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Last year, Pakistan was hit with floods so devastating that they were hard to comprehend. In some areas, 15 inches of rain fell in a single day. And the rain went on for months, inundating one-third of the country, spreading disease, and displacing nearly 8 million people. Six months later, Pakistan is still in crisis—nearly 2 million people are living near stagnant floodwater. Pakistan has estimated that it needs about $16.3 billion to recover from the floods, a sum that does not take into account so many ripple effects of the crisis: grief over those who died, education abruptly ended, the struggles of girls married off young as their families coped with a sudden plunge into poverty.

But these floods were not a “natural disaster.” The monsoon rains were up to 50 percent more intense than they would have been without climate change. So although Pakistan has to foot this bill, or at least most of it, the country bears little responsibility: Pakistan contributes less than 1 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions, while the United States is the world’s second-biggest emitter, accountable for about 20 percent of emissions since 1850. But there is no mechanism for the United States or any other country to pay for the loss and damage that it is at least partially responsible for.

That may be changing. In November, world leaders at the most recent big climate meeting, known as COP27, agreed to set up a “loss and damage” fund, bankrolled by rich countries, to help poor countries harmed by climate change. Now comes the hard part of figuring out the details: This week, a special United Nations committee set up to plan the fund will meet for the first time, in Luxor, Egypt. Delegates will start negotiating which nations will be able to draw from the fund, where it will be housed, where the money will come from, and how much each country should pitch in. At this point, the fund is “an empty bucket,” says Lien Vandamme, a senior campaigner at the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law, who is in Egypt for the negotiations. “Everything is still open.” Other meetings will follow, and the committee will make its recommendations to the world this fall in Dubai at COP28.

If the past several decades of climate negotiations are anything to go on, the loss-and-damage fund will be poorly endowed, or filled with money that got moved over from some other fund and relabeled, or in the form of loans rather than grants. If that happens, it will likely be perceived by poorer nations as yet another inadequate response by the same countries that messed up the climate in the first place. And those that are wronged are unlikely to simply suffer in silence.

The loss-and-damage fund would be separate from what is currently the dominant form of climate funding that flows to the global South: money to help low-income nations reduce their emissions. And it would also be separate from “adaptation,” money to help areas prepare for disasters or avoid the harms of warming. Instead, the new fund would be provided by rich countries to compensate poor countries that have already suffered losses. In a word, it would be reparations.

The agreement to establish a fund for this purpose was initially opposed by some rich countries. The U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said in the fall that helping the developing world cope with climate change is “a moral obligation”—but he wanted that help to flow through existing funds and institutions, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Developing countries, however, demanded a new, dedicated fund, and they ultimately prevailed. Almost all the details were left to be finalized at COP28 in Dubai, after the committee has worked to iron out specifics. But by agreeing that a loss-and-damage fund should exist, countries seem to be reluctantly acknowledging that they bear some moral accountability for climate change. “It is very clear that developed countries have a historical responsibility,” says Liane Schalatek, a climate-finance expert at the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Washington, D.C., who is also in Luxor this week.

Funds are especially needed for the “day after” problems—the ongoing work of rebuilding and recovering after a flood or a heat wave is over and the emergency foreign aid has dried up, Mohamed Nasr, Egypt’s delegate to this week’s meeting, told me. People don’t just need tarp tents and bowls of rice. They need “social support, a way to return livelihoods,” Nasr said.

But how much is enough? One analysis suggests that the true scale of the financial losses due to climate change outside of the West may be as much as $580 billion a year by 2030, and some groups are considering a figure in that ballpark to be the minimum acceptable amount. Another analysis estimated that America owed $20 billion for global climate losses in 2022, a number that would rise to about $117 billion annually by 2030. Nasr demurred on naming specific amounts, suggesting that the workings of the fund be negotiated first. The needs are enormous, and mentioning figures at this point would only “scare people,” he said. “If you put a number on at the beginning, the focus will only be on the number,” he told me. But he did add that “it will be in the billions.”

Given that the standing UN goal for all types of climate funding from rich countries to poorer ones—$100 billion—has never been met, filling the loss-and-damage fund with hundreds of billions of dollars feels like an almost impossible lift. “It will be a huge challenge to get countries to agree on the amount that is needed,” says Leia Achampong of the European Network on Debt and Development. For many delegates from the global South, a key demand is that the fund not come in the form of loans. Many poor countries, including Pakistan, are already dealing with debt, which is affecting their ability to provide for their own citizens. More loans would just add to this debt burden. “If a country is in debt, you have the World Bank and the IMF calling for austerity, and the first thing that usually goes is the social safety net,” Schalatek told me.

A central issue going into the meeting in Egypt is that, despite broad agreement that rich countries responsible for the most emissions should pay in and that poor countries feeling the brunt of the effects should receive the funds, the globe cannot be neatly divided into just two categories—“developed” and “developing.” The trickiest case is undoubtedly China. Historically classified as a developing country, China is getting richer by the month and has emitted 11 percent of historical emissions, second only to the United States. At COP27, a coalition of developing countries rallied around China’s claim that it should be a recipient rather than a donor, to the consternation of the European negotiators. The U.S. will likely be loath to lavish money on a fund that China can draw from. Another outstanding question is whether contributions to the fund will be legal obligations rather than just voluntary donations. Anything with legal teeth would require congressional approval in the U.S., which would not be easy. (The State Department did not respond to a request for comment on the loss-and-damage negotiations.)

If the loss-and-damage fund are skimpy, communities and nations will likely seek restitution for their losses through national and international courts. An early test case began in 2015, when a Peruvian farmer sued the German energy giant RWE. The farmer, Saúl Luciano Lliuya, says his home is at risk of being washed away by meltwater from a glacier, and he wants the company to pay 0.47 percent of his adaptation costs, on the basis of a study that attributes that fraction of emissions to the company’s activities. RWE has denied culpability, and the case is ongoing. In an example of targeting nations rather than companies, Indigenous people from four low-lying Australian islands—Boigu, Poruma, Warraber and Masig—submitted a petition to the UN Human Rights Committee arguing that the country had done little to stop the climate change threatening their homes. In September, the committee agreed, ordering Australia to compensate the islanders for their losses.

But legal action might actually be a best-case scenario for the West. Poor, debt-ridden countries struggling with a climate crisis do not make for a stable globe. In 2021, a U.S. Department of Defense report on climate change warned that “the physical and social impacts of climate change transcend political boundaries, increasing the risk that crises cascade beyond any one country or region.” People who lose homes and livelihoods to climate-caused disasters will do what they can to improve their situation. As far back as 1995, the Bangladeshi dignitary Atiq Rahman warned, “if climate change makes our country uninhabitable, we will march with our wet feet into your living rooms.” Hundreds of millions of people may be displaced by 2050.

Mass migrations, resource scarcity, and poverty can lead to global conflicts. No country, no matter how rich, can build a seawall high enough to keep out that kind of chaos. If rich countries cannot be moved to lavishly fund the loss-and-damage bucket by appeals to justice, perhaps they will be moved by what has long been a more reliable motivating force: fear.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin argued against criticisms from Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville on Tuesday and implored him to support the department's officer nominations, which Tuberville has vowed to block until Austin reverses his stance on policies supporting service members seeking abortions.

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Russia is "deliberately trying to disinform," said the UK Ministry of Defense on Tuesday, after Russian President Vladimir Putin warned London against providing Ukraine with ammunition that contains depleted uranium.

Ukraine's Ministry of Defense said late Monday that a strike destroyed Russian "Kalibr" cruise missiles that were being transported by train in the town of Dzhankoi, in Russian-occupied Crimea.

North Korea on Sunday launched a "suspected ballistic missile," Japan's Ministry of Defense reported.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin vowed on Wednesday that US aircraft will continue to "fly and to operate wherever international law allows," one day after Russian aircraft hit a US drone over the Black Sea, forcing it to be brought down in international waters.

Photo-illustrations by Oliver Munday

Very few Americans—or, for that matter, very few people on the planet—can remember a time when freedom of the seas was in question. But for most of human history, there was no such guarantee. Pirates, predatory states, and the fleets of great powers did as they pleased. The current reality, which dates only to the end of World War II, makes possible the commercial shipping that handles more than 80 percent of all global trade by volume—oil and natural gas, grain and raw ores, manufactured goods of every kind. Because freedom of the seas, in our lifetime, has seemed like a default condition, it is easy to think of it—if we think of it at all—as akin to Earth’s rotation or the force of gravity: as just the way things are, rather than as a man-made construct that needs to be maintained and enforced.

But what if the safe transit of ships could no longer be assumed? What if the oceans were no longer free?

Every now and again, Americans are suddenly reminded of how much they depend on the uninterrupted movement of ships around the world for their lifestyle, their livelihood, even their life. In 2021, the grounding of the container ship Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal, forcing vessels shuttling between Asia and Europe to divert around Africa, delaying their passage and driving up costs. A few months later, largely because of disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic, more than 100 container ships were stacked up outside the California Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, snarling supply chains throughout the country.

[Read: The ship stuck in the Suez Canal is glorious]

These events were temporary, if expensive. Imagine, though, a more permanent breakdown. A humiliated Russia could declare a large portion of the Arctic Ocean to be its own territorial waters, twisting the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to support its claim. Russia would then allow its allies access to this route while denying it to those who dared to oppose its wishes. Neither the U.S. Navy, which has not built an Arctic-rated surface warship since the 1950s, nor any other NATO nation is currently equipped to resist such a gambit.

Or maybe the first to move would be Xi Jinping, shoring up his domestic standing by attempting to seize Taiwan and using China’s anti-ship ballistic missiles and other weapons to keep Western navies at bay. An emboldened China might then seek to cement its claim over large portions of the East China Sea and the entirety of the South China Sea as territorial waters. It could impose large tariffs and transfer fees on the bulk carriers that transit the region. Local officials might demand bribes to speed their passage.

[Read: The world’s most important body of water]

Once one nation decided to act in this manner, others would follow, claiming enlarged territorial waters of their own, and extracting what they could from the commerce that flows through them. The edges and interstices of this patchwork of competing claims would provide openings for piracy and lawlessness.

The great container ships and tankers of today would disappear, replaced by smaller, faster cargo vessels capable of moving rare and valuable goods past pirates and corrupt officials. The cruise-ship business, which drives many tourist economies, would falter in the face of potential hijackings. A single such incident might create a cascade of failure throughout the entire industry. Once-busy sea lanes would lose their traffic. For lack of activity and maintenance, passages such as the Panama and Suez Canals might silt up. Natural choke points such as the straits of Gibraltar, Hormuz, Malacca, and Sunda could return to their historic roles as havens for predators. The free seas that now surround us, as essential as the air we breathe, would be no more.

If oceanic trade declines, markets would turn inward, perhaps setting off a second Great Depression. Nations would be reduced to living off their own natural resources, or those they could buy—or take—from their immediate neighbors. The world’s oceans, for 70 years assumed to be a global commons, would become a no-man’s-land. This is the state of affairs that, without a moment’s thought, we have invited.

Everywhere I look, I observe sea power manifesting itself—unacknowledged—in American life. When I drive past a Walmart, a BJ’s Wholesale Club, a Lowe’s, or a Home Depot, in my mind I see the container ships moving products from where they can be produced at a low price in bulk form to markets where they can be sold at a higher price to consumers. Our economy and security rely on the sea—a fact so fundamental that it should be at the center of our approach to the world.

It is time for the United States to think and act, once again, like a seapower state. As the naval historian Andrew Lambert has explained, a seapower state understands that its wealth and its might principally derive from seaborne trade, and it uses instruments of sea power to promote and protect its interests. To the degree possible, a seapower state seeks to avoid direct participation in land wars, large or small. There have been only a few true seapower nations in history—notably Great Britain, the Dutch Republic, Venice, and Carthage.

I grew up on a dairy farm in Indiana and spent 26 years on active duty in the Navy, deploying in support of combat operations in the Middle East and Yugoslavia, both at sea and in the air. I did postgraduate work at several universities and served as a strategist and an adviser to senior officials in the Pentagon. Yet I have always remained, in terms of interests and outlook, a son of the Midwest. In my writings I have sought to underscore sea power’s importance and the reliance of our economy on the sea.

Despite my experience, I was never able to convince my mother. She spent the last years of her working life at the Walmart in my hometown, first at the checkout counter and then in accounting. My mother followed the news and was sharply curious about the world; we were close, and spoke often. She was glad that I was in the Navy, but not because she saw my work as essential to her own life. “If you like Walmart,” I often told her, “then you ought to love the U.S. Navy. It’s the Navy that makes Walmart possible.” But to her, as a mother, my naval service mostly meant that, unlike friends and cousins who deployed with the Army or Marine Corps to Iraq or Afghanistan, I probably wasn’t going to be shot at. Her perspective is consistent with a phenomenon that the strategist Seth Cropsey has called seablindness.

Today, it is difficult to appreciate the scale or speed of the transformation wrought after World War II. The war destroyed or left destitute all of the world powers opposed to the concept of a mare liberum—a “free sea”—first enunciated by the Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius in 1609. The United States and Great Britain, the two traditional proponents of a free sea, had emerged not only triumphant but also in a position of overwhelming naval dominance. Their navies were together larger than all of the other navies of the world combined. A free sea was no longer an idea. It was now a reality.

In this secure environment, trade flourished. The globalizing economy, which allowed easier and cheaper access to food, energy, labor, and commodities of every kind, grew from nearly $8 trillion in 1940 to more than $100 trillion 75 years later, adjusted for inflation. With prosperity, other improvements followed. During roughly this same period, from the war to the present, the share of the world’s population in extreme poverty, getting by on less than $1.90 a day, dropped from more than 60 percent to about 10 percent. Global literacy doubled, to more than 85 percent. Global life expectancy in 1950 was 46 years. By 2019, it had risen to 73 years.

All of this has depended on freedom of the seas, which in turn has depended on sea power wielded by nations—led by the United States—that believe in such freedom.

But the very success of this project now threatens its future. Seablindness has become endemic.

The United States is no longer investing in the instruments of sea power as it once did. America’s commercial shipbuilding industry began losing its share of the global market in the 1960s to countries with lower labor costs, and to those that had rebuilt their industrial capacity after the war. The drop in American shipbuilding accelerated after President Ronald Reagan took office, in 1981. The administration, in a nod to free-market principles, began to shrink government subsidies that had supported the industry. That was a choice; it might have gone the other way. Aircraft manufacturers in the United States, citing national-security concerns, successfully lobbied for continued, and even increased, subsidies for their industry in the decades that followed—and got them.

It is never to a nation’s advantage to depend on others for crucial links in its supply chain. But that is where we are. In 1977, American shipbuilders produced more than 1 million gross tons of merchant ships. By 2005, that number had fallen to 300,000. Today, most commercial ships built in the United States are constructed for government customers such as the Maritime Administration or for private entities that are required to ship their goods between U.S. ports in U.S.-flagged vessels, under the provisions of the 1920 Jones Act.

The U.S. Navy, too, has been shrinking. After the Second World War, the Navy scrapped many of its ships and sent many more into a ready-reserve “mothball” fleet. For the next two decades, the active naval fleet hovered at about 1,000 ships. But beginning in 1969, the total began to fall. By 1971, the fleet had been reduced to 750 ships. Ten years later, it was down to 521. Reagan, who had campaigned in 1980 on a promise to rebuild the Navy to 600 ships, nearly did so under the able leadership of his secretary of the Navy, John Lehman. During Reagan’s eight years in office, the size of the Navy’s fleet climbed to just over 590 ships.

Then the Cold War ended. The administrations of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton slashed troops, ships, aircraft, and shore-based infrastructure. During the Obama administration, the Navy’s battle force bottomed out at 271 ships. Meanwhile, both China and Russia, in different ways, began to develop systems that would challenge the U.S.-led regime of global free trade on the high seas.

Russia began to invest in highly sophisticated nuclear-powered submarines with the intention of being able to disrupt the oceanic link between NATO nations in Europe and North America. China, which for a time enjoyed double-digit GDP growth, expanded both its commercial and naval shipbuilding capacities. It tripled the size of the People’s Liberation Army-Navy and invested in long-range sensors and missiles that could allow it to interdict commercial and military ships more than 1,000 miles from its shores. Both Russia and China also sought to extend territorial claims into international waters, the aim being to control the free passage of shipping near their shores and in their perceived spheres of influence. In short: Autocratic powers are trying to close the global commons.

Today the United States is financially constrained by debt, and psychologically burdened by recent military conflicts—for the most part, land-based actions in Iraq and Afghanistan fought primarily by a large standing army operating far from home—that turned into costly quagmires. We can no longer afford to be both a continentalist power and an oceanic power. But we can still exert influence, and at the same time avoid getting caught up in the affairs of other nations. Our strategic future lies at sea.

Americans used to know this. The United States began its life purposefully as a seapower: The Constitution explicitly directed Congress “to provide and maintain a Navy.” In contrast, the same article of the Constitution instructed the legislature “to raise and support Armies,” but stipulated that no appropriation for the army “shall be for a longer Term than two Years.” The Founders had an aversion to large standing armies.

George Washington pushed through the Naval Act of 1794, funding the Navy’s original six frigates. (One of these was the famous USS Constitution, “Old Ironsides,” which remains in active commission to this day.) In his final address to the American people, Washington advocated for a navalist foreign policy, warning against “attachments and entanglements” with foreign powers that might draw the young nation into continental European wars. The strategy he advised instead was to protect American trade on the high seas, and advance America’s interests through temporary agreements, not permanent alliances. This seapower approach to the world became the sine qua non of early American foreign policy.

In time, conditions changed. The U.S. was preoccupied by sectional conflict and by conquest of the continent. It turned inward, becoming a continental power. But by the end of the 19th century, that era had come to a close.

In 1890, a U.S. Navy captain named Alfred Thayer Mahan published an article in The Atlantic titled “The United States Looking Outward.” Mahan argued that, with the closing of the frontier, the United States had in essence become an island nation looking eastward and westward across oceans. The nation’s energies should therefore be focused externally: on the seas, on maritime trade, and on a larger role in the world.

Mahan sought to end the long-standing policy of protectionism for American industries, because they had become strong enough to compete in the global market. By extension, Mahan also sought a larger merchant fleet to carry goods from American factories to foreign lands, and for a larger Navy to protect that merchant fleet. In a few thousand words, Mahan made a coherent strategic argument that the United States should once again become a true seapower.

[From the December 1890 issue: The United States looking outward]

Mahan’s vision was profoundly influential. Politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge advocated for larger merchant and naval fleets (and for a canal through Central America). Mahan, Roosevelt, and Lodge believed that sea power was the catalyst for national power, and they wanted the United States to become the preeminent nation of the 20th century. The swift expansion of the Navy, particularly in battleships and cruisers, paralleled the growing fleets of other global powers. Leaders in Britain, Germany, France, and Italy had also read Mahan, and they wanted to protect commercial access to their overseas empires. The resulting arms race at sea helped destabilize the balance of power in the years leading up to the First World War.

This is not the place to relate every development in the evolution of America’s naval capability, much less that of other nations. Suffice to say that, by the 1930s, new technologies were transforming the seas. Aircraft, aircraft carriers, amphibious assault craft, and submarines had all been developed into more effective weapons. During the Second World War, the oceans once again became battlefields. The fighting proceeded in a way Mahan himself had never envisioned, as fleets faced off against ships they could not even see, launching waves of aircraft against each other. In the end, the war was won not by bullets or torpedoes but by the American maritime industrial base. The United States began the war with 790 ships in its battle force; when the war ended, it had more than 6,700.

Alfred Thayer Mahan (Photo-illustration by Oliver Munday. Source: HUM Images / Universal Images Group / Getty.)

No nation could come close to challenging the American fleet, commercial or naval, on the high seas after the war. So great was its advantage that, for decades, no one even tried to match it. In concert with allies, the United States created an international system based on free and unhindered trade. It was the culmination of the Mahanist Age.

[From the June 1919 issue: The future of sea-power]

For the first time in history, open access to the seas was assumed—and so people naturally gave little thought to its importance and challenges.

A new seapower strategy involves more than adding ships to the Navy. A new strategy must start with the economy.

For 40 years, we have watched domestic industries and blue-collar jobs leave the country. Now we find ourselves locked in a new great-power competition, primarily with a rising China but also with a diminishing and unstable Russia. We will need heavy industry in order to prevail. The United States cannot simply rely on the manufacturing base of other countries, even friendly ones, for its national-security needs.

In 1993, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Perry invited the executives of leading defense contractors to a dinner in Washington—a meal that would enter national-security lore as the “Last Supper.” Perry spelled out projected cuts in defense spending. His message was clear: If the American defense industrial base was going to survive, then mergers would be required. Soon after, the Northrop Corporation acquired the Grumman Corporation to form Northrop Grumman. The Lockheed Corporation and Martin Marietta became Lockheed Martin. A few years later, Boeing combined with McDonnell Douglas, itself the product of a previous merger. Among the shipbuilders, General Dynamics, which manufactures submarines through its Electric Boat subsidiary, bought Bath Iron Works, a naval shipyard, and the National Steel and Shipbuilding Company.

[From the October 2007 issue: The Navy’s new flat-Earth strategy]

These mergers preserved the defense industries, but at a price: a dramatic reduction in our overall industrial capacity. During World War II, the United States could claim more than 50 graving docks—heavy-industrial locations where ships are assembled—that were greater than 150 meters in length, each one able to build merchant craft and naval warships. Today, the U.S. has 23 graving docks, only a dozen of which are certified to work on Navy ships.

The United States will need to implement a seapower industrial policy that meets its national-security needs: building steel plants and microchip foundries, developing hypersonic glide bodies and autonomous unmanned undersea vehicles. We will need to foster new start-ups using targeted tax laws, the Defense Production Act, and perhaps even a “Ships Act” akin to the recent CHIPS Act, which seeks to bring back the crucial semiconductor industry.

We also need to tell the companies we once encouraged to merge that it’s time for them to spin off key industrial subsidiaries in order to encourage competition and resilience—and we need to reward them for following through. In 2011, for example, the aerospace giant Northrop Grumman spun off its shipbuilding holdings to form Huntington Ingalls, in Newport News, Virginia, and Pascagoula, Mississippi. Adding more such spin-offs would not only increase the nation’s industrial depth but also encourage the growth of parts suppliers for heavy industries, companies that have endured three decades of consolidation or extinction.

Shipbuilding, in particular, is a jobs multiplier. For every job created in a shipyard, five jobs, on average, are created at downstream suppliers—well-paid blue-collar jobs in the mining, manufacturing, and energy sectors.

Most of the civilian merchant ships, container ships, ore carriers, and supertankers that dock in American ports are built overseas and fly foreign flags. We have ignored the linkage between the ability to build commercial ships and the ability to build Navy ships—one reason the latter cost twice as much as they did in 1989. The lack of civilian ships under our own flag makes us vulnerable. Today we remember the recent backlog of container ships in the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, but tomorrow we could face the shock of no container ships arriving at all should China prohibit its large fleet from visiting U.S. ports. Today we’re proud to ship liquefied natural gas to our allies in Europe, but tomorrow we might not be able to export that energy to our friends, because we don’t own the ships that would carry it. We need to bring back civilian shipbuilding as a matter of national security.

To revive our merchant-shipbuilding base, we will need to offer government subsidies on a par with those provided to European and Asian shipbuilders. Subsidies have flowed to commercial aviation since the establishment of commercial airlines in the 1920s; Elon Musk’s SpaceX would not be enjoying its present success were it not for strong initial support from the U.S. government. Shipbuilding is no less vital.

Reindustrialization, in particular the restoration of merchant-shipbuilding capacity and export-oriented industries, will support the emergence of a new, more technologically advanced Navy. The cost of building Navy ships could be coaxed downward by increasing competition, expanding the number of downstream suppliers, and recruiting new shipyard workers to the industry.

Wherever American trade goes, the flag traditionally follows—usually in the form of the Navy. But the new Navy must not look like the old Navy. If it does, we will have made a strategic mistake. As rival powers develop ships and missiles that target our aircraft carriers and other large surface vessels, we should make greater investments in advanced submarines equipped with the latest in long-range maneuvering hypersonic missiles. We should pursue a future in which our submarines cannot be found and our hypersonic missiles cannot be defeated.

[Elliot Ackerman: The arsenal of democracy is reopening for business]

The Navy, however, is not just a wartime force. It has a peacetime mission unique among the military services: showing the flag and defending American interests by means of a consistent and credible forward presence. Commanders have identified 18 maritime regions of the world that require the near-continuous deployment of American ships to demonstrate our resolve. During the Cold War, the Navy maintained approximately 150 ships at sea on any given day. As the size of the fleet has fallen—to its present 293—the Navy has struggled to keep even 100 ships at sea at all times. The service’s admirals recently suggested a goal of having 75 ships “mission capable” at any given moment. Right now the fleet has about 20 ships going through training workups and only about 40 actively deployed under regional combatant commanders. This has created vacuums in vital areas such as the Arctic Ocean and the Black Sea, which our enemies have been eager to fill.

The chief of naval operations recently called for a fleet of some 500 ships. He quickly pointed out that this would include about 50 new guided-missile frigates—small surface vessels able to operate closely with allies and partners—as well as 150 unmanned surface and subsurface platforms that would revolutionize the way wartime naval operations are conducted. The frigates are being assembled on the shores of Lake Michigan. The construction of the unmanned ships, owing to their nontraditional designs and smaller sizes, could be dispersed to smaller shipyards, including yards on the Gulf Coast, along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, and on the Great Lakes, where ships and submarines were built for the Navy during World War II. These types of ships, combined with advanced submarines, will allow us to exert influence and project power with equal vigor.

Across the 50 years of my life, I have watched the importance of the oceans and the idea of freedom of the seas largely fade from national awareness. The next great military challenge we face will likely come from a confrontation on the sea. Great powers, especially nuclear-equipped great powers, dare not attack one another directly. Instead, they will confront one another in the commons: cyberspace, outer space, and, most crucially, at sea. The oceans would be battlefields again, and we, and the world, are simply not ready for that.

Some voices, of course, will argue that America’s interests, diffuse and global, might best be served by expanding our commitments of land forces to places like Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and South Korea as demonstrations of American resolve, and that air and naval forces should be diminished to pay for such commitments. Others—those in the “divest to invest” school—believe in the promise of future technology, arguing that more traditional warfare platforms and missions should be phased out to fund their newer and more efficient missiles or cybersystems. The first approach continues a path of unnecessary entanglements. The second proceeds along a path of promise without proof.

A seapower-focused national-security strategy would give new advantages to the United States. It would not too subtly encourage allies and partners in Eurasia to increase investment in land forces and to work more closely together. If they build more tanks and fully staff their armies, the United States could guarantee transoceanic supply lines from the Western Hemisphere. The 70-year practice of stationing our land forces in allied countries, using Americans as trip wires and offering allies a convenient excuse not to spend on their own defense, should come to an end.

A seapower strategy, pursued deliberately, would put America back on course for global leadership. We must shun entanglements in other nations’ land wars—resisting the urge to solve every problem—and seek instead to project influence from the sea. We must re-create an industrialized, middle-class America that builds and exports manufactured goods that can be carried on U.S.-built ships to the global market.

We knew all this in the age of Alfred Thayer Mahan. The Chinese are showing us that they know it now. The United States needs to relearn the lessons of strategy, geography, and history. We must look outward across the oceans, and find our place upon them, again.

This article appears in the April 2023 print edition with the headline “America’s Future Is at Sea.”

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Fox News will likely never face any real consequences for the biggest scandal in the history of American media. But will Republican voters finally understand who really looks down on them?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Elon Musk is spiraling. The freakish powers of Miley Cyrus and Lana Del Rey The topic Biden keeps dodging

Loathing and Indifference

It’s time to talk about elitism.

Last month, I wrote that the revelations about Fox News in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit showed that Fox personalities, for all their populist bloviation, are actually titanic elitists. This is not the elitism of those who think they are smarter or more capable than others—I’ll get to that in a moment—but a new and gruesome elitism of the American right, a kind of hatred and disgust on the part of right-wing media and political leaders for the people they claim to love and defend. Greed and cynicism and moral poverty can explain only so much of what we’ve learned about Fox; what the Dominion filings show is a staggering, dehumanizing version of elitism among people who have made a living by presenting themselves as the only truth-tellers who can be trusted by ordinary Americans.

I am, to say the least, no stranger to the charge of elitism. When I wrote a book in 2018 titled The Death of Expertise, a study of how people have become so narcissistic and so addled by cable and the internet that they believe themselves to be smarter than doctors and diplomats, I was regularly tagged as an “elitist.” And the truth is: I am an elitist, insofar as I believe that some people are better at things than others.

But even beyond talent and ability, I do in fact firmly believe that some opinions, political views, personal actions, and life choices are better than others. As I wrote in my book at the time:

Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s. This is the credo of a fair number of people despite being obvious nonsense. It is a flat assertion of actual equality that is always illogical, sometimes funny, and often dangerous.

If that makes me an elitist, so be it.

In this, elitism is the opposite of populism, whose adherents believe that virtue and competence reside in the common wisdom of a nebulous coalition called “the people.” This pernicious and romantic myth is often a danger to liberal democracies and constitutional orders that are founded, first and foremost, on the inherent rights of individuals rather than whatever raw majorities think is right at any given time.

The American right, however, now uses elitist to mean “people who think they’re better than me because they live and work and play differently than I do.” They rage that people—myself included—look down upon them. And again, truth be told, I do look down on Trump voters, not because I am an elitist but because I am an American citizen and I believe that they, as my fellow citizens, have made political choices that have inflicted the greatest harm on our system of government since the Civil War. I refuse to treat their views as just part of the normal left-right axis of American politics.

(As an aside, note that the insecure whining about being “looked down upon” is wildly asymmetrical: Trump voters have no trouble looking down on their opponents as traitors, perverts, and, as Donald Trump himself once put it, “human scum.” But they react to criticism with a kind of deep hurt, as if others must accommodate their emotional well-being. Many of these same people gleefully adopted “Fuck your feelings” as a rallying cry but never expected that it was a slogan that worked both ways.)

In 2016, I believed that good people were making a mistake. In 2023, I cannot dismiss their choices as mere mistakes. Instead, I accept and respect the human agency that has led Trump supporters to their current choices. Indeed, I insist on recognizing that agency: I have never agreed with the people who dismiss Trump voters as robotic simpletons who were mesmerized by Russian memes. I believe that today’s Trump supporters are people who are making a conscious, knowing, and morally flawed choice to continue supporting a sociopath and a party chock-full of seditionists.

I have argued with some of these people. Sometimes, I have mocked them. Mostly, I have refused to engage them. But whatever my feelings are about the abominable choices of Trump supporters, here is the one thing I have never done that Fox’s hosts did for years: I have never patronized any of the people I disagree with.

Unlike people such as Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, I have never told anyone—including you, readers of The Atlantic—anything I don’t believe. What we’re seeing at Fox, however, is lying on a grand scale, done with a snide loathing for the audience and a cool indifference to the damage being done to the nation. Fox, and the Republican Party it serves, for years has relentlessly patronized its audience, cooing to viewers about how right they are not to trust anyone else, banging the desk about the corruption of American institutions, and shouting into the camera about how the liars and betrayers must pay.

Fox’s stars did all of this while privately communicating with one another and rolling their eyes with contempt, admitting without a shred of shame that they were lying through their teeth. From Rupert Murdoch on down, top Fox personalities have admitted that they fed the rubes all of this red, rotting meat to keep them out of the way of the Fox limos headed to Long Island and Connecticut.

You can see this same kind of contemptuous elitism in Republicans such as Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Elise Stefanik. They couldn’t care less about the voters—those hoopleheads back home who have to be placated with idiotic speeches against trans people and “critical race theory.” These politicians were bred to be leaders, you see, and having to gouge some votes out of the hayseeds back home requires a bit of performance art now and then, a small price to pay so that the sons and daughters of Harvard and Yale, Princeton and Stanford, can live in the imperial capital and rule as is their due and their right.

Some years ago, I was at a meeting of one of the committees of the National Academy of Sciences. The conferees asked me how scientists—there were Nobel Laureates in the room—could defend the cause of knowledge. Stand your ground, I told them. Never hesitate to tell people they’re wrong. One panel member shook his head: “Tom, people don’t like to be condescended to.” I said, “I agree, but what they hate even more is to be patronized.”

I believed it then, but we’re now testing that hypothesis on a national scale. I hope I wasn’t wrong.

Related:

Following your gut isn’t the right way to go. The real elitists are at Fox News.

Today’s News

President Joe Biden proposed the third budget of his presidency to Congress. Russia used more than 80 missiles, including some of the most advanced aerial weapons in its arsenal, in a large-scale attack on Ukraine’s infrastructure. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is being treated for a concussion after a fall.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: America is in the midst of a socioeconomic shift, Conor Friedersdorf writes.

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Evening Read

Daniel Zender / The Atlantic; Getty

We Programmed ChatGPT Into This Article

By Ian Bogost

ChatGPT, the internet-famous AI text generator, has taken on a new form. Once a website you could visit, it is now a service that you can integrate into software of all kinds, from spreadsheet programs to delivery apps to magazine websites such as this one. Snapchat added ChatGPT to its chat service (it suggested that users might type “Can you write me a haiku about my cheese-obsessed friend Lukas?”), and Instacart plans to add a recipe robot. Many more will follow.

They will be weirder than you might think. Instead of one big AI chat app that delivers knowledge or cheese poetry, the ChatGPT service (and others like it) will become an AI confetti bomb that sticks to everything. AI text in your grocery app. AI text in your workplace-compliance courseware. AI text in your HVAC how-to guide. AI text everywhere—even later in this article—thanks to an API.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

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Read. Our Share of Night, a grand, eloquent, and startling new novel by the Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez.

Watch. We don’t quite live in the country Poker Face (streaming on Peacock) depicts. But, in an odd way, we should wish to, our critic writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you’d like a more humorous defense of elitism—okay, an outright funny and entertaining one—check out Joel Stein’s 2019 book, In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You Are Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book. I’ll admit that I like it because I’m in it (Joel interviewed me, naturally, as a defender of elitism), but it’s also a sly exploration of the culture war that erupted after Trump redefined elite to mean anyone whom he doesn’t like, except for when he’s using the same word to refer to himself and anyone who likes him.

Stein talked with a lot of folks, including the Dilbert creator, Scott Adams, who had not yet lit the bonfire of his self-cancellation. (In Stein’s visit with him, however, you can see it coming.) Stein even gets a sit-down with—wait for it—Tucker Carlson. When Stein realizes that Carlson is slagging James Joyce’s classic Ulysses, he says, “It made me want to throw Tucker into the sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”

A writer who can make fun of Tucker Carlson while riffing on James Joyce is a writer you’ll want to read.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Lockheed Martin builds its advanced mobile rocket launchers in a converted diaper factory, of all places. When I visited the plant in southern Arkansas at the end of February, I found it humming with activity. The factory and its workers are a key component of America’s arsenal of democracy. The dollars the Biden administration is spending to provide abundant military aid for Ukraine are creating jobs here, and in other industrial towns throughout the United States. But watching the workers on the assembly line also underscored the extent of the challenge ahead. After decades of atrophy and neglect, America’s defense industries are struggling to meet the sudden surge in demand.

[Elliot Ackerman: The war in Ukraine has exposed a critical American vulnerability]

I found Becky Withrow, Lockheed’s director of business development, standing on the factory floor, 90 minutes south of Little Rock, in East Camden. “We had to hang a curtain across the back wall for the opening-day ceremony in 2017,” she says wryly. “There were still a few places we hadn’t cleaned up yet.” It’s a far cry from the famed Ford factory at Willow Run, the mile-long assembly line that cranked out B-24 Liberator bombers during the Second World War, with a new plane rolling out every hour at the peak of production. But it’s at factories like this one where the war in Ukraine, and conflicts to come, may be lost or won.

Dozens of welders and assemblers work the production line behind Withrow. They crawl over mobile rocket launchers in various stages of assembly, the parts laid out like so many toy-model kits. The launchers come in two variants: the tracked M270, and the newer High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, which is wheeled. The M270 program is a public-private partnership, in which Lockheed refurbishes older models stored at Red River Army Depot in northeastern Texas so they can be shipped to our allies, whereas the HIMARS are built from the ground up in Lockheed’s Camden facility.

It wasn’t the war in Ukraine, or even an American purchase order, that first reinvigorated the HIMARS program. By 2013, Lockheed had stopped manufacturing HIMARS altogether, but an order by the United Arab Emirates for 12 launchers in 2017 led the company to open the current facility. It hasn’t closed since, and demand has only grown. To date, NATO has sent Ukraine at least 20 HIMARS and 10 M270s, with more to follow. Of the $67.1 billion appropriated by Congress last year to arm Ukraine, $631 million was awarded to Lockheed Martin for the construction of new HIMARS.

Along with Withrow, I’m guided on my tour by Dennis Truelove, a 40-year veteran at Lockheed. He’s worked on the M270 program for decades, and today he’s retiring. “I like to call myself ‘Redeployment,’” he says, as he speaks about the M270, which is a recapitalization of old systems. “Also, I’m a bit of a hoarder.” He gestures to the old rocket launchers awaiting refurbishment. More than one Lockheed employee tells me of the pride they feel when they see a HIMARS or an M270 launching rockets at Russian targets on the news. That pride extends past the battlefield. Many of the Lockheed assemblers—who are decades younger than Truelove—wear T-shirts that proclaim Coolest Thing Made in Arkansas, 2022 Winner: HIMARS. This, I’m told, was a great coup; Cheetos are also made in Arkansas.

Currently, the Camden facility produces 48 refurbished M270s and 48 new HIMARS each year. The HIMARS numbers are set to expand, doubling to 96 by the third quarter of 2025—two and a half years after a new contract was awarded. Although certain steps are automated, production remains manpower-intensive. One part on the HIMARS chassis requires an assembler to drill 1,300 precision holes by hand. Increasing the rate of production isn’t as simple as flipping a switch.

The potential for expanded capacity is certainly there. Right now, Lockheed employees work a single shift four days a week. To meet increased demand, management plans to add additional shifts and hire another 200 employees over the next five years. Lockheed’s Camden facility, which sits on 2,427 acres, has significant potential for growth. “Camden has unlimited production capacity,” Truelove tells me as we walk around the factory, adding that the facility is “a strategic resource for the U.S. government.” It is located on the larger Highland Industrial Park, whose 18,500 acres were originally the Shumaker Ammunition Depot, built during the Second World War to manufacture and store torpedoes, bombs, and other munitions.

[From the March 2023 issue: The real obstacle to nuclear power]

The Navy selected East Camden in the Second World War to produce and store large quantities of munitions because of its remote location, and it remains remote today. On my way in from the airport the night before, I had to drive 30 minutes to find somewhere to grab a bite to eat, settling on some snacks at a “Boots & Liquor” store off the highway. The non-defense-related economy around East Camden has remained slow to develop, but executives at Lockheed see that changing. In the past four years, their workforce in Camden has doubled to more than 1,000 employees. Highland Industrial Park also counts General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Aerojet Rocketdyne as tenants.

Those who criticize the $67.1 billion approved by Congress for Ukraine argue that this money would be better spent on domestic investment. That critique, however, supposes that these congressional appropriations are akin to direct cash transfers to the Ukrainian government, which they are not. This is money that goes back into the American economy. And military aid to Ukraine is allowing America to rebuild its arsenal of democracy.

There’s historical precedent for this. Nine months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States, better known as the Lend-Lease Act. Lend-Lease reversed neutrality acts passed by an isolationist Congress in 1935, 1937, and 1939. By inhibiting the United States’ ability to arm its allies, these neutrality acts stunted the growth of America’s manufacturing base while the Axis powers invested in theirs. The passage of Lend-Lease reinvigorated America’s defense manufacturing industry. Over the course of the Second World War, Lend-Lease would account for 17 percent of U.S. defense expenditure, a total of $719 billion in today’s dollars, that armed our allies, including Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and China.

Although U.S. defense-production rates have never declined back to interwar levels, there is growing bipartisan consensus that the U.S. must reinvest in its manufacturing capacity. The CHIPS and Science Act, passed last August, provides $280 billion in funding to boost semiconductor manufacturing and research in the United States. Today, more than 90 percent of the advanced chips and semiconductors used in defense are manufactured in Taiwan. Given the possibility of a Chinese invasion, this is an unacceptable national-security risk.

The war in Ukraine requires a different type of reinvestment. It is a hungry war, devouring resources at a rate not seen in decades. On an average day in Ukraine, the two sides lob approximately 30,000 artillery shells at each other. This has created a munitions shortage for both NATO and Russia. The war’s pace has also strained supplies of the rockets fired from both the M270 and HIMARS. Those rockets, known as the guided multiple-launch rocket system, or GMLRS, are manufactured in a separate facility in Camden.

On the drive out to the GMLRS factory, we pass hundreds of black cylindrical railway cars parked along tracks that terminate in the Highland Industrial Park. These railway cars transport many of the raw energetic chemicals Lockheed uses to build its rocket boosters and warheads. The manufacture of GMLRS requires significantly more automation than the production of HIMARS and the M270. The Camden factory is the only one in the world that produces the GMLRS, a munition relied upon by half a dozen allied nations.

On the factory floor, a Jervis Webb conveyor system rattles overhead. In its clutches is a 200-pound warhead. Due to security concerns, no photographs are allowed inside the facility, but at successive stages of assembly, we’re able to witness the accelerant being placed into the rocket’s outer shell, the warhead being fixed onto the rocket’s end, and the series of electrical tests conducted on each pod of six rockets for quality control. Noticeably, on this side of the Lockheed complex there are more women than men at work, performing tasks that require great precision and dexterity.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Western aid to Ukraine is still not enough]

A control room with a dozen screens sits in the center of the plant. A supervisor monitors video feeds from each assembly station. He tracks every rocket as it proceeds down the line. On one screen, he has a pacing chart, showing how long each intermediate step should take. In the center of this screen is a large 52 on a red background. At the end of the day, if the team hits that goal, the number turns green. Jay Price, Lockheed’s vice president for missile and fire control, tells me that last year they built 7,500 GMLRS. This year, that number will increase to 10,000. He says that this facility has “capacity to go beyond that, if needed.”  

As Price and I leave the factory, I start doing some back-of-the-envelope math as to what maximum rocket production might look like if, say, the war in Ukraine increased in intensity or if China moved on Taiwan. Fifty-two rockets a day multiplied by 365 is 18,980 GMLRS units each year. Sure, maybe, Price says. Obviously, this would require more shifts. Possibly, Price adds. Could that number edge higher if the daily rate of production increased past 52? Although Price acknowledges that the team at Lockheed could surge production numbers, if needed, he explains that it wouldn’t be simple.

“Do you know how many parts it takes to build a rocket?” he asks me, glancing back at the factory.

I confess that I have no idea.

“All of them,” he says.