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By Captain William H. J. Manthorpe, Jr., U.S. Navy (Retired)
On 5 June, the Soviet Minister of Defense, Marshal Dmitri Yazov, outlined to the Soviet military newspaper Red Star a ten-year Ministry of Defense military- reform program that he will submit to the fall session of the Supreme Soviet. The Plan is designed to counter a military- reform bill drafted by the caucus of junior military officer delegates to the Supreme Soviet, led by navy political officer Major Vladimir N. Lopatin. That bill Would convert the Soviet military into an all-volunteer force within five years and introduce other radical changes to include Ihe establishment of a civilian Defense Minister. In contrast, the Ministry of Defense proposes a more cautious step toward a volunteer force. Among other things, it would initiate an experiment in the Soviet Navy.
Colonel General Grigoriy F. Krivo- sheiev, a Deputy Chief of the General Staff, described that experiment on 12 April in an interview with the government newspaper Izvestiia. In addition to shortening the term of compulsory service in the navy from three years to two, to conform with terms of service in the other armed forces, it would provide a contract arrangement to enlist volunteers for service on four surface ships and submarines at the beginning of next year. According to the general:
“Persons signing contracts with the Ministry of Defense will be considered as servicemen on active duty. They will live in barracks and on ships, will discharge all the duties required by the manuals, and of course, will enjoy the rights, benefits, and advantages granted to servicemen, petty officers, and their families by existing legislation. There will be some differences, however. Given that the contract is signed for three years while the ordinary term of service is two years, the young men who decide to sign contracts will be paid the salary of extended service personnel plus all the extra allowances for special service conditions, which means for combat duty hours, grade, remoteness of duty assignment, etc. The overall money allowanced may, thus, range from 200 to 380 rubles per month. [The conscript gets from 7-8 rubles per month. The average annual income in the Soviet Union is about 300 rubles.] The three-year term of service will be broken down as follows: six months of training with a standard salary and then, if the person decides to sign a contract, another two-and-a-half years with the salary of an extended serviceman. . . . All of us must understand that... we are entering a new sphere of contract relations with active-duty servicemen.”
General Krivosheiev explains the reason for undertaking this initiative:
“For the Ministry of Defense it is an opportunity to have first-class professionals among the servicemen which equates to a high level of combat readiness for the armed forces. . . . We cannot perform our missions today without professionals working under long-term contracts. This particularly applies to the Navy, where the term of service is going to be reduced. I believe the future belongs to a professional military without eliminating compulsory conscription. The experiment is one step in the direction of a professional military.”
An Overabundance of Personnel
On 8 February in Red Star, Vice Admiral Yevgeniy Yermakov, Chief of the Navy Personnel Directorate, admitted that “Graduates [of higher naval schools] are being sent to the fleets in numbers that exceed requirements in a number of specialties.”
The admiral explained:
“Cadets who graduated in 1989 [had been admitted] ... in 1984. At that time all sources [of information] indicated growth of all naval branches. ... At that time we could neither predict radical changes in military doctrine nor significant armed forces reductions that [have] substantially changed the Navy’s organizational manning structure and fleet requirements for school graduates. . . .
“After announcement of the decisions and receipt of General Staff directives on reduction of the size of the Navy, calculations of officer personnel requirements were conducted for each specialty. ... It was already obvious at the beginning of 1989 that naval school graduates would . . . [exceed] requirements in individual specialities. Of course, we could resolve the problem ... by releasing the excess young lieutenants into the reserves when they graduated from school. However, it would [be] difficult to bring ourselves to take that step. . . . After a comprehensive study of this issue by the Naval Personnel Directorate, naval school staffs, and other interested directorates, the Navy Chief of Staff decided to send all graduates to the fleet. . . .
“This year the Navy is faced with the same dilemma. Obviously, it will be faced with this problem until 1993, since cadets have already been accepted for training in accordance with calculations conducted earlier. The Naval Personnel Directorate is taking steps to correct the plans and is searching for the most painless solutions to this problem. In particular, already in 1989, a portion of the graduates in nonshortage specialties were assigned to other branches of the armed forces and 45 graduates were retrained into related specialties. Retraining possibilities are limited, however. . . .”
The Carrier Debate Continues
In the February issue of Morskoy Sbor- nik, Captain First Rank S. Kozyrev noted that “the Soviet heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser has attracted the attention of people far removed from naval affairs.” Fie listed a number of newspapers and magazines in which articles had appeared and noted that the topic also came up at the second Congress of People’s Deputies saying that
“those articles reflected the people’s desire to know more about the armed forces. But not only that. In some cases they involved doubts about the correctness of our concept of building the Navy, including aircraft-carrying cruisers.”
He chose to rebut one of those articles, “Tbilisi, Riga, and So On,” which appeared in the mid-December 1989 issue of the liberal intellectual magazine New Times. In that article the authors, Andrey Kortunov and Igor Malashenko, stated that “Aircraft carriers are a threatening offensive weapon. . . .” They also asked, “What is the mission of the Tbilisi-class ships?” and “How much does such a program cost overall and can we afford it?” The article went on to raise the central question: “Do we need aircraftcarrying ships?” and concluded, “the program must be brought to completion. Would it not be better to stop it at the right time?”
Captain Kozyrev also suggested that his article serve as a rebuttal to Georgiy Sturua’s critical piece, “Do We Need Aircraft Carriers?” Sturua’s article appeared in the 28 January issue of Moscow News, the newspaper of the Soviet International Friendship Society. (Published in several foreign languages for distribution abroad, Moscow News has been in the forefront of glasnost.) ■
In taking on those articles, the captain set forth the Soviet Navy’s views regarding the difference between U.S. aircraft carriers and Soviet “cruisers” in terms of their missions, weapon configurations, and operational employment. Those differences provide the basis for the rationale used to explain why their “cruisers” are not aircraft carriers, are less costly than U.S. carriers, and are appropriate additions to their navy—even within the new defensive doctrine:
“Let us get our terminology straight. For many, the term aircraft carrier and heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser are identical. In reality, that is not the case. . . . warship classifica-
These Soviet crewmen who toured the USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67) in July 1989 were able to look for the real differences between U.S. aircraft carriers and Soviet aircraft-carrying cruisers.
tions are practically identical in every navy in the world, and everywhere the main classifying characteristic is the ship’s intended mission. . . .
“The main mission of aircraft carriers is to make strikes against enemy territory and naval forces with deck aviation. Hence the main and practically only weapons of an aircraft carrier are her aircraft. . . .
“[An] aircraft carrier is a strictly specialized maneuvering base for naval aviation and a seagoing airhead for making powerful, massed strikes against enemy targets. Therefore, for their defense they require specially assigned escort vessels.”
On the other hand, Captain Kozyrev claimed:
“The main characteristic of heavy aircraft-carrying cruisers is to assure the survivability of the Navy’s task forces against enemy air and surface forces. Their main armament is not only fighters but also antiship cruise missiles . . . and other armament as well.
“The presence of a deck for fighters to take off and land makes our heavy aircraft-carrying cruisers outwardly resemble [U.S.] aircraft carri
ers, but their similarity is mainly limited to that. . . . Our ships have a different suite of weapons and ordnance. . . . Therefore there can be no question of their creating any kind of threat to coastal objects or ocean communications. . . .
“Including aircraft-carrying cruisers in task forces will . . . only complement the combat potential of already existing formations so there will be no need to develop special escort ships for them. . . .
“Even today, from areas of the sea hundreds and even thousands of kilometers distant from our shores, aircraft carriers and missile-carrying submarines and surface ships are capable of making strikes against any kind of target practically over the entire territory of the [Soviet Union].
. “Only the Navy is capable of neutralizing this threat. It would be impossible to accomplish it by concentrating our forces near the coast. One must go into the areas where the enemy’s forces are deployed, squeeze them out of there and, if the war begins, engage in combat with them.
“To accomplish this task we have mainly dedicated submarines and shore-based missile-carrying and ASW aircraft. But to deploy these forces to those areas to engage the bearers of the threat, it is necessary to provide them with effective air cover.
“[T]here is simply no sensible alternative to the heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser for providing air cover to our j forces . . . beyond the effective range of shore-based fighter aircraft.”
Where Is the CIC?
When U.S. and Soviet ships exchange port visits and U.S. officers tour Soviet ships, one of the first professional questions they ask their Soviet counterparts is, “Where is the combat information center [CIC]?” or “Where does the captain fight the ship from?” In response to these questions, U.S. officers are sometimes shown an area behind the bridge with radar repeaters and plotting tables. After seeing that area, they comment on the primitive nature of the Soviet CIC. At other times, visitors are shown a compartment deep within the citadel of the ship that looks like a U.S. CIC, and they wonder how the captain could operate so far from the bridge in combat. This confusion occurs because the underlying professional concepts shaping the configuration and operation of U.S. and Soviet ships are quite different, despite their similar outward appearances.