The shift to these new missions was well under way when President Bill Clinton took office in early 1993. But as he and his administration laid plans for his first summit with Yeltsin, scheduled for the first week of April, they got hit by what seemed to he an anachronistic and unwelcome blast from the past.
On March 20, the USS Grayling (SSN-646) collided with a Soviet missile sub in the Barents Sea. Grayling had been shadowing the Russian sub 105 miles north of Murmansk, smack in the middle of the Northern Fleet's training range. The Russians claimed that their sub had been moving for more than an hour at a steady speed, course, and depth when Grayling left a huge dent in their starboard how. Nobody was hurt.
The incident was everything the State Department had been worrying about since the final days of Reagan's tenure. Yeltsin was in the midst of a political crisis in Moscow. News that his friends within the United States were still sending submarines tooling about Russia's most sensitive ports and bases wasn't going to boost his popularity.
At first, the Pentagon said Grayling had been trailing one of Russia's newest missile boats, a Delta IV, but the Russians insisted that Grayling had been hot on the trail of a Delta IIi, a class of subs that dated back to the late 1970s. This provoked more than a few stinging comments from other submariners, all along the lines that the Navy already had so much information on the Delta Ills that "we could build one from the hull up."
Clinton was furious, and so were his aides. In exasperation, one senior administration official complained of the Navy's leaders: "One wonders if they've read the newspapers."
The Russian defense ministry issued an angry statement expressing "great concern." It was one thing to take such risks during the cold war, but now? As Rear Admiral Valery Aleksin, the chief navigator, put it, "We walk on the razor edge. Once, this hunt will end up in a disaster. I am sure today, too, that if such a practice doesn't stop, the disaster is inevitable."
Clinton offered Yeltsin a formal apology and smoothed things over with him at the start of the summit in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he also pledged $1.6 billion in aid to support Yeltsin's reforms. Declaring the collision "regrettable," Clinton said, "I don't want it to ever happen again." He ordered a review of both the incident and the policies "of which the incident happened to be an unintended part."
That last part of Clinton's promise worried the Navy. There needed to be damage control, and fast. Rear Admiral Edward D. Sheafer Jr., who was now the director of Naval Intelligence, along with the captain who coordinated the submarine reconnaissance program, prepared a detailed briefing for top officials, including Clinton's new national security adviser, Anthony Lake, and his deputy, Samuel Berger; Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary of State; and nearly everybody, it seemed, within the office of Secretary of Defense Les Aspin. The Navy team stressed that submarine spying had indeed changed with the times. Now, only 25 percent of the missions were directed toward Russian waters. The remaining 75 percent had turned to Middle Eastern waters to spy on Iran and enforce the economic embargo against Iraq, to the Adriatic to help seal off Bosnia from Western arms shipments, to the waters off of Haiti to enforce an arms embargo there and to monitor potential threats in the Far East. Finally the submariners marched out their new rallying cry, the one about "preparing the battlefields" around the globe.
It was a briefing as good as any offered up during the cold war, one that showed how quickly the submarine force had reinvented itself. By the time Sheafer and his staff were done, even they were astonished. Here they had thought the Grayling collision might sink their program, and instead, the Naval Intelligence team ended up chortling that the collision "saved our bacon." In their desperation, they did such an impressive job of touting the sub force that several administration officials were practically cheering, saying things such as, "Goddamn, it's a free ocean," and, "There's no prohibition against being outside another country's territorial waters." High administration officials who might never have focused on submarines and submarine spying were impressed that the Navy had changed so much without having to be dragged away from its old foe. The Navy even got the go-ahead to keep watching the Russians, albeit at this greatly reduced pace, as long as the reconnaissance was done more cautiously and judiciously.
Since then, the submarine force has fared relatively well under Clinton. Perhaps his biggest favor has been keeping alive the Seawol f pro gram: Clinton agreed to build three of the mammoth $2.5 billion attack subs rather than halt the program at one, as Bush had tried to do. Clinton said he was doing that to prevent the industrial base that builds submarines from shriveling and dying altogether. There was opposition from normally hawkish Republicans, who described the Seawolf as a cold war relic.
Clinton also okayed a plan to build another new class of attack submarines, one smaller and cheaper than the Seawolf. Quieter and much more versatile than the Los Angeles subs, this new class, known first as "the New Attack Submarine," or NSSN, and now the Virginia class, is designed for the array of new missions in shallow, regional waters. Clinton agrees that the Navy will need new subs after the turn of the century to replace some of the aging Los Angeles vessels. His support has taken some of the sting out of a dramatic downsizing of the force. From a high of ninety-eight in the late 1980s, the number of attack subs had fallen to sixty-six by 1998 and is now expected to dwindle to fifty early in the next century and even further as the Los Angeles subs are retired. The fleet of nuclear missile subs, which are still circling quietly in the oceans, will dwindle to ten to fourteen boats from a onetime high of forty-one.
The Navy is asking Congress for the cash to build the new subs and is arguing that they will be capable of operating not only near Third World countries but also up against Russian shores. The Seawolf is said to be as much as thirty times quieter than the early Los Angelesclass subs that came out in the 1970s, and ten times quieter than even the newest LA-class subs. Both Seawolf and the Virginia class will be especially useful for the new missions closer in to shores and for assisting in conflicts on land. They will carry Tomahawk missiles, be equipped with sonar designed to be especially useful in the shallows, and they will be configured to carry detachments of Navy SEALs and other special forces. The Navy also has been pouring money into creating underwater drones-and even small pilotless aircraft-that could be controlled by these submarines and swim out ahead to look for mines or fly out to do surveillance.
The subs in use now are also being upgraded with new microprocessing technologies to enable them to better communicate a variety of intelligence to commanders of task force battle groups, including email and photographs-even video-taken through their periscopes. This same technology is also likely to help subs with some of the other new missions the Navy has taken on since the end of the cold war. Subs have occasionally tipped the Coast Guard to suspicious trawlers in the Caribbean that have turned out to he carrying shipments of illegal drugs. And subs have been alerting surface ships to freighters suspected of trying to make illicit shipments of arms and other cargo in violation of U.S. embargoes.
Still, the U.S. sub force remains most concerned with countering the threat from other submarines, including new models of both diesel and nuclear boats. Russia has been supplying advanced Kilo subs to Iran and China. Even some Western nations, such as Germany, have been exporting advanced diesel subs to Third World countries. In addition, the Russians continue to view the submarine as the most important vessel in their Navy, and they have kept improving the Akulas, their quietest and most sophisticated nuclear attack subs. (There are still significant flaws in Russian technology. According to Naval Intelligence officials, the latest Akulas are very quiet below 10 knots, but they develop audible knocks at speeds above that and become easy to detect.) The Russians also have started to build an even more advanced replacement, known as the Severodvinsk class, which some U.S. officials fear could he quieter than the improved Los Angeles subs. When and if a proposed START II treaty is finally ratified by the Russian Durna, the bulk of Russian nuclear might will shift to the sea. As long as Russia still has the world's second most powerful sub force-as long as "The Bear Still Swims," as Navy briefers like to say-it needs to be watched, though now it has little money to send its subs to sea.