A Tale Of Two Navies. Anthony Wells
but this was the only true overt attack and sinking since 1945, and this raises many questions. But in this one event in the South Atlantic are many answers. Nuclear-powered attack submarines and nuclear-powered guided-missile-firing submarines are prodigious instruments of naval power—to be challenged only by those who believe that they have comparable capabilities or alternative means. It is not a simple question of David challenging Goliath but one involving a complex set of issues regarding generations of extraordinary technical and operational development and the creation of special cadres of nuclear submariners on both sides of the Atlantic, cadres fortified by many common bonds, total cooperation, and highly classified security and intelligence agreements. To create a rival club takes enormous energy, funding, and expertise. The Soviet Union made that challenge, and today China and Russia are desperate to rival the US-UK submarine special club. The strategic notion that who controls the underwater domain controls the oceans of the world, and therefore the largest segment by far of the global-network economy, is neither fanciful nor exaggerated. To fly slowly at low altitude over the Malacca Straits off Singapore on a clear day and simply observe the extraordinary volume of global maritime traffic is not just an exercise in counting ships but testament to the vibrancy of the global economy and to the fact that most of it depends on the sea.
Measures, countermeasures, counter-countermeasures, and so on are well-understood technological and operational requirements, of which intelligence and acquisition are prime drivers. Anticipating the enemy’s or potential adversary’s next technological development and getting ahead by finding the most cost-effective counter are buried deeply in the psyches and industrial processes of all military professionals and industry in the United States and United Kingdom. This is well understood and underscored by a huge acquisition bureaucracy. This process is at its best in the submarine communities of the US Navy and the Royal Navy. Perhaps it is no exaggeration to claim that this is the most sophisticated process on planet Earth: Virginia-class and Astute-class nuclear-powered attack submarines are the most technologically advanced engineering bodies ever designed and built, perhaps more so than space systems. The United States and the United Kingdom did not arrive in this dominant position by accident; this level of capability is a jewel in the strategic crowns of both countries.
The 1960s witnessed the beginning of a massive ship- and submarine-building enterprise by the Soviet Union. The Cuban Missile Crisis and the later US exploitation of the sea in that decade for carrier-based air strikes into Vietnam, the mining of Vietnamese waters, restriction of the movements of illicit weapons by sea, and the use of small-boat riverine forces all influenced the Soviet Union to build a blue-water navy. The Politburo and military leadership understood that if the Soviet Union was to expand its influence via surrogates and alliances beyond the geographic bounds of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, then it would have to possess a navy that could support those national interests and be a countervailing force to the power of the US Navy and its NATO allies. The plans for a global maritime posture were laid in Moscow, and the Soviet Union began the challenge to US naval power and the support of its strongest naval ally, the Royal Navy. The Soviet Union created on the Kola Peninsula on the Barents Sea and in Leningrad in the Baltic a naval shipbuilding infrastructure that over the next thirty years would witness the greatest Russian shipbuilding program since the days of Peter the Great.
The Admiralty Yard in Leningrad and the other major Russian shipyards came to be supported by a plethora of research-and-development institutes that aimed to acquire technical expertise that would challenge the capabilities of the United States and United Kingdom. A critical element in this huge attempt to catch up in almost all naval technological and operational domains was intelligence gathering—espionage by the main Soviet agencies and the networks that they managed through Warsaw Pact affiliates. Nowhere was the intelligence Cold War more intense than in the naval race. As we have seen, the Central Front of Europe was a pivotal geopolitical arena, but the oceans were where the real confrontations would take place as the Soviets used the sea for hitherto unobtainable access to areas where it perceived national interests.
The boundaries of postwar Europe were drawn and the spheres of influence defined, as witnessed by the 1968 Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. The situation at sea was volatile, boundaries were totally ambiguous, and the freedom of the seas an opportunity for Soviet exploitation. That freedom would be undermined by the strategic nuclear imperative for submarine-based first and second strike and by a new concept of second-strike “withholding,” in which ballistic-missile-firing submarines stationed under ice would aim to hold the West to ransom. From this latter strategy grew a whole new Arctic submarine regime. The oceans of the world would now include the Arctic—an unprecedented development in the history not just of naval warfare but of grand strategy. The US and Royal Navies would rise to meet this challenge.
Intelligence became the key. Let us examine that statement. The Soviet Union had two key intelligence agencies, the KGB and the GRU. The KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security) functioned from 1954 to 1991, with headquarters in the infamous Lubyanka Building in Moscow. Its most notorious and longest-serving chairman was Yury Vladimirovich Andropov, from January 1967 to May 1982. The KGB was dissolved after the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev’s government in 1991 and was split into the Foreign Security Service, the FSS (FSB, in the Russian acronym), and the Foreign Intelligence Service, FIS (or SVR), within the new Russian Federation. The second and by far the larger Soviet and now Russian intelligence agency was and is the GRU, the Foreign Military Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff. In 1997 the GRU was estimated to be six times larger than the SVR. It had at that time approximately 25,000 special forces troops, or Spetsnaz, to use the Russian term. In addition to its HUMINT operations the GRU managed (and still does) huge SIGINT and IMINT (imagery intelligence). Its capabilities and operations far exceeded the primarily clandestine HUMINT operations of the KGB, and today those of the SVR. From late 1967 until 1995 Soviet intelligence controlled a highly significant naval spy ring in the United States headed by Chief Warrant Officer John Anthony Walker. During those eighteen years the Walker spy ring gave away some, though by no means all, of the US Navy’s secrets, an episode that we will address later. Fortunately, Walker did not have access to many key US and UK intelligence capabilities and operations, a tribute to “need to know” and compartmentation policies and procedures.
At the heart of all this lay the underwater domain. Submarine design and construction have to suit the environment in which submarines operate. The key to success is quieting, the ability to be acoustically stealthy, so that the opposition is unable to hear one’s submarine, while the other side’s is detected and its acoustic profile collected and stored for future identification, an acoustic fingerprint that will identify that particular submarine. The difficulties of designing such a quiet, stealthy platform, one that is nuclear powered, can run silently and deeply, can accelerate from slow to high speed in short order, and can change depth without being detected are nontrivial. Submarine safety, necessary nuclear safeguards, and weapons-launch quieting are critical. Crew habitability and sustainability are crucial operational factors; they mean producing enough fresh water and air and carrying enough healthy food to sustain the crew in long, two-month patrols underwater. Optimal ergonomics and use of space are required. Submariners like to listen and not transmit, to avoid detection. They need the very best communications technology to ensure that national command authorities can bring them at any time to communications depth in order to receive messages much longer than is possible at greater depths via extremely low frequency (ELF) transmissions.
A submarine is only as good as the weapons it launches and