Vanishing Act

Once upon a time there was the Threat, the fearsome Soviet military machine poised to sweep across Western Europe in a matter of days or, alternatively, strike down through the Middle East and seize the oil fields or, even more terrifying, knock out America’s land-based missiles in a nuclear first strike, leaving us with little option but to surrender. As Ronald Reagan liked to say, they had “more missiles, bigger missiles, better missiles” than we did. The U.S. military lost no opportunity to extol the martial prowess of the mighty machine that justified its own prosperity.

Intelligence, naturally, played a crucial role in this perennial inflation of the threat. I remember fondly the glowing reviews from uniformed experts on the virtues of the T-72 tank that left unmentioned the automatic gun loader’s tendency to load the gunner rather than the ammunition. Intelligence gave us the “bomber gap” of the 1950s, the infamous “missile gap” of the 1960 presidential campaign, the “civil defense gap” of the 1970s. By the time of the great U.S. defense budget spend-up of the late 1970s and early 1980s under Presidents Carter and Reagan, it was a matter of faith in official circles that America had become “No. 2.” Little wonder then that in 1981 almost half of our federal budget was devoted to defense.

Evidence suggesting that things might not be as bad as all that could always be explained away. When U.S.-supplied combat planes flown by Israel easily overwhelmed Soviet jets furnished to the Syrians in 1982, the USAF hurried to explain that there were few grounds for complacency because “recent intelligence data” showed that the Soviets had developed no fewer than “four new fighter planes that are far more capable” than those at the time flown by the Soviets or their allies.

At that time, I interviewed scores of former Soviet servicemen, whose reminiscences depicted a military system in which the soldiers were ill-trained and brutalized by a vicious hazing system in the barracks while the senior officer corps, mindless of the welfare of their men, used the conscripts as personal servants or enlisted them as slave labor to build palatial dachas. The whole system, it was clear, was rotten and mired in corruption.

Even when the Soviets sought to deploy their famed superiority in numbers by mobilizing reserves for a projected intervention in Poland in the fall of 1980, the call-up resulted in disaster, with large numbers of reservists failing to turn up and many more promptly deserting. Needless to say, none of this found its way into the picture drawn for the taxpayers by the Pentagon and its partners in the U.S. military industrial complex at the time.

Gen. William E. Odom was a leading light among U.S. intelligence experts on the Soviet military in that now-distant period. The military assistant to Carter’s hawkish national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, he transitioned effortlessly to the august post of assistant chief of staff to the Army for intelligence under Reagan before his final appointment as director of the National Security Agency. Not long after he shed his uniform in 1988, the subject of his expertise suddenly dissolved (to the intense surprise of the intelligence community). With the disappearance of Communism and the Soviet Union in 1991, it became impossible to argue that the remnants of the Soviet military were anything other than a pitiable mob. Proof, if proof were needed, came with the humiliation and defeat of the forces sent to subdue Chechnya.

By August of 1998, the Russian ministry of defense was ordering officers to prepare for the coming winter by leading their men into the fields to harvest mushrooms, berries and other sources of food. The force that once kept us shivering in our beds has been reduced to scavenging for personal survival.

Odom, now deploying his expertise from the Hudson Institute and Yale University, has given us his analysis of the downfall of the system to which he devoted his career in “The Collapse of the Soviet Military.” There are hints of nostalgia for the good old days of the Threat in his narrative. He is at pains to emphasize that the military system of the Soviet Union was fundamentally different not only in composition and organization, but also in outlook, from its Cold War antagonists. It was dominated and controlled by the ruling Communist Party and thus imbued with an aggressive Marxist-Leninist ideology. Rather than accepting the precepts of “deterrence theory”--the balance of nuclear terror that Odom insists dominated U.S. military planning--the Soviet high command apparently believed that a world war could break out and, if it did, they planned to take the offensive with nuclear and conventional weapons and win. Thus ideologically driven, Odom explains, the entire Soviet economy was effectively militarized (true enough), churning out uninterrupted streams of weapons to the natural detriment of civilian welfare.

The destruction of this apparently formidable machine, according to Odom, was overwhelmingly the fault (or achievement) of Mikhail Gorbachev. From the time he took power, Gorbachev was set on the goal of reforming and reviving the Soviet economy, which he believed could be realized if only the remorseless appetite of the military-industrial complex could be curbed. Such a task was only possible if the high command were persuaded to adopt a “defensive” strategy and, as a result, the Americans induced to accept sweeping arms control agreements. Gorbachev’s efforts in this direction, explains Odom, combined with his policy of loosening political controls over the civilian population, led to an organizational breakdown in the military. Sapped by internal corruption and abysmal morale, the military were unable even to bring the August 1991 coup by conservative die-hards to a successful conclusion. A few months later the Soviet Union itself disappeared.

There is much interesting history in “The Collapse of the Soviet Military,” and it is gratifying to find a military scholar of Odom’s rank now acknowledging at least some of the many and obvious faults of the Soviet military machine even in its days of prosperity and power. Yet effect and postulated cause do not always appear to follow each other in the narrative. Gorbachev may well have tried to break the power of the military industrial complex by abandoning some fundamental tenets of Soviet ideology, but even by Odom’s own account, this had little effect on the way the complex went about its business. The military, for example, pressed on with a massive biological warfare research program of which Gorbachev and other members of the ruling Politburo were entirely ignorant until alerted by the British and Americans. Nor was the civilian leadership ever able to curb arms exports, in spite of the clearest directives from on high. As late as 1989, Gorbachev had to admit that military spending was increasing at 8% a year.

In other words, despite the reforming Soviet leader’s best efforts, the military system remained remarkably unaffected by his initiatives until almost the very end. Only when he declined to use force to hold onto Eastern Europe and withdrew the elite Soviet forces stationed there did demoralization and collapse set in. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union itself and the reduction of the military and its industrial complex to a starvation diet, the military fell apart. The author has put the cart before the horse.

It is certainly true that by August 1991 the Soviet system was tottering, which was why Marshal Yazov, the minister of defense at the time, and others mounted their coup. Odom discusses this crisis at length but omits one significant fact that does much to explain why this last best chance for the Soviet military to save itself failed: Most of the troops summoned into Moscow to support the coup were not issued any ammunition--the high command did not trust their men. It was indeed a hollow force.

Lest his readers are moved to ask why we sent the national debt through the roof in confronting this mangy bear, Odom makes a special point of deriding as “unconvincing” the argument that “NATO countries, primarily the United States, really did not need to spend as much as they did on military forces to defend against the Soviet Union. The evidence . . . encourages precisely the opposite conclusion.” Yes, those $400 hammers and $600 toilet seats, the very symbols of Pentagon waste, actually played a vital role in driving the godless Bolsheviks to their doom.

Even so, it now appears that our bill for confronting the Soviets was rather small. During the Cold War we spent, on average, $308 billion a year (adjusted for inflation) on defense. In 1999, eight years after the Threat self-destructed and with no other serious enemy in sight, we will spend about $280 billion. So, either our defense against the Soviets was a bargain, costing us $28 billion a year, or the U.S. military industrial complex is a lot more resilient than its old partner in crime.