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389 Guillem Colom Piella Defining the US Navy in the 21st Century From the Sea dating from 1997, was drawn up in parallel to the Naval Transformation Roadmap: Power and Access…From the Sea,41 a technical document that specified the Navy’s priority programmes for 2003-2007 targeted at achieving the transformation objectives marked out by the Quadrennial Defence Review of 2001 and further defined in the Defence Planning Guide of 2002. For this reason, the roadmap and the white paper are based on the same principles, pose the same concepts and define the same priorities and objectives for the transformation of the U.S. Navy. Taking its inspiration from the pillars of the naval revolution set out in Vision… Presence…Power, the broad outlines of military transformation delineated in the Joint Vision 202042 and the strategic objectives of the process established in the Quadrennial Defence Review of 2001, this document attempted to design the roadmap for the implementation of the U.S. naval transformation. This process had two major objectives: • To design a modern and powerful fleet with an expeditionary vocation, modular in composition and network-centric, prepared to face any present or future adversary and with sufficient capability to exercise control over the seas and project power far inland. • To contribute to the strategy of one and a half wars proposed by Rumsfeld by providing sufficient naval combat facilities and support to defend North American waters and territory, maintain advanced deterrence in four distant operations theatres, fight in two regional wars simultaneously and triumph decisively in one of them.43 Invasion of the Transformers”, Proceedings, vol. 129 nº 1.208, 2003, pp. 25-34. 41  It is interesting to point out that, paradoxically, the Naval Transformation Roadmap: Power and Access…From the Sea, does not replace the work of the same name published in 1997, the natural forerunner to the Sea Power 21 – but rather Vision…Presence…Power. 42  This document replaced the Joint Vision 2010 published four years earlier. Less technically-centred than its predecessor, which developed the ideas presented in the earlier work and warned – in the wake of the attempts by the three armies to prioritise the acquisition of materiel to the detriment of other organisational or doctrinal changes– that technological innovation alone would have great difficulty in bringing about revolutionary effects. These could only occur if information technologies were combined with changes in doctrine, organisation, tactics, training, force structure and command and troop instruction. To reach that objective, the fundamental principles of the 1996 roadmap were maintained and the broad outlines of the American military transformation adopted, focused on achieving a joint force capable of imposing itself on any future adversary across the entire range off operations (Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: Joint Vision 2020, Washington DC: GPO, 2000). 43  Based on the Quadrennial Defence Review 2001, it replaced the template of two regional conflicts posed at the end of the Cold War. Valid during the entire War on Terror, this standard has been replaced in the Quadrennial Defence Review of 2014.


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