The Maritime History of a War Weary Naval Fleet

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The Maritime History of a War Weary Naval Fleet

John Lehman’s new book, Oceans Ventured: Winning the Cold War at Sea, could help America gird for what comes next on the high seas.

by James Holmes 

September 25, 2018

I like John Lehman’s new book Oceans Ventured: Winning the Cold War at Sea . It reminds me of how I won the Cold War with a little help from a few of you slackers.

Well, I may have had a little more help than that. After all, I was a dissolute high-schooler for part of the interlude Lehman retells, which roughly spans from 1980 to 1991—then a dissolute college kid, and then a dissolute surface-warfare officer in training. But I made my way onto the wine-dark sea in time for the Cold War’s endgame!
 
The author served as President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the navy from 1981 to 1987. Alongside Chief of Naval Operations James Watkins, he was the principal architect of the Reagan administration’s aggressive new Maritime Strategy. Lehman’s book  Command of the Seas  set forth the rationale for an offensive-minded strategy many years ago; Oceans Ventured: Winning the Cold War at Sea  recounts the operational details of how the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps put the strategy into effect in concert with fellow U.S. armed services and treaty allies. There’s much here for today’s naval magnates to ponder as they try to help the U.S. Navy regain its competitive footing vis-à-vis near-peer opponents such as the Russian Navy and China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy.

If there were a one-liner that sums up the Lehman/Watkins strategy—adopted in classified form by 1982 and  made public  in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings in 1986—it might be this: no more passive defense. This marked a significant turnabout from the 1970s. Secretary Lehman rightly points out that the U.S. Navy was a spent force coming out of the Vietnam War. It degenerated into a “hollow” force at the same time the Soviet Navy went on the march under the tutelage of its founding father, Fleet Adm. Sergei Gorshkov . Hollow forces tend to assume a defensive crouch vis-à-vis rival pugilists rather than compete with derring-do. And indeed, U.S. and allied navies more or less wrote off northern waters as a Soviet naval preserve. They were a Soviet sanctuary or “bastion” where ballistic-missile submarines could shelter.

The American naval establishment transcribed this reticent mindset—Lehman brands it a “Maginot Line” mentality, and this is no compliment—into operations. In the Atlantic Ocean the NATO allies rigged a barricade across the “G-I-UK gap”—the waters separating Greenland from Iceland and Iceland from the United Kingdom—in hopes of confining Soviet surface forces and especially attack submarines to the icy waters off Eastern Bloc shores. Engineers strewed  acoustic sensors  along the seafloor while NATO antisubmarine forces arrayed themselves behind the line in hopes of tailing and, in wartime, sinking Soviet units that crossed the G-I-UK picket line into the North Atlantic. If they succeeded, Western surface traffic could lumber across the ocean unmolested.

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https://nationalinterest.org/feature/maritime-history-war-weary-naval-fleet-31962