Us Naval Strategy In The 1970s

U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1980s: Selected Documents is the thirty-third in the Naval War College Press's Newport Papers monograph series, and the third in a projected four volume set of authoritative documents relating to U.S. Navy strategy and strategic planning during and after the Cold War. Edited by John B. Hattendorf, a distinguished naval historian and chairman of the Maritime History Department at the Naval War College, this volume is an indispensable supplement to Professor Hattendorf 's uniquely informed narrative of the genesis and development of the Navy's strategy for global war with the Soviet Union, The Evolution of the U.S. Navy's Maritime Strategy, 1977–1986, Newport Paper 19 (2004). It continues the story of the Navy's reaction to the growing Soviet naval and strategic threats over the decade of the 1970s, as documented in U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1970s: Selected Documents, Newport Paper 30 (2007), and sets the stage for the rethinking of the Navy's role following the demise of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, as presented in U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1990s: Selected Documents, Newport Paper 27 (2006). Both of these volumes were also edited by John Hattendorf. A fourth volume, of documents on naval strategy from the 1950s and 1960s, will eventually round out this important and hitherto very imperfectly known history. This project will make a major contribution not just to the history of the United States Navy since World War II but also to that of American military institutions, strategy, and planning more generally. Including as it does both originally classified documents and statements crafted for public release, it shows how the Navy's leadership not only grappled with fundamental questions of strategy and force structure but sought as well to translate the strategic insights resulting from this process into a rhetorical form suited to the public and political arenas. Finally, it should be noted that all of this is of more than merely historical interest. In October 2007, the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Gary Roughead, unveiled (in a presentation to the International Seapower Symposium at the Naval War College) “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower,” the first attempt by the sea services of this country to articulate a strategy or vision for maritime power in the contemporary security environment—a new era of protracted low-intensity warfare and growing global economic interdependence. It is too early to tell what impact this document will have on the Navy, its sister services, allies and others abroad, or the good order of the global commons. To understand its meaning and significance, however, there is no better place to begin than with the material collected in this volume and its forthcoming successor.

As U.S. strategy shifts (once again) to focus on great power competition, Strategy Shelved provides a valuable, analytic look back to the Cold War era by examining the rise and eventual fall of the U.S. Navy’s naval strategy system from the post–World War II era to 1994. Steven T. Wills draws some important conclusions that have relevance to the ongoing strategic debates of today. His analysis focuses on the 1970s and 1980s as a period when U.S. Navy strategic thought was rebuilt after a period of stagnation during the Vietnam conflict and its high water mark in the form of the 1980s’maritime strategy and its attendant six hundred –ship navy force structure. He traces the collapse of this earlier system by identifying several contributing factors: the provisions of the Goldwater Nichols Act of 1986, the aftermath of the First Gulf War of 1991, the early 1990s revolution in military affairs, and the changes to the Chief of Naval Operations staff in 1992 following the end of the Cold War. All of these conditions served to undermine the existing naval strategy system. The Goldwater Nichols Act subordinated the Navy to joint control with disastrous effects on the long-serving cohort of uniformed naval strategists. The first Gulf War validated Army and Air Force warfare concepts developed in the Cold War but not those of the Navy’s maritime strategy. The Navy executed its own revolution in military affairs during the Cold War through systems like AEGIS but did not get credit for those efforts. Finally, the changes in the Navy (OPNAV) staff in 1992 served to empower the budget arm of OPNAV at the expense of its strategists. These measures laid the groundwork for a thirty-year “strategy of means” where service budgets, a desire to preserve existing force structure, and lack of strategic vision hobbled not only the Navy, but also the Joint Force’s ability to create meaningful strategy to counter a rising China and a revanchist Russian threat. Wills concludes his analysis with an assessment of the return of naval strategy documents in 2007 and 2015 and speculates on the potential for success of current Navy strategies including the latest tri-service maritime strategy. His research makes extensive use of primary sources, oral histories, and navy documents to tell the story of how the U.S. Navy created both successful strategies and how a dedicated group of naval officers were intimately involved in their creation. It also explains how the Navy’s ability to create strategy, and even the process for training strategy writers, was seriously damaged in the post–Cold War era.

... this is a case study of the process by which a strategy was developed and applied within the present American defense establishment ... bearing in mind the broad aspects involved in the rational development of a strategy through an understanding of national aims, technological and geographical constraints, and relative military abilities.

This collection of documents reflecting the evolution of official thinking within the United States Navy and Marine Corps during the post–Cold War era concerning the fundamental missions and strategy of the sea services is part of a larger project designed to bring greater transparency to an important dimension of our recent naval history. This project was initiated by Professor John Hattendorf with his authoritative study in Newport Paper 19, which utilized much previously classified material, of the so-called Maritime Strategy developed and promulgated by the Navy during the 1980s. In the present volume, Newport Paper 27, covering the decade of the 1990s, Professor Hattendorf assembles for the first time in a single publication all the major naval strategy and policy statements of this period. Though all are public documents, most of these statements remain very little known and relatively inaccessible, at any rate outside the Navy itself. They are also not always easy to interpret, reflecting as they often do subtle shifts in emphasis or the nuances of internal bureaucratic argument rather than broadly understandable major changes in strategic thought or practice. Accordingly, the documents are accompanied by an introductory essay that attempts to put them in the proper historical and institutional perspective, as well as by a brief commentary for each that provides additional pertinent information and attempts to assess wider significance. A second Newport Paper dealing with comparable naval strategy statements of the 1970s and 1980s, in the same format and also edited by Professor Hattendorf. It is important to bear in mind that this material is not merely of historical interest. In his address to the annual Current Strategy Forum at the Naval War College in June 2006, the Chief of Naval Operations. Adm. Michael Mullen, announced his intention to craft what he called a new “maritime strategy” geared to the contemporary and emerging global security environment. The complex and not altogether happy story of earlier efforts within the Navy along similar lines can contribute in vital ways to preparing essential groundwork for such an undertaking.

To understand a series of events in the past, one needs to do more than just know a set of detailed and isolated facts. Historical understanding is a process to work out the best way to generalize accurately about something that has happened. It is an ongoing and never-ending discussion about what events mean, why they took place the way they did, and how and to what extent that past experience affects our present or provides a useful example for our general appreciation of our development over time. Historical understanding is an examination that involves attaching specifics to wide trends and broad ideas. In this, individual actors in history can be surprised to find that their actions involve trends and issues that they were not thinking about at the time they were involved in a past action as well as those that they do recognize and were thinking about at the time. It is the historian's job to look beyond specifics to see context and to make connections with trends that are not otherwise obvious. The process of moving from recorded facts to a general understanding can be a long one. For events that take place within a government agency, such as the U.S. Navy, the process cannot even begin until the information and key documents become public knowledge and can be disseminated widely enough to bring different viewpoints and wider perspectives to bear upon them. This volume is published to help begin that process of wider historical understanding and generalization for the subject of strategic thinking in the U.S. Navy during the last phases of the Cold War. To facilitate this beginning, we offer here the now-declassified, full and original version of the official study that I undertook in 1986–1989, supplemented by three appendices. The study attempted to record the trends and ideas that we could see at the time, written on the basis of interviews with a range of the key individuals involved and on the working documents that were then still located in their original office locations, some of which have not survived or were not permanently retained in archival files. We publish it here as a document, as it was written, without attempting to bring it up to date. To supplement this original study, we have appended the declassified version of the Central Intelligence Agency's National Intelligence Estimate of March 1982, which was a key analysis in understanding the Soviet Navy, provided a generally accepted consensus of American understanding at the time, and provided a basis around which to develop the U.S Navy's maritime strategy in this period. A second appendix is by Captain Peter Swartz, U.S. Navy (Ret.), and consists of his annotated bibliography of the public debate surrounding the formulation of the strategy in the 1980s, updated to include materials published through the end of 2003. And finally, Yuri M. Zhukov has created especially for this volume a timeline that lays out a chronology of events to better understand the sequence of events involved. The study and the three appendices are materials that contribute toward a future historical understanding and do not, in themselves, constitute a definitive history, although they are published as valuable tools toward reaching that goal. To reach closer to a definitive understanding, there are a variety of new perceptions that need to be added over time. With the opening of archives on both sides of the world, and as scholarly discourse between Russians and Americans develop, one will be able to begin to compare and contrast perceptions with factual realities. As more time passes and we gain further distance and perspective in seeing the emerging broad trends, new approaches to the subject may become apparent. Simultaneously, new materials may be released from government archives that will enhance our understanding.