The amphibious ship USS Essex leads a formation of East Asian and United States Navy ships in the Gulf of Thailand, February 8, 2010

Up until last April, all seemed quiet in the South China Sea. Then, a familiar island dispute surfaced again, prompting a days long standoff between Chinese and Philippine navy ships which culminated in an embarrassing retreat for the Philippines—prompting Manila to almost immediately announce deeper defense cooperation with the United States.

April’s crisis was caused when Chinese fishermen were caught in waters claimed by the Philippines. The Philippine navy tried to arrest the men but Chinese coast guard intervened, ominously encircling the Philippine warship that had been dispatched to the location. The Chinese fishing vessels subsequently left without the Philippine ship making a move.

The island nation isn’t the only one embroiled in maritime border disputes with China. Across the South China Sea, Southeast Asian states claim waters that Beijing insists are its. The United States, seeking to counter China’s rise in the Pacific, are formally neutral in these disputes but regularly participate in joint naval exercises to make clear that they will not tolerate China menacing its neighbors.

Before the Chinese-Philippine standoff, 2011 had gone by without a noticeable incident in the South China Sea region, causing M. Taylor Fravel, who is an associate professor of political science and member of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to write in Foreign Affairs that China was trying to restore its “tarnished image in East Asia” and reduce the rationale for a more active American presence there.

China appeared to realize that its usual brashness, far from compelling neighbors to make concessions, created a shared interest among nations in Southeast Asia “and an incentive for them to seek support from Washington.”

None of that has changed. As the International Crisis Group pointed out in a report (PDF) last month, “Beijing’s shift toward a more moderate approach in the South China Sea in mid-2011 was rooted in the desire to repair some of the damage done to regional relationships that had led to an expanded US role in the region.”

So how to account for the return of what appears to be a confrontational policy?

The think tank observes that there is a divide within the Chinese foreign policy establishment between a civilian government that is timid and military hardliners who insist that China should protect its strategic interests in the region.

A third of all commercial maritime traffic worldwide and half of the hydrocarbons destined for Japan, the Korean Peninsula and northeast China pass through the South China Sea.

Conventional wisdom in the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, writes the International Crisis Group, is, “you don’t have to do it but you’ll be blamed if you do it and it doesn’t end up well.” Therefore, the bureaucrats would rather “set the disputes aside” and “leave it to the future, smarter generation.”

Some in the military don’t share that patience. Although few believe that China has a short term interest in stirring a conflict in the area, national security hawks “argue for greater assertiveness by making provocative comments in the media.” They may not be representative of the military’s thinking, coming mostly from retired officers and institutions that are affiliated with the military establishment, but “the hardliners have received more attention and inflamed nationalist public sentiment, placing more moderate policy makers in a difficult position.”

Furthermore, there is little legal clarity on what exactly is to be protected or defended and nationalism continues to restrict Beijing’s policy options.

China’s claims to sovereignty in the South China Sea, though patently revisionist, are ill defined. This adds an element of uncertainty to an already volatile situation. Strategic mistrust between China and the United States makes it all the more difficult for cooler headers to prevail.

So far, China has chosen to deploy its coast guard instead of naval assets to force its neighbors into compromises or submission in South China Sea disputes. What it seeks to avoid is the Southeast Asian states banding together and drawing in the United States further to back up their own claims.

Yet this is exactly what is happening. The tactics that China considers cautious are interpreted as bullying abroad, necessitating an American engagement to provide balance.

The difficulty for the Chinese is that to deescalate the situation, they would either have to negotiate on maritime borders which requires compromise or wind down their military presence which could be seen both by its own people and neighboring governments as surrender and risk “losing” more ground.

Sailors aboard the Chinese navy destroyer Qingdao prepare to depart Pearl Harbor, September 10, 2006 (US Navy/David Rush)

The Chinese fishermen who were engaged in a standoff at sea with Philippine navy ships simply sailed away on Saturday and so did the main Philippine warship. Crisis averted? Not quite.

Tensions flared anew after China deployed a second surveillance ship, along with an aircraft that briefly flew over a Philippine coast guard vessel at the disputed shoal where the Chinese say their fishermen sought refuge from a storm.

Manila accused the Chinese of illegally entering its waters and collecting endangered coral, clams and live sharks near the Scarborough Shoal on Tuesday, northwest of the Philippine islands. Two Chinese navy ships arrived at the scene within a matter of days to prevent the arrest of the fishermen.

According to the Philippines, “The stalemate remains,” even if neither the fishing crew nor the surface combatant BRP Gregorio del Pilar are evidently present at the scene anymore.

Although China may appear to have won the day, its neighbors, certainly the Philippines, will have only more reason to pull the United States into the South China Sea area to balance against what they perceive to be China’s bullying tactics.

China couldn’t give in without undermining its borders claims—allowing its citizens to be arrested by the Philippines for fishing in “their” waters—but it could have negotiated their release rather than giving the Philippines no alternative to either losing face or risking a skirmish.

Since the Philippines have lost face, there is an impetus for them to seek a more powerful American engagement in the region.

Some six hundred Special Forces are currently stationed in the Philippines in assistance of local counterinsurgency efforts. United States Navy ships regularly call at Philippine ports but the Americans haven’t had a permanent base in the island nation since they were kicked out of Subic Bay in 1992. Don’t be surprised if that soon changes.

The Philippine navy's multimission surface combatant ship BRP Gregorio del Pilar arrives at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, July 27, 2011

It’s not all quiet in the South China Sea anymore! The Philippines’ largest warship was engaged in a tense standoff with Chinese surveillance vessels in the area on Wednesday after the ship attempted to arrest Chinese fishermen.

The crew of the BRP Gregorio del Pilar boarded Chinese fishing vessels for an inspection on Tuesday which were found in vicinity of the disputed Scarborough Shoal, situated more than two hundred kilometers west of the Philippines. The sailors discovered large amounts of illegally collected coral, clams and live sharks aboard one of the Chinese ships.

Two Chinese maritime surveillance ships then approached and positioned themselves between the Gregorio del Pilar and the fishermen. “There’s a standoff,” said a spokesman for the Philippine ministry of foreign affairs. According to the Chinese, the “marine surveillance ships are in this area fulfilling the duties of safeguarding Chinese maritime rights and interests.”

For good measure, Beijing added that the shoal “is an integral part of the Chinese territory and the waters around it, the traditional fishing area for Chinese fishermen.” Manila similarly insists that the shoal, which is really group of islands and reefs, “is an integral part of Philippine territory.” A Filipino navy official told the Associated Press that more ships are underway.

The Philippines recently explored the possibility of deepening defense ties with the United States. Standoffs as are occurring this week are the very reason. China’s neighbors regard its military rise warily. They seek an active American engagement to balance against what they perceive to be Chinese bullying.

Some six hundred Special Forces are currently stationed in the Philippines in assistance of local counterinsurgency efforts. United States Navy ships regularly call at Philippine ports but the Americans haven’t had a permanent base in the island nation since they were kicked out of Subic Bay in 1992.

In the South China Sea, China regularly clashes with other East Asian states. Beijing asserts varying degrees of sovereignty over virtually the entire area through which passes a third of all commercial maritime traffic worldwide and half of the hydrocarbons destined for Japan, the Korean Peninsula and northeast China.

American attempts at mediation have so far failed to significantly change Chinese behavior and may be unlikely to. The country is facing major demographic challenges as well as resource and water scarcities well into the twenty-first century, compelling it to ensure a favorable balance of power in its backyard and maritime access to natural riches in Africa and the Middle East.

The British Royal Navy frigate HMS Montrose

In what was explained as a display of “Latin American support for Argentina’s legitimate rights,” Peru on Monday disallowed a British frigate to dock in one of its ports.

According to Peru’s foreign minister, “This decision has been made to honor our commitment with the UNASUR”—an interregional body that includes all South American nations except French Guyana—and in recognition of “Argentina’s legitimate rights regarding the Malvinas, South Georgia and South Sandwich islands and their surrounding maritime territories.”

The “Malvinas” are the Falkland Islands, situated nearly three hundred miles off the southeastern coast of Argentina.

HMS Montrose, on routine deployment in the South Atlantic, was set to dock in Lima’s port of Callao on Thursday for a friendly visit.

At a UNASUR summit in Asunción in November however, Peru endorsed Argentina’s claim to the Falklands and condemned the British military presence in the area.

Argentinean president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner had earlier declared the island dispute “not an Argentine cause” but “a global cause, because in the Malvinas they are taking our oil and fishing resources.” She has also labeled Britain a “crude colonial power in decline” and vowed to “reclaim” the Falklands.

Britain has enjoyed sovereignty over the Falklands since the eighteenth century and asserted its control over the archipelago in 1833 and 1982. On both occasions, it was unsuccessfully challenged by the Argentinians.

The dispute has escalated in recent years after British companies began exploring for oil in waters surrounding the islands.

There appears to be little chance of Argentina staging another invasion attempt. Its naval capacity, for one thing, has barely improved since the 1980s when the South American country most recently tried to conquer the islands.

The United Kingdom, for its part, shrugged off the Peruvian decision as little more than regrettable. For good measure, the British embassy in Lima added in a statement that the government in London “remains fully committed to the Falkland islanders’ right to self determination. This position will not change.”

A Russian tankers arrives in Istanbul, Turkey, October 19, 2008 (Ivan Safyan Abrams)

Various sensationalist media accounts yesterday and this morning have been reporting that Russia has sent some sort of antiterror troops to Syria.

The whole media frenzy seems to go back to an ABC News report, which in turn is based on what is almost certainly a misinterpretation of this report on the RIA-Novosti Arabic website. It seems pretty clear that this is a major exaggeration of what is actually happening in Tartus.

Obviously, I don’t have channel to the Russian Ministry of Defense, so treat the following as well informed speculation, rather than reporting. Nevertheless, what is actually happening seems pretty clear from the available information.

The ship in question, called the Iman, is a tanker that as far as I know has been participating in Russia’s counterpiracy mission in the Gulf of Aden. Its mission in Tartus is to refill supplies. Given its previous mission off Somalia, it undoubtedly has a contingent of naval infantry on board for the protection of the ship’s crew. In fact, the original RIA-Novosti report seems to state that the troops in question are marines rather than “antiterror troops,” whatever those may be.

So it seems to me that this whole episode is nothing more than a small contingent of ship protection troops being mislabeled as Russian troops potentially coming to help Bashar al-Assad.

(For a very similar interpretation of events from a Russian source, take a look at Konstantin Bogdanov’s article on the RIA-Novosti website.)

Now, one might argue that the presence of any Russian ship at Tartus at this point in time should be viewed as a show of support for Assad. There is certainly an aspect of that here but one should note that the naval presence is not new. Russian ships have repeatedly docked at Tartus since the uprising began. The Iman in fact replaced the Ivan Bubnov, another tanker that had been docked in Tartus until recently.

It may be that Russia has decided to keep a ship in Tartus in case evacuation of Russian citizens becomes necessary though that seems to be a bit of a waste of resources.

More likely, the ship presence is the result of a combination of factors, including the need to resupply, the desire to show support for Assad and the potential need for evacuation.

The key point is that Russian ship presence at Tartus is not a policy change and the ship protection unit are almost certainly not “antiterror troops” come to support Assad.

The whole episode will become a “bomb certain to have serious repercussions” (as described by an unnamed United Nations Security Council source in the ABC News report) only if the Western media narrative turns it into something that it’s not.

This article originally appeared at Russian Military Reform, March 20, 2012.

Defense secretary Leon Panetta and Chairman Martin Dempsey of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington DC, November 15, 2011

America’s defense secretary and top military officer on Tuesday warned that deeper cuts to the nation’s military budget would incur “unacceptable risk.”

In testimony to two congressional committees, Secretary Leon Panetta defended the Obama Administration’s plan to trim $450 billion in defense spending over the next decade. He recognized that there was “very little room for error” as a consequence of the reductions but said they were “acceptable risks.”

Plans to reduce projected defense spending increases by another half a trillion dollars Panetta argued were “crazy” though.

The Pentagon requested a $525 billion budget for the fiscal year 2013 which starts in October. Its five year spending plan accommodates roughly $260 billion in savings, more than half of the $450 billion in cuts which were embedded in last year’s Budget Control Act. The rest of the cuts are supposed to be parsed out through the rest of the decade.

Initial savings will be achieved by slowing but not canceling weapons purchases. Procurement reductions make up roughly 40 percent of more than $5 billion in savings next year.

The Air Force will buy two fewer F-35 Joint Strike Fighters and six fewer V-22 Osprey tiltrotor troop transports in 2013. The purchases of unmanned drone aircraft will also be reduced. Next year’s budget contains $885 million to buy twenty-four MQ-9 Reapers for the Air Force, a reduction from forty-eight in fiscal year 2012, as well as $750 million to buy nineteen MQ-1C Gray Eagles for the Army, down from forty-three last year.

The Air Force must also retire six fighter plane squadrons over the next five years but $300 million is requested to 2013 to fund development of a new strategic bomber plane.

As the military prepares to draw down forces deployed in Afghanistan over the next couple of years, Army and Marine Corps combined are set to lose more than twenty thousand troops.

The Navy intends to retain its eleven aircraft carriers and a similar number of amphibious landing ships although the emphasis will shift from a fleet that is dominated by powerful surface combatants and submarines to one that is made up of smaller and lightly armed littoral combat craft and transport vessels.

If lawmakers fail to act, defense could be subject to up to $600 billion more in reductions. As a consequence of Congress’ failure to achieve $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade, a “sequestration” plan was automatically enacted.

The Defense Department has refused to prepare for these additional cuts. As Secretary Panetta told legislators on Tuesday, “I don’t think we should try and bring some common sense to what I think is a crazy process.”

General Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that under sequestration, he would have to cut spending on maintenance, operations and training. “That’s the definition of a hollow force,” he said.

USS Carl Vinson receives fuel and supplies from USNS Yukon during a replenishment at sea in the Pacific Ocean, December 8, 2010

President Barack Obama’s planned reductions in defense spending have earned him considerable criticism from the right. One of his potential Republican challengers, Mitt Romney, laments that the United States Navy “is smaller than it’s been since 1917.” Other conservatives claim that the cuts in military spending will put the nation at risk.

The “cuts,” worth nearly $900 billion over the next ten years, won’t necessarily reduce spending from today’s $671 billion defense budget. Rather, they will reduce projected increases in spending. Part of the reduction will happen if America winds down its engagement in Afghanistan in 2014. For 2012, the Pentagon has requested $118 billion for overseas military operation, the bulk of which is to finance the Afghan war.

Former defense secretary Robert Gates identified some $400 billion more in savings, largely in organization and procurement. He capped production of the new F-22 fighter jet for instance, much to the dismay of national security hawks in Congress.

Yet it’s because of Congress’ failure to find cuts elsewhere that the Defense Department faces an additional half a trillion dollars worth of reductions.

In budget negotiations last year, Democrats and Republicans failed to agree on a plan for long term fiscal consolidation. As a result, some $500 billion in automated cuts was enacted.

Defense secretary Leon Panetta, Gates’ successor, had forecast “doomsday” if the sequester cuts were to come into effect. The American military would be reduced to a “paper tiger,” he said, one that “invites aggression.”

Whatever the effect on the military’s ability to project power, even with the $500 billion in additional savings, the defense budget will not shrink in real terms but remain stagnant for the next ten years.

Since September 11, 2001, defense spending has increased by almost 7 percent a year, up from $291 billion ten years ago. The Congressional Budget Office estimated last year that in order for the military to execute its base budget plans for this decade, it needed a total of $597 billion or 11 percent more than if funding was held at the 2011 level. Military spending would thus rise by almost $60 billion a year on average unless entire weapons programs were reconsidered or pay and benefits for servicemen and -women was reduced.

As procurement costs rise because weapons system are ever more sophisticated, there will have to be reductions in the force to accommodate the budget squeeze. Army and Marine Corps will lose troops as the strategic emphasis shifts to the Pacific realm where air and sea power are deemed critical.

It’s because of this “Asia pivot” that the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Brian Slattery questions the wisdom of not having a more robust navy. “The US fleet, amid a host of defense issues in need of attention, cannot atrophy any further,” he believes. Among those issues; China’s “increasing efforts to assert its ‘indisputable sovereignty’ over the South China Sea.”

If President Obama wishes to follow through on pledges of a greater Pacific presence, he must either somehow overturn much of the defense slashing he has implemented or attempt to loot other defense accounts to fund a sustainable blue water navy.

In real terms, the US Navy has diminished in size from nearly six hundred ships at the end of the Cold War in 1989 to 283 in 2009. Under current plans, the force could approach the number of 245 ships that were in service before the United States joined the First World War in 1916.

Before it faced the $500 billion in sequestered cuts, the Pentagon envisioned buying 275 new ships over the next thirty years at a total cost of $465 billion—although the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the cost would be closer to $539 billion through 2041, about 16 percent more.

More than two hundred of those ships would be for combat with seventy for logistics and support missions. Given the rate at which the Navy planned to retire ships from the fleet, the total number in service would remain over three hundred throughout the thirty years period.

It’s unclear how the additional $500 billion in reductions will impact long term procurement although the Pentagon announced Wednesday that it plans to cut sixteen ships from its five year budget plans which would reduce the number of new ships funded in fiscal 2013 by three, from thirteen down to ten.

Secretary Panetta, moreover, insists that whatever the size of the cuts, the navy will maintain its eleven carrier strike groups with the newest aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford, scheduled to replace the USS Enterprise in 2015.

It seems altogether unlikely that the fleet will approach 1917 levels. Even if it did, it must be noted that simply counting the number of ships gives one a poor indication of American naval power. The vessels that are in service with the US Navy today are among the most sophisticated (and most expensive) in the world. Numbers matter less than capacity and in this regard, the United States military is—and will for decades remain—unparalleled.

HMS Montrose comes along side the Nimitz class aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, December 10, 2005

In the first week of January, defense secretaries Philip Hammond and Leon Panetta signed a statement of intent on aircraft carrier cooperation that, according to a Pentagon spokesman, will “provide the basis for the US to assist the UK Royal Navy in developing its next generation of aircraft carriers. This cooperation is a cutting edge example of close allies working together in a time of fiscal austerity to deliver a capability needed to maintain our global military edge.”

Figuring out exactly what that means in real, physical results is not easy however because, like any NATO allies, and perhaps more than some, the American and British navies are often working together in a number of ways already, from deployments to individual secondments, to war games and other peacetime training exercises.

Interoperability, then, seems covered by existing practices and furthering of it would seem to suggest more of the same. But the statement really comes into its own when one regards the recent policies of the British defense ministry in procurement issues and in retiring systems.

The October 2010, after the latest Strategic Defense and Security Review had been released, I noted the loss of the Harrier GR9 from the Royal Air Force inventory here at the Atlantic Sentinel which ended over thirty years of British use of the vertical takeoff jet, the first in service being the Royal Navy Sea Harriers in 1978 which saw action in the Falklands War. The construction of the two Queen Elizabeth class carriers remained on the board despite fears that one could be scrapped. It may still be sold.

With the retirement of the Harrier, the Royal Navy was left with two light aircraft carriers of the Invincible class: Illustrious and Ark Royal—Invincible herself being decommission in 2005—with nothing to throw off them, but in the SDSR, Ark Royal too was to be immediately retired and currently only Illustrious remains in the role of a helicopter carrier. It is believed she will remain in service until 2014 from which point there will not be a vessel in service with the Royal Navy capable of operating such fixed wing craft, regardless of the fact that there aren’t any anyway. Considering the Royal Navy was the first to operate aircraft carriers in the First World War, it must certainly be a source of shame and embarrassment for that institution.

This, however, is not surprising. The loss of the last real aircraft carrier fielded by the Royal Navy, HMS Ark Royal in 1978, was a sign of the future as much as the past. The Royal Navy had been reduced in capabilities (but not commitments) since the mid 1950s. The winds of change at that time clearly blew forth the final touches to the fact that the Royal Navy had been relinquishing its two hundred year position of mastery of the seas, and the responsibility of maintaining their peace, since the Second World War.

It really hit home in the Suez crisis when the US Navy demonstrated clearly the new formula of the international system, one in which Britain, and subsequently the Royal Navy, was no longer the arbiter of good conduct on the great common of the seas. The US Navy took that role, that capability and that responsibility.

With the passing of Poseidon’s trident from Britannia to Columbia, the funding also changed hands. It was now the duty of the American taxpayer to finance the world’s largest navy with as many as eight carrier fleets today. Britons could at least sigh in relief that this burden was no longer theirs.

Yet until the 2010 SDSR, British defense reviews maintained the need for global role aims, despite constant reduction in suitable capabilities. The Falklands war of 1982 is an example of this.

The 2010 SDSR said it would reduce commitment yet maintained the decision to continue construction of two new carriers, made by the previous administration, which shows a bolstering of capabilities to support commitments necessitating force projection, an about face compared to previous reviews.

The point of such aircraft is geared toward projecting power from beyond established force conveying infrastructures such as those found in or close by states willing to provide airstrips and other facilities. This is therefore not something vital to the security of Britain as a state but in protecting established and emerging interests beyond the immediate area, to maintain good conduct at sea and in the littoral—a job, we have already established, that is undertaken by the much larger, much more capable United States Navy. Could this then be a minor reversal of the last sixty years of British decline at sea in favor of the United States Navy’s growing presence?

In austere economic times as these, even the Department of Defense has considered force reduction, to the happiness of some pundits and observers who too often fail to realize the importance of the United States Navy to maintaining the current international system and the responsibilities of the United States to that system.

Should the United Kingdom come to assist this task of Atlas, the US Navy would find itself more free to cut down its own forces and perhaps, depending on the burden being taken on by allied forces, reduce the number of its carrier fleets.

This is not to say that is how things will pan out but the American encouragement of British plans to expand capabilities like force projection and sea basing are surely not done out of the goodness of Secretary Panetta’s heart. The United States will surely benefit from a friendly carrier out doing the same job as the US Navy, especially one operating the same aircraft, speaking the same language, with officers and men who have worked with the US Navy and with equipment using similar supply chains to the US Navy and allowing American aircraft to land on a conventional carrier deck.

Furthermore, it may be wondered if this will involve industry assistance of some kind in the development of the carrier itself, which would seem to be mentioned in the statement, but of what kind is not made clear. Both the new Royal Navy carriers and the next generation of American ones are said to feature electromagnetic catapults. No doubt the sharing of other technologies could be agreed upon to increase interoperability.

The Royal Navy faces severe challenges in achieving any kind of position from which to lend credible assistance however. In the summer of 2010 it was thought Britain and France could closely integrate aspects of their defence capabilities, including the use of the French carrier Charles De Gaul, an idea that was later rubbished by Liam Fox, then defense secretary, for good reason, Charles De Gaul being a nuclear powered, conventional CATOBAR carrier. The new British carriers will also facilitate catapult assisted takeoff as opposed to the “ski jump” type used on the Invincible class and optimized for aircraft like Harrier.

For the same reason this could not work, the Royal Navy will struggle to adjust to the new vessels, and hence commitment of the assistance of the United States Navy.

The Royal Navy has no operational memory of such a large vessel, of orchestrating such large air flight groups, or of operating decks or aircraft compatible with catapult assisted takeoff. The US Navy has, and Royal Air Force pilots will no doubt have to learn from American counterparts in the technical difficulties of landing and taking off from aircraft carriers, as much as Royal Navy servicemen will have to learn from their opposite numbers in American service in handling all aspects of carrier operation.

This is quite good news as it will be easier to learn from the Americans than any other power with an aircraft carrier, simply by closeness of relationship and by common language. One also suspects the souring of cordiality between Britain and France surrounding eurozone fiscal policies may have played a part in turning to the United States when just last year the French were heralded as the new partner for interoperability and joint training. Defense diplomacy is alive and well.

Furthermore the Ministry of Defense plans the Royal Air Force to use the F-35C on board the new carriers. Britain is the only Level One designated state involved in the unfortunately slightly troubled Joint Strike Fighter project and, should all creases be ironed out, will benefit greatly from experience of working with the United States, specifically the US Navy which is set to use the same variant.

The scheduling of aircraft production however may seem slow with the F-35 perhaps entering service in 2020. The Queen Elizabeth is due to enter service at some point around 2016. That leaves her without aircraft for four years which by the standards of things at the moment is perfectly fine and sensible. Eight years then until RAF pilots (and one hopes, one day again, Royal Navy ones) as well as Royal Navy sailors will learn everything they can on American ships about carrier operations and duties. Ample time, considering it only took the Royal Navy two years to develop the first true aircraft carrier (HMS Argus, launched in 1918) from scratch and write at least the first few chapters in the book on modern naval aviation.

The only problem which remains then, in theory, is the rest of the Royal Navy fleet which has had its other types cut, a number of destroyers and frigates lost along with the amphibious dock landing ship Largs Bay, now HMAS Choules.

With a smaller fleet the Royal Navy will have a weaker stable with which to create and augment a flotilla based around one of the new carrier. Forming two such flotillas around both of the new British carriers is out of the question so perhaps there again interoperability with the US Navy, and possibly even the French, will be the expected outcome, should the scenario come about where Britain has to deploy two aircraft carriers at the same time. Should it have to go it alone, the Royal Navy force sent may be at increased risk due to lack of support vessels and have limited capability if specialist vessels like the Bay class are unavailable or too far away for whatever reason.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta leaves a press conference at the Pentagon in Washington DC, January 5, 2012

President Barack Obama on Thursday unveiled a new defense strategy that prioritizes air force and navy spending at the expense of the Army and the Marine Corps.

In order to trim military spending by $487 billion over the next decade compared to present budget projections, the Army and Marine Corps between them could lose up to a hundred thousand personnel.

An entire combat brigade is likely be withdrawn from forward deployment in Europe as the focus shifts to the Pacific realm. The Pentagon will lose its theoretical ability to wage two wars simultaneously, instead preparing to win one conflict and deny an enemy victory in another.

How this strategic shift will specifically impact force posture and procurement remains to be seen but with a renewed focus on cyber warfare and unmanned aerial vehicles, there is a clear movement away from counterinsurgency toward a rapidly deployable and flexible air and naval force.

Sea power is certainly critical to American superpower but the era of big naval confrontation, and with it, the era of the supercarrier, may be drawing to a close. Amphibious assault ships, particularly of the landing helicopter dock type, able to deploy fighter jets, helicopters and Marines anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice, can project American military force faster and at much lower cost.

Construction of the Nimitz carrier averaged $4.5 billion per ship. The new USS Gerald R. Ford will probably come in over $13 billion. A Wasp class amphibious ship, by contrast, costs $750 million to build while the Navy could buy three America class amphibs for the price of a supercarrier. America is basically a light carrier, the size of France’s Charles de Gaulle.

The recent NATO intervention in Libya was a case in point for the amphibious assault ship. None of the US Navy’s eleven supercarriers was involved in the operation. Instead, the American contribution to Operation Odyssey Dawn was spearheaded by the USS Kearsarge and its four Harrier jump jets. Its capabilities may pale in comparison to the fifty fixed wing aircraft that a carrier brings to the fore but for a military effort that was supposed to be limited in time and scope, it did the job.

Light interventions like Libya are likely to happen again when tumult in failed or failing states threatens regional stability and trade; when nations become a breeding ground for international terrorism; when shipping lanes are menaced.

Nearly all of America’s wars since the end of World War II have been of the light intervention kind or they started out that way. Vietnam and Iraq escalated and became prolonged ground wars. President Obama himself intensified the battle in Afghanistan to wage a deadly counterinsurgency campaign there. Does it make sense to shed the ability to do what used to be called guerilla in favor of a massive Pacific war that’s unlikely to happen?

After Vietnam, the armed forces dismantled their counterinsurgency capabilities. Humanitarian interventions in Somalia and the Balkans in the 1990s were handled relatively well in spite of reductions but when the missions in Afghanistan and Iraq morphed into protracted ground campaigns during the middle of the last decade, the Army and Marines had to learn on the job and invest massively in training and rapid procurement to turn the tide of the war.

There is a real danger that if these investments are now discarded to prepare for a war with China that will not happen, they will have to be made again, at far greater expense, if ever an intervention takes longer than expected.

The Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group sails in formation with Indian warships during Exercise Malabar, October 22, 2008 (US Navy)

AirSea Battle is taking center stage in the emerging American Pacific regional military strategy. Now that the concept has acquired newfound fame, it has also similarly acquired enemies. Marine Corps War College Professor James Lacey is the latest to attack AirSea Battle as a operational concept elevated to strategy. Bryan McGrath of Information Dissemination has counterattacked in a recent blog post. But there’s the thing: what is AirSea Battle?

Unlike AirLand Battle, its Cold War namesake, AirSea Battle is not clearly defined in a doctrinal publication. There is no equivalent of FM 100-5: Blueprint for the AirLand Battle. AirSea Battle is a nebulous joint concept promoted in military journals, a paper by the Center for Strategic Budgetary Assessments looking at an operational solution for access problems in the Pacific, and a multiservice office. There’s also a Joint Operational Access Concept, which is not necessarily the same thing as an AirSea Battle concept.

So what is AirSea Battle? In the absence of any further information it is probably what its proponents say it is—a military operational concept for dealing with the ability of certain states and groups to prevent the United States from entering conflict areas. These groups use a variety of forms of standoff weaponry in both land, sea and air. While it is strongly suggestive that this concept does, in fact, refer to China, it should be observed that there are other maritime areas in which anti-access and area denial threats exist. AirSea Battle is not a strategy, and it is hard to find anyone who has referred to it as such.

There is, somewhat of a similarity to AirLand Battle in that putting both into operation puts some incongruities of policy into sharp relief. AirLand Battle leveraged emerging military capabilities for deep attack, such as the Assault Breaker and Follow-On Forces Attack, just as AirSea Battle would presumably benefit from increased investment in long range strike across longer operational distances.

But lost in AirLand Battle nostalgia is the fact that it was necessitated by two unpleasant facts: overwhelming Soviet conventional superiority and the political (not necessarily military) desirability of a forward defense. And there was also the dicey matter of engaging in a massive conventional war with a nuclear power, a power that knew that we had previously refused to rule out first use of nuclear weapons to offset conventional weakness. AirLand Battle was the lynchpin of a potential military strategy of conventional defense in northeast Europe and a policy that Western Europe would be maintained free of Soviet expansion. But that military strategy was always precarious.

Similarly, AirSea Battle, at least in the Pacific, is part of an overall military strategy that supports the US policy goals of maintaining its own access to the maritime commons of East Asia and maintaining the balance that has allows the structured ambiguity of American, Chinese and Taiwanese understandings of the One China Policy to continue. Of course, given that the anti-ship missiles are themselves located deep inland and supported by C4ISR battle networks, the crux of AirSea Battle could hinge on striking both. It remains uncertain whether the United States would be realistically commit to such an escalation, or whether it would be wise.

Either way, much of the current debate about AirSea Battle is at this point either speculation or a proxy for a more existential battle in Washington: the Pentagon budget wars. The parameters of the concept will continue to evolve, unfortunately dating most writing on it (including this post, perhaps).

This article originally appeared at Asia Security Watch, December 22, 2011.