The New Maritime Strategy: SECNAV’s Speech

SECNAV introduced the new MS before the International Seapower Symposium at Newport last week – and the speech is well worth reviewing if you haven’t heard or seen it yet (available here or with highlights here).   It is revealing in both the expected expository points re. the new MS as well as emphasis he placed in certain areas that many have complained are not explicitly mentioned in the MS – to wit, noting our (Navy’s) core missions to be:

"Providing combat airpower, carrying out land attack missions, providing amphibious assault capability, providing military logistics and executing strike missions at sea continue to be our raison d’etre"

This also comes in the context of a larger discussion of Mahanian maritime dominance (check pgs 2 & 3).

Now, I know the MS wasn’t signed out by SECNAV and that it was a product of the three maritime service chiefs and their staffs.  It is interesting, however, that SECNAV would choose an International Seapower Seminar and the venue of the rollout of the MS to emphasize maritime dominance in addition to the new points in the MS.  To YHS, it would seem this was a tacit nod to the old fart crowd (of which, being these few years retired from the Service, YHS could probably be numbered)…

Oh, and one other interesting item – the OSD press release on the new MS.  Big deal you say?  Well, yes.  First off, OSD as a whole has typically looked askance at Navy’s strategy documents and typically refrained from mentioning in even a neutral, much less positive framework.  Second – it was OSD’s press release for a Service strategy document that OSD and SECDEF himself had no hand in crafting or chopping.  Again, it would seem that this was a tacit approval of the content of the MS by SECDEF without upsetting the other Service’s applecarts in the process.  Which, if carried to a logical end, would seem to bode well for the future it implies. 

That, or I just spent too many years divining levels of favoritism in the Soviet bureaucracies by whomever was standing closest to Brezhnev et al on Lenin’s Tomb for the May Day parades…