What a young lieutenant and his shipmate saw in 1968, what the last thirty-eight years taught us, and where we stand in the spring of 2026.

Everything that follows is drawn from publicly available sources — the author’s copy of Walter M. Kreitler’s unclassified 1988 Naval Postgraduate School thesis, open-source commentary from the Naval Submarine League, the U.S. Naval Institute, and the Center for Naval Analyses, and reporting from 2024 and 2025 by the Washington Post, Reuters, Naval News, and the Royal United Services Institute. Nothing in this article comes from classified material or from the author’s personal knowledge of submarine operations.

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A few weeks ago a shipmate from USS Ray (SSN 653), Bob Mhoon, sent me a thesis. Its title is The Close Aboard Bastion: A Soviet Ballistic Missile Submarine Deployment Strategy.

Its author is Walter M. Kreitler, then a Navy lieutenant, who submitted it to the Naval Postgraduate School in September 1988 under the advisement of Jan S. Breemer. It is a master’s thesis. It is also one of the most durable pieces of open-source strategic analysis produced in the last decade of the Cold War.

I read it through in one sitting. Forty years on, the argument still has legs. What follows is a fair summary of what Kreitler said, an honest accounting of what the decades have confirmed and what they have revised, and a look at where his subject sits today — as the central organizing idea of Russian naval strategy and, increasingly, of Chinese naval strategy as well.

What Kreitler Saw in 1988

By the mid-1980s, the Western consensus held that the Soviet Navy had adopted a defensive posture for its ballistic missile submarines: a “bastion” strategy that would hold the SSBN force in layered sanctuaries extending two to three thousand kilometers from the Soviet coast. The strategy was a response to the acoustic vulnerability of Soviet boats and the superiority of Western anti-submarine warfare.

McConnell and MccGwire at the Center for Naval Analyses had done the foundational work. Jan Breemer had raised careful doubts. By 1981 the intelligence community had settled on bastions as the prevailing interpretation of Soviet intent.

He argued that the Soviets would tighten the bastion into a point defense inside the Soviet-claimed twelve-nautical-mile territorial sea — what he called a Close Aboard Bastion, or CAB. He made his case in three moves.

• The first move was hardware. From the Yankee class with the short-range SS-N-6 — which forced dangerous forward patrols through contested waters — through the Delta family with the SS-N-8, SS-N-18, and SS-N-23, to the Typhoon class armed with the SS-N-20 with a reach of 8,300 kilometers. The trajectory was unmistakable. Soviet missile designers were building submarines that could strike the continental United States from pierside. Long missiles make close-in basing rational.

• The second move was the literature. Gorshkov on combat stability. McConnell on the withholding strategy. MccGwire on the pro-SSBN orientation of the new Soviet surface combatants. Tritten on the aggressive tactical character of bastion defense. Breemer’s skepticism Kreitler engaged fairly rather than dismissed. The weight of the written record, he concluded, pointed toward withholding in homewaters.

• The third move was the most original. He showed why the Close Aboard variant would work. Shallow water, ice, defensive mining, PVO Strany fighter cover, and roughly four hundred thirty coastal combatants organized into something like eighty-six notional flotillas would make the CAB effectively impenetrable to Western conventional anti-submarine warfare. And — this is the arithmetic I have never forgotten — a United States nuclear barrage of three hundred thousand square nautical miles of Soviet territorial sea would require about 7,942 equivalent megatons against a U.S. arsenal of roughly 1,820 EMT.

The barrage option dies on the spreadsheet. It simply cannot be done.

To that military case Kreitler added two more.

• A legal case: Soviet maneuvering at the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea — the twelve-mile territorial sea, aggressive straight baselines, expansive “historic waters” claims — had prepared the legal ground in parallel with Delta-class deployment.

• A strategic case: a Close Aboard posture would free the Soviet blue-water fleet from pro-SSBN escort work and release it for what he argued was the decisive mission of a Central European war — interdicting the trans-Atlantic sea lines of communication.

I saw this first hand, having actually seen the newer Soviet surface ships and while teaching Soviet naval ship recognition to prospective nuclear submarine commanding officers at the US Naval Submarine School in Groton, CT. The Soviet navy was not designed to “project power;” it was designed as a defense against the United States aircraft carriers.

The CAB, in his telling, was not primarily a nuclear-war tool. It was a conventional-war tool that reconciled the apparent paradox between a defensive withholding requirement and the large blue-water fleet the Soviets had built.

He conceded the disadvantages. A CAB-postured force would forfeit short-warning depressed-trajectory strikes. It would simplify future missile-defense geometry. In a prolonged war, the West would eventually learn the locations. But for the kind of war the Soviets said they preferred to fight — a war that began conventionally — he judged the strategy viable. It was a careful thesis, carefully limited, built entirely from open sources. That discipline matters to what follows.

A Note from the Pier

Kreitler built his analysis from what could be read in the open. There is another part of the story that was not in the open at the time, and that Bob Mhoon and I did not understand until years later.

On Ray’s second patrol, up north, I was Communications Officer. On our third, I was Operations Officer. In both billets I had custody of the classified material, the cryptographic equipment, and the key cards. I signed for them. I drew them from the safe and returned them to the safe. I read the muster, counted the cards, and locked the door. It was my job, and I did it the way the Navy taught me to do it. Tight security.

From April 1967 into 1969, a Navy chief warrant officer named John Anthony Walker was assigned as communications watch officer at COMSUBLANT headquarters in Norfolk. His job was, in the words of a later investigator, running the entire communications center for the Atlantic submarine force. He had custody of the same kind of material I had custody of, the same key cards, the same crypto equipment. A few miles from where Ray tied up, he was selling it to the Soviets. He had walked into their embassy in Washington in October 1967 and offered his services. He kept at it for eighteen years.

I never met him. I did not know his name until the trial.

The bastion strategy Kreitler was analyzing in 1988 existed, in part, because of what men like Walker had given Moscow. The Soviets had their own technical intelligence, and by about 1970 their submariners had begun to understand they were being trailed in the open ocean by American and British attack boats. But Walker gave them confirmation — chapter and verse — of just how noisy their own submarines were and how effectively ours were tracking them.

After Walker, the trailing problem was not a suspicion in Moscow. It was a certainty. The response was to pull the boomers home.

Kreitler’s thesis is about geography and arithmetic. What it could not say in 1988 was that the geography and the arithmetic had been shaped, in part, by betrayal.

What the Last Thirty-Eight Years Confirmed

The central architecture of the bastion concept has been confirmed. The Barents Sea became the Northern Fleet’s bastion. The Sea of Okhotsk became the Pacific Fleet’s. Both remain operational today. Russian and Western post-Cold War sources alike have validated the withholding logic, the layered coastal defense, and the Kola and Kamchatka anchor points. The tightening of the bastion that Kreitler called for did happen, though not all the way into the twelve-mile territorial sea — it contracted from the Greenland-Norwegian-Barents expanse into the Barents alone, and on the Pacific side into the Sea of Okhotsk proper.

The trailing story is now in the open.

Norman Friedman and others have written candidly that U.S. and British attack submarines routinely trailed Soviet boomers from about 1970 onward, and that the practice was kept quiet in the West for years partly out of concern that civilian authorities, if they knew, would halt it. Ray and her sisters were part of that work – even though that still today, I will not confirm it.

The bastion was, in one sense, Moscow’s admission that the trailing contest was not going their way.

The range-enables-close-basing logic has been reaffirmed at every turn.

• The Bulava missile on the Borei class now lets a Russian SSBN strike from inside Okhotsk.

• The Chinese JL-3 on the Jin class now lets a Chinese SSBN hold the continental United

States at risk from the South China Sea or the Bohai Gulf.
The Pentagon’s 2023 China Military Power Report makes this explicit and judges that the People’s Liberation Army Navy may therefore be adopting bastion operations of its own. Kreitler’s causal chain — long missiles, close basing, legally shielded sanctuary — is the template.

And the counterbattery arithmetic holds. No one has since proposed a credible nuclear barrage of the Russian bastions. The math has not changed. It cannot be done within the strategic arsenals that exist.

What the Last Thirty-Eight Years Revised

Three things Kreitler did not foresee.

The Soviet fleet collapsed. From sixty-two SSBNs in 1990 to twenty-eight by 2000. Zero SSBN combat patrols in 2002. The free-the-blue-water-fleet trade that was the sharpest strategic claim in his thesis never materialized, because the blue-water fleet itself melted away in the 1990s. The division of labor he predicted survived in a strange form — coastal forces still protect the bastion, and the long-range strike mission went to general-purpose units — but the target set changed.

Kalibr and Zircon cruise missiles carried on corvettes and frigates, and now the Poseidon autonomous nuclear torpedo, have replaced anti-SLOC cruiser warfare as the mission of the Russian general-purpose fleet. The ships got smaller. The weapons got longer.
The architecture Kreitler predicted held.

The Battle of the Atlantic he imagined did not.

Sea-based nuclear deterrence sorted into two families, not one. The United States, the United Kingdom, and France kept the open-ocean, continuous-patrol model. Ohio-class boats average seventy-seven days at sea, blue and gold crews, diluted in the oceans. British SSBNs have maintained at least one boat on patrol, undetected, since 1969. The French have done the same since 1972. Russia and, increasingly, China chose the other path — the bastion path, anchored in geography and coastal defense.

Kreitler was right that close basing would be attractive to some navies. He did not anticipate that others would conclude the opposite: that with quiet enough boats and enough hulls, the whole ocean was a safer place to hide than any sanctuary.

Technology has eroded the bastion’s edge. The Soviet acoustic gap narrowed in the late 1980s, partly as a consequence of Walker’s gifts and the Toshiba-Kongsberg propeller-machining scandal. Mobile road and rail ICBMs — the SS-25 in 1988, now the RS-24 and the Sarmat — displaced some of the SSBN’s unique withholding function. The Arctic ice is receding, which opens corridors through what were once natural barriers. Satellite and unmanned surveillance of the littorals has improved. The very geography Kreitler counted on is thinner now.

The bastion in 2026 is being squeezed from four directions at once —

• politically by NATO enlargement,

• geographically by the Pacific pivot,

• geologically by Kamchatka, and

• technologically by an arc of new Russian sensors built, in part, with Western equipment that should never have reached Moscow.

Finland and Sweden have joined NATO. The Kola Peninsula, home of the Northern Fleet and the western bastion, is no longer a remote sanctuary. It is a pressure point. Three allied states now sit within easy reach of Murmansk and Severodvinsk. The strategic depth Kreitler took for granted — Moscow’s ability to treat the high north as a Soviet lake — is gone.

Russia has pivoted to the Pacific. The Borei-A program is delivering boats to Vilyuchinsk on Kamchatka. By mid-2025 the fifth Borei-A had been commissioned. Three Borei boats have been sent east. A new coastal defense division is being formed in Chukotka, and the 50th Coastal Defence Regiment was stood up between 2021 and late 2022 to extend the defensive perimeter of the Okhotsk bastion into the Bering Sea approaches.

This is the Close Aboard logic applied, now, to the Pacific.

Then, on the thirtieth of July 2025, the ground moved. A magnitude 8.8 earthquake off the Kamchatka Peninsula — the strongest in the region since 1952 — struck roughly one hundred twenty kilometers from the Rybachiy submarine base. Commercial satellite imagery from Planet Labs, published by the New York Times in early August, showed damage to at least one of the base’s floating piers. No major structural damage was reported. But the event made a point Kreitler never modeled. Concentration is itself a vulnerability. Military planners worry about torpedoes and cruise missiles. Geology has its own calendar.

And in October 2025 a joint investigation by the Washington Post and European partners revealed Project Harmony: an arc of Russian sonar arrays stretching from Murmansk past Novaya Zemlya to the Franz Josef Land archipelago. It had been built in secret between 2013 and 2024, using Western sonar, cable, and robotic technology smuggled through Cyprus-based front companies worth more than fifty million euros.

Its purpose, according to former U.S. Navy officials quoted in the reporting, is to give Russian ballistic missile submarines early warning of shadowing adversaries as they leave port — to let them perform delousing maneuvers and confirm they are clear before disappearing into deeper Arctic waters. It is, in effect, a Russian SOSUS built inside the Russian bastion.
It is precisely the kind of defensive technical architecture Kreitler argued the Soviets would need if the CAB were to work.

They did not have it in 1988.

They do now.

Above all of this sits one further fact. On the fifth of February 2026, the central limits of the New START treaty expired. The last bilateral cap on U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals is gone. That does not by itself change the bastion calculus.

It does change the environment in which the bastion sits.

It is the silence after the music stops.

What Kreitler Actually Left Us

Walter Kreitler’s thesis is not a prophecy that came true in every detail. The world moved past him in directions he could not see — the Soviet collapse, the divergence of Western doctrine, the erosion of Arctic ice, NATO on the Scandinavian border, mobile ICBMs in numbers, autonomous undersea weapons. What he left us is a method. A young lieutenant under Jan Breemer’s advisement, working only from open sources, reasoned his way from hardware and geography to a doctrine whose shape the next four decades largely confirmed.
That is a demonstration. Most of what has happened since 1988 is a footnote to it.

There is one more thing the thesis did, without intending to.

It made me think again about Walker. Often — over fifty years now — I find myself wondering about the man who sat in the communications seat at COMSUBLANT, reading what we sent and passing it to the Soviets, or smiling over the keys he had already given them. I am still angry, and I suspect the my shipmate, Bob Mhoon, is angry too.

And on reflection, my young officer’s confidence was pierced by the later knowledge that someone was leaking our secrets. Our boat, the Ray, was more vulnerable than I knew at the time. Our crew was less secure than I felt. My shipmate Bob Mhoon and I — and every man we sailed with — went to sea on the unspoken assumption that the system above us was tight.

The system was not tight.

A warrant officer a few miles from our pier was making sure of it. I do not know how Bob feels about it now. We have not talked about it in those terms. But he sent me this thesis, and I think he understands, as I do, that the discipline we brought to our watch was real and the trust we placed in the channel above us was, in part, misplaced.

The work was clean.

The channel was not.

My thanks to Walter Kreitler for the work, to Jan Breemer for guiding it, and to Bob Mhoon for sending it my way.

Ray is long since decommissioned.

The questions she was built to answer are not.

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Charles C. Jett served aboard USS Ray (SSN 653) as Communications Officer on her second patrol and as Operations Officer on her third. He is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, Class of 1964, and of the Harvard Business School. He writes at criticalskillsblog.com and civicsage.com.