, rather, how do you fill in that, given that sea power is invisible, as you said, in the popular eye, how do you fill in that passion to a degree? What, if I'm the CNO, the Secretary, the Navy, or whoever, how do I sustain popular support and support among the Allies for these various models of our maritime future? Because I'm not sure I know the answer, so I'm hoping that you will provide us with some wisdom on this point. And with that, why don't we just run back down the line and I'll let you all comment as you see fit. Well, nothing more boring than two academics debating some point of a new shape on a particular subject, so I'll keep it very short. What I think, what I try to say is that, Corbett, yes, he addresses the question of economics. He talks about it in his book, and he talks about commerce prevention, but he's inconsistent, and he's in places contradictory. And my point is, is I think, where phrased it was, he's uncomfortable with the subject. And this is particularly apparent, I'm not going so much by his theoretical textbook of 1911, as by his earlier historical works, where his treatment of broader economic issues is rather weak, and I don't really understand the Tudor Navy, I'm beyond. It's, he isn't in command of the subject, he understands the politics of the diplomatic aspects, that when it comes to economics, he struggles as well as when I begin. Well, Jim, thanks very much. That's a great question, a universal way of doing seapower. I'm tempted to say yes, in the broadest sense of the word, because I don't believe in some of the writings about China having this unique way of warfare, unique war culture, the idea of an assassin's mace, and so forth, or asymmetric warfare. I mean, what intelligent military commander doesn't try to seek out his opponent's weakness and attack it? With respect to the island change and the three seas, I think this is being used, as I noted, by Chinese naval planners, with respect to the national strategic objectives that I referred to in core national interest. Number one, still being Taiwan. I think that's why China has developed such a powerful, conventionally-powered submarine force over the last 15 or 20 years. But if we look at what's happening economically and politically between Taiwan and the mainland, it's particularly with the meeting about a month ago in Nanjing, between, for the first time since 1949, official government representatives of each body. I think the Taiwan issue is decreasing in the possibility of turning into a military conflict. And I would suggest that by 2020, 2025, at the very latest, the PLAN will no longer be terribly concerned about a possible conflict involving Taiwan. This, of course, goes to the point that if I were a young PLAN commander in Beijing today, and had been tasked by the Navy commander with justifying continued budget increases by the PLA headquarters and by the national budget, I'd be looking beyond Taiwan, even beyond East China Sea, South China Sea possibilities, and looking perhaps at trying to justify guarding the sea lines of communications as a justifiable mission for the Chinese Navy. I mentioned earlier that during the Ming dynasty and at other times in China's history, it's developed a Navy, but then basically decommissioned it after the emergency of the moment or the decade. I don't think that's gonna happen this time, but I do think that the Chinese Navy is gonna have to find strategic reasons for its continued modernization and expansion. I disagree with Mir Shimer in general. We had John at the NWC a few years ago to that point. And I mentioned, but however, Hugh White in Australia, just very recently, within the last week or two, has published another series of things that he's been publishing on the same point. The idea being that the U.S. and China should establish some accommodation in the Western Pacific, and this goes exactly Jim's point about, well, how do you establish the rules? You can't establish an agreement without the rules. The idea about saying goodbye to Taiwan, I think, is irrelevant at this point. I think Taiwan is on its way sort of out of the American orbit. One last point I'll make is on seapower being invisible or visible, it's not invisible to the Chinese people as we've seen recently. The National People's Congress last year, there was lots of public statements and complaints about China not having a formal maritime strategy. Now that Congress doesn't have any real power to speak of, but nonetheless, as an example of how aware the Chinese people are today about issues like Taiwan, potential conflict with Japan and with the Philippines and others in the East and South China seas. Thank you. Let me just add to that, but when I've talked to Chinese counterparts, more than once I've heard suggestions of a big two arrangement that we would work things out. Maybe someday some kind of accommodation would be possible, but the rules would be the problem. Concerning popular support, you know, when back in 2006, 2007, when we were working on this cooperative strategy for 21st century seapower, we embarked on this big program of what we call conversation with the country. And we took some of our best and brightest from the college's S&P department, went out there and senior officers and engaged in these meetings both on a broad level and then smaller seminars with corporate big wigs all over the country. And this absolutely without success. So the public tends to respond to emergencies, not, you know, trying to stir them up when everything's going fine is probably a bridge too far. There is however this legend among naval officers and naval cognoscenti, especially within the Beltway that there is some adept concoction of words in a maritime strategy document that will open the purse strings of Congress. This I think partly comes from Mahan. You know, who wrote, Hatton Ork would know that at one point somebody said that Teddy Roosevelt opened and read Mahan's influence of seapower in history and closed the book A Changed Man. And then there's the legend surrounding the 1980s maritime strategy in the 600 ship Navy. People seem to think that the strategy was the cause of the 600 ship Navy when it was actually the other way around if you talk to the guys that actually crafted it. So there's this legend out there that some artfully articulated maritime strategy will produce support for the U.S. Navy. I don't believe so. CS21 for its part was built not for really a U.S. audience but for an overseas audience. We had to depict the U.S. on the defensive, met a strategic defensive which we succeeded in doing and that ended up generating some support around the world. So it was not a comprehensive maritime strategy document. It had its purposes, it served its purposes. I watched the struggles OpNav has been going through for the last two and a half years trying to concoct a new strategy and I go, ah, it's too hard. Yeah, I appreciate your candor about the conversations with the country. I was down in Athens, Georgia at the University of Georgia at that point and I didn't hear about the conversation with the country that was in Atlanta until well after the fact. I just happened to stumble across it in the local paper. Actually, I'm not gonna come back to your comeback but I think that you raise a good point. Even Mahan himself conceded in his own memoirs that he did all this writing with an agenda. I mean, he was trying to muster support for a big Navy in the 1890s and around into the early 20th century. But he also conceded very frankly that it took the Spanish-American War to really give what he had been writing about seapower any residence with the American populace. So even the greats wrestle with this question about how to sustain popular support. And with that, I think we still have about 25 minutes so thanks for everybody for keeping within the timelines and I'll just throw it up for Q and A.