"The Pacific theater in World War II, even more than the European Theater, depended on American sea power. Between 1923 and 1940, the U.S. Navy had held twenty-one major fleet exercises designed to develop strategy and allow officers to enact plans in an operational setting. It was out of these exercises that the strategies, tactics, fleet power, and officers developed which enabled the navy to carry the sea war to the enemy. Testing American Sea Power challenges the conventional wisdom that Mahanian theory held the American navy in a steel grip. Felker's research and analysis, the first to concentrate on the navy's interwar exercises, will make a valuable contribution to naval history for historians, military professionals, and naval instructors."--Jacket.