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They could be almost anywhere. And their versatility may be their most misunderstood virtue. Beneath the surface, submarines seem menacing enough. But their visibility on the surface is an overlooked deterrent. Potential targets within striking distance will think twice about starting anything.
Nearly 90 years ago and more than a decade before a submarine first fired a shot in anger, the following commentary suggested a way the submarine might break a blockade by a superior battle fleet:
. . . Colonel V. Cuniberti, of the Italian Navy, told me that he did not consider a submarine boat really needed torpedoes. . . . The moment the enemy’s Commander knew of the presence of a submarine boat he would undoubtedly turn tail and fly. "Of course,” the Colonel added, ‘she might carry torpedoes in case of necessity, but I don't think that they would ever be needed.1
Proceedings / January 1993 37
The language is archaic, and the idea of an unarmed submarine frightening off a war fleet sounds quaint, but the gist of the passage is a modern one. To put it even stronger, turn-of-the-century thought—that the mere presence of a submarine might win a bloodless victory— may just be more modern than today’s mainstream naval wisdom about the value of the submarine.
The “submarine torpedo-boat” has become a weapon of war with a versatility and lethality its pioneers could not possibly have dreamed; even its most devoted supporters would be shocked to find that the submarine has displaced the battleship and aircraft carrier as the “capital” ship in Jane’s Fighting Ships. Today’s submariners have no doubt that “their” weapons roundly deserve this label. If the submarine is indeed the capital ship ot modern naval power, however, this label rests exclusively on its anticipated superior war-fighting power.
Fortunately, wars at sea are few and far between. As a result, the capital invested in warships, especially in submarines, is commonly amortized without the fleet ever having to demonstrate its war-fighting capabilities. This may be the proof-in-the-pudding of a wise investment; the idea of a national investment in a general naval insurance policy sounds reasonable enough. But the matter is not that simple. The investors—i.e., the nation’s taxpayers— have the unfortunate tendency to renew their premium with reluctance if the insurance company’s board of directors, in this case the naval leadership, fails to convince them that, even without disaster—war—their investment will be amortized at a peacetime profit.
This is precisely the dilemma that confronts the U.S. Navy’s submarine force. The end of the Cold War superpower standoff means that the chances of the U.S. underwater fleet being used for its originally intended purpose are more remote than ever. It also signifies Navywide force and budget cuts. But in the fight for post-Cold War procurement dollars, the surface fleet will have one important advantage: practice and popular perception have created an image of the surface navy—aircraft carriers, cruisers, amphibious ships—as a profitable investment short of outright war; that, unlike submarines, surface combatants are a “usable” force in peacetime. At hand is, of course, that bundle of naval activities variously called “presence,” “showing-the-flag,” “crisis response,” or “naval diplomacy.”
Why Submarines “Won’t Do”
Using naval forces for suasive purposes short of war itself has been the U.S. Navy’s practical preoccupation since World War II. Naval forces— reported the then-Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans Policy, and Operations, Vice Admiral Henry C. Mustin, to Congress in 1988— are “the only forces since World War II that have consistently been available and able to meet the nation’s security demands in a crisis; they have been and will remain the force of preference in Third World crises and low-to-mid-in- tensity conflict situations.”2
Scholars of postwar U.S. naval history agree on the fleet’s importance as a military-diplomatic instrument. Barry M. Blechman and Stephen S. Kaplan’s important book Force Without War concluded that the Navy “clearly has been the foremost instrument for the United States’ political uses of the armed forces: at all times, in all places, and regardless of the specifics of the situation.”3 Students and practitioners of naval affairs also agree on another matter: naval influence-seeking is the business of surface fleets. Submarines may provide direct support on behalf of a carrier battle group sent into a crisis area, but this is merely an “auxiliary” task. Because of their technical characteristics and operational penchant for stealth, submarines are claimed incapable of communicating the kind of overt warning that most people believe is necessary to get the message across. “Where are the submarines?” has never been the question asked by U.S. crisis managers.
Why is it that the submarine is commonly dismissed as an investment in national security short of war? How can Sir James Cable, perhaps the most prolific modern commentator on diplomacy at sea, conclude that submarines “would not do” as a tool of crisis management?4 And what is the reasoning for the late Vice Admiral Sir Peter Stanford’s insistence that deterrence by way of naval presence demands surface ships, whereas “submarines, however valuable as fighting machines, make little contribution to naval diplomacy?”5 And finally, why has the submarine community itself preferred to be the “silent service” not only in operational terms but on this issue as well?
Three arguments are typically advanced to declare the submarine inherently unsuitable for presence purposes. First, the submarine cannot be seen. Traditional treatments of naval diplomacy maintain that its most striking feature—stealth—conflicts with the essence of naval crisis management, namely, visible presence. For a threat to be credible, it must be communicated. And that, it is said, if naval forces are used, this communication must be visible. The submarine’s design as a war-making platform is said to make it an all-or-nothing weapon, lacking the ability to engage in “proportional” violence. Military analyst Eric Grove put the problem this way: | are visible, and that crises can be managed from the seas only by the overt deployment of naval forces, can be taken to task on a number of grounds. What comes to mind first is the centerpiece of strategic deterrence and strategic crisis management, the nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarine (SSBN) fleet. But this is arguably a special case that operates by different rules than conventional deterrence. It is not clear that this is so, but there are other compelling reasons to test the insistence that naval suasion be visible and is therefore the monopoly of surface fleets. How Visible Is Visible? |
... the kind of damage they can inflict with their primary torpedo or missile weapons is almost always fatal and catastrophic. This rules them out as weapons of much utility in operations rations at the lower levels of intensity ... if they are unleashed then it usually marks a major escalation of the conflict.6 | If visibility is so critical, surface navies, too, fall short. Presence conveys the image of a stately procession of warships in full view of those intended to receive the message. In reality, fleet movements, especially during a crisis, do not take place in full view of observers on the beach. The straightforward explanation is that international law would not condone the presence of a crisis force in- |
When students of naval diplomacy speak of presence, they mean warships that exude power. To some, submarines fall short on this count, because they do not sport gun barrels or missile launchers. Even worse, the submarine’s clean lines—belying the fact that hidden within is an awesome killing machine—are said to project the wrong image. | side a country’s 12 nautical miles of territorial waters as “innocent passage.” More important, though, the commander of the presence force will have good operational cause not to be seen. He is likely to reason that the very credibility of his carrier battle group or amphibious task force as a political signal requires that his ships be set to shift from deterrence to hostilities under the best possible |
Deterrence, Crisis Stability, and Presence | circumstances, and his opponent be denied information that might lead him to miscalculate and take preemptive action. |
Nearly a half-century ago, author Bernard Brodie announced that, with the invention of nuclear weapons, the chief purpose of the U.S. military had changed from winning wars to averting them.7 From this basic statement evolved the body of concepts and theories that have since shaped our contemporary thinking about deterrence and crisis management. Perhaps the most basic rule of deterrence holds that for a threat to be credible and hence successfully deter, it must Fe communicated. Theorists and practitioners are less certain, however, on how a threat should be communicated and how much information should be contained in the communication. The question is this: Should a threat leave no doubt in the adversary’s mind about what the threat- ener intends and is capable of doing, or is deterrence better served by leaving room for uncertainty? Related is the question of how one packages the threat in a way that accommodates the political need on the one hand to prevent escalation but that, at the same time, prepares the military for the failure of deterrence. Deterrence theorists and practitioners have long discovered that there are no hard-and-fast answers—with one exception. For reasons not obvious in either theory or practice, dogma acknowledges that the communication of threats by seagoing forces must be overt, certain, and clear enough for the whole world to recognize. The very translation of the naval suasion concept into the word “presence” implies that it cannot be otherwise. The notion that naval forces impress only when they | “Presence,” for surface fleets, too, is little more than a metaphor—a throwback to the days when naval blockades were close things, and sea battles were witnessed by crowds on the beach. Crisis Stability and the Value of Invisibility Deterrence theory offers further grounds for questioning the requirement that naval presence be visible. At hand in particular is the concept of crisis stability, which says that international crisis managers must take care that their actions—especially the packaging of particular military forces—do not trigger inadvertent escalation. Measures to ensure crisis stability have both a political and a military component. At the political level, decisionmakers are cautioned to avoid steps, especially public steps, that corner an opponent. Thus, Blechman and Kaplan found that “national leaders will resist demands for policy modifications most strenuously when such demands are made publicly, which is usually unavoidable when military power is used.”8 If crisis stability is truly served by either more or less publicity about the deterrent force’s actions, and if the dispatch of high-profile naval forces is, by definition, a very public signal, then a covert display of force may occasionally be in order. This at least has long been recognized at the strategic nuclear level of crisis management.9 The question is why naval crisis managers have failed to take advantage of the ability to engage in the |
low-visibility signaling inherent in the submarine.
Military capabilities promote crisis stability if both sides perceive them as being able to survive a surprise attack and retaliate. Deterrence theory has mostly been preoccupied with the stability of strategic nuclear forces, but the concept applies equally to conventional forces.
Whether a particular military force posture is stable or not depends on both sides perceiving it as such. For the one doing the deterring, it depends on his confidence that he can ride out a surprise attack and retaliate, and on his confidence that the opponent knows this. For the other side it depends on an estimate that the opposing force is indeed survivable and is therefore under no pressure to launch a preemptive surprise attack. The anathema of crisis stability then is force vulnerability.
Are surface presence forces more vulnerable to surprise attack and therefore potentially more crisis-destabilizing than submarines? One answer is that it depends on the situation, in particular the military capabilities of the opponent. Thus, an adversary highly qualified in antisubmarine warfare could make a stable submarine presence untenable. The most likely targets of future naval crisis deployments will be ASW-poor countries in the Third World. But those same countries will also likely have relatively more advanced antisurface capabilities in the form of aircraft and missiles. This intimates that a surface presence offers an inherently better target-of-opportunity than the unknown whereabouts of a submarine flotilla.
The other answer is that the practice of U.S. naval crisis management has already demonstrated that a surface presence can be destabilizing because of its vulnerability. The prominent case in point is the Vincennes (CG-49) incident, in which vulnerability, or at least perceived vulnerability, compelled the ship's commanding officer to launch a preemptive defensive strike. The Navy’s longstanding reluctance to deploy its most visible weapon, the aircraft carrier, inside constricted waters offers another clue.
Does (ln)visibility Matter?
Two lines of argument have advanced so far to suggest that the importance of visible naval presence has been overstated. Alexander George and Richard Smoke have written that deterrence theory “suffers from its narrow focus on various devices one may employ for strengthening ‘one’s commitment’ or ‘reinforcing the credibility of one’s signals.” They also reported that, by contrast, insufficient attention has been paid to what they called the essence of credible deterrence, namely, the balance of the particular interests at stake.10 According to this theme, the success or failure of a military-diplomatic signal depends less on the dispatch of particular types and numbers of military forces than the substance of the message.
One case history that appears to support George’s and Smoke’s claim is the dispatch of Task Force 74 during the Indo-Pakistani War in 1971. Built around the aircraft carrier Enterprise (CVN-65), the force was designed to underscore the U.S. “tilt” on behalf of Pakistan and, at the same time, warn the Soviet Union that its naval presence in the Indian Ocean would not go unchallenged. The message was loud-and-clear enough, but it failed to impress: Neither India nor the Soviet Union believed that U.S. interests were involved sufficiently for Task Force 74 to make good on its threat and go to war."
If the strength and credibility of a committing signal depends on the substance of the issue at stake first and its instrument next, then it also follows that there may be times that crisis managers have no political reason to select surface over submarine forces as their instruments- of-choice. Naval diplomats have long shortchanged themselves by narrowly focusing on surface combatants and hence reacting to a crisis by asking “Where are the carriers?” They have unnecessarily restricted their options to a limited inventory of available combatants.
The Proportionality Issue
The second major argument against the submarine as a political weapon is its lack of proportionality. It cannot tire a weapon without meaning to kill and thereby commit the act of war that crisis management is supposed to prevent. More important, the party whose behavior the submarine is supposed to influence knows this and will therefore not likely be impressed unless that party expects war. According to Sir James Cable: “Even a merchant vessel with a bold captain might treat a summons (by a submarine) to ‘heave to or be sunk’ as constituting a threat too violent to be credible.”12
Proportionality in Deterrence Theory
The debate during the 1950s over how to make a nu-
clear threat credible led to two schools of thought. The “finality of deterrence” school held that successful deterrence hinges on the threatener’s resolve to inflict punishment in excess of the crime. According to this view, a sufficiently terrifying threat never needs implementing. By contrast, the “credibility of deterrence” school maintained that for a threat to deter it must be believable. Accordingly, credibility is largely in the eye of the threatened beholder, notably his perception of the relationship between the threatened punishment and the offense. If the two are asymmetrical, deterrence will probably fail, so that successful deterrence at all levels of provocation depends on an arsenal of “graduated” or “proportionate” threats.13
Related to these two approaches are two dilferent perspectives on controlled escalation as a crisis-management technique. One holds that escalatory measures to show resolve must be gradual and moderate to reassure the opponent that outright warfare is not intended. The other rejects the gradual approach for prolonging the risk and for tempting the opponent to match every move. This was former National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s view during the 1970 Jordanian crisis:
In my view what seems “balanced” and “safe” in a crisis is often the most risky. . . . Once (a leader) is committed, ... his obligation is to end the confrontation rapidly. For this he must convey implacability. He must be prepared to escalate rapidly and brutally to a point where the opponent can no longer afford to experiment.14
What is the measure of proportionality? Should it be measured by its immediate results or its long-term effect? A case in point is the sinking of the Argentine cruiser Bel- grano by the British submarine Conqueror during the Falk- lands Conflict. Critics condemned the act as disproportionate; the Argentines had received no direct warning, and the Belgrano posed no immediate danger to the advancing British task force. At a minimum, the Conqueror should have fired a warning shot first. Defenders, on the other hand, have argued that the submarine’s action was entirely appropriate and proportional to the broader issue at hand. The loss of the Belgrano sent a message that compelled the Argentine fleet to stay in port and thereby saved many lives, both British and Argentine.15
Proportionality Depends on the Crime
Proportionality says that the threat of punishment must be commensurate with the crime. It does not say that only minor crimes count. The indictment of the submarine rests on its shortcomings in a small and relatively benign portion of the overall crisis-management scheme. In other words, critics have generalized from the submarine’s inability to point a gun, fire a shot across-the-bow, and force a ship to heave to short of sinking it. According to Cable: “Perhaps the greatest weakness of the modern submarine is that it has no equivalent to the graduated ladder of violence enjoyed by (gun-armed) surface warships.”16 True, the modern submarine cannot fire a demonstrative shot across-the-bow. It can launch a torpedo deliberately fused short of the target, but at some one million dollars each, “wasting” a war shot is difficult to justify.17 The alternative is to prepare the submarine for surface action and reintroduce the gun mount that vanished when underwater hunting-and-killing of enemy submarines became the boat’s priority.18 Before this can happen, however, submariners must first be persuaded that there is life after stealth.
But it is narrow-sighted to insist that the value of the submarine as a tool of naval diplomacy stands or falls on its ability to enforce a blockade of seagoing traffic short of an act of war. The war in the Persian Gulf has highlighted the value of naval forces to enforce an embargo, but most of the international crises in recent memory that involved naval forces did not involve warnings to shipping. Instead, most of the episodes involved latent presence, without the firing of a gun or missile. Where latent violence did become active, the intent was mostly to kill.
Warship Aesthetics and Politics
The tendency of skeptics to generalize from the particular also surfaces in the claim that the submarine’s appearance makes it unsuitable for representational purposes. The submarine, wrote L. W. Martin in 1967, has a “sinister and furtive aspect that makes it questionable as an emissary of friendship, quite apart from its physical limitations.”19
Most observers of the naval scene agree that some ships look better than others. In that respect, Soviet Navy cruisers and destroyers have always compared favorably with Western ships. But warship aesthetics matter only at the bottom of the naval-presence ladder: the friendly port call. Even then, there are exceptions.
The submarine is not a practical platform for goodwill visits, if for no other reason than the difficulty in accommodating the hundreds, sometimes thousands of visitors who want to set foot on their first ship. Depending on the desired message to be sent, however, the submarine still can be the political platform of choice. A prominent case in point was the visit by the Polaris-class submarine Sam Houston (SSBN-609) to the Turkish port of Izmir in April 1963. Had this been a routine representational call, the visitor would have been one of the Sixth Fleet’s carriers or cruisers normally on duty in the area. At hand, however, was a distinct political signal—as weighty as the one conveyed by the battleship Missouri (BB-63) 17 years earlier. The intent was to reassure Turkey and at the same time remind the Soviet Union that the then-recent removal of Jupiter missiles from Turkish soil did not diminish the U.S. strategic nuclear guarantee. Some analysts have argued that the temporary visit of U.S. seabased missiles was not an adequate substitute for the “permanency” of the ground-based Jupiters. But at that particular moment, U.S. decision-makers believed that only a submarine could send the appropriate signal.
Warship Capability & Appearance in the Third World
The claim that foreign port calls to impress must be the business of awe-inspiring ships suggests that foreigners, especially the citizens of the developing nations, cannot appreciate a warship that does not show power by way of deck-mounted guns and missile launchers. This may be true for the average viewer, but the claim grossly underestimates the sophistication of the audience that ultimately matters: the host country’s political and military elite. Developed and developing nations transact business in the same global arms market; the proliferation of regional hardware shows that the modern Third World leader is fully aware of the submarine’s hidden capacity for violence. For proof, one has only to consider the submarine’s popularity among Third World navies.
Conclusion
Today, the U.S. Navy confronts the necessity of finding innovative ways to do more with less. Overall fleet levels are declining; the goal of a 600-ship Navy with 15 aircraft carriers has already been downsized to a 450-ship fleet centered on a dozen carriers. And even these numbers are not sacrosanct. At the same time, national policy dictates that forward presence must remain one of the pillars of the nation’s security. The implication for the Navy and the nation is obvious: Neither will long be able to afford presence as the province of visible warships alone. Naval officers will need to turn their thoughts to new ways of efficiently amortizing all assets.
This observation matters, especially to the submarine community. Given that the curtain has fallen on the Cold War, submariners will need to persuade the body politic that, even without the specter of another Atlantic tonnage war, the underwater platform is a capital investment in war and in peace.
This is not to say that the submarine can be an across- the-board substitute for the aircraft carrier or amphibious assault ship as an instrument of naval diplomacy. There are, however, sound (theoretical and practical military and institutional reasons for granting the submarine a much more visible presence role than conventional naval-diplomacy wisdom has so far allowed. The events that set the stage for the political presence of naval power come in different hues and colors—no two international crises are the same. This fact alone is cause enough for national and naval planners to be flexible and count among their options the question: “Where are the submarines?”
'Alan H. Burgoyne, Submarine Navigation Past and Present, Vol. II (London: Alexander Moring, 1903), p. 254—Cuniberti was not just any naval officer. He is widely considered to be the intellectual father of the dreadnought battleship. ^Statement by VAdm Henry C. Mustin, USN (Ret.), before the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, 29 March 1988, Washington, DC, pp. 11, 12.
'Barry M. Blechman and Stephen S. Kaplan, Force Without War: U.S. Armed Forces As a Political Instrument (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1978), p. 39.
4Sir James Cable, “Britain’s Choice of Threats,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, August 1982, p. 32.
5VAdm Sir Peter Stanford, RN (Ret.), “The Current Position of the Royal Navy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, March 1984, p. 105.
6Eric Grove, The Future of Sea Power (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 132. 'Bernard Brodie, “The Weapon,” in Frederick S. Dunn, et. al., Eds., The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1946), p. 76.
"Blechman and Kaplan, op. cit., p. 524.
9Scott D. Sagan’s study of U.S. nuclear crisis management found that policymakers have consistently preferred to signal their actions with a minimum of public exposure. See his “Nuclear Alerts and Crisis Management,” International Security, Spring 1985.
'“Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), pp. 558-61.
"Blechman and Kaplan, op. cit., pp. 214-18.
l2Sir James Cable, Gunboat Diplomacy, 1919-1979, 2d edition (London: The Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1981), p. 152.
’’For a discussion of the “finality of deterrence” and “credibility of deterrence” schools, see Y. Harkabi, Nuclear War and Nuclear Peace (Jerusalem: Israel Program for Scientific Translations, 1966), pp. 28-35.
l4Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1979), p. 622. Cited in Sagan, op. cit., p. 124.
''Both arguments can be found in Desmond Rice and Arthur Gavshon, The Sinking of the Belgrano (London: Martin Seeker & Warburg, Ltd., 1984).
'“Cable, Gunboat Diplomacy, 1919-1979, op. cit., p. 152. l7On the other hand, proposals in the 1960s that NATO might prove its resolve to resist Warsaw Pact aggression by firing a nuclear “demonstration shot” suggest that “wasting” an expensive weapon may be justified politically. In any case, the cost of a torpedo across-the-bow will probably be small compared with the overall expense of a naval crisis deployment.
‘"Interestingly, while she completed her southward passage, the Conqueror's crew reportedly produced a gun mount for the bridge. See Rice and Gavshon, op. cit., p. 65.
I9L. W. Martin, The Sea in Modern Strategy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967), p. 139.
*The author’s work as an adviser to his student, Lieutenant Brent Alan Ditzler, USN, in preparation for the latter’s master’s thesis—“Naval Diplomacy Beneath the Waves: A Study of Coercive Use of Submarines Short of War”—at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, laid the groundwork for this article. Copies of Lieutenant Ditzler’s thesis are available from the author upon written request.
Mr. Breemer is currently Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He served six months in 199*2 as a Secretary of the Navy Senior Research Fellow at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Mr. Breemer’s published work includes the book Soviet Submarines: Design, Development, and Tactics (Surrey, England: Jane’s Information Group, Ltd., 1989), and he is currently at work on a history of antisubmarine warfare.