Arms Control at Sea Just Doesn’t Float : Soviets’ Proposals to Curb Our Navy Would Let Them Be More Provocative

Now that the Soviets have abandoned their old provocative offensive military doctrine, they are asking that the United States do the same. Since their large army, encamped all over Eastern Europe, no longer threatens Western Europe, surely the U.S. Navy can abandon its provocative maritime strategy. Pravda has even gone so far as to suggest that, since war can no longer come on land (thanks to the new and non-threatening Soviet ground strategy), the sea is the only place left where the two superpowers can come into conflict.

It may seem logical, but it isn’t.

No one has yet detected any reduction in Soviet standing forces, or in Soviet military production. Mikhail S. Gorbachev will surely have to make military cuts if he is to modernize his country, but even fairly substantial cuts would still leave the Soviet Union with the most powerful army in the world, quite capable of assaulting our allies in Europe and in the Far East--and, moreover, designed for the offensive. Whatever the Soviets may say about their new doctrine, as long as the forces remain, doctrine can be changed quite suddenly.

The real change in relations between the two superpowers is not glasnost . Rather, it is the growing realization that nuclear weapons are difficult or impossible to use in war, that they tend to cancel each other out. That makes nuclear war much less likely, but it also makes the Soviet ground army much more usable, since there is less fear of a nuclear reaction. Whatever the proclaimed Soviet doctrine, that perceived change makes the Soviet army a more realistic threat to our allies.

Because the United States does not draft soldiers, it cannot maintain a peacetime army on anything like the Soviet scale. What we can do is threaten the Soviets with counterattacks around the edges of their empire--with the mobility that we buy with naval forces. The combination of geography and advanced technology makes that mobility relatively inexpensive. For all the impressive naval buildup of the Ronald Reagan years, the Navy never cost as much as one-third of the overall U.S. defense budget.

This threat is not provocative, as the Soviets would maintain. It helps preserve the peace. Because the Soviets must maintain forces to counter what they see as a U.S. threat, they find it harder to concentrate in any one place. Their doctrine says that they need a great concentration of force if they are to attack, so that dispersal makes attack much less attractive to them. Even their military budget, which in terms of their own economy is about three to four times the size of ours, is limited. Every ruble spent on naval forces to deal with ours cannot be spent on the ground forces with which the Soviets might decide to invade Western Europe or our Asian allies. Again, those provocative naval forces make it more, not less, difficult for war to break out.

Indeed, it may well be that, to the extent that U.S. naval forces help make war an impractical choice for the Soviets, they have encouraged the current changes in Soviet doctrine. It would, however, be extremely foolish for us to take those changes for granted.

Moreover, no change in Soviet doctrine can change geography. Both in Europe and in the Far East, our allies and our most important trading partners are all either on or close to the Soviet border. We can reach out to them, in an emergency, only by sea. The Soviet navy, as it is now constituted, can be used to cut off that resupply route. Our naval doctrine is designed to protect the sea lanes by forcing the Soviet navy to concentrate on operations in waters close to its own coast. If we give up that kind of operation, we release the Soviet navy to operate against the supply lines with which we would sustain our own army in Europe and in the Pacific. We would also allow the Soviets to cut their own naval budget without cutting the forces that we find most provocative--the Soviet ground forces that, in wartime, would seize Western Europe.

The Soviets find U.S. naval exercises in the seas near their coast to be provocative. But those seas also wash our allies’ shores, and without our Navy our allies would see mainly Soviet ships off their coasts.

The Soviets find it provocative that we plan to operate submarines in their waters in wartime against their strategic submarines. But unless we do so, their attack submarines, which would have to protect those strategic submarines, would be free to cut off our resupply routes across the Atlantic and the Pacific. The Soviet Union wants to cut down the scale of the United States’ naval maneuvers. That would have the effect of cutting the readiness of our Navy--which is the primary means that we have of affecting events overseas.

The Soviet arms-control initiative at sea is important because it touches the one area in which the United States is clearly superior to the Soviets. It also comes at a time of economic strain for the United States and at a time when a new Administration could come under strong pressure to discard the current maritime strategy. The Soviets understand as much. Hopefully we can understand that our maritime strategy responds to strategic and geographical reality, not to U.S. partisan politics or a desire merely to spend more on defense.