194 
We must remember in this connection the ‘practical’? orientation 
of Soviet military doctrine, its focus on ‘‘the present and very near 
future.” In this case “‘the present and very near future’? would see 
the appearance in the Soviet operational inventory of the SS-N-8 
SLBM (IOC c. 1972), followed by the SS-N-13 missile (IOC c. 
1975).5° The carrier of the SS-N-8, the D-class SSBN, would be within 
strike range of the United States even in the Barents and Norwegian 
Seas, thereby eliminating the need to traverse ASW-infested waters 
to the Atlantic and permitting the allocation of resources to the pro- 
tection of the Delta that could not reach or might not be combat- 
viable on the open ocean. As for the imminent introduction of the 
SS-N-13, regardless of the motives for the initial development of this 
missile, it may have occurred to the Soviets that the retrofitting of 
some Y-class SSBN tubes with the SS-N-13 would give the Yankee 
a self-defense capability against surface ASW, over and beyond that 
afforded by the SSBN’s natural stealth and quietness, which the United 
States is content to rely upon alone for SSBN security. The question 
may have been, what to do with these new capabilities—and the 
Gorshkov series may very well have been the answer. 
Before the appearance of the Gorshkov series, the emphasis in 
the literature on the navy had been on the decisiveness of the ‘‘initial 
period” of a general nuclear war and the importance of the first 
mass missile strikes, sea- as well as land-based, for rapidly achieving 
the war’s strategic goals.*7 While Gorshkov stresses the problem of 
time urgency in two-sided tactical engagements (‘‘the battle’), he 
conspicuously ignores it in connection with strategic ‘“‘strikes,’’°8 which 
are always understood as unilateral acts in the military art. His focus 
is not on the beginning of the war but on its end and especially 
when the question of peace becomes central and diplomacy is reassert- 
ing its rights at the expense of strategy. At one point, for example, 
he generalizes that it is ‘“‘in the closing moments of war”’ that seapower 
is “especially needed,” so that ‘policy’ will have the grounding 
required to impose “‘peace terms.”’*? 
This theme, though it is not the only one, pervades Gorshkov’s 
historical analysis. The importance of fleets in the Crimean War, 
he says, ““‘was determined by the extent to which their presence in 
a given theater could be used by the diplomats of the opposing sides 
to support their positions at the peace talks.’ At the end of the 
Russo-Japanese War, when “the question of peace was raised’’ and 
it became time to realize ‘‘political goals,” St. Petersburg’s lack of 
seapower proved crucial for its bargaining strength. In World War 
56 Sokolovskiy, op. cit., 255. 
*7In a more recent work—an article in the “Naval Digest’ in December 1974—Gorshkov also — 
ignores the factor of time urgency with regard to strategic ballistic missile strikes. In 1966, in 
discussing the categories of the military art, Colonel Strokov had discussed “‘scope”™’ and “the initial 
period of the war’ together, the same approach taken by the Sokolovskiy collective in all three edi- 
tions. Gorshkov, however, treats “scope” alone when dealing with strategic strikes; nowhere is it in- 
dicated when the strikes will take place. To be sure, there is no positive hint of a withholding strategy 
in this later Gorshkov effort, but this is to be expected from the nature of the work. It was perfectly 
permissible to discuss withholding in a “‘concrete expression of doctrine,’ since doctrine has a milita- 
ty-political side; however, military-political missions would have been out of place in a military-scien- 
tific article frankly devoted, as Gorshkov tells us, to “‘an investigation of the prospects for developing 
military affairs, including the theory of the naval art.’ See Gorshkov in MS, No. 12, 1974, pp. 24ff, 
Strokov in Strokov (ed.), op. cit., 608-609; Sokolovskiy (ed.), Voennaya strategiya (2nd ed., 
Moscow, 1963), 253-254. 
**McConnell, op. cit., 78. 
*9Tbid., 78-80, 84. 
