Overview

This collection of documents reflecting the evolution of official thinking within the United States Navy and Marine Corps during the post-Cold War era concerning the fundamental missions and strategy of the sea services is part of a larger project designed to bring greater transparency to an important dimension of our recent naval history. This project was initiated by Professor John Hattendorf with his authoritative study in Newport Paper 19, which utilized much previously classified material, of the so-called Maritime Strategy developed and promulgated by the Navy during the 1980s. In the present volume, Newport Paper 27, covering the decade of the 1990s, Professor Hattendorf assembles for the first time in a single publication all the major naval strategy and policy statements of this period. Though all are public documents, most of these statements remain very little known and relatively inaccessible, at any rate outside the Navy itself. They are also not always easy to interpret, reflecting as they often do subtle shifts in emphasis or the nuances of internal bureaucratic argument rather than broadly understandable major changes in strategic thought or practice. Accordingly, the documents are accompanied by an introductory essay that attempts to put them in the proper historical and institutional perspective, as well as by a brief commentary for each that provides additional pertinent information and attempts to assess wider significance. A second Newport Paper dealing with comparable naval strategy statements of the 1970s and 1980s, in the same format and also edited by Professor Hattendorf. It is important to bear in mind that this material is not merely of historical interest. In his address to the annual Current Strategy Forum at the Naval War College in June 2006, the Chief of Naval Operations. Adm. Michael Mullen, announced his intention to craft what he called a new maritime strategy geared to the contemporary and emerging global security environment. The complex and not altogether happy story of earlier efforts within the Navy along similar lines can contribute in vital ways to preparing essential groundwork for such an undertaking.

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