Reappraising the Interwar U.S. Navy

Despite a popular narrative that portrays the interwar U.S. Navy as a hidebound organization obsessed with a decisive battleship engagement, a number of scholarly works published in the last decade, following the lead of 1991’s War Plan Orange, have shown the opposite to be the case. These works by Craig Felker, Thomas and Trent Hone, John Kuehn, and Albert Nofi illustrate that the Navy was frequently led by innovative leaders, willing to experiment with new technologies and able to use fleet exercises and an internal review process to creatively, but realistically, generate a strategy that worked within the geographical and treaty constraints of an expected Pacific war.