Wayne Hughes on Policy, Fleet Size, and the Navy Next - on Midrats

"If we cannot have the navy estimates of our policy, then let's have the policy of our navy estimates." ---- Lieutenant Ambroise Baudry, French Navy

As our guest this week noted in his book Fleet Tactics: Theory and Practice, "These are the watchwords for the twenty-first-century American navy."

As we leave our land wars in Asia and look forward to the future maritime challenges of our nation, what size and kind of Fleet should the US Navy have?

How will budgets impact the size and nature of our Fleet, and how will that impact the ability of the Navy to meet what it will be asked to do?

What are the major schools of thought on what should drive our Fleet design, and what does history have to tell us about where we should head, and what we should be cautious of?

Our guest for the full hour this Sunday, 18 November from 5-6pm EST to discuss this and a lot more will be Wayne P. Hughes, Jr., Captain, USN (Ret) Professor, Department of Operations Research at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA.

He is author of the books; Fleet Tactics: Theory and Practice, its major revision Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat, Military Modeling for Decision Making, and is co-author of A Concise Theory of Combat. 

He wrote the article on naval tactics in the current Encyclopedia Britannica, four articles in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History, and two articles on naval logistics in the International Military and Defense Encyclopedia. With Professor John Hattendorf, Hughes co-edited the Naval Institute’s Classics of Sea Power series. He has two awards in the Naval Institute prize essay contest and is one of its distinguished authors. His publication, “Naval Maneuver Warfare,” received recognition as the best article in the Naval War College Review for 1997. His most recent Review essays are “A Bimodal Force for the National Maritime Strategy” (2007) and “Implementing the Seapower Strategy” (2008). He is a member of the NWC Press Advisory Board. 

Captain Hughes received an MS in Operations Research from NPS in 1964, and returned in 1979 and continued as a civilian instructor for thirty-two years, including 5 years as Dean of the Graduate School of Operational and Information Sciences, he is a Distinguished Alumnus of NPS.

On active duty he commanded a minesweeper, a destroyer, and directed a large training command.  Ashore, he was Deputy Director of the CNO’s Systems Analysis (OP-96), and Aide to Under Secretary of the Navy R. James Woolsey.  

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