Strategic Culture and Its Relationship to Naval Strategy

Abstract : At the Naval War College's Current Strategy Forum in June 2006, the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Michael Mullen, called for the creation of a new maritime strategy. The key for the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard in formulating a new strategy will be in describing how, within the context of a national military strategy, maritime forces can make a strategic difference. There are three parts to this requirement. First, it should be cast as a strategy. Secondly, it should be closely aligned with national military strategy, for, as Samuel Huntington sagely observed over fifty years ago, The resources which a service is able to obtain in a democratic society are a function of the public support of that service. The service has the responsibility to develop this necessary support, and it can only do this if it possesses a strategic concept which clearly formulates its relationship to the national security. And, thirdly, the strategy must be in harmony with Navy strategic culture. When the Navy's Cold War maritime strategy was crafted in the early 1980s, it fulfilled each of these three requirements. It was a strategy because it had strategic context: it addressed a specific adversary in specific geographic places along a phased transition in time. It was not doctrine, which tends to be essentially context free. It was complementary to the national, and NATO, strategy of flexible response, and it offered a way to employ naval forces (including allied naval forces) in order to take the war to the Soviets in places, against targets, and at times of our own choosing, not theirs. The question the crafters of the strategy asked themselves was: How can naval forces employ the dimensions of warfare--time, geographic space, and intensity--to influence the course and outcome of the war?