Warming waters and melting sea ice will create new challenges off our northern shores, and the Navy and Marine Corps must be prepared to provide a presence in the Arctic that will ensure peace and ...prosperity in the face of aggressive Russian militarization and expanding Chinese interest. Lessons from America’s Arctic past can illuminate what needs to be done.
Habits of Highly Effective Maritime Strategists is a deliberately compact work aimed at both current and aspiring strategists, especially those who concern themselves with strategy at sea, and at ...those who work for or alongside them. The volume is meant to help strategic leaders know and educate themselves, two of the most important enterprises in the field of leadership. James R. Holmes reaches back to the classics of philosophy-especially to the works of Aristotle, the founder of the Lyceum-to posit that strategy is a habit. Rather, he writes, it involves cultivating a family of habits. To excel at strategy, one should learn what excellent strategists do and practice that ritual each day. Repetition helps the strategist find virtue, which Aristotle defined as the "golden mean" between the extremes of some trait, while shunning vice, the excess or deficiency of that trait. Over time, it becomes second nature to take the long view of national political and strategic ends; marshal diplomatic, economic, and military resources; and devise ways to put those resources to work for strategic gain. The classics of strategy feature prominently in this work. The canon sets forth concepts worth mastering. For instance, Carl von Clausewitz exhorts strategists to amass superior forces at the decisive place and time while abjuring secondary commitments that scatter resources about the map and risk leaving each force too weak to accomplish its goal. In a similar vein Alfred Thayer Mahan devises a formula for sizing fleets to overpower foes in important waters or coastal zones. Sun Tzu espouses the "indirect approach" to strategy, and B. H. Liddell Hart and J. C. Wylie join the classical Chinese general in his advocacy. In the ideal case strategists not just learn but internalize these concepts. Harnessing them in the real world becomes effortless.
Recent programs such as the littoral combat ship, the Zumwalt-class guided-missile destroyer, and the Ford-class aircraft carrier all have highlighted the Navy’s failure to produce innovative, ...affordable ships in the quantity and of the quality needed to configure a larger, redesigned fleet. Unless the Navy can address mistakes made in these programs it will have difficulty innovating successfully—with potentially disastrous consequences.
