Whether in the Black Sea, Baltic, or across the Indo-Pacific today, potential maritime adversaries have been developing abilities to achieve their goals below the threshold of war. Called “salami slicing,” maritime insurgency, gray-zone operations, or hybrid war, these operations, short of full-scale armed conflict, have ample historical precedent. While the Age of Fighting Sail can seem removed from the challenges of the 21st century, today’s strategists and naval professionals can learn a great deal from the period. The U.S. Navy’s conflict with Tripoli at the dawn of the 19th century—a maritime war between two smaller powers operating in the shadows of great empires—offers a deep view of maritime conflict and competition short of existential total war. From the importance of small combatants to the vital nature of partnerships, the First Barbary War (1801–1805) offers valuable insights in approaching competition and conflict in the gray zones of this century.
Countering maritime insurgencies in the gray zone is not a new mission—indeed it was the U.S. Navy’s founding mission. The force that would fight the First Barbary War was created in 1798 with the birth of the Department of the Navy for the express purpose of defending U.S. merchant shipping and seaborne commerce from a challenge to freedom of the sea. That challenge was posed by a great power in a key littoral region, without a declaration of war—namely, the threat posed by France in the Caribbean during what came to be known as the Quasi War. In a maritime competition that included elements of insurgency and episodes of outright combat, U.S. forces contended with many dynamics familiar to the contemporary operating environment: hostile use of private military contractors as irregular maritime forces (in France’s case, privateers), the pluses and minuses of working with partners and allies, and challenges maintaining effective maritime presence on distant stations. The gray-zone conflict between the United States and France resolved itself not through victory or defeat, but instead with a negotiated settlement in December 1800 to simply make the conflict “go away” as both sides realized it was distracting from their larger interests. Peace, however, was not what the rest of the world had planned for the young United States.
In May 1801, less than six months after the end of the Quasi War (1798–1800), Pasha Yousef Karamanli sent troops into the courtyard of the American Consul’s house in Tripoli to cut down the flagpole—a North African tradition symbolizing the declaration of war. Karamanli unleashed corsairs, as his Mediterranean privateers were known, on U.S. merchant ships and civilian mariners in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic. U.S. Navy ships and crews that sailed to the Mediterranean were largely the same ones that had fought the French, and they brought insights and combat experience from the previous conflict that they would apply to its second.