SOZ 
tics, and command and control procedures, that it has slighted its 
objectives: sea control and power projection ashore. ®® 
It became theoretically impossible to get anything ashore because the ports would 
be knocked out by missiles; then it became improbable that one could get slow- 
moving ships through waters infested with so many submarines; finally, with air-to- 
surface missiles at great standoff ranges and modern means of detection, it became 
unlikely that the aircraft carriers could survive in a hostile environment in the Norwegi- 
an Sea. Although this exercise might be valid with respect to another country and 
another war, it could not be valid with respect to Soviet Union.” 
Why does the Navy conduct maneuvers which are expensive exer- 
cises in futility? Why has the Navy failed to search for alternatives? 
Why, says Captain Bathurst, has naval thinking about the Soviet 
menace focused on the strategic level while ignoring Soviet technical 
developments on the tactical level? 
Bathurst, Zumwalt, and other critics have some answers to these 
questions, and they also have asked new and penetrating questions 
in their search for such answers. 
First, the successes of previous wars tend to be extolled long after 
their continued efficacy should be seriously questioned. How can 
today’s Navy protect slow-moving convoys of gigantic tankers against 
modern weapons? Does the convoy system itself make sense in a 
possible conflict with the Soviet Union?” 
Second, nations often prepare for the last, rather than the next, 
war. The Soviet Union, for example, has constructed large numbers 
of superior tanks because their armies were destroyed by Nazi tank 
divisions in the early years of the Second World War. They have 
done so notwithstanding the fact that modern antitank missiles (which 
demonstrated their lethal capability during the 1973 Yom Kippur war) 
may have vitiated the future operational viability of tanks and armored 
personnel vehicles.” The current aircraft carrier debate in the United 
States may be the equivalent of the tank and combat vehicle debate 
in the Soviet Union. At the same time that critics of the U.S. Navy 
were seriously concerned about the vulnerability of the core of the 
conventional navy aircraft carriers, Phillip Karber, a Defense Depart- 
ment consultant,,concluded that the new antitank technology threatens 
the Soviet army with a tactical revolution and the potential abandon- 
ment of the armored offensive.”? The fact that new tanks are being 
designed in West Germany and the United States is, on the other 
hand, an indication that the Army leadership in these countries is 
not convinced that Karber is correct. 
Third, military organizations frequently resist the introduction of 
any radical new weapons that would require basic changes in their 
force structures.7* Both Zumwalt and Bathurst describe the Navy’s 
initial opposition to the nuclear submarine; it might not have been 
constructed if it had not been for Admiral Rickover’s influence with 
the Congress. The Navy is said to have a similarly unrealistic at- 
tachment to the carrier, comparable to its emotional attachment to 
the battleship in an earlier era. 
* Ibid., pp. 38, 39. 
7 Ibid. 
7 Ibid., p. 39. 
72 See: New York Times, May 23, 1976. 
73 Ibid. 
74 Bathurst, op. cit., p. 40. 
