ABSTRACT
Foreign policy is domestic policy writ large has increasingly become the theme in area studies and in writings about economic and military relationships. Of all the domestic sources of military policy, the economic factor is the one which most immediately and most persistently demands attention. Domestic factors affect the size of the slice of the national budgetary cake which a particular navy is given, and through this naval procurement and the quality and quantity of its manpower will be affected. The governmental system is important in the development of a country's naval policy because its structure affects the way the political community identifies its interests, conceives its policies, develops its resources, sees its threats, exploits its opportunities, allocates its resources and ultimately meets its challenges. Ideological factors include such influences as the perceptions of those involved in shaping policy, and of their cluster of beliefs about their state's aims and interests in the outside world.
