1980s Maritime Strategy Series

By Dmitry Filipoff

CIMSEC discussed the 1980s Maritime Strategy with Captain Spencer Johnson (ret.), who was instrumental in assembling the first briefed iteration of the Maritime Strategy in 1982. In this conversation, Capt. Johnson discusses how the strategy had to quickly come together to inform Navy programming, how it was received in its initial briefings by senior leadership, and how the Soviet Union reacted to the Maritime Strategy toward the end of the Cold War.

What was your role in OPNAV when the Maritime Strategy got started?

I went back to OPNAV in January of 1982, on completion of a three-year tour in command of USS Bigelow (DD-942). When I arrived in the Pentagon and checked in, I was told I wasn’t going to 965, I was going back to OP-06, because Vice Admiral Arthur Moreau who was OP-06 at the time had told the bureau that I was coming back to 06. I had had a previous tour at 06 and had a tour on the Joint Staff and Moreau wanted me back in OP-06. So back I went.

I went to OP-603, Strategic Plans. I was there for maybe 3-4 months when I got called up and told by Admiral Moreau himself that he had a new job from me. I was going to be the OP-06 liaison to the programming side of the Navy staff. Irv Blickstein said in his interview there was no connection between plans and policy, and the programming side of the house. But in fact in the spring of 1982 there was a connection, and that connection was me.

I sat in on the deputy program review committee (DPRC) meetings, the two-star level on the programming side of the house. I was liaison to all of the programming side of the house, O-90 and O-9, at that level. I had as a counterpart a captain from intelligence, I believe his name was Alexander, who also was a liaison to the programming side of the house.

This liaison position was something new. It hadn’t existed before. I think I was the first one and who knows, maybe I was the last one. But I was it. I was certainly very grateful because I learned a lot about how the vast bulk of the Navy staff works because they are all basically with their noses down in programs and line items within the Navy budget.

What kind of feedback were you able to give from a strategic sense? What input did a strategy office or a strategy person have in that kind of liaison role?

Well, number one, I wasn’t asked too much. But in OP-06, OP-06B would attend the deputy PRC meetings. Our three-star, Admiral Moreau, would attend the 3-star PRC-level meetings, and I was able to back brief them before they attended those meetings as to what was on the table and what was going to be discussed, and so on. And I sat in a chair behind them when that happened.

How did you initially get started on the first draft of the Maritime Strategy?

In late August or September of 1982, I was the one who received the tasking to produce a maritime strategy. The “snowflake,” we called taskings “snowflakes” because it seemed like they fell out of the sky like flakes of snow, landed on my desk. The reason why was because VCNO Admiral Shear, who wrote the snowflake, said that they wanted a maritime strategy presentation as the kickoff for the POM programming season.

This strategy was to inform the programmers as to what they were spending their money for, so they would have an idea of how the aircraft, submarines, aircraft carriers, destroyers, and so on fit into the big strategic picture. So originally the maritime strategy was not intended to be a tactically executable strategy, it was intended to inform the programming side of the Navy staff as to what they were spending money for. And when it did later become a maritime strategy that was being exercised at sea and so on, that was kind of an offshoot of what originally began as a budgetary strategy.

The snowflake landed on my desk because I was the liaison to the programming side of the house, and if this was to be the kickoff to the programming cycle then I was the guy who was responsible. I spent several days producing three legal pad-sized handwritten outlines of what I thought this ought to look like. And to this I brought several advantages. First, I knew the audience it was going to. Nobody else in OP-06 knew the audience the way I did because I attended the meetings. Secondly, I had had three years on the Joint Staff and I was very familiar with the joint strategic planning system from my seat in the director’s office on the Joint Staff. So I drew up an outline of what I thought this ought to look like for our target audience of programmers.

From my time sitting in on programming meetings at the two-star and above levels, I was pretty well convinced that the programming side of the house didn’t know anything about the strategic planning side of the house. What’s more, they didn’t really care very much because after all strategic planners didn’t command or control any money. On their side of the house, what really counted was money. The deputy DPRC-level meetings were chaired by Rear Admiral Joseph Metcalf. He was quite a character, a very salty dog. He ran these meetings.

When OP-06 was tasked to produce a strategic overview, there were a lot of people around that table, including Metcalf, who thought it couldn’t be done. The Navy had never had a global strategy before. Even in WWII it was not a global strategy, it was theater strategies. This was an effort to produce a global strategy that would inform how the Navy was spending its money in the programming cycle. So there were even bets made that we couldn’t do it.

With the outline in hand, I went to my branch chief in 605 and I said, “Sir, this is bigger than me. We’re going to need some help.” I recommended we go across the hall to 603 and enlist them in the effort. Because when we get down to the actual planned consolidation and execution, that’s not in our shop, that’s in theirs. So we walked across the hall and enlisted the help of 603, and that’s where Stan Weeks was. Roger Barnett, who was a commander at the time, and Stan Weeks essentially shouldered the burden in OP-603, and I produced my end from 605.

Now, we only had about three weeks to do this, which is a pretty fast time. We had to beat the deadline of putting this at the beginning of the next POM cycle. We had a hard deadline. So obviously it was split, with everybody in 605 and 603 making their contributions, and 605 was primarily myself. I started out with an overview of the joint strategic planning system and what the joint strategic operation plan, the JSOP, called for in the event of a war with the Soviet Union. And we went through the three tables of forces in the JSOP, the JIL-READ, and the JEEP. JIL-READ was a joint document that stood for the joint long-range estimate for planning. The JEEP was the joint intelligence estimate for planning. We used those two things for background for what we could expect from the Soviet Union in the maritime sense. And then we’ve laid out what the Joint Staff, what the joint planning system expected from the Navy in the course of a global conflict with the Soviet Union.

Here we began to get into numbers. At the time the JSOP called for three different Navy force levels. One was what we actually had. The second was what we would have at the end of the FYDP, in other words, five years down the road. And the third one was what we actually needed.

We had at that time 12 carrier battle groups. If you go all the way to the end to what we actually required, the number was something like 23 carrier battle groups. It was that sort of thing that I laid out. And believe me, none of the flag officers in the OPNAV staff outside of OP-06 had ever seen any of this. So we were at the Secret level, and we were really laying it out. And then we said, ‘But we don’t have that many carriers.’ We have 12, but one of those was in SLEP, a two-year program that essentially rebuilt the carrier for extended service life.

In drafting the maritime strategy, we said in effect we’re going to have 11 carriers. We assume that within 60 days of the opening of hostilities that we can have all 11 at sea. We have 11 carriers to distribute amongst the theaters for their various needs. Then OP 605 took the strategic plan for each naval commander in each theater and laid it down and with maneuver and whatever, could show each theater command how many forces they would have at any particular point in time, beginning with the two carriers in the Mediterranean doing their business in the Eastern Med with the Russians. The Navy would be sweeping out with carriers from the East Coast and attacking the Russians in the far north in the Atlantic and even as far north as the Russian north. We did the same thing with the Pacific. If we had a carrier in the Indian Ocean he would do his business with the Russians in the Indian Ocean area, then sweep around and join the carriers in the Pacific and then going up to the north Pacific.

At that time the Navy was pushing for 15 carrier battle groups and 600 ships. So we did two excursions here. We did one with the 11 carriers that we had, and we did one with the 15 carriers that were in the FYDP, or what the Navy was building toward. We could demonstrate the difference what the Navy could do with 11 carriers versus 15 carriers.

That basically consisted of what we titled the Maritime Strategy. We titled it “the Maritime Strategy” because we took all elements that would participate in this strategy. It was not just the Navy, we wrapped in the Army, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps. And we didn’t ask them, we didn’t say ‘mother may I do this.’ We didn’t have meetings with the other services, we just didn’t have the time. We took what was in the plans and we wrapped them in, and I was a little permissive and imaginative with some things that weren’t even written in the plans.

For instance, in the Maritime Strategy we did a lot of offensive minelaying. And the best minelayer we had was a B-52D bomber aircraft because it could carry more mines than any other aircraft we had in the Navy inventory. So we wrote Air Force B-52s into the Maritime Strategy, we wrote the Marines and the Army into securing islands in the Atlantic and elsewhere. The Marines going first, then being relieved by Army forces so the Marines could push on to other things later in the implementation of the strategy.

We didn’t ask them. We just did it. We wrote it in. And we called it a maritime strategy to indicate this was not just the Navy.

We had to do this very quickly. We had almost daily late-afternoon run-throughs and rehearsals with three or four flag officers. And they included OP-60, our immediate boss Rear Admiral Bob Kirksey, his deputy, Commodore Dudley Carlson, and Vice Admiral Art Moreau, who was OP-06. And we would have these rehearsals, these run-throughs, and it was interesting because it wasn’t so much them correcting Stan Weeks and I, it was really us familiarizing them with what was in it. And so they had it down literally by heart. And so we gave the first presentation in October to the DPRC, at the two-star level, chaired by Admiral Metcalf.

Once the presentation was ready, what happened with those first few briefings? How was it received?

Stan Weeks and I had a presentation ready. We each did about half, and it took a little over an hour to make the presentation. But before almost anyone could say anything afterward, Admiral Metcalf picked up the phone at his end of the table, called the CNO’s office, and said “You’ve got to see this right away.”

We were not prepared for that kind of success. Within 48 hours they had convened a PRC meeting, program review committee, and now we are at the three-star level. This time the meeting is attended by the CNO and the Vice Chief, as well as all of his principal three-stars on the OPNAV staff. This is Admiral Watkins, he is the new CNO.

We made the presentation, and at the end of it there weren’t many questions. Admiral Trost, who was O9 at the time, made one correction to one of our slides where I showed the number of VP squadrons in the Navy Reserve and we had dropped a digit, it wasn’t three, it was 13. That was his principal feedback.

It was very interesting. We opined that we could put 11 carriers to sea within the first 60 days of a conflict, everybody except the carrier in SLEP. Admiral Watkins asked Admiral Dutch Schultz, who was OP-05, the head of Navy Air, “Is that true Dutch, could we do 11?” And Vice Admiral Schultz said, “No, Sir.” And Watkins asked, “Well, how many do you think?” And Schultz said, “I think between four and six, maybe.”

Woah, this really got Admiral Watkins’ attention. He asked, “Why is that, Dutch?” “The answer is that we don’t have enough yellow gear,” (the little tractors that pull planes around the flight deck), “we don’t have enough ammunition, and we don’t have enough aviation spare parts to put more than four or five carriers at sea on a wartime footing.”

What the Navy was doing at the time was that they offloaded that stuff and put it on the guy who was about to go. They were crossdecking it. Not just people, but spare parts, gear, and munitions as well. Vice Admiral Dutch Schultz said, “I just don’t have that stuff to put all those carriers to sea and expect them to fight.”

Admiral Watkins at the end of that meeting laid down a number of mandates. Number one, he wanted all of those deficiencies corrected in the budget cycle. He wanted to be able to put all of those carriers to sea with the munitions, the yellow gear, and the aviation spare parts they required.

Number two, he wasn’t going to buy anything in the program that was to be put together that didn’t support this strategy. Now, this posed a logistics problem for us, because we only had two sets of slides and now we had to provide everybody with copies of the briefing so that they could tune their program submissions to what they thought their role was in executing the strategy.

The programmers were very quiet. In terms of feedback, it was mostly Admiral Trost making his comment about the squadrons in the Navy Reserve and some finger pointing about putting those carriers to sea.

The next thing Admiral Trost said was, “I want this sent to the War College and I want it wargamed. I want it exercised in our active fleet exercises, and I want it updated and reviewed every year.” So those were immediate outcomes from the first time the CNO saw the briefing.

The next time, and this went in rather rapid order, soon after the PRC meeting there was a quarterly meeting of the fleet commanders-in-chiefs. Admiral Watkins took this to the fleet CINCs meeting. The presentation was given by Admiral Moreau, OP-06. The feedback from that meeting was that the fleet CINCs were all delighted with this because they saw their own fleet theater plans mirrored. We didn’t change their plans, all we did was essentially say, “This is the sequence in which they will be executed, and with what forces.”

It got a big upcheck from the fleet CINCs, which I think made the CNO feel a lot better about its viability in terms of becoming a strategy, a tactical-strategic strategy, as well as a programming tool.

The next major briefing was given to SECNAV. Again Admiral Moreau was the presenter. I’m sure the CNO and VCNO and a number of the 3-stars were there when that happened. John Lehman immediately saw this as the rationale for his 600-ship Navy. He ordered, among other things, that all captains and admirals in the Pentagon who are going to make any kind of an appearance before Congress had to see this strategy. Lehman wanted all these people, if you were going to Congress, he wanted you familiar with this, because he was going to go to Congress with it, and he did. So now we presented it in iterations of one or two sessions in the Army auditorium of the fifth floor of the Pentagon.

The next significant presentation we did was we briefed the Strategic Studies Group of the Chief of Staff of the Air Force. Recall that we had written the Air Force into the strategy, and this was us telling them how we had done that. They were delighted. The Air Force was now given a maritime role, which they really hadn’t been pushing before but they had it now.

Then the presentation was given to the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Weinberger, in the Tank. I believe Vice Admiral Moreau was the briefer. We were told move it fast, keep it moving, because Mr. Weinberger is known to drop off to sleep in some of these kinds of meetings. So we kept it fast, kept it moving, and at the end of the presentation when all was said and done, Mr. Weinberger walked out and put his arm around the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Vessey. And he said, “When can I see the Army and the Air Force one?” That turned up the heat on what the Army and the Air Force had been working on for years, called AirLand Battle. And that became the Army and the Air Force concept, which the maritime strategy helped provoke.

The briefing was well-received by all its audiences. The reason why I say that is that this was the first time many of them became privy to what was happening in the plans and policy side of the house. They were being read in on the Navy’s core planning projects. So it was well-received.

Without asking the other services, we brought them in at the beginning. For all of them, it meant a new mission to accomplish or an old mission to accomplish. Major General Tom Morgan out of the Marine Corps Commandant’s staff, he attended every briefing we gave because General Morgan learned a lot from it and took that back to the Marine Corps and learned how the Marine Corps was going to be supported by this Maritime Strategy.

I know that General Morgan and the Commandant were really right on board with this because again we used Marine Corps forces to secure necessary islands that we needed to use for island hopping and other things in the conduct of war in the Atlantic and the Pacific. The Marines were happy that they were being utilized in this manner. On the Atlantic side the Marines were training to go to Norway. We also used the Marines initially to secure basic islands that we had to have like Iceland and Greenland to keep the GIUK gap closed. We put submarines up beyond the gap to attack Russian submarines and even bases up around the northern cape there. In the end the carriers go through the GIUK cap and attack Russia. Not nuclear necessarily, but they attack Russia. The strategy was kind of all-encompassing. I never got the sense the Marines were antithetical to the strategy.

The Air Force bought into this because of their B-52s. Within four or five weeks of producing and briefing the strategy we devised several MOUs, a couple of which I helped write, which gave the Air Force the Harpoon missile, which they added to their B-52s and maritime surveillance aircraft. So they now had an anti-ship punch they could use. Initially I was kind of against giving them Harpoon because every one you gave them was one we didn’t have, and I was told, “Don’t worry, the ones we gave the Air Force were the ones Iran bought before the revolution.” We gave the Air Force this maritime role, and they were delighted. I can’t think of anybody that was opposed to or anti this Maritime Strategy.

If we had not written the other services into it, it would just be a Navy strategy and viewed as a Navy push for budget dollars. But since we wrote everybody else in, I mean we put everybody that had a maritime impact into the strategy. Nobody to my knowledge was left out, even though we didn’t ask them. If we said it was a pure Navy strategy, they would just close the door on us.

Did the Army have some issues with it at this point?

If they did, I didn’t hear about it. We used the Army and the National Guard in occupying Atlantic islands and other islands. We had these islands initially taken and occupied by Marines and then relieved by Army. Places like Iceland, Azores, other places. It was Marines first and then Army coming in behind them.

The Army liked it because we were still protecting from Soviet interference with the convoys to Europe, which were crucial to the execution of the European campaign. They were rapidly convoyed to Europe and the U.S. Navy in the Maritime Strategy was still removing the threat to those convoys that were so important to the execution of the European campaign. And the Army in those days was almost totally focused on central Europe.

How was this Maritime Strategy different than the Swing Strategy?

What was different about the Maritime Strategy was that we simultaneously executed strategy on a global basis. Before that it might have been this theater and then that theater in some form and sequence. But here we simultaneously executed operations in all the theaters.

When we did the Joint Strategic Operation Plan in the Joint Staff, the most contentious annex to the JSOP was Annex K. Annex K allocated strategic lift, both airborne and maritime. It told theater commanders what they were going to get and when they were going to get it. That was contentious. When you added it all up it was about 300 percent more than what we actually had available to use. Annex K had essentially divided it out sequentially rather than simultaneously.

How did you continue to work on the strategy as an assistant to SECNAV Lehman?

After the Maritime Strategy went down, it was not too long after that I got a phone call on a Friday afternoon from my detailer. He said, “Pack up your briefcase and move up to SECNAV’s office, you’re now working for John Lehman.” For the next two years before I went back to sea again I worked in the Office of Program Appraisal (OPA), but I was a special assistant to John Lehman, with the title of “Special Assistant for Policy Implementation,” which was made up.

I essentially wrote a lot of his Congressional testimony. Much of it revolved around the 600-ship Navy and the Maritime Strategy. I also helped with his annual statement before the various committees on the Navy and I wrapped in what the Navy had done in the past year in those statements.

Did you see much conversation and inputs being shared between the programmers and the strategists? Is there an ideal way this relationship should work, any lessons for today?

My guess is they don’t talk much to each other today (but I’ve been retired 30 years). I know in the years when the Maritime Strategy was alive and well, it was still the kickoff presentation for the programmers. It’s probably not the same today because when the Soviets went away and our major adversary disappeared, and the Maritime Strategy became something else, it just may have fallen off the plate. I don’t know. But I will say, when we gave this for the first time, we were really telling something to the admirals and the senior officers on the programming side of the house. It was opening their eyes to something they’ve never seen or heard before.

From the OP-06 point of view, it may not have even been a need-to-know. All these plans were SECRET or above, and they were not planning in the strategic sense, they were procuring the equipment with which to carry out the plans.

In putting together a strategy for the programmers, I assumed they knew nothing. I was pretty well correct in that. Fleet commanders-in-chief, they are planners in their own right for their particular theater. They are familiar with this to a degree. The programmers on the OPNAV staff were not, they knew nothing about any of this.

I had to start with that front part which I guess you could call a tutorial, to bring them into the broader picture. At one of our late afternoon rehearsals very early on, Commodore Carlson suggested that we drop the tutorial to shorten the briefing a bit. But Admiral Kirksey told him no, and that it is critical toward understanding the whole thing. Carlson probably suggested that because he knew this stuff, but nobody on the programming side of the house knew any of that.

You had said that nobody had tried to do this before, this kind of strategy.

As far as I know, something like this had never been done before. Even in WWII, you had the Atlantic, the Pacific, the South Pacific strategies and force allocations, there was no, as far as I can tell, global plan, in Admiral King’s office or anywhere else for the conduct of WWII.

The Maritime Strategy was a global concept of operations that had to be broken down in a further amount of detail by the fleet commanders and the theater commanders. It wasn’t the end all. It was the big picture, if you will.

Before we actually did this, people like Admiral Metcalf were betting that we couldn’t do it. Maybe they thought it was just too big for anyone to wrap their arms around it, I’m not sure. In meshing those theater plans together, that’s where OP 603 really made a major contribution because they were the guys that did it.

How did the Soviets react to the Maritime Strategy?

For a period of years, the Russians watched us exercise the Maritime Strategy at sea, and in 1986 they saw the unclass version in Proceedings. We learned later after the Iron Curtain fell that they believed everything we said we could do in that Maritime Strategy, because it was being practiced.

Admiral Crowe, who was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, made a trip to Russia. He was a guest of his counterpart in Moscow. The Russians then later came to the U.S., including Crowe’s counterpart, Marshall Akhromeyev. When the Russians came to this country, Crowe took them to an aircraft carrier in the Virginia Capes and they were aboard for the day and watched air operations. They found themselves pretty amazed to be onboard an aircraft carrier, which sparked some more conversations. They believed we could do it.

There was a map that Admiral Crowe and others were shown when they visited Moscow. It showed how the Soviets were ringed by the American Navy.

A priority for them became protecting their submarine-based nuclear deterrent under the ice. That became a major focus of their submarine operations. And our people eventually concluded that they were less of a danger to the convoys to Europe because they were staying above the Arctic circle to protect their own submarines. Similar things could be said in Vladivostok on the Pacific side.

Over the years, up through 1988-1989, our exercises became more expansive. In the Pacific we had combined exercises with the First and the Seventh Fleets, with carriers joining to simulate attacks on Vladivostok and elsewhere. The exercises were becoming larger and more extensive.

The important thing was that the Russians believed it all, that we could do it. The Maritime Strategy in a way acted as a deterrent. That was perhaps the principal, ultimate outcome.

What are the challenges in replicating a similar strategy for today?

We have a different strategic environment today than we did in 1982. We had one major maritime adversary and that was the Soviet Union, and they went away in 1989. Navy maritime strategy then went through a number of fluctuations, such as From the Sea and the focus on littoral warfare and so on.

If you wanted to replicate it today you would have to take in more than one major maritime threat. Today we’ve got Russia and China. You have to reproduce something similar, but now you’re dealing with two major competitors. That makes it more difficult.

I know the Navy is in trouble today with the Congress because the Navy today can’t really explain what it needs and how it is going to use it. We are almost back where we were in 1982, when the Navy had to pull it together.

Captain Spencer Johnson graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1963 and served as a Surface Warfare Officer for 30 years, retiring in 1993. He has served on three destroyers, held command of a destroyer, and commanded a destroyer squadron. He served five tours in the Pentagon, including three tours in OP-06 (Plans and Policy). He has served as executive assistant in OP-06, as special assistant for three years to the director of the Joint Staff, and as special assistant to Secretary of the Navy John Lehman. He holds degrees from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He concluded his uniformed service as Chairman of the Department of Strategy and Operations at the National War College.

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Content@cimsec.org.

Featured Image: November 1, 1987 – An aerial view of Battle Group Echo in formation. The ships are, from the left, top to bottom, row 1: USNS HASSAYAMPA (T-AO-145), USS LEFTWICH (DD-984), USS HOEL (DDG-13); row 2: USS KANSAS CITY (AOR-3), USS BUNKER HILL (CG-52), USS ROBERT E. PEARY (FF-1073); row 3: USS LONG BEACH (CGN-9), USS RANGER (CV-61), USS MISSOURI (BB-63); row 4: USS WICHITA (AOR-1), USS GRIDLEY (CG-21), USS CURTS (FFG-38); row 5: USS SHASTA (AE-33), USS JOHN YOUNG (DD-973) and USS BUCHANAN (DDG-14). (Photo by PH3 Wimmer via the U.S. National Archives)

1980s Maritime Strategy Series

By Joe Petrucelli

CIMSEC discussed the development of the 1980s Maritime Strategy and the role played by the CNO Strategic Studies Group with Admiral William Owens (ret.). Admiral Owens was part of the first SSG during 1982. In this discussion, he discusses changes brought about by the Maritime Strategy, the implementation of the Maritime Strategy concepts by the fleet, and what lessons the Maritime Strategy and SSG have for the modern era.

What was new about the Maritime Strategy and how was it a shift from 1970s concepts and plans?

For the Navy and the Marine Corps, for the entire Defense Department, and for our country the Maritime Strategy was a turning point in the Cold War! For most of the years since World War II the United States Navy and Marine Corps had been focused on how to most efficiently get land and air forces into Central Europe to protect against a Soviet attack. This was the focus of all our force planning. All our analytic efforts in the Pentagon and the grand majority of money in the defense budget was organized around that particular task. The Maritime Strategy changed all of that in profound ways.

Can you briefly describe your personal involvement in the strategy development process?

My personal role was as a member of the first Strategic Studies Group, the SSG. This SSG and the concept was set up by Admiral Tom Hayward, the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO). And it is thanks to Tom Hayward, his vision, and his leadership style, that we wound up with a Maritime Strategy that materially changed everything.

Tom Hayward established the group under Bob Murray, a wonderful gentleman who had been the Under Secretary of the Navy. My personal involvement then was as one of the eight members of that first SSG. Admiral Hayward had personally chosen the eight of us, one from each branch of the Navy and two from the Marine Corps, to spend a year together. That was a transformative year for me and for all of us. As a submariner, I had spent all of my years, about 18 of them, in the submarine force, and had very little experience in the grand strategy of the Navy or the Defense Department. Indeed, I had very little knowledge of the other branches of the Navy, such as the fighter community, the surface navy, the amphibious forces, or the Marine Corps. This year changed all of that for me personally and immersed me in what was, we thought, the principal effort to bring together a very different position for our Navy.

While Secretary Lehman had talked about a different strategic force and several had talked about the need for a more offensive Navy, never before to my knowledge had we put together such a broad view of what the Navy and Marine Corps could possibly execute as principal members of U.S. forces. It is important to note Admiral Hayward’s role in the formation and tasking of the SSG, and in his leadership in imagining the entire year for the eight of us. I will always remember that as a precious lesson of how to lead! The CNO told us personally when we asked “what was the deliverable,” that he did not know. He said, “I formed this group because I have tremendous confidence in each of you, and I expect you to spend a year with no restrictions to do something good for the United States Navy and to make the year worthwhile in every respect, including for yourself.”

Follow-up sessions with Admiral Hayward occurred only two or three times during the year, and under Bob Murray’s leadership we had no restrictions, all doors were open, and all lines of thought were encouraged. This was the only time in my entire time in the Navy that I saw this degree of complete confidence and “gutsy” leadership to do something very special for our Navy and our country.

The SSG is often cited as a key (if not the key) driver behind the emergence of the Maritime Strategy. But at the same time, other initiatives and groups, including exercises such as Ocean Venture ’81, the OP-603 strategist community, the Advanced Technology Panel, and Secretary Lehman’s personal involvement were combined with pre-SSG elements such as Sea Plan 2000 and the Global War Games. In your opinion, which of these elements were the most significant and how did they interact with each other to create what we know as the Maritime Strategy?

While many of these products were well-known to us, there were none in my opinion which laid out the specifics of a new Maritime Strategy, one that would indeed change all of the force analysis, and that would change the thinking in the Congress and in the inner halls of the Kremlin. Regarding which organization came first with the Maritime Strategy, I leave it to the readers. But from our standpoint in the SSG, we had been sent by Admiral Hayward to “do good for the U.S. Navy,” and after many, many discussions among ourselves and many other potential activities that we could have undertaken, we chose to look at how the United States Navy and Marine Corps could play a much more offensive role in what was then the great challenge, the Soviet Union. I know that others were interested in this work, the CNO’s staff was doing work on strategy, and Secretary Lehman had done some work thinking about the Navy of the future.

But for us, we were not aware of any macro-level strategy for our country that dealt with the use of offensive maritime forces. Additionally, when we were looking to brief various commands, through Bob Murray and Admiral Hayward, there was a decision that we should go and visit all of the four-star U.S. Navy commanders to represent a new way of thinking about our Navy, which we called the Maritime Strategy. So, regarding who the originator was, from our standpoint we believed that we were taking the lead and had founded something that could be very special for our country, and I believe it was the SSG who dubbed it the Maritime Strategy.

How did the SSG, and through it the Maritime Strategy, influence and spur innovation in real-world fleet operations and exercises, both at the theater and at the tactical levels? What role did the SSG’s extensive travel to operational fleet commands, or the feedback received from the theater commands and flag ranks, help influence the strategy?

Commander Art Cebrowski and I were the two most junior officers on the first SSG. The natural flow had us both involved in developing presentations, doing some writing, and then eventually being the two briefers that took the Maritime Strategy to each of the four-star commanders-in- chief of the theaters. As such we were able to internalize and absorb the many comments that we received, which were at first quite doubtful, and then in a growing way, believing that there was indeed a new way possible to use naval force. Eventually Art and I started to feel more and more confident. With Bob Murray as an enormous mentor, a shield, we had a great interface with CNO Admiral Tom Hayward to continue our work and then to broaden it.

We noticed that within a few months exercises were being conducted in the various fleets, especially Seventh Fleet, to test out some of the concepts in the field. But more importantly, each of us was blessed to move on to become more senior and start exercising these concepts ourselves. As a young one-star admiral, I was able to mass four dozen attack submarines far forward and “demonstrate to the Soviets directly that we were there in numbers.”

When we looked at the ability of the United States Navy to take the battle forward to the Soviet bastions, to the northern flank of Norway and even the Arctic, when we were able to use carriers, surface forces, and the submarine force together far forward both in the Atlantic and the Pacific, we started to realize that we were having an impact on the Soviets themselves. No longer were the bastions and the northern and western flanks totally the property of the Soviet Union. After the Cold War was over, there were intelligence reports reflecting the critical difference the Navy and Marine Corps’ positioning had had on strategic thinking in the Soviet Union and indeed in their reflection that they could not win, no matter how much they poured into their defense systems.

Why did the Maritime Strategy “work,” if it did, and what about the process has been so hard to replicate?

The Maritime Strategy worked because there was an open mind in the leadership ranks of the Navy, there were very active supporters in OP 603, and in the intelligence community. And I would note that Rich Haver was particularly valuable to us in gaming and supporting our efforts. Rich was a senior civilian, an intelligence professional working in the Chief of Naval Operations office directly in what was called Code 009. He was extremely interested in the SSG’s deliberations and participated in many of our wargames and discussions. He was also a source of information from the intelligence community, and we spent considerable time with Rich regarding the intelligence implications of our thoughts on the Maritime Strategy. We saw a lot of Rich in Newport with the SSG.

Underlying it all, of course, was Tom Hayward and Bob Murray’s terrific leadership. They were the single most important factors in driving the success of those first SSGs! I think it was hard to duplicate the work of the first three or four SSGs, as follow-on CNOs did not lead the effort in the same sense that Tom Hayward did, and there was never another Bob Murray. I think the concept is strong and could remain strong under the right leadership. In other words, “take the very best from the warfare communities, give them a free rein for a year, and ask them to deliver a product that is worth the time and effort for their Navy and Marine Corps.” I don’t think that ever happened again after the first two or three SSGs.

How did the strategy interface with the POM process? What was its budgetary and programmatic influence, what mechanisms channeled this influence, and how did these processes change over this time period?

Because of senior leadership and our exposure to all of the Navy’s four-star officers, there eventually was considerable support and understanding of what the United States Navy and Marine Corps capability was, and I believe that flowed through every branch of both services. Especially for those of us who became three- and four-star officers, we drove the Maritime Strategy as part of all of our budgeting and programmatic directions. It was a critical part of my own efforts both as the first N-8 in the Navy staff and as the Sixth Fleet commander, and then the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Putting pressure on the Soviet Union, and indeed realizing that the Navy and Marine Corps were operating forward, aggressively, and offensively, I believe this carried over after the Cold War ended in the way we thought about our service. It changed the paradigms of World War II. Of course, the submarine force had always been operating forward. But now we were able to operate with other branches of the Navy and Marine corps in a very offensive forward position, and we coordinated those actions with other naval forces to make a much larger difference. In many ways the Maritime Strategy was a coming-of-age for maritime forces.

What lessons can be taken from the 1980s for engaging in modern great power competition, both specifically about the role of the SSG and its functionality, and more generally about the centrality of the Maritime Strategy in 1980s great power competition?

Many of the lessons of the 1980s pertain to naval and Marine forces today, and will in the future. And when we are thinking of great power competition it allowed us to think of truly offensive and game-changing actions in the forward theaters, which pertains as much in today’s world as it did then. I predict that this will continue as we look to the future.

The lessons of the SSG were profound for me. The degree of thinking and engagement that a dedicated, supported from-the-top-group of quality officers can provide, was stunning. Art Cebrowski and I, I’m sure, had our lives changed in many ways from this experience. The leadership lessons learned from Tom Hayward, Bob Murray, and others who supported us also had a profound effect on Art and myself. And I have to add, the loss of Art Cebrowski to our entire Defense Department was a loss that is more than one could ever have imagined.

How did the strategy enhance the Navy’s ability to tell its story to outside audiences, such as Congress, the other services, and allies? How was it received and challenged by outside audiences?

The Maritime Strategy dramatically enhanced the Navy’s confidence in what it already knew in part that it could do. Whether it was with Congress, where the demonstration of the Navy and Marine Corps offensive forces working jointly with the other services became known, or with our allies, where this broad naval offensive power was broadly accepted, the maritime strategy was clearly now a part of everything we did. And in many cases, such as the United Kingdom, our allies joined as part of our forward-thinking Maritime Strategy.

Many audiences of traditionalists, including several of our four-star commanders at the time, were strongly unconvinced, even disapprovingly so. But it did not take long with continued exercises, demonstrated capability, and a realization on the Hill that this was something that could truly change America’s position in the world of military power, that there was widespread acceptance.

For many of us throughout our careers, we took pride in showing our friends and allies around the world and in the United States the true power and ability of our maritime forces to operate freely, jointly, and with substantial capability even in the most challenging areas. It is hard to say this needs to be proven now, since this is the way our country’s military services take military force forward, with naval forces on the leading edge!

Admiral William Owens (ret.) is a retired four-star U.S. Navy admiral. He was Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and was Commander of the U.S. Sixth Fleet from 1990 to 1992, which included Operation Desert Storm. Owens also served as the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Resources. Owens was the Senior Military Assistant to two Secretaries of Defense (Secretaries Cheney and Carlucci) and served in the Office of Program Appraisal for the Secretary of the Navy. He began his military career as a nuclear submariner. He served on four strategic nuclear-powered submarines and three nuclear attack submarines, including tours as Commanding Officer of the USS Sam Houston, USS Michigan, and USS City of Corpus Christi. He currently serves as an executive in the private sector, as well as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Joe Petrucelli is an assistant editor at CIMSEC, a reserve naval officer, and an analyst at Systems, Planning and Analysis, Inc.

The opinions expressed here are the author’s own, and do not necessarily represent the positions of employers, the Navy, or the DoD.

Featured Image: October 22, 1988 – Guests observe the Nos. 1 and 2 Mark 7 16-inch/50-caliber guns being traversed and elevated as the battleship USS WISCONSIN (BB 64) “comes alive” during its recommissioning. (National archive photo)

1980s Maritime Strategy Series

By Dmitry Filipoff

CIMSEC discussed the 1980s Maritime Strategy with Irv Blickstein, who at the time served in the senior executive service in the Navy’s programming office. In this discussion, Blickstein discusses the tradeoffs programmers help leaders understand, the role Navy Secretary John Lehman played in managing the Navy’s program, and to what extent the Navy’s strategists and programmers had a relationship.

Can you describe the environment in the Pentagon and Navy staff when the Reagan administration was coming in and larger budgets were on their way?

I came in 1982. We knew we were going to get more money as the Reagan Administration came into office and promised an increase in defense spending. We had so much money that as programmers we had trouble finding places to put it. We would actually take ships out of mothballs because we now had the money to repair them and make them available. We could afford to bring more sailors into the Navy. It was a very heady time for programmers in the sense that there was more money to do things that both the CNO and the Secretary of the Navy wanted to do.

John Lehman was clearly in charge. Let there be no doubt. On the civilian SES side, he moved numbers of the senior executive service who didn’t agree with him to far-flung locations hoping they would quit over time, and many did. It is something the Trump administration followed in the past four years. There was no doubt who was in charge in the Navy. In the programming meetings with the Secretary, you generally did not have the CNO present, and you rarely had the Commandant of the Marine Corps either. You had their vice chiefs, the VCNO and the ACMC were there. The chiefs didn’t want to be embarrassed by John Lehman talking down to them or opining on issues they didn’t want to opine on. It was a very tough, contentious setting. But overall, money was not an issue. It was flowing, especially in the first few years of the Reagan administration.

What was Lehman’s influence on the POM and how did he relate it to strategy?

Lehman extensively went through the details of the programming process. He understood the POM in great detail. We had to present individual line items or program elements and budget category items to him and he questioned their veracity in great detail to the Captain who was running this process. I don’t recall him moving money out. He wanted to know why we were spending money on certain things. He was looking to create cash to help fund his 600-ship navy.

The issue you run into is that you can spend money on things, you can buy 600 ships, but you may buy fewer sailors, you may buy less modernization, you may reduce readiness and maintenance funding. That has always been the challenge in the programming process. What’s leadership’s priority?

For today’s readiness, you could say I want X-percent of my ships and planes to be ready at a moment’s notice. Or I’m willing to let that drop because I don’t perceive a big threat in the world and I want to spend my money on new construction. Former Secretary of the Navy Mabus in the Obama administration rejected a POM when Admiral Greenert was the CNO, saying if you don’t buy ships then you’re not going to have any. Thus the Navy bought more ships and the readiness dropped. Secretary of Defense Mattis came in with the Trump administration and said our readiness is terrible. And he put more money into readiness and set goals and standards for mission capability, such as for aircraft, and made sure that they were ready for the near-term fight. Those kinds of pressures have always existed.

The questions that John Lehman was asking as he was going through all those line items and understanding where all that money is going, was A) could they justify this to me, and B) could I agree that we should be spending money on these things. Those were the meetings I sat through.

Lehman was right, the Maritime Strategy convinced the Congress that the Navy had a plan, it had a vision, the vision made sense, it made sense of the Soviet Union, and the Congress was generally supportive. The Office of the Secretary of Defense, not necessarily. Defense Secretary Weinberger was a little less enamored with John Lehman, and Lehman going directly to the Congress over his head. But yes, Congress was very supportive. And Lehman was a wonderful speaker to present his case to them.

If you look at the vision the Navy has today, nobody quite understands what they want to do, such as what they want unmanned vessels to do exactly. They are talking about maybe 40 percent of the future carrier force being unmanned, maybe so, maybe not. The Congress is not convinced, and they would like to better understand what the Navy’s plan is. And unfortunately, the people with vision are not running the Navy at the moment.

Were there people in analysis that said a 600-ship navy was unaffordable? Was there some tension and pushback?

The OP-96 people, Lehman basically fired them. He didn’t allow the promotion of the admiral who was in charge of OP-96 at the time. He was not a great fan of analysis. He had to prove his point, and if it didn’t prove his point, he was against it.

He truly believed what he said in the earlier interview: strategy, requirements, the POM, and the budget. In that order. Well, what if you build a strategy that is unaffordable? It’s easy to build a strategy that says I have lots of ships in lots of places. But you may or may not be able to afford them in the POM, because if you do, then they won’t have missiles or bombs, the planes won’t be ready, and they may not have enough people to crew them. Those were the tradeoffs that you had to have some sense of when you develop a strategy. Navy strategists never had to build a POM or budget. Opining is easy when money is considered “free.”

It seems like Lehman got his way, that they did make those tradeoffs.

Well, you still had to balance the POM. It still had to have something to get through the Secretary of Defense, who may say you’re buying too many ships, you didn’t buy enough readiness, so we are going to move the money. The Office of the Secretary of Defense’s program analysis and evaluation organization PA&E, now called CAPE, would evaluate it in great detail the Navy’s POM as it did the other services, in a contentious process. And once you finished all of that, now that you had a POM that the service and the Secretary of Defense is happy with, you now reverted to a budget process where the claimants came in. Pacific Fleet, Atlantic Fleet, people who own real estate who will sometimes say you don’t have enough money for items in the region of concern. And so the budget officer of the Navy then would have to adjudicate that and add money when it made sense. It may not have made Lehman happy at times, and they would have to have that argument before the budget would be submitted again to the OSD comptroller and then on to the OMB and the Congress.

If you want 15 carriers, you will have to afford them, you will have to find the money for them. They bought two carriers in 1983 and 1986 (as I recall). That was money that had not been spent in previous years; it is a loophole that has since been closed. But there was excess cash in the Navy’s program, and a very brilliant Navy civilian SES comptroller said we could use this money to buy two carriers. Lehman was convinced, they convinced the Secretary Defense, and ultimately convinced the Congress.

So there were things you could do, buying carriers, buying submarines, the Secretary could say what he wants to do, but if there wasn’t a path there, the programmers would say there is no use putting your money there to be lost in the PA&E review process and maybe go to another service or priority. We were buying four Los-Angeles class submarines per year those days. Electric Boat could build four per year, but not five. If you want to build-up to 100 submarines then you will have to build many submarines per year, but within the limits of the industrial base. If you put money into that without regard for that limitation, the Office of the Secretary of Defense would take that money and put it somewhere else.

I agree with what Lehman said, that having the U.S. Navy forward deployed scared the heck out of the Russians, and they couldn’t keep up with that. They were mostly landlocked and they were capable, but the U.S. Navy could forward deploy much more easily. We had allies, we had bases. China has a similar problem today.

How did the Maritime Strategy interface with the POM? What was that relationship like?

I confirmed this with some other people, there was almost no relationship between OP-06 and OP-090 and OP-90, which was the programming office, and less so with OP-96 which was systems analysis. So Ace Lyons was OP-06 somewhere in that timeframe, and he led the Maritime Strategy from the CNO’s office. Ace Lyons didn’t talk to OP-090, he just didn’t. I can’t tell you why.

People had a name for the strategists. The OP-06 people were called the “High Priests,” where essentially they would proclaim that “The world should be created in one day, and there shall be this and that.” And the “gladiators” were the programmers who had to fight in the arena for each dollar and to make the dollars work so somebody else wouldn’t take that money away from us. Our measure of effectiveness was: did the Office of the Secretary of Defense change our program? That’s who we cared about. Did the money go to the Army or the Air Force? We cared about keeping money inside the Navy. That was more important than building more ships. There was continuous pressure and tension between the strategists and programmers. But for the strategists, money was not something they evaluated as part of what they thought was important. In their case, it was mainly evaluated against the Soviet Navy.

There was no relationship. As the deputy programmer, I had no relationship with anybody in OP-06. And you’d think, well you’re building a POM and they’re in charge of the Maritime Strategy, shouldn’t you guys be talking all the time? The answer is yes, but did the Maritime Strategy have an impact on our programming work? It really didn’t.

What if something works programmatically, but it doesn’t make sense in terms of tactics, in terms of strategy? Did the programmers have some kind of role in saying something could be bought, but it did not make sense to buy it in that context?

They ought to have that role. With how the POM is built, in those days, there was a three-star baron in charge of each of the major elements. Submarine warfare was OP-02, it is now N97, it was a three-star, now it is a two-star. His job was to build as many submarines as he could, put people in the submarine force, arm the submarines, and get their technology. Same for the admiral in charge of the surface navy and the admiral in charge of aviation. That admiral owned the carriers and he owned the aircraft that flew off the carriers. These admirals were competing with each other.

OP-090’s job was to look for the best meld between them, given the Secretary’s and the CNO’s preference. So if they want to build 100 submarines, 100 frigates, or 15 carriers, is that affordable? It may be affordable if I don’t have any readiness, if I buy fewer people, if I don’t maintain my bases. That’s where the programmers come in and say this is a tradeoff and say this is what we’re going to have to do to get these things funded in the POM.

With the help of the analysts in OP-96 or N81 today, we could tell a particular type of warfare would not necessarily be successful against the Russians or the Chinese as proposed by the resource sponsor. Therefore you ought to move your money from system A to some other system. Those issues were briefed at the two- and three-star levels to the CNO and to the Secretary when Lehman was in office. That tension is running through the POM process all the time. These days it is a bit different because N9 owns the barons, the surface, submarine, aviation, and amphibious barons, the two-star barons are owned by a three-star, and he’s got an integrator, N9I. Admiral Kilby is the current N9, but before that he was the N9I integrator, where his job was to look across the warfare world. But he also owns the people, the maintenance, and the spare parts. In the Navy and the POM process, he owns it all, so it’s a very interesting setup. In those days, however, the barons were quite autonomous.

How would the politics of the communities be adjudicated? They had their preferences, and sometimes they would not want to buy things even if it made sense tactically, such as in the 1980s when the Surface Navy was resistant to fielding the Tomahawk missile.

It would be adjudicated by the two-stars, the three-stars, and maybe even the CNO. You’re buying Tomahawks versus a new missile for surface combatants, or a new missile for a submarine. Those are competing against one another, so which one has the greater firepower? In a wargame, in a battle with China or Russia, which would be more effective? The analysts at OP-96 and more recently at N81 would run those kinds of analyses, and the beginning of the POM process would describe what they believe are the best tools.

They weren’t looking at, “could I really build something that fast,” they were looking at what’s the probability-to-kill. If you’re sitting at OP-02, you had to watch what those analysts were saying about the weapons and the submarines you were building and were they effective compared to something else.

Did this sort of conversation mainly consist of operations research folks talking to systems analysts?

The operations research folks were sprinkled with military officers, like the admiral or the deputy. The chief analyst was for years a guy named Trip Barber. Trip was a great analyst and retired naval officer. I knew him as a Lieutenant Commander as a programmer. He retired as an O-6 and then became the chief analyst in N81 and was a very powerful person. He understood the analysis, what it had to do, where it had to go, what works and what didn’t. And when he spoke, the flag community paid a lot of attention to him. You didn’t have somebody like that back in the 80s. There was no one with the kind of clout he had.

Is that a good model for how it should work, is that how it should work in current times? Some have said that N81 during that time became perhaps too powerful.

If an organization succeeds wildly and people pay attention to them, there will be naysayers that say, “look what’s happened, we’ve got the analysts and the programmers now running the Navy.” I’ve looked at the Air Force programming system, and it’s different from the Navy’s, but in the final analysis, programmers still have to put a POM together, and still have to balance the accounts within them. It still has to work, and it still has to go through CAPE.

In the old days, CAPE was PA&E, and David Chu led it for about eight years. Brilliant guy, very brilliant. He questioned almost everything that we did, and we knew he was going to. We knew the arguments had to stand up. It couldn’t just be John Lehman opining. It couldn’t just be a strategy. Strategies are interesting, but show me the program, show me how effective these programs are against what we know the Soviet Union can do or the Chinese or what whoever can do. We would argue, “hey you can’t take this argument downstairs, they’re going to kill us. Here is what that argument is going to do.”

There were naval officers who worked in CAPE, so we had people who understood how they thought, what analysis was used. CAPE had its ups and downs over the years as well. It got very powerful. But there is an ebb and flow of power. But there are people who will attack those organizations. Our own measure of effectiveness was: did the money stay in the Navy? If they moved it that was one thing, but if it stayed in the Navy, we were happy.

It remains a continuous battle. They are talking about reducing carriers today. Particularly today, with the kinds of missiles the Russians and the Chinese have today. But being a floating base is a real advantage. A base is a fixed base, you know where it is, you know where it is going to be. In a wargame it’s a lot easier to fight against a base than a ship that can move at 30 knots.

In terms of the relationship between the strategists and the programmers, how should this work? Are there lessons from the 1980s on how this could work better today?

When the strategy is being built, you ought to have the analysts in N81 and the programmers in N80 involved in what they are doing. So that they can have a voice, and say, “I understand what you want to build, but what you are suggesting may not be executable. You can’t build at the rate you want to build.” That’s one set of questions. Another set is, if you do build even at the acceptable rate, you will have to find money to pay for other bills, and some of that comes out of shipbuilding.

Historically, there was no relationship between strategists and programmers, but I think it would be a good thing to have.

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Content@cimsec.org.

Featured Image: September 1, 1986 – A port quarter view of the amphibious assault ship USS INCHON (LPH 12) underway during NATO Exercise NORTHERN WEDDING 86. (U.S. National Archives photo by PHAN William Holck)

1980s Maritime Strategy Series

By Dmitry Filipoff

CIMSEC discussed the 1980s Maritime Strategy with Dr. Stanley Weeks, who as a Navy Lieutenant Commander helped assemble the first briefed iteration of the Maritime Strategy in 1982. In this discussion, Weeks looks at how that briefing came together, how it rapidly traveled up the chain of command, and how maritime forces can make the strategic difference in great power conflict.

After you received the initial strategy memo and became the action officer, how did you view the gravity and scope of what was being asked for?

I felt that there was a great opportunity for the Navy and Marine Corps team to claim and be recognized for a leading role in U.S. global defense strategy. With a new administration, committed in general strategy terms to an enhanced maritime role, and to ensuring that funding and resources would be made available to support that role, it would have been a grave mistake for the Navy not to articulate a clear and detailed strategy to justify that lead role.

How did the Maritime Strategy briefing come together in terms of how it was drafted and what sources were consulted?

The Maritime Strategy briefing came together very quickly in September/early October of 1982. Though I was the junior officer (pre-XO LCDR) in the CNO Strategic Concepts Group (OP-603) office, I requested to be the action officer to develop the Maritime Strategy, which then-VCNO Adm. Small had requested to kick off the CNO annual budget process. I drafted the briefing in a couple of weeks in early September 1982, primarily based on my own operational and academic experiences (including a Ph.D. in international relations and having just come from 13 months at sea running the operations of NATO’s multinational Standing Naval Force Atlantic (STANAVFORLANT) for British and Dutch admirals). It was also very much based on the work I did earlier in the summer of 1982 as co-action officer for the first-ever rounds of tank briefings by the combatant commanders for President Reagan.

After my initial drafting work, the Navy office which coordinated budget matters provided an officer, Commander Spencer Johnson, who added more detail to the defense planning elements of the briefing. Then after a quick review by our branch head and OP-06 (both in an acting capacity at this time) the Maritime Strategy briefing made it to the 2-Star Program Development Review Committee (PDRC) at the end of September 1982. In a very unusual move they blessed it on the spot and directed it to go, within the week, to the CNO and his 3-star deputies at the CNO Executive Board. They received the briefing the first week of October 1982, with new CNO Admiral Watkins approving the strategy that day—which was then briefed to Secretary of the Navy Lehman, who termed it consistent with his general strategy thinking and the best product he had seen as Secretary.

In assembling the war plans of the various theater commanders, did you see much friction or alignment in how they came together and how they planned to employ naval power in conflict?

I saw that, if properly articulated by the Navy, there was a basic symmetry between a maritime strategy of forward pressure on the Soviets in the northwest Pacific and the North Atlantic/Norwegian Sea, to threaten the preferred Soviet focus on the Central front in Europe, and therefore allow the Navy to make the strategic difference in a major conflict. Admiral Hayward, as CINCPACFLT before he became CNO, had already a couple of years prior indicated such a forward pressure focus in his strategy in the Pacific. Although the (Army) CINCEUR commander’s strategy briefing to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the president just delivered in the summer of 1982 had little mention of the Navy/Marine Corps role in that theater, NATO had a new NATO Maritime Concept of Operations (which then-CINCHAN UK Royal Navy Admiral Sir James Eberle had shared in draft with me in 1981), and CINCUSNAVEUR London reflected that in their planning. The biggest problem which our briefing to the CNO Executive Board highlighted was that the theater commanders in the Atlantic and Pacific were each assuming they would be able to have allocated to them many of the same maritime forces. It was this “fat” that would have to be highlighted and then trimmed in our CNO Executive Board presentation to ensure the maritime strategy was operationally realistic.

What were some of the core tenets and takeaways from the briefing on the Maritime Strategy? How original and innovative were these concepts at the time?

The core tenets were, as noted above, “full forward pressure,” to posture and employ U.S. and allied maritime forces forward in peacetime presence, crisis, and conflict, to pressure the Soviets on their flanks, threaten their homeland (including, at the highest strategic level, their nuclear forces in the bastions) and therefore deter conflict. If deterrence failed, the U.S. would threaten the Soviet focus on a quick and overwhelming victory on the Central Front in Europe—all in order to use maritime forces to make the strategic difference and ensure war termination on favorable terms. The originality of this strategy was articulating how the maritime element of the national military strategy (and that is what we called it, despite aspersions later cast on a “service strategy”!) would, in the circumstances of that time, coordinate a global maritime response in multiple theaters using classic forward and away pressure.

How was the briefing received by its audiences? What sort of follow-on action did it precipitate?

As indicated above, the briefing was surprisingly well-received and approved within the space of ten days by both the Program Development Review Committee and then the CNO and his CNO Executive Board. In the process of the Executive Board deliberations, subsequent action was called for by the CNO to enhance certain aspects of readiness and munitions (which were being overlooked), and to emphasize the role of allies. Under the officer who relieved me as the OPNAV Maritime Strategy Action Officer in March 1983 when I went back to sea for my XO tour, my excellent officemate Peter Swartz, the strategy would undergo annual refinements (with many more aspiring cooks now lined up at the pot to no doubt help complicate Peter’s days!) until it was finally published in unclassified form in the January 1986 USNI Proceedings article by Admiral Watkins. (I confess to this day that I dislike seeing references to the “1986 Maritime Strategy” since this was essentially the October 1982 Maritime Strategy.)

Why did the Maritime Strategy “work,” if it did, and what about the process has been challenging to replicate since then?

I like to think that the Maritime Strategy was a success because it clearly articulated the case, in a way accepted inside and (largely) outside the maritime services, of how the maritime forces would make the strategic difference in the strategic context of the time. Perhaps the best metric of our strategy’s success was that it became the baseline for almost a decade for how the maritime services budgeted their forces, and for how they planned and exercised these forces. As Secretary of the Navy Lehman’s recent book Oceans Ventured indicates, such force posturing and exercising had already begun in 1981 based on the general strategy outlines of the new administration, even before the more detailed actual Maritime Strategy of October 1982 was formally articulated and approved. By the time I was commanding the 1987 Baltic Operations flagship and the 1988 NATO STANAVFORLANT flagship USS Hayler (DD-997), such exercising to the tune of the Maritime Strategy was in full bloom.

What lessons can be taken from the 1980s Maritime Strategy for engaging in modern great power competition?

Leaders must articulate clearly how the maritime forces element of the National Military Strategy will make a strategic difference to deter great power conflict and, failing that, to threaten vital strategic geography and forces of the enemy to help bring war termination on favorable terms to the U.S. and its allies.

Based on this strategy articulation, maritime force leaders must press tirelessly for funding for the maritime forces required, but ensure a force balanced in readiness and numbers—and ready to work together with the other services and with allies.

U.S. allies are still a vital political and military force multiplier, the likes of which other great powers do not have. Each ally though is a relationship requiring routine cultivation—and, when frustrations arise, requires us to remember Churchill’s observation that the only thing worse than fighting a war with allies is fighting without them.

Dr. Stan Weeks has extensive strategic and operational planning experience in business, defense, foreign policy, and international and regional security contexts. He joined Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in 1990, following a prior 24-year career in the U.S. Navy, including duty on the OPNAV staff as the first action officer and drafter of the Maritime Strategy in 1982-1983, and service as an OSD exchange officer to the State Department Politico-Military Bureau. From 1994 until his retirement in 2016, he was also an Adjunct Professor of the Naval War College, teaching the National Security Decision Making (NSDM) graduate course (strategy and force planning, and executive leadership) to Washington area students from the military, government agencies, and Congressional staffs. From 2007-2012, Dr. Weeks was an Adjunct Professional Staff Member at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), supporting the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where his work included Asia-Pacific engagement and force posture, Defense Planning Scenarios for QDR 2010, counter-piracy strategy, and the outline for a new National Defense Strategy. From 2009-2011, he was a Research Analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA)’s Center for Strategic Studies (where he wrote the study on recent evolution of Joint and services strategies. His education includes:  U.S. Naval Academy 1970; Olmsted Scholar, University of Madrid, Spain 1974-76, Doctoral and graduate Latin America Studies; M.A. 1973 and Ph. D. 1977 in International Studies, The American University; Strategy Faculty, National War College 1988-1990.

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Content@cimsec.org.

Featured Image: March 12, 1986 – An A-6E Intruder aircraft is launched from the aircraft carrier USS JOHN F. KENNEDY (CV 67) (U.S. National Archives photo by PH1 Phil Wiggins)