Sea Control - Sea Control 559 - The Illogic of Naval Forward Presence with Jonathan Panter

Episode Date: January 3, 2025

Links1. "The Illogic of Naval Forward Presence," by Jonathan Panter, Columbia Academic Commons, 2024.2. Jonathan Panter Linkedin page.

Welcome aboard the Sea Control Podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security. I'm Walker Mills, and my guest today is Dr. Jonathan G. Panter, a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a recent graduate of Columbia University. We're going to discuss his PhD dissertation, The Logic of Naval Forward Presence. Jonathan, welcome aboard. Can you start by telling the listeners a bit more about your background? Sure. Thanks for having me on, Walker.

Like you noted, I'm beginning in September of 2024 as a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. I just finished my PhD dissertation at Columbia University. I'll formally be receiving the degree in October, so not quite technically a doctor yet, although I'll accept it. Prior to my graduate work at Columbia, I was a surface warfare officer in the U.S. Navy for about four and a half years. I completed two deployments, the first on USS Bataan, the second on USS San Jacinto, both to the 5th Fleet AOR. Before that, I graduated from Cornell in 2012 with a BA in government, particularly with a focus on Middle Eastern

politics and languages. We're glad to have you here as well. And as a reminder to the listeners, all the opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might otherwise be associated. So Jonathan, can you start off by defining forward naval presence? What is it? What exactly are we going to be talking about here? Naval forward presence is the U.S. military practice of maintaining combat credible naval forces worldwide around the clock, 365 days a year for the purposes of deterring adversaries, reassuring allies and conducting what some people call constabulary functions for the global commons. So that includes things like arms interdiction or sanctions enforcement or humanitarian operations. And this is a substantially

unique practice to the United States Navy in as much as there are other world navies that do send their ships abroad that conduct what we might consider forward presence-like activities, but none conduct them on the scale of the United States and in as many locations simultaneously. Other branches of the U.S. Armed Forces also conduct their own versions of forward presence, but none conduct them to the same extent as the United States Navy. Reading your dissertation, one of the things that I liked about it the most was that you talked about the history of forward naval presence as a concept. So basically, like how we got to now, because I think, you know, now we understand forward naval presence is kind of like a thing that we have to do because we've done it. Could you kind of walk us through where did this idea come from and how has it evolved as a concept over time? I believe there is a common misunderstanding among observers and even some navalists that the U.S. Navy has always done naval forward presence.

It's true that the U.S. Navy has sent surface forces all over the globe dating back to the founding. We're familiar with stories of fighting the Barbary Pirates and later on with the Yank Sea Squadron and so on. The United States has always had a global Navy. Naval forward presence, as we understand it today, more than half the fleet deployed at any given time, is a substantially modern concept. The reasons for which ships were sent overseas in the 19th century and early 20th century differ significantly from the reasons why we maintain ships overseas today. When I examined this in the intellectual history, I divided U.S. attempts to send forces overseas and maintain naval forces overseas into a few distinct periods based on what the purposes of that forward presence was. and the way in which Ford presence is maintained today really dates in both the way in which it's practiced and the reasons for it the purposes of the naval Ford presence to the Cold War and then

to a distinct period after the Cold War prior to the Second World War the U.S. usually sent ships overseas for discrete functions specific crisis response incidents or showing the flag in rare cases did it maintain hubs, large numbers of ships with logistical support permanently deployed. At the end of the Second World War, by default, the U.S. was forward. The U.S. had won, obviously, a massive war. The rest of the world's great power navies were gutted. The U.S. simply already had forces in Europe and in East Asia and maintained those. But what happened was that with the advent of nuclear weapons and as the Soviet nuclear threat built up, the focus within the U.S. military soon shifted away from how we might fight a limited war to how we might avoid war altogether.

The problem with nuclear weapons is that the threat to use nuclear weapons when the other side also has them is inherently not a credible threat. It's hard to threaten that you're going to nuke somebody if they'll nuke you in return. That becomes a suicidal threat. And so the major emphasis in the Cold War became how to develop credibility, how to make one's threat to go to war against the Soviets credible. And the assumption came to be that credibility anywhere was credibility everywhere. That is how we responded to the smallest crisis in the furthest part of the globe would reflect on U.S. credibility and therefore reflect on our ability to deter the Soviets. So even minor crises became extremely important. And that's the genesis of the Ford

presence concept. The forward presence concept is that there need to be U.S. forces all over the globe such that if a small crisis were to arise, the U.S. could immediately demonstrate its interest in a given geographic area. So this is the genesis of the concept. You start to see it enter strategy documents explicitly in the 1970s and then in the 1980s. But the Navy at the time was large enough to accommodate both this crisis response function and the primary purpose of the Navy, which was to fight and win wars at sea. In the aftermath of the Cold War, we get to the second period with Ford presence, where suddenly there was a demand for a peace dividend. The services faced across the board cuts. And as part of the bottom-up review during the Clinton

administration, which was a reevaluation of what resources should be provided to the U.S. military, Each of the branches had to make the case for what they needed, essentially, how many ships, aircraft, tanks, personnel, and so on. The U.S. Navy alighted on the idea that a force-sized, four-forward presence, four-crisis response would be larger than a force based on fighting two major regional contingencies. So the U.S. Navy, beginning in the early 1990s, promoted the concept of naval forward presence, importantly, in non-nuclear terms. The idea was essentially for nuclear deterrence, was for building our credibility against the Soviets. The Soviets were gone after 1991 as a threat. So the U.S. Navy rewrote the purposes of naval forward presence in terms that we're familiar with today, such as protecting the global commons, norms of freedom of navigation, being able to put out small hotspot conflicts or ethnic and internecine civil wars, the sorts of conflicts that might spill over borders.

And so what Naval Forward Presence promised to do expanded greatly after 1991. That was the beginning of some of the trends that I talk about in the dissertation, the major trade-offs that then began to build over time as the combatant commanders and the political leaders saw more and more reasons to draw on the U.S. Navy to the point where it became unsustainable. It seems to me like you're saying it was a bid for relevance in the post-Cold War era. And it's similar to one of the things I've done some research on, which is the U.S. Navy's involvement in counter-narcotics. And there's this period in the early 90s where they were kind of looking around and saying, oh, crap, like we have this huge Navy and they're going to want to cut it down to size.

How do we justify having all these ships and spending all this money and doing all this stuff? Let's start doing these things that until very recently were not important to us at all, like counter-narcotics. And we'll use that as the justification to keep up our huge force size. I would say to a certain extent that it is right, although I don't want to sound too cynical. But certainly there was a bureaucratic interest in promoting the concept of naval forward presence. And this is well documented. In fact, I'm not the first person to say this, and you can see the citations in the dissertation. That the Navy recognized it would acquire a larger force if it structured that force around the purposes of naval forward presence. But that doesn't mean it was entirely cynical. It doesn't mean that the strategists and admirals didn't believe what they were saying, nor does it mean that naval forward presence had no genuine utility.

As I argue in the dissertation, naval forward presence practiced in the 1990s and even into the early 2000s delivered enormous foreign policy benefits to the United States. The purpose of the dissertation, despite its provocative title, is not to argue that we don't need a naval forward presence at all, but rather to say that the way in which it has been implemented and the demands placed upon it by political leaders have outstripped the Navy's capability to conduct it in an effective way. Following up on your last point, you talk in your dissertation about this concept of structural readiness, and you make a strong case that forward presence with the Navy that

we have now is in tension with the idea of structural readiness. Can you talk about that and how that's different than operational readiness and some of that tension that's inherent there? Yes, this is really the thrust of the argument. So I would say the distinction between structural readiness and operational readiness is not my own. That comes from my dissertation advisor, Professor Richard K. Betts, who identified this distinction in a book he published in 1985. this professor betts's distinction was cited most recently in two separate articles by sitting members of the joint chiefs of staff including general charles q brown and they were talking about the substantial readiness challenges facing the armed forces the distinction here is that every military must face a trade-off between having forces that are ready at a moment's notice for

deterrence and having a reserve of forces that may not be immediately ready but can be brought to a higher state of readiness. The reason this is a trade-off is that there's always a distinction between what one needs now and what one's future requirements might be. If we think about its modernization, we could pour all of our money into R&D and into discovering the future means of warfare, but that would take away from maintaining the present ships and aircraft we have that may not be the most advanced, but we may need if we're called upon to fight tomorrow. And so there's always inherently a trade-off between being structurally ready for the next war and between being a sufficient state of readiness for today's war. And then also the threats one faces in the near term may not be the same as the threats one faces in the long term. So in essence, operational readiness is maintaining an adequate level of force to fight tonight, and structural readiness is maintaining a reserve of strength in order to fight a prolonged and substantial conflict.

you've tied this concept of forward presence to the the tragic collisions in 2017 that happened with the uss mccain and the uss fitzgerald and you're certainly not the only one that has made the case that happened because of pressures on readiness but can you talk about why you wanted to include the discussions of those accidents in your dissertation and how you think about them through the lens of structural and operational readiness? Yeah, so the primary question I looked at was as follows. It was well documented by the early 2000s that U.S. Navy surface ships, the surface fleet was being drawn on to an extent that was damaging the Navy structural readiness.

This was long before Jonathan Panther wrote his dissertation. This was documented in the Balliol report, which is the fleet review panel. In 2010, it was documented in GAO reports, the Government Accountability Office, and Congressional Budget Office reports. Over time, the combatant commanders were drawing excessively on U.S. Navy surface ships in their respective theaters. This was keeping the ships at sea for longer parts of the year and disrupting their maintenance cycles. It was disrupting the shipbuilding industrial repair and industrial case. As a result, shipbuilding costs were rising. The Navy could purchase fewer ships per annum per given dollar because costs had gone up. Ships were retiring and not being replaced, so the fleet was shrinking. The demands on those ships were remaining the same or rising, and the size of the Navy overall was shrinking such that in the event of a great power war, it would not have enough assets to draw upon.

not have enough of a reserve, not have enough of that structural readiness, that ability to take it and then fight on. And so the question that I asked was, okay, this trend existed. This trend was identified not only by the government, but by third parties. And why is it that it wasn't being fixed? Why wasn't the Congress allocating more money to shipbuilding? Why wasn't the demand signal being brought under control? Why weren't the reforms to the Goldwater-Nichols Act, which had empowered the combatant commanders. And so was this a political question? Was it a problem of Navy intransigence and sort of bureaucratic inertia or laziness? And I looked at the accidents in particular because this was almost a perfect storm for when you would see

reform. The reason is that an area like military readiness is a very sleepy subject for the public and for Congress. Most people's familiarity with the military has to do with things like the F-35 or an aircraft carrier. People think in terms of technology. People don't think in terms of the slow, very unsexy processes that occur behind the scenes of how we train sailors or how we manage ship maintenance cycles or force generation cycles. These are very arcane subject matters to anybody outside of the Pentagon bureaucracy. But when you have a massive accident of the kind that receives round-the-clock news coverage, which the Fitzgerald and McCain did in 2017, that receives news coverage in multiple languages, is visible to allies and adversaries that kills

people who have congressional representatives who care about them. There is now really a light shown on U.S. Navy readiness in a way that would suggest reforms were possible. And I was interested to see, now that light was shown on the Navy, whether or not that would encourage the Navy to pursue reform. And if reform didn't happen, whose fault was it? And to spoiler, the findings here wasn't the Navy's fault. And that was one of the major findings, that the accidents really did encourage the Navy to look at the problem from multiple angles and suggest substantial and significant structural changes to the force generation cycle and to readiness generation. And that ultimately it was Congress that blocked the most meaningful of the reforms.

Congress focused exclusively on reforms that would improve operational readiness and not on those forms that would improve structural readiness. And the last point I would make about the accidents is that although they generated such substantial media and congressional and public attention, did not actually reflect, were not themselves specifically caused by readiness problems. If you look at the McCain, there was a lot of bad luck involved in that. And if you look at the Fitzgerald, there was a lot of human error involved in that. If you look at the USS Antietam, which is early in the year, probably just a bad luck scenario. There's actually very little in

those accidents that is directly attributable to readiness problems. But the investigations that occurred in the aftermath of the accidents, that giant spotlight shown on the fleet as a whole revealed massive readiness problems elsewhere. The accidents were just a very useful empirical tool for trying to understand if this trend was continuing, why it had not been fixed, because if it was going to be fixed, that was the moment. What did the Navy want to do that Congress blocked? What are your recommendations? What do you think the Navy and Congress should do to better manage structural readiness? I mean, is it is it just a simple we just need more quantity more ships or they're kind of more complex fixes here navy delivered a variety

of recommendations some for operational readiness and some for structural it got everything it wanted for operational readiness for the most part it got increased funding and attention to surface warfare officer training to issues of sleep deprivation it got some changes to the defense officer personnel management act that limited up and out requirements that was you know picking out officers who were specialists but who had met certain career milestones but what the navy wanted to do or recommended structurally was the man train and equip functions that were separated on on each of the coasts the east coast and the west coast they wanted to unify them under a single command and that was blocked by something called the inui amendment which forbid doing that

since the early 2000s. And so Congress blocked that reform. The Navy also suggested conditioning congressional leaders to accept lower levels of foreign presence to restore structural readiness and retain a larger surge capacity. That was overruled. And there were a variety of other sort of structural reforms like that. The problem is that if one asks, well, what can the Navy do? The Navy can do little because the primary finding of the dissertation is that the reason for this excessively high demand signal lies in organizational processes that are outside of the Navy's control, such as the Goldwater-Nichols Act. And the Navy can't change that.

Also, the reason for the excessive demand signal lies in politicians' fixation on this concept of crisis response and credibility anywhere being credibility everywhere, which I spoke about at the beginning. Again, what U.S. foreign policy ought to be is not deciding that is not the purview of the United States Navy. The Navy is told to go somewhere it must go. The Navy has done everything it can to squeeze as much near-term readiness as it can its ships through the optimized fleet response plan and various force generation cycles. And against the hard mathematical reality of the fact that there are not enough ships to meet all these demands. There have not been for 20 years, even under the Navy's most aggressive shipbuilding plans.

The Navy has delivered three shipbuilding plans, the most aggressive one. It gets all the funding it wants. It will be unable to meet all the presence commands made by the combatant commanders. And that's if those demands remain stable. They will probably go up because Congress and the combatant commanders remain enamored of the presence idea. So in answer to your question, what can the Navy do? Frankly, it's sad to say it, but very little.

What it can do is with the Strategic Readiness Review recommended, which has continued to condition congressional leaders to accept the fact that there are costs associated with Naval forward presence. And the Navy did a very good job of this in its congressional testimony in 2017, but then when pressed on the issue, backed off. The Navy is still responsible for its own strategy development and can make clear in those documents the genuine trade-offs associated with maintaining high levels of operational readiness when in reality doing so draws down structural readiness to me this is an

oversimplification obviously but it seems like it comes back to you need more ships more money and more sailors demand them and more infrastructure to keep it all going like they're saying you can only squeeze so much operational readiness out of the force that currently exists yeah the simple way to see it as a supply-demand problem. We have the supply of ships and we have the demands placed on those ships. There are ultimately hard limits on how many ships can be purchased because there's not an unlimited money supply. Also, the Navy is not the only service. As a navalist myself in the ideal world, I would love to see a world in which the Navy is funded to a much greater extent than the other services. And then we can have our cake and eat it too. We can have naval forward presence

and we can have structural readiness for great power war. But the primary argument here is that because the naval forward presence idea is so popular among political leaderships, even if you expand the size of the fleet, the demands will simply grow with that. At some point, the demand signal has to come under control. The Navy is experimenting with new fleet concepts, such as distributed maritime operations, the concept of being able to, instead of exclusively purchasing these large, exquisite platforms that are very costly, such as multi-mission combatant warships, buying a number of small frigates, for instance, or unmanned craft over the long term that might help take some of the pressure off the Navy if it has more ships, even if they're smaller and

less capable. But that depends on a lot of other factors that I don't, I wouldn't want to get into now, such as whether or not we believe the hype about unmanned ship technology, which I've written about elsewhere. I don't believe the hype. And also, you know, there are major debates associated with what kind of platforms we would need to fight in East Asia. So I want to switch gears for a second here for a last question, Jonathan. As someone who has made successfully, very successfully made the transition from active duty Navy to elite PhD program, written a great thesis, what advice, recommendations do you have for junior or mid-career officers looking to pursue serious graduate education

like you? I will provide both a positive assessment here or response and some cautionary notes because both are necessary. First of all, I would say it's an extraordinary opportunity if one has the chance to get a PhD and is truly intrinsically motivated by interest in the material. Ultimately, many of these programs, if you select well and select a funded program, which you ought to, you have the opportunity that very few people have, which is to get paid to learn for five to seven years and to spend all day reading about things you want to read about, writing about things that you want to write about. For someone who is intrinsically passionate about security studies or strategic studies or grand strategy or any of these subjects,

It is a unique privilege. The cautionary note I would provide is that there is an intense opportunity cost associated with getting a PhD. You are embarking in a five to seven year endeavor in which you are not on the job market. If you are a security studies person, you no longer have access to the high side, for instance, or no longer have access to a lot of different career progression opportunities, if you're doing it full time, people should think very carefully about whether this is right for them. A lot of academic social science, academic political science is focused on preparing the student for a lifetime in tenure track academia, research and teaching. It is not necessarily for people who see themselves as pursuing a degree in policy. And so I'd recommend for anybody looking at political science PhD program to read actual academic political science. So you have a sense of what you're going to be doing, what you're going to be reading every day for the next few years, but also what you'll be expected to produce and ensuring that you understand that's really the primary thrust of why you're getting into political science. It's quite different than undergraduate political science that a lot of people have exposure to. i'm sorry that's about all the time we've got for today i'd like to thank my guest soon to be dr jonathan panter for discussing his dissertation on the illogic of forward naval presence with us jonathan where can our listeners find you online what are you working on next they can find me on linkedin and i think we'll we'll post the that link underneath this this

podcast. We will. And what I'll be working at at the Council on Foreign Relations in the fall is twofold. One, I'll be continuing to work on the trade-offs between naval presence and structural readiness. I'll also be working on a project on escalation dynamics in the maritime realm, particularly how unmanned surface vessels will affect. Awesome. Thanks again for joining us. Thank you for having me on. And to the listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 ¶¶