A few weeks ago
I published
a
series
of
posts
analyzing Maksim Tokarev’s outstanding
Naval
War College Review article that detailed the Soviet Navy’s 1980s-era doctrine
for employing combined arms against U.S. Navy battleforces. At the end of my
first post, I suggested that:
With a finite
number of bombers, missiles, and trained crews, it is reasonable to think
Soviet commanders would have been somewhat hesitant to dispatch such
irreplaceable forces into battle unless they had some degree of confidence in
their situational picture’s accuracy; the operational-strategic penalties that
would be incurred if they ‘got it wrong’ simply seem too high for this not to
have been the case. Accordingly, it will be extremely interesting to someday
learn the criteria that had to be satisfied for SNAF commanders to order a
raid.
In the comments section to my final
post in that series,
Maksim graciously shared many new observations to address multiple aspects of
that very question. As before, I’m going to quote his key points and then add
my commentary. I’ve lightly edited his remarks; the wording changes I made are
in brackets.
Maksim first notes that the
Soviet Naval Air Force’s organizational ethos, much like that of most air
forces and service air arms, was rooted in the ‘spirit of attack.’ Detailed
mission planning was less important than seizing upon fortuitous opportunities
to deal the enemy a severe blow:
Courage, brisk battle, blaze of glory, fair uniform first
- and at least moderate careful planning [only] then. The heroes, the warriors,
don’t hesitate to fight and die, bird's souls in the human’s bodies. The staff
work is always something neglected, too boring to be the good job… sometimes
“the good enough decision now is better than the brilliant one tomorrow.”
The consequence was that, as Maksim puts it:
The commanders who share that ethos can send the strikes against [ambiguous
or low-confidence] target, hoping to receive definite targeting enroute, or
counting on the strike’s inherent recco and targeting abilities.
This is a crucial (and quite
obvious in hindsight) point that I’ve previously failed to consider. It is
applicable not only within the context of the Cold War naval competition, but
also to any attacker’s calculus. Attack opportunities against a highly capable
opponent’s maneuvering forces are generally fleeting. A brief intercept of the
opponent’s radio or active sensor emissions, or perhaps a scout’s brief (and
perhaps sacrificial) direct contact with what seems to be an element of the
opponent’s force, might be the only targeting cue the prospective attacker ever
receives. The next detection of the opponent’s force might be when it is too
late to derail or defeat the opponent’s operational plan. In fact, the next
attack opportunity might not arise until after the opponent has already
achieved his operation’s main objective(s). Maksim alludes to this dilemma from
Soviet Navy commanders’ perspective:
Look, they [examined] the Northern Weddings’ logs
hard, every minute of evolutions, every launch and landing, every word on radio
and so on. They understood that when the carriers came in the Norway fjords, it
[would be] just too late to try to hit them [with] air assets. [i] So the time slot to
decide could have been very narrow. It’s better to make a wrong decision than
suspend the good one.
Individuals make opportunity cost decisions based upon
how they subjectively value their available options. A prospective attacker
must choose between withholding scarce strike assets in hopes of a future
opportunity to attack with a higher degree of targeting confidence, or otherwise
expending those assets in the present with low targeting confidence under the
assumption that there may be no future opportunity. When an attack-embracing
organizational ethos within belligerent “A’s” forces mixes with a paramount objective
of preventing belligerent “B” from attacking first, there will likely be
intense psychological pressures on belligerent “A’s” operational commander to
order a strike. The implication is that a careless and perhaps overconfident “B”
who does not employ effective concealment (with some supporting deception for
good measure) risks falling victim to a bold “A” who capitalizes on the most
limited of targeting cues. Conversely, an intelligent “B” who understands “A’s”
opportunity cost calculus well enough might be able to craft a deception and
concealment plan that lures “A” into expending precious ordnance (and perhaps
platforms and crews) for naught. There is no way to determine the outcome of
either of these two scenario types in advance; circumstances and chance during
battle matter greatly.
Maksim makes an additional point, though, in that the destruction
of an opposing force may be far less important within a campaign context than
its disruption or suppression:
The key success is not the sinking of the carriers. Just
stop [their] launch, recovery, any air activity; it’s enough to weaken the NATO
ASW along the Norwegian coast and give the SSBNs the possibility to reach
launching positions in [the] Atlantic, making nuclear war very costly for both
parts, [and therefore] evaporating the political will to start it. At the same
time the tank armies will be in Berlin, Paris, Brussels and so on.
In other words, he is referring
to one of the Soviets’ chief maritime strategic objectives for the early phases
of a conventional European war: degradation of potential offensive ASW efforts
by NATO navies against Soviet SSBNs. His assertion is consistent with the intelligence assessments that shaped the U.S. Navy’s
development of the 1980s Maritime Strategy. The Soviets viewed the correlation
of wartime-fielded nuclear forces as a key factor in deterring NATO’s
escalation to the nuclear threshold. NATO would likely only have contemplated
crossing that threshold, though, if the Red Army had routed NATO’s forward
defenses along the inter-German front. From the Soviet perspective, then, any
measures that increased the likelihood that mutual intra-war nuclear deterrence
would hold also increased the likelihood that they could achieve their war
objectives via conventional means. It was additionally recognized that if the
Soviets had been able to effectively protect their SSBN force during a
conventional war, they would have possessed a stronger position for war
termination negotiations.
Consequently, effective disruption
or suppression of U.S. carrier battleforce operations along the Soviet maritime
periphery could have prevented NATO navies from attaining the margin of local
sea control necessary for combined arms prosecutions of older Soviet SSBNs,
such as the Yankee-class, that had to break through the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom gap in order to reach their Western
Atlantic patrol stations. Similar disruption/suppression efforts against U.S.
carriers operating somewhat deeper within the Soviet maritime periphery could have
delayed or prevented destruction of the Soviet surface combatants performing
defensive ASW in support of the ‘boomer bastions’ used by later generation
Soviet SSBNs such as the various Delta-classes and the Typhoon-class. All this would be in addition
to—and possibly more important to the Soviets than—preventing U.S. carrier air
wings’ conventional strikes against military targets in Soviet coastal areas.
Another key observation by
Maksim is that Soviet maritime strike capabilities should be viewed
holistically, or rather that the Soviet Naval Air Force was not necessarily the
primary combat arm for the anti-carrier mission:
There were also
surface and [submarine] components of the Anti-Carrier Doctrine, and it is
extremely hard to say which one was main and which one [was] complementary. It
depended on who, when, [and] how [the carriers were found] and where the [Soviet
maritime] forces [were] deployed at the moment.
Naturally it
does mean that [the entire] air component could have been used as the decoy,
three whole air divisions of expendable planes and people - if the surface
combatant[s] or subs needed [that kind of support in order to be able to attack
effectively], [whether they were]in better [attack] positions in the staff’s
opinion or by chance.
The idea that an entire combat
arm could be used as an expendable decoy is quite incredible from a Western
perspective, but in light of the aforementioned Soviet maritime strategic
priorities it makes perfect sense. If the Soviets believed it was unlikely that
a conventional conflict would be protracted, and that nuclear deterrence/bargaining
therefore predominated, the opportunity cost of expending these platforms and
crews in such a way could be quite acceptable. Coordination between two or more
combat arms for a single near-simultaneous attack would have been incredibly
difficult based on the issues Maksim identifies in his article and that I’ve
addressed in some of my prior writings. Nevertheless, these issues would not
have necessarily precluded Soviet Navy commanders from burning up one combat
arm in an attempt to knock a U.S. battleforce off-balance in preparation for a
later attack by another combat arm.
When the implications of
Maksim’s aforementioned observations are combined, we come to see what he means
when he says:
That is why my
article is in general about kamikazes. It was one-way navy. No one expected to
return, [had] the war been declared.
Continental powers’ concepts
regarding the combat employment of naval forces have historically been quite
different than those of maritime powers. U.S. naval strategists and operational
planners, not to mention those of us in the armchair analysis community, would
be wise to bear in mind that courses of action that seem rash or potentially
self-defeating from our perspectives could be quite rational from a potential
adversary’s perspective.
