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4 December 2014

Soviet Oceanic Reconnaissance-Strike: New Observations from Maksim Tokarev (Part 1 of 2)

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.

[i] Jon’s sidenote: this refers to the U.S. Navy’s 1980s concept for creating carrier operations bastions in Norwegian fjords. For more details, see Commodore Jacob Børresen, Royal Norwegian Navy (Retired). “Alliance Naval Strategies and Norway in the Final Years of the Cold War.” Naval War College Review 64, No. 2 (Spring 2011): 97-115.

Posted by Jon Solomon at 12:30 AM 0 Comments

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