United States Navy

The United States Navy was established by the Continental Congress in 1775 as the Continental Navy to contest British control of the seas during the American Revolutionary War, was formally reconstituted under the Constitution in 1794 amid the Quasi-War threat from France, and has since grown into the dominant global maritime and naval aviation power of the modern era, organized around aircraft carrier strike groups, submarines, surface combatants and naval aviation. The Navy played a decisive role in securing American independence at sea, in projecting power during the nineteenth century's expansion, and above all in the Pacific theater of World War II, where carrier battles at Midway and elsewhere broke Imperial Japanese naval power and established naval aviation as the dominant form of modern sea warfare. Since 1945 the Navy has maintained a forward-deployed global presence built around its nuclear-powered aircraft carrier fleet and ballistic-missile and attack submarine forces, underpinning American strategic deterrence and rapid power projection capability throughout the Cold War and into the present. The service operates alongside the Marine Corps, with which it shares the Department of the Navy, and remains, by tonnage and reach, the most powerful navy in the world in the twenty-first century.