ABSTRACT
Drawing upon the Mahanian mystique, the "maritime strategy" was a broad concept for the conduct of global war in which it was assumed Western Europe would remain the prime Soviet objective. The goal of the strategy was to "use maritime forces in combination with the efforts of our sister services and the forces of our allies to bring about war termination on favorable terms." In the new, "unipolar" world of the 1990s, it might be argued that the allegedly unilateralist bent of the maritime strategy should provide the basis for the post-Cold War posture of the United States Navy. The importance of maritime forces increased with the adoption by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) of the flexible response strategy in 1967. In Europe, NATO is coming to terms with the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
