A navy consists of the ships, crew members, and related personnel and equipment maintained by a country for purposes of war. HISTORY Early Development In the Western world navies originated with Athens, whose fleet blocked an invasion by the Persian king \TXerxes I\t at the Battle of \TSalamis\t in 480 BC. Rome employed its navy to help destroy Carthage during the \TPunic Wars\t (264-146 BC). More than a century later, at the Battle of \TActium\t (31 BC), a Roman fleet defeated that of Mark \TAntony\t, ensuring the dominance of Octavian (later \TAugustus\t). For a thousand years after the fall of Rome, European nations displayed little interest in maintaining navies. The threat of Turkish expansion into the western Mediterranean finally forced Spain and the Italian states to forge a fleet that checked the Turks at the Battle of \TLepanto\t in 1571. In the following century, Portugal, Spain, Holland, and Britain acquired or consolidated overseas empires, the protection of which required navies. The \TSpanish Armada\t challenged England for dominance of the Atlantic in 1588, and Spain's defeat contributed to the emerging importance of Britain's Royal Navy. The British victory over the Dutch in the \TAnglo-Dutch Wars\t (1652-74) established Britain as the leading sea power of the world. The only serious contender to Britain was France, a rival repeatedly beaten in the \TSeven Years' War\t (1756-63), the \TFrench Revolutionary Wars\t (1792-1802), and \TNapoleonic Wars\t (1803-15). On Oct. 21, 1805, at Cape Trafalgar off the Spanish coast, Admiral Horatio \TNelson\t decisively defeated the French fleet of Admiral Pierre de Villeneuve (see \TTrafalgar, Battle of\t). Nelson's victory eliminated France as a major naval power. For almost 100 years Great Britain remained the world's foremost sea power, commanding virtually every ocean on the globe. Not until the rise of the German navy under Emperor William II (r. 1888-1918) did a serious rival to British maritime preeminence appear. Nineteenth-Century Technological Transformation During the Pax Britannica of 1815-1914, the navies of the Western powers and Japan underwent a fundamental technological transformation. In the mid-19th century, European navies began to experiment with steam propulsion, rifled breech-loading cannons, turrets, and protective armor plating. The experimentation followed a general pattern whereby after one nation had developed a bigger gun, a rival nation would develop heavier armor plating, and a third would build faster ships. By 1890, when the German emperor initiated Germany's serious bid for naval greatness, the sail-driven, wooden, broadside-firing man-of-war that had been the mainstay of major European navies since the 1600s had been replaced by the steam-driven, heavily armored, heavily gunned, turreted \Tbattleship\t. A decade later, in 1902, the German threat to Britain's maritime predominance was so great that Britain was forced to concentrate many of its capital ships in home waters. To offset this reduction in overseas naval strength, Britain signed an alliance with Japan (1902) and effected a diplomatic rapprochement with the United States (1898-1902). U.S. Development The 19th-century American naval experience differed markedly from that of Europe. The \TAmerican Revolution\t had bequeathed a strategic heritage of commerce raiding and coastal defense, as distinguished from the fleet engagements between large capital ships characteristic of British and, to a lesser extent, French strategy. When the United States was pitted against a stronger power, as in the Quasi-War with France (1798-1800) and the \TWar of\t 1812, commerce raiding proved the most effective strategy. The U.S. Navy also scored impressive successes in single-ship actions between \Lfrigate\ls, fast ships mounting about 50 guns. Only when facing a decidedly inferior power did the United States employ the British policy of attacking the enemy's fleet and blockading, bombarding, and invading hostile coasts. The United States was able to fight in this British fashion during the \TMexican War\t (1846-48), the \TCivil War\t (1861-65), and the \TSpanish-American War\t (1898). By the time of the Spanish-American War the United States had developed a "new navy" composed of steam-driven, steel-hulled cruisers and battleships. U.S. naval captain Alfred Thayer \TMahan\t, lobbying for a naval policy modeled on the British example, published his first books on sea power in 1890 and 1892. These books were widely read throughout the world, and they helped insure international adoption of a strategy of capital-ship engagements, followed, if necessary, by amphibious landings. Commerce raiding in its modern guise--that is, by means of \Lsubmarine\ls--never achieved great popularity among the 20th-century naval strategists of the United States, Great Britain, Germany, or Japan. World War I By \TWorld War I\t the United States had adopted the strategy and technology of the leading European naval powers. Whereas in the 19th century the United States had spread its thin allotment of frigates around the world in small squadrons designed to protect overseas Americans and their commerce in periods of peace, the navy in the early 20th century concentrated its battleships and their supporting \Lcruiser\ls and \Ldestroyer\ls in an Atlantic "battle fleet." The Panama Canal was begun in 1904 largely to insure unfettered movement of the fleet to the Pacific to protect the West Coast, Hawaii, or the Philippines from an enemy--envisioned always to be Japan. This "battle fleet," however, saw little significant action in World War I; the most important tasks proved to be the convoying of merchant ships threatened by German U-boats. Destroyers, the most effective escorts of convoys, determined the outcome of the naval struggle in the Atlantic. The great duel between the British and German battle fleets at Jutland in 1916 (see \TJutland, Battle of\t) had little impact on the course of the war. After World War I the leading naval powers reverted to the prewar pattern and launched a costly shipbuilding race. When the U.S. Congress proved reluctant to appropriate funds for a naval arms race, Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes convened the \TWashington Conference\t (1921-22) to curtail the contest. Hughes managed to secure an agreement limiting the tonnage and construction of capital ships--generally defined as battleships--by the major navies of the world. The U.S. Navy was given parity with the Royal Navy of Great Britain. Japan ranked next as a world naval power, and France and Italy fell far behind. In the 1920s and '30s several unsuccessful attempts were made to extend the tonnage limits to smaller ships such as cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. In 1935, Germany began full-scale rearmament, and the next year Japan renounced the Washington treaty. A new naval race began, focused once again on the battleship. World War II U.S. naval strategy in \TWorld War II\t was determined by the Japanese naval air attack on \TPearl Harbor\t on Dec. 7, 1941; most of the battleships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet were destroyed or severely damaged. \Laircraft carrier\ls, previously considered valuable mainly as scouts for battleships, now emerged as warships in their own right. The Pacific Fleet's carriers, which had been at sea during the Japanese attack, survived as the backbone of American naval power in the Pacific. The Pacific war became a combination of engagements between aircraft carriers, as at Midway (June 1942), and amphibious assaults, the latter beginning at Guadalcanal (August 1942-February 1943) and culminating with Iwo Jima (February-March 1945) and Okinawa (April-June 1945). The last two invasions were preparations for a final assault upon the Japanese home islands, an attack rendered unnecessary by Japan's capitulation following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the Atlantic, Allied naval strategy involved the convoying of merchant ships threatened by German submarines and amphibious landings in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and France. No significant engagements took place between capital ships. At the close of World War II the U.S. Navy was incomparably the world's strongest. Britain's Royal Navy, while still a major force, did not have the economic and industrial foundation of the U.S. Navy. Gradually, as its empire broke up, Great Britain reduced its overseas naval operations. The Nuclear Age The U.S. Navy's only serious rival was the U.S. Air Force. Air Force lobbyists argued that future wars would be won with nuclear bombs, a strategy in which the navy had no role because nuclear bombs were at that time too large and heavy to be carried by carrier-based aircraft. The navy between 1947 and 1950 countered with plans for "supercarriers" but was unsuccessful. The \TKorean War\t (1950-53) loosened congressional purse strings, and the annual defense budget rose from about $15 billion to an average of between $40 and $50 billion; the navy's share rose from $4 billion in 1950 to $16 billion in 1952. The administration of Harry S. Truman considered Korea a Soviet-inspired feint intended to draw American attention from Europe. It responded on both fronts; while strengthening the defense of Europe, the Truman administration also permitted the navy to build supercarriers and pressed the development of smaller and lighter atomic bombs. With the congressional authorization of the supercarrier Forrestal in 1952, the navy was included in a national nuclear strategy. In the event of a major war the supercarriers would share in attacking the enemy with nuclear weapons. In smaller, "limited" wars the navy would strike an enemy's warships with carrier-based aircraft, drop bombs on targets ashore, and launch amphibious landings under the protection of naval airplanes. Essentially, the limited-war strategy was followed in the Korean and Vietnam wars. However, the navy's representatives always emphasized the strategic or nuclear purpose of the supercarriers in testimony before congressional appropriations committees; they tended to underemphasize the highly mobile, smaller aircraft carriers' proven merit in limited wars. Concurrently with the development of supercarriers, the U.S. Navy, urged on by Hyman \TRickover\t, also developed nuclear power plants for its ships. Nuclear reactors permit ships to travel at high speed for great lengths of time, thereby vastly increasing their range and making them relatively independent of vulnerable oil tankers or overseas fueling bases. The first nuclear power plant was placed aboard the submarine \TNautilus\t in January 1954. In the late 1950s, development of nuclear-powered submarines capable of launching the nuclear-tipped \TPolaris\t ballistic missile was begun. The submarine George Washington fired a Polaris from a submerged position in 1960. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the United States constructed 45 ballistic-missile submarines capable of firing Polaris or its longer-range successor, the \TPoseidon\t. In the 1980s new submarines were commissioned to carry an even longer-range and larger ballistic missile, the \TTrident\t. The U.S. Navy has also constructed aircraft carriers and cruisers powered by nuclear reactors. The great cost of these ships, however, coupled with congressional uncertainty as to their superiority over the cheaper oil-driven counterparts, has limited their numbers. Carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines all proved their worth during the \TCuban Missile Crisis\t of 1962, when American naval superiority forced the Soviets to withdraw their nuclear missiles from Cuba. This generated new Soviet naval policies. Under the leadership of Fleet Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, the Soviet Navy began in 1962 to build ballistic missile submarines, expand its surface fleet, construct troop-carrying and antisubmarine aircraft carriers, and reach out for overseas bases and anchorages in the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, Cuba, and later, Vietnam. By 1989 the \TUSSR\t had some 130 nuclear-powered attack submarines (with an additional 133 powered by diesel engines), compared with 97 for the United States. Many observers, however, maintained that the Soviet numerical advantage was offset by qualitative U.S. superiority and antisubmarine warfare (ASW) advances. President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 vowing to build a 600-ship navy (up from 479), at a cost of about $600 billion. World War II vintage battleships were modernized and returned to service to provide greater firepower and visibility, and naval strategy was largely centered on aircraft carrier battle groups--several cruisers and destroyers attached to an aircraft carrier in each group, with submarines operating on their own. The vulnerability of surface ships to missile attack that was demonstrated during the \TFalkland Islands\t war in 1982 and the \TIran-Iraq war\t (1980-88) forced a reexamination of this strategy. The \TPersian Gulf War\t in 1991 revealed the need for more attention to the less glamorous elements of naval operations such as sea-lift for ferrying materiel, and antimine warfare. Budget proposals made in 1991 foresaw a reduction to 12 from 15 in the number of large aircraft carriers in the fleet and the retirement of all recommissioned battleships. U.S. NAVAL ORGANIZATION The U.S. Navy is under the operational command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Major commands of the U.S. Navy include the Pacific Fleet, which operates in the Pacific and Indian Oceans; the Atlantic Fleet, operating in the Atlantic and Mediterranean; Naval Forces Europe; and the Military Sealift Command, which transports personnel and cargo for the Department of Defense and other agencies of government and also provides logistic support to the fleets. The sea commands are divided into fleets, including the Third Fleet in the eastern and middle Pacific, the Seventh Fleet in the western Pacific, the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, and the Second Fleet in the western Atlantic. The fleets are divided into smaller task forces. American naval officers earn their commissions in one of three ways: by obtaining a college degree and subsequently attending Officers' Candidate School; by participating in a Naval \TReserve Officers Training Corps\t program while enrolled in college; or by attending the U.S. Naval Academy. Their careers may last up to 30 years. Officers usually specialize in a particular field. For example, they may fly aircraft or operate nuclear-powered ships, but rarely both. Tours of duty at sea alternate with tours ashore, and the officer with demonstrated potential to reach the rank of admiral must spend much onshore duty in Washington, D.C. Kenneth J. Hagan Bibliography: Beach, E. L., The U. S. Navy: 200 Years (1986); Friedman, N., U. S. Cruisers: An Illustrated Design History (1984); George, J., The U. S. Navy: Perspectives on Its Future (1985); Hagan, Kenneth J., ed., In Peace and War: Interpretations of American Naval History, 1775-1978 (1978); Hanks, R., American Sea Power and Global Strategy (1985); Hayward, T. B., et al., The Almanac of Sea Power (1987); Humble, R., Naval Warfare (1983); Jordan, Gerald, ed., Naval Warfare in the Twentieth Century 1900-45 (1977); Keegan, John, The Price of Admiralty: The Evolution of Naval Warfare (1989); Kennedy, Paul M., The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976); Lewis, Archibald R., Naval Power and Trade in the Mediterranean: A.D. 500-1100 (1951; repr. 1970); Mahan, A. T., The Influence of Sea-Power Upon History, 1660-1783 (1890; repr. 1987); Martin, L. W., The Sea in Modern Strategy (1967); Potter, E. B., ed., Sea Power: A Naval History, rev. 2d ed. (1981); Preston, A., Atlas of Maritime History (1986); Reynolds, Clark G., Command of the Sea (1974); Sprout, H. H., and M., The Rise of American Naval Power, 1776-1918 (1980); Sweetman, J., American Naval History (1984); Young, F., With the Battlecruisers (1986).