In fact, it had to be my business.” How did you wield the office of the Secretary of the Navy with respect to developing and advocating for the Maritime Strategy? How should Navy Secretaries view their role on crafting strategy? It never occurred to me as secretary that strategy was none of my business. In your book Command of the Seas, you said “Many retired admirals believe that the secretary of the navy should stick to administration…and leave strategy and requirements to the admirals. It was in those informal gatherings that the Maritime Strategy first began to take shape.

Dick Allen, Sam Huntington, Bing West, Fred Ikle, myself, and others began to meet irregularly for lunch and dinner to discuss strategy, often with active duty sailors like Jim Holloway, Ace Lyons, and Peter Swartz, who were then engaged in the mortal combat of PRM 10.

To many of us veterans of the Kissinger National Security Council and the realist academic world, this “swing strategy” was absurd. Under Carter, the national strategy focused almost entirely on the central front in Europe, assigning only a supportive and defensive role to the Navy, with budgets reduced accordingly. Navy concepts and plans in the 1970s were driven by post-Vietnam naval deterioration, exhaustion, and underfunding compounded by the almost desperate search for détente by Presidents Ford and Carter. Navy could not only protect the sea lanes, but could surround Soviet power, sink the Soviet fleet, and use the seas to blockade, mine, and strike deep into the Soviet heartland. President Reagan believed that the West could win the Cold War without armed conflict and that it was time to move from containment and détente to a forward strategy to demonstrate that if the East attacked NATO they would be defeated. It was part of a three-dimensional national strategy: to maintain nuclear parity with the Soviets, to recognize that the Warsaw Pact had clear superiority in land forces, but to neutralize that advantage with overwhelming naval supremacy. and its allies were capable of easily establishing command of the seas.

The Soviet Union was a relatively land-locked power and the U.S. It was geopolitical and based on a recognition that in the Cold War geography was a huge advantage to the U.S. How would you describe the Maritime Strategy and how was it a shift from 1970s concepts and plans?įirst, the Maritime Strategy was global, not driven by NATO. In this discussion, Secretary Lehman looks at how the Navy tied the Maritime Strategy to force structure goals, how it built credibility with Congress, and how the Navy could offensively leverage command of the seas in a major conflict today. CIMSEC discussed the 1980s Maritime Strategy with Secretary John Lehman, who served as the 65th Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan Administration from 1981-1987.

On Seas of Glory by John Lehman