The movement of oil, food, raw materials and war equipment to north-west Europe was strongly opposed by Soviet submarines and maritime strike aircraft. But attrition of the Soviet forces was such as to wear down gradually the weight of attack. In 1974 Admiral Gorshkov had made this point: ‘The underestimation of the need to support submarine operations with aircraft and surface ships cost the German high command dearly in the last two wars.’ Now his own country had made the same strategic error. Had the submarines been capable of operating submerged in large groups, as the German U-boats had done on the surface in the Second World War, there is little doubt that their campaign would have succeeded. As it was, the submarines could be dealt with in ones or twos — though nearly always with the loss, to missile attack, of one or more anti-submarine vessels. The escort carriers, frigates, patrol ships, helicopters and maritime aircraft had been built, as a matter of great urgency, during the period 1979-85. Of critical importance to JACWA had been the contribution of the Federal German Navy, which, with the strong support of the NATO Council, had been greatly strengthened during the period. The Federal German government, recognizing the supreme importance of the safe and timely arrival of the convoys bringing US and Canadian reinforcements to the Central Front, had increased its light naval forces and naval air forces in the Baltic. This had permitted the release of frigates to work with the additional UK escort carriers.
When the outcome of the 1985 war as a whole can be assessed, it may be that the downfall of the USSR will be attributed, ironically, to Gorshkov, the greatest Russian admiral of all time, whose forceful and successful advocacy of ever-increasing Soviet sea power led the comrades to disaster — when the seas got too rough the Bear drowned.
Even on land the Soviet Union appeared to have overreached itself. In the all-important central front of Western Europe, the Red Army had counted on very early and decisive success. This success had eluded its commanders. Instead they were faced with a check to their offensive and serious misgivings about support at home.
CHAPTER 18: The War in Inner Space
In 1957 the world ran into its gardens and out into the streets to watch Sputnik streak across the sky. Later they were to be glued to their TV sets watching men walking on the moon. Then came the link-up of the US Apollo and Soviet Soyuz spacecrafts, the politics of that misleading handshake in space engaging the world’s spectators more than its technology. As Congress cut back the funds for NASA’s (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) space programme the earthbound mortals with their daily lives to lead rather lost interest. Films like the record running Star Wars, first screened in 1977 and still showing in London at the outbreak of the war, and books about interstellar wars in deep space, fascinated and absorbed the public while real men and their machines performing tasks as they orbited the world, no further away than London is from Manchester in England, seemed of no particular account. That was not, of course, true of the small scientific-military groups whose task it was to think about and manage these things; especially so in the Soviet Union. It was this inner space from 300 to, at most, 32,000 kilometres that occupied their attention. The military applications of this extended area of man’s domination over his environment were seen as precisely those first sought in aviation — namely, reconnaissance and communications.
By 1985 the superpowers had developed astonishing capabilities in those directions. Especially dramatic was space photography of such high resolution that soldiers marching on earth could be counted in their columns. In the event of war, the Russians would be especially interested in seeing what was going on in the Atlantic and on the eastern seaboard of the United States. The US, on behalf of the West, had a prime interest in observing military developments and deployments in the heartland of the USSR by photography and electronic eavesdropping, particularly during periods of tension or actual war, but also in routine times of peace. Communications satellites acting as relay stations in space had not only enormously increased the extent of available facilities, they had enhanced the reliability and quality of radio transmission and reception out of all recognition. They had also provided remarkable navigation assistance, with an accuracy down to a few metres, to ships, submarines and aircraft.
Just as this inner space was now a quite readily accessible extension of the atmosphere, so its military opportunities proved to be, in the main, extensions of existing earth-based facilities, considerably enhanced but not unique — and therefore never wholly indispensable. There was just one activity, of critical interest to the Allies, where the time advantages in war might be so great that it was perhaps in a special category and an exception to that general rule. That activity was electronic reconnaissance. As noted elsewhere in this book, the West enjoyed a decided advantage over the Communist East in ECM, and for that reason the Soviet Union in peacetime shrouded its communications with every possible veil of secrecy. If the West was to exploit its electronic advantage to the fullest extent it needed to know from the outset of hostilities just which parts of the frequency spectrum, and in what modes of emission, the Soviet forces would operate. This information was urgently needed as soon as the battle was joined; the Soviet cloak of secrecy had to be torn aside. This could all be done very much more quickly and comprehensively from space reconnaissance satellites than would ever have been possible by monitoring the communications networks in the war theatre on the ground.
After the early scramble to catch up with the Soviet Union, when spurred into competition by the success of the Sputnik shots, the USA soon took the lead. Their vehicles and systems were demonstrably more capable, more reliable and more durable than those of the USSR. Out of that technological and engineering success came a difference of approach that was to be of fundamental strategic importance: the Americans invested their resources in complicated long-life, multi-purpose craft designed to function in orbit for periods as long as a year. The Russians, under force majeure, went for frequent launchings of simple, single-purpose, short-life payloads. The corollary to this in 1985 was that the Soviet Union had a high launch capability — they had put no less than thirty-two photo-recce satellites in orbit in the previous twelve months, and on 3 August they had more than twenty launchers ready at Baikonur and Plesetsk with a variety of satellites ready as their payloads. The USA, on the other hand, had no more than a few giant Titan II rockets designed to put the thirteen-tonne Big Bird II satellites into space, and five Orbiter aerospace vehicles developed for their space shuttle system.
In the late seventies the US programme seemed to have reached a plateau of development, while the USSR continued with frequent manned launches on research tasks, the exact purposes of which were not always evident to Western observers. It was, however, pretty well authenticated that they were developing a counter-satellite capability employing, in addition to jamming, certainly lasers and other high energy beams. In 1985 both sides had some counter-satellite capability, but it was suspected that the USSR was well in the lead. It refrained from making use of this capability until the early hours of 4 August for fear of still further conceding the advantage of surprise but, as recorded elsewhere, as soon as the offensive was launched in the Central Region it made an all-out effort in space.