16 December 2009
 
The Main Enemy


Soviet Golf II Ballistic Missile Submarine

Rex left the Macon in September of 1956 and was summoned back to the flagpole to learn the ropes in his new trade as a designated Intelligence Specialist.
 
Detached in September 1956 and having been selected as an Intelligence Specialist Officer, he was assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Navy Department, Washington, D.C.
 
I know what it is like to come in from the outer reaches of the Fleet. My first nine years service were out in the hinterlands of the deployed post-Vietnam Navy, and the problems with the Iranians and then the North Koreans.
 
The main enemy was the Soviet Union, though, and we never forgot it. Five years in Hawaii we focused on the Red Banner Pacific Ocean Fleet, and the dark hulls of the submarines that contained the fires of hell, our and theirs.
 
Rex had a benefit of a balanced career, Pacific, Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. His service had included independent command and assistant ops on a nuclear-armed cruiser as a line officer. He was ready for a crash course in how the Office of Naval Intelligence supported the Fleet, and supported the service in the battle against the real Main Enemy of the 1950s- the United States Air Force.
 
Rex was walking into the world of Arleigh Burke, the last Navy Chief who actually drove Operations.
 
Arleigh Burke On 17 August 1955, Burke became the fifteenth Chief of Naval Operations, and he was in trouble immediately. He was at odds with Engine Charlie Wilson, the SECDEF, and with Ike over the issue of reinstating the draft.
 
The Administration wanted it over, and Burke sid the navy needed it. He actually persuaded the President to reverse his decision about that, but warned him never to put the his commander-in-chief in that position again on the way out.
 
My pal Dave is writing the definitive history of Burke as the Chief, and the following is stolen directly from his writings about the most remarkable CNO who ever served. Suffice it to say that by the time he was reappointed to a second two year term in 1957, the Admiral had become “a valued and influential member of the Eisenhower team.”
 
This was the navy that Rex served at ONI, bubbling with innovation and bureaucratic infighting. Burke valued intelligence as the force multiplier that won conflicts, and it was one of the focus areas of his time molding the Navy. I would invite your attention to his address to the Naval Intelligence School about the critical role of intelligence, and how it was intrinsic to operational success, but we don’t have time here.
 
Dave puts it this way: “Burke served as CNO through 1 August 1961, an unprecedented and unmatched three terms and nearly six years in office. During that time, he made contributions to the service ranging from the adoption of formal mess dress uniforms for both male and female officers, and the renovation of buildings at the Naval Academy a few rooms at a time until complete funding could be achieved, to sponsoring nuclear power for aircraft carriers and surface combatants, changing the submarine building programs to insure that all future submarines would be nuclear powered, and starting the Polaris Fleet Ballistic Missile program. In particular, he fulfilled Secretary Thomas's goal of aggressively pursuing the development and procurement of advanced technology systems, including surface to air, air to air, and air to surface missiles, advanced jet fighters and attack aircraft including the F-4 Phantom, the A-6 Intruder, and the A-5 Vigilante; and brought the Navy into the computer age with the development and initial procurement of the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) for command and control of air and naval forces.”

All of this was done against the context of a Main Enemy who did not speak Russian. If the Navy had been pitted against the War Department for its entire history, there was a new threat on the block, and it wore a light-blue uniform. Much of what Burke accomplished as CNO was done within the context of the most intense competition among the armed services for peacetime defense funds in the nation's history.
 
Dave has done the analysis. He says “The Navy consistently came in second behind the Air Force, which received nearly half of all defense dollars during the Eisenhower years. Debates in the Joint Chiefs of Staff (of which Burke was now a member) over strategic plans for the use of U.S. forces in war, particularly general war with the Soviet Union, and over procurement objectives in support of those plans were blunt and prolonged. More was at stake than just forces and funding; the central issue in the debate was nothing less than the American approach to waging war.”
 
The position taken by Burke and the Navy was fundamentally at odds with that of the Air Force, and also differed in many ways from that of the Eisenhower administration. A generation of naval officers, Rex among them, was seasoned in the fires of these budget wars, and the role of the services in the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, for nuclear retaliation against the Russians.
 
Much of the nation's defense expenditures in the mid-1950s was being devoted to the problem of general nuclear war between East and West. U.S. war plans, which through the early 1950s had envisioned a U.S.-U.S.S.R. war as a protracted multi-phase conflict lasting months or years where naval forces could play an important role, had been changed in 1955-1956 and now anticipated a rapid two phase war, with an short, massively destructive, thermonuclear first phase, and a second phase of "indeterminate duration."
 
The Navy was essentially irrelevant in that scenario, and Generals like Curtis LeMay were insistent that only the aero-space service could defend the nation.
 
As CNO, Burke responded with the development of nuclear tipped surface-to-air guided missiles, the anti-submarine ASROC nuclear depth charge, and the deployment of an intelligence sensor called Sound Surveillance (SOSUS) that eventually wired the world ocean with acoustic sensors and was the most expensive single Navy program in history, before or since.
 
He established surface, maritime patrol aviation and submarine barriers to prosecute Soviet submarines and deny the enemy navy access to the open oceans, and used sensitive intelligence sources to divine Soviet war plans, and commit the Navy to a strategy by which it would use the first days of a conflict to surge forward and seek and destroy the Soviet submarines in the frigid waters of the Northern Fleet,
 
But Burke was no Curtis LeMay, and neither were the officers like Rex who were his action officers. Burke for example, also believed that the developing nuclear stalemate between the superpowers would lead to a situation where "it is my opinion that not even a mad Russian would think of starting a nuclear war unless he has some chance of profit and there is no chance of profit if his own country is largely destroyed in retaliation.”
 
Despite the pernicious influence of the Air Force, there was no question about who the Main Enemy was, and the importance of monitoring the Soviets in every way possible. The most prestigious way to do that was to serve as an Attaché, the human intelligence collectors who were accredited to the US Embassy in Moscow.
 
It is one of the first positions established by the Navy to collect sensitive information, which is the oldest continuously active member of the American Intelligence Community. “American Legation, US Naval Attache” is the formal titled, known better as the ALUSNA.
 
In 1959, Rex as selected to start training to be the A/ALUNSA- Moscow, and in March of 1960, he arrived in the capital of the Main Enemy.
 
Admiral Burke retired as Chief of Naval Operations and retired from the United States Navy on 1 August 1961.
 
He was tired, frustrated and felt there was nothing more he could accomplish. He was concerned that the new Kennedy administration would not wage the Cold War as aggressively or competently as necessary.
 
Tight budgets, an implacable enemy, and a new Administration were all in place when Rex returned from Moscow in July 1962. We will have to get back to that tomorrow, but here is a teaser. Another pal was known as half of the Starsky and Hutch team in Moscow several years later. His time was later, but the game was the same.
 
He told me what it was like to serve in the lair of the Main Enemy.
 
In those days, it was a rite of passage that in an attache’s first weeks on the job, out on the Russian Street, the KGB goons would wait until the new guy walked around a corner and then jump him, delivering a solid sucker-punch to the abdomen. It was a greeting intended to leave no marks- no physical ones, anyway, and encourage the foreigners to stay close to home.
 
Breathless and a little stunned, the KGB would walk away. No cause, no reason. Welcome to Moscow.
 
In response, the good attaches would play cat-and-mouse with their KGB minders on periodic trips to Leningrad, which has been reborn as the city of Saint Petersburg.
 
There, on the right side of the Neva River, the attaches were expected to walk the embankment named for Lieutenant P.P. Schmidt of the 1905 revolution. The stroll past the 1730-s buildings featured a brief interval where it was possible to get a street-level look inside the Admiralty dockyards at Sudomekh, where Great Peter had founded his shipyard to support the Great Northern War.
 
In Rex’s time, and even today, that is where the Russians build their submarines, and that was the lair of the Main Enemy.
 
The very belly of the beast, you might say.
 
More on that tomorrow.
 
Copyright David Alan Rosenberg and Vic Socotra 2009
www.vicsocotra.com
Available in RSS!