ABSTRACT
This chapter tracks the shifts in U.S., and other, naval thinking in the turbulent era that followed the end of the Cold War. The disappearance of the Soviet Union ushered in America’s “unipolar moment” as the U.S. Navy had no serious rivals at sea, only a host of allies and partners. This allowed it to concentrate its efforts on maritime power projection “against the shore” in a series of declaratory policies and operations that it considered were in defense of a globalized trade-based international order. But serious naval competitors began increasingly to appear and as the nature of the threats it had to deal with became both more diverse and demanding. The U.S. Navy faced an increasingly multipolar world in which great power competition re-emerged as a planning preoccupation. Faced with this as well as with the still unfamiliar tasks of responding to international terrorism and massive transnational crime at sea, the U.S. Navy, its allies and partners, have had radically to adjust their thinking against a constantly changing international environment.
