All Options Are Not on the Table: A Briefing on the US Mediterranean Fleet

March 16th, 2011

The best current example of the US Navy’s overstretched resources is the absence of warships assigned to the Mediterranean. Until recent years, the US Mediterranean Sixth Fleet numbered up to 75 warships, including the continuous presence of two aircraft carriers with ample fighter and attack aircraft, as well as an accompanying armada of cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and amphibious and logistics vessels. This presence allowed the US and NATO to project power quickly and convincingly to affect developments deep into the lands bordering the sea. Today the US Mediterranean armada has one ship permanently assigned, the flagship of its commander, and it is not an aircraft carrier. A strong permanent US presence in the Mediterranean ended with the Cold War and the mounting needs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Since the early 19th century, the US Mediterranean Squadron maintained an active presence in the great inland sea. Its first mission was to protect American commercial shipping from the Barbary pirates who were attacking commercial shipping — off the coast of modern day Libya, Tunis, and Algiers. Nearly a century and a half later, US amphibious landings made possible the invasion of North Africa in 1942, along with the follow-on movement to Sicily and Italy. During the Cold War, US naval forces blunted Soviet threats to Turkey, helped support a pro-Western government in Beirut in 1958, and played an important role in freeing Kosovo from Serbian rule in 1999. The Sixth Fleet also preserved the freedom to navigate the Med when Colonel Qaddafi claimed the Gulf of Sidra as Libyan territorial waters in 1986.

Today, with the fate of the anti-Qaddafi rebels seemingly hanging in the balance, and perhaps that of Egypt as well, the depleted Sixth Fleet appears to have significantly diminished the ability of the US and NATO to respond quickly or effectively to the crisis in North Africa. Indeed, when US diplomats had to be evacuated from Libya last month as fighting between Qaddafi’s forces and the rebels intensified, a Greek freighter was rented for the occasion.

Yet the need for a Mediterranean US-NATO naval presence is evident, as the region is a crisis in waiting. Iran continues to increase its naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean. Turkey’s government is increasingly hostile to the West and is at once cozying up to and competing with the belligerent fundamentalist government in Iran. Lebanon has all but returned to radical-dominated control imposed from without. Beyond the rebellion in Libya, there is a likelihood for instability and turmoil across Egypt and northern Africa as these countries navigate their uncertain futures.

The United States’ lackluster naval and Marine presence in the region limits NATO’s ability to respond to any number of contingencies, including surveillance, humanitarian, rescue, blockade, interdiction, and “no-fly” needs, as well as a range of other military actions to support US forces to sway recalcitrant dictators, support freedom fighters, and so on. “All options” will not be on the table. And Greece rentals won’t solve that problem.

Seth Cropsey is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He served as a naval officer from 1985 to 2004 and as deputy under secretary of the Navy in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.