Tradition and Innovation in Maritime Thinking

Abstract

During the Cold War, the security environment on which Western naval planning was premised had a number of characteristics. The bipolar structure of the international system meant that East—West security relations were organized around two strong and opposing alliances — NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Against this strategic backdrop, the main tenet of Western defence strategy was deterring the threat posed by the Soviet Union. By the latter stages of the Cold War, planning assumptions were relatively stable because the ‘active deterrent role played by the military was well-defined and clearly understood’, 2 and NATO force levels were based on threat-based calculations and configured primarily for high-intensity war-fighting roles. Collective security was based primarily on the NATO alliance; bipolarity meant that other multilateral organizations, including the United Nations (UN), the West European Union (WEU) and the European Union (EU), played only a marginal role in East—West security affairs. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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