Changing Military Threats

Looking at your career, you are, I believe, the only Naval officer who has been a commander of both the Atlantic fleet and the Pacific fleet, one after another. What was the difference between those two roles?

You're correct about the fact that I'm the only Naval officer that had both of those commands, and there's a major difference. In the first place, you simply have the size and scope of the Pacific Ocean, where you're dealing with so many nations which are, in essence, either islands or peninsulas, and which imparts a significant importance to Naval operations. In the Atlantic, on the contrary, the distances are much shorter, you are also given the command of the Allied Forces Atlantic and NATO organization.

Also, anti-submarine warfare becomes a very significant mission, because two times in this century the United States has certainly saved Europe from defeat by virtue of having transported war supplies to Europe from the United States, despite the fact that the German submarine attacks made it very difficult. Of course, the Soviets are aware of that and therefore they have built up a very large submarine force. So there's more emphasis on anti-submarine warfare in the Atlantic than there is in the Pacific, all with the primary mission of protecting the sea lanes to Europe. Whereas in the Pacific, of course you have submarine problems alright, particularly now that many Pacific nations are so dependant on the flow of oil from the Middle East into Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and so forth. India, for instance, has just acquired six new submarines, and the Soviets have been operating submarines out of Cam Ranh Bay. So, the anti-submarine mission is rapidly increasing in importance in the Pacific, but when I was in command of those two fleets, it was weighted heavily on the side of the Atlantic.

Was it helpful that in both of these theaters there was one common threat, namely the Soviet Union? Was that a good organizing principle for us with regard to the deployment of our forces?

Of course, because the world had more or less polarized into two superpowers, and when developing your force structure, the objective was to be superior to the Soviets. By and large, in many cases, that's still the case. It involves technology, it involved arms production, and of course it involves training of personnel. By and large, to answer your question, you can simply say that if you could handle the Soviets, you didn't have to worry about any other nation or any other confrontation.

Now, of course, people get brainwashed and all this, and we've got all kinds of things we're looking at now called low-intensity conflict. Of course, I don't know what that is. I'm telling you, when you are the one that's in conflict, it isn't very low in intensity. So it depends on your point of view. What they're really talking about when they say low-intensity conflict is the number of forces involved. But again, I come back the point that obviously, if you can deal with the Soviets, you can handle anything else.

Now, the budgeteers always want to divide your force up into what they call a high-low mix. In other words, you build two kinds of weapons systems, one is highly capable, with advanced technology, and then you build another more or less ordinary group. Of course, in my view that's a stupid idea because you'll never get the Soviet to arrange things so that they send their medium-quality forces against your medium-quality forces, and their high-quality forces against your high-quality forces. What'll happen is, first thing you know, your low-quality forces will encounter the high-quality forces and that'll be the end of it.

Do you think if we're seeing the waning, the passing of the Soviet threat, that this will be hard on the morale of our servicemen? Will we lose a sense of why we're in this game?

No, because I think what is happening is there's a very significant impact of technology taking place, where you're going to have many nations that can have a significant rocket force. Only this year we launched navigation satellites. That means we're going to get extreme accuracy with missiles, and more and more missiles are being distributed around by the Chinese and by others.

Secondly, more and more nations are going to acquire a nuclear capability. You see all these disputes about whether a nuclear power plant is going to be used for military purposes and so on, but my personal belief is that you can't stop the advance of technology. It's just going to move ahead, and the idea of putting limits on new technology is not a very realistic one in my view. Specifically, you're going to have different kinds of confrontations. My belief has always been that the Soviets were not going to go pell-mell through Western Europe to the Channel. What they were after was political control of the industrial center of Western Europe. If there is going to be a nuclear exchange, it'll be between some of the smaller countries like India and Pakistan or Sudan and maybe some other target, or Israel and Egypt or something like that. I'm not concerned that I'm going to look up in the skies in Washington someday and see all these bombs falling.

Next page: Working in Washington