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The Strategy
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16385 |
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BOOK WORLD
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5 / 1989 |
2,919 Words |
| Author
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Harry G. Summers, Jr.
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COMMAND OF THE SEAS
Building the 600 Ship Navy
Join F. Lehman, Jr.
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988
464 pages, $21.95
Name a post-World War II secretary of the Army, Navy, or Air Force. Except for John Lehman, most Americans would be hard pressed to do so.
Four decades ago the once powerful civilian heads of the armed services became faceless nonentities when, with the 1949 amendment to the National Security Act of 1947, Congress stripped them of their cabinet status and their National Security Council seats and subordinated them to the spawning Department of Defense (DOD) official procedure.
This is to point up why the John Lehman saga is so amazing. Unlike his predecessors, Lehman refused the cloak of anonymity that has become the DOD-directed uniform for the service secretaries. Instead, he became a throwback to the days a half-century and more ago when the secretary of the Navy was a public figure who saw it as his parochial duty to champion the interests of the Navy.
The Maritime Strategy
Not surprisingly, Lehman drove the Washington defense bureaucracy wild, especially when they found that there was more than just rhetoric involved. Lehman had a plan: the Maritime Strategy. Exciting more attention than anything since Alfred Thayer Mahan's writings on naval strategy at the turn of the last century, Lehman's plan was more than just a theoretical discussion of strategic issues. It had a concrete dimension as well: the 600-ship navy.
Critics searched in vain for the "glass slipper," the secret of Lehman's Cinderella story. At first it was thought to be his close relationship with the president, then his skill in bureaucratic infighting, and finally a variety of other diabolic causes. No one could fathom that the real "glass slipper" was an idea.
Ideas are not common in the Pentagon's quantified and computerized atmosphere, but, unlike many of the technocrats in the defense bureaucracy, Lehman was comfortable with the theory of war. No intellectual lightweight, Lehman had received his bachelor's and master's degrees from England's Cambridge University and his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. He has also written several books, including Aircraft Carriers: The Real Choices.
Serving on the National Security Council under Nixon, he learned that ideas are potent weapons on Washington's bureaucratic battlefields. Lehman also had credentials that many of his critics lacked. As a naval reserve aviator he had hands-on experience with naval operations. And he had even "seen the elephant" (if only briefly) during a 1972 active duty tour, flying close air support for the South Vietnamese marines in the battle for Quang Tri city.
Combining his own ideas with those of the Navy War College Seaplan 2000, Lehman came up with a formula that was unusually attack-resistant. Critics could not assault the fiscal dimensions of the 600-ship
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