Sea Power, Peacekeeping, Defense Conversion and Budgets…Can They Be Balanced?

Abstract

The Persian Gulf War underscored the logic of joint military operations, shared assets and compatible equipments. In that vein, the time is ripe for our individual military services to assess common national needs and tailor their classical strengths to meet modern world realities without compromising those strengths. Within the Navy, in particular, this is an unequalled opportunity to begin constructing fleet units and future weaponry that meet a broad range of uncertainties; this requires a tilt toward ship designs and weapon developments that offer high investment payoff, adaptivity in use and untapped growth potential. Also, selected naval centers of excellence ashore with industrial knowledge and hands‐on experience can lend themselves to true “dual‐usage” and civil‐military integration by combining their Navy contributions with civilian‐training offerings in vocational techniques. This combined approach will let us maintain vital parts of our defense technology industrial base while tapping the skills of seasoned master mechanics and engineers and transferring their knowledge to a new generation facing radically different national needs. This path allows practical satisfaction of our most immediate challenge—meeting both civilian and military demands upon our country—while directly improving the product coming out of our secondary school systems through occupational skill training. The call here is to use experienced professionals with track records of accomplishment to actually produce results rather than simply talk about them; to err on the side of performance and accomplishment is in the tradition of an achievement‐oriented America.