ABSTRACT
The great naval debate of the 1980s concerned the United States Navy’s (USN) ‘maritime strategy’. In addition, rather than wait for the Soviet Navy to mount an offensive against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) maritime forces, the strategy called for forward operations in the Soviet Union’s ‘backyard’. The role of the USN for presence and crisis management, as well as its place in nuclear deterrence, has been dealt with in the strategic literature from the Cold War on. It is in the last decade that the problems of seapower in the NATO context have come to the fore. Before that the allied maritime posture was the ‘forgotten front’. In some ways, this can be attributed to an underlying Mahanian influence. Since the Soviet Union did not possess a large modern navy in the early days of the nuclear age, and Western sea control was almost absolute, the Alliance would not be faced with the prospect of major sea battles.
