Super Nuke! A Memoir about the Life of a Nuclear Submariner and the
Contributions of a “Super Nuke”—The USS Ray (SSN-653)—Toward Winning the Cold War
Charles Cranston Jett. Denver: Outskirts Press, 2016. 308 pp. Illus. Appendices. $22.46.
Reviewed by Vice Admiral Al Konetzni Jr., U.S. Navy (Retired)
Often called our nation’s longest war, the Cold War is now being researched and presented to the world in myriad books, movies, and television programs. Largely because of the security classifications, the role of the U.S. Submarine Force in that war is little known. The fact is that the force put great stress on the Soviet Union’s naval forces, specifically its fast attack and ballistic missile submarines. It did so with a numerically smaller force that was technologically superior to Soviet submarines and manned by volunteers who knew that each crewmember was equally critical to operating the vessel safely at great depths far from home.
As a result, the Soviets found little success in hiding their ballistic missile submarines or in finding ours. Furthermore, as the Cold War progressed, the Soviet Union acted as if each of their submarines and major combatants was being tracked by U.S. submarines. This clearly was impossible given the numerical superiority of the Soviet submarine force. Our ability to stress the Soviet Navy and create great uncertainty helped bring the Cold War to an end in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Super Nuke is a most entertaining look at one individual’s journey as he contemplated, applied, trained, and qualified in submarines. For a Cold War enthusiast, the book’s value is in its critical insights about the role of our submarine force during this period, and its descriptions of the stresses placed on our people as we built and commissioned six to nine submarines per year during the 1960s and early 1970s. U.S. submarines were in such demand that they often deployed shortly after commissioning and a short shakedown cruise.
Charles Jett’s work also provides a look into the thought patterns of a junior officer as he navigates the tasks and challenges of qualification, watch standing, and maintenance requirements, while attempting to maintain a social life. This very readable and enjoyable account of life in a U.S. fast attack submarine gives readers a “story within a story.” It is a good primer for men and women who are thinking about careers in the Submarine Force.
For young officers in any area of service, Super Nuke shows how junior officers can have great influence over events in the Navy. I call this “self-imagination,” or the will to make something occur that did not previously exist. Jett’s contribution was to make pre-deployment training and submerged contact management more efficient than it had been. He was able to accomplish this because of his initiative, the leadership of his seniors, and the support of well-trained subordinates.
Finally, the book sends a clear message to active-duty commanders: Only you can ensure that your wardroom and crew have appropriately balanced work-life routines. Otherwise an atmosphere of all work and no play is created, as Jett experienced. Young service members who cannot maintain a healthy balance will resign their commissions and walk out the door. This is as true today as it was in 1970.
VADM Konetzni, known as “Big Al, the Sailor’s Pal,” served as the deputy and chief of staff to the Commander, Fleet Forces Command before retiring from the Navy in 2004. His previous assignments included Commander Submarine Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet. In 2016 he retired from his position as vice president and general manager of Oceaneering International Inc.’s Advanced Technologies Marine Services Division.
Waging Insurgent Warfare: Lessons from the Vietcong to the Islamic State
Seth G. Jones. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 336 pp. Figs. Notes. Index. $29.95.
Reviewed by John A. Nagl
More words have been written about insurgency and counterinsurgency in the past decade than in the preceding 40 years, a not-inconsiderable share of them by this reviewer. However, as Seth Jones points out in Waging Insurgent Warfare, the vast majority of the analysis has focused on countering insurgencies, rather than on the phenomenon itself. The 2006 U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, for instance, devotes just 31 pages—8 percent of the text—to an analysis of insurgency. This is like oncologists devoting 10 percent of their studies to cancer and 90 percent to surgical techniques. The imbalance is particularly odd given that the United States, which was formed in an insurgency against Great Britain, has long supported uprising as an instrument of foreign policy, as have the world’s other great powers. This book, then, attempts to correct the balance.
The author is well positioned to do so. Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at RAND, Jones wrote In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan (Norton, 2009) based in part on his service as an analyst on the ground in that counterinsurgency campaign. While Waging Insurgent Warfare begins with an examination of an attack he experienced during the Afghan campaign, it is broader than his previous book. This one analyzes insurgencies not as case studies but systematically: how they begin; the strategies, tactics, and organizational structures employed; their use of information campaigns and propaganda; the critical and often decisive role of outside support; and how insurgencies end.
The chapter on “Ending Insurgencies” is supported by significant statistical analysis that makes clear many of the factors that increase or decrease the chances of rebels’ success. Jones concludes that “Great-power combat support to groups significantly raises the odds of insurgent victory, as does a modest number of insurgent groups” engaging in battle. These groups are also more likely to achieve their goals if they can cloak the struggle in the banner of anti-colonialism, a more potent force during the Cold War than in its aftermath.
Conversely, insurgents are less likely to succeed if they lose the support of the local population by punishing the people, a mistake that contributed to the “Anbar Awakening” against al Qaeda in Iraq in 2006 and 2007. Rebels are more likely to prevail when seeking to overthrow a government within existing borders than when their cause is secession from a state. Finally, external support to the government against which they are fighting decreases their chances of success. Few of these conclusions are surprising, but Jones and his fellow researchers provide the data and show the math in a way that buttresses the lessons derived from more often seen case studies of individual uprisings.
The final chapter presents implications of the study for counterinsurgency warfare, and thus turns the Counterinsurgency Field Manual’s ratio on its head: just 27 of this book’s 336 pages discuss counterinsurgency. In what I am certain is a coincidence, that chapter constitutes exactly 8 percent of the text.
Much more of the book is a table annotating 181 insurgencies in the postwar era, listing the opposing sides and the outcomes. Large numbers of insurgencies are “Ongoing,” which testifies to the undoubted truth of one of the primary conclusions of the book—that “Insurgency and counterinsurgency will remain alive and well for the foreseeable future,” and that “The challenge, then, is to better understand this type of warfare.” This book will go a long way toward achieving that objective.
Mr. Nagl is headmaster of the Haverford School. A retired Army officer who served in both Iraq wars, he helped to write the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual and is the author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice (Penguin, 2015).
More On War
Martin van Creveld. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017. 214 pp. Notes. $24.95.
Reviewed by Commander Thomas T. Bodine, U.S. Navy
More on War is Martin van Creveld’s attempt to outline the foundational elements of war in all of its various forms and complexities. In doing so, the author admits early in the first chapter that he endeavors to “fill the gaps” left by Carl von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu by expanding “on themes which, for one reason or another, they neglected or left untouched, and bring their works up to date wherever doing so seems feasible and worthwhile.” Creveld states that his “ultimate objective is to gain understanding . . . by providing soil which may nourish their own thought.” By “their own,” the author refers to those who plan and wage war. The soil that Creveld provides is constituted by wide-ranging topics including the why and the economics of war; training, conduct, and strategy; types of warfare—such as cyber, nuclear, asymmetric, at sea—and the laws governing the lead-up and execution of armed conflict. Creveld is extremely well versed and should be applauded for his noble effort to cover such diverse ground. In just under 300 pages, however, the work suffers from a strategic ends-means mismatch. The discrepancy appears to result from the fact that the book’s ultimate place and purpose are ill defined. The reader is left with the lingering question of how this particular study fits into the already overflowing volumes of scholarly writings on warfare.
Frequently the tone and content have the feel of an introductory work meant to inform readers new to the field. In particular the chapters on economics; nuclear, cyber, and irregular warfare; and law governing wars are great introductions for readers unfamiliar with these subjects. However, these chapters represent too small a percentage of the overall work for the entire text to be considered an introduction. In addition, the examples and, at times, the book’s language assume the reader has a basic understanding of the works of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, as well as a working knowledge of modern military strategy jargon. Finally, the purposeful actions by the author to unhinge his assertions on any particular subject from a specific level of war—strategic, operational, or tactical—represent a precarious method of educating the uninitiated.
Clearly More on War is not an advanced study. Its scope is too wide and its length too short to provide anything but a cursory view of warfare’s prime functions and their complex interplay during armed conflict. Also, the knowledgeable reader will find fertile grounds for professional disagreement with Creveld’s assertions in the chapters on strategy and conduct of war. The pages detailing war at sea, training, leadership, and logistics lack the in-depth discussion vital to developing a mature understanding of these complex subjects.
Perhaps, then, this work is an addendum to the great and eloquently articulated concepts of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz? Possibly. Considerable effort is spent updating ideas developed by these two classics. To truly be an addendum, however, more time would have to be spent specifically linking modern warfare notions back to theories of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. Yet the finest facets of this book are its introductions of operational-level aspects of strictly modern-era phenomena: cyber, space, and nuclear warfare. This occurs despite the author’s overt efforts to avoid the “operational level” label. Creveld’s unwillingness to fully capitalize on this aspect—linking 21st-century operational warfare tenets to the timeless attributes of war espoused by Clausewitz and Sun Tzu—prevents the book from realizing its full potential as a contemporary postscript to On War (Clausewitz) or The Art of War (Sun Tzu).
In the end, by purposefully “refraining from drawing the usual distinction between strategy and tactics” and by the overt omission of the most enduring aspect of modern warfare—the operational level—van Creveld has created a work that tries to be all things to all people, and in doing so fails to find its voice.
Commander Bodine is the commanding officer of Strike Fighter Squadron 22. A master’s graduate with distinction from the U.S. Naval War College, recently he was selected as the first U.S. Navy Federal Executive Fellow to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.