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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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November 16, 2004
[Have an opinion on this column? Sound off in Military.com
at the Frontlines.]
Another Veterans' Day has just gone by, and right before it -- November 9th -- marked fifteen years since the de facto end of the Cold War, when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. To the extent that the Cold War was indeed truly a war, it was by decades America's longest war, and also by far the most dangerous. The men and women in uniform who served in, or directly supported in different ways, our thermonuclear deterrent triad of B-52 and B-1 bombers, ICBM silos, and SSBN "boomer" subs, form one of our largest groups of veterans, living or dead. Through year after year of training, drills, and perpetual on-watch vigilance, they helped achieve our country's greatest victory, the defeat of the Soviet Union, without ever firing a shot. They deserve special recognition as much as do our blooded conventional forces who battled the USSR by proxy in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere, or who manned the front lines in tense long-term stand-offs ranging from Southeast Asia to Central Europe and beyond -- on land, in the air, and on or under the sea. Cold Warriors did their duty unflinchingly in some of the loneliest places, and the harshest environments, that human beings have ever had to face. From the North Pole to Antarctica, from the crushing depths of world oceans to the final wilderness of outer space, brave men and women engaged and entangled an enemy who sometimes stared at them eyeball to eyeball, and sometimes never even knew they were there.
But were it not for a change in U.S. grand strategy that altered the terms of the conflict and stood the Cold War on its head, the frightening stalemate of H-bomb "overkill" mutual assured destruction between NATO and the Warsaw Pact could have continued to this day, with no end yet in sight. The Berlin Wall might still be standing right now -- or, civilization as we know it might be lying in radioactive ruins.
It's been said that all wars are fought, ultimately, for economic reasons. Competition for wealth and power, for ownership of territory (including ideological-religious "ownership"), or for control of natural resources and domination of markets, often triggers the outbreak of actual fighting -- whether with spears or cavalry charges or precision-guided cruise missiles. The key to the end of the Cold War was to escalate the economic aspect of the contest, by using the dynamic waltz between friendly and enemy weapons technology and tactics not to destroy materiel or people, but to drive to ruin the opposition's treasury. Armaments systems and their crews, and scientists and engineers, became tools and enablers of a financial -- not military -- brinkmanship, a test of will and stamina which overwhelmed the USSR. In the global wrestling match between capitalism and communism, capitalism triumphed.
But economic warfare doesn't happen in a vacuum, in the abstract. To fight at all, wrestlers need to grapple at specific times and places; they have to test one another's strengths and weaknesses, both physical and mental, in practical ways. They must apply and break holds that goad each other and challenge endurance, according to styles and rules, until one succumbs.
Reflecting on all this caused me to make some connections and ask a thought-provoking question: Did the very success of the Kremlin's spying against the United States help speed up the Soviet Union's doom? I think it did. Here's why:
One aspect of the Cold War in which most Western analysts concede the USSR definitely outperformed us was human-intelligence espionage (HumInt). The reasons usually given for this are two-fold, based on asymmetries between Washington's and Moscow's abilities and national cultures. First, the U.S. had unquestionably superior electronic means of intelligence gathering, so the
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USSR was forced to rely more on flesh-and-blood secret agents. Second, the U.S. was and is a free and open society, allowing easy travel and social mingling through which local turncoats could be recruited, whereas the USSR was a closed system in which paranoid KGB operatives tailed and harried every suspicious-looking foreign visitor, attaché, and diplomat.
Among Soviet espionage successes in the 1970s and 1980s, two stand out as being of particular importance in their impact on the Kremlin's evolving behavior in one area widely regarded as crucial to -- if not epitomizing -- the entire Cold War face-off: submarine warfare.
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© 2004 Joe Buff. All opinions expressed
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