Samuel Huntington and the U.S. Navy: A Reappraisal
Samuel Huntington and the U.S. Navy: A Reappraisal
The MOC
By Dr. Steven Wills
July 7, 2026
Harvard scholar and civil-military affairs theorist Dr. Samuel Huntington was a towering presence in American political science from the mid-twentieth century into the early twenty-first. Although his post-Cold War “Clash of Civilizations” thesis has fallen out of favor in many quarters, Huntington remains one of the central figures in the intellectual debate over how civilian and military institutions should interact in a democratic society. His entry into that field came in part through a seminal 1954 article in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings, which argued that a military service must explain its strategic purpose to both civilian leaders and the broader public. After that engagement with naval affairs, Huntington moved toward broader questions of U.S. military strategy and civil-military relations, culminating in his strong support for the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986.
For many in the Navy and among those who study naval strategy, force structure, and organization, Huntington has become something of an icon. His 1954 article is often treated as a “voice crying in the wilderness,” urging the victorious Navy of the Second World War to articulate a new purpose for the emerging Cold War. Some contemporary commentators again invoke Huntington as evidence that the Navy requires another strategic turn—this time to confront a rising China, a revanchist Russia, and an increasingly assertive Iran.
That renewed interest is understandable. If the academic world needs a naval theorist to mobilize in support of greater U.S. naval power, Huntington is a useful figure. Yet some of his modern interpreters go too far. They imply that the U.S. Navy has been unable to make its own strategic case—either now or during the Cold War—without Huntington’s framework. They also tend to treat his post-World War II “Eurasian phase” of naval power projection as if it continued uninterrupted to the present, overlooking the Navy’s decisive return to sea control after the rise of the Soviet Navy in the early 1970s. Finally, the Navy’s post-Cold War difficulty in articulating its own maritime strategy and force design owes much to the joint system reinforced by Goldwater-Nichols, which Huntington himself championed. The Navy does not need another invocation of Huntington to recover its strategic voice or rebuild a force structure strained by overuse and material neglect. It needs an operational-level maritime strategy—of the kind it possessed in the late 1940s and again during the 1980s—that translates national security and defense objectives into fleet design, force size, and operational priorities. Developing and defending such a strategy is the responsibility of both the Chief of Naval Operations and the Secretary of the Navy.
The Navy Was Not Bereft of Strategy after World War II
The Navy began planning for a possible conflict with the Soviet Union less than three years after the defeat of Germany and Japan. As early as January 1946, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal directed that “a heavy striking force be prepared for constant offensive operations ostensibly in the Eastern Atlantic and Caribbean.” This force became the Eighth Fleet, led by veteran Pacific carrier admiral Marc Mitscher, with future Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke as his chief of staff. In April 1946, future CNO Admiral Forrest Sherman—then serving as Nimitz’s operations officer—helped drive the mission to return the body of the Turkish ambassador to the United States to his homeland using a powerful Navy task force centered on the battleship USS Missouri. The mission’s strategic purpose was unmistakable: to deter the Soviet Union from deeper involvement in postwar Greek and Turkish affairs.
The potential Soviet submarine threat also emerged quickly after World War II, especially after Moscow acquired advanced German Type XXI U-boats. Admiral Nimitz identified the submarine threat as early as 1946 and, by 1949, ranked it nearly equal to atomic attack as a danger to U.S. national security. The Navy also recognized that the Japanese kamikaze represented a gamer change in naval warfare and rapidly developed the organization and technological means to counter what became the cruise missile threat.
Admiral Sherman had already developed a war plan against the Soviet Union in 1946, known as “Pincher,” and tested elements of it in Arctic waters during “Operation Frostbite” that same year. The plan was briefed to President Truman and selected members of Congress in early 1947, demonstrating that the Navy had a maritime strategy, a defined strategic concept, and an organizational structure to support implementation seven years before Huntington’s 1954 article. Sherman’s strategy lacked the public-facing component Huntington later recommended, but the Navy was far from strategically adrift. It was developing new weapons and strategy even before the Soviets had detonated their first nuclear weapon.
The Missing Middle Maritime Strategy and Diminished Strategic Voice
Contemporary proponents of Huntington also suggest that his “Eurasian” focus has extended to the present, and that only now—facing a growing Chinese threat—must the Navy return to a “panoceanic” orientation. This reading understates the Cold War experience. Even while fighting in Korea and Vietnam, the United States remained centrally focused on the Soviet Union as a peer competitor with massive conventional forces and a formidable nuclear arsenal. Huntington’s “Eurasian” phase arguably ended in 1970 with the Soviet Navy’s OKEAN exercise, a massive global demonstration of ships, submarines, and aircraft that the Chinese navy has not yet surpassed. In response, Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt forced a hard turn back toward sea control and away from a predominantly power-projection focus shaped by bombing and shelling missions in Southeast Asia. Over the 1970s, the Navy rebuilt strategy and force-design competencies that culminated in the Maritime Strategy of 1982–1990. That operational-level strategy envisioned a global sea-control contest with the Soviet and Warsaw Pact navies as a way of deflecting Soviet power from the European central front in the event of a NATO/Warsaw Pact conflict. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the Navy again moved closer to Huntington’s Eurasian phase as it supported ground campaigns in the Middle East, the Balkans, and Afghanistan. Some observers now discount the Soviet threat because of Moscow’s economic weakness, but Soviet conventional and nuclear forces posed a real danger—one continued, in altered and perhaps more unpredictable form, by the Russian Federation.
Today’s U.S. Navy faces severe challenges. The shipbuilding system is hobbled by decades of industrial-base erosion and bureaucratic lethargy, to the point that destroyers and nuclear submarines now take far too long to build. The fleet is too small for the missions it is routinely asked to execute, even as it continues to perform above its weight through superior technology, combat organization, and renewed training for war at sea. Yet the Navy’s diminished strategic voice—the very problem many new Huntingtonians lament—is partly a product of Huntington’s own later preferences. Huntington strongly supported Goldwater-Nichols, legislation intended to improve joint action among the services. In a 1982 Public Interest article, he criticized “servicism” in favor of a broader joint military view. After the Cold War, and especially after 9/11, individual service perspectives became increasingly submerged within joint processes. The distinct Navy voice that Huntington appeared to praise in 1954 became far less influential, while joint and Office of the Secretary of Defense preferences helped shape unsatisfactory platforms such as the DDG-1000 land-attack destroyer and the Littoral Combat Ship. In this sense, the Huntington of 1982 undermined the Huntington of 1954.
What does the U.S. Navy really need? The Navy has been “panoceanic” since 1944, with perhaps a short dip away from the end of World War II to the February 1950 establishment of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean Sea. The Navy again needs a maritime strategy, such as it possessed under the leadership of Admirals Forrest Sherman, Arleigh Burke, and those of the 1970’s and 1980’s from Zumwalt to Kelso, as well Navy Secretaries like James Forrestal and John Lehman. The Navy’s strategy should be derived from the national security strategy, and the objectives of naval strategy should in term determine the size and force design of the fleet. Naval civilian and military leaders in turn should use the strategy as the tool to recommend appropriate action by Congress to support that fleet. Yes, the U.S. Navy has a number of challenges in shipbuilding, fleet size, and force design, but there are processes the service has used before to fix past similar problems. The Navy usually knows or rapidly figures out where it is deficient, and it does not need yet another Huntingtonian appeal to better make its case. The post-1986 joint system that Huntington advocated in fact prevents the service from thinking about itself or making its case to civilian leadership.
What, then, does the U.S. Navy actually need? The service has been broadly “panoceanic” since 1944, with perhaps only a brief deviation between the end of World War II and the establishment of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean in February 1950. What the Navy needs now is not another appeal to Huntington but a maritime strategy comparable to those developed under Admirals Forrest Sherman, Arleigh Burke, Elmo Zumwalt, and their successors through the 1980s, as well as under Navy secretaries such as James Forrestal and John Lehman. That strategy should derive from the national security and defense strategies, and its operational objectives should determine the size, composition, and design of the fleet. Civilian and uniformed naval leaders should then use that strategy to make a disciplined case to Congress for the authorities, resources, and industrial capacity required to build and sustain the fleet. The Navy has serious problems in shipbuilding, fleet size, and force design, but it has addressed similar challenges before through strategic clarity and institutional discipline. The service usually understands—or rapidly discovers—where it is deficient. It does not need a new Huntingtonian appeal to make its case. Indeed, the post-1986 joint system Huntington supported has often made it harder for the Navy to think about itself as a service and explain its maritime purpose to civilian leaders. The first step in repair is for Congress to require the Navy to produce an operational maritime strategy that directly informs fleet size, force design, and future naval investment.
Dr. Steve Willsis the Navalist at The Center for Maritime Strategy.
The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.
By Dr. Steven Wills
Harvard scholar and civil-military affairs theorist Dr. Samuel Huntington was a towering presence in American political science from the mid-twentieth century into the early twenty-first. Although his post-Cold War “Clash of Civilizations” thesis has fallen out of favor in many quarters, Huntington remains one of the central figures in the intellectual debate over how civilian and military institutions should interact in a democratic society. His entry into that field came in part through a seminal 1954 article in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings, which argued that a military service must explain its strategic purpose to both civilian leaders and the broader public. After that engagement with naval affairs, Huntington moved toward broader questions of U.S. military strategy and civil-military relations, culminating in his strong support for the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986.
For many in the Navy and among those who study naval strategy, force structure, and organization, Huntington has become something of an icon. His 1954 article is often treated as a “voice crying in the wilderness,” urging the victorious Navy of the Second World War to articulate a new purpose for the emerging Cold War. Some contemporary commentators again invoke Huntington as evidence that the Navy requires another strategic turn—this time to confront a rising China, a revanchist Russia, and an increasingly assertive Iran.
That renewed interest is understandable. If the academic world needs a naval theorist to mobilize in support of greater U.S. naval power, Huntington is a useful figure. Yet some of his modern interpreters go too far. They imply that the U.S. Navy has been unable to make its own strategic case—either now or during the Cold War—without Huntington’s framework. They also tend to treat his post-World War II “Eurasian phase” of naval power projection as if it continued uninterrupted to the present, overlooking the Navy’s decisive return to sea control after the rise of the Soviet Navy in the early 1970s. Finally, the Navy’s post-Cold War difficulty in articulating its own maritime strategy and force design owes much to the joint system reinforced by Goldwater-Nichols, which Huntington himself championed. The Navy does not need another invocation of Huntington to recover its strategic voice or rebuild a force structure strained by overuse and material neglect. It needs an operational-level maritime strategy—of the kind it possessed in the late 1940s and again during the 1980s—that translates national security and defense objectives into fleet design, force size, and operational priorities. Developing and defending such a strategy is the responsibility of both the Chief of Naval Operations and the Secretary of the Navy.
The Navy Was Not Bereft of Strategy after World War II
The Navy began planning for a possible conflict with the Soviet Union less than three years after the defeat of Germany and Japan. As early as January 1946, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal directed that “a heavy striking force be prepared for constant offensive operations ostensibly in the Eastern Atlantic and Caribbean.” This force became the Eighth Fleet, led by veteran Pacific carrier admiral Marc Mitscher, with future Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke as his chief of staff. In April 1946, future CNO Admiral Forrest Sherman—then serving as Nimitz’s operations officer—helped drive the mission to return the body of the Turkish ambassador to the United States to his homeland using a powerful Navy task force centered on the battleship USS Missouri. The mission’s strategic purpose was unmistakable: to deter the Soviet Union from deeper involvement in postwar Greek and Turkish affairs.
The potential Soviet submarine threat also emerged quickly after World War II, especially after Moscow acquired advanced German Type XXI U-boats. Admiral Nimitz identified the submarine threat as early as 1946 and, by 1949, ranked it nearly equal to atomic attack as a danger to U.S. national security. The Navy also recognized that the Japanese kamikaze represented a gamer change in naval warfare and rapidly developed the organization and technological means to counter what became the cruise missile threat.
Admiral Sherman had already developed a war plan against the Soviet Union in 1946, known as “Pincher,” and tested elements of it in Arctic waters during “Operation Frostbite” that same year. The plan was briefed to President Truman and selected members of Congress in early 1947, demonstrating that the Navy had a maritime strategy, a defined strategic concept, and an organizational structure to support implementation seven years before Huntington’s 1954 article. Sherman’s strategy lacked the public-facing component Huntington later recommended, but the Navy was far from strategically adrift. It was developing new weapons and strategy even before the Soviets had detonated their first nuclear weapon.
The Missing Middle Maritime Strategy and Diminished Strategic Voice
Contemporary proponents of Huntington also suggest that his “Eurasian” focus has extended to the present, and that only now—facing a growing Chinese threat—must the Navy return to a “panoceanic” orientation. This reading understates the Cold War experience. Even while fighting in Korea and Vietnam, the United States remained centrally focused on the Soviet Union as a peer competitor with massive conventional forces and a formidable nuclear arsenal. Huntington’s “Eurasian” phase arguably ended in 1970 with the Soviet Navy’s OKEAN exercise, a massive global demonstration of ships, submarines, and aircraft that the Chinese navy has not yet surpassed. In response, Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt forced a hard turn back toward sea control and away from a predominantly power-projection focus shaped by bombing and shelling missions in Southeast Asia. Over the 1970s, the Navy rebuilt strategy and force-design competencies that culminated in the Maritime Strategy of 1982–1990. That operational-level strategy envisioned a global sea-control contest with the Soviet and Warsaw Pact navies as a way of deflecting Soviet power from the European central front in the event of a NATO/Warsaw Pact conflict. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the Navy again moved closer to Huntington’s Eurasian phase as it supported ground campaigns in the Middle East, the Balkans, and Afghanistan. Some observers now discount the Soviet threat because of Moscow’s economic weakness, but Soviet conventional and nuclear forces posed a real danger—one continued, in altered and perhaps more unpredictable form, by the Russian Federation.
Today’s U.S. Navy faces severe challenges. The shipbuilding system is hobbled by decades of industrial-base erosion and bureaucratic lethargy, to the point that destroyers and nuclear submarines now take far too long to build. The fleet is too small for the missions it is routinely asked to execute, even as it continues to perform above its weight through superior technology, combat organization, and renewed training for war at sea. Yet the Navy’s diminished strategic voice—the very problem many new Huntingtonians lament—is partly a product of Huntington’s own later preferences. Huntington strongly supported Goldwater-Nichols, legislation intended to improve joint action among the services. In a 1982 Public Interest article, he criticized “servicism” in favor of a broader joint military view. After the Cold War, and especially after 9/11, individual service perspectives became increasingly submerged within joint processes. The distinct Navy voice that Huntington appeared to praise in 1954 became far less influential, while joint and Office of the Secretary of Defense preferences helped shape unsatisfactory platforms such as the DDG-1000 land-attack destroyer and the Littoral Combat Ship. In this sense, the Huntington of 1982 undermined the Huntington of 1954.
What does the U.S. Navy really need? The Navy has been “panoceanic” since 1944, with perhaps a short dip away from the end of World War II to the February 1950 establishment of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean Sea. The Navy again needs a maritime strategy, such as it possessed under the leadership of Admirals Forrest Sherman, Arleigh Burke, and those of the 1970’s and 1980’s from Zumwalt to Kelso, as well Navy Secretaries like James Forrestal and John Lehman. The Navy’s strategy should be derived from the national security strategy, and the objectives of naval strategy should in term determine the size and force design of the fleet. Naval civilian and military leaders in turn should use the strategy as the tool to recommend appropriate action by Congress to support that fleet. Yes, the U.S. Navy has a number of challenges in shipbuilding, fleet size, and force design, but there are processes the service has used before to fix past similar problems. The Navy usually knows or rapidly figures out where it is deficient, and it does not need yet another Huntingtonian appeal to better make its case. The post-1986 joint system that Huntington advocated in fact prevents the service from thinking about itself or making its case to civilian leadership.
What, then, does the U.S. Navy actually need? The service has been broadly “panoceanic” since 1944, with perhaps only a brief deviation between the end of World War II and the establishment of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean in February 1950. What the Navy needs now is not another appeal to Huntington but a maritime strategy comparable to those developed under Admirals Forrest Sherman, Arleigh Burke, Elmo Zumwalt, and their successors through the 1980s, as well as under Navy secretaries such as James Forrestal and John Lehman. That strategy should derive from the national security and defense strategies, and its operational objectives should determine the size, composition, and design of the fleet. Civilian and uniformed naval leaders should then use that strategy to make a disciplined case to Congress for the authorities, resources, and industrial capacity required to build and sustain the fleet. The Navy has serious problems in shipbuilding, fleet size, and force design, but it has addressed similar challenges before through strategic clarity and institutional discipline. The service usually understands—or rapidly discovers—where it is deficient. It does not need a new Huntingtonian appeal to make its case. Indeed, the post-1986 joint system Huntington supported has often made it harder for the Navy to think about itself as a service and explain its maritime purpose to civilian leaders. The first step in repair is for Congress to require the Navy to produce an operational maritime strategy that directly informs fleet size, force design, and future naval investment.
Dr. Steve Wills is the Navalist at The Center for Maritime Strategy.
The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.