American taxpayers could be forgiven if recent events have left them wondering why the largest and most expensive Navy in the world is sitting well outside the Strait of Hormuz, watching powerlessly as the Iranians decide which ships they will allow to transit the waterway. After all, they must wonder, why can’t the Navy simply blast the Iranians away and re-open the strait, sending life and the global economy back to normal?
Alas, the days of omnipotent U.S. sea power as a power projection instrument close to well defended shorelines are coming to an end. This change raises questions about the future of navies and the wisdom of investment in these extremely expensive instruments of national power. A brief review of American naval history shows how this shift came about — and casts doubt on whether Washington is ready for the future of naval war.
Past as prologue
At the beginning of the 20th century, aspirant powers like Germany and the United States saw navies as essential to achieving “great power status” and as important instruments to exert influence over friends and rivals alike.
Drawing upon this logic and the experiences of the once mighty British Royal Navy, the United States built the largest fleet in history drawing upon the era’s virtually unlimited industrial capacities. During World War II, America used its Navy to prosecute and decisively win the war in the Pacific against the Japanese, while also winning the U-boat war in the Atlantic that enabled moving the Army to Europe — and thereby prevented all of Europe from becoming part of the Soviet empire. Both of these victories decisively influenced the direction of the 20th century and the resulting consolidation of America’s global power and hegemony.
At the time, navies had the great advantage of being able to deliver land forces to virtually any shoreline in the world. America’s seemingly ubiquitous aircraft carriers also gave sea-borne forces striking power over several hundred miles along any shorelines to pound enemies at will. This approach perhaps found its best expression during the Vietnam War. U.S. carriers spent much of the conflict 90 miles off the coast of Vietnam in an area dubbed “Yankee Station.” From there, U.S. forces launched air assaults that pummeled North Vietnam — albeit at great expense in lost pilots and hardware. Dawn of the anti-access area denial age
In the 1990s, when the U.S. held a position of unquestioned global naval supremacy following the end of the Cold War, the Navy sailed it carriers into the Persian Gulf with impunity to help the Air Force police no-fly zones over Iraq and to indirectly assist in the enforcement of the United Nations trade embargo on Iraq.
Navy sailors flocked into ports in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar until late in the decade, when American intelligence detected active and ongoing construction work on Iran’s Abu Musa and Tunbs islands just inside the Strait of Hormuz, as well as on the coastline of Bandar Abbas, which border the strait. Upon closer examination, planners realized that Iran was installing anti-ship missiles into concrete and steel-reinforced bunkers, giving it the ability to easily target any ships passing near the strait. By the end of the 1990s, the Navy began reducing the transit of its carriers through the strait, and today those carriers are steaming well offshore outside the range of Iranian missiles.
The era of shore-based anti-access and area denial had arrived in the Persian Gulf. The balance between shore- and sea-based weapons had shifted in favor of shore-based weapons — particularly missiles. No more Yankee Stations were possible in areas where enemies had invested in arsenals of cheap, accurate cruise and ballistic missiles.
Iran’s steps to secure the Strait of Hormuz did not go unnoticed. The Chinese immediately grasped the implications of what Iran had accomplished and set about constructing its own “anti-Navy” system designed around missiles that could target U.S. Navy vessels that presumably would come to Taiwan’s aid in case of any cross-strait attack from the Chinese mainland. Today, China boasts various families of accurate ship-killing systems, notably the DF “Dong Feng” series of missiles that can track and target U.S. ships thousands of miles away while underway at sea. Many wargames today conclusively demonstrate that the United States Navy would take serious and perhaps unacceptable losses from these missiles in any war against China.
Back in the Persian Gulf today, the Navy grasps the reality of the circumstances, recognizing that it simply can’t sail into the strait without risk getting blown to smithereens by Iran’s missiles. Today, its carriers are stationed well outside the Gulf and the ranges of Iranian missiles. These steps have imposed additional costs on war prosecution, necessitating expensive and continuous aerial refueling operations. The Navy has integrated various countermeasures to protect itself from incoming missiles, but the close proximity of Iranian systems in the strait greatly reduces the warning times for any attacks. American vessels are also vulnerable to mines and various unmanned systems both above and underwater. Despite discovering its vulnerability to Iranian mines during Operation Earnest Will in the Iran-Iraq War 40 years ago, the Navy today still has no credible anti-mine ships to mitigate the threat. Lessons of the Ukraine-Russia war are relevant. Ukraine successfully drove the Russian Black Sea Fleet from its shores through attacks by missiles and unmanned systems. Iran has integrated various of these systems into its tool kit in the strait. These systems aren’t necessarily sophisticated, but their mere existence introduces significant risks into U.S. Navy operations in and around the strait that can’t be discounted for mission planning purposes. This is why the U.S. Navy hasn’t attempted to force its way through the strait. Simply put, Iran is threatening extremely expensive and manpower-intensive U.S. ships with weapons that are a fraction of the cost in exchange. Moreover, the United States can’t easily replace destroyed or damaged vessels due to the well-documented decline of the shipbuilding industrial base. If U.S. Navy ships can’t force their way through the strait, then some may ask whether the military could do so with the help of ground forces, as President Donald Trump has repeatedly suggested. But the reality is that such operations with relatively small numbers of troops cannot decisively alter the long-term strategic circumstances. Iran can threaten maritime operations in the strait relatively easily and cheaply through their missile, drone, and maritime unmanned attack systems from areas well back from the strait. There is no decisive military solution to this problem given Iran’s geography and military capabilities.
This reality points to an altered paradigm surrounding the application of sea power close to well-defended shores in the contemporary strategic environment. Gone are the days when carriers and their expensive, manned, short-range airplanes could decisively project power and pound America’s enemies at will from the skies. The proliferation of cheap, effective and unmanned anti-ship systems around the world suggests a new way of war at sea is upon us — whether American military planners like it or not.