Cold war maritime competition
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Cold war maritime competition Chen Li1 Received: 26 October 2020 / Accepted: 3 November 2020 © The Institute of International and Strategic Studies (IISS), Peking University 2020
Oceans Ventured: Winning the Cold War at Sea, by John Lehman, W. W. Norton & Company, 2018, 368 pages, $27.95 (Hardcover) Admiral Gorshkov, The Man Who Challenged the U.S. Navy, by Norman Polmar, Thomas A. Brooks, and George E. Fedoroff, Naval Institute Press, 2019, 264 pages, $39.95 (Hardcover) The Silent Deep: The Royal Navy Submarine Service since 1945, by Peter Hennessy and James Jinks, Penguin UK, 2016, 448 pages, $27.40 (Paperback) In the post-Cold War era, the study of Cold War maritime competition became a backwater, as the US enjoyed maritime supremacy. Thanks to the centenary of the First World War, when US–China maritime competition gradually emerged, scholars became interested in the lessons of the Anglo-German naval arms race. Cold War maritime rivalry shares at least two similarities with current US–China maritime competition. The first is technology context, which includes nuclear weapons, precision-strike weapons, and situational awareness. The second is support of peacetime foreign policy objectives by maritime power. The effectiveness of maritime strategy within the overall bilateral competition or grand strategy also deserves more attention. In recent years, an encouraging development in Cold War maritime rivalry scholarship is the emergence of three new books covering US maritime strategy, Soviet naval power development, and the undersea competition by former decision-makers, naval analysts, and historians.
1 The triumph of US maritime strategy? John Lehman, the secretary of the Navy during the Reagan presidency, published Oceans Ventured: Winning the Cold War at Sea, his second book on Cold War maritime competition. The first book, Command of the Seas, published in 1988, presented an overview of his experience as Navy secretary, generally describing the * Chen Li [email protected] 1
School of International Studies, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China
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introduction of the maritime strategy, 600-ship Navy, major acquisition programs, and maritime security cooperation. Thirty years later, further declassification of documents, as well as the arrival of new great power competition, has led to more concentration on strategy-making and maritime operations in his second book. Lehman elaborates on how he worked with senior naval commanders to develop a more aggressive and competitive maritime strategy to seize initiative from the rising Soviet maritime power, and the implementation of this strategy through large-scale maritime operations on the periphery of the Soviet Union. Lehman explains one major difference between the continental arms race in Europe and the maritime arms race during the late Cold War. Once détente led to agreements on European security, including Berlin and post-war borders, and more social and economic exchanges between the two bl
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