ABSTRACT
Chapters 6, 9 and 12 examine Soviet naval doctrine and the Baltic Fleet from the perspective of organizational rivalry. According to this perspective, inter-service competition is a more important factor in the formulation of doctrine than the influence of the external environment. In the real world, there is seldom a conscious choice between clearly defined alternatives. Various financial, domesticpolitical and bureaucratic constraints exercise their influence, pushing developments in a certain direction. To give professional legitimacy to the outcome, the military then formulates a doctrine in retrospect. The decision makers are not viewed primarily as experts dealing with problems within their sphere of professional competence, but as representatives of rival bureaucracies. In 1990, a US admiral publicly admitted that in ‘peacetime I could just never, never bring myself to do anything to help the Air Force or Army’.1
