The US Navy and the Western Pacific

Abstract

Techno-strategic trends in the Western Pacific are challenging the US Navy’s ability to command the seas and project power ashore. Chinese anti-access and area-denial capabilities outrange the striking power of a carrier-centric US Navy, forcing Pentagon strategists to look for new capabilities and tactics to influence events along the Asian littorals. This essay reviews Brent Droste Sadler’s book U.S. Naval Power in the 21st Century, which surveys the technical, manufacturing and logistical weaknesses that stand in the way of a larger and more capable navy, and offers suggestions for how the navy might regain its position of prominence in the Western Pacific. Although Sadler’s suggestions are practical, they underplay the organisational and cultural obstacles that will hinder the types of reforms needed to prepare the US Navy for a new age of great-power competition.

Key words:

• Alfred Thayer Mahan
• autonomy
• China
• first island chain
• great-power competition
• maritime strategy
• naval warfare
• US Navy
• Western Pacific

Notes

1 Bruce Stubbs, formerly of the US Navy Staff, Pentagon. Personal communication with author, March 2022.

2 See Paul McLeary, ‘Congress Pumps the Brakes on Navy, Demands Answers from OSD’, Breaking Defense, 20 July 2020, https:// breakingdefense.com/2020/07/congress-pumps-the-brakes-on-navy-demands-answers-from-osd/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James J. Wirtz

James J. Wirtz is a professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the US Naval Postgraduate School. He recently updated Colin Gray’s strategic history, War, Peace and International Relations, 3rd edition (Routledge, 2023).