With the elevation of humanitarian assistance/disaster response to a core mission of the Navy in the new maritime strategy, it is time to develop an international humanitarian-centric fleet in the Pacific theater.
There should be no mistaking that the newly released A Cooperative Strategy For 21st Century Seapower is a significant shift in naval strategy for the United States. Since the time of Admiral Elmo Zumwalt's Project Sixty in 1970 and Admiral Stansfield Turner's writing of "Missions of the U.S. Navy" in 1974, the core missions of American seapower have remained relatively constant over the last four decades: power projection, sea control, deterrence, and naval presence. 1 While leaders in the Navy debated the order of priority and the implementation of these missions over the years, the focus on these four core missions themselves varied little. That is, until now.
