For the 40 years of the Cold War, the Russians were the enemy and our strategy was to counter Soviet aggression. Underpinning it all was a powerful and capable Navy to ensure control of the sea. In the new international environment—minus the Soviet threat, but with numerous other security concerns—the Navy and Marine Corps still will play the major role within the force structure of our military establishment.
n 2 September of this year, Americans will be ^celebrating the 50th anniversary of the end of 'World War II. One of history’s greatest victories, it hasTbeen referred to as the last “good” war. By that is meant a war worth fighting, a war in which our country’s survival was at stake, a war in which one would be willing to risk his life. By implication then, Korea and Vietnam—and the dirty little police actions in between—
were not “good” wars. This is a view that needs a fundamental reappraisal. Korea and Vietnam were successive campaigns in a larger and more desperate struggle that began with the end of World War II and lasted for four decades, until the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1989. This was the Cold War, and during this epic struggle between the Western powers and the Soviet Bloc, the very survival of the United States was at stake.
For more than 30 years, the United States and its people were threatened with annihilation by 12,000 Soviet nuclear weapons. The Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated that in a strategic nuclear exchange, between 80 million and 130 million Americans would die. Both the United States and the Soviet Union poured a national treasure into their nuclear arsenals. In fact, it was the commitment of the Soviets to the destruction of the United States—characterized by Kruschev’s statement, “We shall bury you”— that hastened the economic ruin of Russia and the political collapse of the USSR.
The Soviet Union was our adversary. The USSR, through its enormous armies, had the capability to overwhelm and occupy Western Europe, and in its nuclear arsenal, it had the capacity to inflict 180 million casualties on our population and literally destroy our industrial economy. Although we fought major conflicts with Korea, China, and Vietnam during this time, those countries did not represent threats to our survival. The Soviet Union alone had the capacity to challenge the very existence of the United States.
' For the 40 years of the Cold War, our basic security philosophy was simple: The Russians were the enemy; our strategy was to counter Soviet aggression; our military establishment was designed to defeat the Soviet military across the spectrum of warfare. The military posture that could contain the Soviet Union could handle any other crisis. The Soviet Union was by far the most powerful potential adversary on the global horizon.
The military strategy that supported this national security policy was equally straightforward, enduring, and remarkably successful. It was known as the forward collective strategy, but it could have been referred to as a maritime strategy with equal accuracy. It was predicated on the geographic disposition of the United States, its allies, and its enemies. In the Western Hemisphere, North America is virtually an island. The United States shares the continent only with Canada, Mexico, and Central America. We have only two international borders, without a potential threat to our basic security behind either one. On the other hand, 2 of our 50 states, all of our territories, and 40 of the 42 nations with whom we had treaties or security arrangements were overseas. ■
This forward strategy used the oceans as barriers in defense of the homeland and as avenues for extending our influence abroad. It exploited the principle that in war fighting we intended to engage an enemy closer to his borders than to ours. This forward strategy depended upon overseas allies, forward deployed military forces, and the mobility to respond to crises around the world and to resolve incipient threats to our vital security interests in our favor before they could become shooting conflicts.
For this strategy to be workable, the United States had to have the ability and the willingness to carry out a full range of military options, including overt armed warfare. With the civilized world generally categorized as free or communist, governments conducting hostile acts against the United States and its allies were motivated by commonality of interest with the Soviets. In these confrontations with the lesser powers, there always was deep concern over possible Soviet military intervention. The U.S. leadership constantly was faced with the critical decision as to how hard and how far the Russians could be pushed in areas of their own vital interests before the Kremlin would commit Soviet military forces to combat against the Americans, with the likely and frightening potential for escalation to nuclear warfare.
But the tactical maneuvering room for our conventional forces was broadened greatly by the fact that throughout the Cold War the United States always maintained essential equivalence with—and at times clear superiority over—the Soviet Union in nuclear warfare capability. This significantly raised the threshold for nuclear war. If either side were to introduce nuclear weapons into a conflict, the nuclear response from the other side would be immediate and devastating. Because both the Americans and the Russians early on had achieved an operational submarine ballistic-missile capability that could survive a first strike to inflict unacceptable damage on the enemy, neither side was capable of a disarming surprise nuclear attack. As a consequence, the United States and its allies were able to conduct major military operations—and in fact fought two major wars—against communist nations and Soviet clients without nuclear intervention on the part of the Soviet Union.
Despite what may have been viewed a stalemate in Korea and a loss in Vietnam, the United States consistently prevailed throughout the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union. During that time, there was no Soviet military aggression against our NATO military partners or Japanese allies. Soviet forces did not attack Western Europe, and North Korea has not again attacked South Korea. U.S. military power was responsible for our survival and our ultimate victory in the Cold War.
The arms technology generated by these four decades of confrontation—nuclear weapons, intercontinental missiles, jet aircraft, and nuclear-powered submarines are but several examples—has restructured for all time the most basic concepts of warfare. It is of infinite credit to our military leadership that we were able to integrate effectively the enormous power and global reach of these new weapons into our operating forces, to constrain the spread of Soviet influence, and at the same time avoid plunging civilization into the holocaust of a general nuclear war.
The complexity of the tasks faced by our military leadership was awe-inspiring. In Korea and Vietnam, we fought in major conflicts in combat theaters that were located almost as far away from the Pentagon as it is possible to get. In those theaters, we not only provided combat forces, but also constructed virtually all of the logistical infrastructure for their support—and did both with limited assistance from our allies.
The role of the U.S. Navy in this forward collective defense was essential. Without a navy capable of gaining and maintaining maritime superiority, the forward strategy was unworkable. That is why it often was called the maritime strategy. The Navy’s functions were threefold:
► To provide the sea-based segment of the strategic triad of nuclear forces—the ballistic-missile submarines, whose virtual invulnerability made them the single credible strategic retaliatory force
► To provide naval components of the U.S. armed forces deployed overseas, such as the Sixth Fleet in the Mediter-
ranean, the Seventh Fleet in the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean, and the Marines deployed to Korea and Vietnam
> To protect the sea lanes, the lines of communication between the United States and our overseas allies, and our own forward deployed forces
In addition to the 40 overseas nations with whom we maintain national security arrangements, the United States during the entire period of the Cold War maintained an overseas force of four Army divisions in Germany, another in Korea, and a Marine division in Japan. In time of conflict, these allies and our own overseas forces had to be reinforced and resupplied. All of the remaining U.S. Army and Marine ground forces were located in the United States. Unless we were to go to war in Canada or Mexico, those divisions would have to be transported overseas to fight.
To accomplish these three roles successfully required that the United States be able to control the seas, specifically those ocean areas needed for the requirements of our national security plans. NATO’s utter dependence on the U.S. Navy’s ability to maintain control of the seas was not lost on Soviet military planners. If the U.S. Navy could be defeated, the allies’ ability to control the sea would
be lost, the Western concept of a forward collective strategy would become invalid, and NATO would collapse. The main support for our European allies had to come from the United States by ship. The mechanization and firepower of the U.S. Army and Air Force first-line components, with their requirement for large quantities of combat consumables and the heavy equipment characteristic of armored divisions and all-weather tactical aircraft, necessitate reinforcement and resupply by sea. For example, more than 100,000 tons of cargo are required to deploy a single mechanized division. When overseas, that division will need more than 1,000 tons per day delivered to sustain it in operations. In their fiscal year 1985 Posture Statement, the Joint Chiefs of Staff reported: “In any major overseas deployment, sealift will have to deliver about 95 percent of all dry cargo and more than 90 percent of all petroleum products.”
Airlift was planned for the rapid movement of troops to join up with prepositioned equipment and for the fast delivery of small amounts of critical supplies and materiel. But airlift is severely limited in its ability to move out- sized equipment and in the total volume that can be lifted. A large portion of the organic equipment of modern armies—such as bulldozers, bridges, helicopters, and tank retrievers—will not fit in most aircraft. One modern con- tainership can deliver the equivalent cargo of 150 C-5 aircraft—and there were only 75 C-5s in the Air Force inventory during the Cold War years.
From the beginning, Soviet strategic planners saw NATO’s viability as dependent upon Atlantic sea lines of communication, and they were determined to do something about it. They set out to build a modern navy
that could challenge the U.S. Navy for control of the sea. Employing the most modem weapons of advanced maritime technology—nuclear-powered submarines, submarine-launched missiles, supersonic maritime strike aircraft, and long-range antiship missiles—the Russian Navy was conceived, designed, built, and trained to defeat the U.S. Navy. There was no other reason for it.
The territory of the USSR, spanning a continent, dominates Eurasia. On its southeastern flank lies the People’s Republic of China. Arrayed along the western border were the buffer satellite nations of the Warsaw Pact, and farther to the west are the NATO nations of Western Europe, a prize clearly coveted by the Soviets. The Soviet Union could defend itself from the Chinese communists, support its Warsaw Pact allies, and invade Western Europe without ever crossing a major body of water. Why then did the Russians build the largest Navy in the world? The answer was to oppose and to defeat the U.S. Navy, gain control of the Atlantic, invalidate the Western forward collective strategy, and ensure the quick collapse of NATO.
In the early days of the Cold War, the Soviet Union maintained a powerful initiative toward world domination through the spread of communism, an autocracy that linked
those communist states to the Soviet Union in a subservient, virtually colonial role. It was through their communist surrogates that the Soviets created the incidents to which the United States, as the leader of the Free World, was obligated to respond. It was U.S. strategy to keep deployed around the globe heavily armed, mobile ready forces, constantly on the alert to react to an incident in virtually any part of the world outside the Soviet Union and China and their satellites. Their mission was to resolve the problem in our favor before it escalated into general war. In most cases, this tactical approach was successful within the overall strategy. On two occasions, however—in Korean and Vietnam—our early intervention did not produce quick solutions, and our national involvement in long, drawn-out, major wars ensued.
In the force structure of the Cold War military establishment, Navy and Marine components made up the majority of the mobile ready forces with adequate logistical support and suitable combat power (including an inherent nuclear capability) for contingency operations. Conceptually, the carrier task forces—later to become carrier battle groups—and the Navy-Marine amphibious task forces were to be the first on scene as the quick reaction forces. In both Korea and Vietnam, the carriers and Marines stayed on beyond their initial response function throughout the conflict, to make major contributions to our limited successes in both wars.
In the early months of the Korean War, when all of the tactical airfields in Korea had been overrun by enemy troops, the only close air support for our beleaguered forces in the Pusan perimeter was from the Seventh Fleet carriers. This air support proved to be a decisive factor in keeping the battered U.S. and South Korean forces from being driven into the sea. The total defeat of the North Korean armed forces and the regaining of South Korea was the result of the amphibious landing at Inchon, linking up with the forces in the Pusan perimeter and driving north
to reoccupy South Korea.
After the defeat of the North Koreans, when the Chinese communists entered the war to overwhelm the U.N. forces north of the demilitarized zone, only the Marines came out of the major U.N. penetrations into North Korea with their units intact. The Marines stayed on the line throughout the rest of the war in Korea, being largely responsible, along with some Republic of Korea divisions, for the eastern sector of the demilitarized zone.
In the Vietnam War, the first air strikes against the North Vietnamese were flown from carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin. Ultimately, more than half of all the missions into North Vietnam were flown by Navy and Marine pilots.
In the ground campaign, by 1968, there were 80,000 Marines in country, more than were involved in either Iwo Jima or Okinawa in World War II. This amounted to a commitment of two and two-thirds divisions out of a total of four divisions in the entire Marine Corps.
While U.S. military forces were fighting in the Pacific, American soldiers and sailors in the Atlantic and Europe were deployed on the front lines to deter the Soviet armies in the Warsaw Pact satellites from attacking across the East German plains to roll on to the channel ports and the North Sea. All during the time that our conventional forces were defending and fighting, the U.S. Strategic Command maintained a second-by-second, around-the-clock readiness for nuclear retaliatory strikes as a deterrent to any Soviet adventuring with their nuclear forces.
Although the wars in Korea and Vietnam at the time may not have appeared to be decisive in terms of winning or losing, our commitments in those theaters were critical campaigns in the prosecution of the broader conflict of the Cold War. Both were strategically essential for the defense of our allies, the containment of communism, and the ultimate national objective of blunting the threat of the Soviet’s nuclear arsenal.
By the commitment of U.S. citizens to the battlefields of Korea and Vietnam, this country demonstrated its resolve and established a level of credibility for our foreign policy. There is no question that without the deterrent presence of U.S. troops—in what has been referred to as the trip-wire strategy—the Russians would have moved against our allies in Western Europe. But the Soviet leadership was convinced that the United States would honor its com-
mitments to its allies and that Americans would fight in support of those obligations. Most of all, the Soviets believed that the United States was determined not to lose to the Russians, even if it meant the possibility of the ultimate resort to nuclear weapons.
Our own military strategy was predicated on the conviction that the Kremlin truly believed that the United States would live up to its obligations to its friends and allies—even if it meant the loss of American lives, and even though it might involve nuclear weapons in the final showdown.
Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. military constantly patrolled the frontiers of the Soviet Union with powerful combat-ready forces. The Army in Germany and Korea, the Marines in Japan, the Navy in the Pacific, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean—all were forward deployed to ensure that should the fighting start, the conflict would be fought closer to the enemy’s borders than to ours. The presence of these battle-ready forces in their lonely outposts was not wasted. Time and again a local outbreak that had the potential to lead to serious trouble was subdued by the immediate presence of U.S. forces powerful enough to limit the conflict and stabilize the confrontation before the crisis could degenerate into an all- encompassing war.
Those incidents may be only half-remembered by this generation, but they will never be forgotten by those soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen who were there, operating under rules of engagement that required they be shot at before they could shoot back.
The Berlin airlift, the Suez Crisis, the Lebanon landings, the Formosa Strait, the Mayaguez off Cambodia, the Korean demilitarized zone—this is only a partial recitation of the litany of crises, which if left without a forceful military response could have posed grave threats to our allies or our own national interests.
The Cold War was won by American citizen-soldiers, who—when they were not fighting and dying in Korea and Vietnam—were patrolling a lonely frontier 10,000 miles from home and family. They fought under conditions that would have been inconceivable in World War II. It was not their fault that the wars in Korea and Vietnam were not clear victories.
Deliberate budget constraints limited ammunition for artillery support in Korea and aviation fuel for training combat pilots in Vietnam. A public preoccupation with getting the Korean War over for any concession was only exceeded some 20 years later by an apathetic home front that accepted the American flag being burned in campus rallies and public speeches of support for the Viet Cong. What these American fighting men lacked in support from the home front was made up for by their own courage and
the strength of their leadership in the field.
In Vietnam, 67 Navy carrier squadron commanders and executive officers were lost in action leading their flights on combat missions. In Korea, one-third of those West Point lieutenants from the classes of 1949 and 1950 who were rushed to Korea immediately after graduation were killed, wounded, or missing in action. Despite the remoteness of the battlefields, the meanness of the objectives, and the apathetic attitudes of the American people, these citizen-soldiers fought, and, in most cases, they fought well. They all risked their lives, and many died: 50,000 in Korea and 55,000 thousand in Vietnam.
The Cold War is over. The Soviet Union has been defeated. The threat to the survival of the United States from the Soviet Union is gone, at least for the period of our future military planning. Nevertheless, there are existing threats to the United States and its allies, and there can be, if otherwise ignored, emergent threats to our vital national interests.
We do have national security concerns, and we do need military defense forces. Today, we have an Army, a Navy, a Marine Corps, and an Air Force that are as ready in terms of technology and training as at any time in our country’s history. The size, organization, and integration of each of these components will depend in the future as it has in the past upon the national military strategy that this country has adopted to cope with the perceived threat.
The time has come for a reappraisal of our national security policies and the updating of our military strategy. The basic conditions under which we postulated our forward collective strategy for the containment of communism have gone away. An obvious prerequisite to designing
a strategic guidance for the next 20 years is to consider the world environment as it can be expected to evolve through that period.
It is difficult—if not downright reckless—to attempt to predict the future while faced with the turbulent world of today, but by avoiding the short term and dealing in generalities, most pundits agree on some fundamental characteristics for the world order that is expected to emerge over the next two decades. It will be a world whose complexities are heightened by its uncertainties, but it is still the world in which the United States must develop a military strategy to ensure its security and preserve its position of leadership. We will face an international environment interlaced with complicating political, social, and economic pressures that will generate instability among both emerging nations and lesser-developed regions. This instability will take on an even more dangerous aspect when more nations gain the capability to use nuclear weapons for military purposes.
In terms of our own security, the simple geography of the past 50 years will be gone. Instead of our defenses being drawn on the eastern border of Germany, the demilitarized zone in Korea, and the Sea of Japan, the United States and its allies will face threats from virtually all directions and at all levels of warfare, from low-intensity conflicts to nuclear strikes.
It will be a security environment that virtually demands a maritime strategy. The continuing erosion of our overseas base structure will accelerate with the emergence of additional Third World nations with strong senses of national sovereignty. Even after our intervention in the Middle East at the Saudis’ request, we were not able to keep sizable contingency forces on the Arabian Peninsula. Fortunately, the alternative to overseas basing exists today with the naval forces designed for power projection, amphibious assault, and strategic sealift.
The proliferation of Third World powers with significant military capabilities also will place a premium on the utility of naval forces. NATO was ideally suited for the employment of semipermanent, forward-based forces such as the U.S. Army and Air Force in Europe. But with the emergence of Third World military powers in South America, Asia, Africa, and the Indian Ocean, meeting all the potential threats to collective U.S. security by maintaining forward deployed, fixed forces on a semipermanent basis becomes impossible. The evolution of this new middle class of military powers means that peripheral conflicts can originate anywhere in the world and be fought with modern high-technology weapons, including nuclear arms. To react to such crises, highly responsive, militarily powerful, high-technology forces that possess an inherent nuclear capability are needed. Naval forces will be our only alternative to forward basing in most areas of the world.
Even with the availability of extremely long-range guided missiles, manned aircraft will continue to be essential in a future world of many potential antagonists with complicated alliances. The rules of engagement will demand positive target identifications to avoid starting bloody conflicts through errors. With the redeployment of Air Force tactical wings from Europe to U.S. bases, the carriers will have to provide the overseas tactical air for the
U.S. presence over a substantially broader area of the globe.
Finally, with the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of lesser nations, which may not be constrained by the same reservations observed by the superpowers, it becomes a matter of vital national concern that the United States be prepared to react to wars on a periphery in such a way that U.S. sovereign territory will not become the launching site for nuclear attacks. We must avoid any possible justification for retaliatory nuclear strikes being directed against targets in the continental United States.
With the lessening of the threat of the Soviet conventional arms, withdrawal and redeployment of U.S. Army forces and their supporting Air Force elements from Europe to the United States is inevitable. With a rapprochement between North and South Korea, there could be substantial reductions of U.S. ground forces from that peninsula, as well as from Japan. Current defense planning is programming reductions of almost one third in U.S. Army and Air Force unit structure. These reductions, combined with the loss of foreign bases and the drawdown of forward deployed Army and Air Force units in Europe, the Far East, and the Middle East, project a minimum presence of U.S. military forces deployed overseas on a semipermanent basis. It certainly will be the lowest since before World War II.
Despite the reduction in permanent U.S. presence abroad, there are no indications that the United States is considering a policy of isolationism. We remain the world’s leader militarily, economically, and in terms of moral responsibility. In the future, when crises occur beyond our borders that affect our national interests, the United States will continue to respond with alert, combat- ready, mobile forces whose function will be to resolve the conflict quickly and permanently in our own best interest.
When crises cannot be resolved in short order and more extensive intervention or large-scale peacekeeping or war fighting is involved, the mission of the Navy and the Marine Corps will remain crucial. Troops can be airlifted to a remote objective area, but the port of entry first must be made secure—and that is the job of the Marines. Except for moving across the borders from a friendly nation that has given permission for such use of its sovereign territory, the only other means of forcible entry in an opposed situation remains the amphibious assault landing. Then the support for such forces must come by ship. Our experience in Somalia showed that even when the enemy is not equipped with heavy tanks and artillery, armor for our own forces is absolutely essential. The only way armored forces can be introduced and supported overseas in extended operations is by sealift.
As the new national security philosophies evolve and the supporting strategies are defined, it is clear that the Navy and the Marine Corps will be playing the major role within the force structure of our military establishment as we plan for the next two decades.
Admiral Holloway served as Chief of Naval Operations and President of the Naval Institute. He retired after 39 years of active duty.