It is true that the Red Navy had come a long way in thirty years. Yet I had deduced one essential point from my days in the Pentagon as director of strike warfare in 1967: In total number of warships, the Russian fleet outnumbered the U.S. fleet, with more than a thousand combatants to our less than four hundred, but the U.S. Navy had fifteen attack aircraft carriers and the Soviets had none. The carrier force was the measure of difference that allowed the United States to maintain a definite margin of maritime superiority.
In the course of annual “posture statements” before Congress in 1978, I testified on 8 February, in response to direct questioning by the House Armed Services Committee on the Soviet naval threat, that in the case of a general war with the USSR, our Navy would be hard pressed to maintain maritime superiority in the western Pacific. At best, we were only capable of maintaining the military sea lines of communication with Japan. Ensuring the continuation of commercial shipping would probably not be possible. Supporting NATO was our first priority. With the continuing decline in our naval force levels, we had become a one-ocean navy.
This testimony raised questions, directed to the State Department, from the highest levels of the government of Japan. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown personally responded to the Japanese in a public statement that did not deny my testimony but simply stated that the Department of Defense (DoD) was transferring naval assets to the Pacific Fleet to rectify that situation.
From my perspective as CNO, the steady growth of the Soviet naval threat was always a primary concern. I had to accept the fact that if the U.S. Navy was not capable of maintaining maritime superiority sufficient to protect the essential sea lanes of communication to our allies and to our own overseas deployed forces, then the forward collective strategy would be unworkable. During much of the Cold War, the United States maintained an overseas force of four Army divisions in Germany, another in Korea, and a Marine division in Japan. In time of conflict, these forces, as well as those of our NATO allies, would have to be reinforced and resupplied. All of the remaining U.S. Army and Marine ground forces were located in the United States. Those divisions would have to be transported overseas if they were to enter the fight, and this reinforcement and resupply had to come from the United States across the oceans.
I consistently pursued this logic in my annual posture statement, which received wide distribution throughout the government. Yet it was never quoted or even acknowledged by the Office of the Secretary of Defense. I believe the OSD wanted to avoid a “roles and missions” showdown among the several services, a showdown that might have been ignited if the secretary of defense were to officially endorse the Navy-oriented title of “maritime strategy.” So it was referred to officially as the “forward collective strategy.”
SEALIFT
In their annual posture statements throughout the Cold War, the JCS had consistently stated that “in any major overseas deployment, sealift will have to deliver about 95 percent of all dry cargo and more than 98 percent of all petroleum products.” From my own analyses of the war plans, it was apparent that the mechanization and firepower of the U.S. Army and Air Force’s first-line components require such quantities of combat consumables, such as fuel and ammunition, and the heavy equipment characteristic of armored divisions and all-weather tactical aircraft, that their reinforcement and resupply must come by sea. As an example, more than one hundred thousand tons of cargo would be required to deploy a single mechanized division. When overseas, that division would need more than one thousand tons delivered per day to sustain it in operations.
AIRLIFT
Airlift was planned for the rapid movement of troops to join up with prepositioned equipment and for the fast delivery of small amounts of critical supplies and materiel, but as a member of the JCS, I felt compelled to point out that airlift is severely limited in terms of the total volume that can be lifted and in its ability to move outsized equipment. A large portion of the organic equipment of modern armies are tanks, bulldozers, portable bridges, helicopters, and tank retrievers, which will not fit in most aircraft. My calculations showed that one modern container ship could deliver the cargo equivalent of 15 °C-5 aircraft — the largest plane in the Air Force — and there were never more than 75 C-5s in the Air Force’s inventory during the Cold War.
Airlift is also very expensive in terms of fuel. The JCS experience in resupplying the Israeli armed forces during the 1973 Yom Kippur War showed that it required seven tons of jet fuel to airlift one ton of aviation fuel to Israel from the United States.
THE ROLE OF AIR POWER IN THE COLD WAR
In a general war with the USSR using conventional, as opposed to nuclear, weapons, the role of manned aircraft would be mainly in support of the ground forces in the land war, especially in Europe, where the two opposing powers had concentrated and massed their armies. The conventional war at sea was expected to be mainly enemy submarine interdiction of our overseas lines of communication and allied response with antisubmarine warfare conducted mainly by U.S. nuclear submarines and U.S. Navy patrol planes. It was possible there would be some carrier operations, mainly in the western Pacific, but the main battles would be in NATO Europe.
It was expected, however, that a general war between the Soviet bloc and NATO would start with a nuclear attack, probably of a preemptive nature. Even a general war with conventional weapons could be expected to escalate quickly to a nuclear conflict with one side initiating a preemptive nuclear attack because of the great advantage gained through a first strike (which would effectively disarm the enemy). In the case of a nuclear conflict the principal use of air power would be flying our SAC bombers against Russia and both sides using air-delivered tactical weapons against ground forces and air bases in the theaters of operations.
Korea is a good example of the use of air power in a limited conventional war. After the amphibious landings at Inchon, the North Korean army had been defeated and driven out of South Korea, yet the Korean War was far from over. As the United Nations (UN) troops pushed toward the Chinese border to fully occupy North Korea, the armies of the People’s Republic of China crossed the Yalu River and entered the war. Outnumbered and stretched thin across the Korean peninsula, the UN forces were forced to retreat before finally being able to rally around the Americans and stabilize the front lines along the thirty-eighth parallel, the original line of demarcation between North and South Korea. It was U.S. air power that made the difference between defeat and survival for the UN forces. With near-total control of the airspace over the battlefield, it was close air support (CAS) that enabled those forces — led by the U.S. ground divisions — to stand and fight the Chinese to a standstill. The tactical air effort by the Air Force, the Navy carriers, and the land-based Marines was so effective that the Chinese armies moved only at night or in bad weather, hiding themselves from air observation by day.
Later, in Vietnam, it was again U.S. air power that was the decisive factor. This time a new capability was added. In addition to the close air support provided by Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force tactical fighters and the use of the B-52 bomber with conventional ammunition, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps were exploiting the helicopter for fire support as well as a primary means of moving troops into the assault. It was the first use of airmobile infantry in warfare on a large scale. Of most significance, however, is the fact that air power was the single U.S. military force used in North Vietnam during the entire conflict in Southeast Asia — except for occasional ship gunfire strikes against targets on the coast — and it was the Linebacker I and II air campaigns into the North Vietnamese industrial heartland that eventually forced Hanoi to agree to a cease-fire. The North Vietnamese air force reacted with MiG-21s, an excellent Soviet fighter, against many strikes, mainly in the Hanoi area. But because of the overwhelming U.S. air superiority, the MiGs were just irritants compared to the batteries of Russian SAMs, which proved to be an effective and dangerous threat and caused major changes in U.S. tactics and aircraft electronic equipment. Although only 15 percent of the fixed-wing aircraft losses in Vietnam were the result of direct SAM hits, the enemy’s capability to launch SAMs in large salvos against our tactical aircraft had the effect of disrupting the strike group’s defensive formations. This made our attack planes more vulnerable to MiGs and forced our planes down to lower altitudes, where they became victims of antiaircraft artillery (AAA) and automatic-weapon fire.