The United States has recently been criticized for a dearth of strategic thought. Those in the naval service can rightfully take umbrage at the charge. The Navy and Marine Corps have historically thought strategically. They laid out the strategy for a war against Japan long before Pearl Harbor. I believe they can also claim a share of the credit for setting the military basis for the end of the Cold War with the 1980s Maritime Strategy. As seafarers, the services were born of Alfred Thayer Mahan to think strategically, and that meant using the seas offensively.
During the Vietnam War the naval services were heavily engaged on land, sea and air in Southeast Asia. But when the conflict ended they were consigned to the sidelines as that chapter of U.S. military history came to a close. The focus of the post-Vietnam period shifted to the NATO-Warsaw Pact standoff in Europe—the preserve of the Army and Air Force. The Navy's job was to try and keep the sea lanes of communication (SLOC) open from the continental United States to Europe. While the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan provided for the deployment of Marines to Europe, there was no European Command employment plan. The Marines were valued as little more than a source of manpower and airplanes until two Marines on the command's staff wrote the flank 4105 Plan.
Passive Paralysis
In this post-Vietnam era, NATO was described as a defensive alliance. Unfortunately, the phrase was taken too literally for the alliance suffered from a defensive mindset and culture. Although it proclaimed a "forward defense" sworn to defend German soil, the fact was, nobody thought NATO was capable of stopping the Soviet juggernaut in Europe short of going nuclear, and that was a prospect that made statesmen in NATO and Warsaw Pact capitals shudder. Both sides concluded that a tactical nuclear war would quickly escalate to the strategic level, something neither wanted. Thus, the tactical nuclear option was vitiated. The Warsaw Pact also advertised itself as a defensive alliance against NATO. But the Pact was organized, trained, and equipped for offensive mechanized warfare, a force that could overwhelmingly prevail on a conventional battlefield. It didn't need tactical nuclear weapons to win.
At the time, the defensive concept of reinforcing NATO from the United States with ten divisions in ten days had so many assumptions as to make it fantasy. Among other things, it depended on adequate warning time and sealing the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) Gap from Soviet submarine, surface, and air attacks on the SLOCs from the Kola Peninsula. Labels like "Active Defense" and "AirLand Battle" were also essentially defensive in nature. The NATO strategy, concept, and planning documents turned out in the 1960s, '70s, and early '80s amounted to passive paralysis. For all practical purposes, the best NATO could do in the face of a Soviet attack was to try to maintain an army-in-being by withdrawing toward the Pyrenees and hoping for a lot of good luck. The Soviets knew this. Their correlation of forces analyses put them at the English Channel even faster than the bleakest NATO estimate.
While the alliance concentrated its attention on the central front, little attention was paid to the flanks, particularly the northern one. But the Soviets didn't ignore the flanks. In their northern Theater of Military Operations, the Soviets were massing ballistic-missile and attack submarines in the Kola region. Ground and amphibious forces were poised against Norway and Denmark. Like a pair of ice tongs they planned to seize the Baltic region with one point of the tongs while with the other they planned on capturing northern Norway. This would give them unfettered access to the Atlantic from the Baltic and Norwegian seas. With control of the northern flank they could extend land-based support for their naval brothers as they debouched into the Atlantic to cut the SLOCs to Europe. For the task, the Soviets mustered 405 aircraft and more than 100,000 ground and naval assault forces. Most important, they also had 500 surface ships and 175 submarines, including 90 ballistic-missile boats with strategic missions.
Seizing the Initiative
This dismal state of affairs began to change in the 1980s with the emergence of two elements. One was a maritime strategy, the other was dramatic U.S. advances in military technology. It turned out to be a happy combination. This commentary, however, confines itself with the strategic part of the equation.
Spearheaded by naval leadership under an aggressive Secretary of the Navy, John F. Lehman Jr., and his bid for a 600-ship Navy, the Navy and Marine Corps jumped into the NATO game big time. The key was to turn the Soviet threat on its head by seizing the initiative at the outset of a war. Defense of the GIUK Gap would be subordinated to offensive operations in the high north against the Soviet crown jewels on the Kola. The initial idea was to start the wheels rolling before a war during a so-called "time of tension." This was considered risky, as it would mean putting aircraft carrier battle groups and submarines in extreme danger in what was the Kremlin's backyard.
Legions of doubters questioned the feasibility of the strategy. Most believed the Navy would end up at the bottom of the Norwegian Sea. There is no doubt had war broken out, the Navy would have suffered severe losses. But given the high stakes in a NATO-Warsaw Pact war, the losses would be justified if the strategy was successful. The Navy's Maritime Strategy was in the best tradition of Midway and Leyte Gulf.
The Navy began exercising carriers in the Norwegian Sea and experimenting with air operations out of the Norwegian fjords. Deception operations were successfully instituted against an increasingly concerned Soviet Navy, which saw a threat develop that it seemed unable to counter. For the first time in the Cold War the initiative had shifted to the West. The Soviets now had to worry about what NATO could do to them rather that what they could do to NATO. The Russian representatives at the Bodo conference conceded that they could not counter the threat in the north without putting an enormous and intolerable strain on their vulnerable economic, technical, strategic nuclear, and conventional military resources.
Send in the Marines
As carrier task forces practiced their trade in northern waters, Marines began training in the Arctic conditions. More important, they also provided critical air support to both Norway and to Fleet operations. The key to the defense of Norway was seen as primarily air power from carriers and Translant Marine reinforcing aircraft to already active reception fields in Norway. The key within this key was U.S. Navy air, sea, and subsurface attacks on the Kola.
High northern Norway was initially conceded to Soviet ground forces (with the exception of Soviet amphibious operations that we were confident we could destroy). The Norwegian defense line was drawn in the Troms?? area. Marines and UK/Netherlands reinforcements to the Norwegians would be in place by the time the Soviets reached that location where they would then be stopped. With extended LOCs across the Finnmark region of Norway, the Soviets would be vulnerable to counterattack and air attacks by an increasing inventory of allied air forces.
The Corps also began prepostioning a brigade's worth of equipment for fly-in units in bomb-proof caves in the Trondheim area. Northern Norway would no longer be a pushover for the Soviets. Concurrently, Marines eyed landing sites on Jutland as a way of introducing air-ground amphibious forces to help bottle up the Baltic, defend Denmark, and bring pressure on the right flank of the Warsaw Pact in the central region. The chances of success in the Baltic were not very high, but it gave the Soviet general staff something more to worry about, particularly as their Polish allies, whose loyalty to the Warsaw Pact was questionable, were tasked with that area.
By going on the immediate offensive in the high north and putting the Soviets on the defensive in their home waters, the Maritime Strategy not only served to defend Scandinavia, but also served to mitigate the SLOC problem. The likelihood of timely reinforcement of NATO from the United States was now more than a pious hope.
With the emergence of an offensive strategy in the 1980s, a change in mindset was energized by concurrent dramatic advances in American technology, especially in C4ISR and weapon systems, that were rapidly offsetting Soviet numerical and material superiority in Europe. No lesser light than the USSR Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov warned that American superiority was shifting the "correlation of forces" in NATO's favor. He called the phenomenon a "military technological revolution." By the end of the decade the military threat from the Soviet Union was consigned to the dust bin of history and with it, the Cold War.