I don't know if this adds anything to this discussion, but I figured I'd just say it.
It's important to recognize that most naval discourse in public forums such as Congressional hearings and what not is not about what the present-day threat actually is.
Due to the long lead-times and great expense of shipbuilding, the Navy is pretty much forced to meet present threats with whatever it has at the present time. They really can't change how many ships are in the present day Navy and basically crosses it's fingers that the admirals of yesteryear were able to convince Congress to build enough ships or more for them to do what they currently need to do. In this sense, the Navy is used to making do.
Instead, the Navy generally talks about worst-case projections of a threat some time 15-20 years in the
future so that it can justify building what it
thinks it needs to meet the future projected threat. The future is, of course, subject to great uncertainty and nobody antipated the Soviet union collapsing as rapidly as it did. So, even though at the time they were talking about Oscars being a major problem they probably weren't, because the Navy wasn't really talking about present day Oscar force. The Navy anticipated that the Oscar's present construction rate would be the same or greater in the future, hence their numbers would be far larger, they would need more ships and the associated construction budget to build them.
Of course, once the Soviet Union collapsed, construction slowed and stopped. Once the next Congressional budget cycle came around, the Navy had to re-justify it's construction budget again based on a new projected threat which maybe didn't include so many Oscars.
In this sense, one should always take whatever the Navy says to be the most dangerous threat with a grain of salt. They don't really know, they're only ever making their best guess about the future based on what is known.
From the perspective of a wargamer, though, this means that when reading in the news, Proceedings, Surface Warfare, or whatever, and trying to imagine what was going through the heads of the admirals that are writing there, you shouldn't ask yourself, "In 1988 the Soviets has N Oscars and our CVBG looked like this, how would the battle play out?" Instead, you have to ask, "In 1988 they had N Oscars and by 2008 they'd have M more. How would the battle play out?"
That really says something about how Admirals think when talking in public about naval matters. Looking at it through that lens, you'd also have to imagine a navy with a whole fleet of Seawolf submarines and various other radical differences from what we actually have today. That was the time of the Lehman's 600 ship navy. Today we have around 300 ships.
In light of that consideration, Oscars look a lot scarier, our Navy looked a lot beefy-er and the whole game would have been something totally different.
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Originally Posted by Gorshkov
Yes, Oscars posed sole real threat to American CBGs screened by AEGIS ships. Unfortunately there were only several Oscars available in 1980s. Remaining Soviet SSGNs were already outdated at that time. You know: surface missile launch (Julliet and Echo, maybe except those fitted with relatively modern SS-N-12) and very short range SLCMs (Charlie, Papa) were good for sinking Chinese Navy galleons but not US Navy ships!
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