Winning The War Of Electrons: Inside The New Maritime Strategy « Breaking Defense - Defense industry news, analysis and commentary: We must win the war of electrons in a more dangerous world. That’s the stark imperative behind the bland title of the new maritime strategy released today by the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard.
“There is an offensive warfighting tone to this document that says, where the United States has interests, it needs access, [and] it can have that access,” said the new Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Joseph Dunford, speaking this morning at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. What Dunford didn’t say explicitly, but the strategy does, is that we may have to fight for that access against increasingly sophisticated adversaries — including in cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum, domains where we long took dominance for granted.
Despite its benign title — “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower” — and plenty of boilerplate, the new strategy has a definite edge. In contrast to the 2007 strategy it replaces, which demurely didn’t mention any specific country as a threat, the new strategy calls out China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran by name. And in a departure from longstanding naval doctrine, it takes the traditional four functions of the fleet — deterrence, sea control, power projection, maritime security — and adds a fifth: “all-domain access.”
