By Robert C. Rubel*
The more deeply one thinks about strategy the harder it is to pin down exactly what it is. This problem is more than an academic musing when it comes to the Navy. The Navy routinely publishes documents that it calls strategy, but these vary widely in form and focus, and in any case are the result of different processes, so much so that it is hard to recognize some as actual strategy. Congresswoman Elain Luria contends that the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act “effectively ended U.S. naval strategy.” What she means is that if one regards strategy as a plan for defeating an enemy, then the Navy no longer has a role in developing such plans, a marked difference from the early 1980s when the Navy developed its Maritime Strategy, a global plan for confronting the Soviet Union in a conventional war.
