On two occasions when I was CNO I met with my opposite numbers in the Russian navy, Admiral Amelko in Oslo in 1975 and Admiral Smirnoff in Helsinki in 1977, in what were euphemistically called “international maritime conferences.” Ostensibly to discuss safety at sea, the Soviet admirals at each meeting earnestly sought me out early in the proceedings to emphasize that we military leaders must keep the politicians from getting the armed forces into a nuclear war. In their words, “No one would win — except maybe the Chinese.” They also evinced the strongest concern for effective nuclear safeguards.
In comparing the conventional military balance between the United States and the Soviet Union, the picture is complicated because it deals with ground, air, and naval forces. In terms of ground troops, the Soviet Union had what must be regarded as an enormous military advantage. The USSR had 174 divisions in the field and the United States never more than 19. Yet that comparison was not quite as negative as the raw data would indicate, because the U.S. divisions were in general somewhat larger, better equipped, and better trained. In addition, a number of Soviet divisions were pinned down on the Chinese border and others were committed to occupation duty in the European satellites. The addition of NATO ground forces, especially the West Germans, helped redress this imbalance. However, throughout the Cold War the USSR maintained a substantial advantage in the size of their ground forces.
U.S. forces never engaged in direct combat with Soviet-flag forces, mainly because both sides were careful not to let this happen. The grave potential for such incidents expanding into a general conflict through miscalculation in the Cold War was recognized by both superpowers and was always taken into account when the commitment of military force was considered. Nevertheless, I felt it important to constantly emphasize to Congress and the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) that U.S. forces would regularly encounter first-line Soviet weapons in combat — as we did in Korea and Vietnam — mainly MiG fighters and Russian surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), often surreptitiously flown or operated by Soviet military crews. These represented a level of arms technology clearly equal to our own, and our military planners had to consider the probability of U.S. forces encountering advanced weapons in the hands of Soviet clients when responding to crises in the Third World. Therefore, I was adamant that the Navy not be required to accept weapon systems of lesser capabilities than the state of the art, on an OSD premise that our most likely enemies would be Third World powers.
Soviet weaponry was in general on a par with our own in terms of its effectiveness within the Soviet warfighting concept, in which the philosophy was more brute force than finesse. Where we would plan to painstakingly clear a minefield using special armored vehicles and combat engineers, the Russians, as one of their officers explained, would simply march a platoon through it.
The Russian tanks and artillery, upon which they heavily relied, were well designed, modern, well made, and extremely durable. Their aircraft were rugged and easy to maintain, with powerful engines but minimum refinements outside of their combat equipment. The MiG-25 could fly at Mach 3 and to an altitude of sixty-seven thousand feet, faster and higher than any of our tactical fighters. The Soviets’ later attack submarines were remarkably fast and could dive to unprecedented depths. They achieved this superior performance by reducing the shielding on the nuclear propulsion plants, with the result of a very high incidence of radiation sickness among their crews.
Soviet ground-to-air missiles were particularly effective and took a heavy toll on U.S. aircraft during strikes into the Hanoi-Haiphong area during the Vietnam War. The Israeli air force also experienced devastating losses during the Yom Kippur War from Soviet SAMs in the hands of the Arabs. In less than two hours after the initiation of hostilities, the Israelis had lost more than thirty first-line aircraft, mainly U.S.-made A-4 Skyhawks and F-4 Phantoms IIs, to the Russian SAMs being used by the Syrians.
I came to the conclusion, early in the Cold War, that the Soviet strategic planners understood clearly how dependent NATO, Japan, and our other allies were upon sea lines of communications, and like the Germans in both World War I and World War II, the Soviets were determined to capitalize on this vulnerability. They set out to build a modern oceangoing force that would challenge the U.S. Navy, employing the most modern maritime technology: nuclear-powered submarines, underwater-launched missiles, supersonic maritime strike aircraft, and long-range antiship missiles, ship-based, air-launched, and submarine-fired, many of them supersonic. It seemed only logical to me that the modern Soviet navy was conceived, designed, built, and organized to defeat or neutralize the U.S. Navy.
It was also easy to appreciate how the character of the Soviet navy was shaped by the maritime strategy of the Soviet Union, which in turn was driven by the Soviets’ own geopolitical situation. The territory of the USSR, spanning a continent, dominates Eurasia. On the Soviets’ southeastern flank lies the People’s Republic of China, and the Russians were, for good reason, deeply concerned about the Chinese threat. Arrayed along the Western border of their country were the buffer satellite nations of the Warsaw Pact. Farther to the west, and still on the same continent, lie the NATO nations of Western Europe, clearly coveted by the Soviets. As a military planner, I could quickly conclude that the Soviet Union could defend itself from the Chinese, support their Warsaw Pact allies, invade Western Europe, and never cross a major body of water. Yet they were building the largest navy in the world. Why? It could only be to oppose and defeat the U.S. Navy, deny its allies control of the seas, and ensure the quick collapse of the maritime strategy of the Western powers.
During my four years as CNO I argued that the Navy needed to be capable of maintaining maritime superiority in those areas of the high seas required for the execution of our war plans in support of our “forward collective strategy.” Without maritime supremacy, which is what a widespread superiority amounted to, our strategy would fail.
When I retired in 1978, I wanted my farewell remarks to be a warning, a reminder of our need for an adequate navy and of the grim consequences of a failure to maintain our position of maritime supremacy. My remarks were referred to the OSD’s public affairs officer for policy clearance then returned to me with the word “supremacy” deleted and “equivalence” substituted. “Supremacy” was considered too aggressive and, possibly, inflammatory. Later on, some bright young naval aide in the E ring of the Pentagon circulated a tongue-in-cheek memorandum that suggested that the Naval Academy Brigade of Midshipmen urge on its football team with cheers of “Tie Army!” at the annual Army-Navy football game. I changed my script but not my remarks.
THE NAVAL BALANCE
The naval balance represented a particularly important comparison in my mind, because it so convincingly demonstrated the Soviet determination to surpass the United States in every sector of national power. At the beginning of the Cold War in the late 1940s, the Soviet navy was little more than a coast guard, an inshore force to support the flanks of the Red Army. After the Cuban missile crisis dramatically exposed their maritime deficiencies, the Soviets embarked on an ambitious naval construction program that in less than three decades, under the leadership of Admiral Gorshkov, had produced a fleet to challenge the U.S. Navy. The U.S. chief of naval operations in 1973 went so far as to say that the Russian navy was “number one”—meaning that the USSR had in effect wrested control of the sea from the United States. Although this view was never shared by the OSD, the JCS, or subsequent CNOs, it was a topic of debate during a Navy Department appearance before Congress in 1973.