The development and application of maritime strategy profoundly affect today’s Navy in many ways. Perhaps the most important of these is the way in which our revitalized emphasis on strategy provides a focus for substantial reform of the Navy from within. The Navy has changed; the Navy is changing; and the Navy will continue to change. This change, however, is neither mindless or directionless, nor is it a defensive reaction to criticisms from outside the Navy. The evolution of our Navy is today based on the recently developed Maritime Strategy, consciously adopted by the Navy’s leadership. We are, in fact, the real reformers.
It appears, however, that these fundamental and substantial developments are invisible to those outside the profession. Public perceptions frequently seem to be shaped by the superficially appealing manifestos of self-proclaimed civilian defense reformers, who assert that those of us in uniform have become bureaucrats rather than strategists and tacticians, that we have no strategy, and that we are incapable of reforming ourselves from within. To be sure, we carefully and repeatedly rebut unfair criticisms and specific arguments which we find objectionable. But to many people, our rebuttals seem to show us to be against a great many things without being for anything other than the status quo. There is a real danger that our critics have gained the intellectual high ground, too often causing us to appear defensive and reactive, rebutting their arguments in the perceived absence of clearly enunciating an alternative vision.
This is why it is important to understand the nature of reform itself, and the relationship of change and continuity in the naval profession. Reform is almost by definition a good thing, and continual reform is essential to the vitality of the Navy. Indeed, most naval officers can point with pride to some reforms in which they have personally participated, ranging from changes in the way a particular ship or squadron is run, to major changes in the Navy as a whole.
But continuity and stability are also important. We cannot lightly undertake reforms and endure a high percentage of failures. The consequences of failed reforms are not simply economic; they can manifest themselves in personnel and organizational turbulence that may persist for many years, even resulting in significant damage to military preparedness. Some Navy experiences of the early 1970s provide object lessons in damage caused by well-meaning reforms that failed in execution.
Further, tradition and continuity are crucial to our organizational culture and identity, and to our ability to perform consistently. Our professional ethic, standards, and codes of behavior are the legacy of 200 years of naval tradition.
We depend on this legacy to provide us perspective, help us through difficult periods, and bind together the community of seagoing men and women. Over the past several years, we have seen the payoff of programs to rebuild a once mislaid sense of pride and professional competence. Interestingly, most of these programs were simply a return to our traditional values and ideals.
Recent emphasis on the Maritime Strategy as the focus for our profession represents a significant change in the contemporary naval establishment and a continuation of the traditions of Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan and the greatnaval reformers of a century ago. It is worthwhile to consider how reforms have been tied to the strategy.
The most striking and far-reaching trend within the naval profession in recent years has been the emphasis on strategy as the focus of naval thought, planning, resource allocation, and operational employment. Since its beginning, development and application of the Maritime Strategy have been and continue to be efforts by naval officers. After decades of abdicating strategic thinking to civilian academicians and armchair strategists, naval officers are again at the forefront of developing strategy and strategic concepts.
Further, development of the Maritime Strategy has been an internally generated, active effort to understand new global realities, and to relate means and resources to national objectives in a changing world. In struggling with this formidable task, the Maritime Strategy has developed several important characteristics, some of which represent a substantially changed strategic vision from that which existed Five or ten years ago:
► The Maritime Strategy is fully consistent with the national strategy documents and directives of this administration which emphasize the importance of maritime superiority to our national defense.
► It is a global strategy designed to meet a global and diverse threat, embracing all possible theaters of operation and their complex interrelationships, in peace, crisis, or war.
► It is a forward strategy, keeping with the national policy of forward defense and drawing on the forward-deployed posture and rapid mobility of naval forces.
► It emphasizes the importance of alliances and coalitions, relying on their major contributions to national security. Further, the Maritime Strategy recognizes the crucial role that naval forces play in binding together our alliances and coalitions.
► It emphasizes the criticality of joint operations with our sister services, an emphasis reflected in exercises and operations, and in a growing number of interservice memoranda of agreement.
► It focuses primarily on the central strategic issue of deterring and, if deterrence fails, fighting a global war against the Soviet Union.
► It increasingly grapples with the issue of diversified violence in an era of violent peace, and considers how to provide deterrence across the entire spectrum of possible conflicts.
► It presents a cohesive menu of global options for controlling escalation, drawing on the flexibility and range of capabilities inherent in naval forces, avoiding reliance on nuclear weapons, and recognizing potential impacts of altering the balance by conventional means.
Clearly, the Maritime Strategy has generated substantial interest in maritime forces both within the naval profession and beyond. It has helped us explain the Navy's purposes to a number of audiences. Most important, it has produced substantial—though not highly visible—reform of the Navy from within. These reforms can be divided into three general categories.
Program development. First, the Maritime Strategy has rationalized, disciplined, and focused Navy program development, budgets, and procurement to a degree that would have seemed remarkable five years ago. Since 1982, the annual Navy program development cycle has commenced with a presentation of the Maritime Strategy. Strategy now drives the entire process and the resulting procurement and research and development decisions. The strategy presentation raises a number of key issues that must be resolved in the budget process. The strategy also provides the foundation for subsequent warfare appraisals, which identify critical requirements to execute the strategy in terms of antiair warfare, antisubmarine warfare, and other warfare areas as well. Finally, the strategy provides a clear framework against which all budget proposals are judged and a common reference point for all related discussion.
This process of applying the Maritime Strategy to program development has produced a number of important organizational and programmatic spinoffs. For example, we recently consolidated responsibility for all electronic warfare programs into a single office under the Director of Naval Warfare. The impetus for this reform came from appraisals of electronic warfare requirements to execute the Maritime Strategy.
These appraisals had clearly shown the need for a cross-platform viewpoint—one that avoided piecemeal solutions.
Another example is the recent Master Antisubmarine Warfare Strategy. A review of long-range antisubmarine warfare requirements to execute the Maritime Strategy showed the need for a comprehensive reexamination of our antisubmarine warfare programs to deal with the rapidly advancing Soviet submarine threat. This process has already led to significant changes in antisubmarine warfare research and development programs, and will provide the rationale for our assignment of cross-platform organizational responsibilities.
Yet another example is a growing awareness of the importance of space- based systems to maritime forces. For too many years, we viewed space as a technological and scientific playground outside the mainstream of naval warfare. But the process of developing a global, forward strategy and using it to drive Navy programs has brought into sharp focus the essential tactical contributions of space-based systems across all mission areas and platforms. This awareness led to the establishment of the Naval Space Command to direct space-related operations, the formation of a Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command to manage procurement and research and development, and formulation of programmatic actions to develop new systems and make better tactical use of existing ones.
Strategic and tactical thought. The Maritime Strategy has produced significant reform in a second fundamental way, by stimulating strategic and tactical thinking among the Navy's leaders. Strategic matters now infuse the informal, everyday discussions among senior naval officers. This simply was not the case five years ago, and it represents a noteworthy change in our organizational culture.
Further, we are building institutional reinforcements for this revival of strategic thinking. Many involve the Naval War College, which once again is the crucible of strategic and tactical thought that it was a century ago.
Within the past several years, we began sending virtually all of our commanding officers to the Naval War College on completion of their command tours. This enables these officers to reflect on strategic issues in light of their recent operational experience, and also offers the benefits of their experience to students in other programs.
We have also invigorated the Wargaming Center at the Naval War College. This is the most advanced such facility in the world, and allows us to test alternative strategies and tactics. It is heavily used both by shore- and sea- based organizations.
Also important is the work of the Strategic Studies Group, associated with the Center for Naval Warfare studies at the Naval War College. During the past five years we have selected a small group of Navy captains and Marine Corps colonels who have distinguished themselves as strategists and tacticians. These officers deal with major issues of direct relevance to Maritime Strategy for a full year. They report directly to me and have full access to top Navy leaders, including the fleet commanders-in-chief. Through this interaction, their work has materially affected the ongoing development of the strategy.
The Naval War College’s role in strategic thinking illustrates an important point. Development of the Maritime Strategy has consistently benefited from a wide variety of opinions and perspectives from multiple and disparate centers of thought. The operating Navy—commanders-in-chief and fleet commanders—has contributed as much as the Washington headquarters and such research centers as the Naval War College. This plurality of perspective and the resulting competition of ideas have made for a robust strategy—one that recognizes and reflects the complexity of strategic issues and the validity of multiple perspectives. This experience is directly relevant to the development of national strategy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff reform issue. The process of national strategy development and advice must involve multiple centers of thought and plurality of advice if the resulting thinking is to be truly vigorous and reflective of the complexity of issues involved. The process may be somewhat untidy, but it is distinctly American. It works, and it must be preserved.
Emphasis on warfighting. A final way in which the Maritime Strategy has served as a focus for reform is by shaping an emphasis on tactics and warfighting at the operational level. For too many years, our fleet exercises suffered from a lack of realism and focus, and our routine operations seemed to be lacking in purpose. But the Maritime Strategy now forms a framework for planning realistic, purposeful exercises, and provides a strategic perspective for daily fleet operations in pursuit of deterrence.
Largely as a result of the Maritime Strategy, we have begun emphasizing exercises with multiple carrier battle forces, which would be required in a major war. We have increased our exercises in the Northern Pacific and Norwegian Sea, to build our base of experience in these key areas. We have begun exercising our submarines in Arctic waters, where they might be called upon to execute portions of the Maritime Strategy.
Thus, the Maritime Strategy has produced substantial reform. It has focused Navy program development, stimulated strategic and tactical thinking, and engendered an emphasis on tactics and warfighting in the fleet. The Navy can take considerable pride in the substance of these reforms, and in the strategic vision that they represent. We can also take pride in the fact that these reforms are clearly ours. We initiated them, and we sustain them—without much hoopla and without the help of self-appointed military reformers outside our profession, who are more adept at criticism than at proposing realistic solutions.
We have met the real reformers, and they are us. We have implemented, and will continue to implement reforms, to meet new realities based on a continuously evolving strategic vision. Our critics may take issue with our strategy. We welcome such debate. But they cannot argue that we have no strategy, or that we are not capable of reform.
The Maritime Strategy is a powerful statement of what we stand for, and a focus for reform that is in keeping with our finest traditions.