Volume 78, Number 1 (2025) Winter/Spring 2025

This extra-sized, combined issue of the Review peers into the past in search of modern solutions for a modern Navy. On our cover, a demolition charge detonates 1,500 meters from Avenger-class mine-countermeasures ship USS Scout during joint mine-countermeasures training. In “Short-Term Solutions, Long-Term Problems: The U.S. Navy’s Approach to Mines during the Tanker War,” Matthew Kastler examines the U.S. Navy’s historical response to threats from naval mines from the Civil War to the Tanker War of 1987–88, revealing a pattern of initial unpreparedness, impressive rapid improvisation, and subsequent institutional neglect, with an eye toward the future of mine warfare for the Navy. In our lead article, "Management or Misdirection: Competing Logics for Military-to-Military Contacts between Great-Power Rivals," Travis Sharp categorizes the ways in which great-power militaries communicate and for what purposes. In Tyler A. Pitrof’s “The Kamikaze Throughline: U.S. Fleet Air Defense from Imperial Japan to Drones,” the effects of modern warfare and potential future issues in air defense are viewed through the eye of history. In “The Riparian Logic of the Montreux Convention in Turkey’s Black Sea Policy,” Daria Isachenko provides an in-depth look at the history of Turkey’s access control of the Black Sea. Peter Dombrowski and Simon Reich's "New Thinking for a New Age: Competing Visions of American Grand Strategy in the Twenty-First Century" adds a new layer to previous typologies of grand strategy. Finally, Dylan Yachyshen’s "Okinawa and the Offshore Island Chain: Eisenhower's Joint Chiefs and the Foundation of Strategic Flexibility" looks back at the first Taiwan Strait Crisis and the impact it had on distribution of force in the Pacific theater, which carries implications into today.