Forward from the Mediterranean

There may be a pinch of Lord Raglan in the recipe that the United States has been following in its policies toward the Mediterranean Basin. As leader of the British forces during the Crimean War, Raglan repeatedly issued orders to attack the French, even though Russia was the enemy and France was an ally. (The malapropisms may not have made a strategic difference, because regardless of what Raglan called them, it was Russians who fought back.) Raglan's mistake was the result of mental habits formed during a career of fighting and planning to fight the French. A decade after the end of the Cold War, the time has come to ask whether U.S. policies toward the Mediterranean betray similar habitual tendencies.

Peacetime forward presence--deploying military forces overseas on a full-time basis or on rotational cycles during noncrisis periods--is an important and highly expensive ingredient in the national strategy recipe. Because large warships tangibly represent military reach and power and because it takes a lot of money to operate warships, naval forward presence is a particularly effective and particularly expensive form of this strategy. In peacetime it helps to ensure stability by demonstrating U.S. national interests in a region and U.S. commitment to its alliances. From this perspective, naval presence is as much a diplomatic as it is a military function. From a purely military perspective, naval presence promotes interoperability among allies and with potential allies. It also increases the operational awareness that U.S. naval forces need to have of the conditions in parts of the world in which they may eventually have to fight.

In terms of its diplomatic aspects, the key question in determining where to apply naval forward presence is, Which parts of the globe are going to be most important to the United States in the near and long-term future? In terms of its military aspects, the key question is, Where are the wars of the future most likely to be fought? These questions should be answered objectively, without being colored in any way by nostalgic assumptions that what was important in the past is equally important today or that what is important today will be at least as important in the future.

The United States maintains a high level of naval forward presence in the Mediterranean Basin. The U.S. Sixth Fleet maintains a steady state of fifteen to eighteen ships in the Mediterranean with individual ships rotating in and out of the fleet on six-month cycles. This ensures an adequate number of U.S. Navy ships with which Mediterranean nations can exercise, and the rotation expands the number of ships and crews that have experience with fleet procedures and doctrine. It also represents significant expense associated with large numbers of ships transiting the Atlantic every six months. This level of naval forward presence makes sense only if the Mediterranean Basin will be more important to the United States than most other areas of the world and if there is a considerable risk of war in that region in the future.

There are, however, many reasons to suppose that any such judgments have been colored by nostalgia, not unlike Lord Raglan's. We may have simply gotten used to thinking of the Mediterranean as being strategically important and have been unable to break the habit.

This is not to say that the judgments we made during the Cold War were wrong. They were not. For fifty years there were good reasons for regarding the Mediterranean as a strategically critical region. It was an area into which the Soviets were expanding their influence either directly in the form of the Soviet eskrada (squadron), through client states, or through indigenous factions or insurgent groups. The United States responded to Soviet probes in the late 1940s in Greece and Turkey by deploying warships to the eastern Mediterranean. Due to the damage suffered by the British and French fleets in World War II, the United States...