'The Blue Age' Review: Dragging Anchor
By: Kate Bachelder Odell (WSJ)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The U.S. Navy hasn't fought at sea in nearly 80 years. Few Americans were even alive when Ernest Evans, a Navy destroyer captain who died in the 1944 Battle of Leyte Gulf, said to his crew on the USS Johnston: "This is going to be a fighting ship. I intend to go in harm's way"—a line now famous in the Navy. The public has grown accustomed to peace, not fighting, on the seas.
But that tranquility is an anomaly in world history, won and maintained at a cost. Gregg Easterbrook's "The Blue Age: How the U.S. Navy Created Global Prosperity—And Why We're in Danger of Losing It" is a useful primer for Americans who have only a foggy understanding of why the U.S. invests in naval power.
The U.S. Navy is "the police force of nearly all blue water," the Washington-based journalist Mr. Easterbrook writes, and one result has been an explosion in global living standards. The Strait of Malacca, a narrow stretch of ocean between Malaysia and Sumatra, was for centuries among the most treacherous passages on the globe; it is now, Mr. Easterbrook says, the shipping equivalent of a Los Angeles freeway. The American Navy "has made the oceans impassable for those bent on war, while safer for commerce," resulting in trade that benefits "almost everyone." He is right that this arrangement is fragile and underappreciated, and that everything from undersea internet cables to power conduits depends on the free seas.
Mr. Easterbrook neatly sets out the benefits of international trade, most of which happens on the seas. The left-right alliance symbolized by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump keeps Americans aware of the costs of free trade and largely ignorant of its blessings. "Globalization," a reality made possible by safe oceans, is blamed for cultural decline, political polarization and much else. Another inconvenient reality that seldom informs trade politics: "The American middle class is shrinking because most who exit are ascending toward the upper middle."
Mr. Easterbrook is by nature an optimist—his 2018 book "It's Better Than It Looks" sought to debunk the habitual declinism of modern American commentary. In "The Blue Age" he dazzles readers with inventories of American naval superiority. "The United States has eleven nuclear supercarriers" compared with "none for the rest of the world." China's two carriers employ a "ski jump" for launching planes, a primitive technology compared with American aircraft catapults. Russia's single in-use carrier is a floating "rust bucket" that on one jaunt had to divert some of its own pilots to land elsewhere. He praises the "forward-deployed" model that parks American ships in neighborhoods across the world. "Land and air forces can win disputes," a retired admiral tells Mr. Easterbrook, "but it is the navy that keeps disputes far from our shores."
All true, but American naval superiority is far from what it was a generation ago. At 296 ships it is only about half the size of its Cold War peak. The U.S. simply can no longer be everywhere at once.
Aircraft carriers only deter aggression if they’re displacing water. But such is the ragged state of the American carrier fleet that the Navy this summer had to divert its only strike group in the Pacific to protect the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. No other carrier could fill in—the predictable result of years of overwork and delayed maintenance. On current budget trends, the size of the fleet will shrink, as the Navy retires 35-year-old cruisers and other assets without commensurate replacements.
It is odd that amid these realities Mr. Easterbrook calls a Navy larger than 300 ships “a fantasy” (repeating a claim made by the late Sen. John McCain), and concludes that the U.S. spends “plenty” on the sea service, based on no particular analysis. “Increasing naval expenditures to anything like the level of the Reagan buildup”—about 600 ships—“is out of the question,” he writes. Why? Mr. Easterbrook cites entitlement spending, tax cuts, the economic and budgetary fallout of Covid-19. Yet Democrats in Congress and President Biden plan to spend trillions of dollars on infrastructure and other priorities, and surely improving the Navy’s budget is not beyond the realm of fiscal possibility.
At the same time, China is “launching ships so fast there’s barely enough champagne to smash against the bows.” The Chinese navy is set to exceed its American competitor in major surface combatants (carriers, destroyers, cruisers, frigates and the like), according to the Office of Naval Intelligence. The Chinese fleet is 11 years old on average, compared with 21 years for the U.S. Navy.
It’s true that China doesn’t have many allies or partners, and that the U.S. is still leagues ahead in submarine technology. The more important difference, however, is that China has become fiercely ambitious just as the U.S. has become more interested in tending its welfare state than in checking global chaos.
Mr. Easterbrook repeatedly makes a tedious comparison by asking readers to walk in “China’s shoes.” The U.S. sends carrier strike groups into the South China Sea. “Imagine how Washington would feel if a powerful Chinese battle group sailed through the Channel Islands near Los Angeles.” How one side or the other might “feel” is beside the point. One of these navies steams to enforce order and calm, the other to disrupt and usurp.
Some of Mr. Easterbrook’s proposals seem glib. He recommends, for example, a “World Oceans Organization” to keep peace on the seas and enforce various environmental regulations and arms control. This new entity would supposedly be composed largely of Chinese and American naval forces, which would engage in “joint peacekeeping actions.” Speaking of fantasies!
Even so, Mr. Easterbrook makes a strong case that the tenuous peace on the seas is worth trillions of dollars to the world economy and is essential to global order. If he’s right, Americans should be willing to pay for a U.S. Navy prepared to preserve it.
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I'm sure that "how would you feel" question might appeal to one of our members. Long may the US Navy prevail.
The Aircraft Carrier pictured above is the current USS Wasp and it was in the South China Sea.
The book is
The Blue Age
By Gregg Easterbrook
This is an important issue. Even if we become more insular, isolationist, and downsize our military overall, not that I’m for that but no matter what we need a 360-400 ship Navy to keep our trade routes open, protect Americans living or doing business abroad, and to project power to protect allies.
The US is the greatest sea power, eclipsing even the Royal Navy. Now more than ever a first line of defense.
After not being dazzled by “launching ships so fast there’s barely enough champagne to smash against the bows”, Gregg Easterbrook might do the trick. Ms. Odell can rely on her naval husband for any placebo pampering.