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A former partner
in a top-10 global management consulting firm,
Joe Buff is a seasoned risk analyst and professional
writer on national security and defense preparedness.
He is also a novelist of tales of near-future
warfare featuring nuclear submariners and
Navy SEALs in action at their bravest and
best. Two of Joe's non-fiction articles on
future submarine technology and tactics, which
appeared in The Submarine Review, received
literary awards from the Naval Submarine League.
His recent novel Crush
Depth made the Military Book Club's
Top 20 Bestseller List after being selected
as a Featured Alternate of the Club in late
2002. Tidal
Rip was released from Wm. Morrow in
hardcover in November, 2003, and quickly made
the Amazon.com Top 100 General Thrillers Bestseller
List (paperback edition due in October, 2004).
Joe's next book, Straits
of Power, is scheduled for hardcover
publication in November, '04.
Joe is a member of the Society for Risk Analysis,
a non-partisan international scholarly body
headquartered in McLean, VA. He is a Life
Member of the following organizations: U.S.
Naval Institute, the Navy League of the
United States, the Fellows of the Naval War
College, CEC/Seabees Historical Foundation,
and the Naval Submarine League. Joe's father
was an enlisted man in the Navy (Seabees in
the Pacific Theater) from 1946 through 1951,
and his uncle was a merchant mariner on the
North Atlantic convoys late in World War II,
before being drafted into the U.S. Army to
serve in the Occupation of Nazi Germany. In
August, 2004, Joe was made an Honorary Life
Associate Member of the Navy Seabee Veterans
of America, partly in recognition of his pro
bono work for Operation
Seabees Knowledge.
Joe
Buff Article & Column Archive
Joe Buff Contact Info:
readermail@joebuff.com
http://www.JoeBuff.com
Joe Buff Books:
Straits
of Power
Tidal
Rip
Crush
Depth
Thunder
in the Deep
Deep
Sound Channel
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5. To continue to threaten the U.S. with shorter-range H-bomb-tipped ballistic missiles, so giving Washington less warning time in case of pre-emptive or first-strike surprise attack, older, noisier, and less mechanically reliable SSBNs were sent out across the Atlantic toward the North American coast. It was one of these second-string players, the Yankee-class K-219, that exploded, burned, and sank as a result of a missile-fuel accident a thousand miles off Cape Hatteras in 1986. (The Los Angeles-class fast attack sub USS Augusta was in trail of K-219 the whole time.) Fortunately, most of K-219's crew was rescued, her twin nuclear reactors were shut down into safe condition, and in 18,000 feet of water an ecological disaster was averted. When Soviet robotic submersibles later visited the wreck, they found that intact missiles and warheads had already been removed from some of the undamaged missile tubes by someone else -- the Americans. Chalk this one up as an espionage coup for us, and as another good example of how the bastion doctrine was backfiring.
The bastion doctrine created other extremely costly problems for the Soviet Navy, in part because once the bastion strategy was recognized as such by U.S. spy submarines, the Naval War College (and others) developed and publicized an aggressive counter-strategy. This became known as the Maritime Strategy -- which instigated and validated a massive build-up in the size of the U.S. Navy. In time of war, and cooperating with other NATO forces, American supercarriers escorted in strength by cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and submarines, would penetrate the Norwegian Sea and the Barents Sea and directly attack Soviet naval and air bases. Other submarines (later-flight Los Angeles vessels, and the newer immensely capable hunter-killer Seawolf class) would simultaneously take on the bastions. These forces would also harry the vulnerable flank of any communist land offensive in Europe. Carefully staying below the nuclear threshold, as the White House used the Hot Line to let the Kremlin ask for peace terms, conventional munitions would batter Soviet sea power assets into useless sunken hulks, smashed fuselages, burning ammo dumps, and obliterated command-and-control infrastructure. Marines might even storm ashore to form amphibious beachheads, behind Warsaw Pact lines.
The Maritime Strategy was known to be a high-risk warfighting strategy, but its mere existence on paper, and as practiced in naval exercises under watchful Soviet eyes while the size of our navy swelled, made it work -- with essentially no loss of life in combat.
The reason it worked was that the Soviet Navy had no choice but to build up more numerous and more effective assets in self defense. Things got so worrisome for the Kremlin, and so bad for the USSR's perceived military situation, that for the first time the modern Soviet Northern Fleet sought to acquire large-deck aircraft carriers. Only a single one was ever even started, let alone finished, the non-nuclear-powered (and frequently renamed) Admiral Kuznetzov. This huge new monetary burden -- coming just as the Strategic Defense Initiative U.S. missile shield also began to enter the equation -- might have been the last straw. The workers' paradise of Marxist-Leninist ideology, or the Evil Empire if you prefer (depending which side you were on) went bankrupt and collapsed.
And all because of spies who told Moscow how bad at one time their submarines were compared to ours, plus some major competition from Ronald Reagan's six-hundred-ship navy and the many thousands of men and women who crewed it. If the Soviets had never had those spies, our armed forces might still be fighting America's longest war, this past Veterans' Day might have had a terribly different meaning, and the Berlin Wall and East German border might still mark the forward edge of the Iron Curtain. Ironic, isn't it?
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© 2004 Joe Buff. All opinions expressed
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