Cold War Transition, Part III: The Navy

Part I (Army), here

Part II (Air Force) here

Like the Army and Air Force, the Navy avoided moving away from the comfort of its Cold War strategy. During the first post-Soviet, the admirals clung to the philosophy that had driven acquisitions during the Cold War. That strategy had been based on controlling the sea, following the precepts of Alfred Thayer Mahan. The Navy built a large fleet that would, when war started, wrest control of the oceans from the USSR and her communist allies. The main theaters of battle were the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the western Pacific, and the Persian Gulf. The main threats were Soviet attack submarines, missile-armed surface ships, and attack planes flying from land. To fight in these theaters and against this enemy, the Navy built a fleet of aircraft carriers, attack submarines, and cruisers optimized to defend against air attack. Allied to that was submarines carrying a larger proportion of the American nuclear deterrent, whose job was to deter a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s the Navy responded to shrinking defense budgets by reducing the fleet rather than changing it. Thus, instead of 15 aircraft carriers, the Navy went down to 11. Similar reductions occurred in the number of attack submarines, cruisers, and ballistic missile submarines. This was the Cold War strategy, miniaturized. Despite the fact that no other nation in the world has anywhere near the naval power needed to dispute American control of the oceans (the sum total of the world’s aircraft carriers are fewer than the number the United States currently deploys), the U.S. still operates a fleet aimed at fighting exactly such a battle.