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Traditional naval strategy is a lot like traditional doctrine for ground warfare: the focus is on the equivalent enemy force. For navies, that means anti-ship capability, which in modern times has extended to anti-submarine capability. A tertiary concern, though not far behind the other two, is how to eliminate the threat from land-based aircraft.
Ever since Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote his classic treatise on naval strategy, naval professionals have framed their concern in Mahan-esque terms. In a nutshell, navies either sought to control the seas, permitting complete "freedom of action." Fleets could decide where to go and what to do—protect shipping lanes, support amphibious operations, strike at targets within an ever-increasing radius of attack.
Navies that couldn't win control of the seas weren't necessarily out of the game. They could still pursue a sea denial strategy, in which the enemy's navy never had complete freedom of action. Submarines, aircraft, and surface raiders could attack convoys. Ships moving to strike at ground targets might be vulnerable to attack. Amphibious units were at risk of being sunk before they landed. Sea denial might raise the cost of naval operations high enough where the stronger enemy might not succeed at every operation that it needed to ultimately win the war. In that case, sea denial might force the enemy to reconsider the war effort altogether.
While this Mahanesque worldview might make better sense of past conflicts, such as the WWI naval struggle between Great Britain (sea control) and Germany (sea denial), it seems to have little to do with the world today. Given the US Navy's overwhelming superiority in aircraft carriers, attack submarines, land-based air, anti-submarine assets (destroyers, aircraft, and other submarines), cruise missile-armed surface ships, and sea lift capability, it appears capable of going wherever it wants, and doing whatever it wants. Most adversaries, such as Iran during its brief effort to stop oil tankers from safely moving through the Persian Gulf in the 1980s, seem doomed from the start to lose what few naval and air forces they have, to pursue even the most humble sea denial strategies.
The most obvious exception is China, whose recent naval expansion could seriously complicate US efforts to defend Taiwan in a crisis. China's larger, more modern submarines and frigates certainly raise the risk that the US Navy might actually lose ships in defense of Taiwan—without even factoring the Chinese air force into the equation.
The Chinese sea denial threat is not the only one, however. A conflict with Russia is far less likely, so the concern has less to do with the capabilities of the Russian navy than the political status quo between Russia and the United States. While military planners have to take into account what might happen if international relations were to take drastic, unexpected turns, the Russian navy seems like a very distant threat right now.
There is a far more imminent threat to the US Navy, however, that just increased dramatically in the last few days. Even if the North Koreans fail to develop a short-range or medium-range missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, they could "deliver" a nuclear weapon in more mundane ways. A nuclear weapon hidden on a boat, or smuggled into South Korea by land, threatens not only targets on the ground, but targets at sea. A nuclear detonation close to an American carrier battle group might spell a catastrophic loss—exactly the kind of "sea denial" scenario that Mahan described.
How could the United States and its allies respond? The logic of this situation inevitably leads to a blockade of North Korean ports. Nothing could exit without being searched—or, perhaps, exit at all. Either way, the US Navy would station what it deems its most valuable assets, the carrier battle groups, far away from where North Korean shipping would be searched or sunk. The "littoral navy," therefore, would be the most important component of the blockade.
Even if North Korea were not thinking in these terms—and it would be amazing if they weren't—Iran certainly is. Faced with a similar risk of a nuke on a boat, the problem of blockading Iranian ports would be even more challenging. The Persian Gulf is more constrained, and more potential targets—oil tankers, other countries, American warships—would be a lot closer at hand. There are a lot more ships moving in and out of Gulf ports, and the sustaining the cooperation of every country along that narrow waterway would be much harder.
Certainly, there's a chance that neither the Iranian nor the North Korean regime would be crazy enough to detonate a nuclear weapon close enough to its own territory that it would suffer some of the damage inflicted. As generations of nuclear strategists can tell you, that's the essence of brinksmanship: convincing the other side that you're just crazy enough to use nuclear weapons, knowing the likely consequences to yourself. Kim Jong Il has successfully built that kind of erratic, dangerous persona. Here's where the DPRK's inability to create a large nuclear weapon isn't necessarily a problem. A smaller bomb would still give naval planners fits, while lowering the risk that North Korean population centers would suffer the shockwaves and radiation from the blast. In other words, a smaller nuclear bomb might make the "nuke on a boat" threat more credible, not less.
We've definitely entered a new era of international relations with the North Korean nuclear test. The Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests, while frightening, raised the risk of war between those two countries reaching catastrophic proportions. The ripple effects of the North Korean test—for example, a potential nuclear arms race among North Korea, China, and Japan, with consequences for the nuclear calculations of India, Russia, and the United States—are more far-reaching. We're back to Mahan's problem of sea denial—but not with the tools Mahan had envisioned to solve it.
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