Читать книгу A Tale Of Two Navies - Anthony Wells - Страница 11
ОглавлениеLimited War in the Nuclear Era
Impact on the US Navy and the Royal Navy
There have been countless studies since World War II on nuclear warfare theory—the fine 1959 book by the man dubbed the “American Clausewitz,” Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age, comes immediately to mind, as does the work of Philip Winsor at the London School of Economics and Political Science and, more latterly, the work of Franklin C. Miller in the United States. There is indeed a whole separate lexicon associated with how the opposing nations of NATO and the Soviet Union developed nuclear-warfare theory, deterrence postures, and indeed the very plans for executing nuclear warfare at various levels of escalation. Brodie was the father of the West’s understanding of the critical value of second-strike capabilities in nuclear deterrence theory. Brodie’s thinking impacted significantly the nuclear capabilities and postures of the US Navy and the Soviet navy. Brodie, for instance, made the singular observation that “thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to prevent them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.”
The ending of the Cold War would seem prima facie to have ended that era. However, logic and common sense say otherwise, since the key nations that were the nuclear powers between 1945 and, technically, August 29, 1949, in the case of the Soviet Union (the day the USSR detonated its first nuclear device) are still in existence and have nuclear arsenals. In spite of the various nuclear arms-limitations agreements, the threat of nuclear war is still there. Other nations may acquire nuclear weapons in due course. The ongoing diplomacy to constrain Iran from becoming a nuclear-weapons nation exemplifies the position of the Western nuclear-weapons “have” nations to prevent the “have not” nations from acquiring these weapons of mass destruction (WMD). From our seventy years of international relations in the nuclear age (1945–2015) one factor is self-evidently clear, that all conventional warfare is by definition limited warfare if conducted by one or more of the nuclear-weapons-owning nations.
As we proceed to look at the US Navy and the Royal Navy in the fifty-five years from 1960, one key factor has to be assimilated. It is simple and perhaps obvious at one level, but still necessary to articulate: that both navies became nuclear-powered navies and both navies became the guardians of their nation’s independent nuclear deterrents. These sea-based systems were on board submarines, and though the US Navy built and still builds nuclear-powered aircraft carriers (CVNs) and had nuclear-powered cruisers (CGNs) in the early part of our period, the submarine became the primary platform in nuclear deterrence strategy. The CVNs were nuclear-weapon capable, as were the Buccaneer aircraft of the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm, and both navies had other nuclear weapons: the nuclear depth bomb, for example. However, it is the submarine that is the mainstay and workhorse of the deterrent forces, with manned bombers and land-based missile systems (in the case only of the United States today) filling support roles. The first leg of the US triad is still today the ballistic-missile-firing Ohio-class nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines, and in the United Kingdom the Vanguard-class SSBNs have the same role as just a single leg. This basic fact is to be coupled to one other crucial fact, that nuclear-powered attack submarines have a service life of approximately thirty years–plus (the new US Virginia-class SSN has an infinite unrefueled life; its reactor never requiring refueling during the hull life of the submarine) and are stealthy, covert, and persistently present in the oceans and littorals of the world. It is clear that the nuclear submarine has a very special place in what follows.
All warfare is therefore limited unless the absolutely inconceivable but by definition always possible event of a nuclear exchange between major-state adversaries occurs or a third party (terrorist) or surrogate nation uses a nuclear device. The umbrella of nuclear protection for the West has been in position since the advent of nuclear deterrence theory. Tactical nuclear weapons, whatever posture changes their advent has brought, and whatever their yield, remain incontrovertibly weapons of mass destruction. The wars, conflicts, campaigns, counterinsurgencies, counterterrorist operations, and a plethora of other naval operations (such as the “Cod War” and the Beira Patrol in the case of the Royal Navy, operations in Central America in the case of the US Navy, and relief and humanitarian assistance, counterpiracy, counterdrugs, counter-weapons and -human trafficking in the case of both navies) of this period are overshadowed by the immensity and cost of both waging the Cold War at sea and the sustainment of the undersea nuclear deterrent posture. At one level the intensity and complexity of continuous forward-deployed operations against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and the maintenance of the submarine-launched ballistic-missile (SLBM) deterrent can never again be matched.
USS Ohio (SSBN 726) U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE PHOTO ARCHIVE
The Royal Navy’s HMS Vanguard (S28) UK MINISTRY OF DEFENSE
The fact that the Cold War never developed into a hot war is a lasting tribute to both navies and their leaderships. When we examine several of the other major conflicts that occurred both during and after the Cold War it is critical to recall that neither navy ever yielded once in any dimension that was militarily and politically significant to the opposition. It behooves us to recall what was achieved both strategically and tactically, because of its significance for the contemporary challenges of an emergent China and a reemergent Russia. The one common denominator throughout is, simply, the sea, and it is the sea that likely holds the keys to the security of the post-2015 world.
Both navies worked hand in glove to keep the West safe under the nuclear umbrella by one critical strategic tool—ensuring the security of the Western European base by maintaining the sea lines of communication (SLOCs), not just in the Atlantic but globally, wherever the Warsaw Pact challenged the West. Securing the sea lines of communication is a fundamental strategic goal. It is a simple concept, written with simple words, yet within these words are enshrined one of the most important concepts for today and tomorrow—that the free flow of trade and people underpins the global economy. It is not merely a question of moving divisions of troops by sea from one place to another without hindrance in order to execute a land campaign. Without sea control there is no free movement, and without access to such key resources as food, minerals, manufactured products, energy sources, and sea-based products (like fish, oil, and gas), there is no serious global economic life. Who controls the sea, controls the global economic flow and all the oceans’ resources. To upset that economic balance by means of war is to attack the very freedom that has sustained twentieth- and twenty-first-century economic life. The global, forward-deployed disposition of naval forces to maintain the balance of power at sea in order to sustain peace and prosperity is at the very heart of naval strategy. In the early part of the last century this was termed “the defense of trade.” Nothing has changed. For examples, keeping oil flowing from the Persian Gulf, maintaining the integrity of the critical straits through the Indonesian archipelago and the Malacca Straits, and preventing the seizure of seabed resources by illegal occupation of island chains are no different from protecting the flow of goods and raw materials during the golden age of the first Industrial Revolution. The impacts of the second Industrial Revolution of the global, networked economy and the attendant issues of energy and critical raw-material acquisition, supply, and flow are already upon us. We will later look at more complex and sophisticated aspects of this fundamental point.
During our period there was only one overt act of military aggression using a submarine: the attack and sinking by the Royal Navy submarine HMS Conqueror of the Argentinian navy cruiser General Belgrano during the Falklands campaign of 1982. There were many covert acts of aggression, but this was the only true overt attack and sinking since 1945, and this raises many questions. But in this one event in the South Atlantic are many answers. Nuclear-powered attack submarines and nuclear-powered guided-missile-firing submarines are prodigious instruments of naval power—to be challenged only by those who believe that they have comparable capabilities or alternative means. It is not a simple question of David challenging Goliath but one involving a complex set of issues regarding generations of extraordinary technical and operational development and the creation of special cadres of nuclear submariners on both sides of the Atlantic, cadres fortified by many common bonds, total cooperation, and highly classified security and intelligence agreements. To create a rival club takes enormous energy, funding, and expertise. The Soviet Union made that challenge, and today China and Russia are desperate to rival the US-UK submarine special club. The strategic notion that who controls the underwater domain controls the oceans of the world, and therefore the largest segment by far of the global-network economy, is neither fanciful nor exaggerated. To fly slowly at low altitude over the Malacca Straits off Singapore on a clear day and simply observe the extraordinary volume of global maritime traffic is not just an exercise in counting ships but testament to the vibrancy of the global economy and to the fact that most of it depends on the sea.
Measures, countermeasures, counter-countermeasures, and so on are well-understood technological and operational requirements, of which intelligence and acquisition are prime drivers. Anticipating the enemy’s or potential adversary’s next technological development and getting ahead by finding the most cost-effective counter are buried deeply in the psyches and industrial processes of all military professionals and industry in the United States and United Kingdom. This is well understood and underscored by a huge acquisition bureaucracy. This process is at its best in the submarine communities of the US Navy and the Royal Navy. Perhaps it is no exaggeration to claim that this is the most sophisticated process on planet Earth: Virginia-class and Astute-class nuclear-powered attack submarines are the most technologically advanced engineering bodies ever designed and built, perhaps more so than space systems. The United States and the United Kingdom did not arrive in this dominant position by accident; this level of capability is a jewel in the strategic crowns of both countries.
The 1960s witnessed the beginning of a massive ship- and submarine-building enterprise by the Soviet Union. The Cuban Missile Crisis and the later US exploitation of the sea in that decade for carrier-based air strikes into Vietnam, the mining of Vietnamese waters, restriction of the movements of illicit weapons by sea, and the use of small-boat riverine forces all influenced the Soviet Union to build a blue-water navy. The Politburo and military leadership understood that if the Soviet Union was to expand its influence via surrogates and alliances beyond the geographic bounds of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, then it would have to possess a navy that could support those national interests and be a countervailing force to the power of the US Navy and its NATO allies. The plans for a global maritime posture were laid in Moscow, and the Soviet Union began the challenge to US naval power and the support of its strongest naval ally, the Royal Navy. The Soviet Union created on the Kola Peninsula on the Barents Sea and in Leningrad in the Baltic a naval shipbuilding infrastructure that over the next thirty years would witness the greatest Russian shipbuilding program since the days of Peter the Great.
The Admiralty Yard in Leningrad and the other major Russian shipyards came to be supported by a plethora of research-and-development institutes that aimed to acquire technical expertise that would challenge the capabilities of the United States and United Kingdom. A critical element in this huge attempt to catch up in almost all naval technological and operational domains was intelligence gathering—espionage by the main Soviet agencies and the networks that they managed through Warsaw Pact affiliates. Nowhere was the intelligence Cold War more intense than in the naval race. As we have seen, the Central Front of Europe was a pivotal geopolitical arena, but the oceans were where the real confrontations would take place as the Soviets used the sea for hitherto unobtainable access to areas where it perceived national interests.
The boundaries of postwar Europe were drawn and the spheres of influence defined, as witnessed by the 1968 Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. The situation at sea was volatile, boundaries were totally ambiguous, and the freedom of the seas an opportunity for Soviet exploitation. That freedom would be undermined by the strategic nuclear imperative for submarine-based first and second strike and by a new concept of second-strike “withholding,” in which ballistic-missile-firing submarines stationed under ice would aim to hold the West to ransom. From this latter strategy grew a whole new Arctic submarine regime. The oceans of the world would now include the Arctic—an unprecedented development in the history not just of naval warfare but of grand strategy. The US and Royal Navies would rise to meet this challenge.
Intelligence became the key. Let us examine that statement. The Soviet Union had two key intelligence agencies, the KGB and the GRU. The KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security) functioned from 1954 to 1991, with headquarters in the infamous Lubyanka Building in Moscow. Its most notorious and longest-serving chairman was Yury Vladimirovich Andropov, from January 1967 to May 1982. The KGB was dissolved after the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev’s government in 1991 and was split into the Foreign Security Service, the FSS (FSB, in the Russian acronym), and the Foreign Intelligence Service, FIS (or SVR), within the new Russian Federation. The second and by far the larger Soviet and now Russian intelligence agency was and is the GRU, the Foreign Military Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff. In 1997 the GRU was estimated to be six times larger than the SVR. It had at that time approximately 25,000 special forces troops, or Spetsnaz, to use the Russian term. In addition to its HUMINT operations the GRU managed (and still does) huge SIGINT and IMINT (imagery intelligence). Its capabilities and operations far exceeded the primarily clandestine HUMINT operations of the KGB, and today those of the SVR. From late 1967 until 1995 Soviet intelligence controlled a highly significant naval spy ring in the United States headed by Chief Warrant Officer John Anthony Walker. During those eighteen years the Walker spy ring gave away some, though by no means all, of the US Navy’s secrets, an episode that we will address later. Fortunately, Walker did not have access to many key US and UK intelligence capabilities and operations, a tribute to “need to know” and compartmentation policies and procedures.
At the heart of all this lay the underwater domain. Submarine design and construction have to suit the environment in which submarines operate. The key to success is quieting, the ability to be acoustically stealthy, so that the opposition is unable to hear one’s submarine, while the other side’s is detected and its acoustic profile collected and stored for future identification, an acoustic fingerprint that will identify that particular submarine. The difficulties of designing such a quiet, stealthy platform, one that is nuclear powered, can run silently and deeply, can accelerate from slow to high speed in short order, and can change depth without being detected are nontrivial. Submarine safety, necessary nuclear safeguards, and weapons-launch quieting are critical. Crew habitability and sustainability are crucial operational factors; they mean producing enough fresh water and air and carrying enough healthy food to sustain the crew in long, two-month patrols underwater. Optimal ergonomics and use of space are required. Submariners like to listen and not transmit, to avoid detection. They need the very best communications technology to ensure that national command authorities can bring them at any time to communications depth in order to receive messages much longer than is possible at greater depths via extremely low frequency (ELF) transmissions.
A submarine is only as good as the weapons it launches and the targets that it can destroy, however capable the platform. The United Kingdom and the United States have produced and systematically improved during our period one generation after another of highly capable acoustic torpedoes, their design and technology based on understanding of the environment in which submarines operate. Knowledge of the complexity of the ocean, particularly changes in its acoustic characteristics from location to location, permits exploitation of complex signal-processing algorithms for long-range detection of threat submarines or surface ships in often inhospitable ocean conditions. Oceanographic data and knowledge of how various acoustic sensors perform in varying ocean conditions predicate how to use a submarine’s sensors optimally. The 1960s saw the final demise of active acoustic transmissions as a means of detection (the transmission itself yielding one’s own position) and a transition to passive detection, using knowledge of the sound-velocity profiles of different acoustic emissions from threat platforms and differentiating a Soviet submarine from a whale or ambient noise. The United States has invested tens of billions of dollars in both submarine quieting technology to preserve stealth and acoustic signal processing. Parallel to this investment the United States spent billions on oceanographic research to understand the noise characteristics of the oceans and how to best exploit them. For example, knowledge of deep sound channels and convergence zones allows US and UK submarines working together to position themselves the better to hear discrete threat submarine “tonals” at significant ranges.
This accumulated knowledge and experience amounted in due course to an immense technical and operational advantage vis-à-vis the Soviet navy, and today the Chinese navy. This vast knowledge embodied in multibillion-dollar platforms and in the ocean science that underlay them was a major target for Soviet intelligence. The Soviet Union knew the one vital weakness of its submarines in the 1960s: they were noisy and could be easily detected by US and UK submarines. What they did not know was how this detection was achieved. The key was the science behind narrow-band signal processing, which could pick a signal from a vast background noise and match it to a piece of equipment in a particular threat submarine, identified by hull number, home base, and other vital profile information. The United States and the United Kingdom enjoyed, very simply, a massive operational advantage. It was the goal of the Soviet Union to narrow that gap.
As part of the counter-countermeasures philosophy mentioned earlier, the United States and the United Kingdom constantly anticipated and stayed ahead of the game. One classic example of this was the Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS, a network that was laid on ocean floors where Soviet submarines regularly transited. It enabled the United States and the United Kingdom to know the location of Soviet submarines without costly and time-consuming individual searches. Submarines, surface ships, and aircraft could be vectored to the projected location of a Soviet submarine detected by SOSUS. The network’s cost was prodigious, but it worked extremely well. Another example was the deployment of special surface ships that towed extremely long passive acoustic arrays that collected acoustic intelligence. Together with other collectors (submarines, surface ships, aircraft sonobuoys, and other fixed ocean-based sensors), they created a vast ACINT data base. There were the keys to the kingdom, the ability to track an individual submarine by its unique ACINT profile—a capability of the US and UK Navies only.
A quiet, well-handled submarine can go where no other platforms can and listen to everything, across the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum. This includes collecting SIGINT across the radio frequency (RF) spectrum; collecting ELINT across the radar, infrared, multispectral, and laser spectra; measure and signature intelligence (MASINT) multispectral techniques for crucial measurement of other discrete parts of the spectrum associated, for example, with nuclear effluent and effects and materials from other highly sensitive events; telemetry collection from missile shoots; and underwater device laying and disruption, cable cutting and interception, and watching, listening to, filming, and recording all manner of threat activities.
The submarine in our fifty-five-year period was therefore the most effective of all US and UK platforms. It had in addition one other extremely valuable operational capability, a fourth weapon, supplementing torpedoes, missiles, and “soft kill” EM capabilities. These are special operations forces. SEAL (Sea, Air, and Land) teams, and, in the case of the United Kingdom, elements of the Special Boat Section of the Royal Marines and the Special Air Service (SAS) are launched and retrieved stealthily from US and UK submarines. A whole panoply of technological advances were made in our period to enhance the capabilities of special operations forces to inflict disproportionate damage on the enemy. SEAL delivery systems and other manned and unmanned underwater systems have enabled the United States and the United Kingdom to stay ahead in the covert and clandestine use of these and other unacknowledged operatives hosted by US and UK submarine crews on special missions.
In the constant cat-and-mouse contest of the Cold War, the United States and the United Kingdom stayed ahead, and we will examine why shortly. However, the Soviet Union sought, and today the Russians and Chinese still seek, to break into the most sensitive secrets associated with the design, building, operation, and maintenance of both nations’ nuclear submarines. Guarding those secrets remains a national counterintelligence priority, one not helped by the arrival of the Internet and cyber operations.
In the first part of the Cold War the Soviets were partially disabled, unknowingly so. They did not know what they did not know until the Walker spy ring complemented other espionage. They simply wanted to know how the United States and the United Kingdom did it all: the technology, the design, operational modes, and communications. Most of all, they wanted to know just how quiet the US and UK submarines were. What were they really up against? The Soviets became creative at the operational level.
New words entered the NATO lexicon; fresh abbreviations and acronyms were added regularly. One such acronym was AGI, Auxiliary General Intelligence (collector), a bland description of Soviet and other Warsaw Pact surface ships that were intelligence collectors disguised as civilian merchant ships. The Soviet Ocean Surveillance System (SOSS, for short) had many components; AGIs were crucial ones. These otherwise innocuous vessels gave themselves away by the antennas they sprouted over their superstructures—SIGINT and ELINT systems that were well known in NATO handbooks. Occasionally a unique system would appear, and it became the job of the technical intelligence-collection systems and the analysts at GCHQ, NSA, UK Technical Intelligence (Navy), and the US Naval Intelligence Center to figure out what it was. The Soviets positioned their AGIs in locations well known to and well surveilled by US and UK systems.
For example, the NATO-designated “Malin Head” AGI was stationed off Malin Head with the clear and explicit goal of collecting intelligence from the UK submarine base at Faslane and the nearby US strategic-missile-submarine tender and submarine support activity in Holy Loch. US and UK submarines followed similar routes from their bases down the Firth of Clyde to the outer channels between the Scottish islands and then the North and Norwegian Seas and the eastern Atlantic. US and UK submarines were on the surface for a considerable part of the transit for safety and navigational reasons before they could dive and leave their protective escorts, which included antisubmarine helicopters.
As the 1970s progressed the Soviets became more adventurous and clever. They coordinated data from the AGI with other SOSS sources and methods and espionage data to intercept a deploying SSBN heading for the deep ocean to begin a two-month strategic deterrent patrol. The patrol areas became increasingly distant from the Soviet Union as the range of the missiles increased from that of the original Polaris through Poseidon to the Trident D-5 and everything in between. From a Soviet perspective, intercepting, destabilizing, and potentially causing a mission abort of a UK or US strategic patrol would send a message to both countries’ leaderships that their primary strategic deterrent was not invincible. From a US Navy and Royal Navy perspective, ensuring that this did not happen was paramount, so a range of technical, operational, and intelligence ploys evolved to counter such assets as the Malin Head AGI. Along similar lines, the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies developed the simple tactic of following US and Royal Navy surface ships of all descriptions, from US nuclear-powered aircraft carrier battle groups to frigate squadrons and supply ships and oilers.
Where the latter went the shadowers hoped to find the fleet, and they were correct. From a Soviet Northern Fleet, Baltic, or Black Sea Fleet perspective, following a fleet tanker to its rendezvous point with a major formation could lead to significant SIGINT and ELINT collection opportunities. NATO’s EMCON (emission control) would obviate the latter, and Soviet listeners would be left only with listening to VHF (very high frequency) communications between combatants and supply vessels. NATO named these Soviet followers “tattletales.” There was more to them, however. As its capabilities improved through the 1970s and right up to the demise of the USSR, the Soviet navy developed a strategic and tactical plan that involved striking first against major US and NATO naval formations. This required significant coordination, timing of deployments and arrival on station, secure low-probability-of-intercept (LPI) communications, and weapons that the planners in Moscow assessed would do the job—that is, deliver a massed surprise and decapitating strike. The tattletale was only one of the assets involved. Others included surface, subsurface, and air assets of several types, and, increasingly, space-based systems for tracking and targeting. Breaking into, compromising, and rendering ineffective this part of the Soviet Ocean Surveillance System was a crucial task, one that the US Navy and Royal Navy, along with their intelligence communities, addressed in full.
There was, however, an additional Soviet component, one that was extremely flexible, deceptive, and at times difficult to locate and track. This comprised the noncommercial use of Soviet and other Warsaw Pact merchant fleets, plus the even more challenging flag-of-convenience surrogates used clandestinely by the KGB and GRU for a variety of intelligence operations. This added component was nontrivial. The KGB and the GRU recognized that they could place merchant vessels in places that a Soviet or Warsaw Pact naval vessel could never go, into the very ports and hearts of the European NATO navies, including the Royal Navy, and into certain US ports that the US government had opened to Soviet- and Warsaw Pact–flag carriers. In the case of surrogate flag-of-convenience vessels there was little NATO governments could do legally and overtly under the various maritime agreements together with the law of the sea. (It should be noted at this point and for future reference that the United States is, unlike the United Kingdom, not a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea [UNCLOS] or to the United Nations convention establishing and maintaining the International Criminal Courts [ICC] at The Hague in the Netherlands.)
The KGB and the GRU selected merchant vessels that ostensibly belonged to well established trading organizations and equipped them with often very capable intelligence collection systems, including sonar and the latest SIGINT and ELINT devices. Photographic collection was easy. A merchant ship visiting Greenock on the Clyde could listen to local communications while sending highly trained crew members ashore on collection missions. These individuals could travel by rental car to such sites such as the Royal Navy nuclear storage facility at Coulport or to the Holy Loch, where they could observe US nuclear submarines berthed. Deployment schedules could be collected, tug frequencies monitored, weapon movements noted, and perhaps most dangerous of all, some of those who went ashore did not return. UK port immigration and customs officials checked crews in and out but could never guarantee that the same persons arrived with the ship and sailed with it. The KGB and the GRU had an ideal way to insert agents and recover them, without the risks of airport and regular port transit, or indeed of clandestine insertion by other means, such as submarines. The KGB inserted agents regularly into and out of Europe in such ways, and the GRU inserted the far more dangerous long-term “sleepers,” tasked to integrate with and live among local communities.
These sleepers were extremely highly trained personnel with perfect language skills, culture, and detailed local knowledge, acquired after multiple clandestine visits before final insertion for what in some cases was decades, often without the knowledge of their owners or operators. They were equipped with totally fictitious identities and documentation. The objectives for these GRU personnel, many of them Spetsnaz trained, was not classic espionage, recruiting and running agents, but rather acquiring detailed local intelligence. In the case of the Royal Navy, they were interested in the location of crucial strategic communications systems and likely routing, weapon storage facilities, strategic fuel-supply sites, and covert command-and-control facilities. Perhaps most worrisome of all was the task given to a select few to assassinate, in the event of a major confrontation between the West and the Soviet Union, the key leadership of the United Kingdom. In the 1980s Mrs. Margaret Thatcher was indeed at the very top of the target list.
At the operational level, these vessels had highly classified war orders to which only their political officers had access: mining in key ports and approaches, scuttling in crucial channels, and destroying with hidden weaponry military infrastructure, and even, where access was possible, attacking warships in harbor or in transit with heavily disguised surface-to-surface weapons. Other targets included logistics and infrastructure oil tanks, aviation fuel supplies, communications sites, and bridges.
The nuclear era did not prevent limited war. The 1960s were a decade of considerable challenge for both the US Navy and the Royal Navy. We will look at operations in due course, but before we do let us examine the technological challenges posed by the Soviet and Warsaw Pact threat and the ways in which the two competing systems, communism and capitalism, vied with one another in unprecedented ways to gain the military edge at all levels of naval warfare. The 1960s witnessed the Cuban Missile Crisis, the war in Vietnam, the Six Day War in the Middle East of June 1967, the United Kingdom’s confrontation with Indonesia in support of its former colony, Malaysia, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. They also saw the beginning of a space race and, most important of all, confrontation at sea on a scale and in ways not seen before in peacetime.
