President Ronald Reagan’s maritime strategy, the one that played such a pivotal role in hastening the end of the Cold War, was first drawn up on a napkin. John Lehman, not then in government service near the end of the Carter administration, sat at the Black Pearl in Newport, Rhode Island with Secretary of the Navy Graham Claytor, Deputy Secretary James Woosley, and Francis ‘Bing’ West following a strategy session at the Naval War College. The gears greased with libations and drawn butter for their lobsters, the four of them molded a revolutionary new operating construct for fleet combat operations in the Norwegian Sea that laid the foundations for Lehman’s maritime strategy as Secretary of the Navy a few years later.1
The story of the development and execution of the maritime strategy in the 1980s, well documented and debated in the pages of the United States Naval Institute’s Proceedings and in the minds of the Navy’s cur- rent senior leaders, has finally been told from the perspective of its orig- inal architect. Secretary Lehman, awaiting the declassification of several key Cold War documents, recently published Oceans Ventured, meticu- lously documenting the Navy’s aggressive operations in the 1980s. Sec- retary Lehman’s readily accessible book tells the story as if you were having a casual conversation at the Black Pearl, listening to the reminis- cences and sea stories of a well-traveled naval officer. The Submarine Review’s readership will find Oceans Ventured relatable and refreshing. In this era, as many Review readers lived through or know, sub- marines found themselves far forward taking the Soviets to task. The Soviet resurgence in the 1970s caused American submariners to doubt their technical superiority as tracking Soviet ballistic missile submarines became harder and moved under the Arctic ice. At the time, we did not know that John Walker had already compromised our operations.2 Sev- eral nerve-wracking years would pass until President Carter’s defense strategy, rather anti-Navy, could be repealed and replaced with a far more hawkish one under President Reagan. Secretary Lehman was confirmed in February 1981 for what would become an eventful six-year tour.
Lehman’s memoir relates his tour through the lens of the Ocean-se- ries of military exercises, starting in 1981 and continuing into the late 1980s. These exercises, true joint exercises with our Allies, demonstrated American resolve in the far-forward regions of the Norwegian Sea in the Atlantic and into the Sea of Okhotsk in the Pacific—the Russian’s back- yards. The exercises demonstrated the modernization of carrier battle group tactics, hiding from the Soviets and they surged forward from their homeports under emissions control, only to pop up in nominal launch positions, forcing the Russians to scramble to monitor. Throughout the Reagan years, Lehman paints the growth of the exercises in complexi- ty and their desire to provoke a response form the Russians. Other US forces were not the Red Team; the Russians responded as themselves, giving the United States the opportunity not only gain intelligence on Russian operational and tactical doctrine, but observe first-hand how their technology and tactics improved and train against them. By the end, the Navy had mastered operating a carrier in Vestfjord in Norway, with submarines clearing out the fjord ahead of time and protecting the inlet so that we might operate with impunity.
The Submarine Force took the strategy under the polar ice caps, demonstrating to the Russians on multiple occasions that their ballistic missile submarines were not safe under the ice; that we could find them wherever they were hiding. On several occasions we showed this public- ly with two to three submarines all surfacing together at the North Pole. In a throwback to this era, Secretary of Defense James Mattis has advo- cated for ‘dynamic force employment,’ which submariners of the 1980s will similarly remember as the “flushing” of the East Coast ports to keep the Soviets on their toes.
Oceans Ventured gives submariners, new and old, a compellingly written account of one of the most prosperous times in our history. As the United States moves into a new era of great power competition, Sec- retary Lehman’s book gives everyone a history lesson, not only on how to gain and maintain the initiative, but on how to see how your actions fit into the strategic whole in real time. For that, Oceans Ventured needs to be well read at all levels.
Endnotes
- John Oceans Ventured. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 2018, p. 52.
- Ibid, p.
NOTES FROM NSL HEADQUARTERS
OPEN HOUSE!
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CALLING FOR STORIES
This issue has three anecdotes (pages 131-135) and we want more! Send your stories to review@navalsubleague.org. Thank you to those who have already submitted.
AWARDS
Four members of the submarine community are going to be honored at our upcoming Annual Symposium. Join us in celebrating them. Distinguished Civilians: Mr. Fred Harris and Mr. Bill Johnson Distinguished Submariners: ADM Hank Chiles, USN, Ret. and RADM Jerry Holland, USN, Ret.
