The Third Dominance Of Seas And Numbers Game Of World Powers: Strategic Environments Of Cold Wars: Part#3

                                                                                           

With defense budget projections flat or dropping, key Defense Department officials are advocating a "strip to contribute" concept in which the Navy should decommission numerous more seasoned boats to free assets to acquire cheaper, more polished, and maybe more lethal stages. In the meantime, China is aggressively expanding its maritime presence and is thought to have the world's largest fleet. Leading voices see an increasing China threat while also arguing that the US should withdraw its existing fleet to modernize. Adm. Philip Davidson, who led the United States Indo-Pacific Command until his retirement this spring, predicted in March that China will invade Taiwan within the next six years, paving the path for a major military clash with the United States Adm. of the United States.

Michael Gilday, the Navy's commander of marine activities, has stated that the Navy has to accelerate the decommissioning of its more experienced cruisers and littoral fighting boats to free up funds for vessels and weaponry that will be required in the future. Taken together, these viewpoints amount to essential chaos and a disregard for history.

Hundreds of years of global rivalry have demonstrated how a nation's power—and its decline—is inextricably linked to the strength and capacity of its maritime and marine capabilities. The ability to transfer goods in large quantities from where they are manufactured to where they are scarce has long been treated as a manifestation of public authority. Athens possessed a strong naval force as well as a massive dealer armada. Carthage in the third century B.C., Venice in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the Dutch republic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries all dealt with naval and marine armadas to pursue and protect their ambitions. As a result, they had the choice of transforming their small and medium-sized countries into extraordinary powers.

Following the Napoleonic Wars in the mid-nineteenth century, a massive Royal Navy has effectively woven together with the British Empire, resulting in "the sun never set." By the final half of the century, the British maintained a "two-power standard," under which the strength of the Royal Navy had to reach or exceed the following two consolidated naval forces. That was finally shown to be ridiculous. Under President Theodore Roosevelt, the United States' naval force battle force was doubled, propelling the country to global influence and prominence. Most historians consider Roosevelt's Great White Fleet's 14-month global cruise to represent the beginning of what would become known as the American Century.

The astonishing expansion of the United States armada through two global battles, concluding the latter struggle with over 6,000 vessels, by far the largest naval force ever above water, placed the country on its road to becoming a superpower. Finally, Ronald Reagan's 600-transport Navy, which was as much an advertisement as a shipbuilding plan, persuaded the Soviet Union that it would not win the Cold War.

Since the dawn of time, massive marine and merchant armadas have served as a multiplier of power as well as an amazing development element in terms of public influence. This was perceived by all recorded ocean powers—until they didn't.

ADM. JOHN "JACKIE" FISHER was appointed as the Royal Navy's first ocean master in October 1904. He came into office knowing who his foe was—Germany—yet with a clear roadmap from ordinary citizen initiative to pick up some slack and accept decreasing marine finance ambitions. Fisher's solution to this critical problem was to considerably reduce the armada to pay for modernization while also concentrating the remaining ships closer to Great Britain. His modernization interests were astounding, most notably the introduction of a steam-turbine, all-enormous handgun warship, the HMSD read nothing, which would lend the name to all succeeding ships, revolutionizing the global marine competition.

Fisher, on the other hand, paid for his updated boats by massively splitting the 600-transport Royal Navy he inherited from his ancestor. "With one courageous stroke of the pen," then-Prime Minister Arthur Balfour praised Fisher, "he slashed 154 vessels from the dynamic decline of the Royal Navy." Fisher referred to some of these boats as "sheep," which were shipped off the butcher in the breakers' yards; others as "llamas," which were reduced but kept in the stores; and still others as "goats," which held their firearms with the expectation that no further upkeep assets would be assigned to them.

Despite this, the separate wasn't free. The majority of the reductions were made to gunboats and cruisers sent to nine far-flung ports where Britain had public interests, such as in Asia or Africa. The cuts prompted extraordinary analysis not just from within the Royal Navy, which was overseen by officials with extensive experience and compelling perspectives on the importance of a maritime presence abroad, but also from the British Colonial and Foreign Offices, which immediately recognized that they would no longer have the option to approach readily available Royal Navy boats to help the country's strategic interests. Fisher eventually updated his armada for the time being.

All previous designs were swiftly rendered obsolete by both the Dreadnought class ships and their consorts, the more modest Invincible-class combat cruisers. What Fisher did not anticipate was that his compression and modernization of the Royal Navy would have two parallel effects: it weakened the global climate and triggered a global maritime weapons competition.

England had effectively felt the pinch in the Far East and had sought Japan for assistance in defending its inclinations there, although it now found itself without an armada of sufficient size to guarantee its inclinations in other geostrategic areas like the Caribbean and Africa. It had to rely on another collaborator, the United States, to carry out that task. The major alternative would have been for Britain to simply forego its border advantages to focus on what it saw as the ubiquitous German threat in the Baltic, North Sea, and the northern Atlantic Ocean.

There were a few more thud on collisions. After relinquishing its overwhelming lead in overall boat numbers, Britain found itself in another maritime weapons competition in which its previous, sunk-cost holdings in more established ships provided little benefit. Regrettably, Britain began this new arms competition in a very identical position as its geostrategic opponents. Soon after, every European country, as well as the United States and Japan, began to build modern gunboats, and Fisher and his naval force were unable to stay up with or reestablish their previous two-power standard.

Fisher's system is now regarded as a divest-to-contribute modernization strategy. Also, the precedent is clear: Britain discovered that it couldn't even maintain the guise of being a global power; it was quickly reduced to becoming a regional maritime force on the outskirts of Europe. The subsequent states of global unrest, shifting cooperation structures, and the global arms struggle all contributed to the outbreak of World War I and the end of kingdoms, including Britain's.