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We Still Need Conventional Arms
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16937 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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4 / 1990 |
3,128 Words |
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James Blackwell
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In 1989, the world as we knew it came unglued. It will never be the same. From Tiananmen Square to Timisoara, people took their quest for liberty and democracy to the streets against totalitarian communist regimes. In many other places, the demonstrations were less violent but no less forceful. Even in Moscow, hundreds of thousands marched against the dictatorship of the party.
It is difficult for us to discern today where the world will be tomorrow. Will Mikhail Gorbachev succeed in leading not only his own Soviet Union but perhaps, by example, the rest of the communist world through a reform process that will make those countries more peaceful and democratic? Or is reform a 10-year tactic aimed at producing a leaner, meaner Soviet Union in the twenty-first century? Either way, is the reform process going to be successful, or will it fail in the face of revolution by the people demanding a more complete and rapid conversion? Or will reactionary forces bring perestroika and glasnost to and end and reinstitute a form of aggressive totalitarian control?
Whether the future of the communist regimes is one of reform, revolution, or reaction, the United States has neither a crystal ball to see the future nor the luxury of waiting to find out how it might go. If Americans fail to establish a strategic road map to guide us through critical decisions, we will end up with a strategy by default, one that is likely to be guided more by bureaucratic and political imperatives than by a grand strategy that harmonizes resources and objectives. Our grand strategy for the next century must recognize the emerging preeminence of conventional forces for our future national security.
The strategy of deterrence has served the United States well for more than l40 years. Rather than match lour principal adversary, the Soviet Union, gun-for-gun of man-for-man, we have chosen to raise the risk of confrontation too high for either side to bear. In its first form, deterrence was achieved through the threat of massive retaliation by overwhelming offensive nuclear strikes. When the Soviets developed their own nuclear arsenal, we adopted a more flexible approach, embracing the twin concepts of flexible response and forward defense.
Flexible response meant that we would react to threats from the Soviet Union with a variety of available options, including, if necessary, the first use of nuclear weapons. Through forward defense, we kept the probability of reaching the nuclear threshold low by maintaining robust conventional forces stationed forward in Europe and the Pacific, aiming to preserve the territorial integrity of our allies without resort to the use of nuclear weapons as long as possible.
Conventional forces were designed primarily to meet the armor-heavy Red Army threat in Europe, as that was the most menacing. When conventional force was needed elsewhere, in place formations were modified from the basic European design.
But with the dawn of a new strategic age, old concepts must give way to new. Flexible response is no longer flexible and may no longer deter emerging military threats. The Germans are erasing the line at which forward defense was supposed to be mounted as they accelerate the pace toward reunification. Pressures on the U.S. defense budget forced a downturn in defense spending beginning in 1985, and progress in
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