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Another Failed Hunt for Red October
In 1981, the very year I was born, a whisky-class Soviet submarine ran aground in restricted waters near a Swedish naval base on the Baltic Coast. This event was dubbed “Whisky on the Rocks”, and was one of many known Soviet intrusions on Swedish territory during the Cold War. It was later made public through reports published after the fall of the Soviet Union – 50-odd Soviet operations had taken place in our waters after the end of World War II. Once the submarine was found, the Soviets apologized for what they called “an honest mistake.” While the explanation was accepted as an official matter, we everyday Swedes went back to warily watching our powerful neighbor flex its muscles in apparent provocation.
As the wall came down along with the Soviet Union, Swedish authorities exhaled and saw an opportunity to drastically cut military spending: scrapping compulsory military service, halting ongoing defense programs, and slashing billions off the defense budget, all while claiming that the threat had been removed and the money would be better spent elsewhere. Military personnel went public, blowing the whistle on what they saw as an historic mistake, but politicians took no heed. Or most of them, I should say. In 2007, continued cuts lead to the resignation of Defense Minister Mikael Odenberg of the Conservative Party, who said “I have to be able to look myself in the mirror and defend these cuts to our military personnel. I cannot, and therefore I must resign”.
Roughly 10 days ago I was, along with the rest of Sweden, thrown back 30 years in time. A foreign submarine was spotted in Swedish waters and, within days, the Swedish Navy was said to have had three more sightings. Along with those incidents, various media outlets reported that radio transmissions in Russian had been detected a day before the first sighting and that a distress call from a Russian submarine had been intercepted by Swedish counterintelligence. With that, the search for what was referred to as “foreign underwater activity” was on in full-scale.
At first, I made several jokes on social media about the whole operation. The reports were just too comical: The King had been informed (I dare anyone not to make a meme out of that one) that there were frogmen running lose in the archipelago; the reporters stood on rubber dinghys talking about “mysterious foam.” But then, a few days in, I watched the live broadcast of the military briefing on the operation, and everything suddenly felt way too real.
The military was calling the sightings “extremely reliable” and saying that there was more to be done in order to find these submarines — but saying that they lacked necessary equipment, and were doing all they could with what they had. I — probably like most of my fellow countrymen — was asking myself: What do we do when we find them? With what do we defend ourselves if they attack? For 30 years we have cut more and more out of an already small pie and we are basically left with a white flag and a ’90s answering machine saying “We give up” in four different languages. Russia is in our backyard, in our waters, and what have they come for? Why are they here?
A few days ago, the search for the underwater vessel was called off after an unsuccessful weeklong operation. The military released a statement saying that it was “probable” that Russian submarines had invaded our waters, and that this was unacceptable, but that the search for the submarines in question was now being halted. Again, we were all having ’80s flashbacks; yet another Russian intrusion, yet another failed hunt for Red October.
Sweden is famously (or rather infamously) neutral. The world around us is not, however, and failure to accept that simple fact has left us with a bewildered rock and stick army forced to “do the best they can with what they have.” In a world where Russia has violated Swedish and Finnish airspace, invaded Crimea, and walked all over Estonian sovereignty — all in just a little over a year — that just isn’t good enough. But while deconstructing an army takes little more than a vote, rebuilding it takes generations.
The Kremlin, of course, denied having anything to do with this incident and released a statement saying it was probably the Dutch. As if they aren’t really trying to lie convincingly; as if they know that Sweden is theirs for the taking, a rubber ducky sitting in the fjord.
Published in General
True; and that’s why I never made the argument you seem to attribute to me . . . that our debt and deficits are due to defense spending. In fact, I was making a nearly-opposite argument . . . that it’s not for lack of spending in general, but for lack of spending on specific ASW capabilities that we no longer (or seldom, at any rate) find and fix submarine targets.
And yes, too, the President has hollowed-out the military . . . most especially the Navy. Americans always get what they deserve . . . our elections are free enough and fair enough that we’ve got no one to blame but ourselves. (However, the fact the IRS actively suppressed Obama’s opponents does mitigate this culpability.)
It’s not. So that’s it, I guess.
It’s physics. It’s not budgets.
I agree, but that pretty much renders this whole discussion a moot point.
Which again gets us back to the 4 women making a baby in 2 months.
1 USN guided missile destroyer from today has more power than half the USN in WW2. The 1980s USN ship fleet is incomparable to the one today.
So what do these numbers mean? Absolutely nothing.
Re-build what? The USN has never been more powerful, and has never enjoyed a greater superiority, both in numbers and in capabilities, against any potential adversary…in it’s history.
What gives you that idea?
How? Where?
Seems to me some “conservatives” say things which are exactly like what liberals say. They say stuff like “we’re cutting welfare spending and throwing people in the streets, man!”…and we say the same stuff when it comes to the military.
Not a single shred of evidence to back any of it up. It’s just assumed to be true.
My favorite is when conservatives decry government waste while simultaneously demanding more spending on “defense.” As if somehow wrapping the spending in a soothing term like “defense” means magically making it efficient and important. We could spend half as much money on DoD and get twice as much security for it. But the federal government doesn’t spend money to get actual results; it spends money for political results. But that’s another thread.
Unfortunately, however, your observation also applies to statements like your own: “The USN has never been more powerful, and has never enjoyed a greater superiority, both in numbers and in capabilities, against any potential adversary…in it’s history.” And: “USN guided missile destroyer from today has more power than half the USN in WW2. The 1980s USN ship fleet is incomparable to the one today.” To be clear: you might have a “shred of evidence” for these claims. But that doesn’t mean they are claims with any significant meaning.
This is basically the Obama answer to Romney during the 2012 debates. It assumes that a context-less concept like “power” can be rendered meaningful by making it comparative; as though slinging around ideas like “more powerful” is what either side does to fight and win wars. A single nuclear warhead is “more powerful” than all the weapons dropped in all the wars ever fought in human history–by orders of magnitude. So what? How does all that “power” get translated into victory in Afghanistan or against ISIS? It doesn’t.
It’s the same with your “more powerful than half the USN in WW2″ destroyer. That might be significant if we were fighting WWII again. Or if we fight an adversary with lots of WWII-era destroyers that are somehow relevant to a battle taking place. The Taliban and ISIS don’t have any destroyers; this isn’t preventing them from defeating us on the field of actual battle. They don’t seem much impressed by AEGIS technology and “powerful” missile launching sea-based platforms. Nor need they be.
What matters more than arbitrary yardsticks of “power” is how effectively one’s means of waging war aligns with its strategy–its collection of security interests and how it intends to defend them. To make the point, let’s take our President’s claim that West African Ebola is a national security threat, as is “climate change.” What use are “powerful” destroyers to these threats? None. So he’s not concerned with how few we might have.
If you can’t find it you can’t kill it. And it wouldn’t take “hundreds of billions of dollars” to rebuild Sweden’s anti-submarine warfare capability. Far less actually along with training and awareness. Remember it one of the major requirements of a government to provide for the common defense and for this instance Sweden has arguably failed.
OTOH, I submit that a surprising number of countries have submarines despite those three factors you mention. Even Canada has a few.
It is meaningful only in the context where you, or others, try to characterize the US military as being “hollowed” because we “don’t have a 600 ship navy anymore”.
I.e., if you’re going to make the point that the only metric that you use is the “number of ships…then this responds to that “criticism”.
Hence, there’s no point to this thread, since the point made here was that Sweden’s military (or US’s) was somehow “gutted” by the fact that it has fewer ships or men that it did 30 or 50 years ago.
But that doesn’t matter, as much as what they can do.
I’m not the one comparing the…number of ships…from decades ago, and making the point that this is evidence of some decreased capability in the USN.
That’s precisely the point.
So now we switched from Russia, to ISIS.
Completely irrelevant and clearly an attempt to make a cheap political point.
If you’re going to argue that the USN, or any branch of the US military, is somehow “weakened”, “hollowed”, etc…then please provide some evidence or facts of this.
Facts matter. Assumptions based on empty political slogans, don’t.
So yes, I stand by my criticism that conservatives act exactly like liberals in these situations. No difference.
PS: Now if you were really serious in looking at the reality, instead of scoring political points (I’m not sure why some of you try doing this on…Ricochet!…it’s not as if you’re debating the liberals here, so what’s the point of repeating meaningless political slogans?)…you’d be talking about the fact that the biggest shift in US military strategy away from “Russia” and actual national security, came during the BUSH administration.
He’s the one who cut very many military projects which were intended precisely at dealing with the “big issues”, and instead refocused the military towards equipping for “peace keeping” operations and insurgency warfare…setting back many worthwhile projects by at least a decade.
(Or to be more precise, Donald Rumsfeld. Since, I’m not interested in scoring cheap political points by attributing things which have nothing to do with the President, to the President. Unlike others)
I remember back in the final days of the Soviet Union Brezhnev was on a state visit to Canada. During a press conference one of the journalists asked him if the USSR had any nuclear missiles aimed at Toronto. “Toronto?” Brezhnev responded, “Why would we want to bomb Italy?”
Seems to me Sweden is having delusions of grandeur if it thinks it has anything the Russians want. If you are worried about Swedish national security you should start expelling some of the more obnoxious “asylum seekers.”