Strategy Shelved ?is a timely and highly relevant study that examines how the Navy developed an extraordinarily effective process to think about and develop strategy in the last two decades of the Cold War and why Navy leaders, unfortunately, failed to appreciate and leverage that process in confronting the challenges in the years following the end of the Cold War. Highly recommended." --Capt. Peter D. Haynes, U.S. Navy (Ret.), author of Toward a New Maritime Strategy: American Naval Thinking in the Post-Cold War Era "In ?Strategy Shelved,? Steve Wills provides a critical examination of the navy staff's organization (OPNAV), leadership, and 'thinking' processes from the period of the development of the Maritime Strategy to the early 1990s. Wills examines how naval leaders in the 1980s were able to create a staff culture that fostered a bottom-up process of creative thinking but was effectively disassembled by the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act (1986), leading to a mentality of 'chasing the POM', vice thinking critically. Officials, analysts, and defense institutions the world over should read this account to discover one of those rare instances in time when a planning process succeeded in producing a coherent force structure."? --Thomas-Durell Young, senior lecturer, Institute for Security Governance Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California "The end of the Cold War transformed the Navy in ways not yet fully understood. Navy veteran Steve Wills has done us all a great service by putting his historian's talents to work unearthing and chronicling the changes and their context, and analyzing their roots and effects." -Capt. Peter M. Swartz (Ret.), senior CNA strategy analyst and former Cold War U.S. Navy strategist "Steven Wills combines an advanced understanding of current and historic U.S. defense policy making, a flawless grasp of past legislative mistakes, and a superb appreciation of strategy itself to show the obstacles to U.S. naval strategic thought since the Cold War's end. The book is exceptionally timely as Chinese and Russian actions return the world to its traditional state of great power competition. Advanced strategic thought--and action--demand that the US respond accordingly. Dr. Wills' book ought to be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the turbulence in which naval strategy finds itself today." --Seth Cropsey, senior fellow & director, Center for American Seapower, Hudson Institute "Navies need strategy to guide what they buy, how they train, and how they will fight. Without it, bureaucratic inertia defaults to 'programs of record' to make choices better left to theorists. In Strategy Shelved, Steven Wills shows how the Cold War U.S. Navy successfully used strategy to guide its planning, then lost that ability after 1990. For historians, it opens up the world of an understudied set of thinkers, while serving as a cautionary tale to uniformed and civilian force planners." --Sarandis Papadopoulos, PhD., historian and co-author of Pentagon 9/11 "There are two kinds of strategists, civilian policy wonks or uniformed leaders. The first have usually never been to sea or heard a shot fired in anger. The latter are often combat veterans and salty warriors of great experience but limited literary skills. Steve Wills is that very rare exception with years of command at sea but also a doctorate who writes clear and elegant prose. He has produced a compelling account of how and why good strategy won the Cold War, and bad strategy lost three successive wars in the mid-East. It is a must-read." --John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy, author of Oceans Ventured and Winning the Cold War at Sea