Armaments: Jane’s Defensive Ships

U.S. Navy commanders are only too keenly aware of the growing strength and aggressiveness of the Soviet navy. Russian ships shadow every NATO maneuver, break into allied formations, and show the red flag in the world’s most sensitive trouble spots. Last week the Pentagon received reassurance of sorts. According to the 1968-69 edition of Jane’s Fighting Ships, the longtime civilian authority on all the world’s navies, “Soviet maritime strategy is defensive or containing rather than provoking or aggressive.”

In fact, said Jane’s, the Soviet navy’s activity may be no more than “a determination to mark the ships of other navies in much the same way that players mark their opposite numbers in a soccer game.” Jane’s assesses a formidable number of Soviet players, among them: 55 nuclear-powered submarines, most of them of the hunter-killer type; 325 conventionally powered subs; 25 cruisers; 100 destroyers; two new helicopter carriers.

“At first sight,” concedes Jane’s in an editorial foreword, the Soviet navy “appears to be poised for control of all ingress and egress about narrow waters.” But Jane’s detects a “subtlety not generally appreciated by laymen. Most recent Soviet warships were apparently designed for a self-sufficient limited role of being able to reply to any attack made on them rather than to pose an attitude of strike action.”

That is a matter of Jane’s semantics-and Soviet intention. There is no doubt that the Soviet fleet has an offensive capability and has been considerably stretching the concept of strategic defense. Soviet submarines appeared in the Indian Ocean for the first time last winter, and only last week the helicopter carrier Moskva turned up in the Mediterranean. That, declared U.S. Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, Chief of Naval Operations, is “visible evidence of Russia’s announced intention to be come a modern major offensive sea power.”

Jane’s was more perceptibly disturbed over the decline of the Royal Navy. Its major force is now down to four aircraft carriers, 21 postwar-built conventional submarines, three nuclear-powered hunter-killer subs, and four nuclear-powered missile submarines. “The Royal Navy,” says Jane’s, “has taken a cruel knock. It is hardly adequate for peacetime defense, and insufficient for war.” Perhaps the cruelest knock of all was Jane’s judgment that by the 1970s, if present plans are carried through, the French navy will be stronger than Britain’s by a margin of two aircraft carriers and one nuclear sub. So much for the navy that William Blackstone, back in 1765, was able to call “England’s greatest defense and ornament; its ancient and natural strength; the floating bulwark of the island.”