ABSTRACT

The United States Navy is facing a period of introspection as it transitions from the Cold War era, which called for a strategy of maritime supremacy, to a more uncertain time of smaller-scale events such as Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction (SSTR) operations. Unlike the other services, which have found themselves involved in nearly continuous combat operations for the past decade, senior naval officers have been forced to reconsider their core mission skill set and its relevance to the evolving threat environment. In so doing, they have recognized, albeit grudgingly, that while there may still be a need for carrier battle groups, submarines, and other traditional types of sea-dominance vessels, far more prevalent will be those sorts of operations that call for the mobile logistical and support capabilities that are inherent in naval forces. These include peacekeeping, humanitarian, stability, security, transition, and reconstruction capabilities – missions that were partly responsible for the creation of a navy in the first place. Stability operations were quite common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and were understood to represent an integral aspect of a great state’s diplomatic mission overseas. In essence, the Navy has discovered that, by looking to its future, it has found its new missions in its past. This discovery, however, has not been fully embraced by today’s naval officer corps, most of whom were weaned on the concept of a blue-water navy requiring large numbers of capital ships trained to fight a peer adversary.