The U.S. Navy Has a Big Problem: It Can’t Do Convoys If War Breaks Out.

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“No one covets sentry duty. British tars found naval raiders and privateers of old an unworthy but also stubborn foe. U.S. mariners may be repeating their mistake. If so, the first year of the next war could be 1942 all over again. That’s a trauma no one should want to relive.”

byJames Holmes

Jerry Seinfeld could make convoys the subject of a standup routine: what’s the deal with them? Or, more to the point, what’s the deal with navies that seem bent on unlearning hard-won lessons from past oceanic wars? Navies such as our own. The U.S. Navy leadership has reportedly informed the chiefs of the U.S. Military Sealift Command and Maritime Administration that “you’re on your own” when trying to run supplies or manpower across the Atlantic, Pacific or Indian oceans to support operations along the Eurasian rimlands. The navy can spare no escort ships to protect them.

That’s right: the threadbare U.S. sealift fleet must shift for itself in a far more lethal strategic environment than merchant mariners faced during the world wars, when the likes of Germany and Japan sought to cut the sea lanes U.S. armies, air forces and their logistical trains had to traverse just to reach battlegrounds in Western Europe and the Far East. It appears about 231 civilian ships are available for the logistical effort. That sounds impressive—until you consider that Axis submarines and surface raiders sank or damaged over five hundred U.S. merchantmen in 1942 alone.

And Axis boats were rudimentary diesel contraptions, not the nuclear-powered killers bristling with anti-ship missiles and sophisticated torpedoes that now prowl the deep. The logic behind open-seas raiding is simple and irresistible: defeat the logistical effort supporting a great-power military operating far from home and you defeat that military. The most overpowering expeditionary army accomplishes little if it can’t reach the theater of conflict or has little food to eat, ordnance to fire or spares to repair equipment.

If there’s one lesson high-seas warfare teaches, then, it’s that lesser powers go after merchantmen. Revolutionary America did it; Napoleonic France did it; Imperial and Nazi Germany did it; Imperial Japan did it. Weaker antagonists strive to interrupt shipments of manpower, ordnance and stores of all sorts needed to support expeditionary operations on distant battlegrounds. Or they damage the commerce on which seafaring nations depend to fund war making. Either way, a weaker antagonist can do a stronger foe grave harm by chipping away at its merchant fleet. Better yet, the weak can strike piecemeal without risking a toe-to-toe battle they might lose.