ABSTRACT
During the early days of the Cold War, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) enjoyed an overwhelming margin of maritime superiority. Had a conflict broken out in Europe, the United States Navy (USN) would quickly have been able to secure the sea line communication across the Atlantic and to press the war at sea forward, projecting conventional and nuclear power ashore, including against the USSR itself. Flexible response increased the importance of the American and other allied naval contributions to NATO well before the USN’s articulation of its ‘maritime strategy’. As NATO was placing more reliance upon its maritime forces to perform its traditional tasks, the capacity of the Warsaw Pact to deny NATO use of the seas had increased markedly. By the late 1970s, allied maritime forces, while indispensable to the strategy of flexible response, provided no solutions to the unavoidably ambiguous and uncertain character of that strategy.
