Adm. James Stavridis might be retiring from the Navy, but he's not leaving the Navy family. He'll chair the U.S. Naval Institute, the private Annapolis institution that provides the Navy with much of its farsighted thinking about seapower. Stavridis should know, since he's already written much of it.
The U.S. Naval Institute announced this afternoon that Stavridis, the outgoing NATO commander and former Southern Command chief, will chair its board of directors as soon as his replacement, Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, gets confirmed by the Senate. (Breedlove had his confirmation hearing this morning.) "We are delighted and honored by Admiral Stavridis' acceptance," retired Vice Adm. Nancy Brown, the acting board chairwoman, said in a statement. "He is a distinguished officer and an individual of the very greatest accomplishments whose contributions epitomize the mission of the U.S. Naval Institute."
And not only his contributions at sea. Stavridis has built a reputation as one of the Navy's foremost strategic thinkers, thanks to a series of articles he penned over the years. The Naval Institute's journal, Proceedings, maintains a website of Stavridis' greatest hits for the publication, with its managing editor terming the admiral "the gold standard for what the U.S. Naval Institute is all about."
In 1992, for instance, Lieutenant Commander Stavridis wrote that a post-Cold War world would mean a decline in foreign land bases and airstrips accessible to U.S. forces and a rise in "multiple simultaneous crises" that are "geographically distant from bases." He concluded that "dealing with this environment will require new ways of organizing air and and sea forces," calling his proposal "A New Air Sea Battle Concept: Integrated Strike Forces." (.PDF) Twenty years later, AirSea Battle is the grand organizational concept of the Navy and Air Force.
Want to know how to integrate civilian agencies with military ones? Lots of government officials still wonder, but Stavridis was offering his blueprint for inter-agency cooperation in 1993. Curious how naval forces could contribute to the land and air-centric battlefields of counterterrorism? See Stavridis in 2004. Sure, everyone in the military and tech sectors these days urges you to "embrace creative disruptive technologies." Stavridis was saying it in 2001. He even announced the end to NATO's 2011 Libya war through a Facebook post.
Stavridis, however, is ending his naval career under something of a cloud. He was under investigation for potential misuse of his official funds at NATO -- and while the Pentagon's inspector general officially cleared Stavridis of wrongdoing, it didn't help his image to be known as the guy who used his government C-37 jet to attend a Burgundy wine-tasting. Some in the naval community think the probe cost Stavridis a chance to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- although the rotating chair had just been vacated by a different Navy admiral, Mike Mullen -- and were also surprised that the influential Stavridis wasn't made chief of naval operations, the top job in the Navy.
Unlike those jobs, Stavridis is about to enter into a position where he can speak his mind freely. While the U.S. Naval Institute isn't actually part of the Navy, it's where the service turns for fresh ideas. Stavridis may not be able to reshape the way the Navy works, but he may be able to keep reshaping the way it thinks.
