Command of the sea was defined as concentration of naval power, in which one nation possessed roughly 50 percent of the total relevant warships owned by all contending powers. When “deconcentration”—the more even distribution of naval power among contending nations—occurred, global war eventually followed, producing a new global leader having command of the sea. Then the cycle repeated. “The long cycle of global politics refers to the process of fluctuations in the concentration of global reach capabilities which provide one foundation for world leadership,” Modelski and Thompson explained.
That was from the USNI article, Think Differently About Naval Presence. Here is a bit more on that from the Midrats podcast with Robert “Barney” Rubel, who wrote the USNI article.
Modelski and Thompson based their analysis on a count — a hull by hull count — of major warships of the powers. Right now, I did my own count of major warships that can go into blue water. We actually are still right at the 50 percent mark. So we can still say we have global command of the sea, but the trends are not good. The US Navy is shrinking. The PLAN [China’s Peoples Liberation Army Navy] is retooling their Navy.
But I would say, at this point I’m not sure counting hulls is the right way to define command of the sea because of the rise of the anti-ship missile, cyberspace — there’s a whole complex of things that now may require us to redefine the basis for command of the sea in a way different than major warship hulls. I don’t know, research is required.
I was fairly surprised to hear that the US, by Reubel’s count, still had 50 percent of major blue water warships despite the PLAN having 355 ships (though, only 145 are “major surface combatants”). That analysis isn’t touted very often.
But certainly, I agree that counting hulls is an increasingly bad proxy for military capabilities because so much of what is now power is intangible. Recently, the CBO’s 30-year shipbuilding analysis moved its focus from hulls to also include vertical launch system (VLS) cells, and found the Navy is moving towards less VLSs spread across more hulls.
The extent to which the Navy has 300 multi-role ships with the same capability versus maybe 25 different types of single-role ships, each with 12 hulls in its class, obviously leads to diverging combat power. Then, when you include all the nuances provided by a suite of sensors, weapons, aircraft, C2 systems, sailor training, and everything else on the ship, you get into intangibles really quickly — or at least you have so many measures of “effectiveness” that it is impossible to recombine them into a single clean number for comparison like “hulls”.
Later in the episode, Reubel discusses how autonomous ships will only be able to serve very niche roles. While you can increase hulls in the water with autonomy, it will not serve much in terms of combat power. Humans are more flexible, and thus more capable.
I agree and disagree. Disruptive new systems will always start out less capable than what came before. But they serve very important niches underserved by the existing systems. Then, what tends to happen over time is that progress in the disruptive tech proceeds at a much faster rate than the “sustaining” innovation on existing systems. They take over more and more niches until they become dominant.
I think this is likely to occur with autonomous ships, but it requires Navy and DoD leaders to have the vision and doggedly pursue that vision despite early setbacks. We’ve seen this happen too many times to count in the commercial sector, perhaps most notably today with electric vehicles. Computer vision market size was $9 billion in 2020 and expected to grow rapidly — perhaps $200 billion by 2030. Imagine all that commercial advances that would essentially go to waste if DoD didn’t put it to good use.
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