Peter M. Swartz

Expertise

• U.S. Navy policy, strategy, deployment, operations and doctrine
• U.S. Navy strategic, operational and organizational history
• U.S. Navy relationships with other services and allies
   

Captain Peter M. Swartz, U.S. Navy (Ret.), a principal research scientist with CNA Strategic Studies, focuses on U.S. Navy policy and strategy. He is a former U.S. Navy officer, having retired in 1993 in the grade of captain. While a junior officer in the Navy, Swartz served as a counter-insurgency instructor, a psychological operations officer, an advisor to the Vietnamese Navy in the western Mekong Delta, and a staff officer supporting Admiral E.R. Zumwalt, Jr., in Saigon and Washington, DC. As a mid-level officer, he initiated and organized the first U.S. Navy-French Navy staff policy talks, was a principal author of The Maritime Strategy of the 1980s, and served on the staffs of successive Chiefs of Naval Operations and Secretary of the Navy John Lehman. As a senior officer, during the time of the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, Swartz was Director of Defense Operations at the U.S. Mission to NATO in Brussels and served as Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin Powell, during the first Gulf War.

Recent Work: Recent and current U.S. Navy strategy, U.S. inter-service relationships, concepts, policies, and doctrine; OPNAV organizational history; alternative U.S. Navy global fleet deployment models; CNA Scientific Analyst to the Director, U.S. Navy Strategy and Policy Division (OPNAV N51); lessons learned from past U.S. Navy homeland defense, riverine, counter-piracy, and irregular warfare operations.

Previous Positions: CNA Research Team Leader (RTL)

Education: M.Phil. in Political Science, Columbia University; M.A. in International Relations, Johns Hopkins University Nitze School of Advanced International Studies; B.A. in International Relations, Brown University

Languages: French, Vietnamese

Publications of Interest

• CNA U.S. Navy Strategy Series (17 volumes).
• The Navy at a Tipping Point: Maritime Dominance at Stake? (with Daniel Whiteneck, Michael Price, and Neil Jenkins), CNA Annotated Briefing D0022262.A2/Final Unclassified, March 2010.
• U.S. Naval Strategy in the 1980s: Selected Documents (with John B. Hattendorf), Newport Paper 33, Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, December 2008.
• Forward . . . From the Start: The U.S. Navy & Homeland Defense: 1775-2003, CNA Occasional Paper D0006678.A1/Final, Unclassified, February 2003.
• A Deep Legacy: Smaller Scale Contingencies and the Forces that Shape the Navy (with E.D. McGrady), CNA Research Memorandum 98-9510/Unclassified, December 1998.
• Doctrine for Partnership: A Framework for U.S. Multinational Naval Doctrine (with Michael Johnson and Patrick Roth), CRM 2795020209/ Unclassified, December 1995.