When war finally broke out in the Persian Gulf in January 1991, submarines played only a bit part. Still, the conflict dramatized the need to refocus defense efforts on regional conflicts, and with an eye to ensuring its place in future conflicts, the submarine force highlighted the role it had played against Iraq for all it was worth. The USS Louisville (SSN-724) and the USS Pittsburgh (SSN-720) together had fired a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles against inland targets in Iraq. Other attack submarines stood guard for cargo ships in the Mediterranean, protecting vast quantities of war supplies. A string of subs from the United States and its allies-Turkey, Greece, Spain, Britain, France, and Italy-were positioned from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Suez Canal.
The war gave the sub force a chance to show its versatility, to show that it could do more than just chase Soviet subs and shadow Soviet ports. It also gave submariners themselves a sense that they could create a new mission-a comforting realization given the fact that any lingering doubts about Soviet intentions were soon to be wiped out by one dramatic event after another. Bush and Gorbachev announced a new deal to cut strategic stockpiles by one-third. Boris Yeltsin rescued Gorbachev from a reactionary coup, signaling the last failed gasp of the Communist hard-liners. And in a richly symbolic move, Bush also grounded the Strategic Air Command bombers that had been on nearconstant alert for thirty-two years.
The Pentagon began rethinking the nation's military strategy. The sub force knew it was going to have to re-create itself-just as it had been forced to do after World War II. It needed to find a new job and new enemies. There was no question that for much of the cold war submarines-missile and attack boats taken together-could stake claim to being the nation's most critical naval weapons. That made sense when the chief enemy had a fleet that was nearly as formidable. But the 1990s were bringing fundamental change, and it was already clear that the submarine was bound to fall from the pantheon. Like the clipper ships in their day, subs had been perfectly suited to their time, and they had so dominated that they defined an epoch.
For its part, the Navy started simply at first, writing new rules in mid-1991 legislating greater distances and caution for U.S. subs trailing Soviet subs. Then the Office of Naval Intelligence recommended that the number of missions off the Soviet coast be cut dramatically. No longer would the U.S. Navy try to maintain "cast-iron" coverage of the largest Soviet naval bases. No longer would one surveillance sub follow in the wake of another to Soviet waters. No longer would they keep constant watch, waiting for something-anything-interesting to happen.
Not even the vaunted special projects subs were sacred any longer. Desperate to update their fleet of spy satellites, the CIA and the Air Force began to eye the hundreds of millions of dollars still being invested in those subs. Because both Russell and Parche were in the shipyard throughout 1991, neither doing any missions, the rival agencies were able to suggest that two special projects boats might be too much of a luxury.
The process of attrition was stopped short by the surprising dissolution of the Soviet Union. On Christmas Day 1991, the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose federation of republics, formally replaced the Soviet Union. Soon after, reports began coming out of a meeting of five thousand Russian military officers that painted a portrait of confusion, anger, and abject frustration. Members of the now-shattered Soviet Navy yanked the old hammer-and-sickle standards from their ships and began flying the flag of St. Andrew, which had marked Russian ships since the days of Peter the Great. Now U.S. Naval Intelligence desperately wanted to know who would get control of the Soviet missile subs and how they would be deployed under the new regimes.
Renewed surveillance had its price. On February 11, 1992, the USS Baton Rouge (SSN-689) collided with a Russian Sierra-class boat, among the newest and quietest to come out of the Soviet shipyards. Baton Rouge was tracking the Sierra near the 12-mile limit off Murmansk when the American commander lost his contact, which then struck Baton Rouge from below. Neither sub was damaged much, and nobody was hurt. But the incident was embarrassing.
Yeltsin quickly complained, and Baker met with him in Moscow to keep things calm. The next day, in an unprecedented move, the Pentagon publicly announced that the collision had occurred, and the Russian Navy began to complain publicly that the United States was still operating too close to its waters.
In the end, this embarrassment was what accelerated the shift in submarine surveillance away from Russia. The president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, chaired by retired Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, examined the special projects program. Shortly thereafter, Naval Intelligence was told that the board had decided that there was no longer any need for more than one special projects sub and that if the Navy was going to keep tapping underwater cables, then maybe it was time to find some cables in other parts of the world.
U.S. attack subs had already handled reconnaissance off countries like Lebanon and Libya, and in the mid-1980s two old missile subs had been converted to carry SEALs. The USS John Marshall (SSN- 611) had bobbed around in the Mediterranean for two months with fifty SEALs aboard during one crisis in Lebanon in 1989, waiting if needed to rescue hostages or mount a retaliatory strike.
Now as part of the Navy's new "From the Sea" military strategy, subs would ride shotgun for aircraft carriers and cruisers and take orders from task force commanders riding on those vessels. But the submarine force would also continue to lurk unseen near potential arenas of conflict and come up with the intelligence to "prepare the battlefield," before the task forces were ever called in. The term had been borrowed from the Army, but in this case it meant sending subs out two, three, four or more years before any anticipated conflicts to learn more about nations that loomed as potential foes, to determine their weaknesses, and to pave the way for U.S. victories in conflicts that would have fewer casualties because of these undersea efforts.
Iran, for instance, had already taken delivery of the first of three "Kilo" diesel submarines-silent and highly advanced boats built in Russia. A top Iranian admiral had boasted that he intended to use these subs to gain control of the Strait of Hormuz, the entrance to Persian Gulf ports and the starting point for about one-sixth of the world's oil. That was enough to send the USS Topeka (SSN-754) to the Persian Gulf to observe the Kilo's arrival in November 1992. It was typical of the new era of reconnaissance missions.
The new spy missions raised no agonizing debates at the National Security Council or within the White House, which was still approving all sub reconnaissance operations on a monthly basis. Still, there were accusations from Capitol Hill that the sub force was merely inventing enemies to keep itself employed. The Navy's answer was simple: some of the other targets had existed for years, and it was only the collapse of the Soviet Union that had offered the luxury of time and resources to allow subs to do a job they should have been doing all along. The enemies might he comparatively unsophisticated-an Iranian Kilo running on diesel power can't really be compared to the high-speed Akulas the Soviets sent out in the later years of the cold war. But the U.S. Navy would still need to know how the Iranians would operate the Kilos, would still need to find their blind spots. "Can you imagine the embarrassment to the U.S. Navy if the Kilos sank the USS America?" said one high-ranking Navy official. Pausing, he added, "Not on my watch."