The Thousand Ship Navy
The United States is trying to organize an international “Thousand Ship Navy” via greater cooperation between the United States Navy and the many nations the U.S. is allies, or simply on good terms, with. Formally called the GMP (Global Maritime Partnerships) the effort is simply a continuation of international naval cooperation American admirals and diplomats have built over the last century. One of the more notable of those efforts, CTF (Combined Task Force)-151, which began operating in 2009 to deal with the pirates off Somalia, was a big success. Over a dozen nations contributed ships and many others (like China and Iran) cooperated with CTF-151 without being a part of it. While organized largely as an American led effort, the task force command regular rotated among member nations and most of the time an American officer was not in charge.
The U.S. now wants to build a global naval alliance to deal with more than pirates, but to do using the techniques that worked so well off Somalia. In other words, GMP is an effort to be better prepared for the next emergency that naval forces can be the solution for. This not only involves threats to world trade (90 percent of which moves by sea) but also natural disasters (most of which have all, or most victims near the coast) and threats to world peace in general, like Chinese claims on the South China Sea and Iranian threats to close the Strait of Hormuz and block most world oil trade.
There are some 12,000 warships in service worldwide. Only about 35 percent of those can go beyond the coasts they guard (as part of the navy, coast guard or police). That’s over 3,000 seagoing warships and most of them are American or on good terms with the United States. Now most of those seagoing ships cannot easily move to distant parts of the world like the U.S. ships can, and do, frequently. But with GMP member navies could quickly organize a local force of hundreds of ocean going warships and even more coast patrol vessels.
Russia, China and the other usual suspects (North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and so on) are expected to oppose GMP, but most nations are initially favorable to the concept. After all the U.S. Navy has been organizing international naval exercises for decades and American naval officers have long sought to establish personal relationships with their peers around the world.
(more here: http://www.strategypage.com/dls/articles/The-Thousand-Ship-Navy-10-1-2014.asp )