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September 4, 2014: The United States is trying to organize an international “Thousand Ship Navy” via greater cooperation between the United States Navy and the many nations the U.S. is allies, or simply on good terms, with. Formally called the GMP (Global Maritime Partnerships) the effort is simply a continuation of international naval cooperation American admirals and diplomats have built over the last century. One of the more notable of those efforts, CTF (Combined Task Force)-151, which began operating in 2009 to deal with the pirates off Somalia, was a big success. Over a dozen nations contributed ships and many others (like China and Iran) cooperated with CTF-151 without being a part of it. While organized largely as an American led effort, the task force command regular rotated among member nations and most of the time an American officer was not in charge.
The U.S. now wants to build a global naval alliance to deal with more than pirates, but to do using the techniques that worked so well off Somalia. In other words, GMP is an effort to be better prepared for the next emergency that naval forces can be the solution for. This not only involves threats to world trade (90 percent of which moves by sea) but also natural disasters (most of which have all, or most victims near the coast) and threats to world peace in general, like Chinese claims on the South China Sea and Iranian threats to close the Strait of Hormuz and block most world oil trade.
Read the full story at StrategyPage