Author Description

As the Vietnam War drew to a close and the Cold War entered a phase of détente, the decade of the 1970s opened for the U.S. Navy with a resurgence of thinking about naval strategy and the role of the Navy in American defense posture.While the emphasis during the 1950s and 1960s had been on nuclear deterrence, the experience of the Vietnam War and the rising number of local crises increasingly stressed the role of conventional arms. Many of the documents reprinted here were public statements. In all cases, however, these documents remain little known and mostly inaccessible, certainly outside the Navy itself. They need to be read with careful attention to their historical and institutional contexts. They are not always easy to interpret, and they differ substantially in the weight they carried at the time. For these reasons, the documents are accompanied by a general essay that locates them in their contexts, as well as by brief commentaries. This is one volume of a four part series; together, they will provide for the first time a comprehensive picture of the evolution of high-level U.S. Navy (and to some extent U.S.Marine Corps) strategic thinking over the half-century following the end of World War II. (Originally published by the Naval War College Press.)