Over the eight decades following the end of World War II, the US has taken part in dozens of land wars, large and small. The outcomes have ranged from comprehensive victory to humiliating defeat, but all have received extensive coverage. By contrast, the US Navy’s admission of defeat in its longest and most significant campaign in many decades, has received almost no attention. Yet the failure of attempts to reopen the Suez Canal to shipping has fundamental implications for the entire rationale of maintaining a navy.
Operation Prosperity Guardian was launched in December 2023, following a series of attacks on shipping undertaken by Houthi rebels. The US dispatched a carrier strike group, led by USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, and supported by ships from the Royal Navy and other European forces. Despite intensive bombardment of Houthi positions, attacks on shipping continued and traffic through the Suez canal fell by 70 per cent.
In July, the Dwight D. Eisenhower quietly returned to returned to Norfolk, after what the Navy correctly described as “a historic nine-month combat deployment” but not historic in a good way. The strike force without achieving any of its goals. And then, in late August, came the official admission of defeat As reported by Voice of America:
Vice Admiral George Wikoff, who heads the U.S. naval efforts in the Middle East said that not only have U.S. strikes and defensive efforts done little to change the Houthis’ behavior, it now appears unlikely the group will be swayed by military force.
“The solution is not going to come at the end of a weapon system,” Wikoff told an audience in Washington, speaking via video from U.S. 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain.
“We have certainly degraded their capability. There’s no doubt about that. We’ve degraded their ability,” he said. “However, have we stopped them? No.”
Why has this failure attracted so little attention? Why, for example, has it not even been mentioned by either side in the course of the Presidential election campaign? The answer, quite simply, is that the strategic rationale for the mission turned out to be spurious. “Vital shipping lanes” are not actually vital at all.
The closure of the Suez canal has, indeed imposed higher insurance costs on shippers using the canal, and has led much of the traffic to be diverted to the longer route around the Cape of Good Hope. But the overall impact on freight rates has been modest, and any effect on global economic activity has been too small to be observable.
There shouldn’t have been any surprise here. Despite some hyperbolic claims at the time, the six-day blockage of the Canal in 2019 (due to the grounding of the Ever Given) caused only modest disruptions, with massive insurance claims being quietly settled for much smaller amounts
More notably, the Canal was closed for lengthy periods in the 20th century allowing studies of the economic impacts. These turned out to be very small except for India and Pakistan, both of which were then heavily dependent on trade with the UK and Europe.
And what is true of the Suez Canal is just as true of other “vital shipping routes”, such as the Straits of Malacca. It’s almost always better to take the long way around (for example through the Sunda straits or even through Australian waters in the Southern Ocean) than to fight a war to keep a short cut open.
On the other side of the coin, the failure of Russian attempts to block Ukraine’s exports of wheat and grain provides further lessons on the limits of naval power. Ukraine’s tiny navy was wiped out on the first day of the 2022 invasion. But Russia’s much-touted Black Sea Fleet has fared little better, being driven from its Sevastopol base to ports in Russia, out of reach of Ukrainian missiles. By sailing close to the western coast of the Black Sea, ships carrying Ukrainian grain can be protected by land-based defences, while sailing in waters too shallow to permit attack by submarines.
In summary, as a recent commentary put it, the failure of Prosperity Guardian poses an “existential threat” However, the threat is not to the world economy but to the US navy and, indeed, all the navies of the world. If keeping “vital trade routes” open is neither militarily feasible nor economically important, a large part of the rationale for surface navies disappears.
It’s unlikely that defeat by the Houthis will have much effect on perceptions of the US Navy in the short run. But with so many other demands on the defense budget, the rationale for maintaining a massive, but largely ineffectual, surface fleet, must eventually be questioned.
I haven’t discussed the broader horror of the various Middle East wars, which gave rise to the Houthi attacks. My long-standing view is that the US can do nothing useful and, beyond humanitarian aid, should do nothing to help any party. Please don’t derail discussion by talking about this.
{ 72 comments }
MFB 10.14.24 at 9:55 am
The US navy has declared that it is not able to win the war against Yemen which it earlier declared (after previously the US Air Force had failed in a war against the same country).
It is pleasing to fantasise that this means that navies are obsolete, but this is not really the case. Firstly, if the US were not currently engaged in so many wars and preparations for wars across the world, but were only trying to deal with Yemen (and if Yemen were acting alone and were not generally supported quite widely in the region) then it is extremely likely that the US would be able to enforce free navigation in the area using naval power alone, even if there were some modest cost.
Secondly, it is far from impossible that the US does not really desire to get embroiled in a war in the region at the moment and is happier to allow the freedom of navigation in the area to go by the board. In the end the US is opposed to freedom of navigation for enemy powers, and therefore this might well provide a precedent for later attempting to block the passage of Chinese goods to Europe, which so far as I know is not currently being blocked by anyone apart from the administration of the European Union.
Therefore narrow military considerations are not really relevant. It is quite possible that the US Navy is poorly equipped for this sort of fighting in any case and that this would require some sort of revision. But I suspect the principal reason for the failure of the US Navy in this instance is political – in part, perhaps, domestic-political.
AmberCat 10.14.24 at 9:59 am
I agree that the might of surface ships alone has declined a lot, but what about surface ships plus bombers surface-to-surface missiles?
Perhaps the real lesson is that countries like Italy or Germany may as well get rid of their surface navies bc they can control their waters more effectively with other assets and aren’t interested in protecting force.
John Q 10.14.24 at 10:35 am
MFB An awful lot of ” far from impossible” and “I suspect” there.
I suggest you replace the comment with “I do not choose to re-examine my beliefs at this time”
qwerty 10.14.24 at 10:58 am
“The outcomes have ranged from comprehensive victory to humiliating defeat, but all have received extensive coverage.”
So, which ones were comprehensive victories? Invasion of Grenada, I suppose; that’s one. Any other?
superdestroyer 10.14.24 at 1:15 pm
The entire issue with the issue of the use of the U.S. military is that politicians refuse to apply the Powell Doctrine. They just want to send the military in until the public gets bored and the politicians can move on.
steven t johnson 10.14.24 at 1:24 pm
Not being invested in the US military being the most powerful in history, reforming US military force capabilities by diverting from a wasteful navy isn’t an issue I’m strongly interested in. But the (inadvertent?) suggestion that PRC-bound oil tankers could avoid going through blocked Indonesian waters by going through Australian waters attracted my attention. The necessary premise I think is that naval forces in foreign waters are largely air forces (which includes missiles.) Air power judging from what I know of the historical record has never succeeded as a strategic weapon, however potent it is tactically. The fundamental cause appears to be that, despite the mantra “the enemy army is the target,” territory must be occupied for effective attrition, absent an overwhelming advantage in numbers.
It seems to me that the US naval failure in Yemen was an inevitable consequence of the Kingdom’s failure. The US naval task force was far too tiny to compensate for that. The Kingdom’s defeat is old news, thus its unsurprising follow on attracts little attention?
It seems to me that the failure of the Russian Black Sea fleet was because Romania and Bulgaria are allies in the war against Russia.
The limited economic impact of local events even in places like the Suez Canal provokes the question of the cumulative effective of several such events?
My tentative conclusion at the moment is that the perceived need for force projection against militarily weak entities, coupled with the presumption that most states are ultimately onboard with the US (that is, the “land” is mostly friendly) will probably lead to the status quo, except with bigger budgets.
The question of Australian nuclear submarines is primarily a political matter, inasmuch as there is no perceivable existential military threat to Australia (as I see it.)
Cervantes 10.14.24 at 3:23 pm
One function of navies you haven’t discussed is to protect merchant shipping and keep ports open, and conversely to attack or block shipping and blockade ports. Okay, the Suez Canal isn’t essential, but being able to get goods in and out of New York and LA is, and a power with a substantial pelagic navy, unlike the Houthis, could sink merchant shipping anywhere in the world. (I seem to remember this being a problem in the 1940s, no?) In case of a BIG WAR, a navy will be necessary, sadly. That doesn’t necessarily mean the navy configured the way it is now, but not having one would not be an option.
Kevin 10.14.24 at 4:20 pm
It seems the real conclusion from the Red Sea issues that, perhaps aside from Israel, no one in Europe or the Mideast or South Asia has any real ability to exert force? The Suez Canal matters for trade but for the US it barely matters. It matters a lot for Europe and the Middle East! And JQ’s original post doesn’t even mention the fact that not a single country in the region has any ability to do even as much as a single US Navy ship sent on a mission no one in the US cared about. It seems like that is the major issue, no?
Aardvark Cheeselog 10.14.24 at 4:44 pm
Oh boy. Another one where I will mostly outsource my reaction to Farley over at LG&M, but this one is even more asinine that previous posts on this topic.
“Armed force cannot accomplish mission $X” is not the same as “Naval surface combatants are obsolete. Nor is “Coastal defenses can take out any surface combatant, if not suppressed.”
Tim Worstall 10.14.24 at 7:02 pm
That a costly surface fleet didn’t win this war is not quite the same as the statement that therefore costly surface fleets have no use, purpose nor justification of their costs.
This justification might not be true, yes, but all?
To put this another way, markets seem to deliver bananas pretty well, socialism tended not to. On the other hand unadorned markets – because externalities – are not going to deliver on climate change. Thus the carbon tax – alter the market so that it can work.
But Stern’s “climate change is the biggest market failure ever” is not proof that all markets fail all the time. Which is, I think, where you’re stretching to. Keeping sea lanes open, well, OK, let’s assume that this is no longer possible. Or even important. Just for the sake of your argument. Does that mean that blue water navies are now redundant? Well, only if sea lanes are the only purpose for a blue water navy.
Which, you know, isn’t necessarily true. The justification for the RN was, for some centuries, that it could deliver the British Army – or a – near anywhere and then, and more importantly, pick it up again win or lose.
I agree that the Falklands isn’t going to be everyone’s example of choice but that sort of thing was actually that justification. Get an army x thousands miles from home, land it, supply it, take it home after.
John Q 10.14.24 at 7:17 pm
Tim W: The fact that you have to go back 40 years to the Falklands is notable in itself. It has to be the example of choice, because there aren’t any others. In particular, contrary to a lot of expectations, the Russians weren’t able to launch a seaborne assault on Odessa or any other coastal city.
And the Falklands was a very near-run thing, successful only because the Argentines hadn’t made any serious preparation for a war. Missiles have improved a lot since then, and ships not so much.
LFC 10.14.24 at 7:23 pm
As Cervantes @7 points out, navies have more than one function. Cervantes mentions keeping ports open. There’s also the related aim of fighting piracy. Also transporting soldiers, whether on humanitarian missions (which the U.S. military has become increasingly involved in in recent decades) or military operations. Nuclear-armed submarines, which of course are part of a navy, are viewed as a key element of the nuclear deterrent (I think it’s fairly clear that the U.S. has considerably more of these than it needs for deterrence, but that’s a separate issue). However, admittedly the OP does seem to be referring only to surface ships.
Aircraft carriers likely continue to have a function in some cases. A plane like the Stealth bomber can fly enormous distances but that’s not the case with all planes. In the event of a war over Taiwan, which I think is probably unlikely at least in the short or medium term but not impossible, the navy will be needed as platforms for planes as well as for other reasons.
Navies also might have a symbolic or signaling function, though whether moving an aircraft carrier or strike force into a particular region is an effective signal of anything is, I suppose, debatable.
LFC 10.14.24 at 7:31 pm
qwerty @4
The first Gulf War (1990-91).
John Q 10.14.24 at 7:38 pm
@qwerty I have to admit, Grenada was the only example I could come up with. Small, but it got a lot more attention than the Suez failure.
I can’t see much to respond to in the other comments, none of which engage with the actual argument of the post. This has been my usual experience on this topic.
Thomas P 10.14.24 at 8:08 pm
How the US navy would handle a war over Taiwan is unclear (and will hopefully remain so), but that conflict will certainly be used as justification for a strong navy. Right now drones and missiles seems to have the upper hand, but the armsrace between guns and armor have swung back and forth over the centuries. If the military manages to get laser defenses working it could make drones far more vulnerable and thus ships more survivable.
LFC 10.14.24 at 8:48 pm
As for the OP’s statement that it’s usually better to take the long way around than fight a war or use military force to keep a short cut open, that’s something I might agree with. But the OP goes beyond that, and I think it’s the further step that some of the comments are taking issue with.
Alex SL 10.14.24 at 9:40 pm
While I don’t want to quibble with the conclusion that big navies are inefficient, as they have been so since at least WWI, I think that the real issue is a much broader one. As far as I can tell, there are two scenarios:
First, in a situation where people don’t care much who governs them as long as they get to get on with their lives, empires or kings can wage wars against each other and take or lose land without too much hassle. Examples are feudalism in Europe or much of the Middle East in classical antiquity – it doesn’t really matter to me if this duke or that baron is my distant overlord before a national consciousness has formed. Yes, if things go very badly, a noble may pillage the land and slay civilians to weaken another noble’s economy, but if the first noble conquers the second noble’s land, the serfs and citizens just become theirs, and live goes on as before. Crucially, while the serfs will rise up in a peasant war if they are very desperate, they won’t form a guerrilla to fight for being returned to their previous exchangeable distant overlord.
Second, in a situation where people care very much who governs them because of either national consciousness or religion, you win wars only through a brutality that is difficult to sustain today in the age of media, democracies, and international pressure, with obvious exceptions under special circumstances that are explicitly beyond the scope of this thread. Why did Caesar manage to get Gaul under control? By some estimates, 75% of the population perished. Why did what is now the federal state of Lower Saxony become part of the Frankish empire and forcibly christianised? Maybe had something to do with Charlemagne being given the title “butcher of Saxons”. Why did colonial empires ‘work’? Because the colonial powers had no qualms massacring or starving entire populations to get their way. Why did the Mongol empire expand so successfully? Because they slaughtered entire cities if they didn’t surrender quickly enough.
Most of the world is currently in the second state of people caring whether their leader is one of their own people or not, and whether it is a Christian or a Muslim who tells them what to do. This is why the USA find it so difficult to ‘win’ wars, be it with the army or the navy. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now the Suez could have been ‘won’ if one could still behave like Caesar, Timur, Charlemagne, and Cortés, but luckily, one mostly cannot get away with this today. The point is, the efficiency of the navy is not the factor that has changed. They always had the same issues, as their peak performance is a naval blockade that can to some degree be undercut by blockade running.
As an aside, I also find it difficult to call it ‘lost’ if you are giving up after causing enormous destruction and suffering but having no significant losses yourself, and certainly none to your homeland. If that is ‘losing’, what do you call it if your homeland is bombed and sues for peace?
Charlie W 10.14.24 at 9:50 pm
“If keeping ‘vital trade routes’ open is neither militarily feasible nor economically important, a large part of the rationale for surface navies disappears.”
Not sure how much work the “surface” part of “surface navies” is doing there. The history of surface ships v. coastal forts, etc. is not very impressive, for sure. Although that said, I don’t recall any of the Prosperity Guardian ships getting hit either, where maybe they should have been, in line with the thesis?
Still, maybe chokepoints are not all that. What about a Taiwan blockade though? A chunk of the relevant history here concerns civilian shipping being interdicted by submarines well away from shore.
Reading between the lines a bit here, I guess it’s true that at least part of the explanation for the existence of the Australian navy is that having a navy is a demonstration of machismo (and you don’t approve of machismo). I’m sympathetic; national policy shouldn’t be determined by machismo. Still, the world is significantly connected by sea, an awful lot of tonnage moves (very efficiently) by sea, there is potential for coercive threats exercised against specifically shipping in places not effectively covered by shore defences or air forces, and therefore to the extent that a navy forms part of an effective counter to that, having a navy is rational. I don’t see how this stops being true in general. Whether or not a given country can get away without having a navy (as Costa Rica and Ireland both get away without having armies); well maybe they can, maybe they can’t, it depends.
bekabot 10.14.24 at 11:22 pm
“If that is ‘losing’, what do you call it if your homeland is bombed and sues for peace?”
Still losing, only worse? ‘Losing badly?’ ‘Losing bigly by a lot?’
I put it down to binarism. You either win or you lose, and you lose every time you don’t win. Wins and losses are digital, not analog, which means there are only the two options. That’s the attitude, and it’s so widespread that I expect that there are very few people who aren’t affected by it in one way or another.
John Q 10.15.24 at 2:37 am
Charlie W and others. I looked at the feasibility of a blockade and reached the same conclusion as you Surface ships trying to blockade a port in 19th century style wouldn’t last more than a few weeks, whether or not the adversary had a navy (see Moskva).
The only feasible option (and as was found in WWII) is unrestricted submarine warfare, which would now have to include shooting down civilian planes. This would be a war crime, for what it’s worth. Perhaps more relevantly, as with air power alone, no blockade unaccompanied by land warfare has ever succeeded in inducing the target to surrender.
More detail here
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/implausibility-taiwan-blockade
maxhgns 10.15.24 at 3:55 am
Would this be true of the Panama Canal, too?
Alex SL 10.15.24 at 5:51 am
bekabot,
Sorry to expand on this, as it is a bit off-topic from navies, but I think it just offends me that a nation can go on reducing other nations to rubble, then walk off completely unharmed themselves, and the media and political class forever discuss it as “we lost”. As often, it is useful to think of an analogy in relationships between individual people, because we have better moral instincts there. Imagine I go around bulldozing occupied houses in my suburb one after the other without ever facing any repercussions and then say, gosh, I am so unsuccessful in what I am trying to achieve, because most of the people whose possessions I destroyed now hate me for some reason instead of adopting my political beliefs. It is just a weird way of looking at the outcome of, say, the bombing of Laos or of drone-striking rural Afghanistan.
The connection to navies here is perhaps that only a fleet allows a country to project the power to reduce more than their immediate neighbours to rubble. Whether doing that is a desirable goal that is long-term beneficial to the perpetrators is another question, but if that is what you want a navy for, then it has been very useful and efficient these past few decades!
Peter Dorman 10.15.24 at 6:10 am
This is only half-related to the OP, but I’ve always wondered how useful a naval force composed of large ships would be against reasonably sophisticated aerial attacks: missiles and now drones. I get that the ships are outfitted with all sorts of defensive hardware, but still, aren’t they ultimately sitting ducks, almost literally? I know nothing of the military technologies involved, but just in principle, boats, and especially large boats, seem ill-suited for modern combat.
Alex SL 10.15.24 at 8:36 am
Peter Dorman,
Certainly not an expert, I assume that they would have a chance of bringing down an individual missile but that any defensive systems would get overwhelmed by More Dakka.
MFB 10.15.24 at 10:02 am
If one believes, as Quiggin does, that navies are obsolete because an outdated Russian cruiser was sunk while trying to do a job for which it was not designed, there’s not much room for discussion.
However, it seems clear that as currently operated, surface warships are vulnerable to swarms of guided weapons, in much the same way that tanks are vulnerable to swarms of guided weapons. At the same time, surface warships are not very effective, and never have been, against capable land-based defenses (see Dardanelles 1915 for details).
It follows that surface warships need more capable defenses against such weapons, which was more or less what all navies discovered in 1939. The fact that no navies have had to deal with these problems for a longish while probably explains why many navies have been caught flatfooted.
Unfortunately this probably means that a lot of countries will be putting a lot of money into new naval equipment, which is probably the opposite of what Quiggin actually is arguing for. Mercifully the current economic conditions may derail this project.
qwerty 10.15.24 at 10:40 am
Isn’t battleship building the most efficient implementation of military Keynesianism?
Think of the number of jobs… Blue-collar jobs… Mmm-mmm…
engels 10.15.24 at 1:02 pm
In so far as there’s a serious claim to be made here it’s about replacing surface fleets with submarines (which however you look it at it still have the rather signficant capability of unleashing Armageddon on all of us).
bekabot 10.15.24 at 3:40 pm
@ Alex SL
I’m not happy about it either, but it’s part of a habit of mind which reaches back throughout recorded history. If this habit of mind has increased in the last few hundred years (and I’m not sure it has) it’s because it’s produced such fantastic rewards. The very devices on which we type and post are produced according to this pattern, in which a switch (or whatever) is either on or off but not both. A one is a one and a zero’s a zero, and any confusion about the division would wreck the machines. (As of right now, anyway.) A square on a punch card is either filled or not filled, like its predecessor, the card for a Jacquard loom. The view of the world which produced these gizmos is not unrelated to the view of the word which says that as long as you don’t win and win big and win definitively, you lose — and it’s certainly not confined to those parts of the world which are conventionally recognized as rich and powerful. By now, everyone’s been bitten by the bug.
Maybe a new paradigm will happen along — a paradigm in which various states (like ‘victory’ and ‘defeat’) can be superposed and aren’t mutually exclusive. Maybe quantum computing will become a thing. The physics for such worldview already exists and has for more than a century, but it has yet to gain currency in the public square. Too bad.
russell1200 10.15.24 at 4:25 pm
The most effective way to limit, and occasionally stop, ocean going traffic is naval mines at a joke point. It is not automatic as their is generally going to be a battle to try and at least slow up the delivery method, and in modern warfare their may be a mine sensor versus countermeasure battle.
The most effective naval mining campaign that I am aware of was Operation Starvation against Japan at the end of WW2. It is this operation that fully stopped traffic on the Sea of Japan and contiguous areas. The mines were mostly dropped by B29 Bombers and may have been the most effective usage of a bomber force in the war.
If the Houthis had effective mines, there would be a lot of trouble. The situation is a little better than it was bag in the Desert Storm era, but countermeasures are way behind potential (presumed?) mine technology.
The US Navy has repeatedly ignored the needs of a brown water/coastal navy. The debacle of the two types of littoral ships is pretty well known. That the US Navy (and most world navies) aren’t very good at fighting this type of warfare, since they don’t prepare for it, shouldn’t be that surprising. Even with the correct navy it would be hard to win a war where you are not going to engage the land area the little ships are coming from.
The plus side of a blue water navy is that when you do decide to do something, you do have the potential to project force into the area. Aircraft carriers probably carry the most political weight, but modern submarines (and they can use mines also) are very hard to stop. The Russians are said to have 3 submarines in the Black Sea. Apparently, they don’t want to use them.
John Q 10.15.24 at 9:03 pm
Engels: As I suggest in the longer post, there are some very good reasons not to engage in submarine warfare, but for the moment, the arguments in the OP don’t apply.
Bekabot and others: the normal outcome of war is that both sides lose, relative to status quo ante.
steven t johnson 10.15.24 at 9:42 pm
John Q@30 “… the normal outcome of war is that both sides lose, relative to status quo ante.” If the warring states are considered as a whole, true. It is not at all clear that nations should be deemed wholes for which costs and benefits are distributed proportionately, or even randomly.
bill t 10.16.24 at 3:17 am
I sympathize generally with the idea that the USA is not always a force for good.
But to call this “war” is bankrupt. It’s not that. Period. It is not that.
Maybe we don’t know what it is.
You could write about that, it might be interesting. Could be proxys of a proxy shooting at non-aligned actors who draw in proxys of the other proxy. It’s far short of war, as is common for the last few decades, unless you live in Ukraine and you got sent back to 1942.
qwerty 10.16.24 at 6:10 am
@29 “If the Houthis had effective mines, there would be a lot of trouble.”
But Houthis’ goal is not to block the Suez canal per se. It’s to punish the Zionist entity in Palestine and its accomplices. Only them. I don’t think mines can be this selective.
John C Quiggin 10.16.24 at 8:29 am
There are always some beneficiaries, such as arms manufacturers. That’s true of any policy that promotes a particular industry
But even if you confine attention to the people in positions of power at the beginning of a “successful” war, they are commonly pushed aside by more ruthless types as the war continues.
Stephen 10.16.24 at 9:43 am
John Q@30 “… the normal outcome of war is that both sides lose, relative to status quo ante.”
A frequent outcome, yes. But as far as the USA was concerned, was that true for the Revolutionary or Civil Wars, the Mexican or Spanish wars, most of the Indian wars? Or even, from a strictly American perspective, both World Wars, which ended with the country vastly enriched, their enemies defeated, and their allies – that is, potential future enemies – greatly weakened?
Come to think of it, was it true for all of the European colonial wars? Were the conquests of Mexico and Peru a loss for Spain? (In the long term, Spain eventually became weaker, but that’s a different matter.)
Closer to home for JQ: were white Australians or New Zealanders losers in their conflicts with the earlier inhabitants?
Trader Joe 10.16.24 at 11:13 am
Imagine the world without any navies
How many ships would it have been acceptable to sink in Suez before some nation would have committed to using ground troops (or other methods) to destroy the rebels? Would the loss of 10 boats and say $20 billion of goods be enough? How about 20? How about 50? They managed quite a few even with the navy there, what loss would have been ‘acceptable?’
Now multiply that loss by all of the other so-called shortcuts that don’t need defending. What are you ok with – maybe 100 boats a year getting sunk, raided or boarded? This is economics – you must have a number for deaths and destruction that you are “O.K.” with.
Now lets consider all of the invasions or land grabs that aren’t happening because navies are there. Taiwan would surely be gone. Really any near-land mass island would just go to the highest bidder. More distant locales would be at the mercy of local rebels. Perhaps Falklands is the only example in +40 years because its where the navy failed to be a deterrent.
Lastly, if the admiral says he failed I’m obliged to take his word for it – but I think he did succeed in keeping the problem from being worse. If your preference is ground combat over naval combat – start by eliminating the navies and let the bloodbath begin.
Kevin Walsh 10.16.24 at 12:24 pm
@10
OK, let’s take the example of the Royal Navy transporting and supporting land based expeditionary forces. Could the US navy support a successful amphibious assault based from, say, Bahrain, on Iran? Or from Taiwan/Japan/South Korea on China? Or would such attempts be disastrous fiascos because the advance of missile technology means it’s no longer feasible to make an amphibious assault against a serious regional military power?
eg 10.16.24 at 12:33 pm
I don’t understand the example offered that the Russian navy has “failed” to interdict Black Sea shipping. I thought that they were committed to its continuation as part of their “charm offensive” with the Global South?
bertl 10.16.24 at 4:02 pm
Summarising a few ideas arising from the above:
First, ships are effective at moving goods from one sea port to another.
Second, ships are effective in blockades if the blockading country is close enough to the blckaded territory and its ships are backed by a landbased airforce and submarines.
Third, even in the first two cases, ships make marvellous targets and they become even more marvellous targets the further they are from their base.
Fourth, bases make excellent targets and the closer bases are to the adversary and the further they are from their home country the better the target.
Fifth, given the third and fourth points, ships are effective at transporting military personnel and materiel if a country physically distant from the conflict is prepared to accept a high level of loss of all three (a personal note: one of my uncles had two ships sink under him in the in the Artic convoys on which he served during the Second War and saw many of his shipmates suffer grievous injuries, some of whom were saved, and many who died of hypothermia and/or drowned or were killed in the initial blast).
Sixth, the safest most effective use of shipping has been and is and will continue to be river based.
Seventh, the emerging world is better explained by Mackinder and not Spykman, because of the points made above in conjunction with the most widely predicted effects of climate change.
steven t johnson 10.16.24 at 4:37 pm
John C Quiggin@34 “But even if you confine attention to the people in positions of power at the beginning of a ‘successful’ war, they are commonly pushed aside by more ruthless types as the war continues.” I am so far behind I don’t even know that the US, for one, has ever been encumbered to any observable degree (not by me, to be fair.) I can only observe I am not for reforming the US navy, not valuing force projection much.*
*A long range global space program to track and if necessary divert asteroids threatening to impact Earth, I am for. But I think I’m the only one. It would cost billions after all.
c1ue 10.16.24 at 4:41 pm
@eg
Indeed. Russia has never said it would block all traffic to and from Ukrainian ports. However, it is starting to hit freighters believed to carry weapons in.
Alex SL 10.16.24 at 9:16 pm
John Q,
I went to bed thinking that I would write a certain response in the morning, and Stephen largely already wrote that response. I agree that there are cases where a warmonger wins but his own nation loses, but it cannot be seriously argued that Spain didn’t win its American colonies, or that Rome didn’t win its wars against Macedon. More to the point of my earlier comment, it would be absurd to claim that the USA didn’t win in Iraq or Afghanistan. The previous administrations and their armies collapsed in very short time. The fact that the USA didn’t achieve their nominal long-term strategic goals is a different issue than the military outcome, and mixing the two is a category error.
bill t,
The ability to get away with labeling a war “not a war” is very useful to circumvent moral considerations that usually apply, to ignore one’s nation’s constitutional limits on who can declare war and how, and to avoid rules one would usually have to follow (these are, like, um, terrorists, yes, terrorists, not enemy soldiers, so I don’t have to give them the rights that prisoners of war are due). That’s what is going on here. Shooting missiles at a different country is still an act of war, no matter the mental contortions of people who deny that.
Trader Joe,
I cannot speak for the OP, but I wouldn’t claim that all military ships are superfluous. I would say that navy strategists and political leaders have a historical tendency of being wrong about what is needed – see, e.g., the weird obsession with rams after the invention of armor plating, the emphasis on extremely large and expensive battle ships that could be disabled by a single lucky torpedo, and a certain nation’s recent decision to purchase numerous nuclear submarines despite having no enemy or threat model. The question therefore should be, what do you need to deter, say, an invasion of Taiwan? I would then think in terms of what forces or installations placed locally in Taiwan could sink troop carriers and defend against air strikes, not in terms of the ability to drive fleets here and there to occasionally drop bombs on some random place.
stephen t johnson,
Luckily, those asteroids appear to happen so rarely that it is statistically vanishingly unlikely that one will impact before any society building such a space program collapses from, say, the next ice age or something.
John Q 10.16.24 at 10:32 pm
Alex SL. I never used the term “win” – as you say, there’s a category error here, but I didn’t make it.
I asked whether either side ended up better off than in the status quo ante. In the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan, I say no.
John Q 10.16.24 at 10:48 pm
Alex SL. I haven’t used the term “win”, though I do use “lose”. As you say, there’s a category error here, but I didn’t make it.
I asked whether either side ended up better off than in the status quo ante. In the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan, I say no.
Alex SL 10.17.24 at 2:25 am
John Q,
Sorry, I am puzzled. As I understood it, you argued that the USA lost against the Houthis and that the normal outcome of a war is that both sides lose. I said that concluding that the USA lost a war that they won overwhelmingly (e.g., Iraq or Afghanistan) because they did not achieve long-term strategic objectives is a category error. As I read all of this, none of it needs you to have said ‘win’ from the US perspective, only ‘lost’…? It is me who claims that the USA ‘won’ some of these, at least in terms of a military operation.
AmberCat 10.17.24 at 4:56 am
Houthis just went “boom” via B-2 bunker-busters. Perhaps the war isn’t over quite yet?
UAE commandos ready for ground insertion . . . lol
Thomas P 10.17.24 at 5:30 am
When it comes to “winning” wars there is also a secondary effect of showing your willingness to rubbelize a country for later threats: “Nice country you have there, would be a pity if something happened to it” to gain concessions without having to fire a shot.
Stephen 10.17.24 at 11:06 am
John Q, Alex SL: I may not have made my point fully with regard to JQ’s original proposition that “the normal outcome of war is that both sides lose, relative to status quo ante.”
Point is: while that is certainly often true, in the case of the USA there was a long historical sequence, from colonial times to arguably Korea, in which it was almost always untrue. The only possible significant exception I can think of is the war of 1812-15, which few Americans will agree they lost, and one could argue that the US indeed won as far as the opportunity to attack the Indians on its western frontier was concerned.
Historical mental inertia is a significant matter. In consequence of a long run of victories, the American outlook on war may have developed differently from, say, the outlook of Australians for whom JQ’s proposition has been true since WW1, if not since the Boer War.
steven t johnson 10.17.24 at 12:39 pm
Alex SL@42 Yes, I am alone on that. Fortunately, no one wins the lottery either.
But I am beginning an extensive series of historical studies in search of ruthlessness shortage in American foreign policy and will too preoccupied for further comment.
Procopius 10.17.24 at 3:11 pm
I’m so old I remember when our Navy had 600 ships. Of course, I’m so old I remember when they had a lot more than 600, but they made a loud outcry about the 600 number being vital. We now have less than 300, going down, and no shipbuilding industry. We don’t have much industry at all, but shipbuilding is what’s relevant to this discussion. I don’t believe the Peoples Liberation Army Navy is willing to cross the ocean, but they already have more ships than we do and a massive shipbuilding industry. I believe they are building half of all the ship under construction in the world. I don’t have any evidence that the Admirals are enriching themselves at the expense of the Navy, but I’m suspicious. I’ve seen some excellent remarks here about what Navies should be able to do, and I’m not sure ours is able to do any of those things now. Alas, I believe there’s no way to reform our military or the MIC (military industrial complex) until after we lose the next war, with great damage to our biggest cities. I wish I had some constructive advice, but I’m afraid I don’t.
John Q 10.17.24 at 6:41 pm
Stephen @48 That’s exactly right. Also true of belief that US is a generous donor of foreign aid, which was true at the time of the Marshall Plan
MisterMr 10.17.24 at 11:16 pm
I will note that while the Marshall Plan was indeed a generous way to treat the defeated enemies, it was a loan not a donation.
Also in the postwar years there was a growing inflation that was unexpected before, and interest on debt was fixed, so this helped lowering the debt burden of the Marshall plan, but this was unknown at the time of the plan.
Stephen 10.18.24 at 11:58 am
John Q @51: I an happy to find you agree with me that y0ur initial proposition, that “the normal outcome of war is that both sides lose, relative to status quo ante” has very many important exceptions, and that till recently US history has been one long series of exceptions: by which much can be explained. I think that Alex SL and I, if we thought it worth while, could come up with a long and tedious list of wars in which one non-US side did very definitely not lose.
I confess that I can’t quite see how the Marshall Plan fits into this discussion: unless you are citing it as a case where the defeated side, and some of the victors, did not lose as badly as they might have done; but even that is a logical leap beyond me. MisterMr may have a better understanding of your argument than I do.
LFC 10.18.24 at 6:32 pm
Procopius @50
If these remarks are supposed to refer to the U.S., I’m puzzled by (among other things) your assertion that the U.S. has “no shipbuilding industry.” Some documentation for this statement seems needed.
Kevin Walsh 10.22.24 at 1:13 pm
@45 I don’t know how it’s possible to maintain that the US won the war in Afghanistan when the US has failed to keep the Taliban out of power, and the US has also failed to make the restored Taliban accede to any plausible US foreign policy objective – there are no US bases in Afghanistan, Afghanistan has peaceful relations as far as I’m aware with China and Iran, Afghanistan is more likely to be part of the Belt and Road Initiative than to host US-owned pipelines running from Central Asia to Pakistan, and Afghanistan doesn’t even produce heroin any more.
Sure, a lot of DoD contractors made a lot of money, but the US did also lose considerable prestige from the fact that the Ghani regime collapsed before US troops had even finished leaving the country, while Najibullah hung on for years after the Soviet withdrawal.
Iraq is a very different story. The Ba’ath regime was not restored to power, Iraq’s oil industry is still privatised, Kurdistan is still a de-facto US fief, and there are many US military bases in the country.
steven t johnson 10.22.24 at 1:55 pm
Kevin Walsh@55 makes the category error charged by Alex SL@45 in my opinion. The US war on Afghanistan began covertly with money, arms and covert tactical support funneled to militant Islamic groups, under Carter/Brzezinski. (Carter’s reputation as an unwarlike president is like Trump’s, partly its own category error, partly relative to other presidents.) The goal was to undermine a pro-Soviet socialist government, and it was hoped (at least so Brzezinski retroactively claimed, honestly?) to provoke a costly Soviet intervention in favor of their local allies.
It seems to me that I recall public figures boasting the cost of the war to the USSR was instrumental in defeating socialism.. (Not a scholar, don’t keep note cards for documentation, my apologies.) There certainly is no socialism in Afghanistan today. I think this is a win, ultimately for the US. Personally, the notion that the Taliban victory was a defeat rather presumes the US was actually intervening to stop the Taliban for principled reasons, rather than because the Taliban was out of control. The US supports the Wahhabist Kingdom as strongly as it supports Israel. I conclude that the victory of a viciously reactionary version of state Islam is not a major issue for the US government. Therefore citing the Taliban victory as a great defeat for the US is not so compelling an argument.
Kevin Walsh 10.22.24 at 4:26 pm
@56
I certainly don’t think that America invaded Afghanistan in 2001 on a point of principle. The point of the invasion was to install a friendly government, and after more than two decades of fighting the US was forced to withdraw from Afghanistan, having failed to keep a friendly government in power. I can’t see this as anything other than a defeat.
Saying that the 2001 invasion was a success and we should just ignore everything that happened in Afghanistan since is like suggesting that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a success because they succeeded in removing Hafizullah Amin from power and replacing him with Nur Muhammad Taraki. The point of the Soviet invasion was to stabilise the PDPA government, and this was ultimately unsuccessful.
jack lecou 10.22.24 at 7:21 pm
It seems like this argument proves too much. Even if we grant the facts presented, and that US vs. Houthis or Russia vs. Ukraine do represent naval defeats/failures as such — and more on that below — you can point to much the same kind of “failure” in virtually any security domain.
Take, say, locks.
Locks are, in actual fact, easily defeatable. AFAIK, this isn’t even a matter of dispute. No matter how sophisticated the lock, it’s virtually guaranteed there’s already a video out there with some lock picking enthusiast opening it in seconds, without apparent effort. And inexpensive tools exist which allow even untrained people to perform similar feats. Or of course, in actual break-ins, locks are more often simply forced open with a crowbar. Or bypassed by going through a window.
On the face of it, then, locks are completely useless. And yet, somehow, I doubt you’ll find a single house, storage unit, security fence, etc. without a lock hanging off of it. One hypothesis might be that all these millions of locks are indeed entirely pointless — obsolete, even — and people buy locks only out of misguided cultural inertia, and/or some conspiracy by lock manufacturers. However, a better hypothesis might be that the utility of ubiquitous locks is a little more subtle than “absolutely prevents unauthorized entry in all circumstances”.
All of which is to say: I wonder if there isn’t some naval/military equivalent for the old maxim “locks are only there to help keep honest people honest”.
“Navies are there to keep docile nations docile,” maybe? Something like that. The point being that any kind of measure or force only deters those not willing to take the risks or pay the price. And I don’t think any of these posts adequately engage with the question of what a world without these supposedly obsolete navies would look like. How would behaviors change? How would balances of power shift?
My own intuition is that once you start running the scenarios, you determine that a world without navies would probably have to re-invent something very much like them about 10 minutes later. Much as we’d probably have to do with locks if they were simply snapped out of existence, without any other adjustments to our social arrangements. That’s a damned ephemeral kind of “obsolescence”.
To be clear, I don’t approve of navies, or military power projection in general. That sort of projection — and the kind of ‘peace’ it enforces — is undoubtedly a pretty morally dubious and imperialist one. A world without navies — like a world without locks — would certainly be a nicer one. But that’s only stable equilibrium in a world with social and political advances beyond the ones we’ve got in evidence right now.
(And this is still granting a lot of charity to what I think is a pretty selectively presented set of facts in the original. We’re invited to conclude, for example, that the retirement of the Eisenhower to Norfolk in the summer represented a capitulation, and that the US has given up on using naval assets to discourage Houthi attacks on shipping. Perhaps given up on using military force to protect shipping in the region altogether.
But this is rather gainsaid by other facts. Such as that, for better or worse, the US continues to conduct operations against the Houthis. For instance, there was a major airstrike against purported caches of drones and missiles on the 16th, literally two days after the date of this post. Or that we’re over here talking about the excesses of naval expenditure and yet somehow failing to remember that the US has way more than one carrier strike group: the USS Theodore Roosevelt is even now sitting there right off the Arabian Peninsula, having been ordered over there from the Pacific just about the same time the Eisenhower was sent home. It’s almost as if the return of the latter wasn’t an admission of defeat, but rather a routine rotation back home after an already doubly-extended overseas cruise…)
John Q 10.23.24 at 6:27 am
I’m going to take a victory lap here, with some links making the point that my often-repeated and equally often derided claim that surface fleets are obsolete is now becoming the conventional wisdom
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/china-building-fleet-aircraft-carriers-it-could-be-mistake-210584
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/adapt-or-sink-can-us-aircraft-carriers-survive-conflict-china-or-russia-209915
Not everyone agrees, but advocates of surface fleets are conceding a fair bit. For example, this otherwise strongly worded claim
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/sink-aircraft-carrier-5-reasons-it-might-be-close-impossible-210117
notes that ” A carrier battle group will tend to stay in the open ocean rather than entering confined areas where approaching threats are hard to sort out from other local traffic.”, a description that would appear to fit the Taiwan Strait perfectly
And rather than deny the fact that drones are a cheap way of destroying surface ships, this retired admiral says “why not have both” .
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/18/drones-ships-navy-ukraine-china/
John Q 10.23.24 at 6:30 am
Jack @58 The recent attack on the Houthis was undertaken by B2 Bombers based in the US and apparently overflying Australia. At a minimum, they appear to have been more effective than the efforts of carrier-based plans.
KT2 10.23.24 at 6:53 am
Lack of replacement, maintainance aka funding leaves vessels ready at 40%. This has set up conditions for suggestions of:
* “… leasing civilian watercraft to bolster its existing fleet and moving all of its watercraft to the Pacific.
* “talking to Congress about leasing civilian vessels, and even hosted representatives recently in Hawaii on the Army watercraft to discuss the benefits of leasing.”
* “looking at possibly replacing the existing fleet of Army watercraft with autonomous vessels in the future.” … “Maybe the future fleet is all autonomous, we just don’t know,”
“Watchdog finds significant issues with US Army’s boat fleet”
By Haley Britzky, CNN
Fri October 18, 2024
…
“Maybe the future fleet is all autonomous, we just don’t know,” he said. “This is all stuff we’re looking at in terms of trying to modernize the way we move people, weapons, and equipment.”
…
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/18/politics/watchdog-significant-issues-us-armys-boat-fleet/index.html
“Actions Needed to Optimize Small but Critical Fleet”
GAO-25-106387. Published: Oct 16, 2024. Publicly Released: Oct 16, 2024.
…
“Why GAO Did This Study
…
“These challenges limit the Army’s ability to meet mission requirements in the Indo-Pacific theater where the need for Army watercraft is most pronounced. …”
…
https://files.gao.gov/reports/GAO-25-106387/index.html
And Luckey Palmer, Peter Thiel and Andreseen Horowitz are now the move fast and break things military autonomous weapons makers… in a lease. Enshitification of war and weapons coming soon.
“Anduril has made a name for itself. The startup recently beat several major companies, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, to win a contract to develop an experimental “collaborative” robotic fighter jet for the US Air Force and Navy.”
https://www.wired.com/story/palmer-luckey-anduril-microsoft-military-headset/
NomadUK 10.23.24 at 12:33 pm
The primary reason for maintaining a surface Navy is that the Navy always have, by far, the best uniforms, and without surface ships, they all stay hidden underwater in submarines.
LFC 10.23.24 at 2:55 pm
steven t. johnson’s claim @56 that the absence of “socialism” in Afghanistan today means the U.S. won in Afghanistan is extremely bizarre, to put it politely.
First (something of a side point), stj apparently thinks that any one-party regime declaring itself socialist is socialist. “Actually existing socialism” (remember that phrase?) was mostly a euphemism for one-party dictatorship. (Note that stj equates the dissolution of the USSR with the defeat of socialism — not surprising given his many previous comments along similar lines.)
Second and more to the point, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan would not have occurred had it not been for the Sept.11 2001 attack carried out by al-Qaeda, whose main base of operations was then in Afghanistan. The aim of the invasion was both to remove the Taliban government, viewed as hosting al-Qaeda or at least letting it operate on its territory, and to get Bin Laden. The second aim failed, as Bin Laden and Zawahiri escaped across the border to Pakistan. The first aim initially succeeded, but deposing the Taliban gave rise to ~20 years of war, culminating in the Taliban coming back into power. So it’s v. hard to see the Afghanistan war as a victory for the U.S.
P.s. That the U.S. supported the mujahideen in their fight vs. the Soviet-backed Afghanistan government in the ’80s is true but not relevant to the question whether the U.S. and its NATO allies won or lost the 2001-2021 war in Afghanistan.
someone who remembers fondly that there was a war not only the US Navy had won 10.23.24 at 3:47 pm
and as one of the highest US Generals just confirmed that the US is about to loose the utmost important war it thought to have won in the last nine decades –
will
nobody
or CT
notice?
jack lecou 10.23.24 at 5:55 pm
Yes, and I didn’t claim otherwise. The point there was only that, as far as the Houthis go, US policy is clearly not quite unanimously in agreement with, “The solution is not going to come at the end of a weapon system.” Which is in fairly stark contrast to what your post implied (“the official admission of defeat”).[1]
Nor does the fact that B2s were used for this particular strike say anything at all about the obsoleteness of surface fleets. At most, it says the B2 platform happened to be the most convenient for that particular day and that particular target. Or possibly just that the Air Force outmaneuvered the Navy that day in terms of excuses to use their particular class of hyper-expensive weapons system.
It certainly doesn’t show that ultra-long-range B2 strikes (or any other system) are a general substitute for the things a carrier group can do. For example, it will have taken those guys 10s of hours to make the trip over from Missouri or wherever, rendezvous with the fuel tankers, etc. And 10s of hours more before they’d be back, rested, serviced, and ready for another go. That can only ever work for targets that are fixed in place, and are only getting a couple of bombers worth of ordnance, with lots advance planning. If the need had been to respond to a developing situation quickly, or fly a lot of repeated sorties — for something like air support of ground troops or no-fly enforcement — there’s still no substitute for either a carrier or a (very) nearby ground base. And while the US has a lot of bases (too many), it doesn’t have them everywhere. There are certainly situations where a base might be unavailable (even captured or overrun), but a carrier could still be safely brought into position.
I see you don’t even bother to address the fact that by the time the Eisenhower was in Norfolk, the Roosevelt was already replacing it on station in the region, and the move was a routine (if overdue) rotation, not “losing a war”.
I do not think those are saying what you think they’re saying.
I don’t doubt that anti-ship weapons are advancing at the moment. And I’m sure some adjustments to strategy and changes in fleet composition (e.g., fewer lots-of-eggs-in-one basket carriers, more smaller missile/drone boats) are on the way one way or another. This is not the same as being “obsolete”.
Like, take the first link about Chinese build up of area denial weapons, and the suggestion that the US+allies should respond by building up their own installations to counter the forthcoming Chinese fleet. OK. But does that mean the US fleet now has no purpose? Could it just disappear without affecting the strategic situation? Of course not. If nothing else, its existence is forcing the Chinese to continuously invest in area denial systems. If the US fleet goes away, the Chinese could redirect those resources into their own fleet. Etc.
You’re persistently failing to address these kinds of iterative strategic issues. AFAICT, your argument largely boils down to “paper is obsolete because scissors counters paper”. That’s just not how anything works.
FWIW, I am onboard with that sentiment – the Houthis anti-shipping activities aren’t a military problem, or one that can be solved that way. They’re a symptom of bad US policy decisions in the region.
jack lecou 10.23.24 at 5:58 pm
PS: Evidently flubbed the markup somehow — last para is the footnote from the first.
steven t johnson 10.23.24 at 8:25 pm
LFC@63 verbally claims Afghan socialism is “something of a side point,” but the notion that a government that from 1978 bans usury, abolishes bride price and engages in land reform, is just another dictatorship no different from the monarchy or the Northern Alliance or the Taliban is about opposing the nefarious evils as listed above. I disagree with those values, but those like LFC and the US government who opposed them, the defeat of such things in Afghanistan most certainly was their victory.
As to the secondary point, which also misses the point, the movie Charlie Wilson’s War is not a sound geopolitical analysis. The first victory of the Taliban was essentially the victory of the US over socialism (in Kabul and Moscow) and the disagreements with the Taliban were merely that. The fact that the Taliban had their origins ultimately in the US sponsored mujaheddin movement does matter, that’s why the US was not adamantly opposed to the Taliban and therefore did not need to continue the same intervention. Tom Hanks seemed truly upset to discover the US was more interested in fighting socialism than fighting for democracy. But selling BS like that is why actors as good as Hanks get paid the big bucks.
The notion that the later open invasion of Afghanistan (which incidentally revived old partnerships so that in practice it was closer to a corporate takeover with help from some of the board)) was entirely separate and also simply a product of 9/11 is absurd. The war aims after 9/11 were not to democratize Afghanistan, but to put up a facade of democracy while continually reshuffling the same personnel as collaborated with the anti-socialist wars against the PDPA. (Of course the advent of sons and sons-in-law and random new faces did impose some superficial changes.)
The war aims after 9/11 included invading Iraq, which to my mind conclusively refutes anyone claiming 9/11 was the cause of any US foreign policy.
The connection of the Afghanistan example to surface navies is indirect, an example of how the goal of attacking a weak opponent far away can still be defended, as by LFC. Surface navies are required for force projection against weaker opponents. So long as that is perceived as necessary, then such a force is required. A navy had little to do in Afghanistan but I think there is no sealift without a surface navy to “protect” the expeditionary forces.
Edward Gregson 10.24.24 at 7:15 am
Regarding long-range bomber flights, it should be mentioned that a lot of them rely on staged refueling at global networks of bases that are defended by navies.
Kevin Walsh 10.24.24 at 1:17 pm
@67
Is the US Air Force stationed at Baghram airport? Are US special forces able to train TPP guerillas on the border of Xinjiang or Balochi separatists on the border with Iran? The last time I checked, the answer to all of these questions was no.
For whatever reason, the US decided to ally with the Northern Alliance against the Taliban in 2001. They succeeded in putting the Northern Alliance into power, but they failed to keep it there. Even the Shia Hazara ethnic minority, who had suffered under the Taliban government of the 1990s and should have been a pillar of the new “democratic” Afghanistan, deserted that government as soon as the US military withdrew. (I understand that this was partially because Afghan intelligence had helped set up the virulently sectarian IS-Khorasan, making the Taliban seem like a safer bet).
That the Taliban are reactionaries is beside the point. The point is that the US, perhaps because the Taliban are apparently sincere Islamists and not simply drug lords fighting under the banner of Islam, selected different reactionaries as clients and unsuccessfully fought against the Taliban for two decades without either destroying it or coercing it into adopting a pro-US diplomatic posture. I find it frankly difficult to think of a more unambiguous defeat for the US military in the entirety of its history – even its defeats in Vietnam and in Lebanon (in the 1980s) are not quite as unambiguous.
LFC 10.24.24 at 2:44 pm
steven t johnson @67
1) I never said that one of the U.S.’s war aims was to “democratize” Afghanistan. Please go back to my comment @63 and read what I wrote. You claim that the U.S. had only “disagreements” w the Taliban after the Taliban first came to power. So why did the U.S. invade Afghanistan in October 2001? Obviously because 9/11 happened.
2) You claim that the 2003 invasion of Iraq refutes any claim that 9/11 was the cause or catalyst of any U.S. decisions. The argument makes no sense. The neocons surrounding GW Bush took advantage of the public’s ignorance to gin up a war against Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do w 9/11. I don’t think this ground needs to be trod again. That does not refute the obviously correct statement that the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan would not have happened if 9/11 had not happened.
3) The U.S. viewed the Cold War as both a geopolitical and ideological struggle, but the adversary was usually identified as Communism (sometimes as “godless Communism”), not as socialism. You imply that I support(ed) all of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War, an implication that is false. Btw I don’t view the USSR as embodying socialism or as being coextensive w the meaning of socialism, but we clearly are not going to agree on that.
steven t johnson 10.24.24 at 4:42 pm
Kevin Walsh@69 “Is the US Air Force stationed at Baghram airport? Are US special forces able to train TPP guerillas on the border of Xinjiang or Balochi separatists on the border with Iran? The last time I checked, the answer to all of these questions was no.” Correct on the first, though it is uncertain how significant this is, absent the position there is no substitute for victory. If “we” aren’t flying the flag, we’ve lost everything?
As to the second, the US has IS-Khorasan still active in central Asia and Pakistan’s ISI et al. still active in Baloch-majority lands. (No, I do not accept Afghan intelligence as an independent actor.) The notion that the redeployment of US forces from Afghanistan was nothing but an unmitigated defeat of the great project for a democratic Afghanistan assumes that the main goals of an intervention that helped produce the Taliban was… to defeat the Taliban? (Being committed pro-US passes for democratic.) The logic escapes me. Any schema that ignores the Afghan wars beginning under Carter and ignoring the priority of the Iraq war makes no sense. Afghanistan was always a secondary theater.
My logic is simple enough: The big goal was to fight socialism, hence the intervention (aka “invasion”) in the seventies under Carter. The US won that, struggle so later getting beaten in a minor theater, not getting (permanently) an openly subservient government was not an unqualified defeat. Getting defeated on the main front, that’s real defeat. That relative unimportance the US intervention ramped down, why the US was satisfied enough for years, what with their factional friends still around in an Afghanistan overall controlled by the Taliban, the friends they recruited later to take down the Kabul government. The US doesn’t like Taliban independence even now, but they don’t have a major problem with Taliban politics in Afghanistan, so again, not an unqualified defeat. I say, by contrast, the US does have a problem with Vietnamese politics and that truly was an unqualified defeat.
LFC 10.24.24 at 8:12 pm
steven t johnson @71 writes:
“The notion that the redeployment [sic] of US forces from Afghanistan was nothing but an unmitigated defeat of the great project for a democratic Afghanistan assumes that the main goals of an intervention that helped produce the Taliban was… to defeat the Taliban?”
This sentence assumes that all U.S. actions in Afghanistan from the Carter era through 2021 should seen as a single long intervention. That’s what the sentence means to refer to with the phrase “an intervention.”
This treats the Carter era as continuous with the G.W. Bush era, neglecting to note that some small things happened in between, such as the end of the Cold War and concomitant dissolution of the USSR. Another thing that happened in between was the emergence of al-Qaeda, its eventual finding of a base of operations in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, and the 9-11 attacks. An analysis that ignores all this and assumes that the goals of U.S. policy in 1979 were basically the same as the goals of U.S. policy in 2001 is deficient.
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