The development of the Soviet Navy has been dominated by two factors. The first is the lack of any historical naval tradition outside the Baltic and the Black Sea. The second, intimately linked with the first, is the adverse maritime geography of the USSR.
The decade of the 1990s represents a distinctive period in American naval strategic thinking. Bounded on one side by the end of the Cold War in 1989-91 and on the other by the beginning of the era of the global war on terrorism after 11 September 2001, these were years in wich the US. Navy of the 1990s found itself faced with a dramatically altered strategic situation.