Tom Karako: Well, good morning, folks. I’m Tom Karako. I’m a senior fellow here in the International Security Program at CSIS, and I direct the Missile Defense Project. Our event today is “The Falklands at 40: Reflections on Maritime Strategy and Anti-Ship Cruise Missiles.”
In doing some research for this, a friend shot me an article from 2012, the 30th anniversary from – it was in Proceedings and Commander Jim Griffin wrote that the Falklands War was the first modern anti-access area denial conflict.
Now, of course, A2AD threats have come a long way in the past 40 years. Nonetheless, you don’t have to try too hard to think about analogies to contemporary events and challenges, be it in Ukraine or the issues with Taiwan. And that’s part of why we’re hosting this today and why this event is being hosted by the CSIS Missile Defense Project. There’s lessons to be learned about anti-ship missile threats and air and missile defense, or the lack thereof.
Our first speaker today is the Honorable John F. Lehman, Jr., former secretary of the Navy from 1981 to 1987 during the Reagan administration. He spent 25 years in the Naval Reserve. He was a staff member on the NSC to Henry Kissinger. Posted a lot of other government service, and more recently was a member of the 9/11 Commission and the National Defense Commission.
So we’re going to turn things over to you, Secretary Lehman, for some opening remarks. Then he and I will have a discussion, and then we’ll have a second panel to continue the conversation.
So over you, sir.
John Lehman, Jr.: Great. Thanks. It’s great to be back here.
Dr. Karako: Thank you.
Sec. Lehman: The whole resurgence of the forward strategy and the end of the Cold War that began in the ’80s really started at what – the predecessor organization of CSIS – the Georgetown Center for Strategic Studies – had a kind of a lunch or dinner group, including some of our distinguished panel members, and we would get together a couple of times a month to talk about strategy because the nation at the time – Congress and executive – were embarked on a major disarmament program, reducing, particularly, the Navy and so this bipartisan group sort of came together spontaneously.
There were as many Democrats as Republicans but all of us felt that we were headed in the wrong direction, and it wasn’t just the United States. It was Europe, especially – in fact, the U.K. led the way in naval disarmament. When I was a student over there, the Wilson government had quite a debate about the future of aircraft carriers and they concluded there was no future for aircraft carriers. So they canceled them all, canceled the plans for new ones and decided to early retire the old ones.
So this seemed to many of us here – and we were in various ways affiliated with the Georgetown Center – CSIS – that we needed to really think through and elaborate more specifically why we needed a strategy that was not a passive strategy to continue defensive worrying about the Russian – the Soviet 180 divisions, and our Defense Department had become obsessive about one small theater, the Fulda Gap and the North German Plain. And Navy, what do they do? How can they help us? They need to help, you know, bring the beans and bullets over but that’s not part of strategy.
Well, of course, we drew together some very, very important people, some within the administration. But the dialogue was really, really good, and what came out of that interaction we had some war games that we put together ourselves and we really came – pulled together things, some that were going on in the fleets but more of it was, really, just to – a concept because all strategy – all good strategy is simple logic, and we always said that, look, as we develop these strategic ideas think of how they are going to be sold because you have to make even a congressman understand what you’re talking about. The more esoteric, the more complicated, the more pages it takes to explain the strategy, the less effective it really is as a strategy.
So you’ve got to keep – instead of what had become in the Navy, especially, strategy became, well, what can we afford? They say they’re going to cut the budget so that’s less than what we have now. So what ships should we start to retire? That, really, was what strategy was about in the ’70s. And so we felt very strongly, all of us – it was a very bipartisan group – that strategy has to start with where – what do you want to do? Do you want to win the Cold War? Is it winnable? If so, then say so and then build your strategy, not on what you think the bureaucrats are going to give you to implement it and Congress will appropriate, but build your force structure. What does it take to win? And from the force structure then build your POM. What is it – how many carriers do you need? How many submarines do you need? How many frigates? How many mine layers, et cetera? Derive it – simple logic – to a budget and that should be the Navy budget.
Now, if the consolidation in the Department of Defense means that the DOD just laughs at the budget, OK, that’s – you know, that’s a problem. But you should have the strategy even if you can’t get it funded in a particular administration or a particular Congress. The Navy should always have a Navy – a maritime strategy that includes all the other services’ participation. But to do the Navy’s job of command of the seas and keeping the nation safe, the Navy must always have a strategy, not a budgetary strategy.
And so in the interwar periods, the Navy was very good until after – until, actually, the establishment of the consolidation in 1947, which, by the way, included in the law that consolidated the services in the Department of Defense that the secretary of defense’s office must never exceed 50 people, and, as we know today, there are 750,000 civilian FTEs in the Department of Defense. They’re not all in the office of the secretary but there are 30-odd independent agencies that don’t report to anybody. And, yet, when I was secretary, they spent 60 percent of the Navy budget and we had no say.
I’m going to jump around a little bit here just to illustrate my final point. After the Falklands we really wanted to know how good we were at defending against Exocets. I read all of our classified reports. It was all goodness, we were – yes, we were able to, clearly, defend against Exocets and, worse, the supersonic sea skimmers of the Soviets with a much bigger shaped charge warhead.
But we decided, no, we couldn’t – we can’t just depend on power metric studies. We’re going to test them. And the Brits were in the same boat because they had suffered some very bad hits from Exocets, and so we agreed on a test – a series of tests – out at Point Mugu on the West Coast. The Brits sent a destroyer over with a dozen Exocets. We built targets of retired mothballed destroyers and bigger ships and smaller ships. We put CIWS on. We put – on some we put Sea Sparrows. On others we had the land-based equivalent of – or the surface-based equivalent of the Sidewinders. We had SLQ-32 jammers. We had Prowler aircraft up. We had the F-14s with Phoenix, and it was a realistic real test.
And I was being pummeled on the Hill at the time because, oh, the Falklands demonstrates surface ships can’t survive. The Brits lost X, Y, Z, and they – the carriers didn’t help them. They were – they kept getting pummeled by World War II bombs and blah, blah, blah. And every day I was up on the Hill trying to apply logic to these, let’s say, less informed congressional committees.
So I didn’t want to wait for the seven layers of commands in between the tests and my office. So I went out there for the tests and I stayed there through the testing phase. I flew as a radar intercept officer in the F-14 that was used specifically to track and counter every one of the missiles fired, and we found that it really validated the analyses that we had.
Of course, as I said, since Okinawa the Navy had depended on layered defenses going out to the first early warning destroyer plots and the – closer in to the fleet because we had over a thousand ships in that battle. So it was a target-rich environment for the Kamikazes, the very smart cruise missiles. These Kamikazes, by the way, were both dive bombers, fighters, twin-engine Bettys, the whole array of combat aircraft in the Japanese arena and loaded with bombs in the – not loaded but carrying at least two 500-pound bombs, every one of them.
And so there were 1,700 of them that attacked the fleet over the hundred days of the battle and we suffered heavy losses and – but we learned as we proceeded and adapted to – as did the Japanese attackers. They adapted their cruise missiles to our defenses and soon adopted sea skimming and sudden pop-ups and a lot of other tactics. They were very good and very adaptable.
But we learned our lessons there that you have to have layered defense. So we tested all those layers and they worked. Only one of the dozen Exocets were able to get passed in the testing of the CIWS, which is the Gatling gun defense. Only one of them got through. The rest were, effectively, shot down.
And so we came away with that confirmed that layered defense is even more important in the age of missile defense. So the Navy always had a good layered defense. But that was, basically, the reason CSIS was able to bring together this group was because there was a feeling that many of the lessons of the previous 50 years had been lost and that it was time to rejuvenate in the intellectual and the policy communities the reality of understanding and remembering the lessons learned in the past.
And that’s why today’s examination, I think, is so crucial because it’s getting harder and harder to keep the memory of legitimate lessons learned that are still valid, and many of the lessons that we learned through the years of all of the conflicts, and not just us but our allies, have been eroded because it’s – you know, as has now become a cliché, the – history does not repeat itself but it rhymes. It rhymes often and regularly, and we forget – we have come as institutions to forget those rhyming tunes and that’s a real challenge, which is, I think, one of the key lessons and reasons that we are here today how do we keep alive the lessons that we have learned with blood and tears over the last – well, you can go all the way back several hundred years but, certainly, in modern history we face many of the same challenges as we are seeing in the Ukraine today.
The cruise missile is nothing new for naval forces. It’s clear the Russians either never learned the lessons, more probably, or forgot them all because almost every lesson that came out of World War II and subsequent wars was ignored in the Moskva, and the worry is that U.S. and Western and NATO navies have forgotten what they should be remembering in training and in equipment and in materiel and in ship design. All of those things are important in naval warfare.
But as we look at procurement today in the U.K. and in the U.S. in the specifications for design in ships – recent ships like the LCS and the Zumwalt – to save money, lessons were forgotten, and so we’ve got to figure out a way to change that. The Navy always depended on layered defense. Now the Navy does not have the layered defense that it used to have – the U.S. Navy. All of the Navy’s long-range carrier aircraft were canceled. We have no more long-range attack, fighter, interceptor, strike.
All of those were cancelled to save money, and so instead of a seven-layered defense against supersonic cruise missiles and now hypersonic cruise missiles, we have a three-layer to – on the carriers four-layer defense, and that’s not enough to the threats that we know are here now and some that are coming. So that’s why we put together this distinguished panel and – that can drill down in these key areas.
And so I’d just like to end this part of the overview with the experiences we had in the Falklands – we, the U.S., and our allies. The first I learned of it was a call to me from the strike fleet commander in Norfolk and that was Admiral Ace Lyons, who was very close to the Royal Navy.
What a lot of people don’t understand is that despite what politicians and academics say about this special relationship it is very real in the maritime and across the military field, but especially in the naval forces – the Marine forces of the U.S. and the U.K. It is a special relationship.
We had – at the time the Falklands decision was made we had 50 persons – officers and NCOs and specialists – in Northwood, the Royal Navy headquarters, and there were 150 Royal Navy personnel in the various commands in Norfolk, and there was no other nation that had that kind of representation. And so the first I heard, as I said, I got a call from Admiral Lyons saying, whoa, we just got through the normal navy-to-navy channels a request for a few unusual things.
They say they have to have right away two tankers full of fuel for – dispatched right away to the – Ascension Island. They need a hundred AIM-9L Sidewinders, which were the new Sidewinders that could shoot head on instead of having to get behind the enemy aircraft. They wanted an aircraft carrier standing by. Kind of unusual things. Moving a couple of satellites and a lot of other things.
So Lyons, who, as, I would say, the majority of naval officers in the U.S. Navy have always been – despite the revolution and the War of 1812 have been very pro Brit for the most part. And so he said, well, don’t do anything. I think we’ve got to get a little higher guidance from this.
So I went down to see Cap, who was the secretary of defense – Secretary Weinberger – and he – we recommended that – well, Ace Lyons recommended, why don’t we just handle this? They do need it. They don’t have any AIM-9Ls. They were going to run out of fuel at Ascension and won’t be able to go beyond that. We’ve got to help them and these are legitimate requests.
So Cap was pretty much an anglophile, even a rabid anglophile, and he agreed. I agreed with Ace Lyons, and he said, I’m going to go over and talk to the president and see if we can get him to authorize handling this within SACLANT and Norfolk and I’ll set up a special task group to work with them.
Above all, we don’t want it to get into the State Department or the – still far worse, the Foreign Office. So Cap went over to the White House, laid out the pros and cons, laid out the whole menu of requests so far, and gave his recommendation that we go ahead and just start handling this through existing channels because this was a normal flow of chat. This was not normal, but there was a flow of joint training exercises, of parts for common weapons systems and so forth.
So what, of course, we now know, which most people didn’t then, was the Argentines were running the Contra camps to counter the Soviet intrusions into Central America, and while we were paying for the cost of the Contra camps to help the opposition to the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua it was the Argentines who were running the camps.
So, obviously, the secretary of state was – under whose purview it was was desperate to try to find a compromise, a ceasefire, and he was in shuttle diplomacy constant, which the British government, not knowing, really, what the Argentines were doing for us in running the Contra camps, thought – you know, I mean, Haig was pilloried in the British press for being pro Argentine and so forth, calling for negotiations, and he was even more an anglophile than Cap was but he was desperately trying to keep the – keep having to choose between two allies. Of course, there was no doubt in his mind, if we had to choose, where we would go.
So that complicated things. So Cap wasn’t sure, really, how President Reagan would come down on this because Haig was very – working with him very closely. And he stroked his chin, according to Cap, and he said, give Maggie everything she wants, and that was the decision. And so Cap came back and he said, I am designating my top civilian official to handle this and Dov Zakheim, who was the only “dove” in the Pentagon as he is proud to say, became the project manager to do the expediting and the waiver writing and to enable this to go right away because it really had to go right away.
So the flow was enormous, especially in intelligence and communications and missiles and spare parts and – but it was a full on, and yet kept pretty quiet. It was – it soon leaked out into the press that we were helping the Brits. But there was – no one really understood the huge volume that was involved.
And so that was how it all started. We soon – after the Brits took many, many hits they hit harder than they were hit and they prevailed, and right away, of course, the media in the U.S. was promulgating the view, as they do today, after cruise missiles sank the Moskva and all of the media about how great the Chinese and the Russians are – they’ve got all these hypersonic missiles and so forth – they – we had to get immediate analysis of the lessons to be learned and there were many lessons, many old lessons that were new to navies that had forgotten them, really, and we found we did have the capability to deal with the Exocets and with stream raids and so forth.
So and now we’ve got the world’s greatest experts on that logistics enterprise and on the lessons to be learned, and how do we keep those lessons alive today because, you know, as the old bromide says if you don’t learn the lessons of history you are doomed to repeat them and we’ve got two what they think are superpowers ready to reapply those lessons.
So I will now turn it over to the people who really know what they’re talking about. Thank you.
Dr. Karako: Well, thank you, Secretary Lehman. This is a great scene setter here. I just want to do a couple quick questions and then we’ll have the panelists come up and join you after a quick break.
First of all, you gave a great start there on the strategic and political aspects of this. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about – you talked about Caspar Weinberger and other folks talking to Reagan on this, but how do you think about the decision-making by both Thatcher and Reagan when this conflict popped up?
Sec. Lehman: I think it’s the right way to decide in crises. We’ve had some very good presidents – wartime presidents. We’ve had some very bad ones. And I won’t go through the catalog but those who weren’t afraid to make decisions, knowing the risk that they could be wrong in some aspects but knowing also that in war you must decide with what is available to you when you feel you have the probability and understand risk reward and make decisions. Margaret Thatcher was excellent at that.
She made some mistakes, not necessarily in this war, but she was decisive. But she wasn’t a shoot from the hip decision-maker nor was Reagan because Reagan really – he was – had been studying national security a much longer time than people gave him credit for and his instincts were brilliant and reliable for the military.
And so I think both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan should be models to study in understanding leadership and decision-making, and it’s no accident the two of them became fast friends because they understood each other.
Dr. Karako: So the fact that they acted forcefully – it would have been easy and the Argentineans probably expected they would blink – but what do you think that deterred longer down the road, the path that was avoided?
Sec. Lehman: Well, we now – that is a very good question because we now know during that brief three-year period when there was a lot of opening of files and sharing of information with the Russians that it really changed their perception of the balance of forces or, as they say, the correlation of forces, because they had, basically, written off the U.K. navy after the Wilson administration.
They were getting out of the navy business. They were not – they didn’t have sufficient funds to, for instance, buy AIM-9Ls and a lot of other stuff. So they had really downgraded their perception throughout the Russian military that on the scale of the military balance in NATO – with NATO, the U.K. counted for very little. It just stunned them, the performance of the Royal Navy in the Falklands, going 8,000 miles away without any warning, and, of course, you know, one of the lessons to be learned is they were surprised. And they didn’t have the logistics to do it but they had an ally who did. But their performance was just so out of the range of Russian perception that they had to recalculate their whole – the whole balance of power. So it really helped end the Cold War sooner than it otherwise would have.
Dr. Karako: So you alluded to lessons learned. You talked about some of them. I wonder, especially with respect to the U.S. Navy, what were the things that you implemented and you changed as a result of the conflict, as a result of the experience, and what you saw?
Sec. Lehman: Well, I think there are some here that can speak to that better than me but I can tell you the highlights were, first, we had to reestablish the strength and the training. Training is so essential. You might have a strategy But if you don’t train to it, if you don’t force those ships to go up in and north of the Arctic Circle where the vulnerabilities of your enemies are and learn that you got to send sailors up to chip the ice off the radars and you can’t go above deck in certain weather without losing people and you can’t land an aircraft carrier in certain kinds of snowstorms, and the only way you learn that is to go do it and take the bruises that come with that.
That was, perhaps, the most important, and we had to really test – real test, not paper tests, academic tests, or simulations – how surface ships particularly can survive against stream raids, sea-skimming missiles, hypersonic missiles, whatever. You’ve got to test it and learn the lessons and make the changes.
The Navy and – Royal Navy and the U.S. Navy, historically, were very good at learning lessons and applying them. It so happened the U.S. built much better warships at the beginning of the 19th century by using woods that were much harder like live oak that were, in effect, armor plating and that by innovative design they could carry a much heavier cannon load than the British ships, and the Brits learned from that. And while they couldn’t find a way to get live oak to build their ships, they changed their design philosophy and learned a lot of lessons that way. So – and they stayed. The lessons learned were kept and valued and passed on, and both navies during the 19th century were very innovative in applying technology – the latest technology as it came into the commercial world, and that was definitely true leading right up to World War II, although, they were – the Japanese were much better at some things than our intelligence let us know.
But we learned from the Falklands, relearned old lessons from World War II – after World War II with all the battle damage, all the naval battles in the Pacific – that you had to get rid of Dacron and these other artificial cloth in the clothing that sailors wore and go back to cotton because the best fire retardant is cotton. And so we learned that lesson in World War II and applied it.
But then we – at the time of the Falklands, because of the consolidation and the growth of the bureaucracy, there were those far detached from operations in the bureaucracy that said, why are these stupid sailors spending three times as much for a flight suit as we have had bids for? Why do they have mattresses that they’re paying double what I can get them at my local store? Why are they using this very expensive covering in all their tables and the mess decks and so forth when we can – we should have Formica? It’s a third of the cost. And all of these were bureaucracies that had grown since the Second World War in both sides of the Atlantic that were mainly civilians that had little experience in operations.
And so a lot of the lessons were ripped out of the consciousness of the institutions by cost cutting and other reasons – more political reasons. But so we – one of the key lessons is, because we found that all of our sailors had all of this crap in their – in the ships and it was a dangerous environment, and not because the Navy asked for it. And, similarly, they – well, that’s – there are lots more of these lessons and I think we can hear more from that.
It’s a great question. It’s, perhaps, the key challenge that we, as free nations, face in a way that authoritarian nations don’t necessarily do so. It takes us now 24 years to go from a concept of a new fighter to the first operational squadron. It takes the Chinese seven years. It takes the Russians about seven years, mainly, copying or trying to copy our technology.
So we’ve got real challenges. We’ve let our bureaucracies grow so that they are stifling the inherent innovative advantage, technological advantage, that the free world always will have. But it’s being stifled in getting out to the cutting edge and, hence, deterring.
Dr. Karako: One final question. I can’t help myself. You know, you talked about the importance of layered defense and I wonder – well, first of all, two years after the Falklands War, the Aegis ships start coming online under your tenure and, you know, Wayne Meyer starts pushing those out to the cruisers and the destroyers, and you’ve talked about CIWS and Sea Sparrows and all this kind of stuff and that’s, of course, come a long way since then.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the philosophy of layered defense and just pull that string just a little bit more, and then we’re going to hand it off to the panel after that.
Sec. Lehman: Yeah. Layered defense is essential and it’s one of our greatest vulnerabilities today because the same people that changed our mattresses they have reduced – to cut costs reduced at least three of the layers of our essential. It’s based on the fact that no technology works a hundred percent effectively. The best might be in the area between a hundred – between 50 percent and 80 percent.
That means that you cannot depend on just one defense against any really threatening effective weapon. You have to have the layers. We learned that lesson in almost every battle, in World War II, certainly, especially Okinawa, where we had – our fleet at Okinawa was attacked by 1,700 very smart cruise missiles, and it was adaptive. They learned our defenses and change their tactics.
We suffered many hits. We lost, in effect – and most of them sunk but we lost 35 destroyers. Others survived but not – were not mission capable. We had five carriers hit by Kamikazes. One of them, the Franklin, was put out of action and couldn’t operate. The others all survived. None of them were sunk.
But we learned. We had very good thick defenses, close in defenses. We had the concept of an outer air battle but we didn’t really have enough to make this impervious. So we took a lot of losses but we won, and that’s – you know, there is no magic weapon. There’s no magic offensive weapon that lasts over time. There is no magic defensive weapons.
Unfortunately, as I said, the seven layers that we had in the last years of the Cold War, which convinced – and we know because we were reading their mail – they could not cope with our seven layers because with Aegis deployed and the F-14s and the Phoenix and the long-range attack aircraft we had in the A-6 they couldn’t reach us because the outer air battle was designed to kill the launcher, not wait for the Soviet bears to launch their cruise missiles. And so that was essential.
Unfortunately, the bureaucracy – not the Navy, the bureaucracy in the late ’80s and early ’90s canceled all of the Navy’s long-range. So they lost, really, four layers of the seven-layer defense and that’s what we have today. We have only short-range aircraft other than the E-2C command aircraft, which is essential and works with the surface ships as well.
We don’t have any long-range attack. We don’t have any long-range interceptors at all. We retired the Phoenix missile, which was a hugely effective missile, and had not funded any replacement, and so we are vulnerable, all of our ships. Carriers are the least vulnerable of all of them because of their thousand watertight compartments and their three-armored decks and blah, blah, blah. They’re big ships so a thousand-pound warhead is not going to sink a thousand – a 10,000. A big ship. So –
Dr. Karako: Yeah. Well, Secretary Lehman, this has been great. I appreciate your helping us keep the memory alive. I also really appreciate the throwback to the URR days of CSIS. (Laughter.) We appreciate that.
So we’re going to take a quick break. My colleague, Emily Harding, will come back and moderate the next panel. But thank you again, sir. Appreciate it.
Sec. Lehman: Thank you. Pleasure to be back. (Applause.)
(Break.)
Emily Harding: I’m the deputy director of the International Security Program here at CSIS, and I am joined by what can only be called a distinguished panel on this particular topic. We have Will Dossel, who was a naval flight officer with operational deployments worldwide. He was instrumental in tactics and doctrine development for the E-2C, and if you ask him what his call sign is he might tell you. Now he is the deputy branch head for IAMD division’s intelligence branch. It is a mouthful.
His division is the Navy’s primary authority and lead organization for naval, joint, and coalition integrated air and missile defense matters, which means he really knows what he’s talking about on this set of issues.
We also have Dov Zakheim, who has had a long national security career spanning government service and private sector experience. From 2001-2004, he was undersecretary of defense comptroller and the CFO of DOD, which means he had all of the money and all of the people. He has advised multiple candidates for president and was the civilian point person on the Falklands crisis. Looking forward to hearing what he has to say. Now he’s also a senior advisor here at CSIS and a senior fellow at CNA.
Finally, we have Dr. Sebastian Bruns, who is an internationally recognized expert in naval and maritime security. Proving the international peace, he drafted the German navy’s capstone strategy in 2016 and now is the McCain Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at the Naval Academy.
And Secretary Lehman has agreed to join us on the panel so we have him here as well to weigh in, which is a pleasure.
So, first, we’ll do some opening remarks from the gentleman in the middle. I believe it goes Will, Dov, and then Sebastian.
So, Will, over to you.
William Dossel: OK. Well, thank you. Good morning. So in deference to my esteemed panel members here, I’m going to focus at the operational to tactical level of war because it’s important when we look at the range of threats that are out there today but especially cruise missiles, which have become an enduring threat, that we see the impact that they have at all levels from operational planning down to individual ship tactics.
And it’s interesting that today we find ourselves bookended by two other very interesting case studies. This October we’ll celebrate – celebrate – will note the 55th anniversary of the first surface-to-surface engagement with cruise missiles with the sinking of the Israeli destroyer Eilat by Egyptian SS-N-2 Styx missiles, jump forward to just a few weeks ago with the sinking of the largest ship yet, a capital ship, the Moskva, by coastal defense cruise missiles launched from the beach, and then, of course, back to what we’re talking about today, the Falklands, with the sinking of the Sheffield by air-launched cruise missiles.
Now, there is enduring lessons that we can draw from all three of those events that we use as case studies down at Dahlgren. But, first and foremost, each one of those three environments was in a littoral environment, and when you look at the fight in the littoral environment there are aspects of that that play to the strengths of a cruise missile and put a premium on things like intelligence, equipment, and training, and as we go through the discussion today I’d like to bring up elements of each of those that play in those cases and that carry forward into enduring lessons learned that we have today, going forward.
Ms. Harding: Great. Thank you very much. That’s a good initial lay down. I’m looking forward to discussing the tactics and the advances in technology and what lessons still apply today.
Dov, over to you.
Dov Zakheim: Well, thanks very much, and my association with CSIS goes back to that maritime strategy group that Secretary Lehman talked about in his remarks, and at the time Jimmy Carter was president he had promised in his election campaign to get rid of a carrier, if you remember that, John, and the Congress overruled him, thank God. (Laughter.)
But the same kind of cutback or mentality for cutbacks was going on in Britain, and one of the things that many people think actually triggered the Falklands War was the fact that Britain had had a ship out at the Falklands, which it withdrew, and the Argentines concluded wrongly that Britain was no longer interested, and in many ways, that’s lesson one of the Falklands, which is be very careful about how you signal things.
And that, of course, has a lot to do with our own strategy or, Secretary Lehman would say, absence of strategy today because as we cut back on the number of ships – we’re below 300, which is – we’re reaching historically low levels, if we haven’t already reached them. We’ve cut back on aircraft. We’ve cut back on just about everything. What kind of signal are we sending to our Chinese friends, for example?
So that may be lesson number one. Be very careful about what you’re signaling and how you’re doing it, and that does go to budgets and, as you heard, I was in charge of the budget in those days and what’s ironic – not in those days but 20-odd years ago – what’s ironic is the budget that I dealt with was $450 billion. It’s now 770 billion (dollars). That’s what’s being requested. And, yet, it turns out that’s not enough because so much of that money goes to personnel. A lot of it goes to standard operations. And, yet, even in the operations accounts we cut back on training. That has had a major impact, by the way, on the Navy, in particular. It’s had a whole bunch of accidents due to lack of training, and as – again, as John Lehman pointed out, training is critical.
Another lesson of the Falklands that has total applicability today is the logistics tail and the importance of logistics, and here, I can tell a personal story about that. I’ve got lots of stories. If you want to ask me about them I will. Older people are full of stories because they’re old. (Laughter.)
The attaché at the time – the British attaché at the time was Admiral Burgoyne. That may be a very familiar name to anybody who knows American history. I suspect our British friends prefer to forget it. But in 1777 we defeated his ancestor at Saratoga.
Anyway, Admiral Burgoyne comes in to tell me that they have a real problem. This is already in the course of the Falklands War. They do not – Britain does not want to spend money on equipment that it might not need. As you already heard from Secretary Lehman, Britain had cut back on its budgets. It had cut back significantly on its – had tried, actually, to do even more than it had.
In the early 1980s, 1981, Britain wanted to close the Chatham shipyard. It wanted to get rid of Hermes and Invincible, which played a major role in the Falklands War, and I was involved in actually delaying it until the war began. We didn’t know the war would begin but I was, certainly, leading the group that tried to delay it.
In any event, the British didn’t have money and they didn’t want to just spend it on things they might not use. So I suggested to him that what we would do, since we both shared Wideawake Airfield on Ascension Island, the British would tell me what they needed or thought they needed, and at that point I would get it shipped down to Ascension. I was in charge of coordinating all the supplies to the British. I reported pretty much directly to Mr. Weinberger because the various officials above me either were not interested or were sympathetic to Argentina.
That was not me. That was not Mr. Weinberger. In my case, I’d fallen in love with Britain when I’d been at Oxford. And, by the way, one of the smartest things Britain has ever done is have Rhodes Scholarships. Even though you went to Cambridge and I went to Oxford, and there’s – but my son also went to Cambridge so don’t worry about that, John. But the fact is that Rhodes Scholarships and such type of scholarships with the U.K. means that you get a lot of policymakers to this day who’ve spent time in Britain and that, I think, is one of the glues – not the only one but one of the glues of the special relationship.
In any event, Burgoyne liked that idea. But it filtered up to Secretary Weinberger and he, being the anglophile that he was, called the minister of defense – Secretary of State for Defense John Nott to ask him if it was OK. Nott, of course, said of course it was OK because this way Britain would only pay for what it took out of our warehouses and not for what it asked for.
I found out about that and I went to see the secretary of defense’s military assistant, Carl Smith, at the time and I said, please tell the secretary he may be an anglophile; I have relatives there. That was the last time I ever got caught out by the secretary of defense, who at some point became quite close.
The lesson of logistics is absolutely critical and the lesson of supply, which I was in charge of, is critical. Those two lessons both appear in the study that the Secretary Lehman commissioned and that I was on the steering group of, and they apply today. You know, it was three and a half – roughly, three and a half thousand miles to Ascension Island from Britain and another three and a half thousand miles from Ascension Island to the Falklands.
How do you manage that kind of long supply line? That would be our issue because the United States is an island nation and we have interests all over the world. With the kind of forces we have logistics become absolutely critical. There’s a major debate going on right now. The commandant of the Marine Corps wants to have a completely new approach to what the Marines should do, have small groups out in the Pacific on islands to hit the Chinese where they don’t expect to be hit.
Well, how do you do that without the logistics? Major issue. Supply – we had to supply the British not just with AIM-9Ls but with lots of other pieces of equipment, most of which I can’t still talk about. But you always underestimate how much you’re going to use and that, again, was something that John Lehman’s study talked about and we still make that mistake to this day.
And, finally – and this goes to the Rhodes Scholarships, it goes to the relationship we had. The Royal Navy, the U.S. Navy, and, generally, the special relationship is really special. But we have other allies as well, and with forces that have shrunk as much as they have, we now need those allies in a very big way, and if we are to succeed, even if we were to increase our own force levels, we couldn’t do it without our allies. We now face two major superpowers – one a nuclear superpower, the other one both nuclear and conventional – on both sides of the world.
What do we do if we don’t have allies? And, again, we have some very special allies and we should never discount that relationship. It is critical. It has been critical for decades. The British have fought alongside us every time since World War II and, of course, in World War II. Not too many other countries have done that.
Ms. Harding: Right. And I love stories. Stories are how we learn. So I appreciate all the stories.
Sebastian, over to you.
Sebastian Bruns: Thank you very much. Yeah. Good morning, everyone. It’s a pleasure to be here. I want to thank CSIS for setting up this panel today because 40 years today, this morning, HMS Sheffield was hit by Exocet missiles and, subsequently, was lost. So as if we needed another reason, the Moskva incident a couple of weeks ago reiterated the use and the timeliness of such a discussion to have today.
And I want to thank the Fulbright Commission for bringing me over here to the Naval Academy. But, of course, what I’m about to say is my own personal opinion and not that of any institution that I am affiliated with nor the Ministry of Silly Walks or anything else.
But what I’d like to do is I’d like to wear my European hat, and, Dov, thank you for raising the issue of allies because I want to point out that European navies, collectively, have not really learned the lessons from the Falklands War.
As a matter of fact, because of the political evolution of the 1990s and 2000s, not only have they downscaled massively but they’ve also engaged because of security politics of the time in low and medium intensity operations because sea control – there was no sea control challenger. There was no anti-ship missile challenge, at least nothing to speak of, really. And they – for the German navy, for instance, they got themselves involved in embargo operations in the Adriatic Sea, in counter piracy and anti-terrorism operations, lately in the rescue of refugees from – in the Mediterranean Sea and that, certainly, not just goes for the German navy but also for a lot of allied navies in Europe as well.
And since 2014, with the – what we now know is just the preface of the war that we’re currently seeing in Russia’s aggressive and illegitimate campaign against Ukraine, the taking – the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the civil war in eastern Ukraine, the German navy, as much as a number of European navies, suddenly found themselves having to relearn what navies are actually for, that navies can do all these kind of low-end missions and low-end operations and medium intensity operations. But that’s not exactly what they’re built for.
And so here we are eight years later, eight years after this last turning point in European history or in international security, I should say, and the conversation is more timely than ever to relearn the roles and missions, the functions, of navies, to relearn the operational, the technical, and the mindset issues that are related to the sharp end of the stick – the sharp end of the spear.
It comes at a difficult time because European navies, certainly, the German navy, is just now – and Secretary Lehman mentioned the long lead times that we have also in Europe for new programs, new ships – were just commissioning four Baden-Württemberg-class frigates, which were conceptualized in the 2000s. They are perfect for anti-piracy and counterterrorism missions. They do carry harpoons. But they’re not exactly the kind of ship that you would put into harm’s way.
And that leads me to the other point I’d like to make. Aside from the operational and the tactical learnings – relearnings – there’s also the political dimension, and Will mentioned the littoral environments that we’re seeing in the world and I would submit to you that the Baltic Sea, which is Germany’s front yard, so to speak – maritime front yard – it probably only rivals the South China Sea in terms of the littoral aspects that it has, and that’s the conversation that, given the dynamics that we’re seeing, we don’t yet have.
What happens in the Baltic Sea, really, when the balloon goes up? And is the German government, is NATO, is our allies anticipating ship losses? Because we will lose ships in the Baltic Sea unless we pull them all out in the case of a major conflict and, certainly, that’s the kind of conversation some of – as some of the aspects are classified or should be confidential, at least.
But I think there’s merits to a public approach to have these issues studied aggressively as much as possible in the public forum or on panels like this to inform policymakers and to inform the broader public about the – again, the roles and missions of navies, a public that’s been getting used to an ever shrinking navy or ever shrinking navies – in that case, plural – and navies that do counterpiracy, counterterrorism and all these missions that makes sense to the broader public. But the broader public, I think, and, certainly, academia and policymakers need to understand what navies are for. Thank you.
Ms. Harding: Thank you. I appreciate the lay down and also the strong endorsement of a navy. I think America has proven over and over again how critically important our Navy is to our national strategies. Also, our panel on the Ministry of Silly Walks, I believe, is after this panel. (Laughter.) So if you want to stick around for that.
Secretary Lehman, do you want to add anything here before we move to questions?
Sec. Lehman: No. It’s undiluted wisdom from all three.
Ms. Harding: That’s what we’re going for, undiluted wisdom. I love the title of this panel, “Falklands at 40.” Forty years feels like a long time. But at the same time, in the life of an aircraft carrier or a foreign policy professional it’s not, actually, that long and it’s just long enough that we need to remind ourselves of the tactical and strategic lessons that were learned in a conflict, pass them on to the next generation.
So I wanted to start off with the strategic question, with the strategic calculations, of two world leaders – Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher – and then also the Argentineans and the decisions that they made in the lead up to the war and how those might apply today, both in what we’re seeing in Ukraine and also for a potential future conflict we all wish to avoid in the South China Sea.
So, Dov, I’ll turn to you first to talk a little bit about the policy process in Washington and how the decisions were made that fit into this bigger strategic picture.
Dr. Zakheim: Well, the policy process was not have decisions that were made on the Falklands. The policy process involves layers upon layers of what are called chopping on memoranda, what the secretary of the – Secretary Lehman was inveighing against, so I won’t repeat that.
But what happened here with respect to the Falklands and what tends to happen when you really have a crisis is that all of a sudden there are shortcuts. In the case of the Falklands, you heard about Secretary Weinberger going to see the president, John Lehman going to see Cap Weinberger.
I was dispatched, and the reason I got involved in this is because I had been leading, as I mentioned, a delegation, which was called the Zakheim power talks. It had nothing to do with my Power. The guy I was dealing with was a man named Michael Power, who was the assistant under secretary of the Navy. But if everybody thought it was me being powerful, that was great. I was very junior. And, as I said, my superiors, until Weinberger himself, were either apathetic or sympathetic to Argentina.
So I became the guy, based on these talks that had been going on for about a year and that did save Hermes and Invincible and kept Chatham Shipyard open at least for a while, to be the guy to sort of set in motion our support for the U.K. should the White House issue the OK to do it.
And so I was going over to London on a weekly basis, which was fine because I love the city. But because I was so junior and I was so under the radar and because, obviously, we didn’t want Mr. Haig to know about this nor, for that reason, our ambassador to the court of St. James, I would have to take a taxi to – I used to stay, I guess, at the Royal Horseguards Hotel, which if you know London is, like, a hop, skip, and jump from the Ministry of Defense, and I was meeting with Peter Blaker, who later became Lord Blaker, who was the minister of state at the time.
So you got this really junior guy meeting with the minister of state, which is kind of fun for the junior guy. I’m not so sure it was so much fun for Blaker. And the taxi drivers would give me hell because, why aren’t you helping us? Why aren’t you doing these things for us? We fought alongside you. We always fight alongside you. And I would get this every week until we went public.
But this got this all laid pretty much in a row. OK. And so this wasn’t the standard policy process, by definition. The secretary of state is totally in the dark. The secretary of defense is dispatching this junior guy to run off and do whatever he’s doing, and, essentially, there are pluses and minuses to this kind of shortcutting. The plus is you can actually get everything done. The minus is you could be dead wrong about what you’re doing, and we’ve seen that happen as well. One could argue, for instance, that Iraq involved shortcutting and we weren’t exactly successful in Iraq. And so the policy process – the reason you have the shortcutting, to answer your question directly, is because the policy process is just so ponderous, and when we have a crisis, and we could have more than one – people say our government can’t walk and chew gum at the same time and there’s some degree of truth to that. But that’s because of the bureaucracy.
Everything has to be approved level after level after level after level. So unless you shortcut it, unless you get a secretary of defense or a secretary of state or a national security adviser who can walk into the president’s office and say, look, I don’t care about all this other stuff, this is what you need to do, and if that person is correct, which may or may not be the case, you’ve got a problem. Do you need some expert backup? Of course you do. Do you need the zillions of layers that we have? Absolutely not.
Ms. Harding: Right. The Washington phrase “where there’s a will there’s a waiver” holds true just as much today as it did 40 years ago.
Sebastian, let’s talk a little bit about the maritime strategy and tactics piece and, especially, NATO today and NATO investments today. Are we doing things we need to do to learn the lessons from the Falklands to be prepared for this littoral strategy? How can we, as a group of countries working together, make strategic purchases so we’re not duplicating each other’s strengths?
Dr. Bruns: That’s an excellent point. Thank you for the question.
My first reflex is it depends who you ask it or who you look at inside NATO. NATO Maritime Command would say we’re on track. We’re doing the right things. I’m not so sure about SHAPE and NATO headquarters in Brussels because they are still very much, fundamentally, Army and Air Force driven. No offense to Army and Air Force colleagues, but the mindset is different.
And let’s not forget NATO is coming off of 20 years of fighting, to some degree or another – NATO member states, I should say – of fighting in Afghanistan. So turning around a mindset is no small feat, and then you’ve got all these individual countries who have strategic cultures of their own – strategic limitations, as the case of my home country – where even the hundred billion euros that have been earmarked will not buy us a new strategic culture even if we set up a military or fund a military that’s then worthy – more worthy of a name – of its name. And for many good reasons there’s a term called sea blindness, and I believe the British gave it to us, which is striking because of the island nation’s sea power history and geography of Great Britain, and that very much holds true in all of Europe – all of NATO Europe.
And NATO, of course, has evolved as well. It used to be this maritime NATO – North Atlantic Treaty Organization – but with various evolutions since the end of the Cold War it’s added Eastern European states who are very much conscious about one thing. That’s Russia. Or three things, I should say – Russia, Russia, Russia. And that’s not a maritime mindset.
And then you’ve got the issue of the northern flank and the southern flank where maritime problems are also vastly different. In the south, as, famously, a previous NATO MARCOM admiral – commander stated it, it’s the three Rs: refugees, radicals, and Russia. And in the north it’s also three Rs: Russia, Russia, Russia.
At the crosshairs, certainly, then you’ve got NATO Europe as well as NATO North America. So lots of dimensions here to take care of, and I’m not so sure that a top-down approach from NATO is the way to go forward. I think there’s merits to think about – bilateral, trilateral, sort of coalitions of the willing who will go forward in creating that kind of thrust that both reaches the NATO headquarters in Brussels, NATO in Mons, and also combats that kind of sea blindness that we have in a lot of member states, or selective sea blindness, as in the case of – as I’ve laid out, in Germany, seeing the navy as sort of a police force with bigger guns because what we’re risking is – and my final comment here on this question, or my final answer – we’re not just risking sea blindness, we’re risking sea amnesia because we’re forgetting the lessons of the past and we’re forgetting the lessons of the Falklands, the lessons – the evolutions of the last 40 years as well as the constants. I mean, I’ve been telling my midshipmen as they join the fleet and get commissioned this summer that they’ll operate on systems that have been introduced in the 1980s, for good or for bad, and that’s the kind of continued continuity that long before they were born these systems have been in operation.
So lots of dynamics. Lots of levels, too, that interact and it is a persistent task. It is a – it never stops. Combating sea blindness, making maritime strategy, operationalizing it, criticizing it, thinking it through, rewriting it, is an eternal process almost and – yeah. Thanks.
Ms. Harding: Eternal process with very long time horizons. It takes a long time to build a ship or a submarine. We’ve got to think ahead for these things.
So I think sea – avoiding sea amnesia is a great headline for this particular panel, between Secretary Lehman’s comments and your comments about being sure we actually learn the lessons. It’s a critical point.
Let’s turn to you, Will, to talk about the specific threat of anti-ship missiles. You’ve talked a little bit about the Moskva and how the lessons from the Falklands may have applied to what happened there. But then also, just looking ahead, the kinds of wars that the U.S. might be fighting in the near future, hopefully, along with our NATO allies, what lessons are we supposed to be taking away? Are we prepared?
Mr. Dossel: Thank you very much. So to answer that question, let’s walk through that engagement of 40 years ago, and there are lessons that could be pulled from each one of those steps inside this engagement that, I think, can be brought forward to today.
So let’s start first with the threat. Intel guy – what do you expect? So what was the threat? Well, according to the best intelligence at the time, they knew that the Argentines had Super Étendards. So there was an air threat. They knew that they had received Exocet missiles, but the French technicians who were supposed to integrate those missiles with the Super Étendards had been pulled out of Argentina before that had happened.
And so the intelligence at the time was that the threat was going to be iron bombs, which meant that the aircraft had to get within visual range and get into the very heart of the envelope of the anti-air weapons that the task force had. All right. So the known/unknown, to borrow a phrase, was, were the Exocets actually integrated to the Super Étendards and were the aircrew trained to be able to utilize the Exocet?
Well, obviously, the answer was yes, and it bespeaks a degree of technical capability on the part of the Argentines that they were able to do that. We go forward today ignoring the same kind of technical capabilities of – let’s call them lesser adversaries – nonpeer adversaries – that are out there. We tend to sort of discount – well, yeah – well, they just copied it and they can’t do this and they can’t do that, right up until we find out that oh, yeah, they can do that. OK.
The environment. The ship, the Sheffield, was designed for the North Atlantic fight – blue water fight. Low clutter, long range. The missiles that were onboard were optimized for the big, fast, high-diving missiles that the Soviets had at the time, things like the AS-4 off of the Backfire or the SS-N-12 coming off of the Slava-class like the Moskva. The environment that they found themselves in was a littoral environment near land – relatively near land – so you were getting significant clutter effects from the land and from the meteorology at the time as well.
The so what factor to that is that was causing any one of a number of false alarms over the periods of minutes, hours, days. That has a degrading effect on combat readiness of the watch teams which we have on board. It ends up with things like the force anti-air warfare coordinator onboard the Invincible discounting reports of, hey, I think I may have a Super Étendard on this bearing because I have an emitter – a snapshot of the emitter on that aircraft on this bearing. No, it’s just clutter, and discount it.
So you have the threat, the environment. What was the support for the threat? The support for the threat was an ancient P-2 Neptune. Special mission aircraft are critical in the littorals as they are in the blue water environment because they provide the targeting information to be able to get the missiles into the targeting basket where their own seekers can then take over, find the target, and engage it.
Look, 1967 to 2022 over 245 cruise missile engagements have occurred during that time frame. However, out of that 245-plus engagements only half actually found a target and that target wasn’t necessarily the intended target, and of those that were actually struck only about 30 percent actually sank. So special mission aircraft helped get the target, get the missiles into the basket to find the target, and try and raise that – (inaudible).
OK. What about the equipment onboard Sheffield? So the radars that were on Sheffield were affected by the clutter. The crew that was on the Sheffield was focused on a threat that was visual in nature, shorter range in nature, wasn’t looking for the cruise missile, so that when a report came in onboard ship of wait a minute, there may be something here, and the bridge says, I have smoke on the port quarter, one second, two seconds, three seconds, four seconds later impact. Four seconds from identification of something that’s out there until impact.
That’s what we’re kind of facing in the littoral environment today. Missiles that come out that are not necessarily active at the time, they have targeting information that’s been passed to them by a sophisticated and growing theater reconnaissance strike complex or advanced sea-denial systems that include everything from overhead to drones and that we find inside the first island chain, we find in the eastern Mediterranean, we find in the Red Sea, and we find in the Gulf.
OK. These missiles that are then able to take this large dump of information and then wait until it gets to very short range to actually activate and engage, and at that point let’s say – let’s just say, for example, 10 miles. OK. Ten miles out, flying at, you know, 50 to 60 feet above the waves, what is the warning time that a ship has that something is inbound when it activates at 10 miles out? You have at Mach .8 1.1 minutes from the time you get an activation until impact. What is that missile, in the meantime, doing inbound during that time frame? Look at the Moskva.
The public images that you see you can do a very – start to do a very detailed decomposition of what may have occurred onboard Moskva. So you have an impact hull center of mass, which is where the missiles are going to most likely go – center of mass of the ship – and, ironically, almost directly underneath the AK-630s, which is their equivalent of CIWS.
Along the port side of Moskva are arranged any one of a number of defensive electronic countermeasures. Were those active? Was the AK-630 active? Most likely not, because of the impact. What about the onboard missiles? Well, when you look back aft at the Top Dome radar – for the SA-N-6 radar – it’s in the aft stowed position. It does not look like it was activated or engaged.
The Pop Group radar that goes with the SA-N-8 on the port side, the SA-N-8 was, obviously, not utilized because there’s no scorch marks, no burn marks, to show that the missile had launched. The Pop Group radar is oriented aft. All intents and purposes, it looks like Moskva was just as surprised as Sheffield was 40 years ago.
What was the combat condition onboard Moskva at the time? OK. What was the crew training? What were the operational command philosophies that were in place at the time? What were the warfighting orders that were in place at the time?
When the Exocet hit the Sheffield it shattered the main fire main and that was the chief reason why damage control, especially firefighting, was not effective onboard Sheffield. Five years later, the Stark took two Exocets and we know that at least one of those warheads detonated. But the other, you know, nasty little part about cruise missiles is there’s a lot of unburnt fuel that remains, and when that unburnt fuel continues to ignite and combust the materials inside the space you can get internal temperatures upwards of a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Starks was able to save the ship because of redundancy in the fire main and the rigorous kind of training that we went through in the 1980s for damage control.
I still remember my time in shipboard firefighting – (laughs) – and flight deck firefighting in Norfolk. It was miserable. It was the middle of winter in Norfolk. But I knew that – if we got hit when I was on Ike, I knew what I had to do from a damage control standpoint and that we were going to be able to do it going forward.
So just, you know, a couple of points there to, you know, bring forward lessons from 40 years ago, 55 years ago, three weeks ago.
Dr. Zakheim: Let me jump in with – to expand on your very first point about underestimating the enemy. Clearly, the Russians underestimated the Ukrainians. Particularly, we know now in the EW sphere – the electronic warfare sphere. On the other hand, we’ve overestimated the Russians.
What that tells me – and I’ve seen this over and over again in my career – there’s a tendency to straight line. You take what you know and you say, this is what’s going to be in the future. That is the dumbest thing you could possibly do and it’s really – it’s a manifestation of a certain intellectual laziness, and it’s not only our intelligence people who have to avoid that. It’s the planners. It’s the programmers.
Ms. Harding: It’s industry.
Dr. Zakheim: It’s industry. You cannot continue and say what happened yesterday is going to happen tomorrow. The reason is it never does.
Ms. Harding: That’s a great point. We didn’t get to talk enough today about the importance of a professional military and the training and the practicing that’s required to really execute in these times of crisis. Save that for another panel. But a shout out there for our professional military colleagues.
We are out of time, and I want to do one quick lightning round for each of you, and that is if you were going to give one lesson from the last 40 years and hand it to the United States Navy and say fix this and fix it now – here’s your magic wand – what are you fixing? What advice would you give? Will seems to know. OK. Go ahead.
Mr. Dossel: So advertisement for my day job. Give me the tools, give me the resources for operationally realistic training. 1982, ReadyX, northern Puerto Rican op area, two carrier battle groups over the course of a 12-hour vulnerability period. At any point in time, there is going to be one or more Firebee drones released for engagement – real-world engagement – with jamming, by the way, comm jamming and radar jamming, and we had to find the damn missile and shoot it. Give me the resources that I can take my fleet and go out and do that today.
Ms. Harding: Real-world training. Absolutely.
Dr. Bruns: If I could add something. To the military, do not just draw on the expertise and the studies that you do – that military or uniformed people do. Draw on the historians, draw on political scientists, draw on experts from the policy field, because there’s so much talent, certainly, in our allied environment that you could draw on and so much knowledge, and if you don’t draw on that you do it at your own peril.
Dr. Zakheim: And I’ll build on the points that have been made. Remember that it’s not just a matter of having allies. It’s a matter of working with them, being able to communicate with them, being able to interchange your equipment with them, being able to train with them, and not just go through the motions but realistic training, the kind of stuff that Secretary Lehman pushed in “Oceans Ventured”, where you really are testing your allies as opposed to going through kind of a rote memory kind of drill.
Alliances are crucial for us but they have to be meaningful.
Ms. Harding: Secretary Lehman? Yeah.
Sec. Lehman: Yeah. I would just concentrate on two lessons that are critical, I believe, today. Everyone, this has been a great panel that has brought to attention the specific things that need to be executed to change our vulnerabilities today. But, first and foremost, we need a strategy, and we don’t have a strategy and we haven’t had strategy for, well, 30 years, maybe. Literally, we haven’t. So now, having been – and given by license by Dov as an anecdotalist, let me say what happened and where did we come – how did we come about having a strategy to win the Cold War.
First, right here in CIS in a different building – CSIS – over about five years navalists had developed a strategy, and it had many manifestations but there was a consensus. Then we got a president who – it’s been recorded in many circles, but during the lead up to the ’80 campaign, Dick Allen, his national security adviser, asked him, well, when you are asked this question, what is your strategy for the Cold War, he said, without hesitation, my strategy is very simple. We win. They lose. And so that immediately opened up for people who really understood and had been keeping the strategy dialogue alive – everybody woke up, and the predecessor to the SNG today, and said, wow, we’ve really got something here.
And so they provided – when the president was elected they provided him with a winning strategy because that’s what he said he wanted. And so, again, a second dimension of that aspect is that having this strategy, first, a lot – all of this is intertwined. Unlike today where it takes a year for presidents to get their team in place, the senior Pentagon people were at their desks through Senate confirmation and sworn in about two weeks after the inauguration. I was sitting at my desk, confirmed February 5th, after January 20th. And so we were able to really get going right away as soon as we were in – in fact, starting before that.
So we had a strategy and we went to then president elect. This was before the swearing in but I and my senior people had been named and were awaiting Senate confirmation. We explained the Navy strategy and he really liked it. We said, you know, we’ve got to, first, demonstrate and make public and demonstrate to the Soviets that we have a strategy and here’s what we’re going to do. And, of course, many of the animals were, oh, you can’t tell them what we’re going to do. How are we going to surprise them in a war? You know, don’t tell them that we can do this and do that. And we said, no, you have – the name of this game is deterrence. No point if you have magic moves and they don’t know about it. You’re not going to deter them.
So we explained we intended to have a fleet large enough to go into those areas that we had not gone into for 20 years, partially because the common wisdom was their – NATO won’t let us go north to the GIUK gap because that will upset détente, and there was a certain amount of truth to that.
But navies were part of the problem. They didn’t want to go up there. It’s nasty up there. It’s tough. It’s tough to fly. You get severe icing. You get hundred-knot downdrafts. It’s scary. And driving a destroyer up there where the calmest seas you’re going to see are, like, three- to six-foot swells and willywalls (ph), and ice and sudden unpredicted snow squalls, you have to teach your sailors they’ve got to be able to climb up that mast even though it’s covered with ice – not rime ice but glaze ice – with a hammer and knock that ice off the equipment. And God help you if you fall into those 40-degree seas.
So we hadn’t been up there, really, and didn’t know how to operate up there and so we had to go up there to show them we could do it, and we believed we could do it. And Reagan really loved that and he said, that’s great. But he said, how do we show the Russians – how do we show the Soviets that we’re serious? This is not just the policy. The ambassador came by with the Republican platform, which says we’re going to build a 600-ship Navy and he was – he said – this is sort of classic politics – you know, goes this way, goes that way. We got to make them understand that this is real. We are going to kick their ass. That was the president speaking.
Ms. Harding: It’s a direct quote so it’s fine.
Sec. Lehman: So I was able to say, Mr. President, we got a good deal for you because NATO every year had a huge naval exercise, 250 some ships every year. Every year they did the exact same thing, starting in the Med, coming across, but never going up to scare the Russians in the Norwegian Sea. And I said, we – all we have to do is you give us the word and we will turn left, because it always really started in Norfolk. And when we get to the Davis Strait let us go left, turn left and keep going up into the Norwegian Sea around the North Cape and operate up there, and we can do this in seven months from now. We’re going to do it in August. And he said, yeah, you know, you could do that. That’s great.
I said, there’s one issue, though, that you have to understand. We can’t tell the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Laughter.) And he said, well, how can you do that? Why can you do it? Because the staff – the Joint Staff is 6,000 people and they are buried in an orthodoxy all the Navy can do is carry beans and bullets to the real war, and it will leak within minutes. You’ll read it in the Washington Post. So let us do that because the reason we haven’t gone north – because there’s no law. There’s no executive order. It’s just presidents had been afraid to do it because it’ll upset the Russians. And he said, oh, OK. And then I said, there’s one more thing. We can’t tell NATO because SHAPE leaks even more than – (laughter) – the Pentagon and so we can’t tell them. We just have to go do it. And he said, well, I thought you said the Europeans and the Royal Navy and the French are all going to be part of this. I said, yeah, we have no problem with them because they never tell their ministries anything and everybody at SHAPE thinks that ships are solid, like, they’re toys when they were kids. They didn’t know they’re hollow. You know, they don’t know what their navy is doing and they don’t care because they don’t think it counts at all.
So he laughed and he said, great, let’s do it. And so we did Ocean Venture and went north, and this guy was a participant. Ace Lyons and Jerry Tuttle, who was his right hand, sent a flight. Intelligence had provided us with information that at the same time the Russians were doing a massive exercise right off Murmansk and out of the White Sea. And so Ace sent four F-14s, four A-6s, and four tankers up a thousand miles.
Today, we couldn’t do it more than 300 miles because we only have short-legged airplanes and not enough tankers. But then we could do it a thousand miles from the Dwight Eisenhower, and we – they blew through at 550 knots the exercise 13 miles off Murmansk, and the Russians were gobsmacked. They had no idea. Where did it come from? They didn’t know even that there was a carrier in the Norwegian Sea. And that changed the whole dynamic because we – he was running the strike. But we demonstrated to them and not just once. Through that whole exercise we had a total of 83 ships, I think, up in the Norwegian Sea, a couple of surface ships up around the North Cape, which they hadn’t been for many years, and the Soviets, they just couldn’t cope thinking about it. They couldn’t get their head around it happened. It’s happened.
Ms. Harding: Secretary, I’m going to stop you there just because we’re running way over time. (Laughter.) I would listen to a story all day because I’m learning so much.
Sec. Lehman: OK. Sorry. But Dov warned you. You know, we’re in our anecdotage. So –
Ms. Harding: I love all the stories. I think it’s also a critical point to end on, which is that sometimes you need to break out of those silos. You need to break out of the thinking that’s been governing your actions for so long and then try something new. Turn left, right. I think it’s a really strong point to end on.
I want to thank our audience for listening in. I want to thank our colleagues from the British Embassy who came along today. We have two of our attaché friends in the audience – appreciate it – representing, again, the continuation of the special relationship, and also an Argentinean-American staffer at CSIS. So bringing peace within the room even today.
Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you for the insights, gentlemen, and I look forward to continuing the conversation. Falklands at 50, anybody? We’ll get back together? (Laughter.)
Thanks a lot. (Applause.)