Abstract
The U.S. Navy has never been comfortable with theory or doctrine at whatis now known as the operational level of war. The Navy has always possessed robust ship- and formation-level doctrine—tactics—and of course has embraced the high-level sea-power theories of both Alfred Thayer Mahan and Julian Corbett. The gap in the middle either has not been needed—as has been essentially the case for most of the Navy’s history except for World War II—or has been filled by adaptive practice in the form of specific campaign or operations plans. For the Navy, the old framework of strategy and tactics has sufficed since 1945. However, an emergent set of circumstances in the form of Chinese naval development, as well as a new generation of weapons and sensors, is driving the Navy into incorporating the operational level into its culture. Moreover, this development is bringing the Navy into competition, or perhaps conflict, with the U.S. Air Force over which should exert operational control of aviation over the water. Whereas this task was always presumed to be the preserve of the Navy, the establishment in Hawaii of a regional Air Operations Center (AOC) that in theory controls all air in the theater will challenge Navy assumptions and equities. The tactics of interservice squabbling aside, the Navy will need a theory of naval airpower as a foundation for its arguments to preserve operational control of its aviation.
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