Naval history as generally recounted is a story of battles at sea.
However, it has to be admitted that since 1945 neither the United
States nor any other contemporary naval power has had much of a
naval history in this sense. Domination of the oceans by the United
States and its allies, together with the fortunate failure of the
Cold War to culminate in a test of strength between the American
and Soviet navies, meant that classic naval battle gradually faded
from center stage in the education and professional orientation of
American naval officers. Beginning in the early years of the Cold
War, the Navy became preoccupied largely with technology and the
tactical proficiency that rapidly advancing naval and weapons
technologies made increasingly necessary. At the extreme, of
course, the advent of nuclear weapons seemed to many to leave the
Navy little role in a major global conflict other than to provide
invulnerable launch platforms for these weapons-and thereby a
powerful deterrent that would, as it was thought, obviate their
actual use. Beyond that, though, the switch to nuclear propulsion
for the Navy's capital ships laid heavy technical demands on new
generations of naval officers, with concomitant impact on their
education and training. The result-or so contends Milan Vego in On
Major Naval Operations, the thirty-second volume in the Naval War
College Press's Newport Papers series-has been a long-standing
neglect by the U.S. Navy of major naval operations and, more
broadly, of the "operational" level of war or of naval "operational
art." The term "operational art" is apt to be unfamiliar to most
Americans. American military officers encounter it routinely as a
fixture of contemporary joint military doctrine, but even today the
concept has substantially less traction within the U.S. Navy than
it does in the other services. The reason is plainly that its
origins are in land warfare-specifically, in large-scale land
warfare as theorized by the German and (especially) Soviet
militaries during the interwar period and practiced by these
countries in World War II. From the latter, it migrated to the U.S.
Army in the late 1970s, as the Army sought novel ways to grapple
with the increasingly formidable prospect of a Soviet ground
assault against Western Europe. Essentially, "operational art"
refers to a level of command intermediate between the tactical and
the strategic, one associated with ground command at the level of
field army or corps and with the conduct of "campaigns" that unfold
as a series of interconnected battles over time. That many naval
officers remain unconvinced of its applicability to their own
domain is not surprising, given the narrowly tactical focus of much
naval warfare of the past. (Wayne Hughes's classic treatise Fleet
Tactics, for example, begins by dismissing the utility of the
concept of operational-level warfare for naval combat.) On the
other hand, it is difficult to deny that naval command and control
doctrine and practice today are insufficiently attentive to what in
Army parlance would be called a "combined arms" approach to
warfare. The tenuous relationship between the three principal naval
warfare communities remains the strongest argument for a serious
reconsideration by the Navy of major naval operations and
operational art. Dr. Milan Vego is a professor in the Joint
Military Operations Department of the Naval War College. He has
published widely on the history of German and Soviet military
doctrine, and he is the author of Operational Art (2001) and Joint
Operational Warfare (2008), an authoritative textbook currently
utilized in the department's curriculum. In this work, he looks
back to the richly instructive experience of the U.S. Navy in World
War II (as well as in more recent operations during the Korean and
Vietnam wars and in the Persian Gulf) in order to develop a
taxonomy of naval operational art that can help inform the thinking
of the Navy as a whole today.
General
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