ABSTRACT

This chapter charts an era of transition in U.S. maritime strategy and operations from the post-Cold War period of power projection “from the sea”—a period in the 1990s of U.S. uni-polarity-to an early-twenty-first-century era of expeditionary warfare and emerging continental-maritime rivalry, set within a new context of conflict with Islamic fundamentalism, of energy and resource competition, and of multi-polar engagement. It begins in 2001, with the 9/11 attack and the U.S. and allied campaign in Afghanistan which followed, and ends in 2009, with the final days of the second Bush term in office and the beginning of the Obama administration. The principal focus of Washington’s post-Cold War strategic attention has shifted increasingly from Europe to the Middle East and Central Asia. Due to 9/11, President Bush apparently saw these regions as the prime source of potential future attacks on the United States. Preventing any new attacks was linked to a neoconservative agenda within his administration to remake the entire region.2 Of course, linked to these factors were the West’s and East Asia’s growing dependence upon imported oil, largely from the Middle East, which is fueling the world economy.3 International competition for energy, together with the sea lines of communication (SLOC) for its transportation-an essential part of the global configuration of U.S. naval-maritime power-means that the wider Middle East is ever more inextricably linked to a world geopolitical competition set in the wide arc of the Eurasian littoral and “Rimland” from the Persian Gulf to East Asia. Within this vast theatre there have been many U.S. “peripheral” strategic initiatives, both those that were executed and others merely projected, during the first decade of the twenty-first century. These have included highly strategic expeditionary campaigns and lower-intensity operations of a “presence” and diplomaticstrategic character. Naval expeditionary power, with its ability to escalate force incrementally, has played an extremely important role throughout this period.