I share Tom's view that our Navy has been lethargic in embracing the changes needed for current defense needs. The tasks now primary have always been seen as doable inside a force structure and strategy built primarily for bluewater combat with a major peer competitor. I challenged that view in print in a Proceedings article in May 2003 titled 'A New Navy for a New World' and then more succinctly in June 2004 with the article replicated below. Others can decide if these thoughts constitute 'strategy.'

The Nation Needs A New Navy

We now fight only on land. In this new century, the nation’s combat will be on terra firma, with air-to-air combat and sea battles relegated to history and to a dim, unlikely future. Is the Navy becoming irrelevant? Sadly, the answer is yes — unless it is reshaped for two essential missions ahead.

Mission One: maintain a sufficient fleet-in-being as hedge against potential threats to freedom of the seas, retaining enough industrial, technological, and training infrastructure to remain superior to any nation that might pose a blue-water threat. The Navy must drastically downsize its capital-ship inventory, because its current cost cripples the second mission.

Mission Two: support land warfare. This is now the Navy’s primary mission and the current fleet works hard at it. Making best use of a Cold War fleet, however, yields much less support than the Navy could provide with a force built purposely for its new role.

A relevant Navy will require:

• Just enough attack submarines and surface combatants to keep Mission One alive — about half the current number. Protect assets in the near-shore area with them and with the new littoral combat ship, a design tuned to the new mis-sion at a cost per hull of one-tenth that of the complex new cruiser-destroyers and submarines on the drawing boards.

• Aircraft carriers as they are now, but hold the CVN(X) until Mission Two is equipped fully.

• Cost-driven replacement of aging combat aircraft that maximizes ordnance delivery, even at the expense of air-to-air combat.

• Large numbers of sea-launched cruise missiles rebased to arsenal ships. Smart weapons do not need smart platforms and their huge per-round delivery costs.

• Just enough Trident submarines to maintain an adequate deterrent posture against rogue nations — six would do. Keep the four Trident conversions.

• Amphibious readiness groups, but with state-of-art ship designs and the concept expanded to embrace support of special operations forces (SOFs).

• Expanded logistics support of land war from more fast sealift and prepositioned ships, also expanded to embrace direct support of SOFs.

• Full commitment to mobile sea bases as a primary contribution to supporting land combat.

At the same time, the shore establishment needs major changes to gain efficiency and focus the Navy culture on its new missions:

• State that Mission Two is the Navy’s primary mission. Reorganize around it and away from the bureaucracies entrenched to sustain Cold War platforms.

• Exercise strong leadership for change, from the top of the Navy to the deck plates. So far, the Navy’s answer to “transformation” is pursuit of a technologically refined version of its legacy force structure, not something fundamentally new that is tuned to future need.

• Break the backs of the three dominant warfare communities, to stop perpetuating a blue-water navy frozen in the Cold War. As long as they call the tune, the surface, submarine, and aviation communities will starve Mission Two.

• Overhaul the officer personnel system to emphasize Mission Two’s priorities and shift the officer corps from its dysfunctional careerist orientation to one that is more mission based.

• Cut end-strength through design-manning tradeoffs, innovative crewing, and aggressive use of commercial sources for nonmilitary work.

• Cut Navy bases back to just what is needed.

• Make costs visible and justify them with mission metrics; eradicate non-mission spending.

• Rebalance the resource shares of the services: more Marine Corps, Army, and SOFs — and less Navy and Air Force.

These are enormous changes. An incremental approach is doomed, as is a wistful hope that the specialized parts of the Navy will put aside parochialism to serve the new primary mission. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Vernon Clark gets it. He has laid out the right framework and the right goals. But his admirals and the rest of the Navy have yet to take up this bold challenge, change course sharply, and help him remake the Navy for the realities of the 21st century.

The USN works hard to capture capital budget. Navy lets their USMC subsidiary take the casualties ashore, with second-tier gear, but hangs onto the hospital commands. One of the biggest sins a navy skipper can commit is to get so close to the land fight that his blue-water boat finds terra firma. The only incident I'm aware of this war happened just off the Honolulu airport.

The inshore and brown-water mission, always a poor career choice, disappears between wars. That is, until the Army begins to comandeer riverine craft, at which point the senior service reluctantly fields something, to 'beat army' back onto land.

No surprise this war has followed patterns as old as Trafalgar and Waterloo. A big ticket Navy item in this years budget fight is three $3B Z-class stealth destroyers, not exactly a GWOT investment. Eight years into the war, Marines are still sucking wind for helo replacements, as they go aground in Afghanistan.

One big strategic initiative for the Navy has been to prevent USAF capture of the missile defense/space budget, which was growing while both occupation and economy foundered. Last years Standard-B missile strike on a satellite was a successful skirmish in the battle for space, against Air Force.

Keeping some distance from what promised early to be a bad war in Iraq might indicate strategic thinking. Recall the Navy dog handler detached to Abu Ghraib who said 'No way, not with my dog.' Score, navy. Fallon took a direct hit, true, but how many generals have gone down in flames?