Seablindness. Seth Cropsey
source of tension and bloodshed between Georgia and Russia. Naval control of the Black Sea advances Russia’s interest in reasserting control over the region. Kolpino and the modernized members of its class are longer than the Kilo boats after which they were modeled. They can launch torpedoes as well as cruise missiles aimed at land and sea targets. One boat of the class, Rostov-na-Donu, named for the city of Rostov-on-Don near the Sea of Azov in south Russia, fired cruise missiles at Syrian targets from the Mediterranean in December 2015.
The improvements have allowed Russian submarine operations in the Atlantic to return to Cold War levels. The Russian navy’s submarine activity is matched by its advanced technology. Royal Navy Vice Admiral Clive Johnstone, commander of NATO’s Maritime Command, says that “through an extraordinary investment path not mirrored by the West,” Russia has made “technology leaps that are remarkable.” He adds that Russian submarines possess “longer ranges, they have better systems, [and] they’re freer to operate,” and notes “a rise in professionalism and ability to operate their boats that we haven’t seen before.”26
The Royal Navy’s views are shared on this side of the Atlantic. Rear Admiral David Johnson, former director of the Navy’s submarine design programs, told a Naval Submarine League symposium in 2014 that “We’ll be facing tough potential opponents. One has only to look at the Severodvinsk [a nuclear-powered attack submarine that entered service in 2014]. I am so impressed with this ship,” said Admiral Johnson, “that I had . . . a model [built] from unclassified data.”27 The boat’s submerged displacement is greater than that of the Virginia-class U.S. attack submarine; it has been tested with the Kalibr land-attack supersonic-capable cruise missile as well as the same missile system’s anti-ship and anti-submarine missiles. The Kalibr is the missile that Russia says its submarines in the Eastern Mediterranean and Caspian Sea launched respectively in 2015 and 2016 at Syrian targets.
The commander of the U.S. 6th Fleet, Vice Admiral James Foggo III, wrote in June 2016 that, “Combined with extensive and frequent submarine patrols throughout the North Atlantic and Norwegian Sea, and forward-deployed forces in Syria, Russia has the capability to hold nearly all NATO maritime forces at risk. No longer is the maritime space uncontested. For the first time in almost 30 years, Russia is a significant and aggressive maritime power. . . . The clear advantage that we enjoyed in anti-submarine warfare during the Cold War is waning.”28 Just as in both World Wars, the cat-and-mouse maneuvers of the Cold War’s great maritime confrontation contested the control of the sea lines of communication between democracies on both shores of the Atlantic. Although there is no doubt that the United States controls the Atlantic’s vast expanses today, Russia’s reemergence as a naval power raises troubling and important questions about the future.
WHAT IS PUTIN UP TO?
When the Soviet Union ceased to exist in December 1991, the so-called republics that girdled Russia to its south and west had already declared independence and become sovereign nations. These states had not been republics; they were run by communist parties controlled from Moscow. The dissolution of the empire ended in the creation of fifteen states that reached from the Baltic Sea, southeast to include Ukraine, and continuing along the Black Sea’s eastern coast to the Caspian and beyond, deep into the eastern frontier of Kazakhstan, which touches Mongolia.
The results of the breach were large. Before December 1991, the USSR’s population stood at about 290 million. Moscow controlled more than 22 million square kilometers, approximately one-sixth of the earth’s land surface. Dissolution cost the Soviet Union 139 million citizens. Russia was left with a total population of 151 million. Its land area had been reduced by nearly one-fourth.
In his 2005 state of the nation address to Russia’s parliament, Vladimir Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union and the attendant diminution of Russia “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century.”29 If Russia’s shrunken borders lead toward a more stable region, Putin is wrong. So far, however, his efforts suggest that the catastrophe lies not in the Soviets’ loss but rather in their successors’ attempt to reconstruct the shattered pedestal from which the USSR fell. If Russian policy triumphs, animated by the same kind of resentment at having lost an empire that consumed Germany after losing World War I, history may judge Putin’s remark as an understatement.
Russia’s subjugation of Georgia in 2008, along with Moscow’s recognition of two breakaway Georgian regions as sovereign states (one of which—Abkhazia—possesses more than 100 miles of coastline on the Black Sea), was a lackluster military operation. But it sent a clear message that Russia’s economic, demographic, and political misfortunes would not prevent her rulers from rekindling the fear of domination that has been a fact of life in the region since before the Russian Revolution.
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, along with his military support for the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine who needed no prodding to take up arms against their own government, emphasized Moscow’s ambition to reassert regional hegemony. The armed conflict between Ukraine’s democratically elected government and Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine continues today.
Putin’s ambitions do not end in Ukraine. Extending their reach beyond border states, Russian military forces intervened on behalf of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2015, four years after the Syrian civil war began. The intervention improved Moscow’s access to a Syrian port, Latakia, on the Mediterranean and a nearby airfield that is used to conduct missions in support of Assad. It also enabled Iran to plant a violent foot in Syria in the form of an expanding network of Shiite terror groups.
The late-2016 fall of Aleppo, the center of Syrian resistance to Assad, was a major success for Putin. Where U.S. policy makers saw only failed outcomes, Putin gambled that Russia would not become enmeshed in a prolonged civil conflict. He won. The victory established Russia as the major external power in the Levant, consolidated his position of strength in the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean, and underlined the retreat of the United States from its previous influence in the region.
Russia’s access to the world’s great seas and oceans offers at once opportunities to complicate the effectiveness of the United States and its allies operating in the same bodies of water, to disrupt communications between the United States and its allies, and to project global force. A revanchist power couldn’t ask for much more. Russia has largely succeeded in monopolizing the energy output of its former possessions in Central Asia. Neutering NATO, replacing the United States as the major external power in the Middle East, and reestablishing control over the Baltic States as well as Ukraine would help right the wrongs that Vladimir Putin believes were perpetrated when the Russian Federation replaced the Soviet Union.
Putin is acting as purposefully at sea as he has on land. Usually the two are linked. With its seizure of the Crimea, Russia regains the access to the Black Sea that the USSR exploited to keep its littoral client states in line and to make Turkey nervous. Today, as before, the Black Sea provides a gateway to the Bosphorus and the Mediterranean. Moreover, Russia understands the same lesson that China, Iran, North Korea, and every other potential adversary learned from Desert Storm: defeating the United States at sea today is much harder than denying it the access needed to apply American land and seapower. Russian possession of the Crimea allows its modern effective anti-surface and surface-to-air missiles to challenge access to the region by NATO vessels, including those of the United States, which conduct presence and deterrence missions in the Black Sea. Moscow’s maritime and continental efforts to restore its position in the Black Sea region are particularly effective as Western national security policy makers concentrate their attention on Russia’s increasing threat to the Baltic States.
Examples of Russian military preparation in the Baltics include increased long-range anti-ship missiles and beefed-up air-defense systems in the Kaliningrad military district. In April 2016, Russian tactical jets flew several high-speed passes dangerously close to the destroyer USS Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea.30 The Russian defense ministry is also tightening its belt; its month-long investigation into its Baltic Sea fleet command led to the firing of fifty senior naval officers for leadership and operational misjudgment in early July 2016.31
But in the revised Russian Marine Doctrine that was published