The overriding goal of this Naval S & T Strategic Plan is to provide the vision and key objectives guiding the essential science and technology efforts that will assure the continued supremacy of U.S. Naval forces in the 21st century. This plan implements the current guidance and direction of our senior civilian and military leadership. It focuses and aligns Naval S & T with Naval missions and future capability needs that address the complex challenges presented by both rising peer competitors and irregular/asymmetric warfare. It puts us on a path toward maturing and transitioning enhanced naval capabilities, such as persistent ISR and dominance of the EW spectrum, and toward pursuing revolutionary advances, such as speed-of-light weapons. This strategy will be reviewed and approved by the Naval S & T Corporate Board every two years to ensure its continued relevance. It provides a means and framework to communicate with decision makers and the various external communities that interact with Naval S & T. Inside ONR, this plan will guide our investment planning and decisions. It is also intended to broaden our reach into the scientific community as well as into industry. The plan will be posted on the ONR website (www.onr.navy.mil) as a gateway for industry and academia into the center of Naval S & T.

The Naval Science and Technology (S & T) Strategic Plan describes how the Office of Naval Research sponsors scientific research efforts that will enable the future operational concepts of the Navy and the Marine Corps. This is a broad strategy that articulates a general direction for the future, while retaining sufficient flexibility and freedom of action to meet emerging challenges or alter course as directed by senior Naval leadership. The Navy and Marine Corps depend on S & T to discover, develop and demonstrate high-payoff, game-changing technologies to ensure the Fleet/Force retain a significant advantage over potential adversaries. This plan enables tomorrow's technologies for our warfighters across all domains.

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.

TRB Special Report 306: Naval Engineering in the 21st Century: The Science and Technology Foundation for Future Naval Fleets examines the state of basic and applied research in the scientific fields that support naval engineering and explores whether Office of Naval Research (ONR) activities, under its National Naval Responsibility for Naval Engineering (NNR-NE) initiative, have been effective in sustaining these fields. The committee developed a series of conclusions and recommendations in five areas--the value of the NNR-NE, the state of science and technology supporting naval engineering, the wholeness of the NNR-NE research portfolio, opportunities for enhancement of research and education, and the effectiveness of the NNR-NE initiative. The report's recommendations are addressed to the administrators of the NNR-NE initiative and of ONR.