Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and the maintenance of the submarine-launched ballistic-missile (SLBM) deterrent can never again be matched.
USS Ohio (SSBN 726) U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE PHOTO ARCHIVE
The Royal Navy’s HMS Vanguard (S28) UK MINISTRY OF DEFENSE
The fact that the Cold War never developed into a hot war is a lasting tribute to both navies and their leaderships. When we examine several of the other major conflicts that occurred both during and after the Cold War it is critical to recall that neither navy ever yielded once in any dimension that was militarily and politically significant to the opposition. It behooves us to recall what was achieved both strategically and tactically, because of its significance for the contemporary challenges of an emergent China and a reemergent Russia. The one common denominator throughout is, simply, the sea, and it is the sea that likely holds the keys to the security of the post-2015 world.
Both navies worked hand in glove to keep the West safe under the nuclear umbrella by one critical strategic tool—ensuring the security of the Western European base by maintaining the sea lines of communication (SLOCs), not just in the Atlantic but globally, wherever the Warsaw Pact challenged the West. Securing the sea lines of communication is a fundamental strategic goal. It is a simple concept, written with simple words, yet within these words are enshrined one of the most important concepts for today and tomorrow—that the free flow of trade and people underpins the global economy. It is not merely a question of moving divisions of troops by sea from one place to another without hindrance in order to execute a land campaign. Without sea control there is no free movement, and without access to such key resources as food, minerals, manufactured products, energy sources, and sea-based products (like fish, oil, and gas), there is no serious global economic life. Who controls the sea, controls the global economic flow and all the oceans’ resources. To upset that economic balance by means of war is to attack the very freedom that has sustained twentieth- and twenty-first-century economic life. The global, forward-deployed disposition of naval forces to maintain the balance of power at sea in order to sustain peace and prosperity is at the very heart of naval strategy. In the early part of the last century this was termed “the defense of trade.” Nothing has changed. For examples, keeping oil flowing from the Persian Gulf, maintaining the integrity of the critical straits through the Indonesian archipelago and the Malacca Straits, and preventing the seizure of seabed resources by illegal occupation of island chains are no different from protecting the flow of goods and raw materials during the golden age of the first Industrial Revolution. The impacts of the second Industrial Revolution of the global, networked economy and the attendant issues of energy and critical raw-material acquisition, supply, and flow are already upon us. We will later look at more complex and sophisticated aspects of this fundamental point.
During our period there was only one overt act of military aggression using a submarine: the attack and sinking by the Royal Navy submarine HMS Conqueror of the Argentinian navy cruiser General Belgrano during the Falklands campaign of 1982. There were many covert acts of aggression, but this was the only true overt attack and sinking since 1945, and this raises many questions. But in this one event in the South Atlantic are many answers. Nuclear-powered attack submarines and nuclear-powered guided-missile-firing submarines are prodigious instruments of naval power—to be challenged only by those who believe that they have comparable capabilities or alternative means. It is not a simple question of David challenging Goliath but one involving a complex set of issues regarding generations of extraordinary technical and operational development and the creation of special cadres of nuclear submariners on both sides of the Atlantic, cadres fortified by many common bonds, total cooperation, and highly classified security and intelligence agreements. To create a rival club takes enormous energy, funding, and expertise. The Soviet Union made that challenge, and today China and Russia are desperate to rival the US-UK submarine special club. The strategic notion that who controls the underwater domain controls the oceans of the world, and therefore the largest segment by far of the global-network economy, is neither fanciful nor exaggerated. To fly slowly at low altitude over the Malacca Straits off Singapore on a clear day and simply observe the extraordinary volume of global maritime traffic is not just an exercise in counting ships but testament to the vibrancy of the global economy and to the fact that most of it depends on the sea.
Measures, countermeasures, counter-countermeasures, and so on are well-understood technological and operational requirements, of which intelligence and acquisition are prime drivers. Anticipating the enemy’s or potential adversary’s next technological development and getting ahead by finding the most cost-effective counter are buried deeply in the psyches and industrial processes of all military professionals and industry in the United States and United Kingdom. This is well understood and underscored by a huge acquisition bureaucracy. This process is at its best in the submarine communities of the US Navy and the Royal Navy. Perhaps it is no exaggeration to claim that this is the most sophisticated process on planet Earth: Virginia-class and Astute-class nuclear-powered attack submarines are the most technologically advanced engineering bodies ever designed and built, perhaps more so than space systems. The United States and the United Kingdom did not arrive in this dominant position by accident; this level of capability is a jewel in the strategic crowns of both countries.
The 1960s witnessed the beginning of a massive ship- and submarine-building enterprise by the Soviet Union. The Cuban Missile Crisis and the later US exploitation of the sea in that decade for carrier-based air strikes into Vietnam, the mining of Vietnamese waters, restriction of the movements of illicit weapons by sea, and the use of small-boat riverine forces all influenced the Soviet Union to build a blue-water navy. The Politburo and military leadership understood that if the Soviet Union was to expand its influence via surrogates and alliances beyond the geographic bounds of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, then it would have to possess a navy that could support those national interests and be a countervailing force to the power of the US Navy and its NATO allies. The plans for a global maritime posture were laid in Moscow, and the Soviet Union began the challenge to US naval power and the support of its strongest naval ally, the Royal Navy. The Soviet Union created on the Kola Peninsula on the Barents Sea and in Leningrad in the Baltic a naval shipbuilding infrastructure that over the next thirty years would witness the greatest Russian shipbuilding program since the days of Peter the Great.
The Admiralty Yard in Leningrad and the other major Russian shipyards came to be supported by a plethora of research-and-development institutes that aimed to acquire technical expertise that would challenge the capabilities of the United States and United Kingdom. A critical element in this huge attempt to catch up in almost all naval technological and operational domains was intelligence gathering—espionage by the main Soviet agencies and the networks that they managed through Warsaw Pact affiliates. Nowhere was the intelligence Cold War more intense than in the naval race. As we have seen, the Central Front of Europe was a pivotal geopolitical arena, but the oceans were where the real confrontations would take place as the Soviets used the sea for hitherto unobtainable access to areas where it perceived national interests.
The boundaries of postwar Europe were drawn and the spheres of influence defined, as witnessed by the 1968 Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. The situation at sea was volatile, boundaries were totally ambiguous, and the freedom of the seas an opportunity for Soviet exploitation. That freedom would be undermined by the strategic nuclear imperative for submarine-based first and second strike and by a new concept of second-strike “withholding,” in which ballistic-missile-firing submarines stationed under ice would aim to hold the West to ransom. From this latter strategy grew a whole new Arctic submarine regime. The oceans of the world would now include the Arctic—an unprecedented
