Nowaydays, new technology enables naval fleets to achieve information superiority in the air. With the advent of aircraft types like Boeing’s P-8 Poseidon or Airbus’ A320neo on offer as the new generation of maritime patrol aircraft (MPA), operators around the globe are encouraged to widen their maritime operating environment. The 2020s continue to throw up evolving challenges for airborne surveillance and reconnaissance assets to successfully tackle new security risks. This capability is what enabled NATO’s efforts at sea in the 1970s and 1980s, be it high-intensity anti-submarine warfare or monitoring the high seas that were becoming within range of Soviet warships and bombers. NATO allies have allowed these key capabilities to decline over the last 20 to 30 years. Forty years ago, in the Spring of 1981 Naval Forces put an extra eye on naval aviation operated by NATO – from carrier-borne combat aircraft to surveillance aircraft. At that time, all of the alliance’s surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft had to be operated from land-based installations. In its third Edition in 1981, Naval Forces, thanks to written information supplied by the international staff of NATO Headquarters in Brussels, reported that the main task for “photo and radar” reconnaissance aircraft was to detect and attack Soviet submarines trying to get into the Atlantic. Some 100 aircraft were expected to be available to CINC EASTLANT, mainly from the United Kingdom, Norway, the Netherlands and Germany. The latter of which deployed 15 Atlantics and four aircraft for the electronic countermeasures role. Norway’s naval aircraft were manned by the Air Force, with the country deploying seven P-3B/C Orions for monitoring waters above the Arctic Circle and in the vicinity of the Barents Sea and Kola Bay. Soviet submarines sailing out from the Kola Peninsula were of increased focus by NATO’s well-coordinated actions of Norwegian MPA at that time. The total force of long-range maritime reconnaissance aircraft available to NATO in northern areas amounted to some 345 airplanes in 1981 – 260 of them were deployed by the United States and 18 by Canada. France was hoped to add its 35 Atlantiques. At the beginning of the 1980s, there was imminent danger that Soviet surface ships and submarines break out into the Atlantic, so there was a strong requirement for reconnaissance aircraft to shadow them. Norman Polmar noted in his tremendous and exciting seven-page strategic and naval policy update, entitled “Red stars over the seas”, that the principal threats to Western use of the seas were the Soviet Union’s missile-armed submarines, which in addition to the two “carriers” – the hermaphrodite “helicopters carriers-missile cruisers” Moskva and Leningrad – as well as the four Kiev class VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) carriers, represented a major threat. The steadily improving carrier force was “adding a new dimension to Soviet naval capabilities.” The growing importance of Soviet Naval Aviation (Aviatsiya Voenno-morskovo Flot; AV-MF) to the Soviet Union’s leadership at that time should not had to be ignored in the West in the early 1980s. And today?
