I think it is generally agreed that credible naval forces provide, to the nation or the alliance which possesses them, a backdrop for political actions on the part of elected leaders. But to be credible, it is extremely important that naval forces be able to win battles and win wars. Therefore, the maritime balance among seafaring nations is extremely important. Raymond Aron, the French professor and journalist, made a very wise observation during the Sea Link Conference at Annapolis last June: “While military might cannot do everything, without it you cannot do anything.” Perhaps that is the central theme of the marriage of maritime capability with those political, economic, and ideological factors that loom so large in the political eyes of the NATO nations.
Naval Presence: Given a war-winning capability, given a battle-winning capability, the phenomenon we describe as peacetime naval presence can be very, very important to our political leaders. Over the past 10-15 years, the concept of peacetime naval presence has been in many ways discredited by those who felt that you must be able to quantify everything. Some analysts argue that every weapon system that a nation programs, budgets for, and ultimately procures must be designed to do something less vague than provide peacetime naval presence. We found ourselves confronted over the past decade with the necessity to answer questions such as: “How many dollars’ worth of deterrence do you get from X number of dollars invested in peacetime naval presence?” or “How many dollars’ worth of event-influencing capability do you get out of Y number of dollars invested in peacetime naval presence?” We were incapable of answering those questions to any of our critics’ satisfaction—certainly not to the satisfaction of the distributors of public funds within the United States.
Nonetheless, naval history over the past 2,500 years is replete with instances in which governments have very successfully used war-winning maritime capability to influence peacetime events in their favor. Over the past several decades, the United States has employed peacetime naval presence in reaction to well over 100 crises.
The reaction to the Jordan crisis of 1970 is an example. I am personally convinced that the dispatch of three carrier task groups and two amphibious task groups to the Levant coast was clearly the influence that resulted in the maintenance of peace in that area. It dissuaded the Soviets from capitalizing on an opportunity to go into Jordan or Iraq and establish themselves in the same way that they have established themselves in Afghanistan. About one year ago, the United States moved one carrier battle group from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. Whether that is identified clearly as fulfilling the vital interest of the NATO alliance or not, it is in fact doing so by protecting those sources of energy which are vitally important to Western Europe.
When I served as the director of the Navy’s systems analysis division, we found that although we couldn’t answer the quantification challenge sufficiently, we did ascertain that there were essentially four different ways in which political leaders could use peacetime naval presence. They could bring to the area a dominant force. The U. S. Navy’s presence in the Indian Ocean today is the dominant maritime force, and there is nothing that the Soviet Navy can do to alter that situation. The Soviets have to content themselves with options that do not require support from the sea.
The second type of naval presence is that in which a nation sends a hostage force, one that is clearly not capable of prevailing in the event hostilities occur. We have done that a number of times in the past several decades. By interposing an inferior U. S. force—say, several destroyers, perhaps even a squadron of destroyers—between two competing nations or forces, the United States was dealing itself a hand, and saying, “If you two go to war, then the United States becomes a player. The choice is up to you.” We have frequently been very successful in preventing hostilities by using forces in that manner.
A third type of peacetime naval presence, as employed by political leadership deliberately, is to keep forces uncommitted. This is essentially what we did in the Mediterranean during the time of the 1976 Lebanon crisis. The Sixth Fleet remained clearly uncommitted. The message was that we would watch whatever events unfolded, then make a decision either to commit the forces or to withhold them.
Finally, the fourth mode that wise political leaders can employ is to indicate clearly that they are not going to become involved. They do so by sending their naval forces in the other direction. This might be a message to two competing parties, who are depending upon the United States or NATO to pull their chestnuts out of the fire and terminate hostilities after a certain number of days, that they will have to cope w'ith their own problems.
In rounding out this section, let me conclude by saying that not all applications of peacetime naval presence are either as enlightened or as deliberate as in the situations I’ve just described. Sometimes— more often than not, I am afraid—political leaders find themselves in a situation in which the only forces with which they can react to a crisis and influence events are maritime forces. Therefore, they sometimes employ those forces in a rather haphazard way.
The Maritime Balance: Although numbers of ships, planes, and weapons are important, you cannot look at the maritime balance in terms of numbers alone. We feel that the maritime forces of the alliance do have a slim margin of maritime superiority over the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact today. Having said that, we must remember, that the Japanese had a slim margin of maritime superiority over the United States in the Pacific at the start of World War II, and they lost that slim margin overnight in the Battle of Midway.
Taken together, the allied navies roughly match the Soviet Navy in numbers. The U. S. Navy, standing alone, can present about half as many ships as the Soviets. There are qualitative advantages and disadvantages which must be assessed in determining who has the edge in the maritime balance. Moreover, the edge of which I speak is so thin that it does not permit your side to lose battles or a large number of ships. You have to win every time you engage.
The NATO qualitative advantages include, first and. foremost, the possession of large-deck aircraft carriers. That gives us a considerable capability to attack other ships, to attack aircraft, and to take the war to the enemy. The Soviets’ maritime capability suffers fatally from the lack of that ability. They have land-based naval aviation that is fixed and reasonably vulnerable. Secondly, the United States and its allies have the ability to sustain combat operations at sea for long periods of time. The Soviets do not have that capability today. Third, the United States and its allies have a very effective long-haul amphibious warfare capability that can land combat-ready marines over the beach in the face of enemy fire. This enables them to take those objectives which will contribute to the preservation of sea control or control of maritime areas. The Soviets, on the other hand, face certain disadvantages, not the least of which are their geographic constraints and the fact that their fleets are bottled up behind choke points, such as North Cape, the Greenland/Iceland/United Kingdom gap, the entrance to the Baltic, the entrance to the Mediterranean, both from the Atlantic and the Black Sea, and the various passages in the Pacific. Because of all these factors, I would rather be the Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic than I would the commander of the Soviet Northern Fleet, or if there was one, the commander of the Combined Soviet Western Fleets. I think that my challenge is more easily met than theirs.
If our war-winning capability is to remain valuable, then we must continue to invest in those things that provide the maritime edge. That means increasing the numbers of carriers, amphibious warfare ships, and other very technically capable units. Our shortage of ships is causing us problems today, because it causes us to pick and choose those areas where we will use our forces. It also compels us to make such accommodations as performing our missions sequentially rather than simultaneously. I would like to point out that when our political leaders give us the guidance that we will program and budget forces for sequential mission execution, they must understand that that choice may not be ours. That choice may be forced upon us by our adversaries. Numbers, therefore, do become important. Tom Hayward, in his testimony before Congress last year, very wisely pointed out that the United States is faced with three-ocean requirements and a one- and-a-half-ocean Navy. We are seeing that scenario played in spades today. We have our forces spread out from the Atlantic through the Indian Ocean into the Pacific. It’s very difficult under those circumstances to achieve that concentration of force that is required to win battles. Battles are won, among other ways, by following a number of basic principles. Not the least of these are concentration of force and taking the offensive. If we have inferior forces, we face the possibility of giving the initiative to our adversaries.
Let me give an example. Suppose we got involved in a war against the Soviet Union or Warsaw Pact in NATO’s southern region. Should that be the case, the concentration of force required to operate successfully in the Eastern Mediterranean in support of our allies in Greece and Turkey is four carrier battle groups operating together. If, at the same time, we are embarking upon the reinforcement and resupply of Europe, which we will do immediately upon onset of hostilities or before, the sea lines of communication will be threatened by Soviet forces operating out of northern bases, coming down through the Norwegian Sea to prey upon the lines of communication in the Atlantic. The best way to ensure that that does not occur, and that our reinforcement and resupply effort is successful, is to make sure that the Soviets can’t use the Norwegian Sea for their access into the Atlantic and that they do not threaten the territorial integrity of Norway. The Norwegian bases must remain available to us to support our maritime dominance in the Norwegian Sea. Such an effort will require four carrier battle groups. Well, already we have gotten up to eight carrier battle groups and we have only seven in the Atlantic to begin with. One or two of those are always in a shipyard. So, no matter what our political leaders say relative to the priorities among our procurement programs and the sequential execution of our missions, the decision of operating first in Norway or first in the Mediterranean may not be left to us.
The Suing Strategy: The matter of swinging naval forces from the Pacific to the Atlantic in time of trouble was a strategy that none of the maritime commanders ever had high confidence in. We never really expected that those ships and planes would arrive in the Atlantic. At the outset of hostilities, it would be irresponsible to automatically take carriers out of the Pacific and thus leave the Soviet Pacific Fleet free to prey on the merchant traffic of the alliance and threaten other allies whose existence is vital to our economic survival. We couldn’t do that without sacrificing things that are very important to NATO and to our individual nations. Therefore, rather than risk giving up an area to the Soviets, we plan, if threatened, to employ the carriers in the Pacific as an adjunct to the war at sea being waged in the Atlantic. The swing strategy has not been abandoned. Pacific Fleet ships will come to the Atlantic if that’s what the situation demands. What has been altered is the notion that they will move automatically.
The Northern Flank: I want to emphasize how important the security of the northern flank is to me, as NATO maritime commander in the Atlantic. I also want to suggest that it is important to those that may have a central front focus. Our studies indicate that, not only is the northern flank essential to our non-European allies’ efforts to reinforce and resupply the action in the center, but also as a piece of strategic real estate. This, of course, is in addition to the fact that Norway is one of the allies whose territorial integrity we are bound to defend and preserve in the event of attack. There is a kind of circular logic here. The air and naval bases in the Norwegian Sea are vital to the defense of Iceland. Iceland is vital to the conduct of the reinforcement and resupply effort. In order to secure those bases, the reinforcement of Norway is going to be required. That reinforcement may well be in terms of U. S., Royal, and the Netherlands Marines being placed into Northern or Central Norway. Once that decision is made by our political leaders, those reinforcements must be where our limited assets can best be applied. Perhaps, when the smoke clears, there will be even greater recognition of the importance of the security of Norway to the center, of the security of Norway to the reinforcement resupply effort, and of the security of Norway to all aspects of the overall security of NATO.
The Atlantic: Former Secretary of Defense Mel Laird has said that NATO is an alliance strung together by ships. That is certainly true. This is a reflection of the total dependence of the alliance upon the reinforcement/resupply effort. It is the Atlantic that gives NATO its character. The ocean which connects the members of the NATO alliance was exploited very successfully by a different alliance in the course of World War II. It was the basis for the longest, most bitterly fought, painful campaign of that war—the Battle of the Atlantic.
It’s a pity that the war in the Pacific generated such great interest on the part of historians that it has totally consumed their activity. Our naval historians have contented themselves with dealing exclusively with the sea control war in the Pacific, where two competing powers fought each other with large-deck aircraft carriers and produced such memorable naval leaders that their names will live on for centuries and become the basis for much discussion on the part of midshipmen and students of naval history. In the course of speaking to service colleges in the United States and Europe, I have often paused and asked the students if they can name one admiral of any nation who fought in the Battle of the Atlantic. Very seldom can anyone, even among students of history, come up with the answer to that question. The Battle of the Atlantic went virtually unobserved by U. S. historians and by many political leaders. It was a dirty, grubby war which at its height involved dozens of aircraft carriers operating on the submarine problem and much of our intelligence services. In the end, however, it was responsible for the successful reinforcement and resupply of Europe. We must not forget that lesson. It is very pertinent to the problem we are facing today.
I must caution all those who become interested in the thing we call maritime balance. There is a principle that has to be borne in mind: when the last battle has been won, the alliance that wins must have a residual maritime capability. When political leaders examine the level of losses they are willing to accept, they must draw the bottom line at “essential residual capability.” We as a nation cannot say, “We have seven carrier battle groups today; therefore, we can afford to lose them all, and at the end of the war if we’ve won the last battle we’re okay.” We’re not okay. It’s a basic principle that is frequently forgotten by the systems analysts of the world.
Conclusion: As we look at the problem of allocating priorities within the NATO nations, we need not necessarily make the choice between social programs and defense expenditures. It’s possible to accommodate both requirements simultaneously. During the Eisenhower years in the United States, we did both concurrently. At that time, the United States invested 10% of its gross national product in defense. Unemployment was the lowest it had been in two decades. The inflation rate was the lowest in two decades, and there were no overriding social problems resulting from that allocation of priorities. The defense effort, in conjunction with the effort to build the interstate highway system of the United States, resulted in the creation of sufficient jobs to minimize the social problems that the country might have been faced with. Nor did we accumulate the enormous national debt that one might expect from that experience. The parallels with today are not exact, of course, but it could well be that the experiences of the past can help us chart our course for the future.