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 [email protected].

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 [email protected].

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)