ID's 6th Anniversary - CNA's U.S. Navy Capstone Strategies

June 20, 2024 -- The Abraham Lincoln Battle Group along with ships from Australia, Chile, Japan, Canada, and Korea steam alongside one another for a Battle Group Photo during RIMPAC 2000. (U.S. Navy photo by PH2 Gabriel Wilson.) Click image for 1280x818 resolution.

June is the anniversary month for Information Dissemination, with 2013 marking the sixth anniversary. Starting last year I decided I was going to commit the month of June every year to something I am interested in. Last year I was able to convince (without bribes) several individuals who have heavily influenced my thinking over the past several years to each answer a question for me. If you didn't read the responses provided by last years contributors, those essay's from some of the most influential leaders in the broad Navy community today are well worth reading.

This year I decided to do something a little different. On June 4, 2024 my good friend Peter Swartz sent me an email asking me to look at a series on U.S. Navy Capstone Strategies that he and Karin Duggan had produced for CNA. The series was originally released in December 2011, and while I had looked at several of the documents individually, I had not looked at the entire set as one collection until his email.

CNA's U.S. Navy Capstone Strategies publications analyze the three dozen or so Navy capstone documents published between 1970-2010 (with a short discussion of what came before and an even shorter post-script covering 2011). They do not include the actual texts of those documents, which can be found in the Naval War College Press’s Newport Papers series - the brainchildren of Carnes Lord and John Hattendorf. The U.S. Navy Capstone Strategies publications also outline the context within which Navy strategy documents were written.

I knew as soon as I read the first document of the series, U.S. Navy Capstone Strategy, Policy, Vision and Concept Documents: What to consider before you write one that I was going to write about this material. What I didn't realize at the time was how the series was going to impact me, change the way I think about naval strategy, and shape my time as it has over the last year and half. Many long time blog readers have undoubtedly noticed that over the past 18 months, I have written less on the blog even as I seem to talk just as much over email, Twitter, or other forums. Ironically, I do not feel less engaged from the Navy conversation, but I do feel less productive as a writer. In truth I still write a lot, just not on my own blog.

Where my time has really been focused is on reading, and listening. For someone like me who wants to fully understand the issues facing the US Navy today, loves reading about the history of naval affairs, and commits a lot of time to serious thought about naval strategy (as opposed to tactics or operations, which is what naval officers do) I personally found the CNA U.S. Navy Capstone Strategies series to be an excellent foundation by which to recommit myself in researching modern naval affairs and recent naval history. While the series does focus on the capstone documents specifically, the context of those documents, and the concepts that circulated within the Navy conversation at the time; for me what the U.S. Navy Capstone Strategies series did was inform me what I should be reading and why I should be reading it. In going through the series a decade at a time, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, I quickly realized I had never read some of the most influencial books that even to this day still apply significant influence on concepts, culture, and starting assumptions of the modern US Navy.

Over the next four weeks I intend to step through each of the four decades as outlined in the series and highlight a few of the topics that jumped out to me, and what I believe is relevant today. The centerpiece of the next four weeks is the work of Peter Swartz at CNA, and my thoughts along the way are far from comprehensive, but I do hope they inspire some conversations and debate.