Conventional strategy

Over the 1980s the main consequence of the developing uncertainties surrounding nuclear deterrence was an increased interest in conventional strategy. For the first two decades of the nuclear age, there had been little interest in that area; given the conviction that any war between the great powers would soon go nuclear, there seemed to be little point in preparing for nonnuclear engagements.

Meanwhile, France and Britain fought a number of colonial wars; France’s struggles in Indochina and Algeria were particularly protracted and bitter. During the 1960s the United States became steadily involved in Vietnam, in which a weak pro-Western government in the South faced an insurgency backed by a communist government in the North. After 1965 there was a substantial commitment of all elements of U.S. military power, excluding nuclear weapons but including a bombing campaign against the North.

Partly as a result of those conflicts, interest began to revive in the likely character of a conventional war involving the major powers. In the West such discussions were also a result of the adoption of flexible response, which demanded greater attention to conventional warfare. In the East as well, to some extent because of the shift in NATO doctrine, conventional warfare grew in importance. There was some irony in that. Flexible response reflected NATO’s concern over Soviet conventional superiority, yet, under Khrushchev, Soviet forces had been cut back dramatically on the assumption that any future war would go nuclear from the start. After Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, the Soviet Union began a major buildup of conventional forces, and in 1967 military exercises were held that indicated the expectation of a substantial conventional stage at the start of a future war.

Besides the need to remain strong in relation to NATO, by the early 1970s the Soviet buildup reflected concern over a possible threat from China, which had become extremely hostile and was rapidly improving relations with the West. Again, there was irony in that development. China and the Soviet Union had finally split in 1963 over Khrushchev’s readiness to deal with the West, over his unwillingness to back the Chinese nuclear program, and over a long-standing border dispute between the two countries. Later, the years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) convinced Brezhnev that the Chinese were dangerous and unstable; clashes on the border in 1969 led to hints from Moscow that it might take action against China’s fledgling nuclear capability.

In the late 1970s the Warsaw Pact buildup, coupled with Soviet-supported operations in such developing countries as Vietnam, Angola, and Ethiopia, stimulated NATO to improve its capacity to resist an offensive and mobilize quickly. That was based on the fear that, without sufficient warning to get mobilization under way, the strength of Soviet frontline and follow-on forces could overwhelm NATO’s thin peacetime lines of defense. Growing doubts over the credibility and durability of nuclear deterrence also increased the importance of improving conventional forces.

Even with increased allocations to defense, NATO governments remained pessimistic about their ability to match Warsaw Pact forces. Although the total military power of NATO was much greater, geography favoured the Warsaw Pact, since reserves from the East could reach the front much more quickly than reserves from the United States, which would have to make a hazardous journey across the Atlantic Ocean. Against that pessimism it was noted that greater numbers were normally assumed to be required by the attacker (a ratio of three to one was often cited, although the critical factor was not the overall ratio but the strength of the offense at the point of attack). Technological advances were said to further favour the defense, in that extremely precise and comparatively simple guided weapons could be used to take on tanks and high-performance aircraft, the central actors in any offensive.

That optimism was questioned by other strategic analysts. They noted that the natural advantage accruing to the defense would do so only if the attacker had to force a way through well-prepared defensive positions rather than simply outflank them. The ability to impose attrition on the enemy would be reduced if the enemy was able to fight a war of maneuver, in which an immobile defense might find itself caught off balance. Moreover, in a war of maneuver, the potential benefits of simple air-defense and antitank systems would soon be qualified by the need to make them mobile, which would put them in need of protection as well.

The proponents of maneuver warfare warned that this was the type favoured by the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet Union preferred the offensive because it would make it possible to defeat the enemy quickly, before the full weight of its power could be brought to bear. Soviet doctrine during the 1970s suggested that a key aspect of that offensive would be the neutralization of NATO’s nuclear assets by overrunning key installations, with a possible shift to a regional nuclear offensive when the right moment arrived. By the early 1980s doubts over whether a war would last long enough for the right moment ever to arrive, and whether nuclear exchanges could be limited geographically, encouraged a greater stress by the Soviet military on obtaining a victory in the conventional stage.

The maneuver school eventually encouraged a shift in NATO thinking toward more mobile operations, as well as a greater willingness to contemplate attacks on Warsaw Pact territory in an effort to reduce the momentum of a Pact offensive. In 1982 the United States adopted an approach known as AirLand Battle, which emphasized maneuver and the need to see the battlefield in the round, taking advantage of emerging military technologies to synchronize operations and direct fire with greater accuracy. The strategy of “follow-on forces attack” (FOFA), for example, envisaged the holding of a Pact offensive on the ground while attacking the Pact’s follow-on forces in the rear with air strikes. Such aggressive defense was criticized by peace movements as being too provocative. Instead, they proposed nonprovocative strategies based on “defensive defense,” which would lack any capability to go on the offensive. Those ideas proved difficult to turn into practice, as any sort of mobile force could move forward, and few armies would tolerate being deprived of their capacity to counterattack.

Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, concern over the burden of high defense expenditures, combined with an awareness that the arms buildup of the 1970s had triggered a counterresponse from NATO, encouraged “new thinking” that actually picked up on the ideas of defensive defense. Those ideas were received by Soviet military commanders with as little enthusiasm as they were received in the West. Nevertheless, they influenced cuts in Soviet forces, announced by Gorbachev in December 1988, that eliminated some military units of a clearly offensive nature without depriving the Warsaw Pact of its offensive options. However modest in themselves, the cuts raised the prospect of an end to the role of those forces in sustaining the Soviet Union’s dominance over eastern Europe.