The Future Maritime Operating Environment and the Role of Naval Power

3 Challenges to Order in the Maritime Environment
If one excludes the sea-based deterrents that were initially developed during the latter half of the
20 th century and that contributed to both the stability and the outcome of the Cold War, it has
been seventy years since the last great international conflict in which the outcome was influenced
to a considerable degree by operations at sea. It has been over three decades since the Falklands
War (1982) so clearly demonstrated the continuing strategic utility of sea power. With the lessons
of the Falklands largely forgotten, and as the Second World War recedes into history, many
people have come to assume that the maritime realm is unchanging and, despite an occasional
media focus on environmental decay or contentious boundary claims, that any problems are either
far away or readily manageable. Our easy familiarity with what we have has created within many
Western societies what some have called maritime blindness. 56 Many of us take for granted the
ready abundance of all types of foods year-round and of goods that maintain our modern standard
of living without being aware that their delivery depends, at some stage, on maritime transport;
and we often fail to acknowledge that the absence of sea-based threats is the consequence of
efforts, in the past and ongoing, to purchase such security. In our own age, maritime strategic
interests and vulnerabilities are largely overlooked. 57 The public is frequently unaware of the
strategic challenge that could come from the sea. Looking to history, a British naval historian
recently observed that “even in the darkest hours of that campaign [i.e., the Battle of the Atlantic],
when the United Kingdom stood in real danger of being starved to death, there were far more
stockpiles of key commodities—fuel and food—at any time than there are now in 2013.” 58 He
was referring to a densely populated island country engaged in a life and death struggle. If the
discussion had turned to current events, he might have drawn attention to the vulnerability of
many advanced economies to disruptions in seaborne trade due to energy import dependence or
the just-in-time approach of the commercial and manufacturing sectors. 59
Modern trade and transportation technologies, and the rising threat of remote attacks (i.e., cyber)
mean that the oceans cannot provide defence-in-depth to the same degree as they once did. But a
greater awareness of vulnerability has not yet translated into a greater appreciation for the
strategic importance of the oceans. Any lingering inclination to assume that the oceans are a
limitless resource, where inter-state competition can be easily managed, or that they provide
56 One author has described the symptoms of maritime blindness as “[t]he public’s blasé expectation that
what we want will be available when we want it without being mindful of how it arrives at the table, store
shelf or the assembly shop floor. (…) It also describes the lack of awareness about strategic and security issues
associated with international use of the ocean commons.” See Tim Dunne, “The Sad State of Maritime
Blindness”, Cutting the Bow Wave (Combined Joint Operations from the Sea Center of Excellence: Norfolk,
Virginia, 2013), p. 43. For the ongoing debate on this issue in the UK, see Jeremy J. Blackham and Gwyn Prins,
“The Royal Navy at the Brink”, RUSI Journal (April 2007), pp. 10–16 and Lee Willett, “The Maritime
Contribution to the Joint Campaign and the National Security Strategy”, RUSI Occasional Paper (June 2009).
57 This argument is made in Jeremy Blackham and Gwyn Prins, “Why Things Don’t Happen: Silent
Principles of National Security”, RUSI Journal, Vol. 155, No. 4, August/September 2010, pp. 16–17.
58 Professor Andrew Lambert quoted in Christopher Bellamy, “Naval power: strategic relevance in the
21 st century”, Jane’s Navy International (online), November/December 2014.
59 In early-2015, for example, industry leaders warned that a shutdown of the Long Beach-Los Angeles
ports, through which 40 percent of the US import trade passes, would pose a severe risk to the US national
economy. See Robert Wright, “Industry warns of crippling impact of work stoppage at US ports”, The
Financial Times, 18 January 2015.
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