The ultimate roots of the present Russo-Ukraine war can be traced back to the end of the Cold War, now more than 30 years ago. In the decades before, the Soviet Union emerged as one of the world’s two ‘superpowers’ – a status that is not existing today. At the beginning of the 1980s, the Soviet Union played its cards as a military – but not economic – superpower, confronting the West with increasing capabilities in nearly all warfighting domains. In the first part of a descriptive article released in Naval Forces II/1982, Ulrich-Joachim Schulz-Torge, at that time a Federal German Navy officer and author of a book series, entitled “The Soviet Navy” (in German), which was published by Bernard & Graefe Verlag between 1976 and 1981, explained why the command organisation of the Soviet Navy was so imminently important for Soviet military operations at the height of the Cold War. The Soviet Naval High Command played a unique role for planning and directing all wartime oceanic operations, also in case the four Soviet fleets were not operating in direct support of land-based operations. In this context, both the Soviet bloc and NATO were strengthening their capabilities in the field of operational intelligence in particular – “to find out where the forces of a possible, or actual, hostile power are at any moment, and what they are doing,” said Vice Admiral (Ret.) Sir Ian McGeoch in his Editorial. Main military warfare domains were filled with new capability. Space-based assets (satellites fitted with new reconnaissance and surveillance sensors), maritime patrol aircraft for ocean surveillance (today often called ‘special mission aircraft’), shore-based anti-submarine warfare assets (in the form of the naval helicopter), coastal defence systems (guided missiles and over-the-horizon radars), new types of airborne, shipboard and land-based sensors for electronic intelligence (ELINT), amphibious assault ships, amphibious landing vehicles and new sorts of landing craft (as outlined in Norman Friedman’s Strategic & Naval Policy paper) and, returning to Ulrich-Joachim Schulz-Torge’s description of the Soviet Naval High Command, new command-and-control architectures at sea became the choices in a conflicting era. The latter, with the prefix ‘C2’, rapidly became one of the highest value assets for military operations until today. As to the use of space, however, only the two superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union – were operating satellite systems equipped with radars capable of detecting surface ships. More on the side-line, in 1982, people were beginning to talk about the “militarisation of space”.
