John B Hattendorf

Congress authorized the creation of the Naval Reserve in March 1915, but the new federal force did not emerge spontaneously. Over the preceding three decades, a naval militia movement motivated the recommissioning of state-level maritime reserve forces. The state militias mostly suspended their operations on the cusp of the U.S. entry into World War I, but they had laid the groundwork for the creation of the modern Naval Reserve (redesignated in 2005 as the U.S. Navy Reserve).

Abstract The decade of the 1980s was the decade of “the Maritime Strategy,” the U.S. Navy’s widely known and publicly debated statement that was associated with President Ronald Reagan’s buildup of American defense forces and Secretary of the Navy John Lehman’s efforts to create “the six-hundred-ship navy.” The strategy is most widely understood only in terms of the Navy’s January 1986 public statements published in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings and summarized in testimony that the...