SOVIET UNION: All the Ships at Sea

Around the world last week, ships of the Soviet navy were under full steam. Off the Azores, NATO spotter planes reported one of the 10,000-ton Kara-class two-year-old missile cruisers that Western naval experts rate among the world’s best modern warships. In the Mediterranean, where the U.S. Sixth Fleet customarily roams while Soviet vessels lie in Syrian and North African ports—except for a few “tattletale” scouts dogging American carriers—the roles were reversed. The Soviet fleet was out in force and the Sixth Fleet was doing the tattling. Other Soviet task forces were sighted in the Pacific Ocean, in the Sea of Japan and off the Philippines.

The global flurry of activity was no accident. At least 200 surface ships and 100 submarines, along with land-based aircraft, were involved in a massive naval exercise, the first such worldwide maneuvers that the Soviet navy has run in five years. The Soviets dubbed the maneuvers “Spring”; the West called them “Okean 1975,” a reference to the Okean (Russian for ocean) maneuvers that the Soviets held in 1970. The new exercise was apparently scheduled for the same length of time as the last one—about three weeks.

Varied Aims. Far from screening the maneuvers, the Soviet navy took pains to advertise its muscle flexing. It passed routine naval orders over regularly monitored radio channels. Okean’s essential message was a now familiar one: under Soviet Admiral Sergei Gorshkov, the Soviet navy is no longer a coastal force but an impressive blue-water global fleet. Said one U.S. officer last week as he busily monitored the Soviet fleet at sea: “What they’ve done in just ten years is absolutely fantastic. From almost nothing, they’ve built up a first-rate navy, and it’s an imposing threat.”

What interested Western observers more than the disposition of the ships was the basic aims of Okean 1975. They appeared to be varied. Judging from groupings of Soviet merchant and hydrographic ships off the Azores and Japan, convoy maneuvers were involved. But whether Russian warships were practicing convoy escort or postulating the convoys as U.S. fleets—or U.S. tanker convoys—would await the same sort of computer analysis that the Pentagon carried out in connection with the first Okean. Even without computers, however, it was obvious that the Soviets had also practiced air reconnaissance and antisubmarine warfare, using not only ships but land-based aircraft, including the intercontinental-range nuclear bomber “Backfire,” and TU-95 “Bears” flying out from Cuba and Guinea.

Most significant for a global fleet, Okean 1975 tested “command and control” communications networks employing satellites and satellite relay. Using a mixture of very high and very low frequencies and linking even submerged submarines, the Russian navy apparently achieved near-instant communications. That would be a considerable asset in Gorshkov’s “first salvo” concept, in which scattered Soviet fleets are supposed to undertake simultaneous attacks within a 90-second period.

As in all such maneuvers, East or West, Okean 1975 had another aim as well. Gorshkov, whose code name during the exercise was “Seagull,” observed it aboard a warship in the Barents Sea, along with Soviet Defense Minister Andrei Grechko. They obviously meant to impress the Politburo as well as the West with the capability and reach of Soviet forces. One fallout from the first Okean exercise, for instance, was the decision to upgrade the Soviet carrier forces. Their third and most sophisticated carrier, the 35,000-ton Kiev, is now outfitting in the Black Sea port of Nikolayev and will undergo sea trials this summer.