Suchergebnisse

"The General Board of the Navy, existing from 1900 to 1950, was a uniquely American and unparalleled strategic planning organization at the time of its establishment. As John T. Kuehn shows, this was the United States' first modern general staff in peacetime, as well as the nexus for naval thought and strategic thinking. The Board's creation was very much a reflection of the reformist spirit of the times that also gave birth to the Army War College, the Army General Staff, and the Chief of Naval Operations. By the 1920s, the General Board was a permanent feature of the Navy and was regarded as the premier strategic "think tank" for advice to the Secretary of the Navy. The service of the men who comprised it is little-known, but their collaborative ethos should serve as a model for their modern counterparts. Kuehn's work offers both the first single-volume history of the General Board of the Navy, as well as analysis of the U.S. Navy during periods of great transition in both peace and war."--Provided by publisher

The U.S. Navy is currently at war on behalf of the United States and its partners in the seas off the coast of Yemen. The nation's earlier Quasi-War with France (1798–1801) shares many of the same attributes with this current conflict. Both involve attacks on neutral shipping and thereby the vital interests of the United States, and both were unprovoked, as the shipping under attack has not violated any international laws or sovereignty. The current conflict traces its origins to both the long-running Yemeni Civil War as well as the more recent Israel-Hamas war. It offers both insight and opportunity for the United States and its maritime partners. Insights reflect key issues involved in protecting maritime shipping in the current environment of high-technology missiles and unmanned aerial systems (UAS, a.k.a. drones), as well as in examining older concepts of sea control such as convoys. Finally, it offers the United States a graphic reminder of the importance of sea power and why the nation has a navy in the first place.

The U.S. Navy's current trajectory may remind the reader of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) prior to the outbreak of World War II in the Pacific in late 1941. This article argues that many of the same problems the IJN faced against its larger U.S. opponent in World War II exist today in the U.S. Navy's planning and preparation for possible conflict with the People's Republic of China. Problems that both navies share include brittle readiness, planning for a short war with a resulting doctrine to match, and a fleet that is too small to sustain any form of attritional war at sea. The article further argues that in many senses the U.S. Navy is less prepared today than was the IJN in 1941. The author provides several recommendations for how to begin to correct these difficulties.

Normally, a recommendation regarding for which audience a book is best suited comes at the end of the review. In this case, it comes first because Professor Aaron Friedberg provides a tight mono- graph that illuminates areas of great misunderstanding to a large population in the policy and defense communities: the debate over the concept of Air-Sea Battle (ASB) and the vernacular of mod- ern maritime strategy.

Commander Henry J. Hendrix has writ- ten a neat monograph based on his doctoral work. He makes two related arguments: first, that one cannot understand the diplomatic style of President Theodore Roosevelt without first understanding his attitude toward the efficacy and use of naval power; and second, that the existing literature has not adequately integrated naval and military historical methods of analysis with existing diplomatic historical approaches. Consequently, previous interpretations of Roosevelt's foreign policy decisions, as they relate to incidents that involved the use of naval power, are incomplete, precisely because they do not fuse the diplomatic and political with the naval—especially the perspective reflected by the navalist attitudes of Theodore Roosevelt.