Australian Maritime Issues 2005 - Royal Australian Navy

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AUSTRALIAN MARITIME ISSUES 2005: SPC-A ANNUAL
both, and seriously inhibited the North’s capacity to use its naval forces in direct support
of McClellan’s forces ashore. It ended indecisively because Merrimack’s role as a oneship
‘fleet-in-being’ required a large squadron to watch her rather than participate fully
in the expeditionary operation McClellan had planned. And when they did, they proved
not to be sufficiently tailored to the task of supporting land forces ashore, unsurprisingly
perhaps because this was not what ships like the Monitor had been designed for. As
far as the US marines were concerned, this showed the need for naval forces explicitly
designed for and wholly dedicated to the conduct of expeditionary operations. Only then
could total ‘battlespace dominance’ be assured.
Sea control was not a problem in the same way in either Afghanistan or the recent Iraq
operation, because there was no peer competitor on the high seas in any real sense.
But nonetheless, there were still constraints on how much sea control could be taken
for granted, not least of which because of the sheer size and extent of these operations.
Something like a third of the USN, for example, was wholly devoted to the recent Iraq
conflict. The British Chief of Defence Staff, recently retired Admiral Boyce, let it be known
that he thought it would be a good idea if Britain could steer clear of another war in 2004,
because British forces needed a period of consolidation and re-balancing. These were
demanding operations in terms of resources and the suicide bombing attack on the USS
Cole in Aden showed that nothing, not even western assumptions of sea control, could be
taken for granted, especially in narrow, complex coastal waters
In fact, the 2003 Iraq War illustrates both the contribution and the limitations of maritime
power projection, and particularly the crucial role navies play in providing force protection
in littoral operations. It seems pretty clear that the British at least thought the opening
maritime moves of this war were to be a grand act of sea-based coercive diplomacy,
expanding on the compellence already in place through the sanctions operation. This
campaign of coercion only turned into war when it failed to elicit the desired response
from Baghdad. Thereafter, sea power moved sufficient military power into the area and
provided a last-minute means of re-balancing the force strategically when it became
clear that the Northern option of entering Iraq through Turkey was not available after
all. From that point on, sea power kept the forces ashore supplied, no mean task given
the complexity and the demands of modern military operations. When those operations
eventually began, naval forces projected air and missile power far inland, engaged in
classic shore bombardments and supported an amphibious operation against the Al-Faw
peninsula. Because of the political imperative to get humanitarian supplies into Umm
Qasr as soon as possible, minesweeping of that port’s approaches became not merely
an enabler of maritime operations and an essential ingredient of sea control, but in
this area at least almost their whole point. The need for navies to cope with the very
different challenges of maintaining sea control in the narrow seas and the littoral against
everything from shore-based aviation, missiles and artillery, mines, coastal submarines
and fast attack craft to swarming attacks from terrorists on jet skis, must be one of the
most obvious and immediate lessons of this exercise in maritime power projection.