Strategy Shelved by Steven T Wills

Author:Steven T Wills [Wills, Steven T]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

MAKING THE CHANGE IN NAVY STRATEGY

By early 1990 it had become evident to many in the Navy’s strategy community that a replacement was needed for the Maritime Strategy. The collapse of the Eastern European communist governments of the Warsaw Pact over the course of 1989 strongly suggested that even if the Soviet Union survived, the global threat it posed to Western interests would be diminished. The end of the Cold War as proclaimed by President George H. W. Bush and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1989 at the conclusion of their summit in Malta accelerated the process.1 The Maritime Strategy, developed over the course of the 1980s, focused mostly on meeting the global Soviet naval threat. Some kind of strategic reorganization along regional lines had appeared likely as early as 1987, when Joint Staff planners reviewing the national military strategy suggested a more regional and less global approach. This fell in line with the greater powers being given to regional commanders following implementation of the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 introducing a joint structure for the military. The legislation serves as a useful reference point in the origins of post–Cold War strategic reorganization.2

Many of the same people who had been involved in the development of the Maritime Strategy in the 1980s led the way toward crafting a replacement. As in the 1980s the process relied on staff from the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (OPNAV), think tank experts and scholars, and senior officers. The changes brought about by the end of the Cold War, the Goldwater-Nichols Act, and the 1991 Gulf War, however, dictated a different product with much-reduced influence on both the Navy and national strategy compared with its predecessor. Geopolitical assumptions about the emerging post–Cold War world demanded a very different product. Littoral and land-based operations, rather than blue water naval strategy, would play the lead roles. Littoral warfare was a new concept for naval planners, some of whom held that the area of engagement extended from coastal regions to six hundred miles inland, which would include 80 percent of the world’s capital cities and 95 percent of the global population.3 The Marine Corps, previously just a component part of naval planning, was to be integral to developing the new strategy.

The inevitable post–Cold War drawdown in military strength complicated the development of a new strategy by demanding greater OPNAV focus on budget and programmatic functions. Thus, N8 (Resources, Warfare Requirements, and Assessments), the programmatic arm of the OPNAV staff, significantly increased its power and influence between 1991 and 1994 at the expense of the strategy and policy divisions. By 1994, a de facto strategy based on management of the force structure rather than meeting a threat applied as the Navy approved and disseminated successors to the Maritime Strategy to the fleet.4

The apparent success of joint approaches in fighting the Gulf War, in particular in regard to Army and Air Force operations, demanded that the Navy’s follow-on strategy parallel that of the other services. This required

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