of naval warfare but of grand strategy. The US and Royal Navies would rise to meet this challenge.
Intelligence became the key. Let us examine that statement. The Soviet Union had two key intelligence agencies, the KGB and the GRU. The KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security) functioned from 1954 to 1991, with headquarters in the infamous Lubyanka Building in Moscow. Its most notorious and longest-serving chairman was Yury Vladimirovich Andropov, from January 1967 to May 1982. The KGB was dissolved after the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev’s government in 1991 and was split into the Foreign Security Service, the FSS (FSB, in the Russian acronym), and the Foreign Intelligence Service, FIS (or SVR), within the new Russian Federation. The second and by far the larger Soviet and now Russian intelligence agency was and is the GRU, the Foreign Military Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff. In 1997 the GRU was estimated to be six times larger than the SVR. It had at that time approximately 25,000 special forces troops, or Spetsnaz, to use the Russian term. In addition to its HUMINT operations the GRU managed (and still does) huge SIGINT and IMINT (imagery intelligence). Its capabilities and operations far exceeded the primarily clandestine HUMINT operations of the KGB, and today those of the SVR. From late 1967 until 1995 Soviet intelligence controlled a highly significant naval spy ring in the United States headed by Chief Warrant Officer John Anthony Walker. During those eighteen years the Walker spy ring gave away some, though by no means all, of the US Navy’s secrets, an episode that we will address later. Fortunately, Walker did not have access to many key US and UK intelligence capabilities and operations, a tribute to “need to know” and compartmentation policies and procedures.
At the heart of all this lay the underwater domain. Submarine design and construction have to suit the environment in which submarines operate. The key to success is quieting, the ability to be acoustically stealthy, so that the opposition is unable to hear one’s submarine, while the other side’s is detected and its acoustic profile collected and stored for future identification, an acoustic fingerprint that will identify that particular submarine. The difficulties of designing such a quiet, stealthy platform, one that is nuclear powered, can run silently and deeply, can accelerate from slow to high speed in short order, and can change depth without being detected are nontrivial. Submarine safety, necessary nuclear safeguards, and weapons-launch quieting are critical. Crew habitability and sustainability are crucial operational factors; they mean producing enough fresh water and air and carrying enough healthy food to sustain the crew in long, two-month patrols underwater. Optimal ergonomics and use of space are required. Submariners like to listen and not transmit, to avoid detection. They need the very best communications technology to ensure that national command authorities can bring them at any time to communications depth in order to receive messages much longer than is possible at greater depths via extremely low frequency (ELF) transmissions.
A submarine is only as good as the weapons it launches and the targets that it can destroy, however capable the platform. The United Kingdom and the United States have produced and systematically improved during our period one generation after another of highly capable acoustic torpedoes, their design and technology based on understanding of the environment in which submarines operate. Knowledge of the complexity of the ocean, particularly changes in its acoustic characteristics from location to location, permits exploitation of complex signal-processing algorithms for long-range detection of threat submarines or surface ships in often inhospitable ocean conditions. Oceanographic data and knowledge of how various acoustic sensors perform in varying ocean conditions predicate how to use a submarine’s sensors optimally. The 1960s saw the final demise of active acoustic transmissions as a means of detection (the transmission itself yielding one’s own position) and a transition to passive detection, using knowledge of the sound-velocity profiles of different acoustic emissions from threat platforms and differentiating a Soviet submarine from a whale or ambient noise. The United States has invested tens of billions of dollars in both submarine quieting technology to preserve stealth and acoustic signal processing. Parallel to this investment the United States spent billions on oceanographic research to understand the noise characteristics of the oceans and how to best exploit them. For example, knowledge of deep sound channels and convergence zones allows US and UK submarines working together to position themselves the better to hear discrete threat submarine “tonals” at significant ranges.
This accumulated knowledge and experience amounted in due course to an immense technical and operational advantage vis-à-vis the Soviet navy, and today the Chinese navy. This vast knowledge embodied in multibillion-dollar platforms and in the ocean science that underlay them was a major target for Soviet intelligence. The Soviet Union knew the one vital weakness of its submarines in the 1960s: they were noisy and could be easily detected by US and UK submarines. What they did not know was how this detection was achieved. The key was the science behind narrow-band signal processing, which could pick a signal from a vast background noise and match it to a piece of equipment in a particular threat submarine, identified by hull number, home base, and other vital profile information. The United States and the United Kingdom enjoyed, very simply, a massive operational advantage. It was the goal of the Soviet Union to narrow that gap.
As part of the counter-countermeasures philosophy mentioned earlier, the United States and the United Kingdom constantly anticipated and stayed ahead of the game. One classic example of this was the Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS, a network that was laid on ocean floors where Soviet submarines regularly transited. It enabled the United States and the United Kingdom to know the location of Soviet submarines without costly and time-consuming individual searches. Submarines, surface ships, and aircraft could be vectored to the projected location of a Soviet submarine detected by SOSUS. The network’s cost was prodigious, but it worked extremely well. Another example was the deployment of special surface ships that towed extremely long passive acoustic arrays that collected acoustic intelligence. Together with other collectors (submarines, surface ships, aircraft sonobuoys, and other fixed ocean-based sensors), they created a vast ACINT data base. There were the keys to the kingdom, the ability to track an individual submarine by its unique ACINT profile—a capability of the US and UK Navies only.
A quiet, well-handled submarine can go where no other platforms can and listen to everything, across the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum. This includes collecting SIGINT across the radio frequency (RF) spectrum; collecting ELINT across the radar, infrared, multispectral, and laser spectra; measure and signature intelligence (MASINT) multispectral techniques for crucial measurement of other discrete parts of the spectrum associated, for example, with nuclear effluent and effects and materials from other highly sensitive events; telemetry collection from missile shoots; and underwater device laying and disruption, cable cutting and interception, and watching, listening to, filming, and recording all manner of threat activities.
The submarine in our fifty-five-year period was therefore the most effective of all US and UK platforms. It had in addition one other extremely valuable operational capability, a fourth weapon, supplementing torpedoes, missiles, and “soft kill” EM capabilities. These are special operations forces. SEAL (Sea, Air, and Land) teams, and, in the case of the United Kingdom, elements of the Special Boat Section of the Royal Marines and the Special Air Service (SAS) are launched and retrieved stealthily from US and UK submarines. A whole panoply of technological advances were made in our period to enhance the capabilities of special operations forces to inflict disproportionate damage on the enemy. SEAL delivery systems and other manned
