Naval Power and Expeditionary Wars

Peripheral Campaigns and New Theatres of Naval Warfare

Bruce A. Elleman, S.C.M. Paine

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136841682
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book examines the nature and character of naval expeditionary warfare, in particular in peripheral campaigns, and the contribution of such campaigns to the achievement of strategic victory.

Naval powers, which can lack the massive ground forces to win in the main theatre, often choose a secondary theatre accessible to them by sea and difficult for their enemies to reach by land, giving the sea power and its expeditionary forces the advantage. The technical term for these theatres is 'peripheral operations.' The subject of peripheral campaigns in naval expeditionary warfare is central to the British, the US, and the Australian way of war in the past and in the future. All three are reluctant to engage large land forces because of the high human and economic costs. Instead, they rely as much as possible on sea and air power, and the latter is most often in the form of carrier-based aviation. In order to exert pressure on their enemies, they have often opened additional theaters in on-going, regional, and civil wars.

This book contains thirteen case studies by some of the foremost naval historians from the United States, Great Britain, and Australia whose collected case studies examine the most important peripheral operations of the last two centuries.

This book will be of much interest to students of naval warfare, military history, strategic studies and security studies.

1
Introduction

Bruce A. Elleman and S.C.M. Paine ¹

Expeditionary warfare entails the deployment of forces far from their normal base of operations and, in the case of an ongoing hot war, to a theatre non-contiguous with the main theatre. Execution requires enormous logistical capabilities to transport, land, and sustain forces, often at great distance, that usually only a Great Power can muster. D-Day, Inchon, and Gallipoli represent a spectrum of the most famous examples of expeditionary warfare, with outcomes ranging from strategic success to operational success to both strategic and operational failure.

Expeditionary warfare is the preferred method of warfare for naval powers, whose goals include keeping all fighting overseas and far from home territory. Naval dominance provides the luxury of fighting in so-called “away games,” rather than the costly home games that devastate one’s own territory and, in doing so, degrade the ability to remain in the war. If a naval power can leverage the sanctuary provided by its oceanic moat to maintain the health of its civilian economy during hostilities, this positions it to outlast a continental adversary in a protracted war aiming at victory through the exhaustion of the enemy.

Sea powers often conduct naval expeditionary campaigns on peripheral fronts as an indirect but economical way to exert pressure on land powers, whose superior or more numerous land forces they do not wish to engage directly. Over time, as their unmolested economies continue to grow and as military operations increasingly interfere with the economies of their enemies or the allies of their enemies, the economic balance of power shifts toward the sea power. In other words, expeditionary warfare, the military operation, often works in tandem with an economic strategy. The subject of this work is the military component.

Through World War II, all the cases studies examined concern peripheral operations as Sir Julian Corbett understood them: campaigns in peripheral theatres in ongoing hot wars. From the Korean War onward, however, wars have taken place within an overarching cold war: the East–West Cold War, the Sino-Soviet split, or the Muslim extremist–Western clash of civilizations. As Eric Jensen discusses in Chapter 2, most expeditionary warfare campaigns are “nonconsensual,” meaning that the government with sovereignty over the destination area of the expedition did not “consent” to the invasion. In contrast, the Inchon landing was “consensual” in that the South Korean government welcomed the landing. Prior to the advent of modern international law, which generally rejects change by military force, coercion was given far more legal latitude. The notion of “consensual” campaigns is comparatively new and involves many levels of cooperation, including the formulation of acceptable Rules of Engagement (ROEs), entry and exit permits, down to permission to deliver mail.

The thirteen case studies have been arranged in chronological order. Michael Duffy focuses on the peripheral campaign that Britain’s greatest naval theorist, Sir Julian Corbett, used as the model for his discussion of peripheral operations, the Duke of Wellington’s expeditionary campaign on the Iberian Peninsula against Napoleon. Beginning in August 1808, not long after Britain gained sea control with its stunning naval victory at Trafalgar in 1805, over 30,000 British troops landed in Portugal to fight with local forces in Portugal and Spain against the French occupation. During the next five years, the Royal Navy acted as a force multiplier for land forces by delivering and protecting Wellington’s supplies by sea, disrupting enemy shipping, destroying coastal roads, and conducting shore bombardment. The Peninsular War constitutes the most protracted large-scale campaign of littoral warfare ever fought by the Royal Navy.

In the Crimean War, the Royal Navy’s White Sea Campaign of 1854 took expeditionary warfare north of the Arctic Circle. Andrew Lambert shows how this most peripheral of theatres kept Russian warships and potential privateers bottled up at Archangel and how Britain’s destruction of Kola threatened all Russian coastal towns in the far north. As a result, fewer than 1,000 men under British command tied down Russian defenses for the entire theatre so that they could not be diverted to the main theatre in the Crimea. Incredibly, Britain and France defeated Russia on its home territory.

In contrast to the previous two case studies, Robin Prior’s examination of Gallipoli presents a negative example. After the initial naval bombardment of Constantinople failed, the original intent not to use and land forces at all escalated to the deployment of 80,000 Commonwealth and French troops. During nine months of bitter combat while the British command remained either unwilling or unable to coordinate joint or combined operations, the opposing Ottoman force grew to 400,000. Given the rapidly ascending topography, with the Ottoman forces in possession of the high ground, Commonwealth forces suffered enormous casualties. The campaign did not relieve pressure on other theatres, because Ottomans forces were irrelevant to the main front in France and Flanders.

A simultaneous British expeditionary campaign in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) also failed to provide benefits commensurate to its costs. Paul G. Halpern concludes that too few Germans were engaged in Mesopotamia to allow significant attrition. Although the campaign did protect the oil fields in Persia, it tied up too many British troops in the pursuit of other territorial objectives. Not only was Mesopotamia peripheral to the war in Europe, but it was also peripheral even to the main Ottoman concerns in Syria, Palestine, and Bulgaria.

Following World War I, naval expeditionary warfare arguably came into its own. In operations that occurred virtually simultaneously with the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese naval expeditionary forces landed in Thailand, on the Malay Peninsula, and on Guam; and began bombing Singapore and Wake Island, and attacking Clark Air Base in the Philippines, Hong Kong, and the international settlement at Shanghai. As S.C.M. Paine demonstrates, although operationally brilliant, none of these theatres solved Japan’s quagmire in China.

Japan’s strategy, rather than cutting off foreign aid to China (the intended strategic outcome), delivered Great-Power allies to China and, for the first time, put the Japanese home islands at risk.

The U.S. responded to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor with an attrition strategy grinding down Japanese forces in peripheral theatres. The most important of these was Guadalcanal, where Japan lost too many irreplaceable pilots either to remain on the offensive or ultimately defend the home islands. Bradford Lee explains that naval aviators constituted Japan’s operational center of gravity in the Pacific and their destruction, particularly at Guadalcanal, made that campaign strategically pivotal.

David Stevens focuses on alliance politics in another geographically peripheral theatre in the Pacific. Although MacArthur’s campaign to protect New Guinea was peripheral to the outcome of the wider Pacific war, it remained crucial for Australian security. U.S. involvement served to shore up its alliance with Australia and New Zealand, therefore U.S. naval expeditionary forces fought hard to help Australia prevent Japan from overrunning New Guinea. Allied logistical capabilities far exceeded those of Japan and produced lopsided casualty rates, imposing unsustainable losses on Japan.

Korea, although geographically peripheral to Europe, became a major hot war of the Cold War. Donald Chisholm examines MacArthur’s potentially war-winning strategy to use Inchon as the operational “hammer” against Pusan as the operational “anvil.” As MacArthur later explained, he envisioned Inchon as

a turning movement deep into the flank and rear of the enemy that would sever his supply lines and encircle all of his forces south of Seoul. I had made that decision in previous campaigns, but none more fraught with danger, none that promised to be more vitally conclusive if successful.

Immediately after World War II, British Commonwealth forces participated in expeditionary campaigns to quell a communist insurgency on the Malay Peninsula, the so-called Emergency (1948–1960), and to halt Indonesian aggression against the Malayan portion of Borneo, an island split among Indonesian, Malaysian, and Bruneian sovereignty, the so-called Konfrontasi (1962–1966). According to Jeffrey Grey, expeditionary naval forces proved much more important against Indonesia during Konfrontasi than during the Malaya Emergency. In the latter, the insurgency remained entirely internal with no outside support, while in Konfrontasi, Indonesia depended on its navy to reach the theatre, and so was vulnerable to Commonwealth interdiction.

In 1974, China, a land power, used its naval forces to occupy the Paracel Islands, then under South Vietnamese sovereignty. As Bruce Elleman discusses, Chinese naval expeditionary forces took advantage of North and South Vietnam’s ongoing civil war to claim the Paracel Islands. As shown during the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese border war, this expeditionary campaign was peripheral to the PRC’s larger conflict with the Soviet bloc, which included North Vietnam.

The Cold War also forms the essential backdrop to the British naval expedition against Argentina in the 1982 Falklands War. Eric Grove details the long post-World War II British naval downsizing and withdrawal of naval forces to the west of the Suez Canal. Argentina falsely interpreted this as a fatal weakening of Britain’s out-of-area naval capabilities. In the event, equipment bought to counter the Soviet Union in Europe proved capable of retaking the Falkland Islands. Argentina also failed to understand the politics in London, where the Royal Navy was eager to counter downsizing by demonstrating operational effectiveness against Argentina to a risk-averse British electorate.

Rear Admiral Peter Jones of the Royal Australian Navy emphasizes the diversity of missions undertaken by an integrated multinational naval force in the expeditionary campaign in the Iraq War. These missions included maritime fire support, around-the-clock air cover from six carrier air groups, and the prevention of sea mining by Iraqi forces. Coalition sea control allowed for the build-up and sustainment of land, air, and naval forces. It also made possible the seizure of the vital offshore oil terminals before the Saddam Hussein government could create an environmental catastrophe by releasing oil into the Gulf.

The final case study focuses on the on-going Global War on Terror. John Reeve provides a wide-ranging analysis of the greater Middle East in the context of a rivalry between continental and maritime coalitions. Since the attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States has engaged in a variety of peripheral initiatives ranging from expeditionary warfare to lower-intensity presence operations. These initiatives have depended on the flexibility of naval expeditionary power to escalate incrementally. Reeve categorizes the United States with other maritime powers like Portugal and Britain, which, for the past 500 years, have relied on sea power to influence events on the littoral stretching from the Persian Gulf to East Asia.

The concluding chapter puts the common characteristics of the thirteen case studies into an operational and strategic context. It shows how the operational factors of time, space, and force contributed to operational success, and then analyzes the relationship between operational and strategic success. It extracts common factors to explain strategic success and failure. Finally, it concludes with an evaluation of the continuing relevance of these ideas given the enormous technological changes in recent decades.

Note

1 The thoughts and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the U.S. Government, the U.S. Navy Department, or the Naval War College.

2
Legal issues in expeditionary campaigns

Eric Talbot Jensen

Over the past several decades, legal issues in military operations have dramatically increased, creating a growing reliance by commanders and staffs on their military legal advisors.¹ This is certainly the case in expeditionary warfare, which can be defined as “Military operations which can be initiated at short notice, consisting of forward deployed, or rapidly deployable, self-sustaining forces tailored to achieve a clearly stated objective at a distance from home base.”²

Expeditionary forces are often deployed in peripheral campaigns, which are called “peripheral” because they take place in secondary theatres, not the main front. Naval powers, in particular, have engaged in numerous peripheral campaigns.

Historically, naval expeditionary campaigns have been both non-consensual and consensual, meaning the government with sovereignty over the theatre either opposes or welcomes the expeditionary campaign. Each type has unique legal aspects.

Legal considerations prior to non-consensual campaigns

Throughout history, most cases of expeditionary warfare have entailed non-consensual invasions of “enemy” territory. The first legal question in such military operations is the applicable legal authority to use force. Under current international law, states may only use force with authorization from the United Nations Security Council³ or in self-defense from an actual or imminent armed attack.⁴ Although policy decisions often influence the use of force, international law requires justification under one of these legal theories.

Once a non-consensual campaign begins, the actions of the armed forces are governed by the legal regime know...

Table of contents

• Cass Series: Naval Policy and History
• Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Legal issues in expeditionary campaigns
• 3 Festering the Spanish ulcer
• 4 The Royal Navy’s White Sea campaign of 1854
• 5 Gallipoli as a combined and joint operation
• 6 The British Mesopotamia campaign, 1914–1918
• 7 Pearl Harbor and beyond
• 8 A pivotal campaign in a peripheral theatre
• 9 The New Guinea campaign during World War II
• 10 Amphibious assault as decisive maneuver in Korea
• 11 Naval operations in peripheral conflicts
• 12 China’s 1974 naval expedition to the Paracel Islands
• 13 “Always expect the unexpected”
• 14 The maritime campaign in Iraq
• 15 U.S. naval operations and contemporary geopolitics
• 16 Conclusions
• Selected bibliography
• Index