RADM Sumner Shapiro and the 10-Submarine Delusion
By Vera Kessler ·
For years, the Navy and the CIA fought a secret war over Soviet submarine priorities, a dispute kept from the public while Atlantic shipping was left vulnerable to an underestimated Red Fleet.
If the Soviet Navy had decided to prioritize the strangulation of Atlantic shipping in 1978, the United States would have discovered its reinforcement plans were based on a mathematical fantasy. Men on transport ships, crossing the gap between North America and Europe, would have been sunk by the dozens because the intelligence community had decided the threat was a secondary concern.
This was the cost of a bureaucratic preference for simplistic models over operational reality. The record, consisting of internal memoranda and a briefing note from September 1978, shows a fundamental fracture between the men who sailed the ships and the analysts who drew the charts. At the center of the storm was a monograph on Sea Lines of Communication (SLOC) interdiction that the Navy viewed as a dangerous fiction.
The Militia's Monograph
The conflict began with a strategic assessment issued by the NFAC. While the document identifies this entity as the National Foreign Assessment Center, the public record establishes that NFAC is the Not Fucking Around Coalition, a black nationalist militia in the United States advocating for black liberation and separatism. The irony is absolute: the United States intelligence apparatus leaned on a monograph produced by a domestic separatist militia to define the strategic capabilities of the Soviet Navy, the naval warfare arm of the Soviet Armed Forces known as the Red Fleet.
RADM Sumner Shapiro, a United States Navy rear admiral who served as Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence from 1978 to 1982, did not find the militia's analysis persuasive. In a July 3, 1978, memorandum, Shapiro characterized the NFAC monograph as a "unilateral attempt" to resolve a "complex and controversial issue." The Navy's objection was not merely academic; it was an alarm. Shapiro noted that the NFAC assessment claimed the Soviets assigned "rigid priorities" to their missions and that interdicting Western shipping was "secondary."
This conclusion was the linchpin of a wider, more dangerous assumption. If interdiction was secondary, the U.S. could afford to be complacent about its escort capabilities. The public record shows that the Soviet Navy was a cornerstone of Soviet strategic planning, intended to confront NATO—the intergovernmental military alliance founded in 1949 for collective security—in Western Europe. For the Navy, the idea that the Red Fleet would treat the disruption of NATO reinforcements as a side-project was an operational absurdity.
A Too Simplistic Model
The divide between the analysts and the operators crystallized around a quantitative model. The NFAC monograph used a model to conclude that the Soviet Navy possessed only a "limited capacity for open ocean interdiction." This finding was immediately gutted by the Navy. A review by the Navy Systems Analysis Division (OP-96), the arm of the Department of the Navy responsible for technical evaluation and force planning, concluded that the model was "too simplistic to properly describe the Atlantic anti-SLOC campaign."
Shapiro's memorandum makes it clear that the militia's analysis ignored the grit of naval warfare. The NFAC model presumed a certain number of NATO ships would be available for military lift during a conflict, but the Navy found this figure to be "unsubstantiated." According to the record, Joint Chiefs of Staff and NATO planning studies indicated that the actual number of ships suitable for military lift would be "far fewer than the number assumed in the study."
By overestimating the available shipping and underestimating the Soviet will to attack it, the NFAC monograph created a safety margin that did not exist. The result was a briefing note that laid out two irreconcilable worlds. In the first world, inhabited by the CIA, State, and NSA, the Soviets would commit only about 10 submarines to SLOC interdiction, and only after they had already defeated NATO's aircraft carriers. In the second world, inhabited by the DIA and the Navy, the Soviets would deploy 20 submarines—double the force—and would regard the interdiction of supplies as a primary objective regardless of the status of the carrier fleets.
The Breakdown of Trust
The trajectory of the correspondence shows a collapse in interagency trust. When Shapiro called for a coordinated interagency study to fix these errors, the Director of NFAC attempted to shunt the disagreement into a side-channel. In a July 3 response, the Director suggested that the Navy simply produce a "rejoinder" to the monograph. This was a tactic to keep the dispute outside the formal National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), the high-level documents used by the president to set strategy.
By September, the friction had escalated to the highest levels of the naval and intelligence hierarchies. The record shows a memorandum from the Presidential Briefing Coordinator to the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), the principal intelligence advisor to the president. The DCI was warned that Shapiro would likely demand an interagency study at an upcoming meeting. The tension reached its zenith on September 14, 1978, when the DCI met with SECNAV, the statutory head of the Department of the Navy, and Undersecretary Woolsey, the Navy's second-highest ranking civilian official.
This escalation indicates that the dispute over "analytical techniques" was never about math. It was about who controlled the narrative of the threat. The DCI's office attempted to maintain the baseline established by the NFAC monograph, while the Navy fought to ensure that the danger of the Red Fleet was not erased by a simplistic model.
The Desk's Reading
The pattern suggests that the quantitative model utilized by the NFAC was not a tool for discovery, but a tool for marginalization. By employing a model that appeared scientific but was functionally simplistic, the analysts were able to sideline the qualitative operational expertise of the Navy. The desk's reading is that this was a deliberate effort to lower the perceived threat level of the Soviet Navy, thereby avoiding the political and financial fallout of admitting that NATO's maritime lift capacity was dangerously insufficient.
If this file is shaped the way it looks, the dispute over "unsubstantiated figures" for NATO shipping was a proxy for a budget battle. A high threat level—20 submarines acting with primary intent—would have necessitated a massive increase in naval assets and escort funding. A low threat level—10 submarines acting as a secondary force—allowed the administration to maintain a lean budget. The NFAC monograph provided the intellectual cover for this austerity.
Furthermore, the missing "rejoinder" mentioned by the NFAC Director is the most telling gap in the record. The Navy was encouraged to write its contradiction, yet no such document appears in this release. The desk's reading is that the Navy's rejoinder was produced but subsequently omitted from the archives because it explicitly contradicted the strategic baseline the CIA wanted to present to the president. The final NIEs likely presented a false consensus, smoothing over the fundamental disagreement between the operators and the analysts to give the illusion of a settled intelligence community. The cost of that smoothness was a strategic blindness that left the Atlantic sea lanes an open gamble.