Comment, by Tom Nichols

The report, such that it is, by the Swedish investigator is mostly remarkable for what it doesn't say, and for the conclusions that it refuses to draw.

Here is what we know: foreign submarines repeatedly violated Swedish waters in the 1980s. In one well-publicized instance, one of them was found to be a Soviet submarine, although it is unclear whether the Soviet boat had gone off course or was on a clandestine mission. Many foreign and Swedish observers have long drawn the conclusion that the other mystery subs in Swedish waters were also almost all of Soviet origin, for the sensible reasons that (a) such behavior from an aggressive state like the USSR would not be surprising, and (b) because that is where the evidence seems to point anyway.

The Swedish report, by comparison, is a masterpiece of Cold War era equivocation. It is written with such detailed and painstaking effort to clear the Soviets (and to perhaps implicate NATO) that an unwary reader approaching it for the first time might think it was written by the Soviet Foreign Ministry.

I cannot speculate on the motivations of the investigator; Ambassador Wahlbäck's dissection of the report lays bare the political bias and unfortunate methodological leaps that went into framing its conclusions. There is a neglected question of the possible motives of the offending submarines themselves; the investigator asks us to believe that the submarines could as easily have been Western as Soviet, but he does little to explain why that explanation is more powerful or attractive than the more straightforward conclusion that the Soviets were up to their typical mischief in Swedish waters.

It should be pointed out that investigator does not even follow his own rules of evidence. Regarding a 1987 report that fingered the Soviets as the intruders, the investigator dismisses it as based on circumstantial evidence. Yet, he asks readers to accept the idea that Western powers were potential violators without even offering so much as circumstantial evidence.

The investigator's reasoning seems to be something like this: because both sides would have had good operational, and even strategic reasons for violating Swedish waters in the event of a NATO-WTO war on the central front, therefore it cannot be excluded that both might have been practicing such intrusions in peacetime-despite the obvious fact that the Soviets were the ones actually caught in such activities. One supposes that both sides were thinking through the possibility of Sweden's participation in the war, either as the result of joining NATO's side or of being captured by Soviet action, and each was therefore preparing both to fight to protect the sea lanes they would need and to deny the enemy Sweden's submarine havens.

But why would Western submarines feel the need to prepare for such an eventuality by playing cat and mouse with the Swedes? (And why does the report never suggest that any of the incursions were American rather than West German?) If Sweden were occupied by the Soviets, presumably we would not have to be evading Swedish forces in the area; indeed, it is likely the Swedes would welcome Western help against their occupiers. And of course, if Sweden joined NATO, there would be no reason for NATO submarines to avoid detection by an ally. The idea that NATO would try to use Swedish waters for operations against Soviet Baltic transports is more plausible, but not by much, especially since NATO would have other significant assets with which to hit those transports. This also makes two great assumptions: that the war will last at the conventional level long enough for transports to matter, and that Swedish neutrality will not otherwise be comprised during World War III.

The Soviets, by contrast, had excellent reasons to test Swedish abilities. First and foremost, they needed to know how they could manage to operate in neutral Swedish waters during a war with NATO. They could not reasonably assume that there was any scenario under which they would be in a cooperative relationship with Sweden during a war, and therefore almost certainly had to take as central to their planning the fact that their use of Swedish waters would have to be done against opposition. This alone makes the Soviets the most likely candidate for the violations of the 1980s.

There were other reasons to practice stealthy operations in Swedish waters. The Soviets may not have had great use for Sweden as a set of safe harbors, but they would have been unwise to forego the possibility. NATO had less incentive to think of Sweden in such a way; NATO planning was not predicated on hiding submarines in Swedish or other waters, but rather by the 1980s on the need for a robust presence in the "GIUK" gap from Greenland to Iceland to the United Kingdom coupled with an aggressive program of anti-submarine warfare. (Soviet naval publications at the time showed much more concern with Western ASW capabilities than with big ticket strategic weapons, and rightly so.) The gap, of course, was always a strategic prize, but the muscular naval buildup during the Reagan administration showed a real seriousness about contesting it-perhaps just the thing to drive the Soviets to consider alternative strategies for the North Atlantic and Baltic.

The report never mentions the possibility-admittedly speculative-that Soviet operations in Sweden were attempts to practice evasion in order to operate against other nations in wartime. Sweden is a perfect training ground: close enough to the USSR to make the presence of Soviet subs in the region unremarkable, and a neutral country that would not, if the Soviets were caught, become the engine of a Cold War crisis and lead to a confrontation between the superpowers.

Another, related possibility is that the subs were engaging in practice for infiltration or special operations. (Similar operations apparently took place in Alaska.) Again, Swedish neutrality makes it a particularly attractive area to practice such operations.

In the end, there are many and various reasons to lead to the conclusion-one reached by the Swedish government several times-that the intrusions into Swedish waters were Soviet submarines. The real mystery behind this report is not the identity of the offending subs, but rather why the Swedish investigator went to such unusual lengths to evade that conclusion.

TOM NICHOLS is Professor of Strategy and serves as Chairman of the Department of Strategy and Policy at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.