U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1980s: Selected Documents

The eight documents in this collection are the key published statements that the Navy's leadership created during the 1990s to explain itself to the men and women of the Navy and, in several instances, to Congress, and to the general public. 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. 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.