Once upon a time, the Navy made America a superpower. Will they be able to again?
Foreign Policy cites the opinion of American experts about the decline of US naval power. The author complains about the quantitative and qualitative reduction of the US Navy and calls its role in the world not decisive, but "fragmentary".
Alexander Wooly
Paul Kennedy made a name for himself by lamenting the decline of America. Now he's wondering if it's possible to reverse it.
In 1987, after the publication of his book "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers), historian Paul Kennedy caused a storm of indignation in his address. His sin was to predict the decline of the United States. Notoriety made his book a bestseller, and Kennedy was subsequently consulted by US presidential candidates. A copy of this work even ended up on the bookshelf of the founder of Al-Qaeda(the organization is recognized as terrorist; its activities in the territory of the Russian Federation are prohibited — Approx. InoSMI) Osama bin Laden. However, critics predictably pounced on Kennedy's apparent defeatism. The review by military strategist Edward Luttwak was called "The Rise and Fall of Paul Kennedy."
"Victory at Sea" is not "The Rise and Fall of great powers" — it does not shake the foundations and is unlikely to cause controversy. At the same time, it is an echo of the book by the same author "The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery" (The Rise And Fall of British Naval Mastery) on part of his favorite theme that naval power is closely related to the economic power and industrial potential of the power. Kennedy, a professor of history at the J. Richardson Dilworth Graduate School and director of International security Studies at Yale University, made it clear from the very beginning that the book began as a short text accompanying paintings of warships by the famous marine artist Ian Marshall. It grew out of this text. (And these paintings are amazing: if you are not excited by the "portrait" of the Italian battleship Vittorio Veneto in La Spezia, the synthesis of the style of the artist Claude Monet and the drawings of Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, perhaps this book is not for you.) The result was partly a coffee table book, partly a broad one-volume study. The scale of the description of this work of Kennedy is most reminiscent of the work of historian Craig Symonds in 2018, "World War II at Sea: A Global History" (World War II at Sea: A Global History).
There is a dual nostalgia in "Victory at Sea". On the one hand, Kennedy seems to be referring to his early work, when he published works on naval history. More broadly, it's nostalgia for a rising America. In 1938, the U.S. Navy had 380 warships. By the end of 1944, there were already 6,084 units. But "Victory at Sea" considers not only the ascent of the United States on the steel hulls of warships to the status of a superpower: She also explores five other naval powers of the Second World War - Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. The narrative begins in 1936, when the widespread rearmament of the world's fleets began, and continues until the worldwide naval demobilization at the end of the war.
Kennedy devotes several pages to a detailed description of the sometimes forgotten raid of the Japanese Navy in the Indian Ocean in April 1942, during which ships were sunk and coastal structures were bombed in modern Sri Lanka, and general horror was sown at sea. He suggests what might have happened if Admiral Tuichi Nagumo had moved further west, creating real threats to Aden, Yemen and the Suez Canal, and how this could have affected Britain's land operations in the Middle East and its ability to hold Malta, a strategic stronghold and a thorny stone in the "Italian boot". There are many books about the naval battles of the Second World War, which focus on the mistakes of Admiral William Halsey Jr., bad torpedoes, the advantages of wooden take-off decks of aircraft carriers compared to armored ones, as well as stories describing the pursuit of the German battleship Bismarck, as if he were a robber fleeing from the police by Clyde Barrow. But what Kennedy is doing masterfully is combining economics, technology and strategy at a high research level to explain why the battles at sea in World War II went the way they did, and not otherwise. He describes in detail the ramified cause-and-effect relationships, and does not "fixate" on who sank what, on which many other popular naval works are focused. As an example, Kennedy talks about how raw materials from the bauxite mountains in Suriname eventually became aluminum, which was crucial for the speed and combat strength of the extremely successful US Navy Grumman F6F Hellcat fighter.
England, fortunately or not, and despite many individual serious problems, maintained its dominance at sea for more than 200 years. The Second World War was an amazing duet when Great Britain and the United States united, which few naval powers have done in history. The British Royal Navy, still powerful but already showing serious cracks, relied on U.S. assistance to protect Atlantic convoys. The tottering US navy will count on Britain in its darkest hour in the Pacific.
The narrative of the book "Victory at Sea" creates a sense of good pace and tension from Kennedy's conviction that before 1943, the war at sea was more like hide-and-seek and catch-up. But since the middle of 1943, according to the author, with the arrival of a whole fleet of new massive American aircraft carriers in the world ocean, it has acquired the character of full-scale epic naval battles. Congress then ordered 32 Essex-class aircraft carriers (24 were built), and also decided to convert nine cruisers into light aircraft carriers and began a program to build 122 escort aircraft carriers. And the Japanese managed to build or refit only half a dozen aircraft carriers during the war, and most of them joined the imperial navy too late to influence the outcome of naval battles.
But these were not only warships. Kennedy presents in his book a chronicle of how each of the major naval powers managed to keep a large number of national shipyards operating - even in the treaty—constrained times of the 1920s and 1930s. Most of their work consisted in the construction of merchant ships. It was the preservation of shipyards and their skilled workforce in the "hungry years" after the First World War that became the core of extensive military shipbuilding programs, as a result of which, for example, more than 2.7 thousand Liberty class ships were built in the USA alone ("Liberty" is a type of transport steamships of the mid-20th century. Vessels of this type were built in very large numbers — a total of 2,751 ships were built — in the United States during World War II to provide mass military transportation - Approx. InoSMI).
It is here that Kennedy's narrative of the Second World War, although very qualitative in itself, acquires relevance and connection with the present. If the naval battles of that war resonate today, it is because the war at sea in 1945 is much closer to 2022 than anything that former French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte or former American General George Patton did for modern land warfare. The aircraft carrier is still the main warship, and destroyers and cruisers are still escort ships. The United States still has, if not the largest, then the most powerful navy. The navigation areas of the US Navy — the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea and the western Pacific Ocean — are the same today as they were before.
The difference is where the world's main shipbuilding facilities are located now. This is where the historical changes took place. China today has the world's largest navy with an avalanche of increasingly sophisticated surface ships. It also supports a large-scale civil shipbuilding program. About 90% of the world's merchant ships are built in China, Japan and South Korea. The United States and Europe are awol here, nervously smoking on the sidelines.
For his bestseller of the 1980s, Kennedy was labeled a "defeatist." He cannot be accused of the same in connection with his latest creation. But anyone who reads "Victory at Sea" can feel the same sense of the decline of American power, comparing the prospects for maritime security then and now. In the 1930s, the Allies abandoned more than a decade of self-imposed restrictions in order, albeit belatedly, to begin active construction of their military fleets. Today, the US Navy is talking about growth, while at the same time reducing the American naval potential. According to the latest draft budget, by 2027, the US Navy, which has already shrunk, will number not today's 297 warships, but only 280. In the United States, the number of shipbuilders is declining and there is not enough shipyard capacity. Ships have been in dry docks for years before they begin to be repaired. Compare this with how in the Battle of the Coral Sea in 1942, the aircraft carrier "Yorktown" (Yorktown) received almost catastrophic damage. Admiral Chester Nimitz said at the time that repairs would take at least three months, and gave the shipbuilders three days. Yorktown fought—and won—the Battle of Midway a few weeks later.
A new generation of war veterans has appeared in Congress. However, most of them were forged during the ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are significantly fewer immigrants from the current US Navy among them. This situation is very different from the Second World War, when both US President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had "sea salt in their blood." Both were in charge of naval affairs in the past - Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty. And both preferred to make their official foreign voyages on large warships. Churchill signed his correspondence with the US president during the war as follows: "A former naval figure."
There is no shortage of published histories of past naval wars. Including the battles at sea during the Second World War. However, a new book by Paul Kennedy offers a broader view of the role — sometimes decisive, and sometimes fragmentary — that US naval power had to play not only in destroying the power of imperialist Japan, Italy and Nazi Germany, but also in establishing lasting peace.
Alexander Wooley is a journalist and ex—officer of the Royal Navy of Great Britain.
