Power Projection:

Power projection requires agility, mobility, flexibility, and technology to project strength against weakness. The Navy accomplishes this through implementing innovative littoral and amphibious maneuver warfare strategies, doctrines, and operational concepts, and using all available capabilities and assets, including:

· Aircraft carriers and sea-based tactical air-power to strike at critical targets and to support directly ground forces ashore

· Surface warships to provide Naval Surface Fire Support (NSFS) with gunfire and missile strikes and Theater Air Defense (TAD) with self-, area-, and theater-defense weapons

· Nuclear-powered submarines to provide covert intelligence, surveillance, and indications and warning; to land and recover Special Operations Forces (SOF); and to launch surprise, long-range tactical missile attacks

· Marine Expeditionary Forces (MEF) operating from amphibious assault ships to take critical and enable follow-on entry of heavy land-based air and ground forces — should they be needed

· Naval Construction Force (Seabees) and the Marine Corps' Expeditionary Combat Service Support (CSS) forces

The nation's naval expeditionary forces can project decisive military power from the sea, in the face of even the most determined adversary. Precision operations conducted from surface warships, attack submarines, and carrier-based aircraft will provide massive, sustainable fires from the sea. Naval forces can generate high-intensity offensive power and Marines can quickly achieve critical objectives to enable the follow-on introduction of U.S. and allied forces. Joint operations, using both Navy and Air Force strike assets, are becoming a standard means of rapidly delivering significant firepower to remote targets, such as the joint Desert Strike operation in September 1996.

In the early years of the next century, the Navy-Marine Corps Team will be able to project sea power in a way that Alfred Thayer Mahan, the late-19th century naval strategist and historian, could not even imagine. Advanced joint and national information and targeting systems will multiply the impact of the Naval Services' long reach — some 80% of the world's population centers can today be the focus of naval "littoral" operations — and enable us to mass the effects of distributed but precise fires from the sea wherever they will have the greatest influence on events ashore. A new dimension of sea power will result in naval campaigns that combine highly mobile Marine operations deep into the littoral with responsive close air and fire support and long-range precision strikes. This focused, precise firepower will be sustained entirely from the sea — accomplishing the effects of massed firepower without the need physically to mass forces.