Erecting on that huge platform that is usually used to lift planes and helicopters on the carrier runway, and in the back of it stands one of the helicopters of the US Navy;
Former US President Trump stood noticeably euphoric, while delivering one of his enthusiastic speeches a few weeks after the start of his term in 2017, wearing a hat and a US Navy jacket decorated with the logo of the new aircraft carrier, on which he was standing on board, and before his eyes the famous slogan sparked, intended to export fear, And in all US aircraft carriers: "One hundred thousand tons of diplomacy."
Donald Trump is not a pretense of American presidents who used to come and spend time in these naval military cities to feel their true authority.
(1) The aircraft carrier, which Trump chose to address, bears the name of former US President Gerald Ford, and today it is the largest aircraft carrier in the world, and the first of its kind in the new generation of carriers, with a length of 335 meters and a weight of one hundred thousand tons It is powered by two nuclear reactors, and the cost of its construction amounted to more than $ 14 billion, and its construction took more than ten years.
Tomahawk naval missiles were the hero of the parade on the seventh of last April, after 59 of them were used in the bombing of Shayrat Airport.
The aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford, which already successfully conducted its first sailing test in the second week of April 2017, to join the fleet of ten other US aircraft carriers, was the perfect place for Trump to announce his intentions, addressing his audience of Navy and ship workers. Civilians, promising additional military investment of $ 84 billion in addition to the defense budget in two years, as one of the largest spending increases in US history, and pledging to expand the country's naval fleet in order to bolster its strength, a force Trump hopes "will be unnecessary, but it is" You will put his enemies in great trouble if he is forced to use them, "he said.
American presidents love their armed forces, the Navy in particular, and are fond of aircraft carriers in particular. The US Navy, which holds the edges of the world from east to west, is the preferred option for them in the event of a conflict that needs quick intervention, so the occupant of the White House at the time only gives orders to move to the closest units of the American fleet, which are stationed near the immediate and potential theaters of conflict around the world. .
Most of the countries of the world have naval forces within their armies, but the real maritime competition in the deep waters in the heart of the oceans, which occupies two-thirds of the land area, has always been the preserve of the great powers and great empires (2), due to the resources they require that are not usually available to others.
Perhaps the beginning of the end for many great empires globally, or even regionally, was the moment when they began to lose their traditional authority at sea, as happened with the British Empire at the turn of the century, and the Japanese Empire during World War II.
The US Navy is located today at the heart of US economic hegemony and is not just an icon of its military superiority and political dominance (Reuters)
At this level, the United States today enjoys overwhelming military superiority over the rest of the world powers and a large gap that separates them from others, but this gap turns into a very deep gap when it comes to the naval forces. The US Navy today has its own fleet of aircraft, its own army of infantry, its special operations division, and an independent intelligence apparatus, and it alone is stronger than most armies of the world, and its budget alone exceeds the entire military spending of China, and its strength is such that the aircraft fleet of the US Navy, Alone, we can classify it today as the second largest air force in the world, after the US Air Force itself, and the US Coast Guard fleet, alone as well, can today be ranked twelfth on the list of the most powerful navies in the world.
Geography forces the United States to be a naval power in the first place, as the secret of American control lies in the country's ability to control and exercise power in the vast expanses of water surrounding it, in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. To prevent any amphibious invasion, the United States adopted an offensive strategy for absolute maritime domination in the two oceans, and invested heavily in its army, and with a huge annual military budget exceeding $ 700 billion soon, the United States achieved unique control over the oceans, and tightened its control over the most used trade routes in the world. .
With its domination of the two oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific, which also contain the world's major economic transport corridors, the United States has risen to unilateral economic hegemony.
And since international trade relies heavily on shipping, Washington is now making huge profits from the trade routes connecting North America with East Asia and Western Europe, meaning that the US Navy is today at the heart of US economic hegemony, and is not just an icon of its military supremacy and political dominance.
It is a story of excellence that did not start suddenly, but is rooted in history for more than two centuries.
Alfred Thayer Mahan, who was called "the most important American strategist of the nineteenth century AD."
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the domination of Napoleon Bonaparte and his powerful fleet had ended forever, and the greatest threat to US maritime navigation had vanished, which convinced the Americans at that time that they needed no more than a small fleet, made up of coastal defense ships and a group of cruisers, to protect Their trade. But the end of the century witnessed a new shift in the balance of power, with the beginning of the colonial era that gave way to imperial rivalries, and the discovery of coal pushed this rivalry to its climax, as modern battleships were built in order to lead the race towards coal colonies around the world.
These developments opened up new potential horizons for attacking the Atlantic coasts, or threatening US trade on the high seas, with new powerful war fleets, which represented a strong threat to US interests, and the need for a new maritime strategy emerged. The solution at the time came from the brainchild of former Navy officer Alfred Thayer Mahan (3), who is known today in the United States as "the Clausewitz of the Sea", as the Americans consider him the naval equivalent of the most prominent military expert in history, "Carl von Clausewitz."
Mahan believed that the United States was primarily a naval power, and that the only way to maintain its global presence was to ensure its control of the sea.
Mahan’s ideas were well received in American circles, especially by "Theodore Roosevelt", who was still the assistant secretary of the Navy at the time.
The first test for the Navy of Roosevelt, and for Mahan’s theories as well, came during the American-Spanish war, which ended with a crushing victory for the US Navy, followed by Spain’s surrender of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the islands of Guam and Wake to the United States. Cuba, in turn, fell under effective US control, despite its acquisition. On its nominal independence, the United States established a large naval base in Guantánamo Bay.
This victory enabled the United States to extend its influence over more strategic ports.
Panama Canal
But Roosevelt achieved his greatest achievement (4) in 1903 after becoming president, when he sent American warships to secure control of Panama, which had just separated from Colombia, opening the door to the construction of the Panama Canal.
This new highway for global trade revolutionized US strategy, making the Caribbean suddenly surpass the importance of the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal.
At that time, the world was witnessing the demise of the time of the British Royal Navy as a dominant power, as it seemed that Britain, despite having the largest merchant fleet in the world at that time, was no longer able to maintain its position as a fighting force, and it became clear that Britain was on its way to leaving the sea world. In the interest of two major naval powers, the United States and Japan, at a time when the world was preparing to enter the era of aircraft carriers.
The locations of the US aircraft carriers
The majestic development in the capabilities of the air force transformed the conventional battleships into burdens more than they are strategic assets with the ease of bombing, and it seemed that the time of classic naval wars is nearing its end, and that the world today is heading towards a mixture of naval and air power in order to increase the offensive and reconnaissance forces, which is the concept Which aircraft carriers embodied as a revolution in the world of war. The United States learned this lesson on the day it will likely never forget its memory.
On the morning of December 7, 1941, (5) hundreds of Japanese aircraft, carried on six imperial aircraft carriers, were making their way toward US naval installations, airports, and warships in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Torpedoes launched by Japanese B5N planes destroyed dozens of American ships anchored in the port. On the same day, the Japanese army moved against US forces in the Philippines, invaded Thailand and landed in the British Malay colony, and the Pacific War began.
In just six months, the Japanese had created a large defensive ocean that stretched thousands of miles from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, the largest truly maritime space under the effective control of a military force up to that point. Japan was a major military and imperial power at that time, but it was a resource-poor country that imported 88% of its energy needs, and most of its raw materials. The strategy of the Japanese war was based on directing large initial strikes, which would surprise the fleets of the Allied countries and the air forces in the ports or weak airfields, and control large areas of the sea, then extend their control by deploying defensive forces to avoid counterattacks.
But preserving sovereignty at sea differs from exercising sovereignty on land, which is what Japan practically learned a few months later, when it lost four aircraft carriers at once, out of its six carriers, in an ambush by the US Navy in Medawi, a battle that was officially declared by the United States Navy. A world dominating force.
Midway's lesson was crystal clear: there is a clear difference between the concept of control granted by the navy and that given by the ground force.
The maritime powers do not need to control large areas of land as much as they need good deployment and accessibility, and trying to permanently control vast areas of seas is a painstaking and costly process for any power regardless of its size, and with the collapse of all major powers in the world by the end of World War II And, and the US domination of the seas, the United States turned its maritime philosophy away from control and trying to create a traditional maritime empire.
In 1968 America embarked on building ten nuclear aircraft carriers of the "Nimitz" class, with nuclear capabilities, which are still the largest in the world, in addition to nine amphibious attack ships (6) which are also considered aircraft carriers in the traditional concept, and are superior in their capabilities to state-owned aircraft carriers The other, where the world contains 20 aircraft carriers of varying capabilities, is the sum of what other countries have without the United States. At the same time, the US Navy reduced the number of its traditional naval fleet after World War II, and has since witnessed varying waves of accumulating and shrinking ships, but it remained the preferred American weapon to respond to rapid crises, especially during the Cold War, and it is estimated that between 1946-1996 the Navy was deployed in Short crises no less than 270 times.
With the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, it became clear that there was no force that could compete with the United States on the high seas anytime soon, which prompted the US Navy to take out its new combat concept under the slogan "Forward .. From the Sea", transforming from open sea operations To the policy of projecting power from the sea, with the aim of influencing conflicts through the use of force on coastal areas. The new policy focused on implementing rapid deployment and direct intervention operations, and the deployment of combat units in conflicts, from the wars in Kosovo and Bosnia in the 1990s, to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, taking advantage of its fleet of aircraft carriers, where (7) American law stipulates that the country must possess At least 11 aircraft carriers in operation. The influence of the Navy's Special Operations Unit, "Ciel 6", which gained wide fame after carrying out the assassination of Al-Qaeda leader "Osama bin Laden", extended its influence.
"Cell 6" is considered one of the most secretive (8) special operations teams and raises media myths, so that the US Department of Defense does not publicly recognize its name, and the division is known as the unit in which the real differences between the soldier and the spy are hidden, and it is linked to a joint program with the CIA known as the CIA. In the name of "OMEGA", it carried out dozens of intelligence operations through it. The activity of "Cell-6" has expanded significantly since the attacks of September 11, 2001, and today includes more than 300 main soldiers known as "the operators", in addition to a support unit of more than 1500 people. It was deployed in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia, where it carried out many tasks that ranged from private escorts; Where the brigade was responsible for guarding former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, to recruiting residents to collect intelligence information, leading to direct assassination operations.Today, the division's support units are believed to be deployed in US embassies in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.
The US aircraft carrier Carl Vinson cruises across the Pacific Ocean (Reuters)
The US Navy wields all this tremendous amount of influence despite the fact that it today has fewer than 300 combat ships, which is the smallest fleet of the United States since the World War, as the size of the US fleet reached more than 500 ships during the Cold War, for example.
Despite this, no country can challenge the US Navy on the high seas, and the rest of the navies around the world are no more than comparatively large coastal patrols.
Today, the US Navy is effectively undertaking the mission of protecting the global order based on "freedom of navigation and free trade," while traditional deployments have shifted to secondary roles for the Navy.
With this relative shift in the priorities of the US Navy, the paradox that governs the world today remains that the main competing powers of the United States depend primarily on the protection provided by the six US Navy fleets, in addition to a network of dozens of bases, of which only 60 are on the US coasts alone. In addition to dozens of bases outside its borders, starting from the Bahamas, passing through Cuba, the Indian Ocean, Greece, Italy, Spain, then Japan and South Korea, and reaching Djibouti, Bahrain and Kuwait.
This complex network provides protection for international trade fleets, starting with Chinese investments in Africa and not ending with Iranian oil exports to Europe, and despite these complex and confirming facts of US supremacy, the ambitions of legitimate maritime hegemony remain fluttering the imaginations of competitors.
The remote danger comes from China, and behind it is Russia and Iran.
(9) The Chinese Navy plans that the number of its ships will exceed the number of ships of the American fleet within a few years, and despite the striking differences in the capabilities of the ships, as China has one aircraft carrier whose efficiency cannot be compared to any of the American aircraft carriers, this number alone may represent a disturbing imbalance. Given the concentration of Chinese naval activity in the South China Sea. China has always been a traditional land power focused on protecting its lands from invasion, by creating a formidable army of infantry capable of facing a technologically superior opponent, but its economic growth and its entry into the club of major economic powers forced it to head to the sea, to protect its interests from falling at the mercy of the archipelago of the islands. Under US dominance in the Pacific Ocean.
While Russia, in turn, embarks on the construction of a naval modernization program, which has been postponed since the Soviet era, that focuses on new submarines and destroyers, as it is expanding or building new naval bases in the Arctic, the Pacific Ocean and the Black Sea. As for Iran, it continues to develop its missile capabilities, including its own program to develop ballistic missiles, and it seems that these three powers are leading the world to a new generation of naval warfare concepts.
These and other powers realize that it is difficult to compete in full swing with the US Navy with its current capabilities. However, with the revolution (10) in the missile industry, especially cruise and laser-guided missiles, and the stealth test of sound barrier missiles, protecting marine assets has become an ever more costly process. Examples of history remain testimony to what this revolution can do: in 1982, during the Falkland Islands War, Argentine forces sank two British ships with French-made Exocet missiles, and five years later an American frigate was paralyzed when it was attacked by the same model of missiles launched by a plane. Iraqi. And with the presence of more sophisticated anti-ship missiles in existence today, aircraft carriers become vulnerable when they enter the range of offensive operations near the shores that possess advanced missile systems.
This new concept of maritime warfare is known as the anti-access-area denial policy, known for short as (A2lAD), and it is a strategy that seeks to render aircraft carriers useless when they carry out offensive operations near the beaches, which deprives them of a large part of their capabilities, Rather, it exposes it to the risk of destruction if it undertakes an offensive operation. This policy, which is based on developing missile capabilities, makes any conventional naval force threatened with losing some of its assets and being exposed to high risks if it decides to carry out an offensive operation.
According to an estimate (11) George Friedman, a famous strategy researcher, if the United States wanted to impose a blockade on China now, it would place its carriers within the range of anti-ship missiles that Beijing accumulates on the artificial islands it is building in the Pacific Ocean. From here, the United States will be forced to Destroying Chinese satellites, so that they cannot know the locations and paths of US carriers and then target them, and even if this happens, Beijing can monitor targets via drones, which means that the states will need to launch a comprehensive air war against the Chinese missile system, before they can Imposing a naval blockade on it, while ignoring the danger of ambushes that could be set up by Chinese submarines.
This is also the case with Iran, which seeks to convert the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, and perhaps the Red Sea and the Strait of Bab al-Mandab if Iran tightens its control over Yemen, to areas prohibited from US incursion, while Iran sets its eyes on having a foothold in Syria on the Mediterranean as well.
This new concept of naval warfare may today be able to challenge the offensive capabilities of the US Navy with more modest force.
Americans are aware of the danger ahead, so rebuilding and developing the US Navy has always been one of the fierce battles in Congress.
The Navy’s budget reached nearly $ 180 billion in 2016 for the Navy and Marine Corps, before it was reduced to about $ 155 billion in 2017 due to plans to reduce President Barack Obama's military spending, which was aimed at reducing the Pentagon’s expenditures by $ 106 billion by 2021. With $ 36 billion in 2018.
The US Navy budget is "yellow" compared to the Air Force "Blue", vertical numbers are "$ billion", and horizontal numbers "from 2000 to 2016 (Al Jazeera)
(3) The US Navy claims that it needs 355 ships, compared to the current target of reaching 308-315 ships by 2025. The assessment of the force structure issued in mid-December (14) suggested that the US Navy should expand its current fleet within decades. The next three, and the paper proposes at least adding a new aircraft carrier, in addition to 16 destroyers, 18 attack submarines, four amphibious ships, and dozens of other units.
At the same time, the Air Force is also requesting more money to finance its fleet of the latest generation of F-35 fighter jets.
And since the US military is the largest (15) employer of direct employment in the country, the truth is that voting on military budgets is often subject to political orientations. Representatives face difficulty in voting against military programs that have a significant economic impact on their constituents, and this sensitivity increases, especially in the case of warships, because the American shipbuilding industry is one of the vital industries for American labor, and the Navy often threatens that if its fleet shrinks significantly, the industry American ships will vanish.
American experts realize that military strength is not only determined by the size of weapons that the army currently possesses, but also by the strength of the military-industrial complex that is able to compensate for losses in operations, conduct periodic maintenance and replace new units.
This was the lesson that the Americans learned from the Japanese Imperial Navy, which collapsed forever, after the Battle of Midway, due to the weakness of the military-industrial complex to replace, as well as the British Navy, whose war capabilities collapsed at the beginning of the last century despite its possession of the largest fleet of cargo ships in the world.
The Battle of Midway
The United States, then, is heading to inflate its naval fleet, despite the fact that US control of the high seas will remain for a long time unchallenged, whether it does so or not. But as long as the United States believes that the international system today serves its interests, the strategic argument for reactivating the US naval power will be the increasing threat that competitors pose to the ability of the United States to ensure freedom of international trade, to communicate safely with its allies, and to transfer its forces from one home to another, Although the solution to the real (16) times that the US Navy faces today regarding engagement is far from accumulating more ships, a flaw that lies in the depth of the strategy in the first place.
Nevertheless, it is likely that the United States will continue to accumulate naval power in order to prove and consolidate its superiority over its opponents on the one hand, and in order to maintain the vitality of the military-industrial complex, which is the true cornerstone of American supremacy on the other hand, and in order to satisfy the vanity of American presidents who They love the scenes of power parades and speeches aboard the battle cities at sea.