The U.S. Navy has been shrinking since the end of the Cold War, yet the service is tasked with a wider array of responsibilities. Its ships track Somali pirates off the Horn of Africa or smugglers from South America. Its engineers manage building projects on every continent. And more sailors are stationed in the Middle East than on ships.

It’s part of an evolution that increases the emphasis on "soft power," or projecting American influence through cooperation, the chief of staff of Navy Region Northwest said during a speech in Tacoma on Tuesday.

"Twenty years ago, we were prepared for a showdown with the Soviet Union," Capt. Peter Blake Rush said. "Today we also focus on piracy, disaster relief, anti-smuggling."

Rush was speaking Tuesday at a meeting of the Kiwanis Club of Tacoma, which was presenting the Howard O. Scott Citizen-Soldier of the Year award. That honor went to Tech. Sgt. Joan Colon, an Air Force Reserve mortuary specialist with the 446th Airlift Wing.

Navy Region Northwest oversees installations in Whidbey Island, Everett, Bremerton, Bangor and Indian Island, near Port Townsend. More than 20,000 active-duty sailors and 3,700 reservists are assigned to the state, and the estimated annual contribution to the Puget Sound economy is $4 billion.

The overall size of the Navy, though, is waning. During the 1980s, it boasted 568 ships and about 500,000 active-duty sailors.

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The upcoming deployments of three Stryker brigades from Fort Lewis are sparking protests from the local anti-war community.

On Thursday afternoon, members of Port Militarization Resistance will be marching in downtown Tacoma to protest the use of the Port of Tacoma to ship Strykers to Afghanistan.

From a release: "Join us as we take back the streets of Tacoma this Thursday! To no one’s surprise the gears of the war-machine are still spinning after the election of Barack Obama. We must show the city of Tacoma that if they continue to allow the military to use their port we will continue to cost them money."

And at noon Saturday, a rally protesting the stop-loss policy will take place at the Freedom Bridge over Exit 122 on Interstate 5. The group Iraq Veterans Against the War will participate.

"We will assemble with soldier’s families and community groups to rally against the systematic mistreatment of soldiers by the Pentagon, which maintains stop-loss as a backdoor draft," said Seth Manzel, the director of the group that runs nearby Coffee Strong in Tillicum.

Photographer Lui Kit Wong and I were out with guys from 4th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division last week for a live-fire exercise. Lui snapped some great shots – but because the story ran inside (and thus the photo was black and white), a really remarkable photo didn’t make the front page.

Here it is:

So what makes this photo so cool (at least in the opinion of this non-photog)? If you zoom in, you can actually see the bullet in mid-flight:

Neat.

The Los Angeles Times offers a snapshot of Jean Chamberlin, the vice president and general manager of Boeing's C-17 Globemaster III program.

She's a local gal:

Chamberlin, 55, grew up in Tacoma, Wash., where her father retired as a senior master sergeant at nearby McChord Air Force Base. "I always had planes flying around in my backyard."