Is the Russian navy a waste of resources? Does it make Atlantic enemies waste resources? Or can we even know how assets would be used before the shooting starts? It's the old "capabilities versus intent" debate.
I've long dismissed the value of a Russian blue water navy when they need more of their scarce resources for land campaigns. The Winter War of 2022 exposes why more resources are needed for land campaigns. But is Russia's navy really a land war asset disguised as a naval threat? Or do we have to judge on visible capabilities rather than the opaque and changeable intent?
Russia's use of their navy in the Black Sea for land attack (ongoing) and amphibious missions (opposed assaults were thwarted but movement of troops and supplies continues) against Ukraine reflects this insight:
In the 1970s it was assumed that the Soviet Navy would launch a World War II-style counter-commerce campaign against NATO resupply in Europe. The Soviets possessed over 300 submarines and such a campaign seemed logical. Signals intelligence and other means, however, determined that Soviet submarines would primarily defend their ballistic missile submarines and support the Soviet Army rather than attack NATO convoys.
For decades I shared that apparently wrong assumption about the Soviet naval focus. Although I recognized the SSBN bastion mission to protect their most survivable strategic nuclear weapons.
Along with the Soviet mission of destroying our big deck strike carriers that the Soviets assumed had strategic nuclear war missions against the Soviet motherland. And that mission is murkier earlier in the Cold War when Soviet SSBNs couldn't fire at their targets from the coastal bastions and needed escorts to get closer to America. The capability to create a temporary forward bastion is indistinguishable from a capability to sink transport ships, no?
So depending on how the land
campaign had gone if the USSR lunged toward the Rhine River, I imagine the Soviets could have decided to try an
interdiction campaign to help a stalled offensive into West Germany. Especially if they managed to nail a lot of our big deck (both strike and ASW) carriers in the early hours of a war with their many--sometimes large--anti-ship missiles intended to disarm one method of nuking the USSR. Those American carriers had conventional sea control capabilities, too.
Remember that Germany had little ability to interdict Atlantic logistics lines at the beginning of both world wars. Yet in both came to rely on that kind of campaign to make up for failure to carry out rapid decisive land operations to win and end their wars. So they built up their submarine arsenal during the wars. The Soviets would have started with a large sub arsenal making a shift a matter of issuing an order rather than deciding to create the capability. Need would trump pre-war doctrine.
Despite Cold War mirror-imaging analysis, assuming a counter-commerce campaign was probably the wisest course of action for NATO to make given the stakes of holding Atlantic supply lines open. The lack of the NATO ability to convoy ships across the Atlantic may have led the Kremlin to decide to use a latent capability to hit an area of NATO weakness at the onset. Pre-war intent would have counted for nothing during a war.
Maybe we are mistaking Soviet reaction to our naval strength that pushed them to use their navy for support of a land campaign as failure to recognize cause and effect. Concluding we were "mirror imaging" what we'd do in a war regarding a line of supply interdiction campaign may have been our wrong explanation for the Soviets saying it wasn't worth the price to batter their naval assets against that wall at sea. Instead, they may have decided it would be more immediately profitable to directly support the decisive main land campaign--not that the Soviets didn't want to sink our transports if they could.
Are my worries about current Navy convoy escort capabilities wrong? I've also said the Russian navy doesn't have the ability to challenge our Atlantic logistics. But the Russians could decide to use what they have to try. Would that provide strategic results for Russia in the absence of current NATO defensive capabilities or "only" increase our casualties?
UPDATE: A timely article on the battle for Convoy HG-76 in the Atlantic.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
NOTE: I'm still adding updates on the Last Hamas War in this post.
