The U.S. Navy’s (Maybe) Strategy for China

Just weeks before Joe Biden is to be inaugurated as president of the United States, the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard released a joint – but Navy-focused – strategy for what the three services will look like in coming years, the threats they anticipate combatting, and how.

The new strategy, “Advantage at Sea – Prevailing with Integrated All-Domain Naval Power,” fully embraces a military response to great power competition with China and Russia.

The title is a stark departure from the previous multi-service document, the 2007 “Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower” and its 2015 update. That strategy focused on global partnerships and the emerging importance of non-traditional threats from maritime governance, transnational crime and terrorism, and environmental challenges. The 2015 revision reflected increasing concern about China’s growing fleet and assertive maritime behavior. It addressed more traditional naval power concerns like sea control and high-end combat, but the specific mentions of China focused on diminishing the risk of miscalculation and discouraging aggression.

By contrast, the new strategy’s target is explicit: “Advantage at Sea is a Tri-Service Maritime Strategy that focuses on China and Russia, the two most significant threats to this era of global peace and prosperity.”

It considers China the primary focus because of its growing economic and military might, its aggressiveness, and demonstrated intention of dominating the seas around it. In aggregate, the strategy says that this makes China “the most comprehensive threat to the United States, our allies, and all nations supporting a free and open system.”

It lays out how the three services will deal with China across a spectrum, from peacetime to high-intensity combat.

In day-to-day interactions with Chinese forces, the strategy envisions pushing back against maritime coercion and unprofessional behavior by documenting and publicizing its activities and raising the reputational cost China incurs. For a stronger response, it says that naval forces “will stand ready to disrupt malign activities through assertive operations,” whose nature will be elaborated in other guidance and doctrines.

Given the damage that China’s hostile style of “wolf warrior diplomacy,” unleashed in 2020, has done to its reputation, it is unlikely that publicizing the aggression of its fishing fleets and naval militias will induce Beijing to moderate its behavior. If anything, the strategy could even backfire and feed frenzied nationalism in China without motivating any stronger international response.

During a crisis the strategy falls back on naval forces’ traditional deterrent role by sending ships to picket the affected region, which raises the risks and costs for an opponent to escalate the dispute.

The strategy’s vision for combat is a symphony of advanced long-range weapons, unmanned platforms, and networked capabilities that focus their power distributed across the map. This incorporates all of the high-profile weapons and concept development that the navy and marines especially have focused on in recent years, particularly putting newer, longer-range missiles on ships and submarines and integrating marines, armed with their own mobile missile systems, into clashes to control the seas and attack adversary fleets.

To make those goals a reality, the strategy makes three strategic prioritizations: focusing on China over other potential rivals; pushing back against malign maritime behaviors over minimizing risk; and investing in future capabilities over answering current demands. 

The strategy’s weakness is that only the last priority, focusing on future capability investments, is comfortably within the navy’s purview to make.

The legacy of service strategies like “Advantage at Sea” began with the “Maritime Strategy,” the U.S. Navy’s plan in the 1980s for fighting the Soviet Navy in the event that the Cold War suddenly turned hot. An unclassified version of the strategy was published in 1986 to publicize the operational rationale for the 600-ship fleet that President Ronald Reagan had promised when running for office. But almost as soon as that strategy was published, the navy was put out of the business of formulating war strategies.

Much of the strategy’s public messaging success was because it was based on real operational plans for facing off against the Soviet Union. But later that year the U.S. Congress passed sweeping defense reorganization legislation that took operational authority away from the individual military services and placed it solely with geographically aligned commanders responsible for all the forces in their regions.

The job of the services was henceforth exclusively to procure, maintain, and train forces for those commanders to use. The enduring institutional joke about the head of the U.S. Navy’s title, the Chief of Naval Operations, is that the position is not, in fact, in charge of naval operations. 

Plans like the “Cooperative Strategy” and “Advantage at Sea” can influence what those forces can do for the geographic commanders because the navy decides what ships, planes, and weapons – like long range missiles – to buy and maintain. It also develops the tactics that forces can use to employ those weapons, and it trains the officers that go on to develop plans and strategies for those commanders. 

But this is still only an indirect influence on what those forces actually get used for by the geographic commanders. Whether and how naval forces push back against “malign” Chinese behavior in the South China Sea and elsewhere, as “Advantage at Sea” asserts that they will, is not up to the navy; it is up to the admirals in the Pacific who do not report back to the head of the navy, but to the secretary of defense.

The fact that there will be a new secretary of defense in January (or February, depending on how quickly the confirmation processes goes) risks the plan’s early obsolescence. Lloyd Austin, the presumed next secretary, may not want the navy to push back against China. While unlikely, the new administration may not want to pursue all the new weapons prioritized in the strategy such as long-range anti-ship missiles, next generation amphibious ships, and hypersonic weapons. While they were highly publicized during the Trump administration, most of those programs and doctrines started being developed during the Obama administration.

But it is at minimum bureaucratically unwise for the navy and marines to release such a broad strategy and vision before the next administration has had the opportunity to officially enumerate its security priorities. The best explanation for the document’s timing could be understood as a personal legacy for current Secretary of the Navy Kenneth Braithwaite, who may have wanted to sign the strategy before he is out of a job when President-elect Biden takes over.

There will undoubtedly be a lot of continuity as the next administration takes over, but it is unlikely to enact any of the strategy’s most assertive ideas, if it does at all, until incoming officials are comfortably in place and Biden’s national security priorities and strategy are better fleshed out.

The strategy’s priorities that fall most clearly within the navy and marine corps’ administrative purview are most likely to continue. Focusing investments on improving “sea control” capabilities – more able ships, submarines, and missiles – has been going on for at least a decade and shares broad bipartisan support. One new idea that has not been previously publicized is developing “intermediate force capabilities.” While no specifics are offered, these are intended to provide naval forces with a new suite of non-lethal tools to use against coercion and other actions that do not merit responding with armed force. This idea could provide commanders in the Pacific with important tools for containing Chinese aggression without risking unwanted escalation or violence. 

As to how well the navy’s plan to “uphold maritime governance and counter malign behaviors below the threshold of war through assertive and persistent operations” meshes with the incoming administration’s priorities remains to be seen. If it does not, we might expect an updated tri-service strategy before the ink is fully dry on this one.