Admiral Maybury then proceeded to present his account of naval operations in four sections: the pre-war naval balance; the naval force deployments on 4 August 1985; the naval operations during the next sixteen days; and the immediate post-hostilities activity.
The following is a digest of what he said.
No doubt the debate will be recalled which continued for at least two decades before the war about the capabilities of the Soviet Navy. It was part of Western, and above all American, concern about the growth of Soviet military power in general. Were Soviet intentions to be deduced from their capabilities? What were their limitations? It is not easy, even now, to find valid assessments in the records. The intelligence community tended to play safe and take no risk of underestimating the threat. Retired officers tended to ‘sound off’, warning the public of the grim consequences of the failure of politicians to make proper appropriations for this or that new weapon system. Various ‘think-tanks’ were given contracts to produce defence studies. Where the concerns putting out these contracts were profit-making, there was a suspicion that the outcomes favoured the point of view of the organization giving the contract. As one sceptic put it: ‘How can you produce an objective study without knowing the objective?’ Obviously, too, the arms manufacturers had an interest in seeing that the Soviet threat, as perceived by the US Administration, and by Congress, matched the particular combat capability that they were in business to sell. Congress itself was not immune from this syndrome. As Admiral Miller, whose own estimate of Soviet naval capabilities stood up better than most, wrote: ‘Often the version of the Soviet threat accepted by individual members is determined to some degree by the impact that version will have on the region and the constituencies they represent. If there is no defence-related industry in their particular area of interest, the charge is made that the version of the threat they consider valid is the one that requires the least financial expenditures for defense.’[19]
The academics who analysed military intelligence data tended to let their particular philosophies influence their deductions; journalists, over-eager to publish what would attract attention, often cared little about the balance of their version; even the active service force commander was apt to be influenced in his judgment of the threat by his own, maybe unique, experience. As to US Administrations, if the President came into office on a platform that promised to reduce the defence budget, it is reasonable to assume that the version of the Soviet naval threat his Administration accepted would be something less than that of a president elected on a platform proposing an increase in the defence budget.
Finally, how much credence could be placed, people wondered, on the books and articles on naval matters that emerged from the Soviet Union itself? Was Admiral Gorshkov’s writing gospel? Was he writing for the NATO intelligence community, to inspire his own navy, to get the generals on his side, or to extract ever greater resources from the Politburo? We now know that Gorshkov believed what he wrote; that it was soundly based upon Marxist-Leninist theory; that the generals neither liked nor believed it; that the Politburo both liked and believed it; and that NATO did not want to believe it. What follows is based upon Admiral Miller’s own assessment of the Soviet Navy, after his period as Commander of the US Sixth Fleet, in the Mediterranean, not many years before the Third World War. As events proved, he was not far out.
As Soviet war deployments will be dealt with separately, indicating the numbers of the principal types of warship available at the start of hostilities, what follows here is confined solely to the aspect of quality. Consider, first, the Soviet surface fleet, other than aircraft carriers. The heavy cruiser, cruiser, destroyer, frigate, and smaller combatant types all included a majority of up-to-date vessels. They were impressive in appearance, quite manoeuvrable and seaworthy; and they were relatively fast and well-armed, primarily with defensive weapon systems. These latter characteristics required compromises in other areas. The number of weapon reloads, for example, was rather small; living conditions for the crews tended to be restricted; space for stores, spare parts, and supplies was limited; and ship construction standards were somewhat lower than was acceptable to most Western navies. The Soviet ships, it was thought, would sink rapidly if hit. In addition, very heavy dependence upon electronics counted against the capacity of the armament to survive attack. Without adequate resistance to electronic counter-measure (ECM), the Soviet ships might find their armaments virtually useless, even if the ships themselves should remain afloat.
In anti-submarine warfare (ASW), the Soviet Navy lagged behind, even in the 1980s. The ships themselves were equipped with sonar; there were helicopters with dipping sonar and fixed-wing aircraft with sonobuoys. But the Soviets had not developed, like the US Navy, arrays of fixed sonars over large areas of the sea bottom, in order to enable hostile submarines to be detected at considerable distances offshore. Furthermore, the Soviet submarines were certainly noisier than those of the US and her allies.
The smaller combatants of the Soviet Navy were, for the most part, fast, missile-armed attack craft. Although readily countered by air attack, these craft were effective in inshore waters, under cover of shore-based fighter protection. Several of the type had proved their value in action in Arab-Israeli and Indo-Pakistani fighting. With the possible exception of the Soviet heavy cruisers of the Kirov class, which being nuclear powered, fast, and well-armed might do much damage on independent missions before being brought to book, the surface-ship element of the Soviet naval threat did not unduly alarm the US Navy.
Submarines were a different matter. Leaving aside for the moment the strategic nuclear ballistic missile-armed, nuclear-powered submarines (SSBN), the Soviets had produced three main types of attack, or general purpose, sometimes called ‘fleet’, submarines. One of these types was nuclear powered and armed with torpedoes and missiles, for both anti-surface ship and ASW purposes. The other two types were armed with anti-ship cruise missiles, one being nuclear powered and the other diesel-electric driven. Within each type there were several classes, the most modern of which could run quietly and deep. In addition, the Soviet submarine fleet included a large number of diesel-electric ‘patrol’ submarines, torpedo armed and capable, as an alternative, of laying mines. Unlike the nuclear-powered submarines, the diesel-electric ones were bound to expose an air induction tube above the sea surface when charging the battery, and this could be detected by radar, especially airborne radar. On the other hand, these submarines were so quiet when submerged that they were extremely difficult to detect by passive means, and active sonar had therefore to be used against them. Active sonar, however, could act as a beacon for nuclear-powered submarines, which were able to proceed at high speed from a distance, closing to missile-firing range while still remaining undetected. They were able to operate in the ocean depths anywhere in the world for as long as the food and the weapons lasted, but they could not safely or effectively operate in the shallow water (200 metres or less) which covers the Continental Shelf. This factor apart, there can be no doubt that the Soviet submarine force posed a severe threat to the warships and shipping of the United States and its maritime allies in being probably able to achieve a successful attack, in the face of the best anti-submarine measures which could be taken, at least once in every three attempts, while on average only one submarine would be destroyed in every five that were detected and classified as a submarine contact.
19
G. E. Miller, Vice-Admiral US Navy (retired), former Commander US Second and Sixth Fleets, ‘An Evaluation of the Soviet Navy’, quoted in Grayson Kirk and Nils H. Wessell (eds), The Soviet Threat: Myths and Realities (Praeger, New York 1978), p. 47.