Strategy Shelved; The Collapse of Cold War Naval Strategic Planning. By Steven T Wills. Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 2021.
Reviewed by Tim Coyle
Naval strategy is the current primary topic of interest in the realm of international relations, particularly in the Indo-Pacific. China has seized on the concepts espoused by grand naval strategists, such as Mahan, Corbett and others of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to prioritise a maritime strategy across all facets of sea power: naval, para-naval (coast guards/maritime militia), commercial shipping, port acquisition and island basing. The Chinese Communist Party aims to become the preeminent world maritime power.
Against this long-term strategic aim are a loose grouping of regional and extra-regional powers led by the United States with its primary asset, the US Navy. Australia, as a formal ally and further engaged with the US and UK in a ‘forever friendship’ (Prime Minister Scott Morrison speaking at the AUKUS announcement), has moved in parallel to enhance our maritime credentials to operate in the near seas.
The title Strategy Shelved; The Collapse of Cold War Naval Strategic Planning, at first sight, promised an insight into what might have caused this concerning state and what effect could this have on the maritime strategic situation the USN and allies are facing today. Steven T Wills is a US Navy specialist in strategy and policy at the Center for Naval Analysis in Arlington, Virginia, and he uses exhaustive research to support his case.
Wills argues the collapse of US Navy strategic planning was due to three causes: the 1990 dissolution of the Soviet Union and the removal of the Soviet navy as a threat, the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act and the 1990-91 Gulf War strategy.
Wills begins his treatise with the post-World War 2 intra-service battles between navy and air power advocates which culminated with the ‘revolt of the admirals’ over retention of aircraft carriers with nuclear strike capability versus the nuclear-armed Strategic Air Command. He then moves to the Maritime Strategy propounded in 1982 by which the USN would fight the Soviet navy. The dissolution of the USSR removed the primary threat and led to existential questioning of US defence planning since the 1950s. In its place came the 1989-94 strategy ‘Forward…From the Sea’, a result of the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which took littoral operations as its basis. Wills argues that while this was generally successful for the period, the USN lost its capacity to grasp and retain the Cold War elements of a strategic organisation. This, Wills claims, was a needless change without adequate assessment of the previously proven system of strategic generation.
The Goldwater-Nichols Act sought to eliminate service parochialism which prevented the Department of Defense developing a joint service doctrine and a new joint military command responsive to civilian leadership. The Goldwater-Nichols Act strengthened the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairmanship and empowered deployed regional commanders who would oversee the confrontation with the USSR. This strengthened the combined arms doctrine the Department of Defense wanted. Wills claims the Goldwater-Nichols Act deleteriously affected the Navy so that it was ill-prepared for the post-Cold War era. The first Gulf War validated Army and Air Force operational doctrines did not reinvigorate Navy strategy.
China’s rise at sea and Russia’s maritime re-emergence has returned the USN to Great Power competition requiring a renewed interest in grand maritime strategy. This has seen the 2015 Cooperative Maritime Strategy and the 2020 Advantage at Sea, the latter encompassing the three US sea services: Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard fostering a distributed maritime operational doctrine.
A 2016 review of the Goldwater-Nichols Act by the Congressional Research Service asked how the Department of Defense could spend $600 billion per year and not achieve all the US goals and the expenditure of $1.6 trillion and 20 years of military engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wills suggests a solution: more decentralisation through semi-autonomous military services guided by the Office of the Secretary of Defense decision-making and resource allocations promoting creativity and motivation through competition.
Wills achieves his aim of arguing the dissipation of US maritime strategy in the years since the collapse of the USSR and its formidable navy. The contemporary challenge of confronting the People’s Liberation Army-Navy, the China Coast Guard, the Chinese maritime militia and associated airpower assets raises the strategic stakes which requires a robust multi-faceted approach. The US Marine Corps is undergoing a major restructuring to enable it to fight innovatively and flexibly across islands and littorals and the US Coast Guard is being seen regularly in the Indo-Pacific region.
Rather disappointedly, it is here that Wills concludes his analysis with the surprising (and defeatist) statement: ‘It will be hard to develop a functioning tri-service strategy in the current contentious environment’. To the non-US reader this is an extraordinary statement. We have seen generational change in strategic maritime interaction: PACOM retitled as the Indo-Pacific Command, the emergence of the Quad (US, Japan, India and Australia), AUKUS which sees the United Kingdom returning to the Indo-Pacific region (with USMC F-35Bs integrated into the HMS Queen Elizabeth air group) and, most significantly, the US accepting it cannot maintain the ‘rules-based order’ in the Indo-Pacific without a strong allied and partnership base. The US and its allies and partners are facing a generational commitment to maritime security in standing against a ‘beyond peer’ strategic competitor.
The lack of mention of allies in Strategy Shelved is a stand-out to the non-US reader. Did NATO have any input into the 1982 Maritime Strategy? What, if any, contribution did allies make to strategic planning post-Soviet collapse – were they help or hindrance to US planning and doctrine?
Strategy Shelved achieves its aim of exposing US maritime strategy deficiencies from the end of the Cold War. It does not attempt to reassure that the current generation of US naval analysts and decision-makers can meet the strategic maritime challenges of the current age. This diminishes the value of the book, particularly to the non-US student of maritime strategy.
