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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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The first case was former National Security Agency cryptologist Ronald W. Pelton's betrayal of the U.S. Navy's ongoing covert wiretapping operations against a key underwater telephone cable in the Sea of Okhotsk (off the northwest Pacific Ocean). This cable ran between major Soviet navy bases. It sat at fairly shallow depth well inside what the USSR insisted was its sovereign territory. Unknown to the Soviets, for several years American submariners and divers had been sneaking into the Sea of Okhotsk, planting high-capacity recording devices on this cable, and then later sneaking back to retrieve them -- and attach new, even better recorders. The insights on Soviet thinking obtained this way were very valuable, and the compromising and loss of this eavesdropping facility was a definite setback. (A similar wiretapping operation also went on against the Soviet Northern Fleet, near Murmansk and Polyarnyy on the other side of the world, but fortunately Pelton didn't know about this, so it continued.)
The second case was the Walker spy ring. It was through the Walker espionage effort, which went on non-stop for many years, that the Soviet Navy a) realized how terribly noisy their own submarines were, b) understood how important it was for submarines to be very quiet, and c) stole top-secret American methods for making our own fast-attack SSNs, and SSBNs, be so quiet in comparison to theirs.
This information was important to the outcome of the Cold War because it shocked the Soviet Union into a series of reactions and counter-actions which were in the end prohibitively expensive. The main effects of this shock factor, which helped change the whole tone of the U.S./USSR struggle and turned the economic tide in our favor, ran something like this:
1. The Kremlin was forced to realize that NATO submarines were penetrating what it considered its most secure home waters with virtual impunity, coming and going at will, completely unsuspected and undetected.
2. The Kremlin was forced to admit to itself that its current generation of submarines, of whatever type and purpose, were hopelessly outclassed by Western designs. The USSR thus went on a crash program to catch up in the quality of its own undersea vessels. It also rethought, and changed, its operational doctrine for where its submarines would be deployed, and what they would be used for.
3. Among the new Soviet submarine classes to enter service, as a result of their peek into classified American data, was the Akula class of SSNs, sometimes referred to bitterly by U.S. submariners as the "Walker class." Akulas were much harder to detect than their clunkier predecessors. But to design, retool, and construct a totally new class of sub is vastly more expensive that to continue serial production of an older, less capable class that already exists. The Akula was a military breakthrough for our enemy, but foretold an economic disaster, too.
4. Realizing the vulnerability of their boomers to NATO fast-attacks, the Soviets did two things. They started construction of better combat-survivable SSBNs, the most famous of which is the Typhoon class -- the largest submarines ever built, bigger than World War II cruisers. The other thing they began to do was hold their best SSBNs back in heavily defended "bastions" in their northernmost home waters, near and under the Arctic ice cap, where attack by American SSNs would be at its most difficult. But to
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assure the effectiveness of their Armageddon-threat boomers under this new bastion doctrine, they needed to continually invest in ever-longer-range and increasingly accurate submarine launched ballistic missiles and H-bomb warhead payloads -- to be able to hit pin-point hardened targets in the United States without coming near our shores. To maximize the security of these high-priced boomers with very-high-priced missiles aboard, they chose to assign their best SSNs, such as the Akulas, to escort and protect the boomers hiding within the bastions. They also developed surface ships whose primary mission was anti-submarine barrier and picket patrol, to further protect their SSBN sanctuaries -- the Sovremennyy and Udaloy destroyer classes among them. This concentration on defense of an inherently inflexible thermonuclear deterrent force, in constricted waters, seriously reduced the options for their fast-attack submarine fleet (and for their aspiring blue-water navy in general) to influence events anywhere else -- putting more and more strain on their building program. The self-inflicted economic wounds began to mount.
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© 2004 Joe Buff. All opinions expressed
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