The maritime strategy enters the terrible twos
October 20th, 2009 | Ballistic missile defense Coast Guard Foreign navies leadership Maritime operations The greenside Washington | Posted by Phil Ewing
The carrier George Washington trained with Korean warships in the Pacific last week. International cooperation was a key plank of the maritime strategy unveiled two years ago this week // MC3 Jeffrey Stewart/ Navy
The famed brown-shoe blogger SteeljawScribe — or as they’d say in Pittsburgh, “Stuhljawr-Scrub” — has reminded the Internet this week that we’ve reached the second anniversary of the unveiling of the maritime strategy (pdf), the document that was supposed to pave a clear road forward for the U.S. naval services and Coast Guard.
Asks Steeljaw: Did it? Answers Steeljaw: Kinda.
As a guidance document the strategy was useful, he writes, but it was incomplete because it contained no specifics for how many and what kinds of ships the U.S. would need to execute it. Those details were supposed to come in the “Naval Operations Concept,” the force structure document for which the world still waits. (Although incomplete initial versions have bubbled to the surface.)
The NOC, writes Steeljaw:
is increasingly important as planners inside and out of the naval services wrestle with new concepts and capabilities, the most recent example being the significant shift in BMD emphasis in the European theater … This redirection and the attendant gossamer-light expositions of how we will employ sea-based BMD in the maritime strategy has led to a fair degree of mis-information and erroneous assumptions as to general operational capabilities, requirements, and necessary force structure. More detailed explanation, as would be found in a NOC, would go a long ways to alleviate this condition.
On the anniversary of the MarStrat, it’s worth asking: How valuable has it proved for the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard?