The Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard have issued an updated maritime strategy that outlines the changing environment throughout the world and how the services intend to address new threats, while at the same time warning further budget cuts will leave them incapable of meeting the mission requirements.
The report, “Forward, Engaged, Ready: A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower,” was released Friday and marks the first update to the strategy since 2007. But it largely reflects themes senior leaders have been voicing publicly for months or even years. There are also classified sections of the strategy that were not made public.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert said the time had come to update the strategy for the maritime services to highlight new threats, noting the previous one came in the midst of a surge in Iraq, ongoing fighting in Afghanistan and other conflicts. It outlines a host of more evolving issues, from the importance of cyber warfare and countering cyber threats to the rise of the Islamic State, also known is ISIS or ISIL, in Iraq and Syria, and Boko Haram extremists based in Nigeria.
“Cyber wasn’t a word yet, ….” Greenert said during the unveiling the document at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, referring to the previous strategy. “We hadn’t head of ISIS, ISIL, Boko Haram. The Western Pacific was still in a different place. There is a very, very different world.”
Greenert was joined at the event by Marine Commandant Gen. Joseph Dunford and Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Paul Zukunft.
The document outlines five key operational tenets: all domain access; deterrence; sea control; power projection; and maritime security. The strategy, as has been the case for decades, relies on the Navy’s aircraft carrier strike groups as the centerpiece for forward presence and power projection, and also asserts the continued role of Marine amphibious strike task groups, as well as the host of surface combatants, submarines and Coast Guard cutters.
The strategy focuses on all domain access, an increasingly important area of warfare where the proliferation of new technologies are allowing potential enemies to pose a threat to U.S. operations and requires a continuous American effort to stay ahead.
It involves joint operations in battlespace awareness, including persistent intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities; assured command and control; offensive and defensive cyber operations; electromagnetic maneuver warfare designed to combine space, cyberspace and electromagnetic spectrum operations to degrade the enemy; and integrated fire control.
It calls on the Navy and Marine Corps to maintain a fleet of at least 300 ships, a figure that is not expected to be reached until the end of this decade, assuming budgets aren’t further reduced, and on the Coast Guard to have 91 vessels, including the National Security, Offshore Patrol and Fast Response Cutters.