The Tenuous Balance

Conventional Forces In Central Europe

James M Garrett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367296483
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000306231
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The instigation for this book was the author's doubt that the political and military confrontation in Central Europe would remain stable in a serious crisis. Uncertainty of success may deter Soviet risk-taking forty-nine years out of fifty but not in that fiftieth year if Soviet leaders should face an apparent threat to their continued hegemony in

1
The Political–Military Balance

The two armed coalitions that face each other in Central Europe reflect an intricate array of contending political aims. Hence, although the two military coalitions are similar in structure, their purposes, strategies, and political effects differ.

A coalition's general political aims are an amalgam of the separate national goals of its members. Since membership in the western alliance is voluntary, its purposes tend to be a not necessarily compatible assortment of the minimum conditions for each member's continued participation. The USSR and its allies' regimes (if not the East European peoples) have common interests in preserving Soviet power west to the Elbe. Thus the Pact's purposes serve Soviet national goals.

Inference plays a large part in discovering these Soviet political goals. At the most general level they are to ensure national security and a formidable bargaining position in any future serious East-West crises. Although Soviet fears of attack are hard to take seriously in the West, history and paranoia may make them seem real in the East.

Accepting as real Soviet declarations that their policies are primarily defensive does not mean dismissing the possibility that they also reflect historical Russian expansionist urges or ideological imperatives rationalized in terms of security. In any event, the USSR would benefit greatly by settling once and for all its power problem to the immediate west, freeing itself to devote its resources to its other two major power problems, China and U.S. strategic nuclear weapons.

Soviet concern with security could be narrowly interpreted as simply requiring adequate defenses against real or imagined threats. However, superior forces deployed well forward and long-standing Pact offensive strategy imply the intent, no doubt deliberate, to defend by suppressing the source of the supposed threat. If it should come to war, a minimum Pact objective would be to occupy or neutralize enough of Western Europe to ensure that Europe itself could never again become a threat or provide the basis for a threat from the United States, as well as to preclude any possibility of future German revanchism. It follows that Pact forces have had to be deployed for attack, preferably on short notice, and that their strategy and tactics have had to be offensive, as indeed they remain at the time of writing.

Military postures—size and nature of forces and their strategies—are designed ultimately to determine or at least constrain a population's behavior or to prevent its being dominated by others. Over an extended time, people's behavior can be influenced by conventional forces that control the territory in which they live. To control territory does not necessarily require occupying it but does depend upon appearing able to do so. Whether out of concern for security or as a product of expansionist designs, the transparent primary purpose of Pact conventional forces has thus long been to enable the USSR to coerce West Europeans by appearing able to invade and occupy much of Western Europe without necessarily bringing on nuclear destruction.

European nations could be more easily coerced if divided from each other and deprived of U.S. support. The USSR has tried incessantly to loosen NATO's political ties in order to be able to isolate individual members and thus expose them to intimidation. Heavy Pact armaments serve this purpose by provoking consumption- and welfare-oriented western societies to spend heavily on arms, thus heightening both social tensions within western nations and friction between them. It would be naive to think that Soviet leaders are unaware of this effect.

General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's announced intention to reduce Soviet tanks and artillery in Eastern Europe and reorient Soviet forces there towards defense, if carried out, will dramatically diminish Soviet coercive power in Europe by reducing the apparent threat. However, it will also reduce political support in the West for armaments while not greatly diminishing future Soviet bargaining power. Indeed, a skeptic might interpret Gorbachev's demarche as yet another phase in the cycle of Soviet attempts to gain political advantage in the East-West confrontation in Europe by appearing to remove the western allies' common danger and by feeding the western left, ever eager to attribute benign purposes to the USSR, material for their anti-defense campaigns.

Thus Soviet, if not Pact, general goals are presumably (1) to be strong enough to prevail in any future power confrontation, (2) to divide NATO allies, (3) to intimidate West Europeans for explicit political purposes, (4) to deny Pact populations any dream of successfully resisting Soviet power or of being liberated by the West, (5) to defend successfully against any imaginable military threat, and (6) conceivably to be able to conquer Western Europe if an opportunity to do so at tolerable risk and cost should arise. Whether Soviet leaders now have such intent or would conceive it later is unknowable, but an earlier generation of leaders did just that in Eastern Europe in 1945.

The West has a different set of tasks. Conditions for Western Europe's security include the following: (1) the sense that the USSR can be deterred, which requires that any possible Soviet act can be either prevented or severely punished, (2) assurance that any fighting that does occur will not be devastating to Western Europe, and (3) a sense of security so pervasive that the USSR will be unable to blackmail Europeans step by step into defeatism by appearing overwhelmingly powerful and ruthless.¹ Thus the West seeks a military balance that both deters war and blocks Soviet conquest of Western Europe if war does occur, while at the same time avoiding escalation to ever more terrible levels of violence.

In their efforts to achieve security, westerners have been torn between the urge to rely upon nuclear deterrence and the dread of nuclear war. Fear of war of any kind in Europe and doubt that Western Europe can be defended anyway have encouraged some Europeans to avoid facing the reality of the military threat from the East with its coercive implications, others to cling desperately to the belief that U.S. strategic nuclear deterrence frees them simultaneously from threats of conquest and of destruction. They have hoped that U.S. power would render the USSR unable to intimidate or coerce them, and at the same time relieve them of the burden and risk of mounting effective defense or deterrence in Europe itself. The greatest weakness of nuclear deterrence is that it may be seen as the bluff that it probably is.

However, doubts about the reliability of the U.S. strategic nuclear deterrent have also presented Europeans with a dreadful dilemma—whether to continue to look primarily to the United States for security despite U.S.-Soviet nuclear parity, or instead to bite the bullet and develop a credible structure of deterrent forces in Europe. During the 1950s, Britain and France went so far as to try to develop their own credible independent nuclear deterrent forces, as the French still do.² However, it may not be possible to achieve credible nuclear deterrence in Europe. The necessary second strike capability—the ability to survive an enemy's worst blow and strike back with devastating force—seems impossible to achieve for the simple reason that Soviet weapons, even after intermediate range land based missiles have been removed, can come close to disarming Europe with a preemptive strike. Moreover, even a NATO theater nuclear arsenal that matched that of the USSR and could survive a preemptive attack might reliably deter only Soviet nuclear weapons, not some future rash or desperate Soviet government's attempt to invade with conventional forces backed by chemical weapons.

Even if technological breakthroughs should make a second strike capability possible, many Europeans would still shy away from the logic that nuclear deterrence in Europe requires being able to fight there. As a result, in recent years they have been ambivalent towards or divided over such innovations as enhanced radiation warheads ("neutron bombs") and intermediate range nuclear missiles. Some have sought to escape their dilemma by proposing to limit theater nuclear weapons or abolish them altogether.³ Thus an apparent nuclear stalemate exists at all levels.

Two conclusions about sub-nuclear deterrence follow from the possibility that at any level nuclear weapons deter only other nuclear weapons. First, in response to great provocation or tempted by some unique opportunity to resolve their European power problem once and for all, Warsaw Pact leaders might attempt a quick move west to seize much of the Federal Republic of Germany, confident that nuclear weapons would not be used. Second, only a truly effective NATO subnuclear defense posture could credibly deter Pact leaders from risktaking, by appearing able to deny them any good prospect of low-risk success. NATO's "flexible response" policy that conventional attack would be resisted solely by conventional forces for an extended period reflects this reasoning.

Thus NATO requires conventional forces that are perceived in both East and West as able to deny the Pact a sure victory. A strong defense would dim the allure of attacking under cover of mutual nuclear deterrence and, by assuring West European people and governments of their security, would enable them to resist coercion. Although being able to carry the war into Eastern Europe by attacking and destroying Pact forces there would be the surest non-nuclear deterrent, a provocative posture is politically unacceptable in the West. Since a stalemate near the German Federal Republic's eastern border would amount to a western victory, NATO could most surely deter within politically realistic limits by fielding forces, making dispositions, and developing tactics capable of destroying successive attacking units until Pact leaders gave up their ambitions. Reflecting these requirements and constraints, NATO's current strategy is broadly defensive, although it is also supposedly "active," requiring tactical offensive capabilities as well as ability to hold ground and slow invaders' advance. A more passive but riskier defense would be simply to prevent Pact occupation or control of large extents of West Germany while trying to ensure that most NATO units survive.

There are sharp differences among NATO governments as well as among academic writers over the role of conventional forces in deterrence. Allies on both sides of the Atlantic have balked at pouring money and resources and the prolonged conscripted service of their young men into forms of military power that many of their citizens see as either futile or unnecessary.⁴ French, British, Dutch and Belgian forces are too lightly armed and they and German forces too leanly supplied for prolonged resistance. The United States, for its part, has been content for years to deploy in Europe poorly trained forces inadequately supported for prolonged fighting. Thus, despite the dubious reliability of nuclear deterrence, present western armies serve principally as a tripwire to set off nuclear weapons.

The nuclear stalemate and their ambivalence towards conventional defense have led the western allies to adopt a curious mixture of postures, full of ambiguities:

1. Conventional forces are too weak and too poorly deployed to give firm assurance of successful defense, yet are much more numerous and stronger than necessary to serve merely to trigger nuclear weapons.
2. Although short range nuclear weapons are ostensibly for actual battlefield use, policy for their use does not accord with reality. Nuclear artillery near the front, for example, is to be fired only after substantial delay, but if the weapons are not used almost immediately many would surely be lost or destroyed during the first surge of invasion. Moreover, some military officers doubt that nuclear weapons could be used on the battlefield to NATO's advantage. Hence def enders may be self-deterred.
3. Longer range theater nuclear weapons, intended mainly as deterrents, in no way match the Warsaw Pact's in numbers or destructiveness. Thus NATO's theater weapons do not come close to threatening Eastern Europe with the scale of devastation that Western Europe has long faced.
4. Deterring chemical attack by threatening nuclear reprisal is not credible, yet western allies avoid preparing to deter by acquiring offensive chemical weapons' comparable to those they may face. Thus, only the passive defense of cumbersome protective clothing that reduces troops' combat efficiency is available to protect against chemical agents.
5. Strategic nuclear forces logically and convincingly deter only Soviet nuclear attack directly against the United States, although the possibility of irrational American behavior may lend strategic forces some deterrent weight in Europe.

Nevertheless, despite implausible policies and inadequate forces, the western force structure as a whole carries substantial implicit dangers to the USSR and its continued control over Eastern Europe. As a result, the NATO posture must deter to some extent. However, because the western alliance may be seen in Moscow as a threat, it must also sorely tempt Soviet leaders to try to destroy it if they should ever see the chance to do so.

Thus, the military balance in Eastern Europe is a house of cards. During the pre-Gorbachev era the rival coalitions were condemned to a fruitless competition to reach a mutually acceptable balance. It is conceivable that the contest will never attain equilibrium because the tenuous security that each achieves from time to time appears threatening to the other. The sequence of Soviet conventional force preponderance of the 1940s, West German rearmament and deployment of western battlefield nuclear weapons in the 1950s, the eastern bloc's conventional and nuclear build-up during the 1960s and 1970s, and NATO's compensatory intermediate range nuclear missiles in the early 1980s seemed destined to continue indefinitely. Each temporary advantage gained by either party forced the other to set out anew on its eternal quest for security and, for the USSR, for the power to coerce. It is too early to judge the long term implications of Gorbachev's triumphant publicity efforts to mitigate the threatening Soviet image by promising to shrink Soviet forces facing Europe substantially and to reorient those that remain towards a defensive posture. Significant Soviet domestic economic reform will require diverting resources from armaments. However, perestroika's implied promise of noticeably improved living standards may have raised unrealizable hopes. Their failure or Gorbachev's fall from power are more likely than not to usher in a new wave of East-West hostility.

Assessing Capabilities

Because many of the factors affecting the conventional arms balance are either intangible, immeasurable, or impossible to relate systematically to battle outcomes, most studies have consisted essentially either of counts of soldiers and weapons or comparative measurements of firepower. This analysis will instead try to assess the dynamic balance, that is, the relative abilities of the two alliances to accomplish their different purposes.

A simple count of like weapons and units does not by itself indicate whether opposing forces can accomplish their missions. Instead, a useful estimate should attempt to determine the extent to which each force is suited to its tasks. The Warsaw Pact's quantitative advantages, its initial holding of the initiative (the ability to control the battle by forcing the enemy to react), and its chance of achieving surprise are not necessarily sufficient in themselves to afford certain victory. Rather, a concatenation of numbers, quality and force utilization is the basis of each alliance's capability.

Neither does any single element of military power—tanks, infantry, artillery, tactical air power, or chemical or battlefield nuclear weapons—determine the relationship of conventional forces. Neither alliance's ability to achieve its purposes rests solely upon a preponderance of any one weapon or type of force. To be able to avoid losing any war that should occur, each alliance requires a mix of forces that denies the other a decisive advantage in any category of weaponry. To compare the two alliances' respective abilities to accomplish their missions thus requires both static and dynamic analyses. Static analysis evaluates quantities and quality of forces; dynamic analysis attempts to predict battle outcomes by judging the interaction ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Acronyms
• 1 The Political-Military Balance
• 2 Strategy, Operations, Tactics: The Warsaw Pact
• 3 Strategy, Operations, Tactics: NATO
• 4 Ground Maneuver Forces
• 5 Battlefield Mobility and Rear Area Security
• 6 Conventional Firepower
• 7 Tactical Air Power
• 8 Logistics and Reinforcement
• 9 Qualitative Factors: Weapons, Personnel, Training
• 10 Command and Control
• 11 Terrain
• 12 The Tenuous Balance
• Appendix: Mathematical Models
• Bibliography
• Index