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Sir James Cable
Ten years ago, the defenseless condition of the Falkland Islands attracted an Argentine invasion, and I first described “the single scenario”—the idea that the only threat deserving serious consideration was a Soviet attack on the Central Front—as “a certifiable delusion.”' In successive books I deprecated undue preoccupation with naval strategies rooted in this scenario: in Britain, with the protection of seaborne reinforcement and resupply of the Central Front; in the United States with an early forward deployment “triggered by recognition that a specific international situation has the potential to grow to a global superpower confrontation.”2 Instead, I advocated the classical doctrine: that oceangoing navies exist to permit a response to the unforeseen and should shun predetermined strategies liable to impair their flexibility. In this century only the Japanese Navy has been able to apply in war the strategy it had devised in peace. Other navies had to discard their peacetime notions, because new weapons (submarines in World War I, aircraft in World War II) assumed unexpected importance, or because the enemy achieved strategic surprise.
The situation that now confronts the navies of the North At-
The world is more unstable now than it has been in 20 years—especially in the Middle East. While peace talks proceeded in mid-February, so did the funeral of Iranian- backed Hezbollah leader Sheik Abbas Musawi, killed when Israeli helicopters fired into his motorcade in Lebanon.
lantic Alliance is different. It sometimes happened in miniature over past naval battles, but never in peacetime, politically, and on so vast a scale. The enemy has disintegrated; the Soviet Union no longer exists; the Warsaw Pact has crumbled; communism is dying in the bed where it was born. Ten years ago that would have been too good a dream to confess. Today we are not so sure. Nuclear weapons are still there, but who controls them, and how many will leak into the hands of a Saddam Hussein or a Muammar Gadhafi or the Iranian Ayatollahs? Whose orders will the former Soviet soldiers, sailors, and airmen obey? We may even come to regret the disappearance of a known, probably rational, predictable enemy. But of one thing we may be reasonably sure. Whatever else emerges from the chaos, the hunger, and the growing unrest now spreading across the former Soviet Union, the most dangerous threat is not an organized attack on the Central Front.
Unfortunately, the world holds dangers undreamed of in the single scenario, and wars of aggression are inevitable. Saddam Hussein provided a much-needed reminder of this. Even in the absence of the familiar threat, the world has not for 20 years been so unstable as it is in 1992. Now is the time for redeployment, for fresh thinking, for the recovery of flexibility. It is not yet a time for spending a “peace dividend,” which has still to be earned.
In politics—and especially in international relations—change can be for the better, once human beings and the societies in which they live have had enough time to adjust their ideas and to adapt their behavior. But the initial effects are usually disturbing and often dangerous. This turbulence can also be slow to subside. The Soviet Union has collapsed at a time when countries all over the world are still paying—in disorder and im-
I
Naval Forces In Perspective
poverishment—the cost of their independence from earlier empires. Lebanon is an obvious example. The realm that Mikhail Gorbachev was the last to rule may indeed have been, as President Ronald Reagan characterized it, “an evil empire.” But too many of its former subjects are now hungrier, angrier, and more despairing than they used to be. And the rest of the world— which had gradually learned to cope with a single power center in Moscow—must now reckon with 20 independent governments, many of them only precariously in control of their people.
Those people of the former Soviet Union feel the turbulence this change has generated most acutely. There is dissension and conflict—sometimes actual fighting—within the newly independent states and between one republic and another. As of early 1992 Russian hopes to inherit the core of the Soviet defense forces were in jeopardy. The other republics wanted separate military organizations and tried to withdraw their own nationals from the former Soviet Army, already crippled by the collapse of conscription, by problems over food and pay, lack of discipline, and low morale. The former Soviet Navy, already withdrawing from the high seas, faced further problems when the Ukraine demanded its share of the Black Sea Fleet (30% of its sailors—more of its bases—belong to the Ukraine). Further difficulties surfaced when officers reportedly took independent control of the Baltic Fleet pending acceptable guarantees for their own future economic security. Even in the Northern Fleet—supposedly a safe haven for the latest carrier—sailors plundered British beef meant for the citizens of Murmansk.
Control of Soviet nuclear weapons aroused the most anxiety abroad. Even if the agreed concentration under Russian control is actually implemented, no one can be sure that the Russian soldiers in charge will, as their society disintegrates around them, maintain the unquestioning obedience and sense of duty drilled into them in a more disciplined era. In any case, from whom Would their orders come? British Secretary of State for Defence Tom King told the House of Commons on 14 January: “We do not even have a good idea or any confidence who might be in control in ten weeks from now.”3
Inside the former Soviet Union no dependable, cohesive force remains. Nothing—no ideology, no party, no single military loyalty, not one unifying patriotism, but many conflicting nationalisms—provides the stability and predictability we took for granted during the reign of “the evil empire.” Organized, purposeful efforts to regenerate the economy and restore social cohesion are conspicuously lacking. That is one of the reasons why, in the political—even the military—context, sudden, isolated impulses of energetic despair remain disquietingly possible. Secretary King was not being needlessly alarmist when he declared that the world was now “at greater nuclear risk than during the frozen period of the Cold War.”4
Now that the Cold War is over, naval forces can concentrate on evacuating endangered civilians. The Navy and Marine Corps have executed several such operations. Here, civilians in Monrovia, Liberia, wait to board a Marine CH-46E Sea Knight, landing to evacuate the U.S. Embassy there on 27 August 1990 as part of Operation Sharp Edge.
That risk is real. The new rulers of Russia know it, and only they can effectively contain it. If the command structure collapses, and anarchy prevails, external deterrence ceases to be dependable. Assuming, as we must, that Russia’s leaders contrive to cage the nuclear tiger, they may decide to concentrate on rebuilding their own country, retaining in harbor or even selling the warships they can no longer afford to fuel. If China does not catch the Soviet virus, it may keep the red flag flying when the Russian Navy finally abandons the base at Cam Ranh Bay. Then there is Islamic fundamentalism—a militant ideology with the exportable fervor long lost by communism and enough oil money to buy weapons and experts. Its missionaries are already active in the Moslem republics of the former Soviet Union. The southern shore of the Mediterranean may give the Sixth Fleet more trouble than the Fifth Eskadra ever did—after 1973, that is. Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco are all at risk. The oil- rich countries of the Persian Gulf may again need help, for Saddam Hussein survived. And he is, in any case, by no means the only adventurer in the Middle East. The end of bipolarity will mean more turbulence, not less.
Much of this turbulence may not reach the level of even limited war, though the recent fighting in Yugoslavia has been on a scale scarcely seen in mainland Europe for 40 years. If a regenerated United Nations resorts—there or in other coastal states—to the use of peacekeeping forces, seaborne air cover could give the lightly armed soldiers some welcome life insurance. A less controversial naval role, though one long-sacrificed to the exigencies of the Cold War, would be the evacuation of endangered civilians, as was done for Greeks from Smyrna in 1922 or Spaniards during the Civil War of 1936 to 1939. And it is high time the oceangoing navies of the world cooperated in a campaign for the suppression of piracy, which flourishes to an extent disgraceful in the 20th century.
The naval future will likely lack the simple certainties of the past 45 years. Events now unforeseen will determine the identity of the enemy—whose hostility may be perceived only when he attacks—and the nature of the task. In the words of the annual Royal Navy Broadsheet published by the British Ministry of Defence in 1986:
“Maritime strategy is inherently variable; there are always a number of possible options and scenarios to choose from. We have to expect the unexpected, keep our options open and keep the initiative.”
After all, nations have navies because they do not know what might happen at sea.
'James Cable, Britain's Naval Future (Annapolis. Md: Naval Institute Press, 1983), p. xiv.
ADM James D. Watkins, "The Maritime Strategy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, 1986, p. 9.
The London Times, 15 January 1992.
'Op. cit., 14 January 1992.
Sir James Cable, a retired British ambassador, is the author of three recent books— Gunboat Diplomacy. 1919-1979 (1985), Navies in Violent Peace (1989), and Intervention at Abadan (1991) all published by St. Martin's Press. New York.
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'oceedings / Naval Review 1992