U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1980s: Selected Documents

Abstract

Abstract : U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1980s: Selected Documents is the thirty-third in the Naval War College Press's Newport Papers monograph series, and the third in a projected four-volume set of authoritative documents relating to U.S. Navy strategy and strategic planning during and after the Cold War. Edited by John B. Hattendorf, a distinguished naval historian and chairman of the Maritime History Department at the Naval War College, this volume is an indispensable supplement to Professor Hattendorf's uniquely informed narrative of the genesis and development of the Navy's strategy for global war with the Soviet Union, The Evolution of the U.S. Navy's Maritime Strategy, 1977-1986, Newport Paper 19 (2004). It continues the story of the Navy's reaction to the growing Soviet naval and strategic threats over the decade of the 1970s, as documented in U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1970s: Selected Documents, Newport Paper 30 (2007), and sets the stage for the rethinking of the Navy's role following the demise of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, as presented in U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1990s: Selected Documents, Newport Paper 27 (2006). Both of these volumes were also edited by John Hattendorf. A fourth volume, of documents on naval strategy from the 1950s and 1960s, will eventually round out this important and hitherto very imperfectly known history.