Let’s not rush to mock Hagel for citing the War of 1812 as a precedent
for contemporary strategy. He has a point.
It’s astonishing how one errant word or metaphor can disarm readers’ or
hearers’ critical faculties. Exhibit A: Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s citing the War of
1812 as a precedent for the U.S. Army to integrate coastal defense into its
post-Afghanistan, post-Iraq slate of missions.
The War of 1812 reference made Hagel the butt of countless jokes.
Military wags roundly lampooned the
secretary for deriving guidance for today from such an antiquarian reference.
After all, today’s ultramodern U.S. military has little to learn from its early
history.
Right?
Well, no. It’s not right at all. The substance of Hagel’s remarks was
mostly lost amid the wisecracks. In reality, what he proposes makes eminent
good sense for groundpounders searching for their identity in maritime Asia.
What do
listeners hear when someone draws the War of 1812 analogy? Two things, it
seems. One, that the person drawing the analogy sees a United States defending
its immediate environs against an outside, far stronger maritime power. It’s
not a globe-straddling superpower. It’s a local power trying feebly to protect
its shores. No serious thinker would pattern contemporary methods on such a
lackluster precedent.
And
indeed, Britannia, faraway but overpowering, ruled the waves — including the
waves lapping against the eastern seaboard of North America — during that
half-forgotten conflict. Its Royal Navy imposed a stifling blockade on the new
republic, squelching seaborne trade almost wholly by 1814. Having won a spate
of inspiring single-ship victories in the opening months of the war, the U.S.
Navy found itself largely confined to port. Worse, the Royal Navy landed
amphibian forces along the Chesapeake Bay. Redcoats burned the presidential
mansion, later the White House, late in 1814. Some precedent.
And two,
that the speaker would trust rudimentary, largely passive, ineffective defenses
to ward off stronger opponents. Strike two! The founding-era U.S. Army
and Navy, their political masters, and Congress placed their hopes in
short-range coastal artillery — all gunnery was short-range in
yesteryear, with combat reach under five nautical miles — and gunboats to hold
enemies at bay. That was homeland defense on the cheap, befitting a
nation loath to levy taxes to fund a battle fleet to mount a forward high-seas
defense. This approach availed little, as naval historians Theodore Roosevelt
and Alfred Thayer Mahan pointed out in their chronicles of the War
of 1812 at sea.
Like
today’s wags, TR and Mahan ridiculed the idea of land-based coastal defense.
They wanted to send the fleet, and presumably would have sent its air arm as
well once naval aviation became a going concern. The good news is that
Secretary Hagel wasn’t talking about withdrawing from the world or reverting to
the brave old world of coastal artillery. He was talking about equipping and
training the U.S. Army to shape events at sea from shore, in distant theaters
like the Western Pacific and China seas.
Shore-fired
weaponry has come into its own since the age of coastal-defense proponents
Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and James Madison. Using long-range precision
weaponry such as truck-launched anti-ship and anti-air missiles may be coastal
defense. But it’s an intensely offensive-minded brand of coastal defense,
capable of pummeling ships and planes throughout large volumes of sky and sea.
Far from
pushing obsolescent concepts that never worked in the first place, then, Hagel
was looking backward to look ahead. What else is history for? The Naval
Diplomat approves of such warmaking methods, and
indeed has touted them for some time.
So should you.
Save the
mockery.
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