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A U.S. Navy for the Post-Cold War World
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11189 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1993 |
3,382 Words |
| Author
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John Lehman
John Lehman was secretary of the Navy in the Reagan
administration. He is the author of Making War and is an
investment banker in New York. |
With the abrupt halt of the Cold War a couple of years ago, a host of urgent questions arose as to the shape of U.S. foreign policy and military strategy in a one-superpower world.
Unfortunately, a proper discussion of what the U.S. Navy did to win the Cold War and what it must do in the new world order has been obscured by the furor over the 1991 Tailhook sexual harassment incident. The deplorable conduct of a very few naval officers was blown out of all proportion, aided by the feckless attitude of the Bush administration, spawning an endless witch-hunt in which the braying of a political lynch mob drowned out all reasoned discussion of naval policy.
It is now quite clear, however, that the post-Cold War era is very much like the pre-Cold War era, characterized by local conflicts, civil wars, revolutions, and despotisms. Although the great threat of total war is gone, threats to the security of our free-world institutions will continue to emerge in unpredictable ways great and small, as they have with Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, and Somalia's Muhammad Farah Aidid.
One huge difference between the pre-Cold War era and the present is that we no longer enjoy the luxury of having a self-contained economy. We won World War II because we were able to produce the most incredible amounts of war materials; mobilize a vast Army, Navy, and Air Force; supply all of our allies; and turn out two merchant ships a day and several hundred aircraft a week, depending essentially on no other region of the world. We were self-sufficient in petroleum, iron, steel, and most raw materials and capital goods.
Today, all of that is gone. There is not a manufacturing enterprise in America that is not fundamentally dependent in some way on suppliers of machine tools, computer software or hardware, strategic minerals, and energy and on markets for goods in areas in every corner of the globe. We are more interdependent, with our vital interests more exposed in more places far off in the world, than we ever were or ever dreamed of being prior to the Cold War.
THE U.S. NAVY IN THE NEW WORLD ORDER
Even as our vulnerability in a global economy has increased, Saddam and the Serbs have demonstrated that the disappearance of the bipolar discipline of the Cold War has made threatening violence much more frequent. It would have been inconceivable just five years
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