The Needed Response On Naval Arms Control: ‘Thanks, But No Thanks’

In the aftermath of Soviet Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on 8 May, in which he revealed Moscow’s latest demands for naval arms control negotiations, the Center for Security Policy released an analysis laying out the many reasons why such negotiations are fundamentally incompatible with U.S. security interests.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director, said in releasing the study entitled, Naval Arms Control: An Idea Whose Time Must Never Come, "There are few areas of military activity more vital to American interests and more essential to U.S. alliance relations than maritime power. Moscow has no comparable requirement for flexible, robust and technologically formidable naval forces. As a result of this strategic asymmetry, it is inevitable that arms control arrangements affecting such forces will have decidedly asymmetric — and pernicious — effects."

The Center’s paper identifies the following as among the most insidious of the predictable results of any prospective U.S.-Soviet naval arms control accords:

• adverse impacts on the character and quality of the American presence in critical areas around the world, with unavoidable, deleterious consequences for U.S. military options;

 

• new strains in relations between the United States and its allies as a result of uncertainties involving the plausibility of U.S. security guarantees and the possible creation of power vacuums in the wake of arms control limits on naval deployments;

 

• further strains on the ability of the U.S. Navy to meet its commitments by exacerbating Bush Administration and congressional proclivities for reductions in the size of the fleet; and

 

• greviously adverse affects on the investment in naval and weapons technologies so key to the Navy’s all-important qualitative superiority over its potential foes.

Gaffney added, "It is the oldest trick in the Soviet diplomatic playbook falsely to assert that some arms control step or another is a precondition to their future behavior. When it comes to naval arms control, the United States has no real choice: It must call the Soviets’ bluff, eschew such negotiations and preserve the most effective naval forces possible. Should the Bush Administration nonetheless choose to accede to Soviet demands — as it has recently in a number of areas — its folly will make that of the framers of the disastrous Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 pale by comparison."