Navy to Unveil New Maritime Strategy

Navy to Unveil New Maritime Strategy
American Forces Press Service | September 27, 2007


Washington D.C. -- The U.S. Navy will unveil a new maritime strategy next month that will address the demands of a globalizing world, a top military official said Sept. 27.

Vice Adm. John G. Morgan Jr., Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information, Plans and Strategy (N3/N5), spoke to a group gathered at the Ronald Reagan Building for a conference on National Security Strategy and Policy.

He told the audience that during the International Seapower Symposium next month in Newport News, Va., the Navy will present a new maritime strategy to some 91 heads of allied navies, Marines and coast guards. The doctrine, which took some 16 months to complete, is the Navy's first attempt to document a seapower strategy since the 1980s.

"If you contrast the last time we made an effort to write a maritime strategy in the 1980s, you'd agree that the world today looks a lot different," he said.

Globalization -- the notion that the world's nations and people have become, and continue to grow, more interdependent -- was in its early stages during the drafting of the last strategy. Since that time, important maritime milestones have occurred. Russia recently placed a flag on the floor of the North Pole, Morgan said, and the Northwest Passage, a sea route through the Arctic Ocean along the North American coast, has opened for the first time.

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Morgan declined to describe in full detail the elements of the new strategy, but said that it addresses the changing 21st century world. Furthermore, strategy planners tried to anticipate what Morgan called the key uncertainty: what the United States' grand military strategy and foreign policy will be in the next few decades.


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