Air University Review, September-October 1985
FROM the American vantage point, any discussion of Europe's defense is guided by the premise that Europe's defense, vital though it is to the United States, can never be as important to Americans as it is, or at least ought to be, to Europeans. For Americans, Europe is not home; and for American force planners, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is but one of several demanding overseas military commitments. Moreover, geography continues to discourage a complete unity of American and European strategic interests. There is no Group of Soviet Forces Canada or Mexico hovering along America's borders, and if one has to fight, it is always better to do so on someone else's territory. It is thus in the strategic interest of the United States to confine any war in Europe to that continent.
How to defend Western Europe without resorting to nuclear fire has been a major preoccupation of NATO force planners ever since the early 1960s, when the Soviet Union acquired the ability to strike the American homeland with nuclear weapons. The development of viable conventional defenses became all the more imperative in the 1970s as the Soviet Union achieved a tough parity in intercontinental nuclear weapons, gained a pronounced superiority in so-called theater nuclear weapons, and continued to expand its long-standing advantage over NATO in conventional forces.
Yet here we are, in the middle of the 1980s, with conventional defenses, according to the testimony of NATO's own supreme commander, inadequate to hold against a major Warsaw Pact attack for more than a few days without the use of nuclear weapons which, given the altered nuclear balance, would be self-defeating and probably suicidal. Flexible response has been a dead letter ever since its official adoption by NATO because the alliance has steadfastly refused to act effectively on the military implications of the loss of American nuclear superiority. That loss dictated the creation of a truly viable conventional leg of the NATO triad, which, in turn, required a willingness to think beyond deterrence. Neither has been forthcoming.
What we have today is instead a continuing nostalgia, at least in Europe, for the good old days of massive retaliation, coupled with something called forward defense, which boils down to a linear defense far more vulnerable than André Maginot's original version. If the Maginot Line lacked sufficient operational reserves behind it, it at least had fortifications. NATO's forward defense has neither. To put it another way, what we have today in the way of conventional defenses is about what we had in the era of massive retaliation, although many refuse to admit it: a nuclear tripwire.
It was this conclusion that prompted submission of the Nunn Amendment before the United States Senate in 1984. While that amendment angered many in Europe, the logic behind the amendment remains unassailable. If the alliance remains unwilling to muster the conventional force wherewithal required to avoid an early first-use of nuclear weapons in the event of war, then U.S. ground forces in Europe sufficient to trip the nuclear wire need not be as large or as costly as they are now. The wire could as easily be tripped by 200,000 or even 150,000 U.S. troops in Europe as by 250,000. Indeed, the fewer the better, since the refusal of key allies to stockpile enough ammunition for more than a few days or weeks of combat and to provide needed shelters for reinforcing U.S. aircraft would condemn U.S. troops in Europe, whatever their number, to probable defeat or destruction. Although Europe's defense consumes more than one-half of the American defense budget, the United States has never been in a position to defend Europe in the absence of sufficient allied investment.
The only intellectual deficiency of the Nunn Amendment, which may well be resubmitted in 1985, is a deficiency common to almost all promptings and plans for improved conventional defenses––namely, an underlying assumption that more effective conventional defenses would raise the nuclear threshold. This assumption is not at all self-evident, at least with respect to a Soviet Union that had already decided on war in Europe. NATO's own doctrine of nuclear first-use reflects a willingness to substitute nuclear fire for conventional inadequacy. Would not the Soviet Union, if confronted with otherwise unbreachable NATO forward conventional defenses, also be sorely tempted to use nuclear weapons as a means of swiftly overcoming those defenses? While it can be persuasively argued that improved NATO conventional defenses would reduce the chance of war in Europe, it can also be argued that such defenses, by diminishing Soviet force planners' confidence in a quick conventional victory, would serve to lower the nuclear threshold for the Warsaw Pact in the event of war. There have always been two nuclear thresholds in Europe, one for NATO and one for the Warsaw Pact.
None of this line of thought is to belittle the continuing deterrent power of nuclear weapons, even in the absence of credible nonnuclear defenses. More than any other factor external to the Soviet Union, it has been the very presence of thousands of American nuclear weapons on European soil that has kept the peace in Europe. Even were NATO to renounce its longstanding doctrine of nuclear first-use, it is doubtful that the most unregenerate of hawks in the Kremlin would feel appreciably more inclined to opt for war in the event of a crisis.
The Soviet military is nothing if not Clausewitzian in its appreciation of war's friction and inherent unpredictability. Could the Group of Soviet Forces Germany make it to the English Channel ports without someone, somewhere, first-use doctrine or no, firing off at least a few of NATO's 6000 tactical nuclear weapons, thereby sparking uncontrollable events that could lead to mutual suicide? One is tempted to ask those who would denuclearize Europe, for centuries a cauldron of interstate violence and the cockpit of both world wars, to explain four decades of peace in a place where the density of nuclear weapons is greater than anywhere else in the world. They might also explain the absence of any kind of war––nuclear or nonnuclear––between the United States and the Soviet Union, which possess the largest arsenals of nuclear weapons.
With respect to the present debate within the alliance over how best to improve NATO's conventional defenses, the first question to be addressed is whether Western Europe is in fact conventionally defensible against a large and determined Warsaw Pact assault. If, as most denuclearization advocates believe, Western Europe is militarily defensible without a resort to nuclear fire, then the next question is: Is a viable conventional defense politically feasible? Within the Atlantic alliance, there has always been an uneasy, and at times bitterly antagonistic, relationship between the militarily desirable and the politically acceptable. Indeed, the history of NATO's conventional defenses since the adoption of flexible response has been for the most part a history of the subordination of military imperatives to political considerations––an inability to reconcile deterrence and defense. Such a situation might be tolerable if NATO enjoyed the major strategic, operational, and geographic advantages over its potential adversary that the Warsaw Pact enjoys.
There is first the Warsaw Pact's numerical superiority in both standing forces and forces readily available upon mobilization. What makes this superiority potentially decisive is a second advantage, geography. Unlike NATO, which is bifurcated by 3000 miles of water, the Warsaw Pact is a compact, contiguous alliance whose principal member and source of reinforcement––the Soviet Union––enjoys comparatively short land lines of communication with Central Europe.
Even shorter are the distances that Soviet forces would have to cover to gain a decisive victory. NATO Center lacks great depth, which, operationally, means that it lacks the ability to trade a lot of space for a lot of time. Yet the history of modern, mechanized warfare has shown that, in the absence of barrier defenses, both the capacity and willingness of a defender to trade space for time is essential in defeating an attack preceded by little warning and characterized by rapid, deep thrusts of large concentrations of armor. The success of the German blitzkriegs of 1939 and 1940 against the relatively shallow states of Central and Western Europe could not be repeated in the vast expanses of Russia against an opponent able and prepared to retreat over a thousand kilometers. However, the distance from the inter-German border to Antwerp is less than 500 kilometers (and from the border to the Rhine, less than 300), and NATO has not seen fit to erect barrier defenses worth the name.
To these numerical and geographic advantages must be added the inestimable operational advantages associated with the initiation of hostilities. By virtue of its purely defensive strategy, NATO has ceded to the Warsaw Pact the choice of time and place. While not for a moment suggesting that NATO should adopt an offensive or preemptive strategy, one would not be imprudent in stating that the operational penalties of its present posture must be recognized. Against an intended victim lacking barrier defenses and robust operational reserves, an attacker that achieves surprise need not possess any margin of numerical superiority, to say nothing of the mythological 3:1 advantage. Moreover, modern military technology and operational doctrines have increased the traditional military benefits of surprise attack against an unready defender. A mobilization command structure that relies confidently on the ability of sophisticated surveillance technologies to provide early, unambiguous warning of an impending blow ignores major improvements in means of deception that might well render it a victim of surprise.
Also ignored by Western strategists is perhaps the weakest link in the entire chain of NATO's conventional defenses––namely, the lack of any assurance that political decision makers will act effectively in time, or even act at all, on whatever warning is received. Unlike the Warsaw Pact, which is an alliance of forced and enforced loyalty, NATO is a voluntary organization of sovereign, democratic states. As such, it lacks both the military commonality and the political cohesion of the Warsaw Pact. And given recent events in Western Europe, including the capture of both the British Labour and German Social Democratic parties by political movements hostile to the United States, to nuclear weapons, and even to the very idea of NATO, the possibility of political paralysis in time of crisis cannot be dismissed. One can envisage some political leaders in Europe refusing to agree on such indispensable crisis measures as the dispersion of nuclear warheads and the movement of ground forces to their general defensive positions. Such actions, they will argue, are provocative and could spark the very war we are trying to prevent; never mind that the Russians have already moved the Group of Soviet Forces Germany out of garrison, that they have called up Category II and III divisions inside the Soviet Union, and that they have sent most of their submarines to sea. Thus, the continuing debate over how much warning NATO will have of an impending Warsaw Pact military move misses the point. Even six months' warning would count for nothing if NATO disintegrated politically.
To be sure, the Soviet Union, too, would be plagued by a number of political and military disadvantages in a violent contest for Europe. However, some of those disadvantages have been grossly overstated, while others probably would prove irrelevant to the outcome of a NATO-Warsaw Pact war. It is said, for example, that some of Moscow's East European allies are politically unreliable and that the Soviet Union could not count on them to provide assured political and military support for an attack against Western Europe. This may well be true, but it also may well be inconsequential. It can be argued that the Soviet forces deployed in Europe and readily available for combat in the theater are alone sufficient to overwhelm NATO's defenses and that, therefore, the only wartime tasks Moscow need ask of its allies are the purely defensive ones of parrying potential NATO counterattacks on East European territory and of maintaining secure lines of communications for Soviet forces passing through Eastern Europe.
It is also said that the Soviet Union lacks unconstrained access to high seas. There can be no doubt on this point. The very geography that works to the Soviet Union's benefit in a land war on the Eurasian landmass has conspired to place the Soviet Union at a distinct disadvantage in a naval war with the West. The question is whether the outcome of the struggle at sea would be decisive in determining Europe's fate in the event of war. Let us assume that on the first day of hostilities NATO succeeded in sweeping every Soviet ship from the high seas and in demolishing all Soviet home and overseas naval bases. Would this prevent the Soviet army from overrunning Europe? For the Soviet Union, whose war economy and ability to conduct military operations in Europe are not dependent on maritime communications, sea power is a luxury, not a strategic imperative. Indeed, Admiral S. G. Gorshkov's transformation of the Soviet navy from a coastal appendage of the land battle into a powerful "blue water" force may be regarded as an inherently unnatural development, as was Admiral Tirpitz's creation of a German High Seas Fleet in the decades before World War I. The Soviet Union, like Wilhelmenian Germany, is a continental power with continental military experiences and traditions, and it possesses none of what Alfred Thayer Mahan defined as the basic elements of sea power, including geographical position.
It is further said, although less so now than in the past, that the Soviet Union is technologically inferior and that its inferiority deflates the significance of its numerical advantage. To be sure, the Soviet Union does lag behind the West in a number of military technologies, including some of the so-called emerging technologies related to "smart" area and precision-guided munitions, sensors and other long-range surveillance and target-acquisition devices, and advanced data-processing and information distribution systems. On balance, however, the Soviet Union during the past two decades has managed to eliminate, and in some cases surpass, the West's qualitative lead in most of the technologies critical to both the land and tactical air battle. Far more significant has been the Soviet Union's success in doing so without an enormous sacrifice in numbers of deployed systems. Unlike NATO, the Soviet Union, with its proportionally far greater investment in things military, has not permitted quality to become the enemy of quantity.
What conclusion can one draw from these multiple circumstances? Namely, that any discussion of how best to improve NATO's conventional defenses must be predicated on recognition that the alliance would enter a conflict in Europe profoundly (though by no means hopelessly) disadvantaged and that those disadvantages––political and military––are not even remotely offset by the disadvantages, real or imagined, attributed to the Warsaw Pact.
Before one addresses the question of what measures are necessary to provide reasonable credibility to NATO conventional defenses, it is important to recognize what is not essential. Take, for example, the Rogers Plan for follow-on force attack, which not only is of doubtful operational validity and political feasibility but also fails to address the most serious operational deficiencies in NATO's present conventional defenses. Those deficiencies are: lack of barrier defenses along the inter-German border; lack of sufficient operational reserves; lack of sufficient war reserve stocks of ammunition, spares, and other combat consumables; and lack, on the part of SACEUR, of prehostilities mobilization authority commensurate with his responsibilities.
None of the premises on which the Rogers Plan rests are self-evident. Many are questionable, and some are just plain wrong. For example, the plan presumes that NATO has, or would be willing to create, the necessary conventional military wherewithal to engage the pact's initial attacking forces and follow-on echelons effectively and simultaneously. To be sure, collectively NATO possesses an economic, industrial, and technological base sufficient, at least on paper, to mount concurrent and successful attacks on the pact's first and follow-on echelons. But the real issue is a political one, resource allocation. The alliance has never chosen to devote resources to the military sufficient to stop the pact's first echelon, to say nothing of decisively engaging follow-on echelons; and, if present defense budgetary trends are indicative, NATO is not likely to do so in the future. Given the current and likely future political constraints on the actual military resources made available to the alliance, strategic and operational choices must be made, and NATO cannot afford to disperse its finite forces over too many objectives. This disparity between assets and ends means, in short, that top or perhaps sole priority must be accorded to defeating the first echelon.
This is not to suggest that NATO refrain altogether from striking targets in Eastern Europe: aerial strikes across the inter-German border have always been a feature of U.S. and NATO war plans for Europe's defense. It is only to argue that choices cannot be avoided between the immediate defense of German territory and the engagement of more distant pact follow-on forces. To put it another way, it is unreasonable to expect annual real increases in national defense expenditure of 6 to 7 percent (the cost, according to General Rogers, of implementing his plan) from alliance members who have failed to honor past pledges of 3 percent.
The heart of the follow-on force attack concept is its operational presumption that the success of a Warsaw Pact offensive against NATO Center hinges on the timely arrival intact of follow-on forces in the battle area––on a delicate, exacting, and complex plethora of timetables and programmed march rates reminiscent of the inflexible and overcentralized Schlieffen Plan of 1914. However, many observers question this portrayal of Soviet ground force offensive doctrine, claiming that it reflects a fundamental misinterpretation of the nature of the problem and of recent Soviet force improvements which suggest a declining operational significance of follow-on echelons. In any event, the stacking of follow-on Soviet echelons behind forces initially committed to the attack presupposes the inability of first-echelon forces to achieve a decisive breakthrough, a presupposition that would seem at odds with General Rogers' own gloomy assessment of NATO's initial conventional force sustainability.
A second and no less suspect, if admittedly implicit, operational premise of the Rogers Plan is that effective countermeasures to follow-on force attack are either unavailable to the Soviets or, if available, very unlikely to be adopted, due to assumed rigidities in Soviet theater force doctrine and structure. A recent major study conducted at the U.S. National War College concluded, however, that a host of effective potential countermeasures to the Rogers Plan are available to the Soviets and that the Soviets are in some cases moving toward their implementation. Countermeasures identified by the study include increasing the combat power of the first echelon either by reallocating units from the follow-on echelons or by increasing the strength of existing first-echelon units across the board; decreasing the time required to commit follow-on echelon forces, improving counterair capabilities or the ability to interrupt air-ground coordination through physical and electronic attacks on C3I systems; and preparing the battlefield to facilitate rapid movement forward, support of forward echelons, defense of the rear area, and quick recovery from interdiction via such measures as forward deployment of additional engineer units and prepositioned bridging and road construction equipment and supplies.
Indeed, the Soviets have for years been increasing the combat power of their first-echelon forces in Eastern Europe, notably the Group of Soviet Forces Germany, while the recent development of the so-called Operational Maneuver Group and its associated doctrine suggests that they are also attempting to decrease the amount of time required to commit second-echelon forces. Additional countermeasures available to the Soviets include heightened investment in decoys, flares, chaff, aerosols, and other items designed to deceive and confuse NATO sensors and other target acquisition devices, as well as electronic jamming, spoofing, and other actions designed to impede, disrupt, or block the flow of real-time information critical to timely NATO strikes, especially on moving targets. The Soviets have long been masters of battlefield deception, and a properly devised large-scale deception could completely destroy the integrity of the computer-based intelligence system on which NATO's follow-on force attack depends.
The Rogers Plan's third operational premise––that effective interdiction of pact follow-on forces can be accomplished by aerial (manned aircraft and missile) strikes alone also is questionable. In many respects the plan is little more than the latest expression of the old forlorn hope of victory through air power. Past aerial interdiction campaigns, notably in Europe, Korea, and Vietnam, failed to achieve decisive results in the absence of attendant large-scale offensive ground operations; and their costs, in terms of munitions expended and lives and aircraft lost, have often exceeded, and in some cases vastly so, both the monetary and operational value of targets destroyed. For example, during the air interdiction campaign in Vietnam known as Rolling Thunder, the United States destroyed targets estimated at less than $1 billion in value at the cost of $6 billion worth of lost aircraft. More to the point, an aerial campaign against pact follow-on forces in Eastern Europe is likely to encounter air defenses far more formidable than those of North Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Even the eventual substitution of ballistic and cruise missiles for manned aircraft as the principal means of carrying out the Rogers Plan promises no significant alteration in the dismal cost-benefit ratios characteristic of most past air interdiction campaigns. Missiles are individually cheaper and would possess far greater system survivability than aircraft in the hostile air defense environment of Eastern Europe; but their lack of reusability would compel their purchase in greater numbers to cover the same target array, and the unit cost of their advanced conventional munitions is expected to far exceed the cost of current munitions carried by manned aircraft.
If the strategic and operational premises of the Rogers Plan are questionable, so too is its political feasibility. Despite the adoption of the follow-on force attack concept by the NATO Defense Planning Committee in 1984, many Europeans question its operational desirability and validity, and most Allied governments have registered little willingness to undertake the substantial real annual increases in national defense expenditure deemed necessary by General Rogers himself to implement the plan. No less a political obstacle to the plan's implementation has been the absence to date of a doctrinal and "procurement" consensus within the U.S. military itself regarding the wisdom and affordability of the plan. Indeed, the U.S. Army's lukewarm response to the Rogers Plan may in the end prove the most formidable political obstacle to its adoption. The Army strongly objects to the plan's emphasis on striking distant rather than close-in targets as well as the plan's centralization of tactical air assets at the theater level, which the Army feels would deprive ground commanders of adequate and timely close air support. And neither the Army nor the U.S. Air Force, which endorses the plan at least in principle, has extended to the associated emerging technologies a preferential position in its respective procurement policy despite strong pressures to do so by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and key members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The Army's other military modernization programs, which entail the purchase of fourteen new systems including the M-1 tank, the Bradley fighting vehicle, and the AH-64 attack helicopter, have clear priority over the emerging technologies program. Similarly, such Air Force big-ticket procurement programs as the F-15, F-16, B-1, and MX programs enjoy a marked preference over emerging technologies. The Air Force also is reluctant to pour its limited resources into deep-strike technology, since many of these systems are designed ultimately to replace manned aircraft missions.
Nowhere is the lack of consensus between the Army and the Air Force on the follow-on force attack concept more evident than in the May 1984 written memorandum of understanding in which the two services, ignoring strong OSD and congressional encouragement, agreed to disagree on the development of a number of joint hardware systems regarded as essential to make the concept a reality. The project to develop a joint tactical missile system carrying a submunitions dispenser for both the Air Force and the Army was shelved because neither service could agree on the missile's specifications: the Air Force favored a smaller air-launched version, while the Army preferred a longer-range weapon based on the existing Lance. The two services also agreed to disagree on the type of aircraft to carry the indicator radar controlling the system: the Air Force favored modified Boeing 707-323C transports, while the Army wanted a much smaller aircraft such as the OV-1D Mohawk. Another casualty of the so-called AirLand Accord was the highly touted assault breaker program, a high-tech stand-off scheme for interdicting second-echelon Warsaw Pact armor. Aside from technological problems encountered in the program, joint Army-Air Force analyses concluded that it would take a force of some 8000 conventionally armed missiles a week just to cover a single pact corps front, with a price tag of approximately $8 billion.
European critics of the Rogers Plan are correct in asserting that the United States needs to get its act together as a prerequisite for any hope of implementing the plan. But there appears to be little prospect that the United States will do so; competing demands on service resources as well as the differing operational requirements confronting the U.S. Army and Air Force in Europe have so far blocked the necessary consensus.
Underlying these political reservations about the Rogers Plan are serious doubts about its technological feasibility and cost. The history of high-technology, "smart" weapons has been a history of cost overruns and of often disappointed expectations in terms of actual operational effectiveness. The ultimate performance of many follow-on force attack technologies remains clouded by technical and budgetary uncertainties, and it can be argued that the Rogers Plan is excessively dependent on complex technologies of questionable operational effectiveness and maintainability in the stress and chaos of actual combat. As for the costs of procuring those technologies, estimates range from $10 to $30 billion. If experience is any guide, however, these estimates will rise not by percentages but by multiples.
Even if the Rogers Plan were feasible, however, it would still be subject to condemnation on the grounds that it seeks a solution to the wrong problem. It is the Warsaw Pact's high-quality and already reinforced first-echelon forces, not its more distant and less capable follow-on forces, that would most threaten NATO's political and military integrity in the event of war. What good would it do to defeat the pact's second-echelon in Eastern Europe while losing to its first-echelon in Western Europe?
To defeat the Warsaw Pact's first-echelon forces, at least four alterations in NATO's present conventional defense posture are required, all but one of them notable for their absence in the Rogers Plan's scheme of operations. The first is fortification. The creation of barrier defenses along the inter-German border––employing bunkers, tank traps, mines, explosives prechambered in bridges or along key defiles, afforestation, and a more deliberate orchestration of NATO's numerous water obstacles––would serve to canalize and retard the momentum of a Warsaw Pact attack. In so doing, barrier defenses would enhance target acquisition and, more important, buy time necessary to form up operational reserves for the purpose of counterattacking breakthroughs. Additionally, because barrier defenses could be manned by reserve units and territorial forces, they would contribute directly to the formation of operational reserves by freeing at least some of those mobile, first-line, and comparatively costly NATO forces now allocated to the inter-German border's forward defense. Given the Warsaw Pact's possession of both the initiative and numerical superiority, the issue is not whether first-echelon pact forces could breach NATO's forward defenses, even forward defenses augmented by barriers, but rather whether, when, and where inevitable penetrations could be halted and subsequently eliminated. Even the Mannerheim Line, a model of what forward defense ought to be, was ultimately breached, although it took the Russians six months and staggering losses to do so.
The question may well be asked as to why NATO has refused to do something so militarily beneficial as to construct barrier defenses. The answer is, as usual, political. Even though proper barrier defenses could be had for far less cost than the Rogers Plan, and even though they might mean the difference between victory and defeat in wartime, Bonn has opposed them on the grounds that fortifications along the inter-German border would somehow encourage the permanent division of Germany. This argument is mystifying, at least to many Americans. Has not the Federal Republic of Germany already recognized the German Democratic Republic as a separate, independent, and politically sovereign state? Is not the German Democratic Republic a member of a military alliance that poses the greatest threat to the Federal Republic's own independence? Has not the German Democratic Republic fortified its own side of the border? And are the consequences of French fear of offending the Belgians by extending the Maginot Line along the Franco-Belgian border to be forgotten?
The second measure required to confer credibility on NATO's conventional defenses is related to the first: more operational reserves, the lack of which many observers regard as NATO's gravest military weakness. Barrier defenses are one means of increasing the alliance's operational reserves, but there are others. David Greenwood has proposed replacing the current, front-loaded "layer cake" of national force dispositions with a "piano keyboard" disposition that would withhold larger forces farther back. Steven Canby has called for a more effective utilization of NATO Europe's vast pool of trained military manpower no longer on full-time active duty. Again, the point must be made that the goal is not an impregnable forward defense of the inter-German border, which is impossible even with barrier defenses and plentiful operational reserves. The objective is rather a successful defense of Western Europe as a whole, including Germany. To attempt to defend every square meter of Germany, irrespective of overriding operational considerations, is to lose every square meter of Germany.
A third prerequisite for any effective conventional defense is, of course, sufficient war reserve stocks of ammunition and spares. Any scheme of defense, be it follow-on force attack, a linear defense, or a modified defense in depth, is by definition doomed to defeat if the defender runs out of ammunition before the attacker. Although the question of how much is enough is a matter of varying opinion (sixty days' supply would seem to be a prudent minimum), it is patently nonsensical for one country to stockpile forty-five or sixty days' worth while other key allies keep but a week or two's worth on hand. This matter is admittedly a tired old issue, but it cannot be simply wished away through inaction and unfulfilled promises. The history of modern warfare has been a history of shell shortages.
Finally, there can be no confidence in an effective conventional defense of Western Europe if, in a crisis, those responsible for that defense are denied authority to undertake essential preparatory measures. This is not for a moment to suggest that SACEUR or any NATO military body be granted de jute or de facto authority to plunge Europe once again into war. No one wishes to return to the summer of 1914. Simple prudence, however, argues strongly for giving SACEUR more authority than he now has to undertake certain prehostility military measures in the face of an impending Warsaw Pact attack. Such measures would include dispersal of nuclear weapons and tactical aircraft, movement of ground forces out of garrison to their general defensive positions, call-up of certain categories of reservists, and commandeering of selected civilian resources.
It might be added parenthetically that judgment of hostilities as likely or imminent is as much a military decision as a political one. And it can be argued that SACEUR, by virtue of his already transnational military role and limited mobilization authority, represents a far more reliable and effective repository for making certain critical preparatory military decisions during a crisis than the present collection of more than a dozen sovereign political authorities who find consensus difficult in times of peace. May it be further added, to dispel suspicions that endowing SACEUR with greater authority would lead to greater American influence within the Atlantic alliance, that there is nothing sacrosanct about the notion that SACEUR should always be an American. Indeed, were France to resume military participation in NATO, one could even envisage a French SACEUR.
The time is long overdue for NATO to face––and to act effectively on––the unpleasant reality that conventional deterrence and defense are inseparable under conditions of nuclear parity. Conventional force deficiencies that were tolerable in the days of pronounced nuclear superiority are no longer so. At this stage in the history of the alliance, the only argument for tokenism is the one, now often heard in Europe, that the Soviet Union does not, if it ever really did, pose any military threat to Western Europe. If this argument is valid, however, there is no need for NATO itself.
Washington, D.C.
Jeffrey Record (B.A., Occidental College; M.A., Ph.D., Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies) is Adjunct Professor of Military History at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow, Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Washington, D.C. Formerly, he was legislative assistant for national security affairs to Senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.). Dr. Record has written numerous books and articles, including earlier contributions to the Review. His most recent book is Revising U.S. Military Strategy: Tailoring Means to Ends (1984).
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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