Toward Better Net Assessment: Rethinking the European Conventional Balance

Toward Better Net Assessment Rethinking the European Conventional Balance Eliot A. Cohen o v e r the past six years, a curious split has opened among those who study and worry about the NATO-Warsaw Pact conventional military balance. On the one hand, we see grim assessments such as those given by the recently retired Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR),General Bernard Rogers: If attacked conventionally today, NATO would be forced fairly quickly to decide whether it should escalate to the non-strategic nuclear level. (The alternative would be to accept defeat).’ At the same time, however, a group of analysts in universities and policy research institutes have come up with markedly more favorable assessments of the balance.2These authors conclude that the Soviets, as one author’s title I am grateful to many friends and colleagues for comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript and for many helpful leads and suggestions. In particular, I would like to thank Alvin Bernstein, Richard Betts, Judith Cohen, William Fuller, Samuel Huntington, Robert Jervis,JeffreyMcKitrick, Stephen Meyer, David Petraeus, Stephen Rosen, Steven Ross, Kevin Sheehan, Henry Sokolski, and Barry Watts for their help. I owe a very great intellectual debt to Andrew Marshall in regard to the general subject of net assessment. I take sole responsibility, however, for the data and arguments presented herein. Eliot A. Cohen teaches in the Strategy Department of the U.S. Naval War College, where he is Secretary of the N a y Senior Research Fellow. This paper represents the views of the author only, and not necessarily those of the Naval War College or any other government agency. 1. Bernard Rogers, ”NATO’s Conventional Defense Improvement Initiative,” NATO’s Sixteen Nations, Vol. 31, No. 4 (July 1986),p. 18. See also ”Gen. Rogers: Time to Say ’Time Out,”’ Army, September 1983, p. 27. For similar judgments see Andrew J. Goodpaster, et al., Strengthening Conventional Deterrence in Europe: A Program for the 1980’s (ESECS11) (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1985); H.J. Neuman, ed., Conventional Balance in Europe: Problems, Strategies, and Technologies (Zoetermeer: Netherlands Institute of International Relations, 1984); Harold Brown, Thinking About National Security: Defense and Foreign Policy in a Dangerous World (Boulder,Colo.: Westview, 1983), p. 102. Recently, the current SACEUR, General John R. Galvin, declared that he could guarantee ”only that we can defend ourselves for two weeks against an all-out Warsaw Pact attack-then we will have to use nuclear weapons.” “NATO,” he said, ”has never had sufficient capabilities for conventional deterrence.” Henry van Loon, “An Exclusive AFJ Interview with General John R. Galvin, Supreme Allied Commander Europe,” Armed Forces journal International, Vol. 125, No. 8 (March 1988),pp. 50-57. 2. See, for example, William W. Kaufmann, “Who is Conning the Alliance?” Brookings Review, Vol. 5, No. 4(Fall1987),pp. 10-17; Kaufmann, “Nonnuclear Deterrence,” in JohnD. Steinbruner and Leon V. Sigal, eds., Alliance Security: NATO and the No-First-Use Question (Washington, D.C.: International Security, Summer 1988 (Vol. 13, No. 1) 0 1988 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology. 50 Rethinking the Balance I 51 has it, ”can’t win quicklyin Central Europe,” and, more generally, that NATO faces an acceptable conventional balance in Europe. Some of these authorslet us call them the Optimists, for short-have high confidence in their conclusions. One of them declares: In short, the prevalent pessimistic view is a myth that is unsupported by scholarship, analysis, or sound professional opinion. How this gloomy view gained such broad currency, especially among members of the press corps, is a p ~ z z l e . ~ This discrepancy between the views of many senior statesmen and military commanders on the one hand and those of some academic analysts on the other is, at the very least, striking and would seem to require explanation. But the reasons for examining the Optimists’ arguments extend beyond a desire to reconcile mere divergences of opinion. Particularly in the wake of the INF agreement, NATO nations must look with renewed interest-some would say anxiety-at the state of their conventional defense. Moreover, although the Optimists’ view of the military balance has not gained wide acceptance...