Asia Looks Seaward

Ironically, the traditional, Mahanian justification for maritime strategy—

global trade—disappeared for the most part during this period. The U.S. mer-

chant marine was a global force only during the first half of the twentieth century,

while the Japanese merchant marine was destroyed during World War II.

The second half of the century witnessed the almost complete disappearance of

American-flag merchant ships, accompanied by the reemergence of global

merchant marine fleets from Japan, South Korea, and China.

The U.S. Navy remained the dominant military force in Asia during the largely

continental conflicts in Korea and Vietnam that marked the Cold War in the

region. More important than these hostilities, however, was the overarching, nearly

half-century-long conflict with the Soviet Union. In the Asia-Pacific, the Cold War

was essentially a maritime contest. The U.S. Navy was the primary vehicle of

American policy against Soviet ambitions and would have been the primary means

of resistance had Moscow opted to seek its goals in that region by force.

Winning the Cold War at Sea

In the 1980s, Secretary of the Navy John Lehman drove the development of the

most important maritime strategy since World War II.^23 Premised on global

nuclear war with the Soviet Union, this strategy sought to take advantage of

carrier-based air power and nuclear-powered submarines. FBM submarines, also

nuclear-powered, provided the core of the nation’s nuclear deterrent triad against

potential Soviet nuclear attack. The maritime strategy of the Cold War’s last decade

was effective both as a domestic instrument for modernizing the U.S. Navy and as a

strategic instrument for neutralizing the growing Soviet Navy. In Asia, the Lehman

strategy included helping Japan prepare its navy—euphemistically called the Japan

Maritime Self-Defense Force—for the Cold War at sea and encouraging friendly

states such as South Korea to develop potent navies of their own.

This maritime strategy represented the most coherent U.S. effort since the

development of War Plan Orange to construct a logical operational and political

framework for the pursuit of American diplomatic and military objectives.

Although Lehman’s ‘‘600-ship navy’’ never put to sea, the strategy it was intended

to execute was the primary American vehicle for defeating Soviet campaigns in

Asia.

The Pacific Fleet responsible for attaining strategic maritime objectives in

Asia faced not only the Soviet fleet but an internal U.S. Navy threat. Operational

planners in the 1980s faced a question that harked back to the pre–World War II

dispute over which theater—Atlanticor Pacific, Europe or Asia—should take

precedence. The navy of the 1980s made the same decision it had in the 1930s

and 1940s, to place ‘‘Europe First.’’ This meant that the first priority for American

maritime resources—even those assigned to the Pacific—would be to defeat a

Soviet attack in Europe, not Asia. This ‘‘swing strategy,’’ under which Pacific

58 Asia Looks Seaward