erected on that huge platform that is usually used to lift planes and helicopters on the transport runway, and behind it stands one of the US Navy helicopters;
Former US President Trump stood remarkably elated as he delivered one of his enthusiastic speeches a few weeks after the start of his term in 2017, wearing the US Navy cap and jacket adorned with the emblem of the new aircraft carrier, on which he was standing, and in front of his eyes the famous slogan intended to export fear, Hanging on all US aircraft carriers: "One hundred thousand tons of diplomacy."
Donald Trump is not among the American presidents who used to come and spend time in these naval cities to feel their real power.
(1) The aircraft carrier, on which Trump chose to deliver his speech, 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 up to 335 meters and a weight of 100,000 tons. It is powered by two nuclear reactors, cost more than $14 billion to build, and took more than ten years to build.
The naval "Tomahawk" missiles were the hero of the show 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 test sea in the second week of April 2017, joining the fleet of 10 other US aircraft carriers, was the perfect place for Trump to announce his intentions, addressing his audience of Navy and ship workers civilians, promising an additional $84 billion in military investment over the defense budget in two years as one of the largest spending increases in US history, and vowing to expand the country’s naval fleet to bolster its power, a force Trump hopes “will be unnecessary, but It would put his enemies in big trouble if he had to use it," he said.
American presidents love their armed forces, and the Navy in particular, and are particularly fond of aircraft carriers. 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 rapid intervention. The resident of the White House at that time only has to give orders to move to the nearest units of the American fleet, stationed near the theaters of immediate and potential conflicts around the world. .
Most countries of the world have naval forces within their armies, but the real naval competition in the deep waters in the heart of the oceans, which occupy two-thirds of the land area, has always been the preserve of the great powers and major empires (2), due to the resources it requires that are not usually available to others.
Perhaps the beginning of the end for many major empires globally, or even regionally, is the moment when they began to lose their traditional dominance at sea, as happened with the British Empire at the turn of the century, and the Japanese Empire during World War II.
Today, the US Navy is at the heart of US economic hegemony, and is not just an icon of its military and political supremacy (Reuters)
At this level, the United States today enjoys an overwhelming military superiority over the rest of the world powers and a large gap that separates it from others, but this gap turns into a very deep chasm when it comes to the naval forces. Today, the U.S. Navy has its own fleet of aircraft, its own army of infantry, its own special operations division, and an independent intelligence service. It is alone more powerful than most militaries in the world. Its budget alone exceeds China's entire military spending, and is so powerful that the U.S. Navy's fleet of aircraft, 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 be ranked today in the twelfth place on the list of the most powerful naval forces in the world.
Geography forces the United States to be a naval power in the first place. 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 of absolute naval dominance in the oceans, invested heavily in its army, and with a huge annual military budget that soon exceeded $ 700 billion, the United States achieved unique control of the oceans, and tightened its control over the most used trade routes in the world .
With its control of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, which also contain the world's major economic transport corridors, the United States ascended to a single economic hegemony.
Since international trade is highly dependent on shipping, Washington today makes huge profits from the trade routes linking North America with East Asia and Western Europe, meaning that the US Navy is today at the heart of American economic hegemony, and not just an icon of its military superiority and political hegemony.
It is a story of superiority that did not start suddenly, but is rooted in history more than two centuries ago.
Alfred Thayer Mahan has been called "the most important American strategist of the nineteenth century".
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the hegemony of Napoleon Bonaparte and his powerful fleet had ended forever, and the greatest threat to American navigation had vanished, which convinced the Americans at that time that they needed nothing 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 competition to its peak, as modern battleships were built to lead the race for coal colonies around the world.
These developments opened new potential horizons for attacking the Atlantic coasts, or threatening American trade on the high seas, with new powerful warships, which represented a strong threat to American interests, and the need for a new naval strategy emerged. The solution came at the time from the brainchild of former naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan (3), who is nicknamed in the United States today as “The Clausewitz of the Sea,” as the Americans consider him the naval counterpart of the most prominent military expert in history, “Karl 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 over the sea.
Mahan's ideas were well received in American circles, especially by Theodore Roosevelt, who was then still assistant secretary of the Navy.
The first test for Roosevelt's Navy, and for Mahan's theories as well, came during the Spanish-American War, which ended in a crushing victory for the US Navy, followed by Spain's ceding of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the islands of "Guam" and "Wake" to the United States, and Cuba, in turn, fell under actual American control, despite having obtained 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 seceded from Colombia, opening the door to the construction of the Panama Canal.
This new highway to global trade has revolutionized American strategy, making the Caribbean region suddenly surpass the importance of the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal.
At that time, the world was witnessing the demise of the British Royal Navy as a dominant power, as it seemed that Britain, despite possessing the largest commercial fleet in the world at that time, was no longer able to maintain its position as a fighting power, and it became clear that Britain was on its way to leave the world of the seas In favor 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.
Locations of US aircraft carriers
The majestic development in the capabilities of the Air Force has turned conventional battleships into burdens rather than strategic assets with the ease of bombing them. It seemed that the time of classic naval wars was about to end, and that the world today is moving towards a mixture of naval and air power in order to increase offensive and reconnaissance forces, which is the concept. Embodied by aircraft carriers as a revolution in the world of wars. The United States learned this lesson on a day that it will likely never forget.
On the morning of December 7, 1941, five hundred Japanese aircraft, carried aboard six Imperial aircraft carriers, were making their way toward US naval installations, airfields, and warships at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Japanese B5N torpedoes destroyed dozens of American ships anchored in the port, and on the same day, the Japanese army moved against American forces in the Philippines, invaded Thailand, landed in the British Malay colony, and began the Pacific War.
In just six months, the Japanese created a great defensive ocean stretching thousands of miles from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, the largest real sea area that had been under the effective control of a military power until that time. Japan was then a major military and imperial power, but it was a resource-poor country that imported 88% of its energy, and most of its raw materials. The Japanese war strategy was based on large initial strikes, which would surprise Allied fleets and air forces in ports or weak airstrips, and control of large areas of the sea, and then extend their control by deploying defensive forces to avoid counterattacks.
But maintaining sovereignty at sea is different from exercising sovereignty on land, which Japan learned in practice a few months later, when it lost four aircraft carriers at once, out of its six, in an ambush by the US Navy in Midway, a battle that the United States Navy officially announced A world dominant force.
Midway's lesson was crystal clear: there is a clear difference between the concept of control afforded by naval forces and that guaranteed by land power.
Naval powers do not need to control large areas of land as much as they need a good spread and ability to reach, and trying to permanently control vast areas of the seas is a strenuous and costly process for any power, no matter its size, and with the collapse of all major powers globally by the end of World War II And the dominance of the seas by the United States, the United States turned its maritime philosophy out of control, and attempted to create a traditional maritime empire.
In 1968, America embarked on building ten Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carriers, with nuclear capabilities, which are still the largest in the world, in addition to nine amphibious assault ships, which (6) are also considered aircraft carriers in the traditional sense, and outperform state-owned aircraft carriers in their capabilities. The other, where the world contains 20 aircraft carriers of varying capabilities, is the sum of what all other countries have without the United States. At the same time, the US Navy reduced the number of its conventional naval fleet after World War II, and since that time has witnessed varying waves of accumulation and shrinkage of ships, but it has remained the preferred American weapon for responding 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 no power could compete with the United States on the high seas anytime soon, which prompted the US Navy to bring 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 the implementation of rapid deployment and direct intervention operations, and the deployment of combat units in conflicts, starting with the wars in Kosovo and Bosnia in the 1990s, to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, taking advantage of its fleet of aircraft carriers, as (7) US law states that the country must possess At least 11 operational aircraft carriers. The influence of the Navy's Special Operations Unit "Cell 6", which gained wide fame in the wake of its execution of the assassination of al-Qaeda leader "Osama bin Laden", also penetrated.
"Cell 6" is one of the most secretive special operations teams (8) and raises media myths, so that the US Department of Defense does not recognize its name publicly, and the squad 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 In the name of "Omega", dozens of intelligence operations were carried out through it. SEAL 6's activity has expanded significantly since the attacks of September 11, 2001, and today has more than 300 core troops known as "operators", as well as a support unit of more than 1,500 people. She has been deployed to Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia, where she has undertaken numerous assignments that range from private escorts to The division was responsible for guarding former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, to recruiting residents to gather intelligence, and even carrying out direct assassinations.The division's support units are believed to be deployed today in US embassies in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.
The US aircraft carrier Carl Vinson cruising across the Pacific Ocean (Reuters)
The US Navy exercises all this huge amount of influence despite the fact that today it owns less than 300 combat ships, which is the smallest US fleet since the World War, as the size of the US fleet reached more than 500 ships during the Cold War, for example.
Nevertheless, no country can challenge the US Navy on the high seas, and the rest of the navies around the world compare to it with more than relatively large coastal patrols.
Today, the US Navy is effectively protecting the global order of "freedom of navigation and free trade," while traditional deployments have shifted to secondary roles for navies.
With this relative shift in the priorities of the US Navy, the paradox that governs today’s world remains that the main competing powers of the United States depend mainly in their trade on the protection provided by the six US Navy fleets, in addition to a network of dozens of bases, of which only 60 bases are located on the American coasts alone. In addition to dozens of bases outside its borders, starting with the Bahamas, passing through Cuba, the Indian Ocean, Greece, Italy, Spain, Japan and South Korea, all the way to Djibouti, Bahrain and Kuwait.
This complex network provides protection for international trade fleets, starting with China’s investments in Africa and not ending with Iranian oil exports to Europe, and despite these complex and emphasizing facts of American supremacy, the ambitions of legitimate maritime hegemony remain to play with the imagination of competitors.
The far danger comes from China, and behind it Russia and Iran.
(9) The Chinese Navy plans to exceed the number of its ships in the number of ships of the American fleet within a few years, and despite the staggering differences in the capabilities of the ships, as China owns 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 territory from invasion by creating a massive army of infantry capable of facing a technologically superior adversary, but its economic growth and 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 islands located Under US hegemony in the Pacific Ocean.
As Russia, in turn, embarks on a deferred Soviet-era naval modernization program that focuses on new submarines and destroyers, 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 ballistic missile development program, and these three powers seem to be leading the world into a new generation of naval warfare concepts.
These and other powers realize that it is difficult to compete with the US Navy in full swing with its current capabilities. But with the revolution (10) in the missile industry, especially cruise missiles and laser-guided missiles, and tests of stealth missiles that cross the sound barrier, the protection of marine assets has become more expensive than ever. History examples bear witness to what such a revolution could bring: in 1982, during the Falklands War, Argentine forces sank two British ships with French-made Exocet missiles, and five years later a US frigate was crippled when it was attacked by the same type of missile launched by an aircraft. Iraqi. With more advanced anti-ship missiles in existence today, aircraft carriers become vulnerable when they enter offensive operations near shores with advanced missile systems.
This new concept of naval warfare is known as Anti-Access-Area denial, or A2lAD, a strategy that seeks to render aircraft carriers useless when conducting offensive operations near shores, which loses a large part of their capabilities. And even exposes them to the risk of destruction if they carry out an offensive operation. This policy, which is based on developing missile capabilities, makes any conventional naval force in danger of losing some of its assets and being exposed to high risks if it decides to carry out an offensive operation.
According to the estimation (11) of George Friedman, the famous strategist, if the United States wanted to impose a blockade on China now, it would put its carriers in the range of the anti-ship missiles that Beijing was stockpiling on the artificial islands it is building in the Pacific Ocean, from here, the United States would have to Destroying Chinese satellites, so that it cannot know the locations and trajectories of American carriers and then target them, and even if that 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 it can Imposing a naval blockade on it, while ignoring the danger of ambushes that could be prepared by Chinese submarines.
This is also the case with Iran, which seeks to turn the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, and perhaps the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait if Iran tightens its control over Yemen, into areas prohibited from the American incursion, while Iran sets its sights 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 a more modest force.
Americans are aware of the danger ahead, so rebuilding and developing the US Navy has always been one of the fiercest battles in Congress.
The Navy’s budget amounted to 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 aimed to reduce Pentagon expenditures by $106 billion by 2021. With $36 billion in 2018.
The US Navy budget is "yellow" compared to the Air Force "blue", the vertical numbers are "billion dollars", and the horizontal numbers "from 2000 to 2016 (Al-Jazeera)
(3) The US Navy claims that it needs 355 ships, compared to the current goal of 308-315 ships by 2025. (14) A force structure assessment released in mid-December suggested that the US Navy should expand its current fleet over the decades. The next three, and the paper suggests 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 asking for more money to fund its fleet of the latest generation of F-35 fighter jets.
Since the US military is the 15th largest employer of direct labor in the country, the truth is that voting on military budgets is often subject to political orientation. Representatives have difficulty 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 employment, and the Navy often threatens that if its fleet is greatly reduced, the industry will American ships will vanish.
American experts realize that military strength is not determined by the size of the weapons that the army currently possesses, but also by the strength of the military-industrial complex that is capable of compensating for losses in operations, performing periodic maintenance and replacing new units.
This was the lesson that the Americans learned from the Imperial Japanese Navy, which collapsed irreversibly, 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 having the largest fleet of cargo ships in the world.
Battle of Midway
The United States, therefore, tends to enlarge its naval fleet, despite the fact that, whether it does or not, the United States' control of the high seas will remain for a long time undisputed. But as long as the United States sees today's international order as serving its interests, the strategic argument for revitalizing U.S. naval power will be the growing threat that competitors pose to the United States' ability to ensure freedom of international trade, to communicate securely with its allies, and to move its forces from one homeland to another. Although the solution to the real 16 times the US Navy is facing today in terms of engagement is far from accumulating more ships, a flaw that lies primarily in the depth of strategy.
Nevertheless, it is likely that the United States will continue to accumulate naval power in order to establish and consolidate its superiority over its opponents on the one hand, to maintain the vitality of the military-industrial complex that is the true cornerstone of American supremacy on the other hand, and to satisfy the arrogance of American presidents who They love the spectacle of show of force and speeches aboard fighting towns at sea.