Running Aground

Mark Helprin has a great piece in today's WSJ on Obama's now infamous "bayonets" comment from the third president debate.  Helprin on the skewed logic of Obama's implicit argument:

During the recent foreign policy debate, the president presumed to instruct his opponent: "Governor Romney maybe hasn't spent enough time looking at how our military works. You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of Battleship, where we're counting ships. It's what are our capabilities." 

Yes, the Army's horses have been superseded by tanks and helicopters, and its bayonets rendered mainly ceremonial by armor and long-range, automatic fire, but what, precisely, has superseded ships in the Navy? The commander in chief patronizingly shared his epiphany that the ships of today could beat the hell out of those of 1916. To which one could say, like Neil Kinnock, "I know that, Prime Minister," and go on to add that we must configure the Navy to face not the dreadnoughts of 1916 but "things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them," and "ships that go underwater," and also ballistic missiles, land-based aviation, and electronic warfare.

But beneath the trivialities lie a serious discussion about how the lack of a navy manifests itself concerning our main competition on the world stage:

While China has risen from 56 to 78, the U.S. has descended from 207 to 114. In addition to parities, China is successfully focusing on exactly what it needs—terminal ballistic missile guidance, superfast torpedoes and wave-skimming missiles, swarms of oceangoing missile craft, battle-picture blinding—to address American vulnerabilities, while our counters are insufficient or nonexistent. 

Nor is China our only potential naval adversary, and with aircraft, surface-to-surface missiles and over-the-horizon radars, the littoral countries need not have navies to assert themselves over millions of square miles of sea. Even the Somali pirates, with only outboard motors, skiffs, RPGs, and Kalashnikovs, have taxed the maritime forces of the leading naval states.

So far from Obama being in the twenty-first century concerning military strategy, he would be a laughingstock in sixteenth century Spain.