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“Modern, effective sea power is essential to our security. Whether we are thinking of the strategic nuclear level, of regional collective security arrangements, or of the high seas and the Third World, we need a full spectrum of capabilities that can operate in peacetime, in crisis, and in war. Our naval strength is an indispensable element of the deterrent we pose to the Soviets [and their Warsaw Pact allies seen here], the deterrent to war, to intimidation, and to subversion.”
I understand NATO to be in its fundamentals an alliance of shared values—and of shared commitments to the safeguarding of those values. Article Two of the treaty speaks of strengthening free institutions; creating a better understanding of the principles on which those institutions are founded; and promoting the stability and the wellbeing of our populations.
The first task of governments, I would submit, is to protect their people in the exercise of their unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—the terms we use in the United States. From the earliest times this responsibility has involved protection of people and territory from violence and threat of harm. That is still true today. This is, in my opinion, what is meant by security, whether national security or allied security. We find the undertaking expressed in definitive form in Article Five of our treaty. We could never read it too often. It says:
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“[T]he parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all. Consequently they agree that if such an armed attack occurs, each of them in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense will assist the party or parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in conceit with
I
the other parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic Area.”
And sea power can best be understood and best be structured when examined in direct relationship to this task of safeguarding and supporting national or allied security.
Because the problems of security are so complex and so pervasive in their effects on the society at large, and are often so demanding of wisdom and sacrifice, it is useful to approach the security issue in a very systematic fashion. We can thereby provide ourselves with a stable and enduring framework for analysis and understanding of the issues involved, without being caught up in the constant ebb and flow of the individual problems of the day.
One approach to such a systematic analysis is to begin with the “valuables” of our society which we wish to protect and keep as safe as we can from outside harm. General Maxwell Taylor says we should start with the “national valuables” that we as military and naval officers are charged with protecting. What are they? They include our people, our homelands, our economic and cultural infrastructure, our ability to conduct our affairs and live under our free institutions without outside interference or coercion, to carry on peaceful international trade, travel, and commerce, and to have the confidence that these things can continue to exist for our children and our grandchildren.
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basis for our NATO planning and our NATO commitments, we must carefully discriminate so that we can identify those that are of the highest priority and those that we as allies share with each other.
It does not seem too difficult to identify a set of such high-priority security interests. Vis-a-vis the Soviets, our chief interest is to deny them an expansion of political and military control over our own homelands. But we must also deny them expansion over other areas, at least over areas of very great importance to us around the world, because such an expansion, if unimpeded, could finally leave us a beleaguered island in the midst of communist totalitarian rule.
The principal interest we share as major allies is to maintain our independence and integrity, not only against attack, but against the threat of attack, against pressure tactics, against coercion, and interference with the free exercise of our national institutions. During this time of Soviet SS-20 deployments and harsh exchanges over intermediate nuclear force issues, it is quite apparent that the Soviet Union does not hesitate to project specific threats at specific member-nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
But our interests take us well beyond simply maintaining our independence and integrity. We unquestionably have a further interest in maintaining our collective effort, the solidarity of the Alliance. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, first as Supreme Commander in Europe and later as President, often emphasized how the many countries working together can achieve results which, if they acted separately, would be beyond the reach of any or of all— or, in more a pithy expression, “Apart we can do nothing; together we can do everything that we have to do.” That statement epitomizes the importance of our solidarity.
Our interests go even further, to what in many ways is an area of concern with considerably more difficulties. I refer to interests vis-a-vis the world beyond the Soviet Union and beyond the regions of the major industrial democracies. In those areas, a first interest is surely maintaining the freedom of the seas—our freedom to use the seas for the conduct of the peaceful trade and commerce on which our economic well-being increasingly depends.
We have interests as well in certain “high-value areas,” which we need to see kept free and accessible. These are interests that are being challenged in ways very difficult to confront, in the Persian Gulf, in the Strait of Hormuz, in Central America. And finally there are areas that are today of lesser direct importance to us, but to which it is nevertheless in our interest to give such limited assistance as we reasonably can, so they can continue to be free and independent, developing their own institutions according to their own lights, without being incorporated by force within the so-called socialist camp. As we know, this is a “camp” from which few nations have been able to emerge, particularly since the Brezhnev Doctrine, laid down a decade or more ago, claiming the right to prevent withdrawal.
To safeguard interests as varied and demanding as these, we clearly need a well-designed and carefully coordinated overall security policy. Within such an overall
framework, it seems to me, three main contributory lines of policy are important to follow. I characterize them as defense, deterrence, and detente. Perhaps the last word is surprising. But the principle of negotiation with our declared adversary—negotiation from a position of confidence and strength on our side—can contribute to the stable security that is surely our true aim in behalf of the well-being of our countries. But if detente is to have meaningful substance, and if we are to be able to maintain deterrence—not only deterrence of large-scale war, particularly nuclear war, but deterrence as well of pressure tactics and coercion—then there must be a solid defense foundation. A former Secretary of Defense of the United States put it very well when he said that “detente” (and 1 would add “deterrence”) without “defense” is delusion.
So we come to defense. To pursue these security policies, to safeguard our security interests, to keep our valuables safe, we arrive inevitably at the question of our defense capabilities. Here we must consider three main categories of forces: our strategic nuclear forces, our regional forces for collective defense, as in NATO or Northeast Asia in the area of Japan and Korea, and our forces for the world beyond—for the high seas and for the support of our relations with countries of the Third World. In each of these categories, naval forces, and the sea power built around them, have a vitally important role.
In this forum we discuss sea power in the context of allied security with a certain degree of trepidation. But I am fortified by the fact that for a large part of the time when 1 served as Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEur), I put the building of our naval strength as a number one priority for NATO. You can well understand that SACEur and the forces under his command are keenly interested in assurance that sea lines of communication can remain open and effective in case of war. They are also keenly interested in seeing that we have the flexible and powerful support that comes from our carrier battle groups. And I am indebted to a long list of naval colleagues for many of the views I offer on sea power in relation to broad issues of U. S. and Allied security today.
The combination of Soviet expansionism with Soviet military power has a heavy impact on Allied naval needs and strategies in peace, in crisis, and in war. For many years, we have seen a steady expansion of Soviet naval forces, both in numbers and in reach. And the expansion continues. Admiral Sergei G. Gorshkov asserted, with reason I believe, that Soviet naval forces were now able to operate in all oceans of the world. He clearly declared the Soviet Union’s global ambitions when he said, “To be at sea is to be at home.”
As we make our analysis of Soviet naval strength, we must add to our consideration the fact that Soviet needs are far different from ours—different in the significance they bear on Soviet security. We have far greater naval needs than do the Soviets, a land power holding a central position with direct access to their satellites in the Warsaw Pact. They are not so dependent on the sea as we are. Soviet objectives, measured against the classical tasks of naval forces, do not include, to anything like the same degree as do ours, such demanding and expensive wartime
Proceedings / Sea Link 1984
tasks as force projection and the maintenance of distant lines of communication.
Nevertheless, the missions they would perform are highly significant. Soviet naval forces would make a strong and sustained effort to interdict the sea lines of communication on which we are vitally dependent. They would undoubtedly seek to prevent our force projection, especially in such places as the flank areas of NATO, where the projection of U. S. naval power would be quite necessary to stabilize and gain control over a military situation, particularly in its earliest stages. The Soviet forces’ strategic nuclear missions would include attacks on our ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) as well as protection for their own SSBNs deployed to threaten or carry out a nuclear attack. Soviet maritime forces, in addition, have a substantial capability to secure their own flanks in the Norwegian Sea, in the Baltic, and in the Turkish Straits, covering the Black Sea.
The full significance of today’s Soviet naval forces extends well beyond their wartime role. In war, I truly believe that our naval forces, with time and effort and sacrifice, would be able to gain and maintain control of the seas. In peacetime, the Soviets already have shown themselves able to make effective use of naval forces. They carry out surveillance of our forces—and on occasion this has been a very close surveillance, as our experience in numerous naval exercises has brought out. They protect both the Soviet merchant marine, which has grown to a very large size, and their fishing fleet which deploys around the world. They maintain a peacetime presence in many distant areas, to show the flag and to support their Third World friends. And when crisis comes, they can use those forces to constrain Allied freedom of action, to complicate our planning and our decisions, and even to interpose their forces in such areas as Africa and the Far East.
Our naval problems are by no means limited to those of Soviet origin. We see in the present war between Iran and Iraq further justification for flexible and responsive Allied naval forces. Among our problems we count the lack of forward bases. If we are to have the capabilities needed to maintain stable security in areas important to our security and economic well-being, we need forward bases. But in many areas it has become increasingly difficult to arrange for the use of bases. We also need naval cooperation that goes beyond NATO itself. The UNITAS program, conducted by the U. S. Navy with the navies of Latin American countries, has been a model of such cooperation. Similar cooperation in Southeast Asia is of continuing value to our efforts to maintain a stable security.
From all of these situations flow extremely important implications for Allied sea power. Modem, effective sea power is essential to our security. Whether we are thinking of the strategic nuclear level, of regional collective security arrangements, or of the high seas and the Third World, we need a full spectrum of capabilities that can operate in peacetime, in crisis, and in war. Our naval strength is an indispensable element of the deterrent we pose to the Soviets, the deterrent to war, to intimidation, and to subversion. Our naval strength helps us to build the strength and the confidence essential to human progress and well-being
in the countries of the Third World. With our naval strength we can assist threatened nations, and support and protect our own peaceful trade and commerce. In time of war, we will look to our naval strength for sea control and protection of lines of communications; for power projection; for the operation of our submarine ballistic missiles, and for the conduct of anti-SSBN operations to limit and to complicate the tasks of the Soviet ballistic missile submarine force.
I must leave it to Navy leaders and their staffs to specify just what all this means in terms of ships and sailors for the full spectrum of naval operations. It is a tremendous professional challenge, and the naval strength in being we have today is an enduring tribute to the professionalism, the dedication, the mastery of the naval art that is provided by the Allied navies.
And our challenges continue. Difficult judgments must be made as to the internal balance of naval forces—the balance between the means of sea control and of power projection, for example. We are challenged to deter nuclear conflict while maintaining freedom and security. We achieve that deterrence by presenting to any would-be aggressor, and specifically to the Soviet Union, a clear prospect that there will be little gain but much loss and enormous risk if a nation were to move against us. There are means of strengthening the conventional deterrent in Europe that constitute a challenge to the Alliance, with respect not only to naval forces, but for land forces and air forces as well. This is a challenge with which the Alliance must come to grips in future months and years.
There is in addition the challenge of building a world order in the Third World, based on sovereignty and human progress, and undergirded with the stable security and confidence essential to economic progress and development. A series of challenges lies ahead of us as we introduce strategic defenses against nuclear attack, to the extent such defenses prove feasible and desirable. We also have the challenge of moving to the more stable patterns of strategic nuclear forces represented in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, now suspended by the Soviets but very important to us in terms of the arms control objectives of our Alliance.
So we see here the combination again of political action and responsibility, of security and sea power. We see a clear need for wisdom and effort at the highest levels of government and on the part of our people at large, the ultimate reservoir of strength in our countries. The needs cannot be avoided or evaded. We are called upon for effort and sacrifice. I am reminded in this regard of the words of Somerset Maugham, who once said, “If a nation prizes anything above its freedom it will lose its freedom, and the irony is, if it is comfort or pleasure that it prizes above freedom, it will lose those too.”
We are here today, 45 years from the final days of peace before the carnage of World War II began. If we respond with wisdom and effort to the present-day challenges that I have tried to describe, and to the others that will surely come in train, then we can hope that 45 years from today it will be said that those who bore the responsibility met it well.
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Proceedings / Sea Link 1984