Provide an independent forum for those who dare to read, think, speak, and write to advance the professional, literary, and scientific understanding of sea power and other issues critical to global security.
The Coast Guard’s long-sought heavy icebreaker, the Polar Security Cutter, was among the programs to receive funding when Congress passed a spending...
Like most editors, I usually spend my workday glued to my desk. So several weeks ago I jumped at the chance to head to sea on board a guided-missile destroyer. While my 24-hour “tour of duty” in the USS Mitscher (DDG-57)...
By Lieutenant Colonel Glen G. Butler, U.S. Marine Corps
Six decades ago the 1st Marine Division battered its way to one of the most startling achievements in the history of warfare: a full-scale withdrawal that left the enemy in tatters.
At the head of the Funchilin Pass, the depleted 1st Battalion, 7th Marines displayed characteristic Leatherneck élan in its final fight of the Chosin campaign.
Stationed at the muzzle of one of the Kearsarge’s XI-inch pivot guns during the Union warship’s duel with the CSS Alabama, first loader John Bickford kept his composure and emerged from the battle a...
Turned away by the Army, Sam Gravely instead enlisted in the Navy. What followed was a color-barrier-breaking climb that culminated with him becoming the first African-American to achieve flag-officer rank.
In the autumn of 1969, when the Naval Institute’s oral history program had just gotten started, John T. Mason Jr., the director, sat down for an interview at the Army-Navy Club in Washington...
In the face of heavy winds and rough seas, a research team spent several days in September on the latest expedition to locate one of the holy grails of underwater archaeology...
“A magnificent ship for her period,” the noted naval strategist and historian Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan would write of the Congress, some years...
The Ling-Temco-Vought A-7 Corsair II was an excellent carrier-based, light attack aircraft. But its career was overshadowed by its predecessor—the remarkable Douglas A-4 Skyhawk. The A-7 served in the U.S. fleet...
A series of interwar naval arms limitation treaties ostensibly designed to usher in an era of international peace instead helped sow the seeds of victory and defeat in the Pacific war.
Hours after Japanese bombs and torpedoes decimated the U.S. Pacific Fleet, British and Commonwealth forces began a forlorn defense of the Pearl of the Orient.
Amid the tangled wreckage of a suicide attack on the USS Manila Bay in 1945, Sailors made a poignant discovery: the photos and personal papers of the pilot who sacrificed his life for Japan. Who was he? Here were the...