Читать книгу Seablindness - Seth Cropsey - Страница 13
ОглавлениеThe object of this and subsequent scenarios is to illustrate the challenges that American seapower faces today and will face in the future: a diminishing fleet; unresolved strategic decisions; and miscalculations in fleet design (which can be the result of insufficient funding, slow adaptation to large geopolitical shifts, or the swift pace of technological change, to name a few). One important element of creating useful war games, scenarios, or plans is imagination. War and architecture on a grand scale, for example, are two complex human activities that require forethought, organization, and decisive leadership. But a civil engineer does not have to worry that a river will alter its course to avoid a planned bridge. Intelligent military officers know that this is exactly what the enemy will do: change his plan to achieve his goal. This fact puts a premium on imagination and thus exacts a very high price for failures of imagination.
During the Cold War’s final years, U.S. maritime strategy came to regard the land mass from the Soviet Union’s western border to the Atlantic as a peninsula surrounded on the north by the Baltic and North Seas and on the south by the Mediterranean. Both NATO and the Warsaw Pact’s high commands believed that a conventional war would most likely spark where the two sides’ forces abutted one another: in the center of Germany. American naval strategists operated two aircraft carrier battle groups in the Mediterranean, whose 140 tactical aircraft could attack targets in the USSR proper and help cut off Moscow’s supply lines that would sustain an armed thrust into Western Europe.
To the north, U.S. aircraft carriers accompanied by attack submarines were added to the mix. Together with its Mediterranean fleet, the United States had effectively encircled the European peninsula—just as the Royal Navy had done during the Napoleonic Wars. If, as the expression of the time had it, “the balloon went up,” U.S. naval forces would hunt for and destroy Soviet ballistic-missile submarines that hid in the northern seas waiting for the order to launch their weapons against North American targets. According to the then-current theory, the submerged Soviet arsenal guaranteed that whatever might happen to the rest of Moscow’s nuclear forces, one part would remain intact and lethal.
The ability to roll back and eventually destroy this so-called second-strike nuclear capability would—American strategists thought—help deter Moscow from launching a first strike. At the same time, U.S. aircraft carrier attacks against Soviet naval bases and infrastructure in the vicinity of Murmansk were planned to distract attention from the central front—just as aircraft carriers were expected to attack key southern targets from the Mediterranean.
No one ever learned whether this scheme would have worked. However, the presence of powerful U.S. naval forces on the Soviets’ northern flank helped divert the Warsaw Pact leader’s intelligence, logistic, air, and naval defenses from the center. Washington saw this as a good thing.
A Scenario In 2025, thirty-four years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. naval fleet was less than one-third the size of its Cold War predecessor. An extraordinarily wealthy autocrat at the top of a small pyramid of oligarchs ruled Russia, much as the czar did before the Bolsheviks seized power. Vladimir Putin had announced in 2013 his plan to spend 4 trillion rubles, or $132 billion, to expand Russia’s combat fleet over the next seven years. As those seven fat years ended, Putin promised to spend an additional $150 billion on naval modernization by 2027. Several U.S. analysts had noted that the delivered—and promised—largesse was close to 30 percent more than the United States planned to spend on shipbuilding during the same period. No one paid them any attention—except in Moscow and Beijing.
Between Putin’s announcement and 2025, eighteen new frigates had joined the Russian Federation combat fleet, along with twenty-four missile-carrying corvettes and a host of smaller, agile combatants. Ten new boomers—nuclear-tipped ballistic-missile submarines—and eleven nuclear-powered attack subs had also been constructed and undergone successful sea trials. At a third or less than the cost of one nuclear-powered sub, Moscow had been turning out far quieter diesel-electric boats that were as well suited for the lucrative export market as they were for operating in the relatively shallow waters of the Baltic and North Seas.
Still, the Russian Federation’s military was a shadow of its communist predecessor’s armed forces. In nearly all categories of weaponry, even with oil prices back at their pre-2014 levels, Moscow could not afford the expense of a robust conventional force. It was not a superpower and could not bring armed might to bear except on its borders. It could not keep forces in the field in a prolonged conflict. But Russia had maintained and modernized a powerful nuclear arsenal of hundreds of weapons that could be launched from land-based aircraft, silos, and submarines.
The United States, still the dominant global power in 2025, was less so compared to ten or fifteen years earlier. As the federal debt reached $24 trillion, politicians had failed to staunch the borrowing or limit the growth of entitlement programs. Debt service and spending that the law required tightened their choke hold on the defense budget.
The portion of the budget that the Navy devoted to shipbuilding had been preserved, not increased. But the foreseeable expenses of replacing a fleet built during the Reagan era had shredded the admirals’ sober long-range shipbuilding plans and left them in tatters.
For example, the first of the Ohio-class nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs) had been commissioned forty-five years earlier. American military planners held fast to the idea that powerful, quick response and/or undetectable nuclear weapons would help discourage an enemy from launching a first strike. So land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, land-based long-range bombers, and boomers remained the triad that, it was hoped, would deter an enemy from launching a nuclear attack against the United States.
The new SSBNs cost more than $7 billion each, more than half the cost of an aircraft carrier, but not by much. Arguing that ballistic missile–carrying subs performed a national mission rather than a seapower one, the Navy had tried to persuade the administration and Congress that additional money should be appropriated to build the new boats—without success. Other programs were slowed or cancelled during the decades it would take to replace the fourteen aged SSBNs with twelve new ones. Congress passed legislation that allowed the number of aircraft carriers to drop from eleven to eight. It accepted the Navy’s proposal to stop buying two new attack subs each year to replace the aging Los Angeles–class boats. By 2025, the U.S. attack sub force had shrunk in a single decade from fifty-three boats to fewer than forty.
Only one carrier was built during the decades it took to modernize the boomers. The refueling of others was delayed as they were tied up dockside. The United States, at least for the indefinite future, could keep only two aircraft carriers at sea on sporadic patrols. The same cost-cutting measures were applied to the attack submarine force, with parallel results. Only thirteen attack boats could be put to sea.
America’s combatant commanders were nervous. Four-star admirals or generals, they commanded the air, sea, and ground forces that were deployed around the world to keep conflict away from the borders of the United States, defend vital American interests, and protect allies. China’s navy had not only surpassed America’s in numbers of ships but had also become a global presence, with constant patrols in the western reaches of the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the entire length of the Western Hemisphere’s Pacific coast. The few ships that remained in the U.S. 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean had been recalled home when its handful of ballistic-missile defense ships were judged redundant, once defenses against Iran’s nuclear-tipped medium- and intercontinental-range missiles became operational in Romania. This made sense to budget cutters only. Ships at sea are harder to target than fixed land-based missile batteries.
The diminished U.S. Pacific Command was able to keep a single aircraft carrier battle group in the Western Pacific. While serviceable in peacetime, a lone U.S. carrier would have very limited usefulness if an incident between China and Taiwan or Japan turned nasty. Long-standing allies cast about for other ways to protect themselves. In Taiwan, one political party was actively engaged in reunification talks with the mainland. China had secretly offered to ensure South Korea’s security if Seoul would send the American military packing, and the Blue House was thinking it over. Japanese politicians were divided between those who wanted to improve relations with China and others who sought to nullify the constitution’s Article 9, which outlawed war as a means of resolving international disputes.
Vladimir Putin had just turned seventy-three; just a few years older than Nikita Khrushchev when he placed medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, and three years younger than Leonid Brezhnev when he was gathered to his fathers. Putin remained firmly in command and had taken to sky-diving, which impressed his countrymen. All of Ukraine had long since been absorbed into Russia. So had bordering Transnistria, the slender belt—a bit larger than Rhode Island—inhabited by Russophiles, which once separated Moldova from Ukraine. In each case, the West objected strenuously, as it had when Russia invaded Crimea. Sanctions were applied, but always ended up leaking, then bursting. European dependence on Russian oil and natural gas overcame other concerns.
NATO, however, had strengthened its military presence in the Baltic States and Central Europe. After the Obama administration’s 2009 tergiversation, Polish and Czech leaders would not risk political capital to argue publicly for acceptance of defenses against Russian ballistic missiles on their territory. But Romania would—and did. NATO conducted annual exercises from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
The other side of the ledger was darker. Despite promises, only one of the Western European alliance members lived up to their NATO defense spending obligations, the U.K. But Britain had long since abandoned its alliance gold standard, the ability to deploy an entire expeditionary division. The Royal Navy was down to a few attack subs and fewer ballistic-missile boats. The surface fleet had nine ships available to patrol the Channel and parts of the North Sea. Two carriers built only a decade earlier had been mothballed.
Putin knew the time was right to crack NATO’s atrophied spine. He did not have to cast about for an achievement to crown his twenty-five-year reign as Russia’s supreme leader. NATO’s demise would allow gains in Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, the Balkans, and Transnistria to be extended. The excuse for invading Ukraine applied equally to the Baltic States: the million or so ethnic Russians who lived in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania must be protected. Returning the Baltic States to Russian control would shatter NATO and make smooth the highway to recreating an imperium in Europe. Except that this time, it might reach the Atlantic, an accomplishment that would dwarf Stalin’s seizure of Eastern Europe at the end of World War II.
In mid-2024, Russian foreign intelligence agents began to contact pro-Russian intellectuals and writers in the Baltic States, and small think tanks sprang up in Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius. Staffs were hired. They turned out articles that explained the “facts” of growing discrimination against ethnic Russians. Friendly reporters repeated the untruths in their journals. Other sympathizers whose pro-Russian credentials had been validated years earlier began to press for solidarity among ethnic Russians in the Baltic States’ trade unions. Websites appeared with fabricated stories of mistreatment, arrests, and harassment directed against ethnic Russians. Moscow contacted ethnic Russians and offered them Russian passports, citizenship, and higher pensions than those that the Baltic States offered.
Russian agents initiated a low-level bombing campaign against ethnic Russian–owned small businesses that heated up the political warfare. The bombings “proved” the dangers that ethnic Russians faced. Other crimes, such as kidnappings and the occasional murder, received international attention. From Moscow to Vilnius, the pro-Russian social media called for “measures” to protect ethnic Russians in the Baltic States. Members of the Duma howled, and eventually Vladimir Putin felt obliged to weigh in.
Putin warned the Baltic leaders to stop what he termed provocations or face the consequences. At the same time, he put the Baltic Sea Fleet on a heightened alert status, mobilized three infantry brigades, and moved one Spetsnaz battalion with helicopter transports and an armored division into the Pskov oblast near the Estonian border.
The U.S. State Department and foreign ministries in London, Paris, and Warsaw issued démarches, and NATO’s general secretary called an emergency meeting. His public statement surprised the foreign policy establishments of most alliance members by reminding Putin that Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty required all members to assist one who had been attacked.
Putin corrected this—privately. He told his close advisers that Article 5 actually says that an attack against one member, and here he quoted from memory, “shall be considered an attack against them all.” “What does that mean?” he asked contemptuously. The Russian president noted that the United Kingdom had told the Polish government in March 1939 that it would “feel” itself “bound” to help Poland if the Nazis attacked. Five months later the Chamberlain government dropped tons of leaflets over Germany after Hitler invaded Poland. “Some feeling,” Putin snorted. “Some binding,” he added. “Treaties,” he declared, “are not handcuffs. They’re like shirts. You wear one when it suits you.
“The Americans,” he continued, “are stretched between their Arctic Fleet, the Mexican civil war, their peacekeeping operations in Kashmir, and stopping the Sunnis and Shiites from a second nuclear volley.” Putin was referring to the concentration of jockeying international naval vessels in the nearly ice-free Arctic, the anarchy of Mexico’s armed struggle between drug lords and the government, the aftermath of war between India and a jihadist Pakistan in which both sides had launched nuclear weapons, and a brief nuclear exchange between the Gulf States and Iran that had driven the international price of oil to just over $300 a barrel.
The Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) responsible for all NATO forces, U.S. Admiral Alec Krone, ordered a squadron of F-35s to move from Timisoara, where they were stationed in Romania, to the Amari air base in northwestern Estonia. U.S. President Algodón started calling the leaders of NATO member states. They were reluctant to admit that the hopes for peace that their defense budgets over the previous two decades reflected might have come a cropper. But for the most part, they agreed that a successful Russian military takeover in the Baltics risked the entire continent and would doom the alliance.
All of Europe’s NATO members maintained ground forces of one kind or another. They started to flow into the Baltic States. Not all the European states possessed major naval combatants. For its part, the United States had bet that the next half century would be pretty much like the previous fifty years: emergencies and the occasional crisis, but nothing more. Under increased budgetary pressure, the U.S. Navy had changed the thirty-year naval shipbuilding plan into a fifty-year plan. The number of ships that were to have been built in three decades would now be constructed in five decades. As a result, the U.S. fleet was short in every category of major combatant: amphibious, attack submarines, ballistic-missile submarines, aircraft carriers, the planes carried on their decks, frigates, destroyers, and the logistics ships that kept the fighters supplied. New technology that might have helped remedy deficiencies—for example, small drone submarines—had been developed but was not deployed in significant enough numbers to make a positive difference.
Russia had been busy building up its navy while the Western powers were dismantling theirs. Moscow had far surpassed the goal it set in 2010 of modernizing 70 percent of its fleet by 2020. The $600 billion it spent during that decade had proved a good investment, especially the supercarrier, Yekaterina Velikaya, with its hundred-plane capacity and electromagnetic launch catapults. Russia had replaced the United States as the dominant naval force in the Mediterranean eight years earlier, and Yekaterina was patrolling the Med during the second week of June 2025 when Putin began to flood the Baltic Sea with amphibious vessels, attack subs, and large surface ships bristling with anti-surface and anti-aircraft missiles.
A debate erupted within the U.S. intelligence community over whether Putin intended to go to war when Yekaterina Velikaya exited the Straits of Gibraltar and sailed north to join the gathering Russian armada in the Baltic Sea. Smaller vessels and ground-based naval aviation would assist her in hunting for NATO submarines.
At the president’s request, Admiral Krone flew back to Washington from Estonia’s Amari air base, where he had established an allied joint force command headquarters. After a lunch of canned sardines, yogurt, and a kombucha—the admiral was a SEAL officer and remained in excellent physical condition—Krone went over his briefing papers and current intelligence reports. Done, he napped for twenty minutes, awakened, and finished the third chapter of Finnegans Wake. It was his second read of the impossible novel. After touching down at Andrews in mid-afternoon on Sunday, June 29, the admiral was ferried by helicopter to land on the White House South Lawn. He began to brief the president and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Thomas Zrebiec less than thirty-five minutes after landing at Andrews.
The essentials were straightforward. NATO fielded more powerful conventional ground and air forces than Moscow. Putin had an important, perhaps decisive, advantage in combat ships—unless the United States were to swing naval forces from the Persian Gulf and West Pacific to the Baltic Sea. This would take at least six weeks. It would also risk additional fighting between the Gulf States and Iran and another even more devastating spike in international oil prices, while encouraging Chinese or North Korean adventures in East Asia.
Then there was the nuclear unknown. Putin had hinted for years that one mission of his nuclear forces was to backstop any conventional weakness. “The military balance between Russia and the West,” Admiral Krone told the president, “is exactly opposite the one we faced in the Cold War.” He meant that, while the Soviets had held the upper hand in conventional forces, the U.S. nuclear umbrella was understood during the Cold War to have protected Europe against being overrun should the Red Army start to push alliance forces west.
“Today,” Admiral Krone observed, “if it comes to war, we can stop them from taking the Baltic States with conventional forces. But Putin is a risk-taker. There is no telling whether he would use nuclear weapons if he feels he is losing.” The president did not have to be told that Putin’s entire calculation was that, while NATO might move forces into position to defend the Baltics, the Europeans and Americans would in the end find some excuse not to act—as they had when all of Ukraine fell eight years earlier.
The president raised an eyebrow and threw a glance in the direction of General Zrebiec. “Do you have everything you need?” asked President Algodón.
Admiral Krone hesitated, coughed slightly, and said, “Yes, militarily.”
“But, what?” asked Algodón.
“Sir, our ground and air forces can handle the Russians. As you’ve probably seen from the intelligence reports, the Russian high command knows it is outgunned on land. We’re at a large disadvantage at sea. The Russians will fail if they try forcing their way from sea. They don’t have enough close air support to conduct an opposed landing, and they have no experience with these operations. But they can harry NATO’s ground operations if the Russians invade Estonia. I am confident that our ballistic-missile defenses can handle anything Putin throws at us. But . . .” Here the admiral hesitated again.
“But what?” the president repeated.
“Aside from Poland, the Czechs, and the Romanians, I don’t think that the Europeans have their hearts in this. I mean I think that Putin is making a good bet. He expects the big NATO states to fold if he actually invades.”
The president nodded. “Yes,” he said. “We led them into Afghanistan and Iraq, and they lost their nerve. Hell, we lost ours. Look, I’ll invite them to Washington on Thursday and remind them what’s at stake for the alliance. I want you there to brief them on the military situation.”
“Sir,” answered the admiral.
“Anything else?” asked the president.
“Yes, sir. If the Russians invade Estonia, I need much more naval support.”
The president, a former Army Ranger, asked SACEUR to explain.
“Sir, a carrier’s air wing; ships and subs equipped with cruise missiles; even destroyers with their electromagnetic rail guns, which can reach a target a hundred miles away, could rip up Russia’s northern naval bases and cut the supply lines their ground forces would depend on in Estonia. I don’t have enough ground-based air now to execute those missions and”—the admiral emphasized—“check the naval forces Putin is collecting in the Baltic. Sir, I need the Navy.”
“Ok,” said the president. “I’ll talk with General Zrebiec here about getting some more ships up there.” The chairman made a note on his yellow pad.
“Sir.” The admiral’s helicopter’s engines were still warm when he climbed back aboard it on the White House South Lawn. Krone was airborne for Estonia two hours after landing at Andrews.
One hour into SACEUR’s eastbound flight, as the C-37A flew over Cape Cod, heading northeast toward the open Atlantic, a pair of Russian multipurpose Sukhoi T-50s lifted off from Pskov and met up with an Ilyushin Il-78 tanker over central Estonia. The summer solstice had occurred a week earlier. At 59+ degrees latitude the northern horizon stayed a blue-gold hue from sunset to dawn. All three planes flew through the quasi-night with their transponders off.
The crews of two C-17 USAF transport planes rising up from Amari on a return flight to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware were settling in for the nine-hour haul back home. Besides the C-17, the traffic controllers at Amari were also monitoring an inbound flight of American F-35s from Frankfurt. The controllers directed the in- and outbound flights safely past one another.
But air traffic control did not know that the Russian stealth tactical fighters were in the vicinity. Both the American and Russian planes were equipped with stealth technology. The F-35 and Sukhoi pilots finally saw one another at an approach speed of Mach 1.89 when they were less than a mile apart. All four pilots turned on their targeting radars and jinked to avoid collision. The evasive action saved one American and one Russian plane. The other two were less fortunate. Their wings brushed each other, severely damaging both aircraft and rendering them uncontrollable. The Russian pilot’s ejection seat failed. He died when his plane crashed. The American was luckier. He parachuted safely, walked away out of the potato field where he’d landed, and hitchhiked to the nearest village.
Russian national security advisor Dmitri Bogdanov awakened Putin at 0400, a half-hour after the sun rose in Moscow. He told the Russian president that a Russian fighter had been downed over Estonia; that the NATO planes had their targeting radars on when the Sukhoi went down; and that the Russian pilot was presumed to have been killed. The second Russian pilot had returned to his base unharmed and was still being debriefed. Bogdanov could not answer whether the Russian plane had been shot down. Putin didn’t care.
He dressed and strolled to the presidential briefing room in the Kremlin, thinking. The surviving Russian pilot had seen his wingman’s plane on fire after the collision and had told briefers that the American pilots had “painted” the Russian jets, that is, turned on their targeting radars. He described how the Russian and American planes had had visual contact prior to the incident. He did not know that his wingman’s plane had collided with the F-35. Putin called for his chief of staff, defense minister, and intelligence head.
Admiral Krone received word of the incident aboard his flight to Estonia. On arrival at Amari, he was driven to his command center, where the reports started to come in. So did the two American pilots who had survived the encounter. Krone ordered an uptick in NATO’s defense readiness condition and sent a draft press release to the Pentagon.
Two NATO F-35s piloted by United States Air Force officers encountered two Russian Sukhoi T-50 fighters over Estonian airspace at approximately 0315 local time this morning. The Russian fighters were overflying a NATO member’s airspace without Estonian approval with their transponders turned off. The NATO pilots were on a standard patrol mission. They and the Russian pilots became aware of each other visually at a distance of less than one mile. They took action to avoid collision. One NATO and one Russian plane avoided each other. The other Russian fighter’s wing collided with the F-35’s wing. Both planes were seriously damaged. The U.S. pilot ejected. He is safe. There is no evidence that the Russian pilot ejected. NATO investigators have located the site of the crash and are making every effort to find the missing pilot. There are no reports of ground fatalities or injuries related to the collision.
After Washington approved the draft, it was sent for information purposes to the NATO ambassadors of all the alliance members. The statement was issued to the media at noon local time in Tallinn.
Before NATO’s first public comment, Putin had gone on state-run television to accuse NATO of “provoking Russia.” He angrily denounced NATO for targeting the Russian planes with their radar, which he said was proof of “hostile intent.” “Ethnic Russians who live in the Baltic States,” said Putin, fixing his hooded eyes on the camera, “have been the subjects of repression and aggression by the governments of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Now, NATO has joined these criminal states.”
The accusation was Putin’s idea. His meeting with Defense Minister Vissarionovich and Intelligence Chief Ulyanov yielded another. Russia initiated bot attacks—Web robots that transformed selected Estonian computers into virtual zombies. The attacks allowed Moscow to control the little Baltic state’s interior ministry’s command and control center. From this center in Tallinn went orders to local police around the country to start rounding up leaders of the ethnic Russian business and civic communities. Once in police custody, they were to be interrogated about subversive activities.
Other bot attacks targeted the Estonian prime minister and his defense, foreign, interior, and finance ministers, as well as their deputies, who learned that their bank accounts, equity, and bond holdings had been either zeroed or reduced by 75 percent.
The alarming reports of personal financial ruin distracted the government’s chief ministers from the arrest of ethnic Russians in Tallinn, Tartu, Narva, and the country’s other population centers, large and small. The government learned of them when the Russian state media broadcast Vladimir Putin’s stormy declaration that “I will not stand by and allow ethnic Russians to be treated like dogs.” By the time of Putin’s broadcast, the Estonian government had already stopped the roundup. Its prime minister went on national television and explained the cyber attack. For naught.
At dawn the following day, Tuesday, July 1, the Kremlin issued the warning order that confirmed military objectives and command relationships prior to combat operations. Russian tanks and mechanized units that had been training for six months made their final preparations. So did the infantry and helicopter gunship units that would assist in capturing airfields at towns west of the border with Russia.
Estonia is a small, low-lying country dotted with marshland and lakes. Unlike central Germany, it lacks an abundance of broad plains suited to large-scale armored battles. Estonia has no easy invasion routes from Russia. The center of the dividing line between the two states runs down the middle of Lake Peipus. Through the long lake’s vertical axis passes about 120 kilometers of the 294-kilometer-long border. Lake Peipus empties into the Baltic Sea through the north-flowing Narva River.
Russian forces went into action at 0300 on July 2. They established bridgeheads along the Narva River and began rolling west to encircle Narva, Estonia’s third-largest city.
The invasion route was well trodden. Russia’s military under Peter the Great had used it twice at the beginning of the eighteenth century. More recently—in the first half of 1944—Soviet General Leonid Govorov, commanding the Leningrad Front, drove west with the immediate object of seizing Estonia from Nazi control. The three armies under his command invaded across the Narva River. This time, the field commander of Russian forces would be a veteran of the 2014 invasion of Crimea, General Alexander Lentsov.
President Algodón had spoken with the other NATO member chiefs of state. He persuaded them that, as Putin had not stopped in Ukraine or Moldova, he would not stop if he could swallow the Baltic States. He reminded them of what European defense would look like if American voters decided that the Europeans were unreliable allies and forced the United States to withdraw from NATO.
Article 5 was invoked. The Russian invasion of Estonia would be regarded as an attack on all the NATO member states. The essence of Putin’s gamble failed. NATO had gone to its highest alert status twelve hours earlier. The Pentagon elevated its level of readiness from DEFCON 4 to DEFCON 2. The last time U.S. forces had been placed on a DEFCON 2 status was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now it was up to Admiral Krone to turn back the Russians’ advance.
Admiral Krone deployed NATO armor and mechanized units back from the border, taking advantage of lakes and marshes that the invading force must circumnavigate. He meant to force Russian ground forces into killing zones, where combined tank and close air support could destroy them. Other tactical aircraft would contest Russian fighters at higher altitudes.
The struggle to control airspace above the battlefield was critical to the outcome below. NATO and the Russian air forces were roughly equal in numbers, although the West enjoyed a technological edge in fighter capability. And here, the admiral cursed. He’d told the president that he needed more naval support, but the conflict had exploded before any ships could arrive—even if a carrier could be dispatched from the Persian Gulf to the Baltic Sea. And he’d told his flag aide, a young SEAL lieutenant, “This is what happens when budgets make strategy. U.S. security policy gets tunnel vision and forgets Europe.”
The aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt was currently on station in the Persian Gulf. Her seventy F-35C fighter-bombers would have given NATO’s air forces an advantage, clearing the skies of Russian aircraft and then striking Russian columns to stop them from moving deeper into Estonia. Any aircraft carrier in the U.S. inventory would have done so. The USS Carl Vinson was currently in intermediate maintenance in Norfolk. She would be pulled out and ordered to the Baltic, but it would be at least seven weeks before she could go into action. There were no other carriers that could arrive sooner. The United States had one other deployed carrier, halfway around the world—in the West Pacific.
The consequence, as Krone had earlier warned the Joint Chiefs, was that the ground campaign would be longer and bloodier. It was. Instead of confronting the Russians with ground forces on the Narva River’s east bank, Krone attacked them as they crossed, smote them as they maneuvered to avoid lakes and marshes, and arrayed his forces west of the river, where the enemy was stopped with U.S. allied units to their west and the river behind them. Estonia’s superbly trained special operations forces nipped at the heels of the invaders and demoralized them.
Krone’s plans accomplished their objective. They crumpled the Russian offensive and brought it to a halt. Putin could not turn back politically. Tactically, the Narva complicated his generals’ escape route back into Russia.
