Spanish-American War
The tensions of the late 1890s finally broke with the explosion of Maine in Havana harbor. Although the explosion was almost certainly due to an internal fire, the Spanish were accused, and the Navy quietly positioned for attack by assistant Navy secretary Theodore Roosevelt. When the Spanish-American War was declared in April 1898, the Asiatic Squadron immediately left Hong Kong for the Philippines, attacking and defeating the Spanish fleet in the Battle of Manila Bay. A few weeks later, an Atlantic fleet destroyed the Spanish ships in the Caribbean in the Battle of Santiago de Cuba.
The Navy's experience in this war was both encouraging, in that it had won, and cautionary, in that the enemy had one of the weakest of modern fleets, and that the Manila Bay attack was extremely risky - if the American ships had been severely damaged or had run out of supplies, they were 7,000 miles from safety. This realization would have a profound effect on Navy strategy in the next several decades.
Great White Fleet
By a series of accidents, the New Navy's most ardent political supporter, Theodore Roosevelt, became President in 1901. Under his administration, the Navy added many more ships, and became involved in the politics of the Caribbean and Central America, with interventions in 1901, 1902, 1903, and 1906. (name some names)
The Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and the launching of HMS Dreadnought in the following year lent impetus to the construction program. At the end of 1907 Roosevelt had sixteen new battleships to make up his Great White Fleet, which he sent on a cruise around the world. While nominally peaceful, and a valuable training exercise for the rapidly expanding Navy, it was also useful politically as a demonstration of US power and capabilities; at every port, the politicians and naval officers of both potential allies and enemies were welcomed on board and given tours.
The cruise had the desired effect, and US power was subsequently taken more seriously. However, the Taft and Wilson administrations failed to capitalize on the Navy's progress, and by World War I the Navy did not have sufficient strength or credibility compared to Britain or Germany to guarantee the neutrality that President Wilson desired.
World War I
Despite US declarations of neutrality and German accountability for its unrestricted submarine warfare, in 1915 Gulflight and more famously Lusitania were sunk. The US reaction was to contemplate increased funding for the Navy, although the bill went through six months of debate in Congress before being passed. When the war began for the US in 1917, the Navy's role was mostly limited to convoy escort and troop transport, and the laying of a minefield across the North Sea.
Inter-war retrenchment and expansion
After a short period of demobilization, the nations of the globe began rebuilding armaments at a tremendous rate, in preparation for the next war; but widespread revulsion at the prospect of further carnage led to the Washington Naval Conference of 1921 and its results, the Nine-Power Treaty, the Treaty for the Limitation of Naval Armament, and limitations on the use of submarines and poison gas. The naval limitation treaty was especially curious in its prescription of numbers and size ratios for the navies of the treaty nations, and many ships were scrapped to meet those limitations.
One consequence was to encourage the development of light cruisers and aircraft carriers. The United States's first carrier, a converted collier named USS Langley was commissioned in 1922, and soon joined by Lexington and Saratoga, which had been planned to be battlecruisers until the treaty forbade it.
Rivalries continued to simmer, and an additional conference in 1927 failed to agree on limitations to the loopholes that navies were busy exploiting. But the financial crash of 1929 encouraged governments to save money by not building ships, and in 1930 the London Naval Conference produced the Five-Power Treaty, which improved Anglo-American relations, but whose results were soon overshadowed by the nationalist movements that were taking control of countries around the globe.
In reaction the Vinson-Trammell Act of 1934 set up a regular program of ship building and modernization. The Navy's preparation was helped along by another Navy secretary turned president, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The first new battleship since 1921, Washington, was laid down in June 1940. In the same month an act authorized an 11% expansion in the Navy, and Chief of Naval Operations Harold Rainsford Stark asked for another 70% increase, amounting to about 200 additional ships, which was authorized by Congess in less than a month. At the same time, Lend-Lease gave Britain much-needed destroyers in exchange for US use of British bases.
In 1941, the Atlantic Fleet was reactivated. The Navy's first shot in anger came on 9 April, when the destroyer USS Niblack dropped depth charges on a U-boat detected while Niblack was rescuing survivors from a torpedoed Dutch freighter. A week later, orders were given to attack all Axis ships within 25 miles of the US East Coast. In October, the destroyers Kearny and Reuben James were torpedoed, and Reuben James was lost.
World War II
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came as a complete surprise to almost everyone, and tactically it was a clever maneuver; the US Navy was off-balance and was unable to effectively counter Japan's takeover of the Far East. In quick succession the Philippines were occupied, the Battle of the Java Sea was lost, the Dutch East Indies were taken over, Wake Island was lost. But strategically it was a foolish act; the urge for vengeance was strong, and the isolationists silenced.
It also became clear that the era of the battleship had come and gone; while the battleships at Pearl were raised and repaired (with the sole exception of the demolished Arizona), they were mostly used for shore bombardment. The carrier Hornet launched the Doolittle Raid against Tokyo in April 1942, while task forces organized around carriers fought the Battle of the Coral Sea in May and the Battle of Midway in June, checking Japanese advances to the east and south.
When the US launched its first counteroffensive, the invasion of Guadalcanal, the Navy became involved in a series of little-known fights with the Japanese; the disastrous Battle of Savo Island, where four cruisers were sunk, the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, the Battle of Cape Esperance, and the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal.
Much of the Navy's activity was in support of landings, not only in the "island-hopping" campaign in the Pacific, but also in the landings in Europe; Torch, Husky, the landings at Anzio in Italy, Overlord, and Dragoon.
(more name-dropping here)
A hunter-killer group of the U.S. Navy captured the German submarine U-505 on June 4, 1944. This was the first time a U.S. Navy vessel had captured an enemy vessel at sea since the 19th century.
The reconquest of the Philippines began at Leyte in October 1944. The Japanese fleet came out to resist the landings, resulting in the four-day Battle of Leyte Gulf, largest naval battle in history.
When the Japanese surrendered, a large flotilla entered Tokyo Bay to witness the ceremony conducted on the battleship Missouri.
Cold War
The immediate postwar fate of the Navy was the scrapping and mothballing of ships on a large scale. This did not last; tension with the Soviet Union came to a head in the Korean War, and it became clear that the peacetime Navy would have to be much larger than ever imagined. Fleets were stationed strategically around the world, and their maneuverings were a standard part of the response to the periodic crises.
The 1950s saw the development of nuclear power for ships, under the leadership of Hyman G. Rickover, and the development of missiles and jets for Navy use. The Navy gradually developed a reputation for having the most highly-developed technology of all the US services; ballistic missile submarines grew ever more deadly and quiet.
An unlikely combination of Navy ships fought in the Vietnam War; aircraft carriers offshore launched thousands of airstrikes, while small gunboats of the "Brownwater Navy" patrolled the rivers. Despite the naval activity, new construction was curtailed by Presidents Johnson and Nixon to save money, and many of the carriers on Yankee Station dated from WWII. By 1978 the fleet had dwindled to 217 surface ships and 119 submarines.
The Cold War on the oceans was dominated by war games in which, for example, United States and Soviet submarines would trail each other for days on end.
Meanwhile the Soviet fleet had been growing, and outnumbered the US fleet in every type except carriers. This concern led the Reagan administration to set a goal for a 600-ship Navy, and by 1988 the fleet was at 588, although it declined again in subsequent years. Several of the old battleships were reactivated after 40 years in storage, modernized, and made showy appearances off the shores of Lebanon and elsewhere.
Modern Navy
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Navy fell apart, without sufficient personnel to man many of its ships. This left the United States as the world's undisputed naval superpower.
US naval forces did undergo a decline in absolute terms. Relative to the rest of the world, however, United States naval power only inceased. By some accounts, during the 1990s, the United States had a navy larger than the next seven largest navies combined. This measure possibly even underestimated the strength of the United States Navy because the USN's advantage was more than just numerical: the United States Navy enjoyed vast technological superiority to any other Navy. All the world's oceans are dominated by the United States Navy, and United States naval power is the guarantor of freedom of the seas.
During the 1990s, the United States naval strategy was based on the overall military strategy of the United States which emphasized the ability of the United States to engage in two simultaneous limited wars along separate fronts.
Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the United States Navy has been undergoing reform to meet perceived new threats.
As of 2005, the Navy is the smallest numerically, with less than 300 ships, than it has been at any time since World War I. However, the comparison is misleading since modern ships are larger and carry more firepower than those of 100 years ago.