Soviets Seen Cutting Navy’s Global Reach

The Soviet Union has significantly scaled back its plans for a “blue water” navy that can project power in Third World conflicts, intelligence and private analysts here say.

Instead, the analysts say, the Soviet navy appears to be stressing defensive operations close to home.

The latest piece of evidence is a radical design change to the largest aircraft carrier in Soviet history, now being built on the Black Sea. The carrier Leonid I. Brezhnev is being equipped with a “ski jump” flight deck, capable of accommodating only “jump jets” and helicopters rather than high-performance aircraft such as those that fly from U.S. carriers.

That unexpected modification, coupled with cuts in Soviet ship-building programs and naval exercises around the world, has confirmed to most experts the Kremlin policy change.

“The roughly 15% drop in out-of-area deployments (exercises) this year, which was the first sharp decline after decades of growth, came as quite a shock to everyone who watches these things,” one naval intelligence analyst said. “It implies the Soviets see bigger problems closer to home, and are focusing now less on the Third World than on their ‘first’ world.”

Analysts see various reasons for the change. Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev may wish to economize on his navy’s fuel bills, for example. Personality changes in the military hierarchy and the U.S. Navy’s more aggressive “forward” strategy--which calls for fighting the Soviet fleet close to its home ports in a war--also may help to account for it.

Earlier Start Seen

But the reduced number of ships and submarines coming down the slipways of Soviet naval yards in recent years indicates that the change probably began in the final years of the Brezhnev regime.

No major impact on the U.S. Navy’s strategy or on its goal of having 15 carrier battle groups--there are 13 now--is expected because of the Soviet strategy change. The American navy has always been the “power projection” force of the United States as well as the protector of its sea lines of communication and commerce, Michael MccGuire of the Brookings Institution said.

However, the greater emphasis on defense measures by the Soviets could create difficulties for the U.S. Navy in carrying out its controversial “forward” strategy, according to several authorities. Still, if the Soviets permanently forgo a blue water navy, the U.S. Navy would run less risk as its performs its global mission. This is already apparent in the Persian Gulf crisis, one analyst said.

“Ten years ago, we would have expected a very major Soviet deployment there under conditions of today,” he said. “Instead, we see only a couple of minesweepers.”

More Sophisticated Gear

Not all experts believe that the Soviet navy is being pulled back. Norman Polmar, a naval consultant here, pointed out that new Soviet warships are often double or more the size of their predecessors and are crammed with more sophisticated equipment.

“There is no falling off, in my view, of the Soviet commitment to a blue water navy,” he said.

Moreover, according to Prof. Condalessa Rice of Stanford University, the Soviet military has increased its spending on land-based naval aviation in recent years.

“The naval mission as a whole may not have been cut back even if the naval service as such has fewer ships,” she said.

But most specialists believe, as does MccGuire, that “we will see the Soviet navy in the markedly diminished role in the future, as low man on the totem pole” of the Soviet military hierarchy, after the army, air force, strategic missile force and air defense force.

The changes to the Brezhnev are considered significant because, as originally designed, it would have been the first conventional carrier in the Soviet navy. As such, predicted a 1985 U.S. Navy publication, “Understanding Soviet Naval Developments,” it would be “one of the most notable developments” in postwar naval history.

Sea-based, high performance aircraft from the deck of a conventional carrier provide air cover beyond the range of land-based air defenses. Conventional carriers also would “markedly improve Soviet ability to project power ashore effectively in the Third World,” the publication said.

Such Third World missions were foreseen 30 years earlier by Adm. Sergei G. Gorshkov when he took command of the Soviet navy in 1956. He was determined to convert it from a coastal defense force into a blue water navy that could challenge the United States everywhere.

“The flag of the Soviet navy flies over the oceans of the world,” he wrote. “Sooner or later the United States will have to understand it no longer has mastery of the seas.”

‘Interventionist’ Policy

In the early 1970s, Gorshkov and other Soviet military leaders began formulating an “interventionist” policy. Defense Minister Andrei Grechko wrote of the “liberating mission” of Soviet power in supporting “progressive” forces around the world, for example, according to a detailed study earlier this year by Frank Fukuyama of the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica. Soviet forces were used in Angola, Ethiopia and Afghanistan, and there was “a dramatic increase” in Soviet military supplies to Third World clients, Fukuyama found.

The Soviet navy also began developing new types of vessels for distant “power projection” missions, including a huge amphibious landing ship for Soviet naval infantry and an “underway replenishment” ship that could transfer fuel and supplies to warships while both were moving swiftly.

But by the early 1980s, signs began to appear that the navy was being downgraded. Instead of fleets of these new ships, only one of each kind was built. Another indication was the failure of the Soviets to send warships in large numbers into the Mediterranean during the 1982 fighting in Lebanon, in marked contrast to the huge fleets dispatched in the 1967 and 1973 Middle East conflicts.

Submarine Production

Still other signs were the declines in Soviet production of submarines. The gigantic ballistic missile-firing Typhoon class, as huge as a World War II aircraft carrier, is being produced at a rate of one each year instead of the two once expected. And the Oscar class cruise missile-firing submarine is entering the water not at the rate of three per year, as predicted, but also at one a year, according to MccGuire. He said that he believes the Soviet navy’s allocation of nuclear reactors to power ships has been halved.

Out-of-area deployment of Soviet ships has dropped steeply everywhere except in the South China Sea off Vietnam where the Soviets now use the former U.S. naval base at Cam Ranh Bay.

In the Indian Ocean, there was an average of 28 Soviet ships every day in 1983; this fell to between 16 and 17 last year, one naval officer said. In the Atlantic, the average number of Soviet ships dropped from about 45 in 1984 to 33 this year.

Ballistic missile submarine deployments in the Atlantic are also sharply down this year.

The Brezhnev is considered significant by military experts, not only because of the change to its design but because, technically, it should not be allowed to leave the Black Sea.

The Montreux Convention of 1936 bars “capital” ships from passing through the Bosporus, which connects that sea to the Mediterranean. Aircraft carriers are not named in the treaty, but they are the modern equivalent of battleships, which were the premier capital ships before World War II.

Calling It a Cruiser

With an obvious eye to that treaty, the Soviets have begun referring to the Brezhnev as an anti-submarine warfare (ASW) cruiser. This same description won exit permission from Turkey, which straddles Bosporus, for the Kiev, which is only half the size of the 65,000-ton Brezhnev and which also has vertical and short-take off and landing aircraft.

“ASW may be the Brezhnev’s primary mission now, but it’s no cruiser,” said RAND’s Harry Gelman.

In contrast to U.S. carriers with fixed-wing, high-performance jets that are catapulted into the air and require about 600 feet of deck to land, the Brezhnev will be just a bigger version of the Kiev “ASW cruiser.” Its jump jets take off by racing up its uptilted nose. They land almost vertically.

The British pioneered the ski-jump concept, which provides 40% more range or payload for the aircraft, and proved its feasibility during the 1982 Falklands War. That may have persuaded the Soviets to modify their plans for the Brezhnev, according to Floyd D. Kennedy, the maritime editor of National Defense magazine and a naval consultant.

But while British jump jets were effective against Argentina’s older, land-based aircraft, which had to operate at the limits of their range, they would be severely tested by the faster, more sophisticated aircraft of the kind based on U.S. carriers.

“The Brezhnev now will not be a good power projection vessel,” Kennedy said.