Читать книгу Seablindness - Seth Cropsey - Страница 11
ОглавлениеChallenges to the international order are synonymous with today’s threats to the United States, whose position as the world’s dominant maritime power is at risk because of increasing threats and decreasing political will to pay for a military to deter them. An understanding of the development of the naval forces of our potential adversaries is essential to grasp the challenge that U.S. seapower faces today.
RUSSIA
A sense of loss or humiliation felt by an entire people is powerful. Germany’s response to its loss of World War I and the terms that the victorious allies imposed were an important part of Hitler’s rise. China’s anger at Europe’s nineteenth-century colonization remains an animating force throughout the Middle Kingdom. Russians may be pleased that the tyranny to which they are subject is no longer exercised by communists. But they are not pleased at Russia’s descent from its status as one of the world’s two superpowers. Understanding what Russia was is essential to understanding what Russia seeks once again to be. In no category of national power is this more important than in the strategic influence that a strong navy gave the Soviet Union.
The professional career of Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy Admiral Sergei Gorshkov poses a problem for Leo Tolstoy’s idea that history is shaped more by the actions of multitudes rather than by great men. Gorshkov single-handedly transformed the Russian navy from a marginally effective coastal force into a genuine threat to American and Western naval superiority. Much like Imperial Germany’s Großadmiral Alfred von Tirpitz, Gorshkov combined an advanced understanding of politics with a keen mind for naval strategy. He managed to remain in command of the Soviet navy under five general secretaries, a feat that no other individual of similar standing accomplished in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). While the U.S. Navy had eight chiefs of naval operations during the same time, Gorshkov’s unified vision directed the growth of the Soviet navy for more than a quarter century.1
During the 1930s, multiple purges cut Soviet naval ambitions short. World War II did not help. The USSR’s greatest adversary, Nazi Germany, abandoned its ambition of a powerful surface fleet after Karl Doenitz replaced Erich Raeder as chief of the Kriegsmarine. Thus, the Soviets had little reason to create naval forces beyond those needed to protect allied convoys that carried war matériel to the northern port of Archangel. The “Red Navy” received only 6.6 percent of the military budget in 1944, and more than 400,000 Soviet sailors were sent into battle on the Eastern Front as infantrymen.2
Immediately after the war ended, the USSR captured a number of German U-boat engineers, who helped chart a course toward a major increase in the quality of Soviet submarines. Nevertheless, the renamed Soviet navy was placed behind the army, strategic missile forces, air force, and air defense forces in service seniority rankings. Gorshkov began a decades-long campaign to convince the Politburo that naval forces were necessary for the country’s future. Drawing upon the successes of the Russian navy in the early 1700s, he argued that the new Soviet fleet would be used predominantly to support the Red Army.
The United States’s 1962 naval quarantine during the Cuban Missile Crisis helped convince Soviet leaders of the need for a stronger navy. The Soviet Union had little flexibility in responding to the U.S. blockade, a fact that narrowed its options during the crisis and forced Nikita Khrushchev into a high-risk game of nuclear brinksmanship with President Kennedy. Gorshkov used the groundwork he had laid over the previous six years as admiral of the fleet to secure greater funding for the Soviet navy. He began to create a major blue-water force.
Gorshkov addressed the difficulties of cold northern environments by developing the world’s largest and most advanced icebreaker fleet to facilitate year-round operations. The Soviet navy was also faced with multiple choke points, such as the Greenland–Iceland–United Kingdom (GIUK) gap and the Dardanelles, which the Western powers routinely patrolled. Geography constrained the movement of ships into the open ocean. Resupplying these ships on major patrols was no less a challenge. Unlike the U.S. Navy, the Soviet Union did not have an extensive network of bases abroad. Diplomacy, threats, luck, and an increasing presence prevailed. By the mid-1970s, the Soviet navy routinely deployed to Cuba, Africa, and the Indian Ocean.
Soviet naval strategy centered on area denial. Gorshkov wanted to prevent the United States and its allies from moving large numbers of troops and supplies to Europe to support a prolonged ground campaign. To accomplish this, Gorshkov built a fleet centered on submarines, which were supplemented with various surface combatants that carried anti-air and anti-ship missiles.3
Kynda- and Kresta-class guided-missile cruisers, launched in the mid-1960s, were both comparable to American air-defense cruisers at the time and carried a wide variety of anti-air, anti-surface, and anti-submarine warfare combat systems. Nimble Soviet destroyers and frigates such as the Kashin- and Krivak-class surface combatants bristled with long-range anti-ship missiles and anti-submarine mines and torpedoes. By the late 1970s, the Soviets had begun work on a very short takeoff and landing aircraft carrier, similar to the United Kingdom’s Invincible-class anti-submarine warfare carriers, but with a heavier surface-to-surface armament.4
Still, Gorshkov’s pride was his submarines. According to Soviet naval doctrine, surface ships would engage air threats while undersea forces would shoulder the bulk of offensive action. By the late 1970s, the Soviet navy operated close to two hundred attack submarines, the majority of which were diesel electric.5 The Alfa-class—NATO’s designation—nuclear-powered submarine was the fastest in the world at the time of its construction in 1977. The Soviets also developed more than a dozen Charlie-class nuclear-powered submarines that carry cruise missiles, designed to stay at sea on extended patrols and attack NATO ships with their long-range missiles. The Soviet Oscar-class submarines, under construction at the end of the 1970s, were long-range, high-endurance guided-missile boats comparable to America’s.
By the early 1980s, the Soviet navy operated around 260 attack, cruiser, and guided-missile submarines, a fleet larger than the American submarine force at that time.6 Gorshkov’s navy supplemented its surface and subsurface fleet with substantial land-based naval aviation. A modified version of the Tu-95 Bear bomber was used for long-range reconnaissance. Strike aircraft included the Tu-22M Backfire bomber and Il-38 May anti-submarine warfare aircraft.7
In addition, Soviet strategic naval forces at that time included seventy ballistic-missile nuclear submarines (SSBNs) of varying types, the most advanced of which could slip undetected through the narrow passage between the Kola Peninsula and the main Russian land mass. The Yankee- and Delta-class SSBNs formed the backbone of the USSR’s sea-based deterrent force. Gorshkov assigned these boats to targets in North America, reserving European targets for the less-advanced Hotel- and Golf-class submarines.8 This choice eliminated the need for older, louder boats to transit the GIUK gap and increased the Soviet nuclear arsenal’s efficiency. The Soviet construction program of ten submarines per year between 1968 and 1977 facilitated this rapid increase in subsurface forces.
Amphibious capabilities were the one area that the Soviet navy neglected during the 1970s. Power projection was never the goal of Soviet sea control strategy; creating an extensive amphibious fleet would have been counterproductive. Nevertheless, Gorshkov initiated some modernization of amphibious capabilities, constructing three Ivan Rogov–class amphibious ships.9 These vessels could operate offshore, dispatching assault troops from a well deck, or discharge tanks and armored personnel carriers directly onto a beach in an opposed landing. Each ship could carry 520 marines and twenty-five tanks, or a maximum of fifty-three tanks and eighty armored personnel carriers. Even in amphibious capabilities, the Soviets were slowly catching up to the United States.
Gorshkov’s Soviet navy could not execute the same range of missions that Admiral Elmo Zumwalt’s U.S. Navy could during the 1970s, even before the Reagan buildup. However, the Soviet navy was more than capable of challenging the free use of critical sea-lanes by U.S. forces for transport and combat. At the same time, the U.S. Navy was shrinking as World War II ships were decommissioned, with the expectation that the administration and Congress would support replacing them with modern combatants.
1972–1980—THE USSR IN AFRICA AND LATIN AMERICA
As U.S. military power declined during the 1970s, America’s rivals became bolder, taking advantage of increasing volatility in the Middle East, Africa, and, later, Latin America. America’s withdrawal from Vietnam and its ensuing global reset had not decreased the range of its commitments, but it had emboldened its adversaries. A resurgent Soviet navy with a true global reach allowed the USSR to exert its influence on several continents. It helped shape Soviet foreign policy throughout the last two decades of the USSR’s existence, reinforcing Moscow’s stock in the Third World and its position as a global power.
Nixon’s presidency initiated the period of rapprochement with the USSR known as détente. This policy represented a shift toward a traditional balance-of-power diplomacy, with the goal of creating a tense but stable international environment. American military power would prevent the Soviet Union from expanding its dominance into Western Europe. But the Soviets would refrain from undue provocations globally in return for a relaxation of the West’s economic barrier against the Eastern Bloc. Simultaneously, Nixon and his successors pursued a strategic reset with China intended to safeguard American interests in the Pacific, while whipsawing the Soviets and raising questions about China’s reliability as a fraternal socialist partner.
For the first half of the decade, this policy was largely successful. Zumwalt’s slowly modernizing U.S. Navy remained dominant over its Soviet adversary, and American conventional and strategic forces in Europe deterred Soviet aggression. The State Department undertook arms control initiatives that produced arguable results.
Still, a host of factors undermined détente after 1975, resulting in increasing challenges to American power. The post–Vietnam War decline in American military power and the United States’s refocus toward Europe’s central front allowed adversaries to exploit openings in Africa and Latin America. Moreover, the relative economic strength of the United States compared to its allies, particularly Japan, had declined. The period of unquestioned American economic dominance ended simultaneously with America’s military drawdown after the Vietnam War.
Political and strategic reasons dictated the USSR’s decision to increase its influence in Latin America and Africa. Both continents were fertile grounds for postcolonial Marxist and nationalist movements, offering Soviet emissaries ideological access to various governments and rebel groups. Strategically, Soviet military planners recognized that the South Atlantic could influence NATO’s main line of communications. NATO might bottle up Russian submarines and surface combatants in such choke points as the GIUK gap, but Soviet naval forces deployed in Africa and Latin America would, at a minimum, tie down significant American assets in the South Atlantic and hold out the hope of distracting the United States from supplying its fellow NATO members during a central European conflict.
The Soviet Union began by targeting Latin America. Latin American stability has been a major U.S. interest since the 1820s. Putting pressure on the United States in this theater made obvious sense to Soviet strategic planners. Cuba became the linchpin of Soviet activities in Latin America. Cuba’s extensive revolutionary activities throughout the region gave the Soviet Union easy access to multiple guerrilla groups throughout Latin and South America. In return, the Soviet Union funneled huge quantities of arms to Castro’s regime, with arms shipments in 1981 reaching 63,000 tons.10 By 1980, Soviet military aid to Cuba alone was ten times the United States’s military assistance to the entirety of South and Central America.11
Nicaragua served as the other pillar of Soviet regional policy. Throughout the 1970s, the Soviet Union progressively increased its support for the Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, or FSLN), a Marxist revolutionary group that sought to topple Nicaragua’s dictator Anastasio Somoza. Beginning in 1978, the Soviet-equipped and -trained FSLN escalated their attacks on government forces, leading to a full-scale civil war between the Somoza regime and the Sandinistas.12 Significant Soviet support allowed the Sandinistas to overthrow the regime and establish control of Nicaragua in July 1979. Not since 1959 had a country in the Western Hemisphere fallen to communist rule. The Soviet Union bankrolled the new Nicaraguan military, enabling it to grow to 45,000 men by the mid-1980s.13 Throughout Latin America, left-wing rebel groups and insurgencies increased their activities, typically with external Soviet backing. By 1980, the USSR supported two major communist regimes, a third friendly regime in Peru, and two insurgent groups in El Salvador and Costa Rica.14
In response to growing Soviet power, President Carter reactivated Operation Condor, the Department of State–Department of Defense–CIA program initiated by President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to train, equip, and finance anti-communist rebels and governments throughout the continent. Nevertheless, instability persisted and grew in Latin America. The Soviets were enjoying a measure of success made possible by Admiral Gorshkov’s increasingly capable navy.
Russian ships operated out of Cuban ports from 1957 onward, and the Kremlin frequently requested that nations—including Peru, Ecuador, and Chile—provide the Soviet navy with basing facilities.15 Soviet ships routinely escorted arms shipments from Russia in and out of Latin American ports. The presence of Soviet naval vessels increased the risk of conflict at sea to prevent arms shipments. Any confrontation between Soviet and American ships had the potential to escalate. Even without direct Soviet combat support, the expanding militaries of Nicaragua and Cuba threatened the heavily used sea lines of communication in the Gulf of Mexico. This factor would significantly complicate crisis planning in the event of hostilities. In Latin America, the Soviet navy clearly influenced and facilitated Soviet foreign policy throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s.
Africa was also identified as a target of opportunity. Postcolonial Africa had become hospitable for revolutionary Marxism, which combined with tribal loyalties and various Pan-African ideologies to encourage political instability. The pervasiveness of left-wing ideology gave the Soviet Union and its Cuban ally an inroad into the continent. In Angola, the Soviet Union and Cuba supported the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), another revolutionary leftist organization with the goal of overthrowing the Angolan government and establishing a revolutionary Marxist regime.16
Wary of being drawn into a multi-factional conflict, especially after seeing the experience of the United States in Vietnam, the USSR restricted itself to financial and technical support of the rebels.17 Throughout the decade, the Soviets attempted to convince the MPLA to allow them to construct a naval base on Angola’s coast. Although this never came to be, during 1978 and 1979 it seemed entirely possible that the USSR could obtain its first international naval base in a strategically critical location. Submarines and surface combatants based in Angola would have directly threatened American shipping and communication in any major conflict. The USSR also supported Ethiopia in its war against Somalia in 1978, to assert its influence in the Horn of Africa.
The Soviet navy played a role in Africa similar to that in Latin America. Russian vessels carried vital supplies to the various Kremlin-backed rebel groups in Angola and operated out of multiple foreign ports. However, the Soviet navy’s actions in Africa were much more aggressive than in Latin America. Soviet ships provided gunfire support to the MPLA in 1976 and attacked Ethiopian rebels in 1978.18 The USSR deployed its modern, long-range cruise missiles to ships operating off the West African coast, increasing the efficacy of Soviet naval fire support. In 1980, the USSR deployed a helicopter carrier and supporting squadron to Mozambique.19 Soviet naval presence was both visible and consequential throughout Africa during the 1970s and later in the 1980s.
Admiral Gorshkov transformed what Soviet rulers initially regarded as an appendage into an effective instrument of national power that generated positive strategic value for the Soviet regime. However, the fleet sailed into shoal waters and went aground as the Soviet Union’s economy collapsed in the late 1980s. The communist regime temporized at first and later began a descent from which it would not recover.
The Soviet hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time on Christmas Day, 1991. Russian military spending went into free fall. Fighters and bombers, whose design necessitated far more attention than Western military aircraft, sat on aprons for lack of maintenance and spare parts. Insufficient fuel immobilized tanks, while naval vessels rusted at their moorings. As one consequence, Chechen rebels turned back a large Russian assault in the 1996 battle for Grozny, the capital city of Chechnya.
During the mid-1990s, the Russian military budget dwindled to a trickle. Penury forced operating military units to forage to pay for ammunition and fuel.20 In August 2000 the Russian navy conducted its first major fleet exercise in a decade, in the Barents Sea. An Oscar-class nuclear-powered submarine, the Kursk, which carried anti-ship cruise missiles and torpedoes, experienced a series of explosions and fires that sank the boat, killing all 118 sailors aboard.
But a crippled military was not part of Vladimir Putin’s design for Russia’s return as a major power. Moscow reversed its military spending decline in 1999, when funding for its armed forces reached a nadir of a little more $20 billion.21 Spending climbed to more than $90 billion annually in 2012, a 27 percent increase over its level just after the Cold War ended. Not only the rise in oil revenues but also Vladimir Putin’s will account for the quadrupling of the military budget in thirteen years. Falling energy prices have battered Russia’s rearmament, but Moscow’s rulers have persisted in their effort to modernize the nation’s military forces, despite economic setbacks.
RUSSIAN NAVAL MODERNIZATION
In the United States, we take for granted the necessity of openness to ideas from afar, technological innovation, and a vigorous economy able to supply revenue for national defense. This combination is one of our virtues. Not all countries share it. Peter the Great’s construction of a Russian navy required an efficient taxation system where none existed as well as a defense industry that met or exceeded the standard of the times. During Peter’s reign as czar—from 1682 to 1721—some ships were built with green wood and fastened together with wooden pegs. They would sink in the absence of any external force.22
One hundred seventy-seven years after Peter died, Leo Tolstoy published an essay titled “Famine or Not Famine” in the Russian Gazette. Tolstoy was responding to a private letter he had received from a Mrs. Sokolóv, who described the impoverishment and hunger of peasants in the Vorónezh district, the northern border of which is 200 miles south of Moscow. Vorónezh is known for the richness of its black soil and its exceptional ability to produce sugar beets, grain, potatoes, sunflowers, and livestock. Tolstoy listed several causes for the region’s hunger: indifference to spiritual matters, dejection of spirit, contempt for agricultural labor, and inertia. In particular, he wrote about the peasants’
unwillingness to change their habits and their condition. During all these years, when in the other governments [i.e., districts] of Russia, European plows, iron harrows, new methods of sowing seeds, improved horticulture, and even mineral manures were coming into use, in the center, everything remained the same—the wooden sokha [a primitive plow that cuts the earth but does not turn it over], and all the habits and customs of Rurik’s time [the ninth century].23
In many respects Russia remains a technologically backward state. Even today, the technology for extracting hydrocarbons from Russian oil fields comes from the West. Modernization, where it exists in Russia, demands firm resolve, uninterrupted purposefulness, and iron commitment. Notwithstanding the general population’s backwardness, the Soviets demonstrated that these qualities could be mustered.
A revival of this applied determination is under way again. Russia’s navy has now awakened from the state-imposed hibernation of the years that immediately followed the end of the Cold War. Russian nuclear-powered submarines were deployed for 1,500 days in 2015, a 50 percent increase over the preceding year, according to a Russian navy spokesman.24 One of the several classes of nuclear-powered subs that saw more deployments was the Oscar-class guided-missile submarine Smolensk.25 With twenty-four anti-ship cruise missiles each, the eight Oscar-class boats are particularly well-suited to attack U.S. aircraft carriers and their accompanying surface escorts.
Russian naval planning calls for these boats to be modernized with updated sonar, electronic intercept capabilities, and fire control. Without modifying the hull, the modernized boat will triple its missile-carrying ability. The changes substantially augment Russia’s ability to threaten the access of American surface ships to such places as the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas and the approaches from the Atlantic to the North Sea between Greenland and Iceland and northern Great Britain.
In May 2016, the Russian navy launched the sixth and final modernized Kilo-class submarine. Kolpino, named for a municipality of St. Petersburg, was built for service in the Black Sea. This inland sea is the center of festering conflicts and tensions from Turkey to Transnistria to the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine to Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and large swaths of Georgia that have been the source of tension and bloodshed between Georgia and Russia. Naval control of the Black Sea advances Russia’s interest in reasserting control over the region. Kolpino and the modernized members of its class are longer than the Kilo boats after which they were modeled. They can launch torpedoes as well as cruise missiles aimed at land and sea targets. One boat of the class, Rostov-na-Donu, named for the city of Rostov-on-Don near the Sea of Azov in south Russia, fired cruise missiles at Syrian targets from the Mediterranean in December 2015.
The improvements have allowed Russian submarine operations in the Atlantic to return to Cold War levels. The Russian navy’s submarine activity is matched by its advanced technology. Royal Navy Vice Admiral Clive Johnstone, commander of NATO’s Maritime Command, says that “through an extraordinary investment path not mirrored by the West,” Russia has made “technology leaps that are remarkable.” He adds that Russian submarines possess “longer ranges, they have better systems, [and] they’re freer to operate,” and notes “a rise in professionalism and ability to operate their boats that we haven’t seen before.”26
The Royal Navy’s views are shared on this side of the Atlantic. Rear Admiral David Johnson, former director of the Navy’s submarine design programs, told a Naval Submarine League symposium in 2014 that “We’ll be facing tough potential opponents. One has only to look at the Severodvinsk [a nuclear-powered attack submarine that entered service in 2014]. I am so impressed with this ship,” said Admiral Johnson, “that I had . . . a model [built] from unclassified data.”27 The boat’s submerged displacement is greater than that of the Virginia-class U.S. attack submarine; it has been tested with the Kalibr land-attack supersonic-capable cruise missile as well as the same missile system’s anti-ship and anti-submarine missiles. The Kalibr is the missile that Russia says its submarines in the Eastern Mediterranean and Caspian Sea launched respectively in 2015 and 2016 at Syrian targets.
The commander of the U.S. 6th Fleet, Vice Admiral James Foggo III, wrote in June 2016 that, “Combined with extensive and frequent submarine patrols throughout the North Atlantic and Norwegian Sea, and forward-deployed forces in Syria, Russia has the capability to hold nearly all NATO maritime forces at risk. No longer is the maritime space uncontested. For the first time in almost 30 years, Russia is a significant and aggressive maritime power. . . . The clear advantage that we enjoyed in anti-submarine warfare during the Cold War is waning.”28 Just as in both World Wars, the cat-and-mouse maneuvers of the Cold War’s great maritime confrontation contested the control of the sea lines of communication between democracies on both shores of the Atlantic. Although there is no doubt that the United States controls the Atlantic’s vast expanses today, Russia’s reemergence as a naval power raises troubling and important questions about the future.
WHAT IS PUTIN UP TO?
When the Soviet Union ceased to exist in December 1991, the so-called republics that girdled Russia to its south and west had already declared independence and become sovereign nations. These states had not been republics; they were run by communist parties controlled from Moscow. The dissolution of the empire ended in the creation of fifteen states that reached from the Baltic Sea, southeast to include Ukraine, and continuing along the Black Sea’s eastern coast to the Caspian and beyond, deep into the eastern frontier of Kazakhstan, which touches Mongolia.
The results of the breach were large. Before December 1991, the USSR’s population stood at about 290 million. Moscow controlled more than 22 million square kilometers, approximately one-sixth of the earth’s land surface. Dissolution cost the Soviet Union 139 million citizens. Russia was left with a total population of 151 million. Its land area had been reduced by nearly one-fourth.
In his 2005 state of the nation address to Russia’s parliament, Vladimir Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union and the attendant diminution of Russia “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century.”29 If Russia’s shrunken borders lead toward a more stable region, Putin is wrong. So far, however, his efforts suggest that the catastrophe lies not in the Soviets’ loss but rather in their successors’ attempt to reconstruct the shattered pedestal from which the USSR fell. If Russian policy triumphs, animated by the same kind of resentment at having lost an empire that consumed Germany after losing World War I, history may judge Putin’s remark as an understatement.
Russia’s subjugation of Georgia in 2008, along with Moscow’s recognition of two breakaway Georgian regions as sovereign states (one of which—Abkhazia—possesses more than 100 miles of coastline on the Black Sea), was a lackluster military operation. But it sent a clear message that Russia’s economic, demographic, and political misfortunes would not prevent her rulers from rekindling the fear of domination that has been a fact of life in the region since before the Russian Revolution.
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, along with his military support for the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine who needed no prodding to take up arms against their own government, emphasized Moscow’s ambition to reassert regional hegemony. The armed conflict between Ukraine’s democratically elected government and Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine continues today.
Putin’s ambitions do not end in Ukraine. Extending their reach beyond border states, Russian military forces intervened on behalf of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2015, four years after the Syrian civil war began. The intervention improved Moscow’s access to a Syrian port, Latakia, on the Mediterranean and a nearby airfield that is used to conduct missions in support of Assad. It also enabled Iran to plant a violent foot in Syria in the form of an expanding network of Shiite terror groups.
The late-2016 fall of Aleppo, the center of Syrian resistance to Assad, was a major success for Putin. Where U.S. policy makers saw only failed outcomes, Putin gambled that Russia would not become enmeshed in a prolonged civil conflict. He won. The victory established Russia as the major external power in the Levant, consolidated his position of strength in the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean, and underlined the retreat of the United States from its previous influence in the region.
Russia’s access to the world’s great seas and oceans offers at once opportunities to complicate the effectiveness of the United States and its allies operating in the same bodies of water, to disrupt communications between the United States and its allies, and to project global force. A revanchist power couldn’t ask for much more. Russia has largely succeeded in monopolizing the energy output of its former possessions in Central Asia. Neutering NATO, replacing the United States as the major external power in the Middle East, and reestablishing control over the Baltic States as well as Ukraine would help right the wrongs that Vladimir Putin believes were perpetrated when the Russian Federation replaced the Soviet Union.
Putin is acting as purposefully at sea as he has on land. Usually the two are linked. With its seizure of the Crimea, Russia regains the access to the Black Sea that the USSR exploited to keep its littoral client states in line and to make Turkey nervous. Today, as before, the Black Sea provides a gateway to the Bosphorus and the Mediterranean. Moreover, Russia understands the same lesson that China, Iran, North Korea, and every other potential adversary learned from Desert Storm: defeating the United States at sea today is much harder than denying it the access needed to apply American land and seapower. Russian possession of the Crimea allows its modern effective anti-surface and surface-to-air missiles to challenge access to the region by NATO vessels, including those of the United States, which conduct presence and deterrence missions in the Black Sea. Moscow’s maritime and continental efforts to restore its position in the Black Sea region are particularly effective as Western national security policy makers concentrate their attention on Russia’s increasing threat to the Baltic States.
Examples of Russian military preparation in the Baltics include increased long-range anti-ship missiles and beefed-up air-defense systems in the Kaliningrad military district. In April 2016, Russian tactical jets flew several high-speed passes dangerously close to the destroyer USS Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea.30 The Russian defense ministry is also tightening its belt; its month-long investigation into its Baltic Sea fleet command led to the firing of fifty senior naval officers for leadership and operational misjudgment in early July 2016.31
But in the revised Russian Marine Doctrine that was published in July 2015, Putin’s naval focus is the Atlantic Ocean and the Arctic. “We emphasize the Atlantic,” states the document, “because NATO has been developing actively of late and coming closer to our borders, and Russia is . . . responding to these developments.”32 This is meant for a domestic audience that is receptive to Putin’s claim that he protects them from Western states bristling with weaponry and bent on subduing Russia. It’s nonsense. Eighty-five percent of NATO’s member states currently fail to meet the alliance’s goal of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense. NATO’s largest single military power, the United States, is experiencing sufficient difficulty in keeping a single aircraft carrier deployed in the Western Pacific and the Persian Gulf so that intervals have been introduced into the carriers’ operational schedules, during which no carrier is on station.
Closer to the truth is the Russian document’s seeming non sequitur that follows its point about the Atlantic’s importance: “The second reason [for emphasizing the Atlantic] is that Crimea and Sevastopol have been reunited with Russia and we need to take measures for their rapid integration into the national economy. Of course, we are also restoring Russia’s naval presence in the Mediterranean.”33
The Atlantic is important to Russia’s revanchist goals because an Atlantic presence challenges America’s ability to sustain NATO if there is a war on the European continent. Russia has two routes to the Atlantic: through the Baltic Sea and through the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Moscow’s ability to command these long passages, or, at a minimum, to deny NATO and U.S. seapower the ability to operate in them, opens the Atlantic to the kind of warfare that the Nazis conducted in World War II, during which more than 72,000 allied sailors and merchant seamen lost their lives and 3,500 ships were sunk, with a loss of 14.5 million gross tons.
The other focus of Russia’s stated maritime doctrine is the Arctic Sea. The overwhelming preponderance of Russia’s nearly 24,000-mile coast lies between Severodvinsk on the White Sea bay of the Arctic and the Bering Sea, where the Arctic Sea empties into the North Pacific. The Arctic today is open to Russian shipping for a couple of months a year, if that, but ships there still require assistance from the world’s only nuclear-powered icebreaker fleet—Russia’s.
The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the Arctic contains 1.6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 44 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, of which 84 percent lies offshore.34 Plentiful mineral resources, such as bauxite, copper, iron ore, and nickel, also lie beneath the seabed. Russia manufactures little. Its economy depends largely on using Western technology to exploit its abundant natural resources. The contest for these resources and control of the seas above them is a certain point of future international friction.
Russian maritime doctrine supports Putin’s goal of reestablishing Russia as a great power by using its navy to challenge the United States’s ability to communicate with its European allies, fill the power vacuum left in the Mediterranean by the United States, and threaten NATO on its northern and southern flanks. Expanding its fleet of nuclear-powered icebreakers and assigning more naval combatants to Arctic duty advances Russia’s goals as it seeks to establish Moscow as the preeminent Arctic power.
Vladimir Putin is building a modern and technologically sophisticated fleet. Russia’s combatants and its ground and air forces are competitive in air defenses, unconventional warfare, electronic warfare, and naval gunfire. Moscow’s cyber abilities have proved sufficiently advanced to influence American and other democratic states’ politics. The program is guided by a strategic vision of advancing Russia’s economic interest in further cornering the world’s energy market while reestablishing a dominant Russian naval presence in the seas that flank the European peninsula. Simultaneously, Putin seeks to offset the ability of U.S. seapower to counter these threats and to shake NATO by interrupting the sea lines of communication that link the United States to its European allies. Along with China’s sale of its capable modern weaponry to such states as Iraq and North Korea, Russia adds to the threat of denying U.S. forces the access they require to succor allies and apply effective force globally.
Changes in the threats that face the United States must have consequences. There is no point in any state’s armament other than to advance its interests in a material way. Many saw Nazi Germany and Japan’s preparations for war in the 1930s, but Western governments’ record of publicizing these was spotty. Harder still was imagining how the preparations could result in disaster. A description of a military’s condition and those that might oppose it is incomplete if it does not attempt to imagine the effects of changes in the balance of power.
