This book examines the nature and character of naval expeditionary warfare, in particular in peripheral campaigns, and the contribution of such campaigns to the achievement of strategic victory. Naval powers, which can lack the massive ground forces to win in the main theatre, often choose a secondary theatre accessible to them by sea and difficult for their enemies to reach by land, giving the sea power and its expeditionary forces the advantage. The technical term for these theatres is 'peripheral operations.' The subject of peripheral campaigns in naval expeditionary warfare is central to the British, the US, and the Australian way of war in the past and in the future. All three are reluctant to engage large land forces because of the high human and economic costs. Instead, they rely as much as possible on sea and air power, and the latter is most often in the form of carrier-based aviation. In order to exert pressure on their enemies, they have often opened additional theaters in on-going, regional, and civil wars. This book contains thirteen case studies by some of the foremost naval historians from the United States, Great Britain, and Australia whose collected case studies examine the most important peripheral operations of the last two centuries. This book will be of much interest to students of naval warfare, military history, strategic studies and security studies.

This book examines the nature and character of naval expeditionary warfare, in particular in peripheral campaigns, and the contribution of such campaigns to the achievement of strategic victory. Naval powers, which can lack the massive ground forces to win in the main theatre, often choose a secondary theatre accessible to them by sea and difficult for their enemies to reach by land, giving the sea power and its expeditionary forces the advantage. The technical term for these theatres is ‘peripheral operations.’ The subject of peripheral campaigns in naval expeditionary warfare is central to the British, the US, and the Australian way of war in the past and in the future. All three are reluctant to engage large land forces because of the high human and economic costs. Instead, they rely as much as possible on sea and air power, and the latter is most often in the form of carrier-based aviation. In order to exert pressure on their enemies, they have often opened additional theaters in on-going, regional, and civil wars. This book contains thirteen case studies by some of the foremost naval historians from the United States, Great Britain, and Australia whose collected case studies examine the most important peripheral operations of the last two centuries. This book will be of much interest to students of naval warfare, military history, strategic studies and security studies.

Maritime powers dominate the planet, from the British empire of the 19th century, to the American post-World War II domination of global affairs. To a large degree their control of the globe is based on control of the seas. This book seeks to examine the strengths and weaknesses of maritime power, including specific chapters on mutiny, blockades, coalitions, piracy, expeditionary warfare, commerce raiding, and soft power operations, but with larger discussion of such sea power characteristics as sea control, sea denial, and the competition between land powers and sea powers. The conclusions will discuss how many other countries, including Russia during the Cold War and the PRC today, have or are seeking to use sea power to claim regional and then eventually global hegemony.

U.S. strategic interests include global security; prosperity; broad respect for universal values; and an international order that promotes cooperative action. Naval expeditionary forces are at the forefront of our national responses to ongoing international conflicts; moreover, they play a vital role in advancing these strategic interests confronting irregular challenges to prevent potential future conflicts. These conflicts and irregular challenges are caused primarily by instability and insecurity, which constitute pervasive threats to the nation's interests. As articulated by our military's senior leadership, these threats, and the corresponding call for our military forces, specifically expeditionary forces, are expected to continue and will likely increase in the future. Naval Expeditionary Warfare Vision 2010 promotes an increased awareness of expeditionary programs and forces, and the way they are supporting the Maritime Strategy. This document continues the description of expanded naval expeditionary capabilities initiated in the 2008 Naval Expeditionary Warfare Plan. It includes Naval Special Warfare; Mine Warfare; Amphibious Warfare; Navy Expeditionary Combat; and Seabasing Integration programs for which the Navy's Expeditionary Warfare Division (N85) provides resource sponsorship and/or has current or future requirements oversight. While addressing programs supporting amphibious capabilities of the Navy - Marine Corps team, it also addresses a wide spectrum of expeditionary capabilities that are similarly important to our nation. This edition of the Naval Expeditionary Warfare Plan will follow the format of its predecessors; it will describe expeditionary warfare assets and programs, and their uses in current expeditionary operations worldwide. The objectives of this publication are to: Promote an increased awareness of current and future expeditionary warfare capabilities and to stimulate discussion amongst the target audience; Show how expeditionary forces support the Maritime Strategy and combatant commanders' (CCDRs') requirements by being forward deployed and rapidly deployable to influence events on a global scale; Describe expeditionary forces and recent expeditionary operations.

In Maritime Power and the Law of the Sea: Expeditionary Operations in World Politics, Commander James Kraska analyzes the evolving rules governing freedom of the seas and their impact on expeditionary operations in the littoral, near-shore coastal zone. Coastal state practice and international law are developing in ways that restrict naval access to the littorals and associated coastal communities and inshore regions that have become the fulcrum of world geopolitics. Consequently, the ability of naval forces to project expeditionary power throughout semi-enclosed seas, exclusive economic zones (EEZs) and along the important sea-shore interface is diminishing and, as a result, limiting strategic access and freedom of action where it is most needed. Commander Kraska describes how control of the global commons, coupled with new approaches to sea power and expeditionary force projection, has given the United States and its allies the ability to assert overwhelming sea power to nearly any area of the globe. But as the law of the sea gravitates away from a classic liberal order of the oceans, naval forces are finding it more challenging to accomplish the spectrum of maritime missions in the coastal littorals, including forward presence, power projection, deterrence, humanitarian assistance and sea control. The developing legal order of the oceans fuses diplomacy, strategy and international law to directly challenge unimpeded access to coastal areas, with profound implications for American grand strategy and world politics.

The Department of Defense is in the process of transforming the nation's armed forces to meet the military challenges of the 21st century. Currently, the opportunity exists to carry out experiments at individual and joint service levels to facilitate this transformation. Experimentation, which involves a spectrum of activities including analyses, war games, modeling and simulation, small focused experiments, and large field events among other things, provides the means to enhance naval and joint force development. To assist the Navy in this effort, the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) asked the National Research Council (NRC) to conduct a study to examine the role of experimentation in building future naval forces to operate in the joint environment. The NRC formed the Committee for the Role of Experimentation in Building Future Naval Forces to perform the study.

The end of the Cold War has ushered in a period in which Western military forces have engaged primarily in expeditionary operations. These have turned out to be much more complex politically than first thought and have required naval planners to focus on delivering effects from the sea rather than at sea. Accordingly, navies around the world are going through a time of transition and transformation in which questions are being asked about their priorities, the relative importance of their contributions to joint and combined campaigns, and how these best might be provided. Because of the understandably widespread fixation on the war-fighting phase of the expeditionary operation, current conceptions of the naval contribution, even in the United States, do not pay sufficient regard to the less obvious aspects of the naval contribution to campaigns which mostly are by their nature maritime. It is easy, for example, to neglect the importance of the diplomatic activity which acts as a kind of beforeand- after-sales service to the main war-fighting event. Naval diplomacy, of course, may reduce the necessity for high-intensity expeditionary operations in the first place. But even when it does not, a naval diplomatic campaign to win friends and influence people and to deter potential malefactors should be designed to create the optimum political context within which the expeditionary campaign may be fought. The same can be said for the naval effort to assure maritime security by maintaining good order at sea against those that threaten it (such as waterborne terrorists, pirates, smugglers, arms suppliers, and the like). Even navies with their institutional and budgetary priorities for the requirements of high-intensity capabilities have a tendency to neglect these less visible low intensity tasks that often are crucial to the winning and, as important, the sustaining of victory in the land campaign. While the U.S. Navy may be taking the lead in developing capabilities of direct value to the prosecution of expeditionary operations, many other navies are doing so as well, if on a smaller and less ambitious scale, although this widespread effort may be predicated on assumptions about "an expeditionary future" which, in the end, may not be obtained. There are three maritime requirements of expeditionary warfare. First is the capacity to maintain sea control on the open ocean and in the littorals to protect the force and enable it to engage in missions against the land. Second is the projection of power ashore, and third is the provision of sea-based logistical support for maritime forces at sea and land forces ashore. These are interrelated in complex ways and should not be considered as separate and discrete. The maintenance of sea control raises issues about the difference and relative priority between operations in the littoral and on the open ocean, and provides a set of significant technological challenges to today's naval planners and force developers. The effectiveness of the response of these planners to these sometimes novel challenges will have significant implications for those involved in the land campaign because of their military and political reliance on high degrees of sea control. Political constraints of the sort revealed in the Iraq war of 2003 also have emphasized the advantages of maritime power projection.

As one can guess from the title, the following book is a non-fiction work that attempts to explain why having a strong naval force can be the deciding factor of whether a country will emerge victorious when engaging in open conflict. It is written by Bradley A. Fiske, an officer in the United States Navy who was noted as a technical innovator. During his long career, Fiske invented more than a hundred and thirty electrical and mechanical devices, with both naval and civilian uses, and wrote extensively on technical and professional issues. At one point, The New Yorker called him "one of the notable naval inventors of all time."