Seablindness. Seth Cropsey
When fascists in Europe and Asia sought its destruction, the United States together with its allies defeated them. Faced with a challenge from the Soviet Union, the United States and its allies contained it.
In all cases, the ability of the United States to communicate with allies and demonstrate solidarity with them reinforced our partners’ determination and fighting spirit. From Normandy to Inchon to Danang to Baghdad, the United States did more than encourage and reinforce. It fought. These engagements were not altruistic. Such actions as deposing a Panamanian dictator, heading off a military coup against an elected Philippine leader, or preventing additional genocide in the Balkans were aimed at local and regionalized threats. But the large contests, undertaken against large threats, had the collateral effect of preserving the international system.
Both diplomacy and force supported the international system. The single most important military enabler has been seapower. The United States used it to sustain England in the fight against Hitler, to transport men and matériel across the Atlantic, and to return to the European continent by force. The island-hopping approach to Japan during World War II would have been impossible without naval and amphibious forces.
Had the Warsaw Pact invaded Western Europe, U.S. seapower would have been indispensable to NATO’s defense or to succor a second invasion had one been needed to free the continent. The ballistic missiles carried aboard U.S. submarines guaranteed the means of retaliation if the United States were struck first. The Cold War could not have ended well if U.S. seapower had consisted of either a regional or a coastal navy.
Threats to the international system did not stop with the Cold War. They went into a remission, which has ended. Today, China and Russia, respectively, threaten international order by seeking to incorporate the South and East China Seas’ international waters as sovereign ones; and by violating the sovereign territory of Ukraine, by projecting power from Crimea throughout the Black Sea, by challenging the security of the Baltic States, and by assisting Syria’s criminal ruler in preserving his grip in the Middle East, including on the Mediterranean’s eastern shore. North Korea is an international miscreant armed with nuclear weapons and missiles of increasing range. As with other surprising achievements of this impoverished and despotic state, it is a question of time until North Korea miniaturizes nuclear devices sufficiently to mount them on missiles of increasing range. Iran’s support for terror and such Sunni terror organizations as Hamas aim at the heart of democratic governance. The order that any of these states or non-state actors represent would change a tolerably messy world into a brutal one.
Global reach is essential to preventing such a transformation. The U.S. Navy is this nation’s chief instrument of global reach. To name a few examples of its influence, American warships make regular port visits around the world, conduct exercises with friends and allies, engage in humanitarian missions, lead anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden, and maintain freedom of navigation. It provides the sinews on which the international system’s preservation rests. Allies were critical when America fought for independence. They have been essential in the major and lesser conflicts and confrontations of the past century. As great power competition once again characterizes international relations, America’s allies are indispensable to our security.
Challenges to the international order are synonymous with today’s threats to the United States, whose position as the world’s dominant maritime power is at risk because of increasing threats and decreasing political will to pay for a military to deter them. An understanding of the development of the naval forces of our potential adversaries is essential to grasp the challenge that U.S. seapower faces today.
RUSSIA
A sense of loss or humiliation felt by an entire people is powerful. Germany’s response to its loss of World War I and the terms that the victorious allies imposed were an important part of Hitler’s rise. China’s anger at Europe’s nineteenth-century colonization remains an animating force throughout the Middle Kingdom. Russians may be pleased that the tyranny to which they are subject is no longer exercised by communists. But they are not pleased at Russia’s descent from its status as one of the world’s two superpowers. Understanding what Russia was is essential to understanding what Russia seeks once again to be. In no category of national power is this more important than in the strategic influence that a strong navy gave the Soviet Union.
The professional career of Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy Admiral Sergei Gorshkov poses a problem for Leo Tolstoy’s idea that history is shaped more by the actions of multitudes rather than by great men. Gorshkov single-handedly transformed the Russian navy from a marginally effective coastal force into a genuine threat to American and Western naval superiority. Much like Imperial Germany’s Großadmiral Alfred von Tirpitz, Gorshkov combined an advanced understanding of politics with a keen mind for naval strategy. He managed to remain in command of the Soviet navy under five general secretaries, a feat that no other individual of similar standing accomplished in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). While the U.S. Navy had eight chiefs of naval operations during the same time, Gorshkov’s unified vision directed the growth of the Soviet navy for more than a quarter century.1
During the 1930s, multiple purges cut Soviet naval ambitions short. World War II did not help. The USSR’s greatest adversary, Nazi Germany, abandoned its ambition of a powerful surface fleet after Karl Doenitz replaced Erich Raeder as chief of the Kriegsmarine. Thus, the Soviets had little reason to create naval forces beyond those needed to protect allied convoys that carried war matériel to the northern port of Archangel. The “Red Navy” received only 6.6 percent of the military budget in 1944, and more than 400,000 Soviet sailors were sent into battle on the Eastern Front as infantrymen.2
Immediately after the war ended, the USSR captured a number of German U-boat engineers, who helped chart a course toward a major increase in the quality of Soviet submarines. Nevertheless, the renamed Soviet navy was placed behind the army, strategic missile forces, air force, and air defense forces in service seniority rankings. Gorshkov began a decades-long campaign to convince the Politburo that naval forces were necessary for the country’s future. Drawing upon the successes of the Russian navy in the early 1700s, he argued that the new Soviet fleet would be used predominantly to support the Red Army.
The United States’s 1962 naval quarantine during the Cuban Missile Crisis helped convince Soviet leaders of the need for a stronger navy. The Soviet Union had little flexibility in responding to the U.S. blockade, a fact that narrowed its options during the crisis and forced Nikita Khrushchev into a high-risk game of nuclear brinksmanship with President Kennedy. Gorshkov used the groundwork he had laid over the previous six years as admiral of the fleet to secure greater funding for the Soviet navy. He began to create a major blue-water force.
Gorshkov addressed the difficulties of cold northern environments by developing the world’s largest and most advanced icebreaker fleet to facilitate year-round operations. The Soviet navy was also faced with multiple choke points, such as the Greenland–Iceland–United Kingdom (GIUK) gap and the Dardanelles, which the Western powers routinely patrolled. Geography constrained the movement of ships into the open ocean. Resupplying these ships on major patrols was no less a challenge. Unlike the U.S. Navy, the Soviet Union did not have an extensive network of bases abroad. Diplomacy, threats, luck, and an increasing presence prevailed. By the mid-1970s, the Soviet navy routinely deployed to Cuba, Africa, and the Indian Ocean.
Soviet naval strategy centered on area denial. Gorshkov wanted to prevent the United States and its allies from moving large numbers of troops and supplies to Europe to support a prolonged ground campaign. To accomplish this, Gorshkov built a fleet centered on submarines, which were supplemented with various surface combatants that carried anti-air and anti-ship missiles.3