President Putin made three foundational assumptions in launching his war against Ukraine that should have been correct but were not. First, Putin assumed the invasion of Ukraine would be a quick and easy fight. Second, he assumed the world would denounce the invasion but tacitly allow it. Third, Putin assumed the war would deter NATO expansion.
Almost eighty years after that war’s end, it sometimes seems little remains to be written about the war at sea. Is another history needed? Kennedy’s genius has always been his ability to highlight how the shifting tectonic plates of power underlie and help explain the surface history, sometimes represented in a single event. Rather than uncovering new history, Victory at Sea arranges existing history in ways that better reveal the whole.
To date, Australia has enjoyed the benefit of a hedging strategy that embraces the economic prosperity of a close trading relationship with China while maintaining a close security alliance with the U.S. This strategy has been tested recently and the tension between values and interests requires focused attention. If there was previously any doubt on where that pendulum would swing, it is now firmly answered in the announcement of AUKUS, an Australian, U.K. and U.S. security partnership.
The popular conception of World War I centers on hellish trench warfare and all its horrors. While it is undeniable that the war was won and lost on the Western Front, the lines stretching back across the Atlantic that brought men and desperately needed supplies into the theater of operations played an essential part in Allied victory.
On 15 October 2036, the USS ZUMWALT (DDG-1000) glides through the Philippines Sea on the twentieth anniversary of its commissioning. Nearby, the USS ENTERPRISE (CVN-80) launches both the F-35C and the unmanned F-47C to jointly conduct bombing raids on the Navy’s Western Pacific bombing range. Both ships, along with the entire ENTERPRISE Carrier Strike Group, are headed toward the South China Sea to participate in the annual US-India-Singapore naval exercise called DRAGON FURY. Below the surface, the USS MONTANA (SSN-794) deploys the unmanned underwater vehicle called SEA-EYE to assist in trailing a Russian Dolgorukiy class SSBN as it leaves port headed to its strategic patrol areas.
