The first paper (Tab A) deals with Soviet strategic thinking. It points
out that Americans have a common tendency to attribute their own views
and values to other peoples, and have often made the mistake of assuming
that Soviet strategic thinking is like their own. The Soviets, they
would reason, face the same overwhelming nuclear
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threat as the United States and, as rational
people, presumably see that threat much as Americans do.
The Soviets, however, come from a vastly different historical tradition,
in which the princes of tiny Muscovy built a powerful autocratic state
through centuries of military expansion. While Americans see military
power as an unpleasant but necessary means of preserving freedom, the
Soviets view it as the way to maintain and expand their authority. The
basic aims of Soviet military power are to ensure the survival of the
political system and enhance its ability to project power abroad.
The Soviets appreciate full well the tremendous destruction that would
accompany any nuclear exchange. At the same time they continue to
believe in the possibility of victory in nuclear war, and through the
1970’s believed that the trend of worldwide political and military
forces was moving in their favor.
Actual national security decision-making in the Soviet Union (paper at
Tab B) is in the hands of a small circle of top leaders.3 The Politburo itself is the top
forum in which all national security decisions are discussed and
decided. It is, however, in one of the Politburo’s committees, the
Soviet Defense Council, that most of the detailed discussion of national
security decisions is thought to take place.
The Defense Council is comprised of both civilian and military leaders
who deal with political or military and technical policy. Gorbachev, like his predecessors, is
its chairman. We do not know its exact composition, but likely members
include the heads of the KGB, State
Planning Committee, and Military-Industrial Commission and the Commander
of Warsaw Pact forces. The Soviet General Staff acts as its secretariat,
coordinating the flow of information to the Council.
The Defense Ministry, particularly the General Staff, seems to exercise
predominant influence over the formulation of defense policy—to a degree
unparalleled in the West. Military information is not shared with
civilian agencies, and there is no nucleus of civilian specialists who
can offer alternative views to those of military planners.
Rumors of civilian dissatisfaction with the military’s near monopoly on
technical expertise occasionally surface. This dissatisfaction is
undoubtedly fed by the system’s inability since the late Brezhnev years
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to come to grips with serious security-related
questions like U.S. arms control proposals. Instead, an aging leadership
has been locked in a transition power struggle which nearly paralyzed
its ability to act decisively.
Tab A
Paper Prepared in the Central Intelligence
Agency4
SOVIET STRATEGY AND STRATEGIC
THINKING
Underlying all the destructive weapons and forces are ideas about
strategy. From the mid-1960’s well into the 1970’s, many influential
Americans believed—despite persuasive evidence to the contrary from
Soviet military writings and agent sources such as Colonel
Penkovsky—that Soviet strategic thinking had to be very much like
our own.5 In our
familiar American tendency to attribute our own views and values to
other peoples and their leaders, we tended to believe that, because
we and the Soviets both faced the awesome problem of nuclear
weapons, and we were both basically sensible peoples, we had to
think about management of this problem in roughly the same way.
Maybe the Soviets weren’t quite as sophisticated as we with all our
think tanks and academic journals, but they would more or less
follow our lead in strategic thinking.
Today, while this mistaken “mirror imaging” of our views on the
Soviets persists in some circles, we know a lot better. The manner
and size of the Soviet strategic and other force buildups of the
last twenty years showed that the Soviets thought differently than
we about strategy and military power, including nuclear power. Study
of the Soviet buildup, of Soviet military exercises and command
structures, of their military writings (including very sensitive
documents collected clan
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destinely) has taught us a great deal about Soviet strategy and
military thinking. It underscores some important differences from
our own.
This shouldn’t have been surprising to us. After all, the Soviets are
coming from a different place in geography, in history, and in
political culture. Although now a global military superpower, at
least in nuclear terms, Soviet Russia remains a continental
superpower and, like Tsarist Russia, places a high store on
dominating its continental periphery. The influence of history and
political culture is often misunderstood as follows: Having been
frequently invaded by Europeans and Asiatics over the centuries,
Russians are seen as pathologically insecure; hence they feel the
need for massive military power. There is some truth in this, but
the essence is different. First of all, growing from a small
principality in Muscovy, Russia has spent much more time invading
and conquering than being invaded and conquered. The Russian state
was built by the autocratic princes of Moscow, not by the merchants
of the more westward-looking cities, such as Novgorod. For this
reason, Kremlin rulers have from Medieval times to the present seen
their security, indeed the legitimacy of their rule, to rest upon as
much control over people, their own and those around them, as they
could get. These attitudes toward political power have also shaped
Russian and Soviet thinking about strategy and military power.
Americans tend to think of military power as an unpleasant but
necessary means of preserving live-and-let-live conditions in a
sometimes dangerous world. The Soviets think of military power as a
means of preserving and expanding their authority. This makes their
strategy both very defensive and very offensive at the same
time.
The structure, or architecture, of their strategy and their overall
military forces displays this quality. The basic aims of Soviet
military power in war, and also in peace, are to assure the survival of the political system at home and
to enhance the projection of its power in the
surrounding world. Hence the Soviets have been engaged in
strategic, air, civil, and ABM
defense from the beginning of the nuclear era. We had strategic
defenses in the 1950’s, but gave them up in the 1960’s, in favor of
the deterrent “balance of terror” concept based on nuclear offensive
forces.
The second basic mission of Soviet military strength is to project
power into the surrounding regions of Eurasia, especially Europe,
but also in East Asia and southward toward the Middle East and
Persian Gulf. Hence the enormous land combat forces, with their
accompanying air and nuclear power, far more than they would need to
retain control of East Europe or to deter attacks. By contrast, the
US and NATO have seen our general purpose forces as a heavy
trip wire to release the nuclear deterrent or as a means of dealing
with very limited contingencies outside of Europe.
The Soviets see their long-range nuclear offensive forces as a
deterrent, as we do. But to a much greater extent, they have also
regarded
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these forces as
long-range artillery support for backing up the other two primary
missions of their forces: strategic defense of the homeland, through
counterforce attacks on US nuclear
forces and their command and control; and dominance of the Eurasian
periphery, through attacks on nearby enemy forces and their
bases.
In their thinking about nuclear weapons and nuclear war, the Soviets
have never made the distinction between deterrence and warfighting
capabilities that have been characteristic of US thinking. Nor have they discarded
the notion of victory in nuclear war despite the assertion of Soviet
leaders that nuclear war should not occur (which they believe) and
cannot be won (which they do not believe).
Even when, in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, they had too little
nuclear force to implement their view, the Soviets developed and
held to the notion that real deterrent power had to be real
warfighting power as well. This is because they believed that they
had not only to deter attacks on them, but as far as they could, to
encourage acceptance of their aims around the world short of a major
war. This required nuclear warfighting strength. Moveover, they
believed that nuclear war could actually occur, and, if it did, it
would have to be fought for rational political and military aims,
despite the awesome destructiveness of nuclear weapons. This is why
they have developed a comprehensive array of counterforce nuclear
weapons, such as the SS–18 against our silos and SS–20s against
Eurasian military targets, and homeland defenses, including civil
defense.
Soviet political and military leaders appreciate full well that any
large nuclear war would be horribly destructive for their country
and potentially lethal for their system. This has not, however,
nullified their belief in the possibility of victory in nuclear war.
For one thing, the ideology on which their system rests prevents
that belief from being discarded. For them to really believe that
the handiwork of humans, such as nuclear weapons, could write the
end to Soviet and even human history would mean that Marx and Lenin
were wrong in a fundamental respect. More important, however, the
Soviets have never believed that nuclear war, even a very large
scale war, was likely to take the form of a mindless exchange of
massive attacks on cities. Rather they have tended to believe that a
major nuclear war would involve attacks of varying intensity and
timing on a wide range of military targets, after which one side or
the other would quit or collapse, but societies as such could
survive, especially if they provided for active and civil
defense.
Over the years they have built up offensive and defensive
capabilities for this kind of nuclear war. Moreover, as their
capabilities have grown, their concept of a major war between the
superpowers has evolved as has their concept of victory. This
evolution continues, and we are trying to track it in their military
exercises and literature. What
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appears to be happening is a growing Soviet
belief that their powerful nuclear forces, along with their general
purpose forces, can enforce a different kind of victory by deterring
US use of nuclear weapons at
least on a large scale, while general purpose forces, supported if
necessary by the required nuclear strikes, can conquer Europe and
perhaps other regions nearby. The US
would have to accept the result rather than be destroyed in a
massive exchange. But the US would
be reduced to a secondary power, while the USSR would emerge preeminent.
The key to this kind of thinking lies in the combination of all
Soviet forces: strategic nuclear, general purpose and homeland
defense. The Soviets do not separate them into distinct categories
quite the way we do. In combination, they could allow victory in a
large scale, general, but still not absolutely allout nuclear
conflict. The Soviets do not see this outcome as certain by any
means; but it is a possibility that the design of their forces and
strategies can make more probable if it ever comes to a war.
In the meantime, the Soviets believe that this overall force
combination, along with increasing ability to project power at a
distance, e.g., into the Third World, enhances the image of the
USSR as a superpower and
enhances their “persuasiveness” (i.e., ability to intimidate)
vis-a-vis neighboring countries. Power projection into the Third
World, which includes military deliveries, insurgency and
counterinsurgency operations, as well as military bases and forces,
has become a fourth pillar of the Soviet strategic architecture,
along with strategic defense, Eurasian dominance, and long-range
nuclear strike.
From another perspective one can say that Soviet strategy has been
designed over the past forty years to defeat American strategy in
war and also in peacetime power politics. Historically, the US has relied on long-range nuclear
sanctions plus relatively weaker forward forces to protect its
exposed allies near the USSR. The
USSR has built forces to
dominate over the regions where US
allies are located while also negating the credibility of US long-range nuclear guarantees.
Desiring to avoid any war or major test of strength, the Soviets
have hoped that this combination would gradually demoralize the
US and its allies in peacetime,
leading to the erosion of our security commitments, the collapse of
our alliances and the replacement of the US by the USSR as the
predominant world power.
In the late 1970’s the Soviets developed a detectable confidence that
trends in the “correlation of forces”, by which they mean political
as well as military forces, were moving in a direction favorable to
this prognosis. In the 1980’s, however, the US and its allies have been more determined to resist
these trends, undermining Soviet confidence that this is the way
things will go. On the contrary, they now see factors that could—not
necessarily will—turn these trends around.
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From a strictly military point of view, the most worrisome new
factors, other than the increase of US defense efforts and renewed commitment to global
security, lie in the combination of SDI and the new non-nuclear technologies for
conventional defense the US is
pursuing. All sources of information indicate how concerned the
Soviets are about SDI.
Interestingly, Soviet marshals write even more eloquently about
their concern over the new conventional defense technologies.
Together they challenge the primacy of the twin darlings of Soviet
military power: the long-range ballistic missile and the tank. If
the US and NATO actually develop and deploy such capabilities,
they will undermine the offensive pillars of the Soviet strategic
architecture. The USSR may be no
less secure in the strictly military sense, as a result, but it will
be less capable of casting an intimidating shadow over its
neighbors. This is why Soviet propaganda, diplomacy, and arms
control policy are trying to stop SDI and other US
defense programs and, more generally, to encourage the US to return to the behavior and
strategic doctrines we exhibited in the 1970’s, which the Soviets
found quite comfortable. Because Soviet superpower status rests so
heavily on offensive military power combinations, the loss of this
edge, so the Kremlin fears, will negate Soviet superpower status and
ultimately undermine the legitimacy of Kremlin rule itself.
In the end, the challenge of the USSR to Western security and values stems more from the
nature of its system than from the content of its strategies and
military thought. If the rulers of the Soviet Union could somehow be
brought to relent in their determination to control everybody they
can reach, at home and abroad, their marshals and generals—who are
intelligent and rational men—could readily come up with military
strategies and force postures which would allow the USSR to be a secure and constructive
participant in the world community. For that to happen, however,
they have to be shown that the strategies they have followed
patiently for thirty years will not work.
