U.S. Navy Humanitarian Assistance in an Era of Austerity

Over the last decade the U.S. Navy has gone beyond disaster response to substantially enlarge its scheduled preplanned humanitarian engagement in the Pacific the Americas and Africa. After an expansionary period that began with the 2005 response to the Indian Ocean tsunami intensifying budget pressures are now triggering spirited debate within the Department of Defense (DoD) about the true value of these soft power missions which utilize scarce personnel funding and assets that otherwise would be dedicated to more traditional and more easily measured and justified hard power missions.