Seapower by Geoffrey Till

Author:Geoffrey Till
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Choke point control was an alternative technique: ‘Sometimes, the best place to engage the enemy is in a geographical bottleneck through which he must pass.’ The advantage of choke point control is that it can use units that would not survive for long in sortie-control operations nearer the enemy’s bases.79

Soviet naval theory focused on the mirror image of this approach – how to get through a blockade. The need for Russia to make ‘her break through to the sea’, so as to defeat encirclement and wield her scattered fleets as a cohesive whole, was a constant if implicit theme of Admiral Gorshkov’s writings. This concern echoed Russia’s historic difficulty in gaining access to the open ocean. Western navies aimed to make sure this remained a problem.80

From time to time, though, dissatisfaction was expressed in Western maritime circles about the necessary limitations of this distant blockade. It seemed to leave the strategic initiative to the Soviet Union, and might make the Soviet General Staff think that the waters off Northern Europe or the North West Pacific were a Soviet lake for them to exploit as they wished. Worse still, forward allies such as Norway, Iceland, South Korea and Japan might come to this conclusion too and gradually adopt different security policies in response. This lay behind the occasional moves to move the blockade forward through the gaps, especially in the late 1940s, and the 1980s, the era of The Maritime Strategy. The idea of Western maritime forces taking up positions off northern Norway to attack the Soviet Northern Fleet in and off its lair in the Kola peninsula attracted much agitated discussion about the operational pros and cons, which was distinctly reminiscent of the historic debate about the balance to be struck between close and distant blockade described earlier.81

These issues re-appeared, if on a much smaller scale, in the Falklands campaign of 1982. During the diplomatic negotiations that preceded the second stage of the war, there was much discussion about both sides ‘withdrawing’ their forces three or four hundred miles from the disputed islands. Not unnaturally, the British rejected the Argentine contention that they should thus deploy their forces for an indefinite period in some of the world’s worst weather conditions, maintaining a kind of (very) distant watching brief over the Falklands while the diplomats sorted things out and the Argentine fleet stayed in the comfort of its own ports. When the conflict re-started, the sinking of General Belgrano ‘turned out to be one of the most decisive military actions of the war’ because ‘the Argentine Navy – above all the carrier – went back to port and stayed there. Thereafter it posed no serious threat to the success of the task force.’ The British decided against taking the war into Argentine waters, ‘so our submarine commanders were left prowling up and down the Argentine 12 mile limit’.82 The islands themselves could be less closely blockaded and a number of small vessels and aircraft from the Argentine forces continued to get through for a time.

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