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John Lehman
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John Lehman
John Lehman, official photo as Secretary of the Navy, 1982.JPEG
United States Secretary of the Navy
In office
February 5, 1981 – April 10, 1987
President Ronald Reagan
Preceded by Edward Hidalgo
Succeeded by Jim Webb
Personal details
Born John Francis Lehman Jr.
September 14, 1942 (age 75)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Political party Republican
Education Saint Joseph's University (BA)
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (BA)
University of Pennsylvania (MA, PhD)
John Francis Lehman Jr. (born September 14, 1942) is an American investment banker and writer who served as Secretary of the Navy (1981–1987) in the Ronald Reagan administration where he promoted the creation of a 600-ship Navy.[1] From 2003 to 2004 he was a member of the 9/11 Commission.

Lehman currently serves on the National Security Advisory Council for the Center for Security Policy (CSP), and on the board of trustees for the think tank Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). Lehman was also a member of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, commonly called the 9/11 Commission, and has signed some policy letters produced by the Project for the New American Century. He also served as an advisor to Sen. John McCain for the 2008 presidential race,[2][3] and for Mitt Romney in his 2012 bid.[4]

Contents
1 Education and family
2 Military career
2.1 Secretary of the Navy (1981–1987)
3 Later career
4 Books
5 References
6 External links
Education and family
Lehman was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Constance (Cruice) and John F. Lehman Sr., an industrial engineer and decorated navy veteran.[5] He graduated from La Salle College High School and received a B.S. in international relations from Saint Joseph's University in 1964, gained a B.A. from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (later elevated to an M.A.) and went on to earn an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

He is a first cousin, once removed, of the late Grace Kelly (Princess Grace of Monaco), and is Chairman of the Princess Grace Foundation-USA, a public charity established after Princess Grace's death to support emerging artists in film, dance, and theater. He led the American delegation to the funeral of Prince Rainier. He and his family live in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and Manhattan. He is a long time Republican. He is known for his quote: "Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat." [6]

Military career
Lehman served in the U.S. Air Force Reserve for three years while at Cambridge, then in 1968 left the Air Force Reserve and joined the United States Navy Reserve (then known as the U.S. Naval Reserve) as an ensign, later rising to the rank of commander as a Naval Flight Officer, flying the A-6 Intruder as a bombardier/navigator.[7] He served on the staff of the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger. [8]

Lehman worked for UBS AG.[citation needed]

In 1977 Lehman founded the Abington Corporation, a consulting company with clients including defense companies such as Northrop Corporation. He remained its president and director until 1981, when he was appointed by Ronald Reagan to be Secretary of the Navy.[9]

Secretary of the Navy (1981–1987)
As the 65th secretary, appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981, Lehman launched the idea of building a "600-ship Navy". He became Secretary of the Navy at 38, a young age that he was conscious of in his dealing with admirals. He was unique in still serving as a commander in the Naval Reserve while being Secretary of the Navy. He developed a strategic concept to counter the threat of Soviet incursion into Western Europe known as the "Lehman Doctrine." The plan called for a military response to any Russian invasion in Europe by attacking and invading the Soviet Far East along the Pacific, a much less defended front. Forces would sever the trans Siberian railroad and fight westward toward Moscow.

According to Hedrick Smith, in his book The Power Game, Lehman lost a fight at the Pentagon with Deputy Secretary of Defense W. Paul Thayer over lowering the number of future aircraft carriers planned. He immediately went to the White House where they were unaware of Thayer's decision, and obtained a press release declaring President Reagan had named two of the ships USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) and USS George Washington (CVN-73), thereby implying that Reagan had endorsed the "600-ship fleet." Lehman was important in the forced retirement of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover. Lehman resigned in 1987.

He was subsequently promoted to the rank of captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1989, later retiring from the U.S. Navy as a reserve officer in that rank after 30 years of service.

Later career
As of 2004, Lehman is chairman of the private equity investment firm J. F. Lehman and Company, as well as chairman of the Hawaii Superferry. Lehman is chairman of the board of OAO Technology Solutions Inc. He is also an honorary member of the First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry. As of 2005, he is a member of a number of influential conservative American think tanks, including the Project for the New American Century, The Heritage Foundation, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Center for Security Policy, and the Committee on the Present Danger.

After his work in the 9/11 Commission in 2002, there was increased speculation that Lehman might be named to a chief security post within the Bush Administration. Positions suggested included Director of Central Intelligence, Director of National Intelligence and Secretary of Defense when Donald Rumsfeld stepped down. None of this speculation has proved accurate.

He currently[when?] serves as Chairman of the Princess Grace Foundation-USA and as a director of the OpSail Foundation. He is also a member of the board of overseers of the School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, and is a trustee of La Salle College High School.[10] He has served on the board of directors of the Ball Corporation since 1987. Lehman is also an advisory board member for the Partnership for a Secure America, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to recreating the bipartisan center in American national security and foreign policy.

On June 26, 2012, Lehman revealed to the staff of the United States Naval Institute and in a speech given in Portsmouth, UK, the Reagan Administration secretly offered the use of the amphibious assault helicopter carrier Iwo Jima as a replacement in case either of the two British carriers, the Hermes and the Invincible, had been damaged or destroyed during the 1982 Falklands War.[11] This revelation made headlines in the United Kingdom, but except for the U.S. Naval Institute, not in the United States.[12][13]

Books
On Seas of Glory: Heroic Men, Great Ships, and Epic Battles of the American Navy
Winner of the 2003 Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature[14][15]
Making War: The 200-Year-Old Battle Between the President and Congress Over How America Goes to War
America the Vulnerable: Our Military Problems and How to Fix Them
Oceans Ventured: Winning the Cold War at Sea (WW Norton 2018)
"The Executive, Congress, and Foreign Policy: Studies of the Nixon Administration" (New York: Praeger, 1974).
Command of the Seas: Building the 600 Ship Navy
Winner of the 1989 Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature[14][15]

John F. Lehman
Dr. Lehman is a founding partner of the firm and has been involved in all aspects of the firm’s private equity investment and management activities since JFLCO’s inception. As Chairman, Dr. Lehman provides strategic and oversight expertise and approves all capital commitments made by JFLCO. Immediately prior to forming JFLCO, he spent three years as a Managing Director in Corporate Finance at PaineWebber, Inc. where he led the firm’s Aerospace and Defense Group.

From 1981 to 1987, Dr. Lehman served as Secretary of the U.S. Navy. As the chief executive of the Navy, he was responsible for the management of 1.2 million people, an annual budget of $95 billion and total assets equivalent to those of the seven largest Fortune 500 corporations combined. Prior to serving as Secretary of the Navy, Dr. Lehman was President of the aerospace consulting firm Abington Corporation, served as a delegate to the Mutual Balanced Force Reductions negotiations, was the Deputy Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and served as a senior staff member to Dr. Henry Kissinger at the White House.

He has served on the boards of Ball Corporation, TI Group plc, Westland Helicopter plc, Sedgwick plc and many of JFLCO’s realized investments. He currently is a director of National Response Corporation, Trident Maritime Systems, Verisk Inc. and EnerSys. He is also Chairman of the Princess Grace Foundation and an Overseer of the School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Lehman was also a member of the 9/11 Commission and the National Defense Commission.

A Pennsylvania native, Dr. Lehman holds a B.S. degree from St. Joseph’s University, B.A. and M.A. degrees from Cambridge University and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. For more than two decades, he flew various tactical aircraft for the Naval Reserve.

John F. Lehman, Former US Secretary of the Navy, on the South China Sea
August 21, 1983: Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman Jr. speaks to the crew by intercom from the bridge of thenuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER (CVN-69)
Image Credit: U.S. National Archives
John F. Lehman, Former US Secretary of the Navy, on the South China Sea
John F. Lehman, former U.S. secretary of the navy, speaks to The Diplomat on U.S. strategy in the South China Sea.

By Constantin Wangenheim
October 10, 2016

John F. Lehman played an important role in shaping the United States Navy. He was appointed Secretary of the Navy in 1981 at age 38, and pushed for a 600-ship navy, supporting Reagan’s plans for military modernization and countering the Soviet threat. Lehman resigned from the Navy in 1987 and later retired as Captain after having served 25 years in the reserves. He has served as a staff member to Henry Kissinger on the National Security Council and as a member of the 9/11 commission. He currently serves as chairman of J.F. Lehman & Company, a private equity investment firm. In this interview with Constantin Wangenheim for The Diplomat, he reflects on the Sino-American military relationship, strategic implications of a weakened U.S. Navy, and what to expect for the years to come.

U.S. strategy with regard to the South China Sea has wavered between engagement and containment since WWII. Recently we’ve witnessed what some commentators call ‘coopetion’, a combination of cooperation and competition. In 1984 you visited Beijing as Secretary of the Navy, paving a path for engagement, leading in 1986 to the first U.S. ships entering Chinese waters in more than 30 years – can you comment on those times?

The main reason I went to China was to negotiate the naval modernization, training, and exchange agreements. At the time, Soviet Admiral Gorschkov was pushing towards Soviet maritime superiority. Our engagement with the Chinese added a whole new dimension of expense and challenge for the Russians; that was the primary purpose of our cooperation with the Chinese. Our first port visit was at Chengdu, followed up by a visit of Chinese ships in Pearl Harbor. Soon after, General Liu Huaqing came to Key West, Florida, to finalize the details of the arrangement. After the official signing of the agreements, we went to visit the old naval base armory where I had allowed Mel Fischer to store the famed sunken treasure from the Spanish Galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha. It was like a movie set: piles of jewels, gold, and silver 3-4 feet deep. General Liu Huaqing and I posed for pictures with the gold chains draped over our shoulders. These times were marked by an atmosphere of openness and friendly cooperation.

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In 1979, just before your time as Secretary, China clashed with Vietnam in the Paracels and sought to consolidate control over the islands. The U.S. observed passively throughout. Was this hands-off approach used to maintain the détente?

An intervention in those clashes simply did not align with our immediate objectives at the time. The primary focus then was the Cold War with Russia. China was not a worry; we viewed them as a friend, along the lines of “The enemy of your enemy is your friend.”

Commentators argue that the U.S. ceasing all cooperation after the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre had dire strategic consequences that are still felt today — a sense of betrayal for one, and China’s resorting to illegal means for acquiring new technologies, hacking Lockheed, for example. Would you say this argument holds any water?

Ceasing cooperation was an overreaction on our part; it speeded their decision that may have come anyway. China has always sought out alternative access to new technology, recognizing that they cannot depend on the West. During the Nixon administration they reverse-engineered Boeing 707s in an effort to copy the design, but this wasn’t unusual. Every deal the U.S. has made with China which included American technology has been co-opted by the Chinese for their advantage. Would they have hacked Lockheed had we maintained our cooperation? Who knows? It is hard to say. I went back to China long after the embargo, about 15 years ago, and met with all their top navy and intelligence staff, many of whom had studied at Stanford, UCLA, and elsewhere. They were quite frank and berated me, asking why the U.S. was disarming and abandoning the Western Pacific. They had counted on us to maintain deterrence and, in our absence, they had no choice but to build their navy to fill the vacuum we left behind. In all my dealings with the Chinese, I’ve been very impressed with their openness and frankness about geopolitics and what they need to do to maintain their defenses.

The “pivot to Asia,” while it serves to strengthen the security relationship and economic ties, is viewed by some Chinese commentators as an effort to contain China. Is their concern legitimate?

Are there Americans who desperately want to contain China? Yes, some, but I don’t think our current decision-makers think in geopolitical terms to the extent that containing China is part of their strategic view. There are certainly those in the Chinese military who believe our intention is keeping them from becoming as powerful as we are. This mindset is unfortunately becoming almost orthodox and institutionalized in the Chinese military. The Chinese are pursuing a doctrine to secure the first island chain, then the second, and third chain, which includes Hawaii. We’re there imposing our presence, but with little to back it up. The fact is, we have cut our navy more than in half, and while the president says we are pivoting to Asia, we’re not. We talk about building a bigger navy, but the Chinese see we’re building an average of 8 ships a year, with a 30-year life. They know how big our fleet is going to be. We are not maintaining the balance of power and we’re not maintaining command of the seas. In fact, to even use that term, which was Reagan’s constant, would be considered politically incorrect to use today in the Obama administration.

The People’s Liberation Army-Navy (PLAN) is eager to demonstrate a greater international role. Fighting piracy and participating in RIMPAC are but just two items on their agenda. How can we continue this high level of engagement, while bringing down levels of competition in the South China Sea?

To ensure engagement, we have to be realistic. It’s dangerous to keep the rhetoric where it is with regard to China’s role in the South China Sea, however much we disagree with it. We must be careful about provocation, because we don’t have the power to back it up. The fact is, we have obligations that would prevent us from swinging the fleet to the Pacific; we cannot evacuate Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, in order to put sufficient capability into the Western Pacific to deal with a conflict with China. A conflict would not be at all in our interests in any case; in nobody’s interests. Certainly, there will be people in China’s military who think that this would be a good opportunity to settle once and for all who’s in charge, but I do not believe that the senior party leadership have any illusions how disastrous that would be for China, even if they could establish their rule over the South China Sea in the end. On Taiwan: theoretically we have an obligation to defend Taiwan against attacks from the mainland. I don’t think there are too many people who really take that obligation seriously anymore.

The State Department has issued a list of official U.S. interests and objectives for the South China Sea. Broadly, there are four: freedom of navigation, honoring alliance and security commitments, promotion of responsible marine environmental practices, and compliance with international law. How would you describe the U.S. record of achievement on these?

I would say it’s greater than zero, because the Chinese government does at least pay lip service to all these points. Of course they qualify that by saying “we do this because we’re good international citizens, but these are our territorial seas.” What should we be doing? We need to spend more effort on developing an alliance system, not targeted against China, but focused on maintaining freedom of the seas and enforcing international law. It’s soft power, and it may just be hot air in some instances, but if we stay consistent and keep diplomacy in close harness with our real, non-imagined military capabilities, then we can establish a stability there that may not fit the rhetoric of either side but, as Churchill said, “Jaw-Jaw is better than War-War.”

China firmly opposes the arbitration ruling initiated by the Philippines and will never accept the ruling. U.S. policy options seem to center around three broad options; concession, accepting a fait accompli, or cutting back on China’s excessive claims. What are some of the diplomatic or military means to achieving each of those ends?

First, I don’t think there’s an absolute imperative that we make the reality on the South China Sea fit our framework of what might be becoming of international stability and the global regime. We certainly shouldn’t underestimate that we have other levers, that when applied over time and consistently, can make it quite arduous for the Chinese to keep asserting their position, even if they do reinforce more islands. It’s not so much a drawback, but it’s something that requires a focused every-day effort. You can’t just devise a policy, set it aside, and focus elsewhere. It has to be maintained, and where necessary backed up with all the levers that we’ve got, economic and others, to avoid it turning into a shooting match. Also, we shouldn’t project onto their government a kind of unity that is a theoretical ideal in a dictatorship. They have factions, they have politics, they have vested interests, and so they do not have a perfect policy being enforced within their own government on the South China Sea. I think they intend to allow innocent passage and freedom of the seas, unless it becomes in their interest to shut it down. This becomes a case of the old saying, “the strong do what they will, the weak bear what they must.”

It’s looking like a Catch 22 – intervening raises the risk of conflict dramatically but ensures compliance with international law and conventions. Non-intervention risks the credibility of international norms. What are some of the possible developments on the horizon?

It depends on who’s president. The last eight years is not a great change from the previous eight years. The navy shrank as much or more under Bush as it did under Obama. In fact, you could say that Obama stopped the shrinkage after the navy was cut in half. The reality today is that we are not the naval power that we were after the Cold War. The nation has chosen under both Republican and Democratic administrations not to pay the price to be able to guarantee freedom of the seas. It would take a complete change of national security policy to reverse this. Reagan was a 180-degree reversal from Carter in terms of naval power; he addressed the balance very quickly, but very quickly took five-six years. You would have to have a new president who had a grasp of elements of national security policy, and the determination to do something about it. Nobody like that is on the horizon. Trump, for whatever his strengths and weaknesses, has never had any real interest in national security policy, certainly not in geopolitics, and definitely not in the military- what the naval forces are, and what they do. So the chances of a major change, even if Trump were to be elected, are thin. Strategic planners need to be more realistic, they can’t be throwing their weight around and recommending that we commit to do this or that if we don’t have the capability.

Hon. John F. Lehman, Jr.
Trustee

Chair - Program on National Security

The Hon. John F. Lehman Jr. is Chairman of J.F. Lehman & Company, a private equity investment firm. He is a director of Ball Corporation, Verisk, Inc and EnerSys Corporation. Dr. Lehman was formerly an investment banker with PaineWebber Inc. Prior to joining PaineWebber, he served for six years as Secretary of the Navy. He was President of Abington Corporation between 1977 and 1981. He served 25 years in the naval reserve. He has served as staff member to Dr. Henry Kissinger on the National Security Council, as delegate to the Force Reductions Negotiations in Vienna and as Deputy Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Dr. Lehman served as a member of the 9/11 Commission, and the National Defense Commission. Dr. Lehman holds a B.S. from St. Joseph’s University, a B.A. and M.A. from Cambridge University and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently an Hon. Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University. Dr. Lehman has written numerous books, including On Seas of Glory, Command of the Seas and Making War. He is Chairman of the Princess Grace Foundation USA and is a member of the Board of Overseers of the School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

Several years ago, when I was teaching at the Naval War College, I had occasion to write a case study on John Lehman for a seminar on strategic leadership. In this study, titled “John Lehman: Navy Secretary as Strategist,” I concluded that he was one of the three most consequential secretaries of the Navy in American history, and certainly the most important one since the creation of the Department of Defense and the downgrading of the service secretaries from cabinet status after World War II.

I argued that since the unification of the U.S. military services under a secretary of defense in 1947, the selection of Lehman was unique in that he did not fit the mold of service secretaries, who for the most part have been chosen because of their financial contributions to presidential campaigns. On the contrary, Lehman, a protégé of Henry Kissinger and others, was a serious strategic thinker who played a major role in shaping the grand strategy of the Reagan administration. It was this strategy that helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union and end the Cold War.

A number of factors contributed to the Soviet Union’s demise. Foremost among them was the decision to challenge the Soviets to an arms race, which the Soviet economy could not sustain. This economic strategy had several components. The first was a substantial increase in the U.S. defense budget that funded cutting-edge weapons. Second, and closely related, was a deliberate technological competition, including the development of stealth and the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a space-based anti-ballistic-missile program, which threatened to render obsolete the Soviets’ latest generation of ICBMs. The third was American support of the Afghan mujahideen, which helped sap Soviet morale.

The fourth was a series of U.S. military-service doctrinal changes that made it more likely that American forces could prevail in a conventional war with the USSR. The fact is that for many years, U.S. operational doctrine in the event of a war with the Soviet Union was a sham that ultimately depended on the American threat to use tactical nuclear weapons to deter a Soviet conventional attack against NATO. The credibility of that threat depended on the assumption that, in the face of Soviet conventional superiority, the United States possessed “escalation dominance,” i.e., the ability to prevail in the event of a nuclear exchange, and that it could in turn prevent the Soviets from threatening a strategic nuclear strike in response to America’s first use of tactical nukes. But the United States had lost escalation dominance by the mid 1970s. Soviet conventional superiority and the loss of U.S. escalation dominance meant that NATO was vulnerable to Soviet military threats.

The Army and the Air Force exploited emerging technologies and new operational concepts to develop a credible war-fighting doctrine in the event of a Warsaw Pact conventional attack. It involved the deep attack of Soviet follow-on forces and eventually became known as AirLand Battle operations. The Navy did the same, employing studies and war games at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., to develop Sea Plan 2000, the genesis of what would become the U.S. Navy’s maritime strategy.

The maritime strategy generated a great deal of controversy. It was opposed by analysts who focused on NATO’s central front — they said it threatened to divert resources to what they considered a peripheral purpose. And it was opposed by those who felt that a naval strategy that threatened action against Soviet bastions on NATO’s maritime northern flank and against Vladivostok in the Pacific was provocative and destabilizing. In fact, the maritime strategy proved to be a major contributor to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Oceans Ventured tells the story of “how a new president’s determination to change the nation’s course came together with a powerful strategy that could be implemented immediately through highly visible and dramatic operations,” Lehman writes.

While in itself the naval buildup and forward strategy did not end the Cold War, it did fundamentally change what the Soviets liked to call “the correlation of forces.” The realization by a new Soviet leadership that the global balance of power was rapidly shifting against them and that their failing economy prevented them from keeping up gave Reagan the leverage to negotiate the web of treaties and agreements that brought about the end of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

The title of the book is a play on “Ocean Venture ’81,” the name of the definitive exercise intended to test and refine the maritime strategy. Executed by the Second Fleet/NATO Strike Fleet under the command of Vice Admiral James “Ace” Lyons, Ocean Venture ’81 was the first of three large, imaginative, and, most significant, aggressive NATO naval exercises designed to bring the U.S. Navy into the icy bastions of the Norwegian Sea, which the Soviet navy believed to be sacrosanct. Lehman persuasively argues that the pressure that Ocean Venture ’81 and subsequent exercises brought to bear on the Soviet Union was instrumental in bringing it to its knees.

To understand the importance of the maritime strategy and its execution, it is useful to remember the state of the United States Navy in the 1970s. The U.S. Navy reigned supreme at the end of World War II, but it was the victim of its own success. The navies of Japan and Germany lay at the bottom of the sea, and the newly created U.S. Air Force now challenged the U.S. Navy as the first line of defense in the emerging Cold War. The lack of a maritime adversary and the Cold War emphasis on nuclear weapons weakened the budgetary position of the Navy. The Vietnam War also consumed naval resources as the fleet aged.

Navy culture also changed. Its traditional offensive orientation declined, as did its emphasis on strategic thinking, weakening the strategist-operator cadre that had served it so well in World War II.

In 1970, the Soviets launched a massive naval exercise, Okean ’70, which confirmed the view of American naval strategists that the USSR was determined to challenge U.S. maritime supremacy, just as American military planners were beginning to forgo the enormous strategic leverage of sea power. During the 1970s, NATO focused on the balance of NATO/Warsaw Pact ground forces, to the exclusion of all else. This was the situation that prevailed as Ronald Reagan became president and John Lehman became his secretary of the Navy.

Lehman was a tireless advocate of American naval power, and his arguments persuaded President Reagan and his national-security advisers. Lehman addressed the strategic and policy debates in his memoir, Command of the Sea. But developing a strategy is one thing; implementing it is another. Oceans Ventured focuses on the operational aspects of the maritime strategy, the way in which U.S. naval forces actually executed the strategy.

Lehman describes in some detail the operations that contributed to the ultimate success of the maritime strategy. These operations were executed by aggressive naval officers under extremely difficult conditions, especially in northern waters. Lehman’s account calls to mind the “Nelson touch,” the lasting influence of Lord Horatio Nelson on the Royal Navy during the Anglo–French wars of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Even after his death in 1805 at Trafalgar, captains of the Royal Navy continued to operate in accordance with Nelson’s standing order: In the absence of signals and command, “no captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy.”

U.S. naval commanders during World War II were also noted for their aggressiveness. But this aggressive orientation declined in the 1970s. Lehman’s selection of aggressive, offensively focused officers to implement the maritime strategy — “Ace” Lyons and others — suggests a “Lehman touch.”

Lehman leaves us with some thoughts about the future of U.S. naval power: “Our situation parallels that of the 1980s, and our adversaries are actively seeking to take advantage of our weakness. . . . The president’s diplomatic power is diminished by a Navy that is stretched too thin and woefully underfunded.” Lehman calls for the Navy to revive awareness of the central importance of strategy and to reconstitute the naval “operator-strategist cadre that proved so vital in helping to win the Cold War at sea.”

The problem with assessing the impact of naval power is that it operates indirectly. Even a decisive naval battle does not immediately affect the outcome of a war, as both Trafalgar and Midway prove. But naval power enables foreign policy. As the British naval historian Colin Gray once observed: If the United States wants to be a land power anywhere but North America, it must first be a sea power. And diplomacy flows from naval power as well. As Lehman remarks, “diplomacy is the shadow cast by military and naval power.” In Oceans Ventured, John Lehman makes a strong case for the role of naval power in winning the Cold War.

In this incisive political and strategic analysis, Lehman, secretary of the Navy from 1981 to 1987, describes the “naval rearmament and maritime superiority” strategy that he argues decided the Cold War. By 1980, Lehman writes, the U.S.S.R. had mounted a comprehensive challenge to American naval supremacy—a challenge unmet by Jimmy Carter’s policy of substituting “soft power and diplomacy” for armed force. Incoming president Ronald Reagan, determined to counter the Soviet initiative, began a massive new exercise, Ocean Venture, involving forward operations in the Norwegian Sea and the Atlantic, to send a message of deterrence. The Soviet government perceived the exercise as a threat and responded with its own programs of modernization, maneuvers, and “surveillance and harassment.” But economic difficulties rendered the Soviet Union unable to close the “significant” and “widening” technological and operational gaps with a revitalized U.S. Navy. After 1983, Lehmann asserts, America’s maritime strategy spurred the Soviet Union into military overextension—contributing to the regime’s collapse—without a shot fired. Lehman makes a difficult-to-ignore case for sea power’s potential to “prevent having to go to war at all.” This well-argued work will have significant appeal for those interested in national security issues.

Following the signing of the Incidents of Sea Agreement on May 25, 1972, Fleet Admiral Vladimir Kasatonov whisked Secretary of the Navy John W. Warner onto an airplane for a flight to Volgograd, once known as Stalingrad, to tour sites associated with the epic World War II battle. The tour concluded with a visit to the monument titled “The Motherland Calls.” Looking up at the huge statue, Kasatonov pointed out to Warner that the female figure pointed to the west, the direction the threat lay.

Over the next few years of détente, the Ford and Carter administrations attempted to placate Soviet concerns about the western threat by scaling down conventional forces and allowing the Soviets to increase their nuclear forces with an aim to achieve parity. However, then-CNO Admiral James L. Holloway III argued that control of the seas was imperative for American credibility to maintain its military alliances. After emerging frustrated from one meeting with President Carter’s Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, Holloway’s aide turned to him and quipped “I guess our new slogan for the upcoming Army-Navy game is ‘Tie Army’.”

However, with setbacks in détente in the late 1970s, Brown did allow Holloway to proceed with developing proposals for using naval forces assertively as a central part of an alternative approach on dealing with the Soviet Union. Sea Plan 2000 provided seeds for what would become known as “The Maritime Strategy.”

When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, John Lehman was chosen to be Secretary of the Navy – the youngest in the history of the republic. As Lehman acknowledges, his selection had been supported by several senior naval officers he had met during his tours on naval reserve duty as he worked toward his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania. With the backing of President Reagan, the scheduled NATO exercise for late 1981, Ocean Venture, took on more aggressive objectives, signaling to the Soviet Union that if the balloon went up, American and NATO naval forces would not be passive. Lehman admits that for the 1981 exercise, the U.S. Navy simulated capabilities it had yet to acquire but soon would, thanks to the Reagan administration build-up to a 600-ship fleet and the arrival of new systems such as AEGIS and Tomahawk.

During Ocean Venture, the exercise that inspired the book title, this naval officer stood on the sidelines at Newport, undergoing surface warfare training. However, a year later, assigned to the ammunition ship Suribachi, I had an opportunity to participate in Northern Wedding – sort of. Throughout Oceans Ventured Lehman discusses how such admirals as James “Ace” Lyons were masters of deception. Because Suribachi was a logistics ship, a Soviet AGI decided to tail us as we left the Eastern Seaboard, figuring that all of the combatants would eventually need to “come to mama.” Well we got vectored out towards the Canary Islands with the snooping trawling in tow as the rest of the fleet sped to the northeast toward Scandinavia.

Reading through the descriptions of these various exercises brought back many memories for me, and certainly is a reason why this book should be acquired by the tens of thousands of my fellow Sailors who served at sea during this era. Secretary Lehman does a fine job of placing our service and what we accomplished in historical context.

That said, what I found lacking in the context was the growing threat from the Soviet ballistic missile fleet. On page 42 Lehman discusses dramatic and sensitive naval intelligence breakthroughs made in the late 1970s but does not mention what those breakthroughs were. In essence, rather than refight the Battle for the Atlantic III, like the Germans in the first two world wars, the Soviets were going to place their missile boats in a bastion near home waters to create a strategic missile trump card in the event of all-out nuclear war. This appreciation of Soviet doctrine became an important component – if not the most important component – of a U.S. maritime strategy that had a “no bastions for the Bear” element. Lehman touches this aspect of the strategy tangentially throughout the narrative, however, his emphasis focuses on threatening targets ashore in the Soviet Arctic and Pacific regions.

By detailing the role the naval exercises played in signaling to the Soviets that the U.S. Navy would be a force to be reckoned with in a global conflict, Lehman makes a valuable contribution to the yet-to-be-written definitive account of this era. Oceans Ventured also serves as an important reminder of the importance of sea power in the contemporary world and serves as a clarion call for a substantial uptick in procurement to confront emerging threats.

As a young workaday Defense Department civilian employee in the mid-1970s, I watched with regret as the American military deteriorated after the end of the Vietnam War. As a Navy veteran who served on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War, I was particularly saddened to see our once-great Navy diminished greatly.

This all changed when Ronald Reagan became president in 1981. President Reagan promised to rebuild the U.S. military — in particular, a formidable 600-ship Navy — to counter the Soviet Union’s military expansion.

John Lehman, a former Navy aviator, became Mr. Reagan’s secretary of the Navy and he served from 1981 to 1987. Mr. Lehman took the helm and guided the service toward that 600-ship Navy goal, which played a significant role in leading to the winning of the Cold War and the crumpling of the “evil empire,” as Mr. Reagan once called the Soviet Union.

Looking back at that crucial time in history, Mr. Lehman has written an interesting book called “Oceans Ventured: Winning the Cold War at Sea.”

“Since World War II, major changes of direction in American national security policy have been rare. Presidential elections have always included strong differences on some issues: Ike promised to end the Korean War; Jack Kennedy campaigned against Ike’s “missile gap”; and Nixon campaigned against Johnson’s conduct of the Vietnam War. But Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign against the Carter administration represented something wholly different: a fundamental rejection of the administration’s policy of detente and convergence with the Soviet Union.”

Mr. Lehman writes in his introduction to the book, “Reagan promised a robust increase in defense spending to build significantly the size and capability of American military and naval forces. He rejected the Soviet-declared Brezhnev Doctrine and made clear his intention to pursue a “forward strategy.” When asked back in January 1977 about his policy toward the Cold War, he had famously replied, “We win and they lose, what do you think of that?” In addition to pursuing the declared policies, he also intended to launch a highly classified program to exploit Soviet economic, political, military, and psychological vulnerabilities.”

In “Oceans Ventured,” Mr. Lehman recounts how the naval build-up and bold naval exercises, such as “Ocean Venture 81,” played a role in Mr. Reagan’s plan.

“Oceans Ventured,” a play on words based on the naval exercise, makes use of Mr. Lehman’s memory, as well as interviews with other participants of that era and wide use of historical material, including many recently declassified documents.

When Ronald Reagan became president and John Lehman became Navy secretary, the United States was losing the Cold War. The Soviets were building up their military during the years we were dismantling ours. In particular, the Soviet navy was working feverishly to become the most powerful navy in the world.

President Reagan led a bipartisan effort through Congress to fund the restoration of the Navy and Mr. Lehman conducted naval exercises, beginning with “Ocean Venture 81,” sending ships and aircraft dangerously close to the Soviet Union. This effort informed the Soviets that our expanding fleet could sink their submarines and takeout Soviet bombers and missiles while simultaneously striking deep inside the Soviet Union. The exercises also showed that the fleet could operate in Arctic waters, which no navy had previously attempted.

Mr. Lehman notes that the technological advances in electronic warfare at the time made “ghosts” of American submarines and surface fleets, which confounded and confused the Soviets. Even though despicable American spies, such as Navy Warrant Officer John Walker, gave the Soviet Union many of our secrets, the Soviets were unable to counter the American Navy effectively.

The Soviets tried to match our military growth in an accelerated arms race, which caused their economy to fail miserably — just as Mr. Reagan had predicted. The Soviet Union would fall on President Bush’s watch, but clearly, Mr. Reagan gave them the fatal push.

In addition to President Reagan, Mr. Lehman generously gives credit for the rebuilding of the Navy to a good number of naval officers, civilian defense officials, members of Congress and others.

I interviewed John Lehman in 2015 and asked him what his high point was as Navy secretary, and he replied, “The high point was just overall being able to work for a leader like Ronald Reagan and being able to lead the transformation and rebuilding of the 600-ship Navy.”

He noted that they got to 594 ships. His low point, he told me, was leaving the Navy.

At times reading like a military thriller, John Lehman’s “Oceans Ventured” offers an interesting and illuminating look back at Cold War naval history. One might also be interested in reading John Lehman’s earlier memoir of his time as Navy secretary, “Command of the Seas.”

Former Secretary of the Navy Lehman (On Seas of Glory: Heroic Men, Great Ships, and Epic Battles of the American Navy, 2001, etc.) unfolds the Ronald Reagan–era strategy to reclaim United States dominance on the high seas and contain the Soviet fleet.

In the aftermath of World War II and the early years of the Cold War, writes the author, the U.S. Navy was devalued in favor of the Air Force even as the fleet was required to carry nuclear weapons, which “required much additional manpower and shipboard space.” Even before Reagan took office in 1981, he had been promising a program of “naval rearmament and maritime superiority.” After winning the election, he assembled a team, including Lehman, to bring this program into being. Among the author’s innovations was a push to assert an American and NATO presence in the Arctic and “the icy bastions that the Soviet sailors considered their domain.” Exercises involving U.S. Marines and other Allied forces in the far north brought the point home, to the consternation of the Kremlin. Toward the end of Reagan’s first term, exercises with the South Korean military on an amphibious landing further agitated the Russians, who tried to catch up but could not. It helped that Reagan opened up the treasury for a military spending spree that the Soviets could not afford, but the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev to the scene was a critical factor; in time, the Soviets began to retreat from distant oceans, particularly lessening their presence in the Mediterranean. Lehman sounds downright Reagan-esque when he writes, “if the Americans were going to press up against Soviet coasts, they had better draw back and circle their wagons.” For the most part, though, this is a matter-of-fact, evenhanded look at a largely overlooked component in the eventual decline and collapse of the Soviet Union.

Valuable for students of naval strategy and geopolitics as well as of Cold War history.