Navy Shifts Focus From High Seas to ‘Brush-Fire’ Wars

The Navy on Thursday unveiled the first major revision of its national security role in a decade, shifting its emphasis from open-ocean conflicts toward development of expeditionary forces that would fight regional “brush-fire” wars around the world.

The Navy “white paper” outlines the service’s response to changes since the Cold War’s end, as well as establishing a stronger position for the Navy and Marine Corps in future contests with other military branches for missions and money.

It places new emphasis not only on the Marines’ role in over-the-beach landings but on the Navy’s ability to form groups of smaller warships to operate in coastal areas like the Persian Gulf. It also places a high priority on sea lifts and mine-sweeping, two missions largely neglected by the Navy during its decade-long emphasis on preparing for warfare on the high seas.

“We’ve been trying for some time to come to grips with how the world has changed, and we’ve refocused from the idea of a global confrontation to how we can help operate with one foot on the sea and one on land,” Adm. Frank B. Kelso, chief of naval operations, said in an interview. “I hope the paper will tell the story of what we do and show it in such a way that when we ask for something in the way of resources, there is something to support that.”

Most important, perhaps, the document appears to mark the end of the Navy’s focus on aircraft carriers as the centerpiece of its fighting forces. The shift comes at a time when Congress has debated sharply whether the Navy should maintain a force of 12 carriers or reduce the fleet to 10.

Former Navy Secretary John Lehman, architect of the controversial “maritime strategy” that dominated Navy thinking in the 1980s, called the behemoth carriers the “backbone” of the nation’s naval force. By contrast, the white paper released Thursday envisions battle groups that could be designed around amphibious vessels, specially equipped cruisers or even attack submarines.

“Naval forces can be continuously tailored to developing events,” the white paper, titled “. . . From the Sea,” observed. “The answer to every situation may not be a carrier battle group.”

That shift occurs at a time when global trouble spots increasingly are developing along the world’s coasts. Over the next 20 years, according to a Marine projection, fully 80% of the populations of developing nations in Latin America, Africa and the Pacific Rim will migrate to or be concentrated in urban coastal regions.

The difficulties of operating an ocean-going fleet in such coastal waters were dramatically illustrated in the Persian Gulf. During escort operations for oil tankers in the late-1980s, Navy ships were bedeviled by mines, shore-based missiles and aircraft and small attack craft. Until the Gulf War, Navy officials simply would not operate aircraft carriers in the Gulf’s narrow waters, where they feared they would be unable to maneuver away from threats.

While the service operated as many as four of the ships in those narrow waters during the 1991 war, Navy officials acknowledged that the service needs to improve its ability to function in such constrained areas.

Kelso said Thursday that several challenges the Navy has faced in the Gulf focused the service on needed changes. He added that among the lessons the war taught was the importance of operating with Army and Air Force units, as well as coordinating more closely with the Marines, which fall under the Navy’s organizational umbrella.