Book Description

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.