Digitizing Proceedings
Realizing an important strategic goal, the U.S. Naval Institute has just completed digitizing every issue of Proceedings published over 140 years. With the contents preserved electronically, they will be available to Members now and in the years to come to access, use, and enjoy.
The decade of the 1980s was a transformative one: It began with the continued ascendance of the Soviet Union and Admiral Sergei Gorshkov’s Soviet Navy. It finished with the dismantling of the Iron Curtain, the Warsaw Pact, and the Berlin Wall, and with rust forming on the Soviet Union’s newly laid-up warships. As the decade had progressed, the American people, the American government under President Ronald Reagan, and America’s Navy shook off the malaise of the 1970s and boldly challenged the Communist superpower in a plethora of domains. While those challenges proved successful, they were not without controversy and debate. Proceedings, naturally, was in the thick of it.
Think of all the buzzwords of the period: Maritime Strategy. 600-Ship Navy. Two-carrier buys. Fixed-price contracts. Ocean Venture. Northern Wedding. America in the fjords. Fighting Instructions. Forward operations. North Cape. The Kola. Vlad and Petro. Backfire bombers. Outer Air Battle. Top Gun and Strike U. Under-ice operations. SSN surge. Anti-SSBN. Marines in North Norway. 3rd Fleet off the Aleutians. OP-603. Strategic Studies Group. Traps and havens. Global War Game. NATO CONMAROPS. Pioneer. Tomahawk. The list goes on and on. And each buzzword is simply code for the intense discussion, testing, and experimentation that were key components in our ultimate Cold War victory. Proceedings helped make that happen.
Mid-decade is the best place to start this particular story. Along with the normal January 1986 issue, the Naval Institute’s steady CEO, retired Navy Captain Jim Barber, and Proceedings’ brilliant new editor-in-chief, Fred Rainbow, published an unusual stand-alone special issue called The Maritime Strategy, with articles (and original artwork) laying out those aspects of the strategy and the 600-ship Navy program that could now be aired authoritatively in public. Five years in development, their contents were sound, mature, and tested. I should know. I wrote and signed one of them, as did Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jim Watkins and Commandant of the Marine Corps General P. X. Kelley.
Proceedings played a key role in that development. Articles like CNO Admiral Tom Hayward’s “Thank God for the Sitting Ducks” (June 1982), Bob Murray’s frank and insightful “A War-Fighting Perspective” (October 1983), D. B. Rivkin’s “No Bastions for the Bear” (April 1984), Major Hugh O’Donnell’s “Northern Flank Maritime Offensive” (September 1985), and Commander Robby Harris’ and Lieutenant Commander Joe Benkert’s “Is That all There Is?” (October 1985) kept us on our toes and helped us hone our ideas. Captain Brent Baker made a valiant attempt to decipher my numbers in “Counting the 600-Ship Navy” (May 1982). Marine Lieutenant Colonel Tom Wilkerson explained the important role the Air Force played in the strategy in his “Two if by Sea,” (November 1983). And while I didn’t agree with everything that Lieutenant Commander Wood Parker wrote in his April 1983 prize essay, “Paradigms, Conventional Wisdom, and Naval Warfare,” I valued the integrity and thoughtfulness his article demonstrated, and later took him on as my flag secretary.
Once Proceedings published the strategy, the debate only increased. Here’s where the journal’s superb “Comment and Discussion” (C&D) section really came into its own, as supporter followed critic followed supporter in critiquing what we had written. We took the opportunity afforded by the skeptics to explain the strategy beyond the pages of the special issue, as Rear Admiral Bill Pendley did in June 1986 and April 1987 in C&D entries, in response to Colonel John Collins’ pointed C&D questions in March and August 1986.
The discussion was spirited. Norman Polmar offered his view of our strategy and force goals in “600 Ships: Plus or Minus?” (August 1986). Vice Admiral Hank Mustin—like so many other of our aggressive sea-going flag officers—turned the strategy’s words into action at sea in some major forward exercises, and discussed his approach in “Maritime Strategy from the Deckplates” (September 1986), followed by Admiral Ace Lyons in an interview and Vice Admiral Duke Hernandez in “The New Third Fleet” (both July 1987). In January 1987 Admiral Carl Trost continued the tradition of CNOs publishing their views on the Maritime Strategy in Proceedings (he was a strong advocate).
And it wasn’t just the admirals who were sounding off. A thoughtful young F-14 aviator, Lieutenant Sandy Winnefeld, laid out the relationships as he saw them among the strategy, battle-group operations, training, and hardware requirements in “Topgun: Getting it Right” (October 1986), “Fresh Claws for the Tomcat” (July 1987), and “Winning the Outer Air Battle” (August 1989). Lieutenant Commander Jim Stavridis was good for at least one valuable Proceedings article a year all through the decade, including the recently reprinted “Creating ASW Killing Zones” (October 1987). Lieutenant Kevin Peppe argued the effects that acoustic parity would have on the strategy in “Acoustic Showdown for the SSNs” (July 1987). And Coast Guard Commander Bruce Stubbs reinforced his service’s specific inclusion in the strategy in “The Coast Guard’s Trident,” (June 1986).
Foreign officers chimed in as well, with Royal Navy Commander S. V. Mackay’s “The Maritime Strategy: An Allied Reaction” (April 1987). Commander Daniel Steward’s report on a forward, Arctic-theater SEAL expedition rivaled anything in National Geographic in “Ski Across Greenland” (June 1986). And leading naval advocate and analyst Bing West weighed in with “The Maritime Strategy: The Next Step” (January 1987), occasioning yet another round of vigorous “Comment and Discussion.”
The decade was about more than just the Maritime Strategy and the 600-Ship Navy, of course. The Navy’s at-sea exercises were complemented by its real-world operations, including 6th Fleet Commander Vice Admiral Frank Kelso’s spectacular raid on Gadhafi’s Libya, recounted by Lieutenant Commander Robert E. Stumpf in “Air War with Libya” (August 1986), based on his own active participation. Reorganization of America’s defense establishment was also afoot, culminating in the Goldwater-Nichols Act. Seth Cropsey alerted Proceedings readers to some of its not-so-beneficial implications in his “JCS Reorganization” (July 1985) and “One Officer at the Top?” (December 1985).
Proceedings wasn’t alone in providing a Naval Institute-sponsored forum for discussion of maritime strategy, force levels, and operations in the 1980s. The Institute also convened a complementary series of conferences on naval strategy and policy all around the country, showcasing a variety of points of view. And the Naval Institute Press published the gripping blockbuster novels The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy and Flight of the Intruder by Stephen Coonts, as well as Captain Wayne Hughes’ Fleet Tactics, Colin Gray and Roger Barnett’s Seapower and Strategy, and John Hattendorf’s edited edition of Rear Admiral J. C. Wylie’s perceptive but by-then almost forgotten Military Strategy, reminding us that U.S. naval officers have often thought strategically. Each of these (and other books from the Press) contributed to the discussion—as well as the role that American sea power played in helping win the Cold War.
And we did help to win it. As we were directed to. At the recommissioning of the USS New Jersey (BB-62) in December 1982, President Reagan forcefully declared that “Maritime superiority for us is a necessity. We must be able in time of emergency to venture in harm’s way, controlling air, surface, and subsurface areas to assure access to all the oceans of the world. Failure to do so will leave the credibility of our conventional defense forces in doubt.” And half a decade earlier, he had summarized what his policy toward the Cold War would be: “We win and they lose, what do you think of that?”
Well, we thought that was the right national security policy to follow. So we did. To victory. Using the forum that Proceedings provided to inform and empower us. What do you think of that?