Our navy needs to think strategically about its return to history — before history comes a-knocking.
Mahan, we hardly knew ye. Does America still have any maritime strategists? Not so according to former U.S. State Department official and International Assessment and Strategy Center analyst John Tkacik.
Washington Free Beacon reporter Bill Gertz contacted Tkacik to comment on China’s new restrictions on foreign fishing in much of the South China Sea. What he says is largely exceptional, but Gertz closes by tossing out a morsel of red meat. “As China’s navy grows stronger — and the U.S. Navy shrinks — Washington’s options will run out in a few years,” notes Tkacik. “I don’t know that anyone in Washington, either at State or the Pentagon, is thinking this challenge out beyond a year,” he added. “It is America’s misfortune that it no longer has any real maritime strategists.”
Zounds!!
Chances are this was an off-the-cuff remark that Gertz reproduced to boost web traffic. It happens. Still, it is a serious charge, with a big enough truth quotient to justify parsing it in some detail. In one sense doing so is a trivial task. Tkacik makes a categorical statement, that this fine republic of ours is home to zero real maritime strategists. To rebut such a stark claim, all you have to so is produce one contrary example. I’d like to think I look at a real maritime strategist in the mirror each morning. (Otherwise, why confront this face made for radio??) Or, my department houses around forty strategists, some of a nautical bent. Outside Newport, there’s Paul Kennedy down at Yale, Bernard Cole at the National War College, Admiral Mike McDevitt at the Center for Naval Analyses, or Bryan McGrath and Seth Cropsey over at the Hudson Institute. Harumph.
Read the full story at The Diplomat