Welcome to 2023—the sesquicentennial year of the U.S. Naval Institute!
This first issue of 2023 kicks off our 150th celebration, marked each month with a special logo noting this time. Each 2023 issue will include a bonus 8-page section dedicated to highlights of past Proceedings on a particular topic. Most months, the section will align with the issue’s theme. Denis Clift, our scholar in residence (and international man of mystery who served as the Proceedings editor-in-chief in the early 1960s and once traveled to the Soviet Union with Henry Kissinger), is mining gold from our archive each month. Think of it as “Where We Were” on steroids. The first installment—in keeping with January’s traditional focus on the surface navy—is “Surface Navy Weapons,” tracing the development of surface guns and then the advent of torpedoes and missiles with greater range and accuracy. Next month he’ll look at naval training and education over the decades.
Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) has been a major topic in our pages since we published “Distributed Lethality” in January 2015. In “Distribute DMO to Tactical Commanders,” Navy Captain Tom Clarity says, “Distributed maritime operations has not been properly explained at the tactical level,” but he offers an example from nature as a way to imagine how it should work in a fluid, dynamic situation. Mission command plays a big role. “Assessing the Expeditionary Sea Base” by Captain Daryle Cardone, Commander Ben Coyle, and Lieutenant Commander Daniel Murphy, U.S. Navy, (pp. 40–45) answers a lot of questions we have had since the USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB-3) entered the fleet a few years ago. What is the Navy going to do with that thing? Well, this article talks about operations the ship conducted in the Fifth Fleet AOR in 2021, its capabilities, capacities, and limitations.
Naval warfare always has an element of geometry to it. In December 2021 and May 2022, the PLA Navy’s first aircraft carrier, Liaoning, operated in the East China Sea, the Miyako Strait, and the Philippine Sea. With numerous surface escorts—all long-range missile shooters—the Liaoning conducted flight operations with its J-15 fighters and helicopters. Commander Mike Dahm, U.S. Navy (Retired)—a retired naval intelligence officer and expert on the PLAN—analyzes those operations in “Lessons from the Changing Geometry of PLA Navy Carrier Ops."
Lieutenant Commander Zachary Zarow, U.S. Navy, has penned an outstanding Professional Note this month: “Ships Need Better Combat Damage Control Training” draws sobering damage control lessons from World War II through the 1980s Tanker War. And this month’s Asked & Answered includes some of our readers’ best sea-and-anchor-detail stories!
You may notice that the Ukrainian flag we have been flying on our cover since last April has moved inside to this page for now. It is our hope that a war that has already dragged on far longer than anyone expected—especially Vladimir Putin’s invasion force—will come to an end acceptable to Ukraine before our anniversary celebration concludes. But we continue to stand with Kyiv.
Until next month, stay warm and keep reading.
