1980s Maritime Strategy Series

By Dmitry Filipoff

CIMSEC discussed the 1980s Maritime Strategy with Admiral Tom Hayward (ret.), who initiated much of the Navy’s efforts toward changing war plans and adopting a more offensive role that would later be embodied in the Maritime Strategy. In this conversation, Admiral Hayward discusses how he came to learn of the Swing Strategy, how he initiated efforts to revise war plans, and how he advocated for these changes as commander of the Pacific Fleet and as the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO).

How did you learn about the Swing Strategy as a senior commander and begin to change the war plans for the Navy?

It’s helpful to begin by providing some context. You have to put yourself back in the position of being an operator, and I myself was an operator when the Vietnam War was coming to an end. I’m no academic, I’m a tactician, and you try to get the immediate job done. So I commanded an aircraft carrier in Vietnam, focused on running strikes 24/7. In the context of global warfare, throughout that whole period of time, the Russians and their Pacific Fleet modernized a lot and clearly got to be bigger and better than our Pacific Fleet. But I didn’t focus on that at the time. I’m just the skipper of a carrier and my job is to get the guys over the beach and back safely.

We had a requirement to stand down every now and then to simulate the war plan launching of nuclear weapons, and this went on all over the fleet, as I far as I know. In the context of how the Seventh Fleet and the carriers would respond, our job was to launch nuclear weapons when so ordered. So we would exercise that. I’d pay some attention to it, but not in great detail, and made sure the exercise was taking place and got what we wanted out of it. Just a standard requirement of running the ship.

I got promoted to Rear Admiral and was eventually sent back to Washington. In all of my jobs for the next 10 or so years, I was trying to help get the Navy back on its feet post-Vietnam. When I went out later to command Seventh Fleet, I was dealing with plenty of logistics problems and getting the Navy back into rhythm again, with all the ships being way behind on maintenance. The primary responsibility of me as Seventh Fleet commander and later at PACFLT and so on was getting things back in shape, sorting things out, and getting our readiness back. We had major, major upkeep issues, retention, all those kinds of issues.

After settling down in Seventh Fleet, I said to the staff, “Let’s go through the war plans, what are they? I haven’t paid any attention to them.” And that’s the first time I found out that seriously what we were supposed to do under a certain DEFCON much of Seventh Fleet was to run and hide down among some islands in the South Pacific and pretend they can’t be found. And then they would use nukes when ordered to execute the war plans. And that’s when I started thinking that’s crazy, we’ve got a fleet out here we’ve got a fight, the Russians have a Pacific Fleet here. That was the real start of my working with the staff and my own thinking about other options. Because that was a lousy choice and we needed to start looking at how we should really do this.

How did you work on that while commanding the Pacific Fleet?

Around that time I get promoted to lead PACFLT. So my perspective changes where I’ve got the whole fleet to worry about now and not just Seventh Fleet. In that context, my priorities were still way over on the side of readiness and getting our Navy back to operating again. We had huge problems. We think we have problems now, back then we had horrible budgets, broken down people and platforms, drug problems, all those day-to-day things that affect readiness in a big way. Our readiness was terrible. So my highest priority at the time was readiness.

However, at the same time I had my ops guys start thinking about the war plans. That’s when I became even more familiar with what was in the war plans about the Swing Strategy. That’s around the time when Captain Jim Patton joined my staff and became the action officer for all my thinking on this and did the research and provided the background on these issues. It became very clear to me that the Swing Strategy was the wrong answer.

That’s when I formulated Sea Strike, the staff came up with that name. The idea was that the strategy would take the fight to the Russians and get them to tie down their eastern armies, which they could otherwise have swung to the west in the event of a major conflict. We were going to put them on the defensive. We knew from intelligence the Russians were logically very sensitive to homeland security. It took many months to put together a plan with all the extensive details and then think about how to wargame it, practice it, put it into effect.

But some people would say, ‘You didn’t promote it at the time.’ I said, absolutely not I didn’t promote it. If I had gone to even the CNO, Admiral Jim Holloway, or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and tell him we wanted to change the war plans, it would surely have been squelched.

Furthermore, I didn’t know yet whether it was a practical thing to do. But I knew that what was already planned was definitely impractical. Send all our fleets to the Atlantic? Crazy idea.

That took place when I was at PACFLT, developing the plan, getting it ready to exercise, work out the obstacles and the hurdles to get through it, and get it to the point where we could be confident about it and then take on the issue of changing the war plans.

It was very clear when I got to be CNO, especially after I got all the debriefings about the way in which DoD was heavily biased toward the Central Front of Europe. Bob Komer, he was Defense Secretary Harold Brown’s loud mouthpiece about why we needed to swing the Navy, and saying the only reason we have a Navy is for getting the Army into Europe. I wasn’t aware of his being too much at the forefront of the issue until I became CNO. Prior to becoming CNO, Harold Brown came out and visited me at PACFLT. Before that, Senator Sam Nunn was out in the area and we briefed him on the whole program. He was very taken by it and it wasn’t too much longer after that when Harold Brown came out. That’s when the seed was planted back in the Washington environment that the Pacific Fleet was looking at alternatives.

When I got to be CNO and all the other issues that go with that, I got a briefing on the war plans for supporting Europe. I saw potential for the same sort of strategic logic I saw in confronting the Soviets in the Pacific and the potential for offensive warfare. This was actually a global issue, and the Navy has a major role to play on the flanks. The flanks being the Mediterranean, the North Sea, the North Atlantic, and elsewhere. We could tie down a lot of Soviet options that might be in their playbook to support the central front, but they wouldn’t be able to execute those options with the Navy and the Marines going after their flanks.

I brought in key flag officers, and folks like Bing West and others, and I started articulating where I wanted to take this. We needed to get buy-in from leadership, because the first reaction would be, “This is a crazy idea.” I gave a talk on a global, forward Navy to every War College in their auditorium. I got the flag officers all together and got their interaction. We got buy-in that there was a new role for the Navy, and it was way beyond escorting the Army to Europe.

When you were PACFLT you said it was risky to change the war plans. Were you in a better position to advocate for that as CNO?

I sure was, of course. Remember, the DOD all had other things on their mind, too. The big obstacle was getting Bob Komer to quiet down. But nobody ever came up and said, ‘You guys can’t do that.’ I don’t know precisely where we got to the point that we rewrote the general war plans, maybe Jim Patton knows that. He was down in the trenches making the details come together. I had brought him back to Washington not long after I was CNO and he kept assisting with the development of the global Navy strategy.

As CNO I’m still heavily involved in readiness issues. The drug issue was a huge thing, retention and recruiting was massively difficult. Harold Brown and President Carter were cutting the budget and making it harder and harder. The nation had turned against the military badly at that time. That’s where my attention was, and gradually changing the perception of the Navy’s global role.

About two-thirds of the way through my tour was when John Lehman came onboard. He apparently was having somewhat similar conversations with others on the future Navy posture and strategy. When he took over as SECNAV, he had his own priorities, but in this area, we were in synch. He wanted to raise the visibility of the Navy, increase the size of the Navy, and of course with President Reagan he came in with more money. And a lot of that went to readiness. We got spare parts, got training to where it belongs, more at-sea time and flying time, all those things that get you ready. In the meantime, 2^nd fleet out there was getting instructions to do a “Sea Strike” exercise in the Atlantic.

After the Reagan Administration comes in, was there a much more receptive audience, especially with building the readiness needed for that kind of strategy?

The word “strategy” was not the driver necessarily, the Navy and all the services were so worn out and needed to get back into shape. I didn’t sell the budget on the basis of strategy but on the basis of the combat readiness of our units.

There are readiness categories, C1, 2, 3, and 4. C1 means I’ve got everything I need for combat. C2 means I’m short some things but we’re in pretty good shape. C3 means we’re getting kind of shaky, and at C4 you’re real shaky. Our readiness was so bad I created C5. That rattled around the building a lot. I was accused with playing games with the budget, and you’ve got to face that kind of thing all the time. But C5 meant that I am unsafe to steam or fly. Lo and behold, an AOE out of Norfolk was about to depart on deployment when the skipper rang the C5 bell. All hell broke loose, ‘Oh Hayward is playing games,’ and so on. I got in front of Congress and I told them to get down there and see what was going on.

That was the start of a major turnaround. That year I think we got about a 26 percent increase in pay, and many readiness-related things. When the real world finally got their attention, all this typical game playing that goes on between budgeteers and accountants, it got pushed to the side a bit. It was an honest effort to see how bad we were getting. That skipper called it right. He didn’t have enough qualified people onboard that ship to go on deployment. Today you wouldn’t get that far.

In the context of the Swing Strategy, I told staff to basically ignore it and we would build our own strategy, and if we can do our due diligence and do this thing right, then we could change the war plans.

What is the value of having a global Navy that can go on the offensive, rather than a more narrow purpose? What lessons are there for today?

The concept of having the enemy worry about you is a major element in deterrence. That was the overriding, broad strategic thrust of having the Navy play a proper and significant role in presenting the adversary with a meaningful threat. A new strategy would give the Navy a valuable deterrent role. The Navy could be in a position to constrain the Soviet ability to launch nukes and affect their ability to focus on a conventional assault on the central front.

We shouldn’t fight China today, whether it’s nuclear or non-nuclear. We have to posture and work all of our policies, foreign policy, commercial policy, and so on to be oriented toward presenting a deterrent in all its dimensions against what President Xi may be thinking about doing, and which could upset the global balance of power.

The role today in the broad sense remains the same, it is to deter. We can’t fight a land war with China. We have to use maritime power in a very constructive way to present deterrence.

Admiral Tom Hayward entered the naval service in World War II through the V-5 Naval Aviation Cadet Program, then transferred to the Naval Academy, from which he graduated in 1947. He has commanded a fighter squadron, a carrier air wing, and an aircraft carrier. In 1973-1975 he was the Navy’s Director of Program Planning, then served as Commander, Seventh Fleet from 1975-1976. From 1976 to 1978 he was Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, then finished his career as the 21^st Chief of Naval Operations from 1978-1982.

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at [email protected].

Featured Image: November 15, 1985 – An elevated stern view of the aircraft carrier USS SARATOGA (CV 60) underway. (Photo by PH1 P.D. Goodrich via the U.S. National Archives)

1980s Maritime Strategy Series

Vice Admiral Hank Mustin had a reputation as a tactical innovator and operationally aggressive commander at sea. At the apex of his career in the 1980s Cold War U.S. Navy, Admiral Mustin played a critical role in the Navy’s force development, especially with taking the Maritime Strategy to sea and working out its operational and tactical foundations. In a piece entitled “Maritime Strategy from the Deckplate,” Admiral Mustin declared, “The difference between strategy and tactics depends on when the shooting starts: prior to the shooting, we talk strategy; after the shooting starts, we talk tactics…The Maritime Strategy provides the basic tactical framework for success and the stimuli to keep our tactical thinking alive to meet tomorrow’s challenges.”

Below are select excerpts from Admiral Mustin’s oral history, conducted by Dave Winkler of the Naval Historical Foundation and republished with permission. In these excerpts, Mustin shares his insights on developing operational and tactical methods for executing the Maritime Strategy at sea, how the bastion strategy of the Soviets affected tactical development, and how the offensive thrust of the Maritime Strategy required operational experimentation. 

Be sure to also explore another CIMSEC republication of Admiral Mustin’s insights in “Vice Admiral Hank Mustin on Naval Force Development.”

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Winkler: …[CNO] Admiral Zumwalt was concerned about this battle for the Atlantic because of the onrush of Soviet submarines, keeping the sea lanes open. In the late ’70s the Soviet submarine force kind of retracts, and because of the range of their ballistic missiles they could hit you from Murmansk now; they kind of develop a bastion strategy and actually retract from their forward positions in the Atlantic. What was the assessment to this?…How was the Soviet threat being reassessed?

Mustin: …the bastion theory really came into play after Bud Zumwalt on the watch of [CNO] Jim Watkins and [SECNAV] John Lehman, with the development of the Maritime Strategy—’79, ’80, ’81. What the bastion strategy meant was that, just as we were saying we wanted to move more of our strategic nuclear response capability to sea, so were the Soviets…In order to protect their bastions, instead of sending their SSN force out into the Atlantic to attack our convoys, they were going to retract their SSNs up into the North Cape area and the Kola area to protect their boomers, just as you said. And they would attack our convoys with long-range Soviet naval aviation—the Badgers and the Bears and the Backfires. They had aircraft that could fly all the way down to Cuba from the North Cape.

What this meant to us, all of a sudden, in the surface Navy was that, whereas before we had looked at protecting the sea lanes as a predominantly ASW problem— which the submariners loved, because that meant more submarines—now we looked at it as an AAW problem. That meant that you de-emphasized ASW, because now their submarine force is all going to be way up north. We’ve got to pick convoy routes that go down south, and we’ve got to be prepared to defend against regimental-size raids of Soviet aircraft that could fly down and attack our convoys. That was one of the principal arguments for the Aegis system that we were going to put in the DDGX. The FFG 7 had no, essentially, air defense system. It had an SM-1, open-ocean capable. So there was an enormous shift in threat assessment in the surface Navy that we started in conjunction with the bastion theory.

Which meant that we really butted heads with the submariners. Our logic, which was later confirmed by the bastion theory, was even if they send their submarines out into the Atlantic, when you looked at the numbers of submarines they could send, you found that the only way they could saturate your defenses was with large numbers of aircraft firing large numbers of missiles at you. So we figured that we could handle the ASW threat with the towed arrays and the things that we had bought, but we could not handle the saturation air raid threat that now was brought into place with the advent of Soviet naval aviation and their long- range capabilities, and the AS-4 [missile] and their long range missions. You know, they had 200-mile air-to-[surface] missiles. We had no way to deal with that 200-mile missile, even with carrier air. This brought into sharp focus the need for Aegis, in the NATO context. Luckily, we had seen these kinds of issues coming in that ’73 war. And the Aegis ships were just starting to trickle in….When I was ComSecondFlt we only had two Aegis ships in the Atlantic Fleet. That was 1984. That’s how long it took to get it to sea…

…[Vice Admiral Joe Metcalf] said that he thought that the Striking Fleet Atlantic, which was the only striking fleet in NATO at the time, was a NATO position that had not been given sufficient emphasis by the U.S. Navy or the U.S. Government. So he thought that the Second Fleet Commander ought to tilt more toward the Striking Fleet role and less toward the Second Fleet role. The Second Fleet role being essentially one to handle the Caribbean, but to work forces up to deploy to the Sixth Fleet. He viewed the Striking Fleet role as very, very important. I would never really have considered that in that light unless he had made those observations.

I started thinking more and more about it as the background for the Maritime Strategy started to emerge. As the notion that we would no longer be fighting the battle of the Atlantic in the Atlantic became extant, mainly because we thought the Russians would retreat to their bastions up in the Murmansk area and the Kola Peninsula area, the way that the Navy could contribute in the battle for Europe became very, very different.

A succession of SACLants had said that they were somewhere around a hundred ships short of being able to escort the convoys to Europe that the European strategy, the SACEur strategy, said were required to be there within ten days, and then to support the war. So you had a SACEur European strategy that required a continuous stream of convoys, and you had a series of SACLants who said: We can’t do the job because we don’t have enough forces. Of course the SACEur strategy said: If I don’t get this stuff then I start to lose, and if I start to lose, I go nuke. So this was not a small-time political exercise by any means.

And separate from all of that, the Navy’s role had been envisioned by the Army as being only one of providing the convoy escorts, because the principal operation that the Army viewed this as was a central front operation through the Fulda Gap and the plains of Germany, and the Navy’s role, principally in the Sixth Fleet, was very, very peripheral. So NATO funding put the Navy at the bottom of the pecking order, and the arguments in our Pentagon for U.S. funding put, in the NATO context, the Navy at the bottom of the pecking order—way, way behind the Army and the Air Force. All of this stuff was in the back of my mind when I started to look at the battle of the Atlantic. I determined that we can’t fight the battle of the Atlantic in the Atlantic, based on the testimony of a succession of Supreme Allied Commanders in the Atlantic.

But if the Russians are going to go up into their bastions, what we should do is go up into the fjords in Norway, and from the shelter of the fjords we can attack, not only the Soviet fleet and keep it penned up in its bastions, but the Soviet facilities in Kola. And also we can prevent the loss of Norway. So we can win the Battle of the Atlantic in Norway.

The SACEur’s counterpart of the Center for Naval Analyses had done a study that said: If the Soviets invaded Norway they would take it over in three days. The reason that they would take it over in three days was because they had total air superiority. They’d do this in the winter and these Soviet tank divisions would just come across the northern plains of Norway and then just stream right on down through the country. Then you would lose the Baltic Sea and things would get very dicey in the central front, because the Soviets would have the northern flank.

I did some analyses. I said, okay, we have all the SACEur study estimates, and we did some analyses with the Center for Naval Analyses rep on my staff, Dave Perin, who’s now a big wheel over there. He was my OEG rep. We said, okay, we’ll take the Norwegian air order of battle, which is the key operation here. Now if we add in one carrier, you still lose the land battle. If we add in two, it becomes a wash. And if you add in three carriers, air wings, we win. So the secret is that we have to get three carriers up there. But they have to be there when the war starts. They can’t try to fight their way up, because the Soviets will have taken over the place in three days, so fighting your way up will get more and more difficult. The only game in town to do this, to offset this Soviet air superiority, is carrier air, because there aren’t enough airfields in north Norway to support a U.S. Air Force TransLant or influx of U.S. airplanes. No air strips. Therefore you need to have the carriers up there.

And how are we going to figure out how to make the carriers survivable in the face of this enormous Soviet fleet? The answer was: If we would go operate inside the fjords, we could use the radar shadowing provided by the mountains to confuse the Soviet air-launched anti-ship missiles. So we could handle Soviet air attacks, and we could seal off the fjords by mining so that Soviet submarines couldn’t get in there. We should be able to do this in the time that our spooks had determined it would take the Soviets to reinforce their forces in the region enough to make this eight-division purge across the northern tip. That was a period of about twelve to fourteen days. So what I developed was a logic that said: When we think we’re twelve to fourteen days away, we should send the two Atlantic Fleet carriers up there, and take the carrier out of the Sixth Fleet and send it up there. That was the strategic plan.

Now, in order to do that we had to figure out a number of practical things. Number one, we had to figure out whether we could operate airplanes in the fjords, because they’re a very restricted space. Number two, we had to determine whether all of my thoughts about the radar shadowing were accurate. And number three, we had to see whether we had the force structure and the rules of engagement and things like that to permit the sealing-off of these fjords so that the three carriers could operate in there. In order to do that we structured a series of NATO exercises, major exercises with all the forces, to test this theory out.

We did this twice on my watch. The first time we went up and just flew a few sorties, and it turned out to be a piece of cake. We also took a bunch of B-52s to see about dropping the Captor mines to seal off the fjords from submarines, and we started to work on the idea of integrating with the air defenses of Norway. We got some airborne radars that were equivalent to the best that the Soviets had, and we flew passes at the carriers. What we determined was that the radar shadowing was so effective that the Soviet airplanes could not launch air-to-ground missiles at these carriers until they were inside the minimum range of these missiles. Plus, in order to come in to even try to get a shot, they had to get within the range of our surface-to-air missiles from our missile destroyers and cruisers. So that, instead of shooting at their missiles, we’re now shooting at their airplanes. There’s a very, very significant difference.

So their saturation air raid attacks on the carriers were absolutely neutralized by the radar shadowing idea. And the notion that they would go nuclear against U.S. forces, which had always been one of the problems with the war at sea, now meant that they were going nuclear against one of the land components in Europe, because we were inside Norwegian territorial waters and near Norwegian cities. So there was no way to isolate this conflict at sea, which is one of the big bugaboos in the rules of engagement. The rules of engagement in NATO are no different from the concerns that the U.S. military has today, but they’re exacerbated because at the time you had sixteen countries worrying about it instead of three services…

…The utilization of the Marines and the amphibious forces and how we would operate them all became part of that strategy. This was all done at very high levels by me, with the senior commanders in NATO on board with this. It became an important element in the U.S. position in NATO and the U.S. strategic concept for NATO. And of course the salesmanship of it was very difficult because there are a lot of people in NATO who say that this was a defensive alliance, and these were offensive moves. I was falling back on Admiral Sharp’s problems in Vietnam, where he said that there has never been a war won by a solely defensive strategy. You can have an overall defensive strategy but there must be offensive elements in it.

Therefore the basic strategy that I was proposing was that we would go up and defend Norway. The way we would defend them was that we would defeat these attacking Soviet armies by guaranteeing air superiority in the northern region. A lot of people in Washington did not realize what was going on up there. When I went up the first time with the America, the commander of the Norwegian air forces in the northern region came out for lunch with the prime minister and the minister of defense. He said, “How many airplanes have you got on this ship?” I said, “We have about a hundred.” He said, “That’s three times as many as I have in all of northern Norway.” So when you talk about adding three carriers up there you are talking about nine times the air power suddenly available…

…Anyway, in that particular element of the Second Fleet tour, I was able to significantly change the organization of the NATO structure in the Atlantic, and to make major changes in strategy for how the U.S. and NATO navies would be employed in the NATO tactical sense. And to try it all out and work it. Books have been written about this by NATO historians. One’s called, “The Battle for the Fjords.” There’s about a chapter devoted to what I just told you in this book, about all this stuff. It meant that I was concentrating on this particular bag of tactics, and not very much on working up the forces to go to the Sixth Fleet, because I was working them up to go up and fight in the fjords. That was a very different kettle of fish, and a whole different bag of tactics. All of a sudden the exercises that we were running down in the Caribbean, now we’re drawing off little geographic sections that look like fjords and operating in them, instead of pretending that we’re operating somewhere in the Med. Having said all that, we got all that done.

It was a very, very significant development of the Navy’s evolution of the Maritime Strategy, and how we played in the overall Cold War…I’ve been told by a number of people that that was one of the pieces that persuaded Mr. Gorbachev that he’d go broke trying to defeat the free world in the Cold War, so he just decided to stop. There were many others, but that one happened to come at a time when a number of other things cascaded along, arms control developments and things like that.

So I was very proud of that strategic concept. There were a lot of opponents of that. Many of the aviators didn’t think we could do it at all, but after the first time we got in there and flew some, they were the most enthusiastic supporters.…That was a very interesting set of events in NATO. All done under the Striking Fleet Atlantic hat, and all sort of started off by that little kernel that Joe Metcalf planted during our turnover when I relieved him.

Henry C. Mustin was born in Bremerton, Washington on 31 August 1933, the son, grandson, and great-grandson of distinguished naval officers. Vice Admiral Mustin, a destroyerman, served at sea in the Pacific and Atlantic Fleets in USS Duncan (DDR 874); as Commanding Officer USS Bunting (MHC 45); as a plankowner in both USS Lawrence (DDG 4) and USS Conyngham (DDG 17); as Commanding Officer USS Henry B. Wilson (DDG 7); as Commander, Destroyer Squadron 12, homeported in Athens, Greece; as Commander, Cruiser Destroyer Group 2; and as Commander, U.S. Second Fleet and NATO Striking Fleet Atlantic. He served ashore in Vietnam with the Delta River Patrol Group; as Flag Lieutenant to the Commander-in-Chief Pacific; as Executive Assistant to the Commander-in-Chief U.S. Naval Forces Europe; as Director, Surface Combat Systems Division in the Office of Chief of Naval Operations; as Deputy Commander Naval Surface Force, Atlantic Fleet; as Naval Inspector General; and as Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Plans, Policy, and Operations). He retired January 1, 1989. He passed away on April 11, 2016.

David F. Winkler earned his Ph.D. in 1998. from American University in Washington, DC. He has been a historian with the non-profit Naval Historical Foundation for over two decades. His dissertation Cold War at Sea: High Seas Confrontation between the U.S. and Soviet Union was published by the Naval Institute Press in 2000, was republished under the title Incidents at Sea: American Confrontation and Cooperation with Russia and China, 1945 – 2016 in December 2017. He was selected in early 2019 to be the Class of 1957 Chair of Naval Heritage at the U.S. Naval Academy for the 2019-2020 academic year and the Charles Lindbergh Fellow at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum for the following year. Winkler received his commission as a Navy ensign in 1980 through the NROTC unit at the Pennsylvania State University. In addition to a B.A. in Political Science, he has an M.A. in International Affairs from Washington University. He is a retired Navy Reserve commander. 

Featured Image: December 1, 1985 – A starboard quarter view of the guided missile cruiser Valley Forge (CG 50) firing a missile from its aft Mark-26 Launcher during sea trials. (Photo via U.S. National Archives)