Sea Control - Sea Control 496 - Naval Presence and the Interwar US Navy with BJ Armstrong

Episode Date: February 22, 2024

Links1.  Naval Presence and the Interwar US Navy and Marine Corps, Forward Deployment, Crisis Response, and the Tyranny of History, by Benjamin Armstrong, Routledge, 2024.2. Sea Control 239 - Things Done By Halves with Dr. BJ Armstrong, CIMSEC, April 11, 2021. 3. Sea Control 311  - Developing the Naval Mind with BJ Armstrong and John Freymann, CIMSEC, January 20, 2022. 4. Sea Control 209 - Learning War with Trent Hone and Sebastian Goldstein, CIMSEC, November 1, 2020. 5. Military Innovation in the Interwar Period, by William Murray and Allan Reed Millett (eds), Cambridge University Press, August 13, 1998.

Hey folks, it's Jared. I've got friend of the pod, BJ Armstrong, on this week discussing naval presence in the interwar period. It's a personal highlight for me because while we've had BJ on previously, I've never been the one doing the interview, so there's another white whale off the list. This episode was edited and produced by Andrew Frame. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out simsec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication.

And with that, Kimber's meant. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is longtime friend of Simsek B.J. Armstrong, and we're going to discuss his latest book, Naval Presence and the Interwar U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. So, B.J., welcome. Could you remind the audience a little bit about your background, please? Yeah, thank you so much for having me aboard, Jared. It's really delightful to be back with Simsek again. I'm a captain in the United States Navy and an associate professor of war studies and naval history at the U.S. Naval Academy, where my teaching is primarily

in the history department. I'm also currently the Admiral J. Johnson Professor of Leadership and Ethics at the Naval Academy. And in that capacity, I do some interdisciplinary collaboration between the history department and the professional development and leadership ethics and law folks at the Naval Academy. I'm a helicopter pilot by trade, a search and rescue and special operations pilot. I did that for about 16, 17 years in the fleet, and then became what we call a permanent military professor at the Academy. And so I earned my PhD at King's College London and will spend the rest of my career in Annapolis working in and around teaching history to midshipmen. I am the author or editor of seven books on naval history or strategy or leadership and quite a few articles

as well. Today, I am here in my personal and academic capacity. And so I need to point that out for the JAGs. Nothing that I say should be construed as policy or opinion of the Naval Academy, the Department of the Navy, or any government agency. These are merely my opinions. So as we remind our listeners each week, all opinions stay our own, not reflective of any of the institutions with which we might be otherwise associated. We are going to reference some of your other work, I think, as we go through here. If you want to hear BJ's previous conversations here on Sea Control. You appeared on Sea Control 239 with Walker Mills talking about things done by HABS, and Sea Control 311 with the great Andrea Howard and your co-author John

Freiman developing the Naval Mine. So while you have appeared on Sea Control multiple times, I haven't actually had the opportunity to interview you yet, though you and I have corresponded a number of times over the years. So you're like one of the last white whales left for me it was down to you and share i like to spread it out like to spread it out yeah it's like we have a couple more hosts but this is definitely a highlight for me that i finally get to uh you don't want to interview you so we'll jump into other questions here you cited the works of cc felker and trent hone who's appeared here a number of times as well in your introduction that they'd left you an opening to approach the interwar navy from a slightly different angle so

what were you looking to explore with this monograph so the monograph really started out with reading of our contemporary naval analysis and articles i started to notice a pretty significant pattern in articles i was reading at you know at simsec at war on the rocks a lot of proceedings um there's a couple of proceedings articles in particular i can think of where they focused on the years between world war one and world war two the inner war years as we call as an area ripe for insights for our contemporary world, our 21st century world with the rise of China and other great powers. And the vast majority of these articles, in fact, maybe it's safe to say all of these articles that I was reading, analyzed the interwar years with the hindsight that comes

from knowing what was going to happen in World War II. And so the focus was, how do you develop the doctrines and technologies to win the next war. And what ended up happening was a narrative begins to come out of these articles that after the First World War, the United States Navy came home, returned the U.S. waters, and it focused on this development of doctrine and development of these new technologies. So we've got the fleet exercise program. We've got the development of naval aviation. We have the development of amphibious warfare. And those were all important things that did happen during that time period but it kind of sucked all the oxygen out of thinking about the interwar years and so reading these contemporary articles saying oh we should

you know in preparation for a fight against china we should think about how we prepared to fight against japan another pacific enemy and here's how we prepared right this was the the doctrine creation and the strategy creation process all super valuable stuff i started to think about the historical literature as a historian, right? Like what's the deep work that historians have done on this era when they've gone to the archives? And C.C. Felker's book, Testing American Sea Power, Trent Holden's book, Learning War, kind of two of the great examples of this, where these historians have done an amazing job of getting into the nitty gritty of that question of doctrine development, of how did the fleet exercises work? How did that virtuous cycle,

as it's been described actually functioned where you know a new idea was created at the naval war college and then war games on the war gaming floors and then it was sent out to the fleet and the fleet ran these big exercises these fleet problems where they experimented with the ideas and tried to make them practically happen and then they did a debrief and said this worked and this didn't flirt back through washington and like the general board and in the op nav structure for war planning and they kind of adjusted the war plans and guess what it went back to the war college and then they reengaged with another set of war games on the war gaming floors uh in in what we know of as sims hat today and that cycle just continued to improve american war fighting

capability across the inner warriors amazing history just really great stuff you know i also ought to mention the the book that wick murray um edited on innovation in the inner war years that kind of becomes becomes one of those standard texts that everybody is citing in their proceedings articles when they write about this idea that in order to prepare for a conflict in the pacific in the 21st century we ought to be thinking in this way and i'm admittedly kind of a contrarian by nature and so if everybody's talking about a particular time period in one way it gives me pause and i wonder is there something that we're missing i mean 20 years is a long time and those two decades between the world wars when we think about international relations are enormously

fascinating right the emergence of weimar germany and then the disintegration of weimar into nazism the rise of the japanese empire the war that breaks out in china first the civil war and then the japanese interventions i mean there's there's a lot of stuff going on the spanish civil war kicks off i mean it's just the world is a busy place and i wondered is it really true that the united states navy and marine corps just came home that just struck me as unlikely with all this stuff going on in the world and so i i went and kind of started digging around in some of the sources. And what turned out to originally have been an intended article, I had intended to just write a relatively short article suggesting that this question could be asked. But once I found the

Secretary of the Navy's annual messages for these 20 years, and I found the CNO's annual reports, the operational reports, and the Commandant Ray Corp's annual messages, annual reports for those years what i discovered was i had a an enormous wealth of information from those just those three sources alone you know and then i dug around a little bit more found some other stuff that was really interesting but just thinking about those three sources as the primary backbone of the the archival work here there was a lot of material and so i sat down and started writing and what was going to be an article just kept going because i had such great information and it ended up ended up being what we'll call it a monograph it's a relatively short book right it's about

100 pages um so it's pretty short pretty easy to get through lengthwise you could you could read it in a weekend um but it it was there was so much more there than just writing an article and the the crux of what i think i have shown in in the writing of the book is that no the navy didn't just come home the navy had an enormous amount of overseas operations the kinds of things that today's navy would call presence operations um i'm with the the the great naval thinker brian mcgrath on this i don't necessarily like the presence label we can talk about that a little bit later on um but the navy was enormously busy during these 20 years and so this narrative that The Navy came home and prepared to fight Japan. So today we need to stop doing forward presence operations and bring the Navy home in order to prepare for a potential eventual war with China. It's based on a partial reading of history. It's an incomplete reading of history because that's not what the Navy did and the Marine Corps did in that era.

And so the monograph, the book, is an examination of what the Navy actually did do in those 20 years between the First and Second World War, and then a little bit of analysis of why was this this way and what does it lead us to think about today? So you brought up Brian and naval presence. To what extent were you influenced? Because there's also a very contemporary debate going on about naval presence and whether or not that mission should be codified in the Navy's current Title X responsibilities to capture the strain that always exists on the fleet because we are constantly deploying. It's like, we have never stopped deploying. I've been doing this for 20 years. We've been deploying a third of the fleet in general all the time. What you're referring to, I believe, is the change to the Navy's mission that was placed in the Inhofe NDAA a couple of years ago. Yes. I think what Congressman Gallagher, who largely led that effort, did is enormously valuable. You know, because prior to this change, the Navy's mission largely was defined in the creation of the military responsibilities in Title 10 of the U.S. Code in 1956. let's just as a story let's think about this for a minute 1956 versus 2023 very very different places international relations wise the dynamics of the world economically enormously different places hell 1956 versus 1996 enormously different places right the idea that the mission that was

placed in title 10 code in 1956 that said the only true mission of the navy is to fight and win the nation's wars first of all that's ahistorical that is not what the navy has done historically across time the u.s navy or other navies so it was ripe for reanalysis because the world is a different place today than when that was placed in code in 1956 so i think two things. First, the effort to take a fresh look was enormously valuable. And I think the naval professionals should be thanking Congressman Gallagher for pushing that effort because just asking the question is valuable. And then to think in a historical context, okay, you know, I teach our American Naval History class at the Naval Academy. I actually love it. It's one of

the great joys of my teaching job to bring in plumes or freshmen and introduce them to this profession that they are joining in the history of the Navy. You look across 250 years, the Navy is a peacetime organization. It has enormous responsibilities in peacetime. It has economic responsibilities. It has diplomatic responsibilities. It has informational responsibilities. It is not just a warfighting organization, or it hasn't been historically. And so I think the new mission as it now appears in Title 10 code, which includes the defense of the prosperity of the United States of America and other peacetime responsibilities, is accurate from a historical standpoint. Now, whether the Navy wants that to be its mission kind of inside the lifelines, I think there is a cultural and social question there that the Navy will have to sort out over the next few years. You know, I wrote an article in War on the Rocks, kind of examining some of the research from this book and thinking about what Secretary Del Toro has been talking about with the new maritime statecraft. If I think about what flag officers tend to tell sailors today, they emphasize for them that they are warriors and warfighters. And we hear those phrases constantly, right? so that's the cultural marker that's a sign that inside the lifelines war and warfare is where we

want to be focused so i think the change in mission it's not just a change for congress to think about in terms of how is the navy funded how is it resourced do we have enough ships those things are all true like it's it is for congress to think about that stuff and it needs to but i think it's also an internal cultural leadership question for the navy itself how do we value these things do we talk about them and how is it a part of our professional identity so you brought up sort of the cultural questions there too and we're diverting a little bit from the intended topic here about our care that's fascinating i think a lot of that commentary comes though from a spate of articles a few years ago about talking about like as the navy lost its war fighting edge

I think the messaging changed around that. So I don't know. I'm not trying to debate you or antagonize you on this point or anything. But I do think there's open discussions like, is that pushback against the notion of presence? Or is it a response to sort of a discussion about like, have we lost our warfighting edge? Like, no, we need to refocus and we need to talk about it more. well i think that's good observation and i don't think bringing that up is debating any kind of point that i'm making because the reality is the trick here for a service and for a profession is to figure out where those balances lie while i say war fighting is not the only job of the navy it clearly is an enormously important job of the navy right so don't think that i am discounting that absolutely i mean we're recording this december 3rd and we've got destroyers downing drones and everything else uh in the vicinity of the uh red sea arabian peninsula right now so it's extremely pertinent right now i'll come back to our script a little bit here

how was the navy organized after world war one and what were the various fleets doing so after world war one and and often before world war one also the navy was structured in a fundamentally different way than how we have the navy today and i think it's important for us to take a moment to think about that because it had strategic and operational impact as well as you know shipbuilding force design impact so the navy prior to the second world war was one fleet that's the way the navy thought of itself was one battle organization one fleet But the Navy had two coastlines, right? It had an Atlantic coast and it had a Pacific coast. And so the challenge for the United States Navy, Mahan writes about this as early as the 1890s, the challenge for the United States Navy is how do you create a structure or a force structure that is capable of fighting on two different fronts or that would have to respond to two different oceans? The Panama Canal is a huge part of this

The Panama Canal comes along It opens in the early 1900s And so what the Navy in the years Immediately before the First World War And then during the interwar years What the Navy's big picture is Hey, we're going to have a Battle force or battle fleet

Depending on which years they call it They have different labels for it But we can't put it all on one coast Because then the other coast is undefended So we're going to have two different organizations We're going to have the battle fleet And then we're going to have the scouting fleet. And one of them is going to be based on the east coast, and the other is going to be based on the west coast.

And if a big war kicks off in one of those two oceans, the force that's there will operate mostly as a holding force, while the other one scoots through the Panama Canal as fast as possible to reinforce them and then have the big battle. now this is well let's just call it suboptimal from an operational and tactical perspective right you know if you've got the scouting force on the west coast and and some pacific power engages with the scouting force and the scouting force is too small well that enemy force can just defeat you in detail then right like it can just it can take out your scouting force and then long an ambush and we fear about it for us to show up through the panama canal and guess what where it's coming from there's only one canal so it's not exactly a great solution it's kind of the one they come up with though because there's not a lot of good solutions here

as a result you have these two organizations one on the east coast one the west coast the battle force and the scouting force and these are the two organizations that have the focus of most naval historians most of the literature focuses on these two fleets or forces because these are the ones that conduct the fleet exercises and the fleet problem turns out the navy also has a lot of other stuff going on so not long after the end of the first world war something called the special service squadron is created that's for really it's the caribbean but they get labeled as the western atlantic also then there's also in the immediate aftermath of the first world war there are ships that remain behind in the eastern mediterranean in the black sea remember as world

war one ends this is also the russian revolution this is the bolshevik revolution and the civil war that kicks off as the bolsheviks as the soviets begin to try and consolidate power and so you know the reds and the whites they're fighting each other in russia and this includes the land being fought over in the sea space being fought over today in ukraine and in the black sea is one of the places of this violence and so there's an american naval unit that is there in the eastern mediterranean in the black sea in order to provide a whole wide range of operational capabilities then there's the asiatic fleet the asiatic fleet is based out of the philippines the philippines at this time it's important for us to remember is american territory after the war of 1898 against

spain the philippines have been annexed the philippines were american territory it's in between world war one and world war two when independence begins to be given to the philippines but even when political independence begins to be given to the philippine people responsibility for the military defense of the philippines remains an american responsibility you know douglas MacArthur is there. He's in command of both U.S. Army forces and Philippine Army forces in this time period between the World Wars. And so the Asiatic fleet is based out of the Philippines and enormously busy in the Western Pacific as well. And then across the time period, across the two decades, there are other units that kind of pop up when emergencies present themselves. Different European squadrons are created. When the Spanish Civil War kicks off, this is one of the things I discovered doing the research that I had never heard about before. And I'm fascinated. So I hope some historian goes and dives into the records and researches this and writes something about it. There's a squadron created when the Spanish civil war kicks off called squadron 40 T and squadron 40 T is sent to Spanish waters to protect

American interests, to protect American civilians who live in Spain, to interdict some of the gun running that's going on, just kind of do maritime security operations. I'd never heard of this organization before, but they're there for almost the whole of the Spanish civil war, deploying out of French ports, at one point and other European ports at others, patrolling both the coasts of Spain and of North

Africa. And so these other organizations like Squadron 40T kind of pop up when operational need requires them. And these are the parts of the Navy that, as I said, are enormously busy. They're doing a lot of stuff out and about in the world. One plug for the listeners that, yes, chaotic time period, a lot of things going on. If you want to read specifically about some of what was happening in and around Russia, a battle in the Baltic by Steve Arden talking about what the Royal Navy was doing to try to preserve Estonian-Latvian independence at that point.

But so as I read, it seemed like many of the deployments were being driven by State Department requests. And you even had Admiral Bristol in Constantinople, at that time Constantinople on a diplomatic coast as High Commissioner. What was the linkage between the Navy Department and State at that point? the linkage here is not there's no formal connection and there's plenty of tension

as we might expect even today yes there is plenty of tension between need be and state i mean even in the sec nav cno commandant level records you can feel the tension and then in some of the more specifics there's a book called the the american black sea fleet about the american destroyers in the black sea in this era it's in there also don york's book about the navy in the caribbean in the first half of the 20th century that includes a lot of the special service squadron stuff you get it in that book also there's lots of tension because there's no formal linkage here It's really one department asking the other for help or assistance, advice across this period. The Ottoman Empire is disintegrating, right, after World War I.

This is the rise of the Republic of Turkey. And there's a kind of a civil war going on in this part of the world, not just in Russia, but also in what we know of today as Turkey. And Bristol's job is as much a diplomatic one to try and collaborate between the other European great powers, between the Turks, between the Russians, keeping civilians safe, keeping American interests protected. There's an enormous food insecurity problem in the aftermath of World War I. I mean, it makes sense, right? this massive war across europe crops have been destroyed there's not enough food for everybody the american people as the american people tend to do have turned towards that humanitarian crisis and begin donating an enormous amount of money an enormous amount of food the american red cross

becomes involved the the american government even creates a food aid organization you know kind of a predecessor to the sort of un type stuff the world food program and things like that that we have today and ships full of food are flowing from the united states of america across the atlantic and through the mediterranean and into eastern europe and central asia to try and deal with this famine that's happening those ships only protecting and those ships need warehouses and port facilities to pull into and they need a logistics hub set up and who does that kind of thing well the navy does that kind of thing bristol had this dual-hatted relationship right he was both a state department representative right and helped negotiate and do all the

diplomacy between the great powers of europe and so he had all kinds of responsibilities and it wasn't just military responsibilities it was humanitarian responsibilities he was helping to coordinate in a massive food aid program food insecurity after the first world War was dramatic. There was a famine going on. As we can imagine, after a war that's that dramatically destructive, of course, all the crops are dead and there's not enough food to feed everybody. The American people, as they tend to do across time, kind of lean into that crisis and want to provide aid and provide help. And so both the American Red Cross and government organizations begin flowing food aid across the Atlantic and through the Mediterranean into the

Black Sea region, into Eastern Europe, into Central Asia. But the Navy is central to that because the Navy is the logistics masters, right? So all of these ships need ports to pull into. They need facilities to offload them. They need warehousing. All of this needs to be protected. All of this needs to be communicated and coordinated. One of the really interesting jobs that the destroyers of Bristol's force have is this is the advent of wireless radio technology, right?

This is that era. And so they go from port to port as radio relays in order to provide communication and coordination amongst all the diplomatic activities as well as the humanitarian activities that are going on. Bristol's coordinating and commanding all of this, as well as evacuating civilians out of Sevastopol and out of other places on the Black Sea in what is Ukraine today, as the white Russians try to escape and the civilians try to escape Soviet juggernaut as it moves south. So the Americans also play an enormous role in the evacuation of Smyrna, Izmir as we call it today. But when the Turks roll into Smyrna and the city is burned, massive, massive humanitarian problem. And Bristol and the Americans are central to the organizing the evacuation of the Greeks and the Armenian populations that are there in the burning city and saving probably hundreds of thousands of lives. all wrapped up in this coordination between the State Department and the Navy in that part of the world, which also happens, as I mentioned, in the Special Services Squadron in the Caribbean.

State Department representatives and embassies all through Central America are often calling on U.S. Navy ships asking for help. Hey, there's word of this revolution that's going to start, or there's some kind of instability. Hey, Special Service Squadron, can you send me a cruiser or a couple destroyers and put a couple shore parties with sailors and Marines on shore just to kind of patrol and establish security. And the Navy does this frequently throughout the interwar years. And so there's a lot of collaboration between the State Department and the Navy, but it's not really formalized. It's a request for assistance, a request for forces that the Navy has the ability to support. And so they do, but it's not like this is being commanded from

washington or something like that so as you explored the range of operations here were you at all surprised that i would call it an incredible amount of autonomy that was being given to sort of junior local commanders whose actions could have very real strategic impacts so i wasn't surprised by it and that largely comes from the the knowledge of naval history and how communication has worked over time. It's something my plebs and I talk about frequently in class, right? What's the state of information technology at any given point in history? Bill Amblett and I were just talking about this a couple of weeks ago when I did a proceedings podcast talking about the Barbary War, right? How does communications work? In that case, in the age of sale, it was a letter,

right? It was a letter that was being carried by someone from the Secretary of the Navy in washington dc to the mediterranean to the forces during the barbary war it'd take four weeks to sail across the atlantic and then you have to find where comrade or whoever's in command is so it's another week or two before they actually get the message to him so you're talking six weeks now and then he's got to take the orders and write a response all right communication took a long time back then and as a result commanders had an enormous amount of latitude they had an enormous amount of responsibility because there was command there was no control right so washington could not control the things that were going on around the world or control their own forces

really because the speed of communication meant you couldn't do it and that changes slowly over time you know really there's the the advent of the undersea telegraph cable as the as the 19th century begins to come to a close makes huge differences remember there's a quote and I'll butcher it so I won't try and quote it directly but there's a quote from Casper Goodrich the the Admiral and I won't be War College

president in those years at the start of the 20th century about how the advent of the undersea telegraph cable ruined officership because it meant that a message could be transmitted much more quickly you know famously you know Theodore Roosevelt, his assistant secretary of the Navy, is left in charge of the Navy office when his boss, the SECNAV, goes home to Long Island for a weekend prior to the beginning of the war with Spain. And Roosevelt sends a telegram to Dewey in Hong Kong saying, get ready for war.

This is going to happen. And Dewey starts preparing for battle. And Roosevelt kind of does it on his own. He probably would have gotten in trouble if he didn't resign soon after to go start the Rough Riders. But that kind of rapid communication, that's one of the early kind of examples of Washington, D.C., being able to communicate relatively quickly with a commander on the scene. Wireless radio is a new thing in World War I. Technologically, we're still figuring out how the radio apes work, how do you get them to go the longest distance, how are they still readable. Well, not to the tone of type, certainly, yet. That's not going to come along until the late 60s, probably, or mid-60s. And so, naval officers on the scene don't have someone looking over their shoulder all the time. The battle network that exists today with near instant communication control mechanisms in the Pentagon or in Washington, D.C. or in the Situation Room in the White House even, that doesn't exist. Like, no one expects that. And because of that, junior officers, relatively junior officers, have to be given an enormous amount of responsibility and latitude to execute the mission as they see fit. And they did. And this was normal. This was part of officership. This was part of command. Now, we think about today in the 21st century, the ability in a cyber world, I think about our crypto folks, networks can go down. It can go silent on us.

And what happens in that situation if we have lost that kind of historic norm of the ability to execute, regardless of whether someone's telling us to do it or not, and to kind of feel comfort in doing what we think is best as a commander on the scene, rather than asking for permission to do things. I don't know that the Navy's in a bad spot in that regard, but it's certainly something that the history suggests to us that we should be asking questions about. I love that line. There was command, but there was no control. I feel like I'm going to be coming back to that for the rest of my professional life. That was tremendous. Unfortunately, that's all we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, BJ Armstrong.

Where can we find you online and what are you working on next? So I am on Twitter at WWATMD. What would Alfred Thayer Mahan do? I've had a couple of books come out in the past year. So I've had this book, The Naval Presence of the Inner Warriors book come out. My second edition of 21st Century Mahan came out on the 10-year anniversary of the release of the first edition. I'm really pretty proud of that book. It is 50% larger than the original first edition. There's three whole new chapters, a whole new introduction, a whole new conclusion, much more kind of analysis and contextualization from myself, as well as adding some really interesting essays from Mahan that are really relevant to us in the contemporary moment, including one that I will particularly recommend on what he calls naval preparedness, and which we call readiness. the problems that we are addressing today are not new problems for navies and a lot of them my hand wrote about and it's really interesting to think about the insights that he had and how

they might apply over a century later for us then i also just had the latest edition of new interpretations in naval history that i edited the leading research from the mcmullin naval history symposium that we conduct at naval academy i had the privilege of working with 14 historians and editing their work together into that book from the naval war college press that just came out about a month ago so those are all kind of out there on the shelves right now if you're interested in my work go find them in your local library or try and get your local library to get them i guess if they're not there because they are pretty academic books and they might not be on the shelf but right now i am because i've had three books come out i'm kind

of tinkering with some smart projects, but not really working on anything big at the moment as I focus on stuff at the Naval Academy. We are at the end of the semester. The stack of papers to grade is quite large, and it's only getting bigger. Well, thank you so much for joining us, BJ2 listeners. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © BF-WATCH TV 2021