NATO Can’t Count Its Way to Maritime Superiority

Allied navies are still counting hulls. The contest at sea is now about who sees, decides, and acts first.Earlier this month, Western officials disclosed that American, British, and Norwegian forces had tracked and confronted Russian deep-sea units near Svalbard this spring as they rehearsed a method for disabling undersea cables. The Russian vessels were stopped before they finished the sabotage and left the area. The confrontation matters less than how it was won. The Allies saw the activity in time to act.That is the right lens for NATO's maritime future.For four centuries, the sea hid things. Distance, weather, and the Earth's curvature made finding a fleet harder than fighting one. Navies were built accordingly. They concentrated their combat power on a small number of survivable platforms and used the ocean's opacity to arrive where the enemy was not.That premise is failing.Commercial satellite imagery now refreshes at rates that were classified a decade ago. Radio-frequency geolocation, synthetic aperture radar, and machine-assisted pattern analysis have turned surface tracking into a subscription service. A warship radiating in the Eastern Mediterranean is a known quantity ...