Operations and Capacities

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the resources available to various governments for the political application of limited naval force and to consider how far their previous words or actions indicate their readiness to employ this expedient. Obviously this cannot be a comprehensive survey. The Military Balance² lists over a hundred navies and, even if all those with good reasons for not venturing beyond their own territorial waters are excluded, too many remain for even cursory treatment in a single chapter. It may thus be better merely to attempt the definition and the illustration by example of zones of probability for the exercise of limited naval force. The object would be to establish the minimum naval resources required before a government could reasonably contemplate resort to this expedient at different levels. These are naturally purely naval calculations and necessarily subject to wide margins of error. A government may have enough ships, but lack the will to employ them; another may attempt operations beyond the true capacity of the naval resources available; a third may rightly believe that the personal qualities and professional skills of their sailors will outweigh the deficiencies of their ships. In principle, however, it should be possible to deduce from the state of a navy the kind of operational ceiling that was expressly proclaimed for Britain in 1966:

It is only realistic to recognize that we, unaided by our allies, could not expect to undertake operations of this character (the landing or withdrawal of troops against sophisticated opposition outside the range of land-based air cover).³

An American child crying on the banks of the Yangtse a thousand miles from the coast can summon the ships of the American Navy up that river to protect it from unjust assault. Wilbur¹