Command of the Seas, by John F Lehman, Jr.
Szamuely, George
T n the successful 1987 movie No 1 Way Out the villain is the defense secretary and the good guy is the director of central intelligence. This reflects current attitudes. Hollywood producers know...
...Reenlistments have jumped from approximately 28 percent in 1981 to more than 50 percent today, reflecting the high morale of the Navy...
...f 4. . . There is no way to draw a cordon sanitaire—a protective shield—against subs and bombers...
...T ehman's argument is always most 1.../ convincing when he talks of the importance of maritime superiority as being essential to U.S...
...Possessed neither of the vulnerable coasts like Normandy, nor of Japanese- or German-like dependence on outside sources for food and natural resources, the U.S...
...should have something like twenty Trident submarines deployed...
...On the other hand, neither in his public utterances nor in the book has Lehman made a consistent case on behalf of the strategy of moving into Norwegian waters to destroy Soviet ports and air bases...
...Marines in Beirut, and ask who bears how much responsibility for each...
...Companies like General Dynamics had been granted long-term monopolies by the Navy...
...Were this no longer possible to achieve, there would be no point in keeping U.S...
...These are standard practice in every other business...
...It might not have much impact on their war effort, Lehman writes, but it would certainly have an enormous impact on ours: The free world is an oceanic coalition...
...Waste and fraud there may well be, even quite serious incidents of fraud, but how on earth could introducing competition into contracting be exclusively responsible for that...
...security...
...First, the necessity for expanding the U.S...
...If our convoys could not get through to our European allies, then we would probably lose any conflict with the Soviet Union within weeks .. . Furthermore, Lehman is surely right to point out that the massive Soviet naval buildup of the last couple of decades could not but be offensive in intent...
...The surface fleet is built around fifteen aircraft carriers (as against twelve under Jimmy Carter) and four battleships mounted with Tomahawk cruise missiles...
...naval strategy, but with being behind the latest Pentagon procurement scandal...
...Just as the Reagan Administration's Central American policy had to have a villain, so the defense buildup also had to have its Elliott Abrams...
...The bureaucracy's estimating what a fighter plane, say, "should" cost had the inevitable effect of eliminating competition...
...According to this mindset, as Lehman points out, "A second competitor would only increase the cost because of the duplication of effort and tooling required...
...But nothing was done about this under Carter and the rundown of the Navy continued...
...naval forces had nothing to do with the supposedly offensive strategy Lehman was espousing...
...As for the Vietnam war, that was pretty well won by 1968 only to have the fruits of victory thrown away by an alternately complacent and hysterical Washington...
...And what is wrong with making individual contractors invest more of their own capital into the development of weapons—as against using Pentagon assets...
...We are not breaking new ground," as he puts it, "only recovering what had been foolishly thrown away...
...Throw in the Soviets' land-based superiority in Europe and it certainly did seem as if the "world correlation of forces" had moved in their direction...
...Lehman contemptuously dismisses the so-called GIUK gap—a line of sea defense stretching from Greenland to Iceland to the United Kingdom intended to prevent a Soviet breakout into the Atlantic—as "a watery Maginot line...
...Needless to say, there would then be enormous cost overruns and no one would be penalized except other items in the defense budget that would have to be cut to accommodate the extra expenses...
...It follows, therefore, that the free world coalition must have unquestioned superiority on the seas if overall strategic parity is to exist—parity at the nuclear level, and inferiority in size of land forces balanced by superiority at sea...
...Compare that with a State Department that was happy to sign a treaty agreeing to stop its supply to the mujahedeen in return for no comparable Soviet commitment vis-a-vis its Kabul clients...
...During the 1980 campaign Ronald Reagan committed himself to a 600COMMAND OF THE SEAS John F. Lehman, Jr./Charles Scribner's Sons/464 pp...
...Was it not the State Department that allowed Soviet personnel George Szamuely is a former associate editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...And this brings us back to the strategy underlying the plan to move into the Norwegian waters in the event of war...
...And he is right to ridicule those who argued that naval supremacy was pointless since defeating the Soviets on the seas would have no impact on their war effort either in Europe or in the Persian Gulf—depending as they do on internal lines of communication...
...The submarines would provide a nuclear second-strike force, and the aircraft carriers and frigates would transport troops and materiel to prolong the fighting and raise the nuclear threshold...
...Whatever the ultimate fate of Lehman's reforms, it was good that there were activists like him in the Reagan Administration...
...Classic economic determinism...
...Elsewhere Lehman often speaks of the "socialist system" operating within the Pentagon...
...The number of nuclear attack submarines has grown from sixty-eight to 100, and by 1995 the U.S...
...Unlike the makers of No Way Out, the antidefense establishment, oddly enough, has picked someone other than the boss of the Pentagon to nourish its new-found fears that the taxpayer is being shortchanged...
...Still, these are disagreements over military strategy, not issues of personal integrity...
...News & World Report in 1986...
...Moreover, while each aircraft carrier is equipped with about ninety aircraft, only thirty-four of them can be employed safely to attack targets...
...First, that though President Reagan early on talked of the need to achieve "maritime superiority" as a "necessity . . . to assure access to all oceans of the world," he never intended his Navy secretary to change U.S...
...In the past the Pentagon would estimate how much a new weapons system would cost before it had even reached the design stage...
...The Ticonderoga-class cruisers, each with a $300-million Aegis missile system to defend against attack on the carrier fleet, also came on tap during the Lehman years...
...And what competition existed was more a "beauty contest among competing designs and selecting a favorite . . . and then awarding a monopoly to one company for decades of production...
...By 1990, according to most estimates, that plan will have been realized...
...But the Pentagon is a different case altogether...
...At other times, however, he has had more ambitious things in mind and has spoken of bottling up the Soviet fleet...
...Lehman claims that through his attempts at bringing in second sources for every appropriate program, the percentage of competition in Navy procurement rose from fifteen in 1980 to seventy-four in 1987...
...By 1979 the Soviet fleet had increased to some 1,700 ships while the 950 ships in the U.S...
...If for their own protection the carriers are kept some distance from the shore, the number of sorties flown per day by the aircraft would be limited, even allowing for mid-air refueling...
...Compare triumphs like Grenada and the Libyan raid with setbacks like the spies in the Moscow embassy and the massacre of U.S...
...In his book, he makes a different point, writing ebulliently that as a result of the change in U.S...
...Why is it all right for the Soviets to plan to block the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico choke points for American shipping in the event of war, but reckless and dangerous when we attempt to do the same to them...
...Regaining American naval supremacy was essential to ensure the secure passage of the transatlantic convoys and to be able to thwart the new Soviet interdiction capability in the Gulf of Mexico...
...Lehman has been equivocal in his justifications...
...As we are finding out today, there are worse things than having too many ideas...
...But Lehman has not answered critics who say that the expensive carrier battle groups could not survive against the Soviet land-based Backfire bombers, which can fire long-range missiles from well outside the range of the carriers' antiaircraft guns...
...But safeguarding that may involve a sounder defense doctrine than risking the gigantic carriers, their accompanying cruisers, destroyers, supply ships, and submarines all for limited gains...
...To take the first charge first, because the Soviet Union has been since 1945 the United States's chief adversary it was not surprising that the Navy played a much smaller part in American grand strategy than it did during the Second World War...
...But the rationale for expanding the aircraft carrier force from twelve to fifteen is less convincing...
...Now there is no doubt that inside a $300-billion-a-year government department we are more than likely to find all kinds of shocking examples of the misuse of public funds...
...Lehman's critics acknowledge his successes but attribute them largely to his skills as a bureaucratic fighter for a larger share of the Pentagon budget...
...The development and deployment of the Stinger missiles led to the greatest reverse the Soviets have suffered in their history...
...50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989 Now, it may well be that some of Lehman's reforms inadvertently led to the current "crisis...
...troops in Western Europe at all—in fact, it would be reckless to do so...
...That is of course barring a START agreement...
...Equality applied to the naval balance would mean catastrophe for us because naval parity would bring stalemate...
...strategy, the Soviets now have to spend more time in their coastal waters and rather less time in ours: "Major fleet exercises in 1986 departed from previous trends that emphasized far-ranging interdiction operations and instead were staged much closer to home...
...Nonetheless, he was absolutely right to attempt to change the procurement process...
...strategy on the seas from the limited role of either bringing American power to bear in various exotic parts of the world like Grenada and Lebanon, or in ensuring the safe passage of men and materiel across the Atlantic to the main theater of conflict—Europe, in other words...
...Was it not the State Department that decided that the marines were really in Lebanon to act as a neutral, peace-keeping force and who, as a consequence, should not take any of the usual security precautions of combatants such as having sentries guarding sleeping soldiers with guns chambered and ready...
...Not Caspar Weinberger but John Lehman, the Navy secretary from 1981 to 1987, has played the role of the man Washington loves to hate...
...to work in the embassy in Moscow...
...Yet it is today that the Washington crowd hollers about "waste" and "fraud" in the Pentagon...
...The Soviets would intervene in Asia and Africa and direct political developments in their direction while the United States would not be in a position to do anything...
...As the Soviet navy grew during the 1960s and '70s, pundits like Henry Kissinger and his protege John Lehman began to worry that the rundown of American seaborne forces would lead to an inability, in the fashionable parlance of the time, "to project American power overseas," namely in the Third World...
...For those who seem to have devoted their lives to negotiating the end of the Cold War, yet who are ready at any time to accept any terms at all, there is something called "Gorbachev," the very utterance of whose name is supposed to be enough to put to shame anyone who still wants to talk about rockets, trajectories, and the like...
...And that's not taking into account the formidable Soviet air defenses...
...The second charge is that through introducing competitive tendering into Navy procurement instead of sticking with the practice of having "sole" sources like General Dynamics along with Pentagon bureaucrats deciding how much a particular weapons system "should" cost, Lehman brought into being a particular class of felons—industry consultants who supposedly obtain confidential information from purchasing officials and pass the data on to companies bidding on Pentagon projects—now taking up the time, manpower, and resources of the Federal Bureau of Investigation...
...Unfortunately, in today's Washington, liberals, too intellectually lazy to take on so-called conservative ideologues, prefer to debate personal ethics...
...At times he has sounded modest, claiming that failure to do so would be immoral, implying as it does a willingness to abandon the Norwegians to the Russians...
...And it was the gigantic logistics bureaucracy contentedly using sole sources for just about everything that was capable of tolerating "prices that a normal human being would reject out of hand," such as the $700-toilet-seat cover...
...could balance huge Soviet preponderance in conventional arms only by one thing: strategic ballistic missiles...
...Here there is something for everyone...
...But as soon as he resigned in February 1987 the two companies dropped out and the monopoly still has not been broken...
...But compared with the performance of other departments the record of the military has not been too bad...
...Hence Lehman's name is increasingly associated not with having changed U.S...
...Instead, the President found himself presiding over a so-called forward strategy, which would entail American submarines and aircraft carriers moving into the Norwegian fjords in the event of a war with the Soviets, and there attacking ports and airfields within reach of the carriers' attack planes...
...Offense is the only defense available to us," he told US...
...Lehman's Command of the Seas is a formidable attempt to answer his critics...
...armory in 1969 had now shrunk to a mere 479...
...Or, alternately, the Soviets would close the Strait of Hormuz or interfere with Western shipping along the Cape route, thereby starving the democracies of important strategic minerals like vanadium, molybdenum, and cobalt...
...In comparison with the Air Force, expected to provide direct tactical support for the forces on the ground, as well as possibly launch a nuclear first-strike, the Navy had become the poor relation of the services...
...And this strategy, so Lehman's critics argue, makes no sense since any attack on Soviet territory would almost certainly lead Moscow to take at the very least commensurate action against the United States, possibly going as far as responding with nuclear weapons, not to mention the fact that it wouldbe highly unlikely for any aircraft carrier to get within the vicinity of a Soviet base before being destroyed by a Soviet submarine or Backfire bomber...
...Clearly, then, the huge buildup in the nuclear attack submarine forces was absolutely essential...
...21.95 George Szamuely THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989 49 ship Navy (not surprising considering it was John Lehman who drafted the Republican platform dealing with national security...
...Lehman managed to persuade Martin Marietta to compete against Lockheed's monopoly on the Trident missile, and Newport News to compete against General Dynamics for the submarines...
...We've got to see that they have to use their forces to protect vulnerabilities...
...The Navy's role was bound to seem subsidiary...
...There are two charges against him...
...For the none-too-successful businessman there is "waste," for the congressional busybody there is "fraud" and "scandal"—terms freely bandied about yet whose unambiguously ugly connotations are in strange contrast with the extraordinarily difficult and technical issues involved...
...Hollywood producers know very well that the Church Committee and then Stansfield lbrner have done their work and that any conspiracy of which the CIA was author would not frighten even them, let alone the generally more sensible consumers of their products...
Vol. 22 • June 1989 • No. 6
