One staple of anti-Americanism is how much we spend on our military.

What goes unsaid is that our military keeps the peace for much of the world. International trade would not be possible without our navy because of piracy.

Deep in what this weekend became the most notorious pirate hideout since Neverland, Somali buccaneers are currently hunkered down in the Indian Ocean with the biggest pillage of their biggest year: the Ukrainian cargo vessel Faina, loaded with 33 T-72 tanks, plus small arms, rockets and ammunition—all headed for Sudan, a U.S. Navy spokesperson confirmed this morning.

As its USS Howard destroyer reached the area and more foreign ships descended on the hijacked boat, however, the U.S. Navy’s response to Thursday night’s capture may signal a new stage in this cat-and-mouse game of modern-day piracy.

What is the future of our navy? Robert Kaplan addressed this a year ago in the Atlantic.

Over the decades our Navy has been slowly disappearing on us. At the end of World War II we had 6,700 ships. Throughout the Cold War we had around 600 ships. In the 1990s we had more than 350. Now we are down to fewer than 280. This decline is occurring while China is in the midst of a shipbuilding and acquisition craze that will result in the People’s Liberation Army Navy having more ships than the United States Navy sometime in the next decade. Qualitatively, the United States will still very much have the edge, but China is catching up. And China is merely one of many challenges—terrorism, piracy, port security, and humanitarian disaster assistance are others—that the Navy now faces.

The Navy has plans to increase the number of ships from below 280 to more than 310. But according to the Congressional Budget Office and the Congressional Research Service, cost overruns of 34 percent, plus other factors, mean that these plans may be overly optimistic. In fact, over the next decade and beyond, if the Navy builds only seven ships per year with a fleet whose life expectancy is 30 years, the total number of its ships may dwindle to the low 200s. And yet we live in a world where 75 percent of the Earth’s population is within 200 miles of the sea, and in an era when 90 percent of commerce travels by sea, including two-thirds of petroleum exports.

Such is the sobering context for the United States’s new maritime strategy, just released after many months of study—particularly at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. The study was commissioned by Chief of Naval Operations Michael Mullen, recently promoted to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was released by the Navy, Marine Corps, and the Coast Guard—the first time the three maritime services have jointly authored a common strategy.