NATO and the North Atlantic

Revitalising Collective Defence

John Andreas Olsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351025003
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The book analyses the renewed importance of the North Atlantic for NATO in the face of new security challenges

This Whitehall Paper explores the renewed importance of the North Atlantic Ocean to NATO's security through the lenses of the United States, United Kingdom and Norway in particular. These three NATO members form the territorial rim around the North Atlantic and its peripheral seas. All are maritime nations that have historically taken prime responsibility for security in the region and together with Iceland they form the front line to a resurgent Russian maritime capability. These three counties, with support from the rest of the northern region, must take the lead to ensure that NATO and its partners devote sufficient resources to this aspect of NATO's area of responsibility.

I. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE NORTH ATLANTIC AND THE NORWEGIAN CONTRIBUTION

ROLF TAMNES

More than 90 per cent of the world’s raw materials, manufactured goods and energy supplies travel by sea. Securing the global commons and sea lines of communication (SLOC) is therefore vital to stability, economic growth and development.¹ In peacetime, securing the sea depends heavily on international law and multinational institutions and regimes, with the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea as a central point of reference. To achieve the same goal in wartime, the US and NATO would have to rely on sea-control and on their own ability to project power.

The two world wars demonstrated the vital role of the North Atlantic as a strategic connection between North America and Europe and the threat posed by submarines to shipping.² With the Soviet naval build-up during the Cold War, especially from the 1960s onwards, securing access for US reinforcements to Europe proved a recurrent concern for NATO.

For a long period after the end of the Cold War, no major threats to the freedom of the seas existed. The West could enjoy what Barry R Posen calls ‘command of the commons’: worldwide freedom of movement on and under the seas and in the air, with the ability to deny this same freedom to enemies.³ Today, the US and the European members of NATO face challenges to the freedom of the seas. The biggest is the prospect that assertive great powers might use long-range, precision-guided missiles to deny access to littorals. This challenge extends beyond the traditional idea of sea-denial: it represents a broader area denial or anti-access threat. In Europe, Russia under President Vladimir Putin seeks to re-impose a sphere of influence, as well as build capabilities to deny the US the ability to project power. By doing so, he would undermine a key pillar of transatlantic defence cooperation.

The roots of Russia’s current policy and strategy go back to the Cold War, when the Soviet Union saw NATO under US leadership as its main adversary. The ‘bastion’ concept – strategic submarines equipped with ballistic nuclear missiles stationed in northern waters, protected by a defensive perimeter stretching to the Greenland, Iceland and UK (GIUK) gap – is once again vital to Russia’s strategy. The options for NATO’s response during the Cold War are therefore relevant today.

The first phase of NATO’s response in the 1970s was air- and ground-centric; it focused on strengthening land and air capabilities in Europe. Today, NATO’s main objective has once again been to build forward presence based mostly on land and air forces. But an alternative approach emerged in the early 1980s with the forward maritime strategy, which prioritised sea-control based power projection. Today’s challenges demand a similar, maritime-oriented response.

This chapter outlines the Cold War roots and present features of Russian policy and strategy. It also examines the positions and responses of NATO and Norway both today and during the Cold War, focusing on their efforts to secure the maritime domain. The central thesis is that NATO needs to address the revitalised Russian bastion defence concept and counter the emerging anti-access strategy in the North Atlantic. The chapter offers six considerations that merit special attention for the way forward.

The Soviet Bastion Defence Concept

During the Cold War, NATO often regarded the northern flank as secondary to the central front in Europe. This concealed the fact that the two superpowers increasingly focused on the far north and northern waters. With the advent of intercontinental bombers and missiles in the 1960s, the polar region gained significance as it represented the direct route between the superpowers. The growing importance of the Russian Northern Fleet and the bastion defence also meant that the northern flank, the maritime domain and the sea bridge between North America and Europe became a major factor in the Cold War conflict.

The traditional role of the Russian navy had been to support the ground forces as a brown-water service. This began to change in the 1950s. The Northern Fleet took on an increasingly prominent position among the Soviet maritime forces, reflecting the fact that the Kola Peninsula offered ice-free access to the North Atlantic, a central Cold War theatre of operation. The first important change occurred with the Soviet build-up of a large attack submarine force. Initially, in the 1950s, submarines operated off the coast of North America and could put pressure on the Atlantic SLOC. By the late 1950s, the Northern Fleet submarine force had become the largest of the Soviet fleets. In 1980, that fleet alone had 143 attack submarines – more than the entire US Navy. Some 50 per cent of the entire Soviet attack submarine fleet and the most modern major surface vessels now belonged to the Northern Fleet.

In the 1960s, the Soviet Union made significant progress towards becoming a fully fledged maritime power. The navy invested heavily in building a general-purpose blue-water fleet that could project power and support diplomacy around the world – and be better able to deny US access to Europe.

The Soviet Union also launched an ambitious strategic nuclear submarine building programme. By 1980, the Northern Fleet had 47 strategic submarines – about 60 per cent of the total – and also received the most modern and capable submarines. From an operational viewpoint, two developments are of particular interest. The first was the steadily growing importance of strategic submarines in the Soviet nuclear triad, although land-based nuclear systems always retained the leading position. The second important change was the evolution of the bastion defence concept.

Given the limited range of missiles on board early generations of strategic submarines, these boats operated close to the North American coast. This made them very vulnerable during long transits, in part because they had to pass Western sonar barriers. Beginning in the 1970s, the Soviets turned their unfavourable geography to their advantage: the Delta class from 1972 and the Typhoon class from 1981 carried intercontinental missiles. Based in sanctuaries in the European part of the Arctic Ocean and the Sea of Okhotsk in the Pacific – where they could operate near or under the icecap and be protected by nearby naval and air forces – they could target nearly all the US.⁴ This approach differed from the US, French and British concepts, which emphasised protection for submarines through covert patrols in the depths of the Atlantic.

The bastion concept developed gradually. Strategic submarines continued to patrol off the coasts of the US, and some of them also deployed to the southern hemisphere. By the late 1980s, however, most operated from bastions.⁵ The bastion concept led to major changes in the Soviet Navy’s strategic and operational priorities. A more distinct Soviet anti-access strategy emerged: the main mission of the Northern Fleet’s general-purpose capability was now to protect and ensure the survival of the strategic submarines and their supporting infrastructure. To accomplish this mission, the fleet sought control of the Norwegian Sea, possibly down to between the Lofoten archipelago in northern Norway and eastern Greenland, and sea-denial down to the GIUK gap. This took priority over the traditional anti-SLOC mission: in a major war, relatively few attack submarines would probably be available for operations in the North Atlantic to sink US ships bound for Europe. However, they could still compel NATO to allocate forces to protect the SLOC.⁶

Consequently, Soviet naval and air activity in northern waters rose incrementally and exercises increased significantly, peaking with Summerex in 1985. The expansion undoubtedly made the northern flank a more prominent theatre of the Cold War.

NATO Response

The Soviet military build-up created a number of challenges for NATO. First, because of nuclear deterrence, NATO saw limited war as the likeliest type of conflict: in the words of the then US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a ‘deliberate, surprise non-nuclear attack with limited objectives, e.g., an attempted “land grab” against Thrace, Hamburg, or Northern Norway’.⁷ Second, the submarine threat underscored the need for defensive barriers, or chains of underwater listening posts, and more patrols of the Norwegian Sea.⁸ As the Soviet naval build-up continued from the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, NATO member states voiced doubts about their command of sea – the bridge between the US and Europe – and the US ability to fight forward and defend Allies. After a visit to Norway in 1971, the US Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Elmo R Zumwalt wrote: ‘Norway feels increasingly behind the Soviet line as the result of her knowledge that NATO defense initially must be across Greenland/Iceland/UK Gap and because of the very high order of recent Soviet fleet exercises off Northern Norway’.⁹ Other NATO members also had reason to ask if the US would risk the loss of carrier battle groups in order to attain sea-control in forward, high-threat areas. In the late 1970s, the Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic (SACLANT) assumed that a considerable number of Allied aircraft would have to operate from Norway to compensate for the non-deployment of carriers in the Norwegian Sea.¹⁰

These concerns did not at first elicit a Western maritime response. The initial NATO rebalancing in Europe and the north in the 1970s was air- and ground-centric: it prioritised the allocation of more land and air reinforcements. Plans for the defence of NATO’s northern region, including the maritime domain, came to rely heavily on bases in the northern triangle: in northern Norway, Iceland and in the southern part of Northern Europe.

In the case of Norway, two initiatives were notable. First, in 1974 Norway was included in the US Air Force Co-located Operating Bases programme. The arrangement was gradually broadened to incorporate several air bases in northern Norway, reflecting a growing concern over the Soviet threat in the far north. Second, based on a bilateral agreement signed in 1981, the US Marine Corps assigned an amphibious brigade to the defence of Norway, and combined this with the pre-positioning of the brigade’s heavy equipment. Britain, Canada and Germany also increased their commitments to flank defence during this period. In 1982, most of the measures taken were incorporated into the Rapid Reinforcement Plan of the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).

The second phase – the forward maritime strategy and the accompanying US plan for a 600-ship navy – heralded a more powerful and self-confident Western maritime response to the Soviet maritime challenge. The strategy had its roots in a fundamental US re-examination of naval threats and counter-strategies of the late 1970s, maturing in the early 1980s and reaching its formative phase in 1984–86.¹¹ NATO’s new maritime operations concept of 1981 embodied key elements of this new US maritime strategy. Unlike NATO’s concept, the US maritime strategy had a global reach and focused increasingly on targeting Soviet strategic submarines in their bastions. Critics voiced concerns over nuclear stability.

Forward operations from the sea now constituted the US and NATO maritime strategy’s pivotal contribution to a potential war with the Soviet Union. By putting pressure on Soviet bastions and the flanks, the USSR would be forced to use most of its naval forces to defend its strategic submarines and their supporting infrastructure, preventing Soviet Russia from deploying general-purpose forces further forward into the North Atlantic. In the event of a global naval war, therefore, it was unlikely that the Soviet Fleet would be able to focus its attention on the SLOC.

While the US and NATO maritime strategies differed in some respects, they both prioritised the Norwegian Sea. A conspicuous aspect of their plans was to deploy carrier groups to the north early in a crisis ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Editor
• About the Authors
• Maps
• Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction: The Quest for Maritime Supremacy
• I. The Significance of the North Atlantic and the Norwegian Contribution
• II. The UK and the North Atlantic After Brexit
• III. The Centrality of the North Atlantic to NATO and US Strategic Interests
• IV. Norway and the North Atlantic: Defence of the Northern Flank
• V. The UK and the North Atlantic: A British Military Perspective
• VI. The United States, the North Atlantic and Maritime Hybrid Warfare
• Conclusions and Recommendations