America’s birth relied on a grievous strategic error by the British Empire of the 18th century: overreliance on the Navy. Britain used the Royal Navy the way America now uses airpower. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. How could the metropole capture greater tax value from its expensive and underpaying colonies? The Navy. How could an empire defend itself and project force without a standing army? The Navy. How could one protect defenseless sugar islands from the enslaved majority or rival empires? The Navy.

Unfortunately the last of these worked. Unlike Haiti, Britain’s sugar possessions were too small and had been too effectively converted to cash crops for even a successful revolt to survive. Antigua’s abortive 1736 revolt was the last major rising organized in the colony for good reason: if enslaved Antiguans had risen in the late 18th century, even if they had taken control of the entire island, they would have starved to death amidst a naval blockade (this is quite likely what would have happened in 1736). Larger Jamaica was defeated during Tackey’s War by the intervention of the Navy and its marines. 

But a navy cannot manage everything. N.A.M Rodger’s big naval history survey The Command of the Ocean is suitably brutal on this in its account of the naval battle outside Yorktown that helped determine the fate of the land battle there. Cornwallis “fortified himself in a suitable seaport (Yorktown)” and “was complacently waiting for the Navy to collect him.” Even the world’s premier maritime fighting force could not guarantee a victory in every battle. French initiative and British inflexibility produced a British defeat. Admiral Hood had spent years in the relative sinecure of Commissioner of His Majesty’s Royal Dockyard at Portsmouth– not a position that leaves one well-prepared to handle French maneuvering. He failed to rescue Cornwallis. Lord North, head of the government, gasped “Oh God! It is all over,” upon hearing the news.

The Royal Navy, like modern airpower, was not autonomous: it relied on logistical and intelligence capabilities that could fail on their own. In WWII, as the writer who goes by “Secretary of Defense Rock” (what a world we live in) recently noted in an interesting takedown of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Bomber Mafia, the “industrial web theory” strategic bombing advocates relied on depended upon “an extraordinary level of economic visibility and analytical precision.” Superior force projection is a limited advantage when you do not know where to project it. Likewise, the Royal Navy’s advantage relied on useful intelligence and clear communication. Failures in both gave the French the advantage in the Chesapeake. 

Here’s the key analysis from Rodger again regarding Lord North’s claim that it was all over: “Military, it was not [over], for the loss even of 6,000 troops, in a subsidiary theater of war which was to be decided at sea, was not an irretrievable catastrophe. Politically, however, North was right–” he was done for as a statesman. The war continued, but Britain was also done for as an imperial power in the Thirteen Colonies. Rodger’s book is great, but I think descrbing the war as “decided at sea” later overstates the case– he’s right that years of subsequent naval war kept other British colonies inside the empire, and that this was a historically significant victory, but I think that’s deciding a theater of the war rather than the entire thing. 

More importantly, the “militarily” vs “politically” comparison is useful. This kind of split borders on a bit of sore loser-ing akin to the US popular account of Vietnam: we didn’t really lose militarily, those wretched guerillas just fought on until our government and public refused to continue. That’s what war is! War isn’t a game with rules where the most warfighter-y warfighter (to use the terminology favored by the current Secretary of Defense) wins. War is a political endeavor, and you win when the other side stops fighting violently– however you achieve that. 

One problem with advanced technology and asymmetrical force projection is that it can make it easier to forget this. I’m writing all of this with an American war in Iran, of course. The stakes of that war for the Iranian state appear to be existential– not only because the United States seeks to destroy the current regime, but because it is facing enormous opposition by Iranians. For Americans, this is a war by a historically unpopular President to defend Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly. Those are much lower stakes. 

The USS Gerald R. Ford is an over $15 billion dollar engineering wonder crewed by thousands. I know very little about missile defense systems, but I do know they aren’t infallible– one lucky shot and this ship could be lost. I drafted this yesterday, and while given Iran’s military performance that already unlikely possibility (again, I cannot stress enough how much I am not an expert in modern ships) seems to be shrinking, another one looms. If Trump gets away with this, he’ll do the same thing again elsewhere. Or someone else will. The aura of invincibility that American expenditures and technology creates dangerous temptations, and the insulation of the executive from accountability makes it possible to act on them.

Heavy reliance on this kind of asymmetric warfare is both practically and morally corrosive. It enables a state to make war without facing significant short-term consequences. There are real cases for particular uses of these capabilities– the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia helped end a genocide. But using them without public accountability makes it should be to begin wars you should not fight (this one) and that you cannot win or easily end.

Wars are fought by a nation, not by a few think tanks or civilian officials. Nations sacrifice lives and resources when they fight. This means it is not only morally, but practically, necessary for the nation to be on board for military action: if you fight wars your people don’t care about, you will lose as soon as your enemy makes your people care about the war. By abandoning military power to the executive, which has in turn embraced a war-from-a-distance airpower strategy, America has insulated our military from our collective conscience, with nightmarish consequences.