How to Rebalance the Navy’s Strategic Culture | Proceedings

To be most effective, the U.S. Navy’s culture must equally leverage three pillars: operational, technocentric, and strategy-centric influences. With these in balance, the Navy translates its assigned ends into the ways and means needed to produce and wield sea power effectively. Most notably, the interwar years (1920–1940) and the late Cold War era (1970–1989) saw sound strategy driving force structure and doctrinal decisions with extraordinary success.

Since the Cold War ended in 1991, the Navy has not sustained the cultural balance established during the interwar years and renewed in the 1970s. A The processes for sustaining American sea power focus largely on developing means (programming and budget), while devaluing ways (strategic and doctrinal underpinnings) for rationalizing and justifying those means. Recently, a congressional leader chided the Navy for its “strategic deficit.”¹ Given this situation, it is worth asking whether the U.S. Navy—after three decades of relative peace and uncontested supremacy at sea—has fallen victim to the misplaced fixation on technology, inspections, and micromanagement that Andrew Gordon attributed to the Victorian-era Royal Navy: “They thought they were good, but, in ways that mattered, they were not. They thought they were ready for war, but they were not.”²

The Navy has struggled to balance its three cultural pillars and reconcile them with the mandates of jointness. Today’s Navy often places means ahead of ways in the ends-ways-means process. It clings to an unbalanced organizational culture that privileges operational priorities and technological solutions, while neglecting the strategic thinking needed to address the emerging global landscape.

Navy leaders must address this cultural imbalance immediately, as they adapt the organization and its people to face significant emerging challenges. As a first step, they must develop an appreciation for how historical and cultural influences produced the organization that exists today and how it differs from more successful past models. With this understanding, Navy leaders will better determine where lasting changes are needed, imagine what those changes should look…