Seablindness. Seth Cropsey
armed thrust into Western Europe.
To the north, U.S. aircraft carriers accompanied by attack submarines were added to the mix. Together with its Mediterranean fleet, the United States had effectively encircled the European peninsula—just as the Royal Navy had done during the Napoleonic Wars. If, as the expression of the time had it, “the balloon went up,” U.S. naval forces would hunt for and destroy Soviet ballistic-missile submarines that hid in the northern seas waiting for the order to launch their weapons against North American targets. According to the then-current theory, the submerged Soviet arsenal guaranteed that whatever might happen to the rest of Moscow’s nuclear forces, one part would remain intact and lethal.
The ability to roll back and eventually destroy this so-called second-strike nuclear capability would—American strategists thought—help deter Moscow from launching a first strike. At the same time, U.S. aircraft carrier attacks against Soviet naval bases and infrastructure in the vicinity of Murmansk were planned to distract attention from the central front—just as aircraft carriers were expected to attack key southern targets from the Mediterranean.
No one ever learned whether this scheme would have worked. However, the presence of powerful U.S. naval forces on the Soviets’ northern flank helped divert the Warsaw Pact leader’s intelligence, logistic, air, and naval defenses from the center. Washington saw this as a good thing.
A Scenario In 2025, thirty-four years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. naval fleet was less than one-third the size of its Cold War predecessor. An extraordinarily wealthy autocrat at the top of a small pyramid of oligarchs ruled Russia, much as the czar did before the Bolsheviks seized power. Vladimir Putin had announced in 2013 his plan to spend 4 trillion rubles, or $132 billion, to expand Russia’s combat fleet over the next seven years. As those seven fat years ended, Putin promised to spend an additional $150 billion on naval modernization by 2027. Several U.S. analysts had noted that the delivered—and promised—largesse was close to 30 percent more than the United States planned to spend on shipbuilding during the same period. No one paid them any attention—except in Moscow and Beijing.
Between Putin’s announcement and 2025, eighteen new frigates had joined the Russian Federation combat fleet, along with twenty-four missile-carrying corvettes and a host of smaller, agile combatants. Ten new boomers—nuclear-tipped ballistic-missile submarines—and eleven nuclear-powered attack subs had also been constructed and undergone successful sea trials. At a third or less than the cost of one nuclear-powered sub, Moscow had been turning out far quieter diesel-electric boats that were as well suited for the lucrative export market as they were for operating in the relatively shallow waters of the Baltic and North Seas.
Still, the Russian Federation’s military was a shadow of its communist predecessor’s armed forces. In nearly all categories of weaponry, even with oil prices back at their pre-2014 levels, Moscow could not afford the expense of a robust conventional force. It was not a superpower and could not bring armed might to bear except on its borders. It could not keep forces in the field in a prolonged conflict. But Russia had maintained and modernized a powerful nuclear arsenal of hundreds of weapons that could be launched from land-based aircraft, silos, and submarines.
The United States, still the dominant global power in 2025, was less so compared to ten or fifteen years earlier. As the federal debt reached $24 trillion, politicians had failed to staunch the borrowing or limit the growth of entitlement programs. Debt service and spending that the law required tightened their choke hold on the defense budget.
The portion of the budget that the Navy devoted to shipbuilding had been preserved, not increased. But the foreseeable expenses of replacing a fleet built during the Reagan era had shredded the admirals’ sober long-range shipbuilding plans and left them in tatters.
For example, the first of the Ohio-class nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs) had been commissioned forty-five years earlier. American military planners held fast to the idea that powerful, quick response and/or undetectable nuclear weapons would help discourage an enemy from launching a first strike. So land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, land-based long-range bombers, and boomers remained the triad that, it was hoped, would deter an enemy from launching a nuclear attack against the United States.
The new SSBNs cost more than $7 billion each, more than half the cost of an aircraft carrier, but not by much. Arguing that ballistic missile–carrying subs performed a national mission rather than a seapower one, the Navy had tried to persuade the administration and Congress that additional money should be appropriated to build the new boats—without success. Other programs were slowed or cancelled during the decades it would take to replace the fourteen aged SSBNs with twelve new ones. Congress passed legislation that allowed the number of aircraft carriers to drop from eleven to eight. It accepted the Navy’s proposal to stop buying two new attack subs each year to replace the aging Los Angeles–class boats. By 2025, the U.S. attack sub force had shrunk in a single decade from fifty-three boats to fewer than forty.
Only one carrier was built during the decades it took to modernize the boomers. The refueling of others was delayed as they were tied up dockside. The United States, at least for the indefinite future, could keep only two aircraft carriers at sea on sporadic patrols. The same cost-cutting measures were applied to the attack submarine force, with parallel results. Only thirteen attack boats could be put to sea.
America’s combatant commanders were nervous. Four-star admirals or generals, they commanded the air, sea, and ground forces that were deployed around the world to keep conflict away from the borders of the United States, defend vital American interests, and protect allies. China’s navy had not only surpassed America’s in numbers of ships but had also become a global presence, with constant patrols in the western reaches of the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the entire length of the Western Hemisphere’s Pacific coast. The few ships that remained in the U.S. 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean had been recalled home when its handful of ballistic-missile defense ships were judged redundant, once defenses against Iran’s nuclear-tipped medium- and intercontinental-range missiles became operational in Romania. This made sense to budget cutters only. Ships at sea are harder to target than fixed land-based missile batteries.
The diminished U.S. Pacific Command was able to keep a single aircraft carrier battle group in the Western Pacific. While serviceable in peacetime, a lone U.S. carrier would have very limited usefulness if an incident between China and Taiwan or Japan turned nasty. Long-standing allies cast about for other ways to protect themselves. In Taiwan, one political party was actively engaged in reunification talks with the mainland. China had secretly offered to ensure South Korea’s security if Seoul would send the American military packing, and the Blue House was thinking it over. Japanese politicians were divided between those who wanted to improve relations with China and others who sought to nullify the constitution’s Article 9, which outlawed war as a means of resolving international disputes.
Vladimir Putin had just turned seventy-three; just a few years older than Nikita Khrushchev when he placed medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, and three years younger than Leonid Brezhnev when he was gathered to his fathers. Putin remained firmly in command and had taken to sky-diving, which impressed his countrymen. All of Ukraine had long since been absorbed into Russia. So had bordering Transnistria, the slender belt—a bit larger than Rhode Island—inhabited by Russophiles, which once separated Moldova from Ukraine. In each case, the West objected strenuously, as it had when Russia invaded Crimea. Sanctions were applied, but always ended up leaking, then bursting. European dependence on Russian oil and natural gas overcame other concerns.
NATO, however, had strengthened its military presence in the Baltic States and Central Europe. After the Obama administration’s 2009 tergiversation, Polish and Czech leaders would not risk political capital to argue publicly for acceptance of defenses against Russian ballistic missiles on their territory. But Romania would—and did. NATO conducted annual exercises from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
The other side of the ledger was darker. Despite promises, only one of the Western European alliance members lived up to their NATO defense spending obligations, the U.K. But Britain had long since abandoned its alliance gold standard, the ability to deploy an entire expeditionary division. The Royal Navy was