The Naval Institute is pleased to announce that the annual Prize Essay Contest will be returning to the pages of Proceedings later this year.
The contest is a Naval Institute tradition and an important part of our history. At the Institute’s meeting of 18 June 1878, with Commander Alfred Thayer Mahan, U.S. Navy, Vice President, in the Chair, the Institute Board adopted a rule that a prize to consist of $100 and a gold medal valued at $50 be offered annually for an essay.
In bringing back the Prize Essay Contest, the Institute remains true to its mission of providing an independent forum for those who dare to read, think, speak, and write in order to advance the professional, literary, and scientific knowledge of sea power and other issues critical to national defense.
The call for papers for the 2014 contest will be made in this month’s Proceedings, with the winner to be published in the October issue.
The Naval Institute Press has published two excellent new books on the Pacific region’s past, present, and future: South Pacific Cauldron: World War II’s Great Forgotten Battlegrounds by Alan Rems, and Rebalancing U.S. Forces: Basing and Forward Presence in the Asia-Pacific edited by Carnes Lord and Andrew S. Erickson.
Rems, who was a 2008 Naval Institute Author of the Year for his work in Naval History, writes in an authoritative, highly readable narrative style. Addressing the land, sea, and air operations in the South Pacific, he covers the battlefields of Buna, Shaggy Ridge, and the Driniumor River on New Guinea, the fighting in the torpedo-infested waters of New Georgia and the deadly skies over Rabaul and Wewak, and the roles of Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, General Douglas MacArthur, and Australia’s General Thomas Blamey.
Lord and Erickson, faculty members at the Naval War College, present a very insightful and wide-ranging set of essays by some of the best minds on the Pacific. Given the rise of China and the emergence of the Asia-Pacific region as the center of global economic growth and strategic contention, nowhere is American presence and basing more important. That said, the manifold political and military challenges, to include rapidly improving Chinese long-range precision-strike capabilities, complicate the future of American access.
Also, beginning this month, the Naval Institute Press will release new paperback editions of our older book titles no longer in print through our print-on-demand partner Sheridan Books International. With the new print-on-demand publishing process, books are not printed until an order has been received, affording the Institute the opportunity to print books singly or in desired small quantities, thus avoiding the costs of adding larger numbers of books to warehouse inventory.
Select titles not available for decades will once again be available to our Members at www.usni.org. This is another milestone met in our Strategic Plan!
In another positive development, the Navy’s General Library Program has selected 12 titles from the Naval Institute Press for inclusion in its Navy e-Reading Device, a portable library loaded with 300 eBooks for reading on submarines where storage space for printed books is limited. The Naval Institute Press titles selected for the Navy e-Reading Device include books from the Chief of Naval Operations’ professional reading program such as SEAL of Honor: Operation Red Wings and the Life of Lt. Michael P. Murphy and Red Star Over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy. They also include Edward F. Finch’s biography Beneath the Waves: The Life and Navy of Capt. Edward L. Beach Jr., and Claude Berube’s novel The Aden Effect.