Michèle Flournoy likes to say that during her years at Balliol College, Oxford, she “majored in rowing” and had the shoulders to prove it. Now under-secretary of defence for policy (and known as the brain of the Pentagon) she is using her brawn to muscle through a fundamental shift in US strategic doctrine. Her thinking is based on the concept of the “global commons,” which is in turn based on the old Royal Navy idea of promoting maritime supremacy while touting the freedom of the seas. Flournoy sees these global commons in a wider context that includes air and space and cyberspace as well as the oceans. Her essay in the latest issue of Proceedings, published by the US Naval Institute, is becoming required reading around the Pentagon.

She warns that “a series of recent events, including anti-satellite missile tests, piracy in the Gulf of Aden and off the east coast of Africa, and attacks in cyberspace” portend the worst challenge to American security since 1945. And ominously for the US Navy, one of the warning signals cited is a 2006 incident in which a Chinese submarine surfaced within the perimeter of a US carrier strike group. Carriers are meant to be protected from such incursions, so if Flournoy is right about the event’s implications this threatens both US Navy doctrine and plans to spend a massive amount of money building ten carriers and their 1,000-plus warplanes over the next three decades. It may also provide ammunition to cost-cutters in Britain’s treasury as they eye the Royal Navy’s plans for two new carriers.

Though stressing that the US military will maintain its dominance for the foreseeable future, the core of Fournoy’s argument is that, in years to come, the real geopolitical battles will be over stability and access to the global commons—which the US will no longer be able to guarantee. Since Fournoy is currently writing the defence department’s Quadrennial Defense Review, which lays down strategic doctrine and spending plans for the future, the military, lobbyists, congress are all trying to work out what the article means for them.

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