Overview

"As U.S. strategy shifts (once again) to focus on great power competition, Strategy Shelved provides a valuable, analytic look back to the Cold War era by examining the rise and eventual fall of the U.S. Navy's naval strategy system from the post-World War II era to 1994. Steven T. Wills draws some important conclusions that have relevance to the ongoing strategic debates of today. His analysis focuses on the 1970s and 1980s as a period when U.S. Navy strategic thought was rebuilt after a period of stagnation during the Vietnam conflict and its high water mark in the form of the 1980s' maritime strategy and its attendant six hundred -ship navy force structure. He traces the collapse of this earlier system by identifying several contributing factors: the provisions of the Goldwater Nichols Act of 1986, the aftermath of the First Gulf War of 1991, the early 1990s revolution in military affairs, and the changes to the Chief of Naval Operations staff in 1992 following the end of the Cold War. All of these conditions served to undermine the existing naval strategy system. The Goldwater Nichols Act subordinated the Navy to joint control with disastrous effects on the long-serving cohort of uniformed naval strategists. The first Gulf War validated Army and Air Force warfare concepts developed in the Cold War but not those of the Navy's maritime strategy. The Navy executed its own revolution in military affairs during the Cold War through systems like AEGIS but did not get credit for those efforts. Finally, the changes in the Navy (OPNAV) staff in 1992 served to empower the budget arm of OPNAV at the expense of its strategists. These measures laid the groundwork for a thirty-year ""strategy of means"" where service budgets, a desire to preserve existing force structure, and lack of strategic vision hobbled not only the Navy, but also the Joint Force's ability to create meaningful strategy to counter a rising China and a revanchist Russian threat. Wills concludes his analysis with an assessment of the return of naval strategy documents in 2007 and 2015 and speculates on the potential for success of current Navy strategies including the latest tri-service maritime strategy. His research makes extensive use of primary sources, oral histories, and navy documents to tell the story of how the U.S. Navy created both successful strategies and how a dedicated group of naval officers were intimately involved in their creation. It also explains how the Navy's ability to create strategy, and even the process for training strategy writers, was seriously damaged in the post-Cold War era."

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9781682476338

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Reviews

Steven Wills combines an advanced understanding of current and historic U.S. defense policy making, a flawless grasp of past legislative mistakes, and a superb appreciation of strategy itself to show the obstacles to U.S. naval strategic thought since the Cold War's end. The book is exceptionally timely as Chinese and Russian actions return the world to its traditional state of great power competition. Advanced strategic thought--and action--demand that the US respond accordingly. Dr. Wills' book ought to be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the turbulence in which naval strategy finds itself today. --Seth Cropsey, senior fellow & director, Center for American Seapower, Hudson Institute Strategy Shelved is a timely and highly relevant study that examines how the Navy developed an extraordinarily effective process to think about and develop strategy in the last two decades of the Cold War and why Navy leaders, unfortunately, failed to appreciate and leverage that process in confronting the challenges in the years following the end of the Cold War. Highly recommended. --Capt. Peter D. Haynes, U.S. Navy (Ret.), author of Toward a New Maritime Strategy: American Naval Thinking in the Post-Cold War Era In Strategy Shelved, Steve Wills provides a critical examination of the navy staff's organization (OPNAV), leadership, and 'thinking' processes from the period of the development of the Maritime Strategy to the early 1990s. Wills examines how naval leaders in the 1980s were able to create a staff culture that fostered a bottom-up process of creative thinking but was effectively disassembled by the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act (1986), leading to a mentality of 'chasing the POM', vice thinking critically. Officials, analysts, and defense institutions the world over should read this account to discover one of those rare instances in time when a planning process succeeded in producing a coherent force structure. --Thomas-Durell Young, senior lecturer, Institute for Security Governance Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California Navies need strategy to guide what they buy, how they train, and how they will fight. Without it, bureaucratic inertia defaults to 'programs of record' to make choices better left to theorists. In Strategy Shelved, Steven Wills shows how the Cold War U.S. Navy successfully used strategy to guide its planning, then lost that ability after 1990. For historians, it opens up the world of an understudied set of thinkers, while serving as a cautionary tale to uniformed and civilian force planners. --Sarandis Papadopoulos, PhD., historian and co-author of Pentagon 9/11 The end of the Cold War transformed the Navy in ways not yet fully understood. Navy veteran Steve Wills has done us all a great service by putting his historian's talents to work unearthing and chronicling the changes and their context, and analyzing their roots and effects. -Capt. Peter M. Swartz (Ret.), senior CNA strategy analyst and former Cold War U.S. Navy strategist There are two kinds of strategists, civilian policy wonks or uniformed leaders. The first have usually never been to sea or heard a shot fired in anger. The latter are often combat veterans and salty warriors of great experience but limited literary skills. Steve Wills is that very rare exception with years of command at sea but also a doctorate who writes clear and elegant prose. He has produced a compelling account of how and why good strategy won the Cold War, and bad strategy lost three successive wars in the mid-East. It is a must-read. --John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy, author of Oceans Ventured and Winning the Cold War at Sea

Author Information

Steven T. Wills is an expert in U.S. Navy strategy and policy at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) in Arlington, VA. He served for twenty years as a U.S. Navy surface warfare officer. He also holds a PhD and MA in history from Ohio University, an MA from the United States Naval War College, and a BA in history from Miami University, Oxford, OH.

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