Seablindness. Seth Cropsey
“because NATO has been developing actively of late and coming closer to our borders, and Russia is . . . responding to these developments.”32 This is meant for a domestic audience that is receptive to Putin’s claim that he protects them from Western states bristling with weaponry and bent on subduing Russia. It’s nonsense. Eighty-five percent of NATO’s member states currently fail to meet the alliance’s goal of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense. NATO’s largest single military power, the United States, is experiencing sufficient difficulty in keeping a single aircraft carrier deployed in the Western Pacific and the Persian Gulf so that intervals have been introduced into the carriers’ operational schedules, during which no carrier is on station.
Closer to the truth is the Russian document’s seeming non sequitur that follows its point about the Atlantic’s importance: “The second reason [for emphasizing the Atlantic] is that Crimea and Sevastopol have been reunited with Russia and we need to take measures for their rapid integration into the national economy. Of course, we are also restoring Russia’s naval presence in the Mediterranean.”33
The Atlantic is important to Russia’s revanchist goals because an Atlantic presence challenges America’s ability to sustain NATO if there is a war on the European continent. Russia has two routes to the Atlantic: through the Baltic Sea and through the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Moscow’s ability to command these long passages, or, at a minimum, to deny NATO and U.S. seapower the ability to operate in them, opens the Atlantic to the kind of warfare that the Nazis conducted in World War II, during which more than 72,000 allied sailors and merchant seamen lost their lives and 3,500 ships were sunk, with a loss of 14.5 million gross tons.
The other focus of Russia’s stated maritime doctrine is the Arctic Sea. The overwhelming preponderance of Russia’s nearly 24,000-mile coast lies between Severodvinsk on the White Sea bay of the Arctic and the Bering Sea, where the Arctic Sea empties into the North Pacific. The Arctic today is open to Russian shipping for a couple of months a year, if that, but ships there still require assistance from the world’s only nuclear-powered icebreaker fleet—Russia’s.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the Arctic contains 1.6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, of which 84 percent lies offshore.34 Plentiful mineral resources, such as bauxite, copper, iron ore, and nickel, also lie beneath the seabed. Russia manufactures little. Its economy depends largely on using Western technology to exploit its abundant natural resources. The contest for these resources and control of the seas above them is a certain point of future international friction.
Russian maritime doctrine supports Putin’s goal of reestablishing Russia as a great power by using its navy to challenge the United States’s ability to communicate with its European allies, fill the power vacuum left in the Mediterranean by the United States, and threaten NATO on its northern and southern flanks. Expanding its fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers and assigning more naval combatants to Arctic duty advances Russia’s goals as it seeks to establish Moscow as the preeminent Arctic power.
Vladimir Putin is building a modern and technologically sophisticated fleet. Russia’s combatants and its ground and air forces are competitive in air defenses, unconventional warfare, electronic warfare, and naval gunfire. Moscow’s cyber abilities have proved sufficiently advanced to influence American and other democratic states’ politics. The program is guided by a strategic vision of advancing Russia’s economic interest in further cornering the world’s energy market while reestablishing a dominant Russian naval presence in the seas that flank the European peninsula. Simultaneously, Putin seeks to offset the ability of U.S. seapower to counter these threats and to shake NATO by interrupting the sea lines of communication that link the United States to its European allies. Along with China’s sale of its capable modern weaponry to such states as Iraq and North Korea, Russia adds to the threat of denying U.S. forces the access they require to succor allies and apply effective force globally.
Changes in the threats that face the United States must have consequences. There is no point in any state’s armament other than to advance its interests in a material way. Many saw Nazi Germany and Japan’s preparations for war in the 1930s, but Western governments’ record of publicizing these was spotty. Harder still was imagining how the preparations could result in disaster. A description of a military’s condition and those that might oppose it is incomplete if it does not attempt to imagine the effects of changes in the balance of power.
Scenarios are the military’s time-tested instrument for juxtaposing current or anticipated forces alongside possible crises. Called “war games,” “command post,” or “table-top” exercises, they enlist the participation of senior civilian and military officials or defense experts to understand how they react to events that could happen. If such exercises are sufficiently difficult and innovative, they can yield valuable clues about strategy, tactics, escalation, logistics, and a host of other variables that challenge commanders in peace, in the dim light between peace and war, and in war itself. The U.S. Naval War College has long specialized in war games. Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz wrote of his experience there in the early 1920s that “the enemy of our games was always—Japan,” adding that, because of his preparation, “nothing that happened in the Pacific was strange or unexpected.”1
By 1939, American cryptanalysts could read Japan’s highest level of diplomatic code, which they code-named Purple. The yield from this rich vein was referred to as “Magic.” In late September 1941, U.S. codebreakers intercepted a message from Tokyo to an agent in Hawaii.2 Two weeks later, the message was decoded and passed along to Army, Navy, and State Department recipients. In the message, Japan’s Hawaiian agent was asked to divide the relatively small (ca. 5 square miles) naval area of the harbor into five zones. He was further instructed to report on the location and type of ships in each zone.
Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Harold R. Stark read the report. He admired Japan’s efficient intelligence services and their attention to detail. Opinion remains divided today about Admiral Stark’s failure to send this intelligence to Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. On December 3, the U.S. high command was also aware that the Japanese had destroyed their codes and encryption devices in Asian consulates as well as in London and Washington. In congressional investigations that followed the end of World War II, Admiral Kimmel stated correctly that not all Japanese codes were being destroyed and that “Such reports had been made to me three or four times in the course of the year.”3
Less senior officers peered into the approaching whirlwind’s opacity with similar results. Because of a November 28 war-warning message from Washington, Lieutenant General Walter Short, who was responsible for Hawaii’s defense, changed the Aircraft Warning Service’s (AWS) watch, which had lasted from 0600 to 1130. Thus, radar screens would now be manned from 0400 to 0700, the general’s estimate of the most likely time for an attack.
However, the watch standers and their immediate superiors were not told the reason for the added hours. Fewer than ten minutes after sunrise—at 0703—on December 7, the watch stander at the Opana radar station, just south of Kawela Bay at the northern tip of Oahu, saw planes approaching the islands 137 miles to the north and reported it to an Army lieutenant at the AWS center. The lieutenant, who was wholly inexperienced, judged that the unidentified aircraft were a flight of B-17s that was due to arrive from the mainland in the morning.
As with most mishaps, hindsight uncovered a host of other miscalculations, errors, and faulty interpretations. But the nub of the attack’s success was the failure of imagination among American political leadership and the high command. The idea that Japan could dispatch six aircraft carriers across the Northern Pacific undetected to strike