Strategic Naval Thinking of the United States of America and its Application on the Current Challenges of the U.S. Pacific Fleet

This thesis presents an analysis and confrontation of the classical and current strategic naval thinking aimed to discover whether the classical theories of naval power are still relevant for the current strategic thinking of the United States of America and operational conduct of the U.S. Navy. This is done by creating a theoretical analytical framework based on the analysis of the works of two chosen classical naval thinkers Admiral A.T. Mahan and Sir Julian S. Corbett. This theoretical framework is then applied to the analysis of the current American strategic documents: National Security Strategy, National Military Strategy and Naval Strategy. By applying the theoretical framework to the analysis of these documents, the thesis will confirm or disproof the relevance of the classical naval thought to the current one. The thesis further continues to apply the theoretical framework to the part of the thesis, which analyses the Pacific Fleet of the United States and their area of responsibility in order to identify the strategic challenges that the Pacific Fleet encounters in its area of responsibility. Further analysis is focused on identifying and evaluating the reactions of the Pacific Fleet to the identified challenges