Based on the published open-source record, with some very notable exceptions*, one might come to believe that only college professors, former civilian Defense Department transients, self-proclaimed civilian “defense experts” around the Washington Beltway, and officers of other services discuss the Maritime Strategy. Such is not the case. The strategy is discussed—and used—in the fleet. As the recent commander of both the U.S. Second Fleet and NATO’s Striking Fleet Atlantic, I witnessed the impact of the Maritime Strategy in both the U.S. and NATO arenas. The Maritime Strategy serves as the blueprint for the development of new tactics and programs required to replace the passive “convoy escort navy” posture—in vogue in the late 1970s—with the offensive forward strategy that is needed to meet today’s threat.
This is not a go-it-alone Navy strategy. Instead, it is a coalition strategy designed to meet NATO and U. S. national military requirements. This strategy involves the Navy and Marine Corps working with the U. S. Army, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Coast Guard, and our Allies’ military forces to wage global warfare. An often-heard pronouncement from uninformed critics is that the strategy is merely a tool to justify a larger Navy. In fact, it has provided the framework for a smaller Navy—the “600 ships” are a fraction of the force-level requirements of the late 1960s. (For example, the present surface combatant requirements are about two-thirds of the 340-odd ship force of yesteryear.) In this regard, the strategy provides a solid rationale to meet NATO’s mission requirements, by providing a fleet that clearly assumes the strike role of the Alliance’s maritime forces, and that invites others to contribute the lower cost ships necessary for a NATO war with the Soviets.
In the late 1970s, two significant trends emerged in the NATO total force. First, the force was growing smaller because the Allies (including the United States) were not replacing their retiring ships on a one-for-one basis. Second, within that smaller force, the percentage of frigates (or naval forces without striking capability) was growing larger.
We had a paradox. The United States had simultaneously accepted NATO rationalization in principle (by assuming the NATO strike forces’ burden), but unilaterally maintained a Navy force structure which rejected rationalization. For example, in pursuing the Oliver Hazard Perry class of frigate (FFG-7), the U. S. Navy unwittingly subjected NATO navies to pressure: Since the U. S. Navy intended to procure—unilaterally—sufficient resources to meet convoy requirements, so the argument went, similar NATO forces were clearly on the margin. Further, since such forces were not readily convertible to other purposes, they should be “turned in” to free resources for ground force improvements.
Given finite U. S. resources and NATO naval force projections, we were on a no-win course. The United States would likely be unable to procure sufficient strike force assets, while at the same time the combined U. S./NATO low-mix force requirements would be exceeded. In the 1950s, NATO had about a three-to-one superiority over the Soviets at sea. In the 1960s, that margin was reduced to about two-to-one. (Now, we are just about at parity.) The entire NATO maritime structure was crumbling, and we had neither a master plan to save it nor an institutional forum in which to debate the issue.
Our Allies do not have the fiscal or industrial resources to build and sustain the sophisticated strike warfare ships needed to operate in very high-threat areas. Moreover, there is a widely understood reliance in Europe on traditional sea lines of communications. This provides strong incentive for our Allies to concentrate on antisubmarine warfare forces and convoy protection forces that would operate in the lower threat environment of the central Atlantic Ocean. In any case, only the United States has the industrial base and resources necessary to build, operate, and maintain strike forces in the required numbers.
The basic requirement for a NATO force that is strike capable flows from the fundamental premise of the Maritime Strategy: deterrence. While there is little confusion regarding the point that we have a deterrent strategy, there is plenty of confusion in its execution because deterrence, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It is vital to recognize that conventional forces offer a deterrent before the nuclear threshold is reached. One must also appreciate that Soviet history and military doctrine reveal that a key element of that deterrence to them is a credible capability to defeat their wartime strategy at both the conventional and nuclear levels. Indeed, given the approximate nuclear balance, the conventional level is critical. The Soviets must be convinced that NATO forces have the capability to strike the Soviet fleet, the Soviet land and air forces that would attack NATO, and facilities in the Soviet Union. Unless the forces exist to give the Soviets pause, NATO s maritime posture contributes nothing to conventional deterrence. Likewise, the Soviets must believe that their adventurism overseas will be strongly challenged by the U.S. Navy. The U.S. Navy cannot do this from a midAtlantic convoy escort posture. This striking capability, then, must be able to affect the land campaign as well as the sea campaign, so that the Soviets can see that the nature of our coalition warfare will not allow them significant advances on land or at sea.
Deterrence by definition involves actions taken prior to hostilities. Therefore, given the likely political climate, those actions must be credible and flexible, and provide a stabilizing influence. Times of high uncertainty and political tension are tailor-made for powerful naval forces. If the NATO Striking Fleet sails forward early in a potential conflict, it would certainly constitute a credible force, for it is one of the most powerful fleets in naval history. (One modern U.S. carrier, for example, and deliver the ordnance of ten World War II carriers, and the Striking Fleet can consist of three or four carriers.) The northern region is a maritime region that would be dominated by the Soviet Northern Fleet unless NATO’s maritime forces are visibly in position to defend and retaliate. By displaying strength at sea, the Striking Fleet can offset inherent weakness in NATO’s posture on land.
As for flexibility, the fleet can show, stop, or turn around and return—all the while international waters, if the situation dictates. Extensive pre-hostilities commitment of land or air forces is neither done nor undone easily, whereas early commitment of the NATO Striking Fleet can be both.
We are left with defining what constitutes a stabilizing influence. Here is the nub of the controversy, because one man’s deterrence is another man’s escalation. In my view, pre-hostilities commitment of the striking Fleet into water in which we routinely train could only be seen as stabilizing. True, it raises the ante for Soviet military planners. That is what deterrence is all about. However, if I am wrong, the broad variety of flexible options made available by crisis use of naval forces includes, as noted, getting the fleet out as fast as it got in.
Therefore, early deployment of the NATO Striking Fleet to the Norwegian Sea firmly displays Alliance cohesion and resolve at just the time and places it is needed most. In addition, it counters the Soviet strategy in the region and reduces the likelihood that conflict will occur—and thereby reduces the likelihood of Soviet aggression in the first place.
The second fundamental premise of the Maritime Strategy, which also is entirely in accord with NATO strategy, is that if deterrence fails, we must defend forward. There are plenty of pundits who take issue with this. In the North Atlantic, their criticism ignores the real world. As repeatedly stated by the NATO Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, he has only about half the forces he would need to fight the Battle of the Atlantic in the Atlantic. If we are not to surrender the initiative at sea, we must be ready to move Navy and Marine forces forward—i.e., into the Norwegian Sea. The striking Fleet will be on the front line to defend the Northern Flank and, if required, retake territory lost in an invasion. There is no other NATO region—separated as it is from Western Europe proper—in which maritime forces have such a dominant role in deterring the outcome of the land battle.
The Striking Fleet doubles the number of NATO interceptors in North Norway. And that means the difference between winning and losing the Norwegian Sea and hence the Battle of the Atlantic and the land war in Europe. We by no means envision some forlorn charge of the Light Brigade; we are dealing with the strategic imperative for early and sustained northern operations.
The Maritime Strategy has strengthened the case for battle forces centered on the aircraft carriers and battleships. It has also set forth the underlying rationale to enhance their survivability and increase their offensive capability. (One has only to look at the original configuration of the Spruance [DD-963]-class destroyer—which, as delivered in the 1970s, was the most lightly armed warship of her displacement in history—and then examine the plans for the heavily armed new Arleigh Burke (DDG-51) class to see dramatically the different kinds of ships we are now building.) Despite certain handwringers’ claims to the contrary, U. S. aircraft carriers have demonstrated in numerous exercises that they will be able to survive during hostilities in the Norwegian Sea.
It is not going to be easy operating in these waters, but nothing really worth doing is ever easy. However, working with U. S. Air Force aircraft, Norwegian forces, and NATO AWACSs, our forces will handle the Soviet Northern Fleet’s surface combatants. Our forward-deployed carriers will provide the air superiority over the Norwegian Sea necessary to permit us to threaten Soviet submarine operations.
The carriers are critical to our operations because their aircraft provide us with the flexibility to operate when and where we desire. Even the carriers’ severest critics would have to admit that it is significantly harder to target an airfield moving over thousands of miles in the ocean than it is an airfield ashore—and yet no one is suggesting that we close all airfields in Norway if the shooting starts. To put this issue into perspective, if the carrier battle groups of NATO’s Striking Fleet, in conjunction with NATO forces in Norway, cannot handle the 400-odd Soviet naval aircraft in the Kola region, how does the NATO ground force deal with the more than 3,000 Soviet aircraft in the Central Front?
Indeed, if carrier battle groups do not remain the nation’s and NATO’s best instruments to conduct naval battles over the spectrum of circumstances because of unilateral U. S. decisions, the Soviets will have achieved another one of their long-held strategic objectives— neutralization of our carriers—without firing a shot or spilling blood.
As a recent fleet commander in both the U. S. Navy and NATO, the foregoing considerations dominated my planning and exercises, and, most important, the thoughts of my subordinate commanders at all levels in both fleets. Based on our examination of the implications of the Maritime Strategy, we made some changes.
• We restructured both the national and NATO fleet command organizations, to improve the inter-command relationships necessary to fight a NATO war in the Norwegian Sea. This has involved—among a number of other arrangements for improved coordination with NATO area commanders—the creation of a new Striking Fleet organization, which elevates a Royal Navy Antisubmarine Warfare Commander in the Fleet to the status of a Principal Subordinate Commander in NATO, and which reemphasizes the roles of the U. S. Marines and the combined United Kingdom-Netherlands landing forces. On the U. S. side, we concluded a number of memoranda of agreement with senior U. S. Air Force commanders, to provide for far greater interservice coordination in both U. S. and NATO exercises and war games. And we aligned the U. S. Second Fleet and the NATO Striking Fleet task organizations in order to facilitate peacetime training for a NATO war, as well as to ease the transition when our forces are actually assigned to NATO.
• We established a series of Second Fleet/Striking Fleet wargames and followed them with major exercises at sea to test and refine our tactics and procedures, with specific focus on fighting in the Norwegian Sea. In so doing, I worked with my U. S. fleet commander colleagues, Vice Admiral Frank Kelso in the Sixth Fleet and Vice Admiral Ken Moranville in the Third Fleet, to identify those tactical innovations that apply to naval operations worldwide, within the overall envelope of the Maritime Strategy. While many of the details are classified, I can say that the tactics that have flowed from this effort are now being studied at the Naval War College, at the Tactical Training Group Atlantic Fleet, and at the recently created Naval Strike Warfare Center. Last fall’s NATO exercise Ocean Safari became the showcase for the first year’s efforts.
• We were able to translate our findings, coherently, into a series of operational requirements, which were forwarded to the Chief of Naval Operations for review and action. These recommendations covered every warfare area and range from specific improvements to ships and aircraft to basic improvements in the NATO support structure ashore in Norway. A key element was the identification, in quantifiable terms, of the logistics support necessary to sustain Striking Fleet operations in the Norwegian Sea.
• We were able to focus the thoughts of the officers and men who fly our planes and drive our ships. And they responded magnificently: They use the equipment they have more imaginatively and intelligently than has been the case in the past. Equally important, we have broken the Procrustean mold of the aforementioned “convoy escort navy”–only syndrome. This notion, which originated in Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s era, had a hidden agenda consisting of two basic assumptions: that the U. S. Navy should only escort convoys across the Atlantic, and that high-threat operations and strikes against targets ashore should be handled by the Air Force. Those who subscribed to that notion saw no need for battleships or Tomahawk missiles, or Aegis systems, or even for aircraft carriers. The officer corps of the Navy has put all that nonsense firmly behind it now, and our young officers are working on the tactics that will take the war to the enemy, instead of those designed to fend him off. In doing so, discovered a truism that applies to all elements of modern naval warfare: carrier aircraft plus long-range guided missiles are far better than either carrier aircraft or missiles alone. Because we can add Tomahawk long-range missile to our fleet faster than the Soviets can build aircraft carriers, the asymmetries between the two navies give us a winning combination that the Soviets cannot overcome for the rest of this century.
• We have brought both theory and forces into line with reality. Until we had the framework of the Maritime Strategy, strategic thinking and contingency plans were often based upon higher force levels than we have or will reach. Our force-level planning and program analyses often rule out a wide range of considerations that are beginning to dominate current strategic thinking. Past practices narrowed the focus of naval alternatives and masked important contributions that the Navy can make to both deterrence and warfighting. By contrast, the strategy has built a conceptual bridge between peacetime forward deployments and warfighting that facilitates understanding of the Navy’s requirements.
We knocked down the strawman argument that states, in effect, that by building a powerful Navy we are in some ill-defined way preventing a build-up of land defenses in Europe. This is the argument put forth by those who think that if the United States would just stop building carriers, then we could buy enough tanks to deter the Soviets in the Central Region all by ourselves, or could by such a gesture somehow stimulate the land powers of NATO to greater action than they have been willing to undertake over the past three decades.
Another either-or proposition which members of this same crowd like to promote is that NATO must choose between preparing for a land war or a war at sea. Their argument is that a NATO war will be short, thus reducing the Alliance’s vulnerability to its dependency on the sea, which would be heightened in a long war. Unfortunately, the land-war dominated strategy is a high-stakes gamble. At immediate risk are our northern Allies and, with them, access to NATO’s lines for resupply and reinforcements. While it is true that we will not win the land war in Central Europe at sea, we can lose it at sea.
My recent immersion in the Maritime Strategy has led me to the conclusion that the strategy has established, once and for all, the framework within which the U. S. naval forces become the spearhead of NATO’s Striking Fleet. There is simply no strategic alternative to the forward operations that are dictated by the U.S. Navy and NATO maritime strategies. Forward deployment of survivable and capable battle forces is the key to early influence of events on land in deterrence, diplomatic, and warfighting contexts. Recognition of this relationship has not only reduced the former risk in the NATO maritime force structure, it has provided the Navy a coherent strategic concept that can be easily grasped by decision-makers at all levels.
*In January 1986, the U.S. Naval Institute published The Maritime Strategy Supplement,” featuring contributions from Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman Jr., then–Chief of Naval Operations Admiral James D. Watkins, and Marine Corps Commandant General P. X. Kelley. In June, Proceedings published amplifying remarks on the Maritime Strategy by Rear Admiral William Pendley, Director, Strategy Plans, and Policy, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. (Admiral Mustin’s overview of the Maritime Strategy was published in the March-Apri 1986 Naval War College Review.)
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Mustin on Fighting & Winning
The difference between strategy and tactics depends on when the shooting starts: prior to the shooting, we talk strategy; after the
shooting starts, we talk tactics. In a fight, the winner will be the navy whose ships can take major damage and still maneuver and shoot to hit. This requires much more than just skill, courage, and endurance as we understand them in peacetime.
It means that our officers and men have to keep functioning, even when they have seen ships blown up and sunk; when many people have been killed and horribly wounded; when the survivors are scared and exhausted; when decks are red hot, lights are out, and equipment is destroyed; and when they are dazed and bewildered by the sights, sounds, and smells of violence and death. Such are the standards to which we must train. Schools can teach our men how to operate equipment; only their commanders can teach them how to fight and that has to be in their own ships, with their own leaders and their own equipment, supported by a tactical scenario that reflects the urgency of their real-world missions.
The Maritime Strategy provides the basic tactical framework for success and the stimuli to keep our tactical thinking alive to meet tomorrow’s challenges.
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Ocean Safari 85 Lessons Learned
In Ocean Safari 85, we had a force that consisted at its peak of about 150 ships and more than 300 aircraft. It involved U. S. forces (Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Coast Guard), and units from Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France (under special arrangements), West Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United Kingdom—80,000 people. One of the exercise objectives was to examine at sea the tactical implications of the command relations we had worked out on paper. A key element consisted of operating the USS America (CV-66), her embarked air wing, and surface ships inside a Norwegian fjord. We did this to show that the fleet could operate with our allies and exploit geography to counter the threat. It is not a simple proposition to have Norwegian, Royal Air Force, U. S. Air Force, and U. S. carrier aircraft operating in the same airspace. The only way to develop the skills necessary for such complex operations is to go to the scene and practice them—and those skills, once developed, are perishable.
Ocean Safari was highly successful in every respect. Valuable lessons were learned for future games and exercises. One very important lesson was the direct relationship between Striking Fleet operations in the North Norwegian Sea and offensive operations in the Central Front of Europe. Basically, by containing the Soviet air threat forward in the region of the Kola Peninsula, the Striking Fleet provides air defense for the United Kingdom. About one-third of all NATO strikes into the Central Region originate in the United Kingdom, and it would be very difficult to execute those strikes while defending against major air attack from the north. Therefore, the Striking Fleet, by denying the North Norwegian airfields to the Soviets, ensures that the Alliance maintains credible Central Front strike capability.
Another important lesson from Ocean Safari was not new, but it is worth mentioning because it is so fundamental. It is, simply, that the oceans are great and ships are small. Despite all the high-tech wizardry of satellites and other devices, the Soviets could not locate the America at sea, nor could the great professional aviators of the Royal Air Force, nor could a U. S. helicopter that had been provided the America's exact location in advance. (Interestingly, there was a British journalist on board that helicopter who was working on an article to be titled “Carriers Are Sitting Ducks.” When last seen, he was contemplating a new title to match his experience.)
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Vice Admiral Mustin served as Commander, U. S. Second Fleet and NATO’s Striking Fleet Atlantic from September 1984 through 1986. A 1955 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he has extensive command time in both the Pacific and Atlantic Fleets and tours with the staffs of the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific; Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Naval Forces, Europe; Commander, U.S. Naval Forces, Vietnam; and the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. He is a graduate of the Naval Postgraduate School; the School of Command and Staff, U.S. Naval War College; and the School of International Affairs, George Washington University.