To understand a series of events in the past, one needs to do more
than just know a set of detailed and isolated facts. Historical
understanding is a process to work out the best way to generalize
accurately about something that has happened. It is an ongoing and
never-ending discussion about what events mean, why they took place
the way they did, and how and to what extent that past experience
affects our present or provides a useful example for our general
appreciation of our development over time. Historical understanding
is an examination that involves attaching specifics to wide trends
and broad ideas. In this, individual actors in history can be
surprised to find that their actions involve trends and issues that
they were not thinking about at the time they were involved in a
past action as well as those that they do recognize and were
thinking about at the time. It is the historian's job to look
beyond specifics to see context and to make connections with trends
that are not otherwise obvious. The process of moving from recorded
facts to a general understanding can be a long one. For events that
take place within a government agency, such as the U.S. Navy, the
process cannot even begin until the information and key documents
become public knowledge and can be disseminated widely enough to
bring different viewpoints and wider perspectives to bear upon
them. This volume is published to help begin that process of wider
historical understanding and generalization for the subject of
strategic thinking in the U.S. Navy during the last phases of the
Cold War. To facilitate this beginning, we offer here the
now-declassified, full and original version of the official study
that I undertook in 1986-1989, supplemented by three appendices.
The study attempted to record the trends and ideas that we could
see at the time, written on the basis of interviews with a range of
the key individuals involved and on the working documents that were
then still located in their original office locations, some of
which have not survived or were not permanently retained in
archival files. We publish it here as a document, as it was
written, without attempting to bring it up to date. To supplement
this original study, we have appended the declassified version of
the Central Intelligence Agency's National Intelligence Estimate of
March 1982, which was a key analysis in understanding the Soviet
Navy, provided a generally accepted consensus of American
understanding at the time, and provided a basis around which to
develop the U.S Navy's maritime strategy in this period. A second
appendix is by Captain Peter Swartz, U.S. Navy (Ret.), and consists
of his annotated bibliography of the public debate surrounding the
formulation of the strategy in the 1980s, updated to include
materials published through the end of 2003. And finally, Yuri M.
Zhukov has created especially for this volume a timeline that lays
out a chronology of events to better understand the sequence of
events involved. The study and the three appendices are materials
that contribute toward a future historical understanding and do
not, in themselves, constitute a definitive history, although they
are published as valuable tools toward reaching that goal. To reach
closer to a definitive understanding, there are a variety of new
perceptions that need to be added over time. With the opening of
archives on both sides of the world, and as scholarly discourse
between Russians and Americans develop, one will be able to begin
to compare and contrast perceptions with factual realities. As more
time passes and we gain further distance and perspective in seeing
the emerging broad trends, new approaches to the subject may become
apparent. Simultaneously, new materials may be released from
government archives that will enhance our understanding.
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