Seablindness. Seth Cropsey
equip, and finance anti-communist rebels and governments throughout the continent. Nevertheless, instability persisted and grew in Latin America. The Soviets were enjoying a measure of success made possible by Admiral Gorshkov’s increasingly capable navy.
Russian ships operated out of Cuban ports from 1957 onward, and the Kremlin frequently requested that nations—including Peru, Ecuador, and Chile—provide the Soviet navy with basing facilities.15 Soviet ships routinely escorted arms shipments from Russia in and out of Latin American ports. The presence of Soviet naval vessels increased the risk of conflict at sea to prevent arms shipments. Any confrontation between Soviet and American ships had the potential to escalate. Even without direct Soviet combat support, the expanding militaries of Nicaragua and Cuba threatened the heavily used sea lines of communication in the Gulf of Mexico. This factor would significantly complicate crisis planning in the event of hostilities. In Latin America, the Soviet navy clearly influenced and facilitated Soviet foreign policy throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s.
Africa was also identified as a target of opportunity. Postcolonial Africa had become hospitable for revolutionary Marxism, which combined with tribal loyalties and various Pan-African ideologies to encourage political instability. The pervasiveness of left-wing ideology gave the Soviet Union and its Cuban ally an inroad into the continent. In Angola, the Soviet Union and Cuba supported the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), another revolutionary leftist organization with the goal of overthrowing the Angolan government and establishing a revolutionary Marxist regime.16
Wary of being drawn into a multi-factional conflict, especially after seeing the experience of the United States in Vietnam, the USSR restricted itself to financial and technical support of the rebels.17 Throughout the decade, the Soviets attempted to convince the MPLA to allow them to construct a naval base on Angola’s coast. Although this never came to be, during 1978 and 1979 it seemed entirely possible that the USSR could obtain its first international naval base in a strategically critical location. Submarines and surface combatants based in Angola would have directly threatened American shipping and communication in any major conflict. The USSR also supported Ethiopia in its war against Somalia in 1978, to assert its influence in the Horn of Africa.
The Soviet navy played a role in Africa similar to that in Latin America. Russian vessels carried vital supplies to the various Kremlin-backed rebel groups in Angola and operated out of multiple foreign ports. However, the Soviet navy’s actions in Africa were much more aggressive than in Latin America. Soviet ships provided gunfire support to the MPLA in 1976 and attacked Ethiopian rebels in 1978.18 The USSR deployed its modern, long-range cruise missiles to ships operating off the West African coast, increasing the efficacy of Soviet naval fire support. In 1980, the USSR deployed a helicopter carrier and supporting squadron to Mozambique.19 Soviet naval presence was both visible and consequential throughout Africa during the 1970s and later in the 1980s.
Admiral Gorshkov transformed what Soviet rulers initially regarded as an appendage into an effective instrument of national power that generated positive strategic value for the Soviet regime. However, the fleet sailed into shoal waters and went aground as the Soviet Union’s economy collapsed in the late 1980s. The communist regime temporized at first and later began a descent from which it would not recover.
The Soviet hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time on Christmas Day, 1991. Russian military spending went into free fall. Fighters and bombers, whose design necessitated far more attention than Western military aircraft, sat on aprons for lack of maintenance and spare parts. Insufficient fuel immobilized tanks, while naval vessels rusted at their moorings. As one consequence, Chechen rebels turned back a large Russian assault in the 1996 battle for Grozny, the capital city of Chechnya.
During the mid-1990s, the Russian military budget dwindled to a trickle. Penury forced operating military units to forage to pay for ammunition and fuel.20 In August 2000 the Russian navy conducted its first major fleet exercise in a decade, in the Barents Sea. An Oscar-class nuclear-powered submarine, the Kursk, which carried anti-ship cruise missiles and torpedoes, experienced a series of explosions and fires that sank the boat, killing all 118 sailors aboard.
But a crippled military was not part of Vladimir Putin’s design for Russia’s return as a major power. Moscow reversed its military spending decline in 1999, when funding for its armed forces reached a nadir of a little more $20 billion.21 Spending climbed to more than $90 billion annually in 2012, a 27 percent increase over its level just after the Cold War ended. Not only the rise in oil revenues but also Vladimir Putin’s will account for the quadrupling of the military budget in thirteen years. Falling energy prices have battered Russia’s rearmament, but Moscow’s rulers have persisted in their effort to modernize the nation’s military forces, despite economic setbacks.
RUSSIAN NAVAL MODERNIZATION
In the United States, we take for granted the necessity of openness to ideas from afar, technological innovation, and a vigorous economy able to supply revenue for national defense. This combination is one of our virtues. Not all countries share it. Peter the Great’s construction of a Russian navy required an efficient taxation system where none existed as well as a defense industry that met or exceeded the standard of the times. During Peter’s reign as czar—from 1682 to 1721—some ships were built with green wood and fastened together with wooden pegs. They would sink in the absence of any external force.22
One hundred seventy-seven years after Peter died, Leo Tolstoy published an essay titled “Famine or Not Famine” in the Russian Gazette. Tolstoy was responding to a private letter he had received from a Mrs. Sokolóv, who described the impoverishment and hunger of peasants in the Vorónezh district, the northern border of which is 200 miles south of Moscow. Vorónezh is known for the richness of its black soil and its exceptional ability to produce sugar beets, grain, potatoes, sunflowers, and livestock. Tolstoy listed several causes for the region’s hunger: indifference to spiritual matters, dejection of spirit, contempt for agricultural labor, and inertia. In particular, he wrote about the peasants’
unwillingness to change their habits and their condition. During all these years, when in the other governments [i.e., districts] of Russia, European plows, iron harrows, new methods of sowing seeds, improved horticulture, and even mineral manures were coming into use, in the center, everything remained the same—the wooden sokha [a primitive plow that cuts the earth but does not turn it over], and all the habits and customs of Rurik’s time [the ninth century].23
In many respects Russia remains a technologically backward state. Even today, the technology for extracting hydrocarbons from Russian oil fields comes from the West. Modernization, where it exists in Russia, demands firm resolve, uninterrupted purposefulness, and iron commitment. Notwithstanding the general population’s backwardness, the Soviets demonstrated that these qualities could be mustered.
A revival of this applied determination is under way again. Russia’s navy has now awakened from the state-imposed hibernation of the years that immediately followed the end of the Cold War. Russian nuclear-powered submarines were deployed for 1,500 days in 2015, a 50 percent increase over the preceding year, according to a Russian navy spokesman.24 One of the several classes of nuclear-powered subs that saw more deployments was the Oscar-class guided-missile submarine Smolensk.25 With twenty-four anti-ship cruise missiles each, the eight Oscar-class boats are particularly well-suited to attack U.S. aircraft carriers and their accompanying surface escorts.
Russian naval planning calls for these boats to be modernized with updated sonar, electronic intercept capabilities, and fire control. Without modifying the hull, the modernized boat will triple its missile-carrying ability. The changes substantially augment Russia’s ability to threaten the access of American surface ships to such places as the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas and the approaches from the Atlantic to the North Sea between Greenland and Iceland and northern Great Britain.
In May 2016, the Russian navy launched the sixth and final modernized Kilo-class submarine. Kolpino, named for a municipality of St. Petersburg, was built for service in the Black Sea. This inland sea is the center of festering conflicts and tensions from Turkey to Transnistria to the Donbass