Sea Power in the Twenty-First Century: Projecting a Naval Revolution

(Hardback)

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As the U.S. Navy enters the twenty-first century, many of the ships, aircraft, weapons, and tactics it employed so successfully during the Cold War will no longer be cost-effective or even effective. Future battlefields will shift the locus of naval action from the high seas into littoral waters, demanding sustained operations in relatively narrow, shallow waters. Naval forces in the twenty-first century must not only meet the traditional requirements of command of the seaships, planes, troops, and basescarrying out forward presence, crisis response, strategic deterrence, and sealift. They must now put these together to obtain the four key operational capabilities of littoral warfare: command, control, intelligence and surveillance, and communication; battlespace dominance; power projection; and force sustainment. The core of the new U.S. strategic concept is power projection, and it envisions naval forces directly leading Army and Air Force elements to influence events ashore, most probably in the Third World. And this navy must be cost effective.

Reviews

[A]n interesting book and quite a useful commentary on the American naval future as seen from the late 1990s.-The Northern Mariner
The book's value rests in the realistic framework it projects for achieving the more revolutionary change to expeditionary warfare it expouses....Hopefully, blue-water naval enthusiasts will not focus on the author's brown-water Coast Guard background, choosing instead to gain from his rich experience as a naval historian and his thought-provoking visions for the US Navy's future.-Military Review
"An interesting book and quite a useful commentary on the American naval future as seen from the late 1990s."-The Northern Mariner
"[A]n interesting book and quite a useful commentary on the American naval future as seen from the late 1990s."-The Northern Mariner
"The book's value rests in the realistic framework it projects for achieving the more revolutionary change to expeditionary warfare it expouses....Hopefully, blue-water naval enthusiasts will not focus on the author's brown-water Coast Guard background, choosing instead to gain from his rich experience as a naval historian and his thought-provoking visions for the US Navy's future."-Military Review

Author Bio

CHARLES W. KOBURGER, JR., is currently a consultant on maritime affairs. He has published extensively on naval and maritime subjects, including Naval Expeditions: The French Return to Indochina, 1945-1946 (forthcoming, 1997), Pacific Turning Point: The Solomons Campaign, 1942-1943 (1995), Naval Warfare in the Baltic, 1939-1945: War in a Narrow Sea (1994), Franco-American Naval Relations, 1940-1945 (1993), Naval Warfare in the Eastern Mediterranean: 1940-1945 (1993), and The French Navy in Indochina: Riverine and Coastal Forces, 1945-54 (1991), all from Praeger.