 The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of Naval Sea Power, both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in national security lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. Well, good afternoon and welcome to our fifth issues in national security lecture for this academic year. I'm John Jackson and I will serve as host for today's event. We're very pleased to welcome Admiral Garvin and Mrs. Garvin with us this evening. The series was originally conceived as a way to share a portion of the Naval War College's academic experience with the spouses and significant others of our student body. Over the past years, it's been restructured to include participation by the entire Naval War College extended family to include members of the Naval War College Foundation, international sponsors, civilian employees, and colleagues throughout Naval Station Newport and around the world via Zoom. We will be offering five additional lectures between now and May of 2024, spaced about two weeks apart. An announcement detailing the dates, topics, and speakers of each lecture will be posted by our Public Affairs Office. Excuse me. Looking a bit ahead, on Monday the 13th of February 2024, Dr. John Maurer will speak about Churchill and Roosevelt. And Dr. Maurer is one of our absolute finest speakers, so if you have the opportunity, you may want to listen in on that. Okay, on with the main event, please feel free to use the chat feature of Zoom and we'll get to as many questions as we can at the end of the presentation. I'm very pleased to introduce our speaker, Dr. James Holmes. Jim is one of the most prolific writers at the college and is known by almost everyone in the maritime security business. He holds the J.C. Wiley chair of maritime strategy here at the college and he previously served on the faculty of the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. A former U.S. Navy surface warfare officer, he was the last gunnery officer in history to fire a battleship's big guns in anger during the first Gulf War in 1991. He later earned the Naval War College Foundation award in 1994, recognizing him as the top graduate of his class. His book, A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy, is a primary selection on the Chief of Naval Operations professional reading program. I'm not exactly sure why, but former Secretary of Defense James Mattis considers him troublesome. His talk this afternoon will explain why it is so hard for the U.S. Navy to prevail in strategic competition or warfare in the Pacific, even though it rains stronger than its competitors. I'm pleased to pass the baton to a friend and colleague, Dr. Jim Holmes. Yeah, Captain Jay actually neglected an important part of my biography, namely he was my last boss in uniform in the United States Navy here in Newport back in 1995, I guess it was, 95-96. So I want to have a little fun with a very serious topic, namely how we are going to do things vis-a-vis China in the Indo-Pacific. And I want to, like I said, I want to have a little fun with it. Everybody loves zombies. I don't think I think The Walking Dead may be off the air now, but boy, I tell you what, it had a heck of a run. This talk goes back quite a ways because the project that it's based on goes back quite a ways. It was in 2010 that Robert Kaplan, whom you may be familiar with, who's written books on the revenge of geography, wrote about The Walkins in the 1990s and so forth, got in touch and said, would you do an article explaining how to count the size of a Navy? Which sounds like kind of a silly thing to spend a lot of time writing about. Open up James fighting ships, count up the ships, and that's the size of the Navy. But it turns out that it's a lot more complex than that. And I think this goes for all military services, but it feels like it's even more pertinent to Naval services. And I'll explain why. And then I will help you look at the Indo-Pacific and figure out what are the barriers in the way of the United States Navy and Marine Corps. How might we actually try to overcome those as we head into this dangerous decade that we are in? This is the, you could probably find this out there on the internet if you want to. It's about measuring power, combat power, and not necessarily counting up hulls, counting up numbers of sailors, and so forth. So my friend Toshi Yoshihara and I did this for Global Asia, a journal based in Korea, back in late 2010. Toshi used to be on the faculty in our department, is now in the think tank world since 2017. But I tell you, having done this, especially in election years, I feel like Rick Grimes. I feel like the Rick Grimes of C-Power. You know how it is when you're fighting zombies, right? You take aim at one, you give it a headshot, it falls down, and 10 more just like it come shambling towards you. Shoot all those down, 100 more come in, and ultimately you run out of ammunition and you're overrun. Bad ideas are kind of like, bad ideas are kind of like undead ideas. You see, especially in election years, again, you see the same sorts of half truths or short hands for naval power come up, and partisans will try to sort of oversimplify the question of how big should the United States Navy be, how should it be configured, how many sailors does it need, and so forth. So my not-so-hidden agenda for this afternoon is to recruit you all to my zombie hunting squad so that you ask the good questions this year, especially this being another election year in which we're concerned about the size of the Navy. So this is something that I think, again, I think it's kind of fun, but it's also of real and present value. My agenda's pretty straightforward for the next hour. I wanted to take on a very simple agenda. First of all, I'll just, I will start with strategy. Look at the US pivot to Asia, which is now over a decade old. This basically means that the United States, because it sees the Asia Pacific, the Indo-Pacific now, as its primary theater, it has shifted the bulk of its assets to the Pacific. Is that enough? That will be the second point I'll take on, and then I'll flip it around. We'll look at some geography and think about why it's so hard to wage away games, which is all the United States Navy Marine Corps and our fellow joint services do. We hope not to fight here in North America, and therefore we try to fight in the Rimlands if we have to of East Asia, of South Asia, or the Western Pacific. So let me launch right into it. The pivot to Asia was basically codified in a series of strategic documents issued as long ago as 2007. The one right there on the left, the Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower, was unveiled on this stage where I'm walking around back in 2007. It underwent a refresh in the middle document in 2015 and then gave way to our current strategy on the right hand side, Advantage at Sea in late 2020. But there's a set of coherent ideas that have been constancy in all of these documents. I'm going to reach back to the 2007 document simply because it states them extremely clearly, but again these ideas have persisted in U.S. strategy since 2007 at least. First of all, the 2007 document says the U.S. military, the Navy and the Marine Corps, reserved the right to project credible combat power in theaters of interest, including the Western Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the Gulf, which of course is an inlet in the Indian Ocean. So that's basically announcing, putting the region and the world on notice that we intend to remain number one. Secondly, and this is a really striking claim. It doesn't really sound like it, but it really is. The document announces that we, the United States, reserved the right to take local sea control pretty much anybody of water on the planet, on the planet Earth, preferably with allies, but perhaps not if our leadership opts to go it along. Let's say, I mean again, that's a pretty striking claim when you consider the whole Earth's surface, trying to use your military forces to take command of those waters and put them to use for uses that the political and military leadership deem wise. So again, that's a pretty stunning thing to talk about. And lastly, and this was kind of an innovation back in 2007. The cooperative strategy announced that that year, declared that the United States in concert with its allies would be a multinational custodian of the system, basically the system of seagoing trade and commerce and then obviously political and military affairs as well. So again, and this is where such ideas as the thousands ship Navy came out, the idea that you would have a multinational fleet that would police the seas against things like we're seeing in the Red Sea today with the irregular groups launching attacks on shipping, piracy became a big thing back in the 2008 timeframe. So these were irregular, almost law enforcement challenges whereas in the Red Sea today with the Houthis, I think it's bleeding over into something that looks more like warfare. But again, these are sort of the big strategic ideas propelling what we are doing in the Indo-Pacific to this day. If you fast forward to the Obama administration, it put in 2015, one of my favorite documents that they put out this document, the Asia-Pacific maritime security strategy. Why is it my favorite document? Because on page one it says, we preside, we safeguard freedom of the sea. That is job one in the Asia-Pacific, now the Indo-Pacific. What is freedom of the sea? We're always talking about freedom of navigation. Freedom of navigation mainly, it basically involves the freedom of a ship to go from point A to point B through somebody of water as it tested to in the UN convention on the law of the sea and related documents. Freedom of the sea is a whole lot bigger than that. Freedom of navigation is a subset of freedom of the sea which includes the rights to do such things as underwater surveys, to do things like surveillance flights over the South China Sea, all the things that coastal states like China, like Russia, Iran, and now the Houthis object to. There's a whole lot of stuff that goes into freedom of the sea beyond freedom of navigation. So this is actually a much more ambitious undertaking than simply safeguarding the right of passage through certain waters on the globe. This is the way of thinking, as I said. It seems to be something that is bipartisan. This is a Trump administration document in 2019, the Indo-Pacific strategy report, which points out, and again, it divulges the bottom line up front. This is our priority theater. And again, this is carried into the Biden administration as well. So it's actually kind of heartening in a time in which there's so little bipartisanship that there are some things that both parties can still agree on and work together to solve our problems. But, and so, given the ambition of all these documents and these ideas that are driving our strategy, operations and forces, the leadership by the leadership back in the Obama administration resolved to have a 60-40 split between the Indo-Pacific and the Atlantic and the other theaters of operation. So we shifted, in fact, this was underway even before all these documents were issued. By 2006, or there about 60 percent of our submarine force was already in the Pacific, and then various administrations codified that and kept moving surface forces carrier aviation and so forth to the region. And that's all good. I mean, if you have these commitments, you have to back them up with forces or else you're not likely to get your way in concert with your allies and the leadership in Washington. So, which brings us to the second point, is this enough? Yesterday, it's good to have a disproportionate commitment to your primary theater. I mean, that's sort of basic strategy. Your top commitments are going to command the most resources for the greatest amount of time, but that doesn't necessarily mean that even this share of forces is enough for you to succeed strategically. And this is where we start becoming zombie hunters because you start seeing a series of ideas that get in the way of trying to get some sense of this and determine how much is enough. Do we have enough to actually get it done? The first idea that I would take issue with a little bit would be this one, the idea that whoever spends the most wins. You see it all the time in the popular press as well. It's all about the Benjamin's. He who spends the most wins. Well, is that true? I mean, it's especially in election years again. This is an older one, but I guarantee if you got out on the internet, you could find something like this. The United States spends more than the next X powers on defense combined. And therefore the United States is in an unbeatable position simply because it has the most dollars. The Financial Times had something very similar to this just today in its commentary on the US Navy and the US military. I think that the figure is not top 14 anymore. Like I said, this is a bit older, but none the last. It dwarfs the rest of the world in terms of defense spending. I mean, that's not unimportant. But I mean, think about what we spend on. This is one of three Zoom walk class destroyers which visited Pier 2. I guess it was Pier 2. I think it was back in 2015 or there about heading south to it to be outfitted with its combat system. We could only afford three of these things because they run about $7 billion a copy. It's a wonderful ship, stealthy. I mean, it's in all of these sorts of things. But nonetheless, that takes a big bite out of all that defense spending that is encapsulated in the chart I just showed. USS Ford just completed its very first deployment to the Mediterranean Sea and to the North Atlantic. That ship, I believe, ran about $13 billion just the hull. That doesn't count putting stealth fighters on it. A couple of squadrons of those, a couple more billion. It appears that by the time you put people, supplies, aircraft, all the things in an aircraft carrier needs to operate. It's probably, and especially once you add in all the escorts that keep it safe from harm, it looks like they're talking about a $20 billion asset. It's just by my sort of rough calculations. Anyway, but the point being, these are big ticket items and they take a huge bite out of that huge defense budget. Right across the bay at Quonset Point, you can probably see it. If you go across the Jamestown Bridge, we are working on the hulls for our next generation SSBNs, Fleet Ballistic Missiles Nuclear Powered Submarines. These are, I mean, they're going to be, this is the Navy's top procurement priority by far. And we're going to get a dozen of these at about $7 billion a copy. So again, more big ticket items. What about labor though? If you ever watch the old Top Gear, I think you have to think that this is sort of an emblem for for our labor costs in the U.S. military. It's been a, the Stig, of course, he was a professional race driver and did all sorts of silly stuff while road testing us to supercars and hypercars. But in a sense, in a sense, our workforce is like this. It's been estimated that the People's Liberation Army Navy can put eight to nine sailors in uniform for the cost of one American sailor. So most institutions, labor is going to be their biggest expense. And I think, and I think that's something else that's going to eat into our defense budget vis-a-vis our potential adversaries such as China and Russia. So again, a lot of the, a lot of this really sort of offsets the idea that he who spends the most wins. So I mean, this is not unimportant again, but it doesn't, it's far from telling the whole story. But yeah, the second one I would point to is the idea, I would call it the idea that he who weighs the most wins. What do I mean, what do I mean by that? Well, here right on, here right on, right on this stage is Robert Kaplan a few years ago talking, talking about this and contending, talking about the nature of the United States as a maritime nation and so forth. But then contending that the U.S. Navy is the largest Navy in the world by far. And the Coast Guard, the Coast Guard, by the way, would be the 12th largest Navy in the world considered as well. Jim Finnell, former Pacific Fleet Intel chief would take it, would take issue with that. In this very good book out of the U.S. Naval Institute presser a few years ago, he forecasted the PLA Navy, the China's Navy World Number, about 500 ships by 2030. And it seems to be tracking towards that rough, that rough goal. What about, here we go. Here's the numbers as of last year. This is the 21 edition of the Pentagon's report on Chinese military power. Estimating that the PLA Navy would number 355 ships today, they made that. 420 by 2025. And again, they have a somewhat lower estimate, but still. We're lingering a little bit south of 300 hulls in the fleet. And China is cranking out hulls like sausages. Here's something of micro-handling. Another one of the greats in the field had to say at a conference down in Washington about this. Here's where he actually gets at it. Yes, the U.S. Navy he contends is bigger than China's because of tonnage, meaning how much water each hull displaces, how big it is. I mean, basically how much it weighs, if you want to really oversimplify it. And again, that's not an unimportant metric, but at the same time, it doesn't tell the whole story, not even close. So what, though? Well, I mean, if you take this to extremes, if tonnage is the measure of naval power, then this is one of the most powerful warships in the world. The MMR's got it out of Denmark. It displaces about five times what the USS Ford, our latest aircraft carrier does, and so on and so forth. I mean, that's obviously an absurd statement, though, because this is an unarmed freighter. But nonetheless, that's where the logic of talking about tonnage as being all important takes you. So again, it's part of the picture, but far from being the entire picture. I mean, think about the, was Coach Belichick trying to recruit this guy to the Patriots? Maybe, I mean, given the way his tenure wound down, perhaps he was. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of mass there, but it doesn't look like there's a whole lot of football capability. If this is the metric, I mean, if this is the metric for weight, for physical ball trains laying into combat capability, I'm good with this. I mean, if the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps can give China's Navy a wedgie, I mean, that's kind of cool. And so I would urge you to look at things a little more deeply, ask the hard questions about this. Yes, tonnage is important. It means our ships are bigger. They can carry more fuel, which they have to, because we're operating far from home. More munitions, more of everything. But again, it doesn't translate into a one-size-fits-all estimate of how strong or numerous a Navy is. So, he who weighs the most need not win. The next one I would put that, I would put this, the emblem of this on it, or put the image of this on it, which is this is the U.S. Great White Fleet, which circumnavigated the globe from 1907 to 1909. And I would use that, again, I would use that to represent a debate between numbers of hulls. You're going to, I guarantee you're going to hear that as the politics of the election year wind up this year. In fact, you hear it pretty much every day. The first one is just basically looking at brute numbers of hulls and saying, look, the United States Navy is now smaller. It is smaller than it has been since 1916 when it's first launched into its bid during the Woodrow Wilson administration to become a world class Navy, a Navy second to none. So, you hear this talking point this year, the smallest Navy since 1917. And that sounds pretty dire. This way of thinking generally comes from the right side of the political aisle. As Senator Wicker of Mississippi representing a big shipbuilding state likes to say, and again, there it is, smallest Navy since World War I. That sounds pretty dire. You'll get pushed back from the other side of the political aisle, such as from our former Navy secretary, Ray Mabus, who was President Obama's secretary for the entire eight years. And he pushed back against this kind of thinking. And he says, yeah, I mean, okay, we have fewer ships than since 1917, but each individual ship is vastly more capable. And that's certainly true. I mean, you could put the U.S., so if you could put the U.S. Atlantic Fleet or Pacific Fleet up against the Great White Fleet, and I guarantee it would prevail. The Great White Fleet would never even get off a shot, because we would dump missiles on it. So, I mean, this makes perfect sense, except that it's not 1917 anymore. Think about the operational environment that this much more modern fleet operates in. It has to face off against things like this, China's J-20 stealth fighter. It has to face off against shore-based anti-ship ballistic missiles, some of which are being used in the Red Sea today. Anti-ship cruise missiles, land-based strategic and tactical aviation, all of these sorts of things are part of a much more difficult strategic environment. So it's actually kind of misleading to compare the Navy today to the Navy a century ago. You have to rate it against what it's actually squaring off against in the Indo-Pacific to figure out whether it's actually good enough. Cieno Francketti, our new Chief of Naval Operations, got into this discussion a couple of weeks ago. Speaking, she released a one-pager stating her priorities for the Navy, and then she gave a talk at the Surface Navy Association and basically said, look, she's not obsessed with numbers. It's about what she calls a war-fighting ecosystem. Do we have the ability to put the right amount of combat power on the scene at the right time of battle in order to outmatch our foes? And she's right about it. I mean, she's basically getting to the right way of looking at this. It's not necessarily all about numbers, and it's really about the mix. Can you actually do what strategy requires and outmatch your adversary? So this would be the takeaway from that one I would leave you with. Numbers are not anything significant, but they also aren't everything. I would sort of the obvious thing to do when you are trying to estimate the capability of a Navy would be sort of flip open your favorite book about navies, Combat Fleets of the World out of the Naval Institute, or Jane's Fighting Ships, which has been around forever, and then just look at fleet-on-fleet configurations. Who has more ships? Who has more missiles? All the things that make fighting navies lethal to one another. And this too seems to make sense. I would give you this image right here. I think this is an image of a battle that's been studied a lot here at the War College and has been replayed here as recently as 2016, the battle of Jotland in the North Sea in World War I, when indeed you actually had navies facing off against each other far away from shorefire support, and thus basically just having a navy-on-navy battle sort of in the classic sense that you would assume fleet actions would take. But in this age, it's simply not the case that battles even at sea take place solely between navies. It's not just fleets, it's not even just navies anymore. Shore-based services are reaching out to sea with shore-based sensors and war-making implements to a greater and greater degree, and that's a serious problem for us in the naval services. Think about PLA Air Force aircraft all packed with anti-ship cruise missiles and equipped to venture out into the western Pacific and do us harm. This is part of the equation as well. It's not just the PLA Navy, it's also the PLA Air Force. It's also the PLA Rocket Force, newly organized a few years ago, which boasted. It actually hasn't used them yet, but it was the first to create anti-ship ballistic missiles. This is the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile. It is reportedly able to reach out about 900 nautical miles from China's seacoast in strike moving ships at sea. That's something that we haven't had to deal with in the past. And again, this is part of the combat power equation as well. This is the DF-26. This is a much more modern and much longer range version than the DF-21D. Another anti-ship ballistic missile, this one the Pentagon tells us, can reach out about 2,000 nautical miles from Chinese seacoast and again, touch us and do us harm. So this too is something you have to factor into the sea power equation when you're trying to figure out who will actually win a naval engagement. Just to take a map out of, if you're interested in missiles of all types, the Center for Strategic and International Studies down in Washington DC has a family of pages like this for all the major contenders. But these are the rings around China. These reflect the ranges of different missiles reaching out from Fortress China from the Chinese mainland. And look at all the real estate that the DF-21D, the inner ring there and the DF-26 can actually reach out and overshadow. If indeed they can find us, target us effectively and put that ordinance on target. Unfortunately, the geography doesn't come out to clearly. It's kind of gray. But the inner ring actually overshadows all of Japan, much of the South China Sea, and into the Arabian Sea. So there's even an Indian Ocean aspect to this. The DF-26 actually overshadows Guam. It reaches out well beyond the second island chain. And thus, if we get in a scrap with China, we will try to reunify the Pacific Fleet that's already in the theater with units coming from the West Coast and Hawaii. At that point, as they steam westward, this is something that Fleet Commanders will have to take into account simply because they could come under fire long before they even reach Guam, let alone a battleground such as the Taiwan Strait, South China Sea or East China Sea. So again, this is a major game changer. But it's not just the shore-based missiles. There's a family of systems of small craft that are able to venture out into some of those same waters. And actually, again, perform sentry duty, strike at the US Pacific Fleet, slow us down, sap the energy out of our advance. And in the ideal case, keep us from ever even getting to the battlegrounds. I love this. This is kind of an old one, but I love the lurid graphics. Basically, just shows how US forces approaching the theater will get into more and more dense defenses, Chinese defenses that they will have to cope with as they approach the likely battlefields in the Western Pacific. So again, it's an intensifying problem in the Western Pacific. And if you follow the news, I'm sure you're familiar with some of the things that have been going on in recent years. Over the past decade, China has actually manufactured artificial islands in the South China Sea out of undersea sea mounts or rocks and so forth and fortified them. This became a real problem during the Obama administration and it has only gotten worse. Competing for control of the South China Sea is a daily thing for China. I would argue that Chinese sea power goes even beyond the PLA Navy, the PLA Air Force and the PLA Rocket Force to encompass paramilitary forces, law enforcement forces, including a maritime militia embedded in the Chinese fishing fleet, which is vast. These are the implements that China uses to stake its claims to maritime territory, especially in the South China Sea, but also around the Senkaku Islands just to the northeast of Taiwan. This is how they outface China's much weaker Asian neighbors. And that's something that we really have to contend with. And of course, the China Coast Guard, you can see that in the background, also the world's largest Coast Guard, protecting these assets as they stake China's claims to maritime territory. So the takeaway I would leave you out of this one is the strongest fleet may not win, but it's the strongest force made up of all these different elements of maritime might. That is what that's what's going to determine who will actually outcompete or actually defeat one another if we actually get in a fight in the western Pacific. Because Einstein tells us that not everything that we can count counts, not everything that can be counted can be counted or counts rather. I had to trip myself up there a little bit. But yeah, so go beyond brute numbers, I guess would be the takeaway for Einstein in this. If you sum up all these bad ideas or at least these partial ideas, these shorthands, thumb rules, whatever you want to call them, you get takes like this out of John Meersheimer. People like John Meersheimer out at the University of Chicago in any very well regarded book not too long ago. This is one of the passages he led off with when talking about the tragedy of great power politics. And here's what he says, China does not possess significant military power. Why is that? Because its military forces are inferior to those of the United States. It would be making a huge mistake to pick a fight with the United States nowadays. And Meersheimer actually seems to think that that is the key point. That Chinese forces are inferior to those of the United States, and therefore it's utterly outmatched. But I think we've seen that China has mass on its side. It has a whole lot of different systems. It's playing on its own home field in the Western Pacific. So it has interior lines. It has a variety of advantages that go to the home team. So even if Chinese forces are not as good as ours, and I don't think they are, on a hull for hull or airframe to airframe basis, nonetheless, these advantages are things that help China offset those. And I think trying to piece together who actually has the advantage in the Western Pacific is sort of where we are right now. But yeah, so be very careful about hot takes like that out of academia, because away games are hard, and that's what we play. I would be remiss as a strategy professor at the Naval War College, not to cite our deity, Karl von Klauswitz, out of 19th century Prussia, who fought against Napoleon, took part in the French Revolutionary Wars, and so forth. He makes a very simple point about strategy. And it's this. The best strategy is to be really strong. I mean, go to Gold's Gym, spend a lot of time working out every day. But especially, and this is the key point, make yourself stronger at the decisive place in time where the battle will take place, which is kind of, which is kind of, it sounds kind of like buy low sell high type stuff, but it is surprisingly difficult to actually make yourself stronger at the decisive place in time. Nonetheless, he says that this is the highest and the simplest law of strategy. Stay concentrated and improve your likelihood of being stronger where it matters and when it matters. And here's how he sums it up. It's all about, even if you're not absolutely stronger, I mean, even if your entire force as a whole is not stronger than your adversaries, if you can make yourself stronger at the decisive place in time, that's really what it's all about. As far as getting your way in a particular battle or engagement. So again, so a contender can be globally inferior, but locally superior, and that's really what it's all about. It's about being stronger where it matters and when it matters. Well, I mean, this is a difficult, this is a difficult theater to fight in, to fight in a way a game in. courtesy of our friends at Google Maps, I'm looking at, I mean, just look at that empty theater. That is the Indo-Pacific. You can see Japan a little bit. You can see the U.S. coast a little bit, but wow. That is, I mean, that's a large experience to try to fight across. Not even just from in terms of combat power, but logistically. I mean, think about all the logistics assets you need to actually carry fuel, munitions, food, supplies of all sorts. There's two battlefields that are thousands of miles away from the United States. But that's okay because we know that zombies can swim. So this logic actually transposes to the Western Pacific. This is a huge theater, again. Here's a map. By the way, if you like political cartography, these are these images I'm going to show you in the next few slides are out there for you to right click on on the internet. From a gentleman by the name of Richard Eads Harrison in his 1943 book, A Fortune Atlas of World Strategy. He really excelled at sort of looking at the worlds and telling us messages by looking at the globe from different altitudes and different angles. And here he's just making the points that, wow, that's what Japan, Imperial Japan, bit off during the Second World War. Try to encircle and make all this geographic space into its own. Both the land masses, the water and so forth. In order to extract those natural resources it thought it needed in order to accomplish its goals in the world. So again, huge theater tends to spread things out and it makes it very, very difficult to project power. But there is a bigger theater in the world. And this is it. Let's say, look at that. That's the theater that Harrison was calling out. But where does the U.S. military operate? That's our theater right there. It's really, really hard as a global power to I2ACG and we're seeing ourselves being stretched around all the Eurasian perimeter to this day. I think underscoring this point. The point I'm making for you is that China remains concentrated. It keeps its force concentrated mostly close to what it cares about, which are things in the western Pacific, Taiwan, South China Sea, East China Sea. Whereas the U.S. military we tend to spread out simply because we have taken on commitments all over the globe. Commitments to demand package of military forces. As you thin things out, as you disperse forces all over the place, chances are each individual packet of military forces assigned to some contingency is going to be weaker and weaker, something because you're trying to spread things out in order to uphold all these commitments. So China is concentrated. We're spread out. This translates into advantage for China. As we see childhood essence saying, and again, repeating that Claesovitzian law, the highest, the eleventh commandment, the highest and the simplest law of strategy is to stay concentrated. And yet that is really hard for a global power such as the U.S. So again, trying to concentrate at the place and time of battle is really, really hard. It's easier said than done. Think about it. Think about it if we do do that. What do I mean? Strategy in a very real sense is a process of setting and enforcing priorities among commitments, which implies that you pick your top commitments and you demote others. But yet there are opportunity costs to doing this. I mean, we're finding this out to our chagrin today. If you take a lot of forces, if you put even more forces into the Indo-Pacific, that makes you weaker in the Eastern Mediterranean. We're fighting is raging. It's making you weaker in the Red Sea. It's making you weaker in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, other theaters around the Eurasian periphery, which is really where the action is. So this is kind of how these debates unfold. It's really, really hard to actually do what strategy says and demote commitments because every commitment has a constituency. It has a logic to it. It's just hard for top decision makers to actually pull the plug on anything. The distance, there's a tyranny of distance. Here's another map out of World War II from Richard E. Harrison. And he's making the point about, boy, look at the lines from the U.S. east coast and west coast to try to get lend lease supplies to our allies before the United States actually joins the war. So again, man, this simply imposes a lot of rigors, a lot of strain on U.S. logistics, as well as armed forces actually trying to make their way to important theaters far from American shores. So looking down from the poll, it's a pretty sobering picture. How do we do this? Well, I mean, here's another thing that cuts into that massive defense budget. You have to have basically what you might actually describe as boosters. You almost have to have boosters in the form of base networks in order to provide that logistics to allow task forces, naval forces, and our fellow joint forces to operate across vast distances. This is an old picture from the Cold War of Honolulu. As you can see, it's a pretty extensive facility, and I don't think it's gotten any less since then. In fact, I would go so far as to reach back to your basic physics from college. Remember the adverse squares law? It tells you that a radiation source, if I'm trying to radiate something, the intensity of that radiation drops off, not just sort of gradually as you get farther from the source. It goes off by the square, by the square of the distance. For example, at 2R on this graphic, the intensity is one quarter what it was at the outset. I think trying to radiate, trying to project military power across distances, it feels sort of like this. So again, you have to have some way to provide the occasional boost to those task forces in order to keep their energy so that you can actually reach the scene of battle. So one thing for Klasovitz to say concentrated the important places on the map, but again, it's really hard to do. He tells us that the simplest thing is difficult in war, or I'm sorry, everything is simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult, and he's absolutely right about that. He saw it in his own lifetime on European battlegrounds. The other aspect to this, I haven't even, all I've talked about is basically the geographic obstacles to waging away games, but the adversary is not a potted plant. The adversary has as many brain cells as we do, as much desire, if not more to win in battles in its own backyard, and on and on it will try to thwart what we want to do on some particular battlefield. For example, and this is actually out of a peacetime context, but back in 2002 there was a famous, or maybe an infamous military exercise in the Persian Gulf or relating to the Persian Gulf, and this gentleman, Paul van Rijper, General van Rijper was assigned to play, well he was assigned to play Country X, but it was Iran. It was pretty clear it was Iran facing off against a U.S. carrier task force out in the Persian Gulf, and he said, I mean this is the quintessential red team. In fact, he's sort of the face of this wonderful book by Micah Zinko a few years ago, the red team. How does the red team think? What does it do in order to thwart my will? Keep me from getting what I want? Well he did wild things. I mean the U.S. task force actually deprived Iran of electromagnetic communications, so he was doing things like sending engagement orders through mosques and stuff like that. I mean just using all the resources at his disposal to their best advantage, and he actually won. He actually used all these short, these shore-based weaponry in concert with the regular and irregular naval forces and defeated the task force. So, but the takeaway from Millennium Challenge, Exercise Millennium Challenge, was the Navy actually changed the rules so that he lost, and he resigned from the exercise and discussed and so forth, and it became a real debacle. But nonetheless, this is a good face if you can think about this sort of experience and assume that real potential red teams will have as much ingenuity and desire to win as Van Rijper. I think that's a good way to think about going into somebody else's backyard and trying to overcome them, much as the great Bruce Lee had to infest a fury, one of the all-time classics. It's just not easy to go into somebody else's dojo and win. The other aspects, other advantages that go to the home team, this is a famous sign down at Texas A&M University where they think they invented the 12th man, basically having a fierce home crowd that makes things really difficult on a visiting team. So maybe keeping the quarterback from hearing the signals or the other players from hearing the signals, just think about all those things that go to the home team advantage. I would say this advantage applies manyfold more than on the sporting field in military affairs. Or Cameron Auditorium at Duke University where they think the home team is called the Cameron Crazies because they're so insane to cheer for Duke. And again, try to make things difficult on, looks like maybe a Boston College player can't really tell who that is, but pretty a tough place to shoot free throws. Here's the, in the one reason I say that I think the home team advantage is much more in military affairs than it is in sports is because it's unregulated. I mean, it's more like the WWE. Yeah, I mean, there's a, yes, okay. All right, there's a referee there. Doesn't look like he's enforcing the laws. I mean, there's nobody going to regulate military conflict in the western Pacific. I mean, it behooves you to bring all your stuff, make it an unequal contest because there's no warrant to referee what you bring to the battlefield and how you use it. So to me, this is actually a better sport metaphor than basketball or football. Somebody because I think it conveys that aspect. That you should try to make it unequal. Because the enemy gets a vote. The enemy is not a potted plant and the enemy will cast the vote against you, obviously. As a surrogate lady would remind us from the elections in 2005. What would my hands say about this as I wind down? I already mentioned one of our Holy of Holies, Klausowitz. This is, of course, is another one. Our second president, Alfred Thierry Mahan, from back in the 1880s and then again in the 1890s. I guess he was my, I guess he was my and Captain Jay's most distant ancestor as a strategy professor here at the War College. And he gives a, he gives us a simple, he gives us a simple way to think about this. How do I actually make myself stronger than the opponent at the time and place of action? And this looks really simple. It's a broad, I mean it's, but let me break it down for you just a little bit. It should, it should be great enough to take on the largest force it might encounter. This I think throws us back into, into the first half of the talk here, while I was talking about how to measure, how to, how to measure naval strength. So great enough that would be such, such indices as numbers of ships, number, I mean, how, how well armed they are. Can they, can they reach out? I mean, what are the ranges of their weapons and so forth? So this would be sort of the standard net assessment type stop for the friendly force and then obviously, then obviously for the opposing force as well. How, how well prepared is the opposing force to take us on? So that's pretty, that's pretty sort of the basic blocking and tackling of, of trying to figure out whether you're strong enough. Second and second, second metric. This force should be able to fight with reasonable chances of success. That enemy force that it may encounter at a place where I am trying to get my way. So there's an element of risk. I mean, that's partly a leadership thing. What is, I mean, what's the, I mean, what's the, what's the, what's the risk tolerance of the fleet commander or, or his superiors or her superiors? So there, so there's an element of that. It can, it can bring higher leadership into it. Admiral Chester Nimitz famously did, did, did his job by what he called the principle of calculated risk. Do unto the others, do, do unto the adversary if you think you can do unto him worse than he can do unto you. So he's trying, he's trying to figure, he's trying to get his fleet commanders in that, in thinking about risk in terms of inflicting and taking damage. But so that's one way to, to think about this particular metric. But to me, this is the most, this is the most interesting aspect of it. Likely, what is the largest enemy force I am likely to encounter at some place that I am trying to win a battle? And that's really, I mean, that's really interesting. And because, I mean, it's basically a matter of geopolitical analysis. Knowing the adversary. What does the adversary want in a particular theater? How many, how many forces is it likely to assign, to defend its commitment in that theater? How much of its navy is it going to send? How much of its air force is it going to assign? Or, or in the case of China, the PLA rocket force? And that's a, that's a, that's a matter of, that's a matter of estimating, estimating how much it wants its goals there. Cause of its, would tell us that determines how much resources they spend on it and for how long. So, so again, there's an element of human desire there. What's the, so what's the, what's, what's the value of the object, the political object, strategic objects, and how much do you spend to get it? That, that gives you a way to, to estimate the fraction of my enemy's forces that you will encounter at a particular time and place of action. And that's just, that's just a really difficult thing to do. But nonetheless, I think my hand is demanding it of us and I, and I agree with him on this. I mean, if you think, if you think about it from his standpoint, he was, he was worrying about making the United States stronger, principally in the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, where the, where the sea lanes running to the Panama Canal would ultimately run. He was looking, he was looking at a potential adversary such as Britain's Royal Navy, and he was trying to, he was trying to estimate how big the U.S., how big the U.S. fleet needed to be in order to defend those waters. And he said, well, yeah, Britain's got a huge fleet. It's full of battleships and cruises and whatnot, but Britain also presides over an empire on which the sun never sets. And it has to, it has to guard the sea lanes. It has to guard, guard many theaters. And he said, so he, so he sort of ran this, he sort of ran this, this analysis and he said, look, Britain probably is not going to send more than 20 capital ships into our backyard, no matter, no matter what it's trying to do in the Caribbean Sea. And therefore that became the benchmark for the size of the U.S. fleet. And indeed, showed a picture of the great white fleet that, that fleet was made up of 20 battleships. 16 went on the voyage forward in maintenance, but, but again, he got to see as I, he got to see this kind of thinking translated into steel, which, which I can tell you, it's kind of a cool thing as a scholar, which, which of course my hand was. So just, just to wrap things up, just to, just to some things, some ways to think about trying to wage away games to, to victory in a fellow superpowers backyard. Who wants it more? Who's going to assign more for a greater share of their forces? Again, that's the, that's the benchmark for what we need in order to get our way. Can you do the net assessment stuff? Think about, think about costs and opportunity costs of various courses of action. And think about, think about risk. What was, what's our risk tolerance? How much risk are we running? Not only, not only directly to the force, but to our standing in the world as well. I mean, for example, if we were to put the US Pacific fleet into, into the Western Pacific and lose a large, a large trunk of it in an afternoon or in a short period of time, the United States is a maritime nation. If we lose a lot of that sea power, at that point we will probably see our standing in the world knocked down, simply because we don't have the assets for, at least for a time in order to defend that status. So this is, and this is where I'll leave you. Who, who wins when a fraction of US forces goes up against most, most are all of an enemy joint force, Navy backed up by shore, shore based defenses. And I, and I, and the, the missile forces, all the, all the variety of missile forces that I, that I cataloged with you this evening. And I think that's an open question. I think that's, I think that's what we're trying to game out and figure out here at the war college and think, and think tanks around the country and so forth. But point I would leave you with is just be very, be very careful about two confident takes on the, on the size, capacity of naval forces and the relative balance in the Western Pacific and elsewhere in the Indo-Pacific. And with that, I will, I will close with these two young ladies and take any questions that you would like to pose. Please stay up here, Jim. I, I think that's probably the best 45 minutes that I've spent in, in the past year. And it really gives you a lot to think about. Not all good news, obviously, but something we all ought to be thinking about. So let's do some questions. If anybody in the audience has a question, please use the microphone and the chair back in front of you and just identify yourself and ask your question. Please. Lieutenant Commander Park from South Korea. Oh, very good. Yeah. Thank you for your good lecture. Very appreciated. I want to ask about the Chinese fishing boat you mentioned in the lecture. My question is, is there any strategy about the Chinese fishing boat, fishing boat and define these Chinese fishing boat? Because in East China Sea, especially about the boundary of Korea, South Korea, there are too many, too, too, too many Chinese fishing boat that it is very hard to navigate on the sea. And when I crossed the South China Sea, there was also too many Chinese fishing boat. And I think this is kind of a Chinese strategy to expand their naval forces to other countries and other seas. And recently, I read some articles and newspaper that even the Chinese fishing boat appears on the Latin America Seas. So if China have a strategy to expand their naval force to the US, I think it's going to be the fishing boat will be the first. So the crews on the fishing boat are civilians. So it is very hard to define their kind of position. Do we have to consider them as a soldier or do we have to consider them as a civilian? So it can be quite hard to deal with. So is there any strategy or is there any definition for about the Chinese fishing boat in the US? Yeah, that's a great get. I blew past that pretty fast as you noted, just something because I didn't want to talk to expand without bounds, which it might have done. Just a long story short. Yeah, I'd say it's a big problem. I mean, the Chinese fishing fleet with the maritime militia, I mean, they're doing what we call in the sports arena here in the United States, flooding the zone. I mean, that gives China the ability to put large numbers of assets, even if on armed assets, into waters that it wants to claim at its own. What China is doing in the South China Sea ever since 2009, but really, in some ways for over a century, even before Communist China, has been claiming what they call indisputable sovereignty in the South China Sea. I'm sure you've all seen that nine or 10 dashed line, enclosing the vast majority of the South China Sea, including the east coast of Taiwan. And sovereignty, if you study international relations on day one, the very first day of International Relations 101, your professor will tell you that sovereignty is a monopoly of force, monopoly of force within certain lines on the map that we call borders. So basically, whoever commands that monopoly of force makes the rules. And I mean, this is something that we thought until the 1980s that we had settled the question of whether coastal states can own the sea. And I mean, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea codifies that, and it says no. That's why the science territorial seas, contiguous zones, and exclusive economic zones to coastal states is to make that point. No one owns the sea. But yet China, China, and also Iran, and also Russia to a degree in the Arctic have now reopened that question. And the fishing fleet is one way of getting presence in there if you're China. I think the way to look at it, look at the problem, is to think about the fishing fleet, as I said, it's the vanguard of Chinese sea power. The coast guard, if you want to claim sovereignty, I mean, if you want to claim that your laws apply on sovereign territory, including at sea, go ahead and start policing them, using law enforcement forces as your primary instrument to safeguard what you want to look like as legitimate commercial activity. And then beyond that, to backstop that, if someone effectively defies the China coast guard and the maritime militia, then you have the Navy, then you have shore-based forces to back that up. So it's a very dense and layered strategy that China has assembled. And no East Asian power can actually outmatch that, especially in the South China Sea. And I think that's, I mean, that's a big problem that we're grappling with. If you want to do some more reading on this, a couple of years ago, I led off a series down at the Naval Institute of Proceedings called the Maritime Counterinsurgency Project, which is basically making the case that, in a sense, China is using, China, a state actor, is waging an insurgency against the international legal order of the law to sea and places like the South China Sea. So you can check those out. My case that I made was, yeah, if you're the United States and if you want to support your allies and defend freedom of the sea, the international legal order, you got to be there. We're really not there on a 24-7-365 basis in places on the South China Sea. We do some pretty impressive exercises and whatnot, but we come and we go and then guess who we leave in charge of that geographic space. China's always there. It's a really tough strategy to beat, but we are trying to get with it. I know that you all have territorial issues in your area as well, so I'm sure you're seeing it as well. Other questions here in the room? We've got a Zoom question here. Jim, wouldn't our Navy be able to shut down the Malacca Straits and starve China of fuel and food? Yeah, the Chinese worry about that. In fact, all the way back to the days of Hu Jintao before Xi Jinping, he called this his Malacca Dilemma. Like I said, the Chinese do worry about that, but there are a lot of practical difficulties. I mean, you can actually clog up the Malacca Straits, but there are certain realities about shipping in the modern world that make it much harder to do a distant blockade than, say, the First World War when the Royal Navy basically barred Imperial Germany from the Atlantic across the North of the UK and not Norway gap and then across the English Channel. Today, cargoes can be sold multiple times en route. That makes it really hard to determine even who owns a particular cargo. There was a lot of talk about back in the 2006-2007 time frame here at the War College and elsewhere in the naval community about a blockade, but that's pretty much quieted down. I haven't heard anybody talk about doing that for a long time. Having said that, if you widen the aperture from the Malacca Straits and look all along the First Island chain, you'll notice two things. The First Island chain, which runs from Japan all the way down through Taiwan and the Philippines, encloses the entire Chinese coastline, no Chinese seaport outflanks it, and the island chain belongs entirely to U.S. allies, partners, and friends. Some of them are very well-armed and also host to U.S. forces. This is the implement of a closer end blockade or at least it could be if our allies and we agreed to make it so, which is one reason the Marine Corps has reinvented itself as an island defense force, basically to put small bodies of Marines on the islands armed with anti-ship sensors and anti-ship weapons, able to close those straight in between the islands to Chinese merchant and naval shipping if we get in a fight with them. The U.S. Army is thinking in very similar terms as well. We had General Charlie Flynn here a couple of months ago and he was talking in very similar terms as well. Thinking about the U.S. Army, it also is a sea service and a means of controlling access to the Pacific and also supporting the fleet. So it's a beautiful thing to see the jointness actually happen. The Air Force is getting into the game too. Well, I'd just like to comment that we have almost 100 participants on Zoom in addition to who we have here in the audience and we will be posting this on YouTube. So if anyone you know of would be interested and didn't get the opportunity today, that will be made available to you. So Dr. Holmes, thank you very much. Thanks, Captain Jay. Thank you, everybody.