To address the issue of trends, ONA’s 1978 European balance also included theater-wide WUV aggregations for 1965, 1970, 1975, and 1977 in the Central Region. These theater WUV totals showed the Warsaw Pact’s overall force-ratio advantage increasing since the mid-1960s. Particularly disconcerting was the growth in Warsaw Pact firepower compared to NATO’s. Here the NATO WUV for artillery, mortars and multiple rocket launchers had grown 35 percent from 1965 to 1977 whereas the Warsaw Pact firepower WUV had gone up over 80 percent.71
FIGURE 6.4.WUV Calculation for a Notional US Combat Division.
SOURCE: US Congressional Budget Office, U.S. Ground Forces and the Conventional Balance in Europe (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, June 1988), p. 15.
IFV = infantry fighting vehicle; TOW = tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided; MLRS = multiple launch rocket system.
Not surprisingly, there soon emerged a discussion between ONA and Project 186 over the efficacy of such scoring systems as WEI/WUV. Recognizing that WEI indices were basically based on firepower scores, in 1978 Marshall initiated a research effort by The Analytic Sciences Corporation (TASC) to develop a scoring system that would better capture the value of NATO and Warsaw Pact equipment. Since WEI/WUV calculations did not include combat aircraft, the initial focus of the TASC Force Modernization (TASCFORM) effort was to develop scores for fighters, ground-attack aircraft, interceptors, and bombers.
FIGURE 6.5.NATO/Warsaw Pact Central Region WUV Trends.
SOURCE: OSD/NA, “The Military Balance in Europe: A Net Assessment,” March 1978, p. 52.
On a more fundamental level, Marshall was concerned with the ability of qualitative weighting methodologies, such as WEI/WUV and TASCFORM, to provide insights into the balance of conventional forces, whether in the European or other theaters. One way to determine this was to see whether the application of WEI/WUV scores to historical battles would reflect actual outcomes. Project 186 set out to address this question by applying WEI/WUV to the Germans’ May 1940 rapid and highly successful campaign through France and the Low Countries. But neither bean count comparisons nor WUV aggregations of the German and Allied forces at the theater level appeared to give any significant insight into why the campaign had been so one-sided.
Given this negative outcome, Karber’s BDM team refined its efforts, examining various head-to-head comparisons, such as the balance of armor versus antiarmor systems, Allied-versus-German fire support systems, and ground-attack aircraft versus air defenses in the hope of achieving more useful results. Again, however, theater-wide bean-count and WUV comparisons provided no significant insight into why the Germans had been so spectacularly successful.
FIGURE 6.6.The German Campaign in the West, May–June 1940.
The German Campaign in the West, May-June 1940. Major General F. W. von Mellenthin, H. Betzler (trans), L. C. F. Turner (ed.), Panzer Battles: A Study of the Employment of Armor in the Second World War (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955).
FIGURE 6.7.Allied/German Theater “Bean Count” and WUV Comparisons, May 10, 1940.
SOURCE: Phillip A. Karber, Grant Whitley, Mark Herman, and Douglas Komer, Assessing the Correlation of Forces: France 1940 (McLean, VA: BDM Corporation, June 18, 1979), BDM/W-79-560-TR, pp. 2–2 to 2–6.
Next, the BDM analysts explored a number of operational factors—deception, surprise, tactics, air superiority, command and control (C2), and terrain—that were not captured in either the bean count or WUV aggregations, but which “played an important role at some time in the eventual outcome” of the campaign.72 The assessment of these factors led to a recognition that each of the three attacking German army groups had been given specific missions, and each was confronted by different styles of defense. With these observations in mind, the BDM analysts shifted their focus to a lower level of analysis. They now considered the Allied-German division and WUV ratios in each of the three German army group sectors: Generaloberst Fedor von Bock’s Army Group B in the northwest, Generaloberst Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group A in the center, and Generaloberst Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb’s Army Group C in the south.*
The results of the sector-by-sector comparison underscored what has long been known about this campaign. The German Schwerpunkt (point of main effort) was in the center, through the Ardennes Forest, terrain that the Allies didn’t believe armored forces could cross. Using WEI/WUV, the BDM analysts found that nearly half of the German army’s combat power was concentrated in this narrow sector under von Rundstedt’s Army Group A. The calculation of WUV totals across the three army groups also found that the Germans were substantially weaker in the northwest and south than a simple aggregation of German versus Allied division ratios suggested, while they were considerably stronger than the Allies in the center. Army Group A’s superiority in divisions was 3.1 to 1. When the WUV scores were factored in, Army Group A’s advantage increased by roughly one third, to more than 4.2 to 1.
The BDM report conceded that WUV comparisons at the theater level provided little insight into campaign outcomes. But the report went on to suggest that the WEI/WUV methodology, if employed at lower levels of aggregation, was capable of “yielding insights into the dynamics of the campaign” as well as “indicating deficiencies and asymmetries in initial deployments plus inferring possible outcomes.”73 On the one hand, this conclusion was encouraging. It suggested that the US military’s investment in WEI/WUV and P-186’s use of this scoring methodology could provide better estimates of conventional force balances at the appropriate level of aggregation below an entire theater. On the other hand, it left one vital question unanswered. In the case of France in 1940, the outcome of the campaign is known, a matter of history. But right to the Cold War’s end a conventional war in Europe, while anticipated on both sides, never actually occurred. In the absence of knowing how such a conflict would have turned out in 1978 or later, there wasn’t any way to make quantitative comparisons at the right level of analysis. If anything, these results reinforced Marshall’s view that the analytic tools needed to make confident predictions of likely war outcomes did not yet exist.
FIGURE 6.8.By-Sector Division and WUV Comparisons, May 10, 1940.
SOURCE: Karber et al., Assessing the Correlation of Forces: France 1940, pp. 4–1, 4–6, 4–7.
Marshall continued pursuing the possibility that static scoring methodologies might yield insights useful to net assessments. In 1986 he entered into a joint effort with the CIA to fund a project to explore the differences and similarities among the more widely used static indices for conventional forces, which by then included the WEI II and III indices, Generic Weapons Effectiveness Indices, TASCFORM, and the Operational Lethality Indices in Trevor Dupuy’s Quantified Judgment Model.74 The project’s objective was to apply the various scoring methodologies to selected NATO and Warsaw Pact force data from 1975 to 1985 to see what insights, if any, might emerge. The study was initiated in part because of growing congressional interest in these various scoring systems.
At the outset of the ONA-CIA project, Marshall’s views about what were often termed measures of effectiveness (MOEs) suggest that he appreciated both their uses and their limitations: “[I]t is very clear from past experience in comparing forces that no MOE will solve the net assessment problem. We have found them useful in understanding long-term trends, but they clearly fail as predictors of outcomes of military operations between opposing forces because they reflect only a few dimensions. In particular, historical cases tend to show that other variables often dominate.”75 By then the WEI/WUV methodology was being widely used in theater war games by the military services and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At least one congressional staffer had requested that ONA provide the TASCFORM methodology to help members of Congress make their own static force comparisons in the context of reviewing annual defense budget requests.
While Marshall remained skeptical of the idea that these sorts of scoring methodologies could provide valid assessments of the military balance in Europe o
r other theaters, he knew that the Soviets had also developed a variety of quantitative metrics that they used in operational planning to calculate correlations between opposing forces as well as rates of advance for army and front operations.76 In the early 1980s US intelligence had gained access to some of the Soviet MOEs, enabling ONA to compare them with TACSFORM aircraft and WEI ground force scores. These comparisons revealed significant differences between how the two sides valued certain weapons. For example, Soviet combat potential scores rated US air defense interceptors substantially higher than did TASCFORM while, relative to the US scoring systems, the Soviets undervalued strike aircraft. The Soviets also scored the US M-60A2 main battle tank substantially higher than did US indices.77 The asymmetries between American and Soviet scoring systems, therefore, provided ONA with insights into Soviet perceptions of the value of various types of equipment and capabilities, which in turn influenced ONA’s assessments in the 1980s of the military balance in Central Europe. Thus while static MOEs obviously had limitations, from a net assessment perspective they were not without value.
The US-Soviet strategic nuclear balance was perhaps the preeminent Cold War assessment because, in the event that deterrence failed, the survival of the United States would be at stake. The European balance was in many respects of comparable importance because of the prospect that a successful Warsaw Pact conventional attack could escalate to a general nuclear exchange. Detailed versions of both these assessments were completed in the late 1970s. But as important as these two balances were, Marshall came to view other assessments completed during Harold Brown’s tenure as defense secretary as having been even more successful. One of these was Navy commander Gerald Dunne’s assessment of US and Soviet command, control, and communications (C3), which was finished in 1978. This assessment revealed a major asymmetry, if not a gaping lacuna, between US and Soviet preparations for conflict, especially in Europe. For the Soviets, C3 loomed large. They had singled out C3 as a specialized, high-priority “area of warfare” and had developed doctrine, planning processes, tactics, and systems aimed at disrupting or destroying 50 percent of NATO’s C3 at every echelon from the theater down to battalions, while investing far more heavily in protecting their own C3 than did NATO forces.78 By contrast, the US military had a fragmented view of C3. Even more troubling, the Pentagon also lacked the concepts, frames of reference, and tools to evaluate C3 performance in combat.79
Marshall and Dunne saw the 1978 C3 assessment as highlighting an area of weakness that the US military needed to address. But the Pentagon’s senior military leaders did not react as Marshall would have liked. In the short term the assessment provoked a surge of research into C3 (including five Defense Science Board studies), increased efforts to improve the survivability of US C3, and stimulated thinking about the importance of an “information advantage” in war.80 In the long run, though, these various studies and research bore little fruit.
Today, over thirty years since ONA’s US-Soviet C3 assessment, the US military’s thinking about C3 still remains largely focused on tactical-level technical issues, giving short shrift to the overall role of information in future warfare. Marshall remains concerned that the US military still lacks the concepts, frames of reference, and tools to evaluate properly the performance of C3 and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems in combat. These concerns have resurfaced with China’s growing efforts since the mid-1990s to modernize its military forces. One could argue that Soviet forces during the Cold War were more reflective of the industrial age than of today’s information age. China’s ongoing modernization efforts, by contrast, are unquestionably those of a rising power in the information age. The overarching goal of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is to build an “informationized military” with Chinese characteristics. How successful the PLA will ultimately be in this endeavor remains to be seen. But since the late 1970s Marshall persistantly highlighted the growing importance of information in future warfare.
Possibly the most consequential ONA assessments during the 1970s did not focus directly on military forces. Recall that when Marshall moved to the Pentagon, Schlesinger asked him to continue pushing the CIA to reconsider its estimate of the burden Soviet military programs was imposing on the USSR’s economy. In 1974 Marshall hired an Air Force economist, Major Lee Badgett, to develop more inclusive dollar-cost estimates of Soviet military spending. By September 1975 Marshall and Badgett had reached a preliminary conclusion that rather than the Agency’s burden estimate of 6 to 7 percent of Soviet GNP, Soviet military activities likely consumed 10 to 20 percent of the USSR’s economic output.81 Over the next decade, as Bob Gough, William Manthorpe, Lance Lord, and David Epstein wrote a series military investment balances for Marshall, the list of indirect costs that Soviet military programs were imposing on the USSR’s economy grew. They eventually included expenditures for civil defense, industrial mobilization preparations and dual-use investments as well as the costs of maintaining the Soviet empire.
The direct and indirect costs of the USSR’s military efforts constituted the numerator of the burden ratio. It addressed the question: How much are the Soviets spending on their military? The denominator problem, as it came to be known, addressed the question: How large is the Soviet economy? The denominator question was first brought to Marshall’s attention in 1979 by the Soviet émigré economist Igor Birman. From 1970 to 1983, the CIA estimated the Soviet GNP to be between 50 and 60 percent of US GNP.82 In hindsight, the Soviet economy during the 1970s and 1980s was probably never greater than 25 percent of that of the United States. As the Soviet economy was roughly half the size estimated by the CIA, and the total cost of its defense expenditures larger than the Agency’s estimates of the USSR’s direct military expenditures, this suggested that the USSR’s military might be consuming as much as 30 to 40 percent of the country’s economic output. Furthermore, as became obvious in the 1980s, the Soviet economy, burdened by military spending and the inherent inefficiencies of the USSR’s centralized economic planning, was encountering increasingly severe structural problems.
The importance of these insights stemming from ONA’s military investment balances cannot be overstated. They effectively demonstrated that Marshall and Schlesinger’s instincts about the USSR’s military burden had been right from the outset. Consequently, time was not, as Kissinger had feared, on the side of the Soviet Union, but very much on the side of the United States. This shift in understanding opened the door to the possibility of winning the Cold War, something that Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, would exploit by building up US military capabilities.
While it would be going too far to argue that the US military buildup during the Reagan years caused the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, by the late 1980s Marshall was saying privately that the USSR’s economy appeared to be on the brink of “Chapter 11” bankruptcy. His pursuit of an accurate estimate of the Soviet defense burden, enabled by both ONA’s charter and Marshall’s long tenure, enabled him to look beyond the immediate, pressing issues of the day, and may well represent his most important contribution to US strategy during the Cold War’s final decade.
* Countermilitary potential (CMP) is calculated by taking a weapon’s yield raised to the two-thirds power and dividing it by its circular error probable squared: CMP=yield2/3/CEP2. CEP is a measure of accuracy. It is the radius of a circle within which 50 percent of the warheads are expected to fall statistically.
* Like most of ONA’s Cold War assessments, the 1977 strategic balance remains classified.
* The term Generaloberst is translated as “colonel general,” a rank equivalent to a lieutenant (three-star) general in the US military.
7
COLD WAR END GAME 1981–1991
We’re not in the business of saying what ought to be, we’re in the business of giving people something to think about.
—ANDREW MARSHALL
On November 4, 1980, the American people gave former California governor Ronald Reag
an a landslide victory over President Jimmy Carter. During the election campaign, Reagan argued that Carter had allowed the nation’s defenses to erode to the point where the US military’s ability to deter the nation’s enemies and fight effectively should deterrence fail was at risk. Reagan noted that despite the United States’ efforts to bring about stability in the nuclear arms race, the Soviets were modernizing their nuclear forces at a prodigious rate.
Recent events in the Middle East also undoubtedly influenced some voters to support Reagan. Critics of the Carter administration’s foreign policy charged that the president had allowed long-standing US ally Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran, to be overthrown by radical Islamist elements under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The result was the formation of the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose leaders were unremittingly hostile to the United States, which they referred to as the “Great Satan.” Making matters worse, the new regime did nothing when Iranian radicals stormed the US embassy in Tehran and seized its staff as hostages.
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