The U.S. Navy’s Cultural Crisis

By Miles Smith IV

Monday, July 14, 2025

 

The U.S. Navy is adrift — strategically, culturally, and spiritually — and unless a bold shift is made, America risks losing its standing in the Pacific and beyond.

 

CDR Salamander, a prominent military history and strategy blogger and commentator, warned that the leadership of the United States Navy is “sleepwalking into defeat” in a potential great-power conflict.

 

“We need drastic change in our senior leadership, and whoever is brought to the front must sharply shift in tone and substance from the standard behavior of this century.” The Navy needs, CDR Salamander warned, to “put to the side the system of incentives and disincentives we use to promote our most senior leaders. This last quarter century’s process has a record of consistently producing sub-optimal performance.” Every aspect of the Navy — from personnel management still shaped by Cold War–era thinking to failing weapons programs — reveals that one of history’s most formidable maritime forces is now a shadow of its former self.

 

Even if Americans ignore the dysfunction making the headlines — a series of accidents on the USS Harry Truman serve as good examples — “we have to look at the potential conflict that presents the greatest danger to our nation’s power, economy, and that of our allies — the threat that would, if it has its way, change the international order in ways that will reverse centuries of progress.” The United States faces its greatest challenge in the Pacific. “To fight and win, there is one simple thing that is common to all wars, but in the Pacific is an order of magnitude greater, because of time, distance, and geography for a sea power coming from the other side of the planet to fight: logistics.”

 

To understand how far the Navy has drifted, it’s instructive to revisit the strategic clarity and cultural confidence of earlier thinkers such as Alfred Thayer Mahan.

 

CDR Salamander is right that logistics and shipbuilding are areas of major deficiency in the United States’ current military and strategic regimes, but there is a deeper, more spiritual problem beleaguering the United States’ high command. Since the 1990s, neoliberal politics has convinced an entire generation of military leaders that their duty is to a vaporously defined Constitution, without any additional understanding of the society that Constitution protects and perpetuates. The Navy’s first mission has always been the protection of the United States, and the United States’ interests. Freedom of the seas remains a vitally important consideration, but the protection of the American republic’s interest is primary.

 

More than 100 years ago, Alfred Thayer Mahan confronted the rise of Asian commercial interests. In his The Problem of Asia and Its Effect Upon International Policies, he saw the need for the United States to change. Mahan was not a static strategic thinker. He understood that the considerations of interests such as changes in commercial and strategic importance of Asian economies “must be dispassionate.” He rejected outright ideological considerations when he wrote that “a perfectly candid reception must be accorded to the views and the necessities of those with whom we thus deal.” Universal human rights, the preservation of liberal democracy, and a host of other ideological considerations were of secondary importance at best. “During the process of deliberation not merely must preconceptions be discarded, but sentiment itself should be laid aside, to resume its sway only after unbiassed judgment has done its work.” The question of Asia, Mahan believed, “may entail among its results no change in old maxims, but it nevertheless calls for a review of them in the light of present facts. If from this no difference of attitude results, the confirmed resolve of sober second thought will in itself alone be a national gain.”

 

Mahan’s sober-minded strategic thought was not rootless liberal utilitarianism. It was deeply seated in the Christian tradition. Only on Western, and Christian, terms could Asia properly be engaged. Europe, and by Europe Mahan meant countries that upheld Christian values, “had learned that it has a community of interests, as well as a divergence. That community of interest may be defined as the need of bringing the Asian peoples within the compass of the family of Christian states.” Asian peoples would not be brought under Christian influence “by fetters and bands imposed from without, but by regeneration promoted from within. This principle, in intellectual appreciation and in practical observance, is perfectly compatible with the diligent safeguarding of individual national interest by precautions of whatsoever kind.”

 

The United States’ military regime, Mahan proposed, would interact with Asian countries positively, always maintaining military and cultural superiority. That cultural and military superiority was good for the United States, good for Europe, and finally, good for the peoples of East Asia. And Mahan’s thesis bore out; the U.S. Navy’s military superiority and the influence of Western Christian culture and society helped rescue defeated Japan and South Korea in the aftermath of the Second World War. But the years of the postwar era saw America believe less in Christianity and in the necessity of pushing around Asian governments, particularly Communist China. The result has been a U.S. Navy that believes more in procedural institutionalism than in fighting and winning the necessary military and sociocultural battles to maintain American military supremacy and, by proxy, American and also East Asian order and prosperity.

 

Unlike his recent predecessors, Secretery of Defense Pete Hegseth understands the necessity of the U.S. Navy’s supremacy and the need to push around China. In a warning to Communist China, Hegseth said in Singapore that “America is proud to be back in the Indo-Pacific — and we’re here to stay. The United States is an Indo-Pacific nation. We have been since the earliest days of our Republic. We will continue to be an Indo-Pacific nation — with Indo-Pacific interests — for generations to come.” Hegseth conceded that “nobody knows what China will ultimately do,” but he correctly noted that “they are preparing.” And, therefore, the United States would, too.

 

To preserve peace and prosperity in Asia, the U.S. must reclaim its naval excellence — not only through logistics and strategy, but through a renewed commitment to the principles that once guided its global leadership.