Word: navalism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wore down isolationist sentiment and took the country into World War II. And while there have been only five formally declared wars, the U.S. has deployed its armed forces abroad more than 200 times, usually with some kind of congressional assent or at least acquiescence--from Thomas Jefferson's naval expedition against the Barbary pirates of North Africa to numerous interventions in Central America and the Caribbean, as well as Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq...
...simple reason that their ground forces would typically bear the brunt of any war in the theater. A bombadier-navigator in Vietnam, Fallon, 62, has no operational experience commanding ground troops or battling the kind of insurgency that grips Iraq or is growing in Afghanistan. "To put in a naval aviator without any command combat experience is like putting a baseball coach in to run the offense in the Super Bowl," grumbles a retired Marine general...
...forces into Iraq as part of a so-called surge. He's "one of America's best strategists," enthuses Ike Skelton, the new Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. But one Marine general who knows the region says it actually makes some sense to put a naval officer in charge. If the U.S. begins redeploying forces outside of Iraq as a part of a drawdown it will increasingly have to use naval vessels, not large land bases, for stationing them...
...proven to be a particularly deft one. After a Navy submarine struck the Japanese fishing boat Ehime Maru in 2001, killing nine aboard the vessel, Bush dispatched the admiral to Tokyo to deliver the U.S. apology to the government and an angry Japanese public. As Vice Chief of Naval Operations in 2002-2003 he impressed Rumsfeld, who was notorious for bullying his flag officers. When Fallon had to fill in for his boss at service chiefs meetings with Rumsfeld, he took advantage of the fact that he was the junior officer in the group and thus the last called...
...From his headquarters on Oahu, Fallon hasn't been shy about flexing U.S. diplomacy the past two years. Despite wariness of Pentagon hawks, he has pressed to improve relations with Beijing, for example, organizing a joint naval exercise last fall with the Chinese navy. Fallon believes diplomacy is as important a weapon as all the ships, planes and soldiers he commands. Some of that broader view "comes with old age," Fallon told TIME in 2005. Bush now hopes that kind of thinking from the admiral in Asia can help rescue a troubled war in a very different part...