"Acknowledging that 21st-century navies face significant technological, operational, and administrative challenges, this book explores the organizational and bureaucratic factors affecting naval innovation, addresses the impact of new tactics and technologies on war at sea, and explores the ways in which naval innovation in an interconnected world can engage with the challenges of operating with partners"--

Toward a New Maritime Strategy examines the evolution of American naval thinking in the post-Cold War era. It recounts the development of the U.S. Navy’s key strategic documents from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the release in 2007 of the U.S. Navy’s maritime strategy, A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower. This penetrating intellectual history critically analyzes the Navy’s ideas and recounts how they interacted with those that govern U.S. strategy to shape the course of U.S. naval strategy. The book explains how the Navy arrived at its current strategic outlook and why it took nearly two decades to develop a new maritime strategy. Haynes criticizes the Navy’s leaders for their narrow worldview and failure to understand the virtues and contributions of American sea power, particularly in an era of globalization. This provocative study tests institutional wisdom and will surely provoke debate in the Navy, the Pentagon, and U.S. and international naval and defense circles.

A Brief Guide to Maritime Strategy is a deliberately compact introductory work aimed at junior seafarers, those who make decisions affecting the sea services, and those who educate seafarers and decision-makers. It introduces readers to the main theoretical ideas that shape how statesmen and commanders make and execute maritime strategy in times of peace and war. Following in the spirit of Bernard Brodie's Layman's Guide to Naval Strategy, a World War II-era book whose title makes its purpose plain, it will be a companion volume to such works as Geoffrey Till's Seapower and Wayne Hughes's Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat, the classic treatise that explains how to handle navies in fleet actions. It takes the mystery out of maritime strategy, which should not be an arcane art for practitioners or policy-makers, and will help the next generation think about strategy.

Fighting the Fleet recognizes that fleets conduct four distinct but interlocking tasks at the operational level of war--striking, screening, scouting, and basing--and that successful operational art is achieved when they are brought to bear in a cohesive, competitive scheme. In explaining these elements and how they are conjoined for advantage, a central theme emerges: despite the utility and importance of jointness among the armed forces, the effective employment of naval power requires a specialized language and understanding of naval concepts that is often diluted or completely lost when too much jointness is introduced. Woven into the fabric of the book are the fundamental principles of three of the most important naval theorists of the twentieth century: Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske, Rear Admiral J.C. Wylie, and Captain Wayne Hughes. While Cares and Cowden advocate the reinvigoration of combat theory and the appropriate use of operations research, they avoid over-theorizing and have produced a practical guide that empowers fleet planners to wield naval power appropriately and effectively in meeting today's operational and tactical challenges.

Rear Admiral Raja Menon contends that nations embroiled in Continental wars have historically had poor maritime strategies. He develops the argument that navies that have been involved in such wars have made poor contributions to politial objectives, and outlines future strategies.

Original publication and copyright date: 2010.

“Engrossing and illuminating.” —Arthur Herman, Wall Street Journal When Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981, the United States and NATO were losing the Cold War. The USSR had superiority in conventional weapons and manpower in Europe, and it had embarked on a massive program to gain naval preeminence. But Reagan already had a plan to end the Cold War without armed conflict. In this landmark narrative, former navy secretary John Lehman reveals the untold story of the naval operations that played a major role in winning the Cold War.